Читать книгу Silvertip's Strike - Max Brand - Страница 6

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The evening came on, and Jim Silver was glad of a chance to get out of the tobacco reek and whisky smell of the closed house into the open. Besides, there was something unusual—rain promised over the desert, and thunder bumping and rumbling in the sky just like carts going over iron bridges.

Steve Wycombe went off by himself for a few moments, and Silver was gladdest of all to be alone. He wanted to do some thinking. He had come to the hardest moment of all, which is when a man tries to untangle his own actions and discover the motives of them. He kept telling himself that he was a fool to have bound himself to fight for this fellow Wycombe and, above all, to have bound himself against such formidable men as Morris Delgas and that ravenous ghost of a man, Harry Rutherford.

Certainly it was not compassion for Wycombe that kept him on the place. He could hardly put his finger on the cause until he saw young Dan Farrel walk from the first corral toward the bunk house. Then he could remember and be sure that it was something about Farrel and the girl that had turned the scales and induced him to stay. Why?

Well, he could not say exactly. He was simply a prospector in the land of trouble, and there seemed to be a rich strike of danger and complications straight ahead of him.

A pair of cow-punchers came away from the horse shed and ran sneaking up on their foreman. They were almost on him when he sidestepped. There was a swift flurry of action, an uproar of laughing voices, and the foreman went on, leaving his two men to pick themselves up from the ground. Jim Silver was pleased enough to smile. He waved Farrel over to him.

"What do you say about rain, Farrel?" he asked.

Farrel shook his head. "It's the wrong season," he declared. "You don't know how rain comes here—just a few drops at a time—just enough to keep the lips wet and the patient from dying. Just enough water to keep the grass from dying clear down to the bottom of its roots. This is a dry ranch, Silver!"

He nodded and smiled as he spoke.

"You like it." said Jim Silver. "There's something about it you like, or that you expect to like later on."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you'll put up with a good deal in order to stay on it. Why, Farrel? There are plenty of jobs everywhere for good cowmen."

Farrel stared at him. Then turning toward the foothills, he waved his hand west and north and east.

"You see how those mountains are heaped up in three bunches? Over there to the east are the Rendais—that's old Mount Kendal back there in blue and white, just on the right. Over here, straight north, that second bunch make up the Humphreys Mountains. I don't have to tell you which is Mount Humphreys itself. Look at the way it goes jump into the sky! Now, yonder on the left, right over there bang against the west, you see the biggest of the three bunches? Those are the Farrel Mountains."

Silver looked not so much at the silhouette of ragged blackness in the west, not so much at the three vast masses of cumulus clouds which were blossoming over the three groups of mountains, as he did into the lean, brown face of Dan Farrel. For it seemed to Silver that some of the fire and grandeur of the sunset mountains was reflected in the face of the cow-puncher.

"I see," said Silver. "They were named after one of your tribe?"

"Great-grandfather. Ever since his day there's always been a Farrel on this ground."

He hooked his thumb over his shoulder.

"It isn't the house that matters. I don't give a hang about that. It's the ground that counts. I've gone away and worked on other places—places on the ledge of the desert, like this, with mountains close by that were a lot bigger and finer than those three outfits—but I never found a place that fitted into my head the way this one does. Every time I lay an eye on those mountains, it's as though I'd daubed a rope on a maverick and added it to my herd. I tell you what, Silver—it may seem a funny thing to you, but it's true—it seems to me that I know every wave of the ground off there to the south from the ranch house. I know just where the waves of the land are running, every one of 'em."

"How did the Farrels lose the place?" asked Silver.

"My old man gambled it away to Wycombe's old man, that's the whole story."

"You hate to leave it?"

"The way you'd hate to stop breathing."

"Well," said Silver, "it looks as though you'd have to go."

"Does it?"

"On account of the girl."

"What d'you mean?"

"I've been talking to Wycombe, and he wants her. If he thinks you're in his way, with her, he'll cut your throat. He'll fire you off the ranch, at least."

"What makes you think that there's anything between the girl and me?" asked Dan Farrel.

"I saw her turning white and pink, to-day in the kitchen. Farrel, you'll have to move."

Farrel took off his hat, mopped his forehead, and then stood with the hat crushed in his two hands. Slowly his glance went across the mountains from the east to the west, until he was facing the last fire of the sunset. He said nothing but, after a moment, he walked away and left Silvertip in profoundly gloomy thought. Tragedy was not ten steps away from the Wycombe ranch, he felt, and it was probably even nearer than those expert gunmen, Morrie Delgas and Harry Rutherford; in fact, it probably was stepping in the boots of Dan Farrel.

Nothing like this had ever come into the ken of Jim Silver.

Through the open kitchen window, he saw the girl moving back and forth rapidly, with the haste of a cook who is making the last preparations for the service of a meal. He went to the window and leaned an elbow on the sill. The girl was pouring the water off a pot of boiled potatoes; a cloud of steam rushed up from the sink about her shoulders and head. Then she spilled the potatoes into a great dish.

"Suppose," said Silver, without an introductory word, "that a fellow had a good pair of hands, plenty of work anywhere he wanted to find it, and a girl willing to travel anywhere in the world with him; couldn't he be happy off the home ground?"

She had turned half toward him, though without looking into his face. It was as if his words had arrested her whole mind so that a greater and a greater tension was put on her. He saw it in the stiffening of her body, in the way her head lifted. Afterward, she came to the window to confront him closely.

"How much has Danny told you?" she asked.

"Not as much as I told him," answered Jim Silver. "Do you know how close you are to trouble?"

"From Steve Wycombe?" she asked.

"He's going to ask you to marry him. How long can you put him off? He's used to having his own way."

She took a deep, quick breath. The shake of her head was a shudder through her entire body.

"I don't know," she answered. "I can't get Danny to leave the place."

"You'll have to," responded Silver. "You'll have to persuade him fast, too. Wycombe wants you. He wants you as much as he can want anything. If you put him off, he'll be suspicious. If he grows suspicious, he can't help finding out that there's something between you and Farrel. And if he guesses that—" He paused.

"I know," said the girl. "He'd murder Dan in a moment, I suppose. I'm going to leave! I'll leave tonight. I'll leave now!"

"You'd better," said Silver. He pitied her, suddenly, more than he had ever pitied any other human being. The trouble which faced her seemed so totally unfair. "There's only one other thing to do—and that's to persuade Danny to live in another place."

"It's no good. He has desert fever, and the only desert he can live in is this one. He's tried to go away before this. But he came back looking like a ghost. It's the sort of homesickness that doesn't fade out."

"Have you got a horse of your own?" Silver asked her.

"I have."

"Have you money?"

"No. Only a little."

"I can help you out with some cash."

"If I have to step out of his life—out of Danny's life—forever—" she murmured.

Then she straightened herself and smiled wanly at Silver.

"I can't even say good-by to him, I suppose," she said.

"No, I suppose not," said Silver.

He reached for his wallet and opened it.

"Take this," said he, and offered a sheaf of bills. But she only shook her head.

"I can't do it," she told him. "I can manage with what I have."

Silver put the money back into the wallet, stared at her, and then walked away into the dusk. His thoughts were so baffled, so gloomy, that he kicked aimlessly at the ground over which he walked. He had been in tangles before, but none so thoroughly complicated as this one. The chief anger he felt was directed toward Farrel. The fellow looked as hard as nails, but his weakness was what is the strength of other men—an overmastering love for one place.

Into the darkening north Silver looked, toward the mountains. They were new enough to him, and yet already they began to stand in his mind like old, familiar faces. He remembered how Farrel had pointed to them; he remembered the reverence and affection with which the voice of Farrel had uttered the names. After all, a man cannot be blamed for passions which are bigger than himself.

He went to the pump and sloshed a tin pan full of cold water. There was soap, yellow and strong, to wash with, and a big, coarse scrubbing brush. He worked on his finger tips until he had got the leather grease out from under the nails. The rest of his washing took very little time. He managed to find a clean spot on one of the big roller towels and dried himself.

The cow-punchers were all around him, sputtering in the water, swearing as the soap got into recent cuts. One of them was red-headed, the clown of the lot. He squared off in front of Silver, swaying thick shoulders.

"He ain't so big," said "Red."

"I'll take you on for a couple of rounds, big boy."

He began to dance on the tips of his toes, easing his hands back and forth in readiness to strike or to parry. Silver finished drying his own hands and smiled.

"Come on!" said Red, as the others began to crow and whoop. "Come on!" said Red. "Nobody gets by on reputation in this man's ranch. Let's see what you've got, Jim Silver!"

He was dancing, still swaying himself from side to side a little, when Silver made a flashing gesture with both arms and caught the two hands of Red. He kept on smiling as he crushed those hands until he could feel the supple bones springing and giving.

"In my part of the world, we shake before we fight," said Silver.

He released the hands and stepped back. Red began to open and close his fingers, laughing.

"In my part of the world, when a gent shakes hands like that, we don't fight him," said Red.

The other punchers were laughing, too. The supper gong rang. Silver went in with the rest, and by the brightness of their eyes he knew that he would have no more signs of trouble from them. They had accepted him as something more than a large bubble of reputation.