Читать книгу Valley Thieves - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 4

Table of Contents

HARRY CLONMEL—we all learned his name shortly after we got into McRae’s place—was flush and treating the crowd. He laid down his money as though it were dirt, while my worried mind kept translating those dollars into bacon, blankets, and beef on the hoof. You could see that money was not what Clonmel wanted to take from the world. He set up a couple of rounds and then drifted back into the long, narrow game room at the back of the saloon. In five minutes he had the games going, and McRae appeared from nowhere, going about in his usual down-headed way, looking up with his suspicious and sullen glances.

“Somebody ought to tell Clonmel that McRae’s the brother-in-law of the sheriff,” said Doc Mitchell to me.

“What good would that do?” I asked Doc. “You wouldn’t show cake to a baby, so why now show trouble to Clonmel?”

Mitchell chuckled at that. But I’ve regretted since that day that one of us didn’t give Harry Clonmel some good advice before the crash came. However, there was not a word said, and in a little while, Clonmel was bucking roulette and making a big play. He sluiced out the money with both hands, won a thousand, lost a thousand, kept right on losing.

“I wonder if that’s honest money?” I said to Mitchell. “It doesn’t seem to have any weight with Clonmel!”

He’d struck a bad losing streak, as a matter of fact. McRae had sent his regular dealer and croupier off the job and was spinning the wheel himself, seeming to despise the coin he was taking in. But I saw his nostrils begin to flare. As a matter of fact, I think that Clonmel pushed five or six thousand dollars into that machine before he stopped, all at once, rubbed his knuckles across his chin, and laid a sudden hold on the machine.

It was bolted into the floor, of course, but that didn’t hold it now. The pedestal tilted. The bolts came ripping and groaning out of the wood.

I looked at McRae and saw him snap out a gun. Well, I had been expecting that, and I just grabbed his gun wrist and said:

“He’ll pay for the damage, Denny.”

“Blast you!” said McRae to me, but he didn’t try to free himself.

The roulette outfit went over with a crash; the cowpunchers cracked the roof open with their yells. And then I heard Harry Clonmel lift his voice. The boom and the ring of it lodged somewhere in my mind so deeply that I can still hear the roar.

“Crooked as hell!” he shouted. “There’s the brake McRae’s been using!”

We could all see it, fitted under the floor boards, with the pin for his foot’s pressure sticking up a trifle through a crack. A light touch on that lever would put the necessary drag on the wheel at the right instant, as the whirling died-away to slowness. The weight of a breath could control the roulette wheel at that stage.

I couldn’t believe what I saw. I had never liked McRae. Nobody ever had. But it wasn’t possible, you’d say, for a fellow to be raised in a town from his boyhood and then install crooked machinery to make sure of stealing the money of his friends. Stealing? Why, a thief is an honest man, a hero, and a gentleman, compared with a dirty snake who cheats at a game of chance.

The impossibility of what I was seeing there under the broken flooring turned me numb and dumb. It froze up the rest of the men, and that gave McRae a chance to be a murderer as well as a sneak. He got his hand away from my grip, pulled up the nose of his Colt, and fired pointblank.

He could not miss, you’d say. Not a target as high and as wide as Harry Clonmel. Besides, McRae was known as a fighting man. It was said that the only reason the sheriff let McRae marry his sister was that he was afraid of having trouble with Denny. And we all knew that McRae spent a couple of hours every day practising to keep his hand in.

Yet Denny missed on this occasion, because as he pulled his hand free and moved his Colt, Harry Clonmel got in motion, too. He took a step forward and hit McRae with the full sweep of his left arm. McRae’s bullet drove under the shoulder of Clonmel, knocked a pipe out of the teeth of Pete Meany, and went slam into a big joist at the end of the room. McRae himself was lifted off his feet at the same instant by Clonmel’s punch. There must have been lift as well as drive in that wallop, because McRae trailed in the air, turned in it, and landed with a whang, on his face.

Clonmel turned aside and emptied the cash drawer of the roulette outfit into his pockets. He was entirely calm. Excitement makes a man puff more than mountain climbing, but Clonmel was not breathing hard. He counted out the sum of money that he had lost, and since there was plenty more than that left, he pushed it over, and the crowd helped itself.

No one went near McRae, who began to lift himself from the floor. His face was a red blur. The punch had smashed his nose flat. His eyes were beginning to swell already, and the blood ran out of him in an amazing way. He looked as though he’d been slammed in the face by a fourteen-pound sledge, or the steel knuckle of a great walking beam. A trickle of red was even running out of his ears. It was a miracle that he could recover consciousness so soon.

However, he soon was on his knees, then on his feet, swaying, when his reserves opened a back door and came on the charge into the room. The bartender was one of them; two more were bouncers; they were all good fighting men, when it came to gun work, and I expected to see Clonmel go down full of lead.

Everyone else expected gunfire, too, and the boys dived for doors and threw themselves under tables. But not a single weapon exploded. Harry Clonmel was the reason. He had picked up McRae by the neck and the belt, and now he heaved the gambler right at the three fighting men. They went down with a crash.

When they got up, they were headed in the opposite direction. They made tracks out of that room pronto.

I wanted to laugh, but I knew that it was no laughing matter. McRae was out of the picture, but not for long. He’d try to kill Clonmel. He had to kill Clonmel. If he were hanged for the murder, later on, that couldn’t mean much more than what had already happened to him. He was a ruined man. The only thing he knew how to do was to run a saloon, and now the fame of his crookedness would travel all over the West. McRae might as well go out and howl with the wolves, and before he did that he would certainly try to get even with the giant.

Then there was the sheriff.

Well, the rest of the boys seemed to figure things the same way. They eased out of McRae’s place as fast as they could go. Only Clonmel was in no hurry. He sat down, made a cigarette, and lighted it. I was amazed at him.

“Clonmel,” I said, “do you have to stay here like this?”

He looked over at me and nodded.

“They may want to come back and talk,” he said, “and I ought to be here to listen.”

“Do you as much as carry a gun?” I asked him.

“No,” said he.

It was the answer I expected, but it staggered me just the same.

“You’ve showed a lot of nerve and a strong hand, but you’ve had some luck, too,” I said to him. “Now you go saddle your horse and get out of this town, because when McRae comes back, he’ll have the sheriff with him!”

“The sheriff?” asked Clonmel. “Does he herd with crooked gamblers in this town?”

“The sheriff’s the brother-in-law of McRae,” I answered him, “and he doesn’t know how to miss with a gun. And he’s coming here to collect your scalp. Do you understand?”

He nodded. After what he had done, you would expect to see a bit of the savage in his face, but, on the contrary, there was no sign of that. Instead, he was simply shining with good nature and high colour, like a small boy who has just finished a good round of tag. There was a blur of red on the knuckles of his left hand; that was the only mark that appeared on him. I could not help wondering what would have happened to the face of the gambler if Clonmel had hit him with his right. Now he sat back in his chair and continued to smile at me, though the sheen of his eyes had diminished a little.

“I understand that the sheriff is coming for me,” he said. “I’ve never run away from a sheriff before and I don’t want to begin doing it now. I’ll stay here and wait.”

I got so excited that I went up and grabbed him by the arm. It was like laying hold on the leg of a horse. I shook the heavy, loose weight of the arm and shouted:

“Clonmel, you don’t know the sheriff. He’s a killer. He’ll kill you! Clonmel, do you hear me? Can you use a gun?”

“I can hit things with a rifle, now and then,” said Clonmel. “I never used a revolver in my life.”

“You’ll be murdered!” I cried at him. “You fool, I know what I’m saying.”

Clonmel took hold of my hands gently and moved me a little away from him.

“You want to help me,” he admitted, “but it’s not any use, and I don’t want you to get into trouble. If the sheriff wants to see me—well, I’ll have to stay here till he arrives.”

It was like arguing with a woman, adding up two and two and two, and finding that they make zero. Then, before I could say a word more, a door opened, and the sheriff stood there. He wasn’t raging. He was all cold, and there was a stony smile chiselled out around his mouth.

“Clonmel,” he said, “you’re a bully and a big-mouthed cur. I’ve come to get you—in the name of the law!”

When he mentioned the law, his grin turned from stone to iron and froze wider on his face. Law? Well, it was gun law that he meant.

Clonmel swayed forward to rise. Then I shouted:

“Sit still! If you get on your feet, he’ll murder you. Sheriff, this is an unarmed man!”

“You lie,” said the sheriff. “The yellow dog is going to get up and fill his hand.”

I got so angry that I forgot to be afraid. I jumped in between them and shook my finger at the sheriff.

Behind me I could feel Clonmel rising like a mighty shadow.

“If you pull a gun on him,” I yelled at the sheriff, “I’ll have a lynching posse after you. I’ll bring this up to the law courts. I’ll tell ’em what I know—that Clonmel hasn’t a gun! Milton, keep your hand away from that Colt!”

The sheriff managed to centre some attention on me, when he heard this. He had worked himself right up to the killing point. Now he saw that raw meat was being snatched away from his teeth and he shuddered like a crazy bull terrier.

But the truth of what I had said struck him harder than bullets. I wasn’t a drinking man; I wasn’t a fighting man; I was, in fact, just a dull, ordinary drone of a worker, trying to make a home and paying my debts as they came up. For that reason, in a law court my testimony would be about ten times as heavy as all the thugs and crooks and hangers-on of the gambling dump put together. Besides, in a society of cowpunchers and young miners and prospectors, I was a fairly old man. All of these things began to add up in the mind of the sheriff. I could see them clicking in his eyes as big Clonmel pushed me gently to the side. The sweep of his arm was like the drive of a downstream current.

“I don’t need anyone between you and me,” said Clonmel to the sheriff. “You’ve used some language that—”

“Oh, hell,” said Walt Milton, and turned on his heel and walked away.

Clonmel started after him. I ran in front of him and held out my hands. He walked into them. My arms buckled under the weight of him.

“Are you going to be fool enough to play his game?” I asked.

His lips worked a couple of times before he managed to unlock his jaws and answer:

“You’re right. I’ve got to—I’ve got to learn how to shoot if I stay in this part of the country. If—”

He shut his teeth on the rest of it. Learn to shoot? Why, those hands of his were too big to be very fast, and what could he learn compared with the gun knowledge of men who were born with the smell of gunpowder in the air? He could only learn enough to make one first gesture, which would be his last. I could see the bullets smashing into his body, into his handsome face. It turned me sick.

“Clonmel,” I said, “come up to my ranch and go to work for me. I’ll teach you to shoot on the side.”

It was the vaguest sort of gesture on my part. I thought at first that he didn’t hear me, because he was still staring through the doorway after Walt Milton. I was a good deal surprised when he pried his jaws open to answer:

“Thanks. I’ll do it.”