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

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THERE were not many occasions when Taxi had to spend time thinking, unless it were some such problem as to how to crack a safe or get at an enemy. The values in his accepted world were fixed, and men were known by what they contributed. All policemen were "hard" or "crooked"; all women were "soft"; all children were "worthless and useless"; and, as for men, they were all on the "make."

Joe Feeley was a little different. If one had asked Taxi why he had come out West to avenge the death of Feeley, he would have been hard put to it to answer. He would have said, perhaps, that there was something about Feeley. Just something about him. That was all. He had a good grin. He knew how to tell a story. He wasn't a welsher.

But it would hardly have occurred to Taxi to call Feeley a friend. That word was an abstraction to be found in books but not in life, so far as he was concerned. Life was steel, and the "wise guy" was the fellow who had a diamond-drill point that would cut the steel of existence and open a way through it.

So Taxi, after he had reflected for a few moments, discarded the first wild flights of his fancy about big Silver, and decided that Silver was on the "make."

Now that he had decided this, he was much more at ease, for there had been beating in on the verge of his mind the suspicion that, after all, there were men of another type in the world, men who would do something for nothing, men to whom words like loyalty, and kindness, and decency had a meaning far more concrete than anything else that could be named. If that were true, then it was also true that Taxi had spent the twenty-two complicated and crowded years of his life in a perfectly futile pursuit of goals which had no real value. For what did mere hard cash and underworld fame count against the possibilities of affection and a cleanliness of soul such as he had guessed at in Silver?

Because it would have meant this denial of all value to his years of life, his years of prison and reform school, Taxi cast the thought over his shoulder. Finally, what he could remember best about Silver was the pale glimmer of his eyes and the soundless pressure of his step on the floor. This memory assured him that Silver was, like himself, a beast of prey. The memory comforted him.

"A big smart mug putting something over on me, is all," said Taxi to himself.

He opened his suitcase and put some clothes into the bureau drawers. That suitcase was packed with exquisite precision and neatness. It was always put up the same way. In the dark, his hands could go instantly to anything in it.

Now he opened a cunningly concealed false top and took out a small burglar's kit. The tools were fragile to the eye, delicate, but they were of a surprising strength. Steel tubing has almost the strength of steel bars—that was one explanation of its power. And the metal itself was of the most exquisite temper.

The manufacturer of those goods put them into the hands of only a few famous and expert criminals in various parts of the world. Each set cost a small fortune; and that manufacturer equipped his favored men with the means of taking several millions of dollars out of circulation every year. The bits of his drills cut through armor-plate steel as though it were butter, and his picklock set was as supple as sword blades and as strong as hope.

All the larger tools were jointed so that they could be taken apart. Taxi was taking them apart, jointing them again, with absent movements of his supple hands, as he worked over the set. He loved every bit of it. It was like an extension of his own flesh. He had nerves in the tips of the picklocks. He had nerves in the heads of the drills. The little flashlight, hardly larger than a fountain pen but capable of throwing a sharply concentrated light for hours, was to Taxi as part of his thinking brain, its sword slash through the dark had opened for him the way through so many familiar dangers. It was his fourth set; the police had grabbed three others; and this fourth set was a little smaller, lighter, stronger than any other he had ever possessed.

He began to put away the tools. They fitted into odd places. Small mouths opened in the seams of his clothes, and into them lengths were slipped. The heels of his shoes screwed off, revealing little hollows into which various bits were put. In a moment his set was out of sight, but when he shook himself, nothing jingled. There was hardly a thing to be felt by the touch of any but the most cunning hand and the forewarned brain. And yet there were few banks in the world that would have dared to turn him loose against their thickest sets of bars and locks for half an hour undisturbed.

He felt better when he had the tools on his person. He always felt better when they were in his clothes. He was complete. Walls and locks could not hold him, now.

The room was darkening as he finished. He went to the window and saw through the dusk the strange sight of Silver playing with the stallion a sort of wild game of hide and seek in the field behind the house, sloping off toward the brook. Silver was dodging through the brush; the horse like a beast of prey was after him. It was an exciting pursuit. They were both cats, one on two legs and one on four.

No matter how the man dodged on the ground like a bat through the air, he was overtaken suddenly. The great horse reared. A cruel smile came on the lips of Taxi as he watched. And then—by magic the man was on the back of the horse, and the stallion was sweeping away with great, rejoicing strides that lifted it from the ground like the beat of wings.

Taxi kept on smiling. The cruelty was gone from his face.

"There's something in that bird," he said to himself. "Maybe—"

He shut the rest of that supposition out of his mind and went out to find supper. He could eat in the boarding house, of course, but the smell of cookery in the hall was not to his taste, which was always a little finicky. So he went up through the barren, open flats of the town to find a restaurant.

A boy with bare legs and trousers ragged about the knees began to walk a block behind him, turned when he turned, and went past the lunch counter which Taxi stopped at.

Even a boy can shadow a man, and Taxi knew that he had been followed and spotted down. But that was all right. It made him feel at home. It gave him an appetite for the food which he ordered. It kept him smiling down at his plate while, with uncounted side glances, he made himself aware of all that passed on the sidewalk in front of the big glass window, and every opening of the back door. At no moment was he more than a tenth of a second away from readiness to whip out his guns. He ate with his left hand, entirely, an art which he had learned and always practiced—because one never can tell.

One thing amused and entertained him and that was the increasing possibilities which he found in Horseshoe Flat. It looked like nothing but a naked junk heap to the casual eye, but there was life in the heap. There was life that had a poison tooth, perhaps.

After his supper, he wanted to find Charlie Larue who, according to fact, had killed Joe Feeley and who, it appeared, was under the protection of the gang of Barry Christian.

He could remember more about Barry Christian now. Barry Christian was one of those Western master minds of the criminal world who find their way even onto the front pages of Eastern journals. Barry Christian, he could now remember, was a fellow who had stood at the top of his profession in the West and whose capture had caused a stir only less than his escape from prison.

Well, it seemed to Taxi in a sense a pitiful thing that he and Barry Christian could not be useful to one another, in place of being at swords' points because Taxi had to kill a member of the gang. What was the life of an unknown man, a Charlie Larue, compared to the benefits which two master crooks could confer upon one another?

He was thinking of this when he paid his bill. There were two sections of the mind in Taxi. With one section he could observe everything that happened near by. With the other section he could carry on his own reflections and observations. The separation of the faculties had cost him much effort and training. But then he had had ten years in which he could devote himself to the training of faculties—ten years of graduate and postgraduate work in reform schools and prisons where the active mind can learn so much.

He knew half a dozen tapping codes. He knew three or four sign languages in which he could talk almost as rapidly as he could by word of mouth. He had evolved a system of gymnastics which worked every muscle of the body, so that he could keep fit even when loaded with chains in "solitary." But above all he had trained his mind to be an instrument supple, dexterous, and strong. He used to feel that his wits matched his burglar kit, and his burglar kit matched his wits.

Taxi next stopped at a clothing store and selected a wide-brimmed Stetson and a pair of boots. He had felt his own hat inadequate as a shield from the power of the Western sun, and, also, its very insignificance had seemed to make him conspicuous. For the men he saw, whatever their clothes might be, all wore hats of considerable dimensions. As for the boots, he knew that he would have some riding to do and that he would need them.

He then went up the street until, behind the flare of a gasoline street lamp, he observed the big painted sign, "Round-up Bar."

That was where Joe Feeley had been shot to death casually in this cheerful little town of Horseshoe Flat. Perhaps that same town would be just as cheerful when it wakened one morning and discovered Charlie Larue, in his turn, had died of self-defense!

He pushed open the swing doors. With his first half step through the opening he saw everything. That was one thing almost above all else that he had trained his eye to do—to glance at the wall of a cell and be able to turn away and give the sum of the number of stones in that wall. To saunter by a shop window and state, afterward, every article that was in it. With two glances, he would be able to give a very fair résumé of the chief exhibits even in the crowded windows of a pawnbroker's shop.

So, with his first half step through the swing doors, he saw everything worth noting and a lot that didn't matter. The saloon was one big room, half-divided by an open partition into a front and a back room. In the front room there was no one. In the back room two men were playing cards by a dim spot of lamplight. In that first half step, he saw both the sawdust on the floor, the places where the feet of the players had swept the floor naked, and also the nature of the game. They were playing seven-up.

He saw the bartender, too, with a fat paunch which he countered in weight by leaning so as to put a sway in his back. The man had pouched, weary eyes. He was one of those men who remain a "good fellow" until fifty and then suddenly die. A cold turns into pneumonia. Any way you take it, you can't beat the game in the long run.

That was what Larrigan had said to Taxi. "Salt Creek for you, kid. You like to see ‘em drop. You like it too damn well."

Taxi always smiled when he thought of Larrigan, but his smile was half in earnest, too.

He went up to the bar and nodded to the bartender and asked for a beer. It was bad beer. It was thin and not bitter enough, and there was no head on it. But Taxi never made complaints in barrooms. He went off to a table and sipped his beer and smoked cigarettes.

He thought of a way of amusing himself. He went back to the bar and asked the bartender to show him how to roll a cigarette. The barman grinned, got a little sack of tobacco with a stiff paper label on it, and rolled a cigarette. His fingers moved like a flash. He held the thin tissue of the wheatstraw paper as a hollow trough. He sifted the yellow dust of tobacco into it. He closed the trough, getting one lip of the paper under the other. With a twist, he rolled the cigarette hard, clamped one end of the paper tube flat, and put the other end in his mouth. He lighted it and smiled wearily at Taxi through the smoke.

"Can you manage that, kid?" he asked.

Back East, nobody called Taxi "kid." Somehow they knew better. He said he would try the trick, and at the first attempt he managed it, very slowly. The barman was impressed. The second time, after that one rehearsal, Taxi twisted up that cigarette faster than ever that barman had made one in all his days. He was amazed, and then he laughed.

"Been kidding me a little, eh?"

Taxi went back to his chair. It was always a pleasure to learn something new to occupy his fingers. Now, with the sack of tobacco and the package of wheatstraw papers, he could amuse himself, seeing how thin and hard he could roll the cigarette, or how big and firm. He smoked only a few whiffs of each cigarette; the tobacco tasted thin, and sweet, and sharp. He liked it.

Then two more men came in. One of them was a squat, waddling figure. He looked heavy with fat, at first, but afterward he was seen to be weighted down with superfluous strength. He could not keep his arms close to his sides. The bulging muscles made the arms swing wide and clear. The great hands came far down toward the knees. The other fellow was middling in height. He had a sour, sallow complexion, a tinge of red in his nose, a bright, hard eye.

"You buy this round, Larue," said the short man.