Читать книгу Marbleface - Max Brand - Страница 9

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PIEGAN lay out on a wide flat; that is to say, the upper surface was all about of a height, but the plateau was cut up with a lot of dry-bottomed draws and a few gorges cut by creeks. That bit of the flat was spotted with sagebrush. As I looked down on it for the first time that day, I saw a whirlwind pick up a cloud of dust and go swaying off with it to invisibility.

It wasn't the most cheerful prospect in the world. We could see the houses, the false fronts of the stores along the main street, and the shining raw wood which was being used for the frames and the boardings of the houses which were under construction.

I remember that the man from Chicago said, quietly, but with a grimness that made me listen: "Well, I might have guessed! It's just another"

He didn't complete the sentence. He didn't have to. It was clear enough that he considered Piegan no good!

The rest of us seemed to feel the same way, but the driver, who had adopted a rather fatherly attitude to us since he became a hero, told us that the place was a lot better than it looked, that water could be put on that flat and make it bloom, and that some day a fortune would be ripped out of the mountains in the shape of gold and silver. He said that he had three lots in Piegan and that he intended to buy more.

This made us all feel a lot better, and we rolled on down into Piegan with more cheerful looks.

From the inside, the town looked bigger than from the hills. There were a few good stores and an ambitious hotel, which was all that Colonel Riggs had contributed to the town and all that he ever would contribute. There were some fairish houses, a lot of shacks and tents.

Riggs had put the place on the map for the moment but, of course, everything was very rough. The streets were staked out but they were not made. The wheels ripped and pounded them, and the wind cleaned out the ruts here and filled them in there. The stage went into that town like a small boat riding on big waves.

The last stop was the hotel. You could depend on Riggs to arrange that. His hotels were always the stage stations, as well.

He came out and turned himself into a reception committee. He was a tall man with shoulders so humped that his coat was pulled up above the seat of his trousers. He had a hollow chest, a large stomach, and long legs, a little bent in at the knees, like the legs of a stork. They gave him a look of possible agility, in spite of his size above the hips. He had a sallow face with the wrinkles that fit a smile well developed, and he had a sandy mustache, pretty well yellowed up with cigar stains and with a part nearly half an inch wide in the middle of his lip.

He looked kindly and simple, like somebody's grandpa, but the way he managed to shake hands with everybody at the same time and was particularly glad to see everybody told me something.

I got myself a fairish sort of room that looked out over the post office and the future location for the city hall, as the sign on the vacant lot informed me. The same sign declared that all of that land had been donated to the community free of charge by the liberality of Colonel Riggs. I had no doubt that the sign had been painted by order of Colonel Riggs, too. I stood in front of my window, reading the sign, listening to the wind hiss at me through the cracks in the wall, and wondering a good deal about my future.

It wasn't the police that crowded my mind, just then. The bigness of those mountains in the distance and the darkness of the forests that covered them told me that I had bored my way into the heart of the wilderness, where the law would not penetrate for a long time. I forgot that a single detective might have picked up my trail.

What bothered me most was that I was flat. My wanderings had cost me a good deal. A crook on the fly can't bargain or ask questions. He has to eat and pay on the run, and those prices are always the highest. I had dribbled a little streak of gold and silver right across the map, and all that was left to me of the stuff was sixty-two dollars.

Well, I had to do a good deal of thinking, when I considered how little that was. Just down the street I could see a restaurant with a menu in front of it. The names of the foods were written big, and the prices were written small, but I made out that steak cost a dollar and a half!

There was nothing for me but to locate work. Yet what work could I do?

Well, I could handle a pack of cards with the next one, but honest cards only pay when you carry a big bank roll, and my promise to Betty Cole barred crooked cards.

Dice, gambling of all kinds, in fact, had been ruled out in the same manner. And I wanted to curse myself for a fool. Besides, I had a sick feeling that I would break my promise before very long. I wanted to go straight, but in this part of the world men made money digging in mines, or with other kinds of manual labor. Outside of that—well, I might be a clerk in a store, or a cook in a restaurant, or wash dishes.

Why should I have turned up my nose?

I don't know. But I never had worked really, except in the gymnasium, training for a fight, and that's harder than other work, but different. Every time you poke the bag, you figure that you're soaking the other pug in the stomach, and it makes the day pass pretty quick.

Logically I saw that it was crooked work, manual labor, clerking, or starvation.

Crooked work I wouldn't do.

Manual labor I couldn't do.

Clerking I despised from the bottom of my soul, but it would have to be that or starving.

I should have gone searching for a job at once, but I decided that I would wait a while and see how fast the forelock of Opportunity grew in this neck of the woods.

Then I went down to the dining room of the hotel and laid in a good feed.

I had fried venison, corn bread, hominy, boiled cabbage, apple pie—dried apples—and coffee, for two dollars and a half, including the tip. That meal made my stock of coin seem much smaller.

I went out to the sidewalk. A blinding, stifling gust of wind and dust hit me and smothered me. I was ready to damn Piegan, all its ways and days.

There's nothing like a high wind to fray the nerves of a man, and mine were pretty badly worn, I can tell you. I was wiping the grit out of my eyes, my back turned to the wind, when a boy came out and tagged me on the arm and said that the colonel wanted to see me. He hooked a thumb toward the hotel.

I was in no mood to see the colonel, but I went in. At the door I stopped a minute and got myself in hand. A burst of bad temper was almost as bad, for my rickety heart, as a run uphill, I smoothed myself down and then followed the boy to the office of Colonel Riggs.

The door opened on him as if on a stage set. He was behind the biggest desk that I ever saw. There were stacks of papers on it. Some of the drawers were open and they were filled, too. He had maps on his walls of Piegan and of what it was going to be. He had filing cabinets in that office, too, and he looked to me like the busiest man in the world. He was writing in a rapid, flowing hand, and his head was cocked to one side, as he looked fondly down at the words he was making. I imagine that a poet must look very much like that when he's scribbling down some windy idea.

When he saw me, Colonel Riggs looked up, nodded, finished his sentence, then pulled the spectacles from his nose and came around from behind his desk to shake hands. His smile was perfect. It was stamped as in steel. It couldn't change.

"Your name is Gann, is it?" said he.

That was the moniker I had chosen, so I told him that he was right.

"I'm glad to know it," says the colonel. "But I wanted to tell you that there's another man in town who would be mighty interested in you if your name were Poker-face Jerry Ash."

I looked at the colonel and smiled. You know, I didn't feel like smiling, but I had had to practice control of emotions so long and so hard that it was difficult to give me a shock. What Riggs said went through me like a stiletto, a small flick of the wound almost deep enough to kill, but I managed to keep my smile steady enough.

"Glad to know anybody would be interested in Jerry Ash," said I. I looked at him, and he looked straight back at me. The grin faded from his face. He looked tired, old, and mighty serious.

"Step to the window there and look across the street to the opposite corner, just in front of the city hall sign," said Colonel Riggs.

I did what he suggested, and there I saw a bulldog of a man with a cigar clamped between his teeth and his hands locked behind his back.

"Is that the fellow who wants to see Poker-face Jerry Ash?" said I.

"I thought that you might recognize him," said the colonel.

I turned around sharp on him.

"Why did you tip his hand to me?" I asked.

"Tip his hand?" said the colonel blandly. "I didn't tip his hand. He simply asked a question of me, and I asked the same question of you. That's all."

"It's more than that," I assured him. "Did he tell you why he wanted me?"

Colonel Riggs put on his glasses, studied me, and took them off again, nodding as though the lenses had shown him something of importance. He began to smile again on me.

"He told me," said the colonel, "that some of the finest detectives in the world had been on your trail, and that you had given them nothing but six thousand miles of trouble. They hadn't even laid a hand or a bullet on you. Is that right? No, don't answer. I can see in your face it's correct. And I'll tell you another thing. If that stage had been loaded with gold, it wouldn't have been so welcome to me and to Piegan!"

"Well, that's fine," said I. "But what am I to do for Piegan? Pave the streets?"

"Sit down," said the colonel.

"I'd rather stand over here," said I. "I can keep my eye on that flatty on the corner, from this place. Who's he got with him?"

"Ah," said the colonel, "you knew that no one man would ever be sent out after you. You knew that, my lad, of course!"

"Stuff," said I. "There are plenty who could handle me, easily enough. But they usually play safe. What does the side kicker of this dick look like?"

"He's a sad-appearing fellow," said the colonel. "He is a trifle bent and he has a thin blond mustache."

"Yeah, I've seen that ferret before," said I. "But that fellow on the corner, he's a new one. They must have picked him up along the way. He looks like business."

"He says that there is four thousand dollars' worth of business in you, Mr.Gann," said the colonel.

"We'll drop the Gann business," I answered. "If I'm known at all, I might as well wear the correct moniker. Now, colonel, suppose you cut the corners and come right across and tell me what I'm to do for you, and you for me?"

"You could see at once that I liked you," said the colonel. "Of course you could see that and that I was not able to believe the cock-and-bull story that the detectives told me. I knew what police persecution can be!"

"What did they tell you?"

"They told me—oh, a great many things—about a retired prize fighter, a gunman, a gambler, and a safe cracker."

He paused and laughed.

"In the first place, you haven't the look," he said. "In the second place, you're too young to have done all of those things."

"The safe cracking—that's out," said I. "I might have the will, but I haven't the way. Now you tell me—what do we do for each other? You haven't called me in here just to pass the time of day, I suppose?"

He nodded. His smile went out. He looked older and grayer than ever, and his eye caught mine, held on it, and fixed it still and steady.

"You came to Piegan to stay here for a while?" he said.

"Yes. A while."

"And the first thing you want is to have that pair of dicks slipped off your trail?"

"That would be a help," I admitted.

"I'll have them out of town before three hours are over," declared the colonel.

I looked at him with new eyes.

"How'll you manage that?" I asked him.

"Life is full of struggles, Jerry," said that old crook, "and one cannot fight one's way through it without learning to use diplomacy, and diplomacy, and more diplomacy. You understand how it may be?"

"Yeah, I understand how it may be," said I.

"A touch of strategy," said he, "may be more powerful than the stroke of a sledge hammer, and there are certain ways and devices I may be able to use to persuade our two detective friends to leave the town for the time being—perhaps never to return to it again!"

"All right," said I, "you strategize as much as you want to. The idea pleases me pretty well."

"And now for the other side of the question," said he.

"Let's have the other side," I answered.

"You can make a good living in this town, Jerry," remarked the colonel. "I can open up certain safe avenues—I can show you where to play cards; you might even open up a saloon in a small way"

I broke in: "Yes, and you might tell me which fellows have the safes that are worth cracking, and where the fattest rolls of bills are carried, but it wouldn't do me any good, Colonel Riggs."

"Why not?" he barked at me.

"Why not? Because I've turned straight."

"Ah!" murmured Riggs. "Is that so? Good lad! Good lad! I'm delighted to hear this. You've turned straight. I don't know, of course, that you've ever been very crooked, but one honest man is worth more to me than twenty crooks."

I shrugged my shoulders. I wondered what the old hypocrite was driving at. At any rate, he would be worth his weight in gold to me, if he could slip that pair of bulls off my trail.

"Go on, Colonel Riggs," I begged him. "Let me know how the deal might stand."

"Certainly," said he.

He was sitting on the edge of his desk and now he leaned forward and began to slap his right hand into his left palm, making point after point in little, short sentences. It was a sort of selling speech. He might have been out to collect votes with it.

"As sure as my name is Alfred Riggs, I've made this town.

"I found it a prairie and I've made it a town.

"I'll make it a city, if they'll leave me alone.

"But they won't leave me alone.

"I've invested capital, time, imagination, effort.

"I've advertised this place. I've written hundreds and even thousands of columns of copy that have appeared in the Eastern newspapers, and nearly every day I get letters which I answer—my bill for postage and correspondence paper alone is—but let that go! After what I've done, you'd think that the people might be generous enough to offer me gratitude, not to say congratulations?"

I nodded. There was no point in asking questions. He would say everything that was on his mind.

"But not they," he went on bitterly. "No gratitude.

"But envy!

"Suspicion!

"Malice!

"Actual hate—actual hate for one of the best-tempered men—if I say it myself!—that ever stepped upon the face of this earth!

"And further than that, what do you think?"

I told him that I could not guess; it seemed that he had said about all that a man could.

"I haven't mentioned the real danger to my life!" said he, lowering his voice and looking around cautiously at the window and then at the door. "But I live in such a danger, Jerry!"

"That's too bad," said I.

I sat down on the arm of a chair, guessing that this little yarn would not end right away.

"Men acquire a certain character, do they not?" said he.

"Yes," I answered.

"So do towns," he went on. "And the character of Makerville, our rival for county seat in this county, is that of a villain. As the town, so are the people in it. There are scores of Makerites who would pay thousands of dollars to see me dead! They would raid our honest town at any time of the night or the day. Their daily paper abuses us. The foulest language is piled upon my head, and I walk in daily danger of my life!"

He paused and drew a long breath. Then he looked rather wistfully at me.

"Go on," I remarked. "Say it, colonel."

He literally writhed in his chair, staring at me. He did not know how far he could go, and I was in no hurry to tell him, of course. I began to guess that the colonel was as thorough a rascal as one could find in a day's walk, outside of a jail. But there was something about him that amused me, too.

"Son," he said to me at last, when he had made up his mind to talk to the bottom of things, "I would pay a thousand dollars to see Sidney Maker of Makerville in this office—right in this office!"

I nodded.

"He's your big rival, is he?" said I.

"The scoundrel!" exclaimed Alfred Riggs. "He would murder me in a minute. And now that the election draws on, and the voting for the selection of a town for county seat is about to begin—why, Mr. Ash, there are no limits to which he wouldn't go. Bribery, corruption, every method of cramming the ballot boxes—nothing is beneath that—that—" The colonel had a large vocabulary, packed with just what he wanted, but for a moment, he hunted through the list vainly, trying to find the word proper to hitch to the name of Sidney Maker, of Makerville.

"You want me to do him in," said I, "but I won't. I'm not going crooked, colonel."

He drew in a great breath.

"Look!" said he.

He snatched open a drawer of his desk and threw a paper before me. There was a big scrawling handwriting that covered it. It ran:

DEAR COLONEL RIGGS: I have just been offered twenty-five hundred dollars by Sidney Maker for putting you out of the way—or clear off the map. What are your terms?

Yours as ever, J.J.

"Why not hire J. J., colonel?" I asked, giving him back the paper.

"For three or four thousand, the villain?" exclaimed Riggs. "No, never! But to a man who is decently reliable, I would pay something like a thousand"

"For Maker delivered into this office?" I asked him.

"Well, that's it." He nodded.

"What makes you think that I could turn such a trick?" I queried, looking curiously at him. "I'm no great hand. And I'm new to this country."

He shook his head.

"The driver told me all about the way you put the slug through that outlaw. He said that he never saw a cooler piece of business. Besides, there's something unmoved and calm about you that suggests that you can do what you wish to do!"

I could have laughed in his face, when I remember that it was my practice in schooling my nerves for the sake of my rotten, crumbling, shattered heart that had given me this calm exterior. But I merely said:

"Well, I wouldn't be any cheaper than J. J. I'll try the thing for twenty- five hundred."

"What?" he shouted. "Twenty-five hundred dollars? And after I've driven the bulls off your trail and"

"Otherwise I'd want five thousand," said I.

He turned gray, literally, at the thought of spending so much money. He sprang up and stamped down his foot. Then he uttered a sigh that was almost a groan, and I knew that he was in my pocket.