by Max Brand
She leaned out and stared down toward the ground. It still seemed impossible. There was a sheer drop of twenty feet. There was no possible way of mounting, except by the slight indentations between the boards and the drainage pipe itself. Hardly a sailor would have liked the task of making that climb.
But then to sit there in the cold wind through hours of the night and the morning! To remain there, certainly, until he had seen her putting the pictures in the book. That was broad day, and a dozen windows of neighboring houses gaped at him, yet he had remained there until she left the room. Then entered — then swiftly slipped down the pipe to the ground, leaving no trace behind him, except that the window was unlatched.
Thinking of this, she grew cold indeed to have made such a man her enemy.
She ran back to the letter, which seemed now even dimmer than before, and read it again.
As I watched you through the window last night and this morning, you sure made a mighty pretty picture. I was powerful tempted to knock on the window and tell you so.
He could have dropped his slang, she thought bitterly, if he had known that she had seen the titles of his books.
That was a pretty clear picture that you made of me, and I didn’t think that you’d mind if I borrowed the prints.
But here I been looking into the book and wondering a pile if you ever read it before, because the girl in there is sure a winner. Which I mean, she’s nothing but good nature and kindness and such. She don’t seem to be full of nothing but trust, and I’d lay my money that she made men better....
It was certainly true that the writing was now so extraordinarily dim that she could hardly make it out. But with straining eyes she found her place again and struggled on.
...and never made a poor cowpuncher burglarize snapshots out of a girl’s room and then go and rob the federal mail which is what I have to hurry and go do before the folks get up. But in the wind-up, I got to say again that you made a mighty pretty picture lying on the bed and pointing that gun at the door that maybe you didn’t notice that the caps was all pulled?
Respectfully yours,
Duval
She could make out the last words only by using a bit of imagination.
But now she hurried to the little revolver and opened it. It was quite true. Every cap had been removed from the cartridges, and she might have pulled the trigger as often as she pleased without firing a shot! It changed her picture of Duval suddenly and completely.
He had returned from the rodeo faster even than the sweating horses of Charlie Nash. He had entered the store, he had been to her room, he had found the weapon and made it harmless. Then he had slipped out from the building.
Why had he done this, then, rather than encounter her suddenly in the dark and take the camera from her with all its evidence that he so much dreaded?
Perhaps he had feared that her outcry would raise the neighborhood. Yet a man who could do what he had done that night would hardly have hesitated for such a reason. There were such things as clothes thrown over the head of a victim, stifling all sounds before they issued from the lips. And Duval, she somehow knew, would be a master of every such craft.
Or if he simply had appeared before her in her room, that moment when she raised the lamp above her head — if she had not died of fright, certainly she would have been incapable of any utterance, or even of flight. Then he could have taken the camera from her nerveless hand.
It was not that he wished to keep his agency in this matter a secret, for had he not written a letter and signed it with his name? Perhaps, she thought, it was a strange weakness, an odd compassion in this singular man that had prevented him from appearing before her in the dimness of the store. He had spared her that shock, even though it made for him a night and a morning of so much danger, of so much serious crime. At this thought, a queer smile came to the lips of the girl, lingered, and slowly died there.
She thought, with a start, of hurrying to the post office to give warning of what might be attempted, but she saw at once that this was impossible. Totally impossible, and all that had happened on this night, together with Duval’s confession, could never be mentioned to any other human being in the world.
He, with a cunning insight, had known it, and taken that advantage to leave the letter behind him.
She picked it up again, but to her amazement, she found that there was hardly a trace of anything upon the smooth paper, and that trace, real or imagined, now vanished under her very eyes.
How he had mixed that mysterious ink, she could not guess, but she told herself that there were a thousand accomplishments of Duval that must be behind locked doors from any investigation of hers. At least there was one secret that they shared, and she laughed a little grimly as she thought of it.
Here, however, her reflections were interrupted by a rattling of the street door, and she flew down the stairs to find old Jud Parker waiting there with an urgent order for ham. They had run out. The infernal dogs had got into the smokehouse and ruined a hundred dollars’ worth of the best smoked meat in the county, and now the best he could do would be to give the men a late breakfast. The confounded dogs, he wished they’d never been born.
She brought him what he wanted, and then raised her most innocent eyes to his face. “Ah, but the poor things,” she said. “They didn’t know that they were doing wrong.”
The hard face of the rancher softened as he looked down at her. “There you go, Marian,” he said. “Always thinkin’ kind thoughts...always doin’ good deeds. It ain’t in you to sow no mischief in this world of ours.”
Chapter Fourteen
In the dusk of the day Duval came from the horse shed where the mule and the saddle horse had been duly stalled and fed. He had worked hard that day, but his step was light as he carried a bucket of water in from the pump, and his whistle was so shrill and gay that Discretion neighed from the pasture and came to hang her head over the fence at him.
He came in to find the steam of great cookery ascending from the stove, and old Henry perspiring before it.
“Too much food for tonight, Henry,” he remarked. “There’s work for me to do. And I can’t overeat.”
“Night work?” Henry asked, his eyes gleaming under their white brows. “I could tell you about some night work that’s been haunting me all the afternoon.”
“You can? You always were a prowling old cat that woke up at sunset. What is it now, Henry?”
Henry extended a long-handled granite cooking spoon. “Yonder, over the hills...,” he began. He choked with a sudden emotion.
“You look as if you were going to cry, Henry. Who do you want to do now?”
“Thousands and thousands,” murmured Henry, “and a safe that would fall down like a house of cards if you blew at it. If you touched it, it would open its door to shake hands. It’s a fine safe, a good safe, an honest safe, it’s a safe that makes friends.”
“Business is as business does,” said Duval. “You old scoundrel, where have you been?”
“I’ve been over the hills and far away,” said Henry. “I might’ve known you wouldn’t talk to me about it. Two weeks’ pay and a lot of extras for about eleven hundred men...two weeks’ pay and a lot of extras, I tell you. Do you hear me?”
“Oh, I hear you clearly enough. You want to take more scalps, Henry? I should think that you’d be willing to retire, by this time, and rest on your laurels.”
“Business is as business does,” Henry said, turning back the remark upon its originator. “The fact is that laurels ain’t ham and eggs, sir.”
“Ah,” said Duval, “but you could stay here with me and grow to a ripe old age, vegetating in the green fields, milking the cow, making the excellent butter that you alone know the secret of, spreading an atmosphere of the home all through the house, Henry. You have just the touch for that.”
“Stay here with you,” Henry said
slowly. “Aye, and maybe I would. Maybe I would chuck the other thing and stay here with you, but how long’ll you be here?”
“I? Why, forever, of course. Isn’t this my home, Henry?”
“Your home,” said Henry gloomily, “is somewhere between the Rue de la Paix and Timbuktu, and right well you know it.”
“Tush,” said Duval. “I much prefer it here, Henry.”
“You’ll be off,” remarked Henry. “Stay here, I think I could.” He lifted his head and looked with narrowed eyes through the doorway at the rosy sky above the treetops. “This’d be a place to live and die in. Seein’ things grow up out of the earth and die back into it, I mean, till the growin’ and the dyin’ of men don’t matter so much. But...you won’t stay long. You’ll be flying as fast as steam’ll take you...in a week...in a month...as soon as the wind stops blowin’ and the dust settles down a little.”
“What dust, Henry?” Duval asked softly.
The older man grinned. “I don’t know nothin’,” he protested. “And I don’t want to know. I’m not that much of a fool. Only if you’d listen to me, I could tell you of a way to spend a night that would be worth somethin’ to both of us.”
“Could you?”
“I’m sayin’ so.”
“Henry, there’s nothing in the world that really interests you except the elbows and the cops.”
“Me?” Henry said, amazed.
“You! You can’t get along without ’em.”
“Without that mangy lot?”
“Of course you can’t, and you’ll know it if you think for a moment. What would you have for spice in life, Henry, if half a dozen detectives weren’t nosing about the country for you all the time?”
“They’ll never get me again,” Henry said solemnly. “Never again.”
“How old are you, Henry?”
“Risin’ fifty,” Henry said, without blushing.
“Rising it so far it’s out of reach and sight,” said his companion. “How many years have you spent in jail?”
“Oh, a few stretches. Maybe twenty.”
“Twenty years in jail, and you’ll be ten more if you live that long.”
“No,” Henry said as gravely as before. “I keep a gun now and not for the other guy but for myself. The next time they grab at me, they’ll catch nothin’ but air. I don’t figure on dyin’ in the stripes.”
The way he spoke made Duval, it appeared, put off his casual and caustic speech.
“What’s your scheme tonight, for some other night?” he asked.
“For this night, and no other,” said Henry. “I’ve been over to the Broom and Carson Company the other day. I’ve seen their office. Why, any fool could walk into it, and, once inside, there’s the safe that fills the whole end of a room. Its own weight is breakin’ it to bits. It sags in the middle as if it had colic. I tell you, it’s mine and yours, if you’ll come with me. If you won’t, I’ll go by myself.”
“Will you?” asked Duval.
“I will. One taste of soap and soup would knock the whole face off it. There’s a couple of hundred grand inside it, or I’m a fool and a liar.”
“What would you do with it, old fellow?” asked Duval.
“What would I do with it? I’d find a way to use it. I might buy a farm beside yours, and settle down here.”
Duval smiled. “They’d have you in two days, probably.”
“The dicks? Nobody knows me in this neck of the woods, and that’s one thing that put the idea into my head, I tell you. I’ll have it as easy as walk. I’ll bring it back....”
“Not here, Henry.”
“Not here?”
“No. If you go for it, then keep away from me,” Duval insisted.
“I’d be missed and suspected, then.”
“It’s true,” Duval muttered. “You infernal old troublemaker, keep quietly at home. If you want money, you have a gun at my head. How much will you take?”
“Money?” Henry said. “Money?” He laughed softly. “It ain’t the money. You know that. It’s the feel of the game. It’s the night, and the listenin’. It’s the creak of a floor under your foot. It’s the whisper that sneaks up behind your back and puts a chill down your spine. It’s the long chance...and then maybe empty pockets and maybe full. But the game is the thing that I’m after. You know what I mean.”
Duval sighed. “I’m going to make you change your mind,” he declared.
“Change it? I can’t change it. Dyin’ wouldn’t change me that way.”
“Kinkaid would, though, from what I hear of him.”
“Kinkaid? I never heard of him.”
“Neither did I, except in the distance. He’s a man-catcher, Henry, who works for the fun of the game, just as you work for fun at the other end of it. It’s no more fun for you to crack the Broom and Carson safe than it is for him to catch you for the same job. He’s gone three years on nothing but one trail, they tell me. I’ve been hearing about him for two weeks, off and on. Tonight, I’m going out to meet him.”
“Goin’ to meet him!” exclaimed Henry. “Are you crazy?”
“I’d be crazy not to. He’s to be at the dance tonight. He’s likely to hear something about me there. Well, I don’t want that. I don’t want him to get suspicions of his own and....”
“What if he knows you?”
“If he knows me?” Duval shrugged his shoulders. He had been undressing as he talked, and now was preparing to step into a galvanized iron tub, into which he had poured his bucket of water and a hot bottle from the stove. “If he knows me, that’s guns, Henry. But he’s all Western. He’s lived here, worked here, grown famous here...and that’s why we don’t hear more of him in New York and other places. But I want to walk under his eyes, be introduced to him, shake hands with him. Then he’s not likely to think I’m dangerous and worth a little study. I don’t want to give him the trouble of coming to find me, Henry, if you can understand.”
Henry nodded, with open admiration in his eyes. “If I had what you’ve got,” he said, “I’d have the world. I’d have the crown jewels of England out of the tower, and take ’em away in a grip at noonday. I’d walk into the Bank of England and take away the heart of it with a ten-ton truck. Why, there ain’t a thing you couldn’t have, fixed the way you are.”
“Then why don’t I have it, Henry?”
“Because,” said the other, “you’re too good to be bad, and too bad to be good. That’s the straight of it. Hurry up. I’ll lay out your dark suit. Are you going to slick up?”
“About halfway. That’s all.”
“And you’re goin’ to the dance, too? You really mean it?”
“I mean it, and you are going to stay home.”
He paused in soaping himself to level a forefinger like a gun at Henry, and the latter grinned with enjoyment.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll be home. I’ll be here when you come back.” But his keen eye flickered away from that of Duval.
The latter, though he marked the sign well and understood it, said not a syllable more on the subject. He dressed rapidly. They sat together through dinner, chatting of the farm, of the horses, of the peculiar ways of the old mule, and most about Discretion.
They sat long.
“How did she come by that name?” Henry asked at last.
“She’s the finest thing I ever owned,” said Duval, “and therefore I hunted about for the best name I could find.”
“Salvator...,” said the old man. “There’s a name for a horse.”
“A big, round Roman name for a horse,” said Duval. “But Discretion, Henry, is a better name. Because discretion is a thing that you keep in your head wherever you go. It keeps you from the wrong chance. It tucks you into bed at night. It keeps guns out of your hands, or if one is put there, it makes the bullet go home. Discretion makes your voice and your
footsteps soft. Discretion keeps you home at night.”
He raised a finger as he said it, and old Henry, lowering his eyes, sat quietly, rubbing his chin.
Chapter Fifteen
It was a big dance, a dressed-up dance.
Spurred boots and bandanas and rough shirts remained in bunkhouses, and from the pegs on the walls wrinkled, unfitted suits of blue serge were taken down, brushed with a fond hope that the spots of yesteryear might not show their faces, and sorrowed over, because old sins would not be hidden. However, there was nothing for it but to don them. They washed in tubs of cold water, those men of the range, and scrubbed themselves with laundry soap, and rubbed themselves dry with harsh cotton towels. They dressed with care. They donned fancifully colored shirts. They buckled chokingly high turnover collars around their bulky necks, and then stood before dim, little, cracked mirrors, tiptoe, with agonized effort, while they tied neckties of white, with little streaks of colored flowers down the center.
They brushed their hair and cursed and watered the tangles that insisted on standing upright in spite of patient labor. Their faces were red with shaving and with work, when at last they squeezed their feet into old shoes, and blacked the dingy toes of them, letting the heels take care of themselves.
After that, miserable, pinched in many places, they passed one another in review. They told each other that they looked “fine,” that they “certainly looked fit,” and that they would stop the show when they began to prance. Then they climbed into carts, into buckboards, and drove from five to thirty miles to attend the festivities.
The orchestra began to moan at eight. New arrivals were still coming in until after midnight, shrugging their shoulders, gripping their hands to get self-confidence, and working their necks uneasily up and down inside their collars.