Читать книгу His Name His Fortune - Max Brand - Страница 4

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He went straight to the cell of Pierre Delapin. That young worthy had composed himself at ease. The day was very hot. The window was a rectangle of blazing white, and the bars were rimmed with fire on one side. So Pierre had stripped off all clothes save his trousers, and these he had rolled up to the knees. He lay full length in his bunk, with one lean, muscular arm curled under his head. He was smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke with the greatest expertise into odd curves and concentric circles.

"Hello, kid," said the sheriff, leaning at the bars of the cell.

Pierre moved his head back, and, rolling up his eyes, he saw the sheriff. He did not rise to his feet. Neither did he turn his eyes away. But from the strained position he continued to regard the sheriff, and he also continued to smoke.

"I said hello!" said the sheriff.

Pierre continued to smoke.

"So this," said the sheriff, "is the poor little orphan."

Pierre swung lightly to his feet. He stretched himself, then he walked to the bars, from which the sheriff instinctively recoiled. Pierre leaned against the iron and looked quietly into the face of Oscar Maine, then down to his boots, then slowly back to his face again. It reminded Maine with startling and uncomfortable distinctness of the way a sleek-bodied devil of a puma had eyed him once from behind the bars of a cage.

"Why, damn your black heart," said the orphan, "my father was a better man than ten like your old man."

He spoke without emotion, but he dropped the cigarette, crushed out its glowing end under the leathery callous of his bare foot, and leaned his forehead against a bar while he continued his study of the sheriff. And the veins of the latter began to turn cold. He felt as if he were bringing on himself the enmity of a wild beast with the brains of a man behind it.

"I said," he went on, "that you're a poor little orphan."

Pierre merely stared without blinking.

"And the thing for you to do," went on the sheriff, "is to play the part."

He was still confronted by the same uncanny steadiness of eye.

"You've heard of the rich Winton estate?" he suggested.

The boy shrugged his brown-black shoulders. His skin was actually darker than his hair.

"The widow," said sheriff, "has been reading in the paper about how the cruel sheriff arrested a poor French child by the name of Pierre Delapin— a little orphan, d'you understand? Arrested him because he was accused of shooting the great brute, Albert Lee."

Pierre scratched his shin with the bottom of his other foot, still without speaking.

"And if she gets to pitying you enough," said the sheriff, "there ain't any telling where it'll end up. She's only got about ten millions to spend, poor thing."

"Pity?" said Pierre.

"Pity," said the sheriff, and suddenly they both grinned.

That smile took years off the apparent age of Pierre. It made him totally childish. The sheriff found himself more at ease.

"Will you do what I tell you to do?"

"Maybe," said Pierre.

"Jump into your clothes. I'm going to bring her over here to see you."

"All right," said Pierre.

"Can you act like you're only fourteen or thirteen?" "I dunno," said Pierre.

"You're a poor little orphan," said the sheriff. "You ain't got any father or mother, and you're locked up here by cruel men that accuse you of doing something that you done just because a great big brute was trying to kill you—savvy, Pierre?"

Pierre grinned and showed two rows of pearly white teeth. Then the sheriff went back to the widow and led her to the jail.

"How terrible—for a child," she murmured as she passed through the doorway into the somber interior of the jail. "What a blot to rest upon his young life."

They passed on down the corridor.

"Which is his cell?" asked the lady.

"I—why—there he is," said the sheriff.

In fact, it had been almost impossible for him to recognize the transformed Pierre. Huddled into a corner of the cell sat the "poor little orphan." A sombrero, from the brim of which all the heavy ornaments had been removed, sat upon the back of his head. His trousers were rolled down and were frayed at the bottom, as though they had been worn to rags, although the sheriff could have sworn that the day before those trousers had been almost new. But now they were full of rents, through which the brown skin could be seen. The shirt that clothed the upper part of his body was likewise ragged. But most of all the face of Pierre was altered, for, instead of the steady and fearless look of defiance with which he had greeted him a little before, he now gazed at them with great, round deer-eyes, and seemed to shrink from every glance as if it were a blow.

Indeed, the widow could only endure one glance at that frightened face. Then she turned away and rested her hand on the arm of the sheriff. "It sickens me," she breathed. "Oh, to see the poor child crushed down by the weight of—" She could not finish. But suddenly she said to the sheriff: "I've seen enough—Sheriff Maine, I'm going to bring him home and raise him so that a few years of happiness will shine into his life."

"Ma'am," said the sheriff, "that's sure a kind thought." He turned to the cell. "Pierre!" he called.

"Ah!" breathed Pierre and shrank away, sheltering his face behind the crook of his arm.

"Sheriff," whispered the widow softly and furiously, "what have you been doing to that child?"

And the sheriff could not make an answer.

That day the "poor little orphan" was taken from the jail—allowed his freedom because there was no one to press a charge against him, because the sheriff had reason to believe that the whirlwind would tone down and not go gunning for a Lee. At any rate, Pierre was garbed in the best that the town store could afford, and placed in a buckboard to be driven to the new home. It was the foreman of the ranch himself who escorted the boy out. Afterward, he gave the report that the house servants had passed on to him concerning the new arrival of the orphan at the Winton house.

"He went sneaking around on tiptoe alongside of Missus Winton," said the foreman. "And every time he seen anything new, he'd let out a little holier—like a girl, seeing a new party dress. When he come to one of them big upholstered chairs, he feels of the cushions first with his hand, and then he shakes his head and sits down cross-legged on the floor.

"'Pardon me, ma'am," he says, 'but I dunno that I can trust a thing like that."

"'The poor child,' says Missus Winton, 'he's had the rearing of a savage Indian!'

"And before night she'd got the whole story out of him, about how he'd been kicked around from one place to another and bullied and treated plumb terrible by cruel men—"

The foreman got no further, for his audience broke into a universal groan.

"And that night," said the foreman, "he shows up in the bunkhouse, just as the boys was turning in. He lights a cigarette and laughs at Missus Winton and himself, and he allows that it's a pretty hard game to play. He says that she has sent him to bed and come in and kissed him before he went to sleep. Then he busts out laughing and asks the boys who's game for a round of dice. He shoots craps with us for an hour, cleans up about fifty dollars, and then goes back to the house.

"I sneaked along behind him to see how he'd manage to enter the house. But he went right up the wall of the house like the wildcat that he is. In through the window, and then, while I was standing in the blackness under a tree, wondering at him, something comes humming past my head and goes smash on the tree trunk behind me. That young devil, he'd knowed that I was following, and his way of showing me that he knowed it was by throwing a glass at me hard enough to've brained me!"

This was the introduction of Pierre to the house of Mrs. Winton. He was like a young savage, roaming through the rooms at first. But, although every servant in the house knew perfectly well that he was only playing a part, Mrs. Winton herself had not the slightest idea of it. And when a chambermaid attempted to tell her what she thought, the poor girl was discharged promptly because she was accused of being part knave and part fool. After that no one in the employ of Mrs. Winton cared to take the risk that would accompany the revelation.

About a month later, however, John Bender, of the Bender Ranch, rode across to the Winton place and told Mrs. Winton all he knew concerning her protégé. Mrs. Winton went to bed with an hysterical attack as soon as Mr. Bender left—and for three days Pierre Delapin was constantly at her bedside. At the end of that time he could leave her, and he went across country as fast as his horse would carry him to the Bender Ranch. He found that Bender himself was gone.

Pierre turned his horse about and galloped for town. But even in town he could not find John Bender. It seemed that the veteran rancher had decided that this community might not be altogether safe for him once the "poor little orphan" struck his trail. But, while he was searching, Pierre found John's son, Pete Bender, in front of the store, exchanging bits of gossip. All talk stopped and was supplanted by broad grins as Pierre approached, for he was dressed like a youth about to swing onto the back of a blooded horse for an exercise jaunt through New York's Central Park.

His riding breeches were works of art. Flaring wide over the thighs and coming neatly and closely about the knee. And his boots shone with hours of careful polishing. For was not a man servant assigned to the sole task of dressing young Pierre Delapin? All these lesser marvels, however, gave way to awe at the sight of the soft white collar of his shirt, and the deftly arranged black bow tie. This in place of a bandanna! Wonder and mirth went hand in hand as they saw these things.

And behold, in his hand was a riding crop with which he idly tapped his shining boots as he stood on the verandah of the store and looked coolly up and down the row of faces where the idlers lounged. He looked extremely young. He looked very boyish, indeed. But everyone sitting on that verandah could recall events in which this same youth had participated. Although there was no revolver in sight on his person, they would have wagered their lives, every one of them, that he was armed secretly to the teeth, and that a long, black-bodied Colt would slide into his hand at need. Therefore, the smiles gradually went out as he picked out his man and walked up to Pete Bender.

"Your dad come over to Missus Winton," he said, "and told her a whole string of lies about me."

He waited, but, although Pete had heard his father had given the lie, he did not strike back. He listened, white of face.

"He said," went on Pierre Delapin, "that I've been simply a vagabond and a tramp all this here time—he says that I been nothing but a troublemaker and a fighter all the time. Matter of fact, I don't know one end of a gun from another. Understand? I don't know nothing about fighting at all, and if I hear of anybody coming out to her with such lies again, I'm going to—send in a friend of mine to clean 'em up!"

With this he favored them all with a smile, turned on his heel, and walked out to his waiting horse. He sprang into the saddle and was gone in a flash.

For a week the country talked of nothing but the effrontery and the cold nerve of this boy. But not a syllable of that talk was carried to Mrs. Winton.