The Max Brand Megapack (281 page)

While he spoke, he was still wringing the hands of Terry. Now he dragged the stunned Terry around the table and forced him down in his own huge, padded armchair, his sign of power. But it was only to drag him up from the chair again.

“Lemme look at you! Black Jack’s boy! As like Black Jack as ever I seen, too. But a shade taller. Eh, Pete? A shade taller. And a shade heavier in the shoulders. But you got the look. I might of knowed you by the look in your eyes. Hey, Slim, damn your good-for-nothing hide, drag Johnny here pronto by the back of the neck!”

Johnny, the Chinaman, appeared, blinking at the lights. Joe Pollard clapped him on the shoulder with staggering force.

“Johnny, you see!” a broad gesture to Terry. “Old friend. Just find out. Velly old friend. Like pretty much a whole damned lot. Get down in the cellar, you yaller old sinner, and get out the oldest bourbon I got there. You savvy? Pretty damned pronto—hurry up—quick—old keg. Git out!”

Johnny was literally hurled out of the room toward the kitchen, trailing a crackle of strange-sounding but unmistakable profanity behind him. And Joe Pollard, perching his bulk on the edge of the table, introduced Terry to the boys again, for Oregon had come back with word that Kate would be out soon.

“Here’s Denver Pete. You know him already, and he’s worth his weight in any man’s company. Here’s Slim Dugan, that could scent a big coin shipment a thousand miles away. Phil Marvin ain’t any slouch at stalling a gent with a fat wallet and leading him up to be plucked. Marty Cardiff ain’t half so tame as he looks, and he’s the best trailer that ever squinted at a buzzard in the sky; he knows this whole country like a book. And Oregon Charlie is the best all-around man you ever seen, from railroads to stages. And me—I’m sort of a handyman. Well, Black Jack, your old man himself never got a finer crew together than this, eh?”

Denver Pete had waited until his big friend finished. Then he remarked quietly: “All very pretty, partner, but Terry figures he walks the straight and narrow path. Savvy?”

“Just a kid’s fool hunch!” snorted Joe Pollard. “Didn’t your dad show me the ropes? Wasn’t it him that taught me all I ever knew? Sure it was, and I’m going to do the same for you, Terry. Damn my eyes if I ain’t! And here I been sitting, trimming you! Son, take back the coin. I was sure playing a cheap game—and I apologize, man to man.”

But Terry shook his head.

“You won it,” he said quietly. “And you’ll keep it.”

“Won nothing. I can call every coin I throw. I was stealing, not gambling. I was gold-digging! Take back the stuff!”

“If I was fool enough to lose it that way, it’ll stay lost,” answered Terry.

“But I won’t keep it, son.”

“Then give it away. But not to me.”

“Black Jack—” began Pollard.

But he received a signal from Denver Pete and abruptly changed the subject.

“Let it go, then. They’s plenty of loose coin rolling about this day. If you got a thin purse today, I’ll make it fat for you in a week. But think of me stumbling on to you!”

It was the first time that Terry had a fair opportunity to speak, and he made the best of it.

“It’s very pleasant to meet you—on this basis,” he said. “But as for taking up—er—road life—”

The lifted hand of Joe Pollard made it impossible for him to complete his sentence.

“I know. You got scruples, son. Sure you got ’em. I used to have ’em, too, till your old man got ’em out of my head.”

Terry winced. But Joe Pollard rambled on, ignorant that he had struck a blow in the dark: “When I met up with the original Black Jack, I was slavin’ my life away with a pick trying to turn ordinary quartz into pay dirt. Making a fool of myself, that’s what I was doing. Along comes Black Jack. He needed a man. He picks me up and takes me along with him. I tried to talk Bible talk. He showed me where I was a fool.

“‘All you got to do,’ he says to me, ‘is to make sure that you ain’t stealing from an honest man. And they’s about one gent in three with money that’s come by it honest, in this part of the world. The rest is just plain thieves, but they been clever enough to cover it up. Pick on that crew, Pollard, and squeeze ’em till they run money into your hand. I’ll show you how to do it!’

“Well, it come pretty hard to me at first. I didn’t see how it was done. But he showed me. He’d send a scout around to a mining camp. If they was a crooked wheel in the gambling house that was making a lot of coin, Black Jack would slide in some night, stick up the works, and clean out with the loot. If they was some dirty dog that had jumped a claim and was making a pile of coin out of it, Black Jack would drop out of the sky onto him and take the gold.”

Terry listened, fascinated. He was having the workings of his father’s mind re-created for him and spread plainly before his eyes. And there was a certain terror and also a certain attractiveness about what he discovered.

“It sounds, maybe, like an easy thing to do, to just stick on the trail of them that you know are worse crooks than you. But it ain’t. I’ve tried it. I’ve seen Black Jack pass up ten thousand like it was nothing, because the gent that had it come by it honest. But I can’t do it, speaking in general. But I’ll tell you more about the old man.”

“Thank you,” said Terry, “but—”

“And when you’re with us—”

“You see,” said Terry firmly, “I plan to do the work you asked me to do— kill what you wanted killed on the range. And when I’ve worked off the money I owe you—”

Before he could complete his sentence, a door opened on the far side of the room, and Kate Pollard entered again. She had risen from her bed in some haste to answer the summons of her father. Her bright hair poured across her shoulders, a heavy, greenish-blue dressing gown was drawn about her and held close with one hand at her breast. She came slowly toward them. And she seemed to Terry to have changed. There was less of the masculine about her than there had been earlier in the evening. Her walk was slow, her eyes were wide as though she had no idea what might await her, and the light glinted white on the untanned portion of her throat, and on her arm where the loose sleeve of the dressing gown fell back from it.

“Kate,” said her father, “I had to get you up to tell you the big news— biggest news you ever heard of! Girl, who’ve I always told you was the greatest gent that ever come into my life?”

“Jack Hollis—Black Jack,” she said, without hesitation. “According to
your
way of thinking, Dad!”

Plainly her own conclusions might be very different.

“According to anybody’s way of thinking, as long as they was thinking right. And d’you know who we’ve got here with us now? Could you guess it in a thousand years? Why, the kid that come tonight. Black Jack as sure as if he was a picture out of a book, and me a blind fool that didn’t know him. Kate, here’s the second Black Jack. Terry Hollis. Give him your hand agin and say you’re glad to have him for his dad’s sake and for his own! Kate, he’s done a man’s job already. It’s him that dropped old foxy Minter!”

The last of these words faded out of the hearing of Terry. He felt the lowered eyes of the girl rise and fall gravely on his face, and her glance rested there a long moment with a new and solemn questioning. Then her hand went slowly out to him, a cold hand that barely touched his with its fingertips and then dropped away.

But what Terry felt was that it was the same glance she had turned to him when she stood leaning against the post earlier that evening. There was a pity in it, and a sort of despair which he could not understand.

And without saying a word she turned her back on them and went out of the room as slowly as she had come into it.

CHAPTER 26

“It don’t mean nothing,” Pollard hastened to assure Terry. “It don’t mean a thing in the world except that she’s a fool girl. The queerest, orneriest, kindest, strangest, wildest thing in the shape of calico that ever come into these parts since her mother died before her. But the more you see of her, the more you’ll value her. She can ride like a man—no wear out to her—and she’s got the courage of a man. Besides which she can sling a gun like it would do your heart good to see her! Don’t take nothing she does to heart. She don’t mean no harm. But she sure does tangle up a gent’s ideas. Here I been living with her nigh onto twenty years and I don’t savvy her none yet. Eh, boys?”

“I’m not offended in the least,” said Terry quietly.

And he was not, but he was more interested than he had ever been before by man, woman, or child. And for the past few seconds his mind had been following her through the door behind which she had disappeared.

“And if I were to see more of her, no doubt—” He broke off with: “But I’m not apt to see much more of any of you, Mr. Pollard. If I can’t stay here and work off that three-hundred-dollar debt—”

“Work, hell! No son of Black Jack Hollis can work for me. But he can live with me as a partner, son, and he can have everything I got, half and half, and the bigger half to him if he asks for it. That’s straight!”

Terry raised a protesting hand. Yet he was touched—intimately touched. He had tried hard to fit in his place among the honest people of the mountains by hard and patient work. They would have none of him. His own kind turned him out. And among these men—men who had no law, as he had every reason to believe—he was instantly taken in and made one of them.

“But no more talk tonight,” said Pollard. “I can see you’re played out. I’ll show you the room.”

He caught a lantern from the wall as he spoke and began to lead the way up the stairs to the balcony. He pointed out the advantages of the house as he spoke.

“Not half bad—this house, eh?” he said proudly. “And who d’you think planned it? Your old man, kid. It was Black Jack Hollis himself that done it! He was took off sudden before he’d had a chance to work it out and build it. But I used his ideas in this the same’s I’ve done in other things. His idea was a house like a ship.

“They build a ship in compartments, eh? Ship hits a rock, water comes in. But it only fills one compartment, and the old ship still floats. Same with this house. You seen them walls. And the walls on the outside ain’t the only thing. Every partition is the same thing, pretty near; and a gent could stand behind these doors safe as if he was a mile away from a gun. Why? Because they’s a nice little lining of the best steel you ever seen in the middle of ’em.

“Cost a lot. Sure. But look at us now. Suppose a posse was to rush the house. They bust into the kitchen side. Where are they? Just the same as if they hadn’t got in at all. I bolt the doors from the inside of the big room, and they’re shut out agin. Or suppose they take the big room? Then a couple of us slide out on this balcony and spray ’em with lead. This house ain’t going to be took till the last room is filled full of the sheriff’s men!”

He paused on the balcony and looked proudly over the big, baronial room below them. It seemed huger than ever from this viewpoint, and the men below them were dwarfed. The light of the lanterns did not extend all the way across it, but fell in pools here and there, gleaming faintly on the men below.

“But doesn’t it make people suspicious to have a fort like this built on the hill?” asked Terry.

“Of course. If they knew. But they don’t know, son, and they ain’t going to find out the lining of this house till they try it out with lead.”

He brought Terry into one of the bedrooms and lighted a lamp. As the flare steadied in the big circular oil burner and the light spread, Terry made out a surprisingly comfortable apartment. There was not a bunk, but a civilized bed, beside which was a huge, tawny mountain-lion skin softening the floor. The window was curtained in some pleasant blue stuff, and there were a few spots of color on the wall—only calendars, some of them, but helping to give a livable impression for the place.

“Kate’s work,” grinned Pollard proudly. “She’s been fixing these rooms up all out of her own head. Never got no ideas out of me. Anything you might lack, son?”

Terry told him he would be very comfortable, and the big man wrung his hand again as he bade him good night.

“The best work that Denver ever done was bringing you to me,” he declared. “Which you’ll find it out before I’m through. I’m going to give you a home!” And he strode away before Terry could answer.

The rather rare consciousness of having done a good deed swelled in the heart of Joe Pollard on his way down from the balcony. When he reached the floor below, he found that the four men had gone to bed and left Denver alone, drawn back from the light into a shadowy corner, where he was flanked by the gleam of a bottle of whisky on the one side and a shimmering glass on the other. Although Pollard was the nominal leader, he was in secret awe of the yegg. For Denver was an “in-and-outer.” Sometimes he joined them in the West; sometimes he “worked” an Eastern territory. He came and went as he pleased, and was more or less a law to himself. Moreover, he had certain qualities of silence and brooding that usually disturbed the leader. They troubled him now as he approached the squat, shapeless figure in the corner chair.

“What you think of him?” said Denver.

“A good kid and a clean-cut kid,” decided Joe Pollard judicially. “Maybe he ain’t another Black Jack, but he’s tolerable cool for a youngster. Stood up and looked me in the eye like a man when I had him cornered a while back. Good thing for him you come out when you did!”

“A good thing for you, Joe,” replied Denver Pete. “He’d of turned you into fertilizer, bo!”

“Maybe; maybe not. Maybe they’s some things I could teach him about gun-slinging, Pete.”

“Maybe; maybe not,” parodied Denver. “You’ve learned a good deal about guns, Joe—quite a bit. But there’s some things about gun fighting that nobody can learn. It’s got to be born into ’em. Remember how Black Jack used to slide out his gat?”

“Yep. There was a man!”

“And Minter, too. There’s a born gunman.”

“Sure. We all know Uncle Joe—damn his soul!”

“But the kid beat Uncle Joe fair and square from an even break—and beat him bad. Made his draw, held it so’s Joe could partway catch up with him, and then drilled him clean!”

Pollard scratched his chin.