Black Jack

The door had hardly closed on him when Terence wanted to run after him and call him back.  There was a thrill still running in his blood since the time the yegg had leaned so close and said:  “That wasn’t Black Jack’s way!”

He wanted to know more about Black Jack, and he wanted to hear the story from the lips of this man.  A strange warmth had come over him.  It had seemed for a moment that there was a third impalpable presence in the room—­his father listening.  And the thrill of it remained, a ghostly and yet a real thing.

But he checked his impulse.  Let Denver go, and the thought of his father with him.  For the influence of Black Jack, he felt, was quicksand pulling him down.  The very fact that he was his father’s son had made him shoot down one man.  Again the shadow of Black Jack had fallen across his path today and tempted him to crime.  How real the temptation had been, Terry did not know until he was alone.  Half of ten thousand dollars would support him for many a month.  One thing was certain.  He must let his father remain simply a name.

Going to the window in his stocking feet, he listened again.  There were more voices murmuring on the veranda of the hotel now, but within a few moments forms began to drift away down the street, and finally there was silence.  Evidently the widow had not secured backing as strong as she could have desired.  And Terry went to bed and to sleep.

He wakened with the first touch of dawn along the wall beside his bed and tumbled out to dress.  It was early, even for a mountain town.  The rattling at the kitchen stove commenced while he was on the way downstairs.  And he had to waste time with a visit to El Sangre in the stable before his breakfast was ready.

Craterville was in the hollow behind him when the sun rose, and El Sangre was taking up the miles with the tireless rhythm of his pace.  He had intended searching for work of some sort near Craterville, but now he realized that it could not be.  He must go farther.  He must go where his name was not known.

For two days he held on through the broken country, climbing more than he dropped.  Twice he came above the ragged timber line, with its wind-shaped army of stunted trees, and over the tiny flowers of the summit lands.  At the end of the second day he came out on the edge of a precipitous descent to a prosperous grazing country below.  There would be his goal.

A big mountain sheep rounded a corner with a little flock behind him.  Terry dropped the leader with a snapshot and watched the flock scamper down what was almost the sheer face of a cliff—­a beautiful bit of acrobatics.  They found foothold on ridges a couple of inches deep, hardly visible to the eye from above.  Plunging down a straight drop without a sign of a ledge for fifty feet below them, they broke the force of the fall and slowed themselves constantly by striking their hoofs from side to side against the face of the cliff.  And so they landed, with bunched feet, on the first broad terrace below and again bounced over the ledge and so out of sight.

He dined on wild mutton that evening.  In the morning he hunted along the edge of the cliffs until he came to a difficult route down to the valley.  An ordinary horse would never have made it, but El Sangre was in his glory.  If he had not the agility of the mountain sheep, he was well-nigh as level-headed in the face of tremendous heights.  He knew how to pitch ten feet down to a terrace and strike on his bunched hoofs so that the force of the fall would not break his legs or unseat his rider.  Again he understood how to drive in the toes of his hoofs and go up safely through loose gravel where most horses, even mustangs, would have skidded to the bottom of the slope.  And he was wise in trails.  Twice he rejected the courses which Terry picked, and the rider very wisely let him have his way.  The result was that they took a more winding, but a far safer course, and arrived before midmorning in the bottomlands.

The first ranch house he applied to accepted him.  And there he took up his work.

It was the ordinary outfit—­the sun- and wind-racked shack for a house, the stumbling outlying barns and sheds, and the maze of corral fences.  They asked Terry no questions, accepted his first name without an addition, and let him go his way.

He was happy enough.  He had not the leisure for thought or for remembering better times.  If he had leisure here and there, he used it industriously in teaching El Sangre the “cow” business.  The stallion learned swiftly.  He began to take a joy in sitting down on a rope.

At the end of a week Terry won a bet when a team of draught horses hitched onto his line could not pull El Sangre over his mark, and broke the rope instead.  There was much work, too, in teaching him to turn in the cow-pony fashion, dropping his head almost to the ground and bunching his feet altogether.  For nothing of its size that lives is so deft in dodging as the cow-pony.  That part of El Sangre’s education was not completed, however, for only the actual work of a round-up could give him the faultless surety of a good cow-pony.  And, indeed, the ranchman declared him useless for real roundup work.

“A no-good, high-headed fool,” he termed El Sangre, having sprained his bank account with an attempt to buy the stallion from Terry the day before.

At the end of a fortnight the first stranger passed, and ill-luck made it a man from Craterville.  He knew Terry at a glance, and the next morning the rancher called Terry aside.

The work of that season, he declared, was going to be lighter than he had expected.  Much as he regretted it, he would have to let his new hand go.  Terry taxed him at once to get at the truth.

“You’ve found out my name.  That’s why you’re turning me off.  Is that the straight of it?”

The sudden pallor of the other was a confession.

“What’s names to me?” he declared.  “Nothing, partner.  I take a man the way I find him.  And I’ve found you all right.  The reason I got to let you go is what I said.”

But Terry grinned mirthlessly.

“You know I’m the son of Black Jack Hollis,” he insisted.  “You think that if you keep me you’ll wake up some morning to find your son’s throat cut and your cattle gone.  Am I right?”

“Listen to me,” the rancher said uncertainly.  “I know how you feel about losing a job so suddenly when you figured it for a whole season.  Suppose I give you a whole month’s pay and—­”

“Damn your money!” said Terry savagely.  “I don’t deny that Black Jack was my father.  I’m proud of it.  But listen to me, my friend.  I’m living straight.  I’m working hard.  I don’t object to losing this job.  It’s the attitude behind it that I object to.  You’ll not only send me away, but you’ll spread the news around—­Black Jack’s son is here!  Am I a plague because of that name?”

“Mr. Hollis,” insisted the rancher in a trembling voice, “I don’t mean to get you all excited.  Far as your name goes, I’ll keep your secret.  I give you my word on it.  Trust me, I’ll do what’s right by you.”

He was in a panic.  His glance wavered from Terry’s eyes to the revolver at his side.

“Do you think so?” said Terry.  “Here’s one thing that you may not have thought of.  If you and the rest like you refuse to give me honest work, there’s only one thing left for me—­and that’s dishonest work.  You turn me off because I’m the son of Black Jack; and that’s the very thing that will make me the son of Black Jack in more than name.  Did you ever stop to realize that?”

“Mr. Hollis,” quavered the rancher, “I guess you’re right.  If you want to stay on here, stay and welcome, I’m sure.”

And his eye hunted for help past the shoulder of Terry and toward the shed, where his eldest son was whistling.  Terry turned away in mute disgust.  By the time he came out of the bunkhouse with his blanket roll, there was neither father nor son in sight.  The door of the shack was closed, and through the window he caught a glimpse of a rifle.  Ten minutes later El Sangre was stepping away across the range at a pace that no mount in the cattle country could follow for ten miles.