Curry

by Max Brand

  The sheriff paled. He was an old-fashioned man, so much so that he followed the maxim, “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” to a ridiculous extreme, and when he made a profit in money, he deposited it in greenbacks in the capacious drawers of his safe. And being the owner of a large and prosperous ranch, his profits were very great indeed. Of old Charlie knew that the key to that safe was invariably carried in the aforementioned pocket. Had he not in person seen the sheriff produce it more than once and use it to unlock the heavy door with its many layers of strong steel?

  A desperate gleam in the eye of the sheriff was correctly interpreted by the robber.

  “If you throw that key through the window, Sheriff,” he said quietly, “I’ll send a chunk of lead to visit your insides. Understand? Do what I tell you. Keep your other hand up while you do it. Don’t talk loud.”

  The sheriff hesitated through another instant, but the steadiness of the revolver in the hand of the outlaw, and withal a certain carelessness with which the fellow managed it, were marvelously convincing. Nance jerked the key from the designated pocket with thumb and forefinger and tossed it onto the carpet just in front of the safe. He did it with a faint accompanying groan that brought a sympathetic murmur from the Red Devil himself.

  In the interval of silence the drone of women’s voices from the adjoining room buzzed strongly through the folding doors that were all that separated them from the scene of the outrage. And there was something so pleasantly ludicrous to Charlie Mark in the incongruity of the scene that he chuckled softly to himself. He measured Lang with a glance. Plainly the tall man would be the less formidable of the two—the one who could be better trusted to use his hands.

  “Go over there and unlock that safe,” he commanded.

  Lang obeyed meekly, lowering his arms as though the elbow joints were rusted. He knelt by the door, inserted the grating key, and then turned it. The heavy door swung lazily open and revealed a neat row of mahogany shelves, one fitted closely above the other, with a row of small drawers below the shelves. Here the documents and here the cash of the sheriff’s saving had been accumulated and stored for many a year.

  Charlie Mark could hear the irregular, panting breath of the man of the law, and for the least moment he was on the verge of abandoning his scheme in sheer pity for Nance. But pity was not familiar to Charlie Mark. It never had been in the past, and assuredly this was not an auspicious hour for commencing. He hardened himself with a slight effort and favored Nance with a scowl. In the old days Nance had often been kind to him. But he must not allow these small considerations to interfere. He had work before him—work that must be performed. Moreover, he was perpetrating a jest over which the entire range of the mountain desert would be laughing before the next day was ended.

  He backed Lang against the wall in turn, knelt, and, fumbling with his left hand, dragged out drawers and the contents of shelves. A great mass of papers of all kinds tumbled out, rustling on the floor. The stacks of greenbacks were a liberal portion of the litter. They might have been much greater had not the sheriff made a large purchase of property only a few days before. But as it was, Charlie Mark’s heart leaped as he crammed the loot into his coat pockets. He had come for a rare jest; he had found, in addition, a fortune awaiting him. How much he picked up, he could not, of course, guess, but he shrewdly estimated by the haggard look of the sheriff that he was taking at least a large part of the hoardings of a life of industry and prosperity.

  When he rose, his coat pockets were swelled out on either side. He was carrying with him enough to retire on. He could leave the mountains if he wished, and go East, and appear there with hands washed clean of all connection with the murders and robberies that he had committed in the far West.

  With this in mind he slipped back to the door and hesitated there with murder in his heart. No matter how he bound these two, the least noise after his departure would bring to their assistance the women of the next room, and then they would be after him. But suppose he were to touch the trigger twice from the doorway. He would send to death those two formidable fighters, and free his trail from immediate pursuit. So he hesitated in the doorway with his grip tightening and loosening around the butt of the gun. And it seemed from the pallor of the two who were backed against the wall with their hands high above their heads that they read in the burning eyes, which they saw through the holes in the handkerchief, the purpose that was forming in the brain of the Red Devil. They shrank back, flattening themselves against the wall as though they half hoped that a secret door might unfold behind them and give them a chance for flight. Then the balance turned in the cruel mind of Charlie Mark. Fierce though his instincts were, he could not kill two helpless men.

  He leaped to one side and raced down the hall. The screen door was kicked open before him, and he plunged into the welcome darkness of the night. At the same instant a window was dragged screamingly open, and through the aperture the sheriff and Lang blazed forth a hail of shots after the fugitive. One of them clipped the skin and the surface flesh of his left wrist as he swung it back in the midst of a stride. That sting gave him greater speed to gain the trees; he urged Meg on as the riot of noise issued from the house and was taken up on either hand, that ringing call—“The Red Devil!”—serving to bring men instantly out of their homes armed and ready to shoot to kill.

  It was miraculous, the speed with which they got into the saddle, these townsmen. Confident that once he reached the back of Meg he was as safe as though he had been whisked into the clouds, Charlie Mark drew the mare down to a rocking canter and looked back with a careless smile at the line of trees that masked the lights of the village. It would be minutes before horsemen issued from it. Then would come a headlong dash of three or four miles, barely enough to make Meg extend herself and start her circulation. After that they would give up as they had given up so many times before.

  But he was in this case sadly mistaken. Hardly had he cleared the trees when man after man shot out of the darkness, riding low on their horses and driving them to the full of their speed. It was almost as though they had been lying in wait.

  In that case they would have such riding tonight as they had never enjoyed before. He called on Meg, and she answered with a swinging gallop deceptively slow and easy to watch, but in reality far swifter than the labored and pounding gallop of the cow ponies behind her.

  Charlie Mark looked back again. There were half a dozen men shouting and racing in the lead. Behind them others and still others were issuing from the trees. Guns began to spurt red tongues of fire here and there. A bullet hummed close to his head. Moreover, his left wrist was stinging. Enraged, he whirled in the saddle with gun poised. Once, twice, and again he fired, and two horsemen plunged to the earth. He had aimed for the horses rather than the men, and he grunted savage satisfaction as he saw them drop. They were not dead, perhaps, but they were badly wounded. And dead or wounded made no difference to Charlie Mark. He wanted liberty and a chance to bandage that wounded wrist. Ah, now he would have what he wanted, for the crowd began to fall back; Meg began to draw away with her matchless gait.

  It was not all the speed of Meg, however. Sheriff Nance, riding in the forefront of the pursuit, had seen his two neighbors go down beside him, and had heard the hum of a bullet pass the head of his own horse. He drew his companions back with a shout and a wave of the hand. Especially he called Lang to him.

  “Boys,” he said, “I want you to keep back at a steady pace. I’ll show you the way. Lang, you turn around and go back to town as fast as your hoss will take you. Get to a telephone, and wire ahead to Elmira Junction. The Red Devil is riding like a fool or a crazy man. He’s going straight up to the narrows, and, if Elmira turns out, they’ll bag him sure.”

  Lang was comparatively new to the region, but he had seen a map of the district. He gathered at once the simple plan of the sheriff, which was so clear to the others, also, that it drew a yell of exulta
tion from them. The valley in which the town lay was shaped like a spoon, and Charlie Mark, heedless of everything except a desire to put distance between him and the pursuit, was driving straight into the handle of the spoon. In that handle lay the village of Elmira. By telephoning ahead, it should be easy to draw out the men of the town into a cordon extending clear across the floor of the valley. On either side were hills with precipitous slopes. They could be scaled, but they could hardly be negotiated with a horse. And if the Red Devil wished to turn aside from the converging lines of his enemies, he would have to leave Meg behind him, which was something that not one of the pursuers believed that the outlaw would do. Villainous he had shown himself on countless occasions, but there was a profoundly based belief through the mountains that the Red Devil loved his horse as though it were a human being and would not desert it under any consideration. Into how tight a hole might that love for the horse drag him?

  At any rate, Lang jerked his horse around and spurred back toward town as though he were racing to reach the gates of his salvation.

  VI

  In the meantime, Meg swung along with tireless ease and speed. She had traveled a great distance that day, and she had behind her the challenge of fresh horses. To be sure, she could distance them in a sprint, but, on the other hand, they could hang in the rear upon her trail as tireless as wolves. They would never give up the work, those dauntless little cow ponies behind her. And now as Charlie Mark, after attaining what he considered a safe lead, stopped to tie up his injured wrist, he was interrupted before the completion of that leisurely job by the dull roar of hoofbeats behind him as they ground over a wide bed of gravel.

  He finished tying the knot, and then raised his handsome head and looked back over his shoulder with something between a sneer and a snarl. That wolfish glance to the rear satisfied him that the pursuers had not yet given up the task of hounding him. And he shook his head in amazement. They were not wont to plunge away blindly through the night behind him. As a rule there was just that opening spurt to overtake him and then, for two or three days, an aimless wandering here and there through the mountains in vague hope of crossing his path. Tonight, however, different tactics were being followed. They clung behind him as though the nose of a hound were showing them the way.

  When he had made up his mind that they were there, however, he simply shrugged his shoulders and loosened the rein. White Meg would do the rest.

  She showed a nice turn of speed for the next couple of miles, and, although he could tell by the slight labor of her gallop that she was far from fresh, she left the cow ponies behind her like the wind. At the end of that burst he slowed her again.

  They had entered the narrow part of the valley. The hills arose on either hand, well nigh as steep as the surfaces of a cliff. And as he drew the mare down to a more reasonable pace, he could hear in the distance behind him the faint sound of the posse still galloping, the noise traveling dimly to the hills and being reechoed still more lightly from them.

  This was puzzling in the extreme. Did the fools think that they could run down Meg? He chuckled at the mere suggestion of such an idea and sent her on briskly once more.

  He diverged well to the right to avoid the outskirts of the town of Elmira Junction, so called because here the two main roads of the valley joined. On swept Meg, never faltering, but tossing her fine head a little now and then as though inquiring the reason for this extraordinary demand. Since morning, when she left the cave, she had had little rest that day. The old master would never have made such a call upon her strength. But then, there were many differences between the old master and the new, and this was only a small sign of them.

  They were in the very center of the narrows, as that cañon was called throughout the neighboring district, when, running up a slight slope toward a cresting line of shrubs that topped it, he was received with a sudden explosion of a rifle and the shrill, small, wicked singing of a bullet past his head. He halted the mare and whirled her around with a single jerk of his arm. And as she turned, there was a roar of angry voices above him—voices that devoutly cursed the man who had fired too soon and betrayed the existence of the ambush. And through and above that roar of voices came the crash of a volley.

  How Charles Mark escaped a dozen bullets in his body by that first smashing volley—how Meg, at least, came off scatheless when by color she was such an ideal mark in the darkness, Charlie Mark could never tell. But the premature shot fired by one man had so upset that ambushed line, waiting as they were for a prearranged signal, that the first fire was wildly delivered. They shot at the mere glimmer of the white mare in the darkness, and the next instant their bullets from the second discharge were plowing through thin air.

  The miraculous disappearance of horse and rider caused the whole line of the watchers, who had ridden out of Elmira Junction in response to the frantic appeals of Lang, to leave their ambush and come at the run, shouting and brandishing their rifles above their heads, for they naturally took it for granted that horse and rider had gone to earth, shot through and through, and so disappeared in a small hollow.

  It was no small hollow, however, into which the Red Devil and his horse had dropped. Just to the left as he whirled the mare about, Charlie Mark saw a sharply cut depression hollowed out by action of rainwater during some torrential downpour. Into that little gully he sent cat-footed Meg with one touch of his heels. Out of sight she dropped into the pit of darkness, staggered in the uneven footing, and then sped like the wind down the valley in the same direction from which she had come.

  When Charlie Mark spurred the mare out of the shelving gully a hundred yards farther down, the pursuit was already thrown into the comparative distance. Panting from their run as they saw the dim figure twinkle again in front of them, they halted, pitched rifles to their shoulders, and blazed away at random. Charlie Mark, with only the occasional waspish hum of a bullet to annoy him, reined Meg into a thicket and rode on, breathing more freely. On the whole it had been his closest call so far.

  His feeling of exultation, however, lasted only a few moments, for coming up the valley he heard a wide-spreading rushing of hoofs sounding like the approach of a distant wave of hail beating over the forest. He knew, of course, that it was the original group of manhunters now pressing steadily after their prey.

  And a sudden sense of doom struck Charlie Mark for the first time, whipped the color out of his head, and covered his forehead with cold perspiration. He had started with a sneer of contempt for the men behind him. That sneer he had repeated time and again as the sound of their galloping horses reached him, but every time he considered himself safe from them, he heard that dull pounding once more. Was it fated that after all he was to meet his end from those men who had ridden out to avenge the insult and the loss of the sheriff?

  He twitched Meg to the left and made for the dark-faced hill in that direction, a considerable stretch, before he remembered that the slopes of those hills were practically impossible for horses to climb. Then, with a savage curse directed at his own stupidity, he jerked Meg about and drove her down the valley again.

  Guns were now exploding behind him and before—not shots directed at him, he could very well guess, but shots meant as signals from the rear party to the party in front. It began to be obvious. In some manner they had communicated with Elmira Junction, and they had spread a net into which he ran—like a fool! Only then he remembered the telephone and its possibilities—that newly strung telephone across the wide stretch of country. He raised his fist and shook it against the spirit of science that had so worked against him this night of nights.

  He drew rein. Speed was not the thing he needed now. But when he tried to think, the heaving sides of Meg disturbed him. She was far spent. She had not many more fast miles in her that night, no matter how gallant her heart. And now the men of Elmira Junction were crashing in behind him on fresh horses, yelling and whooping like Indians in their certainty that
they were about to bag game. And such game.

  Again Charlie Mark clenched his fist and bared his teeth like a cornered wolf. Suppose he were to leave Meg and take to the hills on foot? No, they would find the horse at once, and, while some of them combed the immediate vicinity of the trees, others would swarm up over the hills. And without a horse, ignorant of the exact nature of the ground, he would be found, no matter how fast he climbed.

  Behind and in front, now, the shouts increased. There was no longer a firing of guns. They were calling to one another in long, wailing voices, pitched to cut through the distance. They were joining hands to hem him in—curse them! In the fullness of his hatred it did not occur to him that he had done things to rouse such consuming fury against him. It only seemed brutal waste of energy for so many men to be hounding one. He listened sharply. The original band, on tired horses, pressed ahead slowly, apparently ready to receive a surprise attack from the outlaw, shouting far less often than the men from Elmira, who were riding in with yells of triumph that rushed with increasing speed on the ear of the robber.

  There was nothing else for it. At least he would die like a man, instead of like a rat. He turned Meg, picked what seemed to be a rift between two yelling groups of the riders from Elmira, and jogged the mare ahead. Presently she reached the edge of the trees, and across the clearing beyond swept the avengers, a cloud on either side—a cloud of half a dozen men ready to shoot to kill.

  Charlie Mark flattened himself along the neck of Meg. He clung to her, whispering a frantic appeal for speed in her quivering ear. Then he gave her the spurs.

  She answered it like a two-year-old newly turned from pasture into corral and raging against confinement. She leaped away with as much life as an uncoiling watch spring, plunged past the skirting trees, and darted into the open.

  By sheer good luck the ground over which she raced was soft woodland mold. It was wretched ground for speed, but it gave a priceless advantage to make up for such a handicap. It enabled Meg to rush out from the trees in utter silence. And she was halfway across the clearing, soundless as a running cloud shadow, before a shrill yell went up from the men of Elmira, and they swung their horses about, facing in.