The Max Brand Megapack (294 page)

“Just a hunch,” said the girl. “Yes!”

She stepped closer to the counter and leaned across it. Her eyes were bright. Connor knew that she was seeing that picture of the hot day, the crowd of straw hats stirring wildly, the murmur and cry that went up as the string of racers jogged past.

“They went to the post,” said Connor, “and I got down my bet—a hundred dollars, my whole wad—on Tip-Top Second. The bookie looked just once at me, and I’ll never forget how his eyebrows went together. I went back to my seat.”

“You were shaking all over, I guess,” suggested the girl, and her hands were quivering.

“I was not,” said Ben Connor, “I was cold through and through, and never moved my eyes off Tip-Top Second. His jockey had a green jacket with two stripes through it, and the green was easy to watch. I saw the crowd go off, and I saw Tip-Top left flat-footed at the post.”

The girl drew a breath. Connor smiled at her. The hot evening had flushed his face, but now a small spot of white appeared in either cheek, and his dull eyes had grown expressionless. She knew what he meant when he said that he was cold when he saw the string go to the post.

“It—it must have made you sick!” said the girl.

“Not a bit. I knew the green jacket was going to finish ahead of the rest as well as I knew that my name was Ben Connor. I said he was left at the post. Well, it wasn’t exactly that, but when the bunch came streaking out of the shoot, he was half a dozen lengths behind. It was a mile and an eighth race. They went down the back stretch, eight horses all bunched together, and the green jacket drifting that half dozen lengths to the rear. The wise guys turned and grinned at me; then they forgot all about me and began to yell for King Charles and Miss Lazy.

“The bunch were going around the turn and the two favorites were fighting it out together. But I had an eye for the green jacket, and halfway around the turn I saw him move up.”

The girl sighed.

“No,” Connor continues, “he hadn’t won the race yet. And he never should have won it at all, but King Charles was carrying a hundred and thirty-eight pounds, and Miss Lazy a hundred and thirty-three, while Tip-Top Second came in as a fly-weight eighty-seven pounds! No horse in the world could give that much to him when he was right, but who guessed that then?

“They swung around the turn and hit the stretch. Tip-Top took the curve like a cart horse. Then the bunch straightened out, with King Charles and Miss Lazy fighting each other in front and the rest streaking out behind like the tail of a flag. They did that first mile in 1.38, but they broke their hearts doing it, with that weight up.

“They had an eighth to go—one little measly furlong, with Tip-Top in the ruck, and the crowd screaming for King Charles and Miss Lazy; but just exactly at the mile post the leaders flattened. I didn’t know it, but the man in front of me dropped his glasses and his head. ‘Blown!’ he said, and that was all. It seemed to me that the two in front were running as strongly as ever, but Tip-Top was running better. He came streaking, with the boy flattening out along his neck and the whip going up and down. But I didn’t stir. I couldn’t; my blood was turned to ice water.

“Tip-Top walked by the ruck and got his nose on the hip of King Charles. Somebody was yelling behind me in a squeaky voice: ‘There is something wrong! There’s something wrong!’ There was, too, and it was the eighty-seven pounds that a fool handicapper had put on Tip-Top. At the sixteenth Miss Lazy threw up her head like a swimmer going down and dropped back, and Tip-Top was on the King’s shoulder. Fifty yards to the finish; twenty-five—then the King staggered as if he’d been hit between the ears, and Tip-Top jumped out to win by a neck.

“There was one big breath of silence in the grand stand—then a groan. I turned my head and saw the two wise guys looking at me with sick grins. Afterward I collected two thousand bucks from a sicker looking bookie.”

He paused and smiled at the girl.

“That was the 11th of July. First real day of my life.”

She gathered her mind out of that scene.

“You stepped out of a telegraph office, with your finger on the key all day, every day, and you jumped into two thousand dollars?”

After she had stopped speaking her thoughts went on, written in her eyes.

“You’d like to try it, eh?” said Ben Connor.

“Haven’t you had years of happiness out of it?”

He looked at her with a grimace.

“Happiness?” he echoed. “Happiness?”

She stepped back so that she put his deeply-marked face in a better light.

“You’re a queer one for a winner.”

“Sure, the turf is crowded with queer ones like me.”

“Winners, all of ’em?”

His eye had been gradually brightening while he talked to her. He felt that the girl rang true, as men ring true, yet there was nothing masculine about her.

“You’ve heard racing called the sport of kings? That’s because only kings can afford to follow the ponies. Kings and Wall Street. But a fellow can’t squeeze in without capital. I’ve made a go of it for a while; pretty soon we all go smash. Sooner or later I’ll do what everybody else does—put up my cash on a sure thing and see my money go up in smoke.”

“Then why don’t you pull out with what you have?”

“Why does the earth keep running around the sun? Because there’s a pull. Once you’ve followed the ponies you’ll keep on following ’em. No hope for it. Oh, I’ve seen the boys come up one after another, make their killings, hit a streak of bad luck, plunge, and then watch their sure-thing throw up its tail in the stretch and fade into the ruck.”

He was growing excited as he talked; he was beginning to realize that he must make his break from the turf now or never. And he spoke more to himself than to the girl.

“We all hang on. We play the game till it breaks us and still we stay with it. Here I am, two thousand miles away from the tracks—and sending for dope to make a play! Can you beat that? Well, so-long.”

He turned away gloomily.

“Good night, Mr. Connor.”

He turned sharply.

“Where’d you get that name?” he asked with a trace of suspicion.

“Off the telegram.”

He nodded, but said: “I’ve an idea I’ve been chattering to much.”

“My name is Ruth Manning,” answered the girl. “I don’t think you’ve said too much.”

He kept his eyes steadily on her while he shook hands.

“I’m glad I know some one in Lukin,” said Connor. “Good night, again.”

CHAPTER FOUR

When Connor wakened th
e next morning, after his first impression of blinding light, he closed his eyes and waited for the sense of unhappy doom which usually comes to men of tense nerves and active life after sleep; but, with slow and pleasant wonder, he realized that the old numbness of brain and fever of pulse was gone. Then he looked up and lazily watched the shadow of the vine at his window move across the ceiling, a dim-bordered shadow continually changing as the wind gathered the leaves in solid masses and shook them out again. He pored upon this for a time, and next he watched a spider spinning a web in the corner; she worked in a draft which repeatedly lifted her from her place before she had fastened her thread, and dropped her a foot or more into space. Connor sat up to admire the artisan’s skill and courage. Compared to men and insects, the spider really worked over an abyss two hundred feet deep, suspended by a silken thread. Connor slipped out of bed and stood beneath the growing web while the main cross threads were being fastened. He had been there for some time when, turning away to rub the ache out of the back of his neck, he again met the contrast between the man of this morning and the man of other days.

This time it was his image in the mirror, meeting him as he turned. That deep wrinkle in the middle of the forehead was half erased. The lips were neither compressed nor loose and shaking, and the eye was calm—it rested him to meet that glance in the mirror.

A mood of idle content always brings one to the window: Connor looked out on the street. A horseman hopped past like a day shadow, the hoofbeats muffled by thick sand, and the wind, moving at an exactly equal pace, carried a mist of dust just behind the horse’s tail. Otherwise there was neither life nor color in the street of weather-beaten, low buildings, and the eye of Connor went beyond the roofs and began to climb the mountains. Here was a bald bright cliff, there a drift of trees, and again a surface of raw clay from which the upper soil had recently slipped; but these were not stopping points—they were rather the steps which led the glance to a sky of pale and transparent blue, and Connor felt a great desire to have that sky over him in place of a ceiling.

He splashed through a hasty bath, dressed, and ran down the stairs, humming. Jack Townsend stood on a box in the corner of the room, probing at a spider web in the corner.

“Too late for breakfast?” asked Connor.

The fat shoulders of the proprietor quivered, but he did not turn.

“Too late,” he snapped. “Breakfast over at nine. No favorites up here.”

Connor waited for the wave of irritation to rise in him, but to his own surprise he found himself saying:

“All right; you can’t throw a good horse off his feed by cutting out one meal.”

Jack Townsend faced his guest, rubbing his many-folded chin.

“Don’t take long for this mountain air to brace up a gent, does it?” he asked rather pointedly.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Connor. “It isn’t the air so much; it’s the people that do a fellow good.”

“Well,” admitted the proprietor modestly, “they may be something in that. Kind of heartier out here, ain’t they? More than in the city, I guess. I’ll tell you what,” he added. “I’ll go out and speak to the missus about a snack for you. It’s late, but we like to be obligin’.”

He climbed carefully down from the box and started away.

“That girl again,” thought Connor, and snapped his fingers. His spirits continued to rise, if that were possible, during the breakfast of ham and eggs, and coffee of a taste so metallic that only a copious use of cream made it drinkable. Jack Townsend, recovering to the full his customary good nature, joined his guest in a huge piece of toast with a layer of ham on it—simply to keep a stranger from eating alone, he said—and while he ate he talked about the race. Connor had noticed that the lobby was almost empty.

“They’re over lookin’ at the hosses,” said Townsend, “and gettin’ their bets down.”

Connor laid down knife and fork, and resumed them hastily, but thereafter his interest in his food was entirely perfunctory. From the corner of his eye a gleam kept steadily upon the face of Townsend, who continued:

“Speaking personal, Mr. Connor, I’d like to have you look over them hosses yourself.”

Connor, on the verge of speech, checked himself with a quick effort.

“Because,” continued Townsend, “if I had your advice I might get down a little stake on one of ’em. You see?”

Ben Connor paused with a morsel of ham halfway toward his lips.

“Who told you I know anything about horses?” he asked.

“You told me yourself,” grinned the proprietor, “and I’d like to figure how you knew the mare come from the Ballor Valley.”

“From which?”

“From the Ballor Valley. You even named the irrigation and sand and all that. But you’d seen her brand before, I s’pose?”

“Hoofs like hers never came out of these mountains,” smiled Ben Connor. “See the way she throws them and how flat they are.”

“Well, that’s true,” nodded Jack Townsend. “It seems simple, now you say what it was, but it had me beat up to now. That is the way with most things. Take a fine hand with a rope. He daubs it on a cow so dead easy any fool thinks he can do the same. No, Mr. Connor, I’d still like to have you come out and take a look at them hosses. Besides”—he lowered his voice—“you might pick up a bit of loose change yourself. They’s a plenty rolling round to-day.”

Connor laughed, but there was excitement behind his mirth.

“The fact is, Townsend,” he said, “I’m not interested in racing now. I’m up here for the air.”

“Sure—sure,” said the hotel man. “I know all that. Well, if you’re dead set it ain’t hardly Christian to lure you into betting on a hoss race, I suppose.”

He munched at his sandwich in savage silence, while Connor looked out the window and began to whistle.

“They race very often up here?” he asked carelessly.

“Once in a while.”

“A pleasant sport,” sighed Connor.

“Ain’t it, now?” argued Townsend. “But these gents around here take it so serious that it don’t last long.”

“That so?”

“Yep. They bet every last dollar they can rake up, and about the second or third race in the year the money’s all pooled in two or three pockets. Then the rest go gunnin’ for trouble, and most generally find a plenty. Any six races that’s got up around here is good for three shooting scrapes, and each shooting’s equal to one corpse and half a dozen put away for repairs.” He touched his forehead, marked with a white line. “I used to be considerable,” he said.

“H-m,” murmured Connor, grown absentminded again.

“Yes, sir,” went on the other. “I’ve seen the boys come in from the mines with enough dust to choke a mule, and slap it all down on the hoss. I’ve seen twenty thousand cold bucks lost and won on a dinky little pinto that wasn’t worth twenty dollars hardly. That’s how crazy they get.”

Connor wiped his forehead.

“Where do they race?” he asked.

“Right down Washington Avenue. That is the main street, y’see. Gives ’em about half a mile of runnin’.”

A cigarette appeared with magic speed between the fingers of Connor, and he began to smoke, with deep inhalations, expelling his breath so strongly that the mist shot almost to the ceiling before it flattened into a leisurely spreading cloud. Townsend, fascinated, seemed to have forgotten all about the horse race, but there was in Connor a suggestion of new interest, a certain businesslike coldness.

“Suppose we step over and give the ponies a glance?” he queried.

“That’s the talk!” exclaimed Townsend. “And I’ll take any tip you have!”

This made Connor look at his host narrowly, but, dismissing a suspicion from his mind, he shrugged his shoulders, and they went out together.