by Brand, Max
Bill Naylor said: “I don’t want to make a fool of myself. I’ll tell you the first time we’re alone, chief. I’ll tell you where I was.”
Barry Christian looked right through him.
“You might as well speak out now. You know that I went in with Pudge and Pokey last night, to wait for Jim Silver in his room. We found the room, all right. We waited there all night. But Jim Silver never showed up! It looked as though somebody had warned him that there might be trouble in that room last night. Well, no one could have warned him from this camp. Everybody was accounted for — except you! And you got in about two o’clock. Where were you?”
“Yeah,” said Pokey, under his breath, “where were you?”
“You mean,” said Naylor, repeating the idea as though in loathing of it, “you mean that I might have sneaked in ahead and warned Jim Silver, might ‘a’ told him that you were going to wait for him in his room?”
“That’s what I mean. You’re not a fool, Bill,” said Christian. “That’s what I mean, all right. Now tell me where you were!”
“Why,” said Naylor, “did Silver jump you and try to bag you? You mean to say that the three of you got through a trap that Silver set for you, and none of you hurt?”
“He means,” explained Pudge Wayler, speaking to himself, “that if Silver had had word, he wouldn’t ‘a’ let it go with just staying away from the room. He would ‘a’ tried to bag us. I dunno. I didn’t think of that.”
Christian suddenly stood up and dashed his coffee cup to the ground. His voice, usually so persuasive and soft, rang thundering against the frightened ears of the guilty man.
“Answer me! Where were you, Naylor?”
“Chief,” said Naylor, “I was only over seeing a girl. That was all.”
“A girl? A girl?” exclaimed Barry Christian. “What girl? I was afraid — and now I’m practically sure! Naylor, if you’ve come between me and Jim Silver, no matter what you’ve done for me, no matter if you’re more than a brother to me, I’ll have the best blood out of your heart — and I’ll have it now! What girl are you talking about?”
“Why, Barry,” said Naylor, “I mean the Townsend girl. That’s all I mean. I went over to talk to her last night. I thought that it might be the last chance.”
“Maybe it is — maybe it was!” said Christian savagely.
He stared at Naylor, and his eyes were more like the eyes of Taxi than ever — balls of pale fire. His whole face grew pale. It seemed to Naylor as luminous as steel.
“Pokey — Cassidy — take the guns off Naylor, and cart him over to the Townsend place. Get the facts out of the Townsend girl. If you think that Naylor has lied — shoot him dead, and come back here. Lay him dead right across the threshold of the Townsend ranch house. It’ll teach some of these ranchers what it means to double-cross Barry Christian.”
That was the way they went about it.
Yonder in the town of Elsinore was Jim Silver, who had kept faith and declined to bag scoundrels who were lying in wait for him in the darkness of his own room. Jim Silver had kept faith perfectly. But here with Barry Christian it was a different matter.
Then another thought occured to Bill Naylor. He told himself that no man could lead as Christian led unless he had a soul as hard as chilled steel. No man could go on to so many triumphs unless he had the cruelly stern nature of Christian. If one man failed Christian and the gang, that man had to go to the wall were he Christian’s own brother!
Naylor was frightened, but he could not say that even in this moment of supreme trial he really hated Christian. He was too big and important for such emotions. It would be like hating a tiger to hate Christian. It was as easy to expect mercy and tenderness from a wild beast.
Naylor saw this, at last. He thought of the way he had pulled the man from the water of Kendal River. He thought of the way he had nursed him, of the dangerous expedition he had made to the town of Blue Water for the sake of Barry Christian, of the manner in which, for the sake of Christian, he had saved Duff Gregor from the men of Crow’s Nest. But all of these services would be forgotten if, for an instant, he had come between Christian and the hatred which the great outlaw felt for Jim Silver.
Well, the thing was almost justified. The hate of Christian for Silver had made history in the past and it would make history in the future.
He pondered these things as he was “fanned” for his guns. Then he was taken between Cassidy and Pokey to the Townsend ranch.
Cassidy said, when the gray mustang was saddled: “If he rode all the way to Elsinore, last night, he wasn’t on this mustang. There ain’t enough sweat marks on it. Besides, it’s still full of ginger!”
That was true, also, for the inexhaustible meanness of the gray mustang induced it to try to pitch off its rider as soon as Naylor got into the saddle. He blessed the fierce nature of the gray at that moment!
They got to the ranch to find that Bill Townsend and his daughter were busily stringing wire on the fence posts of the new corral. Townsend worked the lever which stretched the wire while his daughter in a workmanlike manner whacked home the big brads that fastened the wire to the posts. They stopped work to watch the approach of the trio.
It was Cassidy who spoke first. He touched his hat to the girl and said:
“Hello, Townsend. Come over here from the chief. He wants to know if this gent here, this fellow Naylor, was really over here chinning with your girl, last night from around eleven to one?”
“Him?” said Townsend. “He sure wasn’t. If he was, I’d knock his block off. A runt like that make eyes at Sally? I’d tear him in two!”
The girl said nothing.
“You hear that?” said Cassidy grimly, to Naylor.
There was no mistaking Cassidy. He was the type to put cold lead in any man, with or without orders. Yes, and to enjoy the doing of it, too!
“I hear,” said Naylor. “There’s a lot that Townsend doesn’t know, maybe. That’s all I can say.”
“Is that all?” said Pokey savagely.
“Wait a minute,” urged Cassidy.
He turned to the girl.
“What about this yarn of Naylor coming over here to talk to you for a couple of hours last night?”
“What business is it of yours?” asked the girl angrily.
Naylor, with a vast relief of spirit, saw that she intended to be as good as her word, and lie in his behalf.
“I gotta make it my business,” said Cassidy. “Let’s have an answer — if you care enough to get up and talk to this gent for two hours by night, you can say two words for him by day.”
“Well, he was here, and what of it?” said the girl.
Pokey grunted as though it were bad news to him. Cassidy turned his deformed face and stared at Naylor.
“All right, old son,” he said. “I guess that lets you out.”
“Wait a minute!” shouted Townsend. “Lets him out? It don’t let him out at all. You mean to say, Naylor, you worthless hound, that you were over here last night talking to my girl? Sally, is that right?”
She said nothing. Townsend charged like a bull, but Naylor spun the gray mustang about and fairly fled from the danger. At that, the big hand of Townsend clutched for him and barely missed his coat sleeve.
In the near distance, Naylor pulled up again, and saw Townsend gesticulating behind him.
But the two of the escort were laughing as they came up.
“That saves your hide, Naylor,” said Pokey, as he ranged his horse alongside. “You wouldn’t blame Christian for being heated up if he thought that you had crossed him with Silver, would you?”
They got back to the camp, and Christian heard the report. He nodded. There was no apology for the suspicion he had fixed upon Naylor. He simply said:
“Then if Naylor didn’t carry word, somebody else did. Watch yourselves, boys, because we have a traitor with us. And when we catch him, he’ll wish that he’d got to hell in any way except through our hands. However, this is a busy day, and
the crook will have to wait for to-morrow.”
That was the point at which Bill Naylor made up his mind that he was through with Barry Christian and all his men.
CHAPTER XX
A Stroke of Bad Luck
THE plan for the train robbery was perfectly simple. Down the valley, several miles below Elsinore, the railroad track made a quick bend, and at a point where the engineer of the speeding train would not see the obstruction until the last available moment, Christian had several trees felled right across the rails. There would be just comfortable time, as he figured it, for the engineer to clap on the brakes and bring the train to a halt after the locomotive rounded the bend into view of the obstacle.
The place was ideally equipped in every way. For on either side of the way there was plenty of tall brush where a thousand men could have hidden, and there were several clumps of trees, in two of which the horses were tied.
Christian had drilled his men carefully in the details of the work. Certain ones were to master the engineer and fireman, force them to flood the firebox — so that the train could not proceed on its way for help too quickly after the robbery had come to an end.
Others — and this was the most important detail, of course — were to make the attack on the mail car, where the safe was located that should contain the big shipment of cash. And four men were detailed to take charge of the passengers and keep them in the coaches until the fighting was finished. Afterward, the passengers could be paraded outside the cars and searched for valuables.
The plan was simple, but of course there was plenty of danger attached to it. For one thing, the guards in the treasure car were likely to put up a savage fight that might delay the procedure for hours, even. And then in the body of the passenger coaches there might be a number of armed men ready to battle for their rights. Every Westerner in the train was reasonably sure to have a weapon, and to be able to use it. The force of surprise would be half the battle to decide the issue in favor of the gang.
Every man was in his place at least an hour before the time the train was due. That hour was the most trying of all. For as Bill Naylor crouched in the shade of a bush, shifting here and there as patches of the yellow sunshine began to burn through the thickness of his coat like boiling liquid, he thought of a number of things that could happen. There was the danger, for instance, that the warning might have been given, and that when the train arrived, it would consist of coaches filled with keen riflemen who would pour out, sweep through the brush, and gather in every last man of the robbers. That had happened before in the history of the breaking of law in the West. It was not a pleasant prospect.
There were other troubles to have in mind. And a good big 45-caliber slug would put a man on the ground in such shape that Christian, no matter how solicitous for the welfare of his men, could not take the wounded away with him.
Well, if a fellow were snagged in that manner, it might mean anything from fifteen years to hanging, according as to whether or not any one on the train were killed.
But something more than his own personal danger began to trouble the brain of Bill Naylor. The girl had wished one Jim Silver for him to follow rather than a thousand like Barry Christian. And though it was true that her father kept moonshine liquor and sold horses to robbers, something told Naylor that the girl was a different cut from her father. She had to submit to life as she found it; but when she started off for herself, there was something straight and clean about her eyes that told Naylor she would fight with all her might on the side of honesty and the law.
He looked gloomily around him. Of course, it was far too late to withdraw, not only because withdrawal would brand him as a coward, but also because it was known that Chirstian never allowed a man to leave the ranks when trouble was on hand. Once a follower of Barry Christian, always a follower. That was the law of the band. And it seemed to Naylor that he was thinking of another man in another era when he remembered the awe and delight with which he had at first looked forward to being one of Christian’s trusted men.
Off to the side, Pokey and Cassidy were shaking dice, not for money they had in pocket, but for money they expected to have before this day was ended.
Duff Gregor came strolling by slowly. Duff always moved slowly, as though he wanted people to mark him with care. Most of the men in the gang had little use for him, but every one treated him with a certain amount of respectful consideration because of the fact that he had once played the rôle of the great Jim Silver, and because he was made up to play the same rôle again. Just what advantage could be gained from that part now it was hard to say. But Christian undoubtedly had something important in mind. He was not the fellow to waste moves.
Bill Naylor had had a chance to talk to a number of the men and find out from them their exact feelings about Silver. It seemed that they all regarded him with a queer mixture of terror and loathing and wonder. The terror and wonder were explicable, and the loathing came, it appeared, from their feeling that it was unnatural for a man to fight on the side of the law unless the law had given him a place, a title, and a respectable salary. Amateur bloodhounds were considered savage freaks of nature.
“Suppose,” men said, “that everybody took the same angle that Jim Silver does, what sort of a chance would the rest of us have, eh?”
There was enough in this remark to make Bill Naylor want to smile a little. But he realized, also, that as little as a month before he would not have smiled at all!
Naylor was in the midst of these reflections when the first stroke of bad luck hit the men of Christian and their plans. On the top of the hills to the right of the track appeared the figure of a boy on horseback, without a saddle, heading his mustang after a long-legged steer that had, apparently, broken loose from the bunch the boy was riding herd on. The youngster was on the very verge of cutting off the steer in its flight and sending it back when the foolish animal made a sudden turn and bolted right down the steep slope toward the railroad.
The slope was so sharp that the steer, once well under way, had to brace itself on all four legs. It bellowed with fear and catapulted to the bottom of the grade. There it rolled head over heels, but Western steers are made of whalebone and leather, and therefore the neck of this beef was not broken. It recovered its feet, shook its head to clear its addled brains, and bolted again into the brush which sheltered half of the gang of Barry Christian.
That would hardly have mattered, but the second half of the little drama was what mattered. For the boy, after angling for one moment on the verge of the slope, suddenly whipped his mustang right down in pursuit of the steer. Considering the shortness of the brown, bare legs that gripped the barrel of the horse, and the absence of any stirrups, it was as bold a bit of horsemanship as Bill Naylor had ever seen. He saw the boy’s face puckered and his eyes staring with fear, but down he came, with a ringing whoop to raise his own spirits.
In the meantime the steer, as the boy and the mustang safely caromed to the foot of the slope, had flung up its tail and fled, bawling. It seemed so blinded by fear that it had not sufficient sense to dodge the brush, but went crashing straight through a big bush behind which Pokey and Cassidy were playing their game of dice. Pokey leaped up to one side, with a yell. Cassidy, knocked sprawling, rose up on the other. Two or three other men sprang up from the brush as the course of the steer suddenly threatened them.
That was sufficient to turn the steer; but it was also sufficient to tell the boy that a whole band of armed men was hiding out in the shrubbery. That was enough for him. He turned the head of his pony away from the steer and fled on a straight line for the nearest trees — and toward Elsinore, far away!
Every one realized the importance of the episode. No youngster able to ride like that and take such chances could fail to realize that those armed men had not gathered together merely to sit in the shade and waste their time. He would probably go right on to Elsinore as fast as his swift little mustang could carry him.
“Stop him!” shouted the
great voice of Christian as he rose. “Shoot the horse from under him!”
Shoot the horse from under him? Who in the world could determine his shooting so exactly as to be sure of striking the horse, and not the boy, as the pair scuttled away behind their own dust cloud?
Apparently Christian was ready to trust his own hand and eye.
“Give me that rifle,“ he said. “I’ll do the job myself! Here!”
And there he stood, settling the rifle to his shoulder.
It seemed to Bill Naylor that he could see again the puckered face of the boy, frightened, fighting against fear and conquering it. He leaped up and knocked the rifle of Chirstian off the bead that had just been drawn.
“Don’t chance it chief!” he exclaimed.
Christian whirled on him with the face of an ugly devil. He drove the butt of the gun against Naylor’s head hard enough to fling him flat on his back. As he lay there, gradually pushing himself on his elbows, he heard the hammer of the rifle fall with a dull click. The gun had misfired, and far away the boy had passed behind the screen of a grove of trees.
CHAPTER XXI
Suspect
SOME one shouted that they must run the boy down. Christian hurried off to the side with another rifle, hoping to get another shot at the target, but the youngster did not appear again except for an instant as he rounded the shoulder of a hill half a mile away and was quickly out of view again.
Five men were on fast horses, only waiting the signal before they spurred away, but Christian said to them calmly:
“No use, boys. That boy weighs only a feather, and by the way the legs of that mustang twinkled, it’s a little speedster. We’ve simply had a break of bad luck.”
He turned toward Bill Naylor, who was gradually picking himself up from the ground.
“At least,” said Christian, “bad luck is what we can call it for the time being.”
His voice was perfectly quiet. His eyes were still and calm, also. But it was the brightness of a steel point that was glittering deep in them. There was not the least alteration of feature in the man, and yet Naylor knew that he was ready to drink hot blood.