The Flaming Jewel, Robert W. Chambers [reading tree txt] 📗

she coolly chose a rifle and cartridge-belt at the gun-rack.

Then she turned on him as still and dangerous as a young puma:

"Tell Darragh he'd better keep clear of Clinch's," she said. "Tell him I always thought he was a rat. Now I know he's one."

She plunged one slim hand into her pocket and drew out a diamond.

"Here," she said insolently. "This will pay your gentleman for his gun and clothing."

She tossed the gem onto a table, where it rolled, glittering.

"For heaven's sake, Miss——" burst out Wier, horrified, but she cut him short:

"—He may keep the change," she said. "We're no swindlers at Clinch's Dump!"

Wier started forward as though to intercept her. Eve's eyes flamed. And he stood still. She wrenched open the door and walked out among the silver birches.

At the edge of the brook she stood a moment, coolly loading the magazine of her rifle. Then, with one swift glance of hatred, flung at the place that Harrod's money had built, she sprang across the brook, tossed her rifle to her shoulder, and passed lithely into the golden wilderness of poplar and silver birch.

II

Quintana, on a fox-trot along the rock-trail into Drowned Valley, now thoroughly understood that it was the only sanctuary left him for the moment. Egress to the southward was closed; to the eastward, also; and he was too wary to venture westward toward Ghost Lake.

No, the only temporary safety lay in the swamps of Drowned Valley.

And there, he decided as he jogged along, if worse came to worst and starvation drove him out, he'd settle matters with Mike Clinch and break through to the north.

He meant to settle matters with Mike Clinch anyway. He was not afraid of Clinch; not really afraid of anybody. It had been the dogs that demoralised Quintana. He'd had no experience with hunting hounds,—did not know what to expect,—how to manœuvre. If only he could have seen these beasts that filled the forest with their hob-goblin outcries—if he could have had a good look at the creatures who gave forth that weird, crazed, melancholy volume of sound!——

"Bon!" he said coolly to himself. "It was a crisis of nerves which I experience. Yes.... I should have shot him, that fat Sard. Yes.... Only those damn dog—— And now he shall die an' rot—that fat Sard—all by himse'f, parbleu!—like one big dead thing all alone in the wood.... A puddle of guts full of diamonds! Ah!—mon dieu!—a million francs in gems that shine like festering stars in this damn wood till the world end. Ah, bah—nome de dieu de——"

"Halte là!" came a sharp voice from the cedar fringe in front. A pause, then recognition; and Henri Picquet walked out on the hard ridge beyond and stood leaning on his rifle and looking sullenly at his leader.

Quintana came forward, carelessly, a disagreeable expression in his eyes and on his narrow lips, and continued on past Picquet.

The latter slouched after his leader, who had walked over to the lean-to before which a pile of charred logs lay in cold ashes.

As Picquet came up, Quintana turned on him, with a gesture toward the extinguished fire: "It is cold like hell," he said. "Why do you not have some fire?"

"Not for me, non," growled Picquet, and jerked a dirty thumb in the direction of the lean-to.

And there Quintana saw a pair of muddy boots protruding from a blanket.

"It is Harry Beck, yes?" he inquired. Then something about the boots and the blanket silenced him. He kept his eyes on them for a full minute, then walked into the lean-to. The blanket also covered Harry Beck's features and there was a stain on it where it outlined the prostrate man's features, making a ridge over the bony nose.

After a moment Quintana looked around at Picquet:

"So. He is dead. Yes?"

Picquet shrugged: "Since noon, mon capitaine."

"Comment?"

"How shall I know? It was the fire, perhaps,—green wood or wet—it is no matter now.... I said to him, 'Pay attention, Henri; your wood makes too much smoke.' To me he reply I shall go to hell.... Well, there was too much smoke for me. I arise to search for wood more dry, when, crack!—they begin to shoot out there——" He waved a dirty hand toward the forest.

"'Bon,' said I, 'Clinch, he have seen your damn smoke!'

"'What shall I care?' he make reply, Henri Beck, to me. 'Clinch he shall shoot and be damn to him. I cook me my déjeûner all the same.'

"I make representations to that Johnbull; he say to me that I am a frog, and other injuries, while he lay yet more wood on his sacré fire.

"Then crack! crack! crack! and zing-gg!—whee-ee! come the big bullets of Clinch and his voyous yonder.

"'Bon,' I say, 'me, I make my excuse to retire.'

"Then Henri Beck he laugh and say, 'Hop it, frog!' And that is all he has find time to say, when crack! spat! Bien droit he has it—tenez, mon capitaine—here, over the left eye!... Like a beef surprise he go over, crash! thump! And like a beef that dies, the air bellows out from his big lungs——"

Picquet looked down at the dead comrade in a sort of weary compassion for such stupidity.

"—So he pass, this ros-biff goddam Johnbull.... Me, I roll him in there.... Je ne sais pas pourquoi.... Then I put out the fire and leave."

Quintana let his sneering glance rest on the dead a moment, and his thin lip curled immemorial contempt for the Anglo-Saxon.

Then he divested himself of the basket-pack which he had stolen from the Fry boy.

"Alors," he said calmly, "it has been Mike Clinch who shoot my frien' Beck. Bien."

He threw a cartridge into the breech of his rifle, adjusted his ammunition belt en bandoulière , carelessly.

Then, in a quiet voice: "My frien' Picquet, the time has now arrive when it become ver' necessary that we go from here away. Donc—I shall now go kill me my frien' Mike Clinch."

Picquet, unastonished, gave him a heavy, bovine look of inquiry.

Quintana said softly: "Me, I have enough already of this damn woods. Why shall we starve here when there lies our path?" He pointed north; his arm remained outstretched for a while.

"Clinch, he is there," growled Picquet.

"Also our path, l'ami Henri.... And, behind us, they hunt us now with dogs ."

Picquet bared his big white teeth in fierce surprise. "Dogs?" he repeated with a sort of snarl.

"That is how they now hunt us, my frien'—like they hunt the hare in the Côte d'Or.... Me, I shall now reconnoitre—that way!" And he looked where he was pointing, into the north—with smouldering eyes. Then he turned calmly to Picquet: "An' you, l'ami?"

"At orders, mon capitaine."

"C'est bien. Venez."

They walked leisurely forward with rifles shouldered, following the hard ridge out across a vast and flooded land where the bark of trees glimmered with wet mosses.

After a quarter of a mile the ridge broadened and split into two, one hog-back branching northeast! They, however, continued north.

About twenty minutes later Picquet, creeping along on Quintana's left, and some sixty yards distant, discovered something moving in the woods beyond, and fired at it. Instantly two unseen rifles spoke from the woods ahead. Picquet was jerked clear around, lost his balance and nearly fell. Blood was spurting from his right arm, between elbow and shoulder.

He tried to lift and level his rifle; his arm collapsed and dangled broken and powerless; his rifle clattered to the forest floor.

For a moment he stood there in plain view, dumb, deathly white; then he began screaming with fury while the big, soft-nosed bullets came streaming in all around him. His broken arm was hit again. His screaming ceased; he dragged out his big clasp-knife with his left hand and started running toward the shooting.

As he ran, his mangled arm flopping like a broken wing, Byron Hastings stepped out from behind a tree and coolly shot him down at close quarters.

Then Quintana's rifle exploded twice very quickly, and the Hastings boy stumbled sideways and fell sprawling. He managed to rise to his knees again; he even was trying to stand up when Quintana, taking his time, deliberately began to empty his magazine into the boy, riddling him limb and body and head.

Down once more, he still moved his arms. Sid Hone reached out from behind a fallen log to grasp the dying lad's ankle and draw him into shelter, but Quintana reloaded swiftly and smashed Hone's left hand with the first shot.

Then Jim Hastings, kneeling behind a bunch of juniper, fired a high-velocity bullet into the tree behind which Quintana stood; but before he could fire again Quintana's shot in reply came ripping through the juniper and tore a ghastly hole in the calf of his left leg, striking a blow that knocked young Hastings flat and paralysed as a dead flounder.

A mile to the north, blocking the other exit from Drowned Valley, Mike Clinch, Harvey Chase, Cornelius Blommers, and Dick Berry stood listening to the shooting.

"B'gosh," blurted out Chase, "it sounds like they was goin' through, Mike. B'gosh, it does!"

Clinch's little pale eyes blazed, but he said in his soft, agreeable voice:

"Stay right here, boys. Like as not some of 'em will come this way."

The shooting below ceased. Clinch's nostrils expanded and flattened with every breath, as he stood glaring into the woods.

"Harve," he said presently, "you an' Corny go down there an' kinda look around. And you signal if I'm wanted. G'wan, both o' you. Git!"

They started, running heavily, but their feet made little noise on the moss.

Berry came over and stood near Clinch. For ten minutes neither man moved. Clinch stared at the woods in front of him. The younger man's nervous glance flickered like a snake's tongue in every direction, and he kept moistening his lips with his tongue.

Presently two shots came from the south. A pause; a rattle of shots from hastily emptied magazines.

"G'wan down there, Dick!" said Clinch.

"You'll be alone, Mike——"

"Au' right. You do like I say; git along quick!"

Berry walked southward a little way. He had turned very white under his tan.

"Gol ding ye!" shouted Clinch, "take it on a lope or I'll kick the pants off'n ye!"

Berry began to run, carrying his rifle at a trail.

For half an hour there was not a sound in the forests of Drowned Valley except in the dead timber where unseen woodpeckers hammered fitfully at the ghosts of ancient trees.

Always Clinch's little pale eyes searched the forest twilight in front of him; not a falling leaf escaped him; not a chipmunk.

And all the while Clinch talked to himself; his lips moved a little now and then, but uttered no sound:

"All I want God should do," he repeated again and again, "is to just let Quintana come my way. 'Tain't for because he robbed my girlie. 'Tain't for the stuff he carries onto him.... No, God, 'tain't them things. But it's what that there skunk done to my Evie.... O God, be you listenin'? He hurt her, Quintana did. That's it. He misused her.... God, if you had seen my girlie's little bleeding feet!—— That's the reason.... 'Tain't the stuff. I can work. I can save for to make my Evie a lady same's them high-steppers on Fifth Avenoo. I can moil and toil and slave an' run hootch—hootch—— They wuz wine 'n' fixin's into the Bible. It ain't you, God, it's them fanatics.... Nobody in my Dump wanted I should sell 'em more'n a bottle o' beer before this here prohybishun set us all crazy. 'Tain't right.... O God, don't hold a little hootch agin me when all I want of you is to let Quintana——"

The slightest noise behind him. He waited, turned slowly. Eve stood there.

Hell died in his pale eyes as she came to him, rested silently in his gentle embrace, returned his kiss, laid her flushed, sweet cheek against his unshaven