Silvertip's Roundup (2 page)

W
HEN
Taxi left the Boot Hill Cemetery, one of the boys who had been watching him yelled out: “You a friend of that gent's?”

“Where's the Creighton Boarding House?” asked Taxi.

The lad took him there, babbling questions all the way. Taxi smiled, and said nothing. When he came to the boarding house, there was a sign in front of it, offering room and board for a ridiculously small price. It was strange that Joe Feeley should have picked up with a woman who ran a place like that. Joe was generally high class in his choice of females. But it's foolish to judge a man by his choice of a gun or a woman. Taxi had decided that long ago. It's just a matter of prejudice.

The boy knocked loudly at the door. Before the echoes had stopped walking up and down inside, the door was pulled open by a girl whose face was rosy with heat. Her forehead was damp. Bits of her hair stuck to the skin and looked dark, though she was quite blond.

“Here's a gent that's a friend of the dead man!” cried the boy. “He wants to see you!”

The boy stood by and watched. He had his mouth and his eyes wide open.

“Run along, Willie,” said the girl. She waved at the boy but he stood fast.

“Come in,” said the girl to Taxi. He stepped inside. It was worse, to be near the girl. It made Taxi a little sick. He felt cold about the mouth, and he hated to look at her. If she had been a beauty, it would have been different, but she was nothing much. She had a good deal of color and light in her eyes, that was all; there was color in her hair, too. She had on a blue apron. The blue was faded at the knees. Her hair was all tousled. She looked like a poor drudge, except for the light and color in her eyes. There was something young and strong in her. The youth and the strength came up into her eyes and into her voice.

She led the way into a small front room. She raised a roller curtain. It went up with a rattle and let in a great, dusty shaft of sunshine out of the west. The sunshine fell on a carpet that had a pattern of red roses on it. The sunshine fell on the battered legs of an upright piano. There was a round, mahogany table in the middle of the room with some books held up between a pair of book ends. On the wall were some enlarged photographs. The faces seemed to watch Taxi.

“Sit down, please,” said the girl.

He sat down on a plush chair, with his hat in his hand, his suitcase beside him. She sat down opposite him. He looked at the faded blue of the apron, across her knees. The apron was darkly splashed with water marks, and there was a white streak as of flour on it.

“Are you a relative of Joe Feeley?” she was asking him.

He kept looking at her knees, but through his lashes he could see her face, also. He knew how to do that without exposing the pallor of his telltale eyes.

“He's nothing to me,” lied Taxi.

As he said it, he listened to himself and almost smiled. But if Joe Feeley had been near to listen in, Joe would have understood. That was the great thing about Joe. He understood. You could be silent for a week, but Joe always understood.

“I got word from a friend of Feeley's who knew I was coming out this way,” said Taxi. “He asked me to look things over and find out what had happened. I read your name in the paper. That was all. So I came here to ask about it.”

“I don't know anything about it,” said the girl.

Taxi nodded. He kept his face as still as a stone. That was the way to talk to a stranger. You kept your face as still as a stone, and then nobody could get anything on you. You kept your face still, and remembered the shortest way your hands could get to your guns. Woman or man, it was always best to have no expression on the face.

The expression of the girl was growing cold, also. She was narrowing her eyes and staring at him the way people did in this part of the world. Everyone stared at you, as though they were all plain-clothes men and suspected that something might be wrong.

But that was all right. That only made him feel a little more at home. That was the one home touch that he found in this town of Horseshoe Flat.

“It said in the paper,” said Taxi, “that Feeley and a fellow called Larue had an argument about you and — ”

He waited, letting his voice trail away, for the girl was sitting up straighter in her chair.

“Joe Feeley was a week in this house,” she said. “That night he was lonely. He said he was very lonely. He asked me to go to the dance. I wasn't going to the dance, because I had to be up pretty early the next morning to cook a big breakfast for some people who were making a start. But I said I'd go, anyway. We went to the dance, all right. Charlie Larue was there. He had some sort of an argument with Feeley; I don't know about what.”

Taxi nodded.

“Larue a friend of yours?” he asked.

“Yes. Rather a friend. I told Joe Feeley not to have any trouble with Charlie Larue. I danced with Charlie, later on, and told him to remember that Joe Feeley was a stranger. Charlie said he would. But he didn't.”

That was all. She sat back in her chair quietly, and waited. Taxi kept on looking at her knees and seeing her face.

“Feeley was new to this part of the world, the way I understand it,” said Taxi. “I suppose he did a lot of things that he shouldn't have done. He made a lot of people mad. Was that it?”

“I liked him,” said the girl. “I'll never put an eye on Charlie Larue again. I liked Joe Feeley. He was good-natured. He had a good laugh. But Charlie Larue started drinking, and that made the trouble. I think — ”

She stopped. Taxi had heard the little click of her teeth and waited for her to go on.

“I'll take a room here, as long as I stay over,” he said. “Have you got any rooms?”

She looked at him silently, nodding. She rose, and he rose with her, picking up his hat. At the door into the hall she paused and turned sharply. She was shaking her head.

“You'd better not,” she said.

“Why not? What's the matter?” asked Taxi.

“You want to do something about Joe Feeley's death. Don't you try. You'd better pull out of the town and not try.”

“I'm not going to do anything,” said Taxi. “What could I do?”

“I don't know,” she said. “You look quiet enough — in a way. But I want to warn you. Don't try to do anything to Charlie Larue.”

She meant what she said. She had her chin up, like a person who means what he says.

“I only want to find out a few things,” said he. “I simply want to find out what the trouble was about. That's all.”

“I don't believe it,” said the girl.

“And I'd like to have a room here, if you don't mind,” he went on.

“Well — ” She hesitated.

At last she led the way down the hall and opened a door upon a big, empty room. He saw a patch of worn linoleum in front of a washstand, a brass bedstead, a colored calendar on the wall. The wall paper was peeling.

“This is the room that your friend Feeley used to have,” said the girl.

“He wasn't a friend of mine,” said Taxi.

He stepped into the room, feeling her critical eye on him. She wanted to see if the dead man's room would have any effect on him, and he could have laughed to think that such a little thing might trouble his expression. No, not even the dead body of Feeley would trouble him. Nothing would trouble him. He was not such a fool.

“This is all right,” said Taxi.

He put down his suitcase and turned to her with his smile. He had worked on that smile. It meant nothing to him. But he could turn it on and off like a light. But it did things to other people. It made men call him a good fellow. It made women trust him. Sometimes it made them more than trust him. So he turned the smile loose on Sally Creighton. He thought that this might be a good spot to make use of it.

She was leaning against the door jamb, staring at him. Her eyes were so wide that something seemed to be pouring out of her, and through that wideness he could look at something — her soul, her mind — and he guessed that she was in some sort of trouble.

She stretched one arm straight above her to cushion her weight as she leaned against the door. Women when they're playing “vamp” parts on the stage like to stand like that, but this girl was not playing a vamp. She was just being natural. Her loose sleeve fell down. Her forearm was brown as her face. Her upper arm was white. He could see the blue of a vein in it. It was round, and so white that it looked cold. So she leaned like that against the door jamb and stared at him.

“You're going to try to get even for Joe Feeley,” she said. “And you know it!”

“Why,” said Taxi, “Feeley's nothing to me. Not a great deal. He's just the friend of a friend of mine. A fellow called Dell Simpson, out in Chicago. He's a broker, and he happened to ask me to find out about things when I came this way.”

Taxi gave the girl his smile again, and he could see it hit her. She was not so simple as some women are. Most women are pretty simple. They haven't a great deal of sense. They're soft and sort of wide open. She was not so soft, but he could see his smile hit her. Her eyes began to sorrow over him a little.

“You can lie about what you want to do here in Horseshoe Flat,” she said, “but you're on the wrong foot. What
do
you want to do in Horseshoe Flat?”

He turned a little from her and waved his hand toward the great outdoors beyond the windows. There was a fenced field beside the boarding house, and in that field stood a great chestnut stallion, bright as gold, with four silk stockings on its legs, four black silk stockings. The horse looked as though it could move, all right. It looked good enough to carry Taxi's money in almost any race.

Taxi waved beyond the horse, toward the mountains.

“I haven't been very well,” he said, “and the doctors told me that I ought to get out into a big country, like the West, where there's plenty of pure air. So I came out here to look for a place to stay. That's all.”

He was always pale, as a matter of fact, and no one could guess, to see his slenderness in clothes, how he looked when stripped in the gymnasium of Paddy Dennis. A good many people had told him that he ought to take care of himself. They never seemed to guess that iron is only dark with paint and not of its own nature.

The girl said: “Are you rather weak?”

“I'm not very strong,” said Taxi.

She picked up the suitcase and put it on a low stand, nodding as she stepped back from it.

“You can stay here if you want to,” said she. “But when you tell lies, stranger, you ought to pick them better.”

“Lies?” said Taxi.

He wanted to open his eyes to express hurt amazement, but it was always better not to show his pale eyes to anyone. They could be remembered too easily.

“Lies,” repeated the girl sternly. “You carried that fifty-pound suitcase all the way from the station, and you're not even breathing hard. If you're weak, most people are sick in bed.”

She turned her back on him and went to the door, where she turned again.

“You can stay here,” she said. “But I'm going to send someone bigger than I am to talk to you. You're here to make a big play, I know. But I've told you before to keep your hands off Charlie Larue. Now I'll tell you the reason. It's because Barry Christian is behind him! Put that in your pipe and smoke it a while, will you?”

She closed the door, and Taxi looked blankly at it.

She was different. She talked in a free and easy way, and yet she was not free and easy. She could “heft” a suitcase and then make some deductions from the weight of it. She had the straight look of a man and the soft eye of a woman. She was not beautiful, but there was something about her.

Far down the hall he could hear her rap at a door. Then he made out her voice saying, rather plaintively:

“Excuse me, Mr. Silver.
I
'm sorry to wake you up. But
I
just wanted to beg you to do something for me.”

Taxi heard the soft, deep rumble of a man's voice, on which a door closed to give silence. What sort of a man was asleep at the fag end of a day, almost at sunset time? What was there in this part of the world to keep a fellow up late the night before?

I
T
was all different. You met a woman, and she talked like a man. You met a boy, and he laughed at you. Back in New York, women were not like men. And they didn't stand around like vamps, except when they were on the stage. They didn't talk so easily. They didn't talk as though a stranger were a brother of whom they were a little tired.

He stood at the window and told himself, slowly, that perhaps there had been some excuse for poor dead Joe Feeley if he had been interested in this girl.

Had she said that she was sorry about his death? No, she had not even said that, as he remembered. She simply had said that Larue had started drinking. A nice way to run a place — when a man starts to drink and simply rounds off the party by killing another man.

There was a gentle rap at the door.

“Come in,” he called.

He was on edge, ready for anything, because he had not heard a footfall come down the hallway. The knob of the door turned without making a click. The door opened, and on the threshold stood a big man who might have been anything between twenty-five and thirty-five. He had a big head and a big, brown, handsome face. He looked like a wrestler or a heavyweight boxer from the waist up and like a runner from the hips down. Above his temples there were two queer little spots of gray hair that looked almost like a pair of horns beginning to grow from his head. He had a quiet smile and a pair of quiet, steady eyes. But those gray bits of hair that looked like horns gave him a sinister touch, as though he were a devil in the making.

He came in and held out his hand.

“My name is Silver,” he said.

Taxi took the hand.

“My name is Taxi Ivors,” he answered. “Sit down?”

Silver shook his head. He sat on the sill of the open window, instead, then seemed to recall himself with a start and hastily moved to the opposite wall of the room.

He was big and he weighed a lot, but his step was not a noise. It was only a pressure on the floor. Yet he wore boots, and, although on the heels of the boots there were no spurs, to be sure, such high heels ought to have made a good deal of noise on the bare wood of the floor.

“Sally — that's the girl who runs this place,” said Silver, “asked me to drop in and tell you something.”

“She has an idea,” said Taxi, “that I'm here to go gunning for Charlie Larue. She's all wrong.”

“Is she?” said Silver.

His eyes fastened on the face of Taxi. It was not a long look, but it took hold of Taxi like a hand, and he felt the tug of it. His own pale eyes opened wide against his will.

He looked aside hastily.

“She's all wrong,” said Taxi. “I'm only here because I want to look up some things for a friend of mine.”

“And you're trying to find a health resort, too, she tells me,” said Silver.

He was smiling. There was something about his smile that made Taxi want to smile, too. There was a reassuring geniality about it. It met one like the grip of a friendly hand, and hung on, and kept hanging on. Not even a child would mind being understood and smiled at by this big fellow.

“I've got to build myself up a little, the doctors say,” said Taxi.

He saw the glance of Silver take hold of him and probe and weigh him as though he were stripped in the gymnasium. Suddenly, fervently, Taxi hoped that all the men out here in the West were not like this — that Charlie Larue, above all, was not like Silver.

“This is a good place to build yourself up,” said Silver. “But only if you've got the right sort of a constitution to stand the air. The air here is bad for a lot of people. It was bad for your friend Feeley, for instance. Excuse me — I forgot that he's not your friend.”

Taxi said nothing. It seemed to him a good time to say nothing at all, so he smiled a little and kept his lips sealed.

The big man went on talking. He said: “I'm going to give you some information, in case it might be useful. You know Barry Christian?”

“No,” said Taxi. “Wait a minute!”

For his mind was catching at something vague, nebulous, distant. It
was
a name that he had heard before the girl used it. Somewhere in the back of his brain he knew about that name.

“Prison break,” said Taxi suddenly.

“That's it,” said Silver. “And a lot of other things. Nobody knows the story of Barry Christian, but everybody knows enough about it to fill a book. Christian is one of those fellows who knows how to make other people work for him. You understand? Charlie Larue, for instance, works for Barry Christian.”

Taxi listened, with his eyes veiled, but he kept wanting to look up and meet the frankness of this big stranger.

Silver went on: “We don't know where Barry Christian is. But we know where a good many of his men are. We never can hang anything on them. Not very often, that is. But we have an idea about who are the men of Barry Christian. He's so big, Ivors, that a great many fairly honest fellows are not ashamed to work for him. He sticks by his friends. When one of his men is caught by trouble, Christian opens his purse wide.

“If you touch one of Christian's men, you touch the body of a giant. The whole body turns on you — that is to say, the whole of Christian's gang. And you can't tell where you'll find his friends. Your bartender may be on the pay roll of Christian. The ranch you stop at overnight may be owned by a fellow in Christian's pay. The fellow you hire to punch cows may be a Christian man. Barry Christian has his hand everywhere, and the first thing we learn is to fight shy of a man who belongs to Christian.”

He paused, and then added: “This may mean nothing to you, Ivors. But, just in case you want to tell the mutual friend of you and Mr. Joe Feeley, you might write to him that it's a good idea to keep hands off Charlie Larue.”

“Thanks,” said Taxi. He added: “No matter whether you're right or wrong about what I have on my mind, I'm thanking you.”

He followed another impulse which seldom came to him. He stepped up close and gripped the hand of Silver. He lifted his head, and looked with his pale hazel eyes straight into the hazel eyes of Silver.

“And where do you stand about Christian?” he asked.

“I'm different,” said Silver. “Barry Christian is my hobby. Every man has to have a hobby, you know.”

On that speech, he left the room, and as the door closed noiselessly behind him, Taxi was willing to wager a great deal of money that Barry Christian would have preferred to be anything in this world other than the hobby of Mr. Silver.

Taxi lay down on the bed. He could think better when he was lying down. He folded his hands under his head and put his mind on the task before him. The job he had come out to do had seemed very simple. He was merely going to kill a man named Charlie Larue. Now the job seemed to be expanding. It was growing large like the mountains around him.

He got up from the bed and went to sit on the window sill and look at the golden horse that grazed in the nearby field.

As he sat in the window, he could hear beneath him, very dimly, the murmur of the girl's voice, saying:

“I don't care. He may be what you say. But I don't care how much of a fighting man he is — I don't want him to come to any trouble on account of his friendship for Joe Feeley. I was at the bottom of what happened to poor Joe Feeley. Mr. Silver, I'm going to beg you to do something.”

“I'll do whatever I can,” said Silver.

“Then — Oh, I know that your hands are full. I know that you're after Barry Christian. Everybody knows that. I know that you're in danger of your life every minute. But please keep an eye on the stranger. Or else I'll have his death laid at my door.”

Taxi had to lean out from the window to hear what followed. He could barely hear the voice of Silver saying:

“Well, I'll take care of him if I can.”

Taxi stood up. He wanted to laugh. It struck him as almost the most amusing thing that he had ever heard — that somebody should try to take care of him!

There were other things for him to think about, however. Most people, at first sight, took him for a harmless fellow, but this man Silver had apparently seen that he was a fighting man. Of that fighting man he had consented to take care.

This was a thing to be heard but not to be believed.

Then, looking out the window, as he heard a sharp whistle, Taxi saw the golden stallion gallop to the fence, where Silver waited for him. He saw the hand of the master sleek the shining throat of the horse. He saw the stallion nosing at the pockets of the man. And it seemed to Taxi that the two of them, in the suggestion of strength and speed and exhaustless power, were of a type — that he should have known beforehand that they fitted together to make a unit.