Silvertip (1942) (5 page)

The Mexican glanced at the high-headed beauty. His eyes widened; his jaw dropped; his very color changed, it seemed to Silvertip. Then the big head of the man swung back, and he scowled at his questioner.

It was plain to Silvertip that he had reached the end of the rope, that he could extract no more words from this fellow. It was equally plain that the mare was known t
o
the Mexican intimately. Yet it seemed that all the men of the Haverhill Valley would rather die, almost, than talk.

"All right, hombre," said Silvertip, and tossed the knife to him carelessly. The Mexican caught it out of the air with a hungry hand. He had the air, for an instant, of one about to leap forward; but again there was something in the faint smile and the steady eyes of Silvertip that discouraged attack. Presently the big man turned and strode off down the street, making violent gestures, cursing volubly to himself.

The two blacksmiths had stopped their laughter. They remained in the doorway and watched with brutally inexpressive faces while Silver remounted and rode down the street to a hotel. He found stable room behind the place; when he entered the hotel itself, a lowering clerk seemed unwilling to give him a room at first, but eventually he was shown to a dingy corner apartment that overlooked a side lane and the back yard. There he sat down and took his head between his hands. He was sleepy from his all-night ride, but the jumping of his nerves kept him from lying down.

He was half beaten within an hour of his arrival in the Haverhill Valley. All the self-confidence had melted from him, and he felt that he was leaning the weight of his mind against an impenetrable wall.

Chapter
VI

The House of Montere
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HE STRETCHED on the bed at last, for he could find no solution to his problem, and he knew that he needed sleep. When he wakened, a few hours later, a whispering air fanned his face, and he saw the door slowly swinging open.

When it was wide, Silvertip was already sitting up, at watch, and he observed on the threshold a man whose face was of the brutal type which he had seen so often before this in the Haverhill Valley. He was making a cigarette, leaning one shoulder against the jamb, and dripping tobacco unconcernedly over the floor. He was big, like most of these Haverhill men; and, like the rest of them, he stared heavily and steadily, without a shift in his eyes.

"You're the gent that slammed Juan Perez, are you?" asked the stranger.

"Who are you, brother?" asked Silvertip.

"Chuck Terry. Alligator sent me down to get you."

"Get me for what?" asked Silvertip.

"For the ranch."

"I'm not looking for a job."

"Sure you ain't," agreed "Chuck" Terry. "The job'
s
looking for you. Grade-A pay, and the best eats in the land. Is that the sort of a picture you wanta step into?"
Silvertip stood up.

"Look here," said he. "Who's the Alligator? I never heard of him."

Chuck Terry came suddenly to life, stepped into the room, and closed the door behind him.

"You never heard of Alligator Hank?" he repeated. "You never heard of Drummon?"

"No," said Silver. "Never heard of either of 'em."

With amazement, with long-drawn-out disgust, Chuck Terry regarded him.

"Well, what's the use, then?" said Chuck. "What're you driving at in the valley, anyway? You slam a greaser, and yet you ain't throwing in with Drummon?"

"Should I?" asked Silvertip.

"You know your own business better'n I do," replied Chuck Terry.

"What I want to do, first of all," said Silvertip, "is to find the place of Arturo Monterey."

This announcement was so interesting to Terry that he came a step or two closer to Silver, peering earnestly at him all the time.

"You wanta find out where Monterey lives?" he asked.

"I've asked a lot of people already," said Silvertip, "and they laugh at me."

Terry himself began to grin.

"All right," he answered. "I'll tell you. You want to see Monterey, do you? Well, ride right on down the valley and take the first road that forks over to the left. Keep down that left fork till you sight a house that looks like a doggone old castle out of a fairy-story book. And somewheres around there, likely you'll run into this gent, this Arturo Monterey, all right."

Terry struggled with a grin that would not be totally suppressed. It worked and twisted at his face.

"So long, brother," he said. "You go and find Don Arturo."

And, striding to the door, Terry cast it wide, slammed it behind him, and hurried down the hall. A noise of suppressed laughter, then a roar of it, came echoing back to Silvertip.

He went to the window and looked out at the brightness of the day, at the roofs of the town with quivering heat waves dancing over them, and beyond were the muscular knees of the mountains and their bare upward shoulders.
For the first time since his childhood he felt the cold fear of this physical world reach him and finger his very heart. He seemed to have entered a region of ironical Titans. Among them he was reduced to an absurdity, and that purpose which had brought him to the place became more dreamlike than ever.

But his trail, he was sure, would take him far out of the Haverhill Valley. If he felt like a stranger in the place, it was certain that the slender fellow he had killed could never have lived here. It was merely to pick up some clew of him and then to be gone on the out trail that Silver lingered in Haverhill Valley. And with all his heart, he yearned to be gone at once!

He went down to the stable, saddled his own mustang and the mare, and rode down the street with grinning faces at watch on either side of him. They knew where he was going. They knew all about it. And they foresaw disaster, which pleased them to the heart. A group of boys tumbling in a vacant lot jumped up and shouted and pointed at him. Even the children understood things that were curtained away from his understanding.

He was glad to be out of that town, as if escaping from a curse, into the green, open arms of the country. The bright running of the river washed away some of the shadows that were pouring up in his mind. To his desert-bred eyes, the green undulations of the valley were more than waves of gold, and peace came to him as he watched the cattle grazing or lying in dim shadows under the trees. The strength flowed back, and that self-confidence which never had been lost to him for so many years until he entered the town of Haverhill.

He found the branching road that ran to the left. It was worn more by hoofs than wheels, and it mounted into the throat of a narrow valley. Great walls of rock went straight up on either side, one blue with shadow, one on fire with the sun, and through the middle of the canyon a creek ran with a sound of rushing, like a wind. The way up the valley was half blocked by the house of Arturo Monterey.

He knew it by Terry's description, for the road wound up a steep slope toward the entrance; on the other side was a precipitous fall of rocks, and above rose old adobe walls and one blunt tower of stone.

Up the winding way, Silvertip came to the house itself, and a great stone arch across the entrance to the patio. A big Mexican appeared suddenly and stood in his way. Silvertip dismounted.

"Amigo," he said, "I've come up here to find out, if I can, if Senior Monterey ever owned this horse, and who he sold it to. Maybe you can tell me and save me a lot of trouble?"

The Mexican regarded him with a long side glance in silence. Then he turned toward the mare with a sudden start, as though there were something about the animal which had jarred home upon his memory.

"Wait!" he said to Silver, and hurried back into the patio.

Silvertip looked curiously about him. Chuck Terry's description had been a little from the point; the place was more like a fortress than a castle, and the weather-worn adobe had the look of immense age. The patio was flagged with great stones and surrounded by an arching arcade, under the shadow of which he could see doors of heavy oak. The faces of those doors were seamed and cracked by dry old age.

His Mexican reappeared now, and not alone. Two other men walked briskly through the entrance arch, went by Silvertip, then halted suddenly. The man to whom he had spoken came up more slowly, with the look of a hunter who has marked down prey. A door opened on the farther side of the patio; more footsteps approached; and Silver knew that he was trapped.

White men or Mexicans, the Haverhill Valley seemed to be filled with madmen! He glanced over his shoulder toward the first pair who had passed through the arch; they faced him now, one with a drawn gun, one with his hand on a revolver butt. He thought of mounting and trying to break through, and cast that hope away even as it entered his mind.

Two newcomers loomed now at the side of the patio entrance. One of those he knew by the bull face and th
e
sleek round of the neck, that same fellow whom he had pulled from a horse that morning, and to whom Terry had given the name of Juan Perez. He opened eyes and mouth, then grinned gapingly with joy.

"The gringo!" he cried, and reached for his gun.

Retreat was thoroughly blocked; Silvertip followed his normal instinct by advancing. He jumped like a scared cat at his first interlocutor, who had called out all this show of strength against him. The fellow's face convulsed, reaching for a weapon.

"Stop!" cried a woman's voice. "Juan Perez, stop!"

Nothing, could have nullified the motion which Perez had begun. There was a Colt already in the hand of Silver, but he held fire, and saw the fingers of Perez open, so that the revolver he had drawn flicked away and went spinning and rattling and slithering over the pavement of the patio.

Other guns were burning in the keen sunlight all around Silver. If he had been in danger before in his life, it was never a greater danger than that which surrounded him now. The voice of the woman had saved him. The mellow sound of her words still lingered in his mind, tasted and retasted.

She had suspended all the murderous action that had been in progress.

Then Juan Perez was crying out as he turned to the side, gesticulating violently: "This is the man with the horse of Pedrillo! Look! Look for yourself, senorita!"

Past the arch of the entrance a girl came into view. She wore sandals and a wide-brimmed hat of cheap straw, like any peon woman, but her dress was the white translucency of fine linen, and there was a dark Latin beauty in her face. A careless glance might have passed her over in a crowd; but a second look would be sure to dwell on her, and little else.

She came straight toward Silver, and paused at a distance which maintained her dignity.

"What is your name?" she asked.

"Silver," said he.

He took off his hat before her. The brilliance of the sun struck a dazzle across his eyes. He put on his hat again and looked steadily at her through the protecting shadow that fell across his eyes.

"You have the horse of Pedro Monterey," said the girl. "How did it come to you?"

"He is dead," said Silver.

He heard them all cry out. He saw them all surge in toward him and stop again, as though his words had first drawn and then repelled them, as the edge of a cliff draws frightened men. Only the girl remained motionless and well poised, though he could see the pain had gone through her wide eyes and was still working in her.

He added: "I say that he's dead. I only know that the man who rode this horse was middle height, slender, handsome, dark, about twenty or twenty-two years old."

"That was Pedro Monterey," said the girl. "His father will see you."

She turned about. One of the vaqueros hurried to take her arm, but she paused and said in her distinct, quiet voice: "I can walk very well by myself. Call the senior."

Then she passed out of view with the same unhurried step.

Chapter
VII

Don Artur
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SILVER looked around on the stricken faces of the Mexicans who surrounded him. That sorrow was not strange to him, nor the blow which the girl had received so calmly and so deeply. It was right that the man he had killed should have come from such a place as this, with the air of a manor about it. Perhaps the girl was his sister, and these were the adherents of the house. The dead face had been that of an aristocrat, and it was from such a setting as this that he must have come. Long generations of breeding and culture will carve the features with more delicacy, and refine the body itself.

And the very soul of Silver expanded. If he had undertaken a great task, it was in a worthy cause. But more than ever he was baffled and bewildered. For how could he set his great hands to any task that had been important in the life of that dead man who now had a name-Pedro Mon-terey? Pedrillo, the vaqueros had called him, with an affectionate intonation.

They still pressed close, watching Silver like so many wolves about a helpless elk. He had put away his useles
s
gun. Against such numbers it was a folly to show any sign of resistance. The least gesture in such a moment as this would bring the end of him, he knew that perfectly well.

He made a cigarette, lighted, and began to smoke it.