Alcatraz

THE BARGAIN

But in spite of the dinner bell, Hervey made for the corrals instead of the house, roped and saddled the fastest pony in his string, jogged out to the eastern trail, and then sent his mount at a run into the evening haze.  After a time he drew back to a more moderate gait, but still the narrow firs shot smoothly and swiftly past him for well over half an hour until the twilight settled into darkness and the treetops moved past the horseman against a sky alive with the brighter stars of the mountains.  He reached the hills.  The trail tangled into zigzag lines, tossing up and down, dodging here and there.  And in one of these elbow turns, a team of horses loomed huge and black above him, and against the stars behind the hilltop it seemed as though the team were stepping out into the thin air.  Behind them, Lew Hervey made out the low body of the buckboard and on the seat a squat, bunched figure with head dropped so low that the sombrero seemed to rest flat on the shoulders.

Hervey raised his hand with a shout of relief:  “Hey, Jordan!”

The brakes crashed home, but the impetus of the downgrade bore the wagon to the bottom of the little slope before it came to a stop and Hervey was choked by the cloud of dust.  He fanned a clear path for his voice.

“It’s me.  Hervey.”  And he came close to the wagon.

“Well, Lew?” queried the uninterested voice of the master.

Hervey leaned a little from the saddle and peered anxiously at the “big boss.”  He counted on creating a panic with his news.  But a man past hope might very well be a man past fear.  Hopeless Oliver Jordan certainly had been since his accident, hopeless and blind.  That blindness had enabled Hervey to reap tidy sums out of his management of the ranch, and now that the coming of the sharp-eyed girl had cut off his sources of revenue he was ready to fight hard to put himself back in the saddle as unquestioned master of the Valley of the Eagles.  But he could only work on Jordan through fear and what capacity for that emotion remained in the rancher.  He struck at once.

“Jordan, have you got a gun with you?”

“Gun?  Nope.  What do I need a gun for?”

“Take this, then.  It’s my old gat.  You know it pretty near as well as I do.”

A nerveless hand accepted the heavy weapon and allowed it to sink idly upon his knee.

“How come?” drawled Jordan, and the heart of Lew Hervey sank.  This was certainly not the voice of a man liable to panic.

“You and me got a bad time coming, Jordan, when we get to the ranch.  He’s there, and he’s a devil for a fight!”

“Who?”

“Him!  You remember that fight you got into in that saloon up in Wyoming?  That night you and me was at the cross-roads saloon and you got off your feed with red-eye?”

The figure on the seat of the buckboard grew taller.

“Do I remember?  Aye, and I’ll never forget!  The one downright bad thing I’ve ever done, Hervey.  It was the infernal red-eye that made me a crazy man.  You should of let me go back and see how bad he was hurt, Lew!”

“Nope.  I was right.  Best thing a gent can do after he’s dropped his man is to climb a hoss and feed it leather.”

“He didn’t have a gun,” groaned Jordan heavily.  “But I forgot it.  The red-eye got to working on me.  I was losing.  It was the one rotten yaller thing I ever done, Lew!”

“I know.  And now he’s here.  He’s Red Perris!”

“Red Perris!” breathed Oliver Jordan.  “The man Marianne sent for?  Why—­ why it’s like fate, her bringing him right to the ranch!”

Hervey was discreetly silent.

“But,” cried Jordan suddenly, and there was a ghost of the old ring in his voice, “I dropped him once by a crooked play and now I’ll drop him fair and square, if he’s here looking for trouble!  I don’t want your help, Lew.  Mighty fine of you to offer it, but I ain’t plumb forgot how to shoot.  I don’t want help!”

Hervey waited a moment for that heat of defiance to die away.  Then he said with the quiet of certainty:  “No use, Jordan.  No use at all.  Shorty seen this gent do some shooting on the way up to the ranch.  He pulled on a squirrel that dodged across the trail.  First slug knocked dust into the squirrel’s belly-fur and the second chipped off his tail.  Both of them slugs would have landed dead-center in a target as big as the body of a man!”

He paused again.  He could hear the heavy breathing of Oliver Jordan and the figure of the driver swayed a little back and forth in the seat as a man will do when his mind is swinging from one alternative to another.

“He done that shooting from the hip,” added Hervey, as though by afterthought.

There was a gasp from Jordan.

“Good God, Lew!  You don’t mean that!”

“That’s what he done the shooting for—­to show Shorty how to get off a quick shot.  Shorty says he got his gun out and fired inside the time it’d take a common gun-man to wink twice.  And that’s why you and me have got to face him together, chief.  You know I ain’t particular yaller.  But I’d as soon tackle a machine gun with a pea-shooter as run into this Perris all by myself.  He’s bad medicine, chief!”

“Two to one.  That’d be worse’n murder, Lew.  Neither you nor me could ever hold up a head around these parts again if the two of us jumped one gent.”

“I know it,” said Hervey solemnly.  “But it’s better to be shamed than to be dead.  That’s the way I figure.  And I ain’t so sure that both of us together could win out.”

There was another interval of silence, far more important than many words.  Through the hush Hervey, with a beating heart, strove to peer into the mind of the rancher.

“I’ll go back and face him all by myself,” said Jordan huskily.  “I’ll let him rub out that old score.  If he finishes me—­well, what good am I in the world, anyway?  No good, Lew.  I’m done for just as much as though somebody had plugged me with a gat.  Let Perris finish the job.”  He added hastily:  “But these five years have changed me a lot.  Maybe he won’t know me.”

“You ain’t changed that much, Jordan.  Look at Howlands.  He hadn’t seen you for eight years.  He knew you right off.”

“Ay,” growled Jordan.  “That’s true enough.  But what makes you so sure that Perris is so hot after me.  Ain’t there been time enough for him to cool down?”

With the skill of a connoisseur, saving his choicest morsel for the end, Hervey had waited for the most favorable opportunity before striking home with his most convincing item.

“You remember you drilled him in the leg, chief?”

“I remember everything.  The whole damned affair has never been out of my head for a whole day.  I’ve gone over every detail of it a thousand times, Lew!”

“So has Perris,” answered Lew Hervey solemnly.  “That slug of yours—­when the doctor cut it out of his leg he had it fixed up and now he wears it for a fob so’s he won’t forget the gent that shot him down that night when he wasn’t armed!”

“Most like that’s why he’s practiced so much with a gun,” muttered Jordan.  “He’s been getting ready for me.”

“Most like,” said the gloomy Hervey, but his voice well-nigh trembled with gratification.

The head of Jordan bowed again, but this time, as Hervey shrewdly guessed, it was in thought, not in despair.

“Why,” chuckled Jordan at last, “what we wasting all this fool time about?  You just slip back to the ranch and fire Perris.”

In the favoring dark, Hervey threw back his head and made a grimace of joy.  Exactly as he had prefigured, this talk was going.  Every card was being played into his hand as though his wishes were subconsciously entering and ruling the mind of the chief.

“I can’t do it,” he answered firmly.

“You can’t?  Ain’t you foreman?”

“No,” said Hervey, and a trace of bitterness came into his voice.  “I used to be.  But you know as well as me that I’m only a straw boss now.  Miss Marianne is running things, big and small.  Besides, she picked up Perris.  And she won’t let him go easy, I tell you!”

“What do you mean by that, Hervey?”

“I seen her face when she met him.  I was standing outside the bunkhouse.  And she sure was tolerable pleased to see him.”

A tremendous oath burst from Jordan.

“You mean she’s sweet on this—­this Perris?” But he added:  “Why should that rile me?  Maybe he’s all right.”

“He’s one of them flashy dressers,” said Lew Hervey.  “Silk shirts and swell bandannas and he wears shopmade boots and keep ’em all shined up.  Besides, it’s dead easy for him to talk to a girl.  He’s the kind that get on with ’em pretty well.”

The innuendo brought a huge roar from Oliver Jordan.

“By God, Lew, d’you think that’s what it means?  I thought she talked pretty strong about this Perris!”

“Maybe I’ve said too much,” said Hervey.

“Not a word too much,” said Jordan heartily, and reaching through the night he found the hand of Hervey and wrung it heartily.  “I know how square you are, Lew.  I know how you’ve stood by me.  I’d stake my last dollar on you!”

Hervey blessed again the mercy of the darkness which concealed the crimson that spread hotly over his face.  There was enough truth in what the rancher said to make the untruths the more painful.  Before the accident Hervey had, indeed, been all that anyone could ask in a manager.  But when too much authority came into his hands owing to the crippling of his chief, the temptation proved too strong for resistance.  It was all so easy.  A few score of cows run off here and there were never noted, and his share in the profit was fifty-fifty.  Indeed, as the hand of Jordan crushed over his own he came perilously near to making a clean breast of everything, but the memory of his fat and growing bank-account gagged the confession.

“If that’s the way things are standing,” Jordan was saying, “we got to get rid of this skunk Perris.  Good-looking, as I remember him, and Marianne is so darned lonely on the ranch that she might begin to take him serious and—­Hervey, I’ll give you a written note.  That’ll be authority.  I’ll give you a note to Marianne, telling her that I’ve got to go across the mountains and that I want you to have the running of the place till I get back.  I guess that’ll give you a free hand, Lew!  You fire that Perris, and when he’s gone, send me word over to the hotel in Lawrence.  That’s where I’ll go.”

Hervey appeared dubious with great skill.

“I’ll take the note, Jordan,” he said, putting all the despair he could summon into his tone.  “But it sure goes hard—­the idea of losing my place up here.  I’ve been in the Valley so long, you see, that it’s like a home to me.”

“And who the devil said anything about you leaving?  Ain’t I just now about to give you a note to run the ranch while I’m gone?”

“Sure you are.  And I’ll take it—­and fire Perris.  But when you come back—­that’s the end of me!”

“What?”

“You know how your daughter is.  She’ll plumb hate me when I come back with orders to run things.  She’ll think I asked for ’em.”

“I’ll tell her different.”

“Were you ever able to convince her, once she made up her mind?”

“H-m-m,” growled Jordan.

“And she’ll never rest till things are so hot for me that I got to get out.  Not that I grudge it, Jordan.  I’d give up more than this job for your sake.  Only it sure makes me homesick to think about starting out at my time of life and riding herd for a strange outfit.”

“You ride for another outfit?” said Jordan.  “And after you’ve worked this game on Perris for me?  I’ll tell you what, Lew, if you get Perris safe off the ranch you can stop worrying.  You’re foreman for life!  You have my word for it.”

“But suppose—­” protested Hervey faintly.

“Suppose nothing.  You have my word.  Besides, I’m tired of talking!”

With well-acted diffidence, Lew held out the paper, which Oliver Jordan snatched and smoothed on his knee.  Then Hervey rode closer, lighted a match, and held it so that the rancher could see to write.

“Dear Marianne,” scrawled the pencil, “this is to let you know that I have to go on business to—­”

“Better not tell her where,” suggested Hervey.  “She might send after and ask a lot of bothersome questions.  You know the way a woman is.”

“You sure got a fine head for business, Lew,” nodded Jordan, and continued his note:  “to a town across the mountains and it may be a few days before I get back.  I met Lew on the road, so I’m letting him take this note back to you Another thing:  I’ve told Lew about several things I want done while I’m gone.  Easier than explaining them all to you, honey, he can do them himself and tell you later.

Affectionately,”

As he scrawled the signature Hervey suggested softly:  “Suppose you put down at the bottom:  ’This will serve as authority to Lew Hervey to act in my name while I’m away.’”

“Sure,” nodded Jordan, as he scribbled the dictated words.  “Marianne is a stickler for form.  She’ll want something like that to convince her.”

He shoved the paper into the trembling hand of Lew Hervey, and sighed with weariness.

“Chief,” muttered Hervey, finding that even in the darkness he could not look into the tired, pain-worn face of the rancher, “I sure hope you never have no call to be sorry for this.”

“Sorry?  I ain’t bothering about that.  So long, Lew.”

But Lew Hervey had suddenly lost his voice.  He could only wave his adieu.