Читать книгу The Iron Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 11
ОглавлениеAs the Sheriff Told It
The sheriff, hearing this, had sat down in the opposite chair, wiping the sweat and the coagulated dust from forehead and neck, for it had been a wearying ride down the valley.
“You’re thanking the wrong man, Colonel,” said he.
“You’ll dodge the praise,” smiled Exeter, “because it wasn’t your own hand that brought them down, perhaps, but the man who organized the posse and led them to—”
The sheriff raised his hand.
“One minute,” said the colonel. “I’ll hear you dodge glory after I’ve let Dolly know how things are. She wanted to come down here. I wouldn’t let her. It might have looked as though I were trying to use her pretty face, Askew, to keep the depositors from crowding into the bank. Now she must know!”
He took his telephone off the hook, and in another moment he was saying: “We’re safe, Dolly.” He made a little pause, and the joyous cry of the girl came thin and faint to the ears of the sheriff on the farther side of the room.
“We’re safe. All that I know now is that your old friend, Uncle Boots Askew, has just brought the news that he’s bringing in Delehanty dead—and all the stolen money!”
He paused again, and with a strange mixture of sadness and triumph he added: “And with Delehanty, they’re bringing the dead body of Murdoch McKenzie down the valley. That’s all I can tell you. Don’t come downtown. They’re whooping and yelling a good deal. Stay home. I’ll be there as soon as I can get all the tale from the sheriff—but he’s like a bashful boy. He won’t talk, hardly. I need you to loosen his tongue. Good-by, dear.”
He turned back to the sheriff.
“Now, Askew, out with it! Put modesty into your pocket, and let’s hear just how you worked.”
“I’ll tell you my part of it in a nutshell,” said the sheriff. “We waded out of town, riding hard. And in half an hour we had lost the trail! It was clean gone. A fox like Delehanty doesn’t leave his sign scattered about when he’s running away from trouble. At any rate, we aimed up the valley, blind. And as we worked along, above the upper town, we came on a wood with a curl of smoke over the top of it, and I told the boys to scatter, and fade into that bunch of trees from all sides.
“Not that I expected to catch anything there. I knew that Delehanty would never make a breakfast camp last as long as we had taken to crawl up there, figuring trail all the way. But I simply had to give those boys something to work on. And so they scattered, as I told them to do, and they worked their way very soft through the woods, until they came out in full sight of—”
He paused for a moment.
“Well?” said the banker.
“I’m trying to see it all again, to make sure that it wasn’t a dream,” said Boots Askew. “But as we came along, first I heard a gent singing in a tenor voice—a darned good voice to hear. And then his song stopped. Seemed to me that I could hear a bird piping up. And I laughed, when I thought of finding Delehanty in a place like that.
“But then I got to the edge of the woods—and there by a camp fire, finishing his breakfast, and listening to a little fool bird standing on a stump, was a young gent, built fine and slim, with a face like a thinker and a hand like a violinist—or a forger! There was he sitting, enjoying the song of that fool bird, as I should say—and a little distance from him there was a pile of junk—with stacks of greenbacks fluttering on the top of it. The money from the bank, which this gent had won back, and which he was so honest that he wouldn’t put it into his own pocket, not even for a minute, y’understand?”
“That’s a fine picture, Askew,” said the colonel, his fine eyes half melted and half on fire with this sketch of human honesty. “A young man like that—why, gad, man, it would make me young again to know him!”
“Well, Colonel, that ain’t all of it. Because, on the ground there beside this gent, I seen Delehanty lying dead, with his eyes closed for him, and his big hands folded on the top of his chest! And then the wind blowed the hat from the face of another gent, that had been laying there dead all the while that this youngster had been having his breakfast—and there I seen McKenzie!”
Mr. Exeter drew a deep breath.
“I don’t want to feel a brutal satisfaction in the death of any man, Askew,” he said, “but when I think that it was this McKenzie who murdered my lad—my Tom—but go on, Askew. Go on, man. I don’t dare to draw the inference that this youngster you speak of had actually met and killed both of these maneaters?”
“Lemme tell you, Colonel,” said Askew, “that when you see the body of Delehanty, you’ll find that his back and his hair has been singed. And that youngster had not only killed the pair of them, but he had closed with Delehanty and fought him hand to hand—by gad, it ain’t hardly noways possible to believe it!”
“No,” murmured the banker, “it’s not!”
And he added: “Were their wounds from in front?”
“Every one! I’ll tell you that the name of this youngster is Eddie Larned. And that he was so dog-gone modest that he tried to slip away while we were examining the bodies of the two dead men. And that he wouldn’t tell anything of what happened, and that I had to worm it out of him on the trail, as we fair dragged him down the valley. Why, Colonel, not even knowing that he was to get a twelve-thousand-dollar reward would budge that boy! Simply didn’t want no notoriety!”
The colonel closed his eyes and smiled, as one who hears the sweetest music.
“You’re painting over again,” he said gently, “the picture of what my boy Tom would have been in the same situation!”
The sheriff looked down to the floor and cleared his throat.
“But,” he went on, “the facts seem to be something like this: This Larned is a fellow who’s alone in the world. Got tired of his work. Decided to leave the East and go West. Had no money. Probably spent it all paying off his landlord, and his doctor bill—because he looks pale enough to of spent a lot of time sick—and then he hooked onto a freight and traveled that way—hard but cheap. Cheerful gent, though; smiled while he told me that he had come in a box car! And when he got to Culloden Valley, he liked the look of it, dropped off the train—and he started up the valley until he seen smoke coming up over that patch of trees.”
“And the two of them were in it!” breathed the colonel, vastly excited.
“They was! I mean that I had to drag this stuff out of him, because he didn’t want to talk about himself. He came through the woods and stepped into the clearing—and found two pairs of guns looking him in the eye. But in five minutes, he was sitting down talking to them—and all went smooth, until he got to guessing what they really was. And then—why, at that point his yarn was just a blur. He wouldn’t talk. And I had to let the dead men talk for him! But the facts were there lying on the ground for us to see, and there ain’t any reasonable doubt that he just lit into the pair of them. Most likely he dropped McKenzie first. Then he tackled Delehanty in close. You’ll wonder at it when you see him. But he’s all steel. Stronger than you’d ever guess!
“And, anyway, he killed Delehanty, after knocking him into the fire. And then he whirled around and put the finishing slug into the head of McKenzie. And after that, Colonel—and this is the beautiful part of it—he took all their personals, and piled them up in a heap, and put the stolen money on top of the stack; and then before he started to take the money back to where it belonged, he sat down and cooked himself a good breakfast and ate it, with the two dead men lying there and looking at him!”
The sheriff, having finished, sat back with a heavy thump in his chair and dropped his hands upon his hips.
“Those are the facts as far as I can make them out,” said Askew, “and I never done harder thinking or looked over evidence more careful, because, of course, I knew that this here was a red-letter day for Culloden Valley, and that a good many folks would want to know all of the truth later on! And I say that this here is the strangest yarn that I ever been mixed up in! Colonel, did you ever hear it beat?”
The colonel did not answer for a moment, but he sat with his head thrown far back, and his eyes squinted almost closed, and a look as of pain on his face. It was the intense concentration of one lost in thought.
“I think, Askew,” said he, “that you’re very right. It’s a great day for Culloden Valley—but I have an idea that it’s apt to prove an even greater day for me!”
To this, the sheriff listened with the deepest attention. Just what the colonel meant, he could not tell, but he was well aware that no mere money matter could ever stir William Exeter to such deeps as this.
A clamor broke out far off, on the edge of the town up the valley.
“They’ve hit Culloden!” said the sheriff. “Listen to the mob howl!”
“Aye,” said Exeter. “They’re glad to see him.”
“And though they may howl louder,” said the sheriff, “they’ll never again have a chance to look on a gent that’s any finer, any cleaner, any stronger, or any braver, than young Larned, that is up there being brought in by the boys!”
“I believe it! I believe it!” said the colonel, almost trembling with his emotion. “And let’s get out onto the street so that we can see them come!”
Standing in the middle of the street, they had sight of the moving procession presently. And, at the head of it, rode three men. He upon the right held the reins of the horse of the central man. He upon the left seemed to have hold upon the arm of that central rider. And the man in the midst was a comparatively slight young man, who rode with his head bent and his eyes upon the street just in front of him.
“It’s him!” breathed the sheriff. “Now I ask you to look at him! I ask you to take a slant at him and to tell me, would he like to get away from that gang? Yes, pretty near rather get away from this fuss than to have a million dollars! That’s him. That’s his kind, and all this band-wagon stuff, he just hates it!”
Colonel Exeter leaned a hand upon the shoulder of his friend. And indeed, it seemed almost as though he needed some support in order to keep himself from wavering.
“It’s like something that I’ve seen before!” he said. “It’s like a dream that I had many, many years ago—a day-dream, Askew—of my boy Tom, brave and gentle and modest, like that—loved by crowds—and I tell you, Askew, that as he comes closer, every step of that horse is bringing Larned deeper into my heart!”
