Silvertip's Roundup (11 page)

T
HERE
was time to waste, after he was close to the town. He spent it idly in a thicket, lying out on his stomach with his elbows on the ground and his chin in his hands.

He kept thinking. It wasn't about the Christian gang that he thought so much, but chiefly about Silver, and then about the girl. After a time, as the sun went down, he was not thinking of Silver at all, but only about the girl.

“I've been the fall guy, around here. I've been a dud. Every time she thinks about me, she laughs,” he told himself.

Then it was dark, and he rode slowly in toward Horseshoe Flat. She would have finished serving supper, by this time. She would be clearing off the dishes from the long table. The men would be sitting about, rocking back in their chairs and smoking cigarettes. Some of them would use toothpicks of wood or quills. These fellows out in the West had queer manners. But small things don't matter in a man's make-up.

He got down to the town, rode around to the boarding house, tied the roan across the street, three houses up, and then came to the back door of the Creighton place. He had worked everything out, and now there was the rattling of dishes in the kitchen. She began to sing.

That darkened the mind of Taxi. As if she gave a rap about him! But of course she didn't give a rap. He was just a bum, a fall guy that every one kicked around.

It was a funny thing that he should have got her on his mind. Back there in the Big Noise there were some blondes who would have chucked everything to belong to him. There were some real steppers, who knew about him and how he could fade through steel walls and get right at the secret mind of the biggest sort of safes. They were ready to gamble on him. There was one that was almost perfect. She was a lady, practically. When she made up, you hardly knew that she had put on anything. Her cheeks were just natural — except that they were always the same. When she smoked, no red came off on her cigarettes. She had brains, that girl had. And she was all for Taxi.

“Taxi, when you're feeling restless,” she had said, “come around and take
me
for a ride, will you?”

He had never gone to take her for a ride. She was just lost in a crowd, so far as he was concerned. He knew that when a man falls for a girl, he always gets into trouble about it. Some of the toughest mugs in the world have tumbled for a blonde and then talked too much. You can't help talking to a woman, it seems. You tell yourself that you won't, but just the same you talk, and after a while the blonde sells you out. That's the way it always goes. The prettier they are, the deeper they nick you.

And here he was, like a fool, in spite of all he knew, standing on the kitchen steps and preparing to go inside to talk to a kitchen mechanic. Well, he wouldn't be such a fool. He'd leave that place and never come back. But still he kept standing there.

The door jerked open. The song rang loudly in his ears. There was the girl standing above him. She did not start at the sight of a man standing there on the steps. She shaded her eyes with one hand and peered down at him, saying:

“Hello! Come to collect something, partner?”

Then she gasped. She caught him by the lapels of the coat and fairly dragged him into the kitchen.

There she held him, while her frightened eyes ran over him for a moment. Then she darted away and locked both the doors, pulled down the window shade, and leaned back against the drainboard by the sink, panting. She had finished the dishes. There were just some pans on the drainboard. The aluminum was covered with little bright scratches from the sand soap she had been using on it.

She still seemed frightened; she was still panting.

“My Jiminy, Taxi!” she breathed. “Am I glad to see you? Ask me, am I glad to see you!”

He couldn't ask her that. He made a cigarette and went over and stood by the stove. She watched him, and then broke out:

“Talk to me, Taxi! Tell me something! What's happened to you?”

“Well,” said Taxi, “I've got my clothes all covered with spots. A lot of dust has happened to me.”

He smiled at her, but she made a gesture as though she wanted to wipe that smile out.

“What happened in the saloon? Was Jim Silver right? Did Pudge lay you out? Who did the shooting? Where did the gang take you? What did Larue do? Who else was there? Have you seen Jim Silver?
What
has been happening?”

“I've been out in the open air getting a sunburn,” said Taxi.

She folded her arms at that, and began to nod in a severely judicial manner.

Then she walked up close to him and stood there, examining his face with her eyes.

“Somebody's been beating your face off,” she said. “I know what an old bruise looks like.”

“Do you?” said Taxi.

“There's a big patch on the side of your head where the hair has hardly grown out at all. Is that where Pudge whanged you?”

He ran the delicate tips of his fingers over the place where Pudge had fitted his skull to the butt of the gun. He said nothing.

“Go on! Talk!” she urged.

“I've been having a rest cure,” said Taxi. “I've been lying out in the sun and having a rest cure.”

“Don't be such a great big man,” she commanded. “Break loose and tell me something. You don't have to be such a great big man when you're around me. The harder they are, the quicker they break. You look as though you'd been broken all to pieces, Taxi.”

He considered.

“No, I haven't been broken all to pieces,” he said.

“You won't talk, eh?” she demanded, backing up from him a little.

A queer alarm ran through him.

“Are you angry, Sally?” he asked her.

“Not very,” she said. “You have to act like a mug, I suppose. That's the way you see yourself and you have to act that way. But why don't you cut loose? There's no rope on you. Say something. Say you're glad to be back here in Sally's kitchen. Say anything.”

“I wanted to say that,” he answered.

“You wanted to say what?”

“Well, that I'm glad — ”

He hesitated. He felt that he was making a fool of himself, and he flushed.

“Well, I'll breeze along,” said Taxi.

After he had said that, he had to start for the door. He didn't want to go to the door, but what he had said compelled him. She got hold of his arm and pulled him around to face the light. Her violence startled him.

“You didn't come down here just to breeze along again in two seconds.
Why
did you come?” she demanded.

“I wanted to see you,” said Taxi, compelled to truth because he could think of nothing else to say.

“Are you being bright and smart?” she asked, half of herself. “No; he means it, partly. He's only part Indian, and the rest of him is almost human, tonight. What part of you is Indian, Taxi?”

“Indian?” he exclaimed.

He touched the black gloss of his hair, more startled than ever.

“I have no Indian blood,” he said.

She began to laugh.

“Why, you're only about four years old,” she told him. “No Indian, eh? No, because even an Indian does a little boasting
after
he's come in from the warpath. Stop being dark and secret. I'll tell you, it does my heart good to see you again!”

“Does it?” said Taxi. “Do you mean that?”

“Do I sound as if I'm just making conversation?” asked the girl.

“I'm glad of that,” said Taxi.

He looked up so that the black lashes no longer were a veil, and his pale, bright eyes burned against her own.

“It hit me all at once, up there in the hills to-day,” he said. “I was hungry for something. I found out that I was hungry to see you again. So I came down.”

She folded her arms again, and from that support raised one hand to her chin. Her head bowed. She studied him with an upward glance.

“What's this all about, Taxi?” she asked.

He said hastily: “I don't know. Nothing. I don't mean ‘nothing.' It's about you, I suppose. Isn't it all right?”

“It's not just a line,” she said aloud, but to herself. “He means it. Well, Taxi, you can go right ahead and talk like this as much as you want to. I like it. I like it a lot.”

“I don't know what to say,” said Taxi.

“Oh, no?” she asked.

“No,” said Taxi. “I feel like a fool. I don't know what to say.”

“If you can't talk, what do you want to do?” said the girl.

He considered. Then he answered: “I'd like to sit down there by the stove and watch you?”

“Would you?” said the girl. “Not wanting to step up and help me finish with the kitchen, are you?”

“No,” said he seriously. “I'd rather sit still and watch you. I've been remembering your face quite clearly, but not clearly enough. I was wrong about the mouth.”

“Were you?” said the girl.

“Yes. I thought it was too big.”

“It is,” she answered.

“I don't think so,” said he. “It looks about right to me. All of you looks about right to me.”

“What are you trying to do, Taxi? Make love to me?”

“Making love to you?” he exclaimed. “Love? Why, no. Look here, Sally. I wouldn't be that sort of a dog. You don't think that I'd be that sort of a dog, do you?”

He grew pale with anxiety. He came a little closer to her and, in the midst of making a gesture, found that he had taken hold of her hand. He said:

“I know what I am, and I suppose you guess what I am. I wouldn't be such a dog — to make love to a girl that's right. You don't think I'm that sort of a hound, do you, Sally?”

She kept peering at him earnestly, as though she were almost discovering something in the bright pallor of his eyes.

“I don't know what you are,” said the girl. “Tell me what you are, Taxi, will you?”

“You haven't guessed? I'm a yegg, Sally. Safe cracking is my business.”

“That ought to be a lot of fun,” said Sally.

“Whatever you do, I hope you won't laugh at me,” said Taxi sadly.

“I'm a mile and a half from laughing,” said the girl. “There's a whole mountain between me and a laugh.”

And straightway she was laughing. She stopped herself and studied his worried face for a moment.

“It doesn't make you sick to think of a yegg being in your house?” asked Taxi.

“I sort of like it,” said the girl. “What else are you?”

“A jailbird,” said Taxi.

“That goes with safe cracking. It always does,” she said. “It's about three weeks of safe cracking and three years in jail, isn't it, Taxi?”

He was silent. After all, she was not very far wrong. Something about her way of putting it made out Taxi and all other criminals mere fools, mere weak wits.

“Jail always for safe cracking?” she asked.

“No. They haven't caught me so often like that. But they try to run me up Salt Creek all the time. The cops want to frame me and run me up Salt Creek. That's why I've been in prison a lot. I beat the rap — but not entirely. I get a year or two out of it, for some reason or other.”

“What's Salt Creek?”

“The electric chair.”

“Ah?” said the girl.

He could see that that had struck her in the face.

“I'm saying the wrong things,” said Taxi. “I don't know how to talk to women. I won't talk any more.”

“You're saying the right things,” she told him. “How do they try to frame you?”

“They always call it murder,” said Taxi. “It's murder every time, according to the cops.”

“What's murder?”

“They're down on me,” said Taxi, “so they try to call it murder every time I drop a man.”

She took a breath. She seemed to need it.

“I'm a fool,” said Taxi. “I shouldn't talk like this. I won't talk any more.”

“Go on, go on!” she whispered. “I want to hear every word. Taxi, when you say — when you speak about dropping a man, you mean shooting — you mean killing a man?”

“You know,” said Taxi. “When somebody doublecrosses you. Then you go for him, of course.”

“Of course,” whispered the girl faintly.

“He knows you're after him. That's what makes the game.

“Game?” murmured the girl.

“You see, if he knows that you're coming, then he'll get his pals around him. He won't sleep. He'll be in hell, and he'll be ready night and day. You just let him hang on the tree and get ripe. After a while you go and pick him off.”

He laughed a little. His eyes went brightly into the past, remembering certain occasions.

She seemed to be cold. Even her voice trembled. Her eyes gave over narrowing and sharpening to pierce his mind and kept getting bigger and bigger.

“And then,” said Taxi, explaining, “after that happens a few times, you have some enemies. They'll always be gunning for you. Sometimes they think they have you. It means a fight. Besides, there are always some of the big fellows who try to arm in on a successful business like mine. If you don't give them a percentage, they start a pack of gunmen after you. When that happens, I try to dodge the gunmen and get at the big fellows. That's the best part of the game, when you get at the big fellows. But there's always trouble. If you get a big fellow, you do time. That's all there is to it. You do time.”

She began to shake her head.

“You're simply different, Taxi,” she said. “I've never met anybody like you. I want to ask you another thing. Jim Silver left Horseshoe Flat to find you. Did you see him?”

“I'm like the rest,” said Taxi mournfully. “They all told me the same thing. They all said that when I fell for a girl, I'd talk my head off.”

She waited as though she knew he would say more. Then he said, very tersely: