Brand, Max - Silvertip 13 Page 8

  They had cleared the outskirts of Crow’s Nest, by this time, and, coming to a narrow, rocky gorge that headed west, Christian at once turned down it.

  “You’re wasting time and distance,” cautioned Gregor. “If these people around here are goin’ to be as savage as you say, isn’t it our best dodge to get a few miles between us and Crow’s Nest—and lay it out in a straight line?”

  “We stop and pick up Taxi first,” said Christian.

  Gregor threw up his hands with a shout of dismay.

  “Are you a clean fool? Are you goin’ to be a hog, Barry?” he cried. “We’ve got the coin. We’re loaded down with it. Are you goin’ to risk everything in order to sink a slug of lead in that wildcat, that Taxi? Can’t we leave him for another trip?”

  “I’ve got him marked down. He’s waiting, like a horse in a stall,” said Christian. “D’you think that ten times this money would be worth to me what it would mean to brush Taxi out of my way for good and all?”

  The other stared at him.

  “Barry,” he said at last, “you are crazy. You’re blood crazy!”

  Christian looked back at him with an impassive face.

  “Then we’ll separate here,” he said. “I thought we’d better go on farther before we divided the loot, but we’ll make the cut here, and then each of us can go his own way.”

  They dismounted, accordingly, and in the shelter of a nest of rocks in the center of the gorge they dumped the contents of both sacks on top of the flat of one of them. The treasure overflowed and ran out on the ground. The wind came and whispered through the precious papers.

  “All right,” said Duff Gregor, feeling that he was entirely in the hands of this terrible partner. “What percentage do I get?”

  “Fifty per cent,” said Christian.

  Gregor stared. He stared until his mouth opened, though not on speech.

  “It’s more’n I expected,” he said finally. “You been all the brains.”

  The words had been wrung from him. He regretted them instantly. But Christian said:

  “I always get fifty per cent. I never take more. If I do a job all by myself, I never take more than half. The rest goes to charity, to a friend—it’s not my luck to take more than half.”

  The strangeness of that superstition staggered Gregor. It was hard for him to feel gratitude. He felt no gratitude now but merely wonder. Then he found an explanation.

  All men, he told himself, who were geniuses, had something twisted and queer in their make-ups. They all had to have something queer. It was what struck the balance. Christian was a genius. There was no doubt that this devil had plenty of excess brains, but he was also a freak. It was better, Gregor felt, to have only normal brains like his own, than to have the excess talent of a Barry Christian and to throw away opportunities.

  In a case like this, for instance, he was being overpaid twice, and all because Christian was the silly victim of a superstition!

  He did not pause to shake his head over the thing. He started, at once, counting the money.

  Even at that business, Christian was three or four times as rapid as his less-gifted companion. And when it came to estimating the value of the negotiable paper that they had taken, Christian seemed able to get at the truth in a glance. They added up the result, and Barry Christian it was who announced:

  “We’ve each got a shade over two hundred thousand dollars, old son. This little job is going to make history. And—here’s where we say good-by.”

  But a wild enthusiasm overmastered the more cautious instinct of Duff Gregor when he heard the size of the fortune that had come into his hands. He shouted:

  “No, Barry! I was talking like a fool. I’m goin’ to stay with you. We’ll clean up Taxi together, and then we’ll go and conquer the whole world!”

  XIII. — TAXI’S SURPRISE

  Taxi had been awake all night. As the dawn began, he remained hunched over his table in the shack. He was only partially dressed because he had been about to go to bed when his attention had become absorbed in a work of art. He had one shoe on and one off. His coat had been thrown aside. His necktie had been removed and his shirt was open at the throat. One of his cuffs was unbuttoned.

  Most men would have caught a severe chill from exposure in such a garb as this while sitting motionless through the cold of the night, and Taxi had hardly stirred a hand for many hours. But he was warmed by the eager, electric vibration of his enthusiasm that cherished the vital spark in him. He had not so much as rolled or lighted a cigarette. He was unaware of any need of the body. His throat was dry, but he did not heed hunger, cold, or thirst.

  And the work of art which was before him on the table, and to which he had given his whole soul during the entire night, was a steel lock, not overlarge.

  It was, in fact, a very neat and fine bit of metal work; but what interested Taxi was not the goodness of the material but the clever brain of the inventor who had created this master lock. It was guaranteed to baffle all the brains in the criminal world. Nothing but the power to blast it to pieces would be sufficient to open that lock, the maker had declared, and Taxi had specially bought the lock so that he could work on it. It was a habit of his to get the finest productions of the locksmith and then lavish on them his own keen talents. Usually the investment of a mere hour or two was enough to solve the problem, but on this occasion he had been up the entire night working with his various picklocks.

  He had taken out his set of burglar’s tools which he carried about with him in various parts of his clothes. Tools made as if they were precious jewels, without regard to expense, all constructed of alloys of incredible strength and lightness, tools so slender that they would have crumpled in the grip of an ordinary workman. But though they were so meager that most of them could be unjointed and hidden under the seams of his clothes, yet in the expert fingers of Taxi those little tools could cut their way through the secrets of the most powerful safes.

  The principle, with Taxi, was to find the right point, the weak unit in the chain, and then apply brains and a cutting edge. Failure was a thing to which he was a stranger, simply because he would not admit its possibility.

  He did not need most of those tools for the delicate task which was in his hands now, but he had laid out a great portion of them here simply because he liked to have them around him. They inspired him with the recollection of many another knotty problem in the past which, he, unaided, had solved.

  Consider him now, leaning over that fine lock with half-closed eyes, looking like a poet who, with pen poised above the paper, waits for the voice of the muse. But, instead of a pen, the sensitive fingers of Taxi held a bit of watch-spring steel. His finely made, handsome face showed no expression except, now and then, for a slight flicker of the nostrils.

  But in reality he was almost a maniac with nerves. He could have leaped up from his chair and torn at his hair, screaming. Wild horses of desperation and fury were ready to tear him. And the more he controlled himself, the more wildly his nerves raged to have their expression.

  He wanted to catch up the lock and dash it against a rock. He wanted to smash it to pieces. He wanted to rush out and set fire to the trees and curse and yell and rave as the flames soared in a terrible wave over the mountainsides.

  Instead, he held himself firmly in hand. That little smile that occasionally curled at his lips was the stern sign of his tyranny over his flesh and his weaker spirits. He despised the elements which were working to master him.

  The night wore away into the gray of the morning. He was not aware of the change. Born and bred as he had been in the darkness of the great cities of the East, he knew little about sunrises and sunsets. Electric light had shone on nine-tenths of the hours of his life until, at last, something hardly more than chance had brought him west and into sudden and vital contact with Jim Silver.

  There in the West he had remained, but always his heart was turning back to the land he knew—that underworld in which he had been a hero. He was
a hero in the West, also, with a growing name, because he was the one man in the world whom Jim Silver would willingly take on a trail. He had shown himself fearless, able to endure the most devilish torments rather than be untrue to his friend. And for all of these ample reasons he was admired and respected.

  He was so admired and respected that the officers of the law who came west, now and again, on some old trail that pointed in his direction, were never able to get their hands on him. Or, if they did, public opinion, expressed by the heavy public hand, tore him suddenly away from the grasp of the law.

  But now, as he sat there in the shack among the Rockies, his mind and his soul were lost in the work of the locksmith, and the only environment of which he was at all aware was that of crime—the one surrounding with which he was truly familiar.

  He had even forgotten that it was not an electric or a gas light by which he worked, but only the tremulous, yellow flame of a lamp. He was by no means conscious of the beginnings of the day. The universe had no existence for him. He seemed more and more the perfect type of the dreamer or the abstruse speculator, except, now and again, when he raised his eyes and glanced aside, for then it was that the pale brightness of his eyes showed something worthy to be feared, though those side glances were directed only at the inward processes of his own mind.

  Such was the mental state of Taxi when a shadow stirred.

  Ordinarily that shadow would not have been seen by usual mortals, simply because other men would not have had the doors of their cabins open at this hour in the day.

  Neither would it have been seen by Taxi himself, no matter what the sharpness of his senses, except that he was so deeply involved in his speculations that in this very instant he was drawing close, he felt, to the solution of his problem. Therefore, his subconscious mind was in total charge of him, and the subconscious mind of Taxi, like that of a cat or a wolf, was a very safe guardian, no matter how the master slept.

  That subconscious self it was that suddenly jarred the mind of Taxi back to full awareness of the world, just in time to see a mere shadow, a mere hint of a guess at a living form, glide into a patch of shrubbery hardly fifty feet from the door.

  It was a shock to Taxi to come out of the world of the mind into the world of fact. It was a shock to him to see, around him, the wretched rawness of the rickety old cabin in which he was sitting, and the huge, grim beauty of the mountains of the morning beyond his door. It was a shock to say to himself, like a guilty creature of the night: “This is the day. What are you doing here where the things of the day will soon be able to see you?”

  But it was still the subconscious mind that brought an automatic pistol into his hand. He did not have to think twice. If it were an animal, there would be no great harm in hitting it; if it were a man—what chance in a million of that?—men should not be furtively stealing about a lone cabin at this hour of the day.

  And then all the nervous rage which had been boiling in Taxi overflowed. He gritted his teeth so hard that they groaned together, and he sent a burst of three bullets right into the brush.

  A curse and a yell answered him, and then a rifle shot that clipped through both walls of the cabin at about the level of his head.

  He disregarded the open door and danger beyond it, however. There was also the window and its battered shutter to the side, and he sprang to guard against a flank attack, without even having to hesitate to make sure that this was the right course.

  What he saw beyond that window gave pause even to his steel-cold courage, for yonder, in the act of springing to get to shelter behind an outcropping of rocks, was none other than the great Barry Christian, no longer with the make-up of Thomas Bennett, though still in Bennett’s clothes.

  It was such a crushing blow to the wits of Taxi that he hesitated through a priceless interval—an interval, let us say, of a hundredth part of a second—and the result was that he fired just a foot too late. Barry Christian was already in shelter behind the rocks, and his return fire was drilling through and through the cabin.

  Taxi dropped to one knee, gasping.

  If Barry Christian was the reality behind the man who had appeared to be Bennett, then who was the Jim Silver that Taxi had met in the hotel at Crow’s Nest?

  He remembered now—it was not the first time he had thought about it—the husky, faint voice of Silver, the dimness of the room, the strange order which sent him out of town to wait for further instructions. All of these might well be the devices of men trying to keep him from seeing, in a clear light, that it was not Jim Silver in person who had been in that room.

  And yet, what man in the world would be such a fool as to attempt to play the role of Jim Silver?

  Well, why not? There was nothing so very peculiar about the appearance of Silver. And, after all, his habit of living chiefly in the wilderness had shielded him from the eyes of most men. He was chiefly known, to be sure, by the silver spots in his hair above the temples that had given him his name, and by the magnificence of his horse, Parade.

  At any rate, it was certain that yonder was Bennett, that Bennett was Barry Christian, and that, therefore, Christian had been in the hotel room where Taxi thought that he had talked with Silver.

  The thing reduced to an absurdity. A devil and an angel would meet for conversation far more easily than Silver and Christian could be confined to one room.

  It was not Jim Silver, then, that he had seen. It was the order of a masquerader, a scoundrelly pretender, that had sent Taxi out there into the country to wait until Christian and his friend were ready to take his scalp!

  No wonder that the reeling brain of Taxi needed a few moments to absorb these facts.

  He was roused to the need for action by the plucking fingers of a bullet that had flicked through the loose flap of shirt that hung at his side.

  Barry Christian, with his rifle fire, was methodically raking the floor of the cabin, shooting only a few inches above it. There would be no time to burrow down into the ground and secure safety in this manner, as in a trench. And, in the meantime, the second enemy, the unknown man, the false Silver, was firing either hip-high or breast-high.

  Even if Taxi put off the fatal moment for an instant, he could be sure that they would soon have him.

  XIV. THE POSSE

  Taxi looked about him. He was so desperate that he even considered standing up on the table, so that it might be unlikely that the bullets would strike any part of him except the legs. Then he took note of another possibility.

  The cabin was built with a center post to the top of which were led four beams from the corners of the shack, as though the original builder had planned to build a little attic for a storeroom. Where those four beams met, it was possible that he might find a sort of humble crow’s nest in which he could be safe from any but high-ranging bullets.

  He stepped onto the table, jumped, caught the rafter nearest to him, and swung up onto the top of it. Lying out across the top of the beams, he was then fairly safe. The trouble was, however, that he could not see the enemy if they made a sudden rush attack on the house.

  The rifle fire ended momentarily.

  “Taxi! Oh, Taxi!” called the voice of Barry Christian. “Come out and talk to me.”

  Taxi said nothing.

  “Taxi,” called Christian, “on my word and honor as a gentleman, I won’t harm you. Come out here and talk to us. We’ll have a truce.”

  Taxi smiled. He had a very accurate idea of what the word and honor of Barry Christian were worth in such a time as this.

  “There’s no use holding out on me,” said Christian. “I can burn you out, you fool, if you put me to it. But what I really want is a chance to talk with you.”

  They might, as a matter of fact, burn out Taxi, but in the meantime they would have some trouble. Around the cabin there was nothing but grass, rocks, and brush. If there were a sufficient wind blowing, they might start a pile of dry brush burning and let it roll with the wind against the house. But there was no wind to he
lp them, just now.

  Taxi lay still. If he answered, the direction from which his voice came might suggest to the cunning ears of Christian that Taxi was lying well above the level of the floor.

  The silence of Taxi brought a few curses from Christian. It was strange how well the voice carried through the stillness of the mountain air.

  “Maybe we’ve nicked him!” called the voice of the second man, from the other side of the cabin. “Maybe he’s dead, eh?”

  “You can’t kill that much poison as cheaply as that,” answered Christian.

  Taxi smiled a twisted smile at the compliment. He looked down at the table. Half of his soul yearned to be seated there, regardless of flying bullets, at work over the problem of the lock.

  Christian was calling: “You let him see you, you wool-headed fool! You let him see you, and I told you that he has eyes like a hawk. I hope he shot a hole through the middle of you.”

  “He only nicked my cheek,” answered the other. “Blast him! I went softer than an owl through the air. How could I guess that he could see me? I thought that he’d be asleep. It was all quiet There was no smoke coming out of the chimney. How could I tell, eh?”

  “You could have done what I told you to do,” answered Christian. “If I ever tackle a job again with you for a partner—”

  He clipped off his speech, and perhaps vented some of his rage by firing three shots in rapid succession through the rotten walls.

  Taxi could hear the dull, chugging sounds as the bullets chopped through the rotten timber. He could see the little eyelets of light appear.

  The man from the other side had opened in turn, firing sometimes high and sometimes low. They were honeycombing the shack, and it was only a question of time before they whipped some lead into the body of Taxi.