Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  The colonel, however, was not one to allow a neighboring town to down him on any score without a protest. So he began to advertise Piegan, too, as a mining center. It was true that there were two gold mines in the mountains west of the town, and the old rascal had a little work done on the trails leading in those directions and he swore that he intended to build a road to each and so make Piegan one of the great mining centers in the country.

  Well, that was the way that he talked, and the way that he worked. To the end he was always the same!

  He came back this day from overseeing the work of a gang on one of those two roads, and when he got to the hotel he sent for me in a hurry. I came down and found him in the office, strutting up and down, on fire with excitement. His hair was rumpled. Still, as he talked, he was always thrusting his fingers into its long, flowing silver.

  As I came into the office, he got hold of me and sort of dragged me into a chair.

  Then he leaned over me and said in a hoarse whisper:

  “Jerry — Jerry, listen. There’s a railroad coming through!”

  “Great Scott,” said I. “Through Piegan?”

  “No, no! Through Makerville. That is, they think that they’re going to run the line through Makerville, but we’re going to stop them. We’re going to stop them, Jerry, do you hear me? You and I — somehow!”

  I stared at him.

  “Why d’you turn to me, colonel?” I asked him. “I haven’t any influence with railroads, have I?”

  He stretched out his long arm and glared down it towards me as though down a rifle barrel.

  “Jerry,” he said, “you’re my luck. You saved me — and Piegan. Somehow or other, you and I — together — we’ll break Sid Maker’s heart for him again, and run that railroad through Piegan!”

  He talked on some more. He was in a fury of heat and excitement, and he was desperate because, so far, he had not been able to think of a plan.

  It amazed me, in a way, to see the furious jealousy of that man. He had brooded so long over the towns, and Maker, that he had come to hate Makerville as though it were a person. He said that he would see himself dead before he would let the railroad go through Makerville. They would have to build right across his dead body!

  I listened to this rot for a few minutes, wondering when he would come back to his senses, and finally he struck an attitude by his desk, and stiffened there, and seemed to grow taller, the crook coming out of his back. I saw that he was getting an idea of some sort, and I slipped out of the office just in time to meet the clerk.

  He had a puzzled look, and said to me in a quiet way: “There’s a man here who says that he wants to see you, Poker-face. I dunno. You wanta take a look at him before you meet him?”

  “What does he call himself?” I asked.

  “He says his name is Steven Cole,” said the clerk.

  That threw the spur into me. I went straight past the hotel man and in the lobby I saw Steven.

  No wonder the clerk was in doubt about him. Steve looked as though he had just stepped out of a bandbox. He had pale-yellow gloves on his hands, and they were folded on top of a glistening walking stick, as thin as a whiplash. He wore sideburns, quite thick and long, and looked like a regular Apollo, but what the devil was the place for an Apollo? Not Piegan, I could lay my bet.

  Well, I went up to him and shook hands. He was as cold as a stone.

  He merely said: “Ash, I hate to trouble you. I’m here because I promised to come. I’ll take myself off your hands almost at once.”

  CHAPTER XXVI. A DRIVE WITH RIGGS

  SEEING STEVE COLE was no pleasure to me, and his speech was not a very good start towards better relations. I didn’t like him, and it was hard to control myself, except when I remembered that he was the brother of Betty Cole.

  “It’s no burden to have you here,” I told him. “Betty wired to me that you were coming, so I’ve been expecting you.”

  “Betty wired to you, did she?” he said, with a lift of his eyebrows.

  It was plain that he thought she had demeaned herself by getting in touch with such a fellow as I. I swallowed that remark, also, and got him to sit down at a table in a corner of the lobby. Over across the room I saw Calkins and “Bud” Wentworth, and some of the other hardy lads of Piegan, and they were laughing with one another, and now and then sneaking glances at Cole. However, I stuck by my guns.

  “She wired to me,” I repeated. “And now that you’re here, I want to do anything that I can for you. This hotel is the only place in Piegan. You can be pretty comfortable here, and I’ll teach you the ropes.”

  “The ropes?” he said, with a sneering laugh. “Are there ropes to learn in Piegan? Ropes of a rig, maybe you mean?”

  And he laughed again. The sound of that laughter was enough to turn heads toward him, there was such covert insolence in the tone of it.

  I had to look down to the floor and tell myself, thrice over, that he was the brother of Betty Cole. Even that hardly enabled me to keep control of myself.

  “What brought you out this far West?” I asked.

  “It’s about the jumping-off place,” he answered. “But I was wanting a change of air, and Betty asked me to look you up. So here I am, as you see. She seems to take a sort of interest in you.”

  “That’s mighty kind of her,” said I. “All that I’ve heard from her has been a telegram. But I’ve written to her.”

  “So I understand,” says he, sticking his chin up in the air, his eyes getting hard.

  Plainly he thought she was disgraced by receiving letters from me. But I swallowed even this, the hardest of all, and explained:

  “That seems like effrontery — an ex-pug and gambler like me” I began.

  “Is that all?” said he. “What about safe cracker, too, Ash?”

  That was too much. I looked him straight in the eye.

  “You know what made me become a robber, Cole,” said I.

  He shrugged his shoulders, and I wanted to slam him with the butt of my revolver. However, I gritted my teeth and managed to control myself.

  “I would have been landed in the jail for that night’s work,” said I, “but Betty saved me.”

  “Yes, I know she did,” said Cole. “I don’t”

  At least, he had the grace to leave that sentence unfinished.

  But now I opened up on him a little: “I’ve always wondered who got to you that night, Cole? What made you sell us out, after you’d asked us in?”

  “Sell?” said he. “Sell you out? I don’t know what you mean. Are you trying to insult me, my friend?”

  Great Scott, what an arrogant rascal he was!

  “Let that go,” said I. “I want to forget about that night.

  It nearly did me in. But I’ve been curious. Wasn’t Stephani with you in the deal? Hadn’t he planned it with you?”

  He stared at me.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said he.

  That made me more furious than ever. So I snarled out: “The fact is that the safe was robbed. You and Stephani planned the job. You would open the safe, split the profits between you, and then turn the blame on the fools of the party who were caught inside of the house! Isn’t that the straight of it?”

  “I’ve heard enough from you, Ash,” said he, rising. “I knew you were a ruffian before. I’ve heard and seen enough of you here to prove that you’re still a ruffian. Betty’ll be interested when I let her know!”

  I was on my feet, too, and the mention of her name made me insane. I laid a finger on his arm, lightly, I am sure, and I looked into his eyes and tried to find his soul there and destroy it with lightning. Because there was lightning in me, just then.

  “If you try to corrupt her idea of me with lies, or your own ideas of what I am, I’ll kill you, Steve. Remember it. Write it down inside your mind. Look at the writing every day, because it’s true.”

  He made no answer. He just looked me up and down for a moment with a curling lip, and the greatest c
alm in the world, then he turned on his heel and went sauntering away from me.

  I saw little Sam Harlow, the editor of the newspaper that the colonel was starting up, come into the lobby and stop the stranger, and ask questions, and I saw Steve Cole giving careless answers.

  I leaned against the wall with one hand braced on it, very sick, trembling all over, afraid to leave before the tremor was gone. I saw that I had cooked the goose. That fellow had been sent out to Piegan by the express will of his sister. He was there because she wanted him to be there. And now I had cut off all relations with him.

  No matter how he had tried me, I should have resisted and kept our talk smooth. Words should not have been able to irritate me. But they had been.

  One of the fellows in the lobby — I think it was Jem Craig — came over and stood by me.

  “What’s the matter, Poker-face?” said he. “You look as though you wanted to tear him to pieces. Who is the dude, anyway?”

  “He’s a fool from the East,” said I, shortly, because I was out of breath with the racing of my heart.

  “I could see he was a fool,” said Craig. “Maybe we’ll be able to educate him a little, though!”

  I hardly heard that; only afterwards I realized what he had said to me. If I had thought twice, I never would have gone off from Craig without making him promise to leave Steve Cole alone.

  However, just then the colonel came rushing into the lobby, saw me, and hurried up and hooked his arm through mine.

  I was glad to have him interrupt my thoughts. So I went along with him and listened to his chatter. He had a habit of getting me with him when he was thinking out loud. I rarely answered back. I gave him a placid audience that didn’t make trouble, and he was fond of outlining his plans to me and the empty air, so to speak.

  He hustled me into his buggy, this day, and drove at a spanking clip out of the town and up a road — trail, rather — to the top of some hills that rose to the south of Piegan. There he pulled up and stood on the seat and swept the plain with a pair of glasses. He drew the picture of the scene as it would be when the railroad went through. He showed me where it would come through the gap in the mountains, and how it would cut across the rolling ground, and then follow the easy plain straight to Piegan.

  He said that it wasn’t logical, wasn’t possible for sane engineers to desire to run their line out of the way, and to Makerville.

  “They’ll get some heavy shipments of copper ore,” I suggested.

  At this he groaned.

  “The confounded copper!” said he. “That’s the root of all the trouble. I tell you, man, that Piegan cannot grow, cannot really flourish unless there is a railroad along which the blood of life can flow into her!”

  “After a while,” said I, “they might be persuaded to run a branch line — narrow gauge, or something like that — down here from Makerville.”

  “Piegan on a branch line from Makerville?” exploded the colonel.

  I argued no longer, because it was pretty plain that argument was not what he wanted. Agreement was what he was looking for, like a man in love.

  He took out some paper and a pencil, and sketched in the imaginary map of what the valley of Piegan would be like after the railroad came through. He put down some towns, on that mental map — some “tributary” towns, as he called them. And he expanded Piegan itself a good deal.

  He worked for a long time, in this way. And he had the shining face of a bunco artist — or an empire builder!

  After a while, he transferred some of his attention to the ground around us. He said that he had been a fool not to see the possibility lying in those hills. He could buy the land for a song, and then he would develop it as a sort of summer residential sector of the town.

  I pointed out that this was only a couple of miles from the town and not near enough to be part of the place and not far enough and high enough to give a real change from the climate of Piegan. But he had his heart set on the picture, already, and he began to talk about “mansions shining on the height.”

  When he started on that line, I recognized the symptoms and the figures of speech and shut up.

  But he went on ad lib. Then, driving back to survey the rest of the possibilities of the hills for their own sake, he ran into a ragged old fellow steering a burro down out of the hills, a gray and moldy prospector coming back to town with grubstake exhausted, but still with a fire of great hopes in his mind, and glimmering out at his eyes.

  The colonel had a long talk with him about the back regions of the mountains — I must say that Riggs was as interested in the country as though he had made it — and when we finally straightened out for Piegan, the afternoon was nearly ended. A cold wind, I remember, was whipping across the hills and had us uncomfortably silent before we got back to Piegan.

  And there the sky fell on my head.

  I mean to say, it was there that I heard a newsboy crowing for the evening edition of that wretched sheet, in a tone as professional as any of his kind on the streets of New York. I heard two words of his song, and then bought a paper and read on the front page:

  NEW YORKER JAILED FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER

  It was Steve Cole!

  CHAPTER XXVII. THE PALMED ACE

  THE COLONEL ASKED me who Cole was, and if he was a friend of mine, but I just sat there and stared helplessly at the account of how that fool of a man had walked into a gambling place and raised a question about the turn of a card, and then pulled a gun to back up his opinion. His bullet had been high and to the right, however, and a chair had crackled over his head and shoulders the next moment. The sheriff had picked up the limp body and carried it to the “jail,” which at present was the little room in back of Lew Dennis’s office. I jumped out of the buggy now, and the colonel called to me to stop, and wanted to know how he could help me. He said that Piegan would do anything I wanted. But I went on, without answering. I headed for the newspaper. It was operating in a tent — the press, the editorial chambers, and the reporting room. Sam Harlow was editor, advertising agent, reporter, and business manager. He always had ink on his fingers and a sleepless look in his red-rimmed eyes. Afterwards Sam went on to big things in the world of journalism. This was his bed-rock beginning.

  I found Sam taking a moment off to eat and read over his latest edition. He was in his shirt sleeves, and the shirt was covered with inky finger marks. He was eating thick ham sandwiches, and had a pint tin cup of coffee standing on top of a cracker box beside him.

  He looked up and gave me his professional smile.

  “Any little bits of news, Poker-face?” said he. “You’re a great mine of news for me, old son, but you don’t give it out freely. Other imaginations have to work on you.”

  “You won’t have to work hard to get news out of me to-day,” said I.

  “What is it?” he asked, forgetting his sandwiches, forgetting even his coffee.

  “It’s this,” said I. “That you’re a four-legged screech owl, and a wall- eyed liar, and your paper is a disgrace.”

  That was a beginning that I worked up pretty well, and Sam Harlow was staggered and gasping, before I got through.

  “What have I done to you, Poker-face?” said he. “I wouldn’t harm you for the world!”

  “Cork up this whole edition,” said I. “Call it in. And if you print another word in your rotten sheet about young Steven Cole, I’ll come down here and wreck your joint for you!”

  “If I dreamed that he was a friend of yours,” says Harlow, “not a single word”

  “If you knew any of the news in the town, you might have known that!” said I. “Sam, get in those papers you’ve sold, will you?”

  “I will,” he said.

  Then he groaned and struck his forehead.

  “I can’t! I can’t!” he said. “They threw a scare into Cole and told him he’d never get out of jail for ten years, and he’s sent a messenger all the way to the railroad to wire to New York for money. He wants to have enough to hire the best lawye
r in town. Nobody told him that there isn’t any ‘best’ lawyer here!”

  He laughed as he said this, but seeing me glowering, he added:

  “When I saw that messenger mounting — he’s shooting through the hills day and night, using the stage relays — I just poked half a dozen copies of this edition into his saddle bag. I thought that the people on the outside might as well know, by now, that Piegan has a newspaper and can lift up a voice for itself in the world.”

  “You lift up your voice, and you knock the sky down,” said I. “You’re a poor excuse for an editor, Harlow. You’re a poor excuse for a man, too!”

  There was no help for it. I saw that in a few days the word of what young Cole had done would go across the continent, and it would be ice cream and cake for the big New York dailies when they had a chance to copy something like Harlow’s headline on a member of the Cole family. The Coles were too exclusive. Those are the fellows that the reporters are trained to go after and pull down. The higher the family, the harder the fall, the more the dust and blood; and the Coles were due for a real blood-letting, this time. I could imagine Betty taking the blow with a white, set face, but never flinching. But what of her mother?

  Well, I cursed Steven Cole as I went down the street. And I cursed the haste of Harlow who had sent out the news with such a rush.

  I cursed the colonel, too, because except for him I would have been in town and could have stopped the whole affair.

  I went down to the gambling place and found it crowding up, with the proprietor, “Lefty” Tom Gregg, at the faro table. I went over and talked to him.

  “Socking this boy Cole,” said I, “won’t buy you a house and lot. Suppose you don’t prosecute the case, Lefty?”

  He looked me up and down, cool and steady.

  “Is Cole a friend of yours?” he asked.

  “I’d be best pleased to see him out of the trouble,” I said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t,” answered Lefty.

  “Look here, man,” said I, “don’t talk so loud. Why not be friendly?”