Silvertip's Trap (5 page)

As if she needed to make amends! As if she could not spend the rest of her life kicking him in the face!

Well, after supper he went out into the darkness of the veranda and sat still, smoking his pipe.

There was plenty of wealth in the world. There was plenty of money right there in Crow's Nest. And he knew how to get it.

If people paid a man the salary of a dog catcher and asked him to take the duties of a sheriff, what could they expect of him?

Then he heard a soft voice say out of the darkness: “Evening, sheriff. May I have a chat with you?”

The sheriff closed his eyes and knew that this was the softness of the voice of the devil, uttering temptation. He stood up, his eyes still half closed, and blundered down the steps and into the garden path.

C
HRISTIAN
, walking jauntily up and down in front of the little cabin in the woods near the town of Kendal, said: “Now, Bill, it's time that we should begin to do something.”

Bill Naylor sat on a stump whittling at a piece of soft white pine which furled away from the edge of his sharp knife in translucent slivers. He squinted at his whittling as though he were trying to make sure that the stick was shaping straight and true; in reality, he was thinking about his ride to Blue Water, and wondering what Barry Christian meant by “doing something” if that trip to Blue Water had not been “something.”

Then he regarded the tall body and the long, pale, handsome face of Barry Christian, so full of mobility and expression.

“All right,” said Bill Naylor.

A squirrel came out on a branch and chattered down at them, bobbing its tail as rapidly as it barked. Christian with a fluid gesture, produced an oversized Colt from under his coat and shot the squirrel off the branch. It dropped at a distance, a red smudge on the pine needles. Naylor stopped whittling and regarded that little blur against the ground. Even children in that part of the world could take a squirrel out of a tree with a rifle, but revolver work was another matter. The great feats of revolver marksmanship were generally talked about, and rarely seen.

Christian said: “Now we can talk in quiet — and in private, eh?”

The remark pleased Naylor very little. The laughter pleased him not at all. There were certain features in the character of the great Barry Christian which were not ideal. That, in short, was the truth, though Bill Naylor still valiantly strove to close his eyes to the unpleasant truth. Of course, the man was a criminal, but he must be a great, important, classic example of crime, not one to do casual murder even on a squirrel.

Bill Naylor forcibly removed his mind from these thoughts.

“All right, chief,” said he. “We'll do something, then.”

“In the first place,” said Christian, “we must pick up Duff Gregor.”

“Sure,” said Naylor. “All we gotta do is to break the jail, and then, after we've unlocked his cell and taken off his irons, we can pick him up. That oughta be easy.”

His irony had small effect on Barry Christian, who merely said:

“Well, it may not be so complicated. Let me tell you what I'd like to have you do.”

“Fire away,” said Naylor.

“First I want you to go through town — Kendal, yonder — and buy a good, fast, tough mustang. Then I want you to drift down to Crow's Nest.”

“Right.”

“You know the southwest corner of the vacant lot the jail stands in, in Crow's Nest?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Go there with your two horses after dark, and wait in the grove of saplings. Pretty soon a man will walk into those trees and call out in a quiet voice, ‘Barry!' You will answer ‘Waiting!' Can you remember that?”

“Yes. Who will the man be?”

“Why, the man will be Duff Gregor.”

“The devil he will be!”

“Not the devil. Just Duff Gregor. There's plenty of bluff, but not much devil in Duff Gregor.”

“How'll he get out of the jail? Bribery?”

“What a thing to say!” replied Christian. “Bribery? How could that be? No, no. Gregor will break out at a time when the sheriff is in the jail all by himself. At a time when the sheriff, in fact, has made sure that all is well, and has gone into his office to do some paper work. At that time the door of the cell of Gregor will push open, just as though the sheriff had unlocked it. And Gregor will steal out, just as if the sheriff had thrown him the key for his manacles. Gregor will go to the side door, and with another key he'll unlock that. And then he'll step out into the night and walk straight to you. Understand?”

“By thunder,” said Naylor, “you even managed to get to Dick Williams? You can do anything, then!”

“Give me a purse of the right size and I'll find any man's price,” boasted Christian. “It's simple enough. But you'll be there with two horses waiting, and you and Gregor will ride out of Crow's Nest — keeping to the by lanes — and head straight on down the valley till you come to the river. You'll trail along beside the river till you reach the island. You'll probably be able to wade the horses across to the island. If not, and if the river's high and fast, you can swim them across. When you reach the island, I'll probably be there, waiting for you. If not, take the trail I told you about to that deserted ranch. Better take along some provisions in case we need ‘em later.”

“I'll do what you say,” said Naylor.

“You don't seem happy about it, Bill,” suggested Barry Christian. “What's the matter?”

“Me? Aw, I'm happy enough. I'm just wondering where the whole job is heading.”

“As long as you work with me, old-timer,” said Christian, “you can always be sure that every job is heading for easy money.”

“Unless there's a Jim Silver in the way.”

From Christian there was a silence after this remark. Bill Naylor, rather frightened by the silence, stood up and prepared to leave at once. He promised himself that he would make no more cracks about the great Jim Silver — not in the presence of Barry Christian.

So, saddling his mustang, Bill Naylor started at once for Kendal town, first rehearsing to Christian exactly what he should do. All of the instructions were firmly in his mind before he left, and he jogged the patient mustang through the sweeping shadows of the pine woods and out into the blue and green and gold of the open day.

In Kendal he got an excellent mustang, mean, but as tough as leather. The meaner the mustang, the more wear to it, is a regular precept in the West.

He made a few purchases of provisions in Kendal, and then resumed the journey in a very leisurely manner. In fact, he had to kill two hours in idleness outside of Crow's Nest before the coming of sunset, when he was free to enter the town.

As he passed down the streets and saw the lamplight streaking out of the houses, he kept saying to himself that behind every house there was the fortune and the strength of a most corruptible man. If Dick Williams had been bought, then any man could be bought, and Barry Christian was right. Every man in the world could be bought, except, let us say, Jim Silver.

And he was a freak. He didn't count!

When Naylor came to the big vacant space in the center of which the jail stood, it was pitch-dark. All the houses were subdued, and only occasional voices came drifting through the open windows from supper tables.

In the dark of the grove of saplings he waited, holding the lead ropes of the two horses. He grew tired of standing, and sat down on his heels, then cross-legged, like an Indian.

He expected to hear an outbreak of shouting from the jail, first of all, since it did not seem possible that even with the sheriff's connivance a criminal could escape without making some disturbance. Instead, it happened exactly as the great Barry Christian had predicted. There was simply the sound of a quiet voice, calling, in a tone that could not be heard more than ten steps away: “Barry! Barry!”

Bill Naylor could have whistled with surprise. It proved to him that Barry Christian, when he laid a plan, knew how to have one part dovetail with another.

Naylor gave the answer, and instantly a dim shadow appeared before him among the trees as he rose to his feet.

“You're from what?” asked the stranger.

“Barry. And you're Duff?”

“Shut up!” gasped the stranger. “Shut up, you fool!”

Naylor grinned into the darkness. After all, Gregor had not been spending time in jail for fun, and it was no wonder that his nerves were a little bit frayed out.

“All right,” said Naylor. “Here's your pony. Here, on the near side. Mind — it's likely to pitch. I took out most of the kinks to-day, but there may still be a few left.”

Duff Gregor mounted. He was so big that he made the horse look small as a pony indeed. But no wonder he was big. A man who passed for Jim Silver had to have inches, at the least.

Naylor repeated the instructions in a quiet voice.

The only remark of Gregor was: “The island in the lower river is too close to Crow's Nest. A thousand miles is what ought to be between me and this town. They're all going to be out on my trail before half an hour.”

Naylor led the way out of the trees. They jogged across the lot, turned down an alley toward the left, and then made the first right turn, and as they entered this new lane, bad luck overtook them.

A house door beside them swung open suddenly, and as a pair of men came out, the shaft of the lamplight struck full on Gregor. The mustang, startled, reared up, and in so doing, held Gregor in the light for an instant and caused the brim of his sombrero to flare away from his face.

As the horse pitched forward again, well-ridden, a voice said from the porch of the house:

“That's Jim Silver, by thunder!”

And the other voice gasped: “No, that's Duff Gregor — out of jail!”

B
ILL
N
AYLOR
felt that it might be only a guess that would be lost in the darkness of the night; he kept his horse to a dog-trot and muttered to big Duff Gregor to do the same, but a moment later a gun exploded three times, and two wild voices yelled in chorus:

“Turn out! Turn out! Gregors on the loose! Duff Gregor's on his way!”

Could the devil himself have planned the thing more perfectly? Could that door have been opened more inopportunely?

There was nothing for it but to spur the horses. They went through the rest of Crow's Nest at a dead run, and behind them, whirling up into the sky, floating dimly in their ears, was the racket of the gathering pursuit.

For the people of Crow's Nest were not such city dwellers that they had become pedestrians. In front of nearly every house there was sure to be at least one horse tethered. And every man, almost, carried a gun. In ten seconds a man seated quietly at his supper table could be under way, riding like mad in a chase. It was like tapping a wasp's nest and then trying to get away, with the wasps in hot pursuit of the first moving object.

The uproar spread as fast as they could ride; and as they shot out of town and took the dangerous, long down grade toward the bottom of the valley beyond, a man who had run out of his house at the sound of the shouting dropped to one knee and opened on the two fugitives with a rifle. They whirled by some trees, and heard the bullets fly among the branches.

Luckily they had two good horses which could run and stand the gaff for a long time. How good they would prove matched against the very best that the young bloods of Crow's Nest could bring into the field remained to be seen. The bulk of Duff Gregor made Bill Naylor shake his head.

They got down the slope with the pursuit thundering halfway down the hill behind them. Now they had either a straight road to follow, or else there were the open fields toward the river. The road was too dangerous, for at any time they might run into a party of riders from the opposite direction and be hailed to stop. So they took to the fields at the shouted advice of Naylor.

The turf was good; the ground was firm; the horses flew along with doubled speed. The cool, sweet smell of the grass came off the ground. The night had no moon. Before them they could see patches of trees here and there, and willows receded far from the bank of the river now and again, marking out marshy places. If it came to a pinch, they might be able to hide in one of those patches and try to swim the river.

The river, however, was by no means a promising sight. Usually it kept well behind its banks, but there must have been a freshet somewhere among its tributaries in the higher mountains, for now the starlight glistened on wide, still flats of standing water, where the stream had overflowed. Twice their horses spattered through the edges of these floods, and half bogged down in the steep going.

Behind them came the men of Crow's Nest. Bill Naylor saw them spread out like a great fan, which kept growing longer and longer in the handle as the slower riders fell back and the faster ones with a later start speeded up from behind.

Naylor shook his head. By the way the head of that fan was creeping up on them, he could tell what sort of horses and riders there were in the outfit. He could almost see the beauty of the horses and the keen riders leaning forward to jockey the utmost speed out of the mounts.

If Barry Christian had been there — well, what could even a Barry Christian think of a time like that? The paralyzing fear of flight began to thicken the blood of Bill Naylor. Once he jerked out a revolver and turned with a beastly, snarling desire to fire blindly back at the pursers.

Something stopped his hand. Besides, if it came to shooting the thing out at close range, he would want well-filled chambers in his guns.

Then the horse of Duff Gregor stumbled, groaned like a stricken man, and went on, limping heavily.

“What sort of a cheap plug did you bring me?” yelled Gregor. “They're goin' to get me They're goin' to swallow me up again. You bring me a cheap, second-hand plug like this and expect me to do anything with it?”

Naylor said nothing. His whirling mind could not evolve any words, but gallantly he pulled down the gait of his own horse to the labored strivings of Gregor's mustang. Behind them the men of Crow's Nest ever were looming larger and larger.

If only the Indian yelling would stop! But it increased each instant, rising in a wild chorus of joy. Guns exploded rapidly. They were not aimed at the fleeing pair; they were fired in mere excess of happiness as the riders found the quarry coming into their hand.

Then Naylor knew the one thing that remained for them to try. He waved toward the river and yelled:

“Take to the water!”

“I'd rather hang than drown!” shouted Duff Gregor.

Well, it looked like that, right enough. Even the starlight was enough to show the dangerous face of the river, the irregular swirling of the currents, and here and there a rifle lifting from the surface like the fin of a great fish.

But it was the only thing.

Once, with a crew of other youngsters, Bill Naylor ran down a wounded deer until it took to the rapid of a river that was more white water than blue. He remembered how the beautiful animal remained for an instant on the bank, pointing its nose at the sky and trailing the sweep of its horns over its back. Then, despairingly, it leaped. It swam well. Bill Naylor, from the bank, secretly hoped that it would safely make the ford. But his companions, savagely yelling, opened fire on the small, struggling head and shoulders.

No bullets hit. No bullets were needed. In the center of the stream the current suddenly mastered the poor fugitive and sent it whirling down to the cascade.

Well, this was very much like that. There was no real safety in the water, but treacherous currents were better than the rifles and the jails of savage men.

So Naylor swung straight in toward the bank, crying:

“This way or no way. Don't be a fool, Gregor!”

A stream of howling curses answered him, but Gregor obediently followed, driving his lamed horse right at the bank.

It was not two feet above the top of the flood. The good mustang that carried Naylor knew water as well as land, and dipped one step down the bank, then lunged far out into the current. Slipping out of the saddle, he took the horse by the tail and swam with kicking feet and with the strokes of his other hand.

He looked back. Already an immensity of water seemed to stretch between him and the shore. That water had the sheen of polished metal. But metal cannot give back such shifting and changing lights.

He saw the lame horse of Duff Gregor swimming only a little to his rear. He could make out the head quite clearly, and the flaring of the nostrils and the pricking of the gallant ears. Lame or not, it seemed able to swim as well as Naylor's horse. Behind it there was a good deal of threshing and foaming as Duff Gregor worked to get himself faster through the water.

Then monsters came and danced with gigantic leaps along the shore, their double bodies heaving up and down against the stars. Those were the men of Crow's Nest, of course. But they looked like creatures out of a fable, and larger, by far, than human.

Naylor turned his face forward. It would not help his swimming to see the darting fires from the muzzles of the rifles. Therefore he turned, and worked steadily and strongly. His good mustang, in the meantime, had pointed its head a little upstream and was fighting like a Trojan.

A whirling bit of driftwood swept by, its speed showing how well the horse was stemming the current of the stream. And now something like a great water serpent went by, rolling, making a swishing sound in the river. It was not a serpent. It was a great log whose branches had been stripped away far up the course of the river.

Jets of water began to whip across the head and shoulders of Naylor as he swam. He knew they were driven by the impact of the rifle bullets that showered on the stream. He could hear the clangor of the guns. But death by bullets seemed less dreadful than the black coilings of the water in which he floated. Sometimes hands seemed to pluck at him and pull him down. And again and again big logs came hurtling, or low-flying bits of wreckage of one sort or another.

Something approached him with the howling voice of a spirit from among the damned. He made out, at last, a flat bit of wreckage, like the door of a house, and on it a small dog complaining to the stars.

Then, drawn by the shadow of oncoming danger, he glanced to the left and saw peril sweeping toward him straight as an arrow, a gigantic log that lifted a great blank face to beat him down into the dark confusion and death beneath the waters.