Читать книгу The Blue Jay - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 5

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He said: “Now, big boy, you figure that this is all pretty queer, and after I’ve handed out enough money to dress you up, you wonder what I’m going to try to get out of you. Ain’t that right?”

“I dunno,” says I, “but maybe it’s just because you’re a nacherally generous chap and you’re willing to let bygones be bygones.”

Because, you see, I wanted to bluff him out and make him think that I was about ten shades simpler than the fact. But he just leaned a bit over the table and puffed out a cloud of smoke and grinned at me through it.

“You lie like hell!” says he.

And I couldn’t help grinning back.

“Maybe you and me are gunna be able to understand each other,” says I.

“I guess we are,” says he. “I hope that we are. But the first thing for you to write down in red is that I haven’t forgot a thing. I still wear a strip of tape on my side where you busted me in the ribs, and after I take that tape off, I’ll still remember. I’m not a friend of yours, big boy, and don’t you forget it.”

“Randal,” says I, “for a crook, you talk like an honest man. You sort of warm up my heart. Now start going and spill the beans. You want my scalp, and you’ve bought me a new outfit. When do you pull the knife?”

He grinned again. He seemed to like this aboveboard talk as much as I did. Then he said: “I don’t know when the scalping will take place. You’re a pretty hard one, Kitchin, and I don’t know just how I’ll be able to go about cracking you. But in the meantime, I have to forget about what I want to do to you. I have to think just about what you can do for me.”

“Go on,” says I. “This sounds all better and better, I got to admit. Where does the music and the dancing begin?”

“Poison is bad stuff,” says he, “but when you want to get rid of the ground squirrels, it has its uses—and you’re the poison that I want to use now. You hear me talk?”

“I hear you talk. You got a poison job and I’m to be the goat. Go ahead!”

“That’s exactly it,” says Randal, working into the fat of his cigar and enjoying it with his eyes half closed. “I’ve got a bad job on my hands and I need somebody like you. But first, I have to put the cards on the table. Not that I want to, but that I have to in order to get you interested.”

I nodded. It looked pretty clear that he was talking honest. Not because he liked honesty, but because he saw that it was the only policy that would work in this case.

So he went on to say that he had come out of a family where everybody was pretty well fixed, and that when he was a youngster, just out of college, his dad had set him up in business and given him a flying start. But his ways weren’t saving ways. He liked the things that money give you but he didn’t cotton to the ways that money is made. So, pretty soon, he went bust.

Right about then, his father went on the rocks, too, and it busted the old man’s heart. He died and there was nothing in the estate for young Randal, so he looked around and got him a job on the side in the police force of the big town, without letting any of his family know what he was doing. Maybe it was take a thief to catch a thief. Anyway, he done pretty good as a policeman and worked up to a pretty good job as a sergeant, when he got word that his dad’s brother, Stephen Randal, had died, and lacking any other heirs that he was fond of, had split his cash between Harry Randal’s brother and sister and what he left to Harry (my friend) was his ranch.

It was a going ranch and very prosperous, and when Harry had a look at it, he felt that everything was pretty fine for him. Then, about a month after he took possession, over came his grandfather, Henry Randal.

Says the ex-sergeant: “This old goat, my grandfather, is one of those foxes that lose their strength when they get old but that don’t lose their wits, y’understand? He has about three millions in land and money, and when he visited me, he opened up and showed me his bank account and the statement of the stocks and the loans that he had outstanding. It was a list as long as your arm, I tell you! He said to me:

“ ‘Harry, I think that you’re a bright boy, but I don’t know about your working qualities. This ranch of your uncle’s was always a hard proposition to make pay. Your uncle did well here because your uncle was a man who worked about twenty hours out of every day. One reason that this ranch is hard to make pay is that, though the grass is good here and there is plenty of water for the cows, the ranch backs up on a regular hole in the wall country, and it’s pretty hard to keep the rustlers from edging in and getting away with the cream of the calf crop every year. Your uncle Stephen managed to scare the rustlers off because he was a hard-boiled fellow, as maybe you know, and they feared him morning night and noon, and don’t you forget it! But, Harry, I don’t know that you’re going to do so well. You are bright, but I don’t see you working twenty hours out of every twenty-four. You are brave enough, but I don’t know that you’ll make the rustlers lose any sleep. So you see that I understand what troubles you have ahead of you.

“ ‘Now, Harry, I’ve showed you a property worth three millions. I can go another step and tell you something else, and that is that I don’t like your brother. He’s gone in for a banking job in a city; and I hate the cities and the people that stay in them. Your sister has married a fat-head who doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. And neither of them are going to get a penny of my money. That leaves you, Harry, as the sole natural heir, so far as I’m concerned! But, mind you, I have a lot of doubts about you; and the way that you can clear those doubts up is to take hold on this ranch and make a paying proposition out of it. Every quarter I’m going to send out an expert accountant that I can trust to go over your books, and if those books don’t balance on the right side, you’ll hear from me to the effect that you needn’t worry about your inheritance any more. But, Harry, if you can take hold of that ranch and work it satisfactorily to me—and well enough to make a real profit out of it,—you are going to get every penny of my money. You understand? I have a heart that is due to stop working in about a year or two. I haven’t any illusions about my future, at all. I’ll die within about twelve months or two years, at the outside, and I want to leave my fortune in one lump to a man who can take good care of it. Think it all over, my boy, and when you’ve finished thinking, start in and work like the devil. You have to have patience, courage, and brains, and strength to win out. What your other moral qualities may be, I don’t know, and I don’t give a damn—I’m not any saint, myself—but if you can make this ranch pay, you’re as good a man as your uncle Stephen was, and he was my favorite son.’

“Right there he finished. He wouldn’t stay to dinner. He got onto his horse in spite of his eighty years and his bad heart and he rode twenty-five miles back to his own ranch. And there you are, Kitchin. You know me. You think I’m a crook. Maybe I am. I know you. I know you’re a crook, too, and there hasn’t been time for you to let your hair grow since you got out of the pen. Besides that, you hate me because I made things hard for you in the jail, and I hate you because you broke a rib for me and fractured a good deal of my self-respect. Very well. Let’s look at the other side of the picture.

“You’re broke. You need a job. You know the cattle country and the cattle business. I got that much out of you, listening to you in the jail. On the other hand, I’m in a bad boat. I have a big ranch, and I’ve loaded up my staff of cowpunchers with regular two-gun bad-men—hard-boiled eggs with reputations that need a shorthand reporter working a week to write them up. I got those hard fellows because I wanted to run out the rustlers in the backcountry. You see? But now that I’ve got them in, I’ve found out that they work hand in glove with the rustlers themselves. At least, that’s my suspicion. I dread the next round-up, because I know that it’s going to show me short of hundreds of cows—and that will be where my pretty dream busts all to pieces and the three million goes up in smoke.

“I got my place full of these hard-boiled fellows, but now that I have them, I can’t run them. If I fire them, they’ll simply go over to the rustlers and I’ll be in worse than ever. Fire one, and they’ll all quit, because they’re as thick as thieves. I can’t show my face in the bunkhouse without getting laughed at, now. I’ve hired three ranch-managers in the last three weeks, and not one of them has lasted twenty-four hours with that crew of yeggs.

“Very well. What I want is a two-fisted, two-gun fighting fool who will beat that crowd into order and make them like it! I’m willing to take a long chance and try you out. I’m desperate, and that ugly mug of yours looks good to me, right now. What do you say, young feller? What do you say to taking on the job, Kitchin?”

I rolled this idea over my tongue. It sounded good and it sounded bad. I had my two hands, and they were pretty strong hands. What with the life I had led, and the last two years of hard labor in the prison, with boxing every week, I was as hard as nails, and there was two hundred and twenty pounds of me to be hard. No, I didn’t worry about what would happen if it came to a hand-to-hand rough and tumble mix-up. But where would I be if the guns were pulled? I was never any hand at guns, as you may have gathered from what I’ve said about revolvers before, and if some handy two-gun dick was to bob up in a nasty humor, where would I be? Nowhere, of course! However, there is nothing like a hard job to make you rise out of yourself. This looked to me like a lost cause, and there is enough Irish in me to make me like lost causes.

What I couldn’t really do, I might be able to bluff through. I said to Randal:

“Well, where do I get off? I get a year or so of bullet-eating, and fighting and excitement. And after that—?”

“I’m glad to see that you’re a practical man with an eye on the future, old son,” says this Randal. “I’m mighty glad to see it. It proves to me more than ever that you and me will get on. And now, what do you say your reward ought to be?”

I thought it over. As the copybooks say, there ain’t anything like hitching your wagon to a star.

I said: “It looks to me like your main job is being a grandson, and my main job is everything else. Well, Randal, I suppose that the best that I can ask from a hard customer like you is a fifty-fifty split.”

Randal grinned. “You get half of the three million and I get the other half?” he says, very soft.

“That’s about it,” said I.

He shook his head. “Guess again. No, I’ll make you a proposition and a big one. That ranch I’m on is a damned good thing—for the right man. Uncle Stephen cleared fifty thousand a year for the last ten years that he was on it. Now, old timer, what I say is that if you can make the ranch pay for me, you can make it pay for yourself, and if this game works, I take the three millions, of course, and you get the ranch. You can’t budge me a cent higher than that!”

I knew he meant what he said. I leaned back in the chair and sighed.

“All right,” said I. “Put that in writing, and—I’m ready for a cigar, now!”