Black Jack

“My Name’s Pollard,” said the older man.  “Joe Pollard.”

“Glad to know you, sir.  My name—­is Terry.”  The other admitted this reticence with a faint smile.

“I got a name around here for keeping my mouth shut and not butting in on another gent’s game.  But I always noticed that when a gent is in a losing run, half the time he don’t know it.  Maybe that might be the way with you.  I been watching and seen your winnings shrink considerable lately.”

Terry weighed his money.  “Yes, it’s shrunk a good deal.”

“Stand out of the game till later on.  Come over and have a bite to eat with me.”

He went willingly, suddenly aware of a raging appetite and a dinner long postponed.  The man of the black beard was extremely friendly.

“One of the prettiest runs I ever see, that one you made,” he confided when they were at the table in the hotel.  “You got a system, I figure.”

“A new one,” said Terry.  “I’ve never played before.”

The other blinked.

“Beginner’s luck, I suppose,” said Terry frankly.  “I started with fifty, and now I suppose I have about eight hundred.”

“Not bad, not bad,” said the other.  “Too bad you didn’t stop half an hour before.  Just passing through these parts?”

“I’m looking for a job,” said Terry.  “Can you tell me where to start hunting?  Cows are my game.”

The other paused a moment and surveyed his companion.  There seemed just a shade of doubt in his eyes.  They were remarkably large and yellowish gray, those eyes of Joe Pollard, and now and again when he grew thoughtful they became like clouded agate.  They had that color now as he gazed at Terry.  Eventually his glance cleared.

“I got a little work of my own,” he declared.  “My range is all clogged up with varmints.  Any hand with a gun and traps?”

“Pretty fair hand,” said Terry modestly.

And he was employed on the spot.

He felt one reassuring thing about his employer—­that no echo out of his past or the past of his father would make the man discharge him.  Indeed, taking him all in all, there was under the kindliness of Joe Pollard an indescribable basic firmness.  His eyes, for example, in their habit of looking straight at one, reminded him of the eyes of Denver.  His voice was steady and deep and mellow, and one felt that it might be expanded to an enormous volume.  Such a man would not fly off into snap judgments and become alarmed because an employee had a past or a strange name.

They paid a short visit to the gambling hall after dinner, and then got their horses.  Pollard was struck dumb with admiration at the sight of the blood-bay.

“Maybe you been up the Bear Creek way?” he asked Terry.

And when the latter admitted that he knew something of the Blue Mountain country, the rancher exclaimed:  “By the Lord, partner, I’d say that hoss is a ringer for El Sangre.”

“Pretty close to a ringer,” said Terry.  “This is El Sangre himself.”

They were jogging out of town.  The rancher turned in the saddle and crossed his companion with one of his searching glances, but returned no reply.  Presently, however, he sent his own capable Steeldust into a sharp gallop; El Sangre roused to a flowing pace and held the other even without the slightest difficulty.  At this Pollard drew rein with an exclamation.

“El Sangre as sure as I live!” he declared.  “Ain’t nothing else in these parts that calls itself a hoss and slides over the ground the way El Sangre does.  Partner, what sort of a price would you set on El Sangre, maybe?”

“His weight in gold,” said Terry.

The rancher cursed softly, without seeming altogether pleased.  And thereafter during the ride his glance continually drifted toward the brilliant bay—­brilliant even in the pallor of the clear mountain starlight.

He explained this by saying after a time:  “I been my whole life in these parts without running across a hoss that could pack me the way a man ought to be packed on a hoss.  I weigh two hundred and thirty, son, and it busts the back of a horse in the mountains.  Now, you ain’t a flyweight yourself, and El Sangre takes you along like you was a feather.”

Steeldust was already grunting at every sharp rise, and El Sangre had not even broken out in perspiration.

A mile or so out of the town they left the road and struck onto a mere semblance of a trail, broad enough, but practically as rough as nature chose to make it.  This wound at sharp and ever-changing angles into the hills, and presently they were pressing through a dense growth of lodgepole pine.

It seemed strange to Terry that a prosperous rancher with an outfit of any size should have a road no more beaten than this one leading to his place.  But he was thinking too busily of other things to pay much heed to such surmises and small events.  He was brooding over the events of the afternoon.  If his exploits in the gaming hall should ever come to the ear of Aunt Elizabeth, he was certain enough that he would be finally damned in her judgment.  Too often he had heard her express an opinion of those who lived by “chance and their wits,” as she phrased it.  And the thought of it irked him.

He roused himself out of his musing.  They had come out from the trees and were in sight of a solidly built house on the hill.  There was one thing which struck his mind at once.  No attempt had been made to find level for the foundation.  The log structure had been built apparently at random on the slope.  It conformed, at vast waste of labor, to the angle of the base and the irregularities of the soil.  This, perhaps, made it seem smaller than it was.  They caught the scent of wood smoke, and then saw a pale drift of the smoke itself.

A flurry of music escaped by the opening of a door and was shut out by the closing of it.  It was a moment before Terry, startled, had analyzed the sound.  Unquestionably it was a piano.  But how in the world, and why in the world, had it been carted to the top of this mountain?

He glanced at his companion with a new respect and almost with a suspicion.

“Up to some damn doings again,” growled the big man.  “Never got no peace nor quiet up my way.”

Another surprise was presently in store for Terry.  Behind the house, which grew in proportions as they came closer, they reached a horse shed, and when they dismounted, a servant came out for the horses.  Outside of the Cornish ranch he did not know of many who afforded such luxuries.

However, El Sangre could not be handled by another, and Terry put up his horse and found the rancher waiting for him when he came out.  Inside the shed he had found ample bins of barley and oats and good grain hay.  And in the stalls his practiced eye scanned the forms of a round dozen fine horses with points of blood and bone that startled him.

Coming to the open again, he probed the darkness as well as he could to gain some idea of the ranch which furnished and supported all these evidences of prosperity.  But so far as he could make out, there was only a jumble of ragged hilltops behind the house, and before it the slope fell away steeply to the valley far below.  He had not realized before that they had climbed so high or so far.

Joe Pollard was humming.  Terry joined him on the way to the house with a deepened sense of awe; he was even beginning to feel that there was a touch or two of mystery in the make-up of the man.

Proof of the solidity with which the log house was built was furnished at once.  Coming to the house, there was only a murmur of voices and of music.  The moment they opened the door, a roar of singing voices and a jangle of piano music rushed into their ears.

Terry found himself in a very long room with a big table in the center and a piano at the farther end.  The ceiling sloped down from the right to the left.  At the left it descended toward the doors of the kitchen and storerooms; at the right it rose to the height of two full stories.  One of these was occupied by a series of heavy posts on which hung saddles and bridles and riding equipment of all kinds, and the posts supported a balcony onto which opened several doors—­of sleeping rooms, no doubt.  As for the wall behind the posts, it, too, was pierced with several openings, but Terry could not guess at the contents of the rooms.  But he was amazed by the size of the structure as it was revealed to him from within.  The main room was like some baronial hall of the old days of war and plunder.  A role, indeed, into which it was not difficult to fit the burly Pollard and the dignity of his beard.

Four men were around the piano, and a girl sat at the keys, splashing out syncopated music while the men roared the chorus of the song.  But at the sound of the closing of the door all five turned toward the newcomers, the girl looking over her shoulder and keeping the soft burden of the song still running.