Читать книгу Silvertip's Strike - Max Brand - Страница 5

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They sat for a time in the office. Wycombe drank more of the old rye whisky. Silver smoked cigarettes and did the listening, as a rule.

He had merely said: "Let's find out why the pair are after you. It's quite a time since you were in the games where you rubbed elbows with the pair of 'em. Two or three years, I should say."

"All that matters," said Wycombe, "is that they're after me, and that you know what they look like."

"No," said Silver. "I need to know more."

Wycombe curled his upper lip to speak, and once more the lip stayed curled on the projecting teeth while Wycombe changed his mind about the words he was to have spoken.

"Well," he said at last, "you won't be a hired man. You're going to have your full share in the show."

He struck out his jaw after the way he had, and tossed back the blond hair.

"I'm sorry I got sore in front of the girl," he said suddenly. "You think she noticed?"

"She noticed," said Silver.

"What did she look like?" asked Wycombe.

"Frightened," said Silver.

Wycombe lolled back in his chair, suddenly at ease.

"It don't do any harm to throw a scare into a jane," he declared. "Let 'em know that there's a real man around, and they like it all the better. You know what I mean."

"I know what you mean," said Silver, probing the dark and mean soul of the man with a steady eye.

But Wycombe failed to understand the glance. He went on: "You know how it is. A girl likes to see a man that's up to something. She doesn't want to have a yellow pup around. She's always liked that foreman of mine pretty well. She'll hate his heart from now on. Eh?"

"Perhaps," said Silver.

"They know my record, around here," went on Wycombe. "They know that I'm no soft-handed baby. Eh?"

"They ought to know that."

"But, going back a little—I'm kind of beat by you, Silver. You throw ten thousand dollars out the window?"

Silver shrugged his shoulders.

"I want to be my own man," said he. "I want to do as I please. And I don't want blood money. I never took any, and I don't want it."

"But you'll hire out—you'll stay here, I mean—and keep an eye out for me?"

"I'll stay here—for a while. If Morrie Delgas and Harry Rutherford show up, I'll try my hand fighting for you. I'll work for you as though you'd paid me the money, Wycombe—unless you start kicking things around."

"Kicking you around?" said Wycombe, laughing. "I'm not a half-wit, old son."

"Let's hear the story of why the pair are on your trail."

"Why pick on that? Why does it matter?"

"Because," said Silver, "the cause that puts a man on a trail is the grindstone that sharpens the edge of him. I want to know what sort of a temper and edge these fellows are wearing."

Wycombe considered gloomily. He made himself a cigarette and then remarked:

"You know Gold Gulch?"

"Yes."

"Know Fourth Street?"

"Yes."

"Know the pawnshop on the corner?"

"Pudge Wayland used to run it."

"That's right. Know anything more about Pudge?"

"He was a crook and a fence."

"He was a crook and a fence, all right," said Wycombe. "Know what happened to him?"

"He was shot."

"By whom?" asked Wycombe.

"I never heard."

"Nobody else did, except a few. I'm the fellow that killed him."

Silver actually sighed with relief.

"Is that what's behind this trail that Morrie Delgas and Rutherford are on?"

"That's it!" said Steve Wycombe, brightening. "I ought to have a medal and a vote of thanks for getting that fat Gila monster out of the world, instead of inheriting trouble about it, eh?"

"It seems that way. How did the thing happen?"

"I'd had words with him. It was a couple of years back. I'd had words with him. About nothing much. Just about a loan he'd made me on a gold watch. I was sore. The next time I saw him, I was coming out of the mouth of an alley. It was night. I saw the fat back of Pudge Wayland come across the street. I sang out and swore at him. He whirled around. I was drunk. I was on a mean drunk. You know, the kind when you don't know what you're doing. I thought I saw a gun in his hand. I shot him dead. That's all."

He stuck out his lower jaw and stared at the floor.

"That's all—except that he wasn't even wearing a gun?" suggested Silver.

"The fool," said Steve Wycombe, "should 'a' had one on, anyway. There was a witness, y'understand? A sap of a no-good sneak thief. He saw everything. He spotted me. I had to give him a regular pension to keep his mouth shut. And he went off into Mexico, where he'd be safe in case I decided to pay him the rest of his pension with a chunk of lead. He stayed down there and collected my checks. Just like that. And then the blockhead goes and gets into a row, a while ago, and gets himself knifed up, and the doctors say that he's going to die, and he lies there on the floor of a saloon and tells what he knows to the fellow that knifed him. Makes a confession, d'you see? And the fellow that knifed him is Harry Rutherford, and with Harry is that Morrie Delgas.

"Well, this is how the thing all hitches together. That Pudge Wayland was a fence, and you know it. And he'd done a lot of work for Delgas and for Rutherford, both of 'em, because they were working hand in glove. And when Wayland died, he had a whole slew of stolen goods on his hands, and a big pile of it belonged to those two thugs.

"You see what had happened? I bump off Pudge Wayland. His heirs get everything in his shop—and it's a ton! They clean out his safe. They get themselves rich, and gyp Morrie and Harry out of a whole little fortune in honest stolen goods they'd given to Pudge. That must have been the way of it.

"Anyway, my man lies there on the floor of the cantina and talks his fool head off, and he sees that pair shake hands over him and swear that they'll go and bump off Wycombe, just to even the account. They'd always hated me, anyway, since a little poker game we once played together. And then the fool fellow, he doesn't die, after all; but he gets better, and he's honest enough to write me a letter and tell me how he happened to put those two bloodhounds on my trail. But you see the funny part?"

"I don't know what part would be funny to you," said Silver.

"Why," said Wycombe, "ain't it a scream that'd curdle your blood to think of me bumping off a fat fool like Pudge Wayland and then getting a pair of wildcats like those two dropped right down my back?"