Riders of the Silences Part 14

There he was safe, but someday he would see some woman smile, catch the glimmer of some eye, and throw safety away to ride after her.

It was a weakness, but what made a tragic figure of handsome d.i.c.k Wilbur was that he knew his weakness and sat still and let fate walk up and overtake him.

Yet Pierre le Rouge answered this man of sorrowful wisdom: "In my part of the country men say: 'If you would speak of women let money talk for you.'"

And he placed a gold piece on the table.

"She will come out to the supper table."

"She will not," smiled Wilbur, and covered the coin. "Will you take odds?"

"No charity. Who else will bet?"

"I," said Jim Boone instantly. "You figure her for an ordinary sulky kid."

Pierre smiled upon him.

"There's a cut in my s.h.i.+rt where her knife pa.s.sed through; and that's the reason that I'll bet on her now." The whole table covered his coin, with laughter.

"We've kept one part of your bargain, Pierre. We've seen your father buried in the corner plot. Now, what's the second part?"

"I don't know you well enough to ask you that," said Pierre.

They plied him with suggestions.

"To rob the Berwin Bank?"

"Stick up a train?"

"No. That's nothing."

"Round up the sheriffs from here to the end of the mountains?"

"Too easy."

"Roll all those together," said Pierre, "and you'll begin to get an idea of what I'll ask."

Then a low voice called from the black throat of the hall: "Pierre!"

The others were silent, but Pierre winked at them, and made great flourish with knife and fork against his plate as if to cover the sound of Jacqueline's voice.

"Pierre!" she called again. "I've come to thank you."

He jumped up and turned toward the hall.

"Do you like it?"

"It's a wonder!"

"Then we're friends?"

"If you want to be."

"There's nothing I want more. Then you'll come out and have supper with us, Jack?"

There was a little pause, and then Jim Boone struck his fist on the table and cursed, for she stepped from the darkness into the flaring light of the room.

CHAPTER 13

She wore a cartridge-belt slung jauntily across her hips and from it hung a holster of stiff new leather with the top flap open to show the b.u.t.t of a man-sized forty-five caliber six-shooter--her first gun. Not a man of the gang but had loaned her his guns time and again, but they had never dreamed of giving her a weapon of her own.

So they stared at her agape, where she stood with her head back, one hand resting on her hip, one hovering about the b.u.t.t of the gun, as if she challenged them to question her right to be called "man."

It was as if she abandoned all claims to femininity with that single step; the gun at her side made her seem inches taller and years older.

She was no longer a child, but a long-rider who could shoot with the best.

One glance she cast about the room to drink in the amazement of the gang, and then her father broke in rather hoa.r.s.ely: "Sit down, girl.

Sit down and be one of us. One of us you are by your own choice from this day on. You're neither man nor woman, but a long-rider with every man's hand against you. You've done with any hope of a home or of friends. You're one of us. Poor Jack--my girl!"

"Poor?" she returned. "Not while I can make a quick draw and shoot straight."

And then she swept the circle of eyes, daring them to take her boast lightly, but they knew her too well, and were all solemnly silent. At this she relented somewhat, and went directly to Pierre, flus.h.i.+ng from throat to hair. She held out her hand.

"Will you shake and call it square?"

"I sure will," nodded Pierre.

"And we're pals--you and me, like the rest of 'em?"

"We are."

She took the place beside him.

As the whisky went round after round the two seemed shut away from the others; they were younger, less marked by life; they listened while the others talked, and now and then exchanged glances of interest or aversion.

"Listen," she said after a time, "I've heard this story before."

It was Phil Branch, square-built and square of jaw, who was talking.

"There's only one thing I can handle better than a gun, and that's a sledgehammer. A gun is all right in its way, but for work in a crowd, well, give me a hammer and I'll show you a way out."

Bud Mansie grinned: "Leave me my pair of sixes and you can have all the hammers between here and Central Park in a crowd. There's nothing makes a crowd remember its heels like a pair of barking sixes."

"Ah, ah!" growled Branch. "But when they've heard bone crunch under the hammer there's nothing will hold them."