by Max Brand
She looked away. “I never can do anything with you,” she said in a dead voice. “I know that you’re beyond me. You’re up here for some purpose that I can’t fathom. Why should I try? It would be like trying to reach my hand to the bottom of a well. I could talk . . . I could spread out my heart in my hand, and you wouldn’t care to even look at it. I . . . I . . . and yet . . . to whom can I talk now except to you? Oh, I wish I were never born.”
Dunmore stood up.
She rose before him. She was crying, as Jimmy Larren had said she would cry, but there was no hysteria. Only, out of sheer anguish, the tears forced themselves into her eyes, and then down her cheeks. She spoke softly, as though she were sufficiently ashamed of the tears, and did not wish to allow her voice to shake. “I think you’re right,” she said. “He would have stayed. He never would have left. It all was useless. And now he’s no better than dead.”
“Oh, come, come,” said Dunmore. “You’re makin’ a lot of fuss about this young chap. Are you cryin’ because you got engaged to him, or why?”
She shrank away from him. “You are cruel,” she said. “Cold and iron-hearted, and cruel, and you’ll murder him without a second thought.”
“Not a bit,” said Dunmore. “I’m a businessman, Beatrice. I’m for sale. What can you offer by way of a good price?”
THIRTY-FOUR
So greatly was she surprised, that she almost forgot the emotion that had been tormenting her just the moment before, and with parted lips she stared at him. “What have I . . . ?” she asked him. “What do you mean?”
He looked suddenly away from her. Edging between two slender tree trunks, he saw the mischievous face of Jimmy Larren, but he almost forgot the child the next instant. For he was glancing into the very heart of his problem, and it seemed to him clearer than ever that he never could take young Furneaux away without using Beatrice as the lure.
“Why, I mean what I say,” he said. “I’m a merchant. I go where I can get what I want.”
“And so you’ve come to me for what? For compliments?” she asked him suspiciously.
“What else would’ve brought me up here into the mountains?” asked Dunmore in turn.
Again she looked fully at him, and again she winced. “Of course, this is another way of laughing at me,” she suggested.
Dunmore picked a leaf from a shrub and puffed it off the palm of his hand. It spun and floated in the air, then winked down into the water. “I can’t be too serious,” he said. “You’re free to laugh, and I’m free to laugh, if I can. But what else could have brought me up here, except you?”
She said instantly: “The hope of getting into power here . . . of becoming the king up in the edge of the sky.”
This was so close to the truth and so fitted in with what the other Carrick Dunmore, that first of the race, had said, that he could not help starting.
“I knew it was the truth,” said the girl. “You’d really try to shoulder Tankerton off his throne.”
“I wouldn’t mind the job, perhaps,” agreed Dunmore. “But there comes along a time when a man gets to the marrying age, eh? So that age came along and found me.”
She laughed outright. “So you went up into the mountains to find a girl, and there you found her. Lucky, lucky Carrick!” She added: “You never had seen her. But that didn’t make any difference.”
“You ever hear of the Red Pacer?”
“You mean the mustang?”
“Yes.”
“He was captured by somebody, I think.”
“Yep. He wore a halter for five years. That was a friend of mine that caught him, and he had never seen the Red Pacer, either. But he went out and worked for eight months to get him, and get him he did. Spent thousands of dollars on hired men, used up hosses like water, to capture the Pacer.”
“And that’s the way with you and me?” said Beatrice ironically. “You hear about me, and you just can’t keep away, eh?”
“Well?” said Dunmore.
“Stuff!” she said. “I’ve heard men say such things before, and every one of them said it a lot better than you’ve done. Why, Carrick, there’s no more love in you than there is blood in a carrot. D’you think I’m only about five years old?”
“No, no,” answered Dunmore, “I’d say that you’re as old . . . as the blue in the bottom of that canon, over yonder. Do you want me to rant like a fool, Beatrice? Because I can, if you’d rather have it.” He turned closer to her as he spoke. He could see in her face doubt, bewilderment, and amusement. At this moment a breath of wind furled the collar of her blouse about her brown throat and gathered her whole body into gentle arms. Something leaped in Dunmore and rushed out strongly toward her.
“Ah!” she said, and caught her breath. Then she struck her hands together and laughed again. “You’re simply the grandest actor in the whole world,” she said. “I see that you could even do a love scene.”
He smiled at her. It was plain that she would recoil from a display of emotion, and that only an intellectual interest, as it were, would keep her amused by him. So he thrust back the tumult of feeling that had been in him and kept his smile impersonal.
“You won’t believe that I’m wildly in love with you, Beatrice?”
“Oh, tush,” she mocked. “We’ll let it go at that. But what under the heavens do you want of me?”
“Are you interested?”
“Interested? Would you be interested if a mountain lion came and stretched himself up the trunk of a tree in which you were sitting?”
“Hello,” answered Dunmore. “That’s pretty hard on me.”
“I don’t know whether you’re more ghost than panther,” she said, “but I’ll bet that you know how to ride on the wind and how to walk through walls, all right. And now you’re coming after me, d’you wonder that I’m all chills and fever?”
“It’s good to be noticed,” said Dunmore. “It’s the first step to any business deal.”
“This is to be a business deal, is it?”
“Certainly!”
“Very well, then. What do you offer me?”
“Furneaux’s life,” he said shortly.
She shrank, then faced him again. “You’ll not kill Furneaux . . . I wish to heaven that I knew what makes you hate him so.”
“Because,” said Dunmore, “I’m jealous of him. You’ve shown so much interest in Furneaux that I’d like him a lot better with his head off . . . or a hole in it.” He smiled at her again with a white flash of teeth, and she actually turned pale.
“You make me dizzy,” she said more than half seriously. “You can stand and smile and laugh, here, but all the while you’re as ready to murder as a cat is for mice.”
“Not murder, Beatrice. I never take an advantage.”
“Because other men have no chance against you. No, no, I suppose you’d go hunting trouble for the sake of the danger in it? I think you would.”
“You look as if you were in a haunted house,” he said. “Am I as bad as all that?”
“That’s how I feel,” she said. “As though the house were haunted and . . . ghosts were behind me.” She tried to smile as she said this, but her eyes remained very round and still.
“You’ll not hurt Rodman,” she summed up, “who you say you hate because you’re envious . . . jealous, I mean to say.”
“Of course, that’s it,” he said.
“It isn’t at all,” she retorted. “But let’s go ahead. You’ll let Furneaux alone if I’ll give you what?”
“Your company for ten days,” said Dunmore.
“My company . . . for ten days?” she cried.
“That’s it.”
“To do what?” she demanded.
“To ride down out of the mountains with me.”
“Where?”
“That’s my business.”
“You won’t say?”
“No, I won’t say.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m as serious as I ever was in m
y life.”
“To go with you . . . out of the mountains . . . for ten days. To travel alone with you all that time, do you mean?”
“Aye. That’s what I mean.”
“Then,” said the girl, “you’re absolutely a madman.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Will you tell me,” she said, “what you could gain by having me with you for ten days? Except for the pleasure of making me talked about?”
He frowned. “I’ve thought of all that. We can get married on the plains, if you want. . . .”
“I won’t want!” she said, and her lips curled with distaste.
He could not continue smoothly, but for a moment he had to look away from her disdain, across the bright surface of the pool, and at the glittering white pebbles with translucent shadows rippling over them. Then he could face her again with his customary half smile that so puzzled and intrigued her.
“Otherwise,” he said, “I don’t think that most folks will talk very much about a friend of mine, woman or man.” He hesitated. “If somebody started scandal floatin’,” he said at last, “I’d promise to pay him a call, if that would make you feel any better.”
She stared straight through him. “I travel with you for ten days . . . through the woods?”
“Aye. That’s the plan.”
“Suppose I tell that plan to Jim Tankerton?”
“He’d get his gang together to kill me, I suppose. That would make him fight. If the gang would follow him.”
“Do you think they wouldn’t?”
“I dunno,” he answered. “It’s a mighty good gang, but then they’s some things that you can’t always expect a gang to like to do.”
“Such as fighting a Dunmore?”
“They hate to make trouble for a good-natured man like me,” he stated.
“What could you gain by such a trick,” asked Beatrice, “except to cover me with scandal, and to make the whole gang chase you? What else?”
Dunmore shrugged his shoulders again. “I’ve talked it out as simple as a child’s sayin’ a lesson,” he assured her. “Will you let it go at that?”
“Do you think that I’ll do such a crazy thing?”
“You don’t like to think of Furneaux dying,” he told her.
“Whatever you have in mind, it’s something deep as the roots of the world. Whatever you’re aiming at, I’m to be taken along and see the shot fired. But did any woman ever do such a thing?” She came a little closer, curious and trembling with excitement. “Will you give me one hint of why you want me to make that ride?”
“Love, Beatrice,” he said. “I’m wild in love of you, d’you see?”
“And you smile in my face as you talk? What shall I do? What shall I do?”
“Make up your mind by dinner time,” said Dunmore, “or Furneaux will be dead before the meal’s over.”
THIRTY-FIVE
She went from him at once, stepping lightly over the rocks that cropped from the surface of the water. On the farther side, she paused and half turned, as though there was still some word she wished to speak, but she went on again at once, with lowered head, and the brush closed about her.
“She kinda thought that you were jokin’,” said a voice at the shoulder of Dunmore.
He turned and looked down into the face of Larren. “Was she wrong?” asked Dunmore.
“Aw, I’ll tell a man that she was wrong,” said Jimmy, “and, if she’d had half an eye, she’d ’a’ seen it.”
“Her eyes weren’t closed, Jimmy.”
“She was thinkin’ too much, and thinkin’ is always hard on the eyes,” said Jimmy. “When Chuck Barnard come to town, I was pretty bad scared. His dad had been in the ring and knew all the slick ways of sneakin’ a punch home. Well, I had to fight him. . . .”
“Why did you have to?”
“Why, what else would I do?” asked Jimmy, amazed. “Was I gonna back up and give up the game of bein’ boss before I’d had my chance at him? We had it out behind the Schuyler barn. He began boxing high and fine. He kept stickin’ a straight left in my face and clubbin’ me over my shoulder with his right. But pretty soon I noticed that he always was lookin’ thoughtful, like he was tryin’ to remember something. So I begun tryin’ fancy stuff myself. I begun to feint for the stomach, and then hit for the stomach. He could tell there was a feint, but he’d think that the next punch would be for the face. After he’d made a couple of mistakes like that he was no good, and pretty soon he was all upset and remembered that he had to go home and chop the kindlin’ up.” Jimmy paused, with happy eyes, and ran the tip of his red tongue over his lips. “Chuck was thinkin’ too much to really watch where my hands was goin’. And Beatrice, here, she was thinkin’ too much about what you said to keep watchin’ your face.”
“Well, Jimmy, what will she do?”
“Go and get set and think, of course,” said Jimmy.
“And what’ll come of that?”
“Why, what always happens when a woman goes and sets and thinks?”
“You tell me, Jimmy.”
“Sure, I can tell, and so can you. I seen my aunt once set and have a long think about would she go buy a new hat that day . . . she set so long that the bread burned in the oven. And, that afternoon, she did get the hat.”
Dunmore chuckled. “Are all women like that, Jimmy?”
“Sure. When a man sets and thinks, mostly it means that he ain’t made up his mind, yet . . . but you take with a woman, it’s just the opposite. She don’t really set and think . . . she’s just makin’ up excuses.”
“Then you think that Beatrice has made up her mind already?”
Jimmy thrust his bare toes into the verge of the stream, and wriggled them thoughtfully in the cool mud. “I dunno, just,” he said. “I dunno. She ain’t like common folks. You take a fast hoss and you see more of his speed than you do of his points. I reckon that she’s that way. She could change, too. But just now, I guess that she’s aimin’ to go away with you.”
“I think she is,” agreed Dunmore.
Jimmy sighed. “I’d be missin’ you a good deal up around here, chief.”
“You’re coming down with us,” said Dunmore.
“Coming down where, chief?”
“Wherever I take you.”
“You and me and her?”
“Yes, the three of us.”
“I’d like that,” said Jimmy, “I’d like that more’n a mountain of gold.”
“All right, Jim. We’ll probably start tonight. You’d better get your mustang in order.”
“Tonight?”
“I hope so.”
“You ain’t rushin’ things, chief?”
“No, Jimmy. If I stay here more than another day, I’ll never leave the camp alive.”
It was Jimmy’s turn to express greatest wonder. “Anybody been sneakin’ around you, chief?”
“Nobody. You can smell wood smoke before you see it.”
“A mighty lot,” agreed the boy. “Well, are we comin’ back up here?”
“Except on a stretcher, no, I guess.”
“Then I won’t need the mustang.”
“What will you do?”
“They’s a piebald hoss in the barn that I been talkin’ to considerable. He don’t mind me, and I don’t mind him. So maybe we could get along together, pretty well.”
Dunmore grinned. “Who owns him?” he asked.
“That Lynn Tucker, and nobody else.”
“Take him if you can. Get the horses out of the stable while the rest of us are finishing supper. Get ’em out and saddled. It won’t be long after that before we’re movin’, three of us, or only two.”
They crossed the creek, the boy skipping across first, and Dunmore following more slowly, but, as he reached the farther bank, Jimmy Larren turned with a squeal: “Duck!”
He flung himself straight at Dunmore’s knees. That hard impact, so totally unexpected, dropped Dunmore flat.
“Harper!” the boy had eja
culated, as he struck home against the knees of his friend.
As Dunmore fell, he actually felt the wind of a bullet beside his head. Falling, he drew his Colt, and fired at a vague outline behind the brush. Distinctly, like the thud of a fist against a soft body, he heard that bullet strike home. Then the head and shoulders of Chuck Harper appeared above the brush, with both his arms flung high. It looked as though he were striving to leap out at the man he hated, for there was both malice and agony in his squinting eyes and grinning lips. Instead, he crashed face downward through the brush, and rolled over on his back in the open. He was in his shirt sleeves, and red already stained the breast of his shirt. He began to bite at the air, like a dog in a fit.
“Chuck,” said Dunmore, “tell me if this was your own idea, or if somebody put it into your head. Tell me that, and I’ll help you. Otherwise, you can lie here and bleed to death, you murderin’ scoundrel.”
Harper beckoned twice with his right hand, so that Dunmore leaned over him. For that opportunity, Chuck had saved the last of his strength. He snatched from his belt a knife that jerked upward at the breast of Dunmore. But the barrel of the ready Colt dropped across the clutching fingers, battering the weapon from their grip. One final oath bubbled red upon the lips of Chuck Harper—his death agony rolled him upon his face—the pebbles rattled under his clawing feet and hands—then he lay still.
Dunmore looked across at the white, strained face of his companion.
“Thanks, Jim,” he said. “That was close.”
Jimmy laughed to cover a shudder. “Did you have your gun up your sleeve?” he asked.
“Inside my coat. I’ll show you the trick of it, one of these days. I’d like to know his secret, Jimmy.”
“What secret?”
“Whether he was sent by someone else, or came by himself.”
“Maybe he’s got the answer in his pocket.”
“Aye. Look and see.”
So Jimmy knelt by the big man. Presently he rose, a wallet in his hand, which when opened showed a thin, clean sheaf of bills.
“Five . . . hundred . . . iron . . . men,” said Jimmy with awe, as he counted. “Think of havin’ that much. That’s about half the price that hired him, I bet on that, chief.”