Crossroads (23 page)

H
e stepped out and walked slowly in a circle about her, and she all the time standing proudly with her eyes straight before her, as if she were quite unaware of his presence. Dix Van Dyck drew a revolver slowly and cautiously and held it ready, the butt snuggled against the palm of his hand like the pressure of a friend’s fingers. But there was no apparent treachery in this slow, circular movement of
Señor
Oñate’s. He was simply viewing his victim from all angles. Revenge, after all, to a connoisseur like Oñate is not sweet in the final blow so much as in the delightful anticipation. Still, in the same nodding silence, he went over to the little corner table and sat down in the big armchair. He poured himself a drink of tequila, swallowed it drop by drop, his eyes all the while lingering on the form of Dolores, and then rolled back his head. He might have been preparing for a little
siesta
.

This movement raised his face fully to the light for the first time, and Dix Van Dyck perceived a singular change in the countenance of the great sheriff. It was still round, but it sagged here and there. It was like a balloon from which half the wind is gone. His mouth, usually pursed up at the corners with superfluous flesh, now drooped in those places, and below his eyes the flesh was pouched and purple, as if he had been struck there by a heavy hand. He had the worn, battered look of a man who has
been thumped by a crowd in a riot. His body lived, but his spirit was half dead.

He revived, however, in the presence of Dolores. His very body seemed to puff and bloat out like that of some ancient hero, swelling his chest to relate his exploits at the board of the king’s banquet. New light came in his eye. There was a steady and most unpleasant grin on his lips. At length, he leaned leisurely forward on the table and drew out a revolver that he held daintily poised.

“Is she searched?” he asked.

“We called in the women,” said one of the guards with a grin, “and she’s searched to the skin.”

“You may go,” said Oñate.

“Go?” repeated the guard in astonishment.

“Go!” screamed Oñate with a sudden fury. He beat on the table with the muzzle of his gun.

The guard fled but with a backward eye over his shoulder, like a boy forced to leave pleasant company at bedtime.

“Ah,” said Oñate, “it is good to be with you…alone again, Dolores
mia
.”

She turned to him for the first time, walked to the table, poured herself a very small glass of tequila, raised it to her lips, drank it in small swallows, looking Oñate up and down between them. Not a scared look, certainly. It was rather one of not unpleasant meditation.

He nodded, delighted. “I see it in your snake eyes,” he said with a sympathetic grin, “you are seeing where you can wriggle through the grass. But there is no opening, Dolores, my darling. Every door is guarded, every window. The house is full of men, and they are all warned. They are ready for you. And I am.” He tapped his gun. “So the white dog turned you out. He beat you, and he threw you out into the street, and you come whining to the door of old Oñate?”

Dolores sat down, and, resting her elbow on the edge of the table, she tapped her slender fingers against her chin. All the while her wide, dull eyes surveyed Oñate, like one who looks upon a familiar and wearisome landscape. “Yes,” she said, “he turned me out.” She paused, seeming to hunt for the words that would irritate Oñate the most. “He…used me…and threw me out. He found a white woman more beautiful than an Indian girl. So I came back to my sty. It is true.” And she nodded casually. “Yet, I had tried to buy his love and paid a great price. I had freed Joseph Van Dyck. That leaves the hand of Dix Van Dyck free to take you by your fat throat,
Señor
Don Porfirio Maria Oñate. It is true!”

Oñate blinked, and his face wrinkled like that of a sick man under the knife of a doctor. The exquisite pain, the paralyzing fear left him with a heaving chest. He blinked again, as if to shut out the doom, and shrugged his fat shoulders. “We will forget that,” he said. “First there is the death of Dolores. We will think of that.”

“Why,” said the girl, “think of something so far away? It is very tiresome.”

“Yes,” he said with a sort of vicious wonder, “you came, thinking to escape?”

“I came,” she corrected him, “to see the fingers of Dix Van Dyck sink in your swine’s throat, Oñate. Aha!” She gave a little brief laugh of fierce exultation. “As your eyes grow dim, I will snap my fingers under your nose.”

He shrank away from her in real fear. “You are mad!” he said at last. “You have always been mad. Fool! Do you think I will delay with you? No, no, Dolores, to night is the time! Tonight is your last on earth!”

“It is you who are the fool,” said the girl. “Do you think I would risk myself here without protection?”

“Protection?” he asked curiously. “My men surround you…
mine!
”

“Have you guarded the air above you,
señor
?” And she pointed up.

He drew in his breath with a little gasp of horror, and his round eyes flashed up. In an instant, however, he regained some self-possession. “You are very clever, Dolores
mia
.”

“Listen,” said the girl, “have you heard of the cross of the girl, Jack?”

“The she-devil who took the pardon from the governor? What of the cross? Yes, I have heard of it.”

“It is here,” said the Indian calmly, and she raised the glittering trinket on its chain at the base of her throat. “Are you stronger than this luck,
Señor
Oñate?”

He leaned forward and stared at it with fascinated eyes. “It is true,” he whispered at last. “It is the cross! I have heard it described!”

“And now, Oñate?”

“Dolores, we will try the power of that cross. Now!”

“Bah!” she said scornfully, “you have already wasted much time. You will waste still more, Oñate. You have dreamed of me while I was gone. Is it true?”

“I have wakened in the night to curse you!” he said angrily.

She nodded, satisfied. “There are many things in me to curse. But,
señor
, could you live without your tequila?”

“I have no need.”

“No, you could not. Can you live without Dolores,
Señor
Oñate?”

“You have the eyes of a snake,” he muttered, “but I will not look at them.”

“But you will, Oñate, my fat bird. You will look in the eyes of the snake and wait to be swallowed. Besides, you have not much time to live.
Señor
Dix Van Dyck, remember him?”

The sheriff edged his chair back into the corner and
gripped his revolver with a shaking hand. His eyes wandered past the girl to every side and then came back to her.

“So you see, Oñate, your time of life is short. You will try to make it merry, will you not? With tequila, yes, and with Dolores.”

“You shall die,” he said hoarsely, “by inches! By little inches, Dolores. There is fire…there is the knife. I can use them both.”

She laughed softly. “But not yet,
señor!
No, you will wait a while. It is pleasant to sit here in the garden in the cool with Dolores, is it not?”

“If I have no power myself, I will call a guard. He will do for you what….”

“If you called him, Oñate, could you bribe him with money as much as I could bribe him with this little cross?”

He started to his feet, rolling suddenly from his chair. “It is true,” he cried, half scream and half groan. “They will betray me! It shall be my own hand.”

“It shakes, Oñate, does it not?”

He raised the gun and covered her breast with the wavering muzzle.

Dix Van Dyck, on the roof above, raised his own revolver likewise and drew a careful bead on the point where the fat neck of Oñate joined his body. Yet he delayed his shot for an instant. If he fired, the devil of a girl would be seized by the law.

“Steadier, Oñate, my hero,” she urged.

“Oh, devil,” he breathed. “Oh, devil Dolores!”

“Remember Van Dyck!”

“Now!” he said, and squinted his eyes for the shot but did not fire.

She rose. “Sit down,
señor
.”

She approached him, and he pressed the muzzle of
the gun against her breast. There was no question of missing now, and even from that distance Dix Van Dyck could see the eyes of the girl lighted as if all the fires of a small hell burned green and yellow in them.

“This would be too easy a death for me, would it not,
señor
?”

“Too easy, yes!”

“Then sit down and wait. Think of a better way.”

She laid both her hands on his shoulders and literally pushed him back. He fell with a jar into the chair. And she? She turned her back, deliberately, and poured a glass of tequila that she held to his lips.

It was nature. It was habit. He swallowed a mouthful. Remembering what she was with a start, he raised the gun with a jerk and then turned sad eyes upon her.

“Dolores, you have tortured me.”

“It is ended,
señor
.”

She took the revolver from his hand and laid it on the table behind her. The man seemed to have grown perfectly nerveless.

“Van Dyck!” he whispered and, overcome by the horror, gradually closed his eyes.

At that instant the face of Dolores grew positively demonic, but, when he opened his eyes again, her face was again gentle. “Suppose I save you from him?”

“Dolores!” He clutched her by either arm. “I will robe you in silks…gold on your wrists and diamonds on your fingers…jewels in your hair. You shall walk on the petals of roses and sleep in satins and down. Dolores, Dolores, Dolores! Save me! He is the devil…not a man. He walks on me in my sleep. I die every night. No walls and no guards can save me!”

“I will,” said the girl.

“Ah, God!” breathed the sheriff. “You mock me again!”

“With this cross,” said the girl, “I will save you, my Oñate.”

“The cross?” he whispered, in breathless hope, like a child hearing the tale of a curse—a tale of horror and unreal marvels.

“But the carriage and beautiful horses, Oñate?”

“You shall have them all…all! And horse men…I swear it!”

“If I wish to go north and east to great cities?”

“I will send you. I will take you myself. But the fiend…the devil? Van Dyck…you will keep his hand from my throat?”

Dix Van Dyck did not wait for the answer. He was already working his way across the roof with the gun back in its holster. The return was easier. The guards had ceased walking their beats, as if they realized that there was little to guard against from the outside as long as Dolores was within, and Van Dyck reached the street in safety.

At the hotel he found Joseph and Jacqueline, waiting even as he had left them, and they rose and stood stiffly, faint figures through the dark.

“You could not reach him?” asked Joseph at length.

“I reached him,” said Dix Van Dyck, “and I went away again and left him. I do not need to send him to hell. He is already there.”

The text of the story you are about to read was derived from Frederick Faust’s holographic manuscript. It was written as a sequel to his earlier novel,
Luck
, and appeared serially in
Argosy All-Story
in six parts (1/31/20–3/6/20) under the byline John Frederick, as was also the case for the earlier serial. For no reason that can be readily determined at this late date, following magazine publication it never appeared in book form.
Luck
, as the author intended it, was the first installment in the life of one of his finest and most memorable tragic heroines—Jacqueline Boone.
Crossroads
is the conclusion.

Max Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, Destry, and many other fictional characters popular with readers and viewers worldwide. Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres. His enormous output, totaling approximately thirty million words or the equivalent of 530 ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, and fashionable society, big business, and big medicine. Eighty motion pictures have been based on his work along with many radio and television programs. For good measure he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in more different ways.

Born in Seattle in 1892, orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At Berkeley he became a student rebel and one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. Denied a degree because of unconventional conduct, he embarked on a series of adventures culminating in New York City where, after a period of near starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful popular-prose writer. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, and finally in Los Angeles.

Once the United States entered the Second World War,
Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. In the United States alone nine publishers now issue his work. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world. Yet, only recently have the full dimensions of this extraordinarily versatile and prolific writer come to be recognized and his stature as a protean literary figure in the twentieth century acknowledged. His popularity continues to grow throughout the world.

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