by Max Brand
So it was with Sheriff Herbert Moon, who sat at rest, all passive, resting in body, in mind, and in soul, until the summons came that brought him out upon the man trail. In twenty-five years, he had killed or captured two hundred and twelve criminals single-handed. In that list there was no account taken of the sweepings of drunkards from gutters in the early days of the mining boom. But two hundred and twelve times he faced danger for the sake of upholding the law, and he had nearly always won.
It was said that for every year of his service in Clayrock, Sheriff Moon carried a scar. Some silver dot or streak upon his body for every one of twenty-five years of labor. But his face was unmarked. Only, below the chin, there was a long, puckering slash. He was ashamed of it. He always muffled his neck with some scarf, so that he was given rather an old-fashioned appearance by this peculiarity of his dress, and, indeed, it was merely to harmonize with that necessary neck mask that he had allowed his beard to grow, and had trimmed it slender and narrow. If his neck apparel was old-fashioned, so should all his appearance be.
Time, from the moment that he made those two alterations in his appearance, made but a gradual change in the sheriff. Only, each year his attire seemed more threadbare. Men declared, mockingly, that he never had bought a new suit of clothes for twenty-five years. Some men vowed that he was a miser, and that he must have a fortune stowed away in some corner. However, not a soul was aware that the salary of the sheriff had stood still for a quarter of a century. No one thought of increasing it. The buying power of the dollar dropped to thirty percent. But the sheriff asked for no raise of pay and none was given him. Of the rewards that he earned by his courage, he took no account, but always gave the money, as it came in, to charity.
“A man cannot live on blood money, you know,” said the sheriff.
To this little man—“He’s so small, that’s why he don’t get shot up bad,” said the tough citizens of Claryock—to this little sheriff, on the verandah of the hotel, appeared big Lew Sherry. He leaped from his horse. A billow of thin dust swept before him as he halted in front of Herbert Moon.
“You’re Moon? You’re the sheriff?”
“That’s my name, sir,” said the sheriff.
“Wilton’s been murdered in his garden. I came along to report. He was shot through the brain. The body’s lying where it fell. Pete Lang is waiting to show you everything.”
The sheriff stared, for an instant, his lips parted. Against the white of the beard, those lips seemed young and smooth and strangely red.
“Dear me, dear me,” said the sheriff. “Wilton is dead. Another rich Wilton, and in a single year. Dear me, dear me.” He did not rise at once. He continued to look at Sherry as though the big man had told him the most remarkable thing in the world.
“I’m going to tell you one thing more. The man that did the shooting was Fennel . . . the drunken sailor that lived here in the hotel and talked so much and drank such a lot more,” said Sherry.
“I’m glad to know that.” The sheriff nodded. “Of course I want to know who did the murdering. Thank you, Mister Sherry.”
“You know me?”
“Of course. Since the day you killed Capper. I’ve known you ever since that day. I have to know people who can shoot so straight,” said the gentle voice of Herbert Moon.
It made Sherry feel a little uneasy. We like to read the character of a new event in its face. We don’t wish to go by opposites. This fellow appeared to Sherry like the most inoffensive of men. He looked like a learned man, tired of study, retiring from his labors. But he was a famous warrior. He was not one who had killed a great many. After his first month in office, he had not had to. Men usually surrendered when this terrible and quiet little man came upon their traces. But he almost frightened Sherry with his gentleness.
“Are you going back with me?” asked the sheriff.
“No. I’m going to stay here, just now.”
It occurred to Sherry that he had better not announce his intention of searching the room of Fennel. That might interfere with the sheriff’s ideas of what was best. And most desperately did Sherry want to conduct that search in person, in the hope that, in some fashion, he could be able to fasten upon the sailor the crime of that day.
For there was ever, in the back of his brain, the image of Beatrice Wilton, with the blood upon her hand. In his own pocket was her gun, the silencer attached, the empty cartridge. He felt that that was her destiny—and he carried it—he would guard it.
He went into the hotel and said bluntly that he wanted the key to Fennel’s room. The clerk, impressed by this sternness, handed it over without remark, merely staring, and Sherry went up to the chamber.
It was almost exactly as it had been when he last saw it. But there were four whiskey bottles upon the table instead of two. Three of them were empty. But the fourth was still untouched.
Suddenly Sherry struck his knuckles against his forehead. He turned. The clerk was in the doorway, a little frightened, but very curious.
“Has anyone been in this room drinking with Fennel?” Sherry asked.
“Nobody,” said the clerk.
Sherry stared at the whiskey bottles again. It was most odd. According to the mute testimony of those bottles, Fennel had consumed more than a quart of whiskey in his room since Sherry last examined the place. But that was not possible. What, then, had become of the liquor?
A small matter, no doubt, but when there is murder in the air, small matters loom large.
XVI
“Is there anything wrong?” asked the clerk.
“Murder, that’s all,” said Sherry gloomily. He enjoyed, mildly, the confusion and the astonishment of the other.
“I knew that no good ever would come out of a rat like that. I never seen such a fellow for absorbin’ whiskey. A couple of quarts a day, sometimes. I never seen anything like it. He was a regular sponge,” declared the clerk.
A sponge, indeed, if two quarts of whiskey could be consumed in a single day!
He brooded upon the problem and upon the room, and, as though to get more light on the subject, he opened the window nearest to the table.
“You take a man with a brain full of alcohol, that way, he’d be sure to do pretty nearly anything. Crazy with drink, day and night. Sometimes you could hear him laughin’ and singin’ in his choked way here in the room in the middle of the night.”
Sherry listened with only half his mind. The other half was fumbling vaguely, as a man will do at a problem in geometry, when all the lines and the angles go wrong for him. And in that state, he stared at the drainage pipe that ran down the wall and noted with dim unconcern that a spot on it was of different color from the rest, fresher, as though it had rusted less. He touched that spot, and it gave on hinges to his finger. It was, in fact, a trap door let into the pipe. It brought Sherry quickly out of his haze. What was that used for? He stared more closely. He could see that the edges of the metal had been cut not long ago. It would not have been a difficult task, for the pipe was lead.
Then a thought came to Sherry, and he hurried out of the room and down to the garden to a point just below the window of Fennel’s room. The clerk was leaning out the window.
“Find anything, Sherry?” he called with eagerness.
Tiny Lew stood still, his eyes half closed, his breath drawing deeply. But there was no mistaking the odor that welled up thick and rank from the ground all about the vent of the drainage pipe. Close about it, the grass was brown and dead. It had been soaked with alcohol poured down the pipe. And that was the meaning of the trap door in the drain. That was the explanation, too, of the Herculean drinking of this sham drunkard.
“Find anything?” exclaimed the clerk again.
“Not a thing,” said Sherry, and went straightway to his horse and cantered away for the Wilton place.
He had a strangely powerful impulse to turn the head of the horse on the out trail and leave Clayrock and its evil crime behind him forever. Curiously enough, it was not the thought of
Beatrice Wilton that stopped him now, but the knowledge that Peter Lang was yonder in the garden of the house, using his wits to solve this mystery.
So Sherry held on his way to the Wilton house, and walked his horse up the steep carriage road to the stable. The Chinese cook came out from the kitchen with a tin of scraps in his hand, stared at Sherry with fear and wonder, as at a dangerous being from a strange world. Sherry went around to the front of the house, and there he found the sheriff, Lang, and Dr. Layman all gathered in a close group discussing some clothes that lay on the ground before them.
Lang had discovered them among the trees, by closely following up the trail of Fennel, where it left the spot where Wilton had fallen. They consisted of the overcoat, the old hat, and the clumsy boots of Fennel, which he had worn when he confronted the three a little earlier on this tragic day.
“Murderers run, of course, after they’ve done the killing,” said the doctor. “I suppose there isn’t any doubt that Fennel is the man who did this thing?”
“It looks that way, of course,” said the sheriff.
“Thank goodness, he can’t go far,” said Layman. “Not with his build and his face. He’d made himself well enough known around Clayrock, and in a few hours you’ll have him, Sheriff.”
Here Lang put in: “There’s somebody else to be considered in this job.”
Sherry glared at him. And when he failed to catch the eye of his friend, he said roughly: “What d’you mean by that, Pete?”
Pete Lang waved off the question. “I’ll talk to the sheriff,” he persisted. “Murder’s a black thing, and, if there’s any way of getting to the truth about it, I want to help.”
“Aye,” said Herbert Moon in his soft voice, “murder is black. But in this part of the world there are too many who don’t agree with your viewpoint, I’m afraid. Murder is black. And there’s always night gathered around it. Can you help us out of the dark, Mister Lang?”
“I can,” said Pete Lang. “I want to tell you what I’ve seen Miss Wilton do.”
“Pete!” cried Sherry in agony.
“Man, man!” protested the doctor. “Beatrice? Beatrice Wilton? What are you talking about?”
“I think you know your duty, Lang,” was all the sheriff remarked.
“I know my duty. I’m gonna do it. I got a clear case. I’m gonna state it. Me and old Tiny, yonder, seen this here girl practicing off in the woods with a small-caliber revolver with a silencer on it, so that you didn’t hear any explosion. You just heard a sort of puff. Well, a while back Tiny ran into her in the woods sitting pretty thoughtful, and that gun in her lap. And now I want to point out that Wilton was killed with a bullet out of just such a gun, and that him and me, following close on behind, didn’t hear any sound of a gun.”
“It was the wind!” exclaimed Sherry eagerly. “The wind was howling and roaring through the trees, just then. There was enough wind to kill the sound.”
“The sound of a revolver . . . not more’n forty yards away,” persisted Lang.
Sherry groaned. He saw the absurdity of such a claim as he had just made.
The doctor and the sheriff said nothing. They watched and listened intensely, their eyes never stirring from the face of Lang, who continued: “It ain’t easy to say these things. I gotta explain that I hate sneaking murder. And a woman that shoots to kill is a lot more sneaking than a man, because she’s got a lot more chances of getting off, if she’s caught. Well, this one is caught, and I hope she hangs for it . . . and the prettier her face, the more I hope that she hangs! After we started hunting for Wilton . . . missing him on the path . . . we heard a sound in the woods. I asked Tiny to go after it. He did, and he found this here girl crouching in a bush. There was a gun in her hand.
“The barrel of that gun was still warm. There was an empty shell in the cylinder. The girl was scared to death. The first thing she said was . . . ‘I didn’t do it.’ Sherry had to carry her back to the place of the killing. She pretty near fainted. And . . . there was blood on her hand.”
So, rapidly, heaping up the important facts, one on another, Pete Lang made out the case against the girl.
The sheriff joined his small hands together and, raising his head, looked up at the dark flight of the clouds across the sky.
Then Dr. Layman exclaimed bitterly: “Moon, you’re not going to take this thing seriously? You don’t mean to say that you’ll register all this against Beatrice Wilton?”
The sheriff did not answer.
“Great Scott, man!” cried Layman, “Don’t you know Beatrice Wilton? A lady if ever one . . .”
“A Wilton,” said the sheriff. “I know that she’s a Wilton. And they have a strange sort of a record, Doctor Layman.”
“Whose voice have you against her?” asked the doctor, who seemed in an odd state of fear and excitement. “That man’s. An unknown cowpuncher. A gunfighter . . . proved by the fact that Wilton hired him for that purpose. He testifies against Beatrice Wilton. Sheriff, may he not have some reason for wanting to put the blame on other shoulders? Doesn’t it stand to reason that, unless he had some such purpose, he never would have accused her? A Western man doesn’t go out of his way, as he has done, to accuse a woman against whom he could not possibly have any grudge?”
The sheriff looked mildly upon the doctor and appeared to be considering this statement, while Lang raised a finger and pointed it like a gun at the speaker.
“You’re talking a lot and you’re talking loud,” he cautioned.
“Do you think that I care a whit for your threats?” demanded the doctor, actually taking a step nearer to Lang. “I despise you and all the rest of your gunfighting crew. Sheriff, I want you to tell me right now that you’re going to discount the testimony of this ruffian.”
The sheriff merely said: “Mister Sherry was with Lang. You were with him at the time the shooting must have taken place, Sherry?”
“I was,” said Sherry gloomily.
“Have you any reason to suspect that Lang is twisting the truth?” persisted the sheriff.
Sherry stared at the face of his friend.
“It’s all right, Lew,” said Lang gently. “You don’t have to stick by me in this. I know just how you feel.”
Sherry groaned aloud. “I can’t turn a lie against Pete,” he confessed. “Lord forgive me . . . but I got to say that everything he’s said is correct. He hasn’t exaggerated a single thing.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” said the sheriff. “It makes it necessary for me to see Miss Wilton. Will you tell me where she is?”
The doctor threw up both hands to the sky, and, letting them fall again, he struck one against his forehead heavily. “She’s in that room to the right. The one with the French door opening on the garden.”
“Will you come with me?” asked the sheriff of Sherry.
The big man followed little Herbert Moon to the indicated door. They tapped.
“Who’s there?” called the uncertain voice of the girl.
“Sheriff Moon,” said the man of the law.
There was a frightened gasp inside.
And Sherry, interpreting that stifled cry with blinding suddenness, gave his shoulder to the door and burst it open, with a shivering and crashing of broken glass. He, lurching into the chamber, saw Beatrice Wilton running to the center table. Her hand had scooped up the revolver that lay there and raised it toward her own head when the reaching hand of Sherry struck at her.
The weight of the blow flung her against the wall, and the gun exploded with its ominous, soft noise and thudded a bullet into the ceiling, while Sherry, leaping on, gathered the girl safely into his arms.
XVII
Following swiftly on the choked noise of the shot, Lang and the doctor would have rushed into the room, but the sheriff turned toward them and waved them away.
“It’s my duty to examine Miss Wilton,” he said. “Mister Sherry is already here. He’ll serve me as a witness. If you gentlemen wish to assist me, you may search the grounds
again. Doctor Layman, perhaps you’ll inform the coroner?”
With that, he closed the broken door in their faces and turned back to the room.
Beatrice Wilton had sunk into a chair. Leaning to one side, supporting herself with one stiffened arm, while her head hung low, she looked about to faint. Sherry stood behind her, his arms folded. He needed that stricture of his big, hard arm muscles across his breast; otherwise, he felt as though his heart would tear its way out of his breast.
The sheriff took a chair by the center table. He waved to Sherry to take another, but Sherry shook his head.
“Miss Wilton,” said the sheriff, “you are under arrest for the death of Oliver Wilton. Whatever you say now may be used against you in a court of law as admissible testimony. Nothing will be forced from you. You are fully warned about the danger of talking?”
She swayed a little. So much so, that Sherry put down a hand as if prepared to steady her. But then she straightened herself and looked slowly around the room, as though she wished to gain strength and courage from familiar sights. Sherry, with an aching heart, followed that glance. It was a dainty place, thoroughly feminine. There was an Italian bed, low, with a gilt back, and before the bed a painted screen that almost obscured it, so that the chamber could serve as a living room. All was bright and cheerful, gay little landscapes on the wall, and three rugs blurring the floor with color. But the broken door seemed to Sherry to have a strange meaning; so had the security of this girl been lost, and the danger of the world been let in upon her.
Now she looked back at the sheriff and nodded slowly. “I understand,” she said.
Her voice was steady, and the heart of Sherry leaped again—with admiration, this time. And he told himself, bitterly, that he cared little what she had done. She was beautiful, and she was brave. That, in itself, was enough for him.
“You know that I don’t want to take advantage of you?” went on Herbert Moon. “For that matter, your friend Sherry wouldn’t let me, I suppose.”