Читать книгу The Whispering Outlaw - Макс Брэнд - Страница 8

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There was no tidal wave of crime, of murder, and robbery. Here and there, separated at distances of five hundred or even a thousand miles, crimes were committed which were carefully prepared with a painful and laborious hand; and then they were executed in an instant by one or two bold spirits who dashed into a town, did the work for which they had been appointed, and sped away again. Sometimes they struck at night; but sometimes they shot in and out upon their mission in the daylight, securely masked. No one could say that there was a single method in these crimes, for each of them was committed in a totally different fashion, having been planned by a totally different head.

But for six months nothing was known to the public, or, for that matter, to the busy police themselves. They simply were aware that there were more crimes this year. There are always crimes which go undetected, for a time, at least; and the police are not impatient. They endure a world of abuse and contempt, but when the time comes, they do their work and go on without cheering. They have no bands and battle flags to raise their spirits high for their struggles, but each man goes over the top by himself, in the dark of the night. The police, then, knew that there was a slight increase in the number of unpunished crimes, but the increase was small.

No one would have guessed that a new and incredibly successful band was at work had it not been for an accident. A certain eminent rancher, the owner of numberless acres, cows by the thousands, farm land along one rich river bottom, and many an irrigated desert acre—a man of untold wealth in fact—was riding over his domain one day when he came upon a horse standing beside a prostrate man, in a gully. He thought at first that it was one of his lazy cow-punchers taking an afternoon nap, so he spurred his horse ahead and galloped to the place.

Percival Kenworthy, for that was his name, found a wounded man. The bullet had apparently gone straight through the heart, but this was only in appearance, for it had glanced around the ribs and lodged in the poor fellow's back. He was unconscious. His pulse was fluttering on the verge of extinction; plainly he was close to death. So Kenworthy forced a dram of brandy from his saddle flask down the throat of the dying man and was rewarded suddenly by a gasping voice and opened eyes. He was a stranger to the rancher, but he knew his good Samaritan at once.

"Kenworthy," he gasped out, "listen to me. I'm Tirrit. Ask the sheriff. He knows me—too—well, maybe. I'm dying. Him that killed me was"

Here his eyes grew dull, and he passed into unconsciousness again. Kenworthy, feeling that a terrible revelation was about to be made, applied another dram of the powerful drink. It recalled the wounded Tirrit again to consciousness, and he picked up the story where he had left off.

"The Whisperer killed me!" he murmured.

"What about The Whisperer?" asked Kenworthy.

At this the eyes of the other grew dull with despair, as if he realized that there was more to tell than he had time and strength to relate.

"All them robberies" he began. "The safe cracking at the First National in Deaconville—the clean-up in Lead City—twenty others; they was done by one gang, and The Whisperer runs that gang. Me—I was one of the crew. But they got me. The Whisperer got me. I was trying to find out who he was. I did find out! And so he plugged me. His name"

His voice choked away. With a feeble hand he drew the rancher's ear down to his stiffly struggling lips.

"The real name of The Whisperer is"

What that name was, the rancher could not make out. It was only a confused gasp of breath, and then Tirrit died. But Kenworthy had the body brought into town and carried his strange tale to the sheriff. And, just as Tirrit had suggested, the sheriff knew him only too well. Tirrit was young. He could not have been past thirty, but it appeared that he was old in crime. He had spent half of his years since he was eighteen in prison. The other half he had sustained himself with crimes of a dozen sorts. Moreover, the sheriff knew all about the clever work which had resulted in the cracking of the safe in the First National Bank in Deaconville. He knew, also, of the clean-up in Lead City; and he frowned in sober intensity of thought at the news.

Not only that, but he entreated the rancher to say nothing of his experience or of what he had heard from the dying bandit. Too much publicity would destroy the chances of the police to run down the criminals.

In the meantime, the worthy sheriff got in touch with the officials of neighboring counties and neighboring States and passed the word to them. He himself went to Lead City and then to Deaconville, and, with the aid of the local authorities, used his best efforts to discover similar methods and the work of the same master hand behind those crimes. But they were very different. They were as entirely unique, so far as one another was concerned, as if they had been conceived by two entirely separate minds.

Yet all officers of the law know that the majority of criminals, even the greatest of them, perform their crimes according to one pattern. Having achieved their first real success in breaking the law, they continue until death to duplicate that first great effort. Here, however, was all the evidence of two distinct minds conceiving, and two distinct hands in the execution. The police were disturbed. Some of them went so far as to openly state that they discredited the dying statement of Tirrit. It was simply an effort of dying malice to make trouble for a companion whom Tirrit hated, and who had shot him down in a fair fight.

All that really resulted from this careful examination was that the rumor spread abroad. Knowledge shared by so many men could not be kept secret. Indeed, it is the nature of a secret to make men desire to talk about it. The most harmless gossip, if it be told in a whisper, will immediately be exploded into public attention. So it was with the tale of Tirrit's dying story. The noise of it shot abroad upon the thousand invisible wires of rumor, and straightway other men who dwelt outside the law heard of it.

The tale wandered to a hundred resorts of crime—somewhere in the West a great band was operating. Its exact location was unknown, but at least it was certain that it operated, or had operated, in that great county of mountains and desert where the rich man, Percival Kenworthy, had established his ranch. So, toward this focal point the powers of the world of crime began to draw. Wild fellows with ungloved right hands and bright eyes and faces as sunburned and lean as hawks, started over the mountains and through the desert.

They found no Whisperer ready to enroll them in a secret gang when they arrived, but they did find one another. Straightway they pulled together in threes and half dozens. They began to strike right and left. They rustled cattle. They blew safes. They worked as footpads in the towns and as holdup artists and plain highwaymen in the open roads. The carnival of crime which the plans of The Whisperer had so carefully avoided, came into birth within a month after the death of Tirrit. By a cruel trick of fate, it was Percival Kenworthy who suffered more than all the rest.

He was not a man to sit still and endure such a life, having his cattle driven off by the hundreds, his payroll intercepted on its way out from town, his foreman "stuck-up" in the very shadow of the bunk house. He took the matter into his own hands. He called a meeting of his neighbors, the most representative citizens from the mining district in the mountains, the lumber camps, the cattle ranges, and the nearby towns.

Fifty sturdy men of affairs gathered under his roof for dinner to taste the excellent whisky of the rancher, to partake of his fine fare, and to see lovely Rose Kenworthy, newly come home from an Eastern school. For she presided at one end of that huge table while her father presided at the other.

At that dinner they made much talk, and in the end they elected an active committee of a dozen of their ablest members to go to the sheriff and ask to be allowed to participate in the suppression of the crime wave. Kenworthy, of course, was the chairman who went to the sheriff and offered the aid of the citizens in the campaign against The Whisperer. For, since that mysterious name had been first mentioned, it was constantly in use as the guiding spirit behind every crime.

Had he possessed a dozen bodies, he could not have been in every locality where crimes were blamed upon him. That name became a fascinating illusion. Every bank robbery was laid to his name; and every hobo with sore feet and five days' whiskers on his face was arrested and gravely given the third degree to see if he might not be the master criminal.

"No one," said Kenworthy to the sheriff, "has been able to spot the master criminal. I propose to forget that name. I propose a great crusade against crime in general, throwing out a great dragnet. When we haul it in, The Whisperer will be one of those entangled in the meshes."

He cleared his throat. He was a pompous man who wore a stiff white collar even when he was riding on the range. He talked even to his daughter in the quiet of his home as if he were making a political speech from a stump, and he had a way of tucking his rather small chin inside his collar, thrusting his hands into his coat pockets, spreading his legs apart, and delivering his thoughts upon the right way to carve a goose with as much passion as an old, ranting actor doing the closet scene in the third act of Hamlet.

The sheriff did not smile. For Kenworthy was too rich and too successful to be smiled at. He was never referred to in any of the local papers saving as "our distinguished neighbor," or "the cattle king," or, "one of our most distinguished citizens." To laugh at such a man was apt to have cost the sheriff five thousand votes at the next election! For the rancher secretly owned a controlling share in some three or four of those papers which most assiduously mentioned his name. So the sheriff duly swore in Kenworthy as a deputy and gave him the authority to enlist others in the name of the law.

Immediately the "crusade against The Whisperer" began to be a serious affair. There were virtually pledged to it some thirty or forty of the strongest men on the range, each of whom could throw three or four well- mounted, well-armed men into the field for a campaign of any duration, without missing their hands from the working forces upon their ranches.

Deputy Kenworthy found himself placed at the head of a hundred hardy fellows who knew the range to a T, and who were keen as fox hounds on the trial because each one of them was promised three months' pay in a lump sum if he could strike down or capture any man who was afterward proved to be a criminal. Kenworthy hardly knew how to dispose of such large forces, but he was one of those men who could take advice even when trying to give it; if he wanted to know how to build a skyscraper, he would have called upon an eminent architect and started giving him his own ideas until the architect in wrathful self-defense blurted out a few of the truths concerning that matter.

So Kenworthy now went around and talked to some of the old-timers who had been members of vigilante committees, and it was not long before he learned from them that the best weapon of all against crime was that simple name—vigilante! It was of such a power that the strongest bands of criminals and outlaws melted away before it; it had a marvelous prestige, and was known never to have failed in the past. Deputy Kenworthy swallowed the thought at once, equipped his crusaders with the name of vigilantes, and started out to mop up the country.

He mismanaged it sadly. He left holes a mile wide in the nets he spread. But, nevertheless, he had a hundred sharp-eyed fellows working for him, and they began to turn in results in spite of Kenworthy's blundering methods. They caught one rascal of a cattle rustler; they nailed a horse thief; and then they caught a yegg, an old and expert safe cracker. What they did to him was not pleasant to relate, but the group which caught him consisted of old, hard hands, and they determined to make the yegg talk. They tied him to a tree and toasted his feet until he fainted over the fire, and when he recovered his senses the sight of the flames made him begin to blab all that he knew. It was enough.

He gave them names and places as fast as they could write them down. They spent three weeks of furious riding, wearing out a horse and man every other day, but at the end of the three weeks the crime wave in Kenworthy's county was suppressed with a vengeance, the jails were packed, and suddenly it was as safe to walk the open highroad as it had been dangerous before.

Just as the campaign was closing, the time of the county election rolled around, and in noisy admiration of the rancher's work, he was rushed into the office of the sheriff at the last moment, by a tremendous vote, to his own bewilderment and infinite gratification. So he gave a dinner in his big ranch house to celebrate the end of the crime wave and the beginning of his term as sheriff. It was a very happy affair. Men arose one by one and told him what an eminent man and public benefactor he was, until the face of Rose Kenworthy was crimson with shame, and the face of her father was crimson with happiness. At length he rose in turn and announced that he had at least put an end to the crime wave and that The Whisperer would never be heard from again.

"Because, gentlemen," said the rancher, "somewhere among those whom we have caught in my dragnet—somewhere among the rascals whom my vigilantes have brought in, is that arch-rogue who dared to show his face among us in this county of—ours."

He had almost said "mine," but saved himself at the last instant.

"The Whisperer," he continued, "is dead; and may he never rise again!"

This toast was drunk with cheers, so loud that they made a shadowy figure which was at that instant stealing downstairs into the new sheriff's cellar, pause and listen. But presently he went on again. He reached the bottom level of the cellar and searched the wall deliberately with his pocket electric torch. The faint glow thrown back upon him revealed the fact that he was completely masked, his head being hung in black all round. He examined the wall until he discovered something to his interest upon the plain surface of the bricks. He began to fumble at one of these, finally drew it forth, and then inserted his hand into the aperture which it left. At once there was a sharp click followed by a rolling noise of the most oily smoothness; and a section of the wall, a full three feet wide, swung softly open and revealed, within, the lofty and glimmering face of a steel safe.

With the utmost satisfaction, the masked man surveyed it. Then he raised his head and listened with the greatest apparent content to the noise of mirth which continued above him and which was audible even to the faint chiming of the glasses, now and then, because of some door which was left open into the dining room. He now closed the door of the vault behind him almost reluctantly. He laid forth a quantity of yellow laundry soap, excellent for rough cleaning and excellent, also, for the construction of those molds which yeggs run cleverly around the edges of the door of a safe, so that nitroglycerine may be induced to flow around it and trickle into the crack of the door, no matter how narrow.

He next produced a small flask which those of the "trade" would have guessed at once to be filled with the "soup." And, having laid forth these articles, he looked over the safe with the greatest deliberation. He laid his hand upon its bluff and rounded corners as though he admired with all his heart the solidity of its workmanship and the exquisite strength of the tool-proof steel itself. Then, having completed his survey, he set suddenly to work to make his mold of the soap.