Читать книгу Gunman's Gold - Max Brand - Страница 7

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IT was thirty miles from San Andreas to the railroad; it was forty miles from the nearest part of the railroad to the town of Deerfoot. There were several hours of bumpy roadbed in between those two points. And therefore Howison started energetically to get to Deerfoot, calmly trusting that his new ally would at least attempt to help him. What could be done, he was not able to guess. But he had a feeling that the accomplishment of the impossible might be a quite ordinary thing for this bronze-faced monster.

He had barely started down the street when Shannigan called to the girl. She came to the edge of the arcade that ran around the patio, and leaned her hand against one of the rough pillars.

"Call your mother, Mary," said he.

"Just what kind of deviltry are you up to now, Sam?" asked the girl.

"Only a little bit of a white kind of deviltry, Mary," said he.

"If you put trouble in her mind, I'll poison the air you breathe, Sam," said the girl.

"I'm going to show you the difference between trust and trust," said Shannigan. "Go call her, and then stand by and listen!"

She shook her head dubiously, but finally she went to a door. There she turned her head and gave him a final glance over her shoulder.

He smiled and waved, and she disappeared at once.

When she was gone, Shannigan laid his long hands on his knees and looked before him into space with his ever cold and undecipherable smile.

Mrs. Tracy came back with her daughter a moment later. She was a very small woman, with snowy hair that made her thin face seem younger than it was. Her eyes and her smile were as fresh as a girl's. She wore a thin black dress that floated about her as she walked, and the color went with something in her face to prove that sorrow was never out of her mind.

Shannigan stood up to meet her.

"Mrs. Tracy," said he, "there's work to be done that needs a woman in it. Will you let me take Mary away?"

The mother looked at Shannigan and then at the girl, her eyes opening.

"Where would you go, Sam?" she asked.

"Not far," said Shannigan, "as distances go in this part of the world."

"Of course you may take her," said Mrs. Tracy.

"What are you thinking of, mother?" asked the girl. "I wouldn't go away from you. Not with any man!"

"Hush, silly girl," said her mother. "Don't you know Sam well enough to trust him? I'd put my soul in his hands!"

"That's well enough for you," answered the girl. "Every one knows that the devil has no power over saints!"

Mrs. Tracy raised a warning hand. "When you're older, Mary," said she, "you'll learn better how to talk. All your schooling has never schooled your tongue. Sam, she may go where she pleases with you. I permit it."

"That's all I want to know, Mrs. Tracy," said he.

She went back across the court.

"For all of that," said the girl, "I'll be making no trips with you, Samuel Shannigan."

"You're going to be a lovely young wife, Mary," said he.

"Not your wife, Sam," she answered angrily.

"The wife of a man you've never seen," said he.

She frowned at him.

"And you have at home two beautiful young children, a golden- haired lad by the name of Jack and a girl you call Molly," he went on.

She sat down suddenly opposite him, and intently stared into his ugly face.

"Go on, Sam Shannigan," said she. "You were always the one for telling fairy tales."

"You live back in a little Southern town," said Shannigan, "and it's the first time you've ever come West. You hear?"

"What sort of play-acting is this?" asked Mary Tracy.

"It's a play where I'll be on the stage with you mighty little," said Shannigan. "But I may do a little prompting from the wings. You're a soft, sweet, fluffy, charming, adorable thing."

"I couldn't be that," she said. "Not if I had a mile start for the job and a thousand dollars a week for playing it. I couldn't be that kind of a girl."

"You could, though, for the devil of it," said Shannigan. "I know you, Mary."

"Do you? And what do you know?"

"I know that you eat out your heart to do what I do—ride across the world and burn up a part of it now and then."

"I'm to burn up a part of the world, am I?"

"Would you hate that, Mary?" he asked her.

She looked at him, then threw back her head and stared up through the twisting branches of the acacia toward the blue of the pale, bright sky.

"Go on and tell me, Sam," said she, still staring up.

"You'll be a happy young girl mother that's come out from the East to see your young husband and give him the surprise of his life. You're bursting with the great thing you've done! You've come all the way, all by yourself, and your mother has taken the children into her splendid home, and every one has been kind to you on the way, Mary. All the men have been wonderful to you."

He paused and smiled.

"Men always are wonderful to you, Mary," he said.

"I need to think a little," said she. "You're tempting me to do a wrong thing, Sam."

"I'm tempting you to save a man from hanging. Is that wrong?"

"Maybe he needs hanging," said the girl, frowning.

Still she looked upward.

"We all need hanging," said Shannigan.

He leaned forward a little, and added: "You'll be the wife that the town will pity! Oh, but they'll be sad about you—and they'll be pitying you. Instead of hanging the rascal at once, they'll stop to think, and while they're thinking, I'll have him out from the shadow of the rope."

"And then you take the check of Mr. Howison. Is that it?"

"I split the check with you, Mary; or if you play the part well enough, I give you the whole thing."

She jumped up from her chair and stamped her foot.

"As if there could be talk of money from you to me!" she cried. "I'm not such an ingrate that I don't count the thousands you've spent on mother and me!"

"Your mother has worked enough to earn everything that she's had from me, and what you've had, too," said Shannigan.

"Stuff!" said the girl.

"She has," said Shannigan.

"Oh, nonsense," said the girl. "Mother is a darling muddlehead, and you know it!"

"She makes this house a home," said Shannigan.

"Sentimental fiddlesticks," said Mary Tracy. "But you've never asked me to work with you in one of your crazy schemes before, Sam. Why have you asked me today?"

"Because," said Shannigan, "it may be a bigger job than I can do by myself."

"That's not the reason," she declared. "I know that you'd tackle the blue hill of heaven and trust your feet to get you to the top of it. What's the reason that you want me in?"

"I thought you were a small girl, Mary," said he. "But I've just looked at you today and seen that you're a woman."

She shook her head slowly.

"Why can't you tell me the truth, Sam?" she asked him almost sadly. "You may talk all around a thing, but you'll never come out with the truth. Does it hurt you to be telling it?"

He shrugged his shoulders, and looked at her with an eye so cold, so cruel, and so calculating, that she winced a little, though no person in the world had had such practice as she in meeting that glance.

She exclaimed: "Very well, then, what's my name to be?"

"Mrs. Jack Reynolds—Mrs. Mary Reynolds."

"Jack Reynolds? The gunman?" she asked.

"That's the one."

"And I'm to be the sweet little girl bride? I couldn't be that, Sam. I'd choke. I'd break down in the lines. I couldn't carry it through."

"Then say so now," said Shannigan, his voice suddenly cold and hard as the expression of his face. "For if you once come into the game with me—you'll never dare to let me down! Go back and talk to your mother about anything but this. And then come back and say yes or no."

She turned her back on him, saying, with her head still turned away: "I can tell you already that I don't want to—"

"Do what I tell you to do," commanded Shannigan. "And then come back and tell me."

She left the patio, and Shannigan sat as before, with his hands laid palm down and the fingers straight out, upon his knees, and the knees sloped together, and his body erect, and his eyes coldly smiling into space.

She was gone for an entire hour, and during that time he did not stir.

The sun, in the meantime, had shifted so far that its slanting rays cut under the protection of the acacia tree and struck against him in a ceaseless torrent of fire. Right in his face poured those fires, but he remained unwinking, unaware of any change.

The girl came back, flinging open the door into the patio, and flinging it impatiently shut behind her again.

To her, Shannigan's face appeared like a massive piece of dark, shining bronze. And his smile checked her like a hand.

But she gave her head a shake, for her mind was already made up.

He did not stir.

"I'm going, Sam," said she.

He raised one finger.

"To take orders on the way and never to say 'No'?" he demanded.

"Yes, you can have everything your way," said she. "When do we start?"

"Now."

"I'll go pack," said she.

"You'll do no packing. You have a fresh outfit on this trip. And what an outfit for the girl wife, Mary!"

As he ended, he laughed, and the clear sound went ringing across the patio, and reechoed loudly from the walls.