Black Jack, Max Brand [snow like ashes .txt] 📗

CHAPTER 7

There were not many guests. Elizabeth had chosen them carefully from

families which had known her father, Henry Cornish, when, in his

reckless, adventurous way, he had been laying the basis of the Cornish

fortune in the Rockies. Indeed, she was a little angry when she heard of

the indiscriminate way in which Vance had scattered the invitations,

particularly in Craterville.

 

But, as he said, he had acted so as to show her that he had entered fully

into the spirit of the thing, and that his heart was in the right place

as far as this birthday party was concerned, and she could not do

otherwise than accept his explanation.

 

Some of the bidden guests, however, came from a great distance, and as a

matter of course a few of them arrived the day before the celebration and

filled the quiet rooms of the old house with noise. Elizabeth accepted

them with resignation, and even pleasure, because they all had pleasant

things to say about her father and good wishes to express for the

destined heir, Terence Colby. It was carefully explained that this

selection of an heir had been made by both Elizabeth and Vance, which

removed all cause for remark. Vance himself regarded the guests with

distinct amusement. But Terence was disgusted.

 

“What these true Westerners need,” he said to Elizabeth later in the day,

“is a touch of blood. No feeling of family or the dignity of family

precedents out here.”

 

It touched her shrewdly. More than once she had felt that Terry was on

the verge of becoming a complacent prig. So she countered with a sharp

thrust.

 

“You have to remember that you’re a Westerner born and bred, my dear. A

very Westerner yourself!”

 

“Birth is an accident—birthplaces, I mean,” smiled Terence. “It’s the

blood that tells.”

 

“Terry, you’re a snob!” exclaimed Aunt Elizabeth.

 

“I hope not,” he answered. “But look yonder, now!”

 

Old George Armstrong’s daughter, Nelly, had gone up a tree like a

squirrel and was laughing down through the branches at a raw-boned cousin

on the ground beneath her.

 

“And what of it?” said Elizabeth. “That girl is pretty enough to please

any man; and she’s the type that makes a wife.”

 

Terry rubbed his chin with his knuckles thoughtfully. It was the one

family habit that he had contracted from Vance, much to the irritation of

the latter.

 

“After all,” said Terry, with complacency, “what are good looks with bad

grammar?”

 

Elizabeth snorted literally and most unfemininely.

 

“Terence,” she said, lessoning him with her bony, long forefinger,

“you’re just young enough to be wise about women. When you’re a little

older, you’ll get sense. If you want white hands and good grammar, how do

you expect to find a wife in the mountains?”

 

Terry answered with unshaken, lordly calm. “I haven’t thought about the

details. They don’t matter. But a man must have standards of criticism.”

 

“Standards your foot!” cried Aunt Elizabeth. “You insufferable young

prig. That very girl laughing down through the branches—I’ll wager she

could set your head spinning in ten seconds if she thought it worth her

while to try.”

 

“Perhaps,” smiled Terence. “In the meantime she has freckles and a

vocabulary without growing pains.”

 

“All men are fools,” declared Aunt Elizabeth; “but boys are idiots, bless

‘em! Terence, before you grow up you’ll have sore toes from stumbling,

take my word for it! Do you know what a wise man would do?”

 

“Well?”

 

“Go out and start a terrific flirtation with Nelly.”

 

“For the sake of experience?” sighed Terence.

 

“Good heavens!” groaned Aunt Elizabeth. “Terry, you’re impossible! Where

are you going now?”

 

“Out to see El Sangre.”

 

He went whistling out of the door, and she followed him with confused

feelings of anger, pride, joy, and fear. She went to a side window and

saw him go fearlessly into the corral where the man-destroying El Sangre

was kept. And the big stallion, red fire in the sunshine, went straight

to him and nosed at a hip pocket. They had already struck up a perfect

understanding. Deeply she wondered at it.

 

She had never loved the mountains and their people and their ways. It had

been a battle to fight. She had fought the battle, won, and gained a

hollow victory. And watching Terry caress the great, beautiful horse, she

knew vaguely that his heart, at least, was in tune with the wilderness.

 

“I wish to heaven, Terry,” she murmured, “that you could find a master as

El Sangre has done. You need teaching.”

 

When she turned from the window, she found Vance watching her. He had a

habit of obscurely melting into a background and looking out at her

unexpectedly. All at once she knew that he had been there listening

during all of her talk with Terence. Not that the talk had been of a

peculiarly private nature, but it angered her. There was just a semblance

of eavesdropping about the presence of Vance. For she knew that Terence

unbosomed himself to her as he would do in the hearing of no other human

being. However, she mastered her anger and smiled at her brother. He had

taken all these recent changes which were so much to his disadvantage

with a good spirit that astonished and touched her.

 

“Do you know what I’m going to give Terry for his birthday?” he said,

sauntering toward her.

 

“Well?” A mention of Terence and his welfare always disarmed her

completely. She opened her eyes and her heart and smiled at her brother.

 

“There’s no set of Scott in the house. I’m going to give Terry one.”

 

“Do you think he’ll ever read the novels? I never could. That antiquated

style, Vance, keeps me at arm’s length.”

 

“A stiff style because he wrote so rapidly. But there’s the greatest body

and bone of character. Except for his heroes. Terry reminds me of them,

in a way. No thought, not very much feeling, but a great capacity for

physical action.”

 

“I think you’d like to be Terry’s adviser,” she said.

 

“I wouldn’t aspire to the job,” yawned Vance, “unless I could ride well

and shoot well. If a man can’t do that, he ceases to be a man in Terry’s

eyes. And if a woman can’t talk pure English, she isn’t a woman.”

 

“That’s because he’s young,” said Elizabeth.

 

“It’s because he’s a prig,” sneered Vance. He had been drawn farther into

the conversation than he planned; now he retreated carefully. “But

another year or so may help him.”

 

He retreated before she could answer, but he left her thoughtful, as he

hoped to do. He had a standing theory that the only way to make a woman

meditate is to keep her from talking. And he wanted very much to make

Elizabeth meditate the evil in the son of Black Jack. Otherwise all his

plans might be useless and his seeds of destruction fall on barren soil.

He was intensely afraid of that, anyway. His hope was to draw the boy and

the sheriff together on the birthday and guide the two explosives until

they met on the subject of the death of Black Jack. Either Terry would

kill the sheriff, or the sheriff would kill Terry. Vance hoped for the

latter, but rather expected the former to be the outcome, and if it were,

he was inclined to think that Elizabeth would sooner or later make

excuses for Terry and take him back into the fold of her affections.

Accordingly, his work was, in the few days that intervened, to plant all

the seeds of suspicion that he could. Then, when the denouement came,

those seeds might blossom overnight into poison flowers.

 

In the late afternoon he took up his position in an easy chair on the big

veranda. The mail was delivered, as a rule, just before dusk, one of the

cow-punchers riding down for it. Grave fears about the loss of that all-important missive to Terry haunted him, for the postmaster was a

doddering old fellow who was quite apt to forget his head. Consequently

he was vastly relieved when the mail arrived and Elizabeth brought the

familiar big envelope out to him, with its typewritten address.

 

“Looks like a business letter, doesn’t it?” she asked Vance.

 

“More or less,” said Vance, covering a yawn of excitement.

 

“But how on earth could any business—it’s postmarked from Craterville.”

 

“Somebody may have heard about his prospects; they’re starting early to

separate him from his money.”

 

“Vance, how much talking did you do in Craterville?”

 

It was hard to meet her keen old eyes.

 

“Too much, I’m afraid,” he said frankly. “You see, I’ve felt rather

touchy about the thing. I want people to know that you and I have agreed

on making Terry the heir to the ranch. I don’t want anyone to suspect

that we differed. I suppose I talked too much about the birthday plans.”

 

She sighed with vexation and weighed the letter in her hand.

 

“I’ve half a mind to open it.”

 

His heartbeat fluttered and paused.

 

“Go ahead,” he urged, with well-assured carelessness.

 

She shook down the contents of the envelope preparatory to opening it.

 

“It’s nothing but printed stuff, Vance. I can see that, through the

envelope.”

 

“But wait a minute, Elizabeth. It might anger Terry to have even his

business mail opened. He’s touchy, you know.”

 

She hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders.

 

“I suppose you’re right. Let it go.” She laughed at her own concern over

the matter. “Do you know, Vance, that sometimes I feel as if the whole

world were conspiring to get a hand on Terry?”