Free Destry Rides Again by Max Brand Page A

big stakes up, but I’m mighty sure that I didn’t have money on my mind!”
    His smile faded a little as he spoke, and there was a glint in his eyes which turned Jerry Wendell from the crimson of sudden
     shame, to blanched white.
    “What you-all been doin’ this while I been away?” Destry asked politely of Wendell.
    “Me?” said Wendell. “Why, nothing much. The same things.”
    “Ah?” said Destry. “You alluz found Wham a pretty interestin’ sort of a town. I was kind of surprised when I heard that you
     was gunna leave it.”
    “Leave it?” asked Wendell, blank with surprise. “Leave Wham? What would I do, leaving Wham?”
    “That’s what I said to myself, when I heard it,” said Destry gently. “Here you are, with a house, and a business, and money
     in the mines and in lumber. Jiminy! How could Jerry leave Wham where everybody knows him, and he knows everybody? But him
     that told me said he reckoned you got tired of a lot of things in Wham, like all the dances that you gotta go to, and the
     dust from the street in summer blowin’ plumb into your office, and all such!”
    Wendell, confident that something was hidden behind this casual conversation, said not a word, but moistened his purplish
     lips and never budged his eyes from the terrible right hand of the gunman.
    “Him that told me,” went on Destry, “said that you’d got so you preferred a quiet life. Here where everybody knows you, you’re
     always bein’ called upon for something or other. They work you even on juries, he says, and that’s enough to make any man
     hot.”
    Wendell shrank lower in his chair, but Destry, buttering a large slice of corn bread, did not appear to see. He put away at
     least half the slice and talked with some difficulty around the edge of the mouthful.
    “Because them that work on a jury,” he explained to his own satisfaction, “they gotta decide a case on the up and up and not
     let any of their own feelin’ take control. Take a gent like you, you’d have an opinion about pretty nigh everybody in town
     even before the trial come off. And you might make a mistake!”
    “There’s twelve men on a jury!” said Jerry Wendell hoarsely.
    “Sure there is,” nodded Destry. “You seem to know all about juries—numbers and everything! There’s twelve men, but any single
     one of ’em is able to hang the rest! One man could stop a decision from comin’ through!”
    Wendell pushed back his chair a little. He was incapable, at the moment, of retorting to the subtle tortures of Destry.
    At last he said:
    “I’d better be goin’ back.”
    “To Wham?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “Well,” said Destry, “that’s up to you. Go ahead. I think they might be somebody waiting for you along the road, though. But
     a gent of your kind, old feller, he wouldn’t pay no attention to such things.”
    Wendell stood up.
    “I’m leaving now,” he replied, with a question and an appeal in his voice that made the girl look up at him as at a new man.
    “Good trip to you,” said Destry.
    “But first I’d like to see you alone, for a minute.”
    “Don’t you do it,” said Destry. “I know just what it must be like to cut loose from an old home, the way that Wham has been
     to you. Well, good luck to you!”
    “I’ll never come back,” said the other, unnerved at the prospect.
    “Likely you won’t—till the talk dies down a mite.”
    “Destry!” shouted the tormented man suddenly. “Will you tell me why you’ve grounds to hate me the way that you do?”
    “No hate, old fellow. No hate at all. Don’t mix that up in the job. But suppose that we let it drop there? You have your watch
     back, I have a cigarette in this hand and a forkful of ham in that and a lot of information that I would like to use, one
     day.”

Chapter Eleven
    Wendell left that room like a man entranced, and behind him he would have left a silence, if it had not been for the cheerful
     talk of Destry.
    “I come by the