Читать книгу Slow Joe - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 6

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You can bet that I sat down again, fast. I didn’t say a word. I pulled myself together, and began to watch like a cat, for I knew that Werner was a deep one, a tricky one, and always playing a game. This play of the cards I could not follow. I had a terrible desire to look up his sleeve.

After about sixty leaden seconds, he said:

“It shapes pretty well for both of us, if you see things my way.”

“Yeah. I hope so,” said I, reaching into the dark and closing on nothing at all. “Suppose we begin with what you’ve got on me.”

“The Tolosa job,” said he.

I took a quick look backward. I only had a tenth part of a second to do the reviewing, but I had always felt that was about the slickest job I had ever pulled. I felt so then, as I looked back.

“I don’t know what you mean—Tolosa,” said I.

He looked at me in his considering way before he answered:

“You love emeralds, Slow. And that’s a pity.”

He looked at my hand. So did I. There was a great big flat-faced emerald set in the only ring that I ever wore. I loved that green baby like a sweetheart. It was a blue-green. It was the bluest-greenest that you ever dreamed into.

“Yeah, I like emeralds,” said I. “What about emeralds and Tolosa?”

“There were emeralds stolen out of the bank safe,” he answered. “I have a description of every one of them. I don’t want to press the point, though, unless you’d like to have me examine that one on your hand.”

I blew on the emerald and polished it.

“What’s the use of bothering about little details, Chip?” said I.

“Yeah. That’s the way I feel,” said he.

“Go on,” said I.

“I’m not thinking about emeralds, just now.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Ellis.”

“The devil you are!”

“He ought not to have died,” went on the marshal. “He ought not to have been plugged. He was only a kid and a fool. Ellis was the kind that could go straight. He never was like you.”

I blinked, at this. I suppose every thug always thinks that he has it in him to go straight, sooner or later. But there was something that rang in me like a bell when I heard Werner say that I’d never turn the corner onto the straight and narrow.

“I let them play my hand for me,” said Werner. “That’s what I don’t like. They brought me some information. About Ellis. He was a side line, with me. I wanted to get you and send you up for a long term. You’re the sort of a thug that I don’t like.”

“Why not?” I asked him.

“You haven’t got enough vices,” he answered. “Booze, for instance. You don’t lean on it too hard. You’re the kind that keeps learning and covers up better and better. A yegg like you might go on through fifty years and never be clipped inside the ring. That’s why I wanted to get you. That’s why I framed the job on Mike Doloroso.”

I was amazed to hear him talk like this. I began to wonder if he were drunk. Not with booze, but with fatigue, or mental strain, or something like that. He seemed to be putting everything right out in the clear.

He went on:

“Then this pair of strangers comes along and tips me to Ellis. Well, I don’t mind taking two birds with one stone. I assign that window to them, and they use it to murder Ellis. That’s all it was. Murder. They used me. They played my hand and played it wrong. Why?”

He got out another cigarette. I thought he would never be done with the rolling and the tapping, and the lighting of it. Finally he said:

“I see this job bigger than you are, and I see you as the man to put it through. I want the scalps of those two sons of trouble. I want you to go and get them for me. For the state.”

“Listen, Werner,” I said. “I never knew before how fond I was of you. Now I see that I’ve always loved you practically like a blood brother. Just give me the names and let me loose. I’ll get them for you! But what’s this stuff about the state?”

“If you get them, you’re wearing a cute little steel badge while you work,” said he. “It won’t be any weight for you to carry.”

“A steel badge?” says I, standing up so that the chair fell back against the wall.

“Deputy,” says he. “That, or jail for you, boy.”

I poured myself out another drink, a full one. I put it down. But still my brain wouldn’t clear. I gripped the table by the edge.

“You’re a regular wit, Chip,” said I. “I certainly love to laugh at what you say. Deputy, eh?”

“Yeah, deputy,” said he. “That or the pen.”

“Then you and your deputy and your badge be damned,” said I. “I’ll take the pen, for mine. I’m practically hungering for the pen, compared with what you want me to do.”

He nodded at me, not in agreement, but in thought.

“I always knew you had something in your craw,” says he. “Let’s hear what you’ve got against the law?”

“Why, hardly anything at all,” I told him. “Just begins with a little matter of claim jumping, and then a rich rustler turned loose when the old man had the goods on him. That broke the family the first time. Then my brother railroaded for a killing he was a hundred miles away from. Hardly a thing. But you know. It’s just one of my sore points. I’m funny that way. Just touchy on that point.”

“The brother?” says he.

He cocked his head over on one side and twisted his mouth and screwed up his eyes. It was a pretty fair suggestion of a hanged man. I wanted to get up and slam Werner on his sneering mouth.

“No, not that,” I said. “They just sent him up for life. That was all. Hate to take your time mentioning it.”

“How do you know he didn’t do the killing?” asked Werner.

“Because I was with him,” said I. “But let’s get on to the pen. You see how it is. Just a peculiarity of mine that I don’t like the law. I’d rather step into hell than to wear—”

He stopped me, holding up his hand, small, beautifully made, like the hand of a woman, almost, except about the lean, hard knuckles.

“Don’t say it too hard, Slow,” said he. “Many a fellow is tied by his own words tighter than rope. Wait till I finish. You know Kearney County, don’t you?”

“Do I know myself?” said I, some of my heat fading a little.

“Those two fellows came out of Kearney County,” said the marshal.

“They couldn’t,” said I. “First because Lew Ellis comes from there, and everybody loves him up yonder. Second, because his cousin, Tom Fellows, just about runs things in the county. Nobody from up yonder would want to soak Ellis anyway; besides, they’d be too scared of Fellows. Tom Fellows is a lion.”

“The two killers, they came from Kearney County,” said the marshal.

I lowered my head and looked at him. I saw that he had the facts. I looked back into what I knew of my home county, and my old head spun and got dizzy. I couldn’t put the things together at all.

“Listen, Chip,” said I. “I been pretty wild; they like ’em wild in Kearney County. If they saw me wearing a badge, they’d give me the laugh and the run.”

He held out a little steel shield with a pin inside of it; I almost knocked it out of his hand, and then I saw the blood on the floor. I had almost stepped into it.

“Damn you, Chip,” I said. “Gimme their names! And when I’ve got ’em, I’ll tear off this thing and step on it.”

He put the shield on the table. I laid one finger on it. Then he sighed.

“Their names are Whitey Peyton, and Frank Gregor,” he said.

It knocked my jaw down to hear the names.

“Hey, boy, are you crazy?” I said. “Those two would never work together. Whitey is a regular family member of the Peyton outfit, and they’ve been cattle-warring with the Willow bunch for fifteen years. How could the two of ’em join up on one job?”

“I’m telling you facts. I’m not explaining it,” said the marshal. “If I could I wouldn’t be hiring a thug like you to work out the burrows of those animals. I don’t know Kearney County, and you do. I didn’t love Ellis, and you do. You’ve got the information, and you’ve got the cause. Your price is a ticket out of the pen. Now you know everything that I know, but still you’ve got some marching orders to listen to.”

I dropped the infernal shield into my pocket. It made me sick to touch the thing. They’d worn shields, too, the swine who pinched my poor brother, Dick.

“Go on with your orders,” I said.

“You can’t simply go and grab Peyton and Gregor. I’ve got nothing against them. They simply helped out a United States marshal. So far as the law is concerned, they deserve rewards, not punishment. But I know that they came down here for murder, and I guess there’s something behind it all. You find out what the something is. If they belong to opposite camps, why did the two camps combine? You go on the trail and dig up the material. Get something on them, if there’s anything to get. But mind you—there’s an oath to take first.”

“Oath?” said I.

“You have to be sworn in. The oath goes like this.”

He repeated it. I told him to take the oath to the devil. I told him two or three ways he could take it to the devil. He only grinned at me.

“You’re a conscientious objector, I see,” says the marshal. “Well, then, I’ll simply get your promise that you’ll never pull a gun except in self-defense or to enforce the law.”

He stuck out his hand.

“Wait a minute,” said I, and I had a little think. But the blood was there on the floor, seeping in. So I took his hand and looked him in the eye, and felt something like a harness settle over my soul and my body.

He took a big, deep breath.

“That’s done,” said he. “Mind you, old son, I know it’s a hard job. It’s not finding men. It’s finding something on them. And there you are!”

The door opened. One of the posse looked in.

“Hey, chief,” he said to the marshal, “Ellis is passing in his checks, and he wants to see this Joe Hyde pretty bad. Can he?”

“Hyde is a free agent,” said the marshal. “He can go, if he wants to.”

“Free what?” yelled the other guy.

But he swallowed it. A marshal is not like a sheriff. He has a bigger hand to play, usually. So this rough in the door blinks at me a couple of times and then swallows what he’s learned. He was the one who had asked, earlier, if he should sap me. He didn’t seem to feel so good about me, now.

In fact, he made me walk before him, into the room where Ellis was lying on the bed.