Читать книгу The Ancient Highway - James Oliver Curwood - Страница 6

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Clifton was conscious of the ticking of a tiny ivory clock on the timber king's desk. He had not noticed it before, but now the sound seemed to break in excitedly upon the dead stillness which filled the room. From beyond the door came the dully subdued hum and movement of life which had not made itself noticeable until now. He heard faintly the passing of footsteps, a girl's laughter, the indistinct clang of an elevator door. And he fancied he heard a sound which came from Ivan Hurd's rest room. In that he was sure he must be mistaken.

In these moments even Hurd's massive chest did not seem to move as he breathed. He stared at Clifton, and as he stared the flesh of his body relaxed. The hands that had gripped the arms of his chair grew limp; his face and jaw began to show saggy lines; the light blue flame of anger that had leaped into his eyes at the other's cool impertinence was replaced by a filmy horror. At last he had recognized the dead man of Haipoong.

He forced himself to speak, and his voice was scarcely above a hoarse whisper as he looked into the black tube of the automatic and beyond that into the strangely smiling, terrible face of the man who held it. He thought of madness, for only a madman could smile as Clifton was smiling in this moment, without rage or venom, but with something more appalling in his eyes.

"What do you want?"

"You," said Clifton.

With his free hand he drew out his watch and laid it open on the table. It was two minutes slower than the little ivory clock.

"In eighteen minutes your offices will close," he went on. "Will anyone remain after that?"

"My secretary."

"And the janitor?"

"He comes at seven."

Clifton nodded toward the house telephone.

"Connect with your secretary and tell that person to leave promptly at five and see that no one remains after that hour. And if you make a mistake, Hurd, if your voice is not natural, if you attempt to arouse the slightest suspicion at the other end of the wire—I shall kill you!"

Ivan hesitated with his hand on the telephone. Clifton could see him swallow. Then he took down the receiver and briefly gave the instructions to his secretary in a calm and even voice.

Clifton nodded his approbation when it was done.

"I am agreeably surprised with you," he said. "I was afraid one of your stripe and breed would turn entirely yellow in an hour of this kind. I don't like killing a coward. It seems too much like stepping on a worm just through spite."

Hurd made a fighting effort to regain his nerve by lighting the cigar that had gone out. He wet his lips.

"We can talk business now," he said. "We won't be interrupted."

"What business?"

For a moment Ivan Hurd caught himself as he was about to speak, and in that moment his eyes shifted to the partly open door of his rest room. Then he shrugged, as if he saw checkmate there.

"Money, of course. That's what you want, Brant. Money. How much?"

A flash of laughter leaped into Clifton's eyes and his face grew almost friendly as he regarded Hurd.

"I knew something funny would crop up, even here," he exclaimed. "It always does; it's just another proof that comedy lives next door to tragedy, and they're always playing in each other's back yard—granting you're built up to certain specifications that don't make you blind. Why, Hurd, I once saw two donkeys, a cart and a man wiped out of existence by a shell in Flanders and I almost fainted with horror, but when the smoke and dust cleared away I began to laugh, for while the donkeys and cart were gone forever there sat the man, black as a tar baby, without a scratch on him, and only a little deaf. That was funny. But this is funnier.

"I don't want your money. This building and all that is in it couldn't wipe out your debt to me. I want you. And in about nine minutes I'm going to have you. Imagine yourself, Hurd—how funny you will look when your friends find you, all lopsided and terrible, as I'm going to leave you. You are overfat, and will present a comical appearance in shrouds. How much do you weigh?"

"Good God, you are mad!"

"Possibly. You can't cut people up in a country like Haipoong, have them come to life again, and expect them to be entirely sane, can you? Just what do you think that you owe me?"

He waited. The sweat of agony was on Ivan Hurd's forehead now, and Clifton knew the torture that was in his soul.

"For instance," encouraged Clifton, "how much do you consider your life worth—to you? Not to the world, because the world would be better off without it, but to you? Be agreeable, Hurd, and answer me! It's worth more than all the money you've got, isn't it?"

The timber king nodded a throaty assent. He could see death in the steadiness with which the black pit of the gun found the center of his eyes.

"Of course," agreed Clifton. "One's life is quite frequently one's most precious asset. My father valued his life very highly, and it was worth a great deal to me. You killed my father, and I am his inheritor. You killed him while I was away helping to fight the battles which made it possible for you to pile up a profiteer's fortune of more than twenty millions. You grew fat on money while I lost everything I had in the world.

"Now I have come to collect. You were afraid I would come some day. I told you I would, when the story of my father's ruin and death reached me. You received the cards I sent?—one every six months for years! Of course you did—cards which bore those two unforgettable words of that country of yours which went to rot—'der Tag.' You knew you were a murderer and a thief, even though no technical law could touch you, and you grew afraid.

"For that reason, when your agents doing business with the Chinese Government found I was on the Yangtze Kiang job, and then at Haipoong, you took steps to have me put out of the way, and thought you were successful. It was a nice, out-of-the-ordinary place for the extermination of what little was left of the Brant family, and of course you didn't hear from me after that. Everybody collected their money. I understand the Haipoong assassins received eight hundred dollars in American exchange. Your agent, Gottlieb, must have secured a tidy bit. And now I'm on hand, Hurd. It lacks one minute of five o'clock. How much do you think you owe me?"

Clifton had leaned farther over the table. His finger, it seemed to Hurd, was pressing the trigger of the automatic. The man tried to speak. His ashen face was damp with sweat. His lips were white. Saggy lines hung under his eyes and in his cheeks. His hands and body twitched.

A silvery chime in the little ivory clock struck the hour of five. A distant door closed. In the stillness no sound of life came from the outer offices.

Clifton began to count.

"One—two—"

"Great God, don't shoot!"

"What price! What do you owe me?"

"Anything—anything you name!"

"Down on your knees, Hurd! Down!"

The great hulk of a man slid from his chair.

"I am giving you five minutes of life. Answer my questions. I want to hear the truth from your own lips. If you lie I will kill you instantly. By unfair and criminal methods, yet within the law, you robbed my father of the Brant timber concessions while I was away at war. Is it not true?"

The heavy lips moved. "Yes."

"You caused my father's death?"

"I—I—indirectly—yes—"

"Deliberately you plotted and hired assassins to kill me at Haipoong?"

The heavy head fell upon the kneeling man's chest, as if he had lost the strength to support it. A throaty cry came from his lips and his thick hands covered his face. It was confession.

In that moment if Clifton had looked beyond the man huddled on the floor he would have seen the restroom door slowly moving.

But his eyes did not leave Ivan Hurd. Here, at last, was vengeance. Here was justice measuring itself out in its own full measure. Every line in the timber king's sagging body proclaimed his hopelessness and his torture. With the stoicism of the breed from which he had come through two American generations he was waiting for the end. He was caught, and like his kind—knowing no mercy—he expected none. A great sack of quivering flesh, with his head bowed like a dull-witted ostrich, this man of millions, this power in finance, this war-evading political influence was stricken to the soul by the little black tube of the automatic!

And now, as he promised himself in this hour, Clifton laughed. It was a clean, joyous laugh, and in it was the ring of exultation and triumph. Ivan Hurd raised his head. His bloodless face met Clifton's. He saw the other's fingers working at the cartridge clip in the butt of the automatic. The clip came out. It sailed through the air toward him and fell with a tinny clatter at his knees. With pudgy, nervous fingers he picked it up. It was light. It was empty.

The automatic had not been loaded.

He pulled himself up, swaying, and sagged into his chair. The gasping breath that came into his body was like a sob.

Clifton's laughter had subdued itself to a chuckling smile. He laid his impotent gun upon the table.

"Did I frighten you, Ivan?"

"By God—"

The man wiped his face with his naked palms. Mottled spots appeared in his flesh where its ghastliness gave way to a rush of blood. The sagginess began to leave his body.

Clifton was taking off his coat.

"The trouble with you people of Hunnish blood is that you lack the artistic sense," he said, "and that is because you never have the true composition of humor. You make pretty baubles and paint fairly well, but when it comes to the art of dying, and of killing, you are absurdly crude. Now I have come to collect a million dollars, and I am going to show you how it can be done in a pretty way. I don't want it in cash because I hate money, generally speaking. But I am going to collect a million dollars' worth of satisfaction from you, and I am going to take it out of your hide. Killing with the naked hands has its virtue. Are you ready?"

He came around the end of the table. Hurd stared up, gripping the arms of his chair again. With the flat of his hand Clifton struck him in the face.

With an oath Hurd was on his feet. The Hun possessed him again. He no longer faced death, or even the threat of death. He had been terrified, humiliated, and now he was slapped! And all this by a man who had imposed upon him with an unloaded gun, a man who was lighter than he, smaller, slimmer, lithely boyish in comparison with his bulk.

Hun-like he sensed the atrociousness of it all, the unfairness of any enemy playing his own game, or tricking him, or touching him in that way with his hand. He was like a drowning devil, who, praying one moment, found his feet touching solid bottom in the next. His colossal egoism returned and his bullying nature leaped out from the concealment where fear had driven it. To Clifton the transformation was disgustingly amusing. He saw an ox shedding its skin and assuming the form of a lion.

Hurd was throwing off his coat. His cuff links rattled. His watch-chain flopped up and down his vest. He was surprisingly active for a man of his superfluous weight and there was something demoniacally murderous in his rush upon Clifton. He had seized the vase with its flowers, and it preceded him, touching Clifton's shoulder in its passage, and crashed into a thousand pieces against the wall. Then he let out a moaning grunt, for Clifton met him fairly in the face and slammed a fist deep into his fatty paunch.

They clinched. That was as Clifton wanted it. Pugilistic science would have been an insult to his intentions. He wanted Hurd to feel the tiger in him at close quarters, to come in touch flesh to flesh with the pent-up fury that had been gathering and waiting for this moment through many years. A possible blow might have settled it, but Hurd, inanimate or dead, was beyond the reach of his punishment; alive, choking, cursing; feeling himself losing inch by inch, at last facing blackness and the end—in that way he would be paying his debt. They crashed against the table, and in this first contact Clifton was amazed at the other's hardness. Hurd's arms and shoulders were more like solid wood than living tissue, and they possessed a strength he had not guessed at. A month in the woods and he would have been a giant.

His own strength, dominating every fiber of a body trained by walking and the out-of-doors, was like a voltaic force swiftly adjustable to given situations, and realizing instantly his error in judgment he struck up at Hurd. He heard the man's jaw snap. They went down and under the table. Even then Clifton sensed a certain ludicrousness about it—two grown men rolling on a rug under a table! He could have wished the scene to have been attended with a little more dignity. The table upset. It came down sideways on them, then rolled over, so that they were flattened under it like two struggling insects under a chip.

But they were fighting. His fingers were at Hurd's throat. They came out, and he began pounding at the round, huge head, and then—being the first on his feet—he saw his opportunity to grip both hands under Hurd's chin and rip his collar, shirt and vest from his body. The rending of cloth was the last touch to the table-comedy. It left an exposure of Hurd's body up the middle from his belt-band to his chin. When he stood up his collar and tie hung down over one shoulder. His watch was out and dangled at the end of its chain. His fob and diamond pin were on the floor. And Clifton, a little disheveled and with a livid bruise on his forehead, was coolly laughing at him.

The sound Hurd made in his throat might have been that of a great frog. His eyes, it seemed to Clifton, were greenish-red in their rage. His mouth was a little open, and he was sucking in air in quick gasps as he made another rush. His powerful arms were out, his fingers extended like talons for Clifton's neck, when in a swift movement Clifton performed the boy's trick of making himself a stumbling-block in front of his adversary, and Hurd pitched over him and fell to the floor with a crash that sent a tremor through the room.

Clifton recovered himself in time to see the other's watch, rolling in a wobbly fashion across the rug, and Hurd's great legs half in the air, with a broken red and white garter trailing from the back of one shoe. In an instant he was at him, tearing at his garments and beating the bullish head each time it bobbed up.

Hurd had given him the inspiration!—it was a humiliation that would hurt more than physical defeat. The Imperial Instinct was in this Americanized Hun even more than he had thought it would be. To strip Hurd, to leave him naked, to make him a creature of helplessness and self-abasement in his own eyes, drinking to the dregs of humiliation and shame, would be worse than death, leaving in his soul a sore that would burn and fester as long as he lived. With brain and body Clifton leaped to the idea, and for a space he forgot every rule of the game and every instinct of conventional decency as he grappled with the man he hated and whom he had promised himself some day to kill.

And now, if Clifton had noticed, the rest-room door was wide open.

But blindness possessed him, blindness and a fury which until now he had held in leash behind a smile. Their bodies fought from side to side of the room. Chairs fell about them, and one broke into wreckage under their weight. Twice they rolled close to the rest-room door. Hurd's breath came sobbingly and his mouth was open whenever Clifton saw it—open and bleeding; his garments were in rags, his arms naked, his hairy chest and puffy abdomen exposed. Then the reaction seized upon Clifton, and he sprang to his feet. Hurd followed, and Clifton knocked him down. He had never known a head which could stand half the beating which he gave Hurd's after that. The skull was either of iron—or enormously thick, he thought.

At last it was over. Hurd was still conscious, but utterly done for, and his puffy, half-open eyes looked up from the floor at Clifton with an expression of filmy inanity. Clifton, standing over him, recalled the incident of a huge fatted hog which he had helped to rescue from the mire of a shell hole in Belgium. Hurd was like that, wheezing and gulping and choking for breath in the same way, as if his lungs were filled with mud. Clifton straightened the desk armchair and dragged Hurd to it. All of his strength was required to get the heavy body into it, but the result was worth the effort.

As he stood back to observe his handiwork he laughed again.

Hurd, with his backbone gone, was two hundred pounds of formless flesh. He was not tragic, as Clifton viewed him. He was not even horrible, though he was puffed up and bloody and scarcely resembled a man. But he was grotesquely funny. There was something quizzical and bizarre in the glassy way his eyes held their focus on the man who had so successfully collected his debt. He was like a clown who had suffered mishap in the midst of his buffoonery. To Clifton the sublimity of the situation was in the fact that he knew Hurd was perfectly conscious of his own presence, of what had happened, and of his own monstrous appearance—yet was physically incapable of moving even one of his cumbrous hands.

The thrill in Clifton was one of immeasurable joy and satisfaction. How stupid it had been of him ever to have dreamed of killing Hurd! This was better. Memory of this hour would live through Hurd's life with the vividness of a scar branded across his face. It was like the breaking of the Kaiser, he thought. Better to let him live and suffer than to have him die and end it all.

He felt a growing dizziness. Hurd had struck him over the head with a rung from the broken chair and he had not sensed its effect until now. He drew nearer and bent over Hurd. The glassy eyes followed him without the visible movement of a muscle in Hurd's face and an apish desire to do mischief seized upon Clifton. He stuck a pen behind Hurd's ear. He placed an open book on his lap. From a humidor on the desk he took a big black cigar and thrust it into Hurd's mouth. The cigar hung there, a bit droopy, but fixed.

Then Clifton picked up his automatic and the clip and pulled himself together before a mirror. He looked at Hurd again, but the dizziness kept him from laughing as he wanted to laugh, and also it kept him from saying what he had intended to say before he left his victim—granting he was in a condition to understand. But even with his dizziness he saw a last possibility. He took Hurd's hat from a pedestal at the end of the desk and placed it at a rakish angle on the back of Hurd's head.

Then he turned to unlock the door. It was odd, he thought, how his fingers blundered. He opened the door and went out, closing it after him. In the railed enclosure just outside were several chairs and he sat down in one of these. His dizziness would leave in a minute or two, he told himself. But it was deucedly inconvenient just at the present moment.

He heard a big clock ticking on the wall and tried to make out the time, but the hands were muddled.

He noticed the sun coming in at a distant window, and between him and that sun the desks and chairs were confused and indistinct.

He covered his eyes with his hands and waited.

The big clock ticked on. The moments sped. And then an alarming thing startled him.

It was a peal of laughter. It was not loud. It was a girl's laughter, or a woman's, and there was a distinctly sweet and musical quality about it. Clifton started to his feet. The amazing thing was that the laughter had come from Ivan Hurd's room!

It was not repeated. For a space Clifton held his breath, and then the voice of merriment came again from beyond the timber king's door, and this time he heard it say:

"Oh, Mr. Hurd, you look so funny!"