by Brand, Max
“There’s not enough water in the world to soak me all the way through, Pudge. You boys get to know one another. Here’s Bill Naylor, who pulled me out of the river. Here’s Duff Gregor, who stood Crow’s Nest on its head and nearly split the better part of a million with me. They’ve heard your names. You fellows all seemed to be trying to advertise one another. Shake hands and get acquainted.”
They shook hands all around — all except Rooney, who preferred to keep his gun out and scowl at the strangers.
He was a regular bulldog type, with eyes buried under deep brows and a square, wide, projecting jaw.
“You’re not Barry Christian,” he said. “This is a plant of some sort. Christian went down the Kendal River.”
“Look at me again, Rooney,” said Christian. “You must have seen pictures of me. I can trust the newspapers to have spread pictures of me all over the land. Look at me again, and you’ll recognize me.”
He stood close to the lantern that hung on the wall, and Rooney suddenly nodded.
“I‘ve got to believe my eyes,” he admitted.
“This is a lucky meeting, I hope, for both of us,” said Christian, and, walking forward, he held out his hand.
Rooney hesitated only an instant. Then, with a short, barking laugh, he put up his gun and accepted Christian’s hand.
“Except for the way Pokey acted,” he said, “I think I‘d still take it for a hoax. But Pokey wasn’t on a stage when he ran out of the barn. Christian, what do you know of this deal I‘ve been talking over?”
“Only what I heard in this barn. I‘ve been busy, lately, getting Gregor out of jail. We had to look sharp. His trial commences tomorrow.”
Once more admiration of the great criminal overwhelmed Naylor. After all, what other man would have been so true to his follower? What other man, in the first place, would even have dreamed of bribery in the case of the honest sheriff in Crow’s Nest?
And now, at the first turn of the cards, it seemed that Christian was about to step into another big deal.
“Aye,” said Rooney, “I’ve read the papers about Duff Gregor. He’s the one that filled the shoes of Jim Silver for a while. Well, that was even a bigger deal than the one I’ve been talking about.”
“Why, Rooney,” said Christian, “we can’t always talk in terms of millions. We have to pick up the chicken feed when we’re pinched.”
He chuckled.
“Sit down in a circle,” he advised, “and we’ll go over the deal man to man.”
They sat down, and Christian took direction at once, saying:
“First we have to settle with you, Pudge. Do you want me to come in — with Gregor and Naylor?”
“Want you?” cried Wayler. “What else do I want as much? Want you? Why, we’ve got to have you!”
“Thanks,” said Christian. “And you, Rooney. Will you do business with me?”
Rooney smiled. “Of course I will,” said he. “The only reason I opened up with the others was because I knew they’d once been your men. This is what I call a lucky meeting.”
“Then,” said Christian, “we have to settle on your share first of all. You want a third, and that’s just twice as much as you’ll get from me.”
“Then the thing’s off,” Rooney said.
“It certainly is,” answered Christian. “I have to think about this deal, and I have to think about a hundred other deals that may be in the future. It’s a matter of business policy. If I pay you a third for information, I’ll have to pay the next man a half or two thirds.”
Rooney stared at him.
“You’re a sensible man,” Christian said. “You’re forty years old. You haven’t made as much money as you think you need. You want a bigger income. And this is your way of getting it. I’ll offer you fifty thousand if there’s over three hundred thousand in the clean-up.”
“Not enough,” growled Rooney.
“It’s three thousand dollars a year,” said Barry Christian. “Look at it in that light. It’s two hundred and fifty dollars a month. What would you do to have your salary increased by that much?”
Rooney was silent, contemplative.
“Besides,” said Christian, “you know that when you work with me you are with a man who will cover you up. I’ll take care of you. I’ll see that you’re protected. If the law hounds get on your track in any way, it won’t be a leak through me. And I’ll help you when the pinch comes.”
“I know your reputation, Christian,” said Rooney, nodding. “When you make a deal, you follow it up and give — the good will of the firm!”
He laughed briefly.
“Well?” said Christian.
“Well,” Rooney muttered, “now that you’re on the job, I suppose that it’ll go through. I’ll work with you at the cut rate, Christian. Here’s my hand on it.”
CHAPTER XV
The Townsend Ranch
ONE name and a memory beside it began to fill the world of Bill Naylor. The name was Barry Christian; the memory was Jim Silver. Naylor wanted to keep Christian in the foreground and push Silver into the distance. Christian stood for everything that Naylor had wanted to be. Silver stood for everything that he felt he could not be. That was the difference between the name and the memory.
Naylor took a very personal pleasure in the way in which Christian began to run things. He took a pleasure in the “pull” which Christian had.
When they went back into the hills to get horses, provisions, and call in new members to the gang, wherever Christian appeared, things were easy. The party journeyed to a small ranch back in the hills. When they came into sight of it, Christian took Naylor with him, left the rest to camp among some trees, and rode down to bargain for horses.
They found the owner of the ranch busily fencing in a small corral near his house. A girl with a flopping straw hat and a suit of faded blue overalls was helping at the work.
As the pair of them came up, Christian called the man Townsend and hailed the girl as Sally. They made a great fuss. They came running over, Townsend trailing a crowbar with which he had been tamping the earth in around the fence posts. They grabbed the hand of Christian and hung onto it.
“We thought the fish had you, Mr. Christian,” said the girl.
Christian smiled at her. “They’ll get me later on — for dessert, maybe,” he said. Then to Townsend: “You always had good horses in the old days. I need half a dozen of the best. Can I buy them from you?”
“Having good horses is a habit that a gent don’t wear out none too quick,” said Townsend. “Sally, go round up the hosses and run ‘em into the corral yonder. Come inside, gents, and we’ll have a drink. I got some corn liquor that’s worth while.”
Townsend was a big man with a big, red face, and and a sun-faded growth of red hair on it. The hair was pale at the tip of the beard, and shining crimson near the skin from which it sprouted. He had a hearty manner and a smile unaffected, frank, open, and bold. He looked, in spite of his ragged beard, like a boy grown bigger than his years. The wrinkles around his eyes seemed to come from too much smiling and laughter, not from time.
He took them into the house — it was a little three-room shack — and Bill Naylor admired out loud the neatness of the rooms.
“That’s Sally,” said Townsend. “She’s the sort of a girl that doesn’t have to idle around all day to cook three meals. Every lick counts when Sally puts it in. She’s that sort of a girl. When she cooks, what she turns out is worth eating. When she talks, what she says is worth hearing.”
Then he added: “Fetch up chairs. Sit around and make yourselves comfortable, partners. Christian, it’s a great sight to me — seein’ this here face of yours. I’d been thinkin’ that Jim Silver had put you down at last.”
He brought out a jug of whisky. It was almost colorless. There was only a faint taint of yellow in it, but it tasted fairly mellow.
“Sally made the whisky, too,” said Townsend. “Her uncle had a still back in the hills a few years ago, and Sall
y learned how to run it. She made this stuff twelve years ago, believe it or not. And that was when she was ten years old. She was born with a brain and a pair of hands!”
He set out a jam made of wild blackberries — Sally had made it — and some cold pone, and fresh butter that was rather white — “because there ain’t much green grass now, and Sally won’t use no artificial colorin’ stuff in the churn.” They washed down the mouthfuls with generous swigs of the moonshine.
“What’ll you do when Sally up and leaves you and marries?” asked Christian of the father.
“The man that marries her is a man that can lick me,” said Townsend, grinning, “and the gent that can lick me is the right kind of a husband for her. Come on out, boys. She’s got the hosses into the corral. Doggone me if she can’t whistle ‘em into that corral in five minutes, where it always takes me half a day to run down the ornery broncs.”
He led the way out to the corral, where a fine twisting, racing, bounding crowd of mustangs, perhaps thirty in all, were flashing through the dust of their own raising. The girl had just dismounted from a tall brown gelding to run into place the last bar of the corral gate. She came around the fence toward the house; the tall gelding followed her, hunting at the pockets of her overalls as if for sugar or apples.
Barry Christian stood right up on top of a fence post and stared down through the dust clouds and named the horses that he wanted. Townsend and Naylor went in and roped the selected animals. They were the pick of the lot. They might not be the prettiest, but they were the best. Naylor knew it, and he smiled to himself in admiration of his chief. Townsend said openly, when the five were tied outside the corral:
“I hoped you wouldn’t pick out that gray. He’s a mean-looking, ugly devil, and I hoped that you wouldn’t look at his legs and shoulders too hard. You’ve got the cream of the lot, Barry! That’s five of ‘em. Did you say that you want six?”
“I want six,” said Christian. “But I don’t need any more of that lot. How about the brown gelding?”
“He’s not for sale,” said the girl. “Doc belongs to me. He’s not for sale.”
She had hoisted herself onto the top rail of the fence and sat there with one foot swinging. She wore narrow-toed boots like any cowpuncher, except that Bill Naylor had never seen a foot so small.
“I’ll bargain with you,” said Christian. “I’ll give you two hundred and fifty. Three hundred, we’ll call it.”
“He’s not for sale,” said the girl.
“Five hundred flat,” said Christian, folding his arms as he stood magnificently on the top of the post.
Bill Naylor looked up at him with a heightened admiration. Five hundred was a frightful price even for a horse that looked as sound and as fast as the gelding. “Not for sale,” said the girl.
Her foot had stopped swinging. She sat up straight and defied her father with her eye. Naylor forgot his admiration of his chief in order to look at the girl more closely. She was no beauty. Beauties don’t have freckles, and their noses are straight. But there was something about her that fitted his idea of what a woman should be as closely as the butt of a Colt fitted the grip of his hand.
“Not for sale at five hundred?” asked Christian.
“Wait a minute,” broke in Townsend. “Don’t be such a fool, Sally. Sure, Doc is for sale at five hundred.”
“He’s not,” said the girl. “He belongs to me, and he’s not for sale.”
“He belongs to me, if I want him,” said Townsend angrily. “And he’s sold if Christian offers five hundred. You can have the cash, but I want to teach you not to be a fool about a horse. A girl that’ll be a fool about a horse will be ten times a fool about a man. I want you to keep your head in the pinches. Five hundred? It’s too much! Sure, you can have the gelding, Barry!”
“Try him, Naylor,” said Christian.
Naylor looked at the girl. The girl looked back at Naylor, and her face was a pale stone, hard set. Her eyes were glinting. She said not a word.
Naylor took the colt, lengthened the stirrups of the girl’s saddle, and swung up. The colt that had gone smooth as silk for Sally Townsend now developed plenty of kinks and pitched like a savage. But by that bucking, Naylor knew that the gelding was sound as a drum and made of steel wire and springing whalebone. He rode the colt until it was in hand and then came and dismounted.
Christian stood on the ground now, at the side of Townsend, saying:
“That’s a good one, eh, Bill?”
Naylor ran his thumb and forefinger through the sweat and gloss of the shoulder of the horse. He shook his head.
“Weak in the legs, Barry,” he answered. “Sort of horse that would let you down in a long day’s work, I guess.”
“Hey!” cried Townsend. “What is the — ”
He checked himself, for Christian was saying: “All right. We’ll get along with only five horses. That’ll be enough till we get to the next place.”
He gave a thick wad of money to Townsend who took it without counting and thrust it into his pocket. Townsend said to Naylor:
“I dunno where you learned to judge hosses, kid.”
Naylor answered sharply: “I learned in a neck of the woods where every man has a right to his own opinion.”
Townsend started a retort: “Hoss sense is better than the — ”
“Hold on, Townsend,” cautioned Christian. “I don’t want any trouble between you and Naylor. Bill Naylor is one of my best men. You know, Townsend, you can’t judge a bulldog by the shortness of his teeth!”
He laughed, and Townsend chuckled, also. Only the girl, as Naylor noted, did not smile.
While Naylor was getting the newly purchased horses together, Sally Townsend helped him, and she found a chance to say:
“Listen, Bill. Have you picked the right line?”
“What line?” he asked.
“Riding with Barry Christian,” she answered.
He looked at her in great surprise.
“What d’you mean by that?” he demanded.
“Nothing to hurt your feelings,” said the girl. “But you’re not mean enough to win out in a gang like that You have to be able to shoot around corners to live with Barry Christian’s gang.”
Nothing in his life had ever stunned him so much except one thing — the strange conduct of Jim Silver in loosing Duff Gregor. His brain was still buzzing with the speech of the girl when at last he mounted that good gray with the ugly head and took the four other new horses on the lead.
Not mean enough?
All his life he had been “mean.” Bigger and stronger boys, at school, had always avoided him because he was a “mean” fighter. When his back was to the wall, the rules had never counted with him. Now a slip of a girl told him that he was not “mean” enough to get on with the crew of Barry Christian!
Well, he had saved her horse to her, and she had understood that. Women are funny, anyway. You never can understand them.
He came out of his trance of reflection, as they rode away from the Townsend place, for Barry Christian was saying:
“I didn’t want to doubt you, back there. I wouldn’t do that — with strangers looking on. But the next time I want you to remember that nothing comes between you and your work, when you’re with me. I don’t care what women are to you when you’re not on the job. But when you ride with me, nothing exists except the business on hand.”
CHAPTER XVI
Outlaw Crew
THEY spent a week back in the hills, recruiting. By the end of that time, Christian’s men were a dozen strong, and Barry Christian himself made No. 13.
“That’s a lucky number for us,” said Christian, “because we work by the opposites of most people!”
There was not a weak member of the crew. Pudge Wayler was fat, to be sure, and he was the oldest of the lot, but there was not a man, outside of Christian, who was handier with a gun, or shot straighter once it was free from leather. Wayler and Pokey had shared in a jail break while they were servin
g a long sentence that had been imposed after they were gathered in the net by Jim Silver, up at Horseshoe Flat.
But every one of the others had done time, and plenty of it. Every one of them had worked with Christian in the past, and was prepared now to follow the great outlaw blindly. A harder lot, Bill Naylor had never seen. It was not easy for him to be afraid of other men, but of some of these fellows he was frankly in terror. If it came to a show-down, he knew that he would never take water; but there were fellows, like Pokey, who had no more humanity in them than a rattlesnake. They all accepted him and fraternized with him, because it was known that he had saved the life of the chief.
During the week, the chief event was the arrival of a big chestnut stallion which was assigned at once to Duff Gregor. Gregor was an excellent rider, but every one knew that the reason the horse was assigned to him was because, on an animal like this, he had played the rôle of Jim Silver in the town of Crow’s Nest in that deal which had nearly put a million into the pockets of the outlaws. The fame of that deal was still ringing through the minds of men.
The horse was carefully dyed with an equipment of four black stockings, and his other marks were altered so as to conform to the celebrated pattern that appeared in Parade. Then Duff Gregor was made up to resemble Jim Silver. Two gray spots were made to appear in his hair above the temples, and a dozen little glinting scars were caused to glimmer on his face.
Naylor argued the point with his chief.
“Barry,” he said, “I’ve seen Parade, and I’ve seen Jim Silver. Nobody that’s ever looked the pair of ‘em in the face would ever think that this couple did more than wear the wrong names.”
Christian answered: “That’s because you know there’s a fraud. But people only see what they expect to see. Mind that! Besides, in the business we’re following, no one ever wins without taking a mighty big chancel”
Naylor wrote down those words in his own memory. That same day he had something new to think about.
They had drifted down through the hills until they were fairly close to the town of Elsinore. The robbery was to take place the next day.