The Essential Max Brand - 29 Westerns in One Edition. Max Brand
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for the coming of Doone, and he would be brought in to share the discussion on equal terms. It might be difficult to induce his men, he said, to consent to so large a share as one third going to Doone. But no doubt they could compromise handsomely, and every one would be satisfied.
Yet, while he talked, she branded every one of his words as a lie. Not that she hated him. There was a mixture of respect with the fear with which she regarded him, and where respect enters in, there is never a complete detestation. But it was respect for his cool prowess rather than for his moral qualities. What gave her the chief doubt was that he, having so manifestly the upper hand, should be so carefully considerate of others as he was pretending to be of Dawn, herself, and the absent Ronicky Doone. How greatly would the whole problem of the division be simplified, for instance, if a bullet should strike down Ronicky Doone!
No sooner had the idea occurred to her than she was reasonably sure that it had occurred to the bandit also, and she began to strain her ear painfully for the first sound of the sand and gravel under the hoofs of the approaching Lou. In the meantime, Hugh Dawn had recovered his mental poise to a large degree, and when the leader spoke to him, he was able to answer calmly. He even entered into some details of his experiences in the East since he left Trainor, and told of the hard work which had enabled him to make enough money to support his girl from the distance and send her to school.
“But what beats me,” said Jack Moon, “is that you didn’t send for her. Why not, Hugh?”
“Because,” said the other quietly, “I knew pretty well that you were watching her close all the time, and that the minute she made a move out of the country you’d follow her on the chance that she might be trying to get to see me. If I sent for her, I’d be doing the same thing as sending for you.”
Jack Moon shook his head.
“You see,” he complained to the girl, “they’s some folks that never get over being suspicious. Follow a girl trying to get back to her father? I leave it to you, Miss Dawn, if I look to be that sort of a—”
Here she lost track of his words, because far off she heard the hoofs of a horse crunching into the gravel at the bottom of the hill on which Cosslett’s shack stood. The horse came at a steady and swinging gallop. The picture of Ronicky Doone on the lively mare rushed into her mind. Suddenly she started to her feet and shouted: “Ronicky! Danger!”
Far away through the night thrilled her voice. Before an echo could pick it up, there was the crash of half a dozen firearms. Then came the rushing of the galloping horse withdrawing, and last of all a far-flung yell of defiance. Ronicky Doone had escaped.
The girl turned from the window.
“Is this the square deal you’d planned for Ronicky Doone?” she asked fiercely. “Is this what you did? Ah, I read your mind all the while.”
The bandit was shaking his head as though bewildered.
“How come all this, I dunno. Maybe when Doone heard you yell he fired, and my boys answered him. That’s human nature, and you can’t blame them for doing it, I guess. Eh?
She smiled scornfully.
“Treat!” called the leader.
When the black-bearded man entered, Jack Moon left the cabin hastily. “I’ll make out if the fools have done any harm to him,” he called back to Jerry Dawn.
Once outside, however, he broke into a run, cursing under his breath, and so came to the group of Baldy’s men making slowly back toward the cabin. Jack Moon plunged through their midst until he came to his lieutenant, whose shoulder he gripped with fingers of iron.
“Curse you for a fool!” he said bitterly. “I told you to hold your fire till you were sure of him!”
“Then why didn’t you keep that she-devil from screeching? He was about in point-blank range. I was all ready to give the signal, and then she yelled, and he turned.”
“Did you drill him at all?”
“What chance did I have in this light? Even the stars are dim. And he started his hoss swerving. No more chance of dropping him than there was of killing a cloud shadow. He was gone, and that was all there was to it.”
Jack Moon cursed again, and without further speech he turned on his heel and strode back for the cabin.
But he was smiling again when he got to the place.
“Just as I figured,” he said. “When you yelled you scared Doone into pulling his gun and shooting at the first shadow he saw, and my boys figured he was shooting at them, so they gave him a volley. That was all they was to it. But he got off without being hurt.” He went on soberly: “But this messes things up. Most likely this Ronicky Doone will send back for help to get you folks free. That being the case, we got not a ghost of a chance to get to the treasure. He knows the secret, and he’ll lead all the men he can raise straight to the spot and keep me off; and that, Dawn, makes it pretty hard on you, I’d say—pretty hard!”
His eyes bored cruelly into the eyes of his intended victim.
“There goes your price that you was going to pay,” he continued. “There it goes up in smoke. Before morning Doone will have fifty men headed for the place!”
Hugh Dawn raised a hand.
“Gimme one minute alone with you,” he urged.
The leader assented, and Dawn stepped out of the door and into the darkness.
“You don’t need to have no fear of Doone,” he said, as soon as they were safely out of earshot of the girl. “He knows that I ain’t much more of a friend to the law than you are. He knows that I can’t have a sheriff asking me questions. He knows, besides, that I was a member of your crowd once.”
“You think, for your sake, he’ll let five million dollars go?”
“I don’t think. I know,” replied the other. “That’s the kind of a gent he is. Not ordinary by no means, Moon.”
“What d’you figure on doing now? What am I to do? Take a chance that this man-killing Doone, that I’ve heard about, won’t call in a crowd to clean up on me? From what I’ve heard about him, Dawn, he’d rather find a fight than a million, and when he gets a chance for fighting and money at the same time, why, he’ll just start and run amuck. I’m talking to you straight, son, because I dunno how to figure. You know him, and I don’t.”
“I’ll tell you this,” said Hugh Dawn, knowing that in spite of the quiet of Moon, the subject up for discussion was whether or not he, Dawn, should be killed and left or whether the outlaw should bargain his life against his secret. “I’ll tell you this: Ronicky Doone won’t make a move to get help, because he knows that the minute he shows up with a crowd behind him, the first thing you’ll do will be to plug me.”
“Is he as fond of you as all that?”
“Moon, this gent Doone is a killer. I guess you know that already, but if you don’t know it, I’ll tell you. But besides being a killer, he’s as square a shooter as ever I seen! He shook hands to go through this game with me, and he’ll go through thinking just as much of my skin as if it was his own. You can lay to that positive. I know!”
There was something entirely convincing about his manner of speaking. And indeed he was one of the few men in the world whom Moon was willing to believe, at least in part. He stood somewhat in awe of the honesty of Hugh Dawn. This was the only man that had ever come into his clutches and escaped unstained by grim crimes. There was not another man in his band at the present moment that had not committed at least one murder or participated in a killing. Dawn alone had withdrawn from the horrible necessity of obeying the leader, even though he knew that that withdrawal drew down the vengeance of the band on his head.
“Hugh,” he said at last. “I’m going to take the chance. The stake’s large enough to make it worth while. Tell me the secret you learned out of the box, and I’ll give you my word and my hand, before we take another step, that no harm shall