by Max Brand
She looked hastily over her shoulder at the towering form and the frowning brow of Lew.
“You didn’t know he is your friend?” went on Moon.
And she, still glancing up, smiled faintly at Sherry—an incredulous smile, he thought.
“What I want you to do,” said the sheriff, “is to talk freely. Times like this unlock the heart. They break down the barrier that we ordinarily erect against the eye and the ear of the world. Well, the more freely you talk now, the easier it will be to establish your innocence. We have certain facts against you. I’m not allowed to tell you what they are. I even should not tell you that a statement by a suspected person immediately after arrest usually bears with double force in the eyes of the law. In this time of excitement and confusion, truth is supposed to be nearer to the tongue of the one under arrest. You have something to say, of course. Will you say it to me now?”
Sherry broke in: “Why should she talk now? This is a case where she ought to have a lawyer. If I were she, I wouldn’t say a word to anybody without the advice of a lawyer, and a good one.”
“That is usually a good rule,” said the sheriff. “I’m sorry to say that a great many officers of the law are only interested in securing convictions. But I have grown old in my work, Mister Sherry, and I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I have only one great wish in every case . . . and that is to secure justice, not prison stripes, for the accused. Now, Miss Wilton, will you talk to me?”
Sherry suddenly left his post at the back of her chair and stood beside the sheriff, facing her. At that, her eyes no longer wandered. She spoke to the sheriff, but her eyes, all the while, were fixed upon the handsome, stern face of Sherry. And sometimes she looked down to his big hands, sun-blackened, and sometimes her glance swept across the great breadth of his shoulders—famous shoulders were they, up and down the length of the range.
She said: “I was walking in the woods. I was disturbed . . .” She paused. “I was afraid,” she murmured.
“You were afraid,” said the sheriff, encouraging her gently. “Will you tell me of what you were afraid?”
She moistened her lips, tried to speak, hesitated. And then, looking earnestly upon Sherry, as though she were drawing strength and inspiration from him, she continued: “I was afraid of my uncle.”
Sherry raised a warning hand.
“I wouldn’t interrupt her!” exclaimed Herbert Moon with some asperity.
“Don’t you see,” broke in Sherry, “that if you admit you were afraid of your uncle, you furnish with your own testimony a reason why you might have wished to . . .”
“To kill him?” She spoke straight out, her voice perfectly steady. “I understand that, of course. I’m trying to tell the truth.”
“You were afraid of your uncle,” said the sheriff. “You said that, as my friend here interrupted. Sherry, I’m afraid that I’ll have to complete this interview without you. Will you step outside?”
Beatrice Wilton stiffened suddenly in the chair. “No!” she exclaimed. “Please let him stay. He helps me . . . he really helps me to tell the truth.”
“Then . . . by all means,” said the sheriff, as gentle as ever. “Let us continue this conversation, like three friends. And will you remember, my dear young girl, that it is always best to tell the whole truth . . . usually even to win in the law, and always, I trust, for the sake of the God who hears us all.”
Now there was not a great deal of religion on the cow range, and the stern men of the law were hardly apt to have sacred names upon their lips any more than the reckless cowpunchers and gunmen who they tried to keep in order. Therefore, Sherry heard this speech with a little shock of surprise and of awe. And the girl looked for a moment from him and toward Herbert Moon. But instantly her glance came back to the big man.
“You were afraid of your uncle,” went on the sheriff. “And why were you afraid of him?”
“My father’s money was left in trust for one year. At the end of that time, it passes into the hands of my guardian. Uncle Oliver is my guardian. In a few more days, my money would all have been placed in his hands. But still I would have a claim on it. Now, suppose I died. Uncle Oliver would be the next heir. You understand?”
The sheriff nodded. “Your uncle would have been the next heir. And you thought that he was capable of . . . taking your life for the sake of that money?”
“I didn’t know. But I was afraid.”
“What gave you such an idea?”
“There were a good many things. He had queer ways. He lived in the house like a general in a fort. He was always practicing with weapons in the woods behind the house. Besides, I once overheard . . .” She paused.
However, the sheriff did not offer to encourage her, and it was Sherry who nodded slightly.
Then she went on, speaking directly to him: “It has been a rather lonely house to live in . . . since my father’s death. I don’t know why. It used to seem very cheerful, before. It was like living at the top of a wave. One could look down all over the town and the plain, and the hills and the mountains beyond. But afterward, it seemed cold and dark. I was always lonely. I used to hate the house and spend a good deal of my time in the garden or walking among the trees. And one day I was out very late. I should have been home before. It was really after sunset. Yes, I remember that I could see patches of red sky in the west, between the tree trunks. I was coming in slowly, even late as it was, because I hated to reach the house, and because I went slowly, I suppose, I made little noise. Then I came on the sound of voices. I heard my uncle talking excitedly.”
“And who was the other man?” asked the sheriff.
“I don’t know. He spoke more softly. I hardly made out a word he said. It sounded a little like the voice of Doctor Layman, however.”
“Will you go on then?”
“I heard my uncle cry out . . . ‘I tell you that I haven’t them. I’ve lost them. I haven’t a single one.’ Then he swore, like a man frantic with excitement, and he went on . . . ‘Do you suppose that if I were able to find them, and have them, I’d waste my perfectly good time here trying to . . . ’”
“How did he finish that sentence?”
“He didn’t finish it. But then he said . . . ‘Heaven forgive me. Heaven forgive me. People think I’m an honorable man. If they knew what I had in mind and heart . . . and then you come here to badger me. But I swear that I haven’t one of them. Would I be staying here if I did have them?’
“After that I clearly heard the other man say . . . ‘That’s your responsibility. You have had them. They were in your charge. You ought to know that you’ll have to make good for them. You ought to be able to lay your hands on enough money to make a part payment. That’s not asking a great deal.’
“My uncle answered, excited as ever, but a wind began to rise, and I couldn’t hear any more. I went on back to the house. And ever since that moment, I’ve been sick with fear of him. I’ve never known when I’d die in my sleep. I’ve feared even the food on the table before me.”
“Very well. And then today?”
“I used to go out with a revolver, practicing. I thought that I should learn to take care of myself, you see. Today, I was in the garden, doing that. I’d filled my revolver and fired one shot . . . at a sapling.”
“Did you hit it?”
She blinked. “No . . . I think not. I walked on through the trees and came out onto a path . . . and saw a man lying face down. I leaned over him. I saw it was Uncle Oliver. I touched his face to try to rouse him. My hand came away sticky with blood. Then I went mad with fear and ran off into the brush . . . and you found me there . . . and brought me back.” She smiled, a twisted smile, at Sherry, and then closed her eyes and turned white.
XVIII
At this moment it appeared to Sherry that the poor girl had proved her case completely, and he stepped a little forward so that he could turn and look more fully into the face of the sheriff, for he wanted to see the conviction appear in the eyes of t
hat man of the law. But he only saw the sheriff lean forward with a peculiar keenness of expression, and instead of using gentle words, or none, when the girl was so overwhelmed, Sheriff Moon said quickly: “Of course, it isn’t a pleasant thing to see a dead man. It’s not pleasant a bit. That unnerved you. That sent you off scampering through the brush. I suppose that your brain spun and turned dark, didn’t it? Poor girl.”
“Yes, yes,” she muttered, without opening her eyes.
Comforting enough the words of the sheriff had been, except that they had called up the grisly picture of the dead too vividly, but in sound and manner they were not so kind—they had come out rapidly, with a sort of savage eagerness, which Sherry was at a loss to account for.
He said to himself: There’s poison in that little man. There’s poison in all little men. For often it seems that the smaller the man, the more waspish the temper. For his own part, anger advanced upon him slowly. He could endure many taunts and many insults, but only by degrees passion inflamed his brain, until at last he could not endure, and had to fight. So he felt now that the sheriff had allowed bitterness to master him and had struck at a helpless girl.
Her eyes opened again, and she was looking at him, her eyes very wide, but little seeing in them.
The sheriff stood up. “I won’t bother you any longer,” he said. “You’ve made your statement as complete as you care to have it, I suppose?”
“I don’t think of anything else,” she said.
“I’m going outside,” said the sheriff. “But Mister Sherry will stay in here with you, in case you want anything, or if you feel faint. Mister Sherry will take care of you.”
He went out with a brisk step, and all at once she roused herself out of her trance and sprang up and ran to Tiny Lew. She looked very small. She did not come up to his shoulder, and she caught with her hands at his arms, hard and stiff as the large steel cables that made a ship’s crew curse when stowing them below in ample circles.
“He doesn’t believe in me,” said Beatrice Wilton.
“He’s a fool if he doesn’t!” exclaimed Sherry from his heart. “But he didn’t say that he didn’t believe. You take these fellows of the law and they’re great on not committing themselves.”
“He doesn’t believe in me,” she repeated, shaking her head, as though she were casting off the importance of Sherry’s faint denial. “Tell me. He doesn’t believe what I said?”
“They’re queer . . . all these manhunters,” he told her. “It don’t matter what he thinks, though. He’s not the judge. And he’s a long way from being twelve men on the jury.”
At this, the strength of her frenzy of fear relaxed a good deal; she was faint, rather than frantic, once more, and she dropped into a chair by the table, locked her hands together, and stared at him over them.
Sherry was fascinated, for it had been many years since he had lived in the land where women’s hands are white and slender and soft. He almost had forgotten that there are hands that have not been thickened, and spread, and blunted by pulling at the reins, or by swinging axes—hands not reddened from work in dishwater, or in washing suds on Mondays—hands not roughened from scrubbing with sand soap, from dragging heavy brooms across splintered floors.
But she was out of the other world, delicately and softly made, and so Sherry stared at those two hands that gripped and fought at one another until they trembled. The wrists were like the hands. No bulging cords stared from them. He could have held them both easily in the grip of one hand, but the more he felt the excess of his power over her the more he was subdued by two intense emotions—a vast pity for her, and vast awe because of the delicate cunning with which Nature had made her.
When she spoke again, her voice had changed. She was hoarse, as though she had been screaming into a wind, or sobbing heavily for a long time.
“Do you think he’ll bring me up for trial? Do you think that, Mister Sherry?”
“That’s not for him to say,” he told her. “That’s for the coroner’s jury to say.”
She held out both her hands to him, palms up; her eyes were half closed and he had a shuddering fear that she was about to weep.
“Don’t you understand?” she asked. “Everybody in this place does just as Sheriff Moon wants. He does the thinking for all Clayrock. They would think nothing of accusing me, if he so much as frowned at me. They would think nothing of . . . of . . .”
She could not say the word, but she unclasped her hands and laid one of them against her throat. He saw that a fine blue vein ran up the right side of her neck, and it seemed to Sherry that he was looking through translucent white and seeing that vein, deeply hidden.
“Great Scott,” said Sherry. “What are you thinking of? Do you think that people would allow such a thing? Do you think that there are jail doors that would hold you? Do you think that there are not hands that would bring you safely out?”
He held such a hand out to her, not as one who calls attention to himself, but as a man speaking out of the heat of emotion that gathers him up as a strong draft gathers up a powerful flame. He was a magnificent man, this Lewis Sherry, not meant to be ironed out into a common background of stiff white shirt fronts, and black dinner jackets. Out of such a background little appears except grace, and cunning, stinging words, but Sherry looked at that moment like a glorious animal with hands as strong as metal, and with the divine mind all on fire for action.
She looked at him from foot to head, and suddenly she smiled on him. “You would tear the doors open for me,” she said in the same husky voice.
Then as though she gathered strength from him, and from the thought, she lifted herself from the chair and came to him, still smiling. She stood just under him, so that she had to bend back her head a little to look up into his face, and a sad sense of sweetness, like the fragrance of late roses in the fall of the year, possessed Sherry. He wanted to ask her not to smile, her beauty and her nearness made his heart ache so with the knowledge that she trusted him so deeply, and that she was so near perishing.
“I’ll never lose all heart again,” she told him. “I see that you believe in me.”
“I do,” said Sherry. “I believe in you.”
He could manage to make the words simple, but he could not take control of his voice, which rumbled out in a great organ peal, a declaration of faith. If he had said that he loved her, that he worshiped her, that he would serve her in all possible ways, it could not have been put more clearly than by all that his voice inferred. And she glowed beneath him. The weariness and the trouble that had marked her face disappeared, and out of her shone that light that joy kindles in a beautiful girl.
She was saying: “If you want to help me, go to Doctor Layman. If anyone knows a way of doing things for me now, he is the man. Tell him that I asked you to go to him. And, oh, if you wish to help me, follow what he says. For he’s wiser than all the rest. He’s even wiser than the sheriff . . . and so much kinder.”
He knew that he was close to some frantic declaration, and because he was ashamed to break out, and because, too, the mention of another man had somehow brought a sobering touch to him, he left her at once and stumbled out into the garden.
He was met by blinding light. During the brief time he had been in the room with the girl the wind had changed, and the dark cloud masses, no longer shooting south, were rolling toward the northeast in walls and towers between which the rich blue of the sky reached through. It was nearly sunset; the light was golden; hope suddenly filled the world—and also the heart of Lewis Sherry.
The sheriff had gone off to the town, and Sherry found the man he wanted pacing up and down through the garden, pausing now and then to kick at a stone, his head bent toward the earth.
“Beatrice Wilton told me to come to you,” said Sherry. “She said that you would know what to tell me to do.”
The doctor looked up at him by degrees; his hands were locked behind his back, which made his slender figure seem yet more spare, so that he looked to S
herry, at the moment, a very type of the intellectual—his physical existence was so dominated by that imposing brow.
“She sent you to me?” queried the doctor.
“Yes.”
“The deuce she did,” murmured Layman. He actually walked on, kicking the small stones out of his way as he went, and yet Sherry was not offended, for he told himself that it was the sheer excess of sorrow of mind that forced Layman to be rude. At length, coming to the end of the path, the doctor turned upon him and said slowly: “She sent you to me. Did she say what right you had to come to talk to me about her?”
“She said,” quoted Sherry, “that you would know what I could do to help her.”
“To help her? Does she need help?” asked the doctor in the same sharp way.
Sherry was a little irritated. “After her talk with the sheriff,” he said, “I think that she does.”
“The sheriff was stubborn, was he?” murmured Layman. “I believe he has that reputation. But she couldn’t do anything with him?”
“Nothing but tell her story,” said Sherry.
“And that did no good?”
“Not a bit . . . so far as I could see.” Then Sherry added: “Suppose I ask just why she sent me to you for orders?”
The doctor looked at him in doubt. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Suppose I say that we’re engaged to be married. Would that make any further explanation necessary?”
XIX
The vague hopes that had been rising in the mind of Sherry were rebuffed. As a strong wind will clear away mist suddenly, so the passion of Sherry was blown to tatters in an instant. Then, slowly, he settled himself to face the new problem.
“I don’t mind saying that it makes a lot of difference,” he said quietly.
“I thought so,” said the doctor. “It takes a well-balanced youngster to see Beatrice a few times without losing his head.”
He nodded at Sherry. It was really impossible to take offense at this bluntness on his part, for it was plain that he was partly thinking out loud, partly expressing a viewpoint to another. There was no malice in his manner. It was simply the expression of a calm conviction. So Sherry made no answer.