The Hair-Trigger Kid, Max Brand [best classic literature TXT] 📗
- Author: Max Brand
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but this here sounds kind of fishy. Who’s your witnesses?”
“Why, the Kid, of course!” said Bud.
The sheriff grinned.
“All right,” said he. “You bring the Kid in and I’ll hear what he’s got
to say!”
Mrs. Milman exclaimed: “Aren’t you taking sides unfairly, now, Sheriff
Walters? You’re willing to believe the Shay and Dixon crowd when they ask
you to make an arrest; but you won’t listen to our side of it?”
The sheriff smiled upon her almost tenderly.
“Mrs. Milman, ma’am,” said he, “I wanta tell you that there ain’t a man
in the world that I respect no more than I respect John, here. And there
ain’t a lady that I’d rather please than you. But here I’ve got a warrant
swore out all straight and proper for the arrest of the Kid, alias a lot
of other names—but who the Kid is I know. I ain’t sayin’ that Shay and
Dixon is my friends, or that I think much of ‘em. But I know that the Kid
busted into Shay’s house. It may be that he didn’t fire no shots. He was
just havin’ a little picnic of his own. It was his idea of a good time
and a sort of a joke! On the other hand, you want me to believe the Kid.
Well, the Kid for what I know of him is the slipperiest, hell-raisin’est
youngster in the West. Here’s Bud Trainor talkin’, you say. But after a
look at Bud, I know what’s happened. He’s found him a hero, and the Kid
is that man. He’d go and jump off a cliff, if the Kid told him to.
Wouldn’t you, Bud?”
“You don’t want to believe me,” said Bud, “and I suppose that you don’t
have to! Maybe you could get the truth out of Chip, if you was to half
try!”
“All right,” said the sheriff. “That’s another young gent that I know
about, and you’ll see how much he’ll say!”
They all went into the room where poor Graham lay, patiently studying the
ax work which had shaped the rafters that held up the ceiling of the
room.
“Hello, Chip,” said the sheriff.
“Why, hello, Walters,” said the boy.
“Sorry to see you laid out like this,” said the sheriff.
“Aw, I been needin’ a rest,” said Chip.
“I hear as how the Kid got the drop on you,” said the sheriff. “The Kid?”
“Aye. Wasn’t it him?”
“You mean that give me this in the shoulder?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I’ll tell you what, sheriff,” said the boy calmly, “I dunno who’s been
tellin’ you that kind of bunk. But the way it happened was that I was
cleanin’ an old gun of mine—”
“Oh, I see,” said the sheriff. “Just cleanin’ an old gun, and it went off
in your hands, eh?”
“Yes,” said Chip, looking him in the eye.
“Why, I saw the Kid shoot you off your hoss!” exclaimed Trainor.
Graham stared calmly at him.
“It’s been a tolerable hot day,” said he. “Maybe you got your brain
touched up with the sun, eh?”
“That gun exploded as close as that, and didn’t leave no powder burns?”
went on the sheriff, smiling faintly.
“Nary a one,” said Chip, unmoved.
“Well,” said Lew Walters, “I hope that you get well right quick—and then
I reckon that you’ll kick the handles right off of that old gun, Chip?”
“I reckon I will,” said Chip.
They went back into the front room.
“You see how it is,” said the sheriff. “He’s not going to give the law a
grip on the Kid. He wants the Kid free, so that he can handle him, when
he gets back on his feet. Georgia, did you hear—where’s Georgia?”
But Georgia was not there.
Mrs. Milman, with a faint exclamation, ran out of the room and called as
she went, but no Georgia answered.
She went on, and hurrying out the kitchen door, she looked toward the
hitching rack, where the Silver King had been standing.
He was no longer there, and Mrs. Milman suddenly clutched her breast with
both hands. She looked, at that moment, as though she had lost something
far more precious than all of the big Milman ranch and all of the cattle
that grazed upon its grasses.
Georgia, in fact, had not waited to hear the end of the conversation.
Very shortly after Trainor attempted to argue with the sheriff, she could
tell how matters were apt to drift, and the moment she was sure of that,
she had left the house. The Silver King, standing high-headed at the
rack, was too much of a temptation to be resisted. So she quickly
shortened the stirrups and mounted.
After that, she scanned the rolling ground around the house.
Here and there were clumps of trees, bunches of high shrubbery, and even
nests of rocks which would hide a man and a horse without any trouble.
But she judged that the most likely place would be the larger growth of
the woods to the north of the house, and toward them she rode.
In a moment she was passing under the drift of the brown shadows,
sometimes in the blinding brightness of a patch of sunshine, and again in
the thicker shadows where the trees grew high and dense.
Crossing a small opening in the forest, a blue jay screeched suddenly
overhead in such a discordant note that she reined in the King sharply
and Iooked up.
“A good day for lazying in the shade,” said a voice behind her.
She jerked about in the saddle, and there was the Kid, sitting on a
fallen log and whittling at a stick with a long, bright-bladed knife.
How had he come there?
It could not be that she had ridden straight past him! And yet he was so
thoroughly covered by the shadows that the thing seemed possible. The
beautiful head of the Hawk appeared dimly behind some small branches near
her master.
“How did you get here?” she asked.
For was it not possible that he had been trailing her, the mare moving
with catlike softness, and he had dismounted, even now, for the mere sake
of surprising her?
“Ah, I just dropped in,” said the Kid, rising to greet her. “How’s
things?”
She turned the King and faced him.
He was smiling a little, and he had raised his hat high, and then settled
it slowly back on his head He had the air of one who knows how to talk
easily to women. That air, and his smile, troubled her a little; yet she
felt that it was a foolish emotion.
“Things are pretty bad,” said the girl. “I’ve heard a little about what
you did with the Dixon crowd, though. And over at the house is the
sheriff and a deputy, waiting for you.”
“Let them wait and rest,” answered the Kid. “It’s a sort of a sad thing.
when you come to think of it, that a man at the sheriff’s age should have
to be riding, riding, riding all the time. Let him rest in the cool of
the house for a while—and I’ll rest out here Why does he want me?”
He canted his head just a trifle to the side, and waited.
“He wants you for breaking into the Shay house, and for attempted
murder—”
“In the Shay house?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t fire a shot in there. It was the crowd already there that made
the noise like a Fourth of July.”
“What made you go in there?” asked the girl.
“Oh, I wanted to see Shay.”
“You wanted to scare him, you mean.”
“You think so? Well, if his nerves got a little jumpy, I wouldn’t be
sorry, as a matter of fact.”
He added: “Is it only about the Shay business that he wants me?”
“That’s all. What else would there be?”
“You never can tell,” said the Kid, smiling again in that odd way which
troubled her. “People sometimes rig up all sorts of foolish grudges, you
understand.”
“They persecute you, Kid, do they?”
“A lot,” said he.
She laughed, and the Kid laughed with her.
“Sit down and rest your horse,” said the Kid.
She hesitated, then slipped suddenly out of the saddle. But she did not
sit down. With the reins over her arms, and the riding quirt tapping
against her boots, she confronted him. She felt much smaller, now, as she
stood upon the ground, facing him.
“You act a little nervous yourself,” said the Kid.
“I am nervous,” she answered.
“And why?”
“Look here,” said she, “are you pretending that I ought to take you as if
you were just—anybody?”
“No. Take me as if I were just the Kid.”
“I don’t want to call you that. What other name can I give you?”
“Reginald Beckwith-Holman is my real name,” said he. “Beckwith-Hollis you
told my mother.”
“Did I? Matter of fact, I have a hard time remembering names.”
“It must be hard—having so many,” she observed. They waited through a
pause.
“I wanted to ask you a question,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“About what you will do now.”
“I don’t know. Dixon and his crew have dug themselves in. They have a
regular fort down there at Hurry Creek.”
“I know that they have. And there’s nothing that can be done about
them. They have the law on their side—until the case is tried!”
“Does the sheriff admit that?”
“Yes, he admits that. Poor Lew Walters! He wants to help us, but his
hands are tied!”
“Of course they are,” said the Kid.
“And you’re in danger from the sheriff, if you stay near here.”
“I’ll stay, I think,” said the Kid. “Walters is only joking.
We’ve known each other such a long time, I don’t think that he’d do me
any harm.”
“He’d shoot you down in a second!” she exclaimed. “You know it, too!”
“Good old Walters,” said the Kid gently, and shifted the subject by
saying: “Did you come out to send me away?”
“What right have Ito send you away?” asked the girl. “Whatever hope we
have is in you!”
“You do have a hope, eh?” said the Kid. “Thanks. That makes me feel a
little better.”
“I wish that you’d come out in the open,” said the girl. “What
really makes you take such wild chances as you took today? It’s as if you
despised life!”
“Not a bit,” said he, “but I like life with a little seasoning in it. You
can understand how that might be?”
She nodded.
Suddenly she had to pinch her lips together to keep from smiling.
“What’s the real reason?” she asked him. “Only the adventure? Or mostly
because you hate Dixon and all his crowd?”
“It’s the cattle,” said the Kid with a sudden gravity. She shook her
head.
“You don’t believe that?” he asked her. “Hardly!”
“Well, I’ll tell you. When I was a little youngster, my father and
mother started to move. We were poor people. Dirt poor. We had a few
head of horses, and some cows, and a few head of beef. The land where we
were living—”
“Was it out here in the West?”
“Well, it was not East,” he answered evasively,
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