Читать книгу Silvertip's Search - Max Brand - Страница 7

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Silvertip washed the blood from the watch at the rivulet that ran across the trail a few steps away. The water was so cold that the tips of his fingers turned pink, and an icy ache penetrated at the roots of his finger nails.

Then he mounted the stallion and rode on back to Crowtown, leaving the mustang contentedly cropping the tender young grass near its master.

When he got into the town, he found a crowd still milling about in front of the hotel and on its veranda. And everybody looked at him with wide, still eyes. When he asked questions, people answered him in low voices. They wanted to know what had happened between him and Lawson. He shook his head and asked about Granger.

"Granger ain't dead," they said. "He's lucky. He ain't dead. The bullet just run around his ribs, is all. It's a good thing Granger wasn't bumped off."

There had been no reason, then, to kill that man who now lay with his face pressed against the trail high up the hillside. There was no reason to have "them" on his trail. "They" were of course the men of Barry Christian, who would spend ten years and a million dollars to revenge Butch Lawson.

Silver made a cigarette and lighted it. His face was as calm as a stone.

"Can I see Granger?" he asked.

"Sure. Everybody is seeing him,"

They took Silver into the hotel. Granger lay on a couch, propped up a little by many pillows. He was suffering pain; the lines of it were drawing deeper and deeper into his face.

His eyes glinted sidewise at Silver, and then resumed the consideration of the cracks in the ceiling. Sweat was oozing out on his forehead all the time. A woman with stooped shoulders, and a shawl over them, was on her knees beside him. She dried the sweat on her husband's face now and then and said nothing, simply watched him. Other people were in the room. They all stood back in corners, looking, listening, as though they could see the soul departing.

"Butch is lying dead on the trail yonder," said Silver.

The deputy sheriff turned his head and stared.

"They told me you went up after him," said he. "Did you fix him?"

"I thought he'd killed you," said Silver. "He shot you from behind. I thought he'd killed you. I went up and stopped him. He wouldn't come back. We fought it out with a clean break. Butch is dead."

He looked at the deputy sheriff, and Granger looked back at him. Other voices stirred and were silent in the corners of "the room. Death, after all, had come. It seemed a satisfaction to them, in a way, to know that the alarm had not been for nothing. And this was a big day in the history of the village. Twenty such days are about all that a mountain town can count upon in the whole course of its existence.

"You want to hold me for the killing?" asked Silver.

A murmur of protest came out of the corners of the room. The deputy sheriff rolled an agonized but reproving eye, and the murmur ceased.

"Is the wound in front?" asked the deputy sheriff.

"Yes."

"Where you going to be—if we want you?"

"I'm going to Copper Creek."

The deputy sheriff blinked.

"Why Copper Creek?" he asked.

"Why not?" said Silver.

"Well, all right," said the deputy sheriff slowly. "You can go."

Silver said to the other bystanders: "I want to be alone with Granger for a couple of minutes. Will you let me have that time with him?"

No one answered. They looked at Silver and then at one another, but nobody moved.

"Get out, all of you!" said Granger.

At that they moved with shambling feet, like a flock of sheep, and trooped in one mass out of the room.

Silver said: "Granger, Christian's men are going to hunt me down, of course. Well, all that I want is a fair chance to fight back. I can't fight all of Barry Christian's gang, but I might be able to fight Christian himself. What I want you to do is to give me one steer that will help to put me on his trail."

Granger looked at him with blank, indifferent eyes.

"In the old days," said Silver suddenly, "I was useful to you once. I hate to remind you of that day. But I have to."

"I know," said Granger, "I'd 'a' got a slug of lead through me, except for you, that day in the saloon."

"Let me have a direction to follow toward the trail of Christian. That's all I ask for. Will you help me, Granger?"

"I've listened to you once before. And now I'm here with lead pumped through me," said Granger. "You go wherever you please, Go to the devil, for all of me. I won't talk to you any more."

He shut his teeth and his eyes. Silvertip stared at him for a moment, and then went from the room, stepping softly over the faded roses of the worn carpet.

When he was out in the street, he asked the way and the distance to Copper Creek. It was down on the edge of the desert, they told him. It was twenty miles away through the mountains, downhill all the way. And it was among the foothills close to the edge of the desert.

So he mounted the stallion and started at once.

He was in no haste in his preparations. Some of the men came out onto the veranda to watch him start. They said nothing. They merely looked at him with troubled eyes. When they spoke, it was very softly, to one another. And when at last he was outside of Crowtown, Silver felt as though he had left the darkness of a nightmare and come into a safely lighted room.

It was true that the twenty miles to Copper Creek were almost all downhill. Then, as he came out through a ravine, he looked down on the desert like gray mist, and saw in a lower valley the blinking windows of the town, which was stretched out long and thin through the windings of a gorge.

Copper Creek was a word that had had much meaning for Deputy Sheriff Granger. What could that meaning be? At least, there was a sinister significance attached to the place. The very mention of it had caused Granger to look on Silver as upon a lost soul.

But when he rode into the town, it looked to him like any other place which had once been a booming mining town and since then has shrunk its interests to less exciting forms of adventure. There was a line of houses at scattered intervals, or crowded shoulder to shoulder, on either side of the creek. Two-thirds of those houses were vacant. Half of the remainder had fallen into disrepair over the heads of the occupants. Because people who live in a dying town seem to take it for granted that disrepair, like disease, is catching, and hardly worth fighting against.

He passed the small district of shops. The sun was far down in the western sky, so that a rolling crimson fire walked across the window-panes to the left of Silver. And the same light made the stallion gleam brightly enough to startle the attention of people who lounged on their front porches at the end of the day. The beauty of Parade pulled to attention a group of small lads who were scampering across the street in a game of tag.

"I'm looking for a fellow called Doc Shore," said Silver. "Can you tell me where to find him, sons?"

"Doc Shore?" they echoed in three shrill voices that melted into one phrase of sound.

And then they were silent, staring.

They knew "Doc" Shore, and they did not know him favorably. That much was clear.

"Doc Shore!" he repeated. "Where can I find him?"

The smaller lads stood silent. The eldest hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

"That way," he said.

Silver rode gloomily up the street. For he began to feel that the last request of Butch Lawson had loaded him with something more than a watch with a gold case and Swiss works. This foreboding grew on him with every step Parade made, until he saw, to his left, the little golden moons of a pawnbroker's shop, and across the window the letters: "Dr. Shore."

Silver sighed with relief. Perhaps there was, in the mind of the dying Lawson, a memory that he owed some obscure debt to Shore. For that reason he had commissioned Silver to return the watch—to its rightful owner, perhaps?

At any rate, that made a clear explanation. It was only the little scroll which Lawson had cut into the back of the gold case that troubled Silver. The thing might have a meaning more than he could understand, or it might simply have been the signature of a man unable to write his own name.

He dismounted, slapped the neck of the stallion, and, knowing that the horse would now stand there patiently, waiting for him until the ground took fire beneath his feet, Silver walked into the pawnbroker's shop.

A little man with a double stream of misty beard hanging from his chin, and pink-rimmed eyes, and a red-mouthed smile, stood up from a high stool and put the flat of both hands on the counter.

So he waited, still smiling, still expectant. The white hairs of the beard were so sparse that they did not hide the features beneath it.

Silver slid the watch onto the counter; he kept his hand over it.

"You know Butch Lawson?" he asked.

The little old man kept on smiling, but his eyes rolled upward in the act of memory.

"Butch Lawson?" he repeated.

He continued to reflect. Then his pale eyes focused with a sudden brightness on the face of Silver.

"Are you a friend of his?" he asked.

"Do you know him?" countered Silver.

"Oh, very well!" said Doc Shore. "Of course I know Butch. But sometimes the names of a few of the boys pass out of my memory. One cannot remember everything, you know. The mind balks at too many details—and I'm an old man! But Butch is a friend of yours?"

"Butch is dead," said Silver.

The pawnbroker accepted the news with a mere lifting of his brows.

"Dead, eh? Tut, tut! Well, young men may die before the old ones. So poor Butch is dead?"

"And he asked me to take this to you. He asked me while he was dying," said Silver.

He uncovered the watch.

The pawnbroker lifted it, weighed it, looked at Silver with surprised eyes, and then turned the watch on its face. What he saw on the back made him duck his head down suddenly.

Then slowly he straightened. The smile was gone from his red lips. They puckered a little, and the thin mist of the beard spread out thinner than ever, from side to side.

"Well, then," said the pawnbroker, "I'm glad to have the watch. I thought that Butch might have forgotten me. But honesty will show its hand when a man dies. And there we are!"

He spread his hands on the counter again, and the smile came back to him.

"You're staying in Copper Creek a while?"

"I'm leaving in the morning," said Silvertip. "So long and good luck to you!"

He stepped out of the door. As it closed, a bell jingled softly, and, glancing back, he saw that the pawnbroker still leaned over the counter, staring fixedly before him. There was no longer a smile, but a look of such evil as Silver never had seen on a human face.