by Max Brand
The stranger did not persist in his introduction. Instead, he took from his belt a knife. It was a long, rather straight-bladed affair, looking quite unlike any hunting knife that Chuck ever had seen before. This weapon Dunmore flicked into the air. It sailed up fully thirty feet, hung for an instant in a sparkling whirl, then dropped rapidly down. Such a knife, with so sharp and narrow a point, could drop through the skull of a man as though it were pricking an eggshell, and Chuck Harper instinctively ducked to the side.
The knife fell, but, landing in the hand of the stranger, it was flicked up again, and at its heels another followed.
Chuck Harper, disgusted because he had allowed himself to exhibit concern again, ground his teeth, and turned a violent red, but, nevertheless, he could not help feeling an interest in the work of those knives. A knife was, indeed, a weapon that he favored even over a gun. It might produce less harm at long range, but at close quarters or in a crowd it was the very delight of his heart.
This stranger was a master worker. The knives flew up as a pair and descended together, and then flicked upward again, crossed in the air, and dropped almost simultaneously into the right hand—almost simultaneously, but not quite, for that cunning hand was able to give each an upward impulse again. Then the two big knives were snatched from the bright sun and disappeared. Big Chuck Harper gasped audibly. Then, looking down at the belt of the stranger, he saw that the knives were actually in the leather sheath that fitted there, one beneath the other, yet he could have sworn that no human hand had placed them where they belonged.
“You were saying about your name?” said Dunmore.
“I’m Chuck Harper.”
“Chuck, I’m glad to know you. When a gent has been sashaying around through these mountains and not meeting anything but a squirrel or a rabbit . . . just enough company to keep him from starving . . . it’s pretty good to run into a man again. Mighty good to hear some conversation, and all that.”
Chuck, brooding darkly, said nothing. He was contemplating two conceptions, both of which were painfully bright in his mind—one was the power that had lifted that bulk of stone. The other was the speed and craft of hand that had made the heavy pair of knives float and dance like bubbles in the air.
“If you’re Harper,” ran on the other with the same good-natured smoothness, “then I suppose that this is Harpersville?” He hardly waited to appreciate Chuck’s silence, but went on: “Of course, it is, and that means it’s where Jim Tankerton comes for his vacation, as one might say. Is that right?”
Chuck Harper pressed his lips together and gathered anger in his heart.
“That bein’ so, here’s where I hang up my hat, but I might as well put up the mare, first. I’ll just take her around to the stable.” He stood up, and went to the mare.
“The stable’s full,” said Harper.
But now it was Dunmore who did not seem to hear. He broke into a whistle and started around the corner of the hotel, the mare following.
“There ain’t no room for her!” called Harper.
“Why, any little corner’ll do for her,” said Dunmore, and went on his way, the corner of the hotel quickly shutting him out of view.
TEN
Chuck Harper fidgeted in his chair. Above all things, he hated to take note of any stranger. Indeed, there was only one human being in the world whom he feared and respected, but now he felt that he had been pressed into a corner, and that he would have to respond. He first slid a heavy Colt from an armpit holster and saw that it was in good working order. Then he rose, shrugged his shoulders more comfortably into the loose raincoat that covered them, and tugged his hat lower over his eyes. Then he went with long strides in pursuit of the newcomer.
When he came to the door of the barn, he could hear the rustle of hay being forked down in the loft. When he stalked down the aisle of the stable, he found cause to stop with a jolt, for in the one box stall of which he boasted there now stood not the tall and powerful bay gelding that had been there in the morning, but the sleek and lovely mare on which Dunmore had just arrived. He rubbed his eyes, hardly believing what he saw, and now the stranger came down the ladder from the mow and dropped lightly on the floor.
Chuck Harper laid a heavy hand upon his shoulder. “You changed them hosses, you . . . ,” began Chuck. He stopped himself there. For his gripping fingers were working upon a mass of rubbery muscle. Suddenly he understood that this young man was not sleek with fat, but with sheer might, and it discouraged Harper’s rage at once.
Dunmore shrugged his shoulders, and the hand of his host fell away.
“Sure I changed ’em,” he said. “You take this here part of the world, partner, and, of course, you know that a gent always gives room to a lady. When I seen that big hoss standin’ in there all by himself, I took a look in his eye, and plain as day he was sayin’ ladies first. ‘Thanks, old boy,’ says I. I put him in that next stall and tied Excuse Me in here. She just seemed to fit, as you can see for yourself. Where’s the grain bin?”
Mr. Harper had grown a dark and swollen purple, but somehow it seemed impossible for him to find the proper word with which to answer.
“Here we are,” went on Dunmore. “Thanks!” He lifted the lid of the big oat bin in the corner and dipped out a large measure, which he carried into the box stall, and dumped into the feed box there.
“Look here . . . ,” began Harper.
“Yes, look at her,” said Dunmore, sleeking the neck of the mare with a fond hand. “Look at her try to stand on her head in that feed box. Greedy pig, ain’t she? But I never seen a hoss worth his oats that didn’t want to swaller them alive.” He came out from the stall. “I’d better go and see about rooms now,” he announced.
“They ain’t no room for you in that house,” said Harper grimly.
“Why,” said Dunmore cheerfully, “where I roll down my blankets is no worry to me.” He shouldered his pack and stepped lightly past his big host, and through the door of the barn toward the hotel.
Chuck Harper could hardly believe his eyes or his ears. He thought first of rushing after this youth and falling upon him with naked hands. Those mighty maulers of his had beaten many a strong man to a pulp, but something checked him now. It was the thought of the lifting of the great rock in front of the house. For that matter, the thing might not be as difficult as he imagined.
His next impulse was to snatch out his revolver and send a bullet through the back of this calm-mannered interloper. But he remembered what the judge had said about self-defense the last time he was in court, and the memory made Chuck snarl like a savage but half-cowed dog. Finally he hurried from the barn in pursuit, but already the stranger was at the back door, speaking to Mrs. Harper.
“Keep that gent out!” roared Harper.
But at that moment Dunmore had stepped through into the interior.
“What’s your name and what you want?” Harper heard his wife shrilling. “You git out of here! Chuck don’t want you!”
Harper could hear a polite murmur in response. Then a door banged, and he came up into the kitchen with a leap, to find his wife was raging at the dining room door, and shaking the knob of it furiously.
“Chuck, he walked through here and locked the door after him. I never seen anything like it. It’s drivin’ me crazy! What’s he mean? Who is he? Is he drunk? I’d like to scratch his eyes out!”
Chuck Harper laughed. In the pure excess of passion he laughed, and that laughter died into a whining snarl. He tried the knob of the door, assuring himself that the impossible was, indeed, possible. Then he flung out of the kitchen. His wife clutched at him and was dragged a little way with the rushing bulk of him.
She stammered: “Don’t you do no murder, Chuck. Mind you, Chuck, don’t you pull no knife on him. . . .”
“I’m gonna bust him wide open!” gasped Chuck Harper, and raced around the corner of the house.
At the front door, he slipped, such was the recklessness of his abandon, and fell heavily to the gro
und, skinning the palm of one hand. It was like giving the spur to a runaway horse. He bounded to his feet again with a groan of intolerable anguish. It seemed to Chuck that he was entering a dark mist, a fog of sooty smoke, so did his emotion master him. With a bound, he came to the front door and wrenched at it. The heavy bolt answered him with a jangle and crash. That was all.
He recoiled for a step. “My own house, too,” said Chuck.
It was one of his favorite diversions to work himself into a towering rage about trifles, about nothing at all. It was the one constant cup of joy for him to see others cringe and cower, not knowing why he was so maddened. But now he found an excuse for every violence. For the first time in his life, murder itself would be justifiable, nay, praiseworthy. For what court can reprove a citizen for defending his hearth and home from the aggression of a stranger? He would be applauded, men would shake him by the hand, his own wife would smile upon the deed of valor. . . . Chuck Harper threw his arms above his head and cried out in a stifled voice of joy.
Then he rushed for the first window. He jerked it up a few inches, but there it stuck, for the sash was warped and would not run in the groove. “By grab,” said Harper, “the whole world’s gone crazy.”
He, at that moment, heard the stranger pass with a light step and a whistle into the front room, the big room, the room that the great Tankerton himself honored with his presence when he deigned to come here for the night, and, at this, the brain of Chuck Harper was somewhat befogged again. He leaped for the next window, jerked it wide, and sprang in. His Colt was in his hand as he crashed up the stairs. He was so drunk with fury that, at the landing, he lurched into the wall and careened back against the railing, but he paid no heed to this. He felt in himself power enough to rip the house apart like a matchbox to get at the insulting man who called himself Dunmore.
So he came to the upper hall, and the boarding groaned and creaked beneath his weight as he plunged down the corridor to the corner room, the chosen room, the room from which he and his wife so gladly had removed themselves and their belongings in order to make way for the great James Tankerton. The door was wide open. He drove in, gun in hand, with a bellow like the roar of a bull as it closes in battle with a peer.
But suddenly he saw that the room was empty. He whirled about. There beside the door stood the stranger, still whistling softly, and carelessly, hip-high, he held a revolver that pointed straight at his host.
“Gosh!” ejaculated Chuck Harper, and remembered suddenly that life was sweet. The gun slipped from his unnerved fingers and dropped upon the very pack that Dunmore had flung upon the floor.
“You’re pretty modest about your place,” said Dunmore gently. “I guess I figger out how it is. You’d like to have a bang-up, fashionable hotel, with hot and cold runnin’ water in every room, and all that, but for an ordinary cowpuncher like me I don’t see anything wrong with this little old room. It just about fits me, take it all in all.”
He made a gesture, and Chuck Harper saw that the gesturing hand was empty of any gun. He thought for an instant that he had imagined the sight of the leveled weapon of the moment before, but then he knew that he could not have dreamed the thing. But by some mysterious sleight of hand the other had conjured the gun out of view. Perhaps it was merely shaken up his sleeve, and ready instantly to drop again into his fingers.
“This here room,” panted Harper in a hoarse and shaken voice, “is already took.” Suddenly he realized that what he said would make no difference. This genial, pleasant-mannered fellow would simply help himself to what he chose, and smile in answer to every argument.
“You’ve got other rooms for him,” said Dunmore. “But I’ll tell you how it is . . . I need sun. And this here room has a south window. I need a view, too, and it’s got another window that looks over the mountains, yonder.” Deliberately he turned his back and walked to the nearest window and looked out.
Chuck Harper could not believe his eyes. Here was a man who turned his back upon him, and stood at a window without a gun in his hands, and on the floor at Harper’s feet rested his own gun, the handle invitingly toward him. It would be an instant’s work to scoop up that weapon and use it. Yet, Harper hesitated, and gradually his blood turned cold. What could an ordinary man do against a magician? He only bawled out impotently: “You know who’s got this room, young feller?”
“Oh,” said Dunmore, “Tankerton won’t want to have any trouble with me.”
ELEVEN
It was a week later that Chuck Harper walked in the woods behind the hotel with a little dark-skinned man, a handsome little fellow, if it had not been that his eyes were like the eyes of a ferret, so brightly twinkling and so ill at ease. He wore a continual smile and had a habit of keeping his eyes fixed on the ground, as though he were hunting for something there, then lifting them suddenly as though he had found it in his companion’s face. Despite his smallness, Chuck Harper treated him with the greatest respect, for this was Lynn Tucker, who, in any other part of the world, might have been considered a very proper head for the most formidable gang of desperadoes. But this was the domain of Jim Tankerton, and, therefore, Tucker was not in command; men rated him as a sort of second lieutenant, beneath Tankerton himself and that wily old snake of wisdom and poison, Dr. Legges.
Chuck Harper knew all that others knew about Lynn Tucker, and, therefore, he talked chiefly when questions were asked of him. Already he had told of the coming of Dunmore, and Tucker had surveyed the great rock and even tried to budge it with his own lean hands.
“He’s quite a man,” Lynn Tucker said calmly.
So they went back into the woods and continued their talk.
“What does he want?” asked Tucker.
“That I dunno. Sometimes I think that all he wants is to live here free. I asked him for his week today, and he says that he’s hurt and plumb surprised that he should be asked for his money before he’s been here a month.”
“Did he say that?”
“He did. Says that he wasn’t used to being treated that way, and that he would hate to begin now to have his credit doubted, but, seein’ as I was livin’ away up here in the mountains, where they didn’t understand the latest way of doin’ things, he’d be glad to forgive me and overlook it.”
“Does he talk that way?”
“He don’t talk no other way, at all. If you was to go up and swear at him, he’d admire the fine flow of words that you had and ask where you’d studied it out, and was it all original, and did nobody help you with some of the big ones.”
Tucker nodded and smiled at the ground, as usual.
“D’you think he has money?”
“I wished I thought so, but I figger that I’m keepin’ him free of charge.”
“What makes you do it? You got the law to help you.”
The landlord hesitated, and then scratched the stubble on his chin. “The law and me ain’t chums,” he confessed. “We’ve never been pals, and the farther off that I keep from it, the better it suits me, I’ll tell a man.”
“It’s a pretty hard case,” said Tucker.
“He eats me out of house and home. He’s a hog! You could feed four men and a boy on what he pours down his throat every day. The wife, she sets up a feed for him, and he eats it, and then he says he knows that she’s holdin’ back a little surprise on him. And he walks over and unlocks the pantry door. . . .”
“Why don’t you keep the key out of the lock?”
“He’s gone and made himself a master key that fits every door in the house! He opens the pantry door and goes in and comes out with a saddle of venison. ‘Leave that be!’ sings out the wife. He shakes his finger at her. ‘You’re gonna surprise me with this beautiful venison on Sunday, Missus Harper,’ says he, ‘but right here it’s a pleasant enough surprise. What with walkin’ over the hills and all, I’ve worked up a pretty fair appetite.’And then he slices off some steaks a couple of inches thick and fries them himself, or broils ’em over the stove.”
&n
bsp; “And while he’s got both hands full, you wear a gun, old son.”
“I’ve seen him keep five things in the air.”
“Juggler, eh?”
“He is. Knives, and such, is his specialty. Knives sharp as a razor and. . . .”
A gun barked in the distance, and the long echoes rebounded dimly along the forested slopes. Lynn Tucker lifted his head.
“Who’s that?” he said.
“That’s him, of course. Goes out every day and comes back with a batch of squirrels. Says that he’s fond of squirrel meat, and he orders up a stew of rabbit and squirrel. Eats about ten pounds of it at every set down.”
Lynn Tucker looked through a gap in the trees across the depth of the gorge, soft with blues in the hollow, and at the white mountains in the distance, gently veiled with blue, also. He nodded. “I begin to get a sort of an idea of this here gent,” he said in his quiet way.
“Maybe it’d give you a mite clearer idea,” said the landlord, “if you was to know that the way that he kills those squirrels is with a Colt.”
“A forty-five?”
“A forty-five is what he uses, son.”
The other clucked, as though to encourage a tired horse. “We’ll have to see to this here,” he said. “I’d better keep out of sight till evenin’, maybe.”
That, accordingly, was what he did, and remained hidden, in fact, in the cellar of the hotel until the dark came, and then until a tap came at the door at the head of the stairs. He stole up, soundlessly as a shadow, and Chuck Harper opened the door for him. Chuck carried a lantern, and, above it, his face was pale and his little eyes staring.
“Are you ready?” asked Chuck excitedly.
“I’m ready. How long ago did he go to bed?”
“About an hour.”
“Is he asleep?”
“Asleep, and snorin’ like a pig.”
“I like a man that sleeps as hard as that. It’s sort of honest,” said Lynn Tucker, and he smiled in such a way that his host smiled in answer.