Valley Thieves (8 page)

The back of the house was more irregular than the front of it, because here big cabins or little ones had been added to the long structure and the rear showed the differences in size. Finally, we came to a door, where Chuck halted me. He kept his rifle in both hands and kicked the door.

"Who's there?" called a voice that was so husky and deep that it seemed one could count the number of vibrations per second that went to the make-up of the sound.

"Chuck. I got something to show you," said the youngster.

"Open the door and come in."

Chuck opened the door with his left hand, keeping the rifle carefully under his right elbow. But I had no intention of trying to escape. I felt as though I were in the center of a hostile kingdom—as though a great continent had swallowed me up.

I stepped through that doorway and found myself before Old Man Cary.

It was a naked sort of a room with nothing much to it except a broad open hearth and an iron crane hanging in it, with a black pot that hung from the crane, over the low welter of the fire. The smell of the cooking broth was stale through the room. Everything seemed to be soaked with the greasy odor, as though that same pot had been boiling there for years. Mutton was the smell, and if you know mutton, you know what I mean when I speak of the greasy rankness. The air was filled with it. Not this day's cooking only, but a stale offense that rose out of the ground and seeped out from the dark walls.

I say it came out of the ground because there was no wooden flooring. There was just beaten earth. Some of that earth was so footworn that it seemed to have a sheen about it, to my eyes.

Old Man Cary sat in a corner near the fire, with a rug pulled over his legs—an old, tattered, time-worn rug that was once the pelt of some sort of animal. Now, half the fur had been worn away. He had a broad bench beside him, and that bench was littered with revolvers and rifles which he was cleaning. I could imagine that he cleaned the guns for the entire clan and during that cleaning took heed of the way the different weapons had been used.

Now I hope you have some idea of what the place was like, but when it comes to Old Man Cary himself, it's hard to make a picture of him. He still had the great Cary frame which his descendants had inherited from him; he still sat as high as many a man stands. But there was no flesh on him. He was eaten away. Death had been at him for a long time and death was still at work. If it could not strike the old giant to the heart or the brain, it could at least worry him down little by little. His face had shrunk so that it seemed very small, unmatched to the size of his head, like a boy's face under a mature skull.

And his eyes were bright, sharp, young, under the wrinkling folds of the lids. He lifted those eyes to Chuck as he said:

"Who knocked at my door?"

"I did, Grandpa," said Chuck.

"You lie," said the old man. "You didn't knock. You kicked that door."

"Look," said Chuck. "I had my hands full of the gun, like this here, and I had to kind of rap the door with my foot."

"If you ever kick my door again," said that husky voice; which seemed to be tearing the fiber of the throat, "I'll nail you to a tree and take your hide off. Now, what you brought here to me?"

He turned his glance on me.

Chuck was so scared that he had to draw breath a couple of times before he could stammer out that I said my name was Bill Avon, that he had found me up the creek, and that I said I was coming to try to buy cattle, and that everybody ought to know that Cary cattle were not for sale at this time of year.

"They ought to know, ought they?" said the old man. "You know it, do you?"

"Yes, sir," said Chuck, more breathless than before.

"Cary cows are for sale when I say they're for sale. The time of the year don't make no difference," said the old man.

"Yes, sir," said Chuck. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

"Sorry I didn't know."

"What didn't you know?"

"That the cattle—I mean—I dunno."

"You don't know what you don't know, eh? Are you a fool or ain't you a fool?"

"No, sir," said poor Chuck. "I mean—yes, sir."

"You got too much of your mother in you, and she's a fool woman. You hear me?"

"Yes, sir."

"You tell her that. Go back and tell her: 'Ma, you're a fool woman.' If she don't like that, send her to me, and I'll tell her some more."

"Yes, sir," said Chuck. "Pa would knock hell out of me if I told her that."

"You send your pa to me, too, then," said the old man. He looked at me. "You say you're Bill Avon, do you?"

"Yes," said I.

"You come to buy cattle?"

"Yes."

"How much money you got with you?"

"Fourteen, fifteen dollars."

"How many Cary cows would that buy?"

"I was going to dicker for a sale," said I.

"You're lyin'," said the old man. "Chuck, you was right to bring him in. You're a good boy. But what you mean by leavin' a gun on him? Take it away and fan him. We'll see what his linin' looks like!"

THERE was nothing much to be done with that old devil. It was like talking to a man with an eye that could read the brain. I wondered what even the great Jim Silver would do if he ran up against a power like that of Grandpa Cary.

Grandpa went on cleaning a rifle and paying no attention until Chuck had heaped on an end of the bench everything from my pockets, plus the gun from my holster. There were some silver and a five-dollar greenback. There were my old pocket knife and wallet and some bits of string and a couple of nails. I always seem to have some nails around in my pockets, because you never can tell when nails will come in handy.

I stood there like a fool, in a sort of emptiness, waiting.

After Chuck had put my stuff on the bench, he stepped back and eyed me savagely. The rough things the old man had said to him were a grudge that the youngster passed along to me. That's the way with people bred to a certain level. As long as they can feel a good hate, they don't care in what direction it goes.

Before he paid any attention to me, the old man growled:

"M'ria!"

Maria popped a door open and stood on the threshold. She gave one flash at me, and then looked to the head of the clan for orders. She was not much older than Chuck and had not yet begun to bulge with the Cary brawn. She had big bare feet, and she would grow to the bigness of them, one day, but the rest of her was slim and round and smooth enough to stand in stone forever.

"M'ria, gimme somethin' to eat," said the old man.

She ducked back into the other room and came again with speed enough to make her calico dress snap and flutter about her brown legs. She had a big pewter spoon, and a big earthenware bowl, and a lot of stale bread crusts dropped into the bowl. She took the cover off the pot above the fire and stirred the contents, and then dipped out enough of the broth, swimming with shreds of meat, to cover the crusts of bread.

She gave the old man the bowl, and he held it between his knees and began to eat. He was careless about his feeding, and he made a lot of noise at it. Sometimes the soup drizzled out of the corners of his mouth, and then the girl was quick as a wink to wipe the drops away before they had a chance to fall off his lean chin. He had no teeth, of course, and that compression of his lips was one thing that helped to make his face so small, and oddly boyish. Sometimes, too, he was so casual about the way he raised the spoon that some of the soup ran down over his hand and onto his hairy arm, and the girl was always there with an edge of her apron to keep him tidy.

When he had had all he wanted, he gave the bowl a shove. She took it at once. He put his bald old head back on the edge of the chair.

"You ain't a bad girl, M'ria," he said. "Gimme a kiss."

She leaned over him and kissed him on the lips. It must have been a little hard for her to do, but most youngsters are accomplished hypocrites if hypocrisy will give them advantage in the family.

"You make that soup pretty good, too," said the old man. "You make it better than that Alice ever done. I'm glad she gone and got married. Get out of here, now."

Maria got out. She had just time to pass one glance at Chuck, and the glint in her eyes said that she and Chuck knew each other fairly well. She was receiving sparks as well as passing them out, I should have said.

When the door was closed after her, I was glad of the interruption. I was glad that the old man had some food to comfort his stomach while he talked to me. He got out a pipe and loaded it, and put it in his toothless mouth. He had a wad of blackened string wound around the stem of the pipe so that he could hold it better between his gums. He went on examining me.

"You bring up thirteen dollars and forty cents, and you're goin' to buy Cary cattle, are you?" he said.

"I brought along no money to buy. I wanted to see the cows and find out what the prices might be."

"How long you been around these parts?"

"I've had a ranch for about eight years."

"And you don't know that strangers ain't welcome in Cary Valley?"

"I don't know," said I. "Of course, I've heard that people don't come up here very much. Not most people. But I've seen some of the Cary cattle, and I wanted to buy some of them."

"You're a bright man. You got an education. A gent that's got an education is sure to be bright," said the old man, "and you stand there and try to tell me that you didn't know that you wasn't wanted up here?"

"I thought it was worth a chance," said I. "I didn't know, I can tell you, that you had gunmen out watching for strangers. But I'd seen the Cary cattle, and I wanted to buy some of them."

"Why did you want to buy 'em? Because they're so good?"

"No. They're not good. There's no size to them," I said.

"No? No size to my cows?" shouted the old man, suddenly enraged. And Chuck took a little hitch step toward me as though he were going to bash me in the face with his fist.

"There's no size to them. They're all legs," said I, "but they fat up well in a short season. If I could cross them on the short-legged breed I've got, I might manage to turn out a herd with size and one that fats up early in the season."

"You're a fool. He talks like a poor fool, Grandpa," said Chuck.

"Does he?" said that terrible old man. "If you was to listen to some fool talk like this, you might learn somethin', though. He's right. And doggone me if it ain't a pleasure to hear sense talked once in a while, instead of the blatherin' blither I get up here, most of the time."

Chuck was pushed into the background of the conversation by this blast. The old man went on:

"You sound like you might have had a real business idea. But I dunno. It don't sound just right. You know you could 'a' got my cattle without ridin' clear up here. More'n once a year I send beef down to Blue Water and Belling Lake."

"I only got the idea the other day," said I.

The old man closed his eyes and smoked through a long moment.

"No," he announced at last. "You're lyin'. Doggone me if I wouldn't almost like to believe you. But I don't. Now, you come clean and tell me what really brought you up here."

"I've told you," said I.

"Yeah? You told me? Put up your hand and swear."

Well, I'm ashamed to say it, but I raised my right hand and swore. I think most of you would have done the same thing, if you'd been standing in my boots.

When I finished, Grandpa said:

"It ain't goin' to do. There's some folks, built along the lines of this gent, Chuck, that would rather put their hand into the fire than to swear a wrong oath, but he ain't quite that simple. No, sir, he's got more brains than that. He's got brains that I could talk to, I don't mind sayin'. But call in somebody. Call in Hugh, will you?"

You can see that I was in for trouble, already. The old man had looked pretty thoroughly through me. However, worse trouble was just ahead. Before Chuck could leave the room or sing out, we heard a door slam, and voices and heavy footfalls came toward us. Then there was a rap on the inside door of the room.

"Hey, Grandpa!" called the voice of Will Cary.

No, there was no mistaking it. The fine, deep ring of that voice carried a lot of conviction.

"Come in, Will," said the old man.

The door opened, and Will heaved in sight, with his father behind him, and Will sang out:

"Grandpa, what d'you think that we've landed for Barry—"

He snapped his teeth shut. He had not seen me, but his father had, and had silenced his son by the simple expedient of striking him a sharp blow across the back of his head, jarring his teeth together.

"Shut up, you dummy!" said Dean Cary, and pushed into the room, right toward me.

"What's this thing doin' here?" he demanded.

"Maybe you can help me out," said the old man. "I was just about to lock him up till I got some ideas about him."

"I can give you the ideas," said Dean Cary. "He's up here on the trail—of Parade and Silver's wolf. And that man-poisoning snake of a Taxi is probably up here somewhere, also. And then there's Silver himself who may be in the gang, and a man and a half by the name of Clonmel. You hear what I say? Silver—Taxi —and another—you hear me?" he shouted.

"Keep your voice down. I hear good, plenty," said the old man. "Seems like this one is tied up with important folks. But it always takes something big to make a man with brains get himself into trouble. You say there's a gent by name of Silver? Who might he be?"

I was so astonished that I almost forgot my own danger. And then I saw that my own danger was more real than ever. For anything might happen in this place, this secluded valley where news of great Jim Silver had not arrived at the ears of the chief of the clan in all these years!

Dean Cary's breath was taken, too, so that the old man had a chance to ask again:

"And you talk about Parade, and Taxi, and Clonmel—even about a wolf. What have they to do with the Carys? And what did you start to say about Barry? Barry who? Barry Christian? Is that who you mean?"