Silvertip's Trap (6 page)

T
HERE
was no way of dodging the log. The mustang, blind with effort, was unable to be controlled. Naylor could not pull himself forward quickly enough to get hand on the reins. All he could do was to watch that looming destruction grow greater and greater, until at the last it struck down the mustang into the depths. Naylor, casting himself free from the tail of the horse, caught at a broken bough that threatened him as with the point of a spear. For the tree trunk was coming down tip first.

As he got his grip on the stub of the branch, the entire log turned rapidly. He was dragged through stifling darkness and brought up on top, where he dragged in a great breath of air and saw the whirling white lines of the stars steady again to single points of fire. Next he saw Duff Gregor in the very act of being overwhelmed by the log. The horse that helped Gregor through the river was struck by the irresistible weight of the log and knocked under.

Bill Naylor thought seven long thoughts in the course of half a second. He cursed himself and his folly — then he twisted his legs around the branch by which he had been lifted to safety, and, stretching out to his full length, he grabbed blindly in the swirl of the current. He grabbed at a shadow and closed a hand on cloth. He pulled hard. The log, slowly turning, gained impetus and dragged him under. Still he maintained his hold. The tree trunk turned very slowly. The effort he was making made it impossible to hold his breath long. He was about to let go his hold when two frantic hands clutched his arm.

“I'm done,” he said to himself. “I'm pulled under and gone like a water rat!”

Then the log, slowly, slowly revolving, dragged him up dripping to the starlight once more, and to the incredible mercy of the sweet open air.

Big Duff Gregor came with him and clutched the body of the tree trunk with frantic arms and legs. He groaned and gasped with every breath he drew. There was something so clumsy and desperate, at once, about the way Duff Gregor was clutching at his liberty that Naylor cursed him savagely, and then wanted to laugh.

The log, as though it realized that turning and twisting would no longer get rid of the two human lives that clung to it, stopped rolling. Off to the side, Naylor saw the dark cavalcade of horsemen riding along the bank, still firing.

He lay flat. He gripped the roughness of the bark and hoped the darkness would shelter him, because there was still a spasmodic rifle fire, and he could hear the bullets slash the water. One of the slugs thudded hard into the trunk of the tree inches from his hand.

Before him, Gregor began to sit up straight.

“Lie flat” demanded Naylor.

Duff Gregor lay flat again.

Naylor said: “Lie flat and don't move. Who are you that everybody should make such a fuss to give you a hand? Who are you to be dragged out of trouble? Lie flat and keep flat.”

Something urged and swelled in his soul as he saw the big man lie still. Naylor wanted to laugh. To think that he had such control over such a celebrated character as this Duff Gregor, who had the effrontery to play the part of Jim Silver!

Jim Silver? Multiply this rascal by ten and he would still lack ten parts of being a Jim Silver. Size doesn't make the man. Naylor thought greedily of that, taking comfort in his more abbreviated inches. Brains make the man. He himself was no colossus of the world of thought, but he had a brain, just the same. Barry Christian would testify to that.

The rifle fire stopped suddenly, as if a command had been given. The dark silhouettes of the forms along the bank pooled together. Perhaps they had noticed that the horses were gone, and took it for granted that the riders were gone, also. Perhaps this was the end of the pursuit.

A storm was blowing up. It was just conceivable that this might have something to do with influencing the minds of the men of Crow's Nest. Already the stars to the northwest were wiped out. That might be the same storm which had filled the higher valley with surging torrents and started the river flooding. Now it loosed itself suddenly from its birthplace and rolled south and east across the sky. The wind that foreran it blew cold on the wet body of Bill Naylor.

As he looked to the side, he saw that the troop was keeping pace with the drifting of the log. No, now it was turning and scattering. And just before him he saw the loom of the island, like a low-lying bank of mist. To either side of it the bright arcs of the river poured.

“Get ready!” he called. “We're going to swim for the island when we're a little closer.”

“Swim nothing,” answered Duff Gregor. “Ride the horse that knows the way home. Why not?”

“Don't argue, but do as I tell you!” commanded Naylor. He rejoiced tyrannically that he was able to command.

But still Gregor was arguing.

“We're all right,” he said. “Why not stick to the log?”

“Dummy! Because Barry Christian wants to meet us on the island.”

“It's a bad play,” said Gregor. “They've got the island spotted now. They'll be sure to give it a search.”

“They've gone home,” answered Naylor.

“Only up the bank to get boats, maybe.”

“Hey, d'you know better than Christian?' answered Naylor furiously.

Personally, he would like to meet any man in the world fit to argue a point or make a plan against Barry Christian.

They were close in on the island now. Bill Naylor could see the individual trees come out from the mist of darkness and take shape. There was a little point that had been burned over, and the shapes of the trees were skeletons of horrible grotesqueness. Presently the log began to veer off into the deeper and stronger current.

“Now!” called Naylor, and he dived away from the tree trunk.

He swam strongly, and rejoiced to see that it was easy to make progress across the stream. Looking behind him, he saw Gregor hesitate, then follow with a floundering splash.

“The clumsy fool!” thought Naylor.

Suppose that sharp eyes watched them from the other bank and made out the glimmering of that splash?

But as Naylor gained footing and waded through the softness of the mud through the shallows, and felt again the full weight of his body as he got to turf underfoot, big Duff Gregor came striding up beside him, and the sense of superiority which had been Naylor's vanished at once.

They went on through the trees. The water in their boots made squelching sounds. The forest thickened over them just as the rain commenced. It started with volleyings and crashings the way a heavy downpour in the mountains will often set out. Every time they got out from under the foliage of the evergreens, the strength of the rain whipped and stung their faces with the strength of bullets.

Gregor paused suddenly.

“This is hell,” he said.

“Bullets are worse hell,” said Naylor. “Or maybe you'd rather have a nice warm jail?”

Gregor walked on again, and Bill Naylor disliked him more and more. They came into a natural clearing in what must have been just about the center of the river island. Gregor paused.

“We'll have a fire here,” he said, “as long as we have to wait for Christian.”

“No fire,” directed Bill Naylor. “What's the good of showing people the way to us with a light? What's the good of holding up a light for them to see by?”

“You do as you please,” said Gregor. “I'm going to have a fire. No good being saved from jail today to die of pneumonia to-morrow.”

“You're all softened up. Or were you ever hard?” asked Naylor.

Gregor turned on him with a savagery of gesture and voice that lighted him up, so to speak.

“I've had your tongue before,” said Gregor. “I won't have no more of it. Shut up and keep shut up!”

Naylor drew back — to the proper distance for a full-arm smash. He had a long, whipping, overhand punch that did a lot of damage except to men who were expert boxers. He didn't think that Gregor was much of a boxer, and felt that he might trust that overhand wallop. But Gregor did not press his point. He seemed to think that that shrinking back had meant a good deal. Therefore he turned abruptly away and could be heard tearing up brush. He had found some dead brush; it snapped and crackled under his grasp. A whole herd of horses could hardly have made so much noise.

Where a big tree offered almost perfect shelter from the rain, Gregor built up his small heap of brush for the fire. Soon his voice growled:

“Every match wet. Got any matches, partner?”

“Not to light a fire,” answered Naylor.

He was taking off his clothes, preparatory to wringing them as dry as possible. Wet clothes are all right, so long as they're not slopping wet. Clothes only so wet that the heat of the body can dry them out are all right. That is, unless you have to sit still in a wind.

“You got a match. Lemme have a match, will you, brother?” pleaded Gregor.

“You big bum,” said Naylor. “What kind of a man are you? Jail has gone and softened you all up. Well, here's a match for you. It's on your own hook. I'm not guilty.”

“Sure, it's on my own hook,” said Gregor. “Nothing but a frog would come to this island on a night like this. We're as safe as if we were on the other side of the mountains.”

“Yeah, and that's what you say.”

But, finding the oiled silk that carefully wrapped his matches, Naylor handed over the small package. He felt a sulky discontent in surrendering his matches, but when the flame leaped up, yellow-red and cracking, and the first smoke cleared away from the blaze and rolled in low clouds under the wide branches of the tree, he began to change his mind. He finished wringing out his clothes and sat on a stump near the fire in order to empty his boots.

“Yeah, and it ain't so bad, eh?” said Gregor. “Another thing, if Barry Christian's to meet us on the island here, he'll have to have something to guide him, won't he?”

“Yeah? Well, all right,” said Naylor. “The only thing is, I've always gone on the idea that there's nothing safer than playing safe.”

“Aw, we're all right,” insisted Gregor. “I'll take the responsibility. It'll be all on me.”

“You won't take the bullets, though. They won't ask you which way they ought to travel.”

“Who'll shoot at you?” cried Gregor suddenly. “Who'll even think of you? It's me they're after.”

Bill Naylor lowered his head and looked from under the darkness of his brows at his companion. It was a big figure of a man that he saw, with really magnificent shoulders, and the head well-placed on them. The face was handsome, too. There had not been enough jail to fade all the sun-brown off the skin.

More than once Naylor had seen pictures of Jim Silver, and he could understand how it might be that people would mistake this man for the famous fighter. There were even the two spots of gray over the temples, like incipient horns. They gave a sinister touch to the figure of the big fellow. He was stripping off his clothes now, and his body was big with muscle. But it was not quite the effect that one would expect to get from seeing the real Jim Silver stripped. There was not the same easy and stringy flow of muscles that gave speed to the bulk when it was in action. It seemed to Naylor that there was a touch of weakness about the mouth of this man, also.

“All right,” said Naylor. “It's you that they're after, all right. I know that.”

He got out his tobacco pouch, so well wrapped and waterproofed that not a drop had touched the contents. He loaded his short pipe, whose stem had been worried off to little more than a half of its original length, with a new hold for the teeth whittled into the hard rubber. He began to smoke, sucking hard at the tobacco until the flame was well spread and the coal tamped down.

“Got any papers?” asked the other.

“No.”

“Can't I have a smoke, then? Lemme have a whiff, will you, partner?”

There was a slight whine in the voice. The lips of Naylor twitched.

He removed the pipe from his mouth. He prided himself on a certain number of delicacies. Now he took out a clean handkerchief. It was soaked with the river water, of course, but that didn't matter. He used it to cleanse the mouthpiece of the pipe, and then handed it over, stem first.

Gregor grabbed it with a greedy hand and began to draw down great whiffs of the smoke. He started talking, his enunciation biting the exhalation of smoke to pieces.

“Rotten strong stuff you smoke,” he said. “Rotten cheap stuff!”

Naylor said nothing. He registered the bad taste of this remark and said nothing whatever. Things like this helped him to place his companion. There was no use arguing about such a point. Except on a Monday morning, when one wants to get warmed up for a long, hard week.

“Yeah, it's strong,” he drawled finally.

He watched Gregor consuming the pipe load rapidly. After a long time Gregor asked:

“What's your name?”

“Naylor.”

“Which Naylor?”

“Bill Naylor.”

Gregor chuckled.

“You don't like it, eh?”

“That's all right,” said Gregor.

Naylor looked slowly away. The jump of the firelight gave him view of long vistas among the brown tree trunks. Shapes seemed to move with the toss and the swing of the fire.

“I dunno,” he said as a bit of water was shaken from a bough above and went down his neck. “I dunno. Maybe it's not all right.”

“Don't get the bulldog up, Shorty,” cautioned Gregor, lifting a threatening finger.

Then a deep, soft voice, close to them said.

“Hands up, please! Stick them right up, boys.”

T
HE
mind of Bill Naylor slashed through several reflections and one great regret as he heard that voice. He looked straight at Duff Gregor and saw the shock strike the big fellow like a bullet. It paralyzed Gregor. It froze him in mid-gesture, so to speak.

“Right up, friends,” said the soft, deep voice.

It seemed to Naylor like the sort of a voice that one would expect from the spirit of the island, half obscured and dark. There was music in it that went with the sound of the storm. And then the wind, following after, screeched suddenly through the near-by treetops.

Gregor groaned.

Naylor shoved up his hands slowly. Firelight is not good light to shoot by. If he took a dive backward, rolling on the ground, he could get himself into a tangle of brush, and from that behind the trees, and it would take very snappy and straight shooting to get him. Not every man can do much with a revolver in the daylight. Not one in a thousand is any good at night.

“If one of you makes a quick start, I'll have to nail him,” said the voice of the unseen man. “I mean you, Shorty, if that's your name! Gregor, get the hands right up over your head and try to grab that branch of the tree.”

Gregor was obedient. Bill Naylor decided that this was not the time to take chances — not just now. For there was no hysterical yell in the throat of the unknown man. There was no strain of excitement. There was simply the businesslike intonation of one who is in a familiar situation.

Then, as Naylor got his hands high, straight toward him out of the shadows stepped a big man whose wet slicker glistened like polished steel. He had a gun in either hand, and he held those guns low, about the level of his stomach. He held them with the careless mastery of one who knows his tools. He looked like a brother of big Duff Gregor, an older and a better-made brother. There was more in the shoulders and less in the hips. There was more in the flesh, and more under the flesh, so to speak.

And all at once Naylor cried out as realization struck him sick: “Jim Silver!”

Gregor seemed to feel the words in the pit of the stomach. He gasped, as he bent forward with a jerk: “Silver? Jim Silver?” And he twisted his head and stood there agape. “It's Jim Silver!”

“I suppose it was in the books for me to meet you one day,” said Silver. “Straighten up and keep those hands high, Gregor.”

A faint, moaning sound came from the lips of Gregor, and Naylor thought it was like the whining of a young puppy exposed to weather such as this.

“Both of you face away from me,” said Silver. “Then you can put your hands down and shell out your guns. Move your hands slowly. I hope nobody's going to be hurt.”

There was a quiet irony about this. Naylor made no mistakes. He deliberately, slowly, faced around, and then pulled out his pair of guns and dropped them one by one to the ground. Gregor had a gun, too, and got rid of it.

“Is that all boys?” asked Silver.

“Yes,” said Naylor.

And Gregor added: “Every scrap of everything.”

“Get back close to the fire,” said Silver. “You're cold. Start in dressing. I don't have to tell you that I'm watching all the time for queer moves.”

Naylor obeyed and began to dress. He was cold, and shuddering a little. He could see that Gregor was so frightened that he was almost incapable of getting the well-wrung clothes back on his body.

When Naylor was dressed, he said: “Well, Silver? What happens next?”

He was surprised to hear Silver say: “I don't know. Just what do you suggest? What's your name, again?”

“Naylor. Bill Naylor.”

“I think I've heard that name. What do you do?”

Naylor canted his head a little. It never had been very hard to face the lawmen, no matter what they knew about his record. It was not so good to tell things to this man, somehow. It made him feel a little homesick, uneasy in the spirit.

“I live on my face,” said Naylor.

“What do you mean by that?”

“You think over what you've heard about me, and you'll understand.”

“You mean that you live by your wits?”

“What there are of them,” admitted Naylor.

Something happened to the gun that was occupied in covering him. It got a little steadier; it came to life; it took on a certain eager sentience.

“What's your record?” asked Silver.

“Oh, anything you like. I've run chinks over the border and I've been a stick-up artist. A lot of things in between. Why?”

“Well,” murmured Silver. “Well, I don't know. And on the road you and Gregor became friends?”

Naylor grunted.

Silver maintained a long silence. He sighed, at last, and said:

“I thought that Gregor was a rat. I was wrong. No man that has a friend like you, Naylor, is a rat.”

Naylor waited for the new qualification. There might be things lower than and worse than rats. But Silver was not supposed to be a fellow who scattered insults. There was something in the air that was strange.

“I've been in the jail in Crow's Nest,” said Silver. “I know what it means to get out of it. Taxi got me out one night. It was a hard job. And if you've taken out Duff Gregor, you have brains and nerve, Naylor. That's all.”

Naylor saw how the wind was blowing, but he could not believe his eyes and his ears. Big Duff Gregor had finished dressing. He stood straight and stiff by the fire, holding out his hands to the blaze rather as if he wanted to make a shadow for his face than to get warmth into his blood.

“Silver,” he began, “what I want to say is that that other deal — ”

“Don't!” said Silver. “Don't say it. I'd rather not talk with you, Gregor. I'd rather not hear from you.”

Gregor's teeth clicked together in the ecstasy of his fear. He spoke not a word more. And a strange shame suffused the very soul of Naylor as he saw that Silver felt that this jail break had been managed by him, by Bill Naylor, simply because of the friendship that he bore for the big man.

Silver said: “I've wanted to know that Gregor was in jail, safely behind the bars. Perhaps another day I'll be trying to put him where I've always thought that he belongs. But there's nothing in the world as great as friendship. You've done a big thing, Naylor. You've done such a big thing that I'm not going to spoil it for you. Not to-night.”

Gradually Bill Naylor understood. He could not take in the whole thing at once. He had to feel his way through the idea little by little. Friendship is a sacred thing. According to the understanding of Silver, Naylor had done the greatest thing that can be done; he had offered his life for that of another; he had done it through sheer affection.

What would Silver feel if he knew that the money of Barry Christian had organized this whole deal?

Other things went through the mind of Bill Naylor. He could see that we judge others by what is inside us. That was how Jim Silver was judging Naylor — by what Silver would have been capable of in the same circumstances. He was judging Naylor, too, by what “Taxi” had done for him on that other, that famous night when Taxi took his friend out of the Crow's Nest jail, through the lynching mob.

Something swelled in the throat of Naylor and tried to speak. He had to choke it down. It was a crazy impulse to confess the truth. It was an insane feeling that he could not bear to be misunderstood, even for the better, by this man Jim Silver.

But there was Duff Gregor, standing straight and stiff, as though his backbone were a rod of ice. One word of the truth about affairs would ruin Gregor. One word connecting his jail break with Barry Christian would be the destruction of Gregor.

On what a mine of danger Silver himself was standing, thought Naylor, with his greatest enemy restored to the world from death! Ignorance blindfolded Jim Silver. Perhaps that ignorance which he could not help would permit Christian to steal up and deliver the fatal blow.

Such a rage of contrasting emotions as troubled Naylor at this moment never had disturbed him before.

Then he heard men from the distant calling, answering one another faintly. Big Gregor heard the sounds, too, and started violently.

“It's my duty,” said Silver, “to hold you both here until the men from Crow's Nest come up and get the pair of you. Well, I'm not going to be true to my duty. They're going to go over this little island with a fine-tooth comb. There's no way you can get through them. I saw them scattering out to encircle the place. There must be fifty of them. But — well, suppose you drop into this bit of brush right here by the fire. I'll throw my slicker over the brush to keep it in shadow. I'll freshen the fire to make the flames dazzle ‘em a little. Here, take these guns. We don't want ‘em in the way.”