by Max Brand
“Stand out of the game till later on. Come over and have a bite to eat with me.”
He went willingly, suddenly aware of a raging appetite and a dinner long postponed. The man of the black beard was extremely friendly.
“One of the prettiest runs I ever see, that one you made,” he confided when they were at the table in the hotel. “You got a system, I figure.”
“A new one,” said Terry. “I’ve never played before.”
The other blinked.
“Beginner’s luck, I suppose,” said Terry frankly. “I started with fifty, and now I suppose I have about eight hundred.”
“Not bad, not bad,” said the other. “Too bad you didn’t stop half an hour before. Just passing through these parts?”
“I’m looking for a job,” said Terry. “Can you tell me where to start hunting? Cows are my game.”
The other paused a moment and surveyed his companion. There seemed just a shade of doubt in his eyes. They were remarkably large and yellowish gray, those eyes of Joe Pollard, and now and again when he grew thoughtful they became like clouded agate. They had that color now as he gazed at Terry. Eventually his glance cleared.
“I got a little work of my own,” he declared. “My range is all clogged up with varmints. Any hand with a gun and traps?”
“Pretty fair hand,” said Terry modestly.
And he was employed on the spot.
He felt one reassuring thing about his employer—that no echo out of his past or the past of his father would make the man discharge him. Indeed, taking him all in all, there was under the kindliness of Joe Pollard an indescribable basic firmness. His eyes, for example, in their habit of looking straight at one, reminded him of the eyes of Denver. His voice was steady and deep and mellow, and one felt that it might be expanded to an enormous volume. Such a man would not fly off into snap judgments and become alarmed because an employee had a past or a strange name.
They paid a short visit to the gambling hall after dinner, and then got their horses. Pollard was struck dumb with admiration at the sight of the blood-bay.
“Maybe you been up the Bear Creek way?” he asked Terry.
And when the latter admitted that he knew something of the Blue Mountain country, the rancher exclaimed: “By the Lord, partner, I’d say that hoss is a ringer for El Sangre.”
“Pretty close to a ringer,” said Terry. “This is El Sangre himself.”
They were jogging out of town. The rancher turned in the saddle and crossed his companion with one of his searching glances, but returned no reply. Presently, however, he sent his own capable Steeldust into a sharp gallop; El Sangre roused to a flowing pace and held the other even without the slightest difficulty. At this Pollard drew rein with an exclamation.
“El Sangre as sure as I live!” he declared. “Ain’t nothing else in these parts that calls itself a hoss and slides over the ground the way El Sangre does. Partner, what sort of a price would you set on El Sangre, maybe?”
“His weight in gold,” said Terry.
The rancher cursed softly, without seeming altogether pleased. And thereafter during the ride his glance continually drifted toward the brilliant bay—brilliant even in the pallor of the clear mountain starlight.
He explained this by saying after a time: “I been my whole life in these parts without running across a hoss that could pack me the way a man ought to be packed on a hoss. I weigh two hundred and thirty, son, and it busts the back of a horse in the mountains. Now, you ain’t a flyweight yourself, and El Sangre takes you along like you was a feather.”
Steeldust was already grunting at every sharp rise, and El Sangre had not even broken out in perspiration.
A mile or so out of the town they left the road and struck onto a mere semblance of a trail, broad enough, but practically as rough as nature chose to make it. This wound at sharp and ever-changing angles into the hills, and presently they were pressing through a dense growth of lodgepole pine.
It seemed strange to Terry that a prosperous rancher with an outfit of any size should have a road no more beaten than this one leading to his place. But he was thinking too busily of other things to pay much heed to such surmises and small events. He was brooding over the events of the afternoon. If his exploits in the gaming hall should ever come to the ear of Aunt Elizabeth, he was certain enough that he would be finally damned in her judgment. Too often he had heard her express an opinion of those who lived by “chance and their wits,” as she phrased it. And the thought of it irked him.
He roused himself out of his musing. They had come out from the trees and were in sight of a solidly built house on the hill. There was one thing which struck his mind at once. No attempt had been made to find level for the foundation. The log structure had been built apparently at random on the slope. It conformed, at vast waste of labor, to the angle of the base and the irregularities of the soil. This, perhaps, made it seem smaller than it was. They caught the scent of wood smoke, and then saw a pale drift of the smoke itself.
A flurry of music escaped by the opening of a door and was shut out by the closing of it. It was a moment before Terry, startled, had analyzed the sound. Unquestionably it was a piano. But how in the world, and why in the world, had it been carted to the top of this mountain?
He glanced at his companion with a new respect and almost with a suspicion.
“Up to some damn doings again,” growled the big man. “Never got no peace nor quiet up my way.”
Another surprise was presently in store for Terry. Behind the house, which grew in proportions as they came closer, they reached a horse shed, and when they dismounted, a servant came out for the horses. Outside of the Cornish ranch he did not know of many who afforded such luxuries.
However, El Sangre could not be handled by another, and Terry put up his horse and found the rancher waiting for him when he came out. Inside the shed he had found ample bins of barley and oats and good grain hay. And in the stalls his practiced eye scanned the forms of a round dozen fine horses with points of blood and bone that startled him.
Coming to the open again, he probed the darkness as well as he could to gain some idea of the ranch which furnished and supported all these evidences of prosperity. But so far as he could make out, there was only a jumble of ragged hilltops behind the house, and before it the slope fell away steeply to the valley far below. He had not realized before that they had climbed so high or so far.
Joe Pollard was humming. Terry joined him on the way to the house with a deepened sense of awe; he was even beginning to feel that there was a touch or two of mystery in the make-up of the man.
Proof of the solidity with which the log house was built was furnished at once. Coming to the house, there was only a murmur of voices and of music. The moment they opened the door, a roar of singing voices and a jangle of piano music rushed into their ears.
Terry found himself in a very long room with a big table in the center and a piano at the farther end. The ceiling sloped down from the right to the left. At the left it descended toward the doors of the kitchen and storerooms; at the right it rose to the height of two full stories. One of these was occupied by a series of heavy posts on which hung saddles and bridles and riding equipment of all kinds, and the posts supported a balcony onto which opened several doors—of sleeping rooms, no doubt. As for the wall behind the posts, it, too, was pierced with several openings, but Terry could not guess at the contents of the rooms. But he was amazed by the size of the structure as it was revealed to him from within. The main room was like some baronial hall of the old days of war and plunder. A role, indeed, into which it was not difficult to fit the burly Pollard and the dignity of his beard.
Four men were around the piano, and a girl sat at the keys, splashing out syncopated music while the men roared the chorus of the song. But at the sound of the closing of the door all five turned toward the newcomers, the girl looking over her shoulder and keeping the soft burden of the song still running.
CHAPTER
23
So turned, Terry could not see her clearly. He caught a glimmer of red bronze hair, dark in shadow and brilliant in high lights, and a sheen of greenish eyes. Otherwise, he only noted the casual manner in which she acknowledged the introduction, unsmiling, indifferent, as Pollard said: “Here’s my daughter Kate. This is Terry—a new hand.”
It seemed to Terry that as he said this the rancher made a gesture as of warning, though this, no doubt, could be attributed to his wish to silently explain away the idiosyncrasy of Terry in using his first name only. He was presented in turn to the four men, and thought them the oddest collection he had ever laid eyes on.
Slim Dugan was tall, but not so tall as he looked, owing to his very small head and narrow shoulders. His hair was straw color, excessively silky, and thin as the hair of a year-old child. There were other points of interest in Slim Dugan; his feet, for instance, were small as the feet of a girl, accentuated by the long, narrow riding boots, and his hands seemed to be pulled out to a great and unnecessary length. They made up for it by their narrowness.
His exact opposite was Marty Cardiff, chunky, fat, it seemed, until one noted the roll and bulge of the muscles at the shoulders. His head was settled into his fat shoulders somewhat in the manner of Denver’s, Terry thought.
Oregon Charlie looked the part of an Indian, with his broad nose and high cheekbones, flat face, slanted dark eyes; but his skin was a dead and peculiar white. He was a down-headed man, and one could rarely imagine him opening his lips to speak; he merely grunted as he shook hands with the stranger.
To finish the picture, there was a man as huge as Joe Pollard himself, and as powerful, to judge by appearances. His face was burned to a jovial red; his hair was red also, and there was red hair on the backs of his freckled hands.
All these men met Terry with cordial nods, but there was a carelessness about their demeanor which seemed strange to Terry. In his experience, the men of the mountains were a timid or a blustering lot before newcomers, uneasy, and anxious to establish their place. But these men acted as if meeting unknown men were a part of their common, daily experience. They were as much at their ease as social lions.
Pollard was explaining the presence of Terry.
“He’s come up to clean out the varmints,” he said to the others. “They been getting pretty thick on the range, you know.”
“You came in just wrong,” complained Kate, while the men turned four pairs of grave eyes upon Terry and seemed to be judging him. “I got Oregon singing at last, and he was doing fine. Got a real voice, Charlie has. Regular branded baritone, I’ll tell a man.”
“Strike up agin for us, Charlie,” said Pollard good-naturedly. “You don’t never make much more noise’n a grizzly.”
But Charlie looked down at his hands and a faint spot of red appeared in his cheek. Obviously he was much embarrassed. And when he looked up, it was to fix a glance of cold suspicion upon Terry, as though warning him not to take this talk of social acquirements as an index to his real character.
“Get us some coffee, Kate,” said Pollard. “Turned off cold coming up the hill.”
She did not rise. She had turned around to her music again, and now she acknowledged the order by lifting her head and sending a shrill whistle through the room. Her father started violently.
“Damn it, Kate, don’t do that!”
“The only thing that’ll bring Johnny on the run,” she responded carelessly.
And, indeed, the door on the left of the room flew open a moment later, and a wide-eyed Chinaman appeared with a long pigtail jerking about his head as he halted and looked about in alarm.
“Coffee for the boss and the new hand,” said Kate, without turning her head, as soon as she heard the door open. “Pronto, Johnny.”
Johnny snarled an indistinct something and withdrew muttering.
“You’ll have Johnny quitting the job,” complained Pollard, frowning. “You can’t scare the poor devil out of his skin like that every time you want coffee. Besides, why didn’t you get up and get it for us yourself?”
Still she did not turn; but, covering a yawn, replied: “Rather sit here and play.”
Her father swelled a moment in rage, but he subsided again without audible protest. Only he sent a scowl at Terry as though daring him to take notice of this insolence. As for the other men, they had scattered to various parts of the room and remained there, idly, while the boss and the new hand drank the scalding coffee of Johnny. All this time Pollard remained deep in thought. His meditations exploded as he banged the empty cup back on the table.
“Kate, this stuff has got to stop. Understand?”
The soft jingling of the piano continued without pause.
“Stop that damned noise!”
The music paused. Terry felt the long striking muscles leap into hard ridges along his arms, but glancing at the other four, he found that they were taking the violence of Pollard quite as a matter of course. One was whittling, another rolled a cigarette, and all of them, if they took any visible notice of the argument, did so with the calmest of side glances.
“Turn around!” roared Pollard.
His daughter turned slowly and faced him. Not white-faced with fear, but to the unutterable astonishment of Terry she was quietly looking her father up and down. Pollard sprang to his feet and struck the table so that it quivered through all its massive length.
“Are you trying to shame me before a stranger?” thundered the big man. “Is that the scene?”
She flicked Terry Hollis with a glance. “I think he’ll understand and make allowances.”
It brought the heavy fist smashing on the table again. And an ugly feeling rose in Hollis that the big fellow might put hands on his daughter.
“And what d’you mean by that? What in hell d’you mean by that?”
In place of wincing, she in turn came to her feet gracefully. There had been such an easy dignity about her sitting at the piano that she had seemed tall to Terry. Now that she stood up, he was surprised to see that she was not a shade more than average height, beautifully and strongly made.
“You’ve gone about far enough with your little joke,” said the girl, and her voice was low, but with an edge of vibrancy that went through Hollis. “And you’re going to stop—pronto!”
There was a flash of teeth as she spoke, and a quiver through her body. Terry had never seen such passion, such unreasoning, wild passion, as that which had leaped on the girl. Though her face was not contorted, danger spoke from every line of it. He made himself tense, prepared for a similar outbreak from the father, but the latter relaxed as suddenly as his daughter had become furious.
“There you go,” he complained, with a sort of heavy whine. “Always flying off the handle. Always turning into a wildcat when I try to reason with you!”
“Reason!” cried the girl. “Reason!”
Joe Pollard grew downcast under her scorn. And Terry, sensing that the crisis of the argument had passed, watched the other four men in the room. They had not paid the slightest attention to the debate during its later phases. And two of them—Slim and huge Phil Marvin—had begun to roll dice on a folded blanket, the little ivories winking in the light rapidly until they came to a rest at the farther end of the cloth. Possibly this family strife was a common thing in the Pollard household. At any rate, the father now passed off from accusation to abrupt apology. “You always get me riled at the end of the day, Kate. Damn it! Can’t you never bear with a gent?”
The tigerish alertness passed from Kate Pollard. She was filled all at once with a winning gentleness and, crossing to her father, took his heavy hands in hers.
“I reckon I’m a bad one,” she accused herself. “I try to get over tantrums—but—I can’t help it! Something—just sort of grabs me by the throat when I get mad. I—I see red.”
“Hush up, honey,” said the big man tenderly, and he ran his thick fingers over her hair. “You ain’t so bad. And all that’s bad in you comes out of me. You forge
t and I’ll forget.”
He waved across the table.
“Terry’ll be thinking we’re a bunch of wild Indians the way we been actin’.”
“Oh!”
Plainly she was recalled to the presence of the stranger for the first time in many minutes and, dropping her chin in her hand, she studied the new arrival.
He found it difficult to meet her glance. The Lord had endowed Terry Hollis with a remarkable share of good looks, and it was not the first time that he had been investigated by the eyes of a woman. But in all his life he had never been subjected to an examination as minute, as insolently frank as this one. He felt himself taken part and parcel, examined in detail as to forehead, chin, and eyes and heft of shoulders, and then weighed altogether. In self-defense he looked boldly back at her, making himself examine her in equal detail. Seeing her so close, he was aware of a marvellously delicate olive-tanned skin with delightful tints of rose just beneath the surface. He found himself saying inwardly: “It’s easy to look at her. It’s very easy. By the Lord, she’s beautiful!”
As for the girl, it seemed that she was not quite sure in her judgment. For now she turned to her father with a faint frown of wonder. And again it seemed to Terry that Joe Pollard made an imperceptible sign, such as he had made to the four men when he introduced Terry.
But now he broke into breezy talk.
“Met Terry down in Pedro’s—”
The girl seemed to have dismissed Terry from her mind already, for she broke in: “Crooked game he’s running, isn’t it?”
“I thought so till today. Then I seen Terry, here, trim Pedro for a flat twenty thousand!”
“Oh,” nodded the girl. Again her gaze reverted leisurely to the stranger and with a not unflattering interest.
“And then I seen him lose most of it back again. Roulette.”
She nodded, keeping her eyes on Terry, and the boy found himself desiring mightily to discover just what was going on behind the changing green of her eyes. He was shocked when he discovered. It came like the break of high dawn in the mountains of the Big Bend. Suddenly she had smiled openly, frankly. “Hard luck, partner!”