Max Brand (3 page)

The girl turned in her chair and directly faced him, and he saw that she
moved her whole body just as she moved her hand, swiftly, but without a
jerk; she considered him gravely.

"Lonely?" she inquired. "Or worried?"

She spoke with such a commonplace intonation that one might have thought
it her business to attend to loneliness and worries.

"As a matter of fact," answered Ben Connor, instinctively dodging the
direct query, "I've been wondering how they happened to stick a
number-one artist on this wire.

"I'm not kidding," he explained hastily. "You see, I used to jerk
lightning myself."

For the first time she really smiled, and he discovered what a rare
thing a smile may be. Up to that point he had thought she lacked
something, just as the white dress lacked a touch of color.

"Oh," she nodded. "Been off the wire long?"

Ben Connor grinned. It began with his lips; last of all the dull gray
eyes lighted.

"Ever since a hot day in July at Aqueduct. The Lorrimer Handicap on the
11th of July, to be exact. I tossed up my job the next day."

"I see," she said, becoming aware of him again. "You played Tip-Top
Second."

"The deuce! Were you at Aqueduct that day?"

"I was here—on the wire." He restrained himself with an effort, for a
series of questions was Connor's idea of a dull conversation. He merely
rubbed his knuckles against his chin and looked at her wistfully.

"He nipped King Charles and Miss Lazy at the wire and squeezed home by a
nose—paid a fat price, I remember," went on the girl. "I suppose you
had something down on him?"

"Did a friend of yours play that race?"

"Oh, no; but I was new to the wire, then, and I used to cut in and
listen to everything that came by."

"I know. It's like having some one whisper secrets in your ear, at
first, isn't it? But you remember the Lorrimer, eh? That was a race!"

The sounder stopped chattering, and by an alternation in her eyes he
knew that up to that moment she had been giving two-thirds of her
attention to the voice of the wire and the other fraction to him; but
now she centered upon him, and he wanted to talk. As if, mysteriously,
he could share some of the burden of his unrest with the girl. Most of
all he wished to talk because this office had lifted him back to the old
days of "lightning jerking," when he worked for a weekly pay-check. The
same nervous eagerness which had been his in that time was now in this
girl, and he responded to it like a call of blood to blood.

"A couple of wise ones took me out to Aqueduct that day: I had all that
was coming to me for a month in my pocket, and I kept saying to myself:
'They think I'll fall for this game and drop my wad; here's where I fool
'em!'"

He chuckled as he remembered.

"Go on," said the girl. "You make me feel as if I were about to make a
clean-up!"

"Really interested?"

She fixed an eager glance on him, as though she were judging how far she
might let herself go. Suddenly she leaned closer to Connor.

"Interested? I've been taking the world off the wire for six years—and
you've been where things happen."

"That's the way I felt at Aqueduct when I saw the ponies parade past the
grand stand the first time," he nodded. "They came dancing on the bitt,
and even I could see that they weren't made for use; legs that never
pulled a wagon, and backs that couldn't weight. Just toys; speed
machines; all heart and fire and springy muscles. It made my pulse jump
to the fever point to watch them light-foot it along the rail with the
groom in front on a clod of a horse. I felt that I'd lived the way that
horse walked—downheaded, and I decided to change."

He stopped short and locked his stubby fingers together, frowning at her
so that the lines beside his mouth deepened.

"I seem to be telling you the story of my life," he said. Then he saw
that she was studying him, not with idle curiosity, but rather as one
turns the pages of an absorbing book, never knowing what the next moment
will reveal or where the characters will be taken.

"You want to talk; I want to hear you," she said gravely. "Go ahead.
Besides—I don't chatter afterward. They paraded past the grand stand,
then what?"

Ben Connor sighed.

"I watched four races. The wise guys with me were betting ten bucks on
every race and losing on red-hot tips; and every time I picked out the
horse that looked good to me, that horse ran in the money. Then they
came out for the Lorrimer. One of my friends was betting on King Charles
and the other on Miss Lazy. Both of them couldn't win, and the chance
was that neither of them would. So I looked over the line as it went by
the stand. King Charles was a little chestnut, one of those long fellows
that stretch like rubber when they commence running; Miss Lazy was a
gangling bay. Yes, they were both good horses, but I looked over the
rest, and pretty soon I saw a rangy chestnut with a white foreleg and a
midget of a boy up in the saddle. 'No. 7—Tip-Top Second,' said the wise
guy on my right when I asked him; 'a lame one.' Come to look at him
again, he was doing a catch step with his front feet, but I had an idea
that when he got going he'd forget all about that catch and run like the
wind. Understand?"

"Just a hunch," said the girl. "Yes!"

She stepped closer to the counter and leaned across it. Her eyes were
bright. Connor knew that she was seeing that picture of the hot day, the
crowd of straw hats stirring wildly, the murmur and cry that went up as
the string of racers jogged past.

"They went to the post," said Connor, "and I got down my bet—a hundred
dollars, my whole wad—on Tip-Top Second. The bookie looked just once at
me, and I'll never forget how his eyebrows went together. I went back to
my seat."

"You were shaking all over, I guess," suggested the girl, and her hands
were quivering.

"I was not," said Ben Connor, "I was cold through and through, and never
moved my eyes off Tip-Top Second. His jockey had a green jacket with two
stripes through it, and the green was easy to watch. I saw the crowd go
off, and I saw Tip-Top left flat-footed at the post."

The girl drew a breath. Connor smiled at her. The hot evening had
flushed his face, but now a small spot of white appeared in either
cheek, and his dull eyes had grown expressionless. She knew what he
meant when he said that he was cold when he saw the string go to the
post.

"It—it must have made you sick!" said the girl.

"Not a bit. I knew the green jacket was going to finish ahead of the
rest as well as I knew that my name was Ben Connor. I said he was left
at the post. Well, it wasn't exactly that, but when the bunch came
streaking out of the shoot, he was half a dozen lengths behind. It was a
mile and an eighth race. They went down the back stretch, eight horses
all bunched together, and the green jacket drifting that half dozen
lengths to the rear. The wise guys turned and grinned at me; then they
forgot all about me and began to yell for King Charles and Miss Lazy.

"The bunch were going around the turn and the two favorites were
fighting it out together. But I had an eye for the green jacket, and
halfway around the turn I saw him move up."

The girl sighed.

"No," Connor continues, "he hadn't won the race yet. And he never should
have won it at all, but King Charles was carrying a hundred and
thirty-eight pounds, and Miss Lazy a hundred and thirty-three, while
Tip-Top Second came in as a fly-weight eighty-seven pounds! No horse in
the world could give that much to him when he was right, but who guessed
that then?

"They swung around the turn and hit the stretch. Tip-Top took the curve
like a cart horse. Then the bunch straightened out, with King Charles
and Miss Lazy fighting each other in front and the rest streaking out
behind like the tail of a flag. They did that first mile in 1.38, but
they broke their hearts doing it, with that weight up.

"They had an eighth to go—one little measly furlong, with Tip-Top in
the ruck, and the crowd screaming for King Charles and Miss Lazy; but
just exactly at the mile post the leaders flattened. I didn't know it,
but the man in front of me dropped his glasses and his head. 'Blown!' he
said, and that was all. It seemed to me that the two in front were
running as strongly as ever, but Tip-Top was running better. He came
streaking, with the boy flattening out along his neck and the whip going
up and down. But I didn't stir. I couldn't; my blood was turned to ice
water.

"Tip-Top walked by the ruck and got his nose on the hip of King Charles.
Somebody was yelling behind me in a squeaky voice: 'There is something
wrong! There's something wrong!' There was, too, and it was the
eighty-seven pounds that a fool handicapper had put on Tip-Top. At the
sixteenth Miss Lazy threw up her head like a swimmer going down and
dropped back, and Tip-Top was on the King's shoulder. Fifty yards to the
finish; twenty-five—then the King staggered as if he'd been hit between
the ears, and Tip-Top jumped out to win by a neck.

"There was one big breath of silence in the grand stand—then a groan. I
turned my head and saw the two wise guys looking at me with sick grins.
Afterward I collected two thousand bucks from a sicker looking bookie."

He paused and smiled at the girl.

"That was the 11th of July. First real day of my life."

She gathered her mind out of that scene.

"You stepped out of a telegraph office, with your finger on the key all
day, every day, and you jumped into two thousand dollars?"

After she had stopped speaking her thoughts went on, written in her
eyes.

"You'd like to try it, eh?" said Ben Connor.

"Haven't you had years of happiness out of it?"

He looked at her with a grimace.

"Happiness?" he echoed. "Happiness?"

She stepped back so that she put his deeply-marked face in a better
light.

"You're a queer one for a winner."

"Sure, the turf is crowded with queer ones like me."

"Winners, all of 'em?"

His eye had been gradually brightening while he talked to her. He felt
that the girl rang true, as men ring true, yet there was nothing
masculine about her.

"You've heard racing called the sport of kings? That's because only
kings can afford to follow the ponies. Kings and Wall Street. But a
fellow can't squeeze in without capital. I've made a go of it for a
while; pretty soon we all go smash. Sooner or later I'll do what
everybody else does—put up my cash on a sure thing and see my money go
up in smoke."

"Then why don't you pull out with what you have?"

"Why does the earth keep running around the sun? Because there's a pull.
Once you've followed the ponies you'll keep on following 'em. No hope
for it. Oh, I've seen the boys come up one after another, make their
killings, hit a streak of bad luck, plunge, and then watch their
sure-thing throw up its tail in the stretch and fade into the ruck."

He was growing excited as he talked; he was beginning to realize that he
must make his break from the turf now or never. And he spoke more to
himself than to the girl.

"We all hang on. We play the game till it breaks us and still we stay
with it. Here I am, two thousand miles away from the tracks—and sending
for dope to make a play! Can you beat that? Well, so-long."

He turned away gloomily.

"Good night, Mr. Connor."

He turned sharply.

"Where'd you get that name?" he asked with a trace of suspicion.

"Off the telegram."

He nodded, but said: "I've an idea I've been chattering to much."

"My name is Ruth Manning," answered the girl. "I don't think you've said
too much."

He kept his eyes steadily on her while he shook hands.

"I'm glad I know some one in Lukin," said Connor. "Good night, again."

When Connor wakened the next morning, after his first impression of
blinding light, he closed his eyes and waited for the sense of unhappy
doom which usually comes to men of tense nerves and active life after
sleep; but, with slow and pleasant wonder, he realized that the old
numbness of brain and fever of pulse was gone. Then he looked up and
lazily watched the shadow of the vine at his window move across the
ceiling, a dim-bordered shadow continually changing as the wind gathered
the leaves in solid masses and shook them out again. He pored upon this
for a time, and next he watched a spider spinning a web in the corner;
she worked in a draft which repeatedly lifted her from her place before
she had fastened her thread, and dropped her a foot or more into space.
Connor sat up to admire the artisan's skill and courage. Compared to men
and insects, the spider really worked over an abyss two hundred feet
deep, suspended by a silken thread. Connor slipped out of bed and stood
beneath the growing web while the main cross threads were being
fastened. He had been there for some time when, turning away to rub the
ache out of the back of his neck, he again met the contrast between the
man of this morning and the man of other days.

This time it was his image in the mirror, meeting him as he turned. That
deep wrinkle in the middle of the forehead was half erased. The lips
were neither compressed nor loose and shaking, and the eye was calm—it
rested him to meet that glance in the mirror.

A mood of idle content always brings one to the window: Connor looked
out on the street. A horseman hopped past like a day shadow, the
hoofbeats muffled by thick sand, and the wind, moving at an exactly
equal pace, carried a mist of dust just behind the horse's tail.
Otherwise there was neither life nor color in the street of
weather-beaten, low buildings, and the eye of Connor went beyond the
roofs and began to climb the mountains. Here was a bald bright cliff,
there a drift of trees, and again a surface of raw clay from which the
upper soil had recently slipped; but these were not stopping
points—they were rather the steps which led the glance to a sky of pale
and transparent blue, and Connor felt a great desire to have that sky
over him in place of a ceiling.