The Seventh Man by Max Brand (books to read romance .TXT) 📕

ceremonies. Very obviously he was ill at ease to find himself the center of so much attention.

“I s'pose you been practicin' up on tin-cans?” suggested the deputy, leaning on the counter.

“Sometimes I hit things and sometimes I don't,” answered the stranger.

“Well,” and this was put more crisply as the deputy brought out a large pad of paper, “jest gimme your name, partner.”

“Joe Cumber.” He grew still more ill at ease. “I hear that even if you hit the mark you got to talk to the sheriff himself afterwards?”

“Yep.”

The applicant sighed.

“Why d'you ask?”

“I ain't much on words.”

“But hell with your gun, eh?” The deputy sheriff grinned again, but when the other turned his head toward him, his smile went out, suddenly while the wrinkle of mirth still lay in his cheek. The deputy stroked his chin and looked thoughtful.

“Get your gun ready,” he ordered.

The other slipped his hand down to his gun-butt and moved his weapon to make sure that it was perfectly loose in the leather.

“Ain't you goin' to take your gun out?” queried the deputy.

“Can I do that?”

“I reckon not,” said the deputy, and looked the stranger straight in the eyes.

His change to deadly earnestness put a hush over the crowd.

Across the target, not tossed easily as it had been for Pop Giersberg, but literally thrown, darted the line of white, while the gun flipped out of its holster as if it possessed life of its own and spoke. The white line ended half way to the farther side of the target, and the revolver slid again into hiding.

A clamor of amazement broke from the crowd, but the deputy looked steadily, without enthusiasm, at the stranger.

“Joe Cumber,” he said, when the noise fell away a little, “I guess you'll see the sheriff. Harry, take Joe Cumber up to Pete, will you?”

One of the bystanders jumped at the suggestion and led the other from the room, with a full half of the crowd following. The deputy remained behind, thoughtful.

“What's the matter?” asked one of the spectators. “You look like you'd seen a ghost.”

“Gents,” answered the deputy, “do any of you recollect seein' this feller before?”

They did not.

“They's something queer about him,” muttered the deputy.

“He may be word-shy,” proffered a wit, “but he sure ain't gun-shy!”

“When he looked at me,” said the deputy, more to himself than to the others, “it seemed to me like they was a swirl of yaller come into his eyes. Made me feel like some one had sneaked up behind me with a knife.”

In his thoughtfulness his eyes wandered, and wandering, they fell upon the notice of the reward for the capture, dead or alive, of Daniel Barry, about five feet nine or ten, slender, with black hair and brown eyes.

“My God!” cried the deputy.

But then he relaxed against the counter.

“It ain't possible,” he murmured.

“What ain't possible?”

“However, I'm goin' to go and hang around. Gents, I got a crazy idea.”

He had no sooner started toward the door than he seemed to gain surety out of the motion.

“It's him!” he cried. He turned toward the others, white of face. “Come on, all of you! It's him! Barry!”

But in the meantime Harry had gone on swiftly to the office of the sheriff with “Joe Cumber.” Behind him swirled the curious crowd and for their benefit he asked his questions loudly.

“Partner, that was sure a pretty play you made. I've seen 'em all try out to crack them balls, but I never seen none do it the way you did—with your gun in the leather at the start. What part of the country might you be from?”

The other answered gently: “Why, from over yonder.”

“The T O outfit, eh?”

“Beyond that.”

“Up in the Gray Mountains? That so! I s'pose you been on trails like this before?”

“Nothin' to talk about.”

There might have been a double meaning in this remark, and Harry looked twice to make sure that there was no guile.

“Well, here we are.” He threw open a door which revealed a bald-headed clerk seated at a desk in a little bare room. “Billy, here's a gent that cracked it the first whack and started his gun from the leather, by God. He—”

“Jest kindly close the door, Harry,” said Billy. “Step in, partner. Gimme your name?”

The door closed on the discomfited Harry, and “Joe Cumber” stood close to it, apparently driven to shrinking into the wall in his embarrassment, but while he stood there his hand fumbled behind him and turned the key in the lock, and then extracted it.

“My name's Joe Cumber.”

“Joe Cumber,”—this while inscribing it.

“Age?”

“About thirty-two, maybe.”

“Don't you know?”

“I don't exactly.”

His eyes were as vague as his words, gentle, and smiling.

“Thirty-two?” said Billy sharply. “You look more like twenty-five to me. S'pose we split the difference, eh?”

And with a grin he wrote: “Age twenty-two or three.”

“Business?”

“Trapper.”

“Good! The sheriff is pretty keen for 'em. You gents in that game got a sort of nose for the trail, mostly. All right, Cumber, you'll see Glass.”

He stood at the door.

“By the way, Cumber, is that straight about startin' your shot with your gun in the holster?”

“I s'pose it is.”

“You s'pose?” grunted the clerk. “Well, come on in.”

He banged once on the door and then threw it open. “Joe Cumber, Pete. And he drilled the ball startin' his gun out of the leather. Here's his card.”