Читать книгу Silvertip's Roundup - Max Brand - Страница 4

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WHEN Taxi left the Boot Hill Cemetery, one of the boys who had been watching him yelled out: "You a friend of that gent's?"

"Where's the Creighton Boarding House?" asked Taxi.

The lad took him there, babbling questions all the way. Taxi smiled, and said nothing. When he came to the boarding house, there was a sign in front of it, offering room and board for a ridiculously small price. It was strange that Joe Feeley should have picked up with a woman who ran a place like that. Joe was generally high class in his choice of females. But it's foolish to judge a man by his choice of a gun or a woman. Taxi had decided that long ago. It's just a matter of prejudice.

The boy knocked loudly at the door. Before the echoes had stopped walking up and down inside, the door was pulled open by a girl whose face was rosy with heat. Her forehead was damp. Bits of her hair stuck to the skin and looked dark, though she was quite blond.

"Here's a gent that's a friend of the dead man!" cried the boy. "He wants to see you!"

The boy stood by and watched. He had his mouth and his eyes wide open.

"Run along, Willie," said the girl. She waved at the boy but he stood fast.

"Come in," said the girl to Taxi. He stepped inside. It was worse, to be near the girl. It made Taxi a little sick. He felt cold about the mouth, and he hated to look at her. If she had been a beauty, it would have been different, but she was nothing much. She had a good deal of color and light in her eyes, that was all; there was color in her hair, too. She had on a blue apron. The blue was faded at the knees. Her hair was all tousled. She looked like a poor drudge, except for the light and color in her eyes. There was something young and strong in her. The youth and the strength came up into her eyes and into her voice.

She led the way into a small front room. She raised a roller curtain. It went up with a rattle and let in a great, dusty shaft of sunshine out of the west. The sunshine fell on a carpet that had a pattern of red roses on it. The sunshine fell on the battered legs of an upright piano. There was a round, mahogany table in the middle of the room with some books held up between a pair of book ends. On the wall were some enlarged photographs. The faces seemed to watch Taxi.

"Sit down, please," said the girl.

He sat down on a plush chair, with his hat in his hand, his suitcase beside him. She sat down opposite him. He looked at the faded blue of the apron, across her knees. The apron was darkly splashed with water marks, and there was a white streak as of flour on it.

"Are you a relative of Joe Feeley?" she was asking him.

He kept looking at her knees, but through his lashes he could see her face, also. He knew how to do that without exposing the pallor of his telltale eyes.

"He's nothing to me," lied Taxi.

As he said it, he listened to himself and almost smiled. But if Joe Feeley had been near to listen in, Joe would have understood. That was the great thing about Joe. He understood. You could be silent for a week, but Joe always understood.

"I got word from a friend of Feeley's who knew I was coming out this way," said Taxi. "He asked me to look things over and find out what had happened. I read your name in the paper. That was all. So I came here to ask about it."

"I don't know anything about it," said the girl.

Taxi nodded. He kept his face as still as a stone. That was the way to talk to a stranger. You kept your face as still as a stone, and then nobody could get anything on you. You kept your face still, and remembered the shortest way your hands could get to your guns. Woman or man, it was always best to have no expression on the face.

The expression of the girl was growing cold, also. She was narrowing her eyes and staring at him the way people did in this part of the world. Everyone stared at you, as though they were all plain-clothes men and suspected that something might be wrong.

But that was all right. That only made him feel a little more at home. That was the one home touch that he found in this town of Horseshoe Flat.

"It said in the paper," said Taxi, "that Feeley and a fellow called Larue had an argument about you and—"

He waited, letting his voice trail away, for the girl was sitting up straighter in her chair.

"Joe Feeley was a week in this house," she said. "That night he was lonely. He said he was very lonely. He asked me to go to the dance. I wasn't going to the dance, because I had to be up pretty early the next morning to cook a big breakfast for some people who were making a start. But I said I'd go, anyway. We went to the dance, all right. Charlie Larue was there. He had some sort of an argument with Feeley; I don't know about what."

Taxi nodded.

"Larue a friend of yours?" he asked.

"Yes. Rather a friend. I told Joe Feeley not to have any trouble with Charlie Larue. I danced with Charlie, later on, and told him to remember that Joe Feeley was a stranger. Charlie said he would. But he didn't."

That was all. She sat back in her chair quietly, and waited. Taxi kept on looking at her knees and seeing her face.

"Feeley was new to this part of the world, the way I understand it," said Taxi. "I suppose he did a lot of things that he shouldn't have done. He made a lot of people mad. Was that it?"

"I liked him," said the girl. "I'll never put an eye on Charlie Larue again. I liked Joe Feeley. He was good-natured. He had a good laugh. But Charlie Larue started drinking, and that made the trouble. I think—"

She stopped. Taxi had heard the little click of her teeth and waited for her to go on.

"I'll take a room here, as long as I stay over," he said. "Have you got any rooms?"

She looked at him silently, nodding. She rose, and he rose with her, picking up his hat. At the door into the hall she paused and turned sharply. She was shaking her head.

"You'd better not," she said.

"Why not? What's the matter?" asked Taxi.

"You want to do something about Joe Feeley's death. Don't you try. You'd better pull out of the town and not try."

"I'm not going to do anything," said Taxi. "What could I do?"

"I don't know," she said. "You look quiet enough—in a way. But I want to warn you. Don't try to do anything to Charlie Larue."

She meant what she said. She had her chin up, like a person who means what he says.

"I only want to find out a few things," said he. "I simply want to find out what the trouble was about. That's all."

"I don't believe it," said the girl.

"And I'd like to have a room here, if you don't mind," he went on.

"Well—" She hesitated.

At last she led the way down the hall and opened a door upon a big, empty room. He saw a patch of worn linoleum in front of a washstand, a brass bedstead, a colored calendar on the wall. The wall paper was peeling.

"This is the room that your friend Feeley used to have," said the girl.

"He wasn't a friend of mine," said Taxi.

He stepped into the room, feeling her critical eye on him. She wanted to see if the dead man's room would have any effect on him, and he could have laughed to think that such a little thing might trouble his expression. No, not even the dead body of Feeley would trouble him. Nothing would trouble him. He was not such a fool.

"This is all right," said Taxi.

He put down his suitcase and turned to her with his smile. He had worked on that smile. It meant nothing to him. But he could turn it on and off like a light. But it did things to other people. It made men call him a good fellow. It made women trust him. Sometimes it made them more than trust him. So he turned the smile loose on Sally Creighton. He thought that this might be a good spot to make use of it.

She was leaning against the door jamb, staring at him. Her eyes were so wide that something seemed to be pouring out of her, and through that wideness he could look at something—her soul, her mind—and he guessed that she was in some sort of trouble.

She stretched one arm straight above her to cushion her weight as she leaned against the door. Women when they're playing "vamp" parts on the stage like to stand like that, but this girl was not playing a vamp. She was just being natural. Her loose sleeve fell down. Her forearm was brown as her face. Her upper arm was white. He could see the blue of a vein in it. It was round, and so white that it looked cold. So she leaned like that against the door jamb and stared at him.

"You're going to try to get even for Joe Feeley," she said. "And you know it!"

"Why," said Taxi, "Feeley's nothing to me. Not a great deal. He's just the friend of a friend of mine. A fellow called Dell Simpson, out in Chicago. He's a broker, and he happened to ask me to find out about things when I came this way."

Taxi gave the girl his smile again, and he could see it hit her. She was not so simple as some women are. Most women are pretty simple. They haven't a great deal of sense. They're soft and sort of wide open. She was not so soft, but he could see his smile hit her. Her eyes began to sorrow over him a little.

"You can lie about what you want to do here in Horseshoe Flat," she said, "but you're on the wrong foot. What do you want to do in Horseshoe Flat?"

He turned a little from her and waved his hand toward the great outdoors beyond the windows. There was a fenced field beside the boarding house, and in that field stood a great chestnut stallion, bright as gold, with four silk stockings on its legs, four black silk stockings. The horse looked as though it could move, all right. It looked good enough to carry Taxi's money in almost any race.

Taxi waved beyond the horse, toward the mountains.

"I haven't been very well," he said, "and the doctors told me that I ought to get out into a big country, like the West, where there's plenty of pure air. So I came out here to look for a place to stay. That's all."

He was always pale, as a matter of fact, and no one could guess, to see his slenderness in clothes, how he looked when stripped in the gymnasium of Paddy Dennis. A good many people had told him that he ought to take care of himself. They never seemed to guess that iron is only dark with paint and not of its own nature.

The girl said: "Are you rather weak?"

"I'm not very strong," said Taxi.

She picked up the suitcase and put it on a low stand, nodding as she stepped back from it.

"You can stay here if you want to," said she. "But when you tell lies, stranger, you ought to pick them better."

"Lies?" said Taxi.

He wanted to open his eyes to express hurt amazement, but it was always better not to show his pale eyes to anyone. They could be remembered too easily.

"Lies," repeated the girl sternly. "You carried that fifty-pound suitcase all the way from the station, and you're not even breathing hard. If you're weak, most people are sick in bed."

She turned her back on him and went to the door, where she turned again.

"You can stay here," she said. "But I'm going to send someone bigger than I am to talk to you. You're here to make a big play, I know. But I've told you before to keep your hands off Charlie Larue. Now I'll tell you the reason. It's because Barry Christian is behind him! Put that in your pipe and smoke it a while, will you?"

She closed the door, and Taxi looked blankly at it.

She was different. She talked in a free and easy way, and yet she was not free and easy. She could "heft" a suitcase and then make some deductions from the weight of it. She had the straight look of a man and the soft eye of a woman. She was not beautiful, but there was something about her.

Far down the hall he could hear her rap at a door. Then he made out her voice saying, rather plaintively:

"Excuse me, Mr. Silver. I'm sorry to wake you up. But Ijust wanted to beg you to do something for me."

Taxi heard the soft, deep rumble of a man's voice, on which a door closed to give silence. What sort of a man was asleep at the fag end of a day, almost at sunset time? What was there in this part of the world to keep a fellow up late the night before?