by Max Brand
“They’re recuperatin’,” said the sheriff gravely. “They got a sort of shock and a setback a while ago, but they’re recuperatin’.”
“What gave them the shock?”
“Well, typhoid fever, smallpox, diphtheria, delirium tremens and muscular rheumatism all hit this town together, one day, when Billy Shay turned up and opened his gambling house. I had old Law and Order out, taking the sun and the air every day, but now they don’t dare to leave their beds till the sun’s at nine o’clock, and they creep back in around about sundown.”
“Who is Billy Shay?” asked Milman, willing to forget his trouble for a moment.
“Shay is poison,” said the sheriff.
“What kind?”
“Skunk poison,” said the sheriff inelegantly. “He’s just one of those mean, low-down, sneakin’ curs that has teeth and knows how to use ’em.”
“Then why don’t you run ’im out?”
“I can’t hang anything on him. I know that everything crooked in the town depends on Shay, but still I can’t get any information against him. He’s slick as a snake, and he could hide in a snake’s hole, if he wanted to.”
“How does the town take to him?”
“How does any town this far West take to a chance to spoil its health, throw away its bank account, wreck its eyes, and quit work? Why, this town of Dry Creek is crazy about Billy Shay.”
“Does everyone know that he’s a crook?”
“Of course, everybody does. That won’t hold your real hundred-per-cent Westerner from going to that gaming house and tossing his money away. Shay has such a good thing that he only has to use the brakes now and then to stop somebody on a big run. As long as a fool wins once in three times, he’s sure to come back for more. And one player out of ten always makes something worth while. They do the advertising for Billy Shay.”
He extended his hand, pointing across the street.
“There’s Billy’s house. He’s gone and got himself the finest place in town.”
“That’s Judge Mahon’s place, I thought.”
“The judge has sold out and moved up Denver way. Didn’t you know that?”
“News is six months dead to me,” admitted the rancher. “There’s somebody piling down the street in a hurry.”
The horseman came with a rush and a sweep.
“Maybe news from the ranch—maybe bad news!” muttered Milman under his breath.
“Why, it’s Billy Shay!” said the sheriff. “I never saw him ride in like that before!”
Billy Shay appeared to Milman as rather a hump-shouldered man with a long, lean, white face. As he got to the front of his house, he sprang from the saddle, without pausing to throw the reins, and as the horse dashed off down the street, Billy cleared his front gate with a fine hurdle and fled to the door of the house.
Then, as he fitted the key into the lock, he cast a frantic glance over his shoulder up and down the street and flattened his body against the door like one who feels the eyes of danger in the center of his spine.
A moment later he had disappeared into the house.
“Yes, that’s a mighty hurried fellow,” said Milman. “He doesn’t act as though he’s so dangerous as you’ve been saying.”
“No, he don’t,” replied the sheriff. “He don’t look bad enough to eat a raw egg, right now. But I’ve seen him—” He paused and sighed. “I’d like to know what’s after Billy!” he continued, shaking his head. “Whatever is in his mind, I’d like to find out the nature of it. I’d like to discover the kind of mongoose that makes that cobra run!”
Then, distinctly, across the road, they could hear the noise of furniture being dragged—heavy articles which screeched against the floor. They even saw the door tremble as these things were piled against it.
“Dog-gone me if he ain’t barricadin’ himself in that house of his!” said the sheriff with a growing awe.
He laid his brown hand with withered, wrinkled fingers upon the shoulder of his friend.
“I got an idea that maybe we’re going to see something, old-timer.”
“See what?” said Milman.
“I dunno. A mob, maybe, that’s after him. Once we can crack the shell and get at the news that’s in that hound’s life record, we’d have enough to raise the whole of Dry Creek, I suppose.”
“You think there’s a mob rising? I don’t hear a sound.”
“Mobs that mean real business don’t make no noise at all,” said the sheriff. “I’ve seen a hundred and fifty men wearin’ guns and masks, and as quiet as a funeral. Funerals was what they was providin’, as a matter of fact. Cheap funerals and a quick way out of the world to them that didn’t understand the ways of the West, as you might say. How that Shay slicked off of his horse, eh? I never seen nothin’ like it!”
“He’s a badly scared man, all right,” said Milman. “If the crowd should come to mob him, will you have to intervene?” At this the face of Lew Walters turned grim.
“I’d have to,” he declared. “The old days is gone, and Law and Order is supposed to be strong enough to walk right up and down the main street of this town night or day. I’m the escort. I’ve swore to do that job, and I intend to do it!”
He looked anxiously up and down the street as he spoke.
But there was nothing in sight that agreed with his grave imaginings of danger.
“Look at that dormer window in the roof!” exclaimed Milman.
The house of the judge, having been built as pretentiously as possible, had a roof like the crown of a Mexican hat, and on one side of it was a dormer window. The window was open, and inside it a mirror flashed a blinding ray of light, winking rapidly.
“There’s a signal—that’s heliograph work as sure as I’m a foot high, Lew. Can you make out the dots and dashes?”
“I can’t make out a thing. I’m not a telegrapher. But I could guess the name of the fellow who’s handling that mirror!”
“You mean Shay?”
“That’s who I mean. He’s sending out a message to pals of his somewhere, and I’d put my money that it’s a howl for help.”
“If we could get at the meaning of that message, we might be at the heart of Shay’s private affairs—information enough to enable you to make your arrest, eh?”
“Aye, we might. Here’s somebody coming. The mob, I’d say. And a mighty small mob to crack a nut with a shell as hard as Shay’s. He’s probably got half a dozen armed men in that house.”
The dust cloud down the street dissolved, presently, to show two women and two men riding abreast, with led horses directly behind them.
“That’s no mob, Milman,” said the sheriff after a moment. “That’s your wife on the left, there, if I ain’t lost my eyes.”
Milman, with an exclamation, made for the door, but the sheriff remained fixed at his post at the window, watching with curiosity-squinted eyes the flickering light from the heliograph that played in the dormer window. He quite agreed with Milman that this message might be useful to him in his work of ridding the town of the gambling nuisance. But he knew that by the time he had secured a telegragher the signaling would probably have stopped. He could only sigh and watch, uncomprehending.
Still his mind struggled to guess at a solution of the mystery of Shay’s fear. For the man, whatever his other faults of greed, low cunning, and knavery, was brave, and had demonstrated his courage over and over again. Yet here he had fled into his house, barricaded the door, locked the lower windows, and now was signaling—no doubt frantically—in an appeal for help!
The possible mob was the only solution that appeared to the mind of the sheriff. He loosened his Colt in its holster and set his mind sternly on the work that might be preparing for him. No matter what he thought of Shay, mob violence was something which he had put down in Dry Creek, and he was prepared to put it down again at whatever risk.
In order to get closer to the scene of action, as soon as the mirror at the dormer window stopped signaling and the window its
elf was closed with a violent bang, he went downstairs, and in the lobby found his friend, the rancher, with his wife and daughter beside him, looking as happy as any child.
Even with the trouble that was now in his mind, the sheriff could not help letting his eye linger pleasantly on the trio for a moment.
“Clean-bred ones,” said the sheriff to himself, and being a man his glance lingered longest on the face of Georgia Milman. She was as brown as an Indian; she had the rounded, supple body of an Indian maiden, also, and Indian black was her hair, but her eyes were the blue which one sees in Ireland. She swung her quirt and greeted the sheriff noisily and heartily. They had shot elk together the season before.
“Father says that there’s some sort of trouble brewing in the Shay house,” said she.
“I dunno,” answered Lew Walters, “but they’s trouble bud-din’ and bloomin’ over there. Come out on the veranda and have a look at the fireworks. Hello, Mrs. Milman. This here man of yours, he sure needed tyin’ before he seen you down the street. Are you-all comin’ out on the observation platform?”
They were. And the rest of the town seemed to be heading in the same direction, so swiftly had the rumor of excitement spread.
CHAPTER 2
The Kid Arrives
It was not malicious curiosity that brought the crowd. It was the same impulse which draws men together to see a prize fight. There were perhaps fifty people already on the long covered veranda that ran in front of the hotel, supported by narrow wooden pillars, with a row of watering troughs on each side of the steps where a twelve-horse team could be watered at one time without unharnessing them.
“You’re gettin’ a new brand of trouble here in Dry Creek, sheriff,” said an acquaintance.
“I’ve seen a lot of brands,” said the sheriff. “What’s the new one gunna be like?”
“The Kid is comin’ to town, I’ve heard. Charlie Payson, he passed the word along.”
“Which is this Kid?” asked Milman. “Denver, Mississippi, Chicago, Boston or—”
“This ain’t any of them. It’s the Kid,” replied the sheriff. “You mean to tell me that Charlie Payson is handin’ out that story? What would the Kid be comin’ to Dry Creek for?”
“Yeah,” said the other, “you’d say that Dry Creek wouldn’t give him no elbow room, hardly. But that’s what Payson is sayin’. I dunno how he knows. Unless’n maybe he got a letter. Some say that he was with the Kid down in Yucatan once.”
“I’ve heard that story,” said the sheriff. “How they went up the river and found the old temple and got the emerald eye, and all that. Is they anything in that yarn?”
“They’s likely to be something in any yarn about the Kid.”
“Who is the Kid?” said Elinore Milman.
“You never heard of him?” asked the sheriff.
“No. Never. Not of a man who went by just that nickname. What’s his real name?”
“Why, that I dunno. But betwixt Yucatan and about twenty-five hundred miles north they is only one Kid, so far as I know.”
“What sort of a creature is he? Young?”
“The sort of creature he is,” said the sheriff, “is a hard creature to describe. Yes, mostly he’s young.”
“What do you mean by mostly?”
“Well, some ways they ain’t nobody no older in the world. Maybe I can give you an idea of the Kid by what a feller told me he seen in a Mexican town in Chihuahua. When the word came in that the Kid had been sighted around those parts, they fetched in a section of the toughest rurales they could find, and they swore in a flock of extra deputies, and them gents that had extra-fine hosses. They led ’em out of town and sneaked for the tall timber, and the women that had pretty daughters, they got ’em indoors and turned the lock over ’em, and sat down in front of the doors with the biggest butcher knives that they could sharpen upon the grindstone. And the gamblin’ house, it closed up and cached all of its workin’ money by buryin’ it real secret in the ground, and the big store, it closed and locked up all of its windows. It looked like that there town had gone to sleep. But it was lyin’ wide awake behind its shutters, like a cat. Well, down there in Mexico, they know the Kid a lot better than we do, and that’s the way they treat him there.”
“But here in Dry Creek,” Elinore Milman questioned, “you don’t take all those precautions when this philandering horse thief, gunman and yegg comes to town?”
“Ma’am,” said the sheriff, “you’ve heard that he’s comin’. And ain’t you standing out here with Georgia right beside you?”
She flushed a little, but the girl merely laughed.
“I imagine that I can venture Georgia,” said the rancher’s wife.
“Yeah,” said the sheriff, “I see that you do. But if she was mine, I’d blindfold her and put her in a cyclone cellar when they was a chance of that Kid comin’ by. Up here, on this side of the Rio Grande, we’re all too dog-gone proud to be careful and that’s the cause of a terrible lot of broken safes and necks and hearts!”
There was a distinct strain of seriousness in this speech, but Mrs. Milman, turning toward her daughter, smiled a little, and Georgia smiled in turn. They were old and understanding companions.
Murmurs, in the meantime, passed up and down the veranda. “What’s it all about, sheriff?” asked several men from time to time.
He merely shrugged his shoulders and continued to stare at the house opposite him, as though he were striving to read a human mind.
“The curtain ain’t up,” said the sheriff, “but I reckon that the stage is set and that they’s gunna be an entrance pretty pronto.”
“Here’s somebody coming,” said Georgia, gesturing toward the farther end of the street.
“Yeah,” said the sheriff, “but he’s comin’ too slow to mean anything.”
“Slow and earnest wins the race,” said another.
They were growing impatient; like a crowd at a bullfight, when the entrance of the matador is delayed too long.
“We’re wasting the day,” said Milman to his family. “That’s a long ride ahead of us.”
“Don’t go now,” said Georgia. “I’ve got a tingle in my finger tips that says something is going to happen.”
Other voices were rising, jesting, laughing, when some one called out something at the farther end of the veranda, and instantly there was a wave of silence that spread upon them all.
“What is it?” whispered Milman to the sheriff.
“Shut up!” said the sheriff. “They say that it’s the Kid!”
He came suddenly into view, as a puff of wind cuffed the dust aside. His back was so straight and his stirrup so long that he seemed to be standing in his saddle. His bead was high, and his glance was on the distance, like one who knows that his horse will pay heed to the footwork. But there was nothing unusual in his get-up except for the tinkling of a pair of little golden bells which he wore in his spurs.
Such a silence had come over the crowd on the veranda that this sound, small as the chiming of a distant brook, grew distinctly audible. The sheriff suddenly nudged Georgia.
“There’s a horse for you,” said he. “That’s the Duck Hawk, as they call it. That’s the mustang mare that he caught in Sonora. Ain’t she the tiptoe beauty for you?”
She came like a dancer, daintily but smoothly, with a pride about her head, as though she felt she were carrying some one of vast distinction. A king would have liked to ride on such a horse; or a general, or any mayor in the world, to lead a procession.
“She gets her name from her markings,” explained the sheriff. “You see the black of her all over, except the breast and the belly is white. I never seen such queer markings on a hoss before. But that’s the Duck Hawk. I seen her out of Phoenix once. I’d dig potatoes for ten years for a hoss like that, honey. How long,” he added, “would you dig ’em for such a man?”
He turned with a grin as he spoke, and the girl smiled back at him.
“He looks all wool,” she said most
frankly.
So he did. The sort of wool that wears in the West, or on any frontier. Now, as he came up to the hotel and jumped out of the saddle, they could see that he had the strong man’s shoulders, smoothly made and thick; and the legs of a runner such as one finds among the straight-built Navajoes. He had the deep desert tan, but his eyes were of that same Irish blue which made men look at Georgia Milman with a leap of the heart.
Their hearts did not leap when they stared at the Kid, however. Instead, glances were apt to sink to the ground.
The Kid took a bit of clean linen from his saddle bag and wiped the muzzle of the mare before he permitted her to drink, which she did freely but daintily, for Georgia Milman could see, now, that there was no bit between her teeth.
“Hello, folks,” said the Kid. “Waiting here for a procession to come along, or is somebody going to make a speech?”
He picked out faces, here and there, and waved to them, but when he saw the sheriff he jumped lightly to the edge of the veranda between two of the troughs. The intervening people slipped hastily back, like dogs, Georgia thought, when the wolf steps near.
The Kid took the sheriff’s hand in a warm grip.
“I’m glad to see you, Walters,” said he. “I thought I’d drop in here at Dry Creek to see you. You’ve made my old friend Shay so much at home that I thought you might want me up here too.”
“I’m glad to see you, too,” said the sheriff instantly. “I’ve got a right good little of jail over yonder, Kid, and you’ll find it mighty cheap here in Dry Creek to get a ticket to it.”
“Never buy anything but round trips,” said the Kid, “and I hear that yours is only a one-way line. You’re not introducing me to your daughter, Walters?”
“This is the yegg I was telling you about, Georgia,” said the sheriff. “This is the same sashayin’ young trouble raiser. The lady’s name is Milman, Kid.”
The Kid took off his hat and bowed to her with an almost Latin grace.