by Max Brand
“Good-by,” said she, “and good luck.”
I stepped back into the opening of the narrow gate and paused there a moment to look her over and to let her soak in. Feature by feature, the shape of her head, the shoulders, her height and bulk, I worked them well back into my mind because I felt that I would be needing to remember what she looked like one of these days.
“Good-by again,” said I, and went out into the street.
When I heard the creak of the gate being closed behind me, it made me feel pretty much alone, and in need of a doctor.
But I got on, stepping slowly.
I had my hands in my pockets as I came up to the next corner, and there a couple of flatties jumped out at me. I looked at them with a dull eye, and they split away to each side of me.
“Just a drunk,” said one of them, but as I went on across the street, I couldn’t help thinking how well the trap had been set around the house of Parker Cole. Young Steven must have been at the bottom of it, I decided, and that was enough for me.
Well, strange to say, the walking didn’t knock me out, but straightened me up. The ripple and stagger of the heartbeats grew better. And then a cab came along, and I hailed it and went home.
I had the cab wait in the street, because I suspected that everything might not be right. If the others wanted to double-cross me, they had had plenty of time, and police might be waiting for me in the house at that moment.
When I unlocked the door of the rooming house, therefore, and pushed it open, I wasn’t very much surprised to see two men waiting inside. They got up, pale faces under the light, and came for me. So I slammed the door and got back to the cab in time. They yelled and fired a couple of shots, but we got away.
I had not gotten very far, however, before trouble slugged me again. They wanted my hide and they wanted me badly. I was hunted from New York to Pittsburgh, down the Mississippi, on boats, on railroads, and they got wind of me in New Orleans and stuck a two-thousand-dollar reward on my head. However, on that entire trip I never went faster than a walk and I put in eight hours’ sleep each night. Because I knew that I had nearly died in the Cole house, from excitement and physical effort.
Things were getting pretty hot on my trail all over the East and the South, and that was why I slipped out West. I didn’t have much idea what I could do, but I knew I had told the girl that I would go straight, and that was my goal. The job that I had in doing that is what comes next to relate. That brings me to Barney Peel, and Sid Maker, and Makerville; to Colonel Riggs and Piegan. In fact, this opens up everything — so many things that I hardly know where to start.
CHAPTER VI. THE HOLDUP
THE REASON THAT I headed for the town of Piegan was that it was young on the map and was also four days of hard staging from the nearest railroad. Those things appealed to me, because I knew that wherever I went easily, by boat or railroad, the police could go, also, and that they were not likely to let me alone for a long time to come. I needed to get back into the woods and the rough country, where I could get myself out of the first page of the police mind of the country, so to speak.
It’s a funny thing how accidents get multiplied and enlarged, and trifles become important. There were still references in the newspapers to the “Cole robbery,” the “Cole outrage,” and the “great Cole burglary.” But I’ve told you exactly how everything happened. Waddell was captured. One policeman was slightly wounded. Young Cole was knocked on the chin. That was all that had happened. But the police were furious because their perfect trap had failed to insnare the second thug. They could not guess how accident and the calm wits of Betty Cole had saved my neck.
However, since the price on my head had been boosted to three thousand dollars, I was glad to get onto the stage that started for the town of Piegan. Four days of staging, and in those four days I drove four decades, four lifetimes into the heart of the West. It seemed to me as though I had sped down a long chute into the very heart of a mystery.
It was a mystery to me — the look of the men who had gathered for the stage, the stage itself, like a finely modeled ship of the ancient days, and the six wild-eyed horses hitched in front of the craft that was to navigate that inland sea. I looked inside and saw a woman and three small children that had the look of tears. So I handed the driver an extra ten dollars, and he arranged that I should sit beside him. That was my post all through the journey, and on account of being in that seat, I met with a good deal of excitement and trouble, as you’ll soon see.
My idea was to keep my mouth shut and watch other people, and so try to pick up the ways and customs of the community. But it wasn’t a community or members of a community that I found on the stage. There was a Pittsburgher, and an Alabaman with a hat a yard across and a self-conscious air of gentility, a Chicagoan who was always gritting his teeth and looking at the future, and the woman with the three children who came from Maine.
She was going out to join a brother. We all used to pity that poor brother. But people from the State of Maine are like that. They follow duty to the bottom of the sea or clear up above timber line. There were a couple of others in the complement of that company, but I forget who they were. None of them was really out of the West, but all of us would become good Westerners in the course of a few years, or else get our fingers burned and depart for the less strenuous East.
The most typical Westerner I ever knew was a Texan from Philadelphia. Westerners are made, they are not born. I’ve seen a man fit into the wildest West in three days, if he was the right sort. Or, again, he might not do it in thirty.
At this time railroads were pushing through the mountains rather blindly, thrusting out side lines and spur branches. Towns sprang up, disappeared into dust, or else became enduring cities. But for every one that succeeded, I think, there were two or three that failed. It was a period of wildcatting in town building. You picked out a patch of desert and paid ten dollars a square mile for it, and you tried to cut up that square mile and sell it in batches of building lots. The profits were practically limitless, if the deal went through and enough curious home makers and fortune seekers drifted that way.
Piegan, the goal of my journey, had just been put on the map and was the brain child of one Colonel Riggs, celebrated as a promoter of new cities. On the trip I heard a great deal of speculation as to the richness of the soil, the possibility of irrigation, the presence of valuable minerals in the hills around Piegan. But I was not much interested. What continued to occupy my mind was simply the fact that the place was four days from the railroad.
The first two days were hard ones on me. The road we traveled over was called a highway only by courtesy. It was a cattle trail, most of the distance, marked out with skeletons in gruesome style, a dotted chalk mark through the mountains. Only the matchless poise and spring of a Concord coach could have supported us over the rough spots with less than broken backs. The woman and all three of her children were seasick, those first two days, which didn’t help the rest of us. And the pitching motion of the vehicle exhausted me so much that when we reached the sleeping quarters at night, I dropped in my tracks, without waiting for food.
However, by watching the way the driver handled himself, I learned the easiest ways of accommodating myself to the heavy laboring of the stage, and the third day I was feeling much better, when we changed drivers for a wild man, a regular fiend who loved to throw a chill into every one of his passengers.
He was a good hand with the reins. He knew how to use his brakes, too, which was an art in itself, and he understood every inch of that rough road. However, he was always forcing the team. Every time he came to a long up grade, he settled back with a growl of resignation; every time he saw the beginning of a down pitch, his eye gleamed, and he sent the team down in a mad rush while the people in the body of the coach hung on for dear life and the children screamed with fright.
I wondered why some of our rough-looking passengers didn’t take a hand in the business and tell the driver what was what,
but though the men grew more and more stark of expression, more and more grim of face, not a syllable was spoken directly to the driver. When he was overlooking the change of horses, I heard some pretty dire threats, but when he returned, nothing was said.
They all held back, I suppose, for the same reason that I myself said nothing. I was frankly afraid of that man. He was six feet and something, rawboned, but with a neck like a bull’s. He carried a revolver with the air of one who knows how to use it, and his eye was as wild and as red as a heat- maddened steer’s. He always looked as if he were about to break into a stampede, and like a stampede he drove the relays of horses.
He was to take the stage in the final two days of the trip. I knew that, so I locked my teeth and prepared to endure.
That third day my heart jumped up into my throat more than once, but still I managed to steady my nerves and got through with it fairly well. The fourth day was the worst of all.
We were climbing most of the time, and then the suffering horses were allowed to go along at a walk. When the down stretches came, however, they were frightfully steep, and that madman of a driver, with a yell and a slashing of the long whip, sent the horses racing at full speed. We whacked over rocks that threatened to smash our wheels. We skidded far out on curves and, heeling over, we could look dizzily down into great gorges.
I began to think that the driver was actually insane; perhaps he was, as a matter of fact.
I was almost glad when, as we reached the bottom of a hollow, lurched up the farther slope, and then came down to a walk, a rifle clanged from the brush ahead of us, and a masked man stepped out, the rifle still at his shoulder.
Two more voices, over on our left, yelled at the same moment for the stage to halt and the passengers to shove up their hands.
I did some split-second thinking. If we were robbed, a complete description of each of us would get into the papers. And that was what I did not want to have happen. I saw the driver throw on his brakes with a thrust of his foot and at the same time jerk up a sawed-off shotgun that leaned against the seat.
He never fired that gun. A rifle bullet cut through his arm as he raised the weapon and the riot gun dropped down to the road and went off with a roar.
In the meantime, the woman and the three youngsters were screeching like fiends, and it seemed to me that the noise was like a smoke screen that might cover me. As the driver dropped his shotgun, I got out my Colt and tried a snap shot at the fellow who was holding the horses.
He dropped in the road with a shout and started crawling for the brush, while the driver released the brakes and yelled to the horses. We swayed forward, the woman screaming that we must stop or we would all be murdered. But there was no stopping that big brute of a driver. He was standing up in the seat, letting the reins hang, his wounded arm dangling, the blood running down his side, but he had his Colt out, and held it poised, shoulder-high, cursing, swaying as the coach pitched, but always probing the bushes for the other bandits.
It seemed certain to me that they would open fire on us. But perhaps the heart went out of them when they realized that we were moving off and that, though they might murder some of us, they could hardly stop the rest.
We got to the pitch of the grade and went down the farther side. At the next hollow we stopped, and there the shirt of the driver was cut away and his wound was bathed and bandaged by two of the men. It was not a deep wound. But it stiffened his arm, and after that he went on more slowly, with such a blessed calm, in fact, that I wished the robbers had appeared the day before!
There was a good deal of talk, as a matter of course. The lot of us who had detested the driver before were now ready to call him a hero. In addition, we made up a purse among the lot of us, to reward him for his courage and to pay him for the time he would have to lay off from work. We gave him the purse, which amounted to two hundred dollars, just before we sighted Piegan from the top of the hills.
He made a speech, saying if it hadn’t been for the dropping of the rifleman, we would all have been robbed of everything that we stood up in and he remarked that the pistol work I had done was worthy of an expert. He said quite a lot on that subject, and the rest of the passengers began to look on me with a great respect.
I was the only one who knew how lucky that snap shot had been!
CHAPTER VII. THE TOWN OF PIEGAN
PIEGAN LAY OUT on a wide flat; that is to say, the upper surface was all about of a height, but the plateau was cut up with a lot of dry-bottomed draws and a few gorges cut by creeks. That bit of the flat was spotted with sagebrush. As I looked down on it for the first time that day, I saw a whirlwind pick up a cloud of dust and go swaying off with it to invisibility.
It wasn’t the most cheerful prospect in the world. We could see the houses, the false fronts of the stores along the main street, and the shining raw wood which was being used for the frames and the boardings of the houses which were under construction.
I remember that the man from Chicago said, quietly, but with a grimness that made me listen: “Well, I might have guessed! It’s just another”
He didn’t complete the sentence. He didn’t have to. It was clear enough that he considered Piegan no good!
The rest of us seemed to feel the same way, but the driver, who had adopted a rather fatherly attitude to us since he became a hero, told us that the place was a lot better than it looked, that water could be put on that flat and make it bloom, and that some day a fortune would be ripped out of the mountains in the shape of gold and silver. He said that he had three lots in Piegan and that he intended to buy more.
This made us all feel a lot better, and we rolled on down into Piegan with more cheerful looks.
From the inside, the town looked bigger than from the hills. There were a few good stores and an ambitious hotel, which was all that Colonel Riggs had contributed to the town and all that he ever would contribute. There were some fairish houses, a lot of shacks and tents.
Riggs had put the place on the map for the moment but, of course, everything was very rough. The streets were staked out but they were not made. The wheels ripped and pounded them, and the wind cleaned out the ruts here and filled them in there. The stage went into that town like a small boat riding on big waves.
The last stop was the hotel. You could depend on Riggs to arrange that. His hotels were always the stage stations, as well.
He came out and turned himself into a reception committee. He was a tall man with shoulders so humped that his coat was pulled up above the seat of his trousers. He had a hollow chest, a large stomach, and long legs, a little bent in at the knees, like the legs of a stork. They gave him a look of possible agility, in spite of his size above the hips. He had a sallow face with the wrinkles that fit a smile well developed, and he had a sandy mustache, pretty well yellowed up with cigar stains and with a part nearly half an inch wide in the middle of his lip.
He looked kindly and simple, like somebody’s grandpa, but the way he managed to shake hands with everybody at the same time and was particularly glad to see everybody told me something.
I got myself a fairish sort of room that looked out over the post office and the future location for the city hall, as the sign on the vacant lot informed me. The same sign declared that all of that land had been donated to the community free of charge by the liberality of Colonel Riggs. I had no doubt that the sign had been painted by order of Colonel Riggs, too. I stood in front of my window, reading the sign, listening to the wind hiss at me through the cracks in the wall, and wondering a good deal about my future.
It wasn’t the police that crowded my mind, just then. The bigness of those mountains in the distance and the darkness of the forests that covered them told me that I had bored my way into the heart of the wilderness, where the law would not penetrate for a long time. I forgot that a single detective might have picked up my trail.
What bothered me most was that I was flat. My wanderings had cost me a good deal. A crook on the fly can’t bargain o
r ask questions. He has to eat and pay on the run, and those prices are always the highest. I had dribbled a little streak of gold and silver right across the map, and all that was left to me of the stuff was sixty-two dollars.
Well, I had to do a good deal of thinking, when I considered how little that was. Just down the street I could see a restaurant with a menu in front of it. The names of the foods were written big, and the prices were written small, but I made out that steak cost a dollar and a half!
There was nothing for me but to locate work. Yet what work could I do?
Well, I could handle a pack of cards with the next one, but honest cards only pay when you carry a big bank roll, and my promise to Betty Cole barred crooked cards.
Dice, gambling of all kinds, in fact, had been ruled out in the same manner. And I wanted to curse myself for a fool. Besides, I had a sick feeling that I would break my promise before very long. I wanted to go straight, but in this part of the world men made money digging in mines, or with other kinds of manual labor. Outside of that — well, I might be a clerk in a store, or a cook in a restaurant, or wash dishes.
Why should I have turned up my nose?
I don’t know. But I never had worked really, except in the gymnasium, training for a fight, and that’s harder than other work, but different. Every time you poke the bag, you figure that you’re soaking the other pug in the stomach, and it makes the day pass pretty quick.
Logically I saw that it was crooked work, manual labor, clerking, or starvation.
Crooked work I wouldn’t do.
Manual labor I couldn’t do.
Clerking I despised from the bottom of my soul, but it would have to be that or starving.
I should have gone searching for a job at once, but I decided that I would wait a while and see how fast the forelock of Opportunity grew in this neck of the woods.
Then I went down to the dining room of the hotel and laid in a good feed.