The Max Brand Megapack (292 page)

THE GARDEN OF EDEN (1922)

CHAPTER ONE

By careful tailoring the broad shoulders of Ben Connor were made to appear fashionably slender, and he disguised the depth of his chest by a stoop whose model slouched along Broadway somewhere between sunset and dawn. He wore, moreover, the first or second pair of spats that had ever stepped off the train at Lukin Junction, a glowing Scotch tweed, and a Panama hat of the color and weave of fine old linen. There was a skeleton at this Feast of Fashion, however, for only tight gloves could make the stubby fingers and broad palms of Connor presentable. At ninety-five in the shade gloves were out of the question, so he held a pair of yellow chamois in one hand and in the other an amber-headed cane. This was the end of the little spur-line, and while the train backed off down the track, staggering across the switch, Ben Connor looked after it, leaning upon his cane just forcibly enough to feel the flection of the wood. This was one of his attitudes of elegance, and when the train was out of sight, and only the puffs of white vapor rolled around the shoulder of the hill, he turned to look the town over, having already given Lukin Junction ample time to look over Ben Connor.

The little crowd was not through with its survey, but the eye of the imposing stranger abashed it. He had one of those long somber faces which Scotchmen call “dour.” The complexion was sallow, heavy pouches of sleeplessness lay beneath his eyes, and there were ridges beside the corners of his mouth which came from an habitual compression of the lips. Looked at in profile he seemed to be smiling broadly so that the gravity of the full face was always surprising. It was this that made the townsfolk look down. After a moment, they glanced back at him hastily. Somewhere about the corners of his lips or his eyes there was a glint of interest, a touch of amusement—they could not tell which, but from that moment they were willing to forget the clothes and look at the man.

While Ben Connor was still enjoying the situation, a rotund fellow bore down on him.

“You’re Mr. Connor, ain’t you? You wired for a room in the hotel? Come on, then. My rig is over here. These your grips?”

He picked up the suit case and the soft leather traveling bag, and led the way to a buckboard at which stood two downheaded ponies.

“Can’t we walk?” suggested Ben Connor, looking up and down the street at the dozen sprawling frame houses; but the fat man stared at him with calm pity. He was so fat and so good-natured that even Ben Connor did not impress him greatly.

“Maybe you think this is Lukin?” he asked.

When the other raised his heavy black eyebrows he explained: “This ain’t nothing but Lukin Junction. Lukin is clear round the hill. Climb in, Mr. Connor.”

Connor laid one hand on the back of the seat, and with a surge of his strong shoulders leaped easily into his place; the fat man noted this with a roll of his little eyes, and then took his own place, the old wagon careening toward him as he mounted the step. He sat with his right foot dangling over the side of the buckboard, and a plump shoulder turned fairly upon his passenger so that when he spoke he had to throw his head and jerk out the words; but this was apparently his time-honored position in the wagon, and he did not care to vary it for the sake of conversation. A flap of the loose reins set the horses jog-trotting out of Lukin Junction down a gulch which aimed at the side of an enormous mountain, naked, with no sign of a village or even a single shack among its rocks. Other peaks crowded close on the right and left, with a loftier range behind, running up to scattered summits white with snow and blue with distance. The shadows of the late afternoon were thick as fog in the gulch, and all the lower mountains were already dim so that the snow-peaks in the distance seemed as detached, and high as clouds. Ben Connor sat with his cane between his knees and his hands draped over its amber head and watched those shining places until the fat man heaved his head over his shoulder.

“Most like somebody told you about Townsend’s Hotel?”

His passenger moved his attention from the mountain to his companion. He was so leisurely about it that it seemed he had not heard.

“Yes,” he said, “I was told of the place.”

“Who?” said the other expectantly.

“A friend of mine.”

The fat man grunted and worked his head around so far that a great wrinkle rolled up his neck close to his ear. He looked into the eye of the stranger.

“Me being Jack Townsend, I’m sort of interested to know things like that; the ones that like my place and them that don’t.”

Connor nodded, but since he showed no inclination to name his friend, Jack Townsend swung on a new tack to come to the windward of this uncommunicative guest. Lukin was a fairly inquisitive town, and the hotel proprietor usually contributed his due portion and more to the gossips.

“Some comes for one reason and some for another,” went on Townsend, “which generally it’s to hunt and fish. That ain’t funny come to think of it, because outside of liars nobody ever hooked finer trout than what comes out of the Big Sandy. Some of ’em comes for the mining—they was a strike over to South Point last week—and some for the cows, but mostly it’s the fishing and the hunting.”

He paused, but having waited in vain he said directly: “I can show you the best holes in the Big Sandy.”

There was another of those little waits with which, it seemed, the stranger met every remark; not a thoughtful pause, but rather as though he wondered if it were worth while to make any answer.

“I’ve come here for the silence,” he said.

“Silence,” repeated Townsend, nodding in the manner of one who does not understand.

Then he flipped the roan with the butt of his lines and squinted down the gulch, for he felt there might be a double meaning in the last remark. Filled with the gloomy conviction that he was bringing a silent man to his hotel, he gloomily surveyed the mountain sides. There was nothing about them to cheer him. The trees were lost in shadows and all the slopes seemed quite barren of life. He vented a little burst of anger by yanking at the rein of the off horse, a dirty gray.

“Giddap, Kitty, damn your eyes!”

The mare jumped, struck a stone with a fore foot, and stumbled heavily. Townsend straightened her out again with an expert hand and cursed.

“Of all the no-good hosses I ever see,” he said, inviting the stranger to share in his just wrath, “this Kitty is the outbeatingest, no good rascal. Git on, fool.”

He clapped the reins along her back, and puffed his disgust.

“And yet she has points. Now, I ask you, did you ever see a truer Steeldust? Look at that high croup and that straight rump. Look at them hips, I say, and a chest to match ’em. But they ain’t any heart in her. Take a hoss through and through,” he went on oracularly, “they’re pretty much like men, mostly, and if a man ain’t got the heart inside, it don’t make no difference how big around the chest he measures.”

Ben Connor had leaned forward, studying the mare.

“Your horse would be all right in her place,” he said. “Of course, she won’t do up here in the mountains.”

Like any true Westerner of the mountain-desert, Jack Townsend would far rather have been discovered with his hand in the pocket of another man than be observed registering surprise. He looked carefully ahead until his face was straight again. Then he turned.

“Where d’you make out her place to be?” he asked carelessly.

“Down below,” said the other without hesitation, and he waved his arm. “Down in soft, sandy irrigation country she’d be a fine animal.”

Jack Townsend blinked. “You know her?” he asked.

The other shook his head.

“Well, damn my soul!” breathed the hotel proprietor. “This beats me. Maybe you read a hoss’s mind, partner?”

Connor shrugged his shoulders, but Townsend no longer took offense at the taciturnity of his companion; he spoke now in a lower confiding voice which indicated an admission of equality.

“You’re right. They said she was good, and she was good! I seen her run; I saddled her up and rode her thirty miles through sand that would of broke the heart of anything but a Steeldust, and she come through without battin’ an eye. But when I got her up here she didn’t do no good. But”—he reverted suddenly to his original surprise—“how’d you know her? Recognize the brand, maybe?”

“By her trot,” said the other, and he looked across the hills.

They had turned an angle of the gulch, and on a shelf of level ground, dishing out from the side of the mountain, stretched the town.

“Isn’t it rather odd,” said Connor, “for people to build a town over here when they could have it on the railroad?”

“Maybe it looks queer to some,” nodded Townsend.

He closed his lips firmly, determined to imitate the terseness of his guest; but when he observed with a side-glance that Connor would notpress the inquiry, talk suddenly overflowed. Indeed, Townsend was a running well of good nature, continually washing all bad temper over the brim.

“I’ll show you how it was,” he went on. “You see that shoulder of the mountain away off up there? If the light was clearer you’d be able to make out some old shacks up there, half standin’ up and half fallin’ down. That’s where Lukin used to be. Well, the railroad come along and says: ‘We’re goin’ to run a spur into the valley, here. You move down and build your town at the end of the track and we’ll give you a hand bringing up new timber for the houses.’ That’s the way with railroads; they want to dictate; they’re too used to handlin’ folks back East that’ll let capital walk right over their backs.”

Here Townsend sent a glance at Connor to see if he stirred under the spur, but there was no sign of irritation.

“Out here we’re different; nobody can’t step in here and run us unless he’s asked. See? We said, you build the railroad halfway and we’ll come the other half, but we won’t come clear down into the valley.”

“Why?” asked Connor. “Isn’t Lukin Junction a good place for a village?”

“Fine. None better. But it’s the principle of the thing, you see? Them railroad magnates says to us: ‘Come all the way.’ ‘Go to the devil,’ says we. And so we come halfway to the new railroad and built our town; it’d be a pile more agreeable to have Lukin over where the railroad ends—look at the way I have to drive back and forth for my trade? But just the same, we showed that railroad that it couldn’t talk us down.”

He struck his horses savagely with the lines; they sprang from the jog-trot into a canter, and the buckboard went bumping down the main street of Lukin.

CHAPTE
R TWO

Ben Connor sat in his room overlooking the crossing of the streets. It was by no means the ramshackle huddle of lean-to’s that he had expected, for Lukin was built to withstand a siege of January snows and storm-winds which were scooped by the mountains into a funnel that focused straight on the village. Besides, Lukin was no accidental, crossroads town, but the bank, store, and amusement center of a big country. The timber was being swept from the Black Mountain; there were fairly prosperous mines in the vicinity; and cattlemen were ranging their cows over the plateaus more and more during the spring and summer. Therefore, Lukin boasted two parallel main streets, and a cross street, looking forward to the day when it should be incorporated and have a mayor of its own. At present it had a moving-picture house and a dance hall where a hundred and fifty couples could take the floor at once; above all, it had Jack Townsend’s hotel. This was a stout, timber building of two stories, the lower portion of which was occupied by the restaurant, the drug store, the former saloon now transformed into an ice-cream parlor, and other public places.

It was dark, but the night winds had not yet commenced, and Lukin sweltered with a heat more unbearable than full noon.

It was nothing to Ben Connor, however, for he was fresh from the choking summer nights of Manhattan, and in Lukin, no matter how hot it became, the eye could always find a cool prospect. It had been unpleasant enough when the light was burning, for the room was done in a hot, orange-colored paper, but when he blew out the lamp and sat down before the window he forgot the room and let his glance go out among the mountains. A young moon drifted across the corner of his window, a sickle of light with a dim, phosphorescent line around the rest of the circle. It was bright enough to throw the peaks into strong relief, and dull enough to let the stars live.

His upward vision had as a rule been limited by the higher stories of some skyscraper, and now his eye wandered with a pleasant sense of freedom over the snow summits where he could imagine a cold wind blowing through reach after reach of the blue-gray sky. It pleased and troubled Ben Connor very much as one is pleased and troubled by the first study of a foreign language, with new prospects opening, strange turns of thought, and great unknown names like stars. But after a time Ben Connor relaxed. The first cool puff moved across his forehead and carried him halfway to a dreamless sleep.

Here a chorus of mirth burst up at him from the street, men’s voices pitched high and wild, the almost hysterical laughter of people who are much alone. In Manhattan only drunken men laughed like this. Among the mountains it did not irritate Ben Connor; in tune with the rest, it was full of freedom. He looked down to the street, and seeing half a dozen bearded fellows frolic in the shaft of light from a window, he decided that people kept their youth longer in Lukin.

All things seemed in order to Connor, this night. He rolled his sleeves higher to let all the air that stirred get at his bulky forearms, and then lighted a cigar. It was a dark, oily Havana—it had cost him a great deal in money and nerves to acquire that habit—and he breathed the scent deep while he waited for the steady wind which Jack Townsend had promised. There was just enough noise to give the silence that waiting quality which cannot be described; below him voices murmured, and lifted now and then, rhythmically. Ben Connor thought the sounds strangely musical, and he began to brim with the same good nature which puffed the cheeks of Jack Townsend. There was a substantial basis for that content in the broiled trout which he had had for dinner. It was while his thoughts drifted back to those browned fish that the first wind struck him. Dust with an acrid scent whirled up from the street—then a steady stream of air swept his face and arms.