Bad Man's Gulch (12 page)

“Why not?”

“Well, we all got something comin' to us. Some folks live quiet lives for a short time. But everything is balanced up. God plans it all, I reckon.”

A man must be old and must have passed through great sorrows before he can speak of the Creator as
Pete Allison did, with a sort of gloomy surety and understanding.

“But, Pete, think of the men who simply run into a bullet . . . and that's the end of them!”

“Because there wasn't anything left in 'em,” declared Pete Allison with conviction. “When you light a candle, it's gonna keep right on burning until the wax is all used up. Same as with a man. The minute he's born, the wax begins to be used up. If the flame burns high, he's gonna die young. If the flame burns slow, he's gonna die old. Or, if there ain't much wax, he'll die soon. If they's a lot of wax, he'll die late.”

“But when a bullet hits . . . ?”

“Every bullet,” said the old man, “is sent by the Almighty. Dog-goned if He don't direct everything. The sin of the killin' lies with the gent that pulled the trigger, but the death is by the orderin' o' Him.” He made these strange pronouncements in a quiet voice, not as one who prophesied, but as one who was acquainted with the facts of the case.

“There was Sam Lever,” said the girl. “Never was such a big, strong fellow as Sam. He fell off the cliff last winter. . . .”

“He was ready to die, then. God was done with him. You can't tell by the outsides of a gent. The wax is on the inside. It's the heart and the soul that counts. The wax must have been burned out of Sam Lever without us knowin' it. Look at this here Billy Angel. He's loaded with wax. Maybe he ain't gonna last long, but he'll make a darned bright light while he's burnin'.”

“Do you know him, Uncle Pete?” she asked eagerly.

“Ah,” said the old man, “you're took a lot with him, ain't you? Girls is like moths. Them that burn
with a bright light attract the calico to 'em. No matter whether the flame is red or white. Well, yes, I know Billy Angel.”

“What do you know about him?”

“This was ten years back. I had two arms, then, and I was a piece of a man, anyways. I come ridin' down that trail along Old Timber Top . . .”

“You mean the narrow trail?”

“Six inches of rock for a hoss to walk on, and next to that, hell is only two thousand feet away, air line! I come around a elbow turn, with my mule steppin' halfway out into the next world, and I come bang into a kid ridin' a mustang. Says I.  . . ‘Son, back up your pony.'

“‘It ain't a pony,' says he. ‘It's a hoss.'

“‘Back up your hoss,' says I, ‘to that wide stretch behind you, where I can pass, and hurry it up. This here mule of mine is gettin' plumb restless.'

“‘This here mustang of mine,' says he, ‘don't know how to back up.' And he adds, givin' me a ugly look . . . ‘Nor neither do I!'

“I looks this young brat over. He had an eye like a fightin' dog's eye, sort of bright and sad-lookin', as if wonderin' where he would get a whole handful of trouble in the world. He has an old gun strapped onto him, and he begins to play with the butt of it, sort of beggin' me to start some trouble.

“‘Kid,' says I, ‘I'll teach your hoss to back up.'

“‘Old man,' says he, ‘this here hoss don't take to nobody's teachin' except mine.'

“‘What d'you aim to do?' says I, sort of wonderin'.

“‘Never give no inch to nobody in the world,' says he through his teeth.

“I couldn't help grinning, and, at that, he got white, he got so mad. Nothin' makes a proud kid so mad as not to be took serious.

“‘Do we have to fight about this?' says I to him.

“‘Are you scared to?' he says to me, sneerin'.

“‘Why, you little rat,' says I, gettin' sort of mad, ‘hop offen your hoss, so's, when you drop, you ain't sure to splash yourself all over the bottom of that ravine.'

“He just tucks in his chin and laughs at me. And then I seen red. After all, he was man-sized, and he had a man's meanness. I got hot and grabs my gun.

“‘You young fool!' says I, and jerks out my gun. What I mean to say is, that I jerked
at
it. But the front sight caught in the holster and didn't come free. And, quick as a wink, I found myself lookin' straight into the muzzle of a Colt, and that kid's hand was as steady as murder, lemme tell you! I could see myse'f about an inch from kingdom come. Then, he drops his gun back into the holster.

“‘Partner,' says he, as sweet as you please, ‘you had a mite of bad luck. I guess that's a new gun.' And, sayin' that, he backs his mustang as slick as a circus rider over a ledge that wasn't fit for the hoss to walk
forward
on. So he comes to the wide place and waits for me to pass.

“‘There ain't no bad feelin's?' I says, goin' past him.

“He gives me a grin as broad as the moon. ‘None in the world!' says he, and I knew that he meant it.

“Well, sir, he was a fine-lookin' kid, straight as a young pine, strong as the devil, quick as a lightnin' flash. I never seen a pair of black eyes that looked so straight and had so much fire in 'em. And that was Billy Angel. Ever since then, I been waitin' for an explosion back in the hills. And now it's come.”

She listened to this tale with a painful interest, dwelling upon every word of it. “But what else do you know about him?”

“That's all. That's enough. You could live elbow to elbow with a gent for a year and never know as much about him as I found out about Billy Angel in them thirty seconds. After that I knew he was mean and proud enough to fight a army of giants, and kind enough to jump into a river to save a cat that was drownin'. I knew that he was able to burn a town, if he had a spite at the folks in it, or else he was capable of riskin' his life to keep it from burning. That's enough to know. The rest is only that he was an orphan and that he was brung up by his uncle, Ormond.”

“But to have killed his own cousin!”

“Girl, I ain't said that he was a good man. I been sayin' that he was a strong one.”

“Stabbin' him in the back?”

“That sort of looks like a stickler for me. But, after all, he looked pretty near ready for anything even when he was a kid. He might have turned sort of sour when he growed up. But what I say is that they ain't gonna capture him none too easy. His wax ain't burned out yet.”

“Tom Kitchin is a smart man,” said the girl tentatively.

“Him? He'll break Tom Kitchin between his fingers . . . like that. Tom Kitchin? He ain't
nothin'
to a gent like that young feller.”

Such was the opinion of Pete Allison. And he was not a talkative old man, which gave the more weight to his ideas. As for the girl, she locked up each one of his words in her breast and pored upon his sayings in her spare moments as if they had been Bible talk.

Those spare moments came few and far between to her. In the days that followed she was extraordinarily busy. For work is slowly accomplished when half of one's mind is on something else, and that
was the case with Sue Markham. She could not help thinking of her gigantic protégé in the room upstairs—her own room, brightly touched up with color here and there, an incongruous setting for huge Billy Angel.

For three days he did not seem to gain at all. He grew actually thinner in the face. But then he changed. Every hour, almost, made an alteration in him for the better.

In those days, she found that she was not taking a single step toward a better understanding of him. When she came into the room, he did not speak, and he answered her direct questions with monosyllables. He took the food that she gave him without thanks. He refused the books that she brought to him to pass away the long hours of his imprisonment. Instead, he seemed to prefer to lie flat on his back, staring at the ceiling.

What thoughts went through his mind at such times as these? In the dull, weary hours of the day, was he determining to leave the course of lawbreaking on which he had embarked, or was he resolving more wickedness? In spite of herself, she could not help feeling that the latter was the truth. Silence is always more or less dreadful, and his silences seemed particularly so. She never went through the door into that room without a paling of her cheeks and a quickening of her heart, as though she were stepping into a tiger's lair. A dozen times, when she passed the cheerful face of Tom Kitchin or the thoughtful one of Jack Hopper, the engineer, she was on the verge of calling in the law to take this ominous care off her hands.

Then all her fears were redoubled by a most strange happening.

Steve Carney returned to town. Steve was the brightest star in the village of Derby. His father had been a fireman of long standing whose wits were a little too dull for him to advance to the trusted post of engineer in charge of a train. However, he was a man full of honest labor, and to the day of his death he had a great compensation for his own lack of brains, and that was the surpassing intelligence of his son, young Steven. In the school, Steve stood at the head of his class, and, when he had finished the grammar school's eight terms, he went on to high school, and, when high school was ended, it was the plan of the honest fireman to send Steve to college. For that purpose he had saved a considerable sum of money, but, in the very summer after the boy's graduation, the father died—a death brought on, to some extent, by the wretched life to which he had condemned himself in order to lay by the more money for the sake of his son.

When that money came into the hands of Steve himself, he decided that he would take the rest of his education by a short cut in the ways of the world.
He left Derby, therefore, in the beginning of his eighteenth year and was gone nearly a twelvemonth, at the end of which time he returned somewhat out at elbow but with a new light in his eyes. The very first night after his arrival, falling into a poker game, he walked away with all the money in the party, and the town of Derby was forced to admit that Steve's year of education had been by no means wasted. The admirable Steven then remained only a short time in Derby in order, as the old stories have it, to recruit his spirits, before adventuring further.

But when he had renewed his depleted stock of money and when he had engaged in a knife fight and a gunfight, in both of which he came out unscathed, something prompted him to leave Derby for parts unknown. He left half an hour after a band of determined men with shotguns under their arms and with lariats handy for various uses called at the door of his father's shack, which Steve had inherited, of course. He was not seen in town again for another year, and this time, when he returned, it was in a condition that made men forget his errors of the previous visit. Money flowed like water from his hands, and he brought a warmth of good cheer with him that penetrated to the farthest limits of the town.

He remained a mere fortnight, and then left as suddenly as he had come. Two years later he was back, this time out at elbow again, with a leaner, harder face, but still with an air of deathless, boyish good nature in his eyes. Even men who shook their heads at him could not but admire him. He stayed in Derby on this occasion long enough to join the sheriff—Tom Kitchin, serving his first term—and run to earth those famous Greening brothers, whose atrocious murders had terrorized the mountains for two years. In their capture, the quick gun and the
steady aim and the cool courage of young Steven Carney had taken the leading part, as even the sheriff was the first to admit. Then, after a profitable evening of poker, Steve was away again.

He was gone for a year and a half, and now, at last, he came back, and the noise of his coming was the first news that greeted the ears of Sue Markham when she came down in the morning to clean up the lunch counter and build the fire in the stove.

“He got in around midnight,” said Pete Allison, stretching his one hand toward the humming stove.

“Who got in?” asked the girl.

“But he woke up some of the boys and they had a powwow together.”

“Who was it, Pete?”

“He's been around a good bit of the world this time,” declared the old man, still disregarding her direct question in an irritating fashion. “This time he took a drop out into the ocean. He's seen Samoa. He's seen New Zealand. He's been over to the Solomons, too. Lookin' mighty brown and thin, but handsome and clever as ever.”

“Pete Allison, who might you be talkin' about?”

“Wonder to me,” said Pete Allison, “that nobody don't marry him. He's the sort that turns the heads of the girls. I guess he ain't found a nobody yet with money enough to suit him. And he'd take a pretty rich one to bring him more money'n he could spend, I reckon.”

“Ah,” murmured the girl, “you're talking about Steve Carney.”

“Who else? You look like you'd sort of be glad to see him ag'in?” queried Allison sharply.

“He'd never remember me,” she said, and blushed.

“There it is, there it is!” The veteran sighed. “He
ain't been hung yet, and so all the girls is anxious to throw themselves at his head. If he was an honest clerk in an office, or if he was a conductor on a train, or an engineer takin' Two Forty-Nine over the grade every other day, would they be settin' their caps at him so much? Not they. But he's all afire, and he's all a-burnin' up, so the girls can see him, and bust their hearts out to get to him and burn their wings on the flame.”

“Nonsense,” said the girl haughtily. “I've looked twice at him . . . and I never will!”

Pete Allison shook his head. He added: “They say that Steve has a roll of bills that would make a meal for a cow.”

Steve himself came into the lunch counter at noon. He sat on a stool with his hat pushed back on his head and his mischievous blue eyes laughing at her. And when she asked after his travels, he told her absurd fables.