Читать книгу The Stage to Yellow Creek - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 4

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There are so many different kinds of courage in this world that it’s a dangerous thing to say right out that this man is brave and that one a coward. Take, for instance, the eleven people who started out that day, many years ago, on the stage trip from Fort Winton to Yellow Creek. I was one of the eleven, and, what is a great deal more important, I was one of the few who lived to tell of that terrible journey. Fear came to all of us before the thing was over. But what I’m trying to get across is that everyone—even the poor devils who died like cowards—showed courage of one sort or another before the end.

Take the three Mexicans whose last names we never knew, Pierre Vernon, the gambler, and the girl, Lydia Vincent. There was never a time when these five.... But perhaps I’d better tell the thing as it happened, starting with that fateful moment when Mike Jeffreys, as fine a driver as ever I’d ridden with, eased his six-horse team around a sharp bend in the trail and into the misty darkness of Mule Cañon. Then is when the adventure really began, for we hadn’t gone more than a couple of hundred feet between those high rock walls when Mike was forced to yank his horses to a quick stop before an obstruction of branches that had been piled across the trail. At the same time a broad, powerful light, almost like the glare of a train’s headlight, shot out at us. It came from the heavy shadows beside the road, and it covered us all with a broad, strong shaft.

When that light struck me, I simply stuck my hands up above my head. There seemed to be no other wise thing to do. Even at that time I wasn’t exactly a young man. And, after all, I was only a passenger.

A voice came out of the shadows, strong and high. “Keep ’em covered, boys!” it said. “An’ shoot the leaders if they step over that pile of brush. If anybody tries to step off on the far side of the stage, you fellows over there plant him the minute he reaches the road. I’m not over-anxious for bloodshed. But I don’t care how many fools we have to kill, if they ask for it. Everybody out, on this side, if you please. That’s it!”

All that we could see was a shadowy form behind the light and the gleaming muzzles of a pair of Colts leveled at us. For my part, I had nothing with me that I hated to lose. My name, by the way, is Perry Woodstock. I’d been a cowpuncher all my life up till that time. But the week before, on my fiftieth birthday, my wife, Rosemary, and I’d taken all our savings and sunk ’em in a little spread outside Yellow Creek. So I, for one, had no cash in that hold-up. I felt, anyway, that we were thoroughly trapped and that resistance was useless.

Everybody else seemed to feel the same way. I think it was the cool confidence of the bandit that convinced us we were done for. If he had raved and cursed at us, it might not have chilled our blood so much.

The Mexicans were whispering little, sibilant curses. But old George Vincent, the girl’s father, choked back a groan. “God help me!” he said—not as though he were afraid of bodily hurt, but as though there was something else that he could not afford to lose. It didn’t take any great stretch of imagination to understand that money must be what he was thinking about, so much money that the loss of it would ruin him.

He got down with the rest of us, and we lined up with our hands stuck in the air, all except Lydia. The robber said to her: “It’s all right, lady. You don’t need to keep your hands up. I’ve never robbed women.”

He came out from behind his light then, and we saw a black hood over his head, and one gun covering the whole of us. But that gun was enough, to say nothing of whoever might be in the brush on each side of the road, silently giving their chief all the backing necessary.

This robber, I could see, was a fellow with brains, and he used a dodge that was new to me. He went down the line of us, carrying in his left hand a number of black, cotton bags. When he ordered us to put down our arms, one after the other, he dropped these sacks over our heads and shoulders. It was a slick idea. It blanketed us all with darkness. And I stood there in that thin veil of light, suddenly realizing that we had been bamboozled and beaten and fooled by a single man. There were no backers lying in the brush. His talk and the light and our own fear had trapped us. Now, alone and unaided, he was going to go through us.

I heard a yelp from the girl, threw off the black sack without thinking, and there she was, grappling with the robber!

The bandit, of course, could have knocked that foolish girl silly. But he didn’t. Instead, he tried to push her away. Lydia, her eyes blazing, was hanging on and fighting like a wildcat when about five of us hit that highway robber in one wave and put him down.

The Mexicans wanted to kill him on the spot, now that he was helpless. And two other hardcase passengers—Chick Dyne and Stuffy Bill Haines, who were little better than saloon bums—would have kicked in his face without any more to-do. But I managed to stop them, although I had to threaten to use the butt of a gun on the face of Stuffy Bill.

Lydia Vincent was standing back against the stage, panting and flushed, with her head up, her lips parted, and the shine of a daredevil tomboy in her eyes. It was a good picture that she made.

“I ... I’m almost ashamed of myself,” she said. “He could have killed me, but he wouldn’t even use his fist on me, to say nothing of his gun.”

There was a lot of sense in what she said. It made me, for one, feel a lot friendlier toward the bandit, to think that there was so much decency in him that he wouldn’t use his knuckles on the girl when his failure to knock her away meant capture and maybe death.

Now, as he was lifted from the ground and put on his feet, I saw that he was a tall, loose-jointed fellow with the quietest blue eyes in the world and the calmest expression on his face. He looked surprised and innocent, as though he had been knocked down by a riot with which he had nothing to do.

The Mexicans and the precious pair of bums were for lynching the robber on the spot. But with the backing of Mike, the driver, and the girl and her father, I managed to get him safely into the stage. There was no need to tie his hands, I thought, because he was wedged into the midst of the lot of us, and we were all armed, and his weapons had been taken from him.

I simply said: “Look here, partner, do you want us to tie you hand and foot, or will you promise to be a good boy till we get you safely to the cooler?”

He said: “I like coolers. They’re peaceful and quiet. I like ’em a lot.”

“And about giving your word?” I said.

“Why, certainly,” he said. “I’ll sit as quiet as can be, as long as the rest of you sit quiet.”

There might be a left-handed meaning in what he said, but I was pretty sure of him, and with his own lantern at his feet to play light on him the stage started on. Our man made himself a cigarette, and, while he was doing it, the sleeves of his coat worked back a little, and we could see that his wrists were criss-crossed with scars. Stuffy Bill wanted to know how he’d gotten them, and if he was covered all over with the same silver marks.

He said: “How’d you get your arms that way, stranger, and what’s your moniker, besides?”

“I can answer both questions together,” said the prisoner, in a voice the softest and gentlest that you ever heard, and the deepest, too. “When I was a kid, a horse piled me into a cactus patch, and I got cut up pretty badly all over. Ever since then I’ve been called Cactus Terry. The cactus scars are all over my body, about as close as writing could be crowded.”

Stuffy Bill nodded his head as though satisfied with that answer. But across the stage Pierre Vernon, the gambler, laughed. For my part, I thought that a certain round, silver band going around each wrist might have been caused by the friction of a rope or a rawhide thong, working in through the flesh toward the bone. It wasn’t a pretty thing to think about.

Just then somebody noticed the rattling of a galloping horse that was coming along behind the stage and said: “What’s that? Who’s coming up behind?”

“It’s only my horse following along, I suppose,” said Cactus Terry. He whistled, and pretty soon a black mare ran up beside the stage. Part of the lantern glow reached her head and glimmered over the beauty of it.

“What a beautiful horse!” said Lydia Vincent, her eyes shining at the robber.

“She is,” he agreed.

“And how well you’ve trained her,” said the girl.

Old Vincent cut in, asking if Cactus had any information that made him particularly eager to rob this stage. Cactus said that he had. Vincent seemed a good deal cut up by this. “Just what information?” he wanted to know.

“I knew,” said Cactus, “that there was a hundred and sixty thousand dollars traveling in greenbacks along with a fellow by the name of George Vincent on this coach. Are you Mister Vincent, by any chance?”

Vincent was knocked in a heap when he heard this, and so was everybody else. I could see Stuffy rolling his eyes up toward the stars, and the flashing teeth of the three Mexicans as they glanced and grinned at one another.

A hundred and sixty thousand dollars! Well, that’s a whale of a lot of money in any man’s life.

“I thought that I’d borrow some of that money,” said Cactus, in his gentle, cheerful way. “There’s a saying that money makes money grow, you know. I had some special schemes hatching out to make money grow fast as wildfire, once I had a bit of capital.”

I liked his coolness. We all laughed, except George Vincent. He leaned forward and tapped our prisoner on the knee.

“Do you think that anybody else may know, or think they know, that a hundred and sixty thousand is traveling to Yellow Creek on this stage?”

“Oh, sure,” said the robber. “A lot of the boys know all about it.”