Curry

by Max Brand

  $32,000 in two months—that had been his record. Why, this was better than Wall Street. A mask and a wig of red hair and a gun and a white horse had meant more to him than a handsome capital for investment. So greatly did the heart of the murderer and cardsharper rise in him that he turned his head from the window after a while and looked down the length of the car with a sort of lazy good-natured tolerance for the other men in it. They were sheep in his flock. Their fleece would eventually run through his hands, perhaps. All the world was filled with fools—and the fool’s were working every day, hard, for the sake of the intelligent men, who, like himself, sat back and reaped the harvest of their labor.

  The more he pondered it, the more he agreed with himself, and his eye became so gently inviting that a fellow passenger, wandering idly through the observation car in search of companionship and talk, settled into a neighboring armchair and turned half toward him with that vacuous eye and foolish smile that, as a rule, invites conversation.

  Charlie Mark lounged a little about so as to face the stranger. The talk ran upon the desert, upon the weather, upon the speed of the train, upon the eternal curse of the sand that no window could exclude, even though it was close to stifling. Charlie Mark found it not difficult to keep up his end of the talk and at the same time look through and through the character of his companion.

  He was a large and easy-natured man. His hands were broad and thick, with the backs tanned and wind reddened, and the fingers square at the tip as though they had been blunted from surrounding the handle of a pitchfork on many a day and grinding into the hard base of his thumb. His clothes, too, were like the best suit of a farmer. The material was very good, but the fit was just a trifle snug, and the fashion was a full year stale. Assuredly Mr. Warner, as he gave his name, had increased in flesh and perhaps in prosperity, also—if the emerald stickpin were a sign—since that suit was tailored for him. He was not a fool, Charlie Mark decided. His black eyes were keenly focused. The movements of his head, even on the burly neck, were quick and decisive. He was readily moved to laughter, but only when he was honestly amused. He was by no means one of those idiots who burst into tides of laughter to accommodate a neighbor.

  On the whole he struck Charlie Mark as a man proud of his own opinion, shrewd in a bargain, and fond of maintaining his superiority and his sense of superiority with those with whom he had dealings. Charlie Mark observed him with a growing animation of the spirit. Such a fellow as this might yield many a handful of fine feathers at a plucking.

  Instinctively Charlie Mark flexed his fingers a few times and rejoiced to find that gun work had not appreciably stiffened them, although they were far indeed from the matchless adroitness that they had attained before he left his haunts in the East for this singular trip into his own Western country.

  He had grown a trifle absent-minded in the course of these reflections. Mr. Warner nodded somewhat stiffly, to a tall, gaunt man in passing, and immediately, when the tall man’s back was turned, he cast a significant glance toward Charlie Mark. The latter nodded his handsome head and waited attentively.

  “Know him?” asked Warner.

  “I don’t.”

  “You’ve heard of him, anyway. That’s John Cameron Butler. He’s the one that owns the company that turns out the JCB plows. I guess that places him for you?”

  He looked expectantly at Charlie Mark after the fashion of one waiting to see surprise registered. Charlie Mark allowed himself to exhibit a proper degree of surprise, although he had never heard of either Butler or his plows before that moment.

  “Yes, sir,” rambled on Warner, lost in admiration of the broad, convex back of the great man as he settled down on the observation platform. “Yes, sir … that’s old J. C. Butler. He’s got the plow that scratches most of the surface of Kansas and Nebraska already, and he’s spreading north and south mighty fast. The shares of his plow have a great throw to ’em. That’s one of their big talking points. And then they have a queer angle of taking the ground … that counts too. Anyway, that’s JCB. He’s got his initials stamped into about a million plowshares by this time, I guess. Yes … or more than that.” He paused. “And I went to the same school with him,” he concluded.

  Charlie Mark was properly astonished.

  “Yes, sir, I went to the same school with him,” continued Warner. “And we studied the same books, even if we didn’t learn the same things out of ’em. I didn’t see much about plows.” He chuckled at this ghost of a jest. “At that, I learned enough to do pretty well. But I guess they forgot to write in books just how a man can make money when he gets out of school. Wonder why they leave it out, Mister Mark?”

  Charlie smiled in turn.

  “Not that I’d like to be the same kind that JCB is, for all his money. He’s so set in his ways that nobody can tell him a thing … not a thing! He knows what he knows, and nobody can shake him. Take cards, for instance. He’s never lost a game of cards in his life, he says, so long as he’s playing for money.”

  “What?” exclaimed Charlie Mark, startled out of character by the suddenness with which the talk had turned to the mysteries of his own calling. “Never lost a game of cards?”

  “Not when he’s gambling.”

  “Hmm,” said Charlie Mark, and then settled back in his chair and tucked his chin deep in the bosom of his coat and regarded the slim tips of his folded fingers.

  Was it possible that there were upon the earth such idiots as J. C. Butler and his credulous friend? No, it could not be true, and yet Mr. Warner continued.

  “He trimmed me bad last night, and this morning he did the thing over again. He sits back there in his drawing room like a king on a throne and just pities anybody that has the nerve to play with him.” Mr. Warner gritted his teeth. Plainly he did not like to recall the game in which evidently he had lost a great deal of money. “For my part,” he declared, “I’d go a long way to trim him, even if I had to do it with a trick and tell him about it later on when I sent the money back.”

  Charlie Mark turned in his chair. This sounded like the baldest and most stupid and crassest advance agent work for a crooked gambler that he had ever heard. But his glance included, again, the brown-red hands of Warner, and the large emerald stickpin. And his suspicions subsided. This could not be a frame-up. The weather stains ingrained in the seams along this man’s forefinger must be real. He half closed his eyes and reviewed his own appearance. No, there could be nothing in his own appearance that would make him seem to be a man carrying a large sum of money.

  Opening his eyes again, he said, “How could you trim him? What’s the trick?”

  “It needs two,” confessed Warner.

  Again Charlie Mark turned and stared, and again Warner met him with a bland eye. No, this could not be crooked. It was too old for that. It was all stuff twenty years old at least.

  “Go on,” said Charlie Mark.

  “This way,” explained Warner, and briefly he outlined his scheme. It was to enter into talk with the great man of the plow, get him into a stud poker game—the only kind Butler played, it seemed—and then trap him.

  “I’ll sit beside him,” explained Warner, “because when he lifts his under card, he always lifts it pretty hard, and I can see what it is. Every time I can tell you what that card is. The thing to do is to wait until he bluffs, and then call him. He’ll start betting high all at once when maybe he’s away under a good hand. He’ll bet so high that he backs a man down … That’s the way he cleans up most of the time. He plays to one big hand, and, when he’s won that, he stops and nothing can make him play any more.”

  “A short sport, eh?” murmured Charlie Mark. And he sighed as he looked at his traveling companion. It was too easy and too good to be true—far too good.

  What followed was like a dream, it was so simple. With $32,000 in his pocket, and perhaps $1,000,000 to the bank account of the man who he was to face—was it no
t perfect? In half an hour they were settling down in the drawing room of the large and prosperous Mr. Butler with the last whisper of Warner still running pleasantly in the ear of Charlie Mark.

  “You’d better let me give you some money, because Butler is apt to go to the sky if you try to call his bluff. Let me give you something to …”

  “I have enough,” said Charlie Mark, controlling his smile. “I think I can manage. Never mind your help.

  Why should he share with an accomplice like this? If he borrowed a stake to play with, he must split according to the proportion of the loan compared with his own capital.

  “It will be a joke, eh?” Warner chuckled. “We’ll have the laugh on him when we give back his money, eh? And we won’t give it back till the train gets in.”

  Charlie Mark agreed with a smile. Restore the money? He laughed internally again. Truly the fools were not all dead.

  The game was even simpler than the approaches to it. The great goddess Fortune favored him absurdly. He had to cheat in his deals in order to lose, instead of win. And always there was the inevitable Warner sitting snugly in the corner of the seat beside the fat Butler, and signaling the buried card infallibly every time it fell. He was enjoying the game like a great child.

  But as time went on, Warner began to grow worried. He seemed to fear that something had gone wrong with Mr. Mark. And when Butler was called out of his room for a moment by a train acquaintance with a black cigar and an ancient jest, Warner confided his worries.

  “He’s liable to run ’em up high any hand now,” he protested. “You’d better start winning.”

  “Don’t trouble about me,” said Charlie Mark. “I’m trailing the old sport like a foxhound. He’s getting the taste. After a while I’ll trim him a little. Then he’ll come with a strong bluff, and I’ll raise him to the skies. Watch it work.”

  Warner was still protesting when Butler came back.

  The game proceeded exactly as Charlie Mark had prophesied. Shortly after the return of his host, he trimmed the man of the plows for four thousand at a stroke, a loss that put Butler back even with the game and clouded his brow so that Warner signaled to Charlie Mark that the blow would probably come immediately.

  And it came. It was on Charlie Mark’s deal. He sent slipping across the table a buried card that Warner immediately signaled as a jack. And no sooner had another jack gone on its way to Butler than that worthy immediately bet $1,000. Betting had been high, but such betting as this was thrilling even to the case-hardened nerves of such a professional gambler as Charlie Mark. He covered that $1,000.

  He was dealing with skill as great as he had ever shown before. In his delight over his own command of the pack, he determined to make the hand a close one. And it seemed to Charlie Mark, so adroitly was he manipulating the cards that the pack was responding to his bald wishes rather than to the cunning work of his fingers. He was reading them three down as he dealt. He was burying them under the bottom every lick. He thrilled with his own sense of prowess. After all, next to the joy of shoving a revolver under the chin of a man, there was nothing like tying him up in a crooked bit of work at a card table.

  Now he was drawing it with a fine edge. He sent to Butler—who was betting an even thousand with every card that came his way—another jack and two aces—a jack full on aces, which ought to be enough, considering the way the cards were running, to make the older man bet his head off. To himself, with consummate and tantalizing skill, he gave two queens on top of a buried queen and two tens. Would Butler buck that combination with a hair-raising bluff? In the meantime, Warner was leaning forward, perspiring with anxiety, and only drew a long breath of relief and settled back when he received the signal that the buried card was a queen. A queen full over a jack full—that ought to satisfy old Butler when he was called.

  The bluff came immediately. Old Butler studied the cards almost at once, and then—with a set jaw that betrayed his state of mind as clearly as though he had stated it in typewriting—he raked out his wallet, he produced a checkbook from it, and he inscribed the letters with wide, blunt strokes of ink—$20,000! Slowly, with incredulous eyes, Charlie Mark saw that sum written down and then the signature planted at the bottom of the check.

  After all, was not this more thrilling than any hold-up, even though there were less of an element of danger in it? “Twenty thousand!” cried the man of the plow. “Twenty thousand, sir. That is how sure I am that my hand is better than yours!”

  Charlie Mark looked into that expanding, swollen countenance for a moment. Then, fearful of betraying himself with a grin, he looked hastily down again. He in turn produced a wallet. His fingers, in spite of himself, shook a little with pleasure as he counted out in bills the sum of $20,000—twenty bills of $1,000 each, and then, in a separate stack, $8,000 more in cash, also—all that he had. Would to heaven that he had had more with him—a hundred thousand more!

  “See that twenty,” he said carelessly, pushing the money forward, “and raise you eight.”

  No, it was well he had bet no more than the eight. Mr. Butler regarded the money with intent eyes. Then he slowly drew out the checkbook again and wrote down the exact amount and no more. Plainly he was hesitant about risking another lump sum. But he managed to finish the check and pushed it out.

  “Call you, sir,” he said, frowning in doubt.

  Warner, leaning forward, his broad fat face shining with perspiration, seemed unable to breathe with ease.

  Charlie Mark pushed back his chair a little and shifted in it so that his automatic would be more readily under his hand. One could never tell when there would be gunplay in this part of the country. If so, he would be ready for it—and heaven help Mr. Butler if he attempted to resent with a slug of lead the departure of thirty thousand and some odd dollars.

  Then slowly Charlie Mark drew the buried queen toward him, raised it, studied the face of the lady an instant, and deposited it gently on the surface of the table beside the rest of his hand. “A queen full,” he said mildly to Butler.

  “Eh?” grunted the other. “A queen full?” He jerked his glasses away from his nose and leaned far forward as though he must now verify the truth with the naked eye. “A queen full!” he gasped out at length. “Right you are. A queen full.” He leaned back.

  A thrill of pity ran through Charlie Mark. After all, the simple old fellow was going to take defeat like a gamester.

  “Not quite good enough, though,” was what the man of the JCB plow was saying.

  Could Charlie Mark credit what his ears told him?

  “Not quite good enough, my boy.”

  And the fat hand turned over the buried card—not the jack that Charlie expected, but, to his horrified eyes, there was exposed one black spot in an expanse of shining white—the fatal ace of spades!

  It was literally like a physical shock. The blow struck him somewhere in the base of the brain and kept him bowed and staring for a long moment. Then he straightened and found that Mr. Warner, that simple Mr. Warner was watching him with a hard and cynical smile of derision.

  He had been done. He had been done like the simplest and most idiotic gull in the world. Blackness swam across his eyes. No, there must be no killing, simply because there was no escape from a train speeding along at the rate of sixty miles an hour. He had been trimmed, and he must wait for a chance to revenge himself.

  What were they saying?

  “You ought to give up cards and go in for plows, Mister Mark. I’m sure I can make a place for you in my factory.”

  Charlie Mark turned on them a white and terrible smile, then stumbled out of the drawing room and into the buzzing aisle beyond.

  II

  They had not passed the confines of the desert. No, the blank, broad miles of sand still stretched out toward the horizon, and beyond the horizon edge was the pale shimmer of the heat waves rushing up into the sky.

 
And Charlie Mark had thought to take plunder out of this terrible land and deliver it in the East. The whole thing seemed ridiculous for a moment. No, there was only one way, and that was to live in the West—as a strictly, stupidly law-abiding citizen, or else to live in the West as a man destroyer, tearing their winnings from the hands of others. The latter was the role that he preferred.

  But what was he to do now? He could not face the East. The debts he owed there would destroy him and his game, he foresaw. There was only one thing, and that was to go back to the West again, go back either as the Red Devil, under which grim name he had carved his place as an outlaw, or else go back to his adopted father’s house and there attempt to wheedle the old man out of sufficient money to pay off those gambling debts.

  If that failed, there remained another trip on the road as the Red Devil. And once he was back on his feet—oh, to have it in his power to reach this Warner and his friend Butler. The agonizing part of it was that the very simplicity and age of their ruse could so completely have blinded his eyes.

  But with $10 in his pocket, he must first of all leave this train at the first stop and trust to luck that he would be guided once again into the path of Warner and Butler so that he might add something to their account that would strike a balance.

  The first stop proved to be little more than a water tank and section house, but it was a point where Charlie Mark could catch a train running West. Before the afternoon had begun, he was bumping westward on a slow freight to the ruin of his most presentable suit of clothes.

  That journey was among the most grisly memories of Charlie Mark. He could figure very effectively as a man-killer or a gambler in polite circles, but between these two extremes he was not at home, and particularly as a hobo working the freights, he was by no means a success. He lost his last bit of money and his suitcase on the same night, due to the ministrations of a friendly hobo who he had helped the day before. And at length he was forced to drop off the train at a small town and pick up a few square meals by dint of battering doors. And all the while he could only pray that the unshaven whiskers would effectually mask his face and keep him from being recognized, for now he was approaching his home district in the mountains.