The Seventh Man, Max Brand [jenna bush book club .TXT] 📗

He closed the door, and once more the stranger stood almost cringing against it, and once more his fingers deftly turned the key—softly, silently—and extracted it from the lock.

The sheriff had not looked up from the study of the card, for reading was more difficult to him than man-killing, and Joe Cumber had an opportunity to examine the room. It was hung with a score of pictures. Some large, some small, but most of them enlargements, it was apparent of kodak snapshots, for the eyes had that bleary look which comes in photographs spread over ten times their intended space. The faces had little more than bleary eyes in common, for there were bearded men, and smooth-shaven faces, and lean and fat men; there were round, cherubic countenances, and lean, hungry heads; there were squared, protruding chins, and there were chins which sloped away awkwardly toward the neck; in fact it seemed that the sheriff had collected twenty specimens to represent every phase of weakness and strength in the human physiognomy. But beneath the pictures, almost without exception, there hung weapons: rifles, revolvers, knives, placed criss-cross in a decorative manner, and it came to “Joe Cumber” that he was looking at the galaxy of the dead who had fallen by the hand of Sheriff Pete Glass. Not a face meant anything to him but he knew, instinctively, that they were the chosen bad men of the past twenty years.

“So you're Joe Cumber?”

The sheriff turned in his swivel chair and tossed his cigarette butt through the open window.

“What can I do for you?”

“I got an idea, sheriff, that maybe you'd sort of like to have my picture.”

The sheriff looked up from his study of the card, and having looked up his eyes remained riveted. The other no longer cringed with embarrassment, but every line of his body breathed a great happiness. He was like one who has been riding joyously, with a sharp wind in his face.

There was a distant rushing of feet, a pounding on the door of the next room.

“What's that?” muttered the sheriff, his attention called away.

“They want me.”

“Wait a minute,” called the voice of Billy without.

“I'll open the door. By God, it's locked!”

“They want me—five feet nine or ten, slender, black hair and brown eyes—”

“Barry!”

“Glass, I've come for you.”

“And I'm ready. And I'll say this”—he was standing, now, and his nervous hands were at his sides—“I been hungerin' and hopin' for this time to come. Barry, before you die, I want to thank you!”

“You've followed me like a skunk,” said Barry, “from the time you killed a hoss that had never done no harm to you. You got on my trail when I was livin' peaceable.”

There was a tremendous beating on the outer door of the other room, but Barry went on: “You took a gent that was livin' straight and you made a sneak and a crook out of him and sent him to double-cross me. You ain't worth livin'. You've spent your life huntin' men, and now you're at the end of your trail. Think it over. You're ready to kill ag'in, but are you ready to die?”

The little dusty man grew dustier still. His mouth worked.

“Damn you,” he whispered, and went for his gun.

It was out, his finger on the trigger, the barrel whipping into line, when the weapon in Barry's hand exploded. The sheriff spun on his heel and fell on his face. Three times, as he lay there, dead in all except the instinctive movement of his muscles, his right hand clawed at the empty holster at his side. The sixth man had died for Grey Molly.

The outer door of Billy's room crashed to the floor, and heavy feet thundered nearer. Barry ran to the window and whistled once, very high and thin. It brought a black horse racing around a corner nearby; it brought a wolf-dog from an opposite direction, and as they drew up beneath the window, he slid out and dropped lightly, catlike, to the ground. One leap brought him to the saddle, and Satan stretched out along the street.