Crossroads (2 page)

A
fter that, her luck apparently held consistently good. The others at the table were still wagering on her and with her, and the payer at that table did little besides constantly shovel out the coin of the house. However, the other men in the house paid little attention to the scene. In his part of the country Dix knew that such sensational winning would have drawn everyone about in a great circle to watch the big coin roll in. He gained a sudden and deep respect for a community where such prodigious luck passed with hardly a notice. It was like a crowd in a new mining town, where gold almost loses significance except when it comes raw from the earth.

At length, the girl left the table, and the payer wiped his sweaty forehead and turned a venomous glance after her retreating figure. She went straight to the roulette wheel, a small group following. Dix Van Dyck drew a little closer and saw that she had taken the most extreme chance that the game affords—she had placed a whole handful of gold on a single number.

The wheel whirled, the man behind it watching with anxious eyes. It slowed, purred, and clicked softly to a stop—and on her number. Stack after stack of coin was counted out and shoved to her—thirty-six for one. The payer watched her with a wistful eye. She placed her entire winnings again—and still on that most dubious of all
gambling chances—a single number. Again the wheel whirled, purred to a stop, and again the girl won. The payer shook his head in gloomy doubt, and counted out the money slowly, stack by stack. Plainly it would not take much more to break the bank.

But, before he had half finished the count, the girl, as if impatient, picked up a handful of gold—less than her original wager—dropped it into her pocket, and said carelessly: “Keep the rest of it, Bill. I ride light. Keep the rest of it, and the next time a gent drops in here broke…and thirsty…buy him a drink and stake him.”

The payer ceased in his count and stared after her with blinking, uncomprehending eyes while she strolled away to another table. Here, she lingered only a moment and then passed on to the dancing floor.

Dix Van Dyck waited for someone to follow her, someone to take the chair next to hers, but no one moved. She sat at a table alone. Men passed with smiles but without any close approach. If she had been a leper, she could not have been more sedulously avoided. Dix thought of many things: of some terrible, contagious disease, of insanity, or perhaps she was the sweetheart of some noted gunman.

Yes, that would explain it. Dix Van Dyck hitched his belt a little higher and laughed softly, unpleasantly, to himself. Most of his jests were of a nature that he alone could appreciate. He turned to a bearded, unshaven man next to him.

“Stranger,” he said, “will you drink?”

“Don’t mind,” said the other.

“Red-eye?”

“Yep.”

“Partner,” continued Dix Van Dyck amiably, while the bartender was spinning the tall bottle toward them, “I
been watching a little play that looks sort of queer to me. I’m a stranger in these parts, and maybe you could put me wise.”

“Maybe.”

“I been watching that girl over there to the table by the dancing floor.”

“Jack?”

“Is that her name?”

“Yep.”

“None of the boys don’t seem much friendly with her. Can’t she dance? Can’t she talk? Or is she owned private by a gunman?”

The other grinned. “She can dance, she can talk, and there ain’t any man in these parts fool enough to want to own her.”

With this enigmatic reply he rested content, as if there were nothing more to be said. Dix Van Dyck blinked and drew in his breath. His very heart was eaten up with curiosity.

“Bad actor?” he asked.

“Ain’t you really heard nothing about Jack?” asked the other with naïve wonder.

“Never.”

“Follow me.”

He led the way to the door of the saloon and squinted to right and left down the long line of tethered horses. One shape stood out through the half-broken gloom of the early night, a tall white horse, glimmering through the darkness. Even by that faint light the practiced eye of Dix Van Dyck made out an unusually beautiful piece of horse flesh.

“If you don’t know the girl,” said the stranger, “maybe you recognize the hoss? That white one down the line.”

“Ain’t nothing I can recognize him by,” asserted Dix.

“Hmm,” said the other, and scratched his head in the effort to find some clue that the other might be able to follow. “Ever hear of McGurk?”

“Sure,” said Dix Van Dyck. “I’ve lived some way off from these parts, but I know McGurk is about the fastest gunman that ever fanned a hammer.”

“McGurk
was
,” answered the stranger.

“Dead?”

“Worse’n dead. Done for.”

“Well?”

The other persisted in his irritating, roundabout way of telling what he knew, as if he wished to draw out the relish of a rare morsel. “Ever hear of Boone’s gang?”

“Seems like I have,” murmured Dix Van Dyck, “seems like I heard they was all cleaned up by McGurk.”

“You heard wrong…a pile wrong,” said the other. “That girl is Boone’s daughter.”

“The devil she is!”

“The devil she ain’t. And mostly devil she is, at that. That white hoss there in the dark is McGurk’s hoss.”

“Is he here?”

“Nope, the girl rides the hoss.”

The iron hand of Dix Van Dyck gripped the shoulder of his companion and his voice rolled, low and muttering, like approaching thunder. “Partner, I been asking you straight questions, one man to the other. Maybe I been asking too much, but in my part of the country nobody don’t josh me when I feel serious. I’m a pile serious right now. Out with it. D’ye mean to tell me that girl in here finished McGurk…McGurk, who killed…?”

“I know…McGurk who killed a hundred gunfighters. But all we know is that McGurk started on the trail of Boone’s gang and that he finished ’em all except one young feller who beat it East and got married and this girl. We know McGurk started on that trail with a white
horse. We know the girl come down from the mountains, riding that same white horse. Partner, them are the cards, and you can put ’em together any way you want.”

Dix Van Dyck swallowed hard and then set his teeth. It was almost more than he could understand. He had a faint suspicion that the other was amusing himself with generous lies. If so, there would be an unhappy ending to the tale. He decided to draw out the man further. “Is that what scares ’em away from that girl in there?”

The other looked up with a scowl that changed almost at once into friendliness.

“Look here, pal,” he explained, “you’re all due for a cold trail. I’ll tell you straight. When Jack Boone come down from the hills, there was another with her. He was one of the last of Boone’s old gang…the best of the bad lot. All we know is what he told us. He said the girl had got a hold of a little cross…this sounds funny, I know…and that the cross give her good luck, but give bad luck to everyone near her…her friends, particular. He says that cross was what made her able to beat McGurk, and, as long as she had it on, there wasn’t any man could handle her.”

“That sounds all pretty damned fishy to me,” grumbled Dix Van Dyck.

“Don’t it?” agreed the other. “It sounded fishy to the lot of us. But the first thing we noticed was that this feller wanted nothing more than to get free of Jack Boone. He blew north and ain’t been heard of since. Then Bud Ganton, a dirty half-breed with a record it took half an hour to read, made up his mind that he was going to get the loot that the girl was said to have. He started out from town for her cabin where she was living up in the hills. The next day the girl come riding in to tell the deputy marshal that there was a dead man out to her house. The marshal went out and found Ganton pumped full of lead and
both his own guns out with a bullet fired out of each. Now there was only one thing Ganton was any good for, and that was a gun play. With his sixes he was a world-beater. I’ve seen him make a play, and he could make his gun talk French, I’m here to state. Nobody knows what happened exactly out there to the girl’s cabin. But it was sure plain that Ganton had time to get out his guns and make a play before he dropped. The girl was too fast for him and drilled him clean. Now, if the girl didn’t have something like that cross to help her out, how’d she ever have got away with Ganton?”

“If she was Boone’s daughter, he sure taught her how to fan a six,” answered Dix Van Dyck.

“Sure, but that ain’t all the reason we got for thinking that little cross of hers makes her safe and raises hell for her friends. There was Luther Carey. He was knocked off’n his feet by Jack’s pretty face…which she’s some looker…and he said bad luck could go to the devil. He started on the trail for Jack. She warned him fair and square that it was a plumb cold trail and that he’d get bad luck if he stuck around. But Luther stayed. About a week later he was bucked off a little tame cayuse that a boy could’ve rid. He was bucked off and busted his neck when he hit the sand. I’m asking you, was that nacheral? No, I’ll tell a man it wasn’t.

“Then Hopkins, that Eastern dude that was a mining engineer. He come along and seen Jack and went crazy about her. We warned him fair and square, and she warned him, too, they say. But he kept going out to see her. One day he dropped down a shaft in the Buckhorn mine, and they had to go down with a broom and a shovel and sweep up what was left of him.

“There’s two things we blame to the cross Jack wears. There’s plenty of others. I could sit here all night and tell ’em to you. Take her luck with cards, for instance. You
never see her lose more’n one out of every three passes. If she wanted to, she could break every game in the state. But money don’t seem to mean nothing to her. Hang around her? Dance with her? Partner, I’d a pile rather jump off’n Eagle Bluff. It’d be an easier way of dying, but no surer.”

S
o saying, the stranger turned and walked back into the bar. Even the telling of the narrative seemed to make him need a drink.

Now, it was well known in Guadalupe that, if you wanted Dix Van Dyck to do a thing, the best way was to urge him toward the opposite. If there were two roads, one safe and one dangerous, it was thoroughly understood that one could always make Dix take the safe road by urging him to choose the dangerous. If the stranger at Double Bend had been inspired by an angel from heaven, he could not have spoken more effectively to make Dix Van Dyck seek out the girl, Jack. In fact, as he stepped back into the dance hall, his mind was already made up. He only waited for a convenient moment before approaching her. But, although his nature was strangely perverse, there was little that was wholly rash about Dix Van Dyck. In the first place, he believed with his entire soul every word that the stranger had told him about Jack and her mysterious cross. He had seen the effect of that cross in her gambling. Moreover, there is a deep element of superstition in those who live among Mexicans and prospectors. Luck becomes an almost personal god.

Because Dix Van Dyck believed thoroughly that this girl held good luck for herself and bad luck for all who came near her, he was afraid—deeply afraid. He felt a
prickling chill run up his back as he looked at her. But it was the sort of fear that a man feels when he looks at a grim antagonist with whom he knows that he is about to fight. It was the sort of fear that mingles with one’s desire to leap from a high place to destruction. It was the imp of perverse that lives in the soul of every man, but above all was present in Dix Van Dyck.

He was afraid. He would rather have faced a dozen guns in the hands of desperadoes than sit for a single second at the side of this girl. For this very reason he would not have missed the opportunity for all the gold in the world placed at his feet. He was shaken to his very soul with fear in advancing toward a danger against which there was no known method of fighting. And because of that nothing could stop him. He hesitated only long enough to survey the girl sharply, thoroughly, weigh her strength, estimate her character.

He could see only her profile, for she leaned forward with one elbow resting on the table, and her chin in the palm of her hand; the other arm lay across the back of the chair. An attitude of awkward repose in most people, but in this girl Dix Van Dyck felt a capacity for instant action. In the fraction of a second a sleeping dog can uncurl from the most clumsy position and leap a dozen feet away from danger. He felt the same possibility in this girl—a cat-like activity—a unconscious guard that remained alert even when mind and body slept. It even occurred to him that she might be perfectly aware of his scrutiny.

Once more his flesh prickled and grew cold. So he strode boldly up and took a chair near her. Her eyes swung around to him slowly, slowly as if a careful force regulated the movement. He found himself staring into pitchy black depths, wide, unconcerned, meaningless. He felt as if the eyes were looking through him and past
him at some object in the infinite distance. For a man squints to see an object near at hand but stares with open eye at something far away. Judging by her eyes, he might have been a speck of white on the far horizon, an indefinite particle, whether cloud or sail. It whipped all the fighting instinct into his brain.

“My name,” he said doggedly, “is Dix Van Dyck.”

Her voice, in answer, was neither frivolous nor impertinent, but rather that of one who is wearied by the necessity of speech. “My name don’t concern you, stranger. If you want to know it, ask one of the men. He’ll tell you, along with a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t be sitting here.”

“Lady,” answered Dix Van Dyck, “I’ve heard all those reasons. To put it straight, that’s why I’m here.”

The first spark of interest burned up in the dark eyes, and something like the ghost of a smile softened her mouth at the corners, as if in faint recognition of a kindred spirit.

“I’ve heard about good luck that follows you and bad luck that follows everyone around you.”

“You don’t believe it?” she asked, growing somewhat cold again.

“I believe it,” said Dix Van Dyck calmly, “as if I read it in the Bible, but it ain’t any real reason why you should sit here alone.”

“Listen,” said the girl, and she leaned gravely toward him, “I got an idea that I know what you are, and I like your kind. But you’re on the wrong trail…a cold trail, partner. No matter what they told you, they didn’t tell you enough, or you’d have been stopped. There’s bad luck around me. That ain’t all. There’s hell!”

Her eyes widened, and she cast a glance over her shoulder—as if fate listened there, an impalpable presence, grinning invisibly at the warning she spoke to Dix Van Dyck. She had been beautiful even when she sat
there impassively, but, now that a color was flushing the olive-tinted skin and life had come into her eyes, she was the most lovely woman Dix Van Dyck had ever seen. She thrilled him like a strain of music. She uplifted him like a passage of noble poetry. She lured him like the purple distances of the desert.

“Lady,” he said, “speakin’ in general, the only thing I want is action, and being near you promises a pile of it. If I bother you, I’ll be on my way. If I don’t, I’d sure like to hang around a while.”

She considered this cavalier utterance with a frown and a thoughtful, sidewise glance that suddenly lifted to his face. “If I told you to go, would you?” she asked.

Dix Van Dyck flushed. “If you say the word, there ain’t nothing I’d do quicker.”

“Honest?”

The blood died away from his face and left it splotched with gray, tans, and purples. “Talkin’ man to man,” he said evenly, “it’d be some hard job to break away just now, but I’ll go, if I have to.”

“Then go,” said the girl sharply.

The friendliness died from her eyes, and they became in an instant as black as they had been at the first. He pushed back his chair, setting his teeth in anger. But, even as he caught the edge of the table and put weight on it to rise, he knew that he could not go. It was like a desertion before the battle was fought. It was like cowardice under fire. He settled back in the chair, breathing hard, and glared at her.

“You’re saying that to try me out?” he said.

“I never meant anything more in my life,” said the girl.

“Yet,” he persisted, “you was pretty friendly only a minute ago.”

“Was I?” she queried with calm-eyed insolence. “Well, I’m tired of you now.”

He felt a great desire to take that round, slender throat between thumbs and forefingers; he could almost tell how it would crunch under the pressure. Then he remembered with a cold rush of shame that she was a woman. A woman, and therefore a creature of infinite wiles. The thought held him. He studied her.

“Well?” she asked coldly. “Are you going?”

“D’you know,” pondered Dix Van Dyck, his grim eyes boring into hers, “I got an idea that, if I get up and leave this table, you’ll despise me. Am I right?”

The question had the effect of a sharp jerk on the reins. The girl straightened almost with a snap and her serious frown centered steadily on him.

Before she could answer he swept on: “Look at the way I’m fixed. All my life I’ve been hunting action. Most I could find was hounding a few yaller-hearted men. Now I get to you. Action just nacherally follers you around. I wouldn’t have to hunt for it. I find you, and you start to give me the run. I ask you, man to man…is it fair? Is it square?”

There was a movement of her lips.

He raised his right hand suddenly and pointed. “Right now, you got a smile all ready to pop out, and you’re fighting to keep it back. Am I right, lady?”

She could not help it. The smile came, and then a bubbling laugh. It ran on and on through musical variations like the sound of water trickling over rocks and plunging into tinkling shallows and chiming in deep pools. In all his life Dix Van Dyck had never heard a sound that so fascinated him. He could not tell whether she was laughing with him or at him. The laughter stopped. Sitting straight in her chair, she looked at him with marvelously bright eyes, the smile coming and going at the corners of her mouth.