Destry Rides Again

by Max Brand

  He didn’t examine the room further, but went back to join the others as they gathered. They came in not in pairs, but singly, each stepping with an odd haste through the front door and moving quickly inside of it, so that he would not remain silhouetted against the lamplight to any observer on the street

  Having made this somewhat guilty entrance, each tried to assume a cheerful air, which was promptly discountenanced by their self-appointed chairman, for Cleeves was invincibly grave this evening.

  Phil Barker, celebrated for his practical jokes, until that stinging jest of Destry’s had altered his habits, was the first to enter, taking off his sombrero and looking cautiously about him as though he feared lest even Cleeves might have something up his sleeve.

  Immediately afterward came Bull Hewitt and tall Bud Truckman, so close together that it was plain Bull had dogged Bud down the street, though he would not walk beside the other.

  The last to come was Williams, the strong man, who gripped his hat so hard in his powerful hand that he soon reduced it to a ball; at the expense of his hat, he was able to maintain a fair calm of countenance.

  Then Cleeves pointed to the chairs and bade them be seated, while he drew down the shades of the windows and closed the front door. He explained that their host apparently had stepped out, but must be back in a short time. They could sit down and open their minds to one another in the meanwhile.

  So they sat down around the table and each man looked upon the other as though he never had seen him before and was ashamed to be seen by him, in turn. Only Cleeves kept his mind clear for the business before them.

  He said: “We know why we’ve met here, but I’ll say it over again to bring things to a head. Then, if we get any conclusions, we’ll tell them to Jimmy when he shows up. He’s stepped out for just a moment; there’s still a lamp burning in his bedroom. In the first place, Destry is living up to the promise he made to us that day in the courtroom. We’ve scattered and tried to get away from him; still he hunted us down. Warren and Clarence Ogden are dead. Jud Ogden is worse than dead—crippled forever. Lefty Turnbull’s in jail and will soon be in the pen for a long time. Orrin is hiding no man knows where; he’ll be tried for graft when found and in the meantime he’s looked on as a yellow dog. Jerry Wendell has been hounded out of Wham; his heart’s broken. And that leaves six of us. If we can’t run away from him, we’ll have to bunch together and fight him. We’re here to discuss ways and means. As for the money end of it, if that enters, I suppose I can begin by saying that any of us will pay anything up to life to keep life. If I’m wrong, speak up!”

  They did not answer. They listened with their eyes on the table, not the speaker.

  “I’m right, then,” went on Cleeves. “Now, then, we’re ready for the ways of disposing of Destry, alive or dead.”

  “Alive, he’ll never stop,” said Barker.

  “Dead, then. We’ve got that far. He has to be killed! How?”

  No one spoke, until Bull Hewitt lifted his stupid face and said sullenly:

  “You gents all know I never was agin Harry so much. I wouldn’t of voted him guilty at the trial, if you hadn’t crowded me agin the wall, all talkin’ together. But now that it comes to the pinch, I say that Destry’s gotta die, because I wanta live. There’s just a few ways of killin’ a man—rope, knife, gun, poison. But hit on one of ’em quick.”

  After this, there was a bit of a silence, until Phil Barker struck the table with his fist.

  “Poison! It works secret and secret ways are the only ones that’ll ever catch Destry. We’ve tried the other kind and they’re no good!”

  “Ay, poison. But how?” asked Hewitt.

  Cleeves took charge again.

  “We’ve all agreed, then, that we’ll use anything from a knife to poison on Destry?”

  He took the silence for agreement, and then he went on: “The first great problem is how to get in touch with him. We’ll need Jimmy Clifton’s good head to help on that. I wonder where he’s keeping himself so long?”

  They waited, looking at one another.

  Cleeves, making a cigarette, scratched a match, and they all saw his big, bony hands trembling as he strove to light the smoke. At last, he snapped the match away, and struck another, looking around the table with a swift, guilty glance.

  They avoided meeting it. Then Barker broke out, quickly and softly: “We’re all thinkin’ of just one thing. Is Destry the reason that Jimmy ain’t showed up?”

  No one answered, till Cleeves cried: “Ay, and is Destry curled up somewhere, now, and listening to all that we have to say?”

  “Or,” suggested Bull Hewitt, “is Destry about to slip in with a pair of guns ready to work? He’s got us all here in one pen!”

  It was at this very crucial moment that they all heard, distinctly, the sound of the kitchen screen moaning on its hinges, and they stood up as though at a command.

  The kitchen door yawned slowly open. Cleeves had a gun in his hand. Barker was reaching for a weapon, when they saw in the dark doorway the smiling face of Chester Bent. It was at least less unwelcome than that of Destry, and there was a faint general sigh of relief. But Bent, standing in the doorway, ran his eyes carefully across their faces.

  “Friends,” said he, “you’re sitting here planning how to kill Harry Destry, and I’ve come to help you plan!”

  Cleeves exclaimed angrily: “Bent, we know that you’re his best friend! D’you think that you can come here and listen to us under such a shallow pretext as that?”

  “Am I his best friend?” asked Bent.

  Then he laughed a little, adding: “Jimmy Clifton can tell you how much of a friend I am to Destry. Where’s Jimmy now? I thought that all six of you would be here!”

  “You knew about this?”

  “Of course. Jimmy told me and asked me to come here; because I have the only scheme that will kill Destry!”

  They watched him in suspicion and in amazement. Yet what he had said carried with it a certain portion of self-proof. For if he knew of the meeting, it seemed logical that he must have learned from one of the six, and who would have been mad enough to tell him without good reason?

  “Go on, man,” said Cleeves. “God knows we hope that this is true, because I don’t know a stronger hand or head to have us! You want Harry Destry’s death?”

  “More,” said Bent fervidly, “than any of you! And more tonight than ever before!”

  As he thought of Willie Thornton, and of that lad’s knowledge, and of the uncertainty of his death, such a world of sincerity gleamed in the eyes and roughened in the voice of Bent that to see with a single glance was to believe him. There was not only real firmness of will, but a ravening hate which made their own fear-inspired hearts seem bloodless things.

  He added quietly:

  “You know what was attempted in my house the other night against Destry. Do you think that Clifton would have tried that without my permission and my help?”

  It was the final proof and convinced them all. They looked at Bent with wonder, but they also looked at him with a growing hope.

  “Where’s Clifton now?” asked the new recruit peevishly. “We must have Clifton. He’s the one of you who understands my position and can tell you whether or not I’m really with you. Isn’t he in his room?”

  He pushed the door open as he spoke.

  “He’s not there,” said Cleeves, “I looked a while ago and there was no——”

  “Great God!” cried Bent, and rushed into the room as though from the door he had seen something horrible that called him forward.

  Cleeves followed him; the others flocked behind; and they gathered about the prostrate body of Clifton, dead, with the knife fixed to the hilt in his throat.

  “Dead!” said Bent. “But—how long have you been here? Who was here first? What——”

  Cleeves grew pale.

  “Are you pointing at me, Bent?” he demanded hotly. “I was here first, if that’s what you want to know!”

&
nbsp; Williams was leaning above the dead man.

  “The knife!” he said. “The knife! Will ya look at it, all of you? Will ya see the ‘D’ carved into the butt of it? Destry! Destry was here before us! I’ve seen this here knife in the old days. I’ve seen him throw it at a mark! I’d swear it was Destry’s, even without the letter made onto it!”

  Cleeves was drawing down the shade across the window.

  He came back to the frightened circle and said firmly: “He’s been here. There’s his hand on the floor. Now what will we do?”

  He turned to Bent.

  “You wouldn’t be here without an idea, Bent. He thinks you’re still his friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you draw him back to your house?”

  “Not since Clifton made his try there. He won’t come back.”

  “Is there any other way?”

  “There’s one other way. There’s one house that he’d go to, if a message was sent to him.”

  “Charlie Dangerfield?”

  Bull Hewitt cried out in a choked voice: “You mean to use her for bait, to draw Destry into a trap?”

  “Look!” said Cleeves, pointing to the floor.

  And Hewitt, staring at the dead body and the blank, smiling face of Clifton, turned back abruptly, his argument crushed.

  “Can you get a message to him, Chet?”

  “I know how to get to him. I’ll do it tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have to do a bit of arranging, in the first place. I’ll have to see Charlie Dangerfield. I’ll have to have her written invitation to him. I’ll have to get that and bring it out to him. I’ll have to do everything, boys. And your only job will be to lie close and get him when he comes. But I’ll arrange the details. You’ll know everything! Only—what if this thing should happen, and she knew who had led Destry down into the trap?”

  They nodded at one another, for they saw the point. If there was one fact in his life which Bent had taken no trouble to hide, it was that he worshiped Charlotte Dangerfield.

  “Chet,” said Cleeves, “if you can do this for us, you don’t have to doubt! The rest of us would kill the man who talked! Great heavens, man, who would be fool enough to say that he took a hand in the killing of Destry?”

  “Get Ding Slater, somebody!” said Bent.

  He waved to the door.

  “Some of you better leave, too, before Slater comes. You stay on, Cleeves. And here’s an old friend of Clifton—Barker. You and Barker. The rest of us will start. Move the chairs away from that table. Get the blinds up. And don’t touch the dead body. Don’t move a thing in this room—not a chair or a rug. Don’t touch a thing, so that Ding can use his gigantic intelligence on the spot and try to make out what the ‘D’ on the knife may mean!”

  He sneered as he spoke, and, hurrying to the door, waved his hand at them and was gone.

  “I wonder,” said Cleeves slowly, as their new confederate disappeared, “who would win the fight if those two were thrown down hand to hand? That wild cat Destry, or this sleek bull terrier, Bent!”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The next morning, Bent rode out to the Dangerfield place dressed like a puncher of the range, not because he wanted to play that part, but because the cowpuncher’s costume is the only perfect one for rough riding across the brush-laced country of the Western range. His tall hat turns the heat of the sun or the downpour of the rain. It is hat, parasol, and umbrella all in one. His bandana keeps dust from falling down his neck, keeps off the hot rays of the sun where they are apt to fall with most force—the back of the neck—and in time of need is the sieve through which his breath can be drawn and the dust kept from his lungs. His leather chaps turn the needle points of the thorns. His high heeled, narrow toed boots, foolish for walking, are ideal for a man who is half standing in the stirrups on a long ride and does not wish his foot to be too deeply engaged in case of a fall.

  Bent was dressed in this fashion, and he was well accustomed to it. He took a strong, fast horse from his barn and went on a line as straight as a bird’s flight from his house to the Dangerfield place. He found “The Colonel” on the front veranda smoking a long cigar.

  “Hello,” said Dangerfield. “Are you masqueradin’ as a workin’ man, Chet?”

  “I’m a working man every day,” said Bent with a smile, as he threw the reins over the post of the hitching rack and came up to the steps. “I have to sit and grind, while you’re here in the cool of the wind.”

  “There ain’t any sitting work,” declared the Colonel. “The curse of Adam was sweat of the brow, not sweat of the brain.”

  Bent stood with a hand against one of the narrow wooden pillars of the veranda and smiled down at the rancher.

  “What about the worry of the poor devils in the offices?” said he. “Worry and trouble all day long!”

  “What do kids do when they sit in the shade?” asked the Colonel.

  “Day dream, I suppose.”

  “A gent that lives on his brain is simply turning day dreams into money.”

  “He has no pain, then?”

  “Not a mite,” said the other. “But he knows that he’s makin’ a living, and that starts him pityin’ himself. Most men don’t complain of work till they get married, and then it’s only to impress the wife. Because he finds out pretty pronto that he’s gotta be the comforter if he don’t ask to be comforted. But toilin’ with your hands, that’s different. Seein’ the sun stick in one place in the sky for a coupla dozen hours—that’s pain, with payday always about a week away.”

  “I think that I have pain enough,” said Bent.

  “You got it in your imagination,” said Dangerfield. “And there ain’t any larger or more tenderer place to have a pain than in the imagination. Women folks used to have that kind; men always have ’em, unless they’re laborin’, and then they don’t need any imagination at all. But I’ve set here on this porch a good many years and never seen much trouble, except thinkin’ of the first of the month, now and then. But it wasn’t anything serious!”

  “Have you lived such a happy life, then?”

  “Sure,” said Dangerfield. “By not workin’ I kept ready for the luck, and when the luck came, I grabbed it and took off its scalp.”

  He added: “I expect you didn’t sashay all the ways out here to talk to me, but if you came to see Charlie, I’ll tell you that she ain’t good company lately.”

  “I’ve never found Charlie dull,” said Bent.

  “Mostly,” said Dangerfield, “young men don’t know nothin’ about girls. It ain’t that girls wanta lie and be deceivin’ but they just nacherally can’t be themselves when a gent is around. They gotta put the best foot forward. I tell you what, Chet, Sunday’s been a mighty miserable day around this place for years and years, with Charlie usin’ up a whole week of good spirits on Saturday night. But now she ain’t dull; she’s just mean.”

  “Mean?” said Bent. “Charlie mean?”

  “A surprisin’ thing to you, I reckon. She’s so mean that she won’t talk to nobody, except a word or two to the niggers. The rest of the time she spends wranglin’ mustangs. And the wear that she gives a cayuse in two days is enough to keep him thin the rest of his life. I says to her: ‘Charlie, when you break a hoss, aim to save the pieces, will you?’ ”

  “I didn’t know that Charlie went in for rough riding.”

  “Sure you didn’t. But she’s gotta have some way of lettin’ off the steam, I reckon. It ain’t the hosses she’s mad at.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Herself. Because she once had that crazy, fast flyin’ snipe, Destry, tied to a string, and now she’s gone and cut the cord. Where’s he now?”

  “I wanted to talk to her about that,” said Bent.

  “Then she’ll listen,” said Dangerfield, “if you keep close onto that track.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Anywhere from hell to breakfast—from that broken headed mesa yonder to the corrals.”

  At the co
rrals, Bent found her. She had just turned loose a sweating mustang, chafed with white foam and froth about the shoulders; the tired horse merely jogged wearily away. In the meantime, Charlie Dangerfield leaned against the corral fence and criticized the handling of the next candidate for her attention. This was a bald faced chestnut with a Roman nose and the eye of a snake, which was trying to tear the snubbing post out of the ground, and bite, kick, or strike the two men who were working on it. The double purpose kept it from succeeding in either hope.

  “Hello, Charlie,” said Bent. “That’s a pretty picture you’re going to fit yourself into, it looks to me.”

  She waved her hand to him briefly, and hardly gave him a glance.

  “Sweet boy, isn’t he?” said she. “Look at the iron hook in his nose and the hunch in his back. Up on that back, you’ll feel as if you’re sitting on Mt. McKinley and looking down at the birds. Hey, Jerry, sink your knee in his ribs and give those cinches another haul, will you? You’ve got his wind inside that!”

  Jerry obeyed, and finally the gelding was prepared for riding. Bent, in the meantime, was looking over the girl quietly, and found her much changed. She was thinner, he thought, and the shadow about her eyes made them look darker. She might have been an older sister of the girl he had known.

  “Charlie,” he said, “you come away and listen to me. I want to talk to you about Harry Destry.”

  “Do you?” she replied. “Who’s Harry nicked lately?”

  The hardness and casual quality of her voice did not deceive Bent.

  “Little Jimmy Clifton,” he answered gravely.

  “Jimmy? What was Jimmy’s shameful secret?”

  “I don’t know. No one ever will know—if there was one—because it died with him, it appears.”

  Still she would not turn her head, but he well knew that her pretended interest in the mustang had disappeared.

  “Died?” she said.

  “Yes,” answered Bent.

  She turned slowly and faced him. He saw she was white.