The Max Brand Megapack (45 page)

And he winked at Bard for sympathy.

Lawlor smashed his fist on the table.

“What I say is, are you running this ranch or am I?”

“Well?” growled Kilrain.

“If you was a kid you’d have your mouth washed out with soap.”

The eyes of Shorty bulged.

“It ought to be done now, but there ain’t no one I’d give such dirty work to. What you’re going to do is stand right here and show us you know how to sing a decent song in a decent way. That there song of yours didn’t leave nothin’ sacred untouched, from parsons and jails to women and the gallows. Stand over there and sing.”

The eyes of the sailor filmed over with cold hate.

“Was I hired to punch cattle,” he said, “or make a blasted, roarin’ fool out of myself?”

“You was hired,” answered Lawlor softly, as he filled his glass to the brim with the old rye whisky, “to be a cook, and you’re the rottenest hash-slinger that ever served cold dough for biscuits; a blasted, roarin’ fool you’ve already made out of yourself by singin’ that song. I want another one to get the sound of that out of my ears. Tune up!”

Thoughts of murder, ill-concealed, whitened the face of the sailor.

“Some day—” he began hoarsely, and then stopped. For a vision came to him of blithe mornings when he should sit on the top of the corral fence rolling a cigarette, while some other puncher went into the herd and roped and saddled his horse.

“D’you mean this—Drew?” he asked, with an odd emphasis.

“D’you think I’m talking for fun?”

“What’ll I sing?” he asked in a voice which was reduced to a faint whisper by rage.

“I dunno,” mused Lawlor, “but maybe it ought to lie between ‘Alice, Ben Bolt,’ and ‘Annie Laurie.’ What d’you choose, partner?”

He turned to Bard.

“‘Alice, Ben Bolt,’ by all means. I don’t think he could manage the Scotch.”

“Start!” commanded Lawlor.

The sailor closed his eyes, tilted back his head, twisted his face to a hideous grimace, and then opening his shapeless mouth emitted a tremendous wail which took shape in the following words:

“Oh, don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,

Sweet Alice, with hair like the sunshine—”

“Shut up!” roared Lawlor.

It required a moment for Shorty to unkink the congested muscles of his face.

“What the hell’s the matter now?” he inquired.

“Whoever heard of ‘hair like the sunshine’? There ain’t no such thing possible. ‘Hair so brown,’ that’s what the song says. Shorty, we got more feelin’ for our ears than to let you go on singin’ an’ showin’ your ignerance. G’wan back to the kitchen!”

Kilrain drew a long breath, regarded Lawlor again with that considerate, expectant eye, and then turned on his heel and strode from the room. Back to Bard came fragments of tremendous cursing of an epic breadth and a world-wide inclusiveness.

“Got to do things like this once in a while to keep ’em under my thumb,” Lawlor explained genially.

With all his might Bard was struggling to reconcile this big-handed vulgarian with his mental picture of the man who could write for an epitaph: “Here sleeps Joan, the wife of William Drew. She chose this place for rest.” But the two ideas were not inclusive.

He said aloud: “Aren’t you afraid that that black-eyed fellow will run a knife between your ribs one of these dark nights?”

“Who? My ribs?” exclaimed Lawlor, nevertheless stirring somewhat uneasily in his chair. “Nope, they know that I’m William Drew. They may be hard, but they know I’m harder.”

“Oh,” drawled the other, and his eyes held with uncomfortable steadiness on the rosy face of Lawlor. “I understand.”

To cover his confusion Lawlor seized his glass.

“Here’s to you—drinkin’ deep.”

And he tossed off the mighty potion. Bard had poured only a few drops into his glass; he had too much sympathy for his empty stomach to do more. His host leaned back, coughing, with tears of pleasure in his eyes.

“Damn me!” he breathed reverently. “I ain’t touched stuff like this in ten years.”

“Is this a new stock?” inquired Bard, apparently puzzled.

“This?” said Lawlor, recalling his position with a start. “Sure it is; brand new. Yep, stuff ain’t been in more’n five days. Smooth, ain’t it? Medicine, that’s what I call it; a gentleman’s drink—goes down like water.”

Observing a rather quizzical light in the eyes of Bard, he felt that he had probably been making a few missteps, and being warmed greatly at the heart by the whisky, he launched forth in a new phase of the conversation.

CHAPTER XXVI

“THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON”

“Speakin’ of hard cattlemen,” he said, “I could maybe tell you a few things, son.”

“No doubt of it,” smiled Anthony. “I presume it would take a _very_ hard man to handle this crowd.”

“Fairly hard,” nodded the redoubtable Lawlor, “but they ain’t nothin’ to the men that used to ride the range in the old days.”

“No?”

“Nope. One of them men—why, he’d eat a dozen like Kilrain and think nothin’ of it. Them was the sort I learned to ride the range with.”

“I’ve heard something about a fight which you and John Bard had against the Piotto gang. Care to tell me anything of it?”

Lawlor lolled easily back in his chair and balanced a second large drink between thumb and forefinger.

“There ain’t no harm in talk, son; sure I’ll tell you about it. What d’you want to know?”

“The way Bard fought—the way you both fought.”

“Lemme see.”

He closed his eyes like one who strives to recollect; he was, in fact, carefully recalling the skeleton of facts which Drew had told him earlier in the day.

“Six months, me and Bard had been trailin’ Piotto, damn his old soul! Bard—he’d of quit cold a couple of times, but I kept him at it.”

“John Bard would have quit?” asked Anthony softly.

“Sure. He was a big man, was Bard, but he didn’t have none too much endurance.”

“Go on,” nodded Anthony.

“Six months, I say, we was ridin’ day and night and wearin’ out a hoss about every week of that time. Then we got jest a hint from a bartender that maybe the Piottos was nearby in that section.

“It didn’t need no more than a hint for us to get busy on the trail. We hit a circle through the mountains—it was over near Twin Rivers where the ground ain’t got a level stretch of a hundred yards in a whole day’s ridin’. And along about evenin’ of the second day we come to the house of Tom Shaw, a squatter.

“Bard would of passed the house up, because he knew Shaw and said there wasn’t nothin’ crooked about him, but I didn’t trust nobody in them days—and I ain’t changed a pile since.”

“That,” remarked Anthony, “is an example I think I shall follow.”

“Eh?” said Lawlor, somewhat blankly. “Well, we rode up on the blind side of the house—from the north, see, got off, and sneaked around to the east end of the shack. The windows was covered with cloths on the inside, which didn’t make me none too sure about Shaw havin’ no dealin’s with crooks. It ain’t ordinary for a feller to be so savin’ on light. Pretty soon we found a tear in one of the cloths, and lookin’ through that we seen old Piotto sittin’ beside Tom Shaw with his daughter on the other side.

“We went back to the north side of the house and figured out different ways of tacklin’ the job. There was only the two of us, see, and the fellers inside that house was all cut out for man-killers. How would you have gone after ’em, son?”

“Opened the door, I suppose, and started shooting,” said Bard, “if I had the courage.”

The other stared at him.

“You heard this story before?”

“Not this part.”

“Well, that was jest what we done. First off, it sounds like a fool way of tacklin’ them; but when you think twice it was the best of all. They never was expectin’ anybody fool enough to walk right into that room and start fightin’. We went back and had a look at the door.

“It wasn’t none too husky. John Bard, he tried the latch, soft, but the thing was locked, and when he pulled there was a snap.

“‘Who’s there?’ hollers someone inside.

“We froze ag’in’ the side of the house, lookin’ at each other pretty sick.

“‘Nobody’s there,’ sings out the voice of old Piotto. ‘We can trust Tom Shaw, jest because he knows that if he double-crossed us he’d be the first man to die.’

“And we heard Tom say, sort of quaverin’: ‘God’s sake, boys, what d’you think I am?’

“‘Now,’ says Bard, and we put our shoulders to the door, and takes our guns in our hands—we each had two.

“The door went down like nothin’, because we was both husky fellers in them days, and as she smashed in the fall upset two of the boys sittin’ closest and gave ’em no chance on a quick draw. The rest of ’em was too paralyzed at first, except old Piotto. He pulled his gun, but what he shot was Tom Shaw, who jest leaned forward in his chair and crumpled up dead.

“We went at ’em, pumpin’ lead. It wasn’t no fight at first and half of ’em was down before they had their guns workin’. But when the real hell started it wasn’t no fireside story, I’ll tell a man. We had the jump on ’em, but they meant business. I dropped to the floor and lay on my side, shootin’; Bard, he followered suit. They went down like tenpins till our guns were empty. Then we up and rushed what was left of ’em—Piotto and his daughter. Bard makes a pass to knock the gun out of the hand of Joan and wallops her on the head instead. Down she goes. I finished Piotto with my bare hands.”

“Broke his back, eh?”

“Me? Whoever heard of breakin’ a man’s back? Ha, ha, ha! You been hearin’ fairy tales, son. Nope, I choked the old rat.”

“Were you badly hurt?”

Lawlor searched his memory hastily; there was no information on this important point.

“Couple of grazes,” he said, dismissing the subject with a tolerant wave of the hand. “Nothin’ worth talkin’ of.”

“I see,” nodded Bard.

It occurred to Lawlor that his guest was taking the narrative in a remarkably philosophic spirit. He reviewed his telling of the story hastily and could find nothing that jarred.

He concluded: “That was the way of livin’ in them days. They ain’t no more—they ain’t no more!”

“And now,” said Anthony, “the only excitement you get is out of books—and running the labourers?”

He had picked up the book which Lawlor had just laid down.

“Oh, I read a bit now and then,” said the cowpuncher easily, “but I ain’t much on booklearnin’.”

Bard was turning the pages slowly. The title, whose meaning dawned slowly on his astonished mind as a sunset comes in winter over a grey landscape, was The Critique of Pure Reason. He turned the book over and over in his hands. It was well thumbed.

He asked, controlling his voice: “Are you fond of Kant?”

“Eh?” queried the other.

“Fond of this book?”

“Yep, that’s one of my favourites. But I ain’t much on any books.”

“However,” said Bard, “the story of this is interesting.”

“It is. There’s some great stuff in it,” mumbled Lawlor, trying to squint at the title, which he had quite overlooked during the daze in which he first picked it up.

Bard laid the book aside and out of sight.

“And I like the characters, don’t you? Some very close work done with them.”

“Yep, there’s a lot of narrow escapes.”

“Exactly. I’m glad that we agree about books.”

“So’m I. Feller can kill a lot of time chinning about books.”

“Yes, I suppose a good many people have killed time over this book.”

And as he smiled genially upon the cowpuncher, Bard felt a great relief sweep over him, a mighty gladness that this was not Drew—that this looselipped gabbler was not the man who had written the epitaph over the tomb of Joan Piotto. He lied about the book; he had lied about it all. And knowing that this was not Drew, he felt suddenly as if someone were watching him from behind, someone large and grey and stern of eye, like the giant who had spoken to him so long before in the arena at Madison Square Garden.

A game was being played with him, and behind that game must be Drew himself; all Bard could do was to wait for developments.

The familiar, booming voice of Shorty Kilrain echoed through the house: “Supper!”

And the loud clangour of a bell supported the invitation.

“Chow-time,” breathed Lawlor heavily, like one relieved at the end of a hard shift of work. “I figure you ain’t sorry, son?”

“No,” answered Bard, “but it’s too bad to break off this talk. I’ve learned a lot.”

CHAPTER XXVII

THE STAGE

“You first,” said Lawlor at the door.

“I’ve been taught to let an older man go first,” said Bard, smiling pleasantly. “After you, sir.”

“Any way you want it, Bard,” answered Lawlor, but as he led the way down the hall he was saying to himself, through his stiffly mumbling lips: “He knows! Calamity was right; there’s going to be hell poppin’ before long.”

He lengthened his stride going down the long hall to the dining-room, and entering, he found the cowpunchers about to take their places around the big table. Straight toward the head to the big chair he stalked, and paused an instant beside little Duffy. Their interchange of whispers was like a muffled rapid-fire, for they had to finish before young Bard, now just entering the room, could reach them and take his designated chair at the right of Lawlor.

“He knows,” muttered Lawlor.

“Hell! Then it’s all up?”

“No; keep bluffin’; wait. How’s everything?”

“Gregory ain’t come in, but Drew may put him wise before he gets inside the house.”

“You done all I could expect,” said Lawlor aloud as Bard came up, “but to-morrow go back on the same job and try to get something definite.”

To Bard: “Here’s your place, partner. Just been tellin’ Duffy, there on your right, about some work. Some of the doggies have been rustled lately and we’re on their trail.”

They took their places, and Bard surveyed the room carefully, as an actor who stands in the wings and surveys the stage on which he is soon to step and play a great part; for in Anthony there was a gathering sense of impending disaster and action. What he saw was a long, low apartment, the bare rafters overhead browned by the kitchen smoke, which even now was rolling in from the wide door at the end of the room—the thick, oily smoke of burnt meat mingled with steam and the nameless vapours of a great oven.