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

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IT WAS sunset two days later when Bill Naylor had his first look at the town of Blue Water. He did not like it. He came in from the east, and the town was black cardboard against the smoke and fire of the west. It looked a dismal town, the sort of a town a man could expect to die in.

"This is a tough job," Bill Naylor said to himself.

He had been saying that all during the two days of his riding. It was a tough job, and it was over his head. He had told the great man his opinion in direct and stinging language.

"What d'you think I am?" he had said to Barry Christian. "You think I'm a whole fire company and a brigade of U.S. cavalry? I ain't. I'm only human. I can't get away with a big thing like this!"

Barry Christian had simply laid a hand on Bill Naylor's doubled fist and looked straight into his eyes, saying in that deep, rich, hypnotic voice:

"I know what you feel about yourself, Bill. And I know what I feel about you. There's difference. You add yourself up and find a minus. I add you up and find that you're an important man. There's only one great thing that you haven't learned. No man in the world can take a big job and do it in a minute; the thing to do is to go on step by step and don't cross the bridges until your feet are wet with the water."

That was what had proved the antidote for the miseries of Bill Naylor's mind during the journey. Now that he was in sight of the goal and repeated the same words to himself, a great part of the comfort had departed from them. He watched the smoke going up from the town into the haze of the sunset as he sat the saddle with his horse panting beneath him, and the cinches creaking.

"I'm just an ordinary mug," he had told Barry Christian. "I can do an ordinary job, but I'm nothing to write home about. I'm no headliner. Get that, because I mean it. I can ride a horse and shoot a gun. I've got a pair of hands, too. But I'm nothing fancy."

Barry Christian had said: "I'd rather have a steady man who'll take a step at a time than any of the fancy boys who are sure of themselves. I'd rather have a fellow who doubts himself before he starts working than a fellow who does his doubting after things begin to go wrong. Bill, you'll get farther forward than you expect to."

It was the exquisite comfort of this flattery that had spurred Bill Naylor all the way to Blue Water. Here he was in the town, and he was surprised that he had come this far. He was quite sure that he would not attempt the job that had been outlined for him, but nevertheless he went on to look at the site.

He went straight through the town and came out well up the river until he found the old mill which had been repaired as a sort of cheap hotel. Only, as Christian had said, the word had gone out that it was not a hotel at all, but a hang-out for crooks of some gang. Nobody knew what they were driving at. It might even be that already they had discovered the mysterious parcel under the floor of the room in the cellar.

Bill Naylor, as he tethered his mustang in a grove nearby, began to shake his head. He was still shaking it as he came out and sat down at the verge of the brush, looking at the irregular outline of the gloomy building and at the way the last of the fire of the sunset was swirling down Blue Water Creek. Lights came on here and there in the small windows of the old mill. For some reason or other, though they were not millers, the occupants of the place still used the old machinery, and now the wheel was clanking with a monotonous and groaning and wooden sound. There is no noise more horrible than the grinding of wood against wood. It put the teeth of Bill Naylor on edge, no matter how little sensitive he might be.

"What does Barry Christian want? The world with a fence around it? He can't get it out of me!" said Bill Naylor.

And then he grew suddenly afraid of what the imp of the perverse in his own soul might force him to do.

"Step after step" is what does the trick, Christian had said, and, step after step, Naylor found himself drawing closer to the mill. When he was near it, through the brush, he sat down on his heels again, for he saw a man strolling aimlessly up and down at the side of the mill, as though he were out to enjoy the air and the last of the sunset. But men who are enjoying the sunset do not, as rule, carry the weight of a double-barreled shotgun tucked under the arm.

Bill Naylor slowly pushed around the mill to the farther side, and again peered out from the edge of the brush, and again he saw a nonchalant figure of a man strolling up and down, up and down, with a double-barreled shotgun under the arm.

Naylor went far back into the brush and found the mustang.

"I'm goin' to get myself right out of this," he told himself aloud. But with his hand on the lead-rope knot he paused again. He found that his fingers were only fumbling blindly at the knot while his mind was struggling with the greater problem of the mill and the mystery that it contained. If there were a sheriff in Blue Water, he ought to be interested, also.

Suppose a man were to take off most of his clothes and slide into the river and float down past the mill-would an entrance be found, or would the swimmer find himself drawn down the mill race into the ponderous sway of the wheel?

"I wouldn't be such a fool as to try the dodge, anyway," said Bill Naylor to himself.

But in spite of these good and intelligent resolutions, he found himself standing finally on the bank of the stream, peering down at the mill. He could not see everything clearly; the bank hid a good deal. But now he was sitting down and pulling off his clothes!

He stripped to a pair of drawers. In the water he would not want the weight of a heavy Colt revolver. Instead, he unfastened his hunting knife from his belt and took the leather sheath between his teeth. Then he waded into the stream. He took a last look around. He saw the stars coming out, and the greatness of the Blue Water Mountains, and the whirling of the river currents.

"I'm the greatest fool in the world!" said Bill Naylor to himself.

Then he dived into the water and swam down the stream. When he came close, he moored himself to the shore under a tangle of shrubbery. The mill was right above him. A yellow streak of lamplight came out of a window and rippled away across the water of the creek. The bumping and groaning of the wheel was not far away, and the voices of two men were talking.

One of them said: "I says to Murphy: 'I don't like the turn of your nose and the color of your eye.' And Murphy, he says to me: 'I'm goin' to fix you so's you'll like 'em better.' And then we went at it, and the first thing I know, a gent standing by trips me up, and I go down flat and knock my wind out, and Murphy, he throws himself at me. He was so happy that he was howling like a dog. Whining and howling like a dog, sort of choked, because his teeth were grinding together. And I managed to turn around and bring up one knee, and the bone of my knee whanged him on the side of the chin, and it opened him up like a knife, and the blood was all over everything. Murphy yells out that I've cut his throat, and it looked like it. And he gets up and tries to run, and I get up, and the boys kick at Murphy and make him turn around and fight. But he was scared when he seen how much blood was running out of him, and he couldn't hardly hold up his hands. I took and beat the devil out of him. I got him against the wall, and the back of his head bumped the wall just when my fist hit his chin, and he went out like a light, and that's how he come to have that big cut on his chin, like you was talking about."

"That's a good way to get a cut on the chin," said the other voice. "I heard tell that he was kicked by a hoss."

The first speaker laughed.

"Well, he was kicked, all right. He was kicked by my knee, and it laid him right open like a knife."

"I'll tell you what I seen Murphy do in Las Gatas," said the other.

"Have you got some pipe tobacco?"

"No."

"Wait till I get my pouch. Blast a pouch, anyway. When I just carried the sack the way I bought it, it was always in my pocket. But when I take and carry a pouch, I ain't never got it with me."

The voice passed away, still speaking.

"Wait a minute," said the other. "I can tell you where Smithers left his tobacco down here in the basement."

That voice, also, diminished, went out.

Bill Naylor pulled himself up through the shrubbery like an eel.

"I'll take a look and know what the thing's like, and then I'll get out of here," he said to himself. Four men right out on guard. Six men, I'll tell Barry Christian. It's a job that even he wouldn't like to tackle.

He found himself looking onto a sort of basement veranda that ran under the higher, main veranda overhead. The wet paddles of the mill wheel were rising, half revealed, a little to the right, each one coming up with a shudder of effort, like a living thing—shuddering, gleaming in the pallor of the lamp light, and almost stopping at the height of the rise, and then lurching foward again with renewed strength. Whatever work that wheel was doing, the utmost of its strength was being used.

"Whatever they're doing, they ain't making flour," said Bill Naylor.

Across the veranda he saw an open window and a closed door. The two men who had been talking had probably gone in through the door.

"Some fools," said Bill Naylor, "would try to get in through that window."

And then, as if in a story, he actually found himself quaking and shuddering, but peering through the window into a cluttered room that seemed to be filled with nothing but rags and scraps of old paper.

He set his teeth. An electric chill which, he told himself, was like the chill of death, ran over him. A moment later he had ducked through the window and was stealing foward, cursing the rustling of the paper. A lantern, with the wick turned low, hung from the wall. He crossed the room, tried the opposite door, and found that it was not locked.

He peeked through. There was nothing but darkness. It closed over him. It shut like water over his lips, and he could not breathe.

"I'm a fool," Bill Naylor told himself. "What do I think I'm doing?"

No voice of the spirit answered him.

Of course, the thing for him to do was to get back quickly. Get back while the way was open.

He started to open the door through which he had just passed, and inside of it he saw two men striding through the waste paper. He pressed the door soundlessly shut and leaned against the wall, his heart going fast.

Suppose they found him, naked, dripping, what would he say? That he was searching for a parcel!

Well, they'd give him a parcel. They'd give him a parcel of buckshot that would blow his head off, and the fish in Blue Water Creek could dine on what was left of him.

"Fish food," said Bill Naylor. "That's what I am. Fish food. I'm such a fool that even the fish would laugh at me. That's what I am. I'm a simple fool, is all I am."

He fumbled foward along the wall and opened another door. He got it ajar half an inch, and, peering through, he saw a little printing press at work, with a bearded, spectacled, clerical-looking gentleman leaning over one of its products, peering at it through a magnifying glass that was held close to his eye. Other products of the press were scattered on the floor, trampled brutally under foot, and yet all of them looked astonishingly like coin of the United States—neat little ten-dollar bills.

That door slid out of the fingers of Bill Naylor and closed with a slight jarring sound. He knew where he was now. And he knew what sort of people make counterfeit money. Any one who has anything to do with the making or the pushing of the "queer" is apt to be a hardy soul.

Well, if they found him in the place, they would simply finish him, that was all.

He fumbled along the wall until his hip struck another doorknob. Carefully turning it, he opened upon another deep well of blackness. It seemed to him that it was deep, that a musty smell was rising to him from a great pit, and he put foward his bare foot with caution. The sole of his foot rubbed on the rough surface of bricks. He made another step, and another. There was no pit. That had been all something of the mind, a mere fiction.

But there was something important, something significant about the bricks. Then he remembered. The floor of the cellar room about which Barry Christian had spoken was paved with bricks, not floored with wood or left as dank earth. He was in the very room, therefore, in which the parcel was hidden.

Or were there two rooms paved with bricks?

"Sure there are!" said Bill Naylor to his soul. "There's a thousand rooms paved with bricks in this place. And I could fumble a thousand years in the dark and not find anything."

He wanted a smoke with a tremendous yearning. He felt that he could steady all his nerves and make his brain work if he could only smoke.

He moistened his dry lips, found the wall, and began to feel his way along it. He encountered another door. Then he found a niche set back from the rest of the floor.

That was the room! There was just such a corner niche in the room which Christian had described to him.

He got down on his knees and began to try every brick. He tried a thousand bricks, and he could not budge one of them. He needed tools, he felt—took and lantern light.

Then he used both hands and worked patiently, with strength, on every brick. The skin was rubbing off the tips of his fingers on the roughness of the bricks and the mortar, and then—a brick rocked a trifle under the pressure he gave it. A moment later it was up!

Another and another gave way. He thrust his hand down into the cavity, and his hand touched the snaky, slippery smoothness of oiled silk. The hole was not big enough. He had to widen it still more before he stood up, trembling, with the prize in his hands.

His brain was whirling so that he could not at once determine on a way to get out of the place. But at length he remembered his original course.

He got through the door into the darkened room. Again, through a splinter of light, he recognized the apartment in which the press was kept; he could hear the muffled clanking of the machinery.

They had nerve, fellows like these—right on the edge of a town to run a press like this and use the water power to operate it! They had brains and they had luck, or they would soon be closed down.

He opened the door on the room whose floor was littered with waste paper. No man was in it. He went stealthily across the floor. There was the open window beyond which ran the veranda, and beyond the veranda was the black of the swirling river.

He was nearly at the window when suddenly, without the sound of a door being opened, a voice behind him said:

"Goin' to take a swim, Pete?"

"Uh-huh," said Bill Naylor, and walked straight past the window to the door. He opened it as the man behind him said:

"Watch out for the snags. I wouldn't swim this time of day, no matter what the chief says."

Bill Naylor said nothing. He stepped out there into the darkness with one strong, yellow ray of lamplight from an upper window streaming down and rippling in pale gold across the face of the stream.

The two who had been talking on the veranda were no longer there. Naylor slipped through the brush. He walked up the edge of the stream, crouching low, as if there were a strong sun to light him, and eyes spying on his every movement.

He reached the horse. Still he could not believe that he had accomplished the thing.

He donned his clothes and lighted a match to examine the contents of the parcel. Then he remembered his promise, that he would not look inside. He remembered, too, that priceless advice—to make a step at a time.

Well, there was something in that. There was something in that worth more than gold and diamonds. The full beauty of the saying still was dawning on the soul of Bill Naylor. A step at a time, and he could climb all the mountains in the world.

He wrapped up the parcel again, dropped it into a saddlebag, and mounted.