by Max Brand
For his own part, sitting back on the stool with his cap tucked under his arm and his hands folded about one knee, he met the faint, cold smile of the colonel with a broad grin of his own.
“I can put it in a nutshell,” said Donnegan. “I was tired; dead beat; needed a handout, and rapped at your door. Along comes a mystery in the shape of an ugly-looking woman and opens the door to me. Tries to shut me out; I decided to come in. She insists on keeping me outside; all at once I see that I have to get into the house. I am brought in; your daughter tries to steer me off, sees that the job is more than she can get away with, and shelves me off upon you. And that, Colonel Macon, is the pleasant accident which brings you the favor of this call.”
It would have been a speech both stupid and pert in the mouth of another; but Donnegan knew how to flavor words with a touch of mockery of himself as well as another. There were two manners in which this speech could have been received—with a wink or with a smile. But it would have been impossible to hear it and grow frigid. As for the colonel, he smiled.
It was a tricky smile, however, as Donnegan felt. It spread easily upon that vast face and again went out and left all to the dominion of the cold, bright eyes.
“A case of curiosity,” commented the colonel.
“A case of hunger,” said Donnegan.
“My dear Mr. Donnegan, put it that way if you wish!”
“And a case of blankets needed for one night.”
“Really? Have you ventured into such a country as this without any equipment?”
“Outside of my purse, my equipment is of the invisible kind.”
“Wits,” suggested the colonel.
“Thank you.”
“Not at all. You hinted at it yourself.”
“However, a hint is harder to take than to make.”
The colonel raised his faultless right hand—and oddly enough his great corpulence did not extend in the slightest degree to his hand, but stopped short at the wrists—and stroked his immense chin. His skin was like Lou Macon’s, except that in place of the white-flower bloom his was a parchment, dead pallor. He lowered his hand with the same slow precision and folded it with the other, all the time probing Donnegan with his difficult eyes.
“Unfortunately—most unfortunately, it is impossible for me to accommodate you, Mr. Donnegan.”
The reply was not flippant, but quick. “Not at all. I am the easiest person in the world to accommodate.”
The big man smiled sadly.
“My fortune has fallen upon evil days, sir. It is no longer what it was. There are in this house three habitable rooms; this one; my daughter’s apartment; the kitchen where old Haggie sleeps. Otherwise you are in a rat trap of a place.”
He shook his head, a slow, decisive motion.
“A spare blanket,” said Donnegan, “will be enough.”
There was another sigh and another shake of the head.
“Even a corner of a rug to roll up in will do perfectly.”
“You see, it is impossible for me to entertain you.”
“Bare boards will do well enough for me, Colonel Macon. And if I have a piece of bread, a plate of cold beans—anything—I can entertain myself.”
“I am sorry to see you so compliant, Mr. Donnegan, because that makes my refusal seem the more unkind. But I cannot have you sleeping on the bare floor. Not on such a night. Pneumonia comes on one like a cat in the dark in such weather. It is really impossible to keep you here, sir.”
“H’m-m,” said Donnegan. He began to feel that he was stumped, and it was a most unusual feeling for him.
“Besides, for a young fellow like you, with your agility, what is eight miles? Walk down the road and you will come to a place where you will be made at home and fed like a king.”
“Eight miles, that’s not much! But on such a night as this?”
There was a faint glint in the eyes of the colonel; was he not sharpening his wits for his contest of words, and enjoying it?
“The wind will be at your back and buoy your steps. It will shorten the eight miles to four.”
Very definitely Donnegan felt that the other was reading him. What was it that he saw as he turned the pages?
“There is one thing you fail to take into your accounting.”
“Ah?”
“I have an irresistible aversion to walking.”
“Ah?” repeated Macon.
“Or exercise in any form.”
“Then you are unfortunate to be in this country without a horse.”
“Unfortunate, perhaps, but the fact is that I’m here. Very sorry to trouble you, though, colonel.”
“I am rarely troubled,” said the colonel coldly. “And since I have no means of accommodation, the laws of hospitality rest light on my shoulders.”
“Yet I have an odd thought,” replied Donnegan.
“Well? You have expressed a number already, it seems to me.”
“It’s this: that you’ve already made up your mind to keep me here.”
CHAPTER 8
The colonel stiffened in his chair, and under his bulk even those ponderous timbers quaked a little. Once more Donnegan gained an impression of chained activity ready to rise to any emergency. The colonel’s jaw set and the last vestige of the smile left his eyes. Yet it was not anger that showed in its place. Instead, it was rather a hungry searching. He looked keenly into the face and the soul of Donnegan as a searchlight sweeps over waters by night.
“You are a mind reader, Mr. Donnegan.”
“No more of a mind reader than a Chinaman is.”
“Ah, they are great readers of mind, my friend.”
Donnegan grinned, and at this the colonel frowned.
“A great and mysterious people, sir. I keep evidences of them always about me. Look!”
He swept the shaft of the reading light up and it fell upon a red vase against the yellow hangings. Even Donnegan’s inexperienced eye read a price into that shimmering vase.
“Queer color,” he said.
“Dusty claret. Ah, they have the only names for their colors. Think! Peach bloom—liquid dawn—ripe cherry—oil green—green of powdered tea—blue of the sky after rain—what names for color! What other land possesses such a tongue that goes straight to the heart!”
The colonel waved his faultless hands and then dropped them back upon the book with the tenderness of a benediction.
“And their terms for texture—pear’s rind—lime peel—millet seed! Do not scoff at China, Mr. Donnegan. She is the fairy godmother, and we are the poor children.”
He changed the direction of the light; Donnegan watched him, fascinated.
“But what convinced you that I wished to keep you here?”
“To amuse you, Colonel Macon.”
The colonel exposed gleaming white teeth and laughed in that soft, smooth-flowing voice.
“Amuse me? For fifteen years I have sat in this room and amused myself by taking in what I would and shutting out the rest of the world. I have made the walls thick and padded them to keep out all sound. You observe that there is no evidence here of the storm that is going on tonight. Amuse me? Indeed!”
And Donnegan thought of Lou Macon in her old, drab dress, huddling the poor cloak around her shoulders to keep out the cold, while her father lounged here in luxury. He could gladly have buried his lean fingers in that fat throat. From the first he had had an aversion to this man.
“Very well, I shall go. It has been a pleasant chat, colonel.”
“Very pleasant. And thank you. But before you go, taste this whisky. It will help you when you enter the wind.”
He opened a cabinet in the side of the chair and brought out a black bottle and a pair of glasses and put them on the broad arm of the chair. Donnegan sauntered back.
“You see,” he murmured, “you will not let me go.”
At this the colonel raised his head suddenly and glared into the eyes of his guest, and yet so perfect was his muscular and nerve control that h
e did not interrupt the thin stream of amber which trickled into one of the glasses. Looking down again, he finished pouring the drinks. They pledged each other with a motion, and drank. It was very old, very oily. And Donnegan smiled as he put down the empty glass.
“Sit down,” said the colonel in a new voice.
Donnegan obeyed.
“Fate,” went on the colonel, “rules our lives. We give our honest endeavors, but the deciding touch is the hand of Fate.”
He garnished this absurd truism with a wave of his hand so solemn that Donnegan was chilled; as though the fat man were actually conversant with the Three Sisters.
“Fate has brought you to me; therefore, I intend to keep you.”
“Here?”
“In my service. I am about to place a great mission and a great trust in your hands.”
“In the hands of a man you know nothing about?”
“I know you as if I had raised you.”
Donnegan smiled, and shaking his head, the red hair flashed and shimmered.
“As long as there is no work attached to the mission, it may be agreeable to me.”
“But there is work.”
“Then the contract is broken before it is made.”
“You are rash. But I had rather begin with a dissent and then work upward.”
Donnegan waited.
“To balance against work—”
“Excuse me. Nothing balances against work for me.”
“To balance against work,” continued the colonel, raising a white hand and by that gesture crushing the protest of Donnegan, “there is a great reward.”
“Colonel Macon, I have never worked for money before and I shall not work for it now.”
“You trouble me with interruptions. Who mentioned money? You shall not have a penny!”
“No?”
“The reward shall grow out of the work.”
“And the work?”
“Is fighting.”
At this Donnegan narrowed his eyes and searched the fat man thoroughly. It sounded like the talk of a charlatan, and yet there was a crispness to these sentences that made him suspect something underneath. For that matter, in certain districts his name and his career were known. He had never dreamed that that reputation could have come within a thousand miles of this part of the mountain desert.
“You should have told me in the first place,” he said with some anger, “that you knew me.”
“Mr. Donnegan, upon my honor, I never heard your name before my daughter uttered it.”
Donnegan waited soberly.
“I despise charlatanry as much as the next man. You shall see the steps by which I judged you. When you entered the room I threw a strong light upon you. You did not blanch; you immediately walked straight into the shaft of light although you could not see a foot before you.”
“And that proved?”
“A combative instinct, and coolness; not the sort of brute vindictiveness that fights for a rage, for a cool-minded love of conflict. Is that clear?”
Donnegan shrugged his shoulders.
“And above all, I need a fighter. Then I watched your eyes and your hands. The first were direct and yet they were alert. And your hands were perfectly steady.”
“Qualifications for a fighter, eh?”
“Do you wish further proof?”
“Well?”
“What of the fight to the death which you went through this same night?”
Donnegan started. It was a small movement, that flinching, and he covered it by continuing the upward gesture of his hand to his coat; he drew out tobacco and cigarette papers and commenced to roll his smoke. Looking up, he saw that the eyes of Colonel Macon were smiling, although his face was grave.
A glint of understanding passed between the two men, but not a spoken word.
“I assure you, there was no death tonight,” said Donnegan at length.
“Tush! Of course not! But the tear on the shoulder of your coat—ah, that is too smooth edged for a tear, too long for the bite of a scissors. Am I right? Tush! Not a word!”
The colonel beamed with an almost tender pride, and Donnegan, knowing that the fat man looked upon him as a murderer, newly come from a death, considered the beaming face and thought many things in silence.
“So it was easy to see that in coolness, courage, fighting instinct, skill, you were probably what I want. Yet something more than all these qualifications is necessary for the task which lies ahead of you.”
“You pile up the bad features, eh?”
“To entice you, Donnegan. For one man, paint a rosy beginning, and once under way he will manage the hard parts. For you, show you the hard shell and you will trust it contains the choice flesh. I was saying, that I waited to see other qualities in you; qualities of the judgment. And suddenly you flashed upon me a single glance; I felt it clash against my willpower. I felt your look go past my guard like a rapier slipping around my blade. I, Colonel Macon, was for the first time outfaced, out-maneuvered. I admit it, for I rejoice in meeting such a man. And the next instant you told me that I should keep you here out of my own wish! Admirable!”
The admiration of the colonel, indeed, almost overwhelmed Donnegan, but he saw that in spite of the genial smile, the face suffused with warmth, the colonel was watching him every instant, flinty-eyed. Donnegan did as he had done on the stairs; he burst into laughter.
When he had done, the colonel was leaning forward in his chair with his fingers interlacing, examining his guest from beneath somber brows. As he sat lurched forward he gave a terrible impression of that reserved energy which Donnegan had sensed before.
“Donnegan,” said the colonel, “I shall talk no more nonsense to you. You are a terrible fellow!”
And Donnegan knew that, for the first time in the colonel’s life, he was meeting another man upon equal ground.
CHAPTER 9
In a way, it was an awful tribute, for one great fact grew upon him: that the colonel represented almost perfectly the power of absolute evil. Donnegan was not a squeamish sort, but the fat, smiling face of Macon filled him with unutterable aversion. A dozen times he would have left the room, but a silken thread held him back, the thought of Lou.
“I shall be terse and entirely frank,” said the colonel, and at once Donnegan reared triple guard and balanced himself for attack or defense.
“Between you and me,” went on the fat man, “deceptive words are folly. A waste of energy.” He flushed a little. “You are, I believe, the first man who has ever laughed at me.” The click of his teeth as he snapped them on this sentence seemed to promise that he should also be the last.
“So I tear away the veils which made me ridiculous, I grant you. Donnegan, we have met each other just in time.”
“True,” said Donnegan, “you have a task for me that promises a lot of fighting; and in return I get lodgings for the night.”
“Wrong, wrong! I offer you much more. I offer you a career of action in which you may forget the great sorrow which has fallen upon you: and in the battles which lie before you, you will find oblivion for the sad past which lies behind you.”
Here Donnegan sprang to his feet with his hand caught at his breast; and he stood quivering, in an agony. Pain worked him as anger would do, and, his slender frame swelling, his muscles taut, he stood like a panther enduring the torture because knows it is folly to attempt to escape.
“You are a human devil!” Donnegan said at last, and sank back upon his stool. For a moment he was overcome, his head falling upon his breast, and even when he looked up his face was terribly pale, and his eyes dull. His expression, however, cleared swiftly, and aside from the perspiration which shone on his forehead it would have been impossible ten seconds later to discover that the blow of the colonel had fallen upon him.
All of this the colonel had observed and noted with grim satisfaction. Not once did he speak until he saw that all was well.
“I am sorry,” he said at length in a voice almost
as delicate as the voice of Lou Macon. “I am sorry, but you forced me to say more than I wished to say.”
Donnegan brushed the apology aside.
His voice became low and hurried. “Let us get on in the matter. I am eager to learn from you, colonel.”
“Very well. Since it seems that there is a place for both our interests in this matter, I shall run on in my tale and make it, as I promised you before, absolutely frank and curt. I shall not descend into small details. I shall give you a main sketch of the high points; for all men of mind are apt to be confused by the face of a thing, whereas the heart of it is perfectly clear to them.”
He settled into his narrative.
“You have heard of The Corner? No? Well, that is not strange; but a few weeks ago gold was found in the sands where the valleys of Young Muddy and Christobel Rivers join. The Corner is a long, wide triangle of sand, and the sand is filled with a gold deposit brought down from the headwaters of both rivers and precipitated here, where one current meets the other and reduces the resultant stream to sluggishness. The sands are rich—very rich!”
He had become a trifle flushed as he talked, and now, perhaps to cover his emotion, he carefully selected a cigarette from the humidor beside him and lighted it without haste before he spoke another word.
“Long ago I prospected over that valley; a few weeks ago it was brought to my attention again. I determined to stake some claims and work them. But I could not go myself. I had to send a trustworthy man. Whom should I select? There was only one possible. Jack Landis is my ward. A dozen years ago his parents died and they sent him to my care, for my fortune was then comfortable. I raised him with as much tenderness as I could have shown my own son; I lavished on him the affection and—”
Here Donnegan coughed lightly; the fat man paused, and observing that this hypocrisy did not draw the veil over the bright eyes of his guest, he continued: “In a word, I made him one of my family. And when the need for a man came I turned to him. He is young, strong, active, able to take care of himself.”
At this Donnegan pricked his ears.
“He went, accordingly, to The Corner and staked the claims and filed them as I directed. I was right. There was gold. Much gold. It panned out in nuggets.”