Free Blue Kingdom by Max Brand Page A

sun. And this here room has a south window. I need a view, too, and it’s got another window that looks over the mountains, yonder.” Deliberately he turned his back and walked to the nearest window and looked out.
    Chuck Harper could not believe his eyes. Here was a man who turned his back upon him, and stood at a window without a gun in his hands, and on the floor at Harper’s feet rested his own gun, the handle invitingly toward him. It would be an instant’s work to scoop up that weapon and use it. Yet, Harper hesitated, and gradually his blood turned cold. What could an ordinary man do against a magician? He only bawled out impotently: “You know who’s got this room, young feller?”
    â€œOh,” said Dunmore, “Tankerton won’t want to have any trouble with me.”

E LEVEN
    It was a week later that Chuck Harper walked in the woods behind the hotel with a little dark-skinned man, a handsome little fellow, if it had not been that his eyes were like the eyes of a ferret, so brightly twinkling and so ill at ease. He wore a continual smile and had a habit of keeping his eyes fixed on the ground, as though he were hunting for something there, then lifting them suddenly as though he had found it in his companion’s face. Despite his smallness, Chuck Harper treated him with the greatest respect, for this was Lynn Tucker, who, in any other part of the world, might have been considered a very proper head for the most formidable gang of desperadoes. But this was the domain of Jim Tankerton, and, therefore, Tucker was not in command; men rated him as a sort of second lieutenant, beneath Tankerton himself and that wily old snake of wisdom and poison, Dr. Legges.
    Chuck Harper knew all that others knew about Lynn Tucker, and, therefore, he talked chiefly when questions were asked of him. Already he had told of thecoming of Dunmore, and Tucker had surveyed the great rock and even tried to budge it with his own lean hands.
    â€œHe’s quite a man,” Lynn Tucker said calmly.
    So they went back into the woods and continued their talk.
    â€œWhat does he want?” asked Tucker.
    â€œThat I dunno. Sometimes I think that all he wants is to live here free. I asked him for his week today, and he says that he’s hurt and plumb surprised that he should be asked for his money before he’s been here a month.”
    â€œDid he say that?”
    â€œHe did. Says that he wasn’t used to being treated that way, and that he would hate to begin now to have his credit doubted, but, seein’ as I was livin’ away up here in the mountains, where they didn’t understand the latest way of doin’ things, he’d be glad to forgive me and overlook it.”
    â€œDoes he talk that way?”
    â€œHe don’t talk no other way, at all. If you was to go up and swear at him, he’d admire the fine flow of words that you had and ask where you’d studied it out, and was it all original, and did nobody help you with some of the big ones.”
    Tucker nodded and smiled at the ground, as usual.
    â€œD’you think he has money?”
    â€œI wished I thought so, but I figger that I’m keepin’ him free of charge.”
    â€œWhat makes you do it? You got the law to help you.”
    The landlord hesitated, and then scratched the stubbleon his chin. “The law and me ain’t chums,” he confessed. “We’ve never been pals, and the farther off that I keep from it, the better it suits me, I’ll tell a man.”
    â€œIt’s a pretty hard case,” said Tucker.
    â€œHe eats me out of house and home. He’s a hog! You could feed four men and a boy on what he pours down his throat every day. The wife, she sets up a feed for him, and he eats it, and then he says he knows that she’s holdin’ back a little surprise on him. And he walks over and unlocks the pantry door. . . .”
    â€œWhy don’t you keep the