Black Jack by Max Brand (top android ebook reader txt) 📕
His sister's voice cut into his musing. She had two tones. One might be called her social register. It was smooth, gentle--the low-pitched and controlled voice of a gentlewoman. The other voice was hard and sharp. It could drive hard and cold across a desk, and bring businessmen to an understanding that here was a mind, not a woman.
At present she used her latter tone. Vance Cornish came into a shivering consciousness that she was sitting beside him. He turned his head slowly. It was always a shock to come out of one of his pleasant dreams and see that worn, hollow-eyed, impatient face.
"Are you forty-nine, Vance?"
"I'm not fifty, at least," he countered.
She remained imperturbable, looking him over. He had come to notice that in the past half-dozen years his best smiles often failed to mellow her expression. He felt that something disagreeable was coming.
"Why did Cornwall run away this morning? I hoped to take him on a trip."
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smooth means of introducing one of his yarns.
Victory!
But here Elizabeth cut trenchantly into the heart of the conversation.
She had seen and understood. She shot home half a dozen questions with
the accuracy of a marksman, and beat up a drumfire of responses from the
ladies which, for a time, rattled up and down the length of the table.
The sheriff was biting his mustache thoughtfully.
It was only a momentary check, however. Just at the point where Vance
began to despair of ever effecting his goal, the silence began again as
lady after lady ran out of material for the nonce. And as the silence
spread, the sheriff was visibly gathering steam.
Again Elizabeth cut in. But this time there was only a sporadic
chattering in response. Coffee was steaming before them, Wu Chi’s
powerful, thick, aromatic coffee, which only he knew how to make. They
were in a mood, now, to hear stories, that tableful of people. An
expected ally came to the aid of Vance. It was Terence, who had been
eating his heart out during the silly table talk of the past few minutes.
Now he seized upon the first clear opening.
“Sheriff Minter, I’ve heard a lot about the time you ran down Johnny
Garden. But I’ve never had the straight of it. Won’t you tell us how it
happened?”
“Oh,” protested the sheriff, “it don’t amount to much.”
Elizabeth cast one frantic glance at her brother, and strove to edge into
the interval of silence with a question directed at Mr. Gainor. But he
shelved that question; the whole table was obviously waiting for the
great man to speak. A dozen appeals for the yarn poured in.
“Well,” said the sheriff, “if you folks are plumb set on it, I’ll tell
you just how it come about.”
There followed a long story of how Johnny Garden had announced that he
would ride down and shoot up the sheriff’s own town, and then get away on
the sheriff’s own horse—and how he did it. And how the sheriff was
laughed at heartily by the townsfolk, and how the whole mountain district
joined in the laughter. And how he started out single-handed in the
middle of winter to run down Johnny Garden, and struck through the
mountains, was caught above the timberline in a terrific blizzard, kept
on in peril of his life until he barely managed to reach the timber again
on the other side of the ridge. How he descended upon the hiding-place of
Johnny Garden, found Johnny gone, but his companions there, and made a
bargain with them to let them go if they would consent to stand by and
offer no resistance when he fought with Johnny on the latter’s return.
How they were as good as their word and how, when Johnny returned, they
stood aside and let Johnny and the sheriff fight it out. How the sheriff
beat Johnny to the draw, but was wounded in the left arm while Johnny
fired a second shot as he lay dying on the floor of the lean-to. How the
sheriff’s wound was dressed by the companions of the dead Johnny, and how
he was safely dismissed with honor, as between brave men, and how
afterwards he hunted those same men down one by one.
It was quite a long story, but the audience followed it with a breathless
interest.
“Yes, sir,” concluded the sheriff, as the applause of murmurs fell off.
“And from yarns like that one you wouldn’t never figure it that I was the
son of a minister brung up plumb peaceful. Now, would you?”
And again, to the intense joy of Vance, it was Terry who brought the
subject back, and this time the subject of all subjects which Elizabeth
dreaded, and which Vance longed for.
“Tell us how you came to branch out, Sheriff Minter?”
“It was this way,” began the sheriff, while Elizabeth cast at Vance a
glance of frantic and weary appeal, to which he responded with a gesture
which indicated that the cause was lost.
“I was brung up mighty proper. I had a most amazing lot of prayers at the
tip of my tongue when I wasn’t no more’n knee-high to a grasshopper. But
when a man has got a fire in him, they ain’t no use trying to smother it.
You either got to put water on it or else let it burn itself out.
“My old man didn’t see it that way. When I got to cutting up he’d try to
smother it, and stop me by saying: ‘Don’t!’ Which don’t accomplish
nothing with young gents that got any spirit. Not a damn thing—asking
your pardon, ladies! Well, sirs, he kept me in harness, you might say,
and pulling dead straight down the road and working hard and faithful.
But all the time I’d been saving up steam, and swelling and swelling and
getting pretty near ready to bust.
“Well, sirs, pretty soon—we was living in Garrison City them days, when
Garrison wasn’t near the town that it is now—along comes word that Jack
Hollis is around. A lot of you younger folks ain’t never heard nothing
about him. But in his day Jack Hollis was as bad as they was made. They
was nothing that Jack wouldn’t turn to real handy, from shootin’ up a
town to sticking up a train or a stage. And he done it all just about as
well. He was one of them universal experts. He could blow a safe as neat
as you’d ask. And if it come to a gun fight, he was greased lightning
with a flying start. That was Jack Hollis.”
The sheriff paused to draw breath.
“Perhaps,” said Elizabeth Cornish, white about the lips, “we had better
go into the living room to hear the rest of the sheriff’s story?”
It was not a very skillful diversion, but Elizabeth had reached the point
of utter desperation. And on the way into the living room unquestionably
she would be able to divert Terry to something else. Vance held his
breath.
And it was Terry who signed his own doom.
“We’re very comfortable here, Aunt Elizabeth. Let’s not go in till the
sheriff has finished his story.”
The sheriff rewarded him with a flash of gratitude, and Vance settled
back in his chair. The end could not, now, be far away.
“I was saying,” proceeded the sheriff, “that they scared their babies in
these here parts with the name of Jack Hollis. Which they sure done.
Well, sir, he was bad.”
“Not all bad, surely,” put in Vance. “I’ve heard a good many stories
about the generosity of—”
He was anxious to put in the name of Black Jack, since the sheriff was
sticking so close to “Jack Hollis,” which was a name that Terry had not
yet heard for his dead father. But before he could get out the name, the
sheriff, angry at the interruption, resumed the smooth current of his
tale with a side flash at Vance.
“Not all bad, you say? Generous? Sure he was generous. Them that live
outside the law has got to be generous to keep a gang around ‘em. Not
that Hollis ever played with a gang much, but he had hangers-on all over
the mountains and gents that he had done good turns for and hadn’t gone
off and talked about it. But that was just common sense. He knew he’d
need friends that he could trust if he ever got in trouble. If he was
wounded, they had to be someplace where he could rest up. Ain’t that so?
Well, sir, that’s what the goodness of Jack Hollis amounted to. No, sir,
he was bad. Plumb bad and all bad!
“But he had them qualities that a young gent with an imagination is apt
to cotton to. He was free with his money. He dressed like a dandy. He’d
gamble with hundreds, and then give back half of his winnings if he’d
broke the gent that run the bank. Them was the sort of things that Jack
Hollis would do. And I had my head full of him. Well, about the time that
he come to the neighborhood, I sneaked out of the house one night and
went off to a dance with a girl that I was sweet on. And when I come
back, I found Dad waiting up for me ready to skin me alive. He tried to
give me a clubbing. I kicked the stick out of his hands and swore that
I’d leave and never come back. Which I never done, living up to my word
proper.
“But when I found myself outside in the night, I says to myself: ‘Where
shall I go now?’
“And then, being sort of sick at the world, and hating Dad particular, I
decided to go out and join Jack Hollis. I was going to go bad. Mostly to
cut up Dad, I reckon, and not because I wanted to particular.
“It wasn’t hard to find Jack Hollis. Not for a kid my age that was sure
not to be no officer of the law. Besides, they didn’t go out single and
hunt for Hollis. They went in gangs of a half a dozen at a time, or more
if they could get ‘em. And even then they mostly got cleaned up when they
cornered Hollis. Yes, sir, he made life sad for the sheriffs in them
parts that he favored most.
“I found Jack toasting bacon over a fire. He had two gents with him, and
they brung me in, finding me sneaking around like a fool kid instead of
walking right into camp. Jack sized me up a minute. He was a fine-looking
boy, was Hollis. He gimme a look out of them fine black eyes of his which
I won’t never forget. Aye, a handsome scoundrel, that Hollis!”
Elizabeth Cornish sank back in her chair and covered her eyes with her
hands for a moment. To the others it seemed that she was merely rubbing
weary eyes. But her brother knew perfectly that she was near to fainting.
He looked at Terry and saw that the boy was following the tale with
sparkling eyes.
“I like what you say about this Hollis, sheriff,” he ventured softly.
“Do you? Well, so did I like what I seen of him that night, for all I
knew that he was a no-good, mankilling, heartless sort. I told him right
off that I wanted to join him. I even up and give him an exhibition of
shooting.
“What do you think he says to me? ‘You go home to your ma, young man!’
“That’s what he said.
“‘I ain’t a baby,’ says I to Jack Hollis. ‘I’m a grown man. I’m ready to
fight your way.’
“‘Any fool can fight,’ says Jack Hollis. ‘But a gent with any sense don’t
have to fight. You can lay to that, son!’
“‘Don’t call me son,’ says I. ‘I’m older than you was when you started
out.’
“I’d had my heart busted before I started,’ says Jack Hollis to me. ‘Are
you as old as that, son? You go back home and don’t bother me no more.
I’ll come back in five years and see if you’re still in the same mind!’
“And that was what I seen of Jack Hollis.
“I went back into town—Garrison City. I slept over the stables the rest
of that night. The next day I loafed around town not hardly noways
knowing what I was going to do.
“Then I was loafing around
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