Читать книгу The Hair-Trigger Kid - Max Brand - Страница 4

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It was not malicious curiosity that brought the crowd. It was the same impulse which draws men together to see a prize fight. There were perhaps fifty people already on the long covered veranda that ran in front of the hotel, supported by narrow wooden pillars, with a row of watering troughs on each side of the steps where a twelve-horse team could be watered at one time without unharnessing them.

"You're gettin' a new brand of trouble here in Dry Creek, sheriff," said an acquaintance.

"I've seen a lot of brands," said the sheriff. "What's the new one gunna be like?"

"The Kid is comin' to town, I've heard. Charlie Payson, he passed the word along."

"Which is this Kid?" asked Milman. "Denver, Mississippi, Chicago, Boston or—"

"This ain't any of them. It's the Kid," replied the sheriff. "You mean to tell me that Charlie Payson is handin' out that story? What would the Kid be comin' to Dry Creek for?"

"Yeah," said the other, "you'd say that Dry Creek wouldn't give him no elbow room, hardly. But that's what Payson is sayin'. I dunno how he knows. Unless'n maybe he got a letter. Some say that he was with the Kid down in Yucatan once."

"I've heard that story," said the sheriff. "How they went up the river and found the old temple and got the emerald eye, and all that. Is they anything in that yarn?"

"They's likely to be something in any yarn about the Kid."

"Who is the Kid?" said Elinore Milman.

"You never heard of him?" asked the sheriff.

"No. Never. Not of a man who went by just that nickname. What's his real name?"

"Why, that I dunno. But betwixt Yucatan and about twenty-five hundred miles north they is only one Kid, so far as I know."

"What sort of a creature is he? Young?"

"The sort of creature he is," said the sheriff, "is a hard creature to describe. Yes, mostly he's young."

"What do you mean by mostly?"

"Well, some ways they ain't nobody no older in the world. Maybe I can give you an idea of the Kid by what a feller told me he seen in a Mexican town in Chihuahua. When the word came in that the Kid had been sighted around those parts, they fetched in a section of the toughest rurales they could find, and they swore in a flock of extra deputies, and them gents that had extra-fine hosses. They led 'em out of town and sneaked for the tall timber, and the women that had pretty daughters, they got 'em indoors and turned the lock over 'em, and sat down in front of the doors with the biggest butcher knives that they could sharpen upon the grindstone. And the gamblin' house, it closed up and cached all of its workin' money by buryin' it real secret in the ground, and the big store, it closed and locked up all of its windows. It looked like that there town had gone to sleep. But it was lyin' wide awake behind its shutters, like a cat. Well, down there in Mexico, they know the Kid a lot better than we do, and that's the way they treat him there."

"But here in Dry Creek," Elinore Milman questioned, "you don't take all those precautions when this philandering horse thief, gunman and yegg comes to town?"

"Ma'am," said the sheriff, "you've heard that he's comin'. And ain't you standing out here with Georgia right beside you?"

She flushed a little, but the girl merely laughed.

"I imagine that I can venture Georgia," said the rancher's wife.

"Yeah," said the sheriff, "I see that you do. But if she was mine, I'd blindfold her and put her in a cyclone cellar when they was a chance of that Kid comin' by. Up here, on this side of the Rio Grande, we're all too dog-gone proud to be careful and that's the cause of a terrible lot of broken safes and necks and hearts!"

There was a distinct strain of seriousness in this speech, but Mrs. Milman, turning toward her daughter, smiled a little, and Georgia smiled in turn. They were old and understanding companions.

Murmurs, in the meantime, passed up and down the veranda. "What's it all about, sheriff?" asked several men from time to time.

He merely shrugged his shoulders and continued to stare at the house opposite him, as though he were striving to read a human mind.

"The curtain ain't up," said the sheriff, "but I reckon that the stage is set and that they's gunna be an entrance pretty pronto."

"Here's somebody coming," said Georgia, gesturing toward the farther end of the street.

"Yeah," said the sheriff, "but he's comin' too slow to mean anything."

"Slow and earnest wins the race," said another.

They were growing impatient; like a crowd at a bullfight, when the entrance of the matador is delayed too long.

"We're wasting the day," said Milman to his family. "That's a long ride ahead of us."

"Don't go now," said Georgia. "I've got a tingle in my finger tips that says something is going to happen."

Other voices were rising, jesting, laughing, when some one called out something at the farther end of the veranda, and instantly there was a wave of silence that spread upon them all.

"What is it?" whispered Milman to the sheriff.

"Shut up!" said the sheriff. "They say that it's the Kid!"

He came suddenly into view, as a puff of wind cuffed the dust aside. His back was so straight and his stirrup so long that he seemed to be standing in his saddle. His bead was high, and his glance was on the distance, like one who knows that his horse will pay heed to the footwork. But there was nothing unusual in his get-up except for the tinkling of a pair of little golden bells which he wore in his spurs.

Such a silence had come over the crowd on the veranda that this sound, small as the chiming of a distant brook, grew distinctly audible. The sheriff suddenly nudged Georgia.

"There's a horse for you," said he. "That's the Duck Hawk, as they call it. That's the mustang mare that he caught in Sonora. Ain't she the tiptoe beauty for you?"

She came like a dancer, daintily but smoothly, with a pride about her head, as though she felt she were carrying some one of vast distinction. A king would have liked to ride on such a horse; or a general, or any mayor in the world, to lead a procession.

"She gets her name from her markings," explained the sheriff. "You see the black of her all over, except the breast and the belly is white. I never seen such queer markings on a hoss before. But that's the Duck Hawk. I seen her out of Phoenix once. I'd dig potatoes for ten years for a hoss like that, honey. How long," he added, "would you dig 'em for such a man?"

He turned with a grin as he spoke, and the girl smiled back at him.

"He looks all wool," she said most frankly.

So he did. The sort of wool that wears in the West, or on any frontier. Now, as he came up to the hotel and jumped out of the saddle, they could see that he had the strong man's shoulders, smoothly made and thick; and the legs of a runner such as one finds among the straight-built Navajoes. He had the deep desert tan, but his eyes were of that same Irish blue which made men look at Georgia Milman with a leap of the heart.

Their hearts did not leap when they stared at the Kid, however. Instead, glances were apt to sink to the ground.

The Kid took a bit of clean linen from his saddle bag and wiped the muzzle of the mare before he permitted her to drink, which she did freely but daintily, for Georgia Milman could see, now, that there was no bit between her teeth.

"Hello, folks," said the Kid. "Waiting here for a procession to come along, or is somebody going to make a speech?"

He picked out faces, here and there, and waved to them, but when he saw the sheriff he jumped lightly to the edge of the veranda between two of the troughs. The intervening people slipped hastily back, like dogs, Georgia thought, when the wolf steps near.

The Kid took the sheriff's hand in a warm grip.

"I'm glad to see you, Walters," said he. "I thought I'd drop in here at Dry Creek to see you. You've made my old friend Shay so much at home that I thought you might want me up here too."

"I'm glad to see you, too," said the sheriff instantly. "I've got a right good little of jail over yonder, Kid, and you'll find it mighty cheap here in Dry Creek to get a ticket to it."

"Never buy anything but round trips," said the Kid, "and I hear that yours is only a one-way line. You're not introducing me to your daughter, Walters?"

"This is the yegg I was telling you about, Georgia," said the sheriff. "This is the same sashayin' young trouble raiser. The lady's name is Milman, Kid."

The Kid took off his hat and bowed to her with an almost Latin grace.

"I nearly borrowed a pair of your father's horses one evening," said the Kid. "But there were too many barbed-wire fences. Mighty bad thing to use so much barbed wire around horses. You tell your dad that for me, will you?"

He stepped back, replacing his hat upon the tangled, curly hair of his head. Georgia had nodded and smiled faintly, without embarrassment.

"He admits what he is," she said. "Don't your hands simply itch to jam him into that jail, Lew?"

"Yeah," said the sheriff, "and they'd itch a lot more if I had a bigger life insurance."

The Kid, in the meantime, had stepped down from the veranda again, and, breaking two matches, slipped them into his spurs so that the golden bells were wedged and silenced.

He talked to this curious and rather breathless crowd as he did this.

"Anybody know if my friend Shay is at home?"

"Yeah. He's at home," said one.

"He likes a quiet step," said the Kid, "because he says it's a sign of culture. A cultured fellow, is Billy Shay, you know. So I mustn't play bellwether when I go to call on him. I'll see you-all later on."

He walked across the street and through the front gate of Shay's house before the spectators realized, suddenly, what it was apt to mean.

Georgia phrased it in one gasping sentence.

"It's the fear of the Kid that's cornered Shay!"