The Max Brand Megapack (93 page)

The moment he raised that cross the bull throat of Jim Boone bellowed a command, the poised guns of the gang enforced it, and all the crowd dropped to their knees, leaving the six outlaws scattered about the edges of the mob like sheep dogs around a folding flock, while in the center stood Pierre with white, upturned face and the raised cross.

So Martin Ryder was buried with “trimmings,” and the gang rode back, laughing and shouting, through the town and up into the safety of the mountains. Election day was fast approaching and therefore the rival candidates for sheriff hastily organized posses and made the usual futile pursuit.

In fact, before the pursuit was well under way, Boone and his men sat at their supper table in the cabin. The seventh chair was filled; all were present except Jack, who sulked in her room. Pierre went to her door and knocked. He carried under his arm a package which he had secured in the General Merchandise Store of Morgantown.

“We’re all waiting for you at the table,” he explained.

“Just keep on waiting,” said the husky voice of Jacqueline.

“If I leave the table will you come out?”

She stammered: “Ye—n-no!”

“Yes or no?”

“No, no, no!”

And he heard the stamp of her foot and smiled a little.

“I’ve brought you a present.”

“I hate your presents!”

“It’s a thing you’ve wanted for a long time, Jacqueline.”

Only a stubborn silence.

“I’m putting your door a little ajar.”

“If you dare to come in I’ll—”

“And I’m leaving the package right here at the entrance. I’m so sorry, Jacqueline, that you hate me.”

And then he walked off down the hall—cunning Pierre—before she could send her answer like an arrow after him. At the table he arranged an eighth plate and drew up a chair before it.

“If that’s for Jack,” remarked Dick Wilbur, “you’re wasting your time. I know her and I know her type. She’ll never come out to the table to-night—nor to-morrow, either. I know!”

In fact, he knew a good deal too much about girls and women also, did Wilbur, and that was why he rode the long trails of the mountain-desert with Boone and his men. Far south and east in the Bahamas a great mansion stood vacant because he was gone, and the dust lay thick on the carpets and powdered the curtains and tapestries with a common gray.

He had built it and furnished it for a woman he loved, and afterward for her sake he had killed a man and fled from a posse and escaped in the steerage of a west-bound ship. Still the law followed him, and he kept on west and west until he reached the mountain-desert which thinks nothing of swallowing men and their reputations.

There he was safe, but some day he would see some woman smile, catch the glimmer of some eye, and throw safety away to ride after her.

It was a weakness, but what made a tragic figure of handsome Dick Wilbur was that he knew his weakness and sat still and let fate walk up and overtake him.

Yet Pierre le Rouge answered this man of sorrowful wisdom: “In my part of the country men say: ‘If you would speak of women let money talk for you.’”

And he placed a gold piece on the table.

“She will come out to the supper table.”

“She will not,” smiled Wilbur, and covered the coin. “Will you take odds?”

“No charity. Who else will bet?”

“I,” said Jim Boone instantly. “You figure her for an ordinary sulky kid.”

Pierre smiled upon him.

“There’s a cut in my shirt where her knife passed through; and that’s the reason that I’ll bet on her now.”

The whole table covered his coin, with laughter.

“We’ve kept one part of your bargain, Pierre. We’ve seen your father buried in the corner plot. Now, what’s the second part?”

“I don’t know you well enough to ask you that,” said Pierre.

They plied him with suggestions.

“To rob the Berwin Bank?”

“Stick up a train?”

“No. That’s nothing.”

“Round up the sheriffs from here to the end of the mountains?”

“Too easy.”

“Roll all those together,” said Pierre, “and you’ll begin to get an idea of what I’ll ask.”

Then a low voice called from the black throat of the hall “Pierre!”

The others were silent, but Pierre winked at them, and made great flourish with knife and fork against his plate as if to cover the sound of Jacqueline’s voice.

“Pierre!” she called again. “I’ve come to thank you.”

He jumped up and turned toward the hall.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s a wonder!”

“Then we’re friends?”

“If you want to be.”

“There’s nothing I want more. Then you’ll come out and have supper with us, Jack?”

“Pierre—”

“Yes?”

“I’m ashamed. I’ve been acting like a silly kid.”

“But we’re waiting for you.”

There was a little pause, and then Jim Boone struck his fist on the table and cursed, for she stepped from the darkness into the flaring light of the room.

CHAPTER XIII

A TALE OF THE SLEDGE

She wore a car
tridge belt slung jauntily across her hips and from it hung a holster of stiff new leather with the top flap open to show the butt of a man-sized forty-five caliber six-shooter—her first gun. Not a man of the gang but had loaned her his guns time and again, but they had never dreamed of giving the child a weapon of her own.

So they stared at her agape, where she stood with her head back, one slender hand resting on her hip, one hovering about the butt of the gun, as if she challenged them to question her right to be called “man.”

It was as if she abandoned all claims to femininity with that single step; the gun at her side made her seem inches taller and years older. She was no longer a child, but a long-rider who could back any horse on the range and shoot with the best.

One glance she cast about the room to drink in the amazement of the gang, and then with a profound instinct guiding her, she picked out the best critic in the room and said to him with a frown: “Well, Dick, how’s it hang?”

The big man was as flushed as the girl.

“Hangs like a charm,” he said, “a charm that’ll be apt to make men step about.”

And her father broke in rather hoarsely: “Sit down, girl. Sit down and be one of us. One of us you are by your own choice from this day on. You’re neither man nor woman, but a long-rider with every man’s hand against you. You’ve done with any hope of a home or of friends. You’re one of us. Poor Jack—my girl!”

“Poor?” she returned. “Not while I can make a quick draw and shoot straight.”

And then she swept the circle of eyes, daring them to take her boast lightly, but they knew her too well, and were all solemnly silent. At this she relented somewhat, and went directly to Pierre, flushing from throat to hair. She held out her hand.

“Will you shake and call it square?”

“I sure will,” nodded Pierre.

“And we’re pals—you and me, like the rest of ’em?”

“We are.”

“Shake again.”

She took the place beside him.

Garry Patterson was telling how he had said farewell to a Swedish sweetheart, and the roar of laughter took the eyes away from Jacqueline for a moment. So she leaned to Pierre le Rouge and whispered at his ear: “Pierre you’ve made me the happiest fellow on the range.”

As the whisky went round after round and the fun waxed higher the two seemed shut away from the others; they were younger, less touched and marked by life; they listened while the others talked, and now and then exchanged glances of interest or aversion.

“Listen,” she said after a time, “I’ve heard this story before.”

It was Phil Branch, square-built and square of jaw, who was talking.

“There’s only one thing I can handle better than a gun, and that’s a sledge-hammer. A gun is all right in its way, but for work in a crowd, well, give me a hammer and I’ll show you a way out.”

Bud Mansie grinned: “Leave me my pair of sixes and you can have all the hammers between here and Central Park in a crowd. There’s nothing makes a crowd remember its heels like a pair of barking sixes.”

“Ah, ah!” growled Branch. “But when they’ve heard bone crunch under the hammer there’s nothing will hold them.”

“I’d have to see that.”

“Maybe you will, Bud, maybe you will. It was the hammer that started me for the long trail west. I had a big Scotchman in the factory who couldn’t learn how to weld. I’d taught him day after day and cursed him and damn near prayed for him. But he somehow wouldn’t learn—the swine—ah, ah!”

He grew vindictively black at the memory.

“Every night he wiped out what I’d taught him during the day and the eraser he used was booze. So one fine day I dropped the hammer after watchin’ him make a botch on a big bar, and cussed him up one leg and down the other. The Scotchman had a hang-over from the night before and he made a pass at me. It was too much for me just then, for the day was hot and the forge fire had been spitting cinders in my face all morning. So I took him by the throat.”

He reached out and closed his taut fingers slowly.

“I didn’t mean nothin’ by it, but after a man has been moldin’ iron, flesh is pretty weak stuff. When I let go of Scotchy he dropped on the floor, and while I stood starin’ down at him somebody seen what had happened and spread the word.

“I wasn’t none too popular, bein’ not much on talk, so the boys got together and pretty soon they come pilin’ through the door at me, packin’ everything from hatchets to crowbars.

“Lads, I was sorry about Scotchy, but after I glimpsed that gang comin’ I wasn’t sorry for nothing. I felt like singin’, though there wasn’t no song that could say just what I meant. But I grabbed up the big fourteen-pound hammer and met ’em half-way.

“The first swing of the hammer it met something hard, but not as hard as iron. The thing crunched with a sound like an egg under a heavy man’s heel. And when that crowd heard it they looked sick. God, how sick they looked! They didn’t wait for no second swing, but they beat it hard and fast through the door with me after ’em. They scattered, but I kept right on and didn’t never really stop till I reached the mountain-desert and you, Jim.”

“Which is a good yarn,” said Bud Mansie, “but I can tell you one that’ll cap it. It was——”

He stopped short, staring up at the door. Outside, the wind had kept up a perpetual roaring, and no one noticed the noise of the opening door. Bud Mansie, facing that door, however, turned a queer yellow and sat with his lips parted on the last word. He was not pretty to see. The others turned their heads, and there followed the strangest panic which Pierre had even seen.

Jim Boone jerked his hand back to his hip, but stayed the motion, half completed, and swung his hands stiffly above his head. Garry Patterson sat with his eyes blinked shut, pale, waiting for death to come. Dick Wilbur rose, tall and stiff, and stood with his hands gripped at his sides, and Black Morgan Gandil clutched at the table before him and his keen eyes wandered swiftly about the room, seeking a place for escape.

There was only one sound, and that was a whispering moan of terror from Jacqueline. Only Pierre made no move, yet he felt as he had when the black mass of the landslide loomed above him.

What he saw in the door was a man of medium size and almost slender build. In spite of the patch of gray hair at either temple he was only somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. But to see him was to forget all details except the strangest face which Pierre had ever seen or would ever look upon in all his career.

It was pale, with a pallor strange to the ranges; even the lips seemed bloodless, and they curved with a suggestion of a smile that was a nervous habit rather than any sign of mirth. The nerves of the left eye were also affected, and the lid dropped and fluttered almost shut, so that he had to carry his head far back in order to see plainly. There was such indomitable pride and scorn in the man that his name came up to the lips of Pierre: “McGurk.”

A surprisingly gentle voice said: “Jim, I’m sorry to drop in on you this way, but I’ve had some unpleasant news.”

His words dispelled part of the charm. The hands of big Boone lowered; the others assumed more natural positions, but each, it seemed to Pierre, took particular and almost ostentatious care that their right hands should be always far from the holsters of their guns.

The stranger went on: “Martin Ryder is finished, as I suppose you know. He left a spawn of two mongrels behind him. I haven’t bothered with them, but I’m a little more interested in another son that has cropped up. He’s sitting over there in your family party and his name is Pierre. In his own country they call him Pierre le Rouge, which means Red Pierre, in our talk.

“You know I don’t like to be dictatorial, and I’ve never crossed you in anything before, Jim. Have I?”

Boone moistened his white lips and answered: “Never,” huskily, as if it were a great muscular effort for him to speak.

“This time I have to break the custom. Boone, this fellow Pierre has to leave the country. Will you see that he goes?”

The lips of Boone moved and made no sound.

He said at length: “McGurk, I’d rather cross the devil than cross you. There’s no shame in admitting that. But I’ve lost my boy, Hal.”

“Too bad, Jim. I knew Hal; at a distance, of course.”

“And Pierre is filling Hal’s place in the family.”

“Is that your answer?”

“McGurk, are you going to pin me down in this?”

And here Jack whirled and cried: “Dad, you won’t let Pierre go!”

“You see?” pleaded Boone.

It was uncanny and horrible to see the giant so unnerved before this stranger, but that part of it did not come to Pierre until later. Now he felt a peculiar emptiness of stomach and a certain jumping chill that traveled up and down his spine. Moreover, he could not move his eyes from the face of McGurk, and he knew at length that this was fear—the first real fear that he had ever known.

Shame made him hot, but fear made him cold again. He knew that if he rose his knees would buckle under him; that if he drew out his revolver it would slip from his palsied fingers. For the fear of death is a mighty fear, but it is nothing compared with the fear of man.