Читать книгу The Hair-Trigger Kid - Max Brand - Страница 10

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When they had shaken hands, Dixon acted like a man who is breathing a different air. "The dirty dog that told me—" he began.

"Don't tell me his name," said the Kid. He raised his hand and shook his head firmly. "I'll tell you, Champ, that a man has enough trouble in the world without asking for it."

"But what about a man that goes around telling lies about you?"

"Suppose that I started out to kill every man who is telling lies about me, old-timer?"

"Aye, that's true. But the sneaking—"

"Of course. Well, I'll tell you, Dixon, a fellow who hasn't any permanent home address is pretty likely to have stories told about him, a good deal. You can't expect to steal eggs and pass the plate, Dixon."

Champ Dixon chuckled.

"Morrison was telling me that you was this way," he observed. "I couldn't hardly believe it, until I set right here and hear you talk! You act, Kid, as though the people that set fast inside of towns was all good and that the fellows on the road was all bad."

The Kid shrugged his shoulders.

"Why, they're a flock of throat-cutting hypocrites, and you oughta know it!" exclaimed Champ. "Out here on the open road—look how it is! You and me have put a year's trouble straight in a coupla seconds."

"That may be true," said the Kid.

"Besides, most of the fellows that are ridin' long and sleepin' short, they have been drove out of society by the meanness of other men, and not because they wanted to go wrong."

"I've heard a lot about that," said the Kid. "I don't believe much in it."

"I'll tell you my own case," said the other. "I was doin' fine. I had as slick a little ranch as you ever seen. I was follerin' the letter of the law. It was down on the Pecos—it was away off down there. It was a good little old ranch, I'm telling you."

His hard, bright, overwise eyes softened. He dreamed about the happier past for an instant.

"I get me a wife, and the cows are running fine and fat, and everything is what I want it to be, and then along comes Pi Jefford and wants my land, and I won't sell it, and so he gets hold of that long-drawn-out skunk, that Dick Origen, and paid him a reward too for rustling every head of stock that I had on my place. I go bust, the bank gets my ground. Pi Jefford gets the place from the bank, and my wife, she figures that it's a dead waste of time for her to stick with a fellow as down and out as me. All inside of a week I was flat on my face. Why? Because I'd done something wrong? No, but because there was a great crook that pretended to go straight, and that lived inside of the law, and he wanted me out of the way. Well, the world owed me something after that, by my way of figuring, so I've gone and taken it."

The Kid nodded.

He made himself a cigarette, and smoked it with thoughtful care.

"Look here, Champ," he said.

"Aye? What is it?"

"Well, it's this way," the Kid continued. "You liked your life back there on the ranch?"

"That was life, Kid. Making things grow, and—"

"And round-up was a great time?"

"The best times that I ever saw!"

"Champ, I don't think that you mean it. I'd like to make you remember the time that you blew the safe of the First National in Carnedas, according to the story that Bill Jackson told me of that night."

"I remember that night."

Soft laughter brooded upon the lips and the throat of Dixon.

"That was a night, old son!"

"Did you ever have such a good night on the old ranch?" Champ started to speak, changed his mind, and stared fixedly in front of him.

"Did you ever have so much fun in any twenty days and nights on your ranch," persisted the Kid.

Still Champ did not answer, and the Kid, apparently taking this silence as a confession, went on:

"There was no cruel sheriff that drove me out on the road, Champ. Nobody ever cheated or gypped or short-changed, robbed or beat me in any way."

"Hard times can rub through men's patience," declared poor Champ.

"Hard times didn't bother me, either," said the Kid. "I had enough money. My family is a good family. I could walk on Persian rugs and drink tea at four thirty every afternoon and sun myself with the pearls and paste of the opera boxes at night. But that stuff didn't appeal to me. There's too much dressing up and not enough places to go."

Champ regarded his friend with tightened lips and tightened eyes.

"Where can you go out here except from sunstroke into chilblains? What have you got here except a raw neck and an aching back, and dirt, dirt and more dirt? By heck, sometimes I almost think, Kid, that I'd chuck it all for the sake of living next door to a tin bathtub and a good supply of hot water all the time. This is a hard life."

"Yeah," said the Kid. "It's a hard life for those who don't like it. But let them have their soft rugs and deep beds and smart talk. I prefer to shoot my meat, cook it, and eat it. They get the pleasure of being together. I get the pleasure of being alone. They learn how other people live and imitate them. I learn how horses and wild cats live, and imitate them. They're inside the laws. I'm outside the laws. I'm above the laws, Champ. I kick the law in the face, because it doesn't walk on my level."

He yawned and stretched his arms.

"That sounds pretty fat-headed," said he. "Well, I don't mean it that way. I only mean to tell you that I've never gone home since the day I left, and I'll never go home if I live to be a thousand. I've cut myself away from 'em. I've buried my old name. And I'm free as a lark, old son!"

He laughed as he said that, the purest joy in life welling and bubbling in his throat, so that Champ grinned and nodded in return.

"You're all out by yourself, Kid," he remarked. "I've heard it before, and I believe it, now. You haven't even thrown in the sunsets, and the mountain air, and such stuff. I was afraid that you were going to be poetic."

"I knew you were," said the Kid, "and so I went soft on that pedal."

"Where've you been?"

"I've been down south with Juan Gil, the Portuguese in Yucatan. Very hot. Even gold melts down there."

He yawned again.

"You got some, I hope?"

"Yeah, I got some. I loaded a pack mule with what I got."

"Of gold?"

"Yeah. It was everything that Juan Gil had taken out of an old mine down there. Good, patient sort of boy, Juan is!"

"You caught him out?"

"One night he tried to knife me. You see, he thought I wouldn't be needed any more."

"What did you do to him?"

"Well, I pulled down the heads of two saplings and tied him to them. When they jumped up into the air again, they didn't pull him in two but they stretched him a good deal. I left him up there close to the sky, and took away his mules and the gold. Juan cried a good deal to see me go. But he was taken down that day with nothing worse than a few bones broken."

"You don't seem to be traveling very heavy now."

"It's a long way from Yucatan," said the Kid. "You wouldn't have me go all the way without stopping?"

"No. I bet you even threw roses on the desert, eh?"

"I threw a few," said the Kid, complacently. "Even Old Mexico City blushed a couple of times on account of me. And that's a habit that I thought the old town had forgotten a couple of hundred years ago. What have you been doing?"

"I've been selling some mining stock," said Champ Dixon. "It goes pretty well, too, if I can get far enough east. But lately the blamed sheriffs and their deputies have been pretty thick. So I've started in on a new game."

"What's that?"

"Jumping water rights."

"That's nothing new."

"Not new. All the better for that. It's a game that's been tried out and practiced until a fellow can learn all of its dodges."

"Like it?"

"Why not? It's exciting."

"What do you do?"

"Look around through the ranches, and find out the ones that have shaky titles. Why, most of them have, for that matter. They've got their land from the Indians, first of all, or from some old Spanish grant, perhaps, or a Mexican under a law that never was a law, or from some old-timer who never had any claim to the ground in the first place. We look around, Shay and me, and we pick out the likely ranches, and then jump in and claim and start to homestead on the best water on the ranch. Take most of those places hack there where the big Milman ranch is, there's not more than one good stream to the ranch. You grab that creek, and they've gotta buy water rights from neighbors, if they can, and drive the cows a darn long march to get a drink; or else they cannot wait to go to the law, but they can shoot it out with you. Maybe they drop you, and then they have a chance to be hung for murder. Maybe they're dropped. And then it's a case of the poor homesteader defending his rights."

As the beauty of this business came home to Champ Dixon, he chuckled through his teeth again, and drew in a long breath.

"If they go to the law. Shay has got one of the slickest lawyers that you ever seen, and a lot of crooks that knows how to make evidence. Shay has got men that could remember the length of Noah's whiskers. They'll swear to anything. So if the trial comes off one chance in two, we win anyway. And the poor sucker of a rancher has to pay through the nose, and we live on the fat. Why, old son, it's the very kind of a life for you!"

Suddenly he stopped, and grew red. For he saw that the Kid was watching him intently, and without a smile.