The Max Brand Megapack (53 page)

“Kind of peeved, Nash, eh?”

One step more he made, towering above her.

“I’ve done bein’ polite, Sally. I’ve asked you a question.”

“And I’ve answered you: I don’t know.”

“Sally, I’m patient; I don’t mean no wrong to you. What you’ve been to me I’m goin’ to bust myself tryin’ to forget; but don’t lie to me now.”

Such a far greater woe kept up a throbbing ache in the hollow of her throat that now she laughed, laughed slowly, deliberately. He leaned, caught her wrist in a crushing pressure.

“You demon; you she-devil!”

She whirled out of the bunk, the blanket caught about her like the toga of some ancient Roman girl; and as she moved she had swept up something heavy and bright from the floor.

All this, and still his grip was on her left arm.

“Drop your hand, Nash.”

With a falling of the heart, she knew that he did not fear her gun; instead, a light of pleasure gleamed in his eyes and his lower jaw thrust out.

She would never forget his face as he looked that moment.

“Will you tell me?”

“I’ll see you in hell first.”

By that wrist he drew her resistlessly toward him, and his other arm went about her and crushed her close; hate, shame, rage, love were in the contorted face above her. She pressed the muzzle of her revolver against his side.

“You’re in beckoning distance of that hell, Steve!”

“You she-wolf—shoot and be damned! I’d live long enough to strangle you.”

“You know me, Steve; don’t be a fool.”

“Know you? Nobody knows you. And God Almighty, Sally, I love you worse’n ever; love the very way you hate me. Come here!”

He jerked her closer still, leaned; and she remembered then that Anthony had never kissed her. She said:

“You’re safe; you know he can’t see you.”

He threw her from him and stood snarling like a dog growling for the bone it fears to touch because there may be poison in the taste—a starving dog, and a bone full of toothsome marrow which has only to be crushed in order that it may be enjoyed.

“I’m wishin’ nothin’ more than that he could see me.”

“Then you’re a worse fool than I took you for, Steve. You know he’d go through ten like you.”

“There ain’t no man has gone through me yet.”

“But he would. You know it. He’s not stronger, maybe not so strong. But he was born to win, Steve; he’s like—he’s like Drew, in a way. He can’t fail.”

“If I wrung that throat of yours,” he said, “I know I couldn’t get out of you where he’s gone.”

“Because I don’t know, you see.”

“Don’t know?”

“He’s given me the slip.”

“You!”

“Funny, ain’t it? But he has. Thought I couldn’t ride fast enough to keep up with him, maybe. He’s gone on east, of course.”

“That’s another lie.”

“Well, you know.”

“I do.”

His voice changed.

“Has he really beat it away from you, Sally?”

She watched him with a strange, sneering smile. Then she stepped close.

“Lean your ear down to me, Steve.”

He obeyed.

“I’ll tell you what ought to make you happy. He don’t care for me no more than I care for—you, Steve.”

He straightened again, wondering.

“And you?”

“I threw myself at him. I dunno why I’m tellin’ you, except it’s right that you should know. But he don’t want me; he’s gone on without me.”

“An’ you like him still?”

She merely stared, with a sick smile.

“My God!” he murmured, shaken deep with wonder. “What’s he made of?”

“Steel and fire—that’s all.”

“Listen, Sally, forget what I’ve done, and—”

“Would you drop his trail, Steve?”

He cursed through his set teeth.

“If that’s it—no. It’s him or me, and I’m sure to beat him out. Afterwards you’ll forget him.”

“Try me.”

“Girls have said that before. I’ll wait. There ain’t no one but you for me—damn you—I know that. I’ll get him first, and then I’ll wait.”

“Ten like you couldn’t get him.”

“I’ve six men behind me.”

She was still defiant, but her colour changed.

“Six, Sally, and he’s out here among the hills, not knowing his right from his left. I ask you: has he got a chance?”

She answered: “No; not one.”

He turned on his heel, beckoned to Kilrain, who had stood moveless through the strange dialogue, and went out into the night.

As they mounted he said: “We’re going straight for the place where I told Butch Conklin I’d meet him. Then the bunch of us will come back.”

“Why waste time?”

“Because he’s sure to come back. Shorty, after a feller has seen Sally smile—the way she can smile—he couldn’t keep away. I _know_!”

They rode off at a slow trot, like men who have resigned themselves to a long journey, and Sally watched them from the door. She sat down, crosslegged, before the fire, and stirred the embers, and strove to think.

But she was not equipped for thinking, all her life had been merely action, action, action, and now, as she strove to build out some logical sequence and find her destiny in it, she failed miserably, and fell back upon herself. She was one of those single-minded people who give themselves up to emotion rarely, but when they do their whole body, their whole soul burns in the flame.

Into her mind came a phrase she had heard in her childhood. On the outskirts of Eldara there was a little shack owned by a Mexican—José, he was called, and nothing else, “Greaser” José. One night an alarm of fire was given in Eldara, and the whole populace turned out to enjoy the sight; it was a festival occasion, in a way. It was the house of Greaser José.

The cowpunchers manned a bucket line, but the source of water was far away, the line too long, and the flames gained faster than they could be quenched. All through the work of fire-fighting Greaser José was everywhere about the house, flinging buckets of water through the windows into the red furnace within; his wife and the two children stood stupidly, staring, dumb. But in the end, when the fire was towering above the roof of the house, roaring and crackling, the Mexican suddenly raised a long arm and called to the bucket line, “It is done. Señors, I thank you.”

Then he had folded his arms and repeated in a monotone, over and over again: “_Todo es perdo; todo es perdo_!”

His wife came to him, frantic, wailing, and threw her arms around his neck. He merely repeated with heavy monotony: “_Todo es perdo; todo es perdo_!”

The phrase clung in the mind of the girl; and she rose at last and went back to her bunk, repeating: “_Todo es perdo; todo es perdo! All is lost; all is lost_!”

No tears were in her eyes; they were wide and solemn, looking up to the shadows of the ceiling, and so she went to sleep with the solemn Spanish phrase echoing through her whole being: “_Todo es perdo_!”

She woke with the smell of frying bacon pungent in her nostrils.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

BACON

The savour of roasting chicken, that first delicious burst of aroma when the oven door is opened, would tempt an angel from heaven down to the lowly earth. A Southerner declares that his nostrils can detect at a prodigious distance the cooking of “possum and taters.” A Kanaka has a cosmopolitan appetite, but the fragrance which moves him most nearly is the scent of fish baking in Ti leaves. A Frenchman waits unmoved until the perfume of some rich lamb ragout, an air laden with spices, is wafted toward him.

Every man and every nation has a special dish, in general; there is only one whose appeal is universal. It is not for any class or nation; it is primarily for “the hungry man,” no matter what has given him an appetite. It may be that he has pushed a pen all day, or reckoned up vast columns, or wielded a sledge-hammer, or ridden a wild horse from morning to night; but the savour of peculiar excellence to the nostrils of this universal hungry man is the smell of frying bacon.

A keen appetite is even stronger than sorrow, and when Sally Fortune awoke with that strong perfume in her nostrils, she sat straight up among the blankets, startled as the cavalry horse by the sound of the trumpet. What she saw was Anthony Bard kneeling by the coals of the fire over which steamed a coffee-pot on one side and a pan of crisping bacon on the other.

The vision shook her so that she rubbed her eyes and stared again to make sure. It did not seem possible that she had actually wakened during the night and found him gone, and with this reality before her she was strongly tempted to believe that the coming of Nash was only a vivid dream.

“Morning, Anthony.”

He turned his head quickly and smiled to her.

“Hello, Sally.”

He was back at once, turning the bacon, which was done on the first side. Seeing that his back was turned, she dressed quickly.

“How’d you sleep?”

“Well.”

“Where?”

He turned more slowly this time.

“You woke up in the middle of the night?”

“Yes.”

“What wakened you?”

“Nash and Kilrain.”

He sighed: “I wish I’d been here.”

She answered: “I’ll wash up; we’ll eat; and then off on the trail. I’ve an idea that the two will be back, and they’ll have more men behind them.”

After a little her voice called from the outside: “Anthony, have you had a look at the morning?”

He came obediently to the doorway. The sun had not yet risen, but the fresh, rose-coloured light already swept around the horizon throwing the hills in sharp relief and flushing, faraway, the pure snows of the Little Brothers. And so blinding was the sheen of the lake that it seemed at first as though the sun were about to break from the waters, for there all the radiance of the sunrise was reflected, concentrated.

Looking in this manner from the doorway, with the water on either side and straight ahead, and the dark, narrow point of land cutting that colour like a prow, it seemed to Anthony almost as if he stood on the bridge of a ship which in another moment would gather head and sail out toward the sea of fresh beauty beyond the peaks, for the old house of William Drew stood on a small peninsula, thrusting out into the lake, a low, shelving shore, scattered with trees.

Where the little tongue of land joined the main shore the ground rose abruptly into a shoulder of rocks inaccessible to a horse; the entrance and exit to the house must be on either side of this shoulder hugging closely the edge of the water.

Feeling that halo of the morning about them, for a moment Anthony forgot all things in the lift and exhilaration of the keen air; and he accepted the girl as a full and equal partner in his happiness, looking to her for sympathy.

She knelt by the edge of the water, face and throat shining and wet, her head bending back, her lips parted and smiling. It thrilled him as if she were singing a silent song which made the brightness of the morning and the colour beyond the peaks. He almost waited to see her throat quiver—hear the high, sweet tone.

But a scent of telltale sharpness drew him a thousand leagues down and made him whirl with a cry of dismay: “The bacon, Sally!”

It was hopelessly burned; some of it was even charred on the bottom of the pan. Sally, returning on the run, took charge of the cookery and went about it with a speed and ability that kept him silent; which being the ideal mood for a spectator, he watched and found himself learning much.

Whatever that scene of the night before meant in the small and definite, in the large and vague it meant that he had a claim of some sort on Sally Fortune and it is only when a man feels that he has this claim, this proprietorship, as it were, that he begins to see a woman clearly.

Before this his observance has been half blind through prejudice either for or against; he either sees her magnified with adulation, or else the large end of the glass is placed against his eye and she is merely a speck in the distance. But let a woman step past that mysterious wall which separates the formal from the intimate—only one step—at once she is surrounded by the eyes of a man as if by a thousand spies. So it was with Anthony.

It moved him, for instance, to see the supple strength of her fingers when she was scraping the charred bacon from the bottom of the pan, and he was particularly fascinated by the undulations of the small, round wrist. He glanced down to his own hand, broad and bony in comparison.

It was his absorption in this criticism that served to keep him aloof from her while they ate, and the girl felt it like an arm pushing her away. She had been very close to him not many hours before; now she was far away. She could understand nothing but the pain of it.

As he finished his coffee he said, staring into a corner: “I don’t know why I came back to you, Sally.”

“You didn’t mean to come back when you started?”

“Of course not.”

She flushed, and her heart beat loudly to hear his weakness. He was keeping nothing from her; he was thinking aloud; she felt that the bars between them were down again.

“In the first place I went because I had to be seen and known by name in some place far away from you. That was for your sake. In the second place I had to be alone for the work that lay ahead.”

“Drew?”

“Yes. It all worked like a charm. I went to the house of Jerry Wood, told him my name, stayed there until Conklin and several others arrived, hunting for me, and then gave them the slip.”

She did not look up from her occupation, which was the skilful cleaning of her gun.

“It was perfect; the way clear before me; I had dodged through their lines, so to speak, when I gave Conklin the slip, and I could ride straight for Drew and catch him unprepared. Isn’t that clear?”

“But you didn’t?”

She was so calm about it that he grew a little angry; she would not look up from the cleaning of the gun.

“That’s the devil of it; I couldn’t stay away. I had to come back to you.”

She restored the gun to her holster and looked steadily at him; he felt a certain shock in countering her glance.

“Because I thought you might be lonely, Sally.”

“I was.”

It was strange to see how little fencing there was between them. They were like men, long tried in friendship and working together on a great problem full of significance to both.