The Essential Max Brand - 29 Westerns in One Edition. Max Brand
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to me, Ruth Tolliver: If you was to live a thousand years, and the gent with the smile was to keep going for two thousand, it’d never come about that he could ever marry you.”
She shook her head, still watching him as from a distance.
“If I’ve crossed the country and followed a hard trail and come here tonight and stuck my head in a trap, as you might say, for the sake of a gent like Bill Gregg—fine fellow though he is—what d’you think I would do to keep a girl like you from life-long misery?”
And he dwelt on the last word until the girl shivered.
“It’s what it means,” said Ronicky Doone, “life-long misery for you. And it won’t happen—it can’t happen.”
“Are you mad—are you quite mad?” asked the girl. “What on earth have I and my affairs got to do with you? Who are you?”
“I dunno,” said Ronicky Doone. “I suppose you might say I’m a champion of lost causes, lady. Why have I got something to do with you? I’ll tell you why: Because, when a girl gets past being just pretty and starts in being plumb beautiful, she lays off being the business of any one gent—her father or her brother—she starts being the business of the whole world. You see? They come like that about one in ten million, and I figure you’re that one, lady.”
The far away smile went out. She was looking at him now with a sort of sad wonder. “Do you know what I am?” she said gravely.
“I dunno,” said Ronicky, “and I don’t care. What you do don’t count. It’s the inside that matters, and the inside of you is all right. Lady, so long as I can sling a gun, and so long as my name is Ronicky Doone, you ain’t going to marry the gent with the smile.”
If he expected an outbreak of protest from her he was mistaken. For what she said was: “Ronicky Doone! Is that the name? Ronicky Doone!” Then she smiled up at him. “I’m within one ace of being foolish and saying—But I won’t.”
She made a gesture of brushing a mist away from her and then stepped back a little. “I’m going down to see the man with the smile, and I’m going to tell him that Harry Morgan is not in his room, that he didn’t answer my knock, and then that I looked around through the house and didn’t find him. After that I’m coming back here, Ronicky Doone, and I’m going to try to get an opportunity for you to talk to Caroline Smith.”
“I knew you’d change your mind,” said Ronicky Doone.
“I’ll even tell you why,” she said. “It isn’t for your friend who’s asleep, but it’s to give you a chance to finish this business and come to the end of this trail and go back to your own country. Because, if you stay around here long, there’ll be trouble, a lot of trouble, Ronicky Doone. Now stay here and wait for me. If anyone taps at the door, you’d better slip into that closet in the corner. Will you wait?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll trust me?”
“To the end of the trail, lady.”
She smiled at him again and was gone.
Now the house was perfectly hushed. He went to the window and looked down to the quiet street with all its atmosphere of some old New England village and eternal peace. It seemed impossible that in the house behind him there were —
He caught his breath. Somewhere in the house the muffled sound of a struggle rose. He ran to the door, thinking of Ruth Tolliver at once, and then he shrank back again, for a door was slammed open, and a voice shouted— the voice of a man: “Help! Harrison! Lefty! Jerry!”
Other voices answered far away; footfalls began to sound. Ronicky Doone knew that Harry Morgan, his victim, had at last recovered and managed to work the cords off his feet or hands, or both.
Ronicky stepped back close to the door of the closet and waited. It would mean a search, probably, this discovery that Morgan had been struck down in his own room by an unknown intruder. And a search certainly would be started at once. First there was confusion, and then a clear, musical man’s voice began to give orders: “Harrison, take the cellar. Lefty, go up to the roof. The rest of you take the rooms one by one.”
The search was on.
“Don’t ask questions,” was the last instruction. “When you see someone you don’t know, shoot on sight, and shoot to kill. I’ll do the explaining to the police—you know that. Now scatter, and the man who brings him down I’ll remember. Quick!”
There was a new scurry of footfalls. Ronicky Doone heard them approach the door of the girl’s room, and he slipped into the closet. At once a cloud of soft, cool silks brushed about him, and he worked back until his shoulders had touched the wall at the back of the closet. Luckily the enclosure was deep, and the clothes were hanging thickly from the racks. It was sufficient to conceal him from any careless searcher, but it would do no good if any one probed; and certainly these men were not the ones to search carelessly.
In the meantime it was a position which made Ronicky grind his teeth. To be found skulking among woman’s clothes in a closet—to be dragged out and stuck in the back, no doubt, like a rat, and thrown into the river, that was an end for Ronicky Doone indeed!
He was on the verge of slipping out and making a mad break for the door of the house and trying to escape by taking the men by surprise, when he heard the door of the girl’s room open.
“Some ex-pugilist,” he heard a man’s voice saying, and he recognized it at once as belonging to him who had given the orders. He recognized, also, that it must be the man with the sneer.
“You think he was an amateur robber and an expert prize fighter?” asked Ruth Tolliver.
It seemed to Ronicky Doone that her voice was perfectly controlled and calm. Perhaps it was her face that betrayed emotion, for after a moment of silence, the man answered.
“What’s the matter? You’re as nervous as a child tonight, Ruth?”
“Isn’t there reason enough to make me nervous?” she demanded. “A robber —Heaven knows what—running at large in the house?”
“H’m!” murmured the man. “Devilish queer that you should get so excited all at once. No, it’s something else. I’ve trained you too well for you to go to pieces like this over nothing. What is it, Ruth?”
There was no answer. Then the voice began again, silken-smooth and gentle, so gentle and kindly that Ronicky Doone started. “In the old days you used to keep nothing from me; we were companions, Ruth. That was when you were a child. Now that you are a woman, when you feel more, think more, see more, when our companionship should be like a running stream, continually bringing new things into my life, I find barriers between us. Why is it, my dear?”
Still there was no answer. The pulse of Ronicky Doone began to quicken, as though the question had been asked him, as though he himself were fumbling for the answer.
“Let us talk more freely,” went on the man. “Try to open your mind to me. There are things which you dislike in me; I know it. Just what those things are I cannot tell, but we must break down these foolish little barriers which are appearing more and more every day. Not that I mean to intrude myself on you every moment of your life. You understand that, of course?”
“Of course,” said the girl faintly.
“And I understand perfectly that you have passed out of childhood into young womanhood, and that is a dreamy time for a girl. Her body is formed at last, but her mind is only half formed. There is a pleasant mist over it. Very well, I don’t wish to brush the mist away. If I did that I would take half that charm away from you—that elusive incompleteness which Fragonard and Watteau tried to imitate, Heaven knows with how little success. No, I shall always let you live your own life. All that I ask for, my dear, are certain meeting places. Let us establish them before it is too late, or you will find one day that you have married an old man, and we shall have silent dinners. There is nothing more wretched than that.