Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Are you going to come out and listen to me, or kick these fellows out and let me talk to you in here?” said I.

  “You talk here in front of them. There’s nothing between me and McGinnis,” said Maker.

  “Isn’t there?” said I.

  But I was stumped by that. Of course, I didn’t know what had been going on between McGinnis and the boss. But I did know that there was trouble in the air. I was simply playing a bluff, and it seemed to be called.

  Maker did not wait me out. He went on: “How do you know me, anyway? I never saw you before, Poker-face.”

  “I never saw you, either,” said I, “but I heard you described.”

  “Can you recognize a man from a description, my bright boy?” said Maker.

  I could see him leaning a little toward me and I knew that he was beginning to be more and more suspicious.

  “I can recognize you,” said I.

  “You repeat the description that they gave you,” said Maker. “There’s something behind you, son!”

  “They told me to pick out a fellow who looked like a bulldog.”

  Suddenly Maker laughed. And at that signal, the other five roared. They kept on roaring, when he had recovered a good deal from his own amusement, and I saw him pick them off with side glances.

  Still he insisted that I should speak in front of them all.

  “I’ll whisper in your ear then,” said I.

  “You’ll whisper what in my ear?” said Maker, half sneering.

  Bluff again, for me! I hated it, but I had to go ahead. I slipped across the room and bent over him. Two men pulled guns and covered me. But I whispered at the ear of Maker:

  “Everything’s a bust! McGinnis has his back against the wall.”

  “What do you mean that everything’s a Has he”

  He turned on the other five and bellowed:

  “Get out of the room! What’s keeping you in here, anyway? Get out and keep out!”

  They went.

  The last to go through the door was little Chuck, stepping as soft as a cat, and as he closed the door, he was still watching me in a way that sent prickles up and down my spine. There was trouble in Chuck; there was poison in him.

  When the door closed, Maker jumped at me and grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me.

  “Take your hands off me, or I’ll crack your jaw for you!” said I.

  He dropped his hands, cursing.

  “What d’you mean, that McGinnis said everything was a bust?” demanded Maker. “How could be possibly”

  I laid the muzzle of my Colt right against his stomach.

  “Whisper it, Sid,” said I. “Somebody may be listening in from the hall.”

  He looked down at the gun and then looked back at me.

  “You fool,” he murmured. “You think that you can get away with it, Poker- face?”

  “Turn around, Sid,” said I. “Lift your arms carefully and see if you can touch the ceiling. Then lower those hands behind your shoulders. Steady does the trick — slow and steady.”

  He began to move as I ordered, but all the while he was arguing.

  “You can’t get away with murder like this,” said he. “You know that I’ve got man-eaters all around me. They’ll chaw up your bones, kid.”

  “I don’t want to murder you, Sid,” said I. “I don’t think that I’ll have to, either, because you have too much sense to make a quick move. I hate quick moves, Sid. I hate ’em like the devil! Move slow, and everything will be right.”

  “Kid,” said Maker, gradually lowering his hands behind his back, as I had ordered, “you’re making a great mistake. I could fix you for life. I don’t care who you’re working for, you could make more money working for me. That dirty snake, that wall-eyed imitation, that Colonel Riggs, he’s nobody. He’s no man, I tell you. You believe me, or not?”

  “Perhaps you’re right, Sid,” said I, prodding the muzzle of the gun into his ribs, and with my free hand catching his left wrist in the running noose of a cord I had drawn from my pocket. “Perhaps you’re absolutely right. But I’ve thrown in with Riggs, for the time being, and I suppose that I’ll have to stay in with him. I hate to do this. I really hate to. But I’m going to keep on.”

  Then I threw a couple of hitches over the other wrist and had his hands good and fast. There’s a lot of talk about people who can wriggle out of real rope ties, but I’d like to see one really manage it. Usually, somebody with a knife turns the trick for a friend.

  When I had his hands secured, I went through his pockets. I got a plain little knife, a penknife, and then a pair of short-nosed revolvers. I might have guessed that Maker would prefer that kind of a gun. I got his wallet, too, and it was a good thick, hard-packed one. His upper lip twisted when he saw me take it out of his pocket, and he swore.

  I had a balled-up handkerchief ready in my hand and, as he cursed, I shoved it between his teeth.

  I thought that he would choke with his rage. He turned purple. His eyes started out of his face. His nostrils flared to twice their ordinary size. But there was no way he could work that gag out of his mouth except with hand power. There wasn’t enough strength even in his tongue to push it past his teeth, because it was balled up into a knot, the way that Dick Stephani had showed me how to turn the trick. A handy partner was Stephani, I can tell you. He was full of tricks.

  After I had Sid lightened, and tied and gagged, I asked him to step through the window and be easy about it, because something told me that that little tiger of a man, that Chuck, was out there in the hall, listening as close to the door as he dared. I hadn’t liked his parting glance a whit.

  Maker hesitated one instant. I half thought that he would throw himself at me, tied as his hands were, and with the crash of the struggle that he made, bring in attention from the outside.

  However, he thought better of it in the long run and made no foolish play like this.

  I was more than half sorry for him, when he squirmed out over the sill of the window and slipped down to the ground, with me behind him. Of course, it meant a tremendous sacrifice of pride on his part, and pride in a fighting man like Maker is as great as pride in any emperor.

  When he hit the ground, he stood up and looked hastily, eagerly around him.

  “Too bad, Sid,” I whispered at his ear, “but the big boy is asleep for a while. You’ll have to come along with me.”

  He turned his head and gave me such a look as I never want to take again from any human. It was the exquisite perfection of boiled-down hatred and malice. Two looks like that would kill a man on the spot, I think.

  But, after that single, silent glance, he went on obediently enough around the side of the house. I heard some one knocking inside the house.

  “They’re at the door of your room, Sid,” said I. “But they’ll be a little too late. You can break into a dogtrot, Sid. Head straight through those trees, if you don’t mind.”

  He went on at a dogtrot, the way I had commanded him to do. And then, behind us, I heard the crash of a door flung suddenly open and after that the shouting of a fierce voice that was instantly answered by a chorus.

  Such rage I’d never heard. It went through me even in the distance. There was a vibration in it, like the vibration of light. It made a red glow in my brain.

  I could have guessed before what would happen if they caught me. Now it was no matter of guessing. I knew. I knew that they were with Maker as a boss and as a friend. They were ready to die for him, like children for a father.

  You can imagine that I felt as though I were stepping in a fire. We got to a fence, and I made Maker sidle between the bars of it, and then there was the roadway just beyond.

  How I wanted to bolt down that road at full speed, but the curse was on me, and with my staggering, leaping heart, I could manage no more than a dogtrot again! So I forced Sid to go down the road at that gait.

  It was a cruel thing to do, because he could not breathe through his mouth at all. But I didn’t dare to ris
k him with the gag out, for a little while.

  And, behind me, I began to hear the rattling of hoofs. Maker’s trained man-eaters were beginning to scatter to hunt for their chief.

  CHAPTER XII. THE PURSUIT

  WE WERE ABOUT two hundred yards from the place where my two men and the horses were waiting, when I heard the beating of hoofs sweeping up fast behind. I dived with Maker for some tall grass and pitched myself into it, dragging him down.

  Through the tops of the grasses I could see the riders come up and halt. The first was Chuck. I knew him by the smallness with which he loomed in the saddle, and even in the starlight. I could see how he had turned his head toward the spot where I was lying with my man.

  “There’s something in that grass,” said Chuck.

  “Chuck,” said the voice of Bert, “are you crazy? I hear a horse running through the sand up there. Are you going to wait here and”

  “I hear something breathing,” said Chuck, leaning a little from the saddle.

  It was the whistling breath of my friend Maker, half-strangled, and pumping like a steam engine. But of course I didn’t dare to take the gag out, as yet.

  “It’s a toad. Never hear ’em make that noise before? It’s a toad, of course,” said Bert furiously. “Come on, Chuck, or else stay here and go toad sticking by yourself. I’m hunting men, not vermin!”

  He dashed off down the lane, and Chuck, shaking his head, finally lit out in pursuit.

  After that happened, I sat up in the grass, took the gag from Maker’s mouth, and stood up with him.

  He was cursing, not loudly, but steadily.

  “One fool can sink the biggest ship in the world!” said he. “That idiot of a Bert”

  “Look here,” said I, “I’d hate to start shooting, but I love my own neck, and if they’d come this way, wouldn’t both Bert and Chuck have gone out on the long trail?”

  “Bert, maybe — and a small loss!” said Maker. “But you don’t know that boy Chuck. No, you haven’t even got an idea about him. No one man will ever kill that devil! He’s a nine-footed wild cat, is what he is.”

  I was almost touched by this devotion of Maker to his chief lieutenant. But we had other things to think about now. I asked him to promise that he would not make a sound if I let him go without the gag, and I promised him a bullet through the head if he broke his word. He said that he’d as soon die by a bullet as to gag to death, and he declared that he would keep as still as a mouse.

  So we jogged on, my heart fairly well in order again, until we came to the horses. My two men gave one look at Maker, and all at once they gasped:

  “It’s Maker! It’s him! It’s the big chief himself!”

  “Boys,” said Maker, “you’ve made a fine, brave play. But let me tell you that if you start to take me to your town, you’re making the mistake of your lives, and you’ll all be dead men before you get me there. Besides, I can offer you more than Riggs would ever”

  “Sid,” said I, “you’ve talked a good deal already. Another stream of lingo like that and you’ve talked yourself out of court!”

  He grunted something back at me, but he shut up.

  Loftus and Earl had not been sitting still all of the time that I had been away. There were four strips of blankets cinched around the four horses, and with rope nooses they had even built stirrups.

  I was mighty glad to see those stirrups, I can tell you!

  We got Maker onto a horse, and the lead rope of that horse was tied to the cinch of Slim Jim Earl’s mustang. Then we started out.

  The devil was loose behind us, of course. I could hear horses racing through the darkness. I could hear men shouting, and then, out of the distance, came a fusillade of shots, and all of the beating of hoofs and the shouting swept away toward a far point of the horizon. They had started off on the trail of the wrong fox!

  That was a ton’s weight off me.

  “By thunder,” said Maker at this point, “I wouldn’t have believed that it was possible. I still don’t believe it. I don’t think that it happened. I ain’t here. I’m asleep back there at my house, in my chair. I’ll wake up in a minute and find out that the whole business is a dream!”

  “Maybe you will,” I answered. “But here we have you with us. How about that ford of the river? Can we get across there?”

  “Try it and see,” said he.

  By his violence in speaking, I guessed that we had blundered onto the right spot. Also, if it were the wrong one, he was pretty sure to let us know. A man whose hands are tied behind him is not likely to keep mum at a time like that.

  “How did you manage it, Poker-face?” asked Slim Jim Earl. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing and hearing; that’s all.”

  “I had some luck,” said I.

  As a matter of fact, I was feeling pretty high and happy, as though the work were all over and ended. But I talked small. It’s easy, I notice, to talk small, when you’re holding all the aces in the pack.

  “You had some luck!” repeated Slim Jim Earl. “Yeah, and then something else, too! I never heard of such a play! You take him right out of his house?”

  I didn’t even answer, of course, and Maker breaks in:

  “Poker-face, you tell me. Was there anything in that McGinnis business, at all?”

  “Not a thing,” said I honestly. “I never heard of him before to-night.”

  “Who talked about him to-night?”

  “You did.”

  “I did? Not when you were there.”

  “I was behind you, Sid. I was outside the window, listening in.”

  He groaned and cursed, softly, steadily, for some minutes.

  “It was a good play,” he said. “I’ll bet you play cards, Poker-face. I’ll bet that’s your special game!”

  “I’ve given up cards,” said I.

  “Too hard on your nerves?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said I, and thought of Betty Cole, and the black, dropping shadows of that garden.

  Maker was laughing ironically.

  “And the big sap out there in the garden,” said he. “What about him? Will you tell me that?”

  “You know,” said I, “I simply said that I was the other man you’d hired.”

  “Did that take the thickhead in?”

  “No, he was suspicious, and had his gun on me, and stuck my hands up in the air.”

  “Did you use your feet on him?” asked Maker, with a hungry, almost a childish curiosity.

  “No, I just socked him alongside the head with the heel of a Colt. I thought I’d killed him, at first.”

  “I wish you had!” said Maker. “I wish that you’d killed the whole bunch of four-flushing”

  He stopped himself.

  “I’m talking like a fool,” said he. “I’ve got the finest lot of boys in the world, barring one only. And you’re the man that I mean, Poker-face. I want you! Chuck this yellow dog, this Colonel Riggs, and throw in with a real man and”

  “Quit it, will you?” I warned him.

  “We might as well listen to what he has to say, chief,” said Dan Loftus to me.

  “Why not?” said Slim Jim Earl. “He’s a man of his word, too!”

  “You see, boys,” said I to the pair of ’em, “you don’t understand what this is all about. I don’t want to see you losing your heads, but you, Maker, keep your face shut. I warned you before. Now if you begin to yap again, it’ll be the last talking you’ll ever do.”

  He grunted and growled, but he shut up, while my brain spun to think how close he had come to swinging that pair of lads over to his side of the business. A mighty smooth fellow was that Maker, as I could tell for myself.

  At the same time, I was beginning to wonder if he were not worth a whole gross of Colonel Riggses? These two fellows ought to know what they were talking about, and both of them declared that he was a man of his word.

  That’s about as high a compliment as you can pay to a man on the verge of the frontier. If Maker was worth that praise, he was wo
rth still more. Then, I had liked his way of playing cards. The manners of the loser mean something, and a great something, too.

  Now we came down to the edge of the river, and I remember how the smooth water of the shallows darkened before us, as though the stars were throwing our shadows in front. Then Slim Jim Earl spurred is mustang in and towed Maker after him, and after Maker came Dan Loftus, and I, last of all.

  Halfway out, I saw the leaders drop out of sight under water. They had blundered into a hole. Then Dan Loftus shouted, and pointed out something like a log, sliding rapidly downstream. But it was not a log. For a log doesn’t have motion in itself.

  We floundered and smashed through the water till we came up with it, and the log turned out to be Maker himself!

  That fellow had simply slipped out of the saddle and, his hands tied as they were, he was floating on his back and trusting to leg work alone to get him out of the tug of the mid-channel, and out of the shallows where he could stand up and walk.

  A pretty desperate adventure, when you come to think of it. Desperate even to talk about in midday, before a cosy fire, but in the dark of the night, and with icy snow water to reinforce all of the terrors — why, it made the thing almost unimaginable to me!

  We got Maker back to his horse and out of the river. By that time, every man jack of us was soaked to the skin, and half-frozen, but we did not dare to make a halt. Neither did we dare to push on straight for our home town, because we could guess that parties from Makerville would be rushing along that road, by this time, ready to do murder at a minute’s notice.

  To give ourselves distance from the danger point, we got behind the trees, and trekked four or five miles down the creek. Then we camped and built a fire, and I tell you what, the greatest relief that I ever had in my life was when that flame rose broad and high and the warmth of it soaked into me.

  I was done for. I knew that if I made another stroke of effort, I would be fit to collapse. I had reached my uttermost limit of endurance, and so I ordered that we should camp there.

  A glint of satisfaction appeared in the eyes of Maker when I said that. Well, I wouldn’t trust him to the watchfulness of my two companions. So I got a length of young sapling and tied him to it with my own hands, and then I lay down and slept like a dead man.