Читать книгу The Long, Long Trail - Max Brand - Страница 8

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Morgan Valentine concealed his triumph, or sought to do so, by busying himself with taking up the reins and fastening them between his fingers.

"But will your horse follow?"

"It took me two years off and on to teach Angelina to follow. And I figure that if she lives to be two hundred, she won't forget what she's learned," the outlaw replied.

Valentine spoke to the two geldings, and they struck their collars at the same instant in answer to his voice; but at once they settled down to their time- honored pace. In the meantime he was adjusting himself to his companion. It was plain to see that the other had accepted the invitation to ride with his victim simply in the light of a dare. Morgan had put himself side by side with a man who had already admitted to several killings, and he had allowed that man to choose his time and place for an attack. Yet the bandit, scorning to sit far to one side or to keep his head turned toward Valentine, sat perfectly erect in the seat with his eyes fixed far down the road. It was not until Valentine, jerking his hand up swiftly to his cigarette, had made a definite move that could be construed as hostile that his companion showed the slightest sign of being on the alert. Even then he did not turn his head, but Valentine was aware of a flash of those gray eyes to the side and a tint of yellow in them. And all at once he knew that Jess Dreer was fairly a-tremble with an electric watchfulness; that he was concentrating a tremendous energy in keeping aware of his companion, and that in the space of a split second he could have whirled in his seat and got at the throat of the rancher.

It was not altogether a comfortable feeling for Valentine, but in his day he had had to do with many a hard man and had even possessed a certain name for hardness himself. There were few men in that part of the mountain desert who would have cared to risk their lives on the speed and certainty of their gun play as opposed to the speed and certainty of Morgan Valentine. For he was a cold-headed man, a cold-blooded man, and he fought with the same nerveless accuracy with which he lived, with which he had married, with which he had raised his children. The death of his brother—the coming departure of his brother's child—these were the emotional landmarks of his life.

Indeed, it was a sense of loneliness, of lack of food to fill his mind and his heart that had made him ask the bandit to ride with him. There was also a lingering hope that he might be able to turn the tables upon his antagonist. For there was never a man born—at least none worthy of the name of man—who did not have somewhere in the bottom of his heart love for an honest fight. Yet he had sense enough to guess that whatever his prowess might be with weapons, it would be as nothing compared to the man in the seat beside him. For Jess Dreer was his antithesis. If he was without nerves, Jess Dreer was full of little else. And the calm exterior of Dreer was a disguise maintained by an almost muscular effort; beneath the disguise there was a mind of wolfish alertness. It suddenly occurred to Valentine that this man might be many years younger than he seemed, for he was of the kind who age rapidly.

And the interest of Valentine was by no means entirely malicious, as has been hinted. In Jess Dreer he crossed a new type of man, and he was curious to read beneath the surface.

"You've had your horse for eight years," said the rancher, and he looked down to the holster at the hip of his companion, "but I'll chance a guess that you've had the gun a good deal longer."

"This gun?"

With a gesture so smooth that the eye failed to appreciate its speed, the bandit reached back, and with the tips of his fingers—so it seemed—flicked the revolver out. It lay in the palm of his hand under the eye of Morgan Valentine.

Suppose he were to strike up, would he knock that weapon out of the open hand and send it spinning? Something told him that swift as his blow might be, the long brown fingers would move with vastly more speed to curl around the gun. The very thought of what might happen perceptibly lowered the temperature of the rancher's blood.

He saw that it was, as he had guessed, a very old weapon. It bore evidence of the most meticulous care, but in spite of that an expert could see at a glance that it had passed its palmy days as an engine of destruction.

"Now, there's a gun that ain't much to look at," said the bandit, and his singularly winning smile softened his face for a moment. "And between you and me, it ain't much better'n it looks. It bucks like a wild colt. It's got funny ways. It shoots the way a one-eyed hoss runs. It keeps veerin' off to one side. Well, it's a hard shooter—if you know its ways."

He paused, then added: "I seen it thrown out of the door into the ash can one day, and I picked it up."

"Just like this?"

"All the parts was there, but it was considerable chewed up with rust. You can see where it's eat away in places. It was on a Friday that I seen that gun throwed away."

"Unlucky day?"

"Unlucky for most, but I run by opposites. And when I seen it fall, I says: 'There goes somebody's bad luck. Maybe it'll be my good luck.' So I took out the gun and spent the off time for the next couple of days oiling it up. Then I went out and tried her. Lordy, lordy! I shot a circle around a knot. She had twenty queer tricks, that gun had. But after a while I got to know the tricks. And now she does pretty smooth, neat work. You see?"

The gun flipped up in the long fingers, and without raising his hand off his knees, the bandit fired. Twenty yards away a squirrel, standing up like a peg beside its hole, was blown to bits.

The geldings plunged at the explosion of the gun, and the bandit burst at once into a stream of excuses.

"Now ain't that a fool kid thing to do?" he cried. "Shooting a gun without asking you if your hosses was gun-broke? Well, sir, call me a blockhead, because I am one. Mr. Valentine, I sure am sorry!"

Indeed, his words did not seem overdone, for his earnest gray eyes were upon the rancher in a species of entreaty.

"Dreer," said the cattleman earnestly, as soon as he had quieted the horses, "you don't have to apologize. It was worth it—to see that gun act all by itself."

But the other shook his head and returned the weapon to its leather.

"You see," he explained, "that gun is almost human to me. Suppose you had a friend with you when you got into a fight, and it was a dead-sure cinch that you'd get plugged if your friend didn't stand up and play the man by you. And suppose you never knowed whether that friend would fight like a devil or else lie down and quit—like a greaser— Well, sir, that's the way it is with that gun. If I shoot with it, I have to look twice to see if I've hit a thing."

"And yet you still carry it? You still let your safety depend on that old rattletrap?"

The crimson departed suddenly from the face of the stranger. And the muscle at the angle of his jaw leaped out into prominence.

"Sir," he said quietly, "they's one thing that I appreciate, and that's a gent that chooses his words. Rattletrap ain't particular accurate, speaking about my gun!"

"Why, Dreer, you've as good as said as much as that yourself."

The other turned his face, and there was the old unpleasant glint in his eyes.

"I'm a peaceable man, Mr. Valentine," he said. "Matter of fact, I'm a quiet kind of a gent and I mostly hate trouble, but I don't think you and me are going to agree."

Morgan Valentine was too dumfounded to reply.

"In the first place, sir," went on the stranger, "you say you don't think nothing particular fine about my hoss. Then I let that pass, and I just throw in a few qualifying remarks about the roan. And pretty soon you up and say my gun—my gun—is a rattletrap!"

He was unable to continue for a moment.

"But after you'd just said practically the same thing yourself, man."

"Sir, whatever else may be wrong with that gun, it's mine, and, being mine, they ain't any man in the world that I'm going to hear say things about it that they won't stand up and prove. And, speaking man to man, I can sure digest a pile of that sort of proof before I admit that I'm wrong."

A veritable devil was in his face as he spoke. And the long brown fingers were becoming restless upon his knee.

Then, very suddenly, and most welcome sight to Valentine, the blood rushed into the face of the tall man again.

"Hanged if I didn't forget for a minute," he said, "that I was your guest, riding in your wagon. Mr. Valentine, I got to ask your pardon again. Just stop the buckboard and I'll get out and climb on the roan. They ain't any man living whose pardon I've asked three times hand-running. And I've done it twice by you already!"

"Sit still," replied Morgan Valentine. "I figure to keep you right here and take you home with me."