The Max Brand Megapack (446 page)

“Friends!” said the Kid, pulling up the mare.

“What friends?”

“Bud Trainor, and I’m the Kid.”

“Hey! Are you the Kid?”

The rifle took a crosswise, harmless slant, and the puncher came up.

“Hullo there, Kid,” said he. “I’d been hopin’ that I’d see you down here. My name’s Bill Travis.”

They shook hands.

“Things is pretty bad with the cows,” said Travis. “They’s a lot laid down that ain’t gonna get up in the morning.”

“There are a lot who’ll get up in the morning and drop before noon, too,” said the Kid.

“That’s a true thing. Any fool could tell that. Got a chaw with you?”

“I don’t carry it. Here’s the makings, though.”

He passed them over. Dexterously the puncher made his smoke in the dark of the night.

“What are you fellows going to do about this, Travis?”

“Why, what can we do?”

“I don’t know. Any ideas among the boys?”

“Nothing except we might stampede the cows to break down the fences.”

“It wouldn’t work. They’d shoot the head off of any stampede.”

“That’s what we decided. It won’t work. Maybe the old man will have an idea.”

“Are they keeping a sentry go along those fences tonight?”

“Sure they are. Three men along each fence. And the others ready to come on the jump, I suppose.”

“Baby murder—that’s what it is!” said the Kid, his rage breaking out. “Listen!”

He held up his hand in the darkness. The lowing of the cattle swept up around them in waves, as though all the tormented souls from hell were pouring up toward the stars, lamenting. “Aye, it’s pretty bad,” said Travis. “Shay and Dixon—they’ll sweat for it some day.”

“Tonight, I hope,” said the Kid, muttering through his teeth.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. You boys are riding these rounds all night?”

“We’re riding ’em all the night. If Dixon’s crowd starts out to do a little foraging, we’ll teach them how the Milman crew can shoot. The boys are pretty hot. Old Tar Yagers, over on the other side of the ranch, is hankering after a scalp or two, and maybe the old man will get a chance, before this fracas is finished.”

“Maybe he will,” agreed the Kid. “So long. You fellows keep your eyes open, will you?”

“For what?”

“For a signal in the Dixon Camp.”

“What sort of a signal?”

“Fire,” said the Kid, and rode on without further speech.

Bud hurried the silver stallion up beside him.

“What’s that about fire, Kid?” he asked.

But he received no answer, for the Kid seemed lost in thought.

So they came, at last, to the edge of the ravine.

Three steps away the predominant sound was the voice of the cattle from the hollow, but when they came to the verge and dismounted, they could hear nothing except the heavy and continual roaring of the water, like a constant cannonade.

“Listen to it!” said Bud Trainor. “How’d you like to be down there in that, Kid?”

The Kid did not answer.

Presently he drew back from the verge of the cliff.

“You’ve seen that in the daytime, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“How far is it to the bottom?”

“Forty—fifty feet, I reckon.”

“You’ve got a sixty-foot rope,” said the Kid. “Get it for me, will you?”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Bud, for heaven’s sake, stop asking questions. I have enough on my mind, just now, without trying to answer you.”

“All right,” said Bud, “but it makes me pretty sick, even to think about it.”

He went, however, to his horse, and took from the saddle bow the long, heavy rope, for he had learned his punching in Montana when a boy, and stuck to the fashion of the northern rope. This he brought back and the Kid, taking the noose end of it, tied it fast about a jag of rock on the very verge of the canyon wall.

Then he got to the end of the line and tested, tugging with all his weight.

“It’s sound, if that’s what you want to know,” said Trainor. “It’s sound,” agreed the Kid, and threw the other end down the height.

It disappeared in the darkness of the ravine, but for a moment the upper end jerked and wriggled like a struggling snake. “Bud,” said the Kid, “I’m going down there.”

“If you go,” said Bud, “I’ll go after you.”

“You’ll stay here,” commanded the Kid. “It’s my own game and my own business that I’m after. I only want one thing out of you. Give me your hand, and if I don’t come back, remember me!”

“If anything happens to you,” said Bud solemnly, “I’ll keep on the trail of Dixon and Shay till they get me, or I get them. So long, Kid.”

“So long,” said the Kid, and slipped over the edge of the wall.

CHAPTER 31

The Fifth Man Again

Youth Is proverbially cruel, whether in its trust or in its distrust. It cannot halt. It will have no half measures. It is an absolute tyrant which pushes all things to extremes.

Now, when Georgia Milman had heard the story of the Kid which inculpated her father, she hesitated for a moment only. The description of her father’s face, and the distinguishing little mark upon it, had determined her that the Kid was right.

Yet something might be said.

Men appear in most guilty situations without actually possessing guilt, and that might be true of her father also. So thought Georgia. She wanted an explanation. She wanted it at once. But she went about the acquiring of it in the typically youthful, cruel, headlong fashion.

She could have drawn John Milman aside, of course, but if she did this, she would have to wait, for she found him in the house closely conferring with her mother.

It was his habit when a crisis of any kind came to ask for advice, and the advice which he had come to prize above all else was that which he received from Elinore Milman herself. She was calm, keen-witted, and understood as well as he did all the problems of the ranch and of the affairs which had to do with it.

Accordingly, he was now talking over with her the possibilities of the situation, and there Georgia found him.

He was walking up and down the room—the front room of the house where on that other night so many years ago, she had sung him to sleep, and then sung on to the open window and the soft, impalpable darkness beyond it, not knowing that someone waited there, listening.

And the fact that this was the same room hardened the spirit of Georgia a little.

In that story of the Kid’s, she had waited for the things which bore upon her, but he had repressed all emotion, with the restraint of some old Greek poet, preparing an inscription to be cut into stone. There was only a line or two, but it pointed to a great thing, indeed. He had hardly said so much, but most distinctly he had inferred that what had turned his cunning and his anger three times aside from the head of her father was the love of the Kid for her. And she remembered, as she stood there by the door, looking blankly through the window toward the shimmer of the sun on the hills beyond, how she had spoken to that ragged lad, those years before. The bright blue of his eyes had remained in her memory. Now the face itself was distinctly chiseled in her mind. It seemed monstrous that she ever could have forgotten it.

“There are,” said Mrs. Milman, who was summing up precisely, “just two alternatives. Either we pay for the cows by the head and send them in to be watered, or else we hire a mob of gunmen and smash Dixon and his crowd with a strong hand.”

Georgia opened her eyes. She never had heard her mild mother speak like this before. Milman himself was amazed.

“Which do you advise?” said he.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Milman, half closing her eyes, and by the pucker of her brows seeming to attempt to read the future. “I really don’t know.”

“It’s always foolish to break the law,” said Milman.

“It’s always foolish to break the law,” she echoed. “But it’s more foolish to sit and wait—for sure ruin!”

She held up her hand.

“Listen, John!” she said.

And, through the window from the eastward, they could hear a long, dull droning sound—a tremor of deep sorrow on the wind rather than an actual noise.

Milman jumped up, with the sweat running as fast as tears down his face.

He gripped his hands hard together and dragged in a breath.

“I’m half mad with the waiting,” he said. “I feel like riding out there and simply going blindly in at them—but there’s no use throwing oneself away. The sheriff—my own neighbors—the law—everything is blind and deaf to me. It looks almost like a hand from heaven striking me, Elinore!”

“Well,” said the slender, mild woman, “it’s either the hard fist and a crowd of hired guns—or else a miracle.”

“A miracle?” echoed Milman heavily.

“The Kid, I mean,” said she.

His face brightened for a moment.

“Aye, the Kid,” said he. “He’s like an answer to a prayer. But what can even the Kid do? He’s brought in evidence in the shape of one of their hired gunmen that ought to have been enough to establish our rights in the law instantly—except that the sheriff won’t see it that way.”

“The sheriff was right,” said his wife. “We mustn’t throw stones at honest Lew Walters.”

Milman made a wide gesture of despair. Then, resuming the subject of the Kid, he exclaimed. “One never can tell. He is the sort of a lad who does the unexpected.”

He turned to his daughter.

“Georgia,” said he, “we’re talking business, your mother and I.”

“Yes, and miracles, I hear,” said Georgia, with the coldest of smiles.

“What do you mean, my dear?”

“Well, if you’re so interested in the Kid, I think you might like to know that I’ve been talking to him.”

“You have? Where?”

“In the woods. In the clearing in the woods, nearest the house. We’ve been talking for a long, long time.”

“I hope it was not a waste of time,” said Mrs. Milman, eying her daughter narrowly.

“I never heard so many interesting things,” said she.

“Anything that we ought to know about, Georgia?”

“Well, one thing that would curdle your blood,” said the girl.

“And what was that?”

“Why,” said Georgia, studiously avoiding the eye of her father and giving all of her attention to her mother, “when he was a little youngster of six, his father and mother started to go to a new home—they were just poor squatters, I take it—and when they got to the edge of the desert with their few horses, and their mules, and their burro, and their steers, and their pair of milk cows, along came a band of five scoundrels and robbed them of everything, except the milk cows. Think of that!”

“A horrible thing,” said Mrs. Milman a little vacantly. “But we’re very busy now, Georgia.”

Milman, with an odd pucker of his forehead, looked straight before him.

“You don’t understand how horrible it was, Mother,” said the girl. “The poor little boy was sick, but his father insisted on trying to cross the desert and get to the new country—the Promised Land to that poor man, I suppose. So they pushed on. The boy grew more ill. The mother was half mad with anxiety. It was a terrible march. They had yoked the milk cows to the light wagon, you see. They lightened the load, throwing away everything but a little food. Still it was hard going through the sand, and the sun was terrible. It beat down, and one of the cows—old Spot—was the first to drop. Then Red went staggering on for a couple of days with the sick boy perched on her back. A frightful march, of course.”

“Oh, what a ghastly thing!” said Elinore Milman, all the mother in her roused.

“Well, old Red dropped dead too. But then they were in reaching distance of the edge of the desert. They could see the green mist of the Promised Land. They got through to it, all right. But the mother died in a short time from the effects of that march. The father was broken-hearted, and the Kid grew up with just one purpose in life—to find the five men who had done the thing!”

“I hope that he has!” exclaimed Mrs. Milman. “I imagine that he’s the sort of a fellow who would know how to handle them.”

“Yes, he got on the trail of them,” said the girl. “He spotted the stolen mule nine years later.”

Here she let her glance drift across to the face of her father and she saw his eyes widen, and then turn almost to stone. It was a frightful moment.

If ever fear, grief, and sick consciousness of sin were in a face, it was in that of the rancher just then.

She stared at him. She could have fallen to the floor with weakness and with sorrow. And she was stunned by this second blow even more than when the Kid had spoken to her.

Her mother, finally, attracted by the silence, looked curiously from one of them to the other.

“A grisly story, John, isn’t it?” said she.

“Frightful!” said he.

And the word came hoarsely from his throat.

Elinore Milman stood up suddenly.

She faced her daughter and exclaimed: “Did he tell you the names of those men?”

Georgia slumped back against the wall. She was dizzy. The room spun before her eyes.

“He told me—four of them,” said she. “Four of them are dead.”

She roused herself suddenly. She had not meant to let her mother understand, but Elinore Milman was now as white as marble. Her father was like a man hanging upon a crucifix.

There was no use holding back now. She had said too much. Amazement at her own folly in breaking out with the story before them both closed her lips now. But her mother read her mind.

“I think,” said she, “that it’s just as well to have all sorts of things out in the light of day. Family skeletons ought not necessarily to be left in dark closets. Don’t you think so, John?” John Milman got to his feet with a lurch and a stagger.

“I’m going out,” said he. “Need—little air.”

He went past his daughter but he was so blinded that he could not find the handle of the door.

She had to open it for him, and then she watched him going down the hall slowly, with many pauses, supporting himself with a weak hand against first one wall and then the other.

He had been struck down as surely as by a thunderbolt.

And then she remembered what the Kid had done in all the other four cases. There never had been any real use of guns. He had always struck with other means.