Silvertip's Trap

by Brand, Max

  “Seemed to me a risky thing, chief,” said Naylor, holding his injured head. “I didn’t see how even you could shoot at that pair without chancing hitting the kid.”

  “And suppose I had?” demanded Christian. “Suppose that I had hit the boy? What of it?”

  Naylor said nothing. He had a perfectly definite impression that if he had uttered a word, no matter what, he would be murdered on the spot.

  Christian said to him softly: “I’ve owed you several things. They’re wiped out. We start level again, Naylor, unless you did get the word to Jim Silver last night.”

  He meant it. There was no doubt about that. If ever Christian had even a fair suspicion that Naylor had carried that warning to Jim Silver, there would be death, there would be a death more hideous than fire for the traitor.

  Christian had turned from Naylor to the others, and he was saying:

  “Boys, this is a bit of hard luck. But the game isn’t finished. It’s several miles from here to Elsinore. Ordinarily it would require a good bit of time, in a town like that, to get together a posse to come out after a crowd like ours. But these are not ordinary times. You can see, now, why I wanted to get rid of Jim Silver last night.

  “He’s back there in Elsinore, unless some kind devil moved him to leave the place to-day. He’s there in Elsinore, and the instant the news is brought in by that lad riding horseback, Jim Silver will know what’s up. He’ll have a crowd together inside of three minutes, and be pelting out here to get at us. There’s only one thing in our favor, and that is that the train is due in ten minutes. If everything works smoothly, we’ll be able to put the deal through before any interference comes this way from Elsinore and Jim Silver. Get back to your places and wait!”

  They went back solemnly.

  Pokey paused beside Naylor and looked him curiously in the eye.

  “How’d you like it?” asked Pokey, and then, grinning, he sauntered on his way.

  The whole band would turn against Naylor now. He had been too high in the favor of the chief before. He was too low in that favor now.

  He sat down, muttering savagely to himself. He had been right, he knew, in disturbing the aim of the chief. He was glad that he had done it. Other people would be glad to know that he had been man enough to interfere even with terrible Barry Christian for such a purpose as that. Sally Townsend would be glad. Jim Silver would be glad, too.

  As for the personal indignity, he hardly felt it, for he would never have dreamed of comparing himself with the bright glory of Barry Christian. But it seemed to Bill Naylor, as the minutes passed, that he was being carried on wings far away, and far away from the whole purpose of his old life, in which Christian had been a hero.

  Some one was calling in a rather hushed voice: “The train’s already ten minutes overdue, chief. If we wanta have space between us and Jim Silver, hadn’t we better start making tracks now?”

  Barry Christian stood up. He said:

  “Boys, every one of you can do as he pleases. I don’t want any one of you to stay here with me unless he wants to — except Bill Naylor. The rest of you are perfectly free to run and save your scalps. If I’m left alone, I’m going ahead with this job, anyway, and if Jim Silver comes up in the middle of it, we’ll simply try to show him that bullets can cut through his flesh as easily as they cut through ours!”

  It was a good talk, delivered with the right sort of a ring in the last words. It was greeted with a faint cheer, and Naylor knew that not a man of the lot would actually withdraw. That was what proper leadership meant. He wondered what this same Barry Christian could accomplish if he had behind him an army of honest men, and himself could fight with an honest purpose?

  There was something else for Naylor to think of, and that was the entire attitude of Barry Christian toward him. He was now suspect, which meant that to-morrow he might be dead.

  He was still in the midst of these broodings when some one called:

  “I hear it! I hear it comin out of the ground!”

  There was something ghostly in that announcement — all the bright heat of the sun could not remove the suggestion of a spirit transpiring from the solid earth. But then, with his own ears, Naylor heard the faint and distant humming of the heavy iron wheels on the rails.

  “All right, boys,” Christian said. “The thing is going through like a song. Remember, I’m going to crack that safe if I have to do it with my hands and my teeth. There’s several hundred thousand dollars waiting for us. Everybody steady. Everybody cool. Think of the scare we’ll be throwing into the poor devils in that train — and don’t shoot at a man until you see him flash a gun! A few rounds in the air as we close in, that’s all!”

  Bill Naylor repeated his own part to himself. He was to get close to the cab of the locomotive as soon as possible and cover the engineer and fireman. Cassidy, on the other side of the track, would be busy with the same task. They were the foremost of the gang stationed to get at the head of the train. Though it seemed to Naylor, as he looked down the rails, that sanded tracks and heavy brakes would surely bring the train to a halt much more quickly than had been anticipated after the engine rounded the curve of the valley.

  In that case, might not the engineer be able to throw the gears into reverse and back the huge weight of the train away from the danger spot? Once under way, it would be an easy matter for the armed men in the train to keep off three times as many horsemen as Christian could offer for the battle.

  These were the doubts that rose in the mind of Naylor as the sound of humming increased along the rails and then the distinct noise of the engine was heard. But he had prefigured a sort of heavy thundering of steam exhaust and laboring metal, such as a big train makes when it pulls up under the hollow of a vault of a station house, and he was amazed and taken by surprise when the engine suddenly poked its nose around the bend and came grandly on.

  It looked as tall as a tree, and from its stubby smokestack a column of smoke shot swiftly back, expanding, spreading out in a flowing cloud like a half-divided head of hair. Then the engineer seemed to see the obstacle that crossed the tracks. There was a wild hooting of the whistle, and the brakes screamed, and the wheels skidded with a terrible vibration on the tracks.

  CHAPTER XXII

  The Train Robbery

  BILL NAYLOR looked right and left toward the hooded figures. They were not simply equipped with face masks. Barry Christian always insisted that his men wear hoods that completely covered the head. Otherwise telltale features such as hair and ears could usually be glimpsed and serve as bases of identification in case of arrest. Naylor himself was wearing such a mask. He wished now that he had made the eye holes even smaller. It was better to endanger his own accuracy of vision a little rather than to expose too much of his face.

  In the meantime, the train rumbled nearer. It came to a shuddering halt with the engine exactly in front of Naylor, and he sprang suddenly to his feet with a yell and fired a rifle bullet into the sky. That was the arranged signal. He felt, as he saw the train halt right in front of him, that the robbery could not fail to go through perfectly. The skill with which Barry Christian had estimated the distance the engine must cover before the brakes brought it to a halt offered an assurance that all the rest of the scheme would go through smoothly.

  All down the line of the train, in answer to his signal shot, he heard an outbreak of shooting and yelling. Frightened faces looked out the windows of the coaches. But just before him he had his main concern. There was a gray-headed, red-faced hulk of an engineer in the cab of the locomotive. He had leaned from view and reappeared again with a big revolver in his hand. Bill Naylor, his bead already drawn, merely snipped the cap off the engineer’s head.

  “Drop that gun, you fool, or I’ll brain you with the next shot!” he shouted.

  The engineer, his hair tousled and on end, looked woefully down at the big Colt which was in his hand. At last he threw it out on the ground with a curse. Across the cab, Naylor could see the fireman with
his arms stiffly extended above his head. That meant that Cassidy was doing his share of the work.

  In the distance he heard a voice shouting: “Open the door or we’ll blow the car off the track, and you with it!”

  That would be the mail coach which the robbers were threatening. But his own task was merely to see that the engineer was made helpless, together with the fireman, and that the fire box of the engine was thoroughly flooded. He told Cassidy to take the fireman down on his side of the engine. Then, climbing into the cab, he put his rifle aside and laid the muzzle of a revolver against the chest of the old engineer. He sat in the cab with his head fallen, his greasy hands weak, idle, palms up in his lap.

  At Naylor’s command to flood the fire box, he returned with a vacant stare:

  “I dropped my gun like a dirty yellow coward — but I’ll not lift a finger to kill this engine.”

  Naylor felt a sudden touch of pity.

  “You’re not disgraced,” he said. “You got no chance. That’s all. Buck up and do what I tell you!”

  But there was no use arguing. The engineer seemed actually to prefer shooting to obeying orders from robbers. Cassidy had to get the fireman to do the job, and as the flood of cold water hit the raging furnace of the firebox, it exploded into steam that rushed out in enormous clouds with whistlings and rumblings. The cloud enveloped the whole locomotive and the head of the train, while voices of alarm yelled to cut down the fog.

  In the meantime, Cassidy and Naylor tied the engineer and fireman back to back and elbow to elbow, which is about the best way of quickly making two men harmless, because every struggle of the one is sure to hurt the other.

  There was plenty of action for Naylor to see as he walked back down the length of the train.

  The passengers were making enough noise to furnish out a whole battle scene, but what mattered was the attack on the mail coach. The guards had failed to open the doors, and as Naylor left the engine and started back, a petard which Christian had affixed to the door of the mail coach exploded and smashed the lock. The door itself was instantly opened, and from within two repeating rifles opened a rapid fire.

  The very first shot caught Dick Penny, of the Christian gang, full in the chest. He spread out his arms and walked with short steps across the tracks as though he were a performer on a tight rope striving to get his balance. He sat down against the fence and pulled off his hood in order to get more air. His whole chest was covered with red that began to leap down into his lap.

  Naylor, taking shelter close to the side of the train, saw that picture. Then he was aware of a figure climbing apelike up the end of the mail coach and running along the top of it.

  That was Barry Christian. No hood could conceal the dimensions of his big shoulders. And what other man, unless it were Jim Silver, could combine such massive weight and strength with such catlike agility?

  When he was just over the open door, Christian got a toe hold on a ventilator in the roof and drooped his body over the edge of the car. In that way his head and shoulders swung down suddenly over the open door.

  It was a maneuver so daring that it seemed suicidal, but in each of Christian’s hands there was a revolver. He fired three or four times as fast as he could. Then he pulled himself back to the roof of the car.

  The rifle fire inside the car had stopped.

  “Go get ‘em boys! They’re done for!” shouted Christian.

  The last of his words were blurred by a horrible screaming that began inside the mail coach. It made Naylor want to close his eyes and stop his ears, like a child or a foolish woman. He had never heard in his life a sound that was quite so frightful.

  Big Duff Gregor, now that the rifle fire was silenced, was the first into the mail coach, with two others behind him. They pulled out two badly wounded men. They were carried over to the fence beside the railroad where Dick Penny was already sitting, and a yell from Christian told Naylor to guard them. It struck Naylor like a bullet — to hear his own name shouted out like that in the hearing of so many witnesses. Why should he be identified out of the entire crowd?

  However, he had his hands full of work.

  One of the guards had been shot through the body. He looked greenish white, he was so sick from his wound. He never made a sound of pain, but he kept saying in a weak voice:

  “Quit the yelling, Charlie! Quit the noise!”

  Charlie was not fatally hurt, in spite of his screeching. He had a clean bullet wound in his left leg, but what tortured him was the smashing of his right hand. A slug of lead from Christian’s gun had drilled right through the center of the hand, tearing to pieces all the delicate nerves of the palm. He kept holding the hand by the wrist. He would be silent for a few seconds, bending his body forward and back like a pendulum, and then the scream of agony would jerk his head back and distort his mouth.

  Every time he yelled, Naylor felt the sound go through him like a sword — a red, flaming sword that filled his brain with smoke.

  He fell to work as fast as he could to bandage up the-wounds. Cassidy was there, too, not being definitely assigned to any other task. He took charge of Dick Penny. Out of the corner of his eye, Naylor was aware that the passengers were filing out of the train and lining up in a long, straight row beside the coaches.

  It was a long train, and it was crowded. Three women had fainted. They were carried out by other passengers and laid in the shadow beside the train. Up forward, the steam was still gushing with a fainter hissing from the flooded fire box, and now and then wisp of the thin mist were blown back across the passengers. Duff Gregor was starting down the line of them, searching them thoroughly, and dropping everything he got — jewelry, watches, wallets — into a canvas sack.

  In the meantime, of course, Barry Christian and his chosen assistants were working on the blowing of the safe in the mail coach. They must be working with set teeth and hasty fingers, struggling against time, and in their minds, constantly, the image of Jim Silver rushing across the hills on Parade, with his followers streaming out behind him.

  But all of these things were in the background of Naylor’s mind. What immediately focused his attention was the screeching of the man named Charlie, and the doings of the other two wounded men. The guard who had been shot through the body was so sick and weak that he had slumped down on his back. He shook his head when Naylor offered him a drink of whisky from a flask.

  “Just stop Charlie from screaming, will you?” he pleaded.

  “I’m tryin’ to stop, Mike,” gasped Charlie. “But I can’t! I’m tryin’ to — ”

  And again the horrible outcry tore his throat.

  Over on the left, Cassidy stopped trying to work for the comfort of Dick Penny. He wanted to make Penny lie down, but Dick refused. He was only nineteen, a stringy, blond-headed, cheerful youth with a string of killings chalked up to his credit.

  “I’ll take mine sitting up,” he said. “If you don’t stop that blankety fool from yelling, I’ll shoot the other hand off him. Gimme a drink, Bill.”

  Naylor handed him the flask. Penny could not manage it with one shaking hand, but he succeeded by using two in getting the bottle to his lips. He took a long swig.

  “I wish I could get the whisky into me as fast as the blood is running out,” said Dick Penny. “That’d be a fair exchange. Here’s to you, Bill!”

  He drank again. He began to laugh, but the pain which the laughter caused to him cut it short.

  Then he said — and Naylor never forgot it — “How dark it is, and not a star!”

  Cassidy had the soul of a rattlesnake, but this speech had moved him.

  “You’re goin’ to be all right, kid,” he said.

  “Shut up, you fool,” answered Dick Penny. “I know what kind of a darkness this is. I know what kind of a night it is that’s shutting in on me. I ain’t going to wake up from this sleep. Gimme another flask, somebody. There ain’t anything in this bottle.”

  There was no other flask at hand. Naylor said to Charlie:r />
  “Can you shut up for a minute? My partner here is passing out.”

  Charlie bit a scream in two and swallowed the inside half of it. The other wounded guard turned his head toward Dick Penny and watched with eyes that were suddenly bright.

  Penny said, “Help me stand up, boys.”

  “Sit still, Dick. You ain’t fit to stand up.”

  Penny cursed him with a burst of language, saying: “I ain’t goin’ to sit down. I’m goin’ to stand up to it.”

  Naylor understood what was in his mind, and, grabbing him under the armpits, lifted him to his feet. He supported him. Penny’s head flopped over to the side, and his sombrero fell off.

  “Put my hat back on my head,” said Penny.

  Cassidy lifted the hat, actually dusted it, and then settled it carefully on the head of Penny. The blood was running rapidly down to the feet of Penny. He was a crimson figure.

  “All right, Bill. Let go of me,” directed Penny.

  “Are you sure, Dick?” asked Naylor.

  “Shut up, and do what I tell you to do, will you?” commanded Penny.

  Naylor gingerly released his grasp. He expected Dick Penny to fall flat, but instead, Penny supported himself on sagging knees. He turned, staggering, toward the others.

  “Look!” he said.

  “I’m watching,” said Naylor.

  “You tell the others,” said Dick Penny in a voice suddenly clear and loud, “that I took it standing. I didn’t lie down to it, and I didn’t sit down to it. I took it — standing!”

  His voice held out right to the end of his words. Then he crumpled up.

  Naylor grabbed for him, but the loose weight slid through his hands to the ground. He looked down and saw the half-open eyes of Penny, and a small, sneering smile on his lips.

  He knew very well before he fumbled at the heart of Dick that he was dead.

  Then he heard Mike, the guard, saying: “That was pretty good. That’s the best I ever seen. That’s nerve, is what it is.”