The Steel Box

by Max Brand

  She looked back at him, as cool as any man. “You’re here as a fighting man,” she said, “and Uncle Oliver doesn’t make mistakes.”

  “I’ve done my share of fighting,” he admitted. “But I don’t apologize for that. I never hunted trouble in my life.”

  “You simply stood where it was sure to come, you stood and welcomed it?” she said.

  He raised his head and looked at the clouds shooting in close-mustered ranks out of the north. “Well,” he replied thoughtfully, “perhaps you’re right about that. I haven’t thought about it in that way. However, you’ll admit that I know something about guns.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Then take my advice. Throw that gun away. Give it to me, now. No good will ever come to you from that sort of a revolver. It’ll never kill a rabbit, though it would easily kill a man.” He watched her with dread as he said this, and his heart sickened when he saw her flinch. “Will you do that?” he persisted. “Will you give the thing to me? And if it’s merely protection of some kind that you want . . . protection against what I can’t tell . . . why not let me take on the job?”

  She, for an answer, held both her hands away from her, palms up. “You’d never understand,” she said. “And heaven knows it’s something that I can’t explain. I daren’t explain it even to myself.”

  Sorrow and doubt of her so filled the heart of Sherry that he scowled upon her for a moment, and then he said: “I’ve warned you. You’ll find out that I’m right.”

  He turned about on his heel and went off—but slowly, for he yearned to hear her calling him back. But she said not a word, and, when he reached the circle of the trees and looked back at her, she was sitting on the bench once more, with her head in her hands.

  The hour was nearly over, and, therefore, he went slowly back in the direction of the house. He would have been lost if it had not been for the occasional glimpses he had of the white façade through the trees. But by their help he was able to correct his course several times and at last he came out on the more level ground before the Wilton house. At the same moment Lang stepped from among the trees, his head down, as if he were heavy with thought. He hardly glanced aside at his friend as Sherry hurried up to him.

  “Can you make out this queer place?” he asked Sherry.

  “I found the girl,” said Sherry hastily, “sitting among the trees with that murder gun in her lap. She talked oddly, Pete. I can’t make her out. What in the world is happening in her mind?”

  “The dickens is loose all around here,” muttered Lang for an answer. “But I’m going to study it out . . . I am going to study it out,” he declared more resolutely. “I only wish that we had a few days’ more time. But we’re pinched for time, Tiny. We’re mighty pinched for time. They’re all wrong . . . they’re all crooked, and yet we gotta try to read them.”

  When they came to the house itself, Wilton stepped out to meet them. He had put on a heavy overcoat and muffled his neck in a scarf. Nevertheless, he trembled, and he explained his shuddering by saying curtly: “I’m too long off the sea . . . every cold snap sends a chill through me. We’re going down the straight path,” he added. “Fennel will be somewhere along it, I think. And now, boys, you understand what I’m facing, don’t you?”

  “A pile of trouble,” said Lang, “and you’re a fool to run yourself into such danger. There ain’t any need of it.”

  Wilton made an impatient gesture.

  “I didn’t bring you here to be judges of what was best for me,” he said angrily. “I brought you both here as fighting men. Do you hear? When I walk into that garden today, I’m walking into peril of my life. I expect you to be close to me . . . close behind. If so much as a leaf stirs . . . shoot, and shoot to kill.” He added by way of a spur: “You get your money if I live through the ten days. You don’t get a penny, otherwise. Follow on close behind. Do you hear?”

  They nodded, and he walked on with a brisk but uncertain step, as though his legs had become weak at the knees and his feet had no feeling of the terrain.

  Behind him went the two guards, Lang muttering to his companion: “He’s never going to walk back, Tiny.”

  Then they turned the first angle of the path, and saw Wilton stiffly halted, and before him, half lost under the shadow of a pine and leaning against its trunk, the tall form of Fennel. He was laughing in silent content—a most gruesome grimace.

  XIV

  “We’d better close up on him . . . Wilton is scared pretty near to death,” said Pete Lang.

  So, with Tiny Lew Sherry, he advanced to the side of their employer. Still the drunken sailor—if sailor he were—leaned by the tree and laughed at them until it became hideous, impossible to watch him. For it seemed as though he were mocking all three, like some devil beyond the reach of human strength or malice. And yet here were three armed men, mature, strong, capable of hard battle—and yonder seemed only a shaken rag of humanity. It was the unreasonable laughter that made the man appear so terrible.

  “Stay close to me,” muttered Wilton hoarsely, as the two came up. Shame was actually driven from him. He kept his eyes fixed upon the nondescript form of Fennel, enchanted with terror. “I’m afraid to be alone near that man, Sherry. You stay close to me. You, too, Lang. If I ever get through this, I’ll make you know my gratitude.”

  At this last moment, Lang still attempted to argue. “Look here,” he said, “what’s the good of this? You know that he’s not a real sailor. He’s lying. He’s simply trying to blackmail something out of you. Why be a fool like this? Let me go and tell him to get out of this. You don’t have to talk to him at all. I wouldn’t, if I was you.”

  Then Wilton, in spite of fear—or because of it, perhaps—turned in a fury upon the other. “Look here, you,” he said, “I tell you that man knows everything! I’ve hired your hands, not your wits. Do as I tell you!”

  Sherry stared at Wilton. It was hard to think that the man was sane, yet making such richly implied admissions of guilt as this. In fact, he saw that Wilton was not sane. His common, saving sense was swallowed up completely by blank fear.

  However, now Wilton was facing forward toward the enemy, and he went ahead with a quick, light step, which certainly belied the state of his emotions. Or perhaps it sprang from the desperation of one who wanted to have this suspense ended, no matter what the cost might be.

  Fennel did not leave his tree as the trio approached him, but remained leaning against it, still laughing, so that the sound became audible—a husky wheeze, rather than normal human laughter. A beastly imitation of the human sound. He wore an ancient and faded felt hat, was wrapped to the throat in a tightly buttoned overcoat that dragged almost to the ground, and on his feet were partly visible wrinkled boots, like those which Sherry had seen in the sea chest of this seaman, or pseudo-sailor.

  When they were very close to him, at last Fennel left the tree and advanced toward them a few steps, entering the path, but with a staggering step. The man appeared very drunk. Even the upper part of his face was darkly flushed.

  Wilton halted as the fellow approached him.

  “He never was aboard, but I know him,” Sherry heard him mutter, plainly thinking aloud. “Where have I seen him before?”

  Then Fennel, having drawn close enough, said in his thick way: “You think I’m gonna talk to you when you got your pair of bulldogs with you, eh? Damned if I am. I ain’t gonna talk to you at all unless they fall back astern a half cable length, say.”

  Wilton hesitated. Twice he turned back toward his companions, and twice he faced again toward Fennel, but at last he snapped over his shoulder: “Fall back, boys. Fifteen or twenty steps, say. D’you want to walk on with me, Fennel?”

  “You an’ me side-by-side, like old friends, which we are or ought to be,” said the rascal. “You and me together, skipper, like the good old days.”

  With that, he actually took the arm of Wilton, while Sherry looked on with disgust and wonder. The pair drew ahead; they were almost around t
he first bend, when Sherry and Lang started to follow, Lang saying: “Dashed if I like this. I don’t like it at all.”

  At fifteen or twenty paces it really was rather hard to follow the two through such a labyrinth as this garden, where the paths twisted and dodged so unreasonably, but by the sound of the voices they were guided on their way—by the voice of Wilton, rather, for that of Fennel, husky and obscure, was lost in the wind.

  “I don’t like it,” reiterated Lang.

  They almost stumbled on top of the pair, at the next turning of the path, for Wilton and Fennel had halted and Wilton was expostulating in a rapid voice, with many gestures that had both fear and appeal in them. When he saw his guards behind him, he caught the arm of Fennel and drew the man rapidly ahead, as though it was even more to his interest than that of the sailor to be free from observation.

  Twice again Sherry had view of the couple, and all the time his sense of the guilt of Wilton was increased; every glimpse of the man showed that he was in a blue funk—because of the presence of such an obvious reptile as Fennel.

  They came next around a sharp corner into that straighter path that went down the face of the slope with only a few angles in it. They could look straight before them for a hundred yards, but now there was no sign of either Wilton or his companion.

  Lang gave Sherry a significant glance, and they hurried ahead. Lang had his revolver in his hand now, but Sherry still kept his under cover. He was a more practiced warrior than his friend.

  They had at least a partial explanation of the disappearance of the other two, the next instant, for they went blundering past the hidden mouth of a narrow path, adjoining. Up this they turned and went over two windings of it. Then Lang held up a hand; they both halted. Not far away there was a rustling through the brush.

  “Go get it,” said Lang. “I’m going to hunt around here. Go get it and bring it back.”

  Sherry hesitated, not as a man depressed by fear, but rather as one gathering himself for a spring. Then he leaped away into the trees. He had spotted the rustling, faintly crackling noise that he had heard, and now he made toward it with all his speed, swerving around the broad trunks of trees, dodging this way and that, and still sweeping invincibly toward the place from which the sound had been audible.

  He almost overran his quarry. Had the face been turned away, he would have plunged past the bush, but that white glimmer of skin warned him just as he was springing by. He whirled in mid-stride, a trick learned only on the football field or in the squared circle of the boxer, and, gun in hand, lunged straight in upon—Beatrice Wilton!

  As a lion takes up a cub, so he took her out, by the nape of the neck—so to speak— and held her up.

  She was utterly white. She was trembling in his grasp. The revolver with the silencer on its narrow muzzle hung helplessly, almost shaking out of her hand. “I didn’t do it!” she stammered at Sherry. “I swear that I didn’t do it!”

  “You didn’t do what?” he asked her. Then he saw something on the other hand. He turned it up. The palm was smeared; the fingers were thick with crimson.

  “Blood!” exclaimed Sherry.

  She herself held that hand before her face, saying stupidly, in a mutter: “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.”

  The lips of Sherry compressed and his nostrils expanded. He took the gun away from her, none too gently, and found the barrel warm. He opened the cylinder. One bullet had been freshly discharged and the empty shell remained. A faintly pungent odor rose to him. Burned powder, of course. Then he took her firmly by the arm.

  “You’re coming back with me,” he said.

  She drew in a gasping breath. He had heard exactly that sound once before. It had been in a Mexican drinking place, and the gasp had come from a man who had received a knife thrust in his heart.

  “I can’t go,” said Beatrice Wilton.

  “Why not? What’ve you done? Whose blood is that?” He snapped the brief questions at her.

  “I don’t know . . . mine, perhaps,” she said.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked her, more savage with grief than with angry suspicion, even.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered, and began to shake violently again. “Only . . . don’t take me back there. I couldn’t stand that . . . I . . .”

  “You’ve got to come. Or else tell me why.” He urged her forward, as he spoke, and she turned up a pale, sick face of fear and horror to him.

  “Please! Please!” she begged.

  Lew Sherry picked her up in his arms and she made no resistance, but her head rolled helplessly over on his shoulder. He glanced down and saw that her eyes were closed, though her fists were tightly clutched.

  So he bore her back in one arm, straining with the weight of her, but with his other still-armed hand fending off the branches. He came close to the path and there he paused. He said huskily: “Listen to me. If you’ve done something, if you want to dodge it, tell me what you’ve done. Then I’ll take you away. I’ll take you so far that you’ll never be found. I’ll . . . I’ll look after you. You understand?”

  He thought she did not hear, at first. Then she opened her eyes at him, but not with understanding, only with sick trouble.

  Sherry choked, and because he did not know what else to do except obey the original instructions of Lang, he carried her tenderly out into the narrow irregular pathway.

  He saw Lang at once, kneeling in some tall grass near the verge of the path, and suddenly the girl twisted in the arm of Sherry and pressed her face hard into his shoulder. He was beside Lang, now, and, looking down among the grass, he saw a man’s body lying face down. At that very moment Lang turned the body face upward and exposed the white, troubled features of Wilton himself.

  He had been shot through the head. There was a very small purple spot between the eyes, and a very thin trickle of blood ran down over the right eye and onto the right cheek, where it disappeared in a blur.

  XV

  As Beatrice Wilton, half fainting, leaned against Sherry, he lowered her to the ground.

  Pete Lang stood over her. “Miss Wilton,” he said, “d’you know anything about this?”

  “No! I only know that I . . . I stumbled over the body.”

  “Did you see the sailor? Fennel, I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Did you stop here?”

  “Here? By Uncle . . . ?”

  “Yes. Did you stop here?”

  “No, no!”

  “You went straight on past him?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “You’d better go back to the house,” said Lang.

  “I’ll go,” she agreed. She looked up to Sherry with the same appeal in her eyes that he had seen there before, then she moved away. But still, at a little distance, she turned again, and flashed back to Sherry a wild glance of appeal.

  Sherry remained, staring at his friend, and Lang stared back at him.

  “What became of Fennel?” he asked. “He must have done this.”

  “Fennel? I dunno,” muttered Lang. “Look here, kid. Is there apt to be two Twenty-Two-caliber, high-power revolvers in the same town at the same time . . . both of ’em with silencers on their guns?”

  “She couldn’t have done it,” protested Sherry, although he knew that his voice was weak with the lack of conviction. “She simply could not have done it. You know that, Pete. Tell me you realize that.”

  Pete Lang grunted savagely. “She lied straight off the bat,” he pointed out. “How could you want me to talk soft about her, eh? She lied like a streak. She didn’t stop near the dead man. You heard that?”

  “Well, and what about it?” asked Sherry.

  “Well, man, didn’t you see the blood on her hand?”

  “Brush is full of thorns,” said Sherry desperately. “You take a young girl like that . . . let her see a dead man . . . and what will she do? Bolt, of course. No looking where she’s going. And the result will be blood on her hand, if she scratched it on a thorn. You see that, Pete? Of co
urse you see that there’s a lot of sense in that?”

  Pete Lang looked upon his friend with an air of pity. “I’m kinda sorry for you, Tiny,” he said. “That’s all that I got to say to you. I’m just kinda sorry for you. Now, we’ll leave things be. The sheriff will want to see this, without too much of the scene changed. You scatter down to town and let the sheriff know about it. And then head straight on for the hotel and take another look at Fennel’s room. It ain’t going to be hard when they know that he’s suspected of murder.”

  Sherry was very glad indeed to have something active to do. He made no protest against the manner in which his friend had taken the lead in this affair, but like a good lieutenant, he marched unquestioningly to obey orders.

  He got his horse at the stable behind the house and went down the steep road to the street in one furious plunge, with a rattle of flying gravel before him and a rolling of loosened stones behind.

  It was easy to find the sheriff. He sat like a little wooden image in front of the hotel, staring unwinking before him and occasionally smoothing his fine white beard. Sheriff Herbert Moon never drank and never smoked. He had no nervous need of occupying his hands with trifles and his brain with a cloud of smoke. He ate little. He talked less. And he held down his office of sheriff not by dint of popular speeches or appeals to friendly voters, but by sheer brilliance in his office, wherein his record was flawless and unequaled during these past twenty-five years. Exactly half of his life he had spent in catching criminals of all kinds. The work had made him look at least fifteen years older than his actual age. But still he stuck to his task. Nothing changed. He hated change, men said, and that was why he remained in Clayrock, living in the same little shed that had served him as a youth, twenty-five years before, and propping it here and there, from year to year, as its knees grew weaker, and its pathetic back threatened to break. He never had married. He never had so much as looked at a woman. He had no friends. He lived, in fact, encased in solitude, like a sword in a battered but strong sheath. But when there was use for the weapon—lo, the pure, bright flash of the steel when it was drawn.