Black Jack

Looking back, he could understand everything easily.  The horse was the main objective of Pollard.  He had won the money so as to tempt Terry to gamble with the value of the blood-bay.  But by fair means or foul he intended to have El Sangre.  And now, the moment his men were in place, a change came over Pollard.  He straightened in the chair.  A slight outthrust of his lower jaw made his face strangely brutal, conscienceless.  And his cloudy agate eyes were unreadable.

“Look here, Terry,” he argued calmly, but Terry could see that the voice was raised so that it would undubitably reach the ears of the farthest of the four men.  “I don’t mind letting a gambling debt ride when a gent ain’t got anything more to put up for covering his money.  But when a gent has got more, I figure he’d ought to cover with it.”

Unreasoning anger swelled in the throat of Terry Hollis; the same blind passion which had surged in him before he started up at the Cornish table and revealed himself to the sheriff.  And the similarity was what sobered him.  It was the hunger to battle, to kill.  And it seemed to him that Black Jack had stepped out of the old picture and now stood behind him, tempting him to strike.

Another covert signal from Pollard.  Every one of the four turned toward him.  The chances of Terry were diminished, nine out of ten, for each of those four, he shrewdly guessed, was a practiced gunman.  Cold reason came to Terry’s assistance.

“I told you when I was broke,” he said gently.  “I told you that I was through.  You told me to go on.”

“I figured you was kidding me,” said Pollard harshly.  “I knew you still had El Sangre back.  Son, I’m a kind sort of a man, I am.  I got a name for it.”

In spite of himself a faint and cruel smile flickered at the corners of his mouth as he spoke.  He became grave again.

“But they’s some things I can’t stand.  They’s some things that I hate worse’n I hate poison.  I won’t say what one of ’em is.  I leave it to you.  And I ask you to keep in the game.  A thousand bucks ag’in’ a boss.  Ain’t that more’n fair?”

He no longer took pains to disguise his voice.  It was hard and heavy and rang into the ear of Terry.  And the latter, feeling that his hour had come, looked deliberately around the room and took note of every guarded exit, the four men now openly on watch for any action on his part.  Pollard himself sat erect, on the edge of his chair, and his right hand had disappeared beneath the table.

“Suppose I throw the coin this time?” he suggested.

“By God!” thundered Pollard, springing to his feet and throwing off the mask completely.  “You damned skunk, are you accusin’ me of crooking the throw of the coin?”

Terry waited for the least moment—­waited in a dull wonder to find himself unafraid.  But there was no fear in him.  There was only a cold, methodical calculation of chances.  He told himself, deliberately, that no matter how fast Pollard might be, he would prove the faster.  He would kill Pollard.  And he would undoubtedly kill one of the others.  And they, beyond a shadow of a doubt, would kill him.  He saw all this as in a picture.

“Pollard,” he said, more gently than before, “you’ll have to eat that talk!”

A flash of bewilderment crossed the face of Pollard—­then rage—­then that slight contraction of the features which in some men precedes a violent effort.

But the effort did not come.  While Terry literally wavered on tiptoe, his nerves straining for the pull of his gun and the leap to one side as he sent his bullet home, a deep, unmusical voice cut in on them: 

“Just hold yourself up a minute, will you, Joe?”

Terry looked up.  On the balcony in front of the sleeping rooms of the second story, his legs spread apart, his hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets, his shapeless black hat crushed on the back of his head, and a broad smile on his ugly face, stood his nemesis—­Denver the yegg!

Pollard sprang back from the table and spoke with his face still turned to Terry.

“Pete!” he called.  “Come in!”

But Denver, alias Shorty, alias Pete, merely laughed.

“Come in nothing, you fool!  Joe, you’re about half a second from hell, and so’s a couple more of you.  D’you know who the kid is?  Eh?  I’ll tell you, boys.  It’s the kid that dropped old Minter.  It’s the kid that beat foxy Joe Minter to the draw.  It’s young Hollis.  Why, you damned blind men, look at his face!  It’s the son of Black Jack.  It’s Black Jack himself come back to us!”

Joe Pollard had let his hand fall away from his gun.  He gaped at Terry as though he were seeing a ghost.  He came a long pace nearer and let his arms fall on the table, where they supported his weight.

“Black Jack,” he kept whispering.  “Black Jack!  God above, are you Black Jack’s son?”

And the bewildered Terry answered: 

“I’m his son.  Whatever you think, and be damned to you all!  I’m his son and I’m proud of it.  Now get your gun!”

But Joe Pollard became a great catapult that shot across the table and landed beside Terry.  Two vast hands swallowed the hands of the younger man and crushed them to numbness.

“Proud of it?  God a’mighty, boy, why wouldn’t you be?  Black Jack’s son!  Pete, thank God you come in time!”

“In time to save your head for you, Joe.”

“I believe it,” said the big man humbly.  “I b’lieve he would of cleaned up on me.  Maybe on all of us.  Black Jack would of come close to doing it.  But you come in time, Pete.  And I’ll never forget it.”

While he spoke, he was still wringing the hands of Terry.  Now he dragged the stunned Terry around the table and forced him down in his own huge, padded armchair, his sign of power.  But it was only to drag him up from the chair again.

“Lemme look at you!  Black Jack’s boy!  As like Black Jack as ever I seen, too.  But a shade taller.  Eh, Pete?  A shade taller.  And a shade heavier in the shoulders.  But you got the look.  I might of knowed you by the look in your eyes.  Hey, Slim, damn your good-for-nothing hide, drag Johnny here pronto by the back of the neck!”

Johnny, the Chinaman, appeared, blinking at the lights.  Joe Pollard clapped him on the shoulder with staggering force.

“Johnny, you see!” a broad gesture to Terry.  “Old friend.  Just find out.  Velly old friend.  Like pretty much a whole damned lot.  Get down in the cellar, you yaller old sinner, and get out the oldest bourbon I got there.  You savvy?  Pretty damned pronto—­hurry up—­quick—­old keg.  Git out!”

Johnny was literally hurled out of the room toward the kitchen, trailing a crackle of strange-sounding but unmistakable profanity behind him.  And Joe Pollard, perching his bulk on the edge of the table, introduced Terry to the boys again, for Oregon had come back with word that Kate would be out soon.

“Here’s Denver Pete.  You know him already, and he’s worth his weight in any man’s company.  Here’s Slim Dugan, that could scent a big coin shipment a thousand miles away.  Phil Marvin ain’t any slouch at stalling a gent with a fat wallet and leading him up to be plucked.  Marty Cardiff ain’t half so tame as he looks, and he’s the best trailer that ever squinted at a buzzard in the sky; he knows this whole country like a book.  And Oregon Charlie is the best all-around man you ever seen, from railroads to stages.  And me—­I’m sort of a handyman.  Well, Black Jack, your old man himself never got a finer crew together than this, eh?”

Denver Pete had waited until his big friend finished.  Then he remarked quietly:  “All very pretty, partner, but Terry figures he walks the straight and narrow path.  Savvy?”

“Just a kid’s fool hunch!” snorted Joe Pollard.  “Didn’t your dad show me the ropes?  Wasn’t it him that taught me all I ever knew?  Sure it was, and I’m going to do the same for you, Terry.  Damn my eyes if I ain’t!  And here I been sitting, trimming you!  Son, take back the coin.  I was sure playing a cheap game—­and I apologize, man to man.”

But Terry shook his head.

“You won it,” he said quietly.  “And you’ll keep it.”

“Won nothing.  I can call every coin I throw.  I was stealing, not gambling.  I was gold-digging!  Take back the stuff!”

“If I was fool enough to lose it that way, it’ll stay lost,” answered Terry.

“But I won’t keep it, son.”

“Then give it away.  But not to me.”

“Black Jack—­” began Pollard.

But he received a signal from Denver Pete and abruptly changed the subject.

“Let it go, then.  They’s plenty of loose coin rolling about this day.  If you got a thin purse today, I’ll make it fat for you in a week.  But think of me stumbling on to you!”

It was the first time that Terry had a fair opportunity to speak, and he made the best of it.

“It’s very pleasant to meet you—­on this basis,” he said.  “But as for taking up—­er—­road life—­”

The lifted hand of Joe Pollard made it impossible for him to complete his sentence.

“I know.  You got scruples, son.  Sure you got ’em.  I used to have ’em, too, till your old man got ’em out of my head.”

Terry winced.  But Joe Pollard rambled on, ignorant that he had struck a blow in the dark:  “When I met up with the original Black Jack, I was slavin’ my life away with a pick trying to turn ordinary quartz into pay dirt.  Making a fool of myself, that’s what I was doing.  Along comes Black Jack.  He needed a man.  He picks me up and takes me along with him.  I tried to talk Bible talk.  He showed me where I was a fool.

“‘All you got to do,’ he says to me, ’is to make sure that you ain’t stealing from an honest man.  And they’s about one gent in three with money that’s come by it honest, in this part of the world.  The rest is just plain thieves, but they been clever enough to cover it up.  Pick on that crew, Pollard, and squeeze ’em till they run money into your hand.  I’ll show you how to do it!’

“Well, it come pretty hard to me at first.  I didn’t see how it was done.  But he showed me.  He’d send a scout around to a mining camp.  If they was a crooked wheel in the gambling house that was making a lot of coin, Black Jack would slide in some night, stick up the works, and clean out with the loot.  If they was some dirty dog that had jumped a claim and was making a pile of coin out of it, Black Jack would drop out of the sky onto him and take the gold.”

Terry listened, fascinated.  He was having the workings of his father’s mind re-created for him and spread plainly before his eyes.  And there was a certain terror and also a certain attractiveness about what he discovered.

“It sounds, maybe, like an easy thing to do, to just stick on the trail of them that you know are worse crooks than you.  But it ain’t.  I’ve tried it.  I’ve seen Black Jack pass up ten thousand like it was nothing, because the gent that had it come by it honest.  But I can’t do it, speaking in general.  But I’ll tell you more about the old man.”

“Thank you,” said Terry, “but—­”

“And when you’re with us—­”

“You see,” said Terry firmly, “I plan to do the work you asked me to do—­ kill what you wanted killed on the range.  And when I’ve worked off the money I owe you—­”

Before he could complete his sentence, a door opened on the far side of the room, and Kate Pollard entered again.  She had risen from her bed in some haste to answer the summons of her father.  Her bright hair poured across her shoulders, a heavy, greenish-blue dressing gown was drawn about her and held close with one hand at her breast.  She came slowly toward them.  And she seemed to Terry to have changed.  There was less of the masculine about her than there had been earlier in the evening.  Her walk was slow, her eyes were wide as though she had no idea what might await her, and the light glinted white on the untanned portion of her throat, and on her arm where the loose sleeve of the dressing gown fell back from it.

“Kate,” said her father, “I had to get you up to tell you the big news—­ biggest news you ever heard of!  Girl, who’ve I always told you was the greatest gent that ever come into my life?”

“Jack Hollis—­Black Jack,” she said, without hesitation.  “According to your way of thinking, Dad!”

Plainly her own conclusions might be very different.

“According to anybody’s way of thinking, as long as they was thinking right.  And d’you know who we’ve got here with us now?  Could you guess it in a thousand years?  Why, the kid that come tonight.  Black Jack as sure as if he was a picture out of a book, and me a blind fool that didn’t know him.  Kate, here’s the second Black Jack.  Terry Hollis.  Give him your hand agin and say you’re glad to have him for his dad’s sake and for his own!  Kate, he’s done a man’s job already.  It’s him that dropped old foxy Minter!”

The last of these words faded out of the hearing of Terry.  He felt the lowered eyes of the girl rise and fall gravely on his face, and her glance rested there a long moment with a new and solemn questioning.  Then her hand went slowly out to him, a cold hand that barely touched his with its fingertips and then dropped away.

But what Terry felt was that it was the same glance she had turned to him when she stood leaning against the post earlier that evening.  There was a pity in it, and a sort of despair which he could not understand.

And without saying a word she turned her back on them and went out of the room as slowly as she had come into it.