Silvertip's Strike (3 page)

“He's not a cur. He's a man,” said Silver. “And I'd rather murder a man than shame him.”

They sat for a time in the office. Wycombe drank more of the old rye whisky. Silver smoked cigarettes and did the listening, as a rule.

He had merely said: “Let's find out why the pair are after you. It's quite a time since you were in the games where you rubbed elbows with the pair of 'em. Two or three years, I should say.”

“All that matters,” said Wycombe, “is that they're after me, and that you know what they look like.”

“No,” said Silver. “I need to know more.”

Wycombe curled his upper lip to speak, and once more the lip stayed curled on the projecting teeth while Wycombe changed his mind about the words he was to have spoken.

“Well,” he said at last, “you won't be a hired man. You're going to have your full share in the show.”

He struck out his jaw after the way he had, and tossed back the blond hair.

“I'm sorry I got sore in front of the girl,” he said suddenly. “You think she noticed?”

“She noticed,” said Silver.

“What did she look like?” asked Wycombe.

“Frightened,” said Silver.

Wycombe lolled back in his chair, suddenly at ease.

“It don't do any harm to throw a scare into a jane,” he declared. “Let 'em know that there's a real man around, and they like it all the better. You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” said Silver, probing the dark and mean soul of the man with a steady eye.

But Wycombe failed to understand the glance. He went on: “You know how it is. A girl likes to see a man that's up to something. She doesn't want to have a yellow pup around. She's always liked that foreman of mine pretty well. She'll hate his heart from now on. Eh?”

“Perhaps,” said Silver.

“They know my record, around here,” went on Wycombe. “They know that I'm no soft-handed baby. Eh?”

“They ought to know that.”

“But, going back a little — I'm kind of beat by you, Silver. You throw ten thousand dollars out the window?”

Silver shrugged his shoulders.

“I want to be my own man,” said he. “I want to do as I please. And I don't want blood money. I never took any, and I don't want it.”

“But you'll hire out — you'll stay here, I mean — and keep an eye out for me?”

“I'll stay here — for a while. If Morrie Delgas and Harry Rutherford show up, I'll try my hand fighting for you. I'll work for you as though you'd paid me the money, Wycombe — unless you start kicking things around.”

“Kicking you around?” said Wycombe, laughing. “I'm not a half-wit, old son.”

“Let's hear the story of why the pair are on your trail.”

“Why pick on that? Why does it matter?”

“Because,” said Silver, “the cause that puts a man on a trail is the grindstone that sharpens the edge of him. I want to know what sort of a temper and edge these fellows are wearing.”

Wycombe considered gloomily. He made himself a cigarette and then remarked:

“You know Gold Gulch?”

“Yes.”

“Know Fourth Street?”

“Yes.”

“Know the pawnshop on the corner?”

“Pudge Wayland used to run it.”

“That's right. Know anything more about Pudge?”

“He was a crook and a fence.”

“He was a crook and a fence, all right,” said Wycombe. “Know what happened to him?”

“He was shot.”

“By whom?” asked Wycombe.

“I never heard.”

“Nobody else did, except a few. I'm the fellow that killed him.”

Silver actually sighed with relief.

“Is that what's behind this trail that Morrie Delgas and Rutherford are on?”

“That's it!” said Steve Wycombe, brightening. “I ought to have a medal and a vote of thanks for getting that fat Gila monster out of the world, instead of inheriting trouble about it, eh?”

“It seems that way. How did the thing happen?”

“I'd had words with him. It was a couple of years back. I'd had words with him. About nothing much. Just about a loan he'd made me on a gold watch. I was sore. The next time I saw him, I was coming out of the mouth of an alley. It was night. I saw the fat back of Pudge Wayland come across the street. I sang out and swore at him. He whirled around. I was drunk. I was on a mean drunk. You know, the kind when you don't know what you're doing. I thought I saw a gun in his hand. I shot him dead. That's all.”

He stuck out his lower jaw and stared at the floor.

“That's all — except that he wasn't even wearing a gun?” suggested Silver.

“The fool,” said Steve Wycombe, “should ‘a' had one on, anyway. There was a witness, y'understand? A sap of a no-good sneak thief. He saw everything. He spotted me. I had to give him a regular pension to keep his mouth shut. And he went off into Mexico, where he'd be safe in case I decided to pay him the rest of his pension with a chunk of lead. He stayed down there and collected my checks. Just like that. And then the blockhead goes and gets into a row, a while ago, and gets himself knifed up, and the doctors say that he's going to die, and he lies there on the floor of a saloon and tells what he knows to the fellow that knifed him. Makes a confession, d'you see? And the fellow that knifed him is Harry Rutherford, and with Harry is that Morrie Delgas.

“Well, this is how the thing all hitches together. That Pudge Wayland was a fence, and you know it. And he'd done a lot of work for Delgas and for Rutherford, both of 'em, because they were working hand in glove. And when Wayland died, he had a whole slew of stolen goods on his hands, and a big pile of it belonged to those two thugs.

“You see what had happened? I bump off Pudge Wayland. His heirs get everything in his shop — and it's a ton! They clean out his safe. They get themselves rich, and gyp Morrie and Harry out of a whole little fortune in honest stolen goods they'd given to Pudge. That must have been the way of it.

“Anyway, my man lies there on the floor of the cantina and talks his fool head off, and he sees that pair shake hands over him and swear that they'll go and bump off Wycombe, just to even the account. They'd always hated me, anyway, since a little poker game we once played together. And then the fool fellow, he doesn't die, after all; but he gets better, and he's honest enough to write me a letter and tell me how he happened to put those two bloodhounds on my trail. But you see the funny part?”

“I don't know what part would be funny to you,” said Silver.

“Why,” said Wycombe, “ain't it a scream that'd curdle your blood to think of me bumping off a fat fool like Pudge Wayland and then getting a pair of wildcats like those two dropped right down my back?”

The evening came on, and Jim Silver was glad of a chance to get out of the tobacco reek and whisky smell of the closed house into the open. Besides, there was something unusual — rain promised over the desert, and thunder bumping and rumbling in the sky just like carts going over iron bridges.

Steve Wycombe went off by himself for a few moments, and Silver was gladdest of all to be alone. He wanted to do some thinking. He had come to the hardest moment of all, which is when a man tries to untangle his own actions and discover the motives of them. He kept telling himself that he was a fool to have bound himself to fight for this fellow Wycombe and, above all, to have bound himself against such formidable men as Morris Delgas and that ravenous ghost of a man, Harry Rutherford.

Certainly it was not compassion for Wycombe that kept him on the place. He could hardly put his finger on the cause until he saw young Dan Farrel walk from the first corral toward the bunk house. Then he could remember and be sure that it was something about Farrel and the girl that had turned the scales and induced him to stay. Why?

Well, he could not say exactly. He was simply a prospector in the land of trouble, and there seemed to be a rich strike of danger and complications straight ahead of him.

A pair of cow-punchers came away from the horse shed and ran sneaking up on their foreman. They were almost on him when he sidestepped. There was a swift flurry of action, an uproar of laughing voices, and the foreman went on, leaving his two men to pick themselves up from the ground. Jim Silver was pleased enough to smile. He waved Farrel over to him.

“What do you say about rain, Farrel?” he asked.

Farrel shook his head. “It's the wrong season,” he declared. “You don't know how rain comes here — just a few drops at a time — just enough to keep the lips wet and the patient from dying. Just enough water to keep the grass from dying clear down to the bottom of its roots. This is a dry ranch, Silver!”

He nodded and smiled as he spoke.

“You like it.” said Jim Silver. “There's something about it you like, or that you expect to like later on.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you'll put up with a good deal in order to stay on it. Why, Farrel? There are plenty of jobs everywhere for good cowmen.”

Farrel stared at him. Then turning toward the foothills, he waved his hand west and north and east.

“You see how those mountains are heaped up in three bunches? Over there to the east are the Rendais — that's old Mount Kendal back there in blue and white, just on the right. Over here, straight north, that second bunch make up the Humphreys Mountains. I don't have to tell you which is Mount Humphreys itself. Look at the way it goes jump into the sky! Now, yonder on the left, right over there bang against the west, you see the biggest of the three bunches? Those are the Farrel Mountains.”

Silver looked not so much at the silhouette of ragged blackness in the west, not so much at the three vast masses of cumulus clouds which were blossoming over the three groups of mountains, as he did into the lean, brown face of Dan Farrel. For it seemed to Silver that some of the fire and grandeur of the sunset mountains was reflected in the face of the cow-puncher.

“I see,” said Silver. “They were named after one of your tribe?”

“Great-grandfather. Ever since his day there's always been a Farrel on this ground.”

He hooked his thumb over his shoulder.

“It isn't the house that matters. I don't give a hang about that. It's the ground that counts. I've gone away and worked on other places — places on the ledge of the desert, like this, with mountains close by that were a lot bigger and finer than those three outfits — but I never found a place that fitted into my head the way this one does. Every time I lay an eye on those mountains, it's as though I'd daubed a rope on a maverick and added it to my herd. I tell you what, Silver — it may seem a funny thing to you, but it's true — it seems to me that I know every wave of the ground off there to the south from the ranch house. I know just where the waves of the land are running, every one of 'em.”

“How did the Farrels lose the place?” asked Silver.

“My old man gambled it away to Wycombe's old man, that's the whole story.”

“You hate to leave it?”

“The way you'd hate to stop breathing.”

“Well,” said Silver, “it looks as though you'd have to go.”

“Does it?”

“On account of the girl.”

“What d'you mean?”

“I've been talking to Wycombe, and he wants her. If he thinks you're in his way, with her, he'll cut your throat. He'll fire you off the ranch, at least.”

“What makes you think that there's anything between the girl and me?” asked Dan Farrel.

“I saw her turning white and pink, to-day in the kitchen. Farrel, you'll have to move.”

Farrel took off his hat, mopped his forehead, and then stood with the hat crushed in his two hands. Slowly his glance went across the mountains from the east to the west, until he was facing the last fire of the sunset. He said nothing but, after a moment, he walked away and left Silvertip in profoundly gloomy thought. Tragedy was not ten steps away from the Wycombe ranch, he felt, and it was probably even nearer than those expert gunmen, Morrie Delgas and Harry Rutherford; in fact, it probably was stepping in the boots of Dan Farrel.

Nothing like this had ever come into the ken of Jim Silver.

Through the open kitchen window, he saw the girl moving back and forth rapidly, with the haste of a cook who is making the last preparations for the service of a meal. He went to the window and leaned an elbow on the sill. The girl was pouring the water off a pot of boiled potatoes; a cloud of steam rushed up from the sink about her shoulders and head. Then she spilled the potatoes into a great dish.

“Suppose,” said Silver, without an introductory word, “that a fellow had a good pair of hands, plenty of work anywhere he wanted to find it, and a girl willing to travel anywhere in the world with him; couldn't he be happy off the home ground?”

She had turned half toward him, though without looking into his face. It was as if his words had arrested her whole mind so that a greater and a greater tension was put on her. He saw it in the stiffening of her body, in the way her head lifted. Afterward, she came to the window to confront him closely.

“How much has Danny told you?” she asked.

“Not as much as I told him,” answered Jim Silver. “Do you know how close you are to trouble?”

“From Steve Wycombe?” she asked.

“He's going to ask you to marry him. How long can you put him off? He's used to having his own way.”

She took a deep, quick breath. The shake of her head was a shudder through her entire body.

“I don't know,” she answered. “I can't get Danny to leave the place.”

“You'll have to,” responded Silver. “You'll have to persuade him fast, too. Wycombe wants you. He wants you as much as he can want anything. If you put him off, he'll be suspicious. If he grows suspicious, he can't help finding out that there's something between you and Farrel. And if he guesses that — ” He paused.