Silvertip's Roundup (10 page)

W
HEN
Taxi recovered his wits, he lay in semidarkness with a smell of moist earth strong in his nostrils. When he stirred, the voice of Silver said beside him, in a whisper:

“Be still! Don't stir! Don't breathe.”

Taxi turned his head. He was looking out toward the source of light now, and against it he could see the dull shimmer of gold along the flank of Parade. Outside, toward the open air, there were other noises now. There was trampling through brush, and the sound of voices far off, answered nearer at hand.

Then two were speaking close by.

That was Pokey who cried out: “He's
got
to be around here, somewhere. Jim Silver and his horse can't evaporate, can they?”

“Don't ask me what the devil they can do,” said Barry Christian.

“Well, I'll crawl back into this here cave,” said Pokey.

“You fool,” said Christian. “Even if a man could get back in there under the rock, how could a horse do it? Lie on its side and crawl like a snake?”

“Yeah,” said Pokey. “But a man could get back in there.”

“You'll find Silver where you find the horse,” said Christian firmly. “I know it in my bones. I've always known it. There'll be no end to Silver until there's an end to the horse. The two of them are tied together.”

“There's Babe yelling down there in the hollow. Blast him, he's the one that lost Taxi for us!” cried the high, snarling voice of Pokey.

“Babe did everything he was able to do,” said Christian, with surprising moderation. “I was the fool to leave Taxi in the hands of Babe after I knew that Silver had started on the trail. There was no way for Silver to trail us, but I might have known that he would find us, in the end. And how could Babe tell that Scotty had been caught and gagged by Silver? There's no one to blame except the devil that's inside Jim Silver, and that devil I'll have out of his body. One day I'll see what his heart is made of, or he'll see mine.”

He said this with a calm determination that baffled Taxi. It was as though the man had seen the future and knew to a degree what it held. And he thought of that intellectual and cruel face, and it seemed to Taxi that it would be worth while to die at once, if only he could first put a bullet through the brain, between the eyes of Barry Christian.

The voices retreated, after a time, and left Taxi to the long agony of his bruised body.

Half a dozen times, during the next few days, voices again came by them, very close, and half a dozen times they went away again before, at last, Silver said:

“We're going to chance it and get out in the sun. The sun may do more for you than I can.”

There had been, in the interim, such care from the hands of Silver as it seemed only a physician could give. He went out once a day to go to a distance, cut a burden of grass, trap fresh meat, cook it, and then carry the supplies back to the darkness of the cave. That was how Taxi and Parade were supported during the interim of twilight in that refuge. Then, with his saddlebags as buckets, Silver carried in water for the horse and fell to his usual occupation of massaging the invalid.

He seemed to need no light; but, as one who knew every muscle like an anatomist, he carefully rubbed the battered body of Taxi. It was agony to endure. It was exhausting, at first, to such a degree that Taxi always fell into a long sleep, after the massage had ended. But with each treatment more use of his limbs returned to him.

He did not need to be carried, when Silver at last gave the word and they went from the inner into the outer cave. There, lying prone on the verge of the golden day, with the sun soaking through his clothes, reaching his body with healing fingers of warmth, Taxi saw the mystery solved.

The inner cave was blocked off from the outer by two great rocks, under which there was left a hole through which a man could barely crawl. But Silver, grasping the lower edge of one of those boulders, gradually managed to turn it until it fell clear and crashed against the side wall. Then it seemed to fit into an old notch, and Silver called to Parade, who came out like a huge dog, flat on his belly, crawling and scratching until he was through and at last stood in the sun and threw up his head to neigh his delight in the world.

“Stop him!” cried Taxi. “Don't let him whinny — they'll hear sure as shooting!”

Silver shook his head. “We've stopped playing safe. We're taking chances now,” he said.

Taxi lay back and wondered at him.

In fact, Silver set to work to make a home of this place, since he had decided that they were to take chances and no longer live a secret existence.

He made a fireplace of stone, in front of the cave and just to the side of it, so that as little smoke as possible might blow inside. He cut down with a hand ax a quantity of pine boughs and saplings to build two huge, soft beds of the fragrant evergreens. He built two windbreaks that cost him a whole day's labor. And when the next storm came they had reason to be thankful for the shelter.

In the meantime, Taxi increased in strength each day. The diet was cold water, unsalted meat, and certain roots which Silver baked with the meats; besides, there were herbs to make a green salad and go down with the meat.

There was a great, hollow-topped rock near the entrance to the cave. That hollow Silver filled with water every day, and then built a fire about the rock until the water inside it was hot. To that he carried Taxi and gave him as warm a bath as he could stand, followed by massage.

That was a help, but most of all to make the cure, the heat of the sun was at work every day. Silver made Taxi lie out stripped in the white fire that fell through the trees, and the searching heat went to the very marrow of his bones.

Every day he could do more. He could crawl. He could prop himself up on his arms and sit with his back against a tree: Then he could pull himself up along the tree and stand. Finally he could walk, brief, tottering steps.

He was never still while he was awake. To regain control of himself was his present goal. He bent every energy of his keen brain to the task. As soon as he could use a muscle, he was at it constantly. He got a gun from Silver and, sitting under the tree, practiced for hours, making the draw from whatever part of his clothes held the weapon.

It was not like his automatics. It was a big single action Colt with a huge barrel that had, in length, at least four extra inches added. The trigger had been filed away. The sights were filed off, also. And the hammer worked on an easy spring, so that it could be fanned.

There was practically no conversation between him and Silver, because he felt it was dishonorable for him to ask Silver what the hidden purpose behind the rescue might be, and until Silver told him, there was a barrier between them. However, he could at least ask why this weapon pleased Silver more than an automatic.

Silver answered the question readily enough.

“When you use an automatic,” he said, “the kick of the first shot throws the gun out of line for the second one. You're not placing every shot with care. You're sprinkling lead out of a hose, so to speak, and none of the drops may hit the bull's-eye. Besides, the mechanism of an automatic will go out of shape, now and then; and if it's only once in a thousand times, that once is enough to be the death of you, I suppose.”

It seemed to Taxi a fine calculation of chances, this last bit of the argument.

As for the rest, he answered: “I'm fair with my automatics. They shoot pretty straight for me. Will you let me see you work?”

“Certainly,” said Silver.

It had seemed to Taxi that there had been just a shade of boasting about the previous comparison between a single-shot, old-fashioned Colt and the newest pride of the gunsmiths. Now, moved by a malicious impulse, he picked up two small rocks from the ground beside him and tossed them high in the air.

“All right,” said Taxi, and watched not the rocks but the effect on the man.

Even so, it seemed to him that there was no actual move of the hand to get a heavy gun from under the coat. There was merely a double flash and then the double report of a gun, fired from just a little above the hip.

Taxi looked up. But there were no longer two black spots falling through the air. The stones had disappeared.

Taxi continued to stare upward for a moment at the unstained blue of the sky. It was for him a moment of awe and wonder. In all his days he never had encountered a man who was his master with weapons, but now he realized that this big, brown-faced man was his superior as far as he himself was the master of some green novice, almost.

“Pretty good,” said Taxi, and fell back into his usual long silence.

The day came, however, when he could endure it no longer. It was a bright morning. Down the slope between the trees he could see a solitaire, the loveliest of songsters, lifting itself from the top of a shrub by the wild joy of its own music and then descending again to its perch only to be blown upward again on an entrancing cloud of song. Something came out of that song into the soul of Taxi. He could not exactly say what it was; but he knew that, as he listened, a great panorama unrolled in his mind. It was not of towering skyscrapers and shadowed streets and alleys that he thought, but he saw now big-shouldered and hard-flanked mountains, gaunt as athletes, thrusting their heads at the sky, the white of the summits hardly paler than the sun-drenched shining of the heavens. And it seemed to Taxi that he had found a thing which he could never live without again.

It was strange. It was like discovering a new food without which one could not exist and which could only be found far from one's old haunts.

The bird sang, and, as it ended, Silver said quietly: “I've known people who shot singing birds.”

That was all. Taxi could not tell why, but the words drove back a bolt in his heart and made him exclaim:

“Silver, why did you do it? Why did you risk your neck to help me? What can you get out of me?”

“Why did I do it?” asked Silver. He looked at Taxi with a strange twinkle in his eyes. “Why, I don't know,” he concluded. He went on with his work of cutting up venison into gobbets of the right size to be impaled on a wooden spit and turned at the fire.

That was when Taxi made up his mind. Whatever went on inside the brain of Silver, the man was too cunning, too subtle for him. He would have to get away. He wanted with all his heart to ask Silver what plan they could execute together against Barry Christian. But he would ask no more questions. He decided, then and there, to escape from this too formidable companion the first time opportunity came his way.

T
HE
simplest and first idea was to leave in the night. The second thought, however, was better. At night, Silver slept more lightly than a wild cat, and, besides, the stallion gave his master warning whenever the least sound came near to the camp. It would be awkward to explain to Silver, if he were found stealing off in the middle of the dark. But every day Silver was gone for a considerable time, and that was when Taxi decided that he would make his start.

He had climbed the hill near the cave, and from the top of it he could look down across the valley where Parade had leaped the ravine. He could also see, across the higher level, two ranch houses. From one of those places he could “borrow” a horse and make tracks for the cabin where he had been a prisoner. The great Barry Christian probably was no longer there. He must have moved on long before. But perhaps there would be in the house some clew as to the direction in which the gang had fled.

So in the prime of the morning Taxi lay stretched on a bit of sunny turf and watched Silver saddle the stallion and prepare to ride off.

“You'll be able to stand a saddle before long,” said Silver.

“Another week,” Taxi answered.

“Another week?” echoed Silver, and then sighed a little.

It was the first time that he had shown the least impatience, and it seemed to Taxi that it was just the same as receiving marching orders.

The moment that Silver was gone, Taxi took a broad white chip and wrote on it with a scrap of charcoal:

When he had written that, he reconsidered for a moment, remembering above all a certain smile that was often on the lips of Silver, a quiet and brooding smile which only came when he was in silence, looking across the sweep of the mountains, or contemplating Parade as the big horse grazed in the meadow. What went on in the head of Silver at those times baffled Taxi. It was the memory of these moments that made him doubt, to a slight degree, that he was right in attributing to Silver some practical motive in the saving of his life. However, this touch of conscience was by no means sharp. The whole experience of Taxi had been teaching him that one cannot get something for nothing in this world.

He stood up, put on his coat, and brushed it off, looking down at the cloth with a rueful face, for it was spotted with grease and bloodstains into which dust had worked deep. No cleaning process could ever make it presentable again.

Then he struck off across country at an easy run.

On the way, he decided that “borrowing” horses might be a bad idea. In this part of the world men were said to lynch horse thieves more readily than they strung up murderers. They made a fine point of the matter, saying that the greatness of the crime could not be judged by the value of the horse. There was a profound moral reason or superstition hidden somewhere in their minds.

So Taxi went straight up to the first ranch house, and when an old, bent man with a tuft of goat's beard on his chin came to the screen door, he said that he wanted to buy a horse.

The old man got out a pair of spectacles and put them on the end of his nose to stare at Taxi.

“What would a man be doin' out here in the middle of nowhere without a horse?” asked the rancher.

“I was heading for Horseshoe Flat,” said Taxi, “and last night, while I was asleep, somebody must have gumshoed up and stolen my saddle. He got my horse, too, and left me to hoof it.”

“Well,” said the old man, “a gent that's ready to steal a hoss is ready to steal a saddle, too, I reckon. We'll go out and take a look at some ponies.”

He took Taxi out to a big corral where stood a roan with an ugly Roman nose and a gray with a more dainty head.

“You take your pick,” said the rancher. “We got one price on most of our mustangs. Either of them'll cost you fifty bucks, and I guess the gray's a likely lookin' pony, eh?”

“The gray looks well,” said Taxi. “I'll take the roan.”

The old man grinned suddenly at him. “You looked like a tenderfoot,” he admitted. “But maybe they have hosses in your home parts, too.”

It wasn't necessary for Taxi to tell him that human nature and human pastimes were very much the same in all parts of the world. Men in the East may ride differently, but some of them can ride and ride well. So he simply picked out an old saddle and bridle, paid his bill, and wondered, as he received his change, at the peculiarly slipshod methods of Barry Christian and his men, who had satisfied themselves by taking his guns and leaving him with all his money, to say nothing of the complete burglar kit which was tucked away in the seams of his clothes and in his shoes.

He rode straight across country, from that spot, and sent the tough little roan dodging among the pine trees that surrounded the house where Barry Christian had been, as confidently as though he had received definite notice that the gang had vacated the place.

Of course, he was right. There was not a sign of a human being about the cabin. When he went inside, he found many tokens of a quick departure. In the kitchen pantry there was still a good deal of flour in the bin, a quantity of canned goods on the shelves, and a fine ham totally untouched. He found an unopened can of tobacco in the living room, together with some books.

He went scenting through that house for something that might give him a clew to use on the road. He got down to the cellar, at last, where the morning sun slanted down the steps and made a thin slit of gold on the moist earth of the floor.

It seemed to him that he could see himself lying there, a ghost, with Babe sitting near by canted to one side in his chair, reading a newspaper by candlelight. The illusion was so strong that it chilled him and made him want to get out again into the full glare of the sun.

He paused, first, at the spot where the little buckskin sacks of gold had been ranged. There on the ground glittered a few particles left from the handful which he had spilled on the night when he attempted his escape.

The sight of them made him feel again the old agony by which he had passed across the floor and up the steps.

Even the manner in which he had opened the locks of his manacles had not caused them to look for a picklock on his person. And in some ways, he decided, Barry Christian and his men were actually a simple lot.

He went back to the main floor of the house again, but still he could find nothing really worthy of his attention, except his own image as he went by a mirror. He stopped and stared at himself. He looked thinner and older. Here and there on his face appeared thin streaks of fading green — the last of the bruises which Babe had beaten into his flesh. And for the thousandth time he wondered, as he stood there, what he would do to Babe when fortune and his good right hand made him at last the master of the brute.

He remembered what “Tony the Greek” had done in that house on Eighth Street. Tony had walled his dearest enemy into the cellar foundations. Tony was a good mason, and he had built a neat new wall that was exactly like the other walls. He built in his enemy until the bricks and mortar came up to the chin of the man. Then he let him stay there, said report, for three days, until the poor devil went screaming crazy. Then Tony used to go down into his cellar and sit with a bottle of wine and sandwiches and eat and drink and laugh when the crazy man screamed, because it was a subbasement, and not a sound could drift up from it to the street. After a while, Tony built up the rest of the wall to the ceiling, over the yelling lips of the crazy man, and it was not for five years that the dead body was discovered when the house was torn down.

They never did anything to Tony for that neat bit of work. Tony had, in fact, gone up Salt Creek two years before the discovery was made.

And when Taxi looked back on that thought, he decided that Tony's way might be a very good way with Babe.

After Babe — or, really, before him — there was Charlie Larue. That would not be hard, and it would be very pleasant, because Charlie would never be able to face him again. Charlie's nerve was gone and would never come back so long as Taxi was in the vicinity.

Finally, there was Barry Christian.

That was a different matter. Even Jim Silver had not been able to put Christian in his pocket, except for one occasion. And, grudgingly, bitterly, Taxi surmised that Silver was a better man than he. Better, at least, with a gun, and armed with mysterious motives which were beyond human comprehension, motives that made him venture his life to rescue a stranger who had no possible claims upon him, motives that made him put himself inside the power of the Christian outfit for days and days to nurse the sick man.

Mere humanity could not account for this. There was something very deep about it, and Taxi felt a shuddering awe for a man whose secret purposes were so well and so darkly concealed.

He got out of the log cabin, at last, and remounted the roan.

Where should he go next? Somewhere Barry Christian and his men were probably splitting up the gold dust in shares and preparing to spend the profits. Somewhere Taxi must get on their trail again. But the West seemed very big to him, as he sat there on the horse, while the roan thrust out its stubborn head against the bit.

Something else was moving uneasily in the mind of Taxi. He could not place it, at first. It was like a hunger for a certain sort of food, just as a man will yearn suddenly for cheese and beer, or for steak and onions, and it was only after a long moment that he realized what the thing was that troubled him with desire.

He wanted to see the girl again!

That seemed to Taxi the strangest moment in his life, as he sat there among the pine trees with a triple man trail stretching dimly before him and realized that he wanted to see a mere girl. He tried to tell himself that she was simply a kitchen drudge. He tried to remember disagreeable things, such as the way her hair had been stuck in dark wisps against the perspiration of her forehead, and how the streak of dishwater had stained her apron, and how her hands had been reddened and roughened by hard work. But, though he could recall these things, he could also see in his mind how the youth and strength had kept rising and shining in her eyes. He could see the brown of her forearm and the round white of her upper arm. He could see the blue vein in it.

It was dangerous for him to go back to Horseshoe Flat. It was the last place in the world for him to go to, because when he was seen, he would be spotted, and word would go to Pudge, and from Pudge it would go to the gang.

Suppose that he brought an action against Pudge for assault and battery? He smiled at that. It would be a funny thing if he ever used the law on his side of the fence. It was too funny even to be thought of.

Suddenly he loosed the reins and started the roan straight down through the hills in the direction of the Flat.