The Rangeland Avenger, Above the Law & Alcatraz (3 Wild West Adventures in One Edition). Max Brand
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pile of books upon a rudely made shelf. She took them down one by one. Here was the explanation of the bandit’s mixed English, sometimes almost scholarly and correct, but again full of Western vernacular. It was a cross between the slang of cowboy and mountaineer, and the vocabulary of the educated.
There were six volumes all told. The first she opened was Scott’s “Redgauntlet” which fell open at “Wandering Willie’s Tale.” Next came a volume of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies—“Othello,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” and “Hamlet”; “Gil Bias”; a volume of Poe’s verse, and another of Byron’s; and finally quaint old Mallory’s “Morte d’Arthur.”
“Can you beat it?” whispered Jerry to the blank wall. “And me—I haven’t read a single one of ‘em!”
How he had got them she could not imagine. Perhaps he took them with other loot from a stage. At any rate, they were here, and their presence made her strangely ill at ease.
There is a peculiar reverence for books in the minds of the most illiterate. It is a superstition which runs back to the days when the written word had to be copied by hand and a man was esteemed rich if he possessed three or four manuscripts. That legendary reverence grew almost to worship in the early Renaissance, and when the invention of John Fust finally brought literature within the grasp of the poorest man, the early respect still clung to ink and paper—clings to it today.
Of books Jerry knew little enough and consequently had the greater respect. In school she had gone as far as the “Merchant of Venice,” but blank verse was an impassable fence which stood between her and the dramatic action. When she started out on her own gay path through the world she found small time for reading and less desire. Books were all very well, and the knowledge which might be found in them was doubtless desirable, but for Jerry as unattainable as the shining limousines which purr down Fifth Avenue.
Her first impulse when she saw this little array of books was a blind anger, whose cause she could scarcely discover. It seemed as if the reading of those books had suddenly placed the bandit as far away from her as he was away from the law. But when the anger died away a tingling excitement followed.
Perhaps through these books she could gain the clue to the inner nature of Black Jim. If these were his only books he might be molded by the thoughts he found in them. Therefore, through them, she might gain a power over him which, in the end, would avail to bring her safely from the valley. With this purpose before her, Jerry formulated a plan of campaign.
She must in the first place win the liking of the bandit. When this was done all things would be possible, but she also knew that there was much work before her until this end could be accomplished. His gentleness had not deceived her. It was the velvet touch of the panther’s foot with the steel-sharp claws concealed.
Those claws would be out and at her throat the moment she attempted an escape, or even a rash movement. In the mean time she must work carefully, patiently, to win first his respect, and then, perhaps, his affection. It was dangerous to attempt this. Yet it was necessary, and once this was done much might be accomplished. Possibly she could persuade him to attempt flight with her. If so, there was a ghost of a chance that he might be able to fight off the rest of the bandits and take her away from the valley.
The eyes of Jerry brightened again with even this faint hope to urge her on; and all that day she did what she could, with her one hand, to clean and arrange the rooms. By nightfall she was utterly weary but expectant. The expectancy was vain.
Black Jim arrived long after dark, and she heard him moving about in the shed as he put up his roan. It was her signal to commence the cooking of supper. She waited with bated breath for his entrance and his shout of surprise when he saw the changes she had worked in a single day, but when he did come it was in silence. He gave no more heed either to her or her work than an Indian gives to his squaw.
Jerry fumed in quiet as long as she could. Then her plans and resolutions gave way before anger. She dropped a big pan, clattering to the floor. Black Jim, who sat near a lantern at a table, reading and calmly waiting for his meal, did not raise his head from his book.
“Say, Lord Algernon,” she cried, “wake up and slide your eye over this room! Am I your hired cook, maybe? Am I the scrubwoman at eight per?”
He let a vague and unseeing eye rove toward her, and was immediately lost in his book again. She repressed a slight desire to pick up the pan from the floor and hurl it at him.
“All right, deary,” she said, “go on dreaming this is a play, but the finale is going to take you off your feet. The silent treatment is okay for some, cutie, but if you keep it up on me, this show will turn out wilder than a night of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ down in New Orleans.”
She resumed her cooking in silence. Black Jim had not favored her with even a glance during this oration. That evening was a symbol of the days to come. He ate in silence, without thanks or regard to her. Apparently now that her wound was no longer troubling her greatly, his attitude was changed. She felt it was not that he was indifferent; she had simply vanished from his mind. He had cared for her hurt; he had warned her of the dangers she might find in the valley; he had armed her against them. Thereafter she ceased to exist in his mind, for his code was fulfilled.
She fumed and fretted under this treatment at first, and still attempted to follow out her original campaign of winning Black Jim to her side. In all respects she failed miserably. She attempted to read his books; the verse wearied her; the vulgarity of “Gil Blas” stopped her in twenty pages; she could not wade through the opening exchange of letters in “Redgauntlet.” Her mind turned back to Montgomery many times during the first ten days, but he never appeared and she quickly forgot him.
Black Jim was never at home during the day. He either rode out on the roan or else he went off on foot and returned at night with game, so that they never lacked meat. Cooking, short walks through the trees, endless silences, these things occupied the mind of Annie Kerrigan.
Yet she was not unhappy. She was of the nature which loves extremes, and to her own astonishment, growing every day, she discovered that the hush of the mountains filled her life even more than the clattering gaiety of the stage. Slight, murmuring sounds which would scarcely have reached her ear a month before, now came to her with meaning—the thousand faint stirs which never cease in the forest.
Heretofore she had never had a thought which she did not speak. Now she learned the most profound wisdom of all when the mind speaks to itself and the voice is still.
Whatever of the old restless activity remained in her found a vent in the ceaseless study of the bandit. She picked up a thousand clues little by little, but they all led in different directions. At the end of a month she felt that she was farther away from the truth than she had been at the first.
All that she really knew was what he had told her. He lived above the law. She knew him well enough to see that he was not a criminal because of hate for other men, or even because he loved the thrill of his night riding. He simply avoided that other world of men because it was a world where life was constrained by a thousand rules.
To her mind he was like a powerful and sinisterly beautiful beast of prey which hunts where it will through the forest, and when it is pressed in its haunts by man turns and strikes him down. She carried the animal metaphor still farther.
She saw it in his singular silence, which was not reticence, but the speechlessness of a man to whom words are of no use. She saw it most of all in the singularly fathomless eyes. They never mocked her. They were simply veils through which she could not look.
The face changes expression only because man lives among fellows, whom he wishes to read his emotions, his anger, his pleasure, his contempt. Therefore his features grow mobile.
Black Jim lived alone. When he was with men and wished to express an emotion he did not pause to express his will in anything save action. At first, when the endless chatter of La Belle Geraldine disturbed him of an evening, he simply rose and left the cabin to walk (through the woods. It was long before she understood why.
The clock which ticks out our lives