Black Jack, Max Brand [snow like ashes .txt] 📗
- Author: Max Brand
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which the solemn spruce trees furnished the sides, the cold blue of the
mountain skies was just above the lofty tree-tips, and the wind kept the
pure fragrance of the evergreens stirring about them. The odor is the
soul of the mountains. A great surety had come to Terry that this was the
last place he would ever see on earth. He was about to die, and he was
glad, in a dim sort of way, that he should die in a place so beautiful.
He looked at the sheriff, who stood calm but puzzled, and at Gainor, who
was very grave, indeed, and returned his look with one of infinite pity,
as though he knew and understood and acquiesced, but was deeply grieved
that it must be so.
“Gentlemen,” said Terry, making his voice light and cheerful as he felt
that the voice of a Colby should be at such a time, being about to die,
“I suppose you understand why I have asked you to come here?”
“Yes,” nodded Gainor.
“But I’m damned if I do,” said the sheriff frankly.
Terry looked upon him coldly. He felt that he had not the slightest
chance of killing this professional manslayer, but at least he would do
his best—for the sake of Black Jack’s memory. But to think that his
life—his mind—his soul—all that was dear to him and all that he was
dear to, should ever lie at the command of the trigger of this hard,
crafty, vain, and unimportant fellow! He writhed at the thought. It made
him stand stiffer. His chin went up. He grew literally taller before
their eyes, and such a look came on his face that the sheriff
instinctively fell back a pace.
“Mr. Gainor,” said Terry, as though his contempt for the sheriff was too
great to permit his speaking directly to Minter, “will you explain to the
sheriff that my determination to have satisfaction does not come from the
fact that he killed my father, but because of the manner of the killing?
To the sheriff it seems justifiable. To me it seems a murder. Having that
thought, there is only one thing to do. One of us must not leave this
place!” Gainor bowed, but the sheriff gaped.
“By the eternal!” he scoffed. “This sounds like one of them duels of the
old days. This was the way they used to talk!”
“Gentlemen,” said Gainor, raising his long-fingered hand, “it is my
solemn duty to admonish you to make up your differences amicably.”
“Whatever that means,” sneered the sheriff. “But tell this young fool
that’s trying to act like he couldn’t see me or hear me—tell him that I
don’t carry no grudge ag’in’ him, that I’m sorry he’s Black Jack’s son,
but that it’s something he can live down, maybe. And I’ll go so far as to
say I’m sorry that I done all that talking right to his face. But farther
than that I won’t go. And if all this is leading up to a gunplay, by God,
gents, the minute a gun comes into my hand I shoot to kill, mark you
that, and don’t you never forget it!”
Mr. Gainor had remained with his hand raised during this outbreak. Now he
turned to Terry.
“You have heard?” he said. “I think the sheriff is going quite a way
toward you, Mr. Colby.”
“Hollis!” gasped Terry. “Hollis is the name, sir!”
“I beg your pardon,” said Gainor. “Mr. Hollis it is! Gentlemen, I assure
you that I feel for you both. It seems, however, to be one of those
unfortunate affairs when the mind must stop its debate and physical
action must take up its proper place. I lament the necessity, but I admit
it, even though the law does not admit it. But there are unwritten laws,
sirs, unwritten laws which I for one consider among the holies of
holies.”
Palpably the old man was enjoying every minute of his own talk. It was
not his first affair of this nature. He came out of an early and more
courtly generation where men drank together in the evening by firelight
and carved one another in the morning with glimmering bowie knives.
“You are both,” he protested, “dear to me. I esteem you both as men and
as good citizens. And I have done my best to open the way for peaceful
negotiations toward an understanding. It seems that I have failed. Very
well, sirs. Then it must be battle. You are both armed? With revolvers?”
“Nacher’ly,” said the sheriff, and spat accurately at a blaze on the tree
trunk beside him. He had grown very quiet.
“I am armed,” said Terry calmly, “with a revolver.”
“Very good.”
The hand of Gainor glided into his bosom and came forth bearing a white
handkerchief. His right hand slid into his coat and came forth likewise—
bearing a long revolver.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “the first man to disobey my directions I shall
shoot down unquestioningly, like a dog. I give you my solemn word for
it!”
And his eye informed them that he would enjoy the job.
He continued smoothly: “This contest shall accord with the only terms by
which a duel with guns can be properly fought. You will stand back to
back with your guns not displayed, but in your clothes. At my word you
will start walking in the opposite directions until my command ‘Turn!’
and at this command you will wheel, draw your guns, and fire until one
man falls—or both!”
He sent his revolver through a peculiar, twirling motion and shook back
his long white hair.
“Ready, gentlemen, and God defend the right!”
The talk was fitful in the living room. Elizabeth Cornish did her best to
revive the happiness of her guests, but she herself was a prey to the
same subdued excitement which showed in the faces of the others. A
restraint had been taken away by the disappearance of both the storm
centers of the dinner—the sheriff and Terry. Therefore it was possible
to talk freely. And people talked. But not loudly. They were prone to
gather in little familiar groups and discuss in a whisper how Terry had
risen and spoken before them. Now and then someone, for the sake of
politeness, strove to open a general theme of conversation, but it died
away like a ripple on a placid pond.
“But what I can’t understand,” said Elizabeth to Vance when she was able
to maneuver him to her side later on, “is why they seem to expect
something more.”
Vance was very grave and looked tired. The realization that all his
cunning, all his work, had been for nothing, tormented him. He had set
his trap and baited it, and it had worked perfectly—save that the teeth
of the trap had closed over thin air. At the denouement of the sheriff’s
story there should have been the barking of two guns and a film of
gunpowder smoke should have gone tangling to the ceiling. Instead there
had been the formal little speech from Terry—and then quiet. Yet he had
to mask and control his bitterness; he had to watch his tongue in talking
with his sister.
“You see,” he said quietly, “they don’t understand. They can’t see how
fine Terry is in having made no attempt to avenge the death of his
father. I suppose a few of them think he’s a coward. I even heard a
little talk to that effect!”
“Impossible!” cried Elizabeth.
She had not thought of this phase of the matter. All at once she hated
the sheriff.
“It really is possible,” said Vance. “You see, it’s known that Terry
never fights if he can avoid it. There never has been any real reason for
fighting until today. But you know how gossip will put the most unrelated
facts together, and make a complete story in some way.”
“I wish the sheriff were dead!” moaned Elizabeth. “Oh, Vance, if you only
hadn’t gone near Craterville! If you only hadn’t distributed those
wholesale invitations!”
It was almost too much for Vance—to be reproached after so much of the
triumph was on her side—such a complete victory that she herself would
never dream of the peril she and Terry had escaped. But he had to control
his irritation. In fact, he saw his whole life ahead of him carefully
schooled and controlled. He no longer had anything to sell. Elizabeth had
made a mock of him and shown him that he was hollow, that he was living
on her charity. He must all the days that she remained alive keep
flattering her, trying to find a way to make himself a necessity to her.
And after her death there would be a still harder task. Terry, who
disliked him pointedly, would then be the master, and he would face the
bitter necessity of cajoling the youngster whom he detested. A fine life,
truly! An almost noble anguish of the spirit came upon Vance. He was
urged to the very brink of the determination to thrust out into the world
and make his own living. But he recoiled from that horrible idea in time.
“Yes,” he said, “that was the worst step I ever took. But I was trying to
be wholehearted in the Western way, my dear, and show that I had entered
into the spirit of things.”
“As a matter of fact,” sighed Elizabeth, “you nearly ruined Terry’s
life—and mine!”
“Very near,” said the penitent Vance. “But then—you see how well it has
turned out? Terry has taken the acid test, and now you can trust him
under any—”
The words were literally blown off ragged at his lips. Two revolver shots
exploded at them. No one gun could have fired them. And there was a
terrible significance in the angry speed with which one had followed the
other, blending, so that the echo from the lofty side of Sleep Mountain
was but a single booming sound. In that clear air it was impossible to
tell the direction of the noise.
Everyone in the room seemed to listen stupidly for a repetition of the
noises. But there was no repetition.
“Vance,” whispered Elizabeth in such a tone that the coward dared not
look into her face. “It’s happened!”
“What?” He knew, but he wanted the joy of hearing it from her own lips.
“It has happened,” she whispered in the same ghostly voice. “But which
one?”
That was it. Who had fallen—Terry, or the sheriff? A long, heavy step
crossed the little porch. Either man might walk like that.
The door was flung open. Terence Hollis stood before them.
“I think that I’ve killed the sheriff,” he said simply. “I’m going up to
my room to put some things together; and I’ll go into town with any man
who wishes to arrest me. Decide that between yourselves.”
With that he turned and walked away with a step as deliberately unhurried
as his approach had been. The manner of the boy was more terrible than
the thing he had done. Twice he had shocked them on the same afternoon.
And they were just beginning to realize that the shell of boyhood was
being ripped away from Terence Colby. Terry Hollis, son of Black Jack,
was being revealed to them.
The men received the news with utter bewilderment. The sheriff was as
formidable in the opinion of the mountains as some Achilles. It was
incredible that he should have fallen. And naturally a stern murmur rose:
“Foul play!”
Since the first vigilante days there has been no sound in all the West
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