The Max Brand Megapack (411 page)

But there was no mockery forthcoming. The sun was still not up when he paid his bill and hastened to the door of the old building. Quick footsteps followed him, a hand touched his shoulders, and he turned and looked suspiciously down into the face of the girl. It was a frightened face, he thought, and very pretty. At some interval between the time when he first saw her and the present, she had found time to rearrange her hair and make it smooth. Color was pulsing in her cheeks.

“Stranger,” she said softly, “what are you running away from?”

The question slowly penetrated the mind of Bull; he was still bewildered by the change in her—something electric, to be felt rather than noted with the eye.

“They ain’t any reason for hurrying on,” she urged. “I—I can hide you, easy. Nobody could find where I’ll put you, and there you can rest up. You must be tolerable tired.”

There was no doubt about it. There was kindness as well as anxiety in her voice. For the second time in his entire life, Bull decided that a woman could be something more than an annoyance. She was placing a value on him, just as Jessie, three days before, had placed a value on him; and it disturbed Bull. For so many years, he had been mocked and scorned by his uncle and cousins that deep in his mind was engraved the certainty that he was useless. He decided to hurry on before the girl found out the truth.

“I can still walk,” he said, “and, while I can walk, I got to go south. But—you gimme heart, lady. You gimme a pile of heart to keep going. Maybe”—he paused, uncertain what to say next, and yet obviously she expected something more—“I’ll get a chance to come back this way, and if I do, I’ll see you! You can lay to that—I’ll see you!”

He was gone before she could answer, and he was wondering why she had looked down with that sudden color and that queer, pleased smile. It would be long before Bull understood, but, even without understanding, he found that his heart was lighter and an odd warmth suffused him.

The rising of the sun found him in the pale desert with the magic of the hills growing distant behind him, and he settled to a different step through the thin sand—a short, choppy step. His weight was against him here, but it would be even a greater disadvantage to a horseman, and with this in mind, he pressed steadily south.

Every day on that south trail was like a year in the life of Bull. Heat and thirst wasted him, the constant labor of the march hardened his muscles, and he got that forward look about his eyes, which comes with shadows under the lids and a constant frown on the forehead. It was long afterward that men checked up his march from date to date and discovered that the distance between the shack of Bill Campbell and Halstead in the South was one hundred and fifty miles over bitter mountains and burning desert, and that Bull Hunter had made the distance in five days.

All this was learned and verified later when Bull was a legend. When he strode into Halstead on that late afternoon no one had ever heard of the man out of the mountains. He was simply an oddity in a country where oddities draw small attention.

Yet a rumor advanced before Bull. A child, playing in the incredible heat of the sun, saw the dusty giant heaving in the distance and ran to its mother, frightened, and the worn-faced mother came to the porch and shaded her eyes to look. She passed on the word with a call that traveled from house to house. So that, when Bull entered the long, irregular street of Halstead, he found it lined on either side by children, old men, women. It was almost as though they had heard of the thing he had come to do and were there to watch.

Bull shrank from their eyes. He would far rather have slipped around the back of the village and gone toward its center unobserved. A pair of staring eyes to Bull was like the pointing of a loaded gun. He put unspoken sentences upon every tongue, and the sentences were those he had heard so often from his uncle and his uncle’s sons.

“Too big to be any good.”

“Bull’s got the size of a hoss, and as a hoss he’d do pretty well, but he ain’t no account as a man.”

His life had been paved with such burning remarks as these. Many an evening had been long agony to him as the three sat about and baited him. He hurried down the street, the pulverized sand squirting up about his heavy boots and drifting in a mist behind him. When he was gone an old man came out and measured those great strides with his eye and then stretched his legs vainly to cover the same marks. But this, of course, Bull did not see, and he would not have understood it, had he seen, except as a mockery.

He paused in front of the hotel veranda, an awful figure to behold. His canvas coat was rolled and tied behind his sweating shoulders; his too-short sleeves had bothered him and they were now cut off at the elbow and exposed the sun-blackened forearms; his overalls streamed in rags over his scarred boots. He pushed the battered hat far back on his head and looked at the silent, attentive line of idlers who sat on the veranda.

“Excuse me, gents,” he said mildly. “But maybe one of you might know of a little gent with iron-gray hair and a thin face and quick ways of acting and little, thin hands.” He illustrated his meaning by extending his own huge paws. “His name is Pete Reeve.”

That name caused a sharp shifting of glances, not at Bull, but from man to man. A tall fellow rose. He advanced with his thumbs hooked importantly in the arm holes of his vest and braced his legs apart as he faced Bull. The elevation of the veranda floor raised him so that he was actually some inches above the head of his interlocutor, and the tall man was deeply grateful for that advantage. He was, in truth, a little vain of his own height, and to have to look up to anyone irritated him beyond words. Having established his own superior position, he looked the giant over from head to foot. He kept one eye steadily on Bull, as though afraid that the big man might dodge out of sight and elude him.

“And what might you have to do with Pete Reeve?” he asked. “Mightn’t you be a partner of Pete’s? Kind of looks like you was following him sort of eager, friend.”

While this question was being asked, Bull saw that the line of idlers settled forward in their chairs to hear the answer. It puzzled him. For some mysterious reason these men disapproved of any one who was intimately acquainted with Pete Reeve, it seemed. He looked blandly upon the tall man.

“I never seen Pete Reeve,” said Bull apologetically.

“Ah? Yet you’re follerin’ him hotfoot?”

“I was aiming to see him, you know,” answered Bull.

The tall man regarded him with eyes that began to twinkle beneath his frown. Then he jerked his head aside and cast at his audience a prodigious wink. The cloudy eyes of Bull had assured him that he had to do with a simpleton, and he was inviting the others in on the game.

“You never seen him?” he asked gruffly, turning back to Bull. “You expect me to believe talk like that? Young man, d’you know who I am?”

“I dunno,” murmured Bull, overawed and drawing back a pace.

The action drew a chuckle from the crowd. Some of the idlers even rose and sauntered to the edge of the veranda, the better to see the baiting of the giant. His prodigious size made his timidity the more amusing.

“You dunno, eh?” asked the other. “Well, son, I’m Sheriff Bill Anderson!” He waited to see the effect of this portentous announcement.

“I never heard tell of any Sheriff Bill Anderson,” said Bull in the same mild voice.

The sheriff gasped. The idlers hastily veiled their mouths with much coughing and clearing of the throat. It seemed that the tables had been subtly turned upon the sheriff.

“You!” exclaimed the sheriff, extending a bony arm. “I got to tell you, partner, that I’m a pile suspicious. I’m suspicious of anybody that’s a friend of Pete Reeve. How long have you knowed him?”

Bull was very anxious to pacify the tall man. He shifted his weight to the other foot. “Something less’n nothing,” he hastened to explain. “I ain’t never seen him.”

“And why d’you want to see him? What d’you know about him?”

It flashed through the mind of Bull that it would be useless to tell what he knew of Pete. Obviously nobody would believe what he could tell of how Reeve had met and shot down Uncle Bill Campbell. For Bill Campbell was a historic figure as a fighter in the mountain regions, and surely his face must be bright even at this distance from his home. That he could have walked beyond the sphere of Campbell’s fame in five days never occurred to Bull Hunter.

“I dunno nothing good,” he confessed.

There was a change in the sheriff. He descended from the floor of the veranda with a stiff-legged hop and took Bull by the arm, leading him down the street.

“Son,” he said earnestly, walking down the street with Bull, “d’you know anything agin’ this Pete Reeve? I want to know because I got Pete behind the bars for murder!”

“Murder?” asked Bull.

“Murder—regular murder—something he’ll hang for. And if you got any inside information that I can use agin’ him, why I’ll use it and I’ll be mighty grateful for it! You see everybody knows Pete Reeve. Everybody knows that, for all these years, he’s been going around killing and maiming men, and nobody has been able to bring him up for anything worse’n self-defense. But now I think I got him to rights, and I want to hang him for it, stranger, partly because it’d be a feather in my cap, and partly because it’d be doing a favor for every good, law-abiding citizen in these parts. So do what you can to help me, stranger, and I’ll see that your time ain’t wasted.”

There was something very wheedling and insinuating about all this talk. It troubled Bull. His strangely obscure life had left him a child in many important respects, and he had a child’s instinctive knowledge of the mental processes of others. In this case he felt a profound distrust. There was something wrong about this sheriff, his instincts told him—something gravely wrong. He disliked the man who had started to ridicule him before many men and was now so confidential, asking his help.

“Sheriff Anderson,” he said, “may I see this Reeve?”

“Come right along with me, son. I ain’t pressing you for what you know. But it may be a thing that’ll help me to hang Reeve. And if it is, I’ll need to know it. Understand? Public benefit—that’s what I’m after. Come along with me and you can see if Reeve’s the man you’re after.”

They crossed the street through a little maelstrom of fine dust which a wind circle had picked up, and the sheriff led Bull into the jail. They crossed the tawdry little outer room with its warped floor creaking under the tread of Bull Hunter. Next they came face to face with a cage of steel bars, and behind it was a little gray man on a bunk. He sat up and peered at them from beneath bushy brows, a thin-faced man, extremely agile. Even in sitting up, one caught many possibilities of catlike speed of action.

Bull knew at once that this was the man he sought. He stood close to the bars, grasping one in each great hand, and with his face pressed against the steel, he peered at Pete Reeve. The other was very calm.

“Howdy, sheriff,” he said. “Bringing on another one to look over your bear?”

CHAPTER 7

The prisoner’s good humor impressed Bull immensely. Here was a man talking commonplaces in the face of death. A greater man than Uncle Bill, he felt at once—a far greater man. It was impossible to conceive of that keen, sharp eye and that clawlike hand sending a bullet far from the center of the target.

He gave his eyes long sight of that face, and then turned from the bars and went out with the sheriff.

“Is that your man?” asked the sheriff.

“I dunno,” said Bull, fencing for time as they stood in front of the jail. “What’d he do?”

“You mean why he’s in jail? I’ll tell you that, son, but first I want to know what you got agin’ him—and your proofs—mostly your proofs!”

The distaste which Bull had felt for the sheriff from the first now became overpowering. That he should be the means of bringing that terrible and active little man to an end seemed, as a matter of fact, absurd. Guile must have played a part in that capture.

Suppose he were to tell the sheriff about the shooting of Uncle Bill? That would be enough to convince men that Pete Reeve was capable of murder, for the shooting of Uncle Bill had been worse than murder. It spared the life and ruined it at the same time. But suppose he added his evidence and allowed the law to take its course with Pete Reeve? Where would be his own reward for his long march south and all the pain of travel and the crossing of the mountains at the peril of his life? There would be nothing but scorn from Uncle Bill when he returned, and not that moment of praise for which he yearned. To gain that great end he must kill Pete Reeve, but not by the aid of the law.

“I dunno,” he said to the sheriff who waited impatiently. “I figure that what I know wouldn’t be no good to you.”

The sheriff snorted. “You been letting me waste all this time on you?” he asked Bull. “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”

Bull scratched his head in perplexity. But as he raised the great arm and put his hand behind his head, the sheriff winced back a little. “I’m sorry,” said Bull.

The sheriff dismissed him with a grunt of disgust, and strode off.

Bull started out to find information. This idea was growing slowly in his mind. He must kill Pete Reeve, and to accomplish that great end he must first free him from the jail. He went back to the hotel and went into the kitchen to find food. The proprietor himself came back to serve him. He was a pudgy little man with a dignified pointed beard of which he was inordinately proud.

“It’s between times for meals,” he declared, “but you being the biggest man that ever come into the hotel, I’ll make an exception.” And he began to hunt through the cupboard for cold meat.

“I seen Pete Reeve,” began Bull bluntly. “How come he’s in jail?”

“Him?” asked the other. “Ain’t you heard?”

“No.”

The little man sighed with pleasure; he had given up hope of finding a new listener for that oft-told tale. “It happened last night,” he confided. “Along late in the afternoon in rides Johnny Strange. He tells us he was out to Dan Armstrong’s place when, about noon, a little gray-headed man that give the name of Pete Reeve came in and asked for chow. Of course Johnny Strange pricks up his ears when he hears the name. We all heard about Pete Reeve, off and on, as about the slickest gunman that the ranges ever turned out. So he looks Pete over and wonders at finding such a little man.”