The Max Brand Megapack (280 page)

“Why, Slim, I wouldn’t let you run loose now for a million. You got that ugly look in your eyes. I know you, partner!”

And to the unutterable astonishment of Terry, the man pulled his gun from its holster and passed it up to her, his eyes fighting hers, his hand moving slowly. She stepped back, weighing the heavy weapons in her hands. Then she faced Phil Marvin with glittering eyes.

“It ain’t the first time you been accused of queer stunts with the dice. What’s the straight of it, Phil? Been doing anything to these dice?”

“Me? Sure I ain’t!”

Her glance lingered on him the least part of a second.

“H’m!” said the girl. “Maybe not.”

Slim was on his feet, eager. “Take a look at ’em, Kate. Take a look at them dice!”

She held them up to the light—then dropped them into a pocket of her skirt. “I’ll look at ’em in the morning, Slim.”

“The stuff’ll be dry by that time!”

“Dry or not, that’s what I’m going to do. I won’t trust lamplight.”

Slim turned on his heel and flung himself sulkily down on the blanket, fighting her with sullen eyes. She turned on Phil.

“How much d’you win?”

“Nothin’. Just a couple of hundred.”

“Just a couple of hundred! You call that nothing?”

Phil grunted. The other men leaned forward in their interest to watch the progress of the trial, all saving Joe Pollard, who sat with his elbows braced in sprawling fashion on the table, at ease, his eyes twinkling contentedly at the girl. Why she refused to examine the dice at once was plain to Terry. If they proved to have been gummed, it would mean a gun fight with the men at a battling temperature. In the morning when they had cooled down, it might be a different matter. Terry watched her in wonder. His idea of an efficient woman was based on Aunt Elizabeth, cold of eye and brain, practical in methods on the ranch, keen with figures. The efficiency of this slip of a girl was a different matter, a thing of passion, of quick insight, of lightning guesses. He could see the play of eager emotion in her face as she studied Phil Marvin. And how could she do justice? Terry was baffled.

“How long you two been playing?” “About twenty minutes.”

“Not more’n five!” cut in Slim hotly.

“Shut up, Slim!” she commanded. “I’m running this here game; Phil, how many straight passes did you make?”

“Me? Oh, I dunno. Maybe—five.”

“Five straight passes!” said the girl. “Five straight passes!”

“You heard me say it,” growled big Phil Marvin.

All at once she laughed.

“Phil, give that two hundred back to Slim!”

It came like a bolt from the blue, this decision. Marvin hesitated, shook his head.

“Damned if I do. I don’t back down. I won it square!”

“Listen to me,” said the girl. Instead of threatening, as Terry expected, she had suddenly become conciliatory. She stepped close to him and dropped a slim hand on his burly shoulder. “Ain’t Slim a pal of yours? You and him, ain’t you stuck together through thick and thin? He thinks you didn’t win that coin square. Is Slim’s friendship worth two hundred to you, or ain’t it? Besides, you ain’t lying down to nobody. Why, you big squarehead, Phil, don’t we all know that you’d fight a bull with your bare hands? Who’d call you yaller? We’d simply say you was square, Phil, and you know it.”

There was a pause. Phil was biting his lip, scowling at Slim. Slim was sneering in return. It seemed that she had failed. Even if she forced Phil to return the money, he and Slim would hate each other as long as they lived. And Terry gained a keen impression that if the hatred continued, one of them would die very soon indeed. Her solution of the problem was a strange one. She faced them both.

“You two big sulky babies!” she exclaimed. “Slim, what did Phil do for you down in Tecomo? Phil, did Slim stand by you last April—you know the time? Why, boys, you’re just being plain foolish. Get up, both of you, and take a walk outside where you’ll get cooled down.”

Slim rose. He and Phil walked slowly toward the door, at a little distance from each other, one eyeing the other shrewdly. At the door they hesitated. Finally, Phil lurched forward and went out first. Slim glided after.

“By heaven!” groaned Pollard as the door closed. “There goes two good men! Kate, what put this last fool idea into your head?”

She did not answer for a moment, but dropped into a chair as though suddenly exhausted.

“It’ll work out,” she said at length. “You wait for it!”

“Well,” grumbled her father, “the mischief is working. Run along to bed, will you?”

She rose, wearily, and started across the room. But she turned before she passed out of their sight and leaned against one of the pillars.

“Dad, why you so anxious to get me out of the way?”

“What d’you mean by that? I got no reason. Run along and don’t bother me!”

He turned his shoulder on her. As for the girl, she remained a moment, looking thoughtfully at the broad back of Pollard. Then her glance shifted and dwelt a moment on Terry—with pity, he wondered?

“Good night, boys!”

When the door closed on her, Joe Pollard turned his attention more fully on his new employee, and when Terry suggested that it was time for him to turn in, his suggestion was hospitably put to one side. Pollard began talking genially of the mountains, of the “varmints” he expected Terry to clean out, and while he talked, he took out a broad silver dollar and began flicking it in the air and catching it in the calloused palm of his hand.

“Call it,” he interrupted himself to say to Terry.

“Heads,” said Terry carelessly.

The coin spun up, flickered at the height of its rise, and rang loudly on the table.

“You win,” said Pollard. “Well, you’re a lucky gent, Terry, but I’ll go you ten you can’t call it again.”

But again Terry called heads, and again the coin chimed, steadied, and showed the Grecian goddess. The rancher doubled his bet. He lost, doubled, lost again, doubled again, lost. A pile of money had appeared by magic before Terry.

“I came to work for money,” laughed Terry, “not
take
it away.”

“I always lose at this game,” sighed Joe Pollard.

The door opened, and Phil Marvin and Slim Dugan came back, talking and laughing together.

“What d’you know about that?” Pollard exclaimed softly. “She guessed right. She always does! Oughta be a man, with a brain like she’s got. Here we are again!”

He spun the coin; it winked, fell, a streak of light, and again Terry had won. He began to grow excited. On the next throw he lost. A moment later his little pile of winnings had disappeared. And now he had forgotten the face of Joe Pollard, forgotten the room, forgotten everything except the thick thumb that snapped the coin into the air. The cold, quiet passion of the gambler grew in him. He was losing steadily. Out of his wallet came in a steady stream the last of his winnings at Pedro’s. And still he played. Suddenly the wallet squeezed flat between his fingers.

“Pollard,” he said regretfully, “I’m broke.”

The other waved away the idea.

“Break up a fine game like this because you’re broke?” The cloudy agate eyes dwelt kindly on the face of Terry, and mysteriously as well. “That ain’t nothing. Nothing between friends. You don’t know the style of a man I am, Terry. Your word is as good as your money with me!”

“I’ve no security—”

“Don’t talk security. Think I’m a moneylender? This is a game. Come on!”

Five minutes later Terry was three hundred behind. A mysterious providence seemed to send all the luck the way of the heavy, tanned thumb of Pollard.

“That’s my limit,” he announced abruptly, rising.

“No, no!” Pollard spread out his big hand on the table. “You got the red hoss, son. You can bet to a thousand. He’s worth that—to me!”

“I won’t bet a cent on him,” said Terry firmly.

“Every damn cent I’ve won from you ag’in’ the hoss, son. That’s a lot of cash if you win. If you lose, you’re just out that much hossflesh, and I’ll give you a good enough cayuse to take El Sangre’s place.”

“A dozen wouldn’t take his place,” insisted Terry.

“That so?”

Pollard leaned back in his chair and put a hand behind his neck to support his head. It seemed to Terry that the big man made some odd motion with his hidden fingers. At any rate, the four men who lounged on the farther side of the room now rose and slowly drifted in different directions. Oregon Charlie wandered toward the door. Slim sauntered to the window behind the piano and stood idly looking out into the night. Phil Marvin began to examine a saddle hanging from a peg on one of the posts, and finally, chunky Marty Cardiff strolled to the kitchen door and appeared to study the hinges.

All these things were done casually, but Terry, his attention finally off the game, caught a meaning in them. Every exit was blocked for him. He was trapped at the will of Joe Pollard!

CHAPTER 25

Looking back, he could understand everything easily. The horse was the main objective of Pollard. He had won the money so as to tempt Terry to gamble with the value of the blood-bay. But by fair means or foul he intended to have El Sangre. And now, the moment his men were in place, a change came over Pollard. He straightened in the chair. A slight outthrust of his lower jaw made his face strangely brutal, conscienceless. And his cloudy agate eyes were unreadable.

“Look here, Terry,” he argued calmly, but Terry could see that the voice was raised so that it would undubitably reach the ears of the farthest of the four men. “I don’t mind letting a gambling debt ride when a gent ain’t got anything more to put up for covering his money. But when a gent has got more, I figure he’d ought to cover with it.”

Unreasoning anger swelled in the throat of Terry Hollis; the same blind passion which had surged in him before he started up at the Cornish table and revealed himself to the sheriff. And the similarity was what sobered him. It was the hunger to battle, to kill. And it seemed to him that Black Jack had stepped out of the old picture and now stood behind him, tempting him to strike.

Another covert signal from Pollard. Every one of the four turned toward him. The chances of Terry were diminished, nine out of ten, for each of those four, he shrewdly guessed, was a practiced gunman. Cold reason came to Terry’s assistance.

“I told you when I was broke,” he said gently. “I told you that I was through. You told me to go on.”

“I figured you was kidding me,” said Pollard harshly. “I knew you still had El Sangre back. Son, I’m a kind sort of a man, I am. I got a name for it.”

In spite of himself a faint and cruel smile flickered at the corners of his mouth as he spoke. He became grave again.

“But they’s some things I can’t stand. They’s some things that I hate worse’n I hate poison. I won’t say what one of ’em is. I leave it to you. And I ask you to keep in the game. A thousand bucks ag’in’ a boss. Ain’t that more’n fair?”

He no longer took pains to disguise his voice. It was hard and heavy and rang into the ear of Terry. And the latter, feeling that his hour had come, looked deliberately around the room and took note of every guarded exit, the four men now openly on watch for any action on his part. Pollard himself sat erect, on the edge of his chair, and his right hand had disappeared beneath the table.

“Suppose I throw the coin this time?” he suggested.

“By God!” thundered Pollard, springing to his feet and throwing off the mask completely. “You damned skunk, are you accusin’ me of crooking the throw of the coin?”

Terry waited for the least moment—waited in a dull wonder to find himself unafraid. But there was no fear in him. There was only a cold, methodical calculation of chances. He told himself, deliberately, that no matter how fast Pollard might be, he would prove the faster. He would kill Pollard. And he would undoubtedly kill one of the others. And they, beyond a shadow of a doubt, would kill him. He saw all this as in a picture.

“Pollard,” he said, more gently than before, “you’ll have to eat that talk!”

A flash of bewilderment crossed the face of Pollard—then rage—then that slight contraction of the features which in some men precedes a violent effort.

But the effort did not come. While Terry literally wavered on tiptoe, his nerves straining for the pull of his gun and the leap to one side as he sent his bullet home, a deep, unmusical voice cut in on them:

“Just hold yourself up a minute, will you, Joe?”

Terry looked up. On the balcony in front of the sleeping rooms of the second story, his legs spread apart, his hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets, his shapeless black hat crushed on the back of his head, and a broad smile on his ugly face, stood his nemesis—Denver the yegg!

Pollard sprang back from the table and spoke with his face still turned to Terry.

“Pete!” he called. “Come in!”

But Denver, alias Shorty, alias Pete, merely laughed.

“Come in nothing, you fool! Joe, you’re about half a second from hell, and so’s a couple more of you. D’you know who the kid is? Eh? I’ll tell you, boys. It’s the kid that dropped old Minter. It’s the kid that beat foxy Joe Minter to the draw. It’s young Hollis. Why, you damned blind men, look at his face! It’s the son of Black Jack. It’s Black Jack himself come back to us!”

Joe Pollard had let his hand fall away from his gun. He gaped at Terry as though he were seeing a ghost. He came a long pace nearer and let his arms fall on the table, where they supported his weight.

“Black Jack,” he kept whispering. “Black Jack! God above, are you Black Jack’s son?”

And the bewildered Terry answered:

“I’m his son. Whatever you think, and be damned to you all! I’m his son and I’m proud of it. Now get your gun!”

But Joe Pollard became a great catapult that shot across the table and landed beside Terry. Two vast hands swallowed the hands of the younger man and crushed them to numbness.

“Proud of it? God a’mighty, boy, why wouldn’t you be? Black Jack’s son! Pete, thank God you come in time!”

“In time to save your head for you, Joe.”

“I believe it,” said the big man humbly. “I b’lieve he would of cleaned up on me. Maybe on all of us. Black Jack would of come close to doing it. But you come in time, Pete. And I’ll never forget it.”