by Max Brand
Bent lingered on the steps, as though enjoying the evening; for it was just between the last of the sunset and the total dark of the night when the shadows had blanketed up the glare and the dust of the day, when the ground had yielded up its first radiation of heat, and the night wind began to fan cool through the trees and enter windows that yawned for it. The stars were coming out dimly, twinkling, seeming to advance toward the earth. The very sounds of the day were altered. The wheels and wagon beds of huge freighters no longer rattled and groaned in the streets, with a jingling of chains and hoarse shouts from the teamsters. Hammers that had clanged in the smithies, and thudded in the houses which were building nearby, were now silenced, as was the long, mournful scream of the saws in the lumber yard. Instead, they could hear children playing in the streets, their joyful yells of laughter suddenly blotted out as they turned corners, and coming into ken again, musical with distance; choruses of dogs suddenly began and ended, except for one sullen guardian who barked on the edge of the horizon, a mere pulse of sound.
Now Bent stood on the front steps and seemed to drink in these sights and noises with a smile on his face, while Clifton said quietly, as though ashamed to break in on him:
“Hate to hurry you, old fellow, but I have a meeting with some people at my house, tonight, and I have some things to finish up before they come. If you don’t mind, we’d better start on.”
“Why the short cut?” asked Bent, stepping down beside the other.
“I don’t show myself in the street more than I have to, these days. You can guess why.”
“You mean Destry?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I don’t think he’d murder you, Jimmy. Not off hand like that!”
“Murder’s not the worst thing. See what he did to Orrin!”
“Have you been dabbling in politics, too?”
“Not like Orrin, thanks. But as soon as I can wind up some affairs, I’m pulling out of this section of the country until things quiet down a little.”
“Meaning by that, Destry?”
“Ay, somebody’s sure to get him, just as he’s gotten so many others. That’s reasonable to expect. And I’m going to advise the rest of ’em to follow my example when I see them tonight.”
“They’re all coming—is that the meeting?”
“That’s the meeting.”
“You’ll be giving them a dinner, I suppose?”
“Not me. You know the old saying. A filled belly makes a blunt wit. We’ll need our wits tonight.”
“You will,” agreed the other. “So you all meet there and talk over Destry and what to do with him? I hope he doesn’t come and listen in through the window.”
Clifton stopped short and raised his hand.
“Let’s not talk of that demi-devil any more,” said he. “We’ll chat about the notes, if you wish.”
But the plan which already had been forming in the mind of Bent now took a definite shape; for they were walking along narrow alleys and winding paths where no eye observed them, as it seemed, and the secure shelter of high board fences housed them on either side a great part of the time.
“I don’t know about that,” said Bent. “Perhaps the best way is just to give you a check and finish the business.”
“You can? I’m mighty glad that you’re able to, Chet. That’s the best way for me, and for you too, in the long run, I daresay. I’m glad that you have the money on hand. Matter of fact, I was afraid that you didn’t!”
“Were you?” said Bent “Were you?”
He laughed, in such odd key that his companion looked quickly up into his face.
“I’ve got a reserve fund that I don’t like to dip into. I’ll use it now.”
He grew bolder as the sinister irony of the statement came home to him.
“The last time I used it was six years ago! Well, here we are at your back gate, Jimmy!”
The latter raised the wire hoop and pushed the door open, as a dog rushed at them, barking furiously, but immediately began to whine and leap up at his master.
“They see with their noses, eh?” said Clifton, pushing the dog off, but with affectionate hands.
“Well,” said Bent, “I don’t know but that it’s the better way to see. A lot of things aren’t as they seem to the eye!”
“No,” said Clifton, “of course they aren’t. Come on in.”
He pushed open the rear door, and they passed through the kitchen and living room, into Clifton’s bedroom, which had a desk in one corner and was evidently his office as well.
He lighted a lamp and hung his hat on a peg in the wall.
“Sit down here, Chet,” said he. “Here’s a pen and ink, if you want to make out the check at once. It may be a while before the boys come in, but I’ll have to hurry you a bit. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll go and put the chairs around the table in the other room.”
With that, he took a stool and a chair from the bedroom and carried them into the adjoining apartment, where he quickly arranged six chairs around the table.
Bent, in the meantime, took a check book from his pocket and wrote out a check for twelve thousand dollars with the greatest of care, forming the letters with a beautiful precision.
He had finished when his host returned.
The latter scanned the check, blotted it, and nodded.
“That’s finished, and a good job,” he said. “If I told you what a weight was off my mind, you’d be surprised. At the same time, now that the thing’s ended and I know you could pay, I’m sorry that I pressed you so hard.”
“Business is business,” said Bent, and smiled in an odd way at the other. “You have to have what’s coming to you.”
“You’re a lucky fellow to have a reserve fund out of which you can dip such a bucketful as this!”
Bent bit his lip. The thing for him to do, he understood, was to finish what he had in mind as quickly as possible; and yet all that was evil in him rose up from his heart to his brain and urged him to torture his victim before the stroke. So he lingered, the smile still on his lips.
Clifton smiled in turn, but hesitantly, as one not following the drift of his companion.
“You see how it is,” said Bent. “A man needs to have something at his back?”
“Of course,” said Jimmy Clifton. “A good reserve—generals plan on one in a battle, but it makes me feel that you’re sounder than I thought, old man, when I hear you talk like this!”
“You thought I’m one of these fly by night investors, eh?”
“Not exactly that. I always credited you with insight and brains, but——”
“But what?”
“Caesar was ambitious,” said Clifton, smiling at his own small jest.
There was a slight creaking sound, and Bent jerked about.
“What was that?” he asked. “Have they come? Have they come?”
Clifton was amazed at a sort of hard desperation that had crept into the voice of his friend.
“They? The five, you mean? No, they don’t show up for a few minutes. But they’ll come along. That was the wind handling the kitchen screen door, I suppose. It’s in the right quarter for that, just now.”
Bent turned back, with a great gasp of relief.
“Thank God!” said he.
“What’s the matter, Chet?”
“I thought I was going to be interrupted,” said Bent. “But now that I see I won’t be, I wanted to ask you if you’d like to know the nature of my reserve?”
“Of course I would. Some good bonds, I suppose? Negotiable securities? Those are the things to have on hand!”
“Yes, but as a matter of fact my reserve is only related second-hand to money.”
“What in the world is it, then?”
“A good right hand!” said Bent, still smiling.
Clifton frowned, then started a little as a possible interpretation jumped into his mind, only to be dismissed at once as a total absurdity.
“A good right hand?” he e
choed, in a rather worried manner.
“That’s it. A good right hand.”
“With what in it?”
“Not a pen, Jimmy.”
“No.”
“No, but a gun, or a knife!”
Clifton looked in the same puzzled manner at Bent, trying to push into his innermost thoughts, but it was impossible now to place any other than one construction upon the fixed and baleful stare of Bent.
The man seemed to grow taller, and stiffer in his attitude. His eyes glittered, and the smile froze on his lips into an archaic grimace, such as that with which the kings of Egypt look at their people in the tombs and on the pyramids.
Jimmy Clifton was not a coward. There was hardly a braver man in all of Wham, but he could not stir in his chair as he heard the other continue:
“For instance, six years ago it looked as though I’d be disgraced and found out as a petty thief, and therefore I determined to become a real one, and on a big scale. So I went out and held up the express— the job that poor Destry went to prison for.”
Clifton smiled wanly.
“I’m trying to see the point of the joke,” he said.
“It’s not a joke. That’s one reason that I hate Destry, I suppose, because I’ve wronged him, as the poet says. Oh, no, I’m not here to tell jokes tonight, Jimmy.”
“You’re not?”
“No.”
Clifton stood up from his chair slowly.
His eyes wandered instinctively toward the wall, from which hung weapons enough. And by that glance Bent knew that the man was helpless in his hands.
“Then what in the name of God have you come here for, Chet?”
“To cancel the notes, Jimmy, of course, but with a knife instead of a pen!”
Chapter Twenty-eight
It is necessary to return to young Willie Thornton as he approached the big house of Bent earlier in that day and stood at last before it quite overcome with awe. It was the largest and finest dwelling house he ever had seen. It even had little wooden towers at each of the corners that faced on the main street, and those towers, it seemed to Willie, would be marvelous places for princesses to inhabit by day, and ghosts and owls by night. When he had passed the front gate and it had clanked behind him, he made sure that he had taken the first step into a fairyland.
It was hard for him to strike with the knocker at the front door. He had to linger on the front steps and look up and down the street, where a cloud of dust was enveloping a train of burros which were waddling along under great packs. This dust cloud, the burros, and the signs of the shops looked so thoroughly familiar to Willie, and so like any other of a dozen Western towns he had seen, that he recovered somewhat from his awe and was able to use the knocker.
The door was presently opened by a scowling negress, who waved him away and assured him that no dirty little beggars were wanted there. He was so overwhelmed that he barely remembered the note he carried, and then only because he was gripping it in his hand.
This he now presented, and the effect of it was instant! He was not allowed in the front door with his dusty feet, to be sure, but the cook in person issued forth and escorted him around to the rear.
There he was made to visit a pump and wash basin, with soap and a towel, but after that trying ordeal, he found himself in a trice with his legs under a kitchen table and quantities of food appearing before him.
Such food and such quantities he never had known. Ham spiced with cloves, fragrant to the core, and corn bread made with eggs and brittle with shortening, and great glasses of rich milk. This was only the beginning, to be followed by an apple pie from which only one section had been removed.
He took one piece and hesitated.
“He’p yo’se’f,” said the cook.
He helped himself. Assisted by another glass of milk, he gradually put himself outside that entire pie. He felt guilty, but he also felt happy; and what is more delicious than a guilty joy?
Immediately afterward, he was sleepy, and straightway his mentor led him up a winding back stair and into a little attic room.
She shocked him into wakefulness for an instant by saying: “Right next, there, is where Mr. Destry lives, honey, if you ever heard tell of that man!”
Destry lived there!
“You lie down,” he was commanded.
And the instant that he was stretched upon a bed of marvelous softness, his eyes began to close, as though they were mechanically weighted, like those of a doll. His heart beat fast with excitement and happiness at the thought of having his hero so near to him; but sleep was mightier than his joy.
The last he knew, as his head swam dizzily, was the voice of the cook saying: “Growin’ tenderhearted—and to beggar boys! They ain’t no tellin’ how men’ll change. Money to a man is like water to a desert, I declare. They begin to grow kinder!”
But the meaning of this did not enter the mind of the boy, for a great wave of sleep swept over him, and instantly he was unconscious. It was dusk when he wakened.
As he lifted his head, he saw the red rim of the horizon sketched roughly across the window, and by degrees he remembered where he was. His stomach was no longer tight; his head was clear; he was refreshed as a grown man could not have been by sleeping the clock around.
Yet his feet were on the floor and he was stretching himself myscle by muscle before he remembered that the cook had said Destry lived next door. At that, excitement made him instantly wide awake.
He slipped into the dusky corridor and tapped at the door of the adjoining room, tapped three times, with growing force, and with respectful intervals between. But there was no answer.
At last, he tried the knob, found that the door opened readily, and entered.
“Mister Destry!” he called faintly.
He had no answer.
But when he scratched a match and looked around him, the sight of battered boots and a quirt, and a rifle in a corner suddenly re-created Destry, as though the great man was there in the body.
Willie was happy and comforted.
He could have sat among those relics with a swelling heart of pride in his acquaintance with that man of destiny!
Then a qualm struck him, as he wondered whether or not the hero would care to remember him. There is nothing in the living world so proudly sensitive as a boy, but when he recalled the manner of Destry on that night of battle he was reassured. There could be nothing but honesty in such a man as that!
So thought Willie and pursued his investigations, lighting match after match. He even opened the bureau drawers. It was not that he wished to spy on the secrets of Destry, but that every sight of the possessions of that wanderer filled him with pleasure. There in the top drawer, standing tiptoe, he found the hunting knife, and took it out. There were legends about this knife, as well as the gun of Destry. Had not Pop said that Destry could throw a knife accurately a hundred feet?
Pop lied, perhaps. Alas, he had lied in other matters dealing with Destry, and perhaps about this, also. But at least, this was the hero’s knife, with a small “D” cut accurately into the base of the handle.
He put it back reverently, in exactly the position he had found it; he had not dared to bare the bright blade.
He had barely pushed the drawer in when he heard a step in the hall and terror mastered him. Suppose that it was Destry, coming to his room, and suppose that a thief or a spy was found therein?
He slid into the closet and hid behind a long slicker, leaving the door a little ajar just as it had been. There he was hidden when Chester Bent entered and lighted the lamp. He saw the investigations of Bent with wonder, and with a growing fear, for there is something in the manner of a vicious man that betrays him as clearly as the manner of a stalking cat. So did that gliding furtiveness of Bent, in spite of himself, cast a light on him.
And the boy, watching, knew by an instinct that all was not well. He saw the knife taken, and, in his excitement, he stirred, and the buckle of his belt scratched against the wall beh
ind him.
The whirl of Bent was like the turning of a tiger, as he ran back into the room, the knife now naked in his hand. For a moment he glared about him, then the shutter moved in the wind and he seemed satisfied that all was well. Still grudgingly he left that room, and the boy remained for a long moment trembling in the closet, surrounded by utter darkness.
However much he was devoted to Destry, his affection for that man was nothing compared with the terror he felt for Chester Bent! When at last he summoned the courage to leave the room, he glided down the stairs intent on only one thing—and that was to escape from this house of guessed-at horrors as quickly as possible.
He left by neither the front door, nor the back, but slid through an open window and dropped from the sill to the ground. The garden mold received the impression of his bare feet up to the ankles, and, stepping back onto the graveled path, he smoothed out the deep imprints which he had made.
He hurried on, now, crouching a little as if to make himself smaller, after the ancient instinct of the hunted, and so he came to the front corner of the house just in time to hear the voice of Bent speaking from the steps of the house.
A moment later, he saw the man he dreaded going down the front path with a smaller companion. And Willie looked after them, breathing deep and thanking God that he did not have to accompany that man of mysterious fear.
Yet it is by the perversity of our emotions that we are governed, as much as by the legitimate warnings which our instincts give us. The horse he fears is the horse the rider mounts. The man she does not understand is married by the girl. The dog who growls at him, the boy tries to pet.
And the instant that Willie told himself he must not remain near Bent, that moment he felt an inescapable longing to lurk near the man. It was something like the horrible fascination of a great height, tempting him to let go his hold and jump. He sweated in the grip of it; but as the gate clanged behind the two, Willie was down the path in pursuit.
The moment he was in action, the fear almost disappeared, and it was sheer delight, merely seasoned with danger, as he followed the two on their way. All the old joy of the hunter was running like quicksilver in the young veins of the boy, and he slipped from shrub to shrub, from tree to tree, from fence to gateway, always keeping his soundless feet on the search for twigs or dry leaves that might be in the path.