The Steel Box

by Max Brand

  He was gone, and Sherry stood by the window, ill at ease, shifting from one foot to the other, feeling very much like a small boy late for school. He heard no steps disappear or approach—ample testimony to the soundness of the walls of the building—but suddenly the door opened, and Beatrice Wilton stood before him. The jailer loomed for an instant behind her, grinning strangely at Sherry, and then the door closed and they were alone.

  She came hastily across to Sherry, with great relief in her face. “Eustace sent you!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that it? Eustace finally persuaded the sheriff?”

  “No,” said Sherry. “I went to Moon and talked to him. He said that I could come and talk to you here.”

  “You . . . and not Eustace Layman,” she murmured, greatly amazed. “I don’t understand that. But it doesn’t matter. As long as I can send out a written message by you . . . you could be a witness to my signature, too. I . . . there’s a pen and paper.” She hurried to the desk, almost running, and sat down at it.

  Then Sherry leaned over her. “I promised Moon that I wouldn’t take out a message . . . a written message. Anything that you want to send by word of mouth. But nothing written.”

  She pushed the paper away from her and dropped the pen. She looked up at him quite wildly. Not since she had tried to take her own life when he and the sheriff were in the room had he seen her so completely unnerved. “You promised him?” she exclaimed.

  “I had to, for otherwise he wouldn’t have let me come here at all.”

  She clutched her hands together and her eyes flashed from side to side. “What can I do then,” she muttered. Then, more confidently: “But you won’t pay any attention to your promise? Of course you won’t. He hasn’t a right to treat me as he does. It will take me two minutes to write out the order to the bank. You will take it?”

  “You don’t understand,” said Sherry patiently. “I gave him my word. I shook hands with him on it.”

  “What is a promise to a scoundrel?” asked the girl earnestly. “He keeps me here without a chance to talk to a lawyer . . . except at a distance, watched every minute. I haven’t been able to raise a retaining fee. I’m helpless and hopeless. What am I to do? I never can win against Herbert Moon in this town and court without the finest lawyer in the country. And how can I bring in a great lawyer unless I have money? And my money in the bank I can’t touch . . . I can’t touch it because of the sheriff. So you see what he’s doing?”

  Anguish was depicted on the face of Sherry. But the voice of Herbert Moon was still, so to speak, sounding in his ear. He said: “It sounds pretty bad. But I think it will turn out better than you imagine. There never was a squarer man in the world than Moon.”

  “Ah,” cried the girl, “you think that because you know how he’s treated men. You don’t know how he’d treat a woman. He’s never had a woman before on a serious charge. And now he shows himself for the first time. No, no, not the first time. You can see it through his whole life. He hates women. He hates them!”

  “I don’t follow you there,” confessed Sherry.

  “Has he ever wasted his time on any woman or girl in his life? He’s never married. Women don’t exist for him . . . except to loathe them.”

  “That’s happened before,” said Sherry, “to men who were married to their guns and their work. Besides, he has such a beggarly poor salary, how could he ask a woman to share his life? Have you seen the house he lives in? A Mexican laborer lives in better style.”

  She stared at him with blank eyes. “You mean that you won’t do it, then? You won’t carry out a note for me?”

  “I can’t,” said Sherry.

  “But,” she went on in a bare whisper, “you understand what it means? My life. My life . . .”

  “I understand what you think,” said Sherry huskily. “Heaven knows that I want to help you. But I’ve given him my hand on it . . . and my promise.”

  She drew herself up from the chair and seemed about to break into excited speech, but she suddenly collapsed and dropped her face on her arms, weeping heavily. Sherry drew back from her as though a gun were pointed at him. He looked at the door; he glanced behind him at the window; never in his life had his heart been so wrung.

  He could only stammer: “I put my trust in Moon. You’ll find that he’ll give you a fair chance in the end. It’s only now that we don’t understand . . .”

  That seemed to sting her back to some self-control and she threw up her head. “They begin tomorrow. They begin to hang me tomorrow. Oh, mark what I say. The sheriff has the judge in his hand. The weight of the sheriff has poisoned the mind of every man in the county, already. They couldn’t pick a jury that wouldn’t be ready to hang me. And tomorrow the trial begins. Who have I to defend me? No one but a foolish young lawyer. A man with no experience. And he’s doing it on the chance of collecting his fees. I haven’t been able to give him any promise in writing. I . . . I . . . they’ve tied my feet and hands and thrown me into a river to swim if I can. Don’t you see it?”

  He could only stare at her miserably, until at last her own expression of desperation altered to one of horror.

  “You think with the sheriff,” she breathed at last. “You think with Sheriff Moon . . . that I’m guilty.”

  He tried to answer, to disclaim, but truth tied his tongue, and forced him to be silent.

  “You’d better go,” she said in a trembling voice. “I don’t think there’s any good in your staying here longer. You’d better go . . . at once.”

  Sherry stumbled toward the door, but, with his hand on the cold metal of the knob, he managed to turn about and face her again. His brain was reeling.

  “I came to ask how I could help,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come at all. But I want to tell you from my heart that the worst is never going to happen to you. They have thick walls here, but I don’t think that they could keep me out.”

  “Is that what you came to say to me?” she asked. “That after I’m found guilty and judged to be worthy of hanging . . . then you’d come to break into the jail and take me away?”

  He was silent, and saw her shaking her head.

  “I never would go,” she said. “Heaven knows that I’ve no desire to cheat the law.”

  Sherry jerked the door open without even a word of farewell and blundered out upon the street. It was blazing hot. The heat waves shimmered upward from the white, uneven dust, and from the white-washed wall the sun reflected as from a mirror, but it seemed to Sherry the coolest place in the world.

  He mopped his brow and went on with the same uncertain step. He found that his lips were twitching, and his eyes, staring before him, continued to see a picture that he knew never would leave him—of Beatrice in the jail, looking on him with a despairing calmness, and denying that last, faint hope of escape.

  XXXI

  He was glad of the distance and the steep slope back to the Wilton house, for it gave him a chance of purging his mind, as it were, by the sheer exercise of physical effort, and he came to the house with a clear brain, at the least, to find, in their small cabin-like room, Peter Lang bent low over a piece of paper.

  He looked up at his friend with a sidewise scowl of thought.

  “What is it, Pete?” asked the big man with assumed lightness. “Key to a treasure?”

  Lang looked back to his work and made no reply, while Sherry went on: “I’ve seen the sheriff.”

  At this Pete raised his head.

  “He’s straight, to my way of thinking. I never sat and talked to a finer man, Pete.”

  Lang yawned.

  “He even gave me leave to go to the jail and talk to Beatrice Wilton.”

  At this, the cowpuncher started. “Gave you permission?”

  “He did.”

  “It ain’t possible. He wouldn’t let Layman go near her.”

  “It’s queer,” said Sherry. “I know that it’s queer. But up to the jail I went and had a talk to her.”

  “You say it like you’d been to a funera
l.”

  “I’d promised the sheriff that I wouldn’t take any message in writing from her to anyone. Of course, that was the one thing that she really wanted me to do.”

  “It upset her?”

  “Of course. They’ve badgered her and tyrannized over her. I’ve never heard of any prisoner about to be tried for his life that has had such a rough deal as that girl.”

  Lang yawned again. “Leave me alone,” he pleaded. “I’m busy.”

  “Finally,” went on Sherry, “I told her that I’d never leave her to the law, if the decision went against her. What do you think she answered?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care,” said Lang.

  “That she wouldn’t go a step with any man. That she didn’t want anything from the law. Justice, I suppose she meant.”

  Here Lang favored his companion with a long and earnest stare. “Is that straight?” he asked.

  “That’s exactly what she said to me.”

  “I’m going out for a walk with you,” said Lang. “Come along with me, will you?”

  “I’m going to sleep. I need a nap. I’m tired.”

  “You’re fresh as a baby compared with how tired I am. Shut up, and come along.”

  Sherry, grumbling, obeyed, and they went out to the garden. There in the tool shed, Lang took a strong shovel and handed Sherry a pick.

  “Are you going to bury someone?” asked Sherry.

  “Shut up,” replied Lang. “Follow me.”

  He led the way straight back from the house into the woods behind it, and there he headed into the broken ground through which they had toiled with such difficulty on their first day at the Wilton house. Now, however, Lang moved in a weaving course that kept him going with comparative smoothness and speed.

  “How much time have you spent out here solving the labyrinth?” asked Sherry.

  But Lang did not answer. He kept to his work, setting a stiff pace, like a man whose brain is in a state of great anxiety. At length he came to a clearing. Into the middle of this he marched and faced toward the north, picking out a tree on that side. From the tree he paced several steps to the south, then turned sharply at right angles and marched in a new direction. He began over again at the southern side of the clearing and wherever his new course cut the old one, he marked the spots with a dig of his heel. Then, pausing, he considered the last three marks that he had made, stepped away from them, and drove his shovel into the ground with force.

  “Try your pick here!” he commanded, and Sherry, now thoroughly in the spirit of the adventure, obeyed at once, burying the pick to the handle.

  They began to tear up the ground, working very hard and fast for a half hour. In the course of that time, with pick and shovel, they had opened a deep hole, when Lang leaped out of the excavation and signed to Sherry to refill the hole.

  Gloomily, irritated, Sherry obeyed, and, after they had piled the dirt back in and trampled it down as well as they could, Lang scattered pine needles carefully over the spot and tried to remove all signs that they had been digging there.

  “I’ve missed . . . for today,” he said.

  “Suppose you tell me what crazy thing you’re up to?”

  “Well, this.” He thrust a paper before Sherry. Upon it appeared a rudely sketched outline that might have served for the plan of the clearing in which they had been working, and inside the general sketch there was a checking of many figures.

  “What the dickens does it mean?” asked Sherry.

  “It means that I’ve been searching through old Wilton’s room,” answered Lang. “And finally I found this in his private desk.”

  “That desk is locked. How could you get into it?”

  “How did somebody get in there before me?” asked Lang with a snap.

  “Great guns, man, do you accuse me? What would I be doing in his desk? And how could I possibly get into it unless I knew the way to find the key of it?”

  Lang said at last, after a glare of hostility: “You’re right, old son. I’m wrong. I’ve almost had an idea that you were sort of working for yourself on the side, in this here case, but I’m wrong. I’m glad of it.” He leaned a heavy hand upon Sherry’s shoulder. “I’m about beat, Tiny,” he declared. “It ought to be here.”

  “What?”

  “The pearls, you doddering idiot!”

  “Is that it? Is that what you’ve got there?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Lang. “But that’s my hunch. I think that I’ve put my hand on the key to the whole little mystery. I hope so, anyway.”

  “If we got them . . . then we could get what poor Beatrice Wilton needs . . . the finest lawyer in the country.”

  “Aye, and that’s why he’s hunting so hard for them, too.”

  “Who? For the pearls?”

  “He’s seen this paper,” said the other with assurance. “He’s seen it in the desk. I found this sheet on top of a pile. It wasn’t on top of the pile yesterday. Somebody has been in Wilton’s room looking the things over.”

  “Layman, then, by gravy!” cried Sherry.

  “Layman?” echoed Lang, and laughed with excitement. “I tell you, me son, that the gent that looked at that paper and opened that desk is also the gent that murdered Wilton.”

  “The deuce! What brings you to that?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell you all the steps.”

  “And, after all,” cried Sherry suddenly, “why shouldn’t Layman be the man? Why shouldn’t Layman have murdered Wilton?”

  “Him?” Lang frowned. “What would he have to gain by it?”

  “Why . . . everything, if you’ll stop to think of it. He was engaged to Beatrice Wilton, eh?”

  “So they say.”

  “And if he married her, naturally he’d get his hands on her property.”

  “That’s true. Yes. Go on.”

  “It stood to his interest to see that the year didn’t elapse and Wilton come into guardianship over Beatrice Wilton. Great Lord, why haven’t I thought of this before! The doctor, Lang. He’s the man to think about. The doctor. I never even suspected him before. His interest to find the pearls, too, naturally . . . anyone’s interest to find ’em. And who so apt to have access to this office as the doctor, too? I tell you, Pete, he’s the killer. I wish to heaven that my brain were a little truer, and I’d prove it to you.”

  Lang regarded him dubiously, like a man more than half persuaded, but at length he shook his head with decision.

  “The doctor?” he said. “No, it’s Fennel who did the job. Either Fennel and the girl, or Fennel alone.”

  “Fennel? I almost forget about him, since he disappeared.”

  “Of course you did. Fennel wanted to be forgotten. That’s why he played such an open part at the first. He had a purpose in living at the hotel, d’you see? He had that all planned.”

  “Come, come!” exclaimed Sherry. “I won’t admit that. That’s a little deep for me.”

  “Fennel lived at the hotel, pretended to be a drunk, and talked a lot and very loud about how much he knew about Wilton, didn’t he?”

  “That’s true.”

  “Then one day he walks up the hill, meets Wilton, and murders him.”

  “I see that.”

  “Either he’s a deep, smart gent, or else the girl supplies the brains and tells him what to do,” suggested Lang.

  “She? Pete, she had nothing to do with it.”

  “You don’t believe what you say, yourself, so why try to tell me what you don’t think, man?”

  Sherry sighed. “She? Well, get back to Fennel. What do you think he was?”

  “Faker, of course. You proved that, when you discovered the whiskey stains under the drain from the roof. You’ll find that he was faked all the way through. Disguised, I mean. That’s why he made such a public play and show of himself. He wanted to fix the wrong face in the eyes of the public. Then he’d just walk off and change, and be another man.”

  “That would take a deep schemer.”
<
br />   “And this is a deep job,” declared Pete Lang, “because I’ll tell you what . . . the girl has all the brains that anybody needs, and she’d play deep to have this job done according to the way she wants.”

  “She did it? She planned and hired it?” cried Sherry.

  “Go away and don’t bother me,” pleaded Lang. “I gotta think.”

  XXXII

  The trial opened the next day with a great crowd in Clayrock. The courtroom was filled. But Sherry, for one, did not care to be there. Instead, he preferred to walk about the streets of the town, talking here and there, for he remembered what Beatrice Wilton had told him the evening before—that prejudice was so strong against her in the county that no jury could be found that would not have adjudged her guilty before they foregathered in the jury box.

  That statement of hers he wanted to prove, now. And it was hard for him to believe. Western men were not like that. He tried to fall into conversation on the subject half a dozen times until at last a man said to him bluntly: “Why d’you ask me what I think, Sherry? Everybody knows that you’re for the girl. Well, what’s the good of arguing about it?”

  He had to wait until almost noon before he found an impartial listener, an oldish tough-looking mountaineer who regarded him with an unknowing eye, and with him Sherry, rejoiced, fell into talk.

  “What’ll happen to Beatrice Wilton?”

  “I’ll tell you what ought to happen,” said the veteran.

  “Well, tell me that.”

  “She had oughta hang!”

  Sherry looked down to the ground and made a cigarette to cover his emotion. “I’ve heard others guess that,” he said. “I don’t see why.”

  “You don’t? It looks pretty clear to me.”

  “Still I don’t follow you. Why shouldn’t it have been Fennel that did the killing?”

  “That was the sailor drunk, eh? I tell you, if he had had anythin’ to do with the case, the sheriff certainly would have had him a long time ago, wouldn’t he?”

  “I don’t know that he would,” said Sherry.

  “And when did he ever miss?” asked the mountaineer aggressively.

  Sherry was silent. There must have been failures, but he could not remember any. After all, the sheriff was apparently like a universal medicine, in the eyes of the men of his county. He could not fail to do what was right.