by Max Brand
Ronicky Doone glowered at him.
“What she does, and what she thinks,” he said, “ain’t anything to me. I can’t control her.”
“But you can start wishing,” said Al Jenkins, “that you’d shot him dead. That would have been better for Elsie Bennett.”
“I dunno,” said Ronicky gloomily. “Ain’t he good enough?”
“Answer that for yourself,” said Jenkins. “What d’you think about Blondy?”
“I dunno what to think,” said Ronicky.
Al Jenkins sat quiet and rubbed his chin with his fist.
“You’ll find out after a while,” he said. “Oh, you’ll find out!”
“What are you aiming at?” asked Ronicky sharply. “You’re talking all around a circle, Jenkins.”
“I’m just trying to tell you that she ain’t got a wedding ring on—yet!”
CHAPTER XXI
THE LIFTED SHUTTER
Why Jenkins should have said this, and particularly why it should have been accompanied by a tremendous wink, Ronicky could not tell. But Jenkins himself seemed to be perfectly satisfied. He changed the subject abruptly, and when he left a little later, he paused at the door.
“The sheriff may be up to see you,” he said, “but you can lay to it that I’ll see the sheriff before he sees you, so I guess he won’t take up much of your time. About the girl—
Here he paused and studied Ronicky with narrowed eyes.
“You’ve started your fight,” said Jenkins, “and you’ll have to keep it up along the same lines. You’ve started by knocking down the walls around her and getting at her that way. You’ll have to keep it up, son, until you’ve taken her by force. And as soon as you see that I’m right, I guess you’ll be coming along to talk to Uncle Al Jenkins. Good-by for a while!”
He turned away but checked himself again.
“There’s seven days left,” he said. “I’m going to give Bennett seven days’ grace to get a new foreman to take Blondy’s place. And when that time’s up, I’m going to start a drive that’ll sweep Bennett’s place as clean as the palm of your hand. Get ready to be with me before that time comes, Ronicky!”
With his final advice he left the younger man and sauntered away. Ronicky remained in his room, plunged in his sorrowful reflections and walking hastily up and down. Every now and then he paused, and whenever he paused, it was because a new picture of the face of the girl had started up before him and startled him to a stop. She was beginning to grow into his mind and become a part of him from which he could not rid himself.
In the evening, just after the rim of the sun was down, his meditations were broken in upon by a sudden hubbub in the street of the town, and Ronicky jerked up the window and leaned out to listen.
He could not hear enough to form any connected story. But he gathered by the disjointed exclamations that the good people of Twin Springs were greatly distraught because of a daring and outrageous raid which had recently been made, half a dozen outlaws having scooped up a freight wagon, loaded with all manner of supplies, and taken it away with them into the mountains toward their camp. More than this, they had ridden on down the road, leaving the driver of the wagon bound behind them, and they had come to the very outskirts of Twin Springs, where they had gathered in a large quantity of money from one of the leading citizens of Twin Springs.
Then, leaving their victims bound and gagged, they had stolen away again and were safely gone, leaving behind them no clew except the sound of their voices and the description of their masks. And Twin Springs was literally roaring with rage and excitement. Ronicky caught a little of the drift of the talk from the window of his room. When he went down stairs, eager to mix in anything that would free him from the burden of his own thoughts, he heard the details.
No one blamed the sheriff for failing to apprehend the criminals. It was simply that they had found a secure refuge among the impregnable mountains near Twin Springs. The vital question was whether or not the forces of the entire town would be able to find the robbers and rout them. Ronicky drew the soberest man he could find to one side and learned still more about the men who lived beyond the law.
On the crests of Solomon Mountain, which was really many mountains rising to one ragged top, the gang had lived for several months now, growing in strength from time to time, as the rumor of their impregnable position spread abroad and drew in recruits of chosen skill. And as their strength of numbers and quality increased, so also did their boldness. At first they had secured their shelter by committing their depredations at a distance. And so long as they did this, the men of Twin Springs were by no means inclined to bother with the formidable little group, but since then they had begun to come nearer and nearer to the town on occasion, and now at last the blow which all had been dreading, had fallen. The Solomon Mountain gang had struck the precincts of Twin Springs itself, and now the honor of the town was pledged to run them down.
When Ronicky inquired why this was a task of such size, he was informed that Solomon Mountain was a literal labyrinth of canyons and sharp-sided gorges, running one into the other and connecting in a thousand unsuspected places by underground tunnels which were mostly natural caves. A little adroit blasting and pick-and-shovel work had opened them up and made them practicable for man and horse. Not only was this a hole-in-the-wall country, where the shrewdest sheriff in the world would be baffled with a posse of a thousand men, but it was also a place where the outlaws had laid up such provisions that they could stand siege and disappear into their subterranean resorts for an indefinite period. Moreover, it was possible to take advantage of the broken nature of the ground and the many outlook points so as to keep an advancing force under observation and, drifting just ahead and inside the limits of safety, make life wretched for those who attempted to break through and capture the miscreants.
There were already a score of stories to be told, in spite of the fact that the headquarters on Solomon Mountain was new, of celebrated man hunters who had rushed at the stronghold and broken the teeth of their reputation on its jagged sides and gone back shorn of honor. Ronicky Doone, as he heard these things, looked up from the town to the ragged crest of the peak and then turned back to the hotel, carrying with him the interesting item that recruits were added to the gang simply by riding to the top of the mountain in broad daylight and waiting for what would happen to them. No matter where they paused, they would be sure to be looked over by some invisible spy, and, if they proved acceptable, they would be taken into the inner circle.
But Ronicky paid little heed to the story. His interests were too closely attached to the proprietor’s room in the hotel. Here the doctor and Elsie Bennett were fighting to save the life of the man he had shot down.
He learned that Blondy, though still living, was still hardly improved. He had come out of the coma, but he had passed into the almost equally dreaded state of delirium, and now the shrill sounds of his ravings at times were clearly audible through the halls of the ramshackle building. Ronicky walked past the room on the rear veranda and paused by the two big windows which opened upon it from Blondy’s quarters. And he heard the murmurings of the injured man clearly. The strong manliness had passed out of the voice. It was a whining complaint.
“What have I done that I got to stand for this? Where’s old Bennett? Why ain’t he standing his share? Where’s the girl? Where’s Elsie? Why ain’t she helping—why—” Ronicky felt his heart leap into his throat and swell there to choking. A great sense of wretchedness swept over him. With his bullet he had not only struck down a strong man, but, worse than this, he had destroyed his pride.
A cool-toned, pleasant voice broke in on the rough current of the raving: “I’m here, Charlie. I’m here, dear. There’s nothing to worry about; you’re only having bad dreams now. Don’t you see? You’re only having bad dreams now!”
He looked through the door, feeling like a miserable spy, and he saw her sitting by the bed. The lamp had been lighted, as the dusk of the evening incre
ased. And now it was so placed that, while the man on the bed was left veiled in the darkness, a mild radiance fell upon Elsie Bennett. Her hand was on the forehead of Blondy. She was looking down to him with a smile. And at the tenderness in her voice, in her smile, Ronicky felt his pulse leap again.
What lucky star had Charlie Loring been born under? He reverted to what wise old Al Jenkins had said and shook his head. Wise Jenkins might be, but in this case he was mistaken. With all his heart and soul she loved the man she had chosen, or else Ronicky felt that there was no such thing as true and faithful love of woman for man.
He listened, with a guilty and tortured happiness in hearing her, until she rose from the bed and went to the doctor. The latter sat near the lamp with a newspaper shaken out before him, the very picture of indifferent ease. He bent his head and looked up at the girl over the rim of his glasses, still keeping his paper spread out.
“Doctor,” she was saying, “is that the true man that I’m hearing talk over there? Can I believe what he’s saying about himself and about other people?”
There was a rustling of the bedclothes, as Charlie Loring stirred his nervous arms.
“If I can only get it over with in a rush,” he was saying in a mutter. “If I can only get at him and kill him—shoot him down before I got to stand up to them eyes of his—them clear, straight-looking eyes!”
Here the girl caught her breath in something between a sob and a gasp of horror, and the sound apparently broke into the delirious mind of the man, for his talking ceased.
“Does it mean that he was really afraid of Ronicky Doone?” asked the girl faintly. “Oh, doctor, tell me true!”
The doctor lowered his paper, cleared his throat, scratched his head. In short he had not the slightest idea what to answer.
“It might be true, and then again it mightn’t,” he said. “The mind turns a lot of corners from the truth in a delirium, sometimes. But then again a man will tell the naked truth.”
“It can’t be the truth here,” sighed Elsie Bennett. “Don’t you see? He’s saying to face Ronicky Doone! And that would mean that he—that he had not told the truth about how he offered to fight Ronicky in the barn at our place. But he said that Ronicky was afraid—that Ronicky crawled and begged to get out of it and—”
“Miss Bennett,” said the doctor, “they say that Ronicky Doone was able to face Charlie Loring fairly well today. At least he shot with a steady hand. We have evidence yonder on the bed for that.”
“But that may have been shame.”
“Shame?”
“Oh, don’t you see? In private, with no one to see, Ronicky Doone may have shrunk from Charlie. And Ronicky Doone impressed me as a man who might. He is proud—he is terribly proud. But perhaps it is only the pride that makes him want to appear brave to the crowd. He doesn’t care at all what any one man thinks.”
“What gave you such an insight into the character of Doone?”
“I saw him. I talked with him.”
“H’m!” said the doctor in heavy disapproval.
They were speaking very softly, lest their voices should disturb the wounded man, and Ronicky listened with a strange fascination to the changing emotions so subtly expressed by the voice of the girl, fear, sorrow, horror, all in a murmur hardly louder than a whisper.
“And now this terror that keeps coming back to Charlie in his delirium—”
“Well,” asked the doctor: bluntly, “what if he is afraid of Ronicky Doone? I understand that a lot of men have feared that young man.”
Ronicky guessed that she shivered at this.
“But that would mean—” She paused and did not complete her sentence.
Ronicky waited in a bitter suspense. Would she see the truth?
“No,” she cried at length, “it isn’t right. I won’t believe him against himself. It was no lie that he told to us when he carried Ronicky Doone into the house. And I’ll wait till he is well and able to talk for himself before I think of it again!”
“That sounds sensible,” said the doctor. “That sounds mighty sensible.”
With a sigh Ronicky stole back through the gathering shadows and then stepped from the veranda onto the ground. He felt a shutter had been lifted, and he had seen his future course as it must be.
CHAPTER XXII
RONICKY DECIDES
What that course must be he dared not, however, reveal to himself in a single flash of comprehension. It was too much for his mind to grasp at one stretch. There were results involved which spun out before him in a dizzy succession. He could not see exactly where they would lead him.
But step by step he went down the trail until he decided that it was time to put his thoughts into the realization of action. He went straight into the front of the hotel, found Al Jenkins, as usual, with a dense group rotating around him, and drew him to one side.
“Mr. Jenkins,” he said, “you’ve been sort of hard on me once, but, take you all in all, you’ve been pretty square, Jenkins, or at least you’ve tried to be square, and so—”
“Wait!” said the big man.
And laying his mighty grip upon the shoulder of Ronicky he fairly swept him through the night outside, pungent with dust raised by a horse which had just pounded by at a canter.
“When a man begins like you just done,” chuckled Al Jenkins, “the best thing to do is to dodge him and get him to think of something else as quick as you can. I can’t get you to thinking of something else, but as least I can get you out here by ourselves. Now, Ronicky, you were getting all ready to tell me a piece of bad news. Do you have to tell me still?”
“It won’t mean much to you,” said Ronicky, “but what I have to say is that I’ve made up my mind. I thought at first that I was going to be able to get out of Twin Springs without taking any sides in the fight that was going on. But now I see that everything I do has brought me in deeper and deeper. And now I’ve picked my side in the fight, and I’m sorry to say that I’m against you!”
There was a grunt from Jenkins, an absurdly realistic imitation of the sound a man makes when he has received a heavy body blow.
“But,” he protested, “you can’t mean it, Ronicky. You’re crazy about the girl.”
“I never said that,” said Ronicky.
“Sure you didn’t,” agreed Jenkins. “But I say you’re wild about her. Well, if you fight on her side, you’ll be fighting on the same side with Blondy Loring. And that means you’ll be fighting his fight. Don’t you see that now that he’s down and out she’s got to stay with him, and that her loyalty wouldn’t let her desert Blondy for anybody else—that little fool!”
“I see all that,” said Ronicky gloomily. “But the point is—I’ve made up my mind!”
Jenkins was silent a moment, and then he laid his hand kindly on Ronicky’s shoulder.
“My boy,” said he, “if you were like the main run of the young gents that I meet nowdays, I’d let you go and say nothing about it. You ain’t going to make me or break me. But I’ll take time out and tell you that if you buck up against me, you’d better be bucking up against a stone wall. Understand?”
“I know,” admitted Ronicky. “I’ve imagined a good lot of things about you, Jenkins. I know you put on your gloves when you begin to work. I know that you’ve got all the odds on your side.”
“Hang it!” exploded the rancher. “I half begin to think that that’s why you’re against me. You got a sneaking idea that because Bennett is the under dog you ought to help him. Is that it?”
“That hound!” said Ronicky. “I tell you straight I ain’t wasting any thoughts on him.”
Jenkins sighed and began to speak.
“When we meet up,” he said, “remember that I’ll be bound on a blood trail—if it has to be one. But no matter what I have to climb over to get to the end of it, I’m going to smash Bennett before I’m through. Is that clear? And when you and me smash together head-on, I got an idea that you’ll be the one that falls. Keep all them things in mind
, son, before you make up your mind for good and all. Will you?”
“Thanks,” said Ronicky. “I’ll have my own gloves on.”
“You realize that you’ll be all alone? You know that there ain’t a real man on the whole Bennett place? You realize that the old man is going busted, anyway, because he’s up to the ears in debt? And you realize that I’ve got every decent man in the country right behind me?”
“I know all that.”
“Then,” said Jenkins, “God help you. Good-by and good luck!”
He caught the hand of Ronicky in a great pressure, turned on his heel, and before he reached the veranda steps Ronicky heard him humming again. Then Ronicky himself started around the corner of the building. He paused a moment as he passed the spot where he had stood to confront Charlie Loring earlier that day. Where would the result of the firing of that shot some time place him?
In the shed, he saddled the bay mare and led her out. He left her near the front of the hotel, went to his room, made his pack quickly and deftly, and came down again. A moment later he was galloping through the night on the back of Lou and facing a strange future, indeed.
Knowing the lay of the land better now, he bore off to the right until he reached the road running up the valley to the Bennett place, and on this smooth going the mare made excellent time, never checked her pace until the buildings of the ranch rolled up into his view.
Ronicky dismounted at the side of the ranch house and knocked at the door.
“Come in!” called a voice which he recognized as belonging to the rancher.
He opened the door and stood in the presence of Steve Bennett. His effect was magical. It brought Bennett jumping out of his chair and placed him in a straddle-legged position in front of the fireplace, his gaunt right hand clutching at the butt of his revolver.
Whatever the other faults of the father of Elsie Bennett, cowardice was not one of them. A fire burned up in his buried eyes, and color flared in his cheeks, while he set his teeth and stood ready to fight and kill, or be killed, for apparently he took it for granted that this must be the reason for Ronicky’s coming.