The Max Brand Megapack (442 page)

How had he come there?

It could not be that she had ridden straight past him! And yet he was so thoroughly covered by the shadows that the thing seemed possible. The beautiful head of the Hawk appeared dimly behind some small branches near her master.

“How did you get here?” she asked.

For was it not possible that he had been trailing her, the mare moving with catlike softness, and he had dismounted, even now, for the mere sake of surprising her?

“Ah, I just dropped in,” said the Kid, rising to greet her. “How’s things?”

She turned the King and faced him.

He was smiling a little, and he had raised his hat high, and then settled it slowly back on his head He had the air of one who knows how to talk easily to women. That air, and his smile, troubled her a little; yet she felt that it was a foolish emotion.

“Things are pretty bad,” said the girl. “I’ve heard a little about what you did with the Dixon crowd, though. And over at the house is the sheriff and a deputy, waiting for you.”

“Let them wait and rest,” answered the Kid. “It’s a sort of a sad thing, when you come to think of it, that a man at the sheriff’s age should have to be riding, riding, riding all the time. Let him rest in the cool of the house for a while—and I’ll rest out here Why does he want me?”

He canted his head just a trifle to the side, and waited.

“He wants you for breaking into the Shay house, and for attempted murder—”

“In the Shay house?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t fire a shot in there. It was the crowd already there that made the noise like a Fourth of July.”

“What made you go in there?” asked the girl.

“Oh, I wanted to see Shay.”

“You wanted to scare him, you mean.”

“You think so? Well, if his nerves got a little jumpy, I wouldn’t be sorry, as a matter of fact.”

He added: “Is it only about the Shay business that he wants me?”

“That’s all. What else would there be?”

“You never can tell,” said the Kid, smiling again in that odd way which troubled her. “People sometimes rig up all sorts of foolish grudges, you understand.”

“They persecute you, Kid, do they?”

“A lot,” said he.

She laughed, and the Kid laughed with her.

“Sit down and rest your horse,” said the Kid.

She hesitated, then slipped suddenly out of the saddle. But she did not sit down. With the reins over her arms, and the riding quirt tapping against her boots, she confronted him. She felt much smaller, now, as she stood upon the ground, facing him.

“You act a little nervous yourself,” said the Kid.

“I am nervous,” she answered.

“And why?”

“Look here,” said she, “are you pretending that I ought to take you as if you were just—anybody?”

“No. Take me as if I were just the Kid.”

“I don’t want to call you that. What other name can I give you?”

“Reginald Beckwith-Holman is my real name,” said he. “Beckwith-Hollis you told my mother.”

“Did I? Matter of fact, I have a hard time remembering names.”

“It must be hard—having so many,” she observed. They waited through a pause.

“I wanted to ask you a question,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“About what you will do now.”

“I don’t know. Dixon and his crew have dug themselves in. They have a regular fort down there at Hurry Creek.”

“I know that they have. And there’s nothing that can be done about them. They have the law on their side—until the case is tried!”

“Does the sheriff admit that?”

“Yes, he admits that. Poor Lew Walters! He wants to help us, but his hands are tied!”

“Of course they are,” said the Kid.

“And you’re in danger from the sheriff, if you stay near here.”

“I’ll stay, I think,” said the Kid. “Walters is only joking. We’ve known each other such a long time, I don’t think that he’d do me any harm.”

“He’d shoot you down in a second!” she exclaimed. “You know it, too!”

“Good old Walters,” said the Kid gently, and shifted the subject by saying: “Did you come out to send me away?”

“What right have Ito send you away?” asked the girl. “Whatever hope we have is in you!”

“You do have a hope, eh?” said the Kid. “Thanks. That makes me feel a little better.”

“I wish that you’d come out in the open,” said the girl. “What really makes you take such wild chances as you took today? It’s as if you despised life!”

“Not a bit,” said he, “but I like life with a little seasoning in it. You can understand how that might be?”

She nodded.

Suddenly she had to pinch her lips together to keep from smiling.

“What’s the real reason?” she asked him. “Only the adventure? Or mostly because you hate Dixon and all his crowd?”

“It’s the cattle,” said the Kid with a sudden gravity. She shook her head.

“You don’t believe that?” he asked her. “Hardly!”

“Well, I’ll tell you. When I was a little youngster, my father and mother started to move. We were poor people. Dirt poor. We had a few head of horses, and some cows, and a few head of beef. The land where we were living—”

“Was it out here in the West?”

“Well, it was not East,” he answered evasively, frowning a little.

The girl flushed and bit her lip. “Do go on,” said she.

“We moved off the old land—there was nothing but a small shack on it—and then we started across the hills for a sort of promised land about which we’d heard a lot. We plugged along at a good rate. There was no hurry. We wanted to have our cattle in good condition when we came to the badlands, where we’d heard that the grass had been burned out, and that it was very hard to push through. So we slogged along very slowly, and enjoyed being on the road. Our first bad luck was a real smasher. Half a dozen rustlers came down on us one evening, and scooped up everything that we had in the way livestock, except for the two milk cows. They took the horses, the mule, the burro, even; and the steers.”

“The scoundrels!” said the girl. “The contemptible scoundrels! Did you ever learn who they were?”

“There were five of them,” said the Kid dreamily, as though he were looking across the years and seeing that evening closely again. “Yes, I learned all of their names. A tough bunch. Very tough. I learned all of their names, however.”

“How? But go on! What did you do, then?”

“My father was a hard man,” said the Kid. “He’d lived a hard life. He had the pain of work in his eyes, if you know what I mean,”

“Yes,” she answered. “Of course I know.”

“He’d been a farmer. And a scholar! But a farmer—frosty mornings, chilblains at nights, freezing behind the plow, roasting in the hayfield. He worked like a dog.

“Well, when we lost our stock, we were on the edge of the desert. My mother begged him to turn back, but he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t go back to the old life. He lightened the wagon of everything that we didn’t absolutely need, and then he yoked up those two milk cows—and we went ahead!”

“Great heavens!” said the girl. “Across the desert? With cows!”

He paused. His face, losing its characteristic smile, became like iron.

“My mother was a very young woman to have had a boy of six. She was a jolly sort. She was straight, and had a good, sun-browned skin and her eyes were always laughing. Like a dog that loves all the people all around him. You know?”

She nodded She felt a breathless interest.

“She was rather tall,” said the Kid, looking straight and hard at the girl. “She had blue eyes. They sparkled like sea water under the sun.”

The straightness of his glance took her breath. She herself was tall, her skin was brown, and she knew she had dark-blue eyes. Her mirror told her that there was life in them!

“Well,” said the Kid, “after a couple of days, I got sick. Very sick. My mother began to worry. There was hell in the air!”

He looked up, as one suddenly struck to the heart by an irresistible pain.

“Yes,” said the girl, barely whispering. “Yes?”

“The cows kept plugging along. I was sick, but my brain was all right. I mean, I knew everything that was happening around me. I watched those cows get thinner and thinner The flesh melted off them like the tallow off candles. They turned into skeletons. It was a terrible thing to sit there on the wagon seat and watch them dying on their feet. It was a terrible thing to sit and watch it.”

“Go on!” breathed the girl. “What happened?”

“One of them died. I remember her. She was big Spot, we used to call her. She was hard milking, and she was mean with her horns. But we got to love her on that march through the desert. She pulled two thirds of the load. Then she didn’t get up one morning. She was dead.

“There we were, stuck in the sands. There wasn’t very far to go, now, to get to the grasslands, and one night I heard my father begging my mother to go ahead and get to safety. He would wangle me through—me and the wagon.

“Well, after Spot died, there was no chance of that. Mother wouldn’t leave. They made a pack of everything that they dared to carry along. They left the old wagon. They loaded me onto the back of the other cow. She was old Red. One horn had been broken off. The other one curled in and touched her between the eyes. She had eyes like a deer and a shape like a coal barge. You know the way cows are.”

“Yes,” said the girl.

“They loaded me and part of the pack on top of old Red. Well, she was pretty far gone. Her backbone stuck up like a ridge of rocks. I was pretty weak. They had to hold me on her. They didn’t dare to tie me, because every minute they thought that she might drop. And I could feel her weaving under me. Staggering, and then going on. She was used to pain, I suppose. It never occurred to her to lie down and give up.

“We went on for two days. At night, I used to stand in front of her and rub her face, and she would curl out her long, dry tongue, and it felt like a rasp on my hand.

“The third day, she went down with a bump and a slump. She was stone dead.

“But she had done her part.

“Over to the north, we could see a green mist, and we knew that that was the grass country. The edge of it.

“My father took me in his arms. I was too weak to walk. We went across the rest of the desert and got to the grasslands, all right. My father and I did, I mean.”

“Your mother—” said the girl, in horror.

“Oh, she came through, also,” said the Kid. “But a good deal of her was left behind on that trail. She lasted through to the winter. I could see her dying from day to day. So could my father. After a while she stayed in her bed, and then died. The trail took too much out of her. She never could get rested again.”

The girl placed her hands over her eyes.

At last she said: “And the men who did it? The cowards—the devils who stole your stock?”

“Well,” said the Kid, “that’s a funny thing. You know that a mule lasts a long time. Nine years later, when I was fifteen, I saw the mule that had been stolen, and naturally I was a little curious. I started following its back trail, and I looked up the five men, one by one.”

“They were all alive?” she asked.

“Only one is alive now,” said the Kid, and, lifting his head, he looked at her in such a way that the blood turned to ice water in her veins.

CHAPTER 27

Strange Tales

To think of this matter calmly and from a distance, there was nothing strange in the fact that the Kid had just implied that he had killed four men, one after another. He had a reputation that attributed stranger and more terrible deeds than this to him. But to be there in the quiet of the woods alone with him was another matter. The friendliness in his blue eyes upset her. And then he seemed amazingly young. There was not a trace of a wrinkle about his eyes, and the only line in his face was a single incision at the side of his mouth which appeared, now and then, when the rest of his features were gravely composed, and gave him a look of smiling cynically to himself. Whatever cruelties and desperate actions he was guilty of, it seemed also manifest that he was as generous as cruel, as manly as fierce.

Then, suddenly, she asked him: “Did you kill all of those men?”

“I?” said the Kid.

He smiled at her.

“You don’t think that I ought to ask you that,” she agreed, “and I don’t suppose that I should. You’ve never told a soul, I suppose?”

“No, I’ve never told a soul, and I never intend to.”

She took her place on the log, she turned about on it to face him, and, resting an elbow on her knee and her chin in the cool, slender palm of her hand, she studied the Kid as he never had been studied before. He looked straight back at her, but it was not easy.

“Well,” said she, “I don’t lose anything by asking, I suppose.”

“Are you asking me to tell you?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m asking.”

He still had in his hand the knife with which he had been whittling. That whittling, she now saw, was no real use of the edge of the steel, but a mere testing of it, while the whittler produced long, translucent shavings which fel! as light as strips of paper to the ground, and slowly dried, and warped, and curled. Now he flicked the knife into the air. It whirled over and over in a solid wheel of silver that disappeared with a thud. The blade had driven down into the earth its full length, and the hilt had thumped heavily home.

“That’s a weighted knife,” said the girl.

“Yes. It’s weighted.”

He pulled it out and looked down the steel, which was hardly tarnished by the moisture of the ground. He began to wipe and polish the blade slowly and carefully.

“I asked about the four killings,” said the girl. “You won’t talk about it, Kid?”

At this, he laughed a little.

“Do you expect that I’ll answer?”

“I sort of do expect you to,” said she.

“Well, tell me why.”

“Because I want to get to know you, and I hope that you’ll want to get to know me.”

The Kid started a little. He looked at her in amazement, and in bewilderment, and suddenly he seemed to her younger than ever before. There was actually a slight tinge of red in his cheeks, and at the sight of this color, she could have laughed, outright. But she swallowed her triumph with a fierce satisfaction.