Saratoga Trunk (35 page)

“Get down out of there, you varmint! Get down or I’ll haul you down.”

Cupide stood up while the onlookers guffawed as for the first time they realized the stature of this strangely attired passenger. Nimbly he leaped to the ground, his tiny feet in their glittering top boots landing neatly as a cat’s. As Maroon reached for him, the sad eyes looked up at him, the clear boyish voice broke a little with a note of pathos beneath its engaging humor.

“It was like riding on a donkey’s tail, Monsieur Clint. Bumpitty-bump, bumpitty-bump. I’m hollow as a drum.”

Maroon laid a heavy hand on the dwarf’s shoulder. “What do you want here?”

“Breakfast. I am hungry for my breakfast.”

Maroon’s voice dropped. “Did she send you?”

“No. I ran away. I hid in the back of the cart. It was fine—but bumpy.”

“You get out of here.”

“No, Monsieur Clint. No! I want to fight, too, with you and the rest. I’m strong. You know how I am strong.”

“Doggone if I haven’t got a mind to tan you good, here and now, you little rat. Skin you and pin your hide to a fence, that’s what I ought to do. How’d you know where I was going?”

The old face on the childlike body was turned up to him, its look all candor and simplicity. “I listened at the keyhole. I heard everything. It’s going to be a fine fight.” He rubbed his tiny hands together. “I can’t wait undl I begin butting them in the stomach, the
canailles.’’’’

Maroon’s reply was a venomous mutter, out of which son-of-a-bitch emerged as the least offensive term. “You’re going to get the hell out of here. . . . Hi, boy! What’s the next train to Saratoga? . . . D’you want to earn five dollars? You go rustle some breakfast—coffee and so on—for this little runt. You’ve got a good half an hour before train dme. You buy a ticket and set him on that train headed for Saratoga, and don’t you let him out of your sight till the train’s started. Go on, get going, act like you’re alive!”

“Monsieur Clint! You’re not going to send me back!”

“You’re damn whisdin’ I am!” An aggrieved note crept into his voice. “Tagging me around. I bet she put you up to it.”

“No, no! No one. Not Mad’moiselle, not Kaka. No one knows. Please let me stay. I will help, I will work, I will fight—”

“Shut up!” He dropped his voice, his very quietness was venomous. “And if you let out a word of what you know, here or in Saratoga, I’ll kill you when I get back, sure as shooting.” He turned to the fellow who now had emerged from the depot, railway ticket in hand. “Now, you. Hang on to that ticket till he’s on the train. Give him his breakfast. If he gets balky leave him go without. One thing. Look out he don’t butt you.”

A bewildered look came into the face of the newly appointed guardian. “Don’t what?”

“Butt you. He’s got a head like a cannon ball. . . . I’ll learn you to tag around after me. And remember! One word out of you about you know what and—” He snapped his fingers and flung the sound away, dead. Suddenly, to his horror, the litde man dropped to his knees, he clasped his arms about Maroon’s legs.

“Don’t do this to me! Don’t! Don’t! I am strong. You know how strong. I am stronger than three regular men, I will fight—”

With terrible ruthlessness Maroon plucked the dwarf from him as you would fling off an insect. “Get away from me, you varmint you! I’ll learn you to flap those big ears of yours at keyholes!”

The childlike figure was on its feet at once, like a thing made of steel springs. Even as the onlookers guffawed Clint Maroon felt his first pang of contrition, felt his face redden with shame at what he had done.

Cupidon brushed himself off, methodically. Quietiy he looked at Maroon. His eyes gazed straight into those of his idol. “Monsieur, I am a man,” he said. For that instant he was somehow tall.

A moment the two stared at one another. Then Maroon turned and walked quickly away.

He knew where he must go. He was late, and cursed his lateness and the cause of it, but his heart was not in it. You’ll be hitting children next, he said to himself, and women too, likely. What’s come over you! He strode along in his high-heeled boots, his great white sombrero, his fine cloth suit with its full-skirted coat, but he felt a diminished man.

The light cart and the bays would be cared for. That had been carefully arranged days ago. Everything had been arranged. Al that money could insure had been carefully planned and carried out by men of millions. Only physical courage and devil-may-care love of adventure had been lacking. And these he, Clint Maroon, had provided.

Into the hot, dusty office of the stationmaster. Sparse, taciturn, Gid Fish looked up under his green eyeshade at the dashing figure in the doorway. His voice was as dry, his gaze as detached as though sombreroed figures in high-heeled Texas boots were daily visitors in the Abany depot office. The physical contrast between the two men was ludicrous—the one so full-blooded, so virile, so dramatic, the other so dry, dusty and sallow. Yet the two seemed to like and respect one another; their speech had the terseness of mutual understanding.

“Howdy, Gid!”

“Howdy, Clint!”

“Came in my rig like I said.”

“Seen you.”

“Boys in?”

“Yep.”

“Steam up?”

“Yep.”

“Road clear?”

“Yep.”

“Well,
adios!”

Maroon turned to go, his coat-tails flirting about his legs with the vigor of his movements. Gid Fish’s rasping voice suddenly stopped him, held him with its note of urgency. “Somebody must of blabbed.”

Maroon whirled. “Who says so?”

“Just come over the wire. They got wind.”

Maroon’s right hand went to his hip. “Who blabbed?”

“Gould’s a smart fella.”

Even as he said this there came the clack-clack-clack of the telegraph instrument on Gid Fish’s desk. A moment of silence broken only by the clacking sound. “Says there’s hell to pay in Binghamton,” said Fish, laconically. “Git.”

Clint Maroon’s high heels clattered on the bare boards as he dashed from the room. Across the tracks, down the yards to where an engine waited, steam up.

The head that now thrust itself out of the engine-cab window was surmounted by the customary long-visored striped linen cap, the body was garbed in engineer’s overalls, but the face that looked down at the hurrying figure of Clint Maroon was not an engineer’s face as one usually sees it—the keen-eyed, quizzical and curiously benevolent countenance of the born mechanic. It was a hard-bitten ruthless face, but the eyes redeemed it. Devil-may-care, they were merry now with amusement and andcipation.

“You’re going to get them nice clothes mussed up, Clint.”

Maroon ignored this. His eye traveled the engine, end to end. “Sure enough big.”

Pride irradiated the face framed in the engine cab. “She’s the heaviest engine in the East.”

“Better had be. Gid Fish says they got wind of us down in Binghamton. No telling what they’ll do. Of course they don’t know about the boys. Can’t. They all back in there?” He nodded in the direction of the two coaches attached to the puffing engine.

“Yep. Rärin’.”

“Get going, Les. I’ll go talk to the boys. After the first stop I’ll come up there in the engine with you. I want to see what’s ahead. Where at’s Tracy?”

Like a figure in a Punch and Judy show a smoke grimed face bobbed up in the window beside that of Les, the engineer. His teeth gleamed white against their sooty background. “Feeding the critter,” he said. “She eats like a hungry maverick.” Les, the engineer; Tracy, the fireman; Clint Maroon, the leader. Al three had the Western flavor in their speech—laconic, gentle, almost drawling. Les surveyed Clint with a kind of amused admiration.

“You come up here you’re liable to ruin them pretty pants, Clint.”

Maroon grinned back at him good-naturedly. “Got any coffee up there, left over?”

“Sure have. Wait a minute.”

“Can’t stop for it now. When I climb up in there I’ll take it, and welcome. Get her going. We got to lick the whey out of the Binghamton outfit before noon and clean up all along the line to boot.”

The two heads stuck out of the cab window turned to gaze after him a moment; they saw him leap into the doorway of the first car with a flirting whisk of his coat-tails.

“Son-of-a-gun!” said Tracy, affectionately. In another moment the big engine moved.

Passing swiftly from car to car, Clint Maroon faced three hundred men; he stood swaying at the head of each car, he repeated his brief speech, they made laconic answer.

“Howdy, boys!”

“Howdy, Clint!”

They strangely resembled one another, these silent men. Lean, tall, wiry; their faces weather-beaten, their eyes had the look of those accustomed to far horizons. Yet they were ruined faces, the faces of men who, though fearless, had known defeat and succumbed to it. Hard times had searched them out with her bony fingers and sent them wandering, drink-scarred and jobless, into the inhospitable East. Danger meant nothing to them. Risk was their daily ration. Violence flavored their food. Life they held lightiy. Guns were merely part of their wardrobe.

“Like I said, no guns—only maybe the butts in a pinch. You got your clubs and spades and axes and your fists, and you’ll likely need ‘em. No shooting. Every station between here and Binghamton we’re out quick before they can telegraph word ahead. We throw ‘em out, take the books, and leave a bunch behind to hold the fort. Where we’re in we stay in, and we’ve got to be in every station between here and there before nightfall, sure. Whenever you hear three screeches from the engine ahead—no matter where we’re at or what you’re doing—that means out, pronto. We’re going. Hold on to your hats.”

It was child’s play to these men. They treated it as though it were a roundup; they felt that they lacked only the horses under them to make their day perfect. Town followed town, station followed station. The procedure never varied; it even took on a sort of monotony after the first hour. The train would come to a grinding, jolting halt that shook the marrow of even these hard-boned Westerners. Three shrill screeches from the engine. Out the men swarmed armed with bludgeons, spades, shovels; their guns handy in their holsters in spite of Clint’s warning. Quick as they were, Maroon was quicker. The crew was, for the most part, sombreroed as he, but it was the figure in the great white sombrero and the flying coat-tails that led the charge into the station. A rush into the ticket office, bursting into the stationmaster’s room; a scuffle, oaths, yells.

“Come on, you son-a-kabitchee!”

“Stay with him, cowboy!”

“Heel that booger, Red. Heel him!”

“Hot iron! Hot iron!”

The old language of the range and the branding pen and the corral returned joyously to their lips. The West they had known was vanishing—had vanished, indeed, for them. Resentful, fearless, they were blurred copies of Clint Maroon. The thing they had been hired to do was absurd—was almost touching in its childlike simplicity and crudeness. But then, so, too, were they.

In each town they left behind them the bewildered buzz and chatter of the townspeople. Long-suffering as these were, and accustomed to the violence and destruction with which the now-notorious railroad fight had been carried on in the past year, the lightning sortie of these Westerners was a new and melodramatic experience. There was, in the first place, a kind of grim enjoyment in their faces, a sardonic humor in their speech, as they poured out of their modern Trojan horse. Booted, sombreroed like the dashing figure that led them, they seemed, in the eyes of the staid York State burghers, to be creatures from another world. Binghamton was their goal, Binghamton was to be the final test, for there the enemy was fortified in numbers probably equal to theirs, if not greater. Meanwhile their zest was tremendous, their purpose grim, their spirits rollicking. Strange wild yells, bred of the plains, the range, the Indian country, issued from their leather throats. Yip-ee! Eee-yow! And always, bringing up the rear, though the white-hatted leader never knew it, was a grotesque little figure rolling on stumpy legs. In wine-colored livery and top hat and glittering diminutive boots he was, the staring onlookers assumed, a creature strayed from a circus. The whole effect was, in fact, that of a circus minus its tent and tigers and elephants. This litde figure followed an erratic pattern of its own, dodging, hiding, mingling whenever possible where the melee was thickest, darting back to the refuge of the train coaches before the white-hatted leader strode back to his eyrie in the engine cab. Evidently there was some sort of understanding between him and the tall rangey fellows who made up the company. Almost absentmindedly they seemed to protect him; they shielded him in little clusters when it appeared that Maroon’s eye might fall upon him. Here was a mascot. Here was a good-luck piece. Look at the little runt, they said. Says he’s Maroon’s bodyguard. Reckon he’s lying.

In the engine cab Clint Maroon, incredibly neat in spite of the heat, the dust, the soot that belched from the smokestack, leaned far out of the window to peer up the track. Each time he withdrew his head from this watchtower he heaved a sigh of relief.

“No sign of them, hide nor hair,” he remarked to Les, the engineer. “D’you reckon Gid Fish was just throwin’ off on me, saying he’d heard somebody’d blabbed up in Binghamton!”

“Nope,” said Les, cheerfully, above the roar and jolt of the massive engine.

“We’ve only got a matter of fifteen miles to go,” Clint argued.

Tracy, the fireman, his red-rimmed eyes rolling grotesquely in his sooty face, turned his head away from the fire to throw a terse reminder over his shoulder.

“Long tunnel between here and Binghamton. Keep your head stuck out going through there. You’re liable to get kind of specked, but you sure might see something at the end of it.”

Maroon’s hand went to his hip. “You keeping back something you know!”

A grin gashed the black face. “My, my, ain’t you touchy, Clint, since you come East and got to going with New York millionaires!”

With an oath Maroon lunged forward, but the drawling voice of Les with a sharp overtone in it now served to stop him short.

“Something down the line,” he yelled. “I can feel it. On our track. God A’mighty, they wouldn’t mix it in the tunnel!”