Читать книгу Happy Jack - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 6

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Absolute honesty was with the marshal a matter of professional pride. He held that men lie because they are afraid to tell the truth, and since he never had been afraid, he never had lied. It was true when he was a child, even. He preferred to take a flogging, his teeth set, and his eyes flaming dry, bright defiance, rather than tell a simple lie and escape scot-free. He never had lied to gain favor, and he never had lied to magnify his fame.

If he made a narration of his deeds, that narration was sure to contain not one scruple of exaggeration. In a sense, he was so truthful because he felt that he despised applause and that he performed great deeds not because of the headlines that the papers carried afterward, but because he could give himself a bit of approbation. As a matter of fact, he usually read newspaper tributes to himself with a sneer of scorn; he despised flatterers; he hated the manner in which they magnified his own simple reports.

And, therefore, in this new crisis, the marshal had no intention of covering up the truth. He said to the prisoner:

“You won’t have much trouble about this, I guess. But I want to tell you the facts. You can use them, if you want to, when the judge questions you, or they bring you out before the jury, if the case ever gets that far, which I pretty well doubt.”

The light hand of the boy paused upon the guitar strings.

“Look here,” said he, “there ain’t any use in your parboiling yourselves on account of this scrape. It’s over and done with. Nobody’s going to bother me about it. It was self-defense.”

He laughed a little as he said this, while his fingers drew from the steel strings the almost inaudible murmur of:

He was all broke down, and he had the spavin,

And the size of his shoes, they was number eleven—

“Aberdeen!” roared the marshal.

“Well?”

“Am I a fool already, or are you just tryin’ to make one out of me?”

“You ain’t a fool of my makin’, as yet,” said the boy, with this strange, new insolence of his.

And he laughed again, and looked in amusement at the marshal, and through him. He seemed to be taking him up in his hand, and weighing him, and finding him a thing as light as a dead leaf.

Even the professor could feel the danger which floated in the air, and he looked with a tremor from one of these people to the other. He had lost his glow of pride in the knowledge that his miracle had actually been performed. For now he could see that miracle in operation, and the sight of it dampened his spirit and filled him with awe. The sun fell upon the golden hair of the boy and turned it to fire; his eyes were a blue fire, too, pale and burning. His whole body seemed to the professor like a quivering thunderbolt of energy, swift and strong enough to shatter walls of steel.

The marshal, in answer to the last rude and light remark, returned a scowl. Then he said grimly: “You had eighty bucks to pay off Charlie Lake.”

“Sure I did,” said the boy.

“It disappeared?”

“It did.”

“Who took it?”

“I dunno. I don’t care,” said Happy Jack. “It was due to Charlie Lake. He can’t spend it. So I don’t care what sneak swiped it.”

“I’m the sneak,” said the rancher courageously.

“You’re the sneak?”

“I took that money.”

“Ah?” said the boy.

And he leaned back against the window sill, still touching a harmony upon the steel strings of the guitar.

“I’ll tell you about it,” went on Kinney. “The professor, yonder, took a fancy to you. Thought that there was something to you. I said you was soft. He said that all you needed was something to pull you together—electric spark—I dunno all that he meant. But I gathered that to get you cornered was the main thing. So I thought that Charlie Lake could do the cornering. I was right. He did the cornering. The professor was right, too. When you were cornered, you turned into something new. Well, I’m really the one that caused Charlie Lake to be killed. I played sneak thief and took the money. Here it is.”

He held out a sheaf of money, but the boy shuddered.

“I’d rather keep a dead man’s hand in my pocket than that stuff,” said he. “You keep it, will you?”

And he struck out a ripping discord on the strings with a tear of his thumb across them.

The rancher threw the money upon the center table. “Now, Aberdeen,” he said, “I’ll make you a signed statement of these here facts, if you want!”

“And get yourself slammed in jail, maybe? Or get your title of marshal peeled off your head? What good would that be to me? I ain’t sorry that Charlie Lake is dead. I’d just as soon kill him again. I’d do it for the fun of it—a rat like him!”

And again that soft laughter, easy and light as the laughter of a woman, flowed from his lips.

Bill Kinney moistened his dry lips, as he stared at this handsome boy.

The latter had fixed his attention solely upon the professor.

“I want to know about myself,” he said.

“What can I tell you, young man?”

“Danged if I know. But you knew something. What was it?”

The professor closed his eyes for a moment in thought.

Then he said: “It’s something that I can’t very well explain.”

“Try, though.”

“You want me to even put out guesses?”

“Aye,” said the boy, “I want you to. Because I can’t even guess about myself. Something’s happened. I been high-lifed. I dunno how.”

“I had a roommate in college,” said the professor. “He used to work out for the football team. He couldn’t make it. Everything about him was wrong. His running was too slow. He tackled softly. He couldn’t hit the line hard. He always misjudged punts.”

“That’s a long way from Happy Jack,” growled the marshal, beginning to be impatient.

“Let him alone,” said Happy Jack Aberdeen. “Maybe this is what I want to know.”

“One day on the scrub eleven he was at tackle. The coach was working his star halfback on a certain over-tackle play. So he slammed the star three times at my dub of a roommate. Two times the great halfback went scorching through, stepping on the dub tackle’s face.

“The third time the dub knocked the guard away with his shoulder and hit the star so hard that he didn’t come to for half an hour. The ball rolled away. A heap fell on it. When they pulled the great heap apart, the dub was lying there on the ball.

“Well, he became a star. He only had half a season to play in, but he filled the campus with his fame, I’ll tell you!

“I could go on giving other instances. There are men, for example, who seem to be asleep. Suddenly they write a great book. Something that we don’t know about has happened to change their brains. Something too small to be noticed, let’s say!

“But from that moment on, it’s a new man at work. Walter Scott was over forty when he wrote his first novel, for instance. So was Fielding. They’d done nothing really first-rate, or anywhere near first-rate, before that. Napoleon started his life with a series of ridiculous fiascos in Corsica. Suddenly, at Toulon, he shows that the right combination has been made in his brain. He’s in tune with himself, and instantly he’s great. We see these changes going on all the time.

“It isn’t a frenzy that I’m talking about, though there are elements of frenzy in it. A hundred-pound madman can throw a two-hundred-pound guard out the window. Why? Because our most vital strength is nerve strength. It is the flood of nerve strength that enables a man to rise to a great crisis. A policeman in Pennsylvania was shot through the head—bullet went just under the brain. But he kept on fighting and downed two crooks! I know of a man who plucked out four-by-fours which were freshly spiked down—he wanted to get at his child, who was lodged in the water under a little footbridge. The next day, he could not budge one of those four-by-fours which still remained.

“Ecstasy is the thing. It is in all men. It is the lightning in humanity. If only we can control it and teach it when and where to strike! The great men of the earth have possessed it, mentally, from time to time. A few great athletes have shown it, from time to time. And, unquestionably, something has happened to you, Aberdeen.

“That’s all that I can tell you at present, Aberdeen. I’m going to try to think it over. I can’t give you anything definite, as yet. But you’ve been made a happy man!”

At this strange and half-mysterious doctrine, the boy suddenly broke out into laughter.

“I’ll tell you, professor,” said he, “what you mean is that most of us are trying to run uphill with the brakes on.”

“Brakes?” said the professor.

“Fear, I mean,” said Happy Jack Aberdeen. “To-day I stood there in front of Charlie Lake fair paralyzed. Because I was afraid, my muscles wouldn’t work. But he was a whisky soak. He wasn’t as strong as he looked. Why, his arm was like the arm of a baby. Well, that was when I lost my fear. And that’s why he’s dead, instead of me; and that’s the answer to everything, it looks like, instead of all of the fancy arguments that you have about it, professor!”

He laughed again.

“I feel as though I could bust down a wall,” said he.

“You’ll have a chance,” broke in the marshal sourly. “You’ll be sleeping inside of the jail to-night. Unless you can find somebody to go bail for you.”

“Thanks,” said the boy. “I wouldn’t mind a good, warm jail. I’ve been in one before, and I’ve always liked it fine. Only—what sort of chuck do they turn up at your own private jail, Kinney?”

That familiar name jarred upon the proud nature of the marshal and brought to his face a flush.

But the boy was unabashed; he even turned and winked at the professor.

“We’ll start pronto,” said the marshal. “Go get your blankets!”

“I’ll do that,” said Happy Jack. “So long. I’ll be back in a minute. Do I ride my own cutting hoss in, or do you take me in irons, in the buckboard?”

The marshal hesitated, as though he were on the verge of making some savage retort. But then he answered curtly: “Get your hoss!”

The boy left the room.

The professor got up and began to pace about the room.

“It doesn’t seem possible!” he said. “A trained gun fighter—wiped out by that boy—”

“Lake had it coming to him,” said the marshal. “And no man can keep winning forever!”

“Do you call it mere accident?” asked the professor.

“Dang it, man,” said the marshal, annoyed, “there ain’t any such thing as one of those dead-shot Dicks that people are so fond of talking about. A Colt revolver is a damn good gun, but just the same it’s more of a chance than a poker game. If you land one shot out of six inside of the rim of the target, you’re lucky.”

“Then some people have a great share of the luck,” said Walter Lang, and he smiled. “Including yourself, marshal!”

The marshal shrugged his huge shoulders.

“I ain’t had luck,” said he. “Most of these thugs, yeggs, and gunmen are half filled with red-eye before they begin to get ready for a fight. They prime themselves with alcohol until their brains ain’t worth a cent, and they don’t care whether they live or die. Out come their guns and they start smearing lead around. Somebody gets killed, or laid up. But it usually takes ten pounds of lead to do the trick. I don’t drink much ever, and never when I’m on duty. That’s where my luck comes in.”

“Was Lake drunk, and the boy sober?” asked the professor.

“Lake was after being drunk. That’s the biggest reason, of course.”

“Do you think it’s the only one?”

The marshal made a sweeping gesture. “I don’t want to think no more about it,” said he. “The kid goes to jail. That’s all that I know just now!”

He rose to end the talk and left the room, ordered his horse saddled, and had mounted just as young Jack Aberdeen jogged up on his cutting horse.

Without a word, the rancher turned the head of his own horse toward town, and the boy jogged on at his side.

Up and down they dipped over the ragged country. The afternoon wore late. During the two hours that the ride endured, not a word was said by the marshal, and not a word was said by his companion except that when the horses were going along gently, he would unsling his guitar, and his fingers wandered constantly over the strings.

This minstrelsy made the lip of the marshal curl, for he was not a man to pay any heed to the softer arts; and music, in particular, was something which never had bubbled up from his heart or, at least, passed his lips.

All the way to the town, he was filling his mind with a very strange question:

If this slender youngster had managed to meet and beat down the bulk and the practiced skill of Charlie Lake, what would happen in case of an encounter between himself and Jack Aberdeen?

He wondered, too, if that question ever would be answered. He roused himself from this dream to find that already they were on the outskirts of the town; and, at the same time, he was aware that the boy beside, and a little behind, him was singing gaily, as the thrumming of the guitar swept on.

He noted this, and turning a little, he regarded the seat of the boy. It was a perfect seat. His body gave to the jolting of the horse, and he was as undisturbed as though they were merely walking. Certainly, Jack Aberdeen had his points. Strange that he never had showed the good ones on the ranch, before this.

A cluster of riders turned a corner behind them and overtook them with a rush. They recognized the big shoulders of the marshal and hailed him first. Then they swept around the boy.

“Hey, it’s Happy Jack!”

“Hey, Jack, got anything on for this evening?”

“I’m broke,” said Jack cheerfully.

“We ain’t,” said the others. “You name your brand, kid, and we’ll get it for you. Come along down to Morrissey’s, will you? We need you, kid, to warm us up!”

“I can’t,” said Jack.

“Why not?”

“Ask Kinney.”

They turned with a sort of jerk of surprise toward the marshal. They were as surprised as he was angered by this sort of abrupt address for the famous man of the law.

“What’s up, Mr. Kinney?”

“He goes to jail,” said the marshal.

“Hey! Not Happy Jack! He wouldn’t do anything rough!”

“What’s the charge agin’ him?” asked another.

“Nothin’ but murder,” said Kinney.

“Murder! Him?”

“Charlie Lake.”

“You’re kiddin’ us, Mr. Kinney. The kid, there? Not from behind, anyways? Must’ve been an accident!”

The marshal was a fair man. “They had a fist fight,” said he. “He knocked Lake down. Lake pulled a gun. He shot Lake between the eyes. There you are!”

There was a gasp.

“Lake had it comin’ to him,” said one. “This is gunna be a joke, not a trial, kid. Say, Happy, don’t worry, kid!”

Happy Jack laughed. “I’m not worrying,” said he. “It’s the marshal, here, that’s worrying.”

“What about?”

“He’s taking me to his little old tin jail, and I’ve promised him that I’m going to bust loose from it. That’s all!”

There was a yell of delight from the others.

“Is that right, Mr. Kinney?”

The marshal turned and glowered at the boy beside him. And suddenly he realized that it was a game with this youngster, and that he was pitting himself against the law, its agents, the strong walls of the jail itself, and the force and the wisdom of Marshal William Kinney last and not least of all else.

“I’ll lay my hoss agin’ yours, Kinney,” said the boy, “that I’m outside of the jail in a week, without the orders of the judge, either.”

Kinney was silent, mysteriously enraged by that challenge.

“D’you take it, Mr. Kinney?” asked one of the punchers.

“Sure I do,” said the marshal. “There ain’t any reason why a fool shouldn’t be parted from his money, and from his hossflesh, too. I’ll take that bet, kid.”