by B. M. Bower
“I’m going to begin on Sam, pretty quick,” he called through the open door. “I’ve got him right where I want him.” And he stated, with terrible exactness, his immediate intentions towards the bartender.
Behind his barricade of barrels, Sam heard and shivered like a gun-shy collie at a turkey shoot; shivered until human nerves could bear no more, and like the collie he left the storeroom and fled with a yelp of sheer terror. Ford turned just as Sam shot through the doorway into the dining-room, and splintered a beer bottle against the casing; glanced solemnly up at the barroom clock and, retreating to the nearly denuded bar, gravely poured himself another drink; held up the glass to the dusk-filmed window, squinted through it, decided that he needed a little more than that, and added another teaspoonful. Then he poured the contents of the glass down his throat as if it were so much water, wiped his lips upon a bar towel, picked a handful of coal from the depleted coal-hod, went to the door, and shouted to those outside to produce Sam, that he might be killed in an extremely unpleasant manner.
The group outside withdrew across the street to grapple with the problem before them. It was obviously impossible for civilized men to sacrifice Sam, even if they could catch him—which they could not. Sam had bolted through the dining-room, upset the Chinaman in the kitchen, and fallen over a bucket of ashes in the coal-shed in his flight for freedom. He had not stopped at that, but had scurried off up the railroad track. The general opinion among the spectators was that he had, by this time, reached the next station and was hiding in a cellar there.
Bill Wright hysterically insisted that it was up to Tom Aldershot, who was a deputy town marshal. Tom, however, was working on the house he hoped to have ready for his prospective bride by Thanksgiving, and hated to be interrupted for the sake of a few broken heads only.
“He ain’t shooting up nobody,” he argued from the platform, where he was doing “inside work” on his dining-room while the storm lasted. “He never does cut loose with his gun when he’s drunk. If I arrested him, I’d have to take him clear up to Garbin—and I ain’t got time. And it wouldn’t be nothin’ but a charge uh disturbin’ the peace, when I got him there. Y’oughta have a jail in Sunset, like I’ve been telling yuh right along. Can’t expect a man to stop his work just to take a man to jail—not for anything less than murder, anyhow.”
Some member of the deputation hinted a doubt of his courage, and Tom flushed.
“I ain’t scared of him,” he snorted indignantly. “I should say not! I’ll go over and make him behave—as a man and a citizen. But I ain’t going to arrest him as an officer, when there ain’t no place to put him.” Tom reluctantly threw down his hammer, grumbling because they would not wait till it was too dark to drive nails, but must cut short his working day, and went over to the hotel to quell Ford.
Ingress by way of the front door was obviously impracticable; the marshal ducked around the corner just in time to avoid a painful meeting with a billiard ball. Mother McGrew had piled two tables against the dining-room door and braced them with the mop, and stubbornly refused to let Tom touch the barricade either as man or officer of the law.
“Well, if I can’t get in, I can’t do nothing,” stated Tom, with philosophic calm.
“He’s tearing up the whole place, and he musta found all them extra billiard balls Mike had under the bar, and is throwin’ ’em away,” wailed Mrs. McGrew, “and he’s drinkin’ and not payin’. The damage that man is doin’ it would take a year’s profits to make up. You gotta do something, Tom Aldershot—you that calls yourself a marshal, swore to pertect the citizens uh Sunset! No, sir—I ain’t a-goin’ to open this door, neither. I’m tryin’ to save the dishes, if you want to know. I ain’t goin’ to let my cups and plates foller the glasses in there. A town full uh men—and you stand back and let one crazy—”
Tom had heard Mrs. McGrew voice her opinion of the male population of Sunset on certain previous occasions. He left her at that point, and went back to the group across the street.
At length Sandy, whose imagination had been developed somewhat beyond the elementary stage by his reading of romantic fiction, suggested luring Ford into the liquor room by the simple method of pretending an assault upon him by way of the storeroom window, which could be barred from without by heavy planks. Secure in his belief in Ford’s friendship for him, Sandy even volunteered to slam the door shut upon Ford and lock it with the padlock which guarded the room from robbery. Tom took a chew of tobacco, decided that the ruse might work, and donated the planks for the window.
It did work, up to a certain point. Ford heard a noise in the storeroom and went to investigate, caught a glimpse of Tom Aldershot apparently about to climb through the little window, and hurled a hammer and considerable vituperation at the opening. Whereupon Sandy scuttled in and slammed the door, according to his own plan, and locked it. There was a season of frenzied hammering outside, and after that Sunset breathed freer, and discussed the evils of strong drink, and washed down their arguments by copious draughts of the stuff they maligned.
Later, they had to take him out of the storeroom, because he insisted upon knocking the bungs out of all the barrels and letting the liquor flood the floor, and Mike McGrew’s wife objected to the waste, on the ground that whisky costs money. They fell upon him in a body, bundled him up, hustled him over to the ice-house, and shut him in; and within ten minutes he kicked three boards off one side and emerged breathing fire and brimstone like the dragons of old. He had forgotten about wanting to kill Sam; he was willing—nay, anxious—to murder every male human in Sunset.
They did not know what to do with him after that. They liked Ford when he was sober, and so they hated to shoot him, though that seemed the only way in which they might dampen his enthusiasm for blood. Tom said that, if he failed to improve in temper by the next day, he would try and land him in jail, though it did seem rigorous treatment for so common a fault as getting drunk. Meanwhile they kept out of his way as well as they could, and dodged missiles and swore. Even that was becoming more and more difficult—except the swearing—because Ford developed a perfectly diabolic tendency to empty every store that contained a man, so that it became no uncommon sight to see a back door belching forth hurrying figures at the most unseasonable times. No man could lift a full glass, that night, and feel sure of drinking the contents undisturbed; whereat Sunset grumbled while it dodged.
It may have been nine o’clock before the sporadic talk of a jail crystallized into a definite project which, it was unanimously agreed, could not too soon be made a reality.
They built the jail that night, by the light of bonfires which the slightly wounded kept blazing in the intervals of standing guard over the workers; ready to give warning in case Ford appeared as a war-cloud on their horizon. There were fifteen able-bodied men, and they worked fast, with Ford’s war-chant in the saloon down the street as an incentive to speed. They erected it close to Tom Aldershot’s house, because the town borrowed lumber from him and they wanted to save carrying, and because it was Tom’s duty to look after the prisoner, and he wanted the jail handy, so that he need not lose any time from his house-building.
They built it strong, and they built it tight, without any window save a narrow slit near the ceiling; they heated it by setting a stove outside under a shelter, where Tom could keep up the fire without the risk of going inside, and ran pipe and a borrowed “drum” through the jail high enough so that Ford could not kick it. And to discourage any thought of suicide by hanging, they ceiled the place tightly with Tom’s matched flooring of Oregon pine. Tom did not like that, and said so; but the citizens of Sunset nailed it on and turned a deaf ear to his complaints.
Chill dawn spread over the town, dulling the light of the fires and bringing into relief the sodden tramplings in the snow around the jail, with the sharply defined paths leading to Tom Aldershot’s lumber-pile. The watchers had long before sneaked off to their beds, for not a sign of Ford had they seen since midnight. The storm had ceased ear
ly in the evening and all the sky was glowing crimson with the coming glory of the sun. The jail was almost finished. Up on the roof three crouching figures were nailing down strips of brick-red building paper as a fair substitute for shingles, and on the side nearest town the marshal and another were holding a yard-wide piece flat against the wall with fingers that tingled in the cold, while Bill Wright fastened it into place with shingle nails driven through tin disks the size of a half-dollar.
Ford, partly sober after a sleep on the billiard table in the hotel barroom, heard the hammering, wondered what industrious soul was up and doing carpenter work at that unseemly hour, and after helping himself to a generous “eye-opener” at the deserted bar, found his cap and went over to investigate. He was much surprised to see Bill Wright working, and smiled to himself as he walked quietly up to him through the soft, step-muffling snow.
“What you doing, Bill—building a chicken house?” he asked, a quirk of amusement at the corner of his lips.
Bill jumped and came near swallowing a nail; so near that his eyes bulged at the feel of it next his palate. Tom Aldershot dropped his end of the strip of paper, which tore with a dull sound of ripping, and remarked that he would be damned. Necks craned, up on the roof, and startled eyes peered down like chipmunks from a tree. Some one up there dropped a hammer which hit Bill on the head, but no one said a word.
“You act like you were nervous, this morning,” Ford observed, in the tone which indicates a conscious effort at good-humored ignorance. “Working on a bet, or what?”
“What!” snarled Bill sarcastically. “I wisht, Ford, next time you bowl up, you’d pick on somebody that ain’t too good a friend to fight back! I’m gittin’ tired, by hokey—”
“What—did I lick you again, Bill?” Ford’s smile was sympathetic to a degree. “That’s too bad, now. Next time you want to hunt a hole and crawl into it, Bill. I don’t want to hurt you—but seems like I’ve kinda got the habit. You’ll have to excuse me.” He hunched his shoulders at the chill of the morning and walked around the jail, inspecting it with half-hearted interest.
“What is this, anyway?” he inquired of Tom. “Smoke-house?”
“It’s a jail,” snapped Tom. “To put you into if you don’t watch your dodgers. What ’n thunder you want to carry on like you did last night, for? And then go and sober up just when we’ve got a jail built to put you into! That ain’t no way for a man to do—I’ll leave it to Bill if it is! I’ve a darned good mind to swear out a warrant, anyway, Ford, and pinch you for disturbin’ the peace! That’s what I ought to do, all right.” Tom beat his hands about his body and glared at Ford with his ultra-official scowl.
“All right, if you want to do it.” Ford’s tone embellished the reply with a you-take-the-consequences sort of indifference. “Only, I’d advise you never to turn me loose again if you do lock me up in this coop once.”
“I know I wouldn’t uh worked all night on the thing if I’d knowed you was goin’ to sleep it off,” Bill complained, with deep reproach in his watery eyes. “I made sure you was due to keep things agitated around here for a couple uh days, at the very least, or I never woulda drove a nail, by hokey!”
“It is a darned shame, to have a nice, new jail and nobody to use it on,” sympathized Ford, his eyes half-closed and steely. “I’d like to help you out, all right. Maybe I’d better kill you, Bill; they might stretch a point and call it manslaughter—and I could use the bounty to help pay a lawyer, if it ever come to a head as a trial.”
Whereat Bill almost wept.
Ford pushed his hands deep into his pockets and walked away, sneering openly at Bill, the marshal, the jail, and the town which owned it, and at wives and matrimony and the world which held all these vexations.
He went straight to the shack, drank a cup of coffee, and packed everything he could find that belonged to him and was not too large for easy carrying on horseback; and when Sandy, hovering uneasily around him, asked questions, he told him briefly to go off in a corner and lie down; which advice Sandy understood as an invitation to mind his own affairs.
Like Bill, Sandy could have wept at the ingratitude of this man. But he asked no more questions and he made no more objections. He picked up the story of the unpronounceable count who owned the castle in the Black Forest and had much tribulation and no joy until the last chapter, and when Ford went out, with his battered, sole-leather suitcase and his rifle in its pigskin case, he kept his pale eyes upon his book and refused even a grunt in response to Ford’s grudging: “So long, Sandy.”
CHAPTER IV
Reaction
Even when a man consistently takes Life in twenty-four-hour doses and likes those doses full-flavored with the joys of this earth, there are intervals when the soul of him is sick, and Life becomes a nauseous progression of bleak futility. He may, in his revulsion against it, attempt to end it all; he may, in sheer disgust of it, take his doses stronger than ever before, as if he would once for all choke to death that part of him which is fine enough to rebel against it; he may even forswear, in melancholy penitence, that which has served to give it flavor, and vow him vows of abstemiousness at which the grosser part of him chuckles ironically; or, he may blindly follow the first errant impulse for change of environment, in the half-formed hope that new scenes may, without further effort on his part, serve to make of him a new man—a man for whom he can feel some respect.
Ford did none of these things, however. The soul-sick incentive was there, and if he had been a little less of a reasoning animal and a little less sophisticated, he would probably have forsworn strong drink just as he forswore all responsibility for his inadvertent marriage. His reason and his experience saved him from cluttering his conscience with broken vows, although he did yield to the impulse of change to the extent of leaving Sunset while yet the inhabitants were fortifying themselves for the ardors of the day with breakfast and some wild prophecies concerning Ford’s next outbreak.
Apprehension over Bill’s immediate future was popular amongst his friends, Ford’s sardonic reference to manslaughter and bounty being repeated often enough in Bill’s presence to keep that peace-loving gentleman in a state of trepidation which he sought to hide behind vague warnings.
“He better think twicet before he comes bothering around me, by hokey!” Bill would mutter darkly. “I’ve stood a hull lot from Ford; I like ’im, when he’s himself. But I’ve stood about as much as a man can be expected to stand. And he better look out! That’s all I got to say—he better look out!” Bill himself, it may be observed incidentally, spent the greater portion of that day in “looking out.” He was careful not to sit down with his back to a door, for instance, and was keenly interested when a knob turned beneath unseen fingers, and plainly relieved when another than Ford entered his presence. Bill’s mustache was nearly pulled from its roots, that day—but that is not important to the story, which has to do with Ford Campbell, sometime the possessor of a neat legacy in coin, later a rider of the cattle ranges, last presiding genius over the poker table in Scotty’s back room in Sunset, always an important factor—and too often a disturbing element—in any community upon which he chose to bestow his dynamic presence.
Scotty hoped that Ford would show up for business when the lamps were lighted, that night. There had been some delicacy on the part of Ford’s acquaintances that day in the matter of calling upon him at the shack. They believed—and hoped—that Ford was “sleeping it off,” and there was a unanimous reluctance to disturb his slumbers. Sandy, indulging himself in the matter of undisturbed spinal tremors over “The Haunted Chamber,” had not left shelter, save when the more insistent shiverings of chilled flesh recalled him from his pleasurable nerve-crimplings and drove him forth to the woodpile. So that it was not until evening was well advanced that Sunset learned that Ford was no longer a potential menace within its meager boundaries. Bill took a long breath, observed meaningly that “He’d better go—whilst his credit’s good, by hokey!” and for the first time that day
sat down with his back toward an outer door.
Ford was not worrying about Sunset half as much as Sunset was worrying about him. He was at that moment playing pinochle half-heartedly with a hospitable sheep-herder, under the impression that, since his host had frankly and profanely professed a revulsion against solitaire and a corresponding hunger for pinochle, his duty as a guest lay in satisfying that hunger. He played apathetically, overlooked several melts he might have made, and so lost three games in succession to the gleeful herder, who had needed the diversion almost as much as he needed a hair-cut.
His sense of social responsibility being eased thereby, Ford took his headache and his dull disgust with life to the wall side of the herder’s frowsy bunk, and straightway forgot both in heavy slumber, leaving to the morrow any definite plan for the near future—the far future being as little considered as death and what is said to lie beyond.
That day had done for him all he asked of it. It had put him thirty miles and more from Sunset, against which he felt a resentment which it little deserved; of a truth it was as inoffensive a hamlet as any in that region, and its sudden, overweening desire for a jail was but a legitimate impulse toward self-preservation. The fault was Ford’s, in harassing the men of Sunset into action. But several times that day, and again while he was pulling the stale-odored blankets snugly about his ears, Ford anathematized the place as “a damned, rotten hole,” and was as nearly thankful as his mood would permit, when he remembered that it lay far behind him and was likely to be farther before his journeyings were done.
Sleep held him until daylight seeped in through the one dingy window. Ford awoke to the acrid smell of scorched bacon, thought at first that Sandy was once more demonstrating his inefficiency as a cook, and when he remembered that Sandy’s name was printed smudgily upon that page of his life which he had lately turned down as a blotted, unlearned lesson is pushed behind an unwilling schoolboy, he began to consider seriously his next step.