Blue Kingdom (16 page)

The others did not rebel against this sweeping condemnation, but they looked studiously down at their plates, avoiding the eyes of their leader, even avoiding the eyes of their table companions.

When this had gone on for a few moments, there still remained a silence over the table, which was broken by the sound of angrily disputing voices.

“There's our Beatrice at it with young Furneaux again,” said Dr. Legges. “If they keep it up, it will have to be a case either of marriage or of murder.”

Dunmore could hear the voices clearly as they disputed.
Young Furneaux was making no effort to keep his temper or his voice within bounds, but he exclaimed bitterly: “You've made a fool of me again, Beatrice! This is the last time. You've tricked me and dodged me because you're tired of having me around. Well, I'll never bother you again that way. I'm through with this absurd business, I tell you.”

“You won't listen to me,” said the girl. “You're simply trying to make something out of nothing.”

“Is it nothing to ramble half a day through the woods, shouting for you?”

“Dear Rod,” said the girl, “how I wish I could have heard you.”

“I suppose you do, but this is the last time that I'll be such an ass as to think that you can treat any man as a serious friend.”

“Hush! They'll hear you inside the chuck house.”

“What if they do? They've known for weeks that I've been raving mad about you. It's one of their great jokes.”

The girl appeared in the doorway, and, as all heads turned toward her, Dunmore saw her wink broadly upon the crew, as though to invite them into her confidence.

“Uncle Jim,” she appealed to Tankerton, “here's Rodman saying that I'm a liar, and I don't know what else. Are you going to sit by and listen to such things?”

“Of course, I am,” answered Tankerton. “Because he's right, and you know he's right.”

“Harder for you to tell the truth, Beatrice,” said one of the men, “than it is for a snake to make a straight trail on the ground.”

“There you are,” said the girl, taking her place at the right hand of Tankerton. “Every one of you hates me, and every one of you slanders me. I'm going away. I simply won't stay here.”

“Why, honey,” broke in a Southern drawl, “the heat you raise would melt yo'se'f right out of any other place but this.”

Furneaux went gloomily to a chair and jerked it back, looking to right and to left as though he would have welcomed trouble on either hand. Then he sat down.

He looked somewhat like his Aunt Elizabeth. There was the same lean, aristocratic face, the same pride, the same bright, clear eyes. No other at that table seemed worthy of being placed beside young Furneaux, and Dunmore could not regret that he had come to win such a fellow back to an honest life. But though the task seemed worthwhile, it also appeared trebly difficult the instant that he laid eyes on the boy. It would be like guiding a hawk in the middle air to attempt to handle this lad.

The girl, in the meantime, by no means had given up her attack upon Furneaux, but Dunmore, carefully watching, saw her eyes rest more than once half sadly, half dreamily upon the face of Rod. The instant the latter became aware of her gaze, she pretended confusion, dropped her glance, and talked busily with Tankerton. Presently Furneaux was neglecting his food and looking straight before him into vacancy. Dunmore smiled. It was plain that she had won him back again.

“And now for Chelton, boys,” Tankerton stated suddenly. “How are we to help him? Let's have ideas.”

Legges said instantly: “Why, Jim, there's your man. He's so careful to keep us out of drafts that he'll be sure to nearly break his heart to keep any of us out of prison. Let Dunmore handle the job.”

Sheriff Ban Petersen had two qualities that were invaluable in his profession. In the first place, he knew how to shoot straight. In the second place, he had no sense of humor. In all men who laugh, there is a strain of the easy-going, and those who go easily, gently through life are not always prepared for the worst that they may find in the human nature of others. It was very different with Sheriff Ban Petersen. He was always ready to look to the bottom of any problem of crime, and no motive was too small or too mean to escape the keen eye of the sheriff.

In the same manner, he never thought that any jail was “safe enough.” He trusted in this world nothing but himself, and the result was a career that grew more and more brilliant. But of all that he had done, nothing promised so much for him as the bit of luck that made him the captor of that famous member of a famous band—Oscar Chelton. Good fortune had thrown Chelton into his hands, and the sheriff was determined that nothing on earth should get him away. Having got his
man, it only needed that the sheriff should deliver him at the right place. Thereafter, his name would be among the immortals. He could be sheriff forever, and no man would dare to run against him. But that was only true if he kept Chelton from slipping through his hands.

In this case, he did not depend upon himself alone, but he occupied the rear of the smoking car on the train with his prisoner and a hand-picked posse of six men. They were mountain men, these, and they were armed, therefore, not with revolvers but with rifles. For his own part, the sheriff had not much faith in revolvers when they were used by anyone less expert than himself, or a Tankerton, say. Rifles were the safe bet.

“A slow shot but a sure shot is what we want,” he was fond of saying.

But even with the prisoner manacled to his own left arm, and with six hardy riflemen about him, the sheriff was not perfectly at ease, but examined every platform of every station that the local passed through, searching for suspicious faces in the groups that were often standing there.

The curious, from time to time, came back into the smoking car, and the sheriff regarded all these intruders with an intense interest. He would have been very glad to have the smoking car entirely to himself, but, since this could not be, he had to content himself with warning the passengers to keep three seats away from him and his armed escort. Even so, he sometimes unfastened Chelton from his arm, clamped the manacle to the side of the seat, and went forward to assess any man who appeared to him a possible danger.

It was at one of the smallest flag stations that the blind man got on board. Even this fellow the sheriff insisted upon examining, while the posse smiled covertly. For it would have been hard to imagine a more decrepit case of invalidism than this. The old fellow came well bent over, with a grizzly stubble of beard an inch or so long on his face, looking as though it had been trimmed with sheep shears. Dark glasses covered his eyes; his trousers were a sort of rusty green-black, and the frayed seat had been literally patched with sacking, stitched in with sack-sewer's yarn. His boots were very old, and, because one foot was troubled with rheumatism, perhaps, the toe of that boot had been cut away and the foot protruded, wrapped in a dusty rag. He carried a stout stick, as well to feel his way as to support him in stepping, but even with it, his sight seemed so completely gone that he could not have made progress except for the boy who led him along. He was as ragged as his elder, but he was as blithe and chipper as a sparrow and seemed to be winking at the world to invite it to join him in laughter at the poor old derelict.

However, no sooner had these two steered to a seat than the sheriff disengaged himself from his prisoner, and, going to these two, he said: “Who are you, partner?”

The blind man cupped a hand at his ear and barked in a screeching voice that rang through the entire car: “Hey?”

The sheriff started. The posse and the other passengers laughed loudly, and perhaps it was this, or perhaps because he really had detected something in the appearance of the old man that made him suspicious,
but at any rate the sheriff at once plucked the glasses from the face of the other.

The old fellow raised a hand to shade his eyes, as though whatever bits of life remained in them were dazzled by the sudden radiance in which he found himself, and the sheriff leaned over and squinted sharply at him.

“Sonny, sonny, what might it be?” quavered the old man.

The sheriff replaced the glasses he had just removed.

“Maybe you're right,” he said, “but you got a mighty young-lookin' pair of eyes to go with the rest of your make-up. How old are you?”

“Hey?” screamed the old man again, leaning closer with his hand cupped behind his ear.

The sheriff started back a step, thrust away by that horribly raucous voice. “You, kid,” he said to the grinning boy, “what's his name?”

“Pop Cumberland is his name.”

“What does Pop stand for?”

“Grandpop.”

“What's his first name?”

“I dunno. His old friends they all call him Squinty, and Gramma, she called him Josh.”

“Joshua Cumberland,” translated the sheriff. “Where you come from, kid?”

“Up the Kilrainie, in the hills, where Cousin Jack has a place with. . . .”

“Whatcha doin' away down here?”

“When Pop started for Tulma, Cousin Jack, he said it's be better to break the trip by stoppin' off at Cousin Maggie's down here at. . . .”

“You drove down?”

“Cousin Jack, he was sending down the wagon to cart back some two-by-fours for the buildin' of a new corral, because Jack, he's gonna catch mustangs for the market next year and he wanted to yard 'em up where they wouldn't. . . .”

“So you're goin' to Tulma?”

“Yep. Cousin Joe, he's willin' to take on the old man for a couple or two years, he said, and then. . . .”

“You got cousins all over the face of the map?”

“You just oughta see,” said the boy with enthusiasm. “You take an old gent like Pop, here, and he's got 'em right down to great-grandchildren, and all of 'em has married, and all has got children, and them children has married, and what with cousins by birth and cousins by marriage, it's a regular clan, Pop says, that he started all by himself.”

“I've heard of the Cumberlands,” agreed the sheriff, “but I never knew there was such a herd of 'em.”

“Ain't there, though? If you could see 'em come and pool together along about Christmas. . . .”

“What are you gonna do at this Cousin Joe's when you get the old man there?”

“They say that I'm gonna go to school. But they got another guess comin'!”

The sheriff laughed. “I guess you're all right, the two of you,” he said, and went back to his seat, while the passengers and the posse covered their smiles again.

However, Sheriff Petersen was able to detect the amusement in some of the faces, and he explained sternly: “A lot of you think this is queer . . . I wanna tell you that they wouldn't be so many trails run to the
ground if it wasn't that folks looked under stones, now and then, instead of just on top of 'em. That old gent, Cumberland, I guess he's all right, but when he stumbled comin' down the aisle, it looked to me like he recovered himself right smart and easy.”

“He's a mountain man,” said one of the posse.

“Sure he is,” agreed the sheriff, “and, take it from me, a mountain man loses his brains a long time before he loses his legs.”

With this, he leaned and looked out the window. The train was approaching a small station beyond which the track led on in a broad bend into rough hills. His eyes narrowed as he looked ahead, and then, pulling back his head from the window, he turned to the prisoner, whose arm once more was manacled to his captor's.

“How you makin' it, Chelton?” he asked.

“Aw, I'm fair,” said Chelton.

“Ain't hungry, or nothin'?”

“I could use some food.”

“What'd they give you last night an' this mornin' at the jail?”

“Rice 'n' molasses.”

“Hey! Rice an' molasses? Well, I wouldn't feed a Chinaman on that kind of chuck. But we're gonna stop at this here station of Last Chance, and I reckon that we can pick up some sandwiches or something.”

“That'd do me fine,” said the prisoner, who maintained a quiet but not a broken attitude.

The sheriff looked him over with approval. “You ain't made no trouble for me, Chelton,” he said, “and you've acted like a man right straight through. I'm gonna see that counts for you in the wind-up.”

“Nothin' is gonna count for me much,” said young Chelton. “The windin'-up is gonna stretch nothin' but my neck and a rope.”

“I wouldn't be too sure,” suggested the sheriff amiably. “They's a lot of ways of dodgin' that, and the judge might give you a spell in jail. . . .”

“Jail?” said Chelton. “Look here, Petersen, would you want to live on if you had to change into a hog?”

“Why, I dunno what that has to do with it.”

“It's got a lot. I'd rather be a dead man than a swine barred up in a pen! I been in the pen before. Even the smell of it is worse'n death to me, I tell you.”

He said it contemptuously, sternly, and the sheriff looked askance at him and nodded, with rather a dreamy look in his eyes, like one who perceives something far off and cannot tell whether it be horizon cloud or lofty mountain.

Then the brakes began to grind for the stop.

They were pulling into the station at the small town before them, and it appeared that most of the other passengers in the smoking car dismounted at this place, for they were thronging forward toward the platform, the laborers carrying their blanket rolls. The sheriff took note of a number of buckboards and riding ponies gathered near the station, and in front of the station building were half a dozen men waiting. No doubt they had come to meet the cargo of laborers and take them off to ranches and farms.