Читать книгу Gunmen's Feud - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 8

Table of Contents

The silence which followed had an acid quality; it seemed to eat into the mind of the stranger and weaken him; presently he moistened his white lips, and whispered a curse.

“Don’t do it,” said the sheriff, shaking his head. “Don’t talk like that, because it always makes me sort of uneasy when a gent cusses me—even an old acquaintance like you, Pat.”

Then he added, after a moment, during which he looked almost longingly at the other: “Well, I guess we’d better be goin’ back. D’you remember that it was in a place about like this that we—”

“Wait!” Pat gasped and reached his hand out toward the sheriff, but before it touched, his fingers relaxed, and the arm remained suspended in midair. “It can’t end like this!” he cried. “It can’t end like this!” His whole body was shaking, but all at once he straightened, and his mustache stopped working and bristling. “You’re waiting for me to break down, are you?”

The sheriff raised a deprecating hand. “A man like you break down? A scholar and a gentleman like you? Sure I ain’t waitin’ to see that. I’d be a fool, wouldn’t I?”

“Ed, it all happened twenty years ago. It’s dead.”

“She’s dead,” agreed the sheriff, nodding.

The other groaned and clenched his fists.

“It takes about twenty years for a good wine to get ripe and all softened down so’s a man can enjoy it,” said the sheriff calmly.

The horse thief appeared to be buried in thought. “Suppose I were to tell you a story of a fellow who was down and out—who’d done some rotten things while he was young—who straightened up and tried to be a man afterward—”

“Go on,” broke in the sheriff. “You was always a fine talker, Pat,” he added encouragingly. “You’d ought to make a good yarn out of it. Let’s hear it, Langley.”

“You know me too well to think I’d whine,” said Pat Langley.

“Sure I do.”

“I want you to see in one glance what you do if you take me into Sloan and drag up that other matter against me. Out in the West Indies on the island of St. Hilaire I have one of the finest plantations in the whole place; I have a wife and daughter.” He drew a second little leather case from an inside pocket. “You’ll see their pictures on one side of the card and the picture of my house on the other.” He handed the case to the sheriff. “I want you to know that you’ll be stepping into the happiest home in St. Hilaire and ruining two lives beside mine. But if you’ll drop this affair, Ed, you’ll step through the doors you see in that picture and halve everything that’s inside. If you don’t want to be near me—and I don’t suppose you will—you get half of my bank account. More than that. You can see my financial statement and make your own terms. I’m not offering this as a bribe. In the first place, I did you a great wrong; I want to make amends for that wrong, and the only way I can do it is to work on the financial end. At the same time, I want you to see that after I wronged you I realized what I had done. I did go straight.”

But the sheriff gave back the unopened leather case.

“I couldn’t look into a woman’s face just now, Pat,” he said gently.

Langley paled as though he had gained a first glimpse into the mind of the other. A change came gradually over his face. The sheriff, watching in fascination, noted that change and dropped his hand for the first time upon his rifle stock; but always he had kept the muzzle directed at the horse thief.

Yet Langley only said: “Throw me the makings, will you? See if I’ve forgotten how to roll ’em.”

The sheriff obeyed without a word and watched him deftly make his smoke and light it. When he had inhaled the first breath Langley seemed to find a new cheer. He raised his head and looked about him as he exhaled the blue-brown vapor slowly.

“Not so bad,” he said. “Better than a lot of the tailor-mades I smoke.” He met the eye of the sheriff. “And now that I’m back in it,” he said, “this same country isn’t so bad. Cleaner air around here than we have in the islands.” He drew a long breath and puffed it out again. “Well, when did you spot me first, Ed? I knew you the moment I saw you, but I depended on the twenty years and this mustache—like a fool! I knew you when I was putting my hands up and I hesitated about making a try with that little necklace of mine. Well, when did you know me first?”

“You’re a hard man, ain’t you, Pat?” said the sheriff quietly. “When it comes to the pinch, wife and child can go hang.”

“You thought I’d weaken, didn’t you?” He chuckled.

“It wasn’t your face that told on you,” said the sheriff, “though it gave me a bit of a shock. Made me start thinking. First of all, when you threw yourself on the ground. That made me guess—that old trick, you know. But all those things were hints pilin’ up in the back of my head. Then I got my first real clue when you twisted your eyes at me when I mentioned La Paloma. Funny way you have of glintin’ at a gent out of the corner of your eyes, Pat. But what sewed the thing up in my mind was the cards. You always used to have cards with you, and if it came to a choice in a pinch you liked to cut for aces.”

The horse thief looked calmly at him and tossed his cigarette butt away.

“Speaking of cards,” he said, “I wonder if she knew that you’d played cards that night?”

The rifle trembled in the hands of the sheriff, but Langley did not wince.

“I was drunk,” the sheriff replied.

The other chuckled. “We’ve all heard that sort of talk.”

Sturgis began to breathe through his mouth, as though he had been running.

“To go back to the beginning,” said the horse thief, “suppose you and I were to have an even break for our guns. Just you and me with nobody to look on. We take anything for a signal to start for the butts—say the next time that hawk screams. And the fellow who drops is left for the buzzards. If you get me—why, you did it making an arrest of a horse thief; if I get you, I take pinto along over the hills.”

“I’d like the idea,” Sturgis sighed. “Heaven knows how I been prayin’ for it twenty years!”

“Good old sport!” Langley said as he rose. “It’s done, then?”

“Wait a minute. In the old days you was always a bit better with a gun than me, Pat.”

“But you’ve had more practice lately.”

“You lie,” said the sheriff, without heat. “You practice with a gun every day of your life. You have to.”

The other flushed, looked swiftly about him, and then saw that he was helpless.

“But aside from that,” went on the sheriff, “I think the way of the law is a pretty good way, mostly. It gets at the inside of some gents in a way that powder and lead can’t. Suppose I was to blow your head off. You wouldn’t feel nothin’. I’d feel sort of better afterward, but what would you feel? Nothin’! But s’pose you get sent up for a little while—for stealin’ a hoss. That wouldn’t be bad. Not the prison, but after you got out, St. Hilaire would have the news. I’d take care that they did. You’re proud, ain’t you, Pat?”

“I’d kill you,” said the other thoughtfully. “I’d kill you as sure as heaven when I was out.”

“I don’t cross no bridges till I come to ’em,” the sheriff replied. “Besides, I know the warden of the state prison. Maybe he’d let me come up and pay you friendly visits once in a while. And then maybe I’d get so fond of havin’ you where I could see you that I’d hate to see you leave. So I might want to dig back twenty years and get something else that would hold you the rest of your life. Or if I got tired of seein’ you that way, I might even get something that would hang you, Pat.” He bit off a large corner of his Virginia leaf and stowed it gingerly in his cheek. “You see how many sides they is to the thing, Pat?” he said gently.

“I see one thing,” said the other, with equal calm. “Twenty years has drilled through your thick head and put some sense there.”

“Well, the day’s wearin’ on. S’pose we start back. I hate to make you walk.”

“Don’t mind me,” said Pat heartily. “I generally walk every day on the island, and I’m in pretty fair trim.”

The sheriff climbed on his horse, and as he did so, the other stepped to the side of the road, whistling, and leaned over.

“Stand up!” called the sheriff.

The other slowly stood up and showed his teeth under the black mustache. He kicked the revolver away. “I almost had it,” he confided to the sheriff.

“My, my!” murmured Sturgis, smiling. “Wasn’t that a close chance, now? I’ll tell a man!”

He motioned down the road ahead of him.

“Certainly,” said the horse thief, “I always like to go first.” And he stepped out into the road.

“The same old Pat,” the sheriff said reminiscently. “You was always prime company.”