Bad Man's Gulch (13 page)

“What's in the Solomon Islands, Steve?” she asked him.

“They got their name after the king of them. He's an old bronco with a bald head and a white beard that comes down to the fat wrinkles in his waist.”

“Wrinkles in his waist?” she cried.

“He's bare to his middle,” said Steve Carney. “And he looks so much like Solomon must have looked that people call him King Solomon and the islands are the Solomon Islands.”

“Steve Carney!” she exclaimed. “What a thing to say! But what sort of people are there on the islands, really?”

“Cannibals, mostly.”

“Steve!” She threw up her hands, and he grinned and chuckled at her. “I don't believe that you were ever near the islands,” she declared.

“I was, though. The king and me was pals.”

“Did you really know him?”

“Of course I did. He gave me this for a souvenir the day I left.” He pulled out a long knife with a blade of beautiful steel, worked into wavy curves, a marvelous and a dreadful weapon. It was fitted with a hilt of antique gold work and set with a multitude of small pearls to roughen the handle.

“Why, it must be worth a lot, Steve.”

“He would've given me more than that. He wanted to give me a couple of his wives, Sue. All I would have to do the rest of my life was to lie on the flat of my back under a palm tree while one wife waved the flies away with a branch and the other fed me coconuts.”

“Every word is made up. Why should he want to do so much for you?”

“Because I brought in more than any missionary ever did.”

“You mean you gave him something?”

“Yep. Something that keeps all the natives busy every evening.”

“What was it?”

“Dice,” said the incorrigible.

They laughed together over this.

“Did you like it?”

“It was a good place to swim,” said Steve thoughtfully. “But I got lonely there.”

“You're never lonely, Steve. You make company wherever you go. I've heard a hundred men say that.”

“Men are the small half of things, Sue. I was lonely for a girl, d'you see? A girl back here in the mountains.”

She was hushed with interest. One did not readily imagine the unconquerable Steve Carney falling in
love. It was very, very strange. She lowered her voice as she asked: “Does she live near Derby?”

He thought a moment: “Pretty near,” he said at last, nodding.

“Steve! Do I know her?”

“I think you do, pretty well.”

“But what's her name, Steve?”

“Sort of an ordinary name. It's Sue.”

She started; she stared. But no, this could not be, and his blue eye was fastened upon her with a perfect indifference, a perfect gravity.

“Really? Sue? I don't know anybody else by that name, I think. What's her last name, Steve?”

“Her last name is Markham.”

“Stupid!” she cried, growing very red. “I was an idiot not to see . . . you'll never stop your joking, Steve!”

“Does it sound like a joke?”

“A mighty poor one.”

“Ah,” he said, “
I
think it's a mighty poor joke. But if you'd take it more serious and sort of let it trickle into the insides of you . . . would it be so bad?”

He made no effort to touch her, or even to lean closer to her. There was nothing of the melted calf in his eyes. They were as bright, as cold, as blue as ever. But all of the sardonic mirth was gone from around his mouth. He became, for the moment, nothing of the mischievous boy, but all man, eager, purposeful.

“I've only seen you a few times, Sue,” he said. “And still we know each other pretty well, I guess. I know you. God understands that there ain't much that's hard to read in you. It's all clear as a crystal. And you know one half of me. The whole world does. That's the bad half. I never sneaked behind corners and tried to hide myself. I let them see me the way that I am. Well, Sue, there's something in
me besides the fool and the cardsharper. I've been playing, you understand? While Dad was living, I had to work hard for him. He wanted to see me get on. He wanted to see me advance a lot. He wanted to see me talk book English and lead my classes and get to be a lawyer or something indoors and soft-handed, like that. His idea of a gentleman was spats and a cane.

“Well, I swallered what was really in me till he died. Then it all busted out. I didn't even know that it was there. But I would have exploded, I think. I had to break loose. I
did
break loose. I've been run-nin' around ever since. Well, finally I'm through with my fling. I've made a little pile. A good many thousands, Sue. I got it here with me. Someday I want you to count it. I got enough here to settle down to some kind of business. I don't care what, so long as it keeps me up here in the mountains, you see? Y'understand, Sue? I don't want you to say a thing now. But if you don't mind, put this thought in your pocket and, when I'm gone, take it out and look it over. Maybe you'll take it more serious. Then in a couple of days, I'll come back and talk to you again. Most likely you'll say . . . ‘It's a bad idea, I'm afraid. I could never love you, Steve.' Well, I'll not cry. But whatever happens, I know that you ain't gonna laugh at me or talk about me behind my back. That's why I could come straight to you and talk out without no dodging around corners. I'd hate to do that. A fellow has to do what they want. He has to laugh when they want to laugh. He has to dance when they want to dance, and sit down when they want to sit. He pleases them till he gets 'em under lock and key, and, after that,
they
got to do the step-pin' around. But, Sue, if you was ever to come into
my house, you and me would be partners fair and square. Well, so long.”

He stood up; he raised his hat. But presently he came back from the door to where she was tracing invisible patterns on the surface of the counter with the tip of her finger.

“About the way that I've been roaming around,” he said. “I've done some pretty bad things. The money I've got in my pocket is gambled money. But I've taken my chances fair and square. I've never beat a man out of a penny with crooked cards, no matter what they say about me. And, Sue, if you was to ask me, serious, I'd tell you every step I've taken since I first left Derby . . . every step!”

With that, he walked out of the lunch counter and was whistling and turning up the collar of his coat as she watched him dimly through the frosted windowpane working his way down the street against a half gale.

He was gone, but his work remained behind him. It seemed to the girl that the four walls of the room had been broken out, and that her eye now roamed across the world through a vast perspective, seeing all things clearly, heart and body and soul. She roamed in spirit as Steve Carney had roamed. She did not know whether or not she loved him; she
did
know that his frank homage made her feel like a queen.

In such times, women cannot think. They can only pass pictures through their minds, and compare them, feature by feature. So it was with Sue Markham. The keen, handsome face of Steven Carney she kept, as it were, in the one eye, and the dark and honest countenance of Jack Hopper arose in the other. But Jack Hopper could maintain that comparison for a very instant only. Then he faded, truly, into nothingness, and never again could his eyes trouble the eyes of Sue.

She knew it with a little shudder. For Jack Hopper, during these recent years, had been looming larger and larger upon her mental horizon, walking big upon her mind, like a figure with a low sun behind it. He had cast the shadow of his presence about her feet like fate, and she had been on the point of surrendering to him, not because she loved him, but because she felt, oddly, that he deserved this and more—that she was honored unduly by the love of such a man. He had a right to a good home. If he chose her to make it, she must not resist his will. For six months, now, she had known that, if he
asked her to be his wife, she would have to say yes. She had never seen him without the dread of that approaching moment falling upon her.

But now the danger was gone. Jack Hopper did not exist, and the fire in the clear, steady eyes of the gambler was the thing that had banished him. For that, she was grateful to Steven. She cast about her for a second figure by which she should compare Steve Carney with that which her soul demanded of a man. And of all the scores who had met her and known her and flirted with her, some gaily, some sadly, some sternly, there was only one, she found, who had stepped far enough past the gates of her heart to be worth the counting. To her own astonishment, it was the face and the form of Billy Angel who arose in her mind's eye, now, to be contrasted, little by little, with Steve Carney himself. It was the big man who lay in her room at this very moment.

It staggered her, this revelation of herself. It was as though she had turned the corner of a familiar street and found that a palace or a pit was revealed in the well-known path before her. So was it to Sue Markham, finding this unsuspected thing in herself.

Yes, there was Billy Angel strongly entrenched in her imagination. His bold, black eyes looked keenly back to her, looked cruelly back to her, looked with a scorn and with a mockery, so it seemed, that made a little flush of anger rise to her face. It could not be, indeed. She could never seriously consider this brute.

Yet, in spite of herself, she must. She closed her eyes. If Billy Angel had sat before her at the counter and spoken to her as Steven Carney had done, what would she have answered? She could not tell. But of this she was certain, that she could not have maintained perfect silence, as she had done with Steve. She would have been too much afraid of him.

She went up to her room to see the man face to face, and to convince herself that there was nothing godlike about him—that there was only a great physical strength in the man—that and no more. When she entered, she found that he was seated before her mirror, shaving himself. By that, she knew that he had been prying through her effects until he had come, at last, to the little old chest in the closet where the last mementoes of her father were kept and, among other things, this old, horn-handled razor.

She flushed and bit her lip with shame and anger. As though, indeed, the search of Billy Angel could have revealed something shameful concerning herself—as though that search of his hands could have given him too great an insight into the hidden corners of her very mind.

He was only half shaven. He turned to her, looked at her in silence, and then faced the glass again, intent upon his work. It was as though she were not in the room! There was no apology for the thing that he had done, unforgivable and crude as that had been. He took it for granted—took everything for granted—as he had done since the first moment when she brought him to succor.

She had read, somewhere, of kings who performed their very toilet in public—to whose dressing and undressing great nobles lent their reverent attention and their silent interest. The big-backed man in front of the mirror was like that. He proceeded with his work as though there were nothing better or more absorbingly worthwhile for her to do than to stand patiently by and watch him.

She flushed again; again she bit her lip. He was humming as he worked. Then he paused to wipe some of the lather from the razor blade on a bit of
paper. Without turning to her, he said: “D'you know that song?”

“I never heard it before.”

“Sam Curran brought it up from Mexico. I dunno what it means, either. But it's a funny lingo, eh? And a funny tune.”

She had never seen him so gay and so communicative.
Now,
she thought to herself,
I shall draw from him all of the colors out of which I shall draw a picture of him so black that I shall never again be troubled comparing him with that wild and knightly spirit, Steven Carney!
“What Curran is that?” she asked.

“You must have heard of him. He was pretty well known, I guess, before he died.”

“How did he die?”

“Hank Lang got him in a wheat field down in the valley and killed him with a load of buckshot. You remember?”

“I remember. Did you know him, Billy?”

“Know him? I'd tell a man. He was a friend of mine. He taught me how to use a knife.” With that, he puffed out his upper lip, and began the critical work of running the razor edge over the curved, stiff surface. But all her blood had turned to ice. That he should have dared to mention such a thing—he the murderer—he the man who had stabbed the son of his benefactor in the back with a knife!

“Curran,” she said, “murdered Chuck Marshall?”

The big man nodded. His answer was half stifled, for the shaving still went on. Nothing could have been more noncommittal than his tone. “He done it on a bet. It was easy, I guess.”

She went to the window and looked out. She dared not face this man for fear some of her anger and her disgust should appear in her eyes. So she
looked forth upon the world, playing with the string of the window shade and aware that Billy Angel had cleansed the blade of the razor again and that he was now stropping it upon the large, pale palm of his hand. How white it seemed—how soft. Yet she knew that hand could be iron, filled with the strength of a giant. And the old fear thrilled through her, the half terrible, half delightful fear.

“Billy Angel!” she cried. And she whipped around upon him. He did not turn. Only, in the mirror, she could see him lift his lordly brows a little.

“Well?” he said.

She swallowed her fury. “Nothing,” she said, and turned hastily back to the window.

Now, in a stroke, he finished the shaving. He had been going slowly ahead with it, the moment before. Each bit of the work had seemed to require the utmost care and patience. It had been like sculptor's work when the outer shell of stone is off, and he is working near the very flesh of his subject. But now, at his will, without the slightest hurry, but with a certain large ease, the shaving was finished—in a gesture, so to speak.