by B. M. Bower
Jack looked at him quickly, struck by something in Bill’s voice that betrayed his real concern. “Don’t take it to heart, Bill,” he said, dropping his bantering and his stubbornness together. “I won’t air my views quite so publicly, after this. I know I was a fool to talk quite as straight as I did last night; but some one else brought up the subject of Sandy; and Swift called him a name Sandy’d have smashed him in the face for, if he’d been alive and heard it. I always liked the fellow, and it made me hot to see them hustle him out of town and hang him like they’d shoot a dog that had bitten some one, when I knew he didn’t deserve it. You or I would have shot, just as quick as he did, if a drunken Spaniard made for us with a knife. So would the Captain, or Swift, or any of the others.
“I know—I’ve got a nasty tongue when something riles me, and I lash out without stopping to think. Dade has given me the devil for that, more times than I can count. He went after me about this very thing, too, the other day. I’ll try and forget about Sandy; it doesn’t make pleasant remembering, anyway. And I’ll promise to count a hundred before I mention the Committee above a whisper, after this—nine hundred and ninety-nine before I take the name of Swift or the Captain in vain!” He smiled full at Bill—a smile to make men love him for the big-hearted boy he was.
But Bill did not grin back. “Well, it won’t hurt you any; they’re bad men to fuss with, both of ’em,” he warned somberly.
“Come on out and climb a hill or two with me,” Jack urged. “You’ve got worse kinks in your system, today, than I’ve got in my legs. You won’t? Well, better go back and take another sleep, then; it may put you in a more optimistic mood.” He went off up the street towards the hills to the south, turning in at the door of a tented eating-place for his belated breakfast.
“Optimistic hell!” grunted Bill. “You can’t tell a man anything he don’t think he knows better than you do, till he’s past thirty. I was a fool to try, I reckon.”
He glowered at the vanishing figure, noting anew how tall and straight Jack was in his close-fitting buckskin jacket, with the crimson sash knotted about his middle in the Spanish style, his trousers tucked into his boots like the miners, and to crown all, a white sombrero such as the vaqueros wore. Handsome and headstrong he was; and Bill shook his head over the combination which made for trouble in that land where the primal instincts lay all on the surface; where men looked askance at the one who drew oftenest the glances of the women and who walked erect and unafraid in the midst of the lawlessness. Jack Allen was fast making enemies, and no one knew it better than Bill.
When the young fellow disappeared, Bill looked again at the shifting crowd upon which his eyes were wont to rest with the speculative gaze of a farmer who leans upon the fence that bounds his land, and regards his wheat-fields ripening for the sickle. He liked Jack, and the soul of him was bitter with the bitterness that is the portion of maturity, when it must stand by and see youth learn by the pangs of experience that fire will burn most agonizingly if you hold your hand in the blaze.
One of his night bartenders came up; and Bill, dismissing Jack from his mind, with a grunt of disgust, went in to talk over certain changes which he meant to make in the bar as soon as he could get material and carpenter together upon the spot.
He was still fussing with certain of the petty details that make or mar the smooth running of an establishment like his, when his ear, trained to detect the first note of discord in the babble which filled his big room by night, caught an ominous note in the hum of the street crowd outside. He lifted his head from examining a rickety table-leg.
“Go see what’s happened, Jim,” he suggested to the man, who had just come up with a hammer and some nails; and went back to dreaming of the time when his place should be a palace, and he would not have to nail the legs on his tables every few days because of the ebullitions of excitement in his customers. He had strengthened the legs, and was testing them by rocking the table slightly with a broad palm upon it, when Jim came back.
“Some shooting scrape, back on the flat,” Jim announced indifferently. “Some say it was a hold-up. Two or three of the Committee have gone out to investigate.”
“Yeah—I’ll bet the Committee went out!” snorted Bill. “They’ll be lynching the Diggers’ dogs for fighting, when the supply of humans runs out. They’ve just about played that buckskin out, packing men out to the oak to hang ’em lately,” he went on glumly, sliding the rejuvenated table into its place in the long row that filled that side of the room. “I never saw such an enthusiastic bunch as they’re getting to be!”
“That’s right,” Jim agreed perfunctorily, as a man is wont to agree with his employer. “Somebody’ll hang, all right.”
“There’s plenty that need it—if the Committee only had sense enough to pick ’em out and leave the rest alone,” growled Bill, going from table to table, tipping and testing for other legs that wobbled.
Jim sensed the rebuff in his tone and went back to the door, around which a knot of men engaged in desultory conjectures while they waited expectantly. A large tent that Perkins had found convenient as a temporary jail for those unfortunates upon whom his heavy hand fell swiftly, stood next to Bill’s place; and it spoke eloquently of the manner in which the Committee then worked, that men gathered there instinctively at the first sign of trouble. For when the Committee went out after culprits, it did not return empty-handed, as the populace knew well. Zealous custodians of the law were they, as Bill had said; and though they might have exchanged much of their zeal for a little of Bill’s sense of justice (to the betterment of the town), few of the waiting crowd had the temerity to say so.
Up the street, necks (whose owners had not thought it worth while to wade through the sand to the scene of the shooting) were being craned towards the flat behind the town, where the Captain and a few of his men had hurried at the first shot.
“They’re comin’,” Jim announced, thrusting his head into the gambling hall and raising his voice above the sound of the boss’s nail-driving.
“Well—what of it?” snapped Bill. “Why don’t you yell at me that the sun is going to set in the west tonight?” Bill drove the head of a four-cornered, iron nail clean out of sight in a table top. And Jim prudently withdrew his head and turned his face and his attention towards the little procession that was just coming into sight at the end of the rambling street, with the crowd closing in behind it as the water comes surging together behind an ocean liner.
Jim worshiped his boss, but he knew better than to argue with him when Bill happened to be in that particular mood, which, to tell the truth, was not often. But in five minutes or less he had forgotten the snub. His head popped in again.
“Bill!”
There may be much meaning in a tone, though it utters but one unmeaning word. Bill dropped a handful of nails upon a table and came striding down the long room to the door; pushed Jim unceremoniously aside and stood upon the step. He was just in time to look into the rageful, blue eyes of Jack Allen, walking with a very straight back and a contemptuous smile on his lips, between the Captain and one of his trusted lieutenants.
Bill’s fingers clenched suggestively upon the handle of the hammer. His jaw slackened and then pushed itself forward to a fighting angle while he stared, and he named in his amazement that place which the padres had taught the Indians to fear.
The Captain heard him and grinned sourly as he passed on. Jack heard him, and his smile grew twisted at the tone in which the word was uttered; but he still smiled, which was more than many a man would have done in his place.
Bill stood while the rest of that grim procession passed his place. There was another, a young fellow who looked ready to cry, walking unsteadily behind Jack, both his arms gripped by others of the Vigilance Committee. There were two crude stretchers, borne by stolid-faced miners in red flannel shirts and clay-stained boots. On the first a dead man lay grinning up at the sun, his teeth just showing under his bushy mustache, a trickle of red running down fro
m his temple. On the next a man groaned and mumbled blasphemy between his groanings.
Bill took it all in, a single glance for each,—a glance trained by gambling to see a great deal between the flicker of his lashes. He did not seem to look once at the Captain, yet he knew that Jack’s ivory-handled pistols hung at the Captain’s rocking hips as he went striding past; and he knew that malice lurked under the grizzled hair which hid the Captain’s cruel lips; and that satisfaction glowed in the hard, sidelong glance he gave his prisoner.
He stood until he saw Jack duck his head under the tent flaps of the jail and the white-faced youth follow shrinking after. He stood while the armed guards took up their stations on the four sides of the tent and began pacing up and down the paths worn deep in tragic significance. He saw the wounded man carried into Pete’s place across the way, and the dead man taken farther down the street. He saw the crowd split into uneasy groups which spoke a common tongue, that they might exchange unasked opinions upon this, the biggest sensation since Sandy left town with his ankles tied under the vicious-eyed buckskin whose riders rode always toward the west and whose saddle was always empty when he came back to his stall at the end of the town. Bill saw it all, to the last detail; but after his one explosive oath, he was apparently the most indifferent of them all.
When the Captain ended his curt instructions to the guard and came towards him, Bill showed a disposition to speak.
“Who’s the kid?” he drawled companionably, while his fingers itched upon the hammer, and the soul of him lusted for sight of the hole it could make in the skull of the Captain. “I don’t recollect seeing him around town—and there ain’t many faces I forget, either.”
The Captain shot him a surprised look that was an unconscious tribute to Bill’s diplomatic art. But Bill’s level glance would have disarmed a keener man than Tom Perkins.
Perkins stopped. “Stranger, from what he said—though I’ve got my doubts. Some crony of Allen’s, I expect. It was him done the shooting; the kid didn’t have any gun on him. Allen didn’t deny it, either.”
“No—he’s just bull-headed enough to tough it out,” commented Bill. “What was the row about—do yuh know?”
Perkins stiffened. “That,” he said with some dignity, “will come out at the trial. He killed Rawhide outright, and Texas Bill will die, I reckon. The trial will show what kinda excuse he thought he had.” Having delivered himself, thus impartially and with malice towards none, Perkins started on.
“Oh, say! You don’t mind if I talk to ’em?” Bill gritted his teeth at having to put the sentence in that favor-seeking tone, but he did it, nevertheless.
The Captain scowled under his black, slouch hat. “I’ve give strict orders not to let anybody inside the tent till after the trial,” he said shortly.
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll talk to ’em through the door,” Bill agreed equably. “Jack owes me some money.”
The Captain muttered unintelligibly and passed on, and Bill chose to interpret the mutter as consent. He strolled over to the tent, joked condescendingly with the guard who stood before it, and announced that the Captain had said he might talk to the prisoners.
“I did not,” said the Captain unexpectedly at his shoulder. “I said you couldn’t. After the trial, you can collect what’s coming to you, Mr. Wilson. That is,” he added hastily, “in case Allen should be convicted. If he ain’t, you can do as you please.” He looked full at the guard. “Shoot any man that attempts to enter that tent or talk to the prisoners without my permission, Shorty,” he directed, and turned his back on Bill.
Bill did not permit one muscle of his face to twitch. “All right,” he drawled, “I guess I won’t go broke if I don’t get it. You mind what your Captain tells you, Shorty! He’s running this show, and what he says goes. You’ve got a good man over yuh, Shorty. A fine man. He’ll weed out the town till it’ll look like grandpa’s onion bed—if the supply of rope don’t give out!” Whereupon he strolled carelessly back to his place, and went in as if the incident were squeezed dry of interest for him. He walked to the far end of the big room, sat deliberately down upon a little table, and rewarded himself for his forbearance by cursing methodically the Captain, the Committee of which he was the leader, the men who had witlessly given him the power he used so ruthlessly as pleased him best, and Jack Allen, whose ill-timed criticisms and hot-headed freedom of speech had brought upon himself the weight of the Committee’s dread hand.
“Damn him, I tried to tell him!” groaned Bill, his face hidden behind his palms. “They’ll hang him—and darn my oldest sister’s cat’s eyes, somebody’ll sweat blood for it, too!” (Bill, you will observe, had reached the end of real blasphemy and was forced to improvise milder expletives as he went along.) “There ought to be enough decent men in this town to—”
“Did you git to see Jack?” ventured Jim, coming anxiously up to his boss.
The tone of him, which was that hushed tone which we employ in the presence of the dead, so incensed Bill that for answer he threw the hammer viciously in his direction. Jim took the hint and retreated hastily.
“No, damn ’em, they won’t let me near him,” said Bill, ashamed of his violence. “I knew they’d get him; but I didn’t think they’d get him so quick. I sent a letter down by an Injun this morning to his pardner to come up and get him outa town before he—But it’s too late now. That talk he made last night—”
“Say, he shot Swift in the arm, too,” said Jim. “Pity he didn’t kill him. They’re getting a jury together already. Say! Ain’t it hell?”
CHAPTER III
THE THING THEY CALLED JUSTICE
Jack stared meditatively across at the young fellow sitting hunched upon another of the boxes that were the seats in this tent-jail, which was also the courtroom of the Vigilance Committee, and mechanically counted the slow tears that trickled down between the third and fourth fingers of each hand. A half-hour spent so would have rasped the nerves of the most phlegmatic man in the town, and Jack was not phlegmatic; fifteen minutes of watching that silent weeping sufficed to bring a muffled explosion.
“Ah, for God’s sake, brace up!” he gritted. “There’s some hope for you—if you don’t spoil what chance you have got, by crying around like a baby. Brace up and be a man, anyway. It won’t hurt any worse if you grin about it.”
The young fellow felt gropingly for a red-figured bandanna, found it and wiped his face and his eyes dejectedly. “I beg your pardon for seeming a coward,” he apologized huskily. “I got to thinking about my—m-mother and sisters, and—”
Jack winced. Mother and sisters he had longed for all his life. “Well, you better be thinking how you’ll get out of the scrape you’re in,” he advised, with a little of Bill Wilson’s grimness. “I’m afraid I’m to blame, in a way; and yet, if I hadn’t mixed into the fight, you’d be dead by now. Maybe that would have been just as well, seeing how things have turned out,” he grinned. “Still—have a smoke?”
“I never used tobacco in my life,” declined the youth somewhat primly.
“No, I don’t reckon you ever did!” Jack eyed him with a certain amount of pitying amusement. “A fellow that will come gold-hunting without a gun to his name, would not use tobacco, or swear, or do anything that a perfect lady couldn’t do! However, you put up a good fight with your fists, old man, and that’s something.”
“I’d have been killed, though, if you hadn’t shot when you did. They were too much for me. I haven’t tried to thank you—”
“No, I shouldn’t think you would,” grinned Jack. “I don’t see yet where I’ve done you any particular favor: from robbers to Vigilance Committee might be called an up-to-date version of ‘Out of the frying-pan into the fire.’”
The boy glanced fearfully toward the closed tent-flaps. “Ssh!” he whispered. “The guard can hear—”
“Oh, that’s all right,” returned Jack, urged perhaps to a conscious bravado by the very weakness of the other. “It’s all day with me, anyway.
I may as well say what I think.
“And so—” He paused to blow one of his favorite little smoke rings and watch it float to the dingy ridge-pole, where it flickered and faded into a blue haze “—and so, I’m going to say right out in meeting what I think of this town and the Committee they let measure out justice. Justice!” He laughed sardonically. “Poor old lady, she couldn’t stop within forty miles of Perkins’ Committee if she had forty bandages over her eyes, and both ears plugged with cotton! You wait till their farce of a trial is over. You may get off, by a scratch—I hope so. But unless Bill Wilson—”
“Aw, yuh needn’t pin no hopes on Bill Wilson!” came a heavy, malicious voice through the tent wall. “All hell can’t save yuh, Jack Allen! You’ve had a ride out to the oak comin’ to yuh for quite a while, and before sundown you’ll get it.”
“Oh! Is that so, Shorty? Say, you’re breaking the rules, you old pirate; you’re talking to the prisoners without permission. As the Captain’s most faithful dog Tray, you’d better shoot yourself; it’ll save the town the trouble of hanging you later on!” He smoked calmly while Shorty, on guard without, growled a vilifying retort, and the other guards snickered.
“Ah, brace up!” he advised his quaking companion again. “If my company doesn’t damn you beyond all hope, you may get out of the scrape. You didn’t have a gun, and you’re a stranger and haven’t said naughty things about your neighbors. Cheer up. Life looks just as good to me as it does to you. I love this old world just as well as any man that ever lived in it, and I’m not a bit pleased over leaving it—any more than you are. But I can’t see where I could better matters by letting myself get wobbly in the knees. I’m sorry I didn’t make a bigger fight to keep my guns, though. I’d like to have perforated a few more of our most worthy Committee before I quit; our friend Shorty, for instance,” he stipulated wickedly and clearly, “and the Captain.”