Curry

by Max Brand

  He was taking no chances. His long revolver was balanced across the top of his knees and directed at the breast of the other. He kept his grip on it secure. His back against the solid wall gave him security from attack in that direction. There was nothing to fear except from the helpless man who sat confronting him, a few feet away. The game was won, and yet, with the surety at hand, Charlie Mark was still not altogether confident.

  “The queer thing,” he said at length, “is that no one else has been able to do this.”

  “I can tell you how that happened,” said the other without the slightest tremor of fear escaping to temper his voice. “I simply left the block of stone out of the entrance tonight. If it hadn’t been for that, I guess you wouldn’t be here now, eh, partner?”

  “I guess not,” admitted Charlie Mark.

  “You wouldn’t be here. You’d be clear on the other side, away from twenty thousand dollars’ worth of man?” He grinned as he spoke. Then he continued: “Well, what’s the main idea, friend? You take me into town tonight, or do you sleep out here?”

  “Sleep out here!” exclaimed Charlie Mark. “You sure figure me to be green, sir.”

  “Tolerable green,” the Red Devil said insolently.

  “But not green enough to try to sleep here in the cave with you … not while you’re alive.”

  He threw in the sinister hint with a marked change in his voice. But the Red Devil merely smiled.

  “Would you have me dead in here?” he said. “Would you have the nerve to sleep with a dead man?”

  “Why not,” asked Charlie Mark, “when you’re worth as much dead as you are alive they say?”

  “Do they say that? Well, they lie.”

  “Let the money go. I have enough of that, and …”

  “You’re out for the glory of taking me, eh?”

  “That’s it!”

  “You lie,” said the outlaw, sneering. “You’re here for the money … you want hard cash. You’re on a trail like a ferret, and you won’t get off till you have your teeth deep in. I know you.”

  He spoke with the most remarkable assurance, and Charlie Mark felt as guilty as if some confidant had informed the man of what went on in his secret mind, and yet to no confidant had he murmured a syllable of his plans. It was uncanny.

  “What made you think that?”

  “Well, a bird whispered it to me.”

  “Listen,” replied Charlie Mark, “you’re money in my pocket, either as dead meat or live stuff. I don’t much care which. Now talk when I tell you to. What made you think I’d come here just for the money. Out with it.”

  The other regarded him with an unfaltering sneer. And it was plain that he answered not because he was in fear, but because he chose to speak.

  “You’re tolerable scared,” he said, “but even in spite of being scared, you keep looking around. I know that you half expect to see a pile of gold sacks.”

  Charlie Mark gritted his teeth. “Well, my friend,” he said, “I’m glad you have such a handy sense of humor.”

  “I can laugh,” answered the brigand. “That’s something that I learned early.”

  “Well,” said Charlie Mark, trembling with anger at this continued sneering, “you’d better crowd a lot of laughing into the next few minutes. Your time’s short.”

  “No,” answered the other. “You’re hound enough, I guess, to shoot a gent deliberately, but, before you pull the trigger, you’ll take another think and begin to worry about the loot you may be missing if you kill me now.”

  “Can’t I dig up the whole length of the cave and find it?” asked Charlie Mark.

  “Sure you can dig up the whole floor of the cave, but what makes you so sure that the coin is buried here? Do you think that a wise gent would live in the same place in which he kept his coin? That’d be a fool idea, I figure!”

  “Hmm,” replied Charlie Mark. “You think on all sides of things, I see.”

  “For you and against you,” said the Red Devil.

  “Right now,” Charlie Mark stated, resting his elbows on his knees, “you’re pretty sure you’re going to get out of this mess alive and happy. Why?”

  “Because,” said the Red Devil, whose hair, by the way, was a very ordinary dark brown, “because I can’t see myself being killed by a rat like you.”

  “Curse you!” cried Charlie Mark, springing to his feet. “I think you’re hungry to die!”

  “Bah,” said the other sneeringly. “Don’t point that gun at me. You won’t shoot. You’re a gold-digger, that’s what you are.”

  Charlie Mark stepped back writhing with rage and the knowledge that the outlaw had read him right. It was true. He dared not take the chance and kill when there might be thousands and thousands of dollars within the reach of this fellow’s cleverness. With his hate there was mingled a great and growing admiration.

  “Anyway,” said Charlie Mark, “the stuff you took from Lang must be here, and that, together with the coin on your head, is enough for me.”

  “If you’re as cheap as that … go ahead. I rated you a little higher. A little too high, I guess.”

  A stream of curses burst from the lips of Charlie Mark, curses because he wished with all his head to drive a volley of lead slugs into the body of his tormentor, and yet he had not the nerve to do it.

  “I’ll hear you talk a while,” he said. “What d’you got to say?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Hurry it up,” said Charley Mark. “I haven’t a year’s time on my hands.”

  The Red Devil laughed.

  Charlie Mark listened in awe and pleasure. There was never in the world a sound so silken, he felt. It flowed and rippled from the throat of the robber. It was a thing of wonder and of beauty, and it was hardly louder than a whisper. It brought the white horse leisurely from the rear of the cave. A beautiful head was lowered beside the head of the bandit.

  “Good girl,” said the Red Devil. “Good old Meg. If you could understand him, you’d laugh along with me … and a pile louder.”

  “What a horse!” exclaimed Charlie Mark. “What a marvelous horse! My friend, you live up here like a king. Everything you see is yours, if you want it. You drop down out of the mountains like an eagle out of the sky, and take the thing you desire. Then you turn around and scoot back up here and dissolve … drop out of sight.”

  “Maybe,” said the Red Devil, “you’d like to change places with me?”

  “Maybe!”

  “I been seeing it in your eyes,” the bandit said. “Well, you might fit in with the job a pile better than I do. Would you give up your home and live this sort of a life?”

  “Why not?” asked Charlie Mark. “Why not? The old man could get along without me. Little he cares. So could the girl get along without me.”

  “Your father and your sweetheart, maybe you mean?” asked the robber.

  “My father and sister. My father is Henry Mark.” Why not tell the truth to this man who was about to die, so soon as the secret of the treasure was wormed out of him?

  “You’d leave them?” asked the outlaw. “You’d leave them for the sake of the life I lead?”

  “Isn’t it good enough for you?”

  For the first time the Red Devil seemed truly moved.

  “It’s good enough for me,” he said. “I sure like the freedom of it. Sometimes I look off the mountaintops and down to the towns that I see in the valleys, and I pity the folks that live down there. I pity ’em because I feel like an eagle, and them down there … they’re just field mice.” His color rose, and his eye flashed, but he changed almost at once. “That’s only once in a while.”

  “Why’d you pick out the life, then?” demanded Charlie Mark.

  “I was plumb forced into it,” said the other. “I dunno why I waste words telling you this, but, low as you seem to be, son,
I figure that you’d ought to be warned of the truth.”

  “Robber and sky pilot mixed together, eh?” asked Charlie Mark.

  “Call it that if you want, but I was forced into this life, friend. I’ll tell you how. My father killed a man by accident. A mob heard about it and thought it was murder. They came out and killed him. I got away from the house, but I plugged two of the boys that had helped at the killing. I thought they was dead, and started on my way. Well, they weren’t dead, but I figured they were and I acted like my life was to pay, if I was caught. Before I’d gone a day’s ride, I’d messed up the posse that rode after me, and I figured that I was gone, if ever I got in rifle range of a law-abiding citizen that knowed me. So I went on from one thing to another, and here I am. One thing I’ve done … I’ve never taken a cent except from crooks who didn’t really deserve what they had. And even out of that coin, I’ve always sent back the money when I knew who it had been taken from.”

  “Look here!” broke in Charlie Mark. “D’you expect me to swallow that?”

  “I don’t think you will,” replied Jim Curry, alias the Red Devil. “I don’t think you will, but I’m going to tell you, just the same. That coin I took from Lang yesterday … d’you know why I stuck the stage up?”

  “Because you wanted the stuff, I guess.”

  “Bah! The rancher had close to ten thousand, and Jake had a fat wad under the box.”

  “How do you learn those things?”

  “I have friends, and the reason I have friends is because I play as square as I can. I heard that Lang had cleaned out a poor gent named Vincent, over the mountains. I made that special trip to get back the coin he’d taken. Every bill of it goes back to Vincent.”

  Charlie Mark burst into a tirade of laughter. “Do you expect me to believe that nonsense?”

  “I expect you to believe this, at least,” said Jim Curry solemnly. “The money you take at the point of a gun won’t do you no good. It’ll fill up your dreams.”

  “Bah!” exclaimed Charlie Mark. “I begin to see a chance. I begin to see a mighty good chance. Suppose I never turned you in. Suppose I shot you, my friend, the Red Devil, and left you here to rot in a grave, while I took your horse and slipped down to some of the towns? Why, they’re wild with money. They have more than they know what to do with, and the first sight of the white horse and the red wig would make ’em throw up their hands. They wouldn’t even begin to fight back. It would be a picnic, eh?”

  He was striding up and down the cave by this time, full of the scheme, as it grew and expanded in his eager imagination.

  “Does it sound as good as all that?” asked Jim Curry, studying the captor with a strange mingling of disgust and fascination.

  “It does! The more I look at it, the better it seems.” He was talking to the Red Devil simply because he had to talk to someone of the thoughts that were flowing through his brain.

  “Hark to me a minute, will you?” demanded Jim Curry. “If you take up this job, partner, you’ll curse yourself for it later on. You’ll be lonely, and there ain’t any demon in the world as bad as loneliness.”

  “Why should I have to be lonely?”

  “Because you can’t work this game if you have partners. It can’t be done. Other gents have tried it. They’ve all been run down. It’s the loneliness that kills ’em off, my boy. Look at the best of ’em. They go down. Why? Because they got to have noise around ’em. They got to have company to keep ’em from thinking about what they’ve done.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I don’t, thank goodness, because I’ve never done a killing in my life, sir.”

  Charlie Mark burst again into uproarious laughter.

  “Do you really think that I’ll believe that?”

  “No, I don’t think you will. I’m telling you, anyway.”

  “Go on. You make a pretty convincing liar, at that. You have the tune, I might say, even when you are a bit shaky on the words.”

  Jim Curry continued, unshaken by this badinage: “I tell you true. Of course they’ve saddled about a thousand killings on me. But they’re wrong. I couldn’t do it. I don’t have to do it.”

  “Eh?”

  “You don’t have to do it,” said Jim Curry, “if you can shoot straight enough and quick enough.”

  Back into the mind of Charlie Mark came the memory of how Lang had been shot cleanly through the arm at much risk to the outlaw, because, if the bullet had failed of this outside shot, a stream of lead from Lang’s automatic must inevitably have ended the days of the Red Devil at once.

  “You’re good with a gun,” he declared frankly. “Better than I could ever be.”

  “You’d improve, if you got into my shoes,” said Curry. “A man can shoot pretty straight when he has to shoot straight. A lot of these desperadoes that break out of jails from time to time are ordinary, fair-to-middling shots, but, when they have to live by shooting straight, all at once they forget how to miss. I guess that’s the straight of it.”

  “I understand,” murmured Charlie Mark, listening with puckered brows.

  “But the thing that makes it hard to get away with the life,” said Curry, “is that the loneliness will get you. One of these days I’ll look off the mountains and see the lights of some village and ride down for it, even knowing that I’ll get a rope around my neck for taking the chance.”

  “Aye,” said Charlie Mark. “But you don’t know me. I’d never get lonely, if I got enough money and freedom and power out of it. Never!”

  He spoke with great enthusiasm, enthusiasm so great that he did not notice that the Red Devil, while listening with great intentness, had slipped far down on the stone on which he had been sitting. Nor did Charlie Mark give heed to the fact that he was standing not four feet away from the other.

  The first intimation that there might be danger in such close range came from a startling impact and a twinge of pain in his right hand. Then the gun, which had been kicked loose by the accurate toe of the robber, spun into the distance and exploded with a roar as it landed at some distance among the rocks of the cave.

  Charlie Mark, with a shout of fear and surprise, sprang back, or tried to spring back, but, as he moved, the active legs of the other were wrapped around his, and he came crashing to the floor of the cave.

  Still, the advantage was his, for he had struck on top, and beneath him was a man whose arms were bound tightly to his sides. But there seemed to be a slippery devil in Jim Curry. In an instant he had wriggled from beneath, and his fumbling hands, held short by the binding rope, had jerked the hunting knife out of Mark’s belt, and now he held the deadly weapon close to the breast of the other.

  “Steady up,” he said in the ear of Mark, as they rolled over—Mark on top. “If you move, son, I’ll give you the whole blade in your insides.”

  At the same time Charlie Mark felt the stinging point of the sharp knife through his shirt. Instantly he became still and rolled quietly over to the floor of the cave. If that knife had not been sunk at once into his flesh, it might be that the formidable fellow did not intend to kill. At least it was his only hope. With gleaming eyes he watched his conqueror, as the latter rose and severed the cords that bound him.

  IX

  The next move of the outlaw was to back up to the place where the gun that he kicked from the hands of Charlie Mark had fallen. He scooped it up, dropped it into his own holster, and, disdaining with a fine indifference to keep his man covered, advanced upon Charlie Mark.

  “Get up,” he said coldly. “I don’t remember asking you to lie down there.”

  Charlie, moving cautiously, for fear that a sudden motion might bring the gun snapping out of the holster, sat up and then rose to his feet.

  “I guess I’ve told you true about one thing,” said the Red Devil. “I don’t kill unless I have to, and I haven’t had to yet. Stand back … away from
those guns … that’s all I ask. But I warn you now, partner, that, if you make one move that I don’t like, I’ll be plumb tempted to send a slug through you. Understand, my boy?”

  “Sure,” replied Charlie Mark, sauntering to the far side of the cave, where he leaned against the wall.

  “You’re cool,” said Jim Curry, watching attentively. “Take you all in all, you’re about as cool a one as I ever seen.”

  “Thanks,” said Charlie Mark.

  “Don’t thank me,” answered the other, “because I didn’t mean it that way.”

  So saying, he turned to the fire, presenting his back to the other as he did so, and heaped some more wood on it. There was a single twitch of the muscles of Charlie Mark. Was the robber doing this to tempt him? At least it was maddening to think that he should be held so lightly. In fact, he was still quivering with indignation, remembering with what ease the Red Devil had deprived him of his weapon and made him helpless. Yet he controlled the almost overmastering impulse to spring at the back of the outlaw. When Jim Curry turned from the brightened fire, he nodded almost amiably at his captive.

  “You got a steady nerve and a cool head,” he complimented Charlie Mark. “I’m only sorry that you ain’t a man, a real man, to use it the right way.”

  “Thanks,” said Charlie Mark. “I’ll manage things my own way and get along as well as I can.”

  The outlaw smiled. Apparently he was greatly pleased by this indomitable steadiness.

  “A gent with a nerve like yours,” he said, “could be …” Here he paused and continued on another tack. “Whatever come into your head a while back that you’d like to have my place?”

  “I meant it then,” said Charlie Mark, “and I mean it now.”

  Jim Curry smiled again and shook his head, as one bewildered. Then he leaned, still apparently thinking, and scooped up a small package that had fallen to the ground.

  “You see this?” he asked.