by Max Brand
“I’ve done some when I was a kid.”
“You can step,” the marshal said absently. And suddenly he was looking at Duval with an open, flaming envy in his eyes, so extremely patent that Duval had to look out the door to avoid appearing to recognize it. He felt an odd pang of superiority, amusement, and pity combined, for he saw with this touch of human nature that the great Dick Kinkaid, the stern marshal, the slayer of men, was in some respects as much an envious little boy as any other human in the world.
“Partly,” the marshal began again, shrugging his heavy shoulders, “I come here on business. I’ve heard that you got a mare that can outrun the jack rabbits.”
“She’s fast,” admitted Duval without enthusiasm.
“In my line,” said Kinkaid, “I need a fast one. I’d aim to buy that mare, Duval.”
“Would you?” Duval said. “But she ain’t for sale. Besides, she wouldn’t carry your weight, I reckon.”
“I’d like to see her. Maybe I could make you an offer.”
Duval did not hesitate. There was not likely to be a man in the West who would refuse to offer his horse to the admiration of even the most casual passer-by, let alone such a celebrity as Kinkaid. He went out at once with the big man and took him to the pasture.
She was grazing on the far side, and at the whistle of the master she tossed her head and came to him with her long, bounding stride.
Kinkaid looked at her with a critical eye. “Rawhide and cat gut,” he said. “She’s twice what she looks. She could carry me, Duval.”
“Maybe, Kinkaid, but don’t you go tempting me. I like that mare a lot.”
“I’ll tell you,” said the marshal. “Without no trial, without looking her over, I’ll pay you down five hundred spot cash for her.”
It was a large price, almost a staggering price on a range where a tough mustang, broken to the saddle, could be bought for $50, and in Mexico for less.
Duval, entrenched in his part, saw that he must appear to be tempted, so he said: “It’s a lot of money, Kinkaid. But look here...I was flush last winter and had a bust clean to New York. I saw a horse show there and she done fine, the way she slid over the jumps. I couldn’t get her out of my head. So, I sent for and got her when I was flush again. It cost me a lot of money, and a lot of thinking, too.”
“Well,” Kinkaid said impatiently, “lemme try her, will you?”
“Sure.”
Kinkaid brought up his own saddle from the powerful animal he had been riding, and this was cinched on the back of the mare, then the marshal mounted. He simply jogged her down to the bottom of the path, then turned her and galloped her back to the pasture at full speed.
His eyes gleamed as he dismounted, but his deep voice was quiet as he said: “A thousand dollars, Duval.”
Duval looked around him at the pitiful farm on which he appeared in the eye of the world to be pouring forth all his might of labor for what niggard results. Almost the price of that farm had been offered to him for the horse and now the marshal went on to expand upon the thought.
“You gotta have more acres. You can get ’em with this money. Take a gent like you that’ll be marrying before long, he’s gotta have more land than this to keep a wife, and maybe kids.”
“Yeah,” Duval agreed grudgingly. “But look here, Kinkaid. There’s some things that you can’t get with money. Suppose you seen a man with a fine son. Would you put a price on the kid?”
“Suppose I wanted him, why not? Suppose that I could give the kid a fine home, and everything that he wanted, and a reputation.... Why, I’d make this here mare famous, Duval. If I could fork her, the crook I started after would think that the wind had blowed me over the hills.” After a pause, he added: “I’ll come up a little. I’ll give you twelve hundred iron men for her.”
Duval shook his head.
“Oh,” said Kinkaid, “money don’t mean much to you, eh? Maybe I was wrong. I thought that you was a small farmer, Duval. Maybe you’re just a banker taking a vacation?”
At this slowly drawled suspicion, Duval felt himself weaken. Certainly his own attitude was going to be hard to understand if he held out much longer. But he knew it was not merely for the pursuit of criminals that the other wanted the horse. He had some purpose in the back of his mind that was not to the advantage of the present owner of the mare, though what that purpose could be, Duval was unable to decipher. Unwillingly, too, he admired the liberal methods by which Kinkaid had fairly cornered him. All that was left for him to do was to growl: “You could buy a whole cavvy with that there money, Kinkaid. Leave me be with my horse and buy a herd.”
“I’ll make you a last price,” said the marshal. “I want her, and I figger that I ought to have her. What good is she to you? She ain’t for plowing. You don’t often go out, except down to the village, I reckon. She’s nothing to you but something to look at...and I’ll pay you fifteen hundred cash on the nail for her.”
Cold perspiration burst out on Duval. He was silenced and sick at heart.
“That,” went on Kinkaid, “is what you give for your house and your whole farm. You can have twice as much of a farm, now. If farming is what you’re really interested in.”
“No,” Duval declared, “I can’t let her go.”
But he said it faintly, for he realized that this refusal would make his whole position seem absurd. No farmer in his apparent condition could afford to throw away such a tidy little fortune as this.
Kinkaid did not appear to have heard the refusal. He had taken out a long, fat, pigskin wallet, and, unfolding this, he drew out a stack of bills, oddly neat and crisp. From them he took two $500 notes, and after these, some of smaller denominations. He packed the stack together neatly, and offered it to Duval, who reached for it, hesitated, and then took it in his hand with another speech of refusal on his lips.
The marshal, however, seemed to take the conclusion of the affair for granted. He turned to the mare and looked her over almost spitefully now, scowling at her long legs and skinny, reaching neck.
“She’s pretty lean,” he objected. “I’d like to put fifty pounds on her, but I reckon that she’s one of them skinny ones that never get fat. Here you, Cherry, stand still.” He raised his voice loudly as he delivered the order. The ears of the mare flattened, but she was still.
“I’m late,” said Kinkaid. “Here...sign this. It ain’t very regular, but it’ll do for a bill of sale, maybe.” And he placed before Duval a slip of paper that read:
For value received I, the undersigned, have sold the chestnut mare called Discretion to Richard Kinkaid.
Duval, with the marshal’s fountain pen in his hand and the paper resting on top of a post, hesitated long, with bitterness in his heart. He had been trapped, and sign he must, so the pen slowly traced his name — D. Duval.
He passed it back and thrust the sale money down into his coat pocket. Looking up, it seemed to him that he had surprised a faint smile upon the lips of the other.
But the thing was ended. The mare was gone. Kinkaid was riding her down toward the gate!
Chapter Nineteen
What is more stifling than for a strong and brave man to be forced to control his anger? So it was that Duval choked with his wrath as he looked down the path after the marshal. That half-suppressed smile suggested many things — that the marshal might have guessed that $1,500 was hardly a third part of the price of the runner, and, therefore, that there was almost as much of the fox as of the lion in the composition of Kinkaid.
At any rate, he had come, he had seen, and he had conquered, in the course of a scant half hour. It was as though a charge of enemies had swept over Duval, and left him crushed in the dust. He had all the feeling of the vanquished — humiliation, rage, and helpless despair.
Cherry was gone forever!
Such a procession of pictures then passed through his mind as had not bee
n in it for many a day, for he was seeing all the days and the ways of Cherry, from her spring as a foal to her wild days as a two-year-old, when she had been tried for the track and found just short of the right foot, and then the dark days of her three-year-old form, when she was neither hunter nor racer, but simply a long-striding hack, pleasant to drift with across the countryside. In those days, their affection for one another had become fixed. He rode her not because he valued her, but because he loved her wise, ugly head, and her imperial ways, and she loved him as only a good horse can love her master. In her fourth year began her glory, and this was her fifth.
But now she was taken out of his hand by the coin and the cunning of Kinkaid, lost to him forever, and he actually had signed the document that divided them!
So thought Duval, as he looked after the marshal, and suddenly he roused himself, and forced his lips to smile. He made himself whistle cheerfully as he went back to the plow team, and in a few more minutes, he was singing as he followed through the dust of the rattling, dodging, jumping harrow. But for all of his change of face and front, there was less security for Kinkaid’s future at that moment than there ever had been before.
* * * * *
Kinkaid himself had ridden down to the village, and there he stopped in front of the grocery store to buy some dried meat for his food supply. Not that he needed the meat, but that he wished to accomplish a double outside purpose. One was to allow the people of Moose Creek to see what he had done. The other was to personally inform Miss Marian Lane.
The crowd was gathering the instant the marshal appeared on the chestnut, but for the moment he had enough to do in meeting the girl.
She finished serving a customer, but her eyes and her smile were both for Kinkaid as he strode toward the counter. And then she saw the mare tethered in the street just as he gave his order.
It was the sweetest pleasure to Kinkaid to see the consternation, almost the fear, in her face.
“You borrowed her?” she gasped in explanation.
“I bought her,” said the marshal. “I needed a fast horse, so I bought her. I want two pounds of dried beef and a pound of hardtack.”
She went to fill the order. “Poor Duval,” she said as she brought the order to him and wrapped it up. “Poor Duval. Is he as broke as that?”
But he saw, with relief, that it was not real pity that was in her voice, but merely the semblance of it. Really, there was sheer excitement, and she looked at him as though he had accomplished some wonderful thing, far beyond the mere purchase of a horse. She, too, knew that Duval had been vanquished, and the thought made her eyes shine.
And the heart of the marshal was filled with surety and with peace. He had thought, the night before, that Duval had danced his way into the very heart of the girl. He assured himself now that there was no fear whatever of that danger.
“You paid, then?” she said.
“Fifteen hundred,” the marshal answered carelessly.
He did not look at her as he gathered up his parcel, but he knew that he had made a point, and a great one. Such a sum of money as this was not spent, in that range, for the sake of a riding horse.
Then he went out hastily. He knew that he could not make effects by mere conversation. His rôle with her must be that of the man of action, who performs three deeds to every sentence that he speaks. But as he reached the street, he felt confident that he had done more than a little to establish himself in her eyes.
From the crowd, too, he received the same murmur of wonder.
Pete came out from his place of business, wiping his hands on his white apron, and gaped like a child at the mare and her new rider.
“Borrowed?”
“Bought,” said the marshal.
“My gosh,” said Pete. “Poor Duval! Is he gone bust, already?”
But Charlie Nash, dark with doubt, shook his head. “There’s something behind it,” he whispered to himself. “There’s gonna be trouble. There’s gonna be big trouble. There’s gonna be trouble that Moose Creek never seen the like.”
The marshal, content, went whirling out of town with the long-striding mare half extended, swaying him forward, even then, at an amazing speed. In this gait, he held her for mile after mile, and then he sprinted her up a sharp slope, and at the top of it reined her in and listened carefully to her breathing. She was well covered with sweat, but then the day was warm. Her breathing was slow and easy, and she went up well against the bit, plain token that she was fit for further effort. Kinkaid drew in a breath so deep that it crowded his shoulders back, and made him sit the saddle like a conqueror returning from the battlefield. He felt, in fact, that the battle already was won, that he had demonstrated his superiority over Duval in this entire transaction, that he had staggered the faith of Moose Creek in its hero, and that he had fixed the attention of Marian Lane entirely upon himself.
The latter was, for the moment, the most important thing that he could do. It seemed to Kinkaid, indeed, that this was the most important object toward which he could strive, at that time, and he smiled with a grim self-content. Other men devoted a vital portion of life to the pursuit of the woman they wished to marry. He, having found her, would, in a few days, brush from the stage all other contenders, and take her if he chose.
He was not, in fact, a self-important ass, but he had won so often in other fields that he could not conceive of defeat.
As for Duval, it seemed patent to the marshal that the mare was not too expensive, even at $1,500. How much had Duval paid for her, then? Why did he let her go at no profit, or even at a loss? Obviously, simply to maintain his rôle as the simple farmer of no resources. That rôle, then, was a farce, and something lay behind Duval more than the eye perceived. That, then, was the reason that Marian Lane had begged him to find out more about the stranger at Moose Creek.
The marshal literally laughed aloud, for he began to see that this was not only a woman for his heart but also a companion for his brain. The thought enriched him already, in prospect. She was one who would know his problems, understand them enough to give keen feminine suggestions, here and there, and, above all, enough to admire the talent that he expended in his labors.
He wakened from his daydream with a start to find himself almost in the act of riding past the Broom & Carson place. He turned in hastily, biting his lip, and straightaway began his investigation.
To the amazement of the distressed Mr. Carson, who was frantically walking up and down inside, the celebrated marshal paid not the slightest heed to the interior of the shop, but he went out to a certain patch of poplar trees that he had located when he first cut for sign around the place.
There he had found the grass trampled, and leading from the trees back into the woods there were more hoof marks in the grass. They had been made by a trotting horse, and the length of the stride was what had made him think at once of the mare of Duval, now celebrated on the range for her long action.
He trotted the mare in a parallel course, but when he dismounted for measurement, he discovered that the slipping of the hoofs in the grass and the fact that that which had been trampled down in the morning already was springing up straight again, made it impossible for him to make any accurate measurements for comparison.
He looked next down the back trail, striving to find a distinct print of a hoof, but that was almost equally difficult.
There were plenty of dim impressions upon dead pine needles; there were scratches on rocky surfaces; but there were no real prints. He had been working for at least an hour in this patient fashion, getting no results, when he was aware that he was being watched from behind his back. When he turned sharply about, he saw a tall man with a gloomy face, a big fellow whose thin lips were hooked in the curve of a perpetual sneer.
“Hello!” said Kinkaid. “What are you looking at, stranger?”
“I’m lookin’ at a man waste his time, Kinkaid,” said
the other.
The marshal took no immediate offense.
“Can you do better at this job?” he asked.
“Tolerable,” said the other.
“That’s what you say.”
For a reply, the other carelessly raked the pine needles that lay before his foot. “Look here,” he said.
The marshal obediently went to look, and there he found the complete and delicate outline of a near forehoof, the very nail holes being clearly indicated.
“That’s what you want, I reckon?” said the stranger.
The marshal, without an answer, brought up the mare at once, and caused her to step with the left forehoof exactly beside the former mark.
The instant the impression was made, there was no need for measurement. The two were identical to the spacing of the nail holes. There was the same rather large spread of hoof. The same distance between the open ends of the shoe. In all respects the two were identical, and it was established that moment beyond cavil that this mare, earlier in the morning, had been ridden to the poplars, held there long enough to trample the grass down, and then brought back through the trees.
“Duval was at the dance,” said the marshal. “Who are his friends in Moose Creek? Because I got an idea that one of ’em is a fellow with a hurt hand, just now.”
“There’s an old man named Henry that lives with him,” said the stranger.
“Tell me,” said the marshal with interest, “who are you? If you got eyes as good as this, I could use you, friend, and pay you good for your time, too.”
“I got no use for money on this job,” replied the other sourly. “I’m in it for the sake of doin’ what I can to Duval. My name is Larry Jude.”
Chapter Twenty
The conclusions of the marshal were prompt, definite, and strong. Mr. Henry, as he learned, had accompanied the mare from the East. Since Duval in person could not have committed the robbery, and since the mare was most apparently ridden by the robber, therefore, Henry was the guilty man.