Brand, Max - Silvertip 10 Page 14

  “So I run along, do I?” said Sue. “And how am I to know that you won’t be running the opposite way, pretty quick, and the gal along with you? I’ve seen you giving the eye to her. I ain’t blind, Christian.”

  “Do you think, Sue,” said Christian, “that we would run away from the Carys? Do you think that we’d be such fools?”

  “I’ll trust a man as far as I can keep a forty-foot rope tied to him,” said Sue. “When there’s a gal with a face like Julie’s mixed up in it, I won’t even trust him that far. Understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand,” said Christian. “And you don’t remember, do you, that Julie Perigord is engaged to Will Cary? What’s the matter with you, Sue? You’re a bit rattled, aren’t you?”

  “Her and Will Cary—that was calf love—or no love at all,” said Sue. “Well, I’m going to get out and leave you two alone, but I’ll bet I catch the devil for it, in the wind-up.”

  XXIII. — CHRISTIAN’S IDEA

  I heard a chair pushed back in that room, and the flashlight of Taxi at the same instant glinted on the knob of a door just beside him. He pushed that door open, and we faded into the dark of a room, all of us, while the firm footfall of Sue came out of the next door and turned down the hall.

  She kept on talking as she moved.

  “Treat him good, Julie,” she called. “It ain’t every gal in this world that gets a smile from Barry Christian. Mostly he don’t smile except on gents with loaded wallets.”

  She laughed. The sound of her laughter passed away down the hall, and went suddenly dim around a corner. The creaking of her footfall still sounded clearly, moving out of hearing only step by step.

  There was only a thin partition between our room and the next. When Christian spoke, it was startlingly as though he were in the darkness on our side of the wall.

  “Here we are at last, Julie,” he said.

  A thickness of silence followed that remark.

  “Just thinking things over, or damning me a little, Julie?” he asked.

  “Not a little,” said the voice of the girl, speaking for the first time.

  A breath was caught somewhere close to me. That would be Clonmel, I could imagine.

  “And yet,” said Christian, “the fact is that you ought to be leaning on me, Julie. There’s no good chance for you here. Do you know just how bad your chance really is?”

  “I’d like to know,” said Julie Perigord.

  I liked the way she talked, quietly, with a world of that composure which is like a reserve of strength.

  “You’ll have to marry a Cary,” said Christian. “Does that sound good to you?”

  “I won’t have to marry a Cary,” said the girl. “They know that I’ve come up here for a different reason.”

  “Because of that big fellow? Because of Clonmel? Yes, they realize that, and that’s the reason they have to make sure of you. You’ve seen a great deal too much, and you know a great deal too much. You’ve got to be a Cary—or else you’re not going to be anything at all!”

  “You think that they’d knock me over the head?” asked Julie.

  “No, I don’t think that. The old man doesn’t like killings. Just a few, now and then, to show that his young men are the right stuff. And he wants most of those killings to take place a good distance from home. But there are ways of persuading a girl to change her mind.”

  “Are there?” asked Julie.

  “For instance—” began Christian.

  “I don’t want to know what they are,” she declared.

  “Let it drop, then. I simply want to make sure that you understand.”

  “I understand they’re savages,” said Julie.

  “Then that leads me straight on to a logical conclusion,” said Christian. “I’m rather tired of a lonely life. There’s only one way you can dodge out of this place—and that’s with my help. What do you think of the idea?”

  “Elope with Barry Christian?” said Julie.

  “That’s the idea. You may have some bad ideas about me, Julie. I deserve a good many of the bad ideas, at that. But there are some decent streaks in me, too. What do you say?”

  “On the whole,” said Julie, “I suppose I ought to thank you.”

  “I don’t ask for thanks.”

  “I’m afraid you won’t get them, either,” said the girl.

  “You’re going to be hard on me, are you?” asked Christian. It was a wonderful thing to hear the plaintiveness creep into his voice. And what a voice it was! Listening to him on the far side of the wall, I could not help forgetting what I knew about him. Even the nearness of Silver to me in the dark was not entirely enough to keep the truth about Barry Christian in my mind.

  “I won’t be hard on you,” said Julie. “It simply can’t be that way. You see?”

  “You’d rather stay with the Cary tribe? Is that the truth?”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “What makes you detest me so, Julie?”

  “Why, I’ve heard a good deal about you. At secondhand, so to speak.”

  “How do you mean that?” asked Christian.

  “I mean, I’ve heard what Jim Silver has been through on your trail.”

  “He’s a head-hunter,” said Christian. “Are you going to believe all the fairy tales that they tell about Silver?”

  “If I couldn’t believe in Jim Silver,” said Julie, “I don’t think that I’d want to believe in anything.”

  “Ah, there’s your handsome giant—there’s Clonmel,” said Christian. “What about him?”

  “I love him,” said Julie, so quietly that the force of what she said only struck me afterwards. “And love isn’t exactly the same as belief. I don’t know Harry Clonmel. But I know Jim Silver. Every decent person in the mountains knows Jim Silver and has to believe in him.”

  “Are you going to throw me out like this?” said Christian. “Isn’t it being a little foolish?”

  There was a sound like a whispering. My friends were rising from the floor where we had been crouching. The ray from Taxi’s torch showed us the door. Taxi opened it. We passed out into the hall, arranged ourselves in a half moon, and then Taxi opened the next door, softly but suddenly.

  It made a soft, rushing noise of wind as the draft sucked out after the door. That whispering noise made Christian turn his head and see Jim Silver on the threshold.

  XXIV. — END OF THE TRAIL

  Right behind Silver, looming above him, was the half-naked giant, Clonmel. And on the other side of Silver stood the slender form of Taxi. As for me, I didn’t count, and I was about out of sight, anyway. But those three must have looked to Christian like three devils out of hell.

  The sight lifted him to his feet, slowly, as though an invisible hand had grabbed him by the hair of the head and raised him. I think there was hardly a man in the world with a colder nerve than Barry Christian, but now he turned white. His face was always pale; now it became like clear stone, and his eyes were dark streaks.

  Against these odds, he was perfectly helpless.

  Julie Perigord got up from the table, also. She looked at the trio in the doorway, and I saw her smile. There were not three men there. For her, there was only Clonmel.

  Silver said: “You can put your hands up, Barry.”

  “Thanks, Jim,” said Christian. “I must tell you that if you take another step, I’ll yell. You’ll have me dead, but the Cary tribe will be picking your bones before my body is cold.”

  That was true enough. I could see that with a fellow as cool as Christian there was only one thing to do.

  And then I heard Silver saying: “Do you think that I’ll back out of the house without you, Barry?”

  “Why not?” answered Christian. “You’ll have the girl. To a fellow of your character, Silver, the righting of a wrong ought to be enough. Tut, tut! You won’t leave the poor child here in the hands of the brutal Carys, will you? Not if I know the noble character of Jim Silver.”

  You see, he was entire mas
ter of himself again, after the first deadliness of the shock. There he stood and sneered at his great enemy. I could understand then why Christian had been able to stand out so long against Silver. It was because the man was as great a power for evil as Silver was for good.

  “Besides,” said Christian, “you have to think about your friends. A young hero, there—Clonmel—and my old companion, Taxi—the lad you saved from the underworld and brought right up into the honest sunshine of life—to say nothing of that flat-faced mug of a Bill Avon, that I see in the rear of the trouble—you don’t want to throw them all away, Jim. And most assuredly they’ll die with you, if you take another step. I shout, Jim—and the final battle begins!”

  It was convincing. Not so convincing as I write it down, but utterly convincing if you had been there to see the flash of his eye and the sneer of his lip.

  But Silver took the step forward!

  “Better wait there, hadn’t you?” said Christian.

  The calmness of the pair was what drove knives of ice through me.

  “You’re a very intelligent fellow, Barry,” said Silver, “and you might win out with most people. There’s only one valuable thing that I know about you—that is that you value your hide. But if the girl has to become a Cary; if Taxi and Clonmel and poor Bill Avon have to die with me—it’s worth the price to wipe you off the earth!”

  And he went straight up to Christian.

  I saw the lips of Christian part. I saw his chest heave as he drew in a breath. I squinted my eyes against the shock of hearing the cry that would be the death signal for all of us. But the cry did not come. Silver simply took hold of Christian by the wrist and held in his other hand a Colt revolver, by the barrel, so that it would make an efficient club.

  “All right, Jim,” said Christian. “It looks as though you win this trick, for the moment. How you’d like to smash the gun into my face, eh?”

  He chuckled softly. It seemed to me that I could live a thousand years and never come across a stranger thing than that laugh of Christian’s, as he confronted Silver.

  “Fan him, Taxi,” said Silver.

  The slim, deft hands of Taxi dipped into the clothes of Christian.

  They brought out two man-sized Colts and a little double-barreled pistol hardly larger than a man’s hand, but able to throw a fatal bullet across the width of a room, no doubt. It was hitched up the arm of Christian with a strong elastic. There was a long knife that was worn just inside the front of his belt. It had a flat, heavily weighted handle, so that it could be used either for throwing or hand-to-hand fighting. As I looked at the four weapons, I had a grisly, a sickening sense that all of them had taken lives.

  There was a wallet, also, that Taxi produced. It was fat. He opened it up, and I saw two thick sheaves of bills, each sheaf filling a side of the wallet. The man was carrying a good-sized fortune around with him.

  Silver said hastily: “Put the wallet back, Taxi.” There was a quick disgust in his voice.

  Christian interpreted calmly: “Blood money, Taxi. None of that shall ever touch the pure fingers of Jim Silver. Blood money, my boy!”

  He chuckled again. I had a feeling that the cool devil was almost enjoying this excitement.

  Silver tied Christian. He did it in a strange way. He simply wound a twine cord around his wrists and then put a loop of the twine around his neck. That left Christian free to move, but it meant that he could not move fast. His hands were about helpless, and no man could run or jump freely, tied in that way.

  Then we four left the house, taking Christian with us, and Julie.

  Nothing happened, of all the things that could have happened. We simply went down to the head of the first stairs, and down those stairs through a door that stood open for us, and so out under the stars. I had a crazy desire to screech and laugh.

  We walked straight away from the house and got safely into the first patch of brush. As it closed around us, rays of dim light came from the cabin and struck all about us, throwing wild patterns of shadow over us.

  And I heard the voice of the old man, saying: “Keep on watch all night. Mind you, keep stirring. And every time a star blinks, think that it may be Jim Silver about to drop out of the sky!”

  Yes, the old man had finished stirring up his boys, and now he was posting them on guard. He was just a little too late. If he had been ten years younger, he would have had them out on post well before we got away from the place, I dare say. And I had a shivering suspicion that, when he was a youngster, he might have been a full match for Jim Silver and all the rest of us.

  I looked back through the leaves and I saw the old man’s tall, straight, but fragile figure, supported as usual against the slender strength of Maria. The Cary outfit was scattered here and there, taking up positions about the house.

  Then I heard the old man say: “What the devil’s the matter with you, M’ria? What are you bawlin’ about?”

  Maria’s sobbing voice answered: “Shut your mouth! Don’t speak to me. Don’t you never speak to me!”

  I wondered what would happen after that speech, but to my amazement, the old man simply broke out into his husky laughter.

  “That’s the way I like to hear a gal talk,” he said. “That’s the good old Cary blood speakin’ up loud and bold. M’ria, I’m sorry that you ain’t a man. You would ‘a’ been worth all the rest of the gang, I can tell you!”

  The girl said nothing. I heard her catch her breath on another sob. That was all.

  I wondered, then, whether she cried because she thought Clonmel was still in the house, being hemmed in, or whether she guessed that he was already gone. I still wonder about it, but I imagine that the second guess was right.

  Then I had to turn and walk on after my companions.

  We went through the trees for a good distance, and down a hollow, and across a rivulet of water, and over a hill into another wood until we reached a small clearing among the trees. Every step of that journey I was thanking my stars that we were putting distance between us and the house of the Carys.

  But here we stopped, and Silver said to Taxi:

  “Will the sound of guns carry from here to the house?”

  “Not the noise of revolvers,” said Taxi. “Not with the wind hanging where it is.”

  Silver looked carefully about him. When he had finished his survey, he finally said:

  “Well, It seems all right to me. Taxi, turn Christian’s hands loose, and give him one of his Colts.”

  “Why?” asked Taxi.

  “Because,” said Silver, “the time has come for us to fight the old fight out to a finish. Either Christian or I come to the end of the trail, here.”

  XXV. — A NIGHT TRIP

  When I heard Silver say this, I looked steadily at Christian, but the moonlight struck such a shadow across his face that I could not see his features clearly or judge his expression. I only remember that by the dignity of his carriage and that peculiarly proud outline of the high head, he seemed perfectly at ease.

  Silver told us to pile all our weapons under a tree and stand a little distance from them. We did as he told us. I felt a trembling awe when I thought that I had come to see the end of the long feud.

  I remember how Frosty sat down and pointed his nose up in the air as though he were about to bay the moon, and how the black shadows of the western trees lay out on the sun-bleached whiteness of the grass. Then Silver said:

  “You can pick the sort of weapons, Barry. Rifles or revolvers—or bare hands. Whatever you say.”

  When he came to “bare hands,” something came into his voice that I can’t describe. It was simply one rush of savagery to the throat, and the sound of the voice gave me the creeps. It made me realize how utterly he hated and loathed Barry Christian.

  Then I heard Christian say, as calmly as ever: “I won’t fight you, Silver.”

  I heard it, but I couldn’t believe it.

  Neither could Silver, it seemed. He walked up and gave Christian one of the revolvers
which had been taken from him. Christian took it in a limp hand.

  “It’s no good, Jim,” he said. “I won’t fight you.”

  “You don’t understand,” explained Silver. “You see not one of my friends has a weapon of any kind. All the stuff is piled under that tree. If you drop me, you can get out before they even reach the guns.”

  “Frosty would pull me down if I ran,” said Christian.

  “A bullet would stop Frosty,” answered Silver. “Or I’ll tie him.”

  Christian simply shook his head. He turned a little. The moon struck aslant across his face, and I could study the expression easily. There was no contortion, as of a man passing through a great emotion. He was perfectly calm, I’ll swear.

  “It’s no good, Jim,” he said. There was something like affection in his voice, as when one explains a thing to a small child. “I won’t fight you.”

  “Knife, or hand, or gun—you can make your choice,” said Silver.

  He was the one who was passing a little out of control. His voice quivered.

  “You’re a shade stronger, a shade faster, a shade keener than I am,” said Christian. “You can murder me, Jim, but I won’t fight you on equal terms.”

  “You want a—” Silver choked on what he was about to say. He walked up to Christian and struck him across the face with the back of his hand and then leaped away. I saw Christian crouch a bit. I made sure that he would jerk up his gun that instant and fire. Silver, tense as a cat, was ready for the first move. But gradually Christian straightened.

  “No,” he said slowly. “Not even that!”

  I heard Silver groan, as he said: “You wait for a chance to put a bullet through my back. Is that it?”

  “The way one wild beast treats another. That’s exactly it,” said Christian.

  It was the strangest scene I ever imagined. My mind still turns back to it with a shock—a sort of horror. For here were two fearless men. You couldn’t say that fear was what was working in Christian. It was simply that he was logical. He was convinced that Silver was his master in a fight and he would not throw his life away.