by Max Brand
CHAPTER XIII. THE TEAMSTER
ALTOGETHER, WE SLEPT for only about two hours. But that was enough to bring the dawn, and dawn was a sad thing for us, you can imagine! By this time, Makerites were scattered all the way between us and the town of Piegan, and they would mean business. They would be scattered across country, too. The longer I thought about it, the more hopeless it appeared to me.
I went out to the edge of the wood and looked across at the Piegan- Makerville road. I saw a couple of horsemen jogging down it, going past a wagon loaded with hay, that had six horses hitched on in front. A peaceful job, that farmer had. I wished that I were in his boots.
And the moment I thought of that, I decided that that was the best place for all of us.
The Makerites would probably expect me and my valuable captive anywhere rather than on the main trail. And they would be looking for horsemen, not portions of a load of hay.
So I got my fellows together, and we rode straight across the fields until we came up to the road at a bend, a good distance ahead of the hay wagon. Slim Jim Earl began to get excited, and he wanted to know if I had lost my head, and couldn’t I understand that I was taking them straight up to the jumping-off place?
I didn’t explain my plan. I was tired, groggy, and ready for bed. I just stuck out my jaw — as Maker was doing and led the party up to the roadside. We dismounted, stripped the fixings from our horses, and turned them out to graze where they chose. Then we sat down by the road and watched the wagon coming up. The driver was a slouching lump of a man with a head that jutted out before him. This characteristic gave him something of the profile of Colonel Riggs — a caricature of the colonel, so to speak.
He stopped his team — six rugged mustangs — when he saw us.
“Hello, strangers,” said he.
He gave us a grin and a wave of the hand. We all waved back, except Maker. His hands were still tied.
I asked the teamster where he was hauling his hay, and he said that he was hauling it seven miles down the road toward Piegan, and that he intended to put it in a barn he was building.
“What would you want,” said I, “for hauling it all of the way into Piegan?”
“Sixteen miles?” said he. “What would I want to haul it there for?”
“For money,” said I.
“You mean you know somebody that wants it?”
“I want it.”
He looked at me and took off his hat and scratched his head for a time, with the most loutish look that I ever saw. However, he wound up by shrugging his shoulders. I gathered that it was not the first time that he had given up a problem before he came to the solution.
“Well, what would you pay?” he asked.
“How much is on that wagon?”
“Three tons.”
“What did you pay for it?”
“Twelve dollars a ton. It’s good hay, too.”
“I’ll pay you fifteen, and cartage. How much for that?”
“Well, lemme see. A dollar a day for each hoss is six dollars, and a dollar for me is seven. Then there’s the return trip. That’s fourteen dollars.”
“You rate yourself for as much as a horse, but you won’t pull as much,” said I.
He seemed stumped by this.
“It’s this way,” said he. “I’ve got a pair of hands. They’ve only got hoofs.”
He was only about two cuts above a half-wit. I began to be sorry for him.
“Fourteen dollars, and forty-five for the hay, that makes fifty-nine for the whole job,” said I.
“I ain’t added it up yet,” said he.
He paused, cocked an eye at the sky, and began to work on his fingers. In five minutes or so he told me the right answer.
“How much for four passengers?” said I.
“You wanta ride?” said he.
“Yes, we want to ride on the load.”
He hesitated.
“I wouldn’t charge a man for a lift,” said he.
“I want to pay, though,” said I. “I want to pay for everything. And besides that, I want you to forget that you’ve seen the four of us. I want to pay you for forgetting. You understand?”
It took him a while to gather the meaning of this, but finally he nodded. Out of the wallet of Sid Maker, I had taken a hundred dollars in gold, and I passed that sum on to the teamster at once.
He weighted it in his hand, with his eyes staring. He lived in a country where money came easily enough, but it seemed as though he never had seen those familiar coins before.
“Why, that’s a whole lot,” said he, looking up in my face like a child, from his examination of the money.
It saddened me a good deal, to see his expression. I began to feel like a lucky fellow, heart or no heart, when I watched him.
“That’s a hundred dollars,” said I. “Fifty-nine for the hay and the hauling and your return trip, empty. And forty-one even for what you forget. We’re going to climb up on that load of hay and disappear into it. Is that clear to you?”
After he had stared at me for a full minute, he began to nod, and then I waved the others on. They understood my plan, by listening to my bargaining, and they agreed that it was a good thing. We climbed into the load of hay and burrowed down into it. I put Maker in front of me a little, well buried. And I eased him by tying his hands in front of his face, so that he could rest with his head on his arms, if he had to. The other two were behind me. And then I saw the teamster looking up at the hay, and when he saw how we had disappeared, he began to laugh heartily.
I was glad of that laughter. It told me that the heart of the man was as right as his mind was simple.
He whooped to the mustangs, and off we went. I felt so secure that I prayed for one thing only — that we could get across the rocky draws on the way without a broken wheel or axle.
It was a rattling, crashing, hard ride, that journey to the town of Piegan.
We had just sixteen miles to go, and it took us twelve hours. We started not much more than an hour after sunrise. And the west was red when we pulled into the town.
Not once were we stopped!
That leaves out of the count five separate occasions when horsemen came up beside our driver and questioned him about what he had seen on the road, but he always said that he had seen nothing. Several times his ignorance and stupidity were cursed, but in every instance the riders went off. No one thought of that load of hay. It was too simple a place for such a valuable cargo as Sid Maker to be hidden, I suppose!
I was amused by Slim Jim Earl’s talk, after we had gone through several of these close calls. He seemed to forget all about the success of this expedition, and he began to regret the good buckboard, and the four good mustangs that we had left behind us. I pointed out to him that the price of the horses and the buckboard would hardly matter to Colonel Riggs, so long as he had Maker in his hands. But still Earl kept on, speaking particularly of a chestnut gelding with all dark points, the best upstanding horse, he swore, that he had ever held the reins over.
It grew tiresome, but still I had to endure that chatter. I hated the English language, before the end of the journey. There were other things to make the trip unpleasant, such as the way the dust and the chaff from the hay began to work down the back of my neck and fly into my eyes and ears. And the sun was very strong, until well past the middle of the afternoon. It was true that the hay gave us shelter against the direct rays, but it also shut out the wind, and we fairly baked and steamed.
Twelve hours of almost constant going took us out of the last of the draws, and in the dying time of the day we pulled across the final stretch of soft sand that led on the widening of the trail to Piegan. At last we could afford to sit up on our load of hay, and I must say that the sight of the little scattering town was a blessing to my eyes. As for Slim and Dan Loftus, they yelled like Indians!
I begged them to keep still and finally managed to persuade them. So we drove up the main street, turned into an alley, and finally halted behind the
hotel barn.
I got Maker out of the hay load and made the two guard him in a shed while I went into the hotel to make my report.
I was pretty well covered with dust and chaff. I paused to clean myself of this, and to roll a cigarette, and pull up my belt a couple of notches, for in over twenty-four hours, I had not tasted food of any kind, of course.
When I felt that I had made myself fairly presentable, and with the fumes of the cigarette comforting me, I went on into the hotel and asked for the proprietor.
The colonel was in his office, I was told, and must not be disturbed. He was in his office, discussing important business.
It was important, right enough. One could tell that by the stream of cursing that suddenly broke out into the air and was shut off again by the slamming of a door.
A man came hurrying out, ran down the steps, and flung himself into his saddle.
“This town can go to the devil, for all of me,” he shouted, shaking his fist at us, as representatives of the whole place. “Riggs has come to the end of his rope. I hope he rots!”
He dashed off down the street, and I rather wondered that two or three of the rough-looking bystanders did not unlimber their guns and take a shot at him. But they all seemed depressed. What they heard was as though they had heard it before, and more than half agreed with it.
Trouble was black as a cloud over the whole mind of Piegan!
I turned back to the clerk and saw him shaking his head.
“I’ve got to see the colonel,” said I.
“You can’t,” he insisted. “Besides, it’s too late for him to pay, to-night. The safe’s locked, and everything.”
“Go tell him that Ash has come back,” said I. “See if that makes him open the door!”
He looked doubtful, but off he went at last, hesitating in his stride, from time to time, as though he knew that he was going on a fool’s errand.
CHAPTER XIV. THE TRUMP CARD
THE CLERK CAME back in a minute to say that I was wanted, and he looked at me with a queer interest as he said it. On the way down the hall he confided to me:
“I guess things are going smash, all right?”
I made no answer. It would not be surprising if things went smash, but I had no particular knowledge. I simply felt in my bones that the colonel was a rascal.
As we came closer to the office, the voices of the people inside it cut through the wall as a knife pokes through paper. I heard a man shouting that he had waited long enough and that he would wait no longer.
The colonel put in with a harassed, soothing murmur, which was cut short by the outright swearing of a second voice. I gathered that Riggs was getting it from two sides, and I cannot say that I was sorry for the oily old rascal. It amused me, and yet it was exciting to think that perhaps I was bringing the highest trump in the pack to this game.
When we got to the door, the dispute was at its loudest, and the clerk, after having his knock shouted down, so to speak, simply opened the door, and let out the full, flowing tide of the dispute.
I stepped inside and saw the colonel backed against his desk, a fellow in rough cow-puncher’s garb planted before him, actually shaking his fist in the face of poor Riggs. But his voice was not as loud as that of a big black-browed man who stood with his arms folded, looking like a picture of murder in repose. He was bellowing:
“Talk is the cheapest way of striking coin, but it won’t work all the time. Not when people get used to the loose-lipped gibbering of a—”
It made me pretty hot to see the poor colonel backed into a corner like this. It was plain that he was a man of language rather than a man of action, and I took pity on his sallow face and the frightened rolling of his eyes.
“Colonel,” said I, “do you want these fellows thrown out?”
The clerk had been waiting behind me, to see how I was received, I suppose, or to spy for an instant on the scene inside, but when he heard this, he jerked away and slammed the door behind him with a noise like the report of a gun.
The attention of the three men inside the room was focused on me by that crash, and by what I had just said. I don’t know why I made such a remark. Either of that pair looked able to eat me alive, but I was driven to say something by the look of Riggs. I suppose that one of the two would have started a gun play on the spot, but each of them seemed a little flabbergasted, and now Riggs called out to me:
“Not at all, Ash. Not at all. Just two friends of mine who have lost their tempers for the moment. We’re all childish, now and again!”
That was rather a good remark, when you come to think of it. It had them backing up, at once.
Before they got their vocabularies unlimbered, the colonel asked me what I had to report.
At this the big man of the black brows bawled out: “Maybe he’s got the election report!”
“No,” I said, “I’ve only brought back a man.”
“A man from where?” asked Riggs.
“From Makerville,” said I.
“Who did you get?” asked the colonel, snapping his fingers nervously. “And why bring anybody but”
“It’s Maker,” said I.
That seemed to split them apart. They all fell in different directions, so to speak, the colonel bringing up short against his desk and glaring at me. But he recovered himself a long time before the other two. The bigger of the pair had flopped heavily into a chair. The smaller man had spread out his legs as though bracing himself against another shock.
“You’ve got Maker, have you? And how many men has Maker with him?” he asked.
“Two,” said I, “to see that he keeps his hands tied.”
The second shock seemed almost greater than the first one. The colonel turned and looked out the window.
“Where — where is he?” he asked huskily.
“In the shed behind the barn,” said I.
“I’ll go get him,” said the big man.
I stepped to the door.
“You’ll stay here, friend,” said I, for I had no mind to let my night’s work be undone by the touch of a knife upon the rope that held Maker safe.
“Now who are you?” asked the tall fellow, striding slowly up to me so that he could look down on me.
“Shut up and back up, Hooker,” said his friend. “If he has Maker out there, he is the devil.”
Hooker took this hint as a chance to laugh. Then he spun around on Riggs and slapped him on the shoulder.
“I’ve talked too much, colonel,” said he. “But how was I to know that you had cards like this up your sleeve?”
Riggs brushed the apology — if you could call it that — away.
He simply said: “I don’t bear any hard feelings, boys. Only, remember that I’ve done something more than talk. You said that Piegan was not worth the blasting powder needed to blow it to pieces unless we won this election. And with Maker out of the way for two days, will you tell me how we’re going to fail to win?”
He turned to the other man.
“Hooker’s dumb with joy,” said Riggs. “You tell me, Fernie.”
Fernie was ready enough with an answer. He said:
“If we have Maker, we certainly have the county in our pockets, already.”
“And town lots are good as gold payments to you boys?” asked the colonel, with a bit of a sneer.
Hooker used his loud laugh again. I didn’t like that man from the first. I liked him less with the passage of every second. He said that town lots in Piegan would be kiting sky-high, as soon as the place was the official county seat. But first he wanted to have a look at Maker.
I saw the colonel parting his lips with a smile and about to say a thing that I couldn’t stand for.
“That’s too bad, Hooker,” said I. “But you can’t see him. The colonel and I can see him, and that’s all.”
“Hey!” shouted Hooker furiously, bridling at me like a hen, or a fool. “We’re not to see him, eh? This little trick is just wind and words, too, eh?”
&n
bsp; I wanted to kill him. I never wanted to kill a man more badly. So I looked hard and straight at Riggs, sort of asking his permission. The colonel looked baffled, blinking back at me, but he decided instantly on the line that he would take. He adopted the highest hand, at once.
“Look here, Hooker, and you, Fernie,” he said, “I’ve taken more from the pair of you to-day than I’ve ever taken from human beings before. I took it because I know that you’ve been friends, and because I didn’t want to let you talk yourselves out into the cold and the dark. I wanted to keep you on the inside, as from the first. But now I’m not going to take any more of this. You know that Maker is here. If you don’t believe it, it’s nothing to me. Jerry, we’ll leave them here to try to find the light.”
As he said this, he crossed the room, hooked his arm familiarly through mine, and went out into the hall with me.
He had carried off his exit in the finest possible shape. No actor could have done the thing better, but when I got him into the hall, I felt him stagger a little. He had been hard-pressed, and he was feeling his knees sag, I suppose.
He panted, like a man who had been running for his life uphill! “What do you mean, boy? Was it a bluff? Was it just a bluff to get me out? Of course it was just a bluff, but it was the best one that I ever heard used. It will get me out of this town with my neck whole, I suppose. You and I against the world, Jerry. You’re a man after my heart. I’m glad I pulled the detectives off your trail. I knew that we could use one another!”
In a way, that was as bad a confession as you could ask a man to make. It showed that he was ready and willing to run for his life to get from Piegan before a crowd of angry investors lynched him. For I saw, now, that lynching was the very thing that was in the air.
However, I helped him out of the bottomless pit at once.
“I meant what I said,” I answered. “I have Maker out there in the shed, unless those two fellows have let him slip away.”