Black Jack, Max Brand [snow like ashes .txt] 📗
- Author: Max Brand
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“A new one,” said Terry. “I’ve never played before.”
The other blinked.
“Beginner’s luck, I suppose,” said Terry frankly. “I started with fifty,
and now I suppose I have about eight hundred.”
“Not bad, not bad,” said the other. “Too bad you didn’t stop half an hour
before. Just passing through these parts?”
“I’m looking for a job,” said Terry. “Can you tell me where to start
hunting? Cows are my game.”
The other paused a moment and surveyed his companion. There seemed just a
shade of doubt in his eyes. They were remarkably large and yellowish
gray, those eyes of Joe Pollard, and now and again when he grew
thoughtful they became like clouded agate. They had that color now as he
gazed at Terry. Eventually his glance cleared.
“I got a little work of my own,” he declared. “My range is all clogged up
with varmints. Any hand with a gun and traps?”
“Pretty fair hand,” said Terry modestly.
And he was employed on the spot.
He felt one reassuring thing about his employer—that no echo out of his
past or the past of his father would make the man discharge him. Indeed,
taking him all in all, there was under the kindliness of Joe Pollard an
indescribable basic firmness. His eyes, for example, in their habit of
looking straight at one, reminded him of the eyes of Denver. His voice
was steady and deep and mellow, and one felt that it might be expanded to
an enormous volume. Such a man would not fly off into snap judgments and
become alarmed because an employee had a past or a strange name.
They paid a short visit to the gambling hall after dinner, and then got
their horses. Pollard was struck dumb with admiration at the sight of the
blood-bay.
“Maybe you been up the Bear Creek way?” he asked Terry.
And when the latter admitted that he knew something of the Blue Mountain
country, the rancher exclaimed: “By the Lord, partner, I’d say that hoss
is a ringer for El Sangre.”
“Pretty close to a ringer,” said Terry. “This is El Sangre himself.”
They were jogging out of town. The rancher turned in the saddle and
crossed his companion with one of his searching glances, but returned no
reply. Presently, however, he sent his own capable Steeldust into a sharp
gallop; El Sangre roused to a flowing pace and held the other even
without the slightest difficulty. At this Pollard drew rein with an
exclamation.
“El Sangre as sure as I live!” he declared. “Ain’t nothing else in these
parts that calls itself a hoss and slides over the ground the way El
Sangre does. Partner, what sort of a price would you set on El Sangre,
maybe?”
“His weight in gold,” said Terry.
The rancher cursed softly, without seeming altogether pleased. And
thereafter during the ride his glance continually drifted toward the
brilliant bay—brilliant even in the pallor of the clear mountain
starlight.
He explained this by saying after a time: “I been my whole life in these
parts without running across a hoss that could pack me the way a man
ought to be packed on a hoss. I weigh two hundred and thirty, son, and it
busts the back of a horse in the mountains. Now, you ain’t a flyweight
yourself, and El Sangre takes you along like you was a feather.”
Steeldust was already grunting at every sharp rise, and El Sangre had not
even broken out in perspiration.
A mile or so out of the town they left the road and struck onto a mere
semblance of a trail, broad enough, but practically as rough as nature
chose to make it. This wound at sharp and ever-changing angles into the
hills, and presently they were pressing through a dense growth of
lodgepole pine.
It seemed strange to Terry that a prosperous rancher with an outfit of
any size should have a road no more beaten than this one leading to his
place. But he was thinking too busily of other things to pay much heed to
such surmises and small events. He was brooding over the events of the
afternoon. If his exploits in the gaming hall should ever come to the ear
of Aunt Elizabeth, he was certain enough that he would be finally damned
in her judgment. Too often he had heard her express an opinion of those
who lived by “chance and their wits,” as she phrased it. And the thought
of it irked him.
He roused himself out of his musing. They had come out from the trees and
were in sight of a solidly built house on the hill. There was one thing
which struck his mind at once. No attempt had been made to find level for
the foundation. The log structure had been built apparently at random on
the slope. It conformed, at vast waste of labor, to the angle of the base
and the irregularities of the soil. This, perhaps, made it seem smaller
than it was. They caught the scent of wood smoke, and then saw a pale
drift of the smoke itself.
A flurry of music escaped by the opening of a door and was shut out by
the closing of it. It was a moment before Terry, startled, had analyzed
the sound. Unquestionably it was a piano. But how in the world, and why
in the world, had it been carted to the top of this mountain?
He glanced at his companion with a new respect and almost with a
suspicion.
“Up to some damn doings again,” growled the big man. “Never got no peace
nor quiet up my way.”
Another surprise was presently in store for Terry. Behind the house,
which grew in proportions as they came closer, they reached a horse shed,
and when they dismounted, a servant came out for the horses. Outside of
the Cornish ranch he did not know of many who afforded such luxuries.
However, El Sangre could not be handled by another, and Terry put up his
horse and found the rancher waiting for him when he came out. Inside the
shed he had found ample bins of barley and oats and good grain hay. And
in the stalls his practiced eye scanned the forms of a round dozen fine
horses with points of blood and bone that startled him.
Coming to the open again, he probed the darkness as well as he could to
gain some idea of the ranch which furnished and supported all these
evidences of prosperity. But so far as he could make out, there was only
a jumble of ragged hilltops behind the house, and before it the slope
fell away steeply to the valley far below. He had not realized before
that they had climbed so high or so far.
Joe Pollard was humming. Terry joined him on the way to the house with a
deepened sense of awe; he was even beginning to feel that there was a
touch or two of mystery in the make-up of the man.
Proof of the solidity with which the log house was built was furnished at
once. Coming to the house, there was only a murmur of voices and of
music. The moment they opened the door, a roar of singing voices and a
jangle of piano music rushed into their ears.
Terry found himself in a very long room with a big table in the center
and a piano at the farther end. The ceiling sloped down from the right to
the left. At the left it descended toward the doors of the kitchen and
storerooms; at the right it rose to the height of two full stories. One
of these was occupied by a series of heavy posts on which hung saddles
and bridles and riding equipment of all kinds, and the posts supported a
balcony onto which opened several doors—of sleeping rooms, no doubt. As
for the wall behind the posts, it, too, was pierced with several
openings, but Terry could not guess at the contents of the rooms. But he
was amazed by the size of the structure as it was revealed to him from
within. The main room was like some baronial hall of the old days of war
and plunder. A role, indeed, into which it was not difficult to fit the
burly Pollard and the dignity of his beard.
Four men were around the piano, and a girl sat at the keys, splashing out
syncopated music while the men roared the chorus of the song. But at the
sound of the closing of the door all five turned toward the newcomers,
the girl looking over her shoulder and keeping the soft burden of the
song still running.
So turned, Terry could not see her clearly. He caught a glimmer of red
bronze hair, dark in shadow and brilliant in high lights, and a sheen of
greenish eyes. Otherwise, he only noted the casual manner in which she
acknowledged the introduction, unsmiling, indifferent, as Pollard said:
“Here’s my daughter Kate. This is Terry—a new hand.”
It seemed to Terry that as he said this the rancher made a gesture as of
warning, though this, no doubt, could be attributed to his wish to
silently explain away the idiosyncrasy of Terry in using his first name
only. He was presented in turn to the four men, and thought them the
oddest collection he had ever laid eyes on.
Slim Dugan was tall, but not so tall as he looked, owing to his very
small head and narrow shoulders. His hair was straw color, excessively
silky, and thin as the hair of a year-old child. There were other points
of interest in Slim Dugan; his feet, for instance, were small as the feet
of a girl, accentuated by the long, narrow riding boots, and his hands
seemed to be pulled out to a great and unnecessary length. They made up
for it by their narrowness.
His exact opposite was Marty Cardiff, chunky, fat, it seemed, until one
noted the roll and bulge of the muscles at the shoulders. His head was
settled into his fat shoulders somewhat in the manner of Denver’s, Terry
thought.
Oregon Charlie looked the part of an Indian, with his broad nose and high
cheekbones, flat face, slanted dark eyes; but his skin was a dead and
peculiar white. He was a downheaded man, and one could rarely imagine
him opening his lips to speak; he merely grunted as he shook hands with
the stranger.
To finish the picture, there was a man as huge as Joe Pollard himself,
and as powerful, to judge by appearances. His face was burned to a jovial
red; his hair was red also, and there was red hair on the backs of his
freckled hands.
All these men met Terry with cordial nods, but there was a carelessness
about their demeanor which seemed strange to Terry. In his experience,
the men of the mountains were a timid or a blustering lot before
newcomers, uneasy, and anxious to establish their place. But these men
acted as if meeting unknown men were a part of their common, daily
experience. They were as much at their ease as social lions.
Pollard was explaining the presence of Terry.
“He’s come up to clean out the varmints,” he said to the others. “They
been getting pretty thick on the range, you know.”
“You came in just wrong,” complained Kate, while the men turned four
pairs of grave eyes upon Terry and seemed to be judging him. “I got
Oregon singing at last, and he
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