Читать книгу Marbleface - Max Brand - Страница 8

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THE reason that I headed for the town of Piegan was that it was young on the map and was also four days of hard staging from the nearest railroad. Those things appealed to me, because I knew that wherever I went easily, by boat or railroad, the police could go, also, and that they were not likely to let me alone for a long time to come. I needed to get back into the woods and the rough country, where I could get myself out of the first page of the police mind of the country, so to speak.

It's a funny thing how accidents get multiplied and enlarged, and trifles become important. There were still references in the newspapers to the "Cole robbery," the "Cole outrage," and the "great Cole burglary." But I've told you exactly how everything happened. Waddell was captured. One policeman was slightly wounded. Young Cole was knocked on the chin. That was all that had happened. But the police were furious because their perfect trap had failed to insnare the second thug. They could not guess how accident and the calm wits of Betty Cole had saved my neck.

However, since the price on my head had been boosted to three thousand dollars, I was glad to get onto the stage that started for the town of Piegan. Four days of staging, and in those four days I drove four decades, four lifetimes into the heart of the West. It seemed to me as though I had sped down a long chute into the very heart of a mystery.

It was a mystery to me—the look of the men who had gathered for the stage, the stage itself, like a finely modeled ship of the ancient days, and the six wild-eyed horses hitched in front of the craft that was to navigate that inland sea. I looked inside and saw a woman and three small children that had the look of tears. So I handed the driver an extra ten dollars, and he arranged that I should sit beside him. That was my post all through the journey, and on account of being in that seat, I met with a good deal of excitement and trouble, as you'll soon see.

My idea was to keep my mouth shut and watch other people, and so try to pick up the ways and customs of the community. But it wasn't a community or members of a community that I found on the stage. There was a Pittsburgher, and an Alabaman with a hat a yard across and a self-conscious air of gentility, a Chicagoan who was always gritting his teeth and looking at the future, and the woman with the three children who came from Maine.

She was going out to join a brother. We all used to pity that poor brother. But people from the State of Maine are like that. They follow duty to the bottom of the sea or clear up above timber line. There were a couple of others in the complement of that company, but I forget who they were. None of them was really out of the West, but all of us would become good Westerners in the course of a few years, or else get our fingers burned and depart for the less strenuous East.

The most typical Westerner I ever knew was a Texan from Philadelphia. Westerners are made, they are not born. I've seen a man fit into the wildest West in three days, if he was the right sort. Or, again, he might not do it in thirty.

At this time railroads were pushing through the mountains rather blindly, thrusting out side lines and spur branches. Towns sprang up, disappeared into dust, or else became enduring cities. But for every one that succeeded, I think, there were two or three that failed. It was a period of wildcatting in town building. You picked out a patch of desert and paid ten dollars a square mile for it, and you tried to cut up that square mile and sell it in batches of building lots. The profits were practically limitless, if the deal went through and enough curious home makers and fortune seekers drifted that way.

Piegan, the goal of my journey, had just been put on the map and was the brain child of one Colonel Riggs, celebrated as a promoter of new cities. On the trip I heard a great deal of speculation as to the richness of the soil, the possibility of irrigation, the presence of valuable minerals in the hills around Piegan. But I was not much interested. What continued to occupy my mind was simply the fact that the place was four days from the railroad.

The first two days were hard ones on me. The road we traveled over was called a highway only by courtesy. It was a cattle trail, most of the distance, marked out with skeletons in gruesome style, a dotted chalk mark through the mountains. Only the matchless poise and spring of a Concord coach could have supported us over the rough spots with less than broken backs. The woman and all three of her children were seasick, those first two days, which didn't help the rest of us. And the pitching motion of the vehicle exhausted me so much that when we reached the sleeping quarters at night, I dropped in my tracks, without waiting for food.

However, by watching the way the driver handled himself, I learned the easiest ways of accommodating myself to the heavy laboring of the stage, and the third day I was feeling much better, when we changed drivers for a wild man, a regular fiend who loved to throw a chill into every one of his passengers.

He was a good hand with the reins. He knew how to use his brakes, too, which was an art in itself, and he understood every inch of that rough road. However, he was always forcing the team. Every time he came to a long up grade, he settled back with a growl of resignation; every time he saw the beginning of a down pitch, his eye gleamed, and he sent the team down in a mad rush while the people in the body of the coach hung on for dear life and the children screamed with fright.

I wondered why some of our rough-looking passengers didn't take a hand in the business and tell the driver what was what, but though the men grew more and more stark of expression, more and more grim of face, not a syllable was spoken directly to the driver. When he was overlooking the change of horses, I heard some pretty dire threats, but when he returned, nothing was said.

They all held back, I suppose, for the same reason that I myself said nothing. I was frankly afraid of that man. He was six feet and something, rawboned, but with a neck like a bull's. He carried a revolver with the air of one who knows how to use it, and his eye was as wild and as red as a heat- maddened steer's. He always looked as if he were about to break into a stampede, and like a stampede he drove the relays of horses.

He was to take the stage in the final two days of the trip. I knew that, so I locked my teeth and prepared to endure.

That third day my heart jumped up into my throat more than once, but still I managed to steady my nerves and got through with it fairly well. The fourth day was the worst of all.

We were climbing most of the time, and then the suffering horses were allowed to go along at a walk. When the down stretches came, however, they were frightfully steep, and that madman of a driver, with a yell and a slashing of the long whip, sent the horses racing at full speed. We whacked over rocks that threatened to smash our wheels. We skidded far out on curves and, heeling over, we could look dizzily down into great gorges.

I began to think that the driver was actually insane; perhaps he was, as a matter of fact.

I was almost glad when, as we reached the bottom of a hollow, lurched up the farther slope, and then came down to a walk, a rifle clanged from the brush ahead of us, and a masked man stepped out, the rifle still at his shoulder.

Two more voices, over on our left, yelled at the same moment for the stage to halt and the passengers to shove up their hands.

I did some split-second thinking. If we were robbed, a complete description of each of us would get into the papers. And that was what I did not want to have happen. I saw the driver throw on his brakes with a thrust of his foot and at the same time jerk up a sawed-off shotgun that leaned against the seat.

He never fired that gun. A rifle bullet cut through his arm as he raised the weapon and the riot gun dropped down to the road and went off with a roar.

In the meantime, the woman and the three youngsters were screeching like fiends, and it seemed to me that the noise was like a smoke screen that might cover me. As the driver dropped his shotgun, I got out my Colt and tried a snap shot at the fellow who was holding the horses.

He dropped in the road with a shout and started crawling for the brush, while the driver released the brakes and yelled to the horses. We swayed forward, the woman screaming that we must stop or we would all be murdered. But there was no stopping that big brute of a driver. He was standing up in the seat, letting the reins hang, his wounded arm dangling, the blood running down his side, but he had his Colt out, and held it poised, shoulder-high, cursing, swaying as the coach pitched, but always probing the bushes for the other bandits.

It seemed certain to me that they would open fire on us. But perhaps the heart went out of them when they realized that we were moving off and that, though they might murder some of us, they could hardly stop the rest.

We got to the pitch of the grade and went down the farther side. At the next hollow we stopped, and there the shirt of the driver was cut away and his wound was bathed and bandaged by two of the men. It was not a deep wound. But it stiffened his arm, and after that he went on more slowly, with such a blessed calm, in fact, that I wished the robbers had appeared the day before!

There was a good deal of talk, as a matter of course. The lot of us who had detested the driver before were now ready to call him a hero. In addition, we made up a purse among the lot of us, to reward him for his courage and to pay him for the time he would have to lay off from work. We gave him the purse, which amounted to two hundred dollars, just before we sighted Piegan from the top of the hills.

He made a speech, saying if it hadn't been for the dropping of the rifleman, we would all have been robbed of everything that we stood up in and he remarked that the pistol work I had done was worthy of an expert. He said quite a lot on that subject, and the rest of the passengers began to look on me with a great respect.

I was the only one who knew how lucky that snap shot had been!