Читать книгу Twenty Notches - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 6

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He stepped toward the place where the other brute always had kept watch. Carefully he probed the dark with his eyes, but the animal was not there! If it had seen him strike down its brother, how strange that it had not leaped on the assailant’s back? But it was indubitably gone. It had fled off through the misting rain and left the tramp free, with nothing between him and the Sleeper in the house except a locked door.

Yet he did not step out of the circle of the woodpile instantly. He lingered there for a moment, with almost a sense of regret in departing from it, and though he could not tell what had happened to him, yet he guessed that the fire which had burned him here had purged him of a certain dross; at least he was free in a sense which he never had known before. Fear had shackled and manacled him. He was no longer afraid!

He approached the back door of the little house.

His shoes, such as they were, he left on the wet ground. Up the steps he went, as a cat goes, feeling its way with stealthy feet, soundlessly crossing the flimsy boards until he was kneeling at the door.

Then from his pocket he took a sliver of steel and worked it into the keyhole. It was so simple that the Sleeper smiled a little; the wards of that old-fashioned lock were to his touch like an open, sunlit road, and presently the door gave before him.

He pressed it inward, firmly and steadily, then stepped into the darkness and closed the door with equal slowness behind him.

The starlit night was brightly illumined, compared with this place; it was warm and black as the mouth of a wolf, and the teeth which it held, he knew, could bite to his life in a single stroke.

A light tapping sound began. It walked straight up to him through the obscurity of the room; then he knew that it was the sound of the water dripping from his own clothes, and since his eyes were now accustomed a little more to the dark, he began to go forward.

He could see the table in the center of the room—his extended hands found a chair, circled it, reached a door, and opened this into a narrow hall.

The moment that door was wide, he heard the breathing of Trot Enderby, regular and loud with sleep, and he gripped the ax harder. Some men can see in the dark like beasts of prey; their pupils have the power of expanding to gather in the dimmest rays of light; and the Sleeper possessed this gift, so that he could go forward with a good deal of surety down the hall with his naked, cautious feet.

In the doorway of the bedroom, he crouched to listen and to mark the positions of the furniture in the room. For, looking up at this slight angle, he could spot things more clearly against the dull gray square of the window. In this manner he located a washstand, a chair, and a bed. There was also a bureau, with a streak of starlight on its varnished top.

Where would the gun be?

He hardly had to ask himself, he was so sure that it could lie in only one spot; for Trot Enderby had killed twenty men!

His clothes had stopped dripping. It had taken him half an hour to make this excursion into the region of danger. So he went inch by inch across the floor.

Your consummate housebreaker understands one main essential that the clumsy tyro cannot guess at—he makes his breathing fall into the rhythm of the sleeper whose room he is invading, and this was what the tramp now did. He came so close that he could see the whiteness of the sheet, turned down at the top, and the darkness of the big hands which lay upon it.

The face of Trot Enderby was turned toward him, and for a moment, thinking of twenty dead men, the Sleeper shook with fear.

This spasm did not last long. He found himself saying that fear was an old, dead thing in his nature, to be remembered out of the vague past. Fear and his former self remained behind him inside the magic circle of the woodpile. There his frightened ghost could lie, chin upon breast, and sleep soddenly through the remainder of the night, but the real Sleeper was here kneeling beside the bed of Trot Enderby, and his twenty men!

No mouse could have moved so furtively as the hand of the tramp beneath the pillow, and when his finger tips reached cold metal his hand shook until he made sure that Enderby must waken. At this, he lifted the ax in his other hand and poised it, almost hopeful that the sleeping man would stir.

There was no sign of movement. Trot Enderby was sleeping soundly, and when the gun was slid out from beneath the pillow, he merely turned his head and began to snore.

The Sleeper stood up and almost laughed in the darkness. So Perseus, with winged heels and the magic sword, might have stood beside the Gorgon.

Now that he had the reassuring weight of the revolver in his hand, he was in no haste. He could afford to remember that he was wet, cold, and hungry, so first he went to the pegs along the wall and from them took down coat, vest, trousers.

He went to the bureau.

A wild cat is not more liable to screech than the varnish-stuck drawers of a bureau, but the Sleeper dared even this. It was not exactly daring, either, for he would have welcomed the wakening of his unconscious host. He had the bed well marked, and the gun was ready in his hand.

So he worked open two drawers and found the underwear and socks that he wanted. He found a pair of boots, too, standing with their toes pushed under the lower part of the bureau. He took them. He even let his touch linger until he had discovered neckties, neatly folded and stacked. Some of these he took, as well!

Then he went back to the bedside and rummaged through the clothes which hung there over the back of the chair. At the very first dip, he discovered leather, and took out a wallet slick with time and much wearing.

That was all he reasonably could hope for.

He left the bedroom, moving five times as fast as when he first approached it. In the warmth of the kitchen—the top of the stove still was hot—he undressed and afterward put on his spoils. The trousers, of course, were too short, and refused to button around his stomach. But to his utter amazement the vest and coat made for the ponderous shoulders and the long arms of Trot Enderby fitted him with a tailored smoothness. It showed the tramp to himself in a new light.

While he dressed, he opened the bread box and found good fresh pone, and in the cupboard was a huge tin of plum jam. Jam and pone he devoured in great mouthfuls.

At last he was dressed and fed.

So great was his temerity that he actually considered making a fire and heating coffee, but he knew that this was sure to waken Enderby, and even if he had the power in his hand to kill, that was no reason that he should abuse the gift.

The revolver itself was an old one.

The sights had been filed off. The trigger was gone, as well, and obviously it could only be fired by fanning the hammer. He was well accustomed to this practice, for like most of his kind he had spent many an hour in shooting galleries. He had been what his friends called “a gallery crack.” And to amuse himself and them, he had worked a little with the old single-actions stripped in this manner for rapid rather than accurate shooting at close quarters.

From the wall he took down a cartridge belt and fitted the weapon into its holster. The fit was good. The belt had to be lengthened a notch to fit his hips, but at last he stood ready to depart. There was only a hat to be added to his outfit. He picked a sombrero off the peg beside the door, and now his bewilderment became so great that it almost made him exclaim aloud. For that hat fitted his head with the utmost comfort and exactness!

Through the rear door he cautiously stepped out onto the porch.

The second watchdog was there, but at the sight of the tramp, he wheeled with his tail between his legs and fled in silence. The silence was what baffled the Sleeper more than all else. He could understand, possibly, the fear which the dog might feel after seeing its companion struck dead in an instant, but somehow this silent flight appeared to him an almost gruesomely unreal thing.

He went on light tiptoes up the path to the corral gate, but reaching it, he would not risk its creaking hinges. Instead, he put one of his sore hands on the top of the fence and vaulted over.

He walked on toward the barn.

There was no dawn color as yet; the stars were bright in the wind-scoured heavens; and the breeze itself had fallen, having swung around several points of the compass toward the west and south.

This fresh, open air which he breathed cleared the mind of the Sleeper at once. There was not, of course, anything in the fairy tale which he had heard from Doc about the gun which could not miss. And, no doubt, he simply had misunderstood the equally obvious interpretation which Doc wished to have placed upon his words—which was simply that the skill of Trot Enderby kept his guns from failing at a target, and not that the gun in itself had any power.

However, the careless, the childishly careless manner in which he had yielded to a first curious impulse had brought him into the greatest adventure of his life—had given to him, indeed, a new being, for such he felt that he possessed. Under his shoulders the big coat of Enderby fitted with the utmost comfort. The gun of Enderby rested on his thigh.

And yet Enderby had killed his twenty men!

One did not need to hunt for mystical or fairyland interpretations in order to understand a meaning in these comparisons and facts.

At the barn, he pulled the door back, found a lantern hanging beside that door, and, after lighting it, remembered the stolen wallet. When he opened it, he found inside the pockets two sheaves of bills. He counted out twenty-two fifties in one sheaf. The other was in smaller denominations, and made up a total of something less than four hundred.

“Two days’ work,” said the tramp, grinning, “at seven hundred and fifty a day, plus clothes, saddle”—here he took one down from its peg—“and horse and—”

He opened his eyes with a great start as he glanced toward the line of horses. He expected to find two or three cow-ponies. Instead, he saw five lean-legged thoroughbreds!