Black Jack, Max Brand [snow like ashes .txt] 📗
- Author: Max Brand
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“I know. It was Minter. And they turned you out for that?”
There was a trembling intake of her breath. He could catch the sparkle of
her eyes, and knew that she had flown into one of her sudden, fiery
passions. And it warmed his heart to hear her.
“I’d like to know what kind of people they are, anyway! I’d like to meet
up with that Elizabeth Cornish, the—”
“She’s the finest woman that ever breathed,” said Terry simply.
“You say that,” she pondered slowly, “after she sent you away?”
“She did only what she thought was right. She’s a little hard, but very
just, Kate.”
She was shaking her head; the hair had become a dull and wonderful gold
in the faint moonshine.
“I dunno what kind of a man you are, Terry. I didn’t ever know a man
could stick by—folks—after they’d been hurt by ‘em. I couldn’t do it. I
ain’t got much Bible stuff in me, Terry. Why, when somebody does me a
wrong, I hate ‘em—I hate ‘em! And I never forgive ‘em till I get back at
‘em.” She sighed. “But you’re different, I guess. I begin to figure that
you’re pretty white, Terry Hollis.”
There was something so direct about her talk that he could not answer. It
seemed to him that there was in her a cross between a boy and a man—the
simplicity of a child and the straightforward strength of a grown man,
and all this tempered and made strangely delightful by her own unique
personality.
“But I guessed it the first time I looked at you,” she was murmuring. “I
guessed that you was different from the rest.”
She had her elbow on her knee now, and, with her chin cupped in the
graceful hand, she leaned toward him and studied him.
“When they’re clean-cut on the outside, they’re spoiled on the inside.
They’re crooks, hard ones, out for themselves, never giving a rap about
the next gent in line. But mostly they ain’t even clean on the outside,
and you can see what they are the first time you look at ‘em.
“Oh, I’ve liked some of the boys now and then; but I had to make myself
like ‘em. But you’re different. I seen that when you started talking. You
didn’t sulk; and you didn’t look proud like you wanted to show us what
you could do; and you didn’t boast none. I kept wondering at you while I
was at the piano. And—you made an awful hit with me, Terry.”
Again he was too staggered to reply. And before he could gather his wits,
the girl went on:
“Now, is they any real reason why you shouldn’t get out of here tomorrow
morning?”
It was a blow of quite another sort.
“But why should I go?”
She grew very solemn, with a trace of sadness in her voice.
“I’ll tell you why, Terry. Because if you stay around here too long,
they’ll make you what you don’t want to be—another Black Jack. Don’t you
see that that’s why they like you? Because you’re his son, and because
they want you to be another like him. Not that I have anything against
him. I guess he was a fine fellow in his way.” She paused and stared
directly at him in a way he found hard to bear. “He must of been! But
that isn’t the sort of a man you want to make out of yourself. I know.
You’re trying to go straight. Well, Terry, nobody that ever stepped could
stay straight long when they had around ‘em Denver Pete and—my father.”
She said the last with a sob of grief. He tried to protest, but she waved
him away.
“I know. And it’s true. He’d do anything for me, except change himself.
Believe me, Terry, you got to get out of here—pronto. Is they anything
to hold you here?”
“A great deal. Three hundred dollars I owe your father.”
She considered him again with that mute shake of the head. Then: “Do you
mean it? I see you do. I don’t suppose it does any good for me to tell
you that he cheated you out of that money?”
“If I was fool enough to lose it that way, I won’t take it back.”
“I knew that, too—I guessed it. Oh, Terry, I know a pile more about the
inside of your head than you’d ever guess! Well, I knew that—and I come
with the money so’s you can pay back Dad in the morning. Here it is—and
they’s just a mite more to help you on your way.”
She laid the little handful of gold on the table beside the bed and rose.
“Don’t go,” said Terry, when he could speak. “Don’t go, Kate! I’m not
that low. I can’t take your money!”
She stood by the bed and stamped lightly. “Are you going to be a fool
about this, too?”
“Your father offered to give me back all the money I’d won. I can’t do
it, Kate.”
He could see her grow angry, beautifully angry.
“Is they no difference between Kate Pollard and Joe Pollard?”
Something leaped into his throat. He wanted to tell her in a thousand
ways just how vast that difference was.
“Man, you’d make a saint swear, and I ain’t a saint by some miles. You
take that money and pay Dad, and get on your way. This ain’t no place for
you, Terry Hollis.”
“I—” he began.
She broke in: “Don’t say it. You’ll have me mad in a minute. Don’t say
it.”
“I have to. I can’t take money from you.”
“Then take a loan.”
He shook his head.
“Ain’t I good enough to even loan you money?” she cried fiercely.
The shaft of moonlight had poured past her feet; she stood in a pool of
it.
“Good enough?” said Terry. “Good enough?” Something that had been
accumulating in him now swelled to bursting, flooded from his heart to
his throat. He hardly knew his own voice, it was so transformed with
sudden emotion.
“There’s more good in you than in any man or woman I’ve ever known.”
“Terry, are you trying to make me feel foolish?”
“I mean it—and it’s true. You’re kinder, more gentle—”
“Gentle? Me? Oh, Terry!”
But she sat down on the bed, and she listened to him with her face
raised, as though music were falling on her, a thing barely heard at a
perilous distance.
“They’ve told you other things, but they don’t know. I know, Kate. The
moment I saw you I knew, and it stopped my heart for a beat—the knowing
of it. That you’re beautiful—and true as steel; that you’re worthy of
honor—and that I honor you with all my heart. That I love your kindness,
your frankness, your beautiful willingness to help people, Kate. I’ve
lived with a woman who taught me what was true. You’ve taught me what’s
glorious and worth living for. Do you understand, Kate?”
And no answer; but a change in her face that stopped him.
“I shouldn’t of come,” she whispered at length, “and I—I shouldn’t have
let you—talk the way you’ve done. But, oh, Terry—when you come to
forget what you’ve said—don’t forget it all the way—keep some of the
things—tucked away in you—somewhere—”
She rose from the bed and slipped across the white brilliance of the
shaft of moonlight. It made a red-gold fire of her hair. Then she
flickered into the shadow. Then she was swallowed by the darkness.
There was no Kate at breakfast the next morning. She had left the house
at dawn with her horse.
“May be night before she comes back,” said her father. “No telling how
far she’ll go. May be tomorrow before she shows up.”
It made Terry thoughtful for reasons which he himself did not understand.
He had a peculiar desire to climb into the saddle on El Sangre and trail
her across the hills. But he was very quickly brought to the reality that
if he chose to make himself a laboring man and work out the three hundred
dollars he would not take back from Joe Pollard, the big man was now
disposed to make him live up to his word.
He was sent out with an ax and ordered to attack a stout grove of the
pines for firewood. But he quickly resigned himself to the work. Whatever
gloom he felt disappeared with the first stroke that sunk the edge deep
into the soft wood. The next stroke broke out a great chip, and a
resinous, fresh smell came up to him.
He made quick work of the first tree, working the morning chill out of
his body, and as he warmed to his labor, the long muscles of arms and
shoulders limbering, the blows fell in a shower. The sturdy pines fell
one by one, and he stripped them of branches with long, sweeping blows of
the ax, shearing off several at a stroke. He was not an expert axman, but
he knew enough about that cunning craft to make his blows tell, and a
continual desire to sing welled up in him.
Once, to breathe after the heavy labor, he stepped to the edge of the
little grove. The sun was sparkling in the tops of the trees; the valley
dropped far away below him. He felt as one who stands on the top of the
world. There was flash and gleam of red; there stood El Sangre in the
corral below him; the stallion raised his head and whinnied in reply to
the master’s whistle.
A great, sweet peace dropped on the heart of Terry Hollis. Now he felt he
was at home. He went back to his work.
But in the midmorning Joe Pollard came to him and grunted at the swath
Terry had driven into the heart of the lodgepole pines.
“I wanted junk for the fire,” he protested; “not enough to build a house.
But I got a little errand for you in town, Terry. You can give El Sangre
a stretching down the road?”
“Of course.”
It gave Terry a little prickling feeling of resentment to be ordered
about. But he swallowed the resentment. After all, this was labor of his
own choosing, though he could not but wonder a little, because Joe
Pollard no longer pressed him to take back the money he had lost. And he
reverted to the talk of Kate the night before. That three hundred dollars
was now an anchor holding him to the service of her father. And he
remembered, with a touch of dismay, that it might take a year of ordinary
wages to save three hundred dollars. Or more than a year.
It was impossible to be downhearted long, however. The morning was as
fresh as a rose, and the four men came out of the house with Pollard to
see El Sangre dancing under the saddle. Terry received the commission for
a box of shotgun cartridges and the money to pay for them.
“And the change,” said Pollard liberally, “don’t worry me none. Step
around and make yourself to home in town. About coming back—well, when I
send a man into town, I figure on him making a day of it. S’long, Terry!”
“Hey,” called Slim, “is El Sangre gun-shy?”
“I suppose so.”
The stallion quivered with eagerness to be off.
“Here’s to try him.”
The gun flashed into Slim’s hand and boomed. El Sangre bolted
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