Blue Kingdom (7 page)

“I'd pay five hundred just for the looks of her!”

“She ain't for sale.”

“That's what you always say. I remember when you had the gray hoss that jumped so well. But when you're broke and tight, you'll sell, right enough, and not for five hundred.”

The second man broke in: “Look here, Carrie. They want you over to the crossroads. You'll have free drinks there. They still got the knives sticking in the wall just where you left 'em after drawin' the silhouette of Pete Logan with 'em. Hey, Carrie, come on along. It won't be no piker's party. It'll be just the kind that you want to sit in on.”

“I can't go,” said Dunmore. “Can't even think of goin'. But who's there?”

“Who's there? Why, everybody, I tell you. There's Bill Clay, and the Guerneys, and Oliver Pike, and the Jensens, and Captain Patrick. . . .”

“Is the captain there?”

“Why, sure, it was him that sent us over to get you, and Miss Furneaux, she said that you'd gone up the road this way for a little outing on Excuse Me.”

“Captain Patrick? How is he getting on?”

“He's flush,” was the eager assurance. “And he says that he'd rather have you across the table from him than any other gent that ever tipped a glass in the world. He's got a belt of gold dust that you could wrap around you twice, and it's loaded, every inch of it. He's so heavy with gold that his heels hit hard when he walks. He goes upstairs like he was carryin' a hod. Come on along, Carrie. You might as well get in on some of it as the next gent, eh?”

A whirl of wind raised the dust on the road before them and whirled it into the face of Carrick Dunmore. It was very hot, and the way dipped up and down interminably, and, after all, a man about to undertake such an important enterprise ought to relax a little. . . .

“There's snow on old Digger Mountain, ain't there?” asked one of the pair who had overhauled him.

He looked in that direction and saw the gleam of the snow strike through the horizon blue of his new-found land, his own country. Suddenly he touched the mare with his heels, and she bounded away like a deer. That was his answer. A very rude one, and one that allowed no answer, for the pair could not match strides for one minute with the gallop of Excuse Me.

It had just rained in Harpersville, and Chuck Harper, builder, proprietor, and manager of the town hotel, author, also, of its name and principal reason for its existence, came out from his hostelry and sat in a chair that he gripped with his knees, as though it were a horse. In this position, with his hat on the back of his head, he set to work whittling a stick of sugar pine, and to this he gave his utmost attention. He was not trying to reduce the stick to any definite design; he was working with such pains merely to see how thin a slice he could remove with the knife, which was sharp as a razor. The long, translucent whittlings were so light that they almost floated in the wind, and they fell one by one about his feet.

Every ten minutes, punctually, he raised his head and showed a massive, sullen face. He cast a gloomy look up and down the roads that here wound about the mountainside and entered the village, and, bending his thick neck, he returned to his whittling.

There was a rattling of rain among the trees every
time the wind slapped them, but the clouds had long ago melted, and the sun was raising steam from the pools and the silver streaks of water that lay in the ruts along the road. Chuck Harper gave no heed to the face and form of nature. He watched the road and communed with his own dark mind.

Presently the door of the hotel banged. His wife, a raw-boned half-breed of his own age—which was less than forty—sang out in a nasal voice: “Hey, Paw!”

He did not answer.

“Paw!” she shouted.

A touch of contentment appeared upon the savage face of Chuck Harper.

“Paw!” she screamed. “Are you gonna hear me?”

“I hear you,” said the giant, without turning.

“You hear me, do you? Then I wanna know, are you gonna cut that wood for me?”

He squinted down the stick and removed a shaving as thin as a feather.

“Paw, I'm askin' ye, are you gonna cut that wood for me?”

He raised his head but did not answer.

“Paw, confound you, are you gonna cut that wood?” she shrieked.

“Naw,” he said, and resumed his whittling.

This brief answer brought the woman to the verge of a veritable insanity of rage. For a time she lingered at the door, her clenched hands raised above her head, speechless with the imprecations that crowded up into her throat. Then the door crashed heavily as she went inside.

Her husband raised his head again, and there was almost a smile of contentment upon his face.

At this moment, a rider came about the bend of the road on a dark, dappled chestnut mare, a thing of such deer-like beauty that even the brutal eyes of Chuck Harper glimmered a little as he watched the animal come closer. She trotted with a movement so sweeping and soft that the rider hardly stirred in the saddle, and Chuck Harper turned his attention to the face of that rider for a single moment and saw a man who smiled as he came.

Down dropped the head of Chuck again, and once more he whittled.

“Whoa, girl,” said the stranger, drawing rein. “Is this Harpersville?”

Chuck did not hear.

“I'd like to know,” said the other, “if this is Harpersville?”

Chuck did not speak. But his heart was eased by this new opportunity to annoy another. The daily torture of his wife was monotonous and would have been hopelessly so if it had not been that he knew that, sooner or later, she would try to slip a knife between his ribs while he slept. But strangers were a fair game, sweet to the tooth of Chuck.

His silence, however, was presently matched by the silence of the newcomer. Chuck, interested, saw the man dismount at the watering trough and watch his mare drink. Then he turned, and stretched himself.

He was not a giant like Chuck, but he was big, and there was a peculiar sleekness about his neck and
shoulders that suggested useless bulk and softness. This in turn was more or less denied by the extraordinary lightness of his step. Chuck observed these details not because he was greatly intrigued, but because he could not help noting every physical detail, any more than a hungry wolf can help being alert. There was one deathless craving in the soul of the hotel-keeper, and that was for trouble.

“Steady, Excuse Me,” said the stranger to his horse. He turned from her, and, at that, she followed him like a dog at the heel.

Chuck regarded the pair with disgust, because he looked upon horses as stupid means of travel and had no more affection for them than he would have had for a machine.

The stranger, however, spoke gently to the mare as he went toward the end of the water trough where there was a massive stone, one that had rolled down the mountainside the year before and luckily lodged here. It was of enormous weight and, if it had come faster, would have plunged straight through the hotel, from front to back. The stranger, going to it, leaned, patted it, and bent over. Then Chuck was aware that the man was straightening, there was a sound of suction, and the burden came free. Next, the fellow was bearing it, straight toward him, walking slowly, but without bulging eyes, or a convulsed face, or any sign that this was a crushing burden. He advanced. Wonder and awe leaped into the soul of Chuck, and he started up from his chair. The other came straight on and dropped the rock beside the chair.

“Sit down,” he said. “Now we're fixed comfortable for a chat.”

Chuck Harper sat down.

Amazement still flooded his soul, but he was enraged because he had been so startled by this exhibition of uncanny power that he had not been able to control his emotion. It was the first time since he could remember that he had been so unmanned, and fury gathered in his heart. So as he sat down, he resumed his whittling, and said nothing.

“This is a pretty good sort of a hang-out,” said the other. “I'll introduce myself. I'm Carrick Dunmore.”

He waited. Chuck said no word.

Side by side, they sat silently.

“I'm Carrick Dunmore,” repeated the newcomer.

Still Chuck was silent. He felt that this would be the beginning of a fight, and that was what he yearned for. The lust of battle was as hot as fire in his brutal heart, and already his lips were twitching at the corners, like the lips of a bulldog when it sees an enemy.

The stranger did not persist in his introduction. Instead, he took from his belt a knife. It was a long, rather straight-bladed affair, looking quite unlike any hunting knife that Chuck ever had seen before. This weapon Dunmore flicked into the air. It sailed up fully thirty feet, hung for an instant in a sparkling whirl, then dropped rapidly down. Such a knife, with so sharp and narrow a point, could drop through the skull of a man as though it were pricking an eggshell, and Chuck Harper instinctively ducked to the side.

The knife fell, but, landing in the hand of the
stranger, it was flicked up again, and at its heels another followed.

Chuck Harper, disgusted because he had allowed himself to exhibit concern again, ground his teeth, and turned a violent red, but, nevertheless, he could not help feeling an interest in the work of those knives. A knife was, indeed, a weapon that he favored even over a gun. It might produce less harm at long range, but at close quarters or in a crowd it was the very delight of his heart.

This stranger was a master worker. The knives flew up as a pair and descended together, and then flicked upward again, crossed in the air, and dropped almost simultaneously into the right hand—almost simultaneously, but not quite, for that cunning hand was able to give each an upward impulse again. Then the two big knives were snatched from the bright sun and disappeared. Big Chuck Harper gasped audibly. Then, looking down at the belt of the stranger, he saw that the knives were actually in the leather sheath that fitted there, one beneath the other, yet he could have sworn that no human hand had placed them where they belonged.

“You were saying about your name?” said Dunmore.

“I'm Chuck Harper.”

“Chuck, I'm glad to know you. When a gent has been sashaying around through these mountains and not meeting anything but a squirrel or a rabbit . . . just enough company to keep him from starving . . . it's pretty good to run into a man again. Mighty good to hear some conversation, and all that.”

Chuck, brooding darkly, said nothing. He was contemplating
two conceptions, both of which were painfully bright in his mind—one was the power that had lifted that bulk of stone. The other was the speed and craft of hand that had made the heavy pair of knives float and dance like bubbles in the air.

“If you're Harper,” ran on the other with the same good-natured smoothness, “then I suppose that this is Harpersville?” He hardly waited to appreciate Chuck's silence, but went on: “Of course, it is, and that means it's where Jim Tankerton comes for his vacation, as one might say. Is that right?”

Chuck Harper pressed his lips together and gathered anger in his heart.

“That bein' so, here's where I hang up my hat, but I might as well put up the mare, first. I'll just take her around to the stable.” He stood up, and went to the mare.

“The stable's full,” said Harper.

But now it was Dunmore who did not seem to hear. He broke into a whistle and started around the corner of the hotel, the mare following.

“There ain't no room for her!” called Harper.

“Why, any little corner'll do for her,” said Dunmore, and went on his way, the corner of the hotel quickly shutting him out of view.

Chuck Harper fidgeted in his chair. Above all things, he hated to take note of any stranger. Indeed, there was only one human being in the world whom he feared and respected, but now he felt that he had been pressed into a corner, and that he would have to respond. He first slid a heavy Colt from an armpit holster and saw that it was in good working order. Then he rose, shrugged his shoulders more comfortably into the loose raincoat that covered them, and tugged his hat lower over his eyes. Then he went with long strides in pursuit of the newcomer.

When he came to the door of the barn, he could hear the rustle of hay being forked down in the loft. When he stalked down the aisle of the stable, he found cause to stop with a jolt, for in the one box stall of which he boasted there now stood not the tall and powerful bay gelding that had been there in the morning, but the sleek and lovely mare on which Dunmore had just arrived. He rubbed his eyes, hardly believing what he
saw, and now the stranger came down the ladder from the mow and dropped lightly on the floor.

Chuck Harper laid a heavy hand upon his shoulder. “You changed them hosses, you . . . ,” began Chuck. He stopped himself there. For his gripping fingers were working upon a mass of rubbery muscle. Suddenly he understood that this young man was not sleek with fat, but with sheer might, and it discouraged Harper's rage at once.

Dunmore shrugged his shoulders, and the hand of his host fell away.

“Sure I changed 'em,” he said. “You take this here part of the world, partner, and, of course, you know that a gent always gives room to a lady. When I seen that big hoss standin' in there all by himself, I took a look in his eye, and plain as day he was sayin' ladies first. ‘Thanks, old boy,' says I. I put him in that next stall and tied Excuse Me in here. She just seemed to fit, as you can see for yourself. Where's the grain bin?”

Mr. Harper had grown a dark and swollen purple, but somehow it seemed impossible for him to find the proper word with which to answer.

“Here we are,” went on Dunmore. “Thanks!” He lifted the lid of the big oat bin in the corner and dipped out a large measure, which he carried into the box stall, and dumped into the feed box there.