Free Max Brand by Riders of the Silences Page A

me."
    And then he walked off down the hall—cunning Pierre—before she could
send her answer like an arrow after him. At the table he arranged an
eighth plate and drew up a chair before it. "If that's for Jack,"
remarked Dick Wilbur, "you're wasting your time. I know her and I know
her type. She'll never come out to the table tonight—nor tomorrow,
either. I know!"
    In fact, he knew a good deal too much about girls and women also, did
Wilbur, and that was why he rode the long trails of the
mountain-desert with Boone and his men. Far south and east in the
Bahamas a great mansion stood vacant because he was gone, and the dust
lay thick on the carpets and powdered the curtains and tapestries with
a common gray.
    He had built it and furnished it for a woman he loved, and afterward
for her sake he had killed a man and fled from a posse and escaped in
the steerage of a west-bound ship. Still the law followed him, and he
kept on west and west until he reached the mountain-desert, which
thinks nothing of swallowing men and their reputations.
    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 Dick
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 shirt where her knife passed 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
butt 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 butt 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 hoarsely: "Sit down, girl.
Sit down and be one of us.