by Max Brand
And fear, too. I suppose no hatred is perfect without fear thrown in. They feared his scorn, which was as strong as their own rage. And they feared, above all, that faultless, swift, sure hand and the eye as steady as drilled steel—the eye and the hand that would not make mistakes when the time for battle came.
So, in a breathless silence, they watched him. If there had been a dozen sheriffs there, they could not have arrested him, because there were no proved crimes to charge to the account of Chester Ormonde Furness. He was not fool enough to sin recklessly in daylight without a mask drawn over his handsome features. And he had a way of roughening and sharpening that smooth voice of his so that no one could be sure that the ruffian behind the mask was really this dapper Furness. No one could be sure, but they could guess near enough. The whole county could not have delivered testimony enough to have hanged this man, but the whole county did assuredly know one thing, which was that Furness deserved to die with a rope around his neck.
Very strange to Sammy Gregg, newly come from a breath of Eastern life where the law lives in every corner of even the greatest city. Very strange to know that ten days had carried him from Manhattan to Munson.
Furness was making a speech, but still nothing happened in the body of the buckboard, nothing stirred. Could it be that the men were really dead? That thought obsessed Sammy and sickened him. And there was something so terrible in the cold eye of Furness that Sammy could well believe he had brought two dead men to the town.
“Gentlemen, neighbors,” Furness said, “and I had almost said . . . friends. A pity, too, that I cannot say it. For I am sure that I have done my best to win . . . your respect.” He paused and laughed softly in their faces.
A stir of anger worked through the crowd, and terror with the anger. Oh, what a man was this, to play with these fifty human tigers as Chester Furness was playing.
“But though I trust,” went on the mocker, “that I may have won your respect, still it seems that you cannot be persuaded to keep at anything but a formal distance. However, you still remain, if not my friends, at least, my neighbors . . . and gentlemen.” And he laughed again, filled certainly with an exquisite devil.
Sammy heard an iron-faced man beside him murmuring: “I wish to heaven I had the nerve to try him, but he’s got his eye fixed special right on me . . . he knows.”
So it seemed to them all, no doubt, as though that omnipresent eye were fixed steadily upon them, each face singled out particularly by The Duke.
“But lately,” Furness continued, “it seems that there has been a growing habit among you of sending out people to call upon me . . . to come unannounced and give me a pleasant surprise.” He paused, and there was just a little less amusement and a little more cruel edge in his smiling. “The young men of Munson and of Chadwick City have made it a point to drift about through the hills and through the forest hunting for me, to pay their respects. Very kind of them. But it keeps me rather nervous. It keeps me, in short, feeling that I must always have my house in order, seeing that I never know when to expect callers. The result is that I rarely rest, and I really have to keep watchful.”
All of those innuendoes were patent enough, and they might have brought a snarl from the crowd, but it was too fascinated with his narrative now to pay much attention even to his insults. Something was coming—something of dreadful moment. They could guess it, and they wondered from what direction the trouble would strike Munson.
“Finally,” said The Duke, “when others had failed to find me at home . . . two young gentlemen of Munson decided that they must try their hands and come up to have a look at me. So they came up and in the middle of last night they dropped in upon me. Oh, most unexpectedly. I could only sit up in my blankets and stare at them. And they stood there and stared back at me.”
He paused to light a cigarette, while the crowd held its breath. But Sammy, who already guessed the point of the tale, was turning sick with sorrow and with disgust.
“Of course,” The Duke went on, “I wanted to make them at home, but they insisted upon doing the honors for me. And they made me sit quietly there by my fire, with one of them on each side of me. We were all very quiet, for a time.” He laughed again. And when he stopped laughing, his nostrils were quivering, and his eyes flashed like whips across the faces of the crowd. “They could not think of very much to say, so it seemed, and so they filled in the interval toying with their Colts. As for me, I was so pleased and surprised to have them with me, that you can imagine that I was quite dumb. However, they presently fell into a discussion as to which of them could rightly claim the honor of having found my campfire. After that, they grew quite hot over the point of which of them had the pleasure of first confronting me in my camp.
“You will not believe me when I tell you how irritated they became. Suddenly they had jumped to their feet. They declared that they had had enough of one another. I, sitting on the ground between them, begged them to lower their voices . . . because the buzzards might be listening.” The Duke tilted back his head and laughed, with a sound like the snarl of a wolf buried deep in his throat. “But all I could say was as nothing to them. I have told you already that they had their guns out. Now they jerked them up to the hip. I think young Harper fired twice, and young Blythe fired only once. But, unfortunately, both of them shot too straight.” He paused and looked with mock sorrow around him. “To my most stinging grief, I found myself suddenly sitting with a dead man upon either side of me, each shot cleverly through the head. Imagine my confusion and my sorrow.”
“And as I sat there through the night with the dead men, it occurred to me that I really owed it to the town of Munson, and my acquaintances there, to let them know just how these poor young men had stumbled into the arms of death, so to speak, in spite of my protests against it. And it seemed to me that I should try to find some way in which I could discourage those fine young men of the towns from wandering through the hills trying to catch me unawares. Because I was afraid lest they might, also, quarrel with one another, just as poor young Harper quarreled with poor young Blythe about which of them should take precedence in my camp. And finally it seemed to me that the very best way I could manage the thing would be to carry Harper and Blythe into the town and let their friends see just what they did to themselves. And so, gentlemen, here they are.”
He snatched the blue calico sheet away from them and let the staring, horror-stricken people look on the dead faces of the two boys. Their guns were still in their hands, placed there by the devilish forethought of Furness.
“And it is my modest trust,” went on Furness, “that the other young men from the towns in this neighborhood will be deterred from following the same example, because I really should not like to waste many more days carting the poor young men back to Munson or to Chadwick City. Gentlemen, I make a present of the buckboard and the bay horse to the town of Munson. Until old Mister Graham happens along . . . as no doubt he will before long . . . to remark that I was forced to borrow it from him. Tell him, then, that the roan horse broke its legs, and so I put it out of its pain and harnessed my own galloper in its place. However, he need not thank me for that. Gentlemen, good day. May we continue to be just as neighborly as ever. But let my next callers announce themselves to save confusion.”
Here he was reining his great gray horse backward down the street. No, he dropped the reins, and so perfectly trained was that magnificent stallion that it continued to back gradually down the street, leaving the left hand of Furness free to take off his hat and salute with it the staring crowd, while his right hand still rested jauntily on his thigh, near to the butt of a Colt revolver. He reached the next corner, and a sway of his body caused the well-trained stallion to leap sidewise, like a cat, throwing the master behind cover. And so he was away.
Of course there was a reaching for guns the instant his terrible eye was removed from them, but by the time they reached the corner, the stallion was already out of view behind a hill.
Chapter Nin
eteen
There was no pursuit of The Duke, for, as Rendell remarked, though everyone knew that Furness had lied rankly and that the bullets that had killed the two adventurous youths had come from his own revolver, yet what way had they of proving what they felt to be the truth? They could only think their thoughts, but so far as a legal case against Furness was concerned—they had not the shadow of a ghost of one. He was not pursued, but allowed to retire into the mountains to work away at his schemes.
“Only,” Sammy said to Rendell, “I don’t understand how a . . . gentleman like that, could be a robber . . . and a murderer!”
“When I was a kid,” Rendell said, “I used to read a little mite. And I remember a book about some of the old gentlemen who used to go around in store clothes that was cut out of cast-iron junk and their idea of a happy little outing in those days was to shy a spear at you and knock you off your horse and then dip six or seven inches of steel dirk through the bars of your helmet and through your eye and into your brain so’s you wouldn’t feel much pain. A very neat outfit. Well, them ways has got sort of old-fashioned. Gents with them inclinations is discouraged something scandalous most places in the world. But right out here, Sammy Gregg, there is room for some of them to go a-gallivanting around and pick up a little of what they call fun and some spare money, besides. And that’s what my idea of Furness is. He’s simply bad by nature and by taste, you might say.”
Something of that was in the mind of Sammy, also. “But,” he said, “how long will it be before the people get together and get rid of him?”
“That always happens, I suppose,” Rendell opined.
“I think so.”
“In fiction, perhaps, but in actual fact, I don’t think so. Some of the worst skunks I ever seen have lived the longest lives, and you can lay to that.”
However, there was not much time on the hands of Sammy to indulge in thought about the nature and the ways of Furness. He was too busy with his own affairs in the accomplishment of which, to be sure, Furness appeared as one of the obstacles to the smooth operation of the stage line for which he was planning. But Furness was only one among many obstacles. He and others of his kind, no doubt, would make it a precarious business for any of the miners in the Crumbock lode to entrust their earnings to the stage for transportation. And even passengers, as the Chadwick man had put it, had begun to lack enthusiasm for stage traffic when they were held up two times out of three and their pockets picked.
Yet he trusted that once he got the line in operation, he might be able to swing the deal and keep the stages fairly safe. He refused to cross any bridge until he came to it. And, in the meantime, his hands were full.
He had to employ teamsters, in the first place, to bring the lumber of the station houses of the Chadwick City Company, which he had bought for a song. And when the timber arrived in Munson, he had to send it out to each of the station sites that he had selected for his own route. He had picked those station sites with much care, sometimes making a long distance between points of relay, but always striving, if possible, to give to each station plenty of wood and water and grazing land, which must next be fenced in for the horses.
He had heard from Gonzalez. By the grace of good fortune, that able cavalier had come to Juárez in time to get the letter. Now he was busy gathering mustangs and breaking them, using a hardy crew of men for the work. But it was difficult. To break a horse to the saddle was one thing. To break it to pull a wagon was quite another, most fabulously considered to be an easier task. But the work went forward in spite of all difficulties. The stations of relay were located and built, and the pasture lands fenced in near them, and hardy men were gathered—a ticket agent at either end of the line, and eight skillful, daring men who were willing to risk their lives driving the stages, and twenty men to man the relay stations—and, in addition to all of these matters, a thousand little details that no one but Sammy himself could supervise. He was flying back and forward between Munson and the Crumbock mines nearly every day. He had to keep a string of horses in both towns, and all those nags were worn almost to a shadow.
One pleasant discovery was made almost at the beginning of the affair. The men of Crumbock were disposed to smile at the slender little thin-faced man who declared that he was going to put a stage line through from Crumbock to the outer world, but when word came up from Munson that this same little man was already known there and that he had been as good as his word in at least one other large transaction, Crumbock came instantly out of its smiling humor and began to pat Sammy on the back.
For Crumbock was being stifled—fairly stifled for the lack of proper transportation between its mines and the towns beyond the rough, inner core of the highest mountains. The lode needed manpower for its development, for one thing, and whoever wanted to cross the mountains had to pack up three days’ provisions, bought at famine prices in Chadwick City or in Munson, and thence plod wearily on a five- or a seven-day trip to the mines. And men bound for mines do not like to have a week’s walk put in at some point on the journey.
But manpower was the least of the troubles at the Crumbock mines. All that was needed for the mines, from ironwork to powder, had to be delayed to the speed of the wagons that crawled wearily across the mountains. A small thing could delay a teamster for a week. A broken axle might stall him indefinitely, and broken axles were common commodities on the road from Munson to Crumbock. So the mines were throttled for the lack of rapid and certain delivery of supplies that were so vitally needed. The slow freight could be handled, after their manner, by the wagons, but when a man needed a set of new drills and needed them in a rush—could he sit twiddling his thumbs while the wagons slowly moiled away to Munson, and there waited for the goods, and then slowly, slowly struggled back to the upper peaks where the lode was? No, for by that time that necessary bit of drilling might be a month out of date.
In short, Crumbock was a place where the necessities of existence were growing more numerous every instant, as the ground was broken deeper and deeper and the mining problem became more abstruse. And there was no artery of supply. There was even no sure way of getting letters through to Munson or to Chadwick City. And a dozen of the larger concerns were each maintaining their own mail service, at enormous expense and uncertainty, dispatching riders into the wilderness.
What wonder then, that a dozen hearts were broken when the Chadwick City line failed them? And what wonder that a great pulse of joy ran through the big camp when it was learned that another line would try the shorter but more difficult passage from Munson to the lode?
Little Sammy Gregg found himself received like a most important personage at the camp. And everyone had time enough to talk business with him.
Then Gonzalez arrived at Munson with the first half of the horse herd—a hundred and fifty head of fire-eyed mustangs with a far-away look in their eyes and ears that quivered backward and forward to betoken danger. However, they were all broken—after a fashion. Gonzalez solemnly described how he had found a wagon made of iron, with lofty, old-fashioned wheels, and iron spokes, and iron hubs, and, indeed, everything about it except the bed composed of the finest wrought iron. To that indestructible vehicle he had hitched half a dozen mustangs at a time. The harness that he had used was made of heavy chains, very thinly coated with leather. It could not be broken, and the more the mustangs kicked, the more they simply stripped away the leather paddings and exposed themselves to the rusted iron chains that bit through mustang skin and flesh and cut quickly to the bone. Hence certain scabby places on the legs of all his four-legged stock.
But the wagon could not be broken by all the bucking and plunging and kicking—the chain harness had refused to give way—and the iron singletrees had refused to snap. The mustangs might have tied themselves into as many knots as they chose, but when they got through fighting, the driver still sat on the seat above them, long-lashed whip in hand, and with whip and voice he had urged them back toward quiet behavior and good sense. If they tried, finall
y, to bolt to freedom, the huge brakes of the vehicle dragged the wheels until they had had enough of plowing it through the soft sand. And if they chose to balk, they were whipped until the blood spurted. In this fashion, every horse, as Gonzalez swore, had been harnessed at least four times to the iron wagon and handled with whip and with rein.
“And every team had to pull that wagon two mile, señor,” Gonzalez informed Sammy. “Oh, yes, these very gentle, now.”
Sammy might have his doubt of that. Whatever lessons might have been taught, they seemed to have lapsed back into their native wildness quickly enough on the northward drive to Munson. But at any rate, he accepted the mustangs—he could do nothing else—scattered them in groups along the route at the relay stations, and prepared to make the first trip across the mountains in his stage line, while Gonzalez returned to hurry up the second installment of the horses that were already on the way.
It was an anxious time for Sammy Gregg. He had invested $7,500 in horses alone. He had paid out $1,500 in wages for the building of his relay shacks and sleeping houses. He had spent another $2,500 for harness. It was strong harness, but the price was life’s blood from Sammy Gregg. And beyond all that, he had invested $1,000 in the odds and ends of the necessities—such as the coaches themselves.
Before the first coach ran, he had spent close to $13,000, and he had not yet received a single penny in return. Well for Sammy Gregg that he had already been through that Western school of investment.
He had a scant $3,000 in his pocket when he saw the team picked for the first run from Munson into the wilds. And he saw the first return on his labor and his capital, too. Ten men, he estimated, would be in each load, and men were willing to pay $25 a throw to be whirled across those mountains in a single day and a half. $250 for each trip for human passengers alone, to say nothing of what would be paid for the other freight—perhaps another $250. For every journey, then, $500.