The Fugitive (12 page)

“But, after all,” he decided, “old Chris Martin won't give a hang about my looks. It's my bank account that he'll inquire after.”

He stepped to the door, and the hot wind rolled heavily against him. It burned up his perspiration in an instant; it scorched his body even through his clothes. But it was better than the stifling closeness of the atmosphere inside. He scowled, so that a steep shadow fell across his eyes, and, thus sheltered, he was able to look forth upon the landscape.

“Mostly flat,” he said to himself.

In truth, it was not a very attractive picture. There was just enough roll to the ground to spoil the grand effect of an absolute level plain standing away to the horizon, but there was not roll enough to give the comforting variety of hills. The surface was simply thrown into little waves one hundred yards apart—that was all. It looked to Willie Merchant as though that landscape had been turned out with a gigantic rolling pin. The only bit of mountain sculpture was the Diablo range to the south and west. They were a huge distance for riding, but the eye went to them so easily through the dry air that no tint of the horizon blue was on them in the midday.

They were simply big, brown, naked ugly masses, a poor monument to the Creator of this wretched country. Yet Willie Merchant surveyed the scene with much complacence—if in some respects it were ugly, in others it was delightful. For instance, that sunburned bunchgrass, withering still more in this hot wind, had the most astonishing nutritious properties. It fattened certain scores of wide-horned, redeyed cattle that roamed the desert, branded with a peculiar scrawl and cross. A most delightful hieroglyphic, in the eyes of Willie, because it meant that they were his property.

No wonder, then, that he looked fondly at that brown grass, and then away to a single form of a cow that strolled into the skyline across the top of a knoll and then disappeared. Only a fleeting glimpse. But he knew the creature. It was the four-year-old brindled mongrel among the half dozen he had bought for a song from Peterson last winter, when they were half starved. He had nursed them through the bad season almost by hand. Today five of the six were living and prospering. They were money in his pocket. By such shifts as these he had built up his little herd in the amazingly short time of two years. After all, he had not received the weight of a single hand to help him. It was all his own work. The only previous preparation had been the year he spent accumulating his pay. That saved cash, and then infinite labor to eke out his capital, had given him these returns.

So great were the returns that Willie Merchant lifted his brown face and smiled toward the white-hot sky; his ideas concerning a divinity were very vague, very less real than the wisps of cloud forms here and there that the sun had not yet been able to burn up. But to whatever God there were, he rendered up his thanks.

The house in which he lived was small, but it was his own. His own money had bought the remnants of old Sam Chandler's shack in the draw. How few dollars had been needed to persuade the whiskey-loving old scamp. His own labor had brought that lumber across the hills; his own uninstructed hands had, somehow, contrived to erect the shack. For two years he had struggled on, propping it, refitting it, making it finally ugly enough, but sound and strong. He rejoiced in the possession of three rooms. There was a kitchen-dining room. There was a bedroom. And there was another room more splendid than the others. He himself hardly knew what to call it. Surely it would be presumption to name it a parlor.

At the thought, he turned from the door and went to the front of the house and gingerly pulled open the door of the sealed chamber. The window was kept tightly shut lest sand and dust blow in. Accordingly the room was furnace hot, and the stinging smell of new varnish, half melted, came to the nostrils of Willie Merchant. But that he did not mind. What he looked at was the grass rug on the floor, embroidered with a brilliant Indian design, and two pictures on the wall that had been cut from magazines, but which looked well enough in neat frames, and, most of all, he regarded three great bundles wrapped in coarse cord and paper. The biggest was the rocking chair. The other two were straight. Willie regarded them with a leaping heart.
Her
hand was to cut the strings, remove the paper, and bring those chairs to use and the light of day.

She was pretty Jennie Martin, so gay and so happy that the only blot on her life was the freckles across the bridge of her nose. But Willie was blind to such small defects; to him she had seemed an angel, on a day, three years before. The sight of Jennie had made him begin his savings. The sight of her had made him toil and slave for two more years. Now, at the last, he was ready to marry her.

There was a single last hurdle to be jumped. Jennie herself was willing; she had told him so two months before. She had ridden to the ranch. She had inspected everything with cries of delight. She had nodded with a flushed, uncomprehending face of joy as he explained with magnificent gesture, how his little ranch would expand west and west toward the Diablo range, and how the cows would multiply. She had been escorted through two of the rooms of the house and had declared it was more than good enough to start housekeeping in. And to think that he himself had planned and executed this dwelling. How big and wise and strong he was. The heart of Willie ached to think of her words. And how she had teased and pleaded to be allowed to peek—one single glance, no more—into the sealed chamber. But he had been adamant. He had wondered at his own strength. In the end, when he took her home, she had cried for pure happiness into the hollow of his shoulder, and all the stars in heaven had seemed to look down upon Willie Merchant to bless their union.

Yet still there was one hurdle to cross, and that was to gain the consent of Chris Martin, her uncle. He had raised her. Therefore he had a right to speak as to her destiny in her years to come. What answer he would give was the great question now, and, although Willie Merchant could not imagine why he might be refused, yet no one could be sure of what old Chris would do. All the old-timers declared that his mind was as unreadable and whimsical as the mind of the Sphinx. Yet to Willie himself he had always seemed a kind and simple man, singular only from the fewness of his words.

There was no time to ponder now, however. So Willie picked rope and saddle from the wall and went out to the corral. The four horses began to swirl about when they saw him coming. It did not confuse Willie. He opened the gate, stepped inside, dropped the saddle upon the top rail of the fence, and with a single wrist movement shook out the noose of his rope. Then he advanced. It was the roan he wanted, the fiery, ugly-headed roan. He wanted to feel the strength of that indomitable little mustang under him on the way to town for the momentous interview. It would give his very mind greater power. So he sifted through the others, and let the three fly to the far corners of the corral. But the roan he cornered and advanced on tiptoe toward him, prepared to spring to either side. For the roan was rope-wise to a degree. And it could dodge like a house cat. In one hand Willie held the rope end, noosed. In the other hand he carried the real noose. When the roan plunged to one side, he feinted with the nearest hand, and the horse finally was backed into the corner, watching him with glittering little eyes of hate.

At length, desperate, the roan made a blind charge for freedom, neither to the right nor the left, but straight at Willie. Willie dodged like a bullfighter, just before those gaping teeth were in reach of him. The rope slithered out of his hand. The noose floated out, formed in a perfect circle above the roan, and then dropped around his neck. The roan stood still. He had been rope burned too many times not to surrender the instant that prickling coil had hold on him. He stood like a lamb while the master saddled him, and like the most well-trained saddle horse he cantered off when Willie Merchant had mounted him. Only his ears were flattened along his neck, and his little bloodshot eyes watched the rider from their corners. Someday that horse would make him trouble, but Willie never worried about the future.

He was in the presence of Martin before he even saw the old Tartar, for, when he entered the town, he was upon Martin's land. All the town and all the houses upon it belonged to the little czar of the district. There were twenty houses or shacks. They were all Martin's. There was a combination hotel and general merchandise store. It was Martin's. There was a blacksmith shop. It was Martin's. So were broad stretches of land outside the town and the cattle that grazed on them. All belonged to Martin. Perhaps he was not worth, actually, many hundreds of thousands of dollars. But he seemed to be richer than a millionaire, for, what he owned, he owned with an absolute right. The families that were his tenants were almost his slaves. They owed him money, and they were powerless in his grasp. But he never pressed his tenant debtors for the money they owed him. He gave them freely his keen, practical wisdom. There was not a man in his village who did not live in comfort. Yet they feared him, rather than loved him, for they knew that to differ with him was to be ruined. Rebellion he would not tolerate. In short, he was a tyrant. He was a kindly tyrant usually, but, when his fur was rubbed the wrong way, his claws were instantly out.

Willie Merchant could not help thinking of these things as he entered the town, and for every step his horse advanced, his heart sank lower. If the czar refused him, what would he do? What could he do?

 

His courage returned when he actually faced the great man. Old Chris kept a room in a corner of the hotel as his office. It was a most unpretentious place. It was up two flights of stairs, in the little corner room that was all that the third story consisted of. The stairs were unpainted, rickety, with the center of the boards hollowed out by the treading of many rough boots. The door of the office sagged upon one hinge. For three years old Chris had let it hang like that, lifting it carefully open, and shutting it again with equal caution. He used to say that he could read the character of a man by the fashion in which he opened and shut that door. The office itself was a heap of scraps and a little of odds and ends. Whatever old Chris found, he picked up; whatever he picked up, he saved.

Martin was dressed, when Willie Merchant found him, in a soft white shirt with a double stripe of blue and red lines running through the cloth. It had shrunk so that the collar and the sleeves were much too small for him. But he made short work of those hindrances. He cut off the sleeves at his fat elbows, and he left the collar unfastened. Such was the shirt of the great man; the rest of his costume consisted of a pair of old brown trousers, faded to a tan across the knees and the seat, and bagging beyond conception at the knees. They were held up by a single suspender, which was used out of preference and not carelessness. It crossed the left shoulder, and Chris used to say that this gave him a little more freedom in his right shoulder and arm. What he needed that slightly greater freedom for, need not be said. His boots, to complete his costume, were heavy, unpolished, shapeless things, and, most of all offensive to the eye of a cowpuncher like Willie Merchant, who would not have donned other than shop-made boots had he starved to buy them.

Martin was short and heavy without being wide of shoulder. He was simply very thick through. He had, in fact, a round build. His strength was enormous, but it was disguised even on his ponderous forearms by a thin layer of fat that was spread over the surface of his body. His muscles, indeed, showed at only one place, and this was at the base of the jaws, where a great permanent knob pushed out on either side, and, when he set his jaw, as he was continually doing, either in meditation or in anger, those knobs turned into corrugated knots. He had a rather pale face, for, much as he talked about the value of labor, he no longer touched any sort of work. His face showed fat and soft. The flesh under the chin was flabby. His nose was short and flattened a bit, like the nose of a pugilist. He had great, flapping ears, which thrust out on either side of his face, and which were even exaggerated in size by his habit of keeping his hair closely cropped. All of him, as might be seen at a glance, was extraordinarily commonplace, with one exception, and this was that he possessed a pair of those bright blue eyes that never falter, and which denote, without exception, a bull terrier courage, an indomitable will, and a cool, steady brain in all trials.

He sat with his chair tilted back and his cowhide boots resting on the face of his desk. That desk was piled with papers blackened with house dust and yellowed at the edges. They had lain there for years, with a bit of iron lying on the top of each pile. Those piles of paper were never touched. Perhaps they stood there to give the office an appearance of a lively industry. But the singular inertia of old Chris kept him from maintaining the bluff or removing it. The only vestige of recent industry consisted of certain handfuls of iron junk, red with rust, which he had recently picked up. His hands were red with the same rust; where he had rubbed the side of his face there now appeared what seemed to be a broad marking of dried blood.

All the drawers of his desk were stuck fast. They could not have been opened without a hammer and chisel and many wedges. That is, all were fast sealed by the warping of dry summers, with the exception of a single one. This was that in which old Chris kept his cigars. He had one expensive habit only. That was his choice of tobacco. Some said that on a time after prosperity came to him, he made a long trip to the West Indies, studied tobacco on the spot, and selected for himself a certain type of leaf of a certain type of tobacco; he even selected the maker who was to prepare the tobacco, and instructed him in the exact shape of the cigar he desired. It was a long fat cigar. Its color was a pale, yellow-brown. It was rolled very compactly, and, although it drew clearly, it made a slow smoke at the best, even for old Chris. It produced a long, black ash. That is to say, it was really a mottling of gray, but so much darker than an ordinary cigar that it seemed black. It was commonly supposed that old Chris spent his time in his office smoking steadily at these cigars and thinking of little other than the length to which he might draw out the ash of that particular smoke.