Читать книгу The Smiling Desperado - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 7

Table of Contents

If Sunday is a dull day in town, it is the incarnation of boredom on a cattle ranch. Hence the weekly migration of cow-punchers on Saturday night toward any center of lights and voices to fortify themselves against the silence of the “day of peace.” But on Sunday morning, there were two in the bunk house. One was old McKay who had lost all his money playing blackjack with Kirby on Wednesday night, and one was Cadigan, for whom towns had no more attraction than the open country.

Cadigan listened to a story of prospecting days in which he heard, again, how McKay had had millions in his hands, only to lose them through the crookedness of a partner. He listened from eight o’clock until ten-thirty. Then he spoke on his own behalf.

“Who’s the best shot in these parts, Mr. McKay?”

The “mister” always pleased McKay. It was partly a tribute to his years; he felt that it was even more a tribute to his exceptional character.

“Why, I s’pose that Steve Atwater is about the best. Steve is fast and pretty accurate. Tom Kirby ain’t no slouch himself. And I’ve always had my day.”

“Atwater is the best?”

“Take him for speed and score together. Atwater is about the best. They ain’t no more like there used to be—except this Lancaster, you might say. Lancaster is poison. He’s like some of the old-timers. Pretty near!”

“No old-timers left?”

“You mean them that couldn’t miss?”

“Yes.”

“They’re all gone, son. They’re mostly dead. Nobody ever shot too straight and too quick to get dropped some day. Nobody but Uncle Joe Loftus.”

Cadigan stroked the bandage which encircled his head, where the gash which the heavy barrel of Lancaster’s gun had made was fast healing.

“Loftus? I’ve heard a little about him. He was a pretty well-known man in the old days, I guess.”

“Oh, the whole doggone country knowed Loftus. Loftus is the one that the president made marshal in the days of the Murchison gang. He got the whole gang. He done it pretty near all by himself, too. I’d say that Loftus was pretty well known. He was a killer, and he lived past his killin’ days. Even right now, I guess they ain’t nobody that would go trailin’ Uncle Joe. Maybe his hand ain’t too steady. But his brains, they don’t shake none!”

He chuckled over the thought, rocking himself back and forth on the box which served him as a chair. For real chairs did not last long in the bunk house.

“Well,” said Cadigan, “how old is Uncle Joe Loftus, if you might happen to know?”

“I dunno,” said McKay, “that anybody knows how old Uncle Joe is. I dunno that he knows himself how old he is. About all he could do is to guess. He reckons time by ‘before the war’ and ‘after the war’.”

“Which side did he fight on?”

“Both!” said McKay, and laughed again. “They ain’t nobody like Uncle Joe!”

“I hear that he lives over in the Chico Mountains?”

“Right under the left shoulder of Chico Mountain itself.”

“He was fast and straight shootin’, both?”

“Lightnin’—and straight as a string. I could tell about when he met up with the two oldest Murchison boys—”

It was noon before that story was ended by the merciful ringing of the dinner bell. But after the meal, Cadigan went to Tom Kirby.

“I guess I’ll slope,” said Cadigan, “if you could pay me off today, Mr. Kirby.”

Kirby grinned broadly. “You slept on it and then figgered out that I was right? You got a head on your shoulders, old son. Keep right on south and don’t stop, if you take my advice, till you got the Rio Grande to the north of you. A few years down there and you’ll hear that Lancaster has got his own dose of lead and has gone to sleep. Then you come back up here. You ain’t goin’ to be forgot in these parts, Cadigan!”

All of which came from the heart, so that Cadigan could not without embarrassment confess that this was not exactly what he had planned to do. He received his pay and mounted an old bay gelding which was presented to him by Kirby—“for luck” and perhaps also because it was badly broken down in front.

So, having made his pack and strapped it behind his saddle, he shook hands with McKay and jogged off south with the last words of McKay still ringing in his ears.

“If you should ever meet up with Lancaster, remember that he ain’t the kind that’s got to shoot twice. He ain’t goin’ to drill you through no leg or through no place in the body so’s you’ll have a chance to get in your own bullet. His first shot is his last one. He kills with it!”

With this solemn warning to guide his action, Cadigan jogged the old gelding south for half a dozen miles. Then he turned almost east, keeping for a landmark and a goal straight before him the broad face and the lofty head of Mount Chico.

In the middle of the afternoon, he passed through a small town and there, even though it was Sunday, he was able to buy all the ammunition which he could load upon his gelding. After that, he went on again, and he came, an hour before sunset, in view of the place.

It was a little shack set out on the bald shoulder of the mountain, surrounded, at a distance, by a scanty growth of lodge-pole pines, those hardy pioneers of forests and heralds of the coming of the great trees. A spring broke from the side of the mountain a little distance away. And so there was ample provision for such a man as Uncle Joe Loftus. His rifle could kill his game. His traps could catch enough pelts to supply him with flour and ammunition. And, for the rest, he worked as he had done for the past thirty years, in a vain endeavor to locate a fabulous lead of copper ore in the Chico Range—a famous secret mine from which, it was said, the Indians in the ancient days had brought down great chunks which were eighty-five per cent pure copper. For that vast wealth the old fellow was still hunting, patiently, counting his progress by decades, still recombing the old ground and patiently plotting out the new. One could hardly believe that such a fighting man could have settled down to such a lonely, dull life!

Or was it dull? Perhaps, thought Cadigan, the hunt for the hidden mine, was like a man trail—with this difference—that it promised to have no ending. One might as well have been following a ghost.

As he came up, walking and leading his horse, for the poor thin brute had been exhausted by its heavy pack and the long climb up the side of the mountain—he saw a thin old man come to the door of the shack and shade his eyes against the flare of the western light to peer at the stranger. It was a tall figure, with clothes hanging loosely on the fleshless bones, and a large head set uneasily on a scrawny neck which had been withered away to bones and sinews and windpipe. Age had taken his teeth, and now his strong and cruelly outthrust chin curved up almost to meet the downward hook of the long red nose.

And his head was as bald as a billiard ball!

One could not have called Uncle Joe a prepossessing figure. He seemed to Cadigan very like a standing skeleton. His toothlessness and his deeply wrinkled skin gave him the appearance of an endless broad grin. As a matter of fact, it was said of him that he never smiled.

This legend and other tales came into the mind of Cadigan as he approached the old hero. When he came close, he stopped. His horse paused with a grunt of relief behind him, and Cadigan bade the old fellow good evening.

Uncle Joe Loftus wasted no time on foolish inquiries concerning the well-being of the stranger. He merely said in a high-pitched, wavering voice, as thin and dead as an ancient autumn leaf: “Who might you be, young feller?”

“My name is Cadigan.”

“I knowed a hoss thief by that name when I was about,” said Uncle Joe unkindly. “What might you want up in these parts?”

“Just travelin’ along,” answered Cadigan briefly.

“Not much interested in nothin’, I guess,” said the old man.

“Nothin’ particular.”

“Maybe you ain’t aimin’ to do no trappin’, eh?”

“Not any,” said Cadigan truthfully.

“Nor do prospectin’, eh?”

“Not a bit. I never learned how to read rocks, Uncle Joe.”

“Uncle the devil!” said the irate old man. “How come you’re a nephew of mine?”

“I thought,” said Cadigan, “that they all called you by that name.”

“You thought wrong as the devil,” said the old prospector. “You just gimme my own name and not none that was loaned to me by a lot of fools like—” Here he paused, but it was not hard to put “you” into the pause. “You don’t know nothin’ about rocks and ores, then?” he went on, glaring balefully at Cadigan.

“Not a thing.”

“Ain’t you been raised in these parts?”

“Why, round about, you might say.”

“And you don’t know nothin’ about minin’? You wouldn’t recognize gold, maybe, if you seen it?”

“Why, I s’pose that I would.”

“You only s’pose, eh? Well, partner, I dunno that you and me is goin’ to get along very well up here together on the same mountain. They ain’t much room, you see.”

“It looks to me,” said Cadigan, “as though there’s room for a whole army up here.”

“That don’t show no good sense,” said Uncle Joe more sternly than ever.

“Why not? Ain’t there miles and miles of open up here?”

“What’re miles and miles, young man, to a couple of gents that can’t get on with each other?”

“What should keep us from gettin’ on with each other, Mr. Loftus?”

“Talkin’ pretty like that and callin’ me mister—that don’t mean nothin’ to me, neither. Nothin’ at all! I’ll tell you why we don’t get on well together. It’s because I was born and raised to hate a liar like I hate a rattler. You savvy, son?”

“How come that I’ve lied none to you?”

“You ain’t?”

“Not a bit,” said Cadigan thoughtfully, looking back over all that he had said. He could remember nothing in the slightest degree mistaken in any of his speeches, however.

“You ain’t lied to me, then?”

“I said not a bit!”

“You said that you ain’t come up here to shoot?”

“I said that.”

“Neither to hunt nor to trap nor to—prospect none?”

“I said all of that, too.”

“And that’s the truth, is it?”

“All gospel, Mr. Loftus.”

“Well, man, why in the devil did you come up here, then? What brung you all the way up the side of Mount Chico with a tired horse?”

“Oh,” said Cadigan with a sigh of relief. “Is that all that’s botherin’ you? You want to know what would bring me up here, Mr. Loftus? Well, sir, I come all this way just for the sake of seein’ you!”

This complimentary speech was uttered by Cadigan with a broad smile of pleasure, for surely, he thought, it must serve to conciliate the stubborn old man. But Mr. Loftus, after staring at the young stranger for a moment, replied to his compliment by reaching inside his door and jerking into view a long and ponderous rifle, of a make so thick, so heavy, and so old, that it was a wonder that his skinny old arms could bear up its burden. Yet he shifted it easily enough, letting the barrel fall over the crook of his left arm while the forefinger of his right hand curved around the trigger.

“If that’s what brung you up here,” he said savagely, “then now that you’ve had a doggone good look at me, suppose that you turn around and get out?”