Читать книгу Twenty Notches - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 10

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There was only one person in the room who was not very greatly surprised. That was the Sleeper. Yet he, too, felt a ghostly tingle down his spine, for this was the authentication of the fable of the magic gun, of course. What other motive could have been behind the flight of the slayer of twenty men he could not imagine. It never occurred to him that the blandness of his own assurance might have had a great deal to do with this thing.

Trot Enderby had killed his “twenty” men, though as the middle-aged tramp suggested, the newspapers had something to do with that number. At least, it was well known that he had sent a good round ten or a dozen men to their last account, and some of them were celebrated ruffians. They had gone down before the gambler and his accurate shooting. But in the very boots of every gunman there lurks a feeling that one day he must meet his match. Perhaps that feeling had overcome Enderby, and as he looked into the assured and almost smiling eyes of the tramp, he must have remembered a day when he, too, was so desperately reckless that flirtations with death meant little or nothing to him. He might have thought of that, and decided that a little shame and a longer life would be welcome enough.

However, he was gone.

And to the Sleeper, it was an assurance of the greatest solemnity that the mystic legend of the revolver was the truth. It was charmed. Its owner, the great Enderby himself, when he saw that weapon, had simply thrown up the sponge and fled without more ado. Thence the thrill and the chill that passed up the spine of the Sleeper.

But the others saw this affair in a different light.

“He wanted a mob behind him,” said the fat hotel keeper, with almost virtuous indignation. “He’d met his match, and he wanted backing. Otherwise, he’d’ve taken the job on his own hands!”

The others did not answer, and they did not comment. But they looked upon one another with rather sick eyes, for it isn’t a pleasant thing to see a great name fall, and Trot Enderby had been famous for the greater part of a generation, as generations were measured in that part of the West, in those days. He had been at the great mining camps. He had accumulated a competence and retired with it to a life of comparative inaction, only sallying out now and again from his house on the hill when he needed the stimulant of an exciting change. He was established in legend. He was established in fact. Among the tales of the great dead, one found the name of Trot Enderby mentioned. He had been there when “Duck” McGuire was shot to death by the Slawson boys. He had ridden with Doc Loftus on that famous journey from Silver City to Sonora. It was he who had ended the meteoric career of young Charlie May in Tombstone.

Now all that glory was a little altered. It could not be denied. It was the record of accomplished deeds. But instead of leaving it upon the furrowed brow of Trot Enderby, the halo was shifted at once to the young head of the tramp.

These things were in the minds of that group of eyewitnesses. And in that moment of silence, when they stared at one another, and then back at the doors, the windows, the floor, they were marking down every particular.

This was history. To have been present here had, at first, seemed a mere lark—to watch terrible Enderby discipline a young stranger. Instead, it was a Waterloo.

There was the chair in which the Sleeper had sat. Yonder was the shadowy corner in which Trot Enderby had stood. (Might they not have guessed, by the obscurity in which he shrouded himself, that there was something of fear in the mind of the gunman and gambler?)

Yonder came the Sleeper through the doorway, and the proprietor, so silently, so cleverly, had closed the doors and locked them to shut off retreat.

A thing for laughter—to dream that this terrible and casual young man ever could wish to retreat!

Here he had stood and sat down.

What was the hour?

Half a dozen heads turned and marked the big-faced clock that hung on the wall above the registry desk. Yes, those hands had told one vastly important moment.

The proprietor interrupted these profound reflections, these quiet memorizings, by walking up to the Sleeper and holding out his hand.

“Mr. Sleeper,” said he, “I was wrong as the dickens. That Trot Enderby, he told me you were no good. Well, I believed him. I locked the doors behind you. As if you’d try to get away! But—dang him!—he knew the job was too big for him! He wanted to have the crowd do his work!”

At this moment, the Sleeper was sublime.

He smiled, and the smile was not an affected one. He smiled, because the delicious hidden humor of this scene ate deep into the very marrow of his bones.

He took the hand of the proprietor. Naturally, he was strong, but there was one respect in which he was beyond other men, and that was his grip. It had been developed by hanging onto beams and rods beneath passenger trains, where a weak hold is a quick death. It had been developed by jumping at the iron ladders which run up and down the ends of freight cars. You jump with your feet and your hands bunched together. If the hands catch a partial hold, then, like a sailor, every finger of the hand must be a fishhook, or he falls to death under the wheels, or to a bone-breaking drop down the steep cinders of the embankment. The Sleeper had fallen. But only once. After that, he learned to hold on.

When he saw that extended hand, he knew that a casual touch would allow the hotel keeper to feel the sore places on his palm and inside his fingers, which might be an eloquent testimonial to his own lie and to the truth of the story which Trot Enderby had told. If, on the other hand, he refused that handshake, he established himself at once as a “grouch,” a most detestable characteristic in the Far West.

So he compromised by taking the hand of the proprietor in his own and gripping it with all his might, though he smiled to make it appear a casual thing. The bones grated in the back of the hotel man’s hand. He felt that they were being shattered.

He could not help groaning, as the Sleeper said cordially:

“Why, Steve, anybody can make at least one little mistake about a stranger!”

That was a neat bit of accent.

Steve managed to get away. Everybody was grinning broadly.

“Hello!” said the Sleeper gently. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“Hurt me?” cried Steve, half laughing, and still half groaning, as he went about holding his tormented hand against his fat stomach. “Hurt me? I don’t know what you call hurt! But look at this!”

Suddenly, he displayed that hand. He held it forth for all eyes to see—and there was a visible stain upon it.

“You squeezed the blood out of me, that’s all!”

It made something to look at—blood pressed from a human hand by mere gripping. They were in such a humor that it never occurred to a man of them that this blood might have come from the stranger’s hand, but they flocked and stared. Then they looked at the Sleeper as at a hero.

And he?

He felt like a beggar who has been made into a king. There was the same dizzy joy, the unbelief, the sense of impermanence.

They introduced themselves one by one, but they excused themselves from shaking hands. They made jokes about it. They said that they had no blood to spare. That they were workingmen and needed their hands. That spare parts to a good many machines were sold in old Win’s store, but that hands were hard to buy even there.

They chuckled over their own jokes and laughed at others. They put the Sleeper at home. And he found himself standing somewhat apart, as a man above the rest, outside of them and their interests, a greater force, a keener brain, a loftier personality.

“Suppose Enderby went off with the mare?” some one suggested.

At this, there was a rush for the outside, and toward the barn, but the Sleeper did not follow, for it seemed rather out of place and beneath his new dignity to show alarm or to betray curiosity even about such a peerless animal as the bay mare.

The proprietor was going with the rest, but he noticed that the new possessor of the mare had not followed the others and he checked himself at the door, turning back.

“You figger that he ain’t taken the hoss, Mr. Sleeper,” said he.

“I guess he hasn’t,” said the other.

“Well, maybe you’re right. He was kind of in a hurry, all right. Now, that was a surprisin’ thing, to see Enderby show yellow, that way.”

The Sleeper felt a slight pang of compunction. “Well, it may not have been his day, and he felt it in his bones,” he said. “He felt unlucky, that’s all. I dare say that he’s brave enough, Enderby is.”

The other nodded and grinned. “Not his day! Oh, he felt that, all right. He knew that when he come here and talked up a lynchin’! He knows how we feel about hoss thieves in these parts since Parmenter stole Ironwood.”

“I haven’t heard of that.”

“You mean that?”

“Yes, it’s a fact. Ironwood the name of a horse?”

“Why, that’s Ironwood that won the Creole stakes in New Orleans two years back.”

“Ah, yes,” said the Sleeper, feeling that this was a matter of town pride which it was heresy in a stranger not to know.

“You remember?”

“I’ve heard the name.”

“I bet you have. It ain’t every hoss in the world that runs for twenty-five thousand dollars and wins! Then Parmenter stole that hoss, the skunk! Now old Morice is broke. His heart is broke, too. And hoss thieves don’t rate very high around here ever since.”

“Well, Morice has the twenty-five thousand,” said the Sleeper, feeling that that amount of money was enough to console any man for even a greater loss than that of a horse.

“He spent that tryin’ to get Ironwood back. He took three parties up there into the mountains, and three times they got nothin’. The last time there was a fight. Three men laid out as good as dead, and poor old Morice been tryin’ to learn the use of a wooden leg since them days. I’ll take you over in the morning.”

“I’ll be traveling on,” said the Sleeper, who felt that the more mileage he piled up the better it would be for him.

“Well, nobody would wanta be leavin’ Alcalde without seein’ poor old Joe Morice. You better wait for that. He’s up by sunrise, anyways.”

“Well, I’ll wait,” said the Sleeper.

And then the flood of men came back, chattering cheerfully, and announcing complacently the last marvel, that the great Trot Enderby not only had fled, but actually had gone off without taking the horse which he claimed as his own. And that failure, as all of Alcalde agreed, was as good as a bill of sale to young Mr. Sleeper.