The Max Brand Megapack (251 page)

“You’re apt to do him harm,” said he. “He’s got to have quiet. But if you’ll stay and help nurse him—if you’ll stay and take care of him, that’s just what I want. He needs a woman’s hands around him. The hands of a man are too thick, too heavy. Will you stay and help me with him?”

“Will I stay?” murmured she. “No one could make me leave!”

She turned and saw Ronicky and Al Jenkins together. There was one flash of anger and scorn for Ronicky, and then her gaze centered bright and wide upon big Al Jenkins. She pointed.

“Who is that?” she whispered.

“You don’t know him? That’s Jenkins—Al Jenkins!”

“Oh!” cried the girl and buried her face in her hands. It seemed impossible to Ronicky that she should never have seen the big rancher before. But then he remembered how recently it was that Jenkins had come back to that district, and how his way with Bennett must have kept the two apart, and the mystery was not so strange. It dawned on him in a burst that these two were seeing one another actually for the first time, the girl and her formidable antagonist. Ronicky was struck by the horror in the face of Jenkins, the look as if he were facing a ghost. Perhaps that sprang from the similarity he saw between her and her mother whom he had loved before her.

At any rate she recovered before he did. Jenkins was still leaning against the door, overcome as it seemed, when Elsie Bennett came swiftly to them, flushed with a lofty anger.

“You and your hired man!” she said to Jenkins. “Is there no shame in you? Have you come here to gloat over him? Oh, I’ve heard of base things, but never anything so base as this! Will you go?”

They looked at one another, as though each hoped the other would be able to speak, and then they turned of one accord and faded through the doorway.

“I’m going up to my room,” said Ronicky, when they stood outside, silent and shamefaced.

“And I’m going with you,” declared Jenkins. They climbed the stairs together, but at his door Ronicky turned to his companion. “I’d sort of like to be alone,” he said. “You think you would,” said Jenkins, “but you’re wrong. You wouldn’t like it a bit. You need company. I’m going in there and get you cheered up.”

To this insistence there was nothing which Ronicky could oppose, and they went into the room and sat down. But almost immediately Ronicky was up and walking to and fro. The rancher watched him with a keen and measuring eye. Presently Ronicky spoke.

“Did you ever see such love as she has for Blondy? Did you ever see anything like it, Jenkins?”

He stopped, stared at the wall or vacancy, and shook his head as he remembered. To Ronicky’s surprise, Al Jenkins merely shrugged his shoulders.

“It looks like love to you, son. But you never can tell.”

“Eh?” cried Ronicky. “What do you mean by that?”

“How old are you?” asked the rancher.

“Twenty-seven,” said Ronicky. “But what the devil has that to do with—”

‘Twenty-seven! That’s about what I thought. You’re too young.”

“Too young for what?” asked Ronicky, his irritation growing apace under the cross fire of apparently irrelevant questions.

“To young to know anything about women. About ten years is what you need on top of your age, son.”

Ronicky merely glared. His face might be youthful, he told himself, but inside him there was a weary sense of age. “I’m old enough to use my eyes and my ears,” he said. “I could see what she did and hear what she said.”

“Sure you could,” said Jenkins, yawning. “My guns, ain’t she beautiful, Ronicky? I’ve only seen her a couple of times in the distance before. But today when I stood up and faced her in the same room, it was like having a gun shoved in my face. It carried me back twenty years in a second!”

He stopped and sighed.

“But what she did and said don’t mean nothing,” he declared presently.

“Maybe she’s sort of weak-minded?” asked Ronicky fiercely. “Maybe that’s why what she says and does don’t mean anything?”

This savage sarcasm left Jenkins untouched. He yawned again.

“She’s in love with the idea of being in love, maybe,” he said at last.

“Now what the devil do you mean by that?”

“She’s at the ripe age for it, you see,” said Jenkins. “Most likely she’s been cramming her head full of stories about love, poems about love, music about love. Understand?”

“I’m trying to follow you,” said Ronicky. “Go on.”

“And presently along comes a young gent pretty well set up and with a good clear voice and a fine set of teeth and a handsome face. Well, she brings herself up short. ‘This is a man,’ says she to herself. ‘He’s young; he’s handsome; he’s a stranger. Why ain’t I in love with him?’

“Well, sir, if you ask old folks a question the first thing that pops into their heads is to say ‘no’ tolerable loud. But if you ask young folks they all have ‘yes’ bubbling right behind their teeth. Take you, for instance. If I say to you: ‘Let’s start out and go to Alaska tomorrow,’ the first way you feel is that you’d sure like it a terrible lot if you could go. And you want to say yes. And it ain’t no different with girls.

“They look different, but right down under their hides they’re just the same as boys, only more so. Well, when she asked herself that question about Charlie Loring, the first thing she did was to say ‘yes’ to herself. And no sooner did she say yes than she began to think the same way that she’d been talking. It’s easy to do that. Don’t take much to change a man’s mind. If you frown by accident, pretty soon you’re beginning to feel mad all the way through. But if you make yourself smile, pretty soon you’re smiling all the way through. So after she’d said yes, pretty soon she was feeling that she was in love with Loring!”

Here Ronicky interrupted with an infusion of spectacular oaths that would have done credit to a mule skinner on a mountain road.

“It was a fool question to ask herself!” he declared.

“If that was the only fool thing that girls do,” said Jenkins, “it wouldn’t be so bad. But I’ve knowed it to go on and get worse and worse. Yes, sir, I’ve known girls to start fooling themselves that way and never wake up out of their dream till they was gray-headed grandmothers. And then all at once they give a start and a shake like Rip van Winkle. ‘Why,’ says they to themselves, ‘I been sleeping; I ain’t been living all this!’ And they wake up and get ready to live their real lives, but they find that their real lives are just about up, and by the time they find out what they’ve done with themselves they’re ready to die.”

He concluded this dark sermon with a shake of his ponderous head, leaning back in his chair until it creaked loudly.

“What difference does it make?” asked Ronicky gloomily. “If they go ahead and marry and all that, because they’re sort of hypnotized, what’s the real difference between hypnotism and being awake? It gives you the same results!”

“D’you think it does?” asked Al Jenkins with a singular smile. “No, lad! There was Elsie’s mother before her. She hypnotized herself and married that skunk Bennett But the real girl that I knew was never Bennett’s wife. No, sir. Things ain’t always what they look to be. Inside the shell they’s a kernel. What she was, I know. But she wasn’t the woman that the world thought she was—the whole damned world, starting right in with Bennett himself! Same way with Elsie, now. She’s got a flying start to make a fool of herself. She’s picked out a gent and told herself that she’s crazy about him. Then along come you, Doone, and shoot him up, so that she’s got a chance to get foolisher still about him. Nothing that makes a woman so in love with a man as finding him helpless on her hands. She begins by feeling proud. She winds up by feeling humble. And when she starts pitying him, it’s just the same as putting a crown of glory on him. And for that, Doone, you can blame yourself.”

Ronicky Doone glowered at him.

“What she does, and what she thinks,” he said, “ain’t anything to me. I can’t control her.”

“But you can start wishing,” said Al Jenkins, “that you’d shot him dead. That would have been better for Elsie Bennett.”

“I dunno,” said Ronicky gloomily. “Ain’t he good enough?”

“Answer that for yourself,” said Jenkins. “What d’you think about Blondy?”

“I dunno what to think,” said Ronicky.

Al Jenkins sat quiet and rubbed his chin with his fist.

“You’ll find out after a while,” he said. “Oh, you’ll find out!”

“What are you aiming at?” asked Ronicky sharply. “You’re talking all around a circle, Jenkins.”

“I’m just trying to tell you that she ain’t got a wedding ring on—yet!”

CHAPTER XXI

THE LIFTED SHUTTER

Why Jenkins should have said this, and
particularly why it should have been accompanied by a tremendous wink, Ronicky could not tell. But Jenkins himself seemed to be perfectly satisfied. He changed the subject abruptly, and when he left a little later, he paused at the door.

“The sheriff may be up to see you,” he said, “but you can lay to it that I’ll see the sheriff before he sees you, so I guess he won’t take up much of your time. About the girl—

Here he paused and studied Ronicky with narrowed eyes.

“You’ve started your fight,” said Jenkins, “and you’ll have to keep it up along the same lines. You’ve started by knocking down the walls around her and getting at her that way. You’ll have to keep it up, son, until you’ve taken her by force. And as soon as you see that I’m right, I guess you’ll be coming along to talk to Uncle Al Jenkins. Good-by for a while!”

He turned away but checked himself again.

“There’s seven days left,” he said. “I’m going to give Bennett seven days’ grace to get a new foreman to take Blondy’s place. And when that time’s up, I’m going to start a drive that’ll sweep Bennett’s place as clean as the palm of your hand. Get ready to be with me before that time comes, Ronicky!”

With his final advice he left the younger man and sauntered away. Ronicky remained in his room, plunged in his sorrowful reflections and walking hastily up and down. Every now and then he paused, and whenever he paused, it was because a new picture of the face of the girl had started up before him and startled him to a stop. She was beginning to grow into his mind and become a part of him from which he could not rid himself.

In the evening, just after the rim of the sun was down, his meditations were broken in upon by a sudden hubbub in the street of the town, and Ronicky jerked up the window and leaned out to listen.

He could not hear enough to form any connected story. But he gathered by the disjointed exclamations that the good people of Twin Springs were greatly distraught because of a daring and outrageous raid which had recently been made, half a dozen outlaws having scooped up a freight wagon, loaded with all manner of supplies, and taken it away with them into the mountains toward their camp. More than this, they had ridden on down the road, leaving the driver of the wagon bound behind them, and they had come to the very outskirts of Twin Springs, where they had gathered in a large quantity of money from one of the leading citizens of Twin Springs.

Then, leaving their victims bound and gagged, they had stolen away again and were safely gone, leaving behind them no clew except the sound of their voices and the description of their masks. And Twin Springs was literally roaring with rage and excitement. Ronicky caught a little of the drift of the talk from the window of his room. When he went down stairs, eager to mix in anything that would free him from the burden of his own thoughts, he heard the details.

No one blamed the sheriff for failing to apprehend the criminals. It was simply that they had found a secure refuge among the impregnable mountains near Twin Springs. The vital question was whether or not the forces of the entire town would be able to find the robbers and rout them. Ronicky drew the soberest man he could find to one side and learned still more about the men who lived beyond the law.

On the crests of Solomon Mountain, which was really many mountains rising to one ragged top, the gang had lived for several months now, growing in strength from time to time, as the rumor of their impregnable position spread abroad and drew in recruits of chosen skill. And as their strength of numbers and quality increased, so also did their boldness. At first they had secured their shelter by committing their depredations at a distance. And so long as they did this, the men of Twin Springs were by no means inclined to bother with the formidable little group, but since then they had begun to come nearer and nearer to the town on occasion, and now at last the blow which all had been dreading, had fallen. The Solomon Mountain gang had struck the precincts of Twin Springs itself, and now the honor of the town was pledged to run them down.

When Ronicky inquired why this was a task of such size, he was informed that Solomon Mountain was a literal labyrinth of canyons and sharp-sided gorges, running one into the other and connecting in a thousand unsuspected places by underground tunnels which were mostly natural caves. A little adroit blasting and pick-and-shovel work had opened them up and made them practicable for man and horse. Not only was this a hole-in-the-wall country, where the shrewdest sheriff in the world would be baffled with a posse of a thousand men, but it was also a place where the outlaws had laid up such provisions that they could stand siege and disappear into their subterranean resorts for an indefinite period. Moreover, it was possible to take advantage of the broken nature of the ground and the many outlook points so as to keep an advancing force under observation and, drifting just ahead and inside the limits of safety, make life wretched for those who attempted to break through and capture the miscreants.

There were already a score of stories to be told, in spite of the fact that the headquarters on Solomon Mountain was new, of celebrated man hunters who had rushed at the stronghold and broken the teeth of their reputation on its jagged sides and gone back shorn of honor. Ronicky Doone, as he heard these things, looked up from the town to the ragged crest of the peak and then turned back to the hotel, carrying with him the interesting item that recruits were added to the gang simply by riding to the top of the mountain in broad daylight and waiting for what would happen to them. No matter where they paused, they would be sure to be looked over by some invisible spy, and, if they proved acceptable, they would be taken into the inner circle.