Читать книгу Slow Joe - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 10

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Now that I was through with the last will and testament of Lew Ellis in the way that I thought would please him best—if his ghost could watch me—I got old Brindle into the livery stable, hired a hump-backed neck-breaker in his place, and loped out the north road from Kearneyville to the ranch of Tom Fellows. It was only three miles, but I had done my share of riding, recently, and I was tired when I pulled up in front of the ranch house.

Fellows was the strongest man in the county, in the head and in the hand. He was the best rider, roper, and shot. He was the surest hunter, the slickest trailer, the most dangerous fighter. There was no more fear in him than there is in a wolverine. Also, he was the handsomest man, the best dancer, the best singer, the best nature, the truest friend, the easiest enemy. He was everything that is “best” so far as Kearney County was concerned. He could elect a man for sheriff by patting him on the shoulder in public, and he could pull anybody out of office by just keeping silent when others were praising. He never said a bad word about anyone. But everybody seemed to know what he wanted, and everybody jumped to do it.

He had a tidy bit of a ranch that ran along well enough. But the one fault of Fellows was carelessness. Sometimes he would be away for four or five months at a time and leave things in the hands of a foreman. It would have busted anyone else, but, along with the rest of his qualities, Fellows was lucky. He never was broke. He always had money to help a friend, subscribe to a school fund, or give the poor a hand. I say that he always had money to do good, but he never talked about what he did. He was the finest man, up to then, that I ever had known. He was what the kids considered god on earth. It seemed to me as though he must have been going on forever. The fact that he was only thirty-five and looked younger, even, didn’t matter. It merely proved that he was gifted with a sort of immortality, also!

So you can imagine that I stepped soft when I went into the Fellows house. You never knocked at the front door. You just walked in.

It was a little Spanish house, clean, but not too neat for comfort. The rooms were small, rather darkish, and the hall went through into a little patio, where Fellows spent his time when he was at home, and not riding his range. It was a pleasant little court, with a squirt of a fountain jumping and bubbling in the center. The sun was westering. Half the fountain was in shadow. Only the cypress-shaped head of it was nodding in the sun.

Fellows was out there, sitting like the fountain, half in sun and half in shadow. He had on a broad striped mackinaw jacket which was a lot too hot for the day. But weather didn’t bother Fellows much. Neither did clothes. He came home wearing the clothes he had picked up on his latest travels and he kept on wearing them, for a while, until something else came to his hand. Sometimes he would be as flashy as a Mexican dude. Sometimes he would look like an English Lord What-not, with whipcord riding breeches and all that rot.

Once there was a poor fool from Montana who thought Fellows was a tenderfoot and started in to boob him right in the main street of Kearneyville. But that’s another story and a mighty mean one.

What do you think the great man was doing, in his patio? Reading? Playing his fiddle or his guitar—which nobody could make music like him? Or maybe talking to some friends?

No, sir. He was sitting there as calm as a ten year old kid, cracking walnuts and feeding his face with them, and sipping cider out of a big glass mug. He didn’t look up until I was half way across the patio. And then he stuck out a hand to me and gave me the smile that made the whole county love him.

“Can’t get up, Slow,” he said. “Got something weighting me down a little.”

I saw it. It was a cream-gray cat with a sooty muzzle and ears, and soot on the paws, too. And it had pale gray-blue eyes that looked up at me without fear.

“What’s that?” I asked him. “A cross between a coon and a cat?”

“I just got her,” said he. “I’m getting her used to me and the place. They call her a Siamese cat. Look at her eyes, Slow. The color of some of that Chinese porcelain, aren’t they?”

I didn’t know Chinese porcelain from Indian jugs, but I said he was dead right. He was sure to be. Fellows was never wrong.

He told me to sit down, which I did, and eased myself back in the chair and closed my eyes, and listened to the fountain whispering, and felt pretty good, and restful. That’s the way you always felt when you were with Tom Fellows. He said:

“You’re fagged, Slow. You oughtn’t to work too hard. You’re always riding, riding. Here, try some of these nuts. Here’s a whole handful of ’em cracked. Start in on these, and I’ll fix some more. And have a shot at this cider. It’s just right, and just cold, and hard enough to give you a glow.”

He gave me the nuts and offered me the glass mug. That was Tom’s way. I sipped out of my side of the mug, and ate walnuts, and he ate walnuts and sipped out of his side of the mug. We finished it off.

“Will you have some more?” said he.

“You tell me where it is,” said I.

“You’re a good fellow, Slow,” said he. “Right down the cellar, yonder. Right turn at the foot of the steps—well, you know where the ice room is.”

Of course I did. Everybody in the county, almost, knew about the ice room. It isn’t so easy to get ice, in Kearney, but old Tom, he used to spend a lot of time and money and horse power hauling ice from the mountains in the dead of winter so as to make himself a reservoir that would last through the longest and hottest summer. I went into the ice room and closed the door, and I let the cold soak into me for a few minutes, while I lighted a match and looked around me.

He certainly knew how to live. Whiskey, and wine bottles, blue, green, amber, and stuff packed in straw, and about everything that a man would want. He knew how to live, but he was never a hog. Anyone who could call himself a friend was welcome to everything that Fellows owned. I often wondered why he wasn’t eaten out of house and home. I think it was because we all looked after him as though he were a child, in a business sense. If anybody started taking advantage of that open house, half a dozen hard-boiled cowpokes would be apt to call on him and give him some inside information on how hot the temperature could be in Kearney County, even in the middle of the winter.

Well, I found the cider jug, uncorked it, tipped out a new mugful, and brought it back to the patio. Tom was petting the cat, and singing softly to it, and the cat lay out on his knee and closed its eyes, and went to sleep, sound, arching its neck and grinning in its sleep.

When I sat down, he had his smile for me, as usual, but when I offered him the mug, he shook his head, still smiling.

I settled back in the chair, once more. It was one of those things made by the Indians, with supple backs of willow, woven together. It fitted me everywhere, all at once. I put the mug on the arm of the chair.

“Doggone it, Tom,” said I. “I’m so happy that I can’t budge even to roll a cigarette.”

“You stay here a while and soak up some rest—and some cider, Slow,” says Tom. “You’re played out. You’re thinner than when I last saw you.”

That had been about four years before. And I was a little thinner. Maybe five pounds. But how could he remember just how I had looked? That was his way. A hundred people knew him better than I did. That hardly mattered. No one expected to monopolize him. It was hardly a matter of being the nearest. Once inside the door of his mind, everybody was the same to him.

“I’m a little thinner,” I said, trying not to smile with foolish pleasure. “A lot of riding.”

“Making good money now, I hope, Slow?” says he.

I looked hard at him.

“You know what my line is now, I guess?” I asked him.

“Cracking safes, the last I heard rumored. Is that right?” says Fellows.

“Yes. Cracking safes. I’m a yegg,” said I, and waiting, hard and brittle, for the shock of his criticism.

I might have known better. He merely nodded, his eyes as gentle as ever.

“Must be an exciting game,” said he, “and take a lot of skill.”

It thawed me out at once, to hear him speak in this manner. I was ashamed, too, and on the edge of saying something emotional, foolish.

“It’s exciting, all right,” I told him. “It’s rotten, too. Besides, I make money. Then I blow it. Dirty money. A fellow is sort of glad to get rid of it.”

He watched me, steadily, for a moment. I thought he was going to give me advice. He merely said:

“You ought to lie up here for a while, Slow. You’re getting nervous. I don’t suppose that they have anything on you, up here?”

I laughed.

“Nobody has anything on me, now. Nobody, anywhere. Look at this!”

I fished the infernal badge out of my pocket and slipped it onto the table. He didn’t exclaim. He just picked it up, and looked at it, as much at the back as at the front.

Then he put it back.

“That’s useful,” said he.

“And I’m going to use it,” said I.

His eyebrows raised just the shade of a flicker. I broke out:

“You think I’m a hound, Tom. Don’t you do it till I explain. I’m on a one-man trail. When it’s ended, I’m through. I had to take this to keep myself out of jail, and get a crack at a pair of thugs that cracked one of my best friends. That’s why I’m here to talk to you. You’ll help me. Tom, Lew Ellis is dead!”

He lifted the cat off his knee and put it on the ground. He leaned a bit across the little table.

“My cousin Lew is dead?” said he.

“Yes,” said I.

Calm and controlled as he was, I expected an outburst, then. But I was wrong. He merely stared for an instant in a way that was hard for me to endure. Then he settled back in his chair and began to make a cigarette. His fingers were perfectly steady. I admired him more then, I think, than I ever had done before. And I had a sort of pity for Whitey Peyton and Frank Gregor.

“Do you know who did it?” he asked me.

I gave him the whole story, in detail—the place, the shooting, the marshal, the names—Whitey Peyton and Frank Gregor. He said nothing, till I had ended. Then, merely:

“Through the back, was it?”

The quiet way of putting it didn’t fool me. I shuddered a little. Not many men ever had faced Tom Fellows. No one of them had lived to tell how the thunderbolt struck them.

“Through the back,” I hardly more than whispered.

I waited for more words, and, when they failed to come, I grew so nervous that I carried on.

“What excited Werner was not the killing of Lew,” I said. “You know Werner. He’s a fish. There’s no warm blood in him. He wouldn’t care much about the killing of twenty Lew Ellises. But he smelled something deep and black, behind this killing. He seemed to think that there must be something behind the job, getting one man from the Willow gang, and one man from the Peyton outfit, and putting them together to kill poor Lew. That’s why he put me on the job, and turned me free with a badge to do the trick. Because he knows that I understand things up here in Kearney County. I don’t think he’s so much interested in pinning something on Gregor and Whitey. What he hopes is that I’ll unearth the fox that started the trouble. And by thunder, Tom, if there’s anything in the idea—and Werner is no fool—you and I together ought to be able to go a long way!”

“Somebody behind them,” nodded Fellows. “Of course there’s somebody behind them. No Willow man ever pulled with a Peyton, before. Who could it be?”

He looked up at the fountain head. Only the top half of it was silver in the slanting sunlight, now. I had such a faith in Fellows that I half expected him to sit there and think the whole thing right out for me. At last he said:

“You were Lew’s friend, Slow. You’re showing it now. I won’t forget! But what’s the first thing? To slip onto the trail of Whitey and Frank Gregor. I’m not very familiar with them.”

“You wouldn’t be,” I told him. “They’re a low cut. Whitey is the worst of his family. He’s done time. He’s done it for manslaughter, and he should of hanged for the job. He’s a little runt and gets his name from his blond hair. He’s got an upper lip swollen and thick. Looks as though he’d been stung there by a bee. Matter of fact, I think it’s some sort of a growth.”

Fellows shook his head.

“Don’t remember him,” he admitted.

I didn’t expect him to. He either let people inside his house and his mind, or else he didn’t know them at all. He was all ready with the smile and the nod that made the whole county love him, but, as I said before, there were not only about a hundred men he really knew.

“Frank Gregor,” I went on, “is a different style. He’s a foreigner of some sort. Sort of Hungarian or something. Big cheek bones, and slant eyes like a Chinaman. Narrow shoulders, and long arms, and strong as a gorilla. Dark skin. Dark as a Mexican’s.”

Fellows shook his head again.

“Zip!” he called.

In came Zip. He was a funny one. No one could tell whether he was Tom’s overseer, house-mozo, private secretary, or what. Nobody could tell what his blood was, either. He was the build of a Navajo, straight and slim; he had the round face of a Mexican peon of the coldest blood; he grinned like a Jap, more with his eyes than his mouth; he was a shadow with his feet and a cat with his hands. Nobody could understand why Fellows kept him. He looked like poison. We all thought Tom kept him on to keep him from starving. Nobody else would have given him anything but the door.

But, because of Tom, we all had to treat Zip as well as we could. I had to get up and shake hands with him, while he asked me in his pretty good English and very funny accent if I were well, and hoped that I had enjoyed happy years since he last saw me, and admired the way my shoulders had broadened.

He was as polite as a woman, or a minister soliciting funds. I gave him a couple of grunts. It was all that I could find in my pocket, just then.

“Zip,” said Fellows, “you know everything.”

Zip opened his hands and turned them upside down. That was his way, I suppose, of indicating that he didn’t know much of anything at all.

“You know Whitey Peyton and Frank Gregor?” asked the boss.

Zip looked toward the fountain. It had lost the sun and was just a streaking of dull gray pencil strokes against the wall. His forehead wrinkled like the forehead of a cat.

“Yes,” he said. “Now I remember them both.”

“Where did you see them last?”

“Peyton was in Kearneyville. I saw him going into the First Chance saloon when I drove out with the groceries this morning.”

I don’t know how to spell out the sound of his lingo. The “ing” of morning was really more like “eeng.” “Him” was “heem,” and there were a lot of other funny pronunciations.

“And Frank Gregor?”

“I pass him on the road, too. He is riding out from town. He turns off on the road toward the Willow ranch.”

“Thanks, Zip,” said Fellows. “This cider is prime. Have some?”

“It is too early for my drinking,” says Zip, and, seeing that he’s not wanted any more, he backs out, bowing. He always made his exit like that, damn him!