The Max Brand Megapack (225 page)

“We must of made wrong measurements,” said Moon. “We sure must of got the mountains lined up wrong, boys!”

No one else ventured to answer until Silas Treat spoke.

“Jack,” he said, “I looked over those sightings. I got ’em lined up proper. There’s The Vixen; there’s The Crescent, and the point at the left is the peak of The Crescent. There’s Mount Noah, and there’s The Ravenhead. Don’t I know this country like I was born and raised here? No, sir, we sure got the right peaks lined up, and we sunk the old hole more’n twenty feet. Jack, they simply ain’t no treasure here, and old Cosslett, cuss his white-livered hulk, had a laugh at us while he was dying! Wish I had him here now, so I could plug him once more myself.”

Afterward, Jerry Dawn wondered why that brutal speech did not shock her. But at the time she was intent on only one interest—gold! She paid no attention to even the surly faces around her. Here was a problem, and the reward for solving it was thousands of pounds of solid gold. She could not doubt that the treasure was buried in this vicinity. The slip of paper and the figures on it had been real; the code could not have lied to her.

“But suppose,” she said at length, “that Cosslett didn’t know this country as well as you, Mr. Treat. To him it might be impossible to calculate which tip of The Crescent is the highest. It lies there like a new moon, on its back. Suppose he took the other tip as his guide and lined it up with Mount Noah beyond. That would bring the line farther over to our right.”

She began walking, climbed a little mound, and stood on the top of it, shading her eyes and peering under the flat of her hand.

“Here’s where the line would fall, Mr. Treat. And surely the chance is worth trying. I know we can’t fail.”

The black look with which Jack Moon had been regarding Hugh Dawn cleared a little.

“Boys,” he said, “shall we try it? Not now, because we’ve done a day’s work already, and night’s almost here. But tomorrow?”

The expectant face of the girl had produced the inevitable reaction. The gold fever, which had exhausted them with the first great disappointment, returned with new force. There was but one gloomy voice of foreboding.

“Here’s the place, right enough,” said Silas Treat, following the girl and, like her, squinting to line Mount Noah with the south crest of The Crescent, “but look here. How come old Cosslett was so strong he could bury his gold under rocks like this one?”

He pointed to a great boulder on which he was standing. He leaned and laid hold on a ragged projecting edge. The rock did not move.

“Cosslett wasn’t never the man I am,” he declared. “If I can’t budge this rock, how come it that old Cosslett could ever have put stones like this in the way?”

“He might have had other men working for him,” answered Jack Moon. “That ain’t hard to explain.”

“Hire gents? Gents that would know where the gold was buried as well as he knew? That don’t sound like Cosslett! He always played safe!”

“Maybe when the hole was dug he just up and plugged ’em and buried ’em on top of the money,” suggested Jack Moon. “That sounds reasonable.”

“Maybe it’s got a reasonable sound to you,” Silas Treat returned gruffly, “but it’s got a devilish bad sound to me. Anyway, if you want to dig, I’ll bear a hand. Only, how come these big rocks here?”

Jerry Dawn pointed up the nearest side of the hollow.

“See where the trees have been torn away along the hill by a landslide?” she exclaimed. “That same landslide must have rolled these rocks down. It made the mound, too. And well have to dig through the mound and then twenty feet beneath it. But I know that the gold is here! I feel it!”

“That’s what all green hands at prospecting talk like,” declared one of the men.

“The girl’s talking sense, though,” retorted another. “More sense than ever come out of your head, Nick! We’ll make that try, Jack!”

“Good!” the leader said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Motives and Men

The dirt began to crash back into the hole as Jerry Dawn turned away and looked upon the ending of the strangest day of her life. All the forested sides of the evergreen hollow were gilded now with sunset colors falling on the trees, crimsons and golds of exquisite dimness, pastel shades almost too faint for the most exact eye. Beyond, the greater mountaintops walked up to the brighter color of the horizon sky, and to the zenith was an infinite reach of the eye—the purity of blue distance.

The girl drew close to her father with a chastened heart. Looking into his seamed, sorrow-worn face, she was able to understand those wild moments of his younger life which now placed him in peril. She was able to forgive the cruelty of carelessness and neglect which had broken the heart of her mother. For the big man was only a product of this big country—intense in passions, big of will, great of heart, and sublime in indifference.

Such men are needed to make the Western mountains, she thought. If she were able to extend her influence around him, how vitally he might be changed, and in how short a time! His had been too muscular a nature to submit to life and gain lessons from it in his youth. The milder hours of receptivity were reserved for his maturer years. She looked on him with a touch of pity, a hallowed emotion; she looked on him as she might have looked on a child.

His face, also, had been raised as he followed her glance to the central sky. But when he looked down to her he murmured: “Well, Jerry, here’s another day ending, and I’m still alive!”

She only took his hand in both of hers and gripped it hard. Her finger tips closed over deep, stiff calluses. However wild he might once have been, he had proved his worth by the bitter labor which earned money enough to give her a schooling. Through her mind flashed in swift procession, memories of the letters which had come to her from the East, never with an address to guide her answer, for fear that that address might become known to Jack Moon.

Each letter had contained a money order; and about each money order was always wrapped a bit of paper over which, in a sprawling, stiff hand, were traced a few formal words. Their formality she had not been able to understand until she grew much older. And then she knew that it is typical of the uneducated. The written word is to them a fearsome thing. Their thoughts come forth haltingly on paper. They blush at attempted tenderness. They feel that they are addressing the world, and therefore they write to their nearest and dearest as though they were writing to strangers.

She was still thinking of these things when she heard the deep and musical voice of Jack Moon behind her. It was a voice rare indeed! It might have been used to move thousands of men. And always when the man spoke she was conscious of the strong mind, the strong will behind the words. There was ever something about Jack Moon as strong as his muscles, as big as his body. Beyond the power of the flesh there was a secondary power of the spirit. The longer she saw him, the more she knew of him, the greater seemed the extent of the undiscovered bourn behind his eyes.

He was giving his orders for the night, and he issued them with a military precision. To some he gave the task of collecting wood for the big camp fire which was to be built in the central space among the huts. Others still would care for the unpacking. A third crew would do the cooking. And finally the fourth would relieve the two watchers in the forest, who were keeping ward against Ronicky Doone, and would call them toward the cabins, where a fresh guard must be mounted all night to keep off the expected marauder.

With this accomplished, the bandit leader overtook Hugh Dawn and his daughter.

“You, Dawn,” he said gruffly; “maybe you think you got a free ticket to chuck and bed and everything, eh? Not a hope of that, son! You mosey along and do your share. You can help the boys with the unpacking. Treat will give you orders just what to do. And mind that you keep in sight. No trying to run off through the trees. Treat has a terrible nervous trigger finger. Now off with you! Go tell Treat that I sent you!”

Hugh Dawn cast a glance at his daughter and then departed.

“And now,” said Moon, his voice changed adroitly to fit her hearing, “I got a chance to talk to you private. I been wanting to all day, but one thing or another kept coming up. What I got to say is this: Me and the boys all like you fine, and we aim to give you as good a time as we can, considering everything.”

She turned a little and looked him squarely in the eye, smiling whimsically.

“I suppose,” said Jack Moon, grave before her subdued mirth, “that that sounds pretty queer to you. I suppose that you got us all wrote down as man-eaters that do a couple of murders before breakfast to work up an appetite. That it?”

She examined him somewhat cautiously. She had always thought that the fellow was far too intelligent to have any illusions about himself or about what others might think of him. Now, searching for a trace of stupidity or of weak conceit, she was unable to find it. She saw a noble cast of features, strange only in their unvarying pallor. She had heard of men like this before, whose skins were apparently impervious to the burning rays of the mountain suns, but Moon was the first she had seen.

Aside from his complexion, however, there was nothing curious about his make-up. The mouth was generously large, and formed with a promise of sensitiveness. The chin was cut in a manner to suggest plenty of solid bone beneath. The nose was straight, large enough to give dominance to his face, but perfectly formed. The eyes were large and well separated, and they looked straight as the flight of an arrow. The forehead above was magnificently high and broad, and crowning all was a luxuriant mass of chestnut-colored hair. His face, indeed, was like his body, flawless in proportions; and the unmanageable hair suggested the mane of a lion—a leonine head, a leonine nature formed to command. By his looks, by his voice, by his glance, he could have been picked among ten thousand chosen men.

It suddenly came to her that perhaps such a fellow, framed for superiority, might have chafed against the bonds of society, learned the fierce empire of the outlawed world, and broken away to it.

“I thought,” she said, deciding that frankness was entirely permissible with such a man, “that you would understand everything. I thought you wouldn’t make friendly speeches that seem to require friendly answers. Because, you know, I have to do what I’m expected to do. If you want friendliness, I’ll have to act the part. Is that the order?”

He smiled again, enjoying her mood.

“What’s always queer to me about folks like you,” he said, “clean-bred, clean-raised, clean-taught, is that you ain’t got the imagination to put yourselves in the boots of the other fellow. You see, we know we’re a hard lot. We know you know it. But we figured you to have a sense of humor, lady. We figured you’d be able to forget what can’t be helped for a day or two, and make yourself sociable. Understand?

“Back in the old days they had what they called The Truce of Heaven. I think it lasted from Thursday nights to Mondays. I dunno for sure, but a schoolteacher told me about it once. Those were the times when every gent done his bit of fighting pretty regular and counted a week lost that didn’t see him whaling away at some other gent in armor. Well, when Thursday night come, they quit the fighting. They laid off their armor and called on their enemies and sat down and had a smoke together, so to speak—because they wasn’t any use talking mean and acting mean between Thursday and Monday. Well, I thought it was kind of the same way with us. Suppose it takes us a couple of days to dig that next hole. Does it pay for us to keep our claws out all the time during them two days? Can’t we use the velvet paw, lady? Can’t we call it The Truce of Heaven till we sink that hole and find out if the treasure of Cosslett is down under it.”

“And if the treasure isn’t there?”

“Then out come the claws. I have a bargain with your father, lady. You know that!”

She shuddered.

“But that’s a good way off—two days, three days—three centuries!” he suggested.

She nodded, intensely curious at this working of his mind.

“You’d gain one thing,” he said. “If you’d give me your word not to try to leave and get to a town through the mountains, I’d parole you. Savvy?”

“You would accept my word?” she queried.

“As free as you’d accept mine,” he answered at once.

She bit her lips to keep back the smile.

“I know,” he said. “But when you come to think it over, you would take my word on anything. Go all through the mountains. That’s what I’m known as—a gent that never busted a promise. Lot of other things charged up again’ me, but never a real promise that I’ve broke.”

“For instance,” she said, “last night you promised that Ronicky Doone would be received as a friend, and yet your men opened fire on him!”

“Sure,” he replied, absolutely unabashed. “I just stated that he’d be received that way. I didn’t promise. I didn’t take no oath. I didn’t give anybody my hand on it.”

She observed the distinction with a thoughtful mind. There was a distinction. Even the low took heed of the difference between an oath and a mere given word.

“It’s hard for me to sympathize with that viewpoint,” she said coldly. “In my world we could not call it fair play.”

“I’m not asking for sympathy,” he replied readily. “Not a bit. I ain’t asking you to step inside my world. But I want to find out if my world is so plumb far away from yours that you can’t even see it through a telescope, so to speak. Is it?”

“No,” she said, “I think I can understand a good many things. And I’ll give you my word that I won’t attempt to escape until—”

He did not wait for her to finish the difficult sentence.

“Mind shaking on that?” he said.

“No.”

They shook hands. His palm was as soft as a woman’s, well nigh. No labor had ever hardened it. For some reason the touch of that hand convinced her more than a thousand words, a thousand deeds, of the essential evil of the man.

“This is fine!” he said. “We’ll have a couple of good days out of this. Why not? Every minute you save out of being sad is a minute that’s gained.”

“But what if sorrow comes afterward?”