Saint Errant (13 page)

But the setting for the encounter was what made it so ineffably superb. To have met him in the city would have been ordinary enough; but to meet the city gunman out here in the great open spaces was a poem which only the Saint’s impish sense of humor could realize to the full.

Glancing down at the rifle carried ready across his pommel, the Saint even asked himself the wild question whether Amadeo Urselli might conceivably be mistaken in a moment of well-staged excitement for a mountain lion. Almost regretfully he dismissed the idea; but when a turn of the trail brought him a sight of Urselli sitting disconsolately on a rock slapping at the indefatigable flies, he felt genuinely distressed to think that such an ideal opportunity had to be passed by. They rode down into the gulch, and Intuccio leaned over in the saddle with his forearm on his thigh.

“You have seen nothing, Amadeo?”

“Nothing but flies,” said Urselli sourly.

He was pinkly sun-broiled and very bad-tempered; and the sight of his misery almost made up for the fact that they had not seen so much as a toe print of the mountain lion which they had set out to look for.

They arrived back at the hotel a few minutes after four. Urselli was the first to dismount, moving stiffly from the exertion of the day. He stopped to read a message that was nailed to the door; Simon, coming up behind him, saw the conventional black hand at the head of the letter before he could distinguish the words; and then Intuccio’s arm drove between them and ripped it down.

Urselli spoke from the side of a thin hard mouth.

“I though there were no more bad men.”

Intuccio did not answer. The paper crumpled in his grasp, and without a word he thrust them both aside and crashed through the door. He stumbled over an upturned chair in the gloom as he went in; and then they stood on either side of him surveying the wreck of the kitchen. The center table was tilted drunkenly against the range of the far end, and two other chairs were flung into different corners, one of them broken. A saucepan lay at their feet; and little splashes of shattered china and glass winked up at them from the floor.

Intuccio dragged himself across the room and detached a fragment of gaily printed cotton stuff from the back of the broken chair. He stared at it dumbly. Then, without speaking, he held out the message from the door.

Simon took it and smoothed it out.

If you wish to see your daughter again, bring $20,000 in cash to the top of Skeleton Hill by midnight tonight. Come alone and unarmed. We shall not send a second warning. Death pays for treachery.

“You gotta pay, Salvatore,” Urselli was saying. “I’m tellin’ ya. You can’t fool with kidnapers. A gang that snatches a girl won’t stop for nothin’. Say, I remember when Red McLaughlin put the arm on Sappho Lirra-“

Intuccio straightened up lifelessly, like a stunned giant.

“I must find the sheriff,” he said.

The Saint’s hand crossed his path, barring it, in a gesture as lithe and vivid as the flick of a sword.

“Let me go.”

He went down the short road to the town with a light step. This was adventure as he understood it, objective and decisive, like a blast of music; and the Saint smiled as he went. Far might it be from him to deny the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli any of its quintessential poetry. He walked into the sheriff’s office and found Saddlebag’s solitary representative of the law at home.

“Lucia Intuccio has been kidnapped,” he said. “Will you come up?”

The man’s eyes bulged.

“Kidnaped?” he repeated incredulously.

“There was a note calling for twenty thousand dollars ransom nailed to the door,” said the Saint, and the sheriff took down his gun belt.

“I’ll be right along.”

Simon went with him. The news spread like an epidemic, and a dozen men had gathered in the back room when they arrived.

Intuccio told the story. He seemed to have shaken off some of his first numbness, and at intervals his eyes veered towards Urselli with an ugly soberness. When he had finished, the sheriff’s gaze leveled in the same direction.

“So,” he said slowly, “while Urselli knew that you’d be gone at least three hours, there wasn’t anybody to see what he was up to.”

“What of it?” protested Urselli grittily. “You got no-“

Simon interposed himself.

“We’re wasting time,” he said coolly. “I guess we ought to make a search.”

“Mebbe we will.” The sheriff’s gaze did not shift. “You’ll come as well, Urselli-and stay with me.”

The group of men filed out quickly, splitting up outside into two and threes, for there were less than five hours of daylight left-an almost hopeless time in which to find and follow a cold trail in that wild country. Simon joined them.

The sun went down in a riot of gold and crimson, and the search parties began to filter back through the gray-blue dusk. By ten o’clock, when the night was a vaulted bowl of dark glass studded with silver pin points, they were all gathered together at the inn; and the sheriff, with Intuccio and Urselli, came in last while they were all waiting.

There was no need for questions. A silence that was its own answer hung in the room, mirroring itself in the glazed tension of the yellow highlights smeared by the single oil lamp on the circle of leathery faces. The angles of black shadow in the far corners held the strained heaviness of a mounting thunder storm.

The sheriff read through the ransom notice again, and raised his eyes to Intuccio’s face. The nervous scrape of a man’s feet on the bare floor rasped a nerve-stabbing discord into the still-ness before he spoke.

“You wasn’t aimin’ to pay this money, was you, Salvatore?”

The old man stared back at him haggardly. Before he came in, the alternatives had been discussed by the reassembled search parties in measured low-pitched voices that scarcely ruffled the texture of the air. Organized help could not come from the nearest big town before midnight-it might not come before morning. What would the sophisticated city police think of Black Hand threats?

“Buon Dio!” said Intuccio, in a terrible voice, “I have not so much money in the world.”

Urselli started.

“But you said yesterday-“

“I lied.”

The innkeeper’s great fists were clenched at his sides, his powerful shoulders quivering under his soiled shirt.

“I have always failed. Everything I touched has been under a curse. You all know how the farm ate up my money until it was nearly all lost, and the land was sold for the mortgages. You all know how I bought this inn to try and make a living; but none of you came here. Perhaps you were afraid of me because I never laughed with you. Dio mio, as if a man who has suffered as much as I have could laugh! You thought I had the evil eye, some black secret that made me unfit to be one of you. Yes, I had. But the only secret was one which you all knew-that I had failed… . But when that cousin of mine came back from Chicago, with his fine clothes and his jewels, and boasted of the money he made-I lied. I did not want to see him despise me. I told him I had thirty thousand dollars. I have not got five hundred.”

Urselli lighted a cigarette mechanically.

“That looks bad,” he said. “I tell you, those guys mean business.”

“You know a great deal about them, Amadeo? You speak from experience?”

The innkeeper’s burning eyes were bent rigidly on the small er man’s face. There were red notes glinting in them, hot swirling sparks from a fire that was breaking loose deep within them. In the core of the soft voice was a deep vibrant note like the premonitory rumble of a volcano. “Perhaps you know more than any of us?”

Urselli looked right and left, with a sudden widening of his ratlike eyes. Not one of the ring of faces painted in the lamp light moved an eyelash. They waited.

He sucked at his cigarette, the tip flickering abruptly to the uncertain inhalation.

“In the cities, you hear things,” he gabbled shakily .“You read newspapers. I’m only tellin’ you-“

“Now I will tell you!”

Intuccio’s restraint broke at last; the fire that was in him seethed through in a jagged roar. His iron hands crushed into the other’s shoulders, half lifting, half hurling him round.

“I said last night that you would find more robbers in the big cities of America than you would find here. I was right. Here is one of them! A dog who has come back to the home where he does not belong any longer!”

The voice sank again, only momentarily. “This very morning you were exposed. The stranger here did it. He challenged you. I was listening. He made you show your gun. Does an honest man need a gun? And you could shoot. I watched. He told you that you were a liar when you said you traded in jewelry-because you did not know that the diamond on your finger was not real. And he said that perhaps the true reason why you left Chicago was because you were-on the spot. Per haps you thought I did not understand. But we are not so ignorant. We also read newspapers. I know you, Amadeo! You are a gunman!”

He turned to the Saint.

“Is that not so?”

Simon nodded.

“That would be my guess.”

“So you thought you could swindle me,” Intuccio went on mercilessly. “But then you were exposed. You knew that after what I had seen and heard I should never trust you. You had to be quick, before I denounced you to the sheriff. This after noon you were alone. You came back here. You! You took Lucia away! You wrote that letter! You are the man we want!”

Urselli’s gasp of fright as he was shaken as if he were a doll in the convulsive grasp of the huge hands that held him sobbed out against the fearful low-pitched growl of wrathful men. As the innkeeper’s voice rose uncontrollably, the murmur beat up wards like an angry sea. Other voices clanged against it, echoing clearer and louder in the vengeful cry of a wolf pack, soaring to drown every other sound, shouting against each other. The circle narrowed in, creeping out of the shadows into the full yellow of the smoking lamp, hands reaching out, throats snarling gutturally. “Lynch him! Lynch the swine !”

“Stop!”

The sheriff’s command boomed like a gunshot through the din. He turned to Urselli grimly.

“Reckon you better say something quick, friend,” he drawled.

Urselli’s face twisted and twitched, his hunted eyes swiveling frantically over the bank of remorseless faces. He shrank away like a cornered animal.

“It’s not true!” he blubbered. “I ain’t done nothing. Ya can’t frame this on me! This won’t help ya. That ransom’s gotta be paid by midnight-an’ if it ain’t there-“

The clamor which had been hushed began again. Fingers plucked at him. Red eyes glowered into his whichever way he turned. And all the time the innkeeper’s inexorable hands held him as helpless as a struggling child. Urselli screamed.

“Don’t touch me!” he gasped, writhing away from them. “You’re all wrong. You don’t know what you’re doing. Gimme a break. Don’t touch me! Salvatore-you wouldn’t let them do this to me? I’ll do anything-anything. Here, look. I told you I had twenty thousand bucks. You can have them. I’ll give them to you. Take them and pay the ransom!”

“What do you think, Salvatore?” asked the sheriff steadily.

Silence came down again, raw-edged and expectant. Intuccio turned. He shrugged; and the slobbering object in his grip rose and fell like a puppet with the heave of his shoulders.

“It is easy enough to pay ransom to oneself,” he said skeptically. “But I can take his money. If they will give Lucia back to me-if she is safe-afterwards we shall see.”

“We c’n all go with you,” spoke up one of the bystanders; and there was a chorus of assent. “If we c’n catch one o’ them thar coyotes-“

Others chimed in.

“Fools!” cried the old man bitterly. “If it were as easy as that, should I not have asked your company long ago? Lucia will not be there. They will keep her until the money is paid.” The fire smoldered again in his dark eyes. “But when I return, you, Amadeo, will still be here. And death pays for treachery. If Lucia does not come home, I will kill you myself.”

He tore off Urselli’s belt and flung it to the sheriff. Pack after pack of new crisp bills came from it, and the sheriff counted the pile and stacked it together.

“It is my duty to forbid this,” he said gravely. “But it’s- your daughter.”

Intuccio nodded stonily.

“Yes,” he said. “It is my daughter.”

He scanned their faces once, his eyes resting last on the trembling figure of Urselli held by two pairs of strong hands, and then he passed through them to the door, with the circle opening to let him through. And again the stillness began to be broken, voice by voice.

“I have an idea,” said the Saint.

He stood by the wall, a little apart from them, cigarette poised between lean brown fingers. The very quiescence of his lounging suppleness had the electric quality of a smoothly humming dynamo; but the light was too dim for them to see the reckless blue twinkle of his eyes. Yet they all looked at him.

“All of you couldn’t go,” he said quietly. “But one man might. I’ve done plenty of night hunting. I could follow-and see where the money was taken.”

“Could you be sure no one would know?” asked the sheriff; and Simon smiled.

“Anyone who heard me, or saw me, would be a living miracle.”

He had a way about him.

They listened to him.

He went through the night toward Skeleton Hill with a blithe softness. The country before him and on either side was an earthly sleeping wilderness, ragged and obscure in the shrouded darkness of a night without a moon. The cry of a hunting coyote somewhere in the distance wailed faintly through the veiled space; and the Saint smiled again. Presently, ahead of him, he heard the monotonous scrunch of plodding boots going down the dirt road. He came up swiftly with the sound, till he could see the ghostly bulk of the walker blotting out the stars.

He himself made no sound. He came up until his hand could stretch out and grip the man’s shoulder; and he spoke in a sudden gentle whisper of Italian.

“One moment, Salvatore. You know as well as I do that there is no hurry to reach Skeleton Hill.”

The man halted with a jerk, and turned. His black-bearded face bent forward till he could recognize the Saint in the vague starlight. Then the shaggy black head bowed.