Crossroads (12 page)

A
fter he had dismounted before the jail at Double Bend,
Señor
Oñate approached the building slowly, enjoying every step of his progress. A sense of richness surpassing filled his heart. Life to him was a gleaming river of tequila against a pleasant background of Dolores and with a future rich in nameless possibilities of political power and personal wealth. He began to feel himself a man of destiny. The bright sun of the afternoon meant as much to him as Napoleon’s sun at Austerlitz. All things conspired to please him.

The jail, for instance, might have been designed by him in person for the incarceration of Dix Van Dyck. It had formerly been a store with wide adobe walls and a capacious cellar. The cellar was now used as the prison, while in the upper story were the guards and in one corner a saloon. In the cool gloom of the saloon he paused for a drink, then he went in search of the jailer.

The jailer, being politically dependent on Oñate, greeted his coming with chattering delight. Hearing that he wished to see Dix Van Dyck, he took up a lantern from the corner of the room and lighted it. He explained that he had received Sheriff Oñate’s request that the prisoner be made as uncomfortable as possible, and that he had lodged him in one of the two cells that had been dug out in a sort of subbasement—a place where little air filtered
through and where no ray of daylight entered. Sheriff Oñate grinned and nodded.

He followed his guide across the patio, down the first flight of stairs, and then they stopped before an iron-barred door. It was made of thick wood—oak, perhaps—and it sweated in the prison damp. The jailer produced a rusty key of unusual dimensions and, after much labor, managed to turn the creaking lock. When the door opened, the darkness of the interior seemed to roll out upon them like a palpable wave and with it came a faint, disagreeable taint on the air, partly of the underground, partly of that indefinably disagreeable odor of confined humanity.

The jailer raised the lantern above his head and, before entering the passage, peered into it. He was crouched, and there was about his whole bearing the suggestion of one entering a place of danger. Before he actually stepped into the damp gloom within, he loosened the revolver at his side and hitched his belt around so that it would be more convenient for the draw.

“I take no chances,” he explained to Oñate. “Suppose
Señor
Van Dyck breaks from his cell and lurks here behind the door, ready to spring on me as I enter. I shoot him down, and there is no more to do.”

“Has he tried to break out?” queried Oñate, adopting the undertone of his companion automatically.

“No,” answered the jailer, “but he sits thinking like a cheetah all day and all night, and, when the time comes, he will strike.”

“At least,” murmured Oñate, his chuckle marvelously reduced as though he feared that he might be overheard, “he has enough to think about.”

“
Señor
Oñate,” said the jailer with an answering chuckle, “will have seen to that.”

All this while they had been descending a steep and
circular flight of stairs cut into the hard, sweating ground—slippery underfoot. Now they came to the level bottom and stopped before a door of steel bars. The jailer raised his lantern high, and by that light Oñate saw a little cell hardly more than six feet by six feet. At one side of it, occupying fully half of the total floor space, was a raised wooden platform serving as a bed and a single blanket by way of bedding. On this platform sat a heavy-shouldered man with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. As the light struck him, he raised his head—very slowly—and turned toward the visitors.
Señor
Oñate sprang back with a little cry that turned into a curse.

“The bars,” he whispered anxiously to the jailer. “Will they hold when he springs at ’em?”

The jailer turned on the sheriff with an understanding smile.

He said at length: “I also used to feel that he would spring at the bars when he looked at me like this, but he has never sprung. No, he is hungry for a kill, but like the cheetah he sits there night and day, waiting till his hunger grows too great.”

“And then?” queried Oñate breathlessly.

“Then he will try the bars.”

“And…?”

“They will hold…and
Señor
Van Dyck will go mad.”

Oñate ran to the bars in a sudden wild exultation. He shook them as though he strove to tear them apart and get at the prisoner within.

“Hear?” he called, his voice sharpening almost to a scream. “Do you hear?
Americano
dog…coyote…swine…do you hear? When you try the bars, you will fail…and go mad…mad…mad! Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!”

He fell back from the bars, rubbing his plump palms
together. Then he turned to the jailer. “You may go. I will be alone with my friend Van Dyck.”

The jailer nodded, surrendered the lantern, and went rather hastily up the narrow flight of the stairs.

“And so,” went on Oñate, turning back to his victim, “this is the end of
Señor
Van Dyck…the man-killer? This is the end?”

The silence of the prisoner continued.

“It was I,” said Oñate, “who went to the governor, my friend the governor, and made him put the price on your head.
Made
him,
Señor
Van Dyck. Do you hear?
Made
him! It is I who put you here under the ground like a dog in the dark. It is I who have hired the witnesses to swear away your life when the trial comes. It is I who will be there in the death room when the trap is sprung, and Dix Van Dyck drops through. Do you hear? Do you think of that?”

The prisoner smiled. “I only think,” he said calmly, “of the feel of the throat of Vincente under my hands.”

“Ah!” groaned Oñate.

“Of the way my thumb sank in the hollow of his throat.”

“Dog…fiend!” gasped Oñate, and tore at the collar to loosen it around his fat throat.

“I felt him go limp,” said Van Dyck.

“I shall tell the jailer,” said Oñate. “There are many little attentions he can pay you.”

“His tongue popped out of his mouth like a jack-in-the-box,” went on Dix Van Dyck carelessly and in a meditative tone.

“I will have you tied hand and foot,” groaned Oñate, “and I will have them drop water on you…drop by drop…until you scream and beg me for mercy.”

“His eyes,” said Van Dyck, “pleaded with me. I laughed into his dying face.”

“Damn you!” screamed Oñate.

“I laughed…laughed…laughed!” repeated Van Dyck with slow emphasis.

The gun leaped from the hip of Oñate and poised in the dim light, wavering crazily.

“I shook him,” said Dix Van Dyck calmly, “as you’ve seen a dog shake a dead rat. Vincente…he looked very much like a dead rat.”

“Another word,” gasped Oñate, “and I blow your head off…and pump bullets into your body.”

“I shook him,” said Dix Van Dyck, “and then I threw the body into a corner of the bar room and laughed again.”

“Damn you!” breathed Oñate, and poised the gun, squinting his eye down the sights.

“Then I laughed as I laugh now at you,” said Dix Van Dyck, and he broke into deep, heavy laughter.

“What keeps me from shooting?” panted Oñate in a sort of dazed wonder.

“Your cowardly heart,” said Dix Van Dyck, “and the same fear that made your little brother, Vincente, drop on his knee before me and shriek for his life.”

The door creaked above them, and a man ran, stumbling, down the steps.

“
Señor
Oñate!” he called.

“Get out!” snarled the sheriff. “I’m busy.”

“Word from the governor!” answered the other and stood at the side of the sheriff. He was a Mexican, dusty as if from long and furious riding.

“Damn the governor!” answered Oñate after he had glanced at the face of the messenger. “I’m busy.”

“It is life and death,” muttered the messenger.

“Give it here.”

He snatched the letter, tore it open, and read. He had hardly scanned the first half-dozen words when the paper dropped, fluttering, to the floor, and Oñate reeled back against the wall. His face was the color of ashes
mixed with mud. The messenger, seizing him about the waist, would have supported the sheriff, but the fury of a madman gave Oñate super-human strength.

“Rather than that, I’ll finish you myself, Van Dyck…wolf…devil…swine!” he screamed. He leaped to the door of the cell and fired point blank at the prisoner.

I
t was not the riding alone that fatigued Jacqueline Boone, though she had been in the saddle fifteen hours with only a few short stops. It was the continued thirst that not only tormented her but so sapped the strength of the white stallion that he came haltingly up the last slope. She had determined either to turn to the right and go to Godfrey for water or else make a detour to the left, for somewhere among the hills she was sure that at this season of the year she would find a stream of snow water.

This trail was new to her. It was the old path, the straight line from Double Bend to the capital, but in recent years the town of Godfrey had grown up and now the main-traveled trail passed through that village. On that course she would have known exactly where to find water; on this new trail she was almost helpless. Fortune, however, served her at the very point when she was about to turn from the trail to the left and make her detour through the higher mountains, for she found a tiny pool, oozing from the side of the mountain at the very edge of the trail.

It was hardly a spring. Only a small quantity of water seeped through a little fissure on the mountain edge, draining a great gravel bed above, and even this small quantity of water would not have been available for drinking had it not providentially trickled into a depression hollowed, as
if purposely, in the top of a slab of rock. She checked her horse and the stallion, his ears flat back and his nostrils distended in the anguish of his thirst, made straight for the pool, but she drew the reins hard and surveyed the place.

Even here in the heart of the mountains her caution did not desert her. In a way it was a region to inspire caution, for a thousand men might have lurked within five hundred yards of her position and taken her hopelessly at a disadvantage. For a mile in either direction the valley made a perfect V, the cliffs on either side rough and straight at the tops and sloping more gradually at the bottom of the ravine. Down these slopes great boulders, detached perhaps by earthquakes, had rolled to every conceivable position. Behind these and behind the shrubs there were innumerable natural hiding places.

The eye of Jack swept the valley quickly and surely. For all her haste there was not a shrub or a boulder within easy range that she did not examine critically. Then she dismounted, and leaned over the pool. In the fever of her thirst she plunged her face into the water like a horse, and drank deeply with closed eyes. Raising her head to breathe, she kept her wet eyes closed and allowed the delicious coldness of the water to trickle down her throat. It was as she knelt there that a hand fell on her shoulder and something hard pressed against the center of her back. The muzzle of a gun, she knew.

She set her teeth but said calmly: “Well?”

“Stand up!” ordered a man’s voice.

She rose. Her revolvers were drawn from the holsters.

“Turn around.”

She turned and faced the most ominous pair she had ever laid eyes on in all her wild life among the mountains: the face of one round, gross, bestial and that of the other the opposite type of viciousness, thin, dark, hollow-cheeked,
as if a fire consumed the man within. The same fire shone in the eyes of both.

“Look in the saddlebags,” ordered the fatter and older of the two who seemed to be the commander.

The slender man moved instantly to the horse and opened the nearest bag.

“You’re wrong,” said the girl, “the money’s in my belt. You’re welcome to it. It’s a pretty stiff stake at that, but…come easy, go easy.”

She knew the ways of the lawless, and they love nothing so well as a graceful loser. The heavy-faced man, however, was not to be won.

“Shut your face,” he ordered. “Noony, look ’em through.”

It occurred to her that they might be looking for something other than money, but she shrugged the suspicion away. She had ridden far too fast to be overtaken. There was not a horse in the mountains that could have followed the pace of the white stallion even half the distance from the capital city to this point. She breathed easier. These could not be agents of Oñate or the governor. Noony was fumbling through the first bag.

“Nothing here, Lawton,” he called.

“Try the other, Noony,” answered Lawton. “Steady, there, I got my finger hard down on the trigger, my beauty, and I’ll blow you to hell as soon as you bat an eye!”

She had started but not because she was about to make a move of resistance. The freedom with which the men called each other by name was the thing that made her start. It worried her. Among the outlaws she had known, no one was called by name except when they were alone together. Even then, names were not popular. Nicknames were chiefly in use.

If they were so free to call each other by names before
her, it must mean that they had nothing to fear from her testimony against them. This absence of fear again argued only one thing. They meant to get rid of her. It drew the color down from her cheek, but she was calm enough to examine Noony carefully.

She saw it now in the peculiar, hungry steadiness of his eyes. They were fixed upon hers. They burned into her mind. She knew that it is hard for any human being to face the glance of another except when he is bent on destruction. That steady glance worried her to the heart. Only one thing sustained her courage and that, strangely enough, was the chill touch of the little cross that hung suspended from her throat beneath her dress. It was like the light pressure of a reassuring and omniscient hand.

“Here!” called Noony suddenly. “She’s got it, all right. It’s something from the governor. It’s going to Double Bend.”

The face of Lawton hardened swiftly, and he drew closer by inches to the girl until his revolver was almost touching her breast. In his eye the will to murder was now a flame.

“Read it out,” he said hoarsely, “and read it quick. I want to make sure before….”

Noony began to read. Before he was half through with the legal phraseology, the brow of Lawton began to contract, but this time it seemed more in wonder than in anger. When the article was finished, he asked: “What’d you get out of it, Noony?”

“What it says,” answered Noony. “This here paper pardons a gent named Dix Van Dyck for murderin’ a few Mexicans.”

“Murder?” said Lawton and stepped back from the girl a whole pace. “Murder?” he repeated, strangely moved. “And Mexicans?”

“That’s what it says,” nodded Noony, consulting the pardon again.

“This here Van Dyck,” said Lawton to the girl, and he scowled terribly at her, “where is he?”

“In the jail at Double Bend,” she answered steadily.

She heard him only faintly, so deeply was she concentrating on the touch of the little metal cross against her breast. She was wondering, dimly, how that strange power could free her now.

“Jail?” echoed Lawton, his former emotion shaking his voice again. “Jail, d’you say?”

“Sure,” broke in Noony. “How’d the old governor be sendin’ him a pardon if he wasn’t in jail?”

“Noony,” said Lawton in the same shaken voice, “you come here and take the drop on this girl…plug her if she moves. My hand ain’t no good jest now.”

Noony obediently crossed to them and leveled his revolver against the girl while Lawton fell back a little and mopped his forehead. The heat seemed on the point of overcoming him.

“Tell me, honest to God,” said Lawton, “what kind of a murderin’, no-good coyote is this here Van Dyck?”

“He ain’t murdered no one and he ain’t no good,” answered the girl hotly. “He’s never fired a shot that wasn’t in self defense.”

“Damn ’em…damn ’em all!” answered Lawton with rising warmth. “So Van Dyck’s in jail. In jail…all alone…with the shadows of the bars…. God!”

“Steady up!” said Noony sharply. “Ain’t you goin’ through with this little game, Bill?”

“Wait,” said Lawton. “I’m tryin’ to think. Jail! What’s he look like, girl?”

“He looks,” said Jack instantly, “like the kind of gent that could pull a gun and shoot his man. He looks like
the kind men like to have for a friend and hate like hell to have for an enemy. He looks like the kind that don’t never leave no trail he starts. That’s the kind he is. Big, ugly, with a steady eye.”

“Noony,” said Lawton, “is that kind of a gent to rot in jail and then get his neck stretched?”

“I dunno,” answered Noony uneasily. “Ain’t you goin’ to finish the game after you’ve played it this far?”

“Shut up!” commanded Lawton sharply. “I got a pile of thinkin’ to do. Girl,” he said, turning to Jack, “what you got ag’in me?”

“Nothin’,” she said calmly, “except that you were hard up and needed a stake. I’ve done some odd things myself, and I’ve seen a pile of odder ones done.”

“Who might you be?” asked Lawton, coming closer to her again.

“Have you heard of old Boone and his gang?” Jack asked.

“By God!” said Lawton reverently. “You ain’t Boone’s girl? You ain’t the girl they call Jack in these parts?”

“Right.”

“The one that packs the cross…that brings bad luck on everybody but yourself?”

“It’s that bad luck,” she said sadly, “that brought Dix Van Dyck to jail. Lawton, don’t you see, I’m tryin’ to break the luck of the cross.”

“Are we goin’ to stop her?” asked Lawton moodily. “Are we going to play yaller dog, Noony?”

“I’m broke,” said Noony sadly.

“My money belt’s full,” broke in Jack, “and you’re welcome to it. Consider it a gift…a stake, if you want. You’re welcome to it and no bones broke.”

Bill Lawton considered her with his keen scowl. “For a woman,” he said at last, “you look white, you talk white,
and…by God, I think you
are
white. But I don’t trust you none. Trust nothin’ that wears a skirt. I
know
.”

“Besides,” broke in Noony, “what about the big boss?”

Lawton started. “Him!” he said sharply. “Damn me, if I didn’t forget plumb all about the boss. Noony, what we goin’ to do?”

The girl listened and waited with her heart at her lips, but she was too wise in their ways to interrupt.

“I dunno,” said Noony. “You say and I’ll follow.”

“Jail,” muttered Lawton. “God!” He paused and then growled: “Bars in front of him. And him bein’ a big man and a strong man. I know what he’s feelin’. About this time of the day the long shadows of the bars is beginnin’ to crawl across the floor. All hell’s poppin’ loose in him. Noony, what’m I goin’ to do?”

“Hold her here. I’ll slide down into Godfrey and telephone the boss. Maybe he’ll find a way out.”

“Do that!” said Lawton with great relief. “I’ll take her down the valley to old Duffy’s shanty. Ride hard, Noony. And see if there ain’t some way out with the big boss. Noony, this hits me hard as hell.”