by Max Brand
“Miss Cosden: But did he take it?
“Durfee: Yes. I heard them countin’ the money out and I heard it go crashin’ and jinglin’ into his wallet, I guess! I turned my head, and I seen him take it and I squinted hard to make out his face.
“Miss Cosden: Didn’t he have on a mask?
“Durfee: No, there was no mask on him. But there was a sort of blackness runnin’ around in front of his eyes and I couldn’t make him out clear!
“Miss Cosden: Was there anything else about him that struck you?
“Durfee: Nothin’ but his hoss.
“Miss Cosden: What sort of a horse was it? Or could you see it in the night?
“Durfee: I couldn’t of seen it if it had been any other color. But it was a gray hoss and mighty big and upstanding, sort of. It looked like a fine hoss. I could tell that much! A hoss that could carry a big man, too!
“Miss Cosden: I think you’re tired, now.
“Durfee: I’m sort of hankerin’ for a little sleep.”
Sammy Gregg lowered the envelope. “That’s the end of it, boys,” said he. “There wasn’t any more, after that. He quieted down and I came out to you. But I wonder if any of you think the same thing about the gray horse that I’m thinking?”
There was an instant of scowling silence which showed that a good many had a thought, but that they were unwilling to speak it. Then Jack Lorrain broke out: “I’ll tell you what I thought about a gent that used to play a lone hand, but they say that he’s been mixing up with some of the other crooks, lately, and letting them do part of his work for him. The rest of you know who I mean. He’s a big man; and he’d be the leader of the gang; and he rides a gray hoss that’s about as well knowed in these parts as the rider is knowed. I mean, Chester Furness!”
There was a sullen roar of assent. Then another in the rear of the crowd shouted: “Then let’s go and hunt him up!”
There was another shout; a movement toward horses was stopped by the thunder of Hubert Cosden: “You’ll never get him, that way!”
They paused, itching for action.
Cosden went on. “I’ve seen gatherings like this before. A hundred well-armed and well-mounted men all set on getting some scoundrel. Though we’ve never had scoundrels quite as black as these seven! But it always ends up the same way. We get hot under the collar. We jump onto our horses. We ride like sixty through the mountains with no particular end in mind. And, the next day, about half the boys have tired their horses; there’s no real clue before them; and most of them troop off back to town and to work.
“The rest stay on a few days longer, perhaps. They hear a couple of rumors, ride to hunt them down, find nothing, and then they go home and say that it’s the business of the law to handle these affairs, after all. But there is no law here. If we had a sheriff, we wouldn’t have affairs like this one of Durfee. There is no law except such law as we make with our own hands. And I say that the time has come for us to adopt new tactics. Do any of you agree with me?”
They agreed. A good deal of their flare of enthusiasm vanished as he mentioned so many hard-faced facts.
“But what do you suggest, Mr. Cosden?”
“I suggest that we have one man to direct all of us. Better to have one head, even if it’s a poor one, than to have fifty heads all wanting to do different things!”
Anne Cosden came out to tell them to make less noise, for her charge was now asleep. But she remained to listen to the most exciting part of the scene that followed. Big Rendell, the storekeeper, walking with a frightful limp because of his battered hip, uttered his advice in a roar that had to be heard:
“Gents,” said he, “I know the man to plan the work for you. He ain’t a fighting man. But he’s a man with brains. He can’t throw a rope, or handle a knife, or shoot with a gun. But he’s got a head on his shoulders. I mean him that brung the first big herd of ponies from Texas, which was something we all said couldn’t be done. I mean him that pushed through the Munson-Crumbock stage, after everybody else had tried it and failed. I mean my friend, Sam Gregg! He’s the man for you!”
Anne Cosden could not help smiling as she looked at the five feet and eight inches of which Sammy Gregg was composed, and the thin face, which the sun could never entirely turn brown, and the nervous, eager body with which he had been furnished by nature and never improved by exercise. Sammy Gregg seemed immensely embarrassed and shook his head, and Anne Cosden waited for this crowd of proved menkillers, many of them, rough frontiersmen nearly all of them, to burst into a roar of laughter at the jest.
But to her bewilderment, they did not laugh. They did not seem to take it as a joke, at all. And she was more amazed than ever when she saw them nodding to themselves, gravely, and muttering. Until Jack Lorrain said:
“That’s what I call good sense, Rendell. There’s enough of us to shoot the guns and ride the hosses. We need a gent to sit back with a good head on his shoulders and tell us what is the next best trick for us to take. Here’s Sam Gregg that has done what nobody else could do. I say, let’s have Gregg to tell us what is what. He’s our general, I guess. And we’ll keep him off of the firing line, if we can. He’ll be headquarters for us. What you say, Sam? Will you take the job of doing our thinking for us?”
Sammy Gregg was most reluctant. There were twenty better men than he among them, he declared. And then he saw the astonished, almost thunderstruck face of big Anne Cosden, and his own color grew hotter still.
“But,” said Sammy Gregg, “I’ve sat in the shack of old Hobo Durfee. And I’ve had his pone and strawberry jam, the same as most of the rest of you. And if you want me to take charge, I’ll do it. I’ll do my best to bring in the whole seven of ’em, dead or alive, but mostly big Chester Furness with a rope around his neck.”
There was no doubt about the heartiness of the response. It was a true, old-fashioned, Anglo-Saxon throated cheer.
Anne Cosden fairly staggered back into the room where her patient was stirring fretfully in his sleep. For to Anne, little Sammy had never seemed more than an imitation man before this day.
CHAPTER XXVI. SAMMY’S SOLUTION
THEY GAVE SAMMY Gregg time to think out a plan, and he went off by himself and sat down on a stump behind the hotel and embraced his skinny knees with his thin hands and pondered his problem, and watched a pair of busy hens foraging among the seeds which the grass had dropped, under the surveillance of a lordly rooster with a red-helmeted head and a cuirass of curious greens and crimsons and rich purples.
It was only for a moment that he contemplated the strangeness of his work and his place in that work. Then he lost all thought of self, and his mind was rapt in the contemplation of the problem. It was more than an hour before he called together the leaders among the men, the well-known figures who were familiar to cowpunchers and miners alike.
More than one of them, no doubt, envied him his eminent position on this day and would be willing to scoff at his schemes. He must win their trust and confidence first of all. So he stood with them at the corner of the street and laid his plan bare.
It was more complicated than they liked, he could see that, but the longer he talked the more willing they seemed to agree with him. In the first place, he decided that the seven, having drawn together, would never content themselves with one such act as the robbery of poor old Durfee.
Big Furness was not the sort of a man to assemble forces merely because there was a handful of money like this in the offing. His own gains in the trade of highway robbery must now be mounting to scores and scores of thousands. And if he called together seven men, it was never for the sake of robbing a helpless old fellow like Durfee.
For, as Sammy pointed out to them, Furness was a fellow who lived as a road agent partly for the money but mostly, he had no doubt, as a means of amusing himself. No, it was plain that he had appointed to his followers some rendezvous near the house of Durfee. He himself had been late and while they waited for him, they had started out to make a little money on the si
de. And the horrible torture of Durfee had followed.
But originally they must have been summoned to effect a raid of a major importance. No such blow had been struck within the last few days; therefore it was plain that the work for the band had not yet been accomplished. It was still to do, and they could trust to big Furness that the blow would most surely fall! If the countryside were roused against him, so much the greater reason would there seem to him to push his scheme through, no matter what it might be.
With this in mind, what Sammy Gregg proposed was that they learn, as soon as possible, how many of the men who were assembled in Munson on this day could be relied upon to campaign for a matter of a week, at the least. There were now more than a hundred under arms. But perhaps more than two thirds of these could not leave their work for a long manhunt. Better find out the permanent men for the posse at once.
In the meantime, Mr. Cosden would enter the stage and make the journey back to Crumbock as fast as possible. There he would spread the alarm in the same fashion and gather as many permanent men as he could.
“Now,” said Sammy to his new henchmen, “there’s half a dozen places where Furness’ riders are apt to strike. They might tackle Munson. They might try Crumbock. They might land at Chadwick City, or Little Orleans, or Buxton Crossing. Or they might even ride as far as Old Shawnee. Now look at the map.”
He sketched in the dust with his forefinger as he talked.
“Here are the mountains in a lump, an armful, a hundred and fifty miles across. Crumbock is fairly close to the center of it. Munson is off here to the edge. The other towns are out on the plains beyond.
“Very well. No matter where they rob, Furness and his men always head for the heart of the mountains. That is their ‘hole-in-the-wall’ country. They hide there as soon as they can after they’ve made a raid.
“Now, what I plan to do is not to try to herd them away from all the towns, but cut off the line of their retreat. We ought to get thirty or forty men out of Munson, and the same number out of Crumbock. Then split those men into two sections each. That’ll give you four posses of between fifteen to twenty men each. Then post each of the four in the mountains, in a square.
“Every side of that square will be about seventy or eighty miles long. We’ll put men here and here and here!”
He jabbed out the places on his rudely sketched map.
“Now we’ll make no more noise about this thing than we have to, but we’ll at once send riders from Munson to go to each of the towns where big Furness is most apt to strike. In the towns they’ll not speak a word or give any warning that we think that Furness is going to raid. Because, so far as we know for sure, he may not raid. But we’ll have our men there, as messengers. Now, the instant a raid is carried out, the messenger in the town that is raided will ride, not on the trail of the raiders, but straight into the mountains until he comes to that section of the posse which is located nearest to his own town.
“When the word is brought in, in that fashion, the party that is warned will give the messenger a fresh horse and send him on to warn the other nearest sections of our posse. In the meantime, it will have fixed in its own mind the most likely routes along which the seven are apt to hit into the mountains from the nearest town.
“And, in a way, you can say that we’ll have Furness and his men running right into our hands. Fifteen or twenty men, who know what to expect, ought to be able to handle at least the seven men of that gang. The advantage of surprise will be all on our side.”
Perhaps it was a little complicated. Perhaps, also, it was a little more selfish than a real sheriff’s posse would have dared to be. But the need was urgent. And the scheme appealed most strongly to the imaginations of the men to whom Gregg talked.
There was one chief danger. They needed three full days in order to set their trap. And if the raid occurred before the trap was set, most of their preparations would be wasted. So the first thing was speed in those preparations.
All was arranged with perfect harmony. In another hour, Cosden was whirling away toward Crumbock to gather what good men he could in the mining camp, and Jack Lorrain and others were weeding out the volunteers of Munson. They got thirty-four men who declared their willingness to remain at least a week on the job. Besides, they were furnished with five messengers who were to scatter to the points of danger exposed to the attack of Furness, namely, to the five towns.
When that was arranged, the Munson volunteers were split into two sections and marched at once out of the town. They only delayed long enough to load up with plenty of bacon and flour and salt at Rendell’s store. And then they were off.
Anne Cosden waved farewell to them from the front door of the saloon, as cheerfully as though they were off on a picnic and she herself left behind among old friends. She had her own work, which was to care for old Durfee in his pain, with the meager assistance of Doctor Stanley Morgan.
But the rearmost rider of the second party that started for the upper mountains was beckoned to by her. It was Sammy Gregg, who rode over before her and removed his hat respectfully.
“Sammy,” said she, “I hope that you’re only riding out of town with the boys to see them off. You’re not going with them!”
“Why,” said Sammy, “after starting a thing like this, I couldn’t stay behind!”
“Will you tell me,” said Anne Cosden impatiently, “why you should put yourself in the way of bullets when you don’t know the first thing about how to shoot back?”
“Oh, no,” said Sammy, “I don’t expect that I’ll be of any real use when the bullets begin to fly. But you see, I thought that I could be handy around the camp.”
“Are you a camp cook?” asked Anne Cosden sternly.
“I can wash the pans, at least,” said Sammy Gregg, and he rode on with a grin.
“Young man,” said Anne Cosden, “don’t be silly and try to be a hero.”
At the head of that party from Munson of which young Sammy Gregg was himself a member, there rode that tall and long-mustached viking, Cumnor. It was he who had abandoned all such industries as mining and lumbering and even cowherding for the reason, as he said, that they were the sign of a new country, and what he wanted to be in was a country which was permanent in its occupations and in the returns which it yielded to good law-abiding citizens.
Therefore, he had established himself, after a time as a rancher, in the smaller field as farmer. It was said that he and poor old Hobo Durfee were the only real farmers in that part of the world, and now that Durfee was unlikely ever again to till a field, or afford to have one tilled for him, Mr. Cumnor stood alone in that branch of work.
He was proud of this lonely eminence, and he was fond of saying that the rest of the members of the community were no better than mere temporary interlopers, whereas he was the forerunner of the men who would make the country rich and great. The time would come, as Cumnor was fond of saying, when those mountains would be terraced high up their sides and thriving farms would throng in every valley.
It was a beautiful sight to see Cumnor lay his course through the mountains to the spot which had been designated as his location. He had been given the post of honor at the angle which was nearest to the two towns of Chadwick City and Little Orleans. The warning messengers from either of those towns would find the party of big Cumnor first. And now the farmer guided his band swiftly among the growing peaks.
He did not need a compass to tell him the way. That was a trail which he had never traveled before, but any old plainsman has learned to stock his brain with all manner of landmarks and signs; and when he comes out of the plains, where it is difficult enough to find any sort of a mark, it is simple enough when he finds himself among the mountains. For they are not to him what they are to the uninitiated, simply great forms monotonous as waves in the sea. Rather, they are so many faces, each with individual features.
The general landmarks were so well fixed in the mind of big Cumnor that now he led the party on with a perfect su
rety, never pausing to make his reckoning at any point along the journey. They crossed the first range of heights before noon of the starting day. Then they swung down into a rough, narrow valley which extended between that range and the next just off to the north.
The next day they labored slowly along through the mountains with the yellow flannel shirt and the rigidly squared shoulders of Cumnor in the lead. That evening they camped on the spot which had been chosen for them by Sammy Gregg before the start. They were now at one of the four corners of the square which the scattered posse sketched across the surface of the mountains. And from that time forth they need do nothing except wait from day to day for news of the raiders.
So two lazy days in the camp passed away, comfortable days of rest for the men with Cumnor, days of torture for Sammy. For he was not one of those who are plentifully entertained by the sights and the sounds of the great outdoors. If someone cared to sit down and talk to him about the nature of the stones or about the trees and their peculiarities, their ages and their uses, he was glad enough. And there were many men who could make a most fascinating tale out of the sign on the trails which crossed the mountains. However, if left to his own devices, Sammy could only sit and twiddle his thumbs.
Left to himself in the dreary silences of the camp, he could only wonder if any success would ever attend this complicated scheme of his, or would it be another of the failures which had always attended every effort to bring back Chester Ormonde Furness to the hands of the law?
It was on the fourth evening that the news came. They had started the campfire to cook the evening meal. Cumnor himself, left free from camp duties as the leader of the expedition, was walking across a hill to the east of the fire, when they saw him pause and then wave his hand and shout. A moment more and they heard the rapid drumming of hooves. And after that, a horseman loomed suddenly beside Cumnor, a man who talked with many violent gestures.
It seemed that Cumnor refused to listen. He turned and led the way to the fire, the rider still rattling forth news as he went. But when they came in to the scene of cookery, Cumnor said: