by Brand, Max
IT WAS Sheriff Dick Williams, looking as he always looked — sawed-off and strong and competent of body and mind. He had long ago come to the gray years when time changes the body of a man very slowly, and his face seems wiser, not older, from year to year.
“Hey,” answered Bill Naylor. “What’s the main idea? You got nothing on me now, Williams.”
“Haven’t I?” asked the sheriff, his eye twinkling. “Well, I don’t suppose I have for the moment. But I can always trust you to start something new before long. What’s it going to be this time, Bill? Old line or new?”
Naylor rubbed his knuckles across his chin and frowned. He was neither complimented nor pleased by this banter. He had a feeling that the sheriff knew only part of him, and that there were other things he might show Dick Williams.
“Well,” he said. I wanta talk to you about something.”
“Blaze away,” said Dick Williams.
“I was just going to ask you: Suppose that the ghost of somebody walked into your house some night, what would you do?”
“Ask him to walk out again,” said the sheriff. “Why?”
“Suppose it was the ghost of Barry Christian?”
“Christian!” gasped the sheriff.
He kept staring at Naylor, and his eyes were as round as marbles. All at once he seemed a little boy with the mask of a middle-aged man set over his real features.
“What are you talking about?” demanded the Sheriff. “Barry Christian dropped off Kendal Bridge, and he went down the river — with his hands tied behind his back. And he went over the falls and was smashed to bits.”
“All right,” said Bill Naylor. “I’m just asking you something. I’m not saying that while he was in the water he managed to get his hands free from the rope that tied his wrists together. I’m not saying that he snagged on a rock and managed to get past the falls. I’m only saying — if the ghost of Barry Christian walked in on you, what would you do? Would you talk?”
The sheriff took a great breath.
“Barry Christian!” he whispered. Then he added: “If Jim Silver hears that that devil has come out of the dead again, he’ll lose his mind!”
“Well,” said Naylor, “I asked you a question. What about it?”
“Talk to him? Why should I talk to him?” said the sheriff. “I’ve got guns, and I’ve got handcuffs. Why should I talk to him?”
“That’s the point,” remarked Naylor. “Suppose that Christian was to walk in on you, would you want to talk to him — or something else?”
“Well,” said the sheriff after a moment of hesitation, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I ought to do — about a ghost. Listen to me. If Barry Christian should walk into my house some night, I’d talk to him.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” answered Bill Naylor, and he mounted and rode away.
When he looked back, he saw the sheriff rooted to the same spot, shaking his head in bewilderment.
At the First Chance Saloon, Bill Naylor paused to take refreshment. He stood at the bar, leaned his elbow upon it, and poured down two stiff drinks of whisky. After that he beckoned the bartender toward him. The bartender looked upon him with a judicial eye.
“No credit,” he said.
“Don’t be a fool,” said Naylor, and he pushed a ten-dollar bill over the counter.
The bartender looked at that bill with attention. It was water-stained and pocket-chafed, but it seemed all right.
“Got your girl’s picture on it?” Bill Naylor sneered.
“You know,” said the bartender, “there’s a lot of phony tens wandering around the country just now. A gent has gotta have an eye. But this looks all right to me.”
“Thanks,” growled Bill Naylor. “What’s the news, anyway?”
“About what?”
“Oh, about things. What’s the news here in Crow’s Nest?”
“I dunno,” answered the other. “Things are going along pretty good. Everybody feels pretty fine since Jim Silver saved the bank. Then he went and faded out. You know that?”
“I heard something about it. Why’d he do that? Somebody told me he was as good as married to Wilbur’s daughter.”
“Maybe he was. They was around a lot together,” said the bartender. “But you know how it is. It hurts Jim Silver to stay long in one spot. There’s a sort of a curse on him. He’s gotta keep moving. So one day he’s here, and the next day he’s gone, and who knows where?”
“How’s the girl feel about it?” asked Naylor.
“I never asked her!” said the bartender shortly.
Naylor understood. Since the recent great events, every one in Crow’s Nest took a sort of family interest in Henry Wilbur and his daughter; just as Crow’s Nest now felt that it had a sort of proprietarial claim to Jim Silver.
“Well, I been and seen her once,” said Bill Naylor. “She’s got the kind of gray eyes that turn blue when a girl gets worked up. She’s got the nerve all right.”
The bartender smiled faintly, as one who deprecates praise of a relative.
“I seen her cut into the crowd when they was after Jim Silver,” he said. “I seen her go sashaying right through the middle of ‘em with gents trying to paw her off her horse. She saved Jim Silver that day. And now — well, nobody’s seen her since Silver left the town. But what’re you going to do?”
He was silent, shaking his head.
“There’s Gregor in the jail,” said Bill Naylor. “They’ll chaw him up fine, I guess.”
“Yeah. He’ll go down the throat. They got everything ready for him. His trial comes in three days. It’ll be something like twenty years for Duff Gregor, I guess. That’s what everybody says that oughta know. That’s what the lawyers say. The town’s hired a special fine lawyer to help the district attorney so’s they can be sure to sock Gregor for everything that’s coming to him.”
That was the news that Naylor carried back to Barry Christian. Christian moralized a little on the tidings about Silver and the girl. He said, in his deep, gentle, soothing voice:
“The trouble with Jim Silver is that you never know where to have him. He’s not like the rest of us.”
“A jump ahead, eh?” suggested Naylor with a grin.
“He’s beaten me three times,” said Christian calmly. “But the fourth time I think I might win. I think I might take him by surprise, Bill. At any rate, I’m going to try.”
“Ain’t there room for the two of you?” asked Bill Naylor. “Couldn’t you get some place where he wouldn’t reach you?”
“Of course,” said Christian. “If I ran away, of course, there would be room for both of us.”
But by his manner of saying it, Bill Naylor knew very well that nothing in the world was farther from the mind of his companion than the thought of avoiding the conflict. He squinted his eyes as he thought of the thing — two giants, hand to hand. The day would come, and perhaps he, Bill Naylor, would be an eyewitness. For he felt that Barry Christian was going to take him into the presence of great events.
CHAPTER VII
The Sheriff’s Temptation
BACK in Crow’s Nest, Sheriff Dick Williams paced the veranda of his cottage uneasily. Before him the town was spread out, filling the hollow hand of the night with a glow, and uneven sparklings, and long rows of lights. But this picture, which had so often delighted him, he could not see now.
Every time he walked past the open front door of his house, the stream of the lamplight from the lamp which burned on the hall table struck him and illumined him sharply.
At any other time he would have known better than to expose himself in this manner, for there were plenty of straight shots in the mountains who would have liked nothing better than a chance to send a little chunk of lead through Dick Williams. His course as sheriff had been a little too straight. He had made too many enemies by the steadiness of his honesty.
But this evening there were too many burdens on his mind for him to think of his own danger.
He wen
t back into the house with a quiet step, turned the knob of a door cautiously, and peered inside. There was a screen surrounding the bed. Outside the screen, in the dim field of light from a lamp whose wick was turned very low, sat the sheriff’s wife, sewing, bending her head low to see the stitches.
She looked up at her husband with a smile. She had never been more than vaguely pretty. Now the time and work and care had tightened her face here and loosened it there, and printed black-and-purple circles around the eyes. But when the sheriff looked at her he never saw the modern fact of her, but the ancient and pleasant myth which had made him love her in the beginning.
Behind the screen the child stirred and moaned.
The sheriff shrank back a little in the doorway. He could always feel the voice of the child somewhere inside him. It made him sick with fear. It made him want to run away.
He saw his wife get up, put down her sewing, and pass behind the screen. She spoke, so softly that he could not understand the words, though he well knew the voice that uttered them. He could remember a like voice out of his own childhood.
There was a sleepy murmuring, and then Mrs. Williams came out from behind the screen again and smiled once more.
“Do you want to see him?” she asked.
The sheriff blinked.
“No,” he said.
“You ought to see him,” said his wife. “He’s a little better tonight. The doctor says he’s a little better. You ought to see him, Dick. You’ll feel a lot better if you see him more often.”
He drew in a soft breath.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “The morning’s my time to see him. I’ll see him in the morning. How are you?”
“Me? Oh, I’m all right. I never was better.”
“You’re all right?”
“Of course I am.”
She went back to her sewing and sat with it in her lap, still smiling at him while he stood helplessly in the doorway. But after a time he backed out and closed the door, and went on tiptoe down the hall.
It was no more true that she was “all right” than it was that the boy was “a little better.” Women are sure to lie like that — good women are, at least. They keep smiling and let the pain go inward and consume the heart.
The sheriff returned to his veranda and paced slowly up and down it. If he had given up smoking and an occasional drink two years ago, and cut down on everything and saved every penny, by this time they would have enough money to do what the doctor wanted them to do with the boy. Seaside air might be very good for the child. But as matters stood, the seaside was as far outside the range of the pocketbook of the sheriff as the blue and gold of heaven.
“You don’t dig much money with a six-shooter,” the sheriff thought. It was an old thought of his. He had been a fighting man — on the side of the law — for the half of his life, now. And he never had made money. “You don’t dig money with a six-shooter.” Nothing could be truer than that.
Just as that thought worked in his mind, things began to happen fast. A low voice called:
“Hello, sheriff.”
He stopped walking. He put a hand on a gun before he remembered that any one with a mind to do so might have picked him off twenty times during the last twenty minutes.
He stepped to the edge the veranda.
“Well?” said he.
And the voice said: “Will you come down here from the veranda and talk to me?”
“Who are you?”
“Barry Christian.”
The hair stirred on the scalp of the sheriff. He remembered the words that had been spoken to him by Bill Naylor. Then, gathering his strength, he walked down from the veranda and along the narrow path into the garden. A tall figure suddenly appeared beside him.
It was Barry Christian. He knew that somehow with a perfect certainty. It wasn’t that he had been told that it was Barry Christian who wanted to talk with him. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that an inner sense gave him warning.
He made no move toward a gun now, not only because he was afraid, but because he remembered his promise to talk.
So he stopped short and merely said: “Well, Christian?”
“I thought that I’d like to have a chat with you,” said Christian.
“Here I am,” said the sheriff.
“Just about things,” said Christian. “About the boy, for instance. How’s Dick Williams, Jr.?”
“He’s all right,” answered the sheriff.
“That’s not what the doctor says.”
“How do you know what the doctor says?”
“Well, a fellow happens to hear things now and then. I’ve heard that little Dick needs a change of air.”
“That’s all right, too,” said the sheriff.
“Of course it is. All right for you and me. But how about little Dick? How all right is it for him?”
“I’ll attend to him,” said the sheriff.
“Sure you will. You’ll attend to him. You’ll attend to his funeral, you mean.”
“Damn you!” said the sheriff.
“Anyway,” answered Christian, “I’ve dropped around to have a chat.”
“I’ve had enough of your chatting. Get out of my sight, Christian, and don’t come back again.”
“Hard lines, Dick Williams. Hard fines,” murmured the soft voice of Barry Christian. “I’ll tell ‘you what I’ll do. I’ll step away and leave you to yourself for a few minutes. I’ll leave you to look at a little trifle that I brought you. Not for you, but for little Dick. Understand? I’m fond of children, sheriff.”
He chuckled as he said this. It sounded to the sheriff like the mirth of a fiend.
“Take this,” said Christian. “Give it a look, and I’ll drop by again in five minutes.”
He handed the sheriff a flat, paper-wrapped package; then he stepped into the brush. The sheriff raised the package to hurl after the criminal, but his hand was stopped by another thought.
He went up on the veranda, unwrapped the paper, and found inside what he had guessed at before by the pinch of his thumb and forefinger. It was a good, thick sheaf of money. He counted out five thousand dollars in excellent currency of the country.
He loosed his collar and sat there for a time, breathing hard. Oh, he knew what it meant, well enough. Up yonder in the jail was Duff Gregor, a few steps away from twenty years of darkness. And here in the hand of the sheriff there was five thousand dollars in hard cash. He could send his wife and youngster to a place where the boy would grow well, where they would both regain their strength. He could manage some tale — about borrowing money, or a business deal. There were plenty of stories that he could tell. And when she came back, brown, rosy, stepping lightly, with the boy a bundle of healthy energy — well, what would he care about the source of the money?
As far as Duff Gregor was concerned — well, what was Duff Gregor, other than the most helpless of tools in the hand of Barry Christian? Christian had planned the crime and merely used the face of Gregor to perform it — the mere chance that Gregor so strikingly resembled Jim Silver. If Gregor were turned loose from the jail, what real harm would be done?
So the sheriff argued with himself. Then a soft step approached up the gravel of the path and paused at a sufficient distance to remain covered by the dark of the night.
“Well?” said the gentle voice of Barry Christian.
The sheriff started to speak, found himself breathless, and moistened his dry lips.
Then, instead of saying a word, he threw the sheaf of money down on the gravel path and went back inside the house. He sat on the side of his bed, trembling. He was afraid every moment that there would be a tap at the front door, and that Barry Christian would be there again to start bargaining. But there was no tap at the front door.
He went to bed, but he could not sleep for a long time. He could only go half a step into the region of nightmares before he was recalled again to the land of wakefulness and living horrors.
Once, as full consci
ousness returned to him, he saw a white form seated beside the window, and he knew that it was his wife sitting there, thinking.
He got out of bed and put his hand on her bare shoulder. Her flesh was dank and cold, like the coolness of dead bodies. He told her to get into bed, that she would have to sleep.
She said, without looking up: “I don’t want to go to bed. I don’t want to admit the day has ended.”
Well, he understood that, too. If this day ended, Heaven alone could tell what the next day would bring. The next day might be the last day for which they were waiting. The next day might not dawn at all for little Dick.
“Things are going to be all right,” said the sheriff. “You go to bed. I’ll go in and sit there with Dickie.”
“You sit there? Are you out of your head? Have you lost your mind?” she exclaimed. “What are you thinking of? Take care of your crooks and thugs and jailbirds, but let Dickie alone. Unless you want to frighten him into the grave.”
She never had talked like this before. She would not be talking like this now, he knew, except that she was strained to the breaking point. He stood back in a corner, silent, until she snapped at him:
“Go back to bed! I don’t want you here. You’re no comfort to him.”
He said nothing. Perhaps it was not all nerves, he told himself. Perhaps she meant what she said. Perhaps she never had cared much about him. Women can do that; they can cover up the truth for years and years. In great criminal cases you find women who are capable of acting like that.
So his heart grew old and small in him as he considered the dreadful possibilities of her unknown mind.
“Are you going to bed?” she snapped again.
“When you do,” he told her.
She got up. He thought that she was going to throw herself at his throat. Instead, she ran to the bed and flung herself into it, face down. He went to the bed and covered her up. She began to cry softly. Now and then a great sob would break out. She fought with writhings of the body to keep the noise inside her for fear lest it might disturb the boy in the next room.
“Don’t let me make a noise! Don’t wake him up!” she said.
The sheriff put his hand on her bare, cold shoulder, and sat silently in the darkness.