the Seventh Man (1921)

by Max Brand

  "I heard Satan whinney. But what does that mean? How does that make you go?"

  "Somewhere," he murmured, "something's happening. I felt it on the wind when I was comin' up the pass."

  "If you--oh, Dan, you're breaking my heart!"

  "Stand out of the door."

  "Wait till the morning."

  "Don't you see I can't wait?"

  "One hour, ten minutes. Buck--Lee Haines--"

  She could not finish, but Buck Daniels stepped closer, trying to make a smile grow on his ashen face.

  "Another minute, Dan, and I'll tell a man you've forgotten me."

  Barry pivoted suddenly as though uneasy at finding something behind him, and Daniels winced.

  "Hello, Buck. Didn't see you was here. Lee Haines? Lee, this is fine."

  He passed from one to the other and his handshake was only the elusive passage of his fingers through their palms. Haines shrugged his shoulders to get rid of a weight that clung to him; a touch of color came back to his face.

  "Look here, Dan. If you're afraid that gang may trail you here and start raising the devil--how many are there?"

  "Five."

  "I'm as good with a gun as I ever was in the old days. So is Buck. Partner, let's make the show down together. Stick here with Kate and Joan and Buck and I will help you hold the fort. Don't look at me like that. I mean it.

  Do you think I've forgotten what you did for me that night in Elkhead? Not in a thousand years. Dan, I'd rather make my last play here than any other place in the world. Let 'em come! We'll salt them down and plant them where they won't grow."

  As he talked the pallor quite left him, and the fighting fire blazed in his eyes, he stood lion-like, his feet spread apart as if to meet a shock, his tawny head thrown back, and there was about him a hair-trigger sensitiveness, in spite of his bulk, a nervousness of hand and coldness of glance which characterizes the gun-fighter. Buck Daniels stepped closer, without a word, but one felt that he also had walked into the alliance. As Barry watched them the yellow which swirled in his eyes flickered away for a moment.

  "Why, gents," he murmured, "they ain't any call for trouble. The posse?

  What's that got to do with me? Our accounts are all squared up."

  The two stared dumbly.

  "They killed Grey Molly; I killed one of them."

  "A horse--for a man?" repeated Lee Haines, breathing hard.

  "A life for a life,'"said Dan simply. "They got no call for complainin'."

  Glances of wonder, glances of meaning, flashed back and forth from Haines to Buck.

  "Well, then," said the latter, and he took in Kate with a caution from the corner of his eye, "if that's the case, let's sit down and chin for a minute."

  Dan stood with his head bowed a little, frowning; two forces pulled him, and Kate leaned against the wall off in the shadow with her eyes closed, waiting, waiting, waiting through the crisis.

  "I'd like to stay and chin with you, Buck--but, I got to be off. Out there--in the night--something may happen before mornin'." Black Bart licked the hand of the master and whined. "Easy, boy. We're startin'."

  "But the night's just beginnin'," said Buck Daniels genially. "You got a world of time before you, and with Satan to fall back on you don't have to count your minutes. Pull up a chair beside me, Dan, and--"

  The latter shook his head, decided. "Buck, I can't do it. Just to sit here"--he looked about him--"makes me feel sort of choked. Them walls are as close--as a coffin."

  He was already turning; Kate straightened in the shadow, desperate.

  "As a matter of fact, Dan," said Lee Haines, suddenly, "we need your help badly."

  "Help?"

  The heart of Kate stood in her eyes as she looked at Lee Haines.

  "Sit down a minute, Dan, and I'll tell you about it."

  Barry slipped into a chair which he had pulled to one side--so that the back of it was towards the wall, and every one in the room was before him.

  Chapter XIV. Suspense.

  The help which Lee Haines wanted, it turned out, was guidance across a difficult stretch of country which he and Buck Daniels wanted to prospect, and while he talked Barry listened uneasily. It was constitutionally impossible for him to say no when a favor was asked of him, and Haines counted heavily on that characteristic; in the meantime Black Bart lay on the hearth with his wistful eyes turned steadily up to the master; and Buck Daniels went to Kate on the farther side of the room. She sat quivering, alternately crushing and soothing Joan with the strength of her caresses.

  Buck drew a chair close, with his back half towards the fire.

  "Turn around a little, Kate," he cautioned. "Don't let Dan see your face."

  She obeyed him automatically.

  "Is there a hope, Buck? What have I done to deserve this? I don't want to live; I want to die! I want to die!"

  "Steady, steady!" he cut in, and his face was working. "If you keep on like this you'll bust down in a minute or two. And you know what tears do to Dan; he'll be out of this house like a scairt coyote. Brace up!"

  She struggled and won a partial control.

  "I'm fighting hard, Buck."

  "Fight harder still. You ought to know him better than I do. When he's like this it drives him wild to have other folks thinkin' about him."

  He looked over to Dan. In spite of the bowed head of the latter as he listened to Haines yarning he gave an impression of electric awareness to all that was around him.

  "Talk soft," whispered Buck. "Maybe he knows we're talkin' about him."

  He raised his voice out of the whisper, breaking in on a sentence about Joan, as if this were the tenor of their talk. Then he lowered his tone again.

  "Think quick. Talk soft. Do you want Dan kept here?"

  "For God's sake, yes."

  "Suppose the posse gets him here?"

  "We musn't dodge the law."

  They were gauging their voices with the closest precision. Talking like this so close to Barry was like dancing among flasks of nitroglycerine.

  Once, and once only, Lee Haines cast a desperate eye across to them, begging them to come to his rescue, then he went back to his talk with Dan, raising his voice to shelter the conference of the other two.

  "If they come, he'll fight."

  "No, he isn't at the fighting pitch yet, I know!"

  "If you're wrong they'll be dead men here."

  "He sees no difference between the death of a horse and the death of a man.

  He feels that the law has no score against him. He'll go quietly."

  "And we'll find ways of fightin' the law?"

  "Yes, but it needs money."

  "I've got a stake."

  "God bless you, Buck."

  "Take my advice."

  "What?"

  "Let him go now."

  She glanced at him wildly.

  "Kate, he's gone already."

  "No, no, no!"

  "I say he's gone. Look at his eyes."

  "I don't dare."

  "The yaller is comin' up in 'em. He's wild again." She shook her head in mute agony. Buck Daniels groaned, softly.

  "Then they's goin' to be a small-sized hell started around this cabin before mornin'."

  He got up and went slowly back towards the fire. Lee Haines was talking steadily, leisurely, going round and round his subject again and again, and Barry listened with bowed head, but his eyes were fixed upon those of the wolf-dog at his feet. When he grew restless, Haines chained him to the chair with some direct question, yet it was a hard game to play. All this time the posse might be gathering around the cabin; and the forehead of Haines whitened and glistened with sweat. His voice was the only living thing in the cabin, after a time, sketching his imaginary plans for the benefit of Barry--his voice and the wistful eyes of Joan which kept steadily on Daddy Dan. Something has come between them and lifted a barrier which she could not understand, and with all her aching child's heart she wondered at it.

  For the second time that eve
ning the wolf stood up on the hearth, but he was not yet on his feet before Dan was out of his chair and standing close to the wall, where the shadows swallowed him. Lee Haines sat with his lips frozen on the next unspoken word. Two shadows, whose feet made no sound, Black Bart and Dan glided to the door and peered into the night--then Barry went back, step by step, until his back was once more to the wall.

  Not until that instant did the others hear. It was a step which approached behind the house; a loud rap at the back door.

  It was the very loudness of the knock which made Kate draw a breath of relief; if it had been a stealthy tap she would have screamed. He who rapped did not wait for an answer; they heard the door creak open, the sound of a heavy man's step.

  "It's Vic," said Dan quietly, and then the door opened which led into the kitchen and the tall form of Gregg entered. He paused there.

  "Here I am again, ma'am."

  "Good evening," she answered faintly.

  He cleared his throat, embarrassed.

  "Darned if I didn't play a fool game today--hello, Dan."

  The other nodded.

  "Rode in a plumb circle and come back where I started." He laughed, and the laughter broke off a little shortly. He stepped to the wall and hung up his bridle on its peg, which is the immemorial manner of asking hospitality in the mountain-desert. "Hope I ain't puttin' you out, Kate. I see you got company."

  She started, recalled from her thoughts.

  "Excuse me, Vic. Vic Gregg, Buck Daniels, Lee Haines."

  They shook hands, and Vic detained Haines a moment.

  "Seems to me I've heard of you, Haines."

  "Maybe."

  Gregg looked at the big man narrowly, and then swung back towards Dan. He knew many things, now. Lee Haines--yes, that was the name. One of the crew who followed Jim Silent; and Dan Barry? What a fool he had been not to remember! It was Dan Barry who had gone on the trail of Silent's gang and hounded it to death; Lee Haines alone had been spared. Yes, half a dozen years before the mountain-folk had heard that story, a wild and improbable one. It fitted in with what Pete Glass had told him of the shooting of Harry Fisher; it explained a great deal which had mystified him since he first met Barry; it made the thing he had come to do at once easier and harder.

  "I s'pose Molly showed a clean pair of heels to the whole lot of 'em?" he said to Dan.

  "She's dead."

  "Dead?" His astonishment was well enough affected. "God amighty, Dan, not Grey Molly--my hoss?"

  "Dead. I shot her."

  Vic gasped. "You?"

  "They'd busted her leg. I put her out of pain."

  Gregg dropped into a chair. It was not altogether an affectation, not altogether a piece of skilful acting now, for though the sheriff had told him all that happened he had not had a chance to feel the truth; but now it swept over him, all her tricks, all her deviltry, all that long companionship. His head bowed.

  No smile touched the faces of the others in the room, but a reverent silence fell on the room. Then that figure among the shadows moved out, stepped to the side of Vic, and a light hand rested on his shoulder. The other looked up, haggard.

  "She's gone, partner," Dan said gently, "but she's paid for."

  "Paid for? Dan, they ain't any money could pay me back for Grey Molly."

  "I know; I know! Not that way, but there was a life given for a life."

  "Eh?"

  "One man died for Molly."

  As the meaning came home to Gregg he blinked, and then, looking up, he found a change in the eyes of Barry, for they seemed to be lighted from within coldly, and his glance went down to the very bottom of Vic's soul, probing. It was only an instant, a thing of which Gregg could not make sure, and then Dan slipped back into his place among the shadows by the wall. But a chill sense of guilt, a premonition of danger, stayed in Gregg.

  The palms of his hands grew moist.

  Chapter XV. Seven For One.

  Dangerous men were no novelty for Gregg. He had lived with them, worked with them, as hard-fisted himself as any, and as ready for trouble, but the man of the mountain-desert has a peculiar dread for the practiced, known gun-fighter. In the days of the rapier when the art of fence grew so complicated that half a life was needed for its mastery, men would as soon commit suicide as ruffle it with an assured duellist; and the man of the mountain-desert has a similar respect for those who are born, it might be said, gun in hand. There was ample reason for the prickling in his scalp, Vic felt, for here he sat on an errand of consummate danger with three of these deadly fighters. Two of them he knew by name and repute, however dimly, and as for Buck Daniels, unless all signs failed the dark, sharp-eyed fellow was hardly less grim than the others. Vic gauged the three one by one. Daniels might be dreaded for an outburst of wild temper and in that moment he could be as terrible as any. Lee Haines would fight coolly, his blue eyes never clouded by passion, for that was his repute as the right hand man of Jim Silent, in the days when Jim had been a terrible, half-legendary figure. One felt that same quiet strength as the tawny haired man talked to Barry now; his voice was a smooth, deep current. But as for Barry himself, Gregg could not compute the factors which entered into the man. By all outward seeming that slender, half-timid figure was not a tithe of the force which either of the others represented, but out of the past Gregg's memory gathered more and more details, clear and clearer, of the wolf-dog, the black stallion, and the whistling man who tracked down Silent--"Whistling Dan" Barry; that was what they called him, sometimes.

  Nothing was definite in the mind of Gregg. The stories consisted of patched details, heard here and there at third or fourth hand, but he remembered one epic incident in which Barry had ridden, so rumor told, into the very heart of Elkhead, taken from the jail this very man, this Lee Haines, and carried him through the cordon of every armed man in Elkhead. And there was another picture, dimmer still, which an eye witness had painted: of how, at an appointed hour, Barry met Jim Silent and killed him.

  Out of these thoughts he glanced again at the man in the shadow, half expecting to find his host swollen to giant size. Instead, he found the same meager form, the same old suggestion of youth which would not age, the same pale hands, of almost feminine litheness. Lee Haines talked on--about a porphyry dyke somewhere to the north--a ledge to be found in the space of ten thousand square miles--a list of vague clues--an appeal for Barry to help them find it--and Barry was held listening though ever seeming to drift, or about to drift, towards the door. Black Bart lay facing his master, and his snaky head followed every movement. Kate sat where the firelight barely touched on her, and in her arms she held Joan, whose face and great bright eyes were turned towards Daddy Dan. All things in the room centered on the place where the man sat by the wall, and the sense of something impending swept over Gregg; then a wild fear--did they know the danger outside? He must make conversation; he turned to Kate, but at the same moment the voice of Buck Daniels beside him, close.

  "I know how you feel, old man. I remember an old bay hoss of mine, a Morgan hoss, and when he died I grieved for near onto a year, mostly. He wasn't much of a hoss to look at, too long coupled, you'd say, and his legs was short, but he got about like a coyote and when he sat down on a rope you couldn't budge him with a team of Percherons. That's how good he was! When he was a four year old I was cutting out yearlin's with him, and how--"

  The loud, cheerful tone fell away to a confidential murmur, Daniels leaned closer, with a smile of prospective humor, but the words which came to Gregg were: "Partner, if I was you I'd get up and git and I wouldn't stop till I put a hell of a long ways between me and this cabin!"

  It spoke well of Vic's nerve that no start betrayed him. He bowed his head a little, as though to catch the trend of the jolly story better, nodding.

  "What's wrong?" he muttered back.

  "Barry's watchin' you out of the shadow."

  Then: "You fool, don't look!"

  But there was method in Vic's raising his head. He threw it back and br
oke into laughter, but while he laughed he searched the shadow by the wall where Dan sat, and he felt glimmering eyes fixed steadily upon him. He dropped his head again, as if to hear more.

  "What's it mean, Daniels?"

  "You ought to know. I don't. But he don't mean you no good. He's lookin' at you too steady. If I was you--"

  Through the whisper of Buck, through the loud, steady talk of Lee Haines, cut the voice of Barry.

  "Vic!"

  The latter looked up and found that Barry was standing just within the glow of the hearth-light and something about him made Gregg's heart shrink.

  "Vic, how much did they pay you?"

  He tried to answer; he would have given ten years of life to have his voice under control for an instant; but his tongue froze. He knew that every one had turned toward him and he tried to smile, look unconcerned, but in spite of himself his eyes were wide, fixed, and he felt that they could stare into the bottom of his soul and see the guilt.

  "How much?"

  Then his voice came, but he could have groaned when he heard its crazily shaken, shrill sound.

  "What d'you mean, Dan?"

  The other smiled and Gregg added hastily: "If you want me to be movin' along, Dan, of course you're the doctor."

  "How much did they pay?" repeated the quiet, inexorable voice.

  He could have stood that, even without much fear, for no matter how terrible the man might be in action his hands were tied in his own house; but now Kate spoke: "Vic, what have you done?"

  Then it came, in a flood. Hot shame rolled through him and the words burst out:

  "I'm a yaller houn'-dog, a sneakin' no-good cur! Dan, you're right. I've sold you. They're out there, all of 'em, waitin' in the rocks. For God's sake take my gun and pump me full of lead!"

  He threw his arms out, clear of his holster and turned that Barry might draw his revolver. Vaguely he knew that Haines and Buck had drawn swiftly close to him from either side; vaguely he heard the cry of Kate; but all that he clearly understood was the merciless, unmoved face of Barry. It was pretense; with all his being he wanted to die, but when Barry made no move to strike he turned desperately to the others.

  "Do the job for him. He saved my life and then I used it to sell him.