Читать книгу Happy Jack - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 7

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The marshal gripped the hard sides of his charger as he spoke, and his heart suddenly sank at the thought of being parted from the mare. She was a dark gray, dappled like a leopard, with four black stockings and a black muzzle. When she was covered with sweat she looked like black velvet all over, and as beautiful as a deer.

She had carried the weight of her master for two long years, and she had carried him so fast and so far that he had done more famous deeds with her beneath him than in all the rest of his career. Once launched on the trail of the fugitive, he could not fail to overtake him, as it seemed, with this gray speedster beneath him. She could endure like the toughest mustang, and she could run like a racer. Only three months before, she had gallantly carried her master while “Texas Joe” Loomis changed mounts three times, and galloped like mad for three days, and galloped in vain to escape from that smoothly gliding Nemesis in the rear.

To the marshal she was dearer than all things in the world. He loved her for her strength, he loved her for her dauntless courage, for her truth to him, her unflagging devotion, and perhaps more than all for a sort of savage interest which she seemed to take in the hunt, as though she herself understood perfectly the importance of her work.

Loving her in this manner, it was typical of the man that he selected as a name for her the most careless appellation that he could think of. He called her Rags! Now, as he made this bet which concerned her destiny, he looked down at her fine head, and wished that he had not been persuaded to speak so soon.

It was far too late, now, however. The cow-punchers had taken up the wager with a shout. It was a most sporting wager on the part of the boy, even though the mare was worth ten times his own horse. He had all the odds against him in his task, all the odds to win in succeeding.

So that chattering cavalcade followed on toward the jail.

One or two galloped away before the group. The rumor of what was happening and of what had happened swept like fire through that town. For the West thrived on rumors, and tales, and deeds of battle. The air they breathed would not have been so sweet, had it not been that some, at the least, were in fear of losing breath and life also any moment.

So the town of Debney Wells turned out to greet the procession.

Children appeared by magic, their bare brown legs raising puffs of dust. And men and women, too, came out to stare, shading their eyes against the slant force of the sun.

The marshal hated this. He disliked public display, but, above all, he loathed the importance which this gave to the event of the day. Plainly not he was the center of attention, but Happy Jack Aberdeen.

“It’ll give the kid a fat head,” said the marshal to himself, “and he’s on the way to that, already. Dang all the fools! Dang all the fools!”

When they came to the jail, he became more furious than ever. He heard a sharp click, and when he looked hastily to the side, he was aware of a tripod, and a black-hooded box upon the top of it, and a man crouched behind the machine.

He had been photographed taking in this prisoner!

If he had obeyed his first impulse, he would have shattered that camera and the head of the photographer with a 45-caliber bullet. He hardly had been so tempted in all his life before. But he restrained himself, and merely gritted his teeth as the photographer stood up.

“I got you that time, Mr. Kinney,” he shouted, and waved his hand in greeting and exultation.

A terrible oath rose to the lips of the marshal, and was checked and forced back. For he recognized Sam Phelps, the editor of the Debney Wells Bugle.

It did not do to toady to the press. The marshal would have been the last man in the world to do such a thing. But he could not help being aware that Sam Phelps was constantly filling columns and columns with the deeds of the great marshal. And when Eastern newspapers wrote up the famous man in detail, after one of his exploits, he always could recognize that the majority of their information was based upon the articles which had first appeared in the Debney Wells Bugle.

It was all very well to despise newspapers, but from their columns and their records, serious historians would draw the true narrative, one of these days. And was he not of sufficient importance to merit a biography? He himself, in his boyhood, had spent many an hour reading of the deeds of heroes, until a strange thirst, and a bitter, burning hunger, invaded his heart and never would quite be satisfied, no matter what deeds he had wrought in this life of his. He found himself instinctively waving at the editor, and saying to him:

“Why, hullo, Phelps, you scoundrel! You got me, this time, it looks like.”

There was an old feud between them. He always refused to sit for a portrait, and the result was that Phelps had hunted him with his camera as desperadoes hunted each other with guns. He had succeeded in getting more than a score of photographs of the great man. He had them enlarged and framed behind glass, and strung them around the walls of his press room. When one of his cubs complained of a difficult assignment, he used to love to point to those photographs.

“There’s a man who wouldn’t have his picture taken. I got him twenty times! Now, don’t talk any more, but go and get it!”

The marshal sometimes threatened to invade that room and tear all the portraits down. But in his secret heart he was pleased to know of those twenty representations of himself. For it is one of the mysterious truths about all men, that no matter how ugly we are, we can always endure looking at ourselves!

“I got you this time,” said Phelps. “That makes twenty-one. ‘Marshal Kinney arriving at jail door with celebrated prisoner.’ How would that be for a caption?”

“Celebrated? This?” said the marshal. And he turned and regarded the boy with a grunt of disgust.

“That’s what I want to hear about!” said Phelps. “Marshal, will you do me one favor? I beg you to do me one favor.”

“Well,” said the marshal, “what is it? I suppose I will. I got nothing agin’ you, Phelps.”

“Well, then, lemme have the story of what happened to Charlie Lake right from the lips of this Jack Aberdeen—and more than that, how he came to make a wager with you—and how Rags was put up for the bet.”

“Is that your idea of a story?” said the marshal.

“Story?” said the other. “I tell you what, it’s the best story that ever came over my desk since the time that you got the Cranmer boys and ‘Tough’ Guinness.”

“Oh, dang your stories!” said the marshal.

“I’ve got your word, marshal!” cried Phelps.

“You’ve got my word. Well, fire away!”

“Now, Aberdeen, let’s have it—right out here before the crowd. Let’s know your whole side of the question.”

“I’ll tell you the story,” said Happy Jack. And he laughed again, in what seemed to the marshal a foolish fashion. “I owed Lake eighty dollars. He came to get it. I didn’t have it. He soaked me; I soaked him; he pulled his gun; I shot him with it. Well, that’s all!”

He laughed again. And so did the crowd, and turned and eyed the disappointed Phelps, whose pencil was poised above his shorthand pad.

“Is that all? What about the bet?” yelled some one in the crowd.

And then a thunderbolt fell.

For Happy Jack jerked his thumb at the great marshal, and announced carelessly:

“Kinney has such a fat head that I’m going to help reduce the size of it. I’ve made the bet with him. My pony, here, against Rags. If you got any money to put down, lay it on me, boys, if you’ll take my word for it. This fellow Kinney is going to be ten years out of date, in another week!”

He laughed again in the same manner, but it no longer appealed to the marshal as idiotic laughter, but as the mirth of a mocking fiend. Fury rushed up from his heart to his head, and then rushed back again, and left him cold with a nameless apprehension.

For the crowd was quiet, awed by his presence, but he heard a bubbling sound of suppressed laughter!

It was not alone the dread lest the boy should escape from him that oppressed the marshal. With bolts and bars and manacles and guards he could make fully sure against that, he thought; but as he listened to the laughing murmur of the crowd, the truth came coldly home to him. He always had told himself that he was a man who despised the mob, and that he cared not whether the crowd worshiped or hated him. He used to think that he rather would have preferred hatred to its mawkish, unreasonable, changing affections.

But now he understood himself for the first time. He had not merely tolerated the articles in the press. He had not really scorned the plaudits of the people.

In fact, they had been the breath of vital life in his nostrils and the savor of existence! He could look back, now, to the hours that he had spent poring over the writings which concerned him.

Dark blood rose hot in the face of the marshal, and he turned in the saddle and looked steadily upon the boy, as he would have looked upon the evil one, not altogether in fear, or hatred, or disgust, but with a mixture of all these emotions.

Then he dismounted and went briskly about his work, for he felt the need of immediate occupation, lest he should say or do something absurd to reveal his wounded pride and dignity. But he could not help knowing that from this moment he was a changed man, and that he had lost his greatest strength, which was his surety in himself.

He conducted the boy into the jail and the sheriff received the prisoner with a faint smile. He had heard the case through the window of his office!

“I dunno that this young feller can be held very long,” said he.

“The judge has the say about that,” said the marshal, “and the judge ain’t going to be here for a spell of days, I reckon! I suppose that you got room for him in here?”

“I got room for him,” said the sheriff, “but I gotta say that it’s sort of agin’ my principles to hold the lad. I know Charlie Lake. He’s been waiting for years for what the kid gave him. Why, man, it was self-defense, wasn’t it?”

The marshal looked earnestly upon the sheriff, and then he said slowly:

“I s’pose that it’s gotta be a choice between what you want and what I want. I say that he oughta stay. You say you won’t take him in?”

The sheriff wriggled in his chair and grew hot. He was a good man, an honest man, a brave man, and a man loved by the voters of the county, but he knew that he could not stand against the marshal. The marshal was a national figure.

“I’ve said my say,” said he. “I ain’t going to block the way of a brother officer. Only you see how I stand about it!”

“I got no doubt that the kid will remember what you’re sayin’ and not hold this agin’ you,” said the marshal, purposely misunderstanding the sheriff. “Now lemme see what kind of irons you got in here.”

The sheriff was silenced by this barbed retort, though it brought him to a fighting heat, and his self-control almost gave way. He merely answered: “There’s two drawers full of contrivances. You take your pick. And there’s the new-fangled cell, too. You might stick him in there, and mount guard in front of it yourself, if you think that he’ll jump out of sight, so soon!”

He got up and left the office. The marshal looked dourly after his colleague, and then he turned to the boy.

“I’m gunna load you down, kid,” said he.

“Go ahead,” answered Jack Aberdeen. “You go ahead and load me down, and when I get ready, I’ll shake off the stuff!”

The marshal began to pick out the proper instruments. He was in no haste. He wanted to make every step a sure one, for it began to seem to him more important than anything he ever had attempted—the safeguarding of this boy! If seven days elapsed and he were not inside the jail, what would people say? Perhaps he could endure their comments, but he knew, now, that he could not endure their laughter.

Despising himself, heavy of heart, savagely he worked on.

Finally he found a pair of cuffs that fitted firmly over the wrists of the boy. He was not so new at his game as not to understand that supple hands can be folded and made smaller than the wrists. However, Aberdeen had always been a working man, and his hands looked reasonably large, and spread by labor. The marshal felt that he could bank upon the manacles holding.

That was not all. He got the brightest and strongest shackles he could find for the ankles of young Jack Aberdeen, and these he locked in place. Then he linked a strong steel chain to a fifty-pound weight, and ran another chain from the ankles to the hands.

This left Aberdeen a certain amount of liberty, but not much. He could move, but only by making as much noise as a dray rolling over a hollow bridge.

The marshal had barely finished this work when he heard a click, and caught a glimpse at the window of the disappearing head of the editor, with his camera.

The scoundrel had climbed up to the window and there taken a picture which would reveal to the entire world exactly the manner in which the marshal was safeguarding this unlucky prisoner. The killing of Charlie Lake would make the boy, and these brutal precautions would call down bitterest condemnations upon the head of William Kinney.

His prisoner seemed to understand perfectly, and he was laughing silently when the marshal turned toward him again.

“They got the news, now,” said he. “Everybody’ll have it, and if I win this hand, Kinney, you might as well quit business and crawl into a hole. I’ll certainly make a sick dog out of you, big boy!”

He laughed aloud, and the marshal gritted his teeth, and then cursed himself because he could not help but show his irritation. The more he felt himself in the wrong, the more cordially he detested this youthful prisoner.

Then he led the boy to the special cell. He himself had devised it, and he felt that it was above all things in the world a safe receptacle into which to pour the life of the most desperate of men.

Once in that inclosure, the wits of the greatest genius could be expended in vain, unless some one deliberately gave him the keys to the cell!

This cell was, after all, a simple contrivance. It consisted merely of a sheet of tool-proof steel—an expensive business!—which coated the walls, the floor, the ceiling of the cell. There was an outer casement, and the steel, in front of this casement, was clipped full of holes. They were enough to let in the air, but they could not be enlarged enough to permit an escape in a month of hard sawing.

There was a similar group of holes in the door, so that the air could readily pass across the apartment. The furniture consisted of little more than a cot.

The place was damp. It sent out a tepid breath of bad air. Grimly the marshal admitted that there was hardly more than enough air to sustain life in the lungs of a small dog, let alone a man.

However, men had lived here before, suddenly losing strength, turning yellow and sick. Let the boy turn the same color; it would not break the marshal’s heart!

He regarded the hard, narrow cot, and nodded again. “There’s your happy home,” said he.

“Is this here the death cell?” asked the boy.

“Get in,” said the marshal.

Young Jack Aberdeen did so, shuffling painfully, with the leaden weight attached to his feet.

And then the marshal noted that his prisoner had taken with him the guitar from the sheriff’s desk. He snatched the instrument.

“There ain’t any need for you to keep the rest of the boys awake with your jingles,” said he.

He regretted his action as soon as it had been performed. He knew that he had given way to a sullen fit of peevishness, and that did not improve his bad temper.

Said young Jack Aberdeen:

“If you’re going to use it, just remember that it’s pitched a mite high, old song bird!”

The marshal turned his back most abruptly.

“I get no light, eh?” said the boy, as the heavy steel doors crashed shut.

The marshal hesitated.

There were in the law certain prescriptions which concerned the portions of light and air to be doled out to every prisoner, but now that he had closed the door, he felt shame to open it again. On the morrow, perhaps, he would give the boy a light in his dark chamber.

Now, without making any response, he turned the keys in the lock, and grimly hoped that that sound would put a weight upon the spirit of the lad.