Читать книгу Twenty Notches - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 8

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He got off the mare very fast and touched the body of the jack. It was still warm. And looking up, he saw the same ragged headline of rocks over which the jack had disappeared when he fired.

The gun had not missed, then. It had shot true, and the result was a dead jack rabbit.

To the Sleeper it was the greatest single fact of his life.

As has been said, he had his share of superstitions such as live on the road. But they were no stronger than the emotion which makes a man uncomfortable when he walks under a ladder, or sees a new moon over his left shoulder. That is to say, he was vaguely and mildly uncomfortable, not really moved.

Here was a different thing.

He got out the revolver and examined it carefully.

He took it to pieces. It seemed to him no different from other old guns he had seen, except that the parts were rather more worn, so that he never would have picked it out for straight shooting. While the gun was still disassembled, he remembered that Trot Enderby might at any moment come rushing up this trail. With fingers trembling he hastily put the weapon together again, and then he felt prepared, reassured, totally indifferent even to Trot Enderby, or half a dozen others like him.

There were six shots in the magic revolver!

At this, he took himself severely to task, saying grimly that this was the most total folly. He was no Christian believer. There never had been in his life a thing in which he believed, except that some fists are harder, some hands are stronger than others. To that faith he was willing to cling, because he had seen it demonstrated at his own tender expense.

On the whole, he was a cheerful, dreamy, careless, casual fellow. There never had been much evil in his nature except laziness. Stealing to him had been an almost honorable pursuit. That is to say, he approached it as children approach the stealing of sweetmeats. He was as natural, shallow, and uninspired by ambition as anything above a Hottentot.

This mystery of the revolver troubled him to the bottom of his heart.

Other things flashed upon his mind—the austere faith of religious men who certainly could not be called fools in other respects; the superstitions of Indians for which they were willing to die; and between these unreasonableness on the one hand and the marvels of science on the other, it seemed to the Sleeper that there well might be some peculiar property of this weapon which gave it an uncanny power.

Now that he recalled it, the very bearing of Trot Enderby had been that of a man who is contemptuous of his fellow creatures because he knows very well that it is safe to despise them. As a rule, men who respected .45-caliber Colts had to learn respect for those who wore them. Trot Enderby had not this respect. He treated humans as though they were dogs. His blazing, contemptuous eye looked through and through as though piercing souls and reading their secrets.

And why not?

Among ordinary enemies, he was a conquistadore sheathed in steel among the poor Indians with their weapons of brittle glass and their armor of quilted feathers.

He had spent some moments, by this time, looking at the dead rabbit. Now he climbed back onto the bay mare and started her again toward the west.

Still he had no goal, but some of the lightness of heart left him. His mind remained engrossed by the strangeness of the old Colt. He began to tell himself that a great power had been given to his hand, and why?

Because Trot Enderby was a cruel brute, for one thing, and not worthy of harboring such a treasure.

No matter what Enderby’s faults were, what about the Sleeper himself, the low, degraded, bullied, lazy tramp? What right had he to such a weapon, anyway?

He could not tell. He was entering into a region of mysterious speculation which fairly made his flesh creep. At any rate, one thing was sure. There was not a human being in the world whom he needed to fear at close range.

He rode up the thicket of a canyon, among pines and willows, and coming out on the farther side, in the afternoon of that first day, he saw beneath him a flat land set in a saucer rim of sharp-sided mountains. The ravines and the canyons of those mountains were black with trees, but the flat was smoked over with a thin purple of desert shrubbery. There he saw the cattle spotted singly and in groups, smaller than the toys for a doll’s house. And beside an empty river bed, which was like a white scar across the land, he saw the roofs and the blinking windows of a village.

He rode down to it.

He knew that there might well be danger to him in a place no farther distant than this from the home of Trot Enderby, where that man and his horses might be known—his clothes, also; but he wanted a pair of trousers that fitted him, and as for the danger, did he not carry six deaths in one holster?

Alcalde was like a hundred other Western towns of its ilk. Hardly a quart of paint had been spent on its walls or roofs. Window glass was a luxury, and gardens were not. A crossroads and the river which ran full twice a year were the reasons for its being. It possessed what one expected to find—a blacksmith shop; a little hotel with a general merchandise store filling half of the first floor; two shingles of lawyers sticking out over doorways; one doctor’s sign; a carpenter shop, and a scrawny straggling of houses which stood close to the street or back from it with an irregularity which showed that men were building close together not because the land was dear but because they loved company.

The Sleeper went into the general merchandise store, and there he was served by old Win Belting himself. Win had a blank pair of old gray eyes and a conciliating smile and soothing voice. He went back to the clothes department and gave the youngster his choice. Overalls and corduroys were passed over. But a strong, neat pair of whipcords touched the fancy of Mr. Sleeper. He took them, he paid for them, and then learned that Win Belting’s daughter would be able to make such alterations as would fit those trousers to the wearer as close as water.

The Sleeper hesitated, lifting his head and looking out the window. To delay here until evening was to multiply the chances of detection by ten, but the old fellow was so vague, so innocent, that he decided he would take his chance. It was true that the coat and the vest fitted him as though with a charm—a pity that the trousers should be wrong!

Young Miss Belting came in and measured him. She would have those trousers ready within two hours, at the most. The Sleeper went to the hotel, got a room, and lived up to his name. For within five minutes after he had closed the door, he was sound asleep.

When he awakened, his room was dusky, the mirror over the bureau held a dark shadow, and a hand was tapping at his door.

The Sleeper roused himself with an effort, for he had slept hard. There was in him an ocean of unexpended fatigue, and for a moment he remained on the dizzy borders of a dream. It seemed to him that he still was in a freight car, listening to the noisy engine as it shuttled the car back and forth across the switching tracks of a big yard.

Then he roused completely and bade the man at the door come in. It was the fat proprietor, with his faded flannel shirt open at the loose throat, and the single suspender strap crossing his perspiring shoulder.

“Hullo, stranger,” said he.

“Hullo,” said the Sleeper.

“Might you be Tom Grierson of Tucson, stranger?”

“No, I mightn’t,” said the Sleeper.

He yawned and stretched. Then he stood up with a shake of his head to clear his brain. It was high time that he should be on the road.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why, they’s a gent downstairs heard about you comin’. Said he reckoned that you must be Tom Grierson. He’d like powerful to see you; if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” said the Sleeper. “I can give him a minute. Ask that stable boy to saddle my mare, will you, and bring her around to the front door at once?”

“Sure,” said the host.

As he said this, he smiled a little, though very faintly, and chiefly on one side of his face. The Sleeper, annoyed, stared the proprietor fairly in the face.

“You don’t like that horse?” he asked sharply.

“Sure, sure I do,” said the hotel keeper. “She’s full of points!”

He laughed a little, adding that a man had to have his joke.

“Well, she’s thin, all right,” admitted the Sleeper.

He went down the stairs in front of the landlord, and so he came into the lobby, which was also the sitting room of the hotel, with a stove standing in the center which made a source of heat in the winter and a doubtful ornament for the rest of the year. There had not been a soul in that lobby when the Sleeper entered the hotel.

It was fairly filled now.

Two men were lingering at the front door, rolling cigarettes and chuckling softly to one another. There were at least seven or eight others seated in the various chairs.

He blinked at them.

For the light from the open door came blindingly at him from the west, and his eyes were not yet quite accustomed to the time of day. Sleep was still lingering in them.

“All right,” said he. “Which is the man that wants to speak to me?”

He turned.

To his amazement, the proprietor was no longer at his shoulder, but the double doors at the bottom of the stairs were being rapidly, and yet softly closed.

He thought, in a sudden panic, of leaping back and trying to burst those doors open, but he checked that impulse. After all, he carried deliverance in the holster.

Then he turned and scanned the crowd again.

He could see now what he had not noticed before, that though some seemed to be talking together and some to be reading their newspapers, all of them were eying him askance, and not in the most friendly manner. And if here and there he saw a smile, it was by no means a smile of cordial curiosity. It was the look of men who expect exciting action to begin at once.

Nobody spoke.

He turned farther, scanning the rest one by one with a frown of penetration, and then in the shadows of the farthest corner he saw the red head and the flaming, grim eyes of Trot Enderby!