Riders of the Silences

She wore a cartridge-belt slung jauntily across her hips and from it hung a holster of stiff new leather with the top flap open to show the butt of a man-sized forty-five caliber six-shooter—­her first gun.  Not a man of the gang but had loaned her his guns time and again, but they had never dreamed of giving her a weapon of her own.

So they stared at her agape, where she stood with her head back, one hand resting on her hip, one hovering about the butt of the gun, as if she challenged them to question her right to be called “man.”

It was as if she abandoned all claims to femininity with that single step; the gun at her side made her seem inches taller and years older.  She was no longer a child, but a long-rider who could shoot with the best.

One glance she cast about the room to drink in the amazement of the gang, and then her father broke in rather hoarsely:  “Sit down, girl.  Sit down and be one of us.  One of us you are by your own choice from this day on.  You’re neither man nor woman, but a long-rider with every man’s hand against you.  You’ve done with any hope of a home or of friends.  You’re one of us.  Poor Jack—­my girl!”

“Poor?” she returned.  “Not while I can make a quick draw and shoot straight.”

And then she swept the circle of eyes, daring them to take her boast lightly, but they knew her too well, and were all solemnly silent.  At this she relented somewhat, and went directly to Pierre, flushing from throat to hair.  She held out her hand.

“Will you shake and call it square?”

“I sure will,” nodded Pierre.

“And we’re pals—­you and me, like the rest of ’em?”

“We are.”

She took the place beside him.

As the whisky went round after round the two seemed shut away from the others; they were younger, less marked by life; they listened while the others talked, and now and then exchanged glances of interest or aversion.

“Listen,” she said after a time, “I’ve heard this story before.”

It was Phil Branch, square-built and square of jaw, who was talking.

“There’s only one thing I can handle better than a gun, and that’s a sledgehammer.  A gun is all right in its way, but for work in a crowd, well, give me a hammer and I’ll show you a way out.”

Bud Mansie grinned:  “Leave me my pair of sixes and you can have all the hammers between here and Central Park in a crowd.  There’s nothing makes a crowd remember its heels like a pair of barking sixes.”

“Ah, ah!” growled Branch.  “But when they’ve heard bone crunch under the hammer there’s nothing will hold them.”

“I’d have to see that.”

“Maybe you will, Bud, maybe you will.  It was the hammer that started me for the trail west.  I had a big Scotchman in the factory who couldn’t learn how to weld.  I’d taught him day after day and cursed him and damn near prayed for him.  But he somehow wouldn’t learn—­the swine—­ah, ah!”

He grew vindictively black at the memory.

“Every night he wiped out what I’d taught him during the day and the eraser he used was booze.  So one fine day I dropped the hammer after watchin’ him make a botch on a big bar, and cussed him up one leg and down the other.  The Scotchman had a hangover from the night before and he made a pass at me.  It was too much for me just then, for the day was hot and the forge fire had been spitting cinders in my face all morning.  So I took him by the throat.”

He reached out and closed his taut fingers slowly.

“I didn’t mean nothin’ by it, but after a man has been moldin’ iron, flesh is pretty weak stuff.  When I let go of Scotchy he dropped on the floor, and while I stood starin’ down at him somebody seen what had happened and spread the word.

“I wasn’t none too popular, bein’ not much on talk, so the boys got together and pretty soon they come pilin’ through the door at me, packin’ everything from hatchets to crowbars.

“Lads, I was sorry about Scotchy, but after I glimpsed that gang comin’ I wasn’t sorry for nothing.  I felt like singin’, though there wasn’t no song that could say just what I meant.  But I grabbed up the big fourteen-pound hammer and met ’em halfway.

“The first swing of the hammer it met something hard, but not as hard as iron.  The thing crunched with a sound like an egg under a man’s heel.  And when that crowd heard it they looked sick.  God, how sick they looked!  They didn’t wait for no second swing, but they beat it hard and fast through the door with me after ’em.  They scattered, but I kept right on and didn’t never really stop till I reached the mountain-desert and you, Jim.”

“Which is a good yarn,” said Bud Mansie, “but I can tell you one that’ll cap it.  It was—­”

He stopped short, staring up at the door.  Outside, the wind had kept up a perpetual roaring, and no one noticed the noise of the opening door.  Bud Mansie, facing that door, however, turned a queer yellow and sat with his lips parted on the last word.  He was not pretty to see.  The others turned their heads, and there followed the strangest panic which Pierre had ever seen.

Jim Boone jerked his hand back to his hip, but stayed the motion, half completed, and swung his hands stiffly above his head.  Garry Patterson sat with his eyes blinked shut, pale, waiting for death to come.  Dick Wilbur rose, tall and stiff, and stood with his hands gripped at his sides, and Black Morgan Gandil clutched at the table before him and his eyes wandered swiftly about the room, seeking a place for escape.

There was only one sound, and that was a whispering moan of terror from Jacqueline.  Only Pierre made no move, yet he felt as he had when the black mass of the landslide loomed above him.

What he saw in the door was a man of medium size and almost slender build.  In spite of the patch of gray hair at either temple he was only somewhere between twenty-five and thirty.  But to see him was to forget all details except the strangest face which Pierre had ever seen or would ever look upon in all his career.

It was pale, with a pallor strange to the ranges; even the lips seemed bloodless, and they curved with a suggestion of a smile that was a nervous habit rather than any sign of mirth.  The nerves of the left eye were also affected, and the lid dropped and fluttered almost shut, so that he had to carry his head far back in order to see plainly.  There was such pride and scorn in the man that his name came up to the lips of Pierre:  “McGurk.”

A surprisingly gentle voice said:  “Jim, I’m sorry to drop in on you this way, but I’ve had some unpleasant news.”

His words dispelled part of the charm.  The hands of big Boone lowered; the others assumed more natural positions, but each, it seemed to Pierre, took particular and almost ostentatious care that their right hands should be always far from the holsters of their guns.

The stranger went on:  “Martin Ryder is finished, as I suppose you know.  He left a spawn of two mongrels behind him.  I haven’t bothered with them, but I’m a little more interested in another son that has cropped up.  He’s sitting over there in your family party and his name is Pierre.  In his own country they call him Pierre le Rouge, which means Red Pierre, in our talk.

“You know I’ve never crossed you in anything before, Jim.  Have I?”

Boone moistened his white lips and answered:  “Never,” huskily, as if it were a great muscular effort for him to speak.

“This time I have to break the custom.  Boone, this fellow Pierre has to leave the country.  Will you see that he goes?”

The lips of Boone moved and made no sound.

He said at length:  “McGurk, I’d rather cross the devil than cross you.  There’s no shame in admitting that.  But I’ve lost my boy, Hal.”

“Too bad, Jim.  I knew Hal; at a distance, of course.”

“And Pierre is filling Hal’s place in the family.”

“Is that your answer?”

“McGurk, are you going to pin me down in this?”

And here Jack whirled and cried:  “Dad, you won’t let Pierre go!”

“You see?” pleaded Boone.

It was uncanny and horrible to see the giant so unnerved before this stranger, but that part of it did not come to Pierre until later.  Now he felt a peculiar emptiness of stomach and a certain jumping chill that traveled up and down his spine.  Moreover, he could not move his eyes from the face of McGurk, and he knew at length that this was fear—­the first real fear that he had ever known.

Shame made him hot, but fear made him cold again.  He knew that if he rose his knees would buckle under him; that if he drew out his revolver it would slip from his palsied fingers.  For the fear of death is a mighty fear, but it is nothing compared with the fear of man.

“I’ve asked you a question,” said McGurk.  “What’s your answer?”

There was a quiver in the black forest of Boone’s beard, and if Pierre was cold before, he was sick at heart to see the big man cringe before McGurk.

He stammered:  “Give me time.”

“Good,” said McGurk.  “I’m afraid I know what your answer would be now, but if you take a couple of days you will think things over and come to a reasonable conclusion.  I will be at Gaffney’s place about fifteen miles from here.  You know it?  Send your answer there.  In the meantime”—­he stepped forward to the table and poured a small drink of whisky into a glass and raised it high—­“here’s to the long health and happiness of us all.  Drink!”

There was a hasty pouring of liquor.

“And you also!”

Pierre jumped as if he had been struck, and obeyed the order hastily.

“So,” said the master, pleasant again, and Pierre wiped his forehead furtively and stared up with fascinated eyes.  “An unwilling pledge is better than none at all.  To you, gentlemen, much happiness; to you, Pierre le Rouge, bon voyage.”

They drank; the master placed his glass on the table again, smiled upon them, and was gone through the door.  He turned his back in leaving.  There was no fitter way in which he could have expressed his contempt.