by Grey, Zane
Then Rue gave Nevada an inscrutable look, more deceiving for the pleasant voice with which he accompanied it.
"But you're not particular about throwin' a gun on--anybody?" he queried.
Nevada's cool bright stare was not so deceptive. And then he drawled: "Not at all--not at all, Mr. Rue. Shore it's just a habit. I never mean anythin' uncivil."
The two men passed on to a gaming table, where seats evidently awaited them. Nevada turned on his heel, muttering: "Damn them anyhow. They just cain't let me alone."
Among others who entered presently was Cash Burridge. He was a tall man nearing forty, but he looked younger. He had the build of a horseman, a fine figure in top-boots and spurs. Nevada was quick to see where he packed his gun, and that was significant. Burridge was a handsome, dissolute man, blond, with a curling mustache, almost gold, and light, gleaming, restless blue eyes.
Nevada knew that Burridge had seen him the instant of entrance, if not before, and he wondered what the outcome would be. It did not matter one way or another to Nevada. Burridge had been the ringleader in the stage hold-up to which Nevada had been a party.
The one deed to which he owned with shame!
At length Burridge disengaged himself from his companions and deliberately walked around between the tables to get to Nevada.
"Jim, I'm dog-gone glad to see you!" he said, extending his hand, and his handsome face corroborated his words.
"Howdy, Cash!" replied Nevada, meeting the outstretched hand.
"Reckon I'm glad you're glad to see me."
"It's good you blew in. I've often wondered what'd become of you.
I'll tell you, Jim, I'm not curious about where you've been or what you've been doin', but I'm plumb interested in what you're goin' to do."
"Why so?" asked Nevada, not without surprise. He was not wholly proof against Burridge's warm welcome.
"Are you goin' to hole up here this winter, same as the rest of us?" queried Burridge.
"Reckon I am, as far as I know," returned Nevada, slowly feeling his way.
"Broke?" queried Burridge, with a knowing look.
"Shore am."
"I'm not so well heeled myself, but I can stake you to a roll."
"Thanks, Cash. But I cain't borrow. I don't like borrowin', an' maybe I never could pay back. I'll get a job for my keep heah.
An' the cairds an' drinks won't bother me."
"Jim, what'll you do after the snow flies?"
"I'll be hanged if I know," replied Nevada, truthfully enough.
"That's all I wanted to hear," spoke up Burridge, with great satisfaction. "I've got a deal on--the biggest I ever handled.
It's--"
"Cash, reckon you're not goin' to ask me to rustle cattle with you?" interrupted Nevada, severely.
"No. I swear I'm not," hastily returned Burridge, and if he was not sincere, he surely was a splendid actor. "By Heaven! it's an honest deal, Jim."
"Wal, I'm glad to heah you say that. An' I'll listen to you."
"This ain't the place for us to talk. Besides, I've a poker game on. The deal I'm in is big; it's cattle, an' it's honest. I've got to have a hard-shootin' outfit, an' a leader with a reputation like yours."
"But, Cash, I heard you say this deal was honest," protested Nevada.
"If it ain't then I don't know what honesty is," declared Burridge, forcibly. "Sure my talk is plumb misleadin'. But you wait till I tell you all about the deal."
"Wal, Cash, I'll shore try to be patient waitin'," drawled Nevada.
"I'm givin' you a hunch," rejoined Burridge. "Keep it to yourself."
Burridge withdrew then to his card game, while Nevada returned to his chair by the fire. "What the devil is Cash up to now?" pondered Nevada. "Honest deal? Cattle? Hard-shootin' outfit . . .
I'll be darned."
Nevada discovered that the word honest inhibited all his deductive powers in relation to what Cash Burridge might be engaged in.
Cash's deliberate assertion was a poser. Nevada could not solve it. But he grasped one significant fact at once, and that was a motive for Burridge's warm greeting. He had never before shown any kindliness to Nevada. Where Burridge had any special interest he could be agreeable, and, if the case required, most persuasive and dominating. These traits, however, had never before been exercised upon Nevada.
Meanwhile the saloon and gambling room filled up. In the former there was raucous noise and in the latter a contrasting silence, broken by the low voice of a gamester now and then, and a clink of coin, or the whir and rattle of the roulette wheel. During this period Nevada sat beside the fire, glancing at it occasionally, but seeing always those who came in and went out. The glowing embers of any fire cast a spell upon Nevada, always bringing the face which haunted his waking and sleeping hours.
A little later Lize Teller returned, and before he could get up to offer her the chair she had plumped herself over the arm.
"You sit still or I'll jump into your lap," she threatened, half petulantly and half merrily. She would have done it, too; therefore Nevada decided he had better be quiet. What had once been shyness in him had now become aloofness.
"But, Lize, shore if you want to make a show of yourself, you don't need to pick on me," mildly protested Nevada.
"Jim Lacy, there isn't a man in this room, except you, who wouldn't put his arm around me if I sat like this on his chair."
"Wal, suppose you let me see some of them do it."
"Aha, you're the smart one. Listen! If you want to make me your friend--I say FRIEND--forever, just be lover-like for a few minutes. Or if you can't be that, make a bluff at it."
Nevada laughed at her in spite of the annoyance he could scarcely conceal. "What're you up to, Lize?"
"Link Cawthorne just came in," she replied, tossing her black head defiantly.
She still had some of the charms of girlhood left. With what pity in his heart did Nevada recognize this, and contrast the havoc of her face with the semblance of the thing she momentarily felt!
"So I reckoned," replied he. "Wal, Lize, it may be fun for you to use me in your little tricks, but it mightn't be funny for me. An' it might turn out bad for Link."
"That's why. He makes me sick. I'm so tired of him I ache. . . .
He's in there drinking. I want him to come in and find me with you. He was up all last night, in a card game, and he doesn't know you're here."
"Lize, it strikes me you don't want very much a-tall," returned Nevada. "I hate to be rude to a lady, but _I_ want to get up."
"I'll make it worse," she almost hissed, with the somber fire in her eyes leaping to a blaze. "You know me."
"All right. I reckon it's bad enough without you makin' it worse," he said, with a forced resignation.
"Bad? Bah! I can handle Link Cawthorne. All I want is for the conceited lout to SEE I can like some other man."
"Lize, I reckon you must have given Link some reason for bein' so conceited. Now didn't you?"
"I suppose I did. I thought I was mad about him, but I guess I was only mad at Cash Burridge. . . . Women are strange, Jim."
"Wal, you cain't prove it by me," answered Nevada.
"There he comes," she whispered, in fiendish glee, and then leaned over Nevada, radiant with some feeling quite beyond his comprehension.
Nevada looked up, not without a stir in his veins. Link Cawthorne stood with the bead curtain parted. How well Nevada remembered the heated face, the beady little eyes too close together, the reckless, weak, leering lips, the choice and manner of garb that inclined to dandyism. Indeed, he had been called the dandy outlaw, an epithet far from displeasing to him.
Nevada doubted Lize's assertion that Link had been unaware of his return to Lineville. He certainly did not start, nor change his expression materially. But he looked steadily at Lize, while she babbled to Nevada, apparently oblivious to her lover's advent.
Nevada's feeling, in that moment, changed from a good-natured contempt for Link and a vexation at his own part in thi
s little farce to something vastly different. It seemed to be premonition that amounted to shock. He saw something, as a dream might foreshadow a future event--something that moved gray, cold, sickening across the swift stream of his consciousness. The sensation was so sudden and dismaying that Nevada heard nothing of Lize's whispered pretenses. It took violent effort of will, which was effected with Cawthorne's stalking across the room, to return to his cool, keen self.
A year and more did not set lightly upon Link Cawthorne's features.
Nevada judged all these men by the changes that had risen in himself. Cawthorne halted before Lize and Nevada, bending his lean, hawklike head, with his elbows crooked and his hands at his hips. His right hand covered the butt of a gun belted high.
Whatever he had intended to say or do manifestly yielded to the passion which arose at close range. His gimlet-eyes fastened first upon Lize, who did not turn her face away from Nevada for a long moment. Then Lize's glance traveled from Cawthorne's! boots slowly upward, at last to meet his piercing gaze with surprise that seemed as genuine as insolent.
"Oh, you here?" she said. "Link, have you ever met my old friend, Jim Lacy?"
"Cat!" he spat out, fiercely, and his body jerked with the liberation of something in the word.
"Howdy, Link!" interposed Nevada, thinking to pour oil on the troubled waters. "Reckon Lize has forgotten you an' me was acquainted."
"Forget--hell!" responded Cawthorne, in hard scorn. "Never mind Lize. I'll settle with her. I'm addressin' you, Jim Lacy."
Nevada seemed a long moment in replying, during which he looked steadily up at Cawthorne.
"Ahuh. Wal, strikes me you're not very civil aboot it."
"Strikes me you're too familiar with Lize," flashed Cawthorne, hotly.
"Familiar? Say, you're out of your haid. If it's any of your business, we're old acquaintances. Shore I never had nothin' but a brotherly feelin' for her. An' if she wants to sit on the arm of my chair--"
"Guff!" interrupted the other. "She was sittin' on your lap. An' that won't go with me."
"Link, look for yourself," returned Nevada, quietly. "There's where she's been all the time. Shore that isn't anythin' to raise a row, even if you an' she are engaged."
"Pooh!" burst out Lize, airily.
That word must have been a blow to Cawthorne, and his whole body leaped with a muscular violence.
"Jim Lacy, you're a liar!" he burst out, stridently.
Lize, swift as a panther, slid off Nevada's chair, to spring erect like a released willow bough. Nevada could not see her. He heard her panting breaths. He was gazing hard up at Cawthorne's face, which had suddenly turned white. In his ungovernable fury he had said what had not been calculated upon. A sudden cessation of all sound from the gamesters was proof that they had heard him denounce Nevada. Cawthorne stood a moment as one transfixed, if not with terror, then with the inevitableness of catastrophe.
"Now, Link, I'm not a liar an' you know it," replied Nevada, without evident stress. "Reckon I can make allowance for your feelin's."
The young outlaw's face lost its pallor and rigidity. It waved red, and all at once his hair appeared to bristle. His youth, his fury, his conceit, not to define his lack of penetration, misled him into mistaking Nevada's reply.
"I'll have no allowances from you," he shouted. "I'm invitin' you for a little walk outdoors."
Chapter four.
Nevada calmly rose to his feet and stepped aside from the chair.
He did not believe that Cawthorne would attempt to draw on him, but as there was no certainty, he wanted to be on his feet. Even at the moment he seemed strange to himself. Yet after that first flash he felt coolly master of himself.
Cawthorne, more emboldened every instant, shouted the louder:
"I'm invitin' you outdoors."
"What for?" queried Nevada.
"You know what for."
"I haven't an idee, Link," went on Nevada. "Shore I see you're r'iled. But I reckon there's no call for me to get r'iled, too, aboot your mistake. It's cold outdoors. An' I like this warm fire. If you've any more to say, why, go ahaid."
Cawthorne expanded under this wholly unprecedented experience. A few drinks had addled his brains and an unreasonable jealousy had set them on fire. To realize Jim Lacy had refused the challenge born of wild haste had set him on the pinnacle of his dream of fame.
"Say?" he demanded, with hoarse and pompous contempt. "I've no more to say. I've called you, an' you're yellow. That's all."
Whereupon he turned to the amazed and discomfited Lize and, half leading, half dragging her, left the room. The business of the gamblers was resumed, with a loud laugh here and caustic remarks there. Nevada heard the content of some of them: "What the hell's got into Lacy?" . . . "He always was a decent chap." . . . "Reckon he couldn't kill thet durn fool right before the girl's eyes." . . .
"You're wrong, gentlemen," said a cold-voiced gambler. "That was a little by-play between a real gunman and a would-be. I've seen it often."
As Nevada resumed his chair and drew it closer to the fire these and other remarks did not escape him, and that of the gambler lingered with him moodily. Gradually his momentary depression passed away. He saw Hettie Ide's face in the golden glow of the fire. How he quivered in heart and body! He had been put to the test and he had been true to what she would have expected of him.
Nevada went early to his lodgings and his sleep was untroubled.
When he awoke in the morning he was glad to face the sun.
There was plenty of work for him to do, which he set about with a will. He found tasks that Mrs. Wood did not think of. Thus, with most of the daylight hours passed in manual labor, Nevada began his winter in Lineville.
For nearly a week he stayed away from the Gold Mine. Then one night at supper Mrs. Wood spoke up seriously:
"Jim, that big-mouthed Link Cawthorne is braggin' around you're afraid to come downtown."
"Wal, you don't say," drawled Nevada.
"Yes, I do say. I don't like it at all, Jim. You can't let him keep that up."
"Shore, I don't care what Link says."
"Son, that's not the way of the West," she went on, gravely. "I've lived all my life on the frontier. No man can afford to lose the respect of his associates, even if they are mostly a worthless outfit of gamblers, rustlers, an' sech. They can't understand it.
Least of all Link Cawthorne can't. He's likely to shoot you from behind a corner an' swear he met you on an even break."
"But, Mother Wood, what can I do?" queried Nevada, robbed of his imperturbability.
"Well, as long as you're here in Lineville be Jim Lacy as THEY used to know him," she declared, forcefully. "If you let this towhead run amuck with his brag, pretty soon he'll get the nerve actually to draw on you. Now, Jim, you don't want to have to kill him.
Lize was fond of him. An' if she's fond of anyone it keeps her straight. You go downtown an' slap Link's face. Take his gun away from him an' stick it down the back of his pants!"
Nevada laughed mirthlessly. "Wal, maybe you're right," he said, with a sigh. "By gosh; I wish spring would come, so I could hit the trail."
"Mark my words, son," she replied, earnestly, "the best way for you to make sure of spring an' summer an' fall is to be yourself!"
Nevada went back to the Gold Mine, dubious in mind, once more doubtful that he could ever escape the inevitable consequences of his name.
It chanced that Link Cawthorne was sober and deeply involved in a card game, where he was having a remarkable run of good luck. He merely sneered when Nevada strolled in.
Cash Burridge, however, made at once for Nevada, with all show of friendliness.
"Where you been, Lacy?" he inquired, disapprovingly. "We've certainly looked for you here."
"Aw, been workin' hard an' goin' to bed early," replied Nevada.
"Then, Cash, I reckon I wanted to avoid meetin' Cawthorne."
"Bah!" snorted Burridge. "You'll have to shoot that damned brag, an' th
e sooner you do it the better we'll all be pleased."
"Wal, we won't argue aboot it, Cash, but I'm not seein' it that way."
"I'll bet you five to one Link will nag you to draw. I've seen a hundred four-flushers like him. An' they all got the same."
"Wal, I cain't bet with you, that's shore," returned Nevada, in good humor.
"Let's go up to my room, where we can have a quiet talk," said the other, and led the way through the hall and upstairs.
"Shore, you're comfortable heah," remarked Nevada, gazing around the room.
"I like it nice when I'm not in the saddle," returned Burridge.
"Take a seat, an' if you won't drink have a smoke. . . . One more word about this Link Cawthorne. He was harmless enough until Lize made him a snake in the grass. That girl is a hell's rattler. My advice is for you to beat the daylights out of Link or call his bluff an' kill him."
"Reckon I'm some worried, Cash," admitted Nevada.
"A man like you must always worry," rejoined Burridge, with evident sympathy. "You can't ever be free unless you hide your name. It's bad enough to have sheriffs after you, an' natural enemies, but it must be hell to know there're men who want to kill you just because of your reputation."
"Wal, I hope I don't get sore an' go back to drinkin'," said Nevada, gloomily.
"Jim, I want to talk serious to you now," went on Burridge, with change of voice.
"Wal, fire away. You'll shore get my honest opinion, anyway."
"Lineville is gettin' a little too much travel to suit me. In another year it won't be any place for me, let alone you. Agree with me?"
"Shore do. When spring comes I go for good."
"Exactly. Same here. Now I want to tell you about my deal. I'll tell you straight. An' if you don't want to go in with me, it'll be all right, only I want you to respect my confidence here in Lineville. Will you do it?"
"I reckon," replied Nevada, soberly.
Burridge showed satisfaction at that assurance, but he plainly hesitated over the next disclosure. Little flecks of light danced in his eyes, suddenly to coalesce in a set, cold gleam.