Sour Creek Valley Page 12

  I said to Pepillo, “Well, kid, how come you ain’t had much to say about all this?”

  “Why should I talk,” asked Pepillo, “when you’re not willing to hear good advice?”

  “Let’s have it,” I said, “and then I’ll make up my mind for myself.”

  “It’s only this,” said Pepillo. “That you don’t know that Almadares.”

  “Do you know him?” I asked.

  “Sure,” said the kid. “Don’t I, though? And every Mexican knows about him. He cannot lose a fight. That is his way.”

  “He is gonna change his way now, though,” I said. “These boys of mine mean mischief.”

  Pepillo nodded.

  “They will kill many men,” said Pepillo. “But what good is that if Almadares gets away? He will raise more men and come back to fight again. And the second time it will be he who makes the surprise attack!”

  He was dead set on that fact. You couldn’t budge him on it, so I stopped arguing.

  We all turned in early that night. The horses were ready. The men would be on deck by three o’clock, and all was to be set. I saw to that, made my rounds at about ten, and then I went to bed. The last that I saw was Pepillo, sitting up cross-legged on his goat-skin rug. He blew the light out, and still he sat there. I watched the glow and the darkening of the end of his cigarette until I went to sleep.

  I woke up with a queer feeling that somebody was leaning over my bed. I reached out quick and grabbed an arm so soft that the grip of my fingers went right to the bone. I heard Pepillo gasp out, “Mercy, señor! You will break my arm!”

  Something clinked on the floor. I jumped up and, dragging Pepillo along with me, lighted the lamp. I saw that Pepillo was so scared that he was white. He was so scared that he didn’t have any words on tap. Then I went back with the lamp, and I saw what had dropped from his hand.

  It was lying there on the floor as big as life—the key to the cellar room where I had locked up Sammy Dance in the afternoon of the day before!

  Chapter Twenty

  I looked at the key and then at the kid. What had little Blue Jay been up to now in the way of mischief? I asked him, but he scowled at me and wouldn’t speak.

  “If you’ve been raising the devil, kid, and messing up with this plan of mine,” I said, “I’ll give you such a hiding that you’ll never forget it. You understand?”

  I picked up my quirt and took a hard grip on it. He simply swallowed hard, but he wouldn’t speak. I went down into the cellar, still dragging the kid along with me. I opened the door with the key and looked inside. There was no sign of Sammy Dance!

  Well, when I had finished lighting the little lamp that was down there, I closed the door and sat down. I was so sick to find Dance gone that I was weak.

  “Blue Jay, will you tell me now why you did it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Look here,” I said. “This was the biggest chance that I’ll ever have in my life. I could’ve blotted out that gang of thugs. I could’ve made rustling the most unpopular sport in the world, so far as the Sour Creek Valley is concerned, and here you’ve spoiled my game for me. You’ve turned that yegg loose. Curse your heart, will you tell me why you did it?”

  At that, some of the color jerked back into his face. “I shall tell you nothing under compulsion,” he said.

  Well, when I thought how he had ruined everything, and how Sammy Dance was scooting back through the night to get to Almadares ahead of us and tell Almadares everything that we planned on, I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. I took both of the slim wrists of the kid in the fingers of my left hand.

  “Blue Jay,” I said to him, “I’ve stood a lot from you, and so have other folks. I like the nerve that you got, and the quick wits that you got. But one thing that you need mighty bad is a dad to lick you into shape. Now, kid, I’m so hot that I could bust you into pieces and welcome. But I ain’t gonna. All that I’m gonna do is to give you the beating that you need. I’m gonna give you a dressing down that will serve you for a long time.”

  He jumped back from me, but it wasn’t any good. There was enough strength in my one hand to bust the bones of both of his wrists, if I had wanted to turn on the pressure.

  “Señor,” said the Blue Jay, “do not do it!”

  “Bah! Are you gonna beg off?”

  At that he leaned over quick and sank his teeth in my wrist. The pain and the surprise made me let go, and he jumped for the door. He was almost through it when I caught the nape of his neck and yanked him back. Then I picked him up by the wrists again. I was so mad that there was black before my eyes.

  I said, “Pepillo, I swear that I’m praying to God to keep me from doing anything wrong, but you’ve got this coming to you.” I cut him across the shoulders with that quirt.

  He didn’t yell, and he didn’t wriggle any more. The minute that he felt that lash bite home, he stood, stiff and straight, and just looked at me. I let the quirt hang in the air for half a second.

  He said, “Señor, it was to keep you from running your head into sure death that I turned him loose.”

  “Sure death?”

  “Almadares,” said Pepillo. “I tell you that you would be no more to him than I would be to you. Than I am now in your hands.”

  He said it like he meant it, too. But just then the suggestion that I would’ve been helpless in the hands of another man didn’t make any great winning with me. It sent the blackness swimming across my eyes again, and I slashed home half a dozen cutting blows, hitting without any aim at all.

  Then what brought me back to my senses was the fact that he wasn’t yelling, and he wasn’t trying to get away, and he wasn’t tugging at my wrists. That wasn’t like a boy. He ought to have been screaming, the way that I had laid that quirt into him, and a quirt is the most cuttingest thing that there is, next to a knife. Only it hurts a lot worse than any knife ever did, you may be sure.

  The quietness of the kid, as I was saying, brought me to my senses. The blackness cleared away from before my eyes, and there I saw Pepillo standing with his head up and turned a little away from me, as though he didn’t want to see my face. In his eyes, there wasn’t any pain—only a terrible, great shame.

  The quirt dropped right out of my hand. I turned his wrists loose. Those wrists were white as snow from the force that had been gripping them.

  I don’t know why I should have felt the way that I did. The kid had been bad, and real bad. I leave it to you. Didn’t he deserve a licking and a hard licking? But, well, a quirt is a horsewhip—and the skin of Pepillo was pretty thin.

  Besides, hitting at him, blind with rage, an end of the lash had just flicked across his face, leaving a white mark that was turning red and raising in a little weal. It wasn’t a bad mark, you understand, but somehow the fact that I had hit the kid in the face was like a knife driven into my heart.

  When he saw that I had turned him loose, he turned around to the door. But I jumped in front of him. Well, it was grand to see him step back and look me in the eye.

  “Is there more, señor?” he asked. “Because I shall not attempt to run away.”

  “Pepillo,” I said, “I didn’t understand …”

  The kid sank down on the cot of Sammy Dance, and he sat there with his eyes closed. He just laid a hand against his throat as though he was stifling. It was no play acting. You would think by the look of him that I had just finished horsewhipping a cross between a Duke of York and a United States senator.

  “I dunno how it is,” I had to tell the kid, “but I’m sick. I’ve done wrong. I shouldn’t’ve used a quirt. And … except I was so blind mad, I wouldn’t’ve hit you in the face. I want to ask you to believe me that I wouldn’t mean to hit you in the face … with a whip, my son.”

  “Son?” said Pepillo, and he looked up at me, giving a queer little laugh. “Ah, well, if you have finished beati
ng me with the whip, spare me from your clumsy tongue, señor. May I go?”

  I held the door for a minute. I wanted a lot to find something else to say. Which something else seemed to be needed. But I couldn’t discover a thing. Only I knew that I was sick.

  “You’re gonna leave me, Pepillo?”

  He stepped right out past me and turned around to stare, when he heard me say that. “Is it likely that I should stay?” he asked.

  “It ain’t likely, son,” I said, “only if you would try to listen to me for a minute, maybe I could explain why it would be for your own good.”

  There was a sort of a spasm that crossed his face, and ten thousand devils shone in his eyes. “Do you think that I don’t detest you more than there are words to tell it?” he asked. “You dog of a gringo!”

  And doggone me if he didn’t bust out crying. Yes, sir, all my whipping hadn’t raised a tear to his eyes, but when he got so mad and so ashamed, that was the way that emotion turned loose in him.

  I didn’t try to comfort him. I just stood back and hung my head like a dog that had been kicked. That was the only way that I could explain the way that I felt.

  “Blue Jay,” I said, “I don’t mind all of your hard talk. I would only wish that you could find harder words so that you could take it all out on me like that.”

  Then an idea come bang right into my head. I grabbed up the quirt.

  “Ah,” Pepillo said, “is it to come again?”

  I give him the handle of the whip.

  “I sure acted like a low-down skunk to you, kid,” I said. “Now, I got a lot tougher hide and a lot stronger hand than you got, but you’re free to use that quirt on me till your arm aches with the weight of it. Go ahead and turn loose.”

  “You lie!” cried Pepillo, shaking away his tears and grinding his teeth at me in his awful rage. “You lie, you bluff! You know that I dare not!”

  I took off my coat. “Now,” I said, “you go ahead, and see if I budge.”

  “Then …” Pepillo yelled. He took the handle of that quirt with both hands and swung it around his head.

  Z-zing! It cut through the air and slashed me across the breast. I cussed. I couldn’t help it, because it hurt so bad, but I didn’t budge, and I looked him in the eye.

  He swung that quirt back again over his head, but when he saw me standing still for the whip, the fierceness appeared to run right out of his face. He dropped the whip and give a sob; he turned and ran down the hall, and then up the cellar stairs, his feet just flying.

  “Pepillo!” I called.

  The door upstairs slammed, and the echo was the only answer that I got. Pepillo was gone. I sure would never see him again. On the way up from that cellar, I tell you that I was like a mourner at a funeral. Just that. From the first minute that I saw him in front of Gregorio’s store in Sour City, to the last instant that he stood there with the quirt over his head, every picture of him jumped right through my head.

  It wasn’t like losing a mere kid. When my old man died, and when my mother died, too—well, there was almost the same sort of sadness in the losing of Pepillo. Even more, I’m ashamed to say. You try to explain it if you can. I couldn’t then.

  I went on out to the bunkhouse, and I woke up Shorty and Rusty McArdle. You can believe me that they were both sleeping light. I took them out into the pale of the moonlight, saying, “That gent that was gonna guide us is gone. The kid thought that we would get ourselves busted up a lot if we ran into Almadares and his gang, and he stole the key from me and turned him loose.”

  Rusty couldn’t talk. He had been hankering for that fight so bad that he was fair thirsty for it. Now he was dumb. But Shorty could talk. The first minute or two couldn’t be put down in print, what he said. After that: “I knowed that the little rat would do us a harm before he got through!” said Shorty. “And when I get my hands on him, now … cuss my eyes if that ain’t him sneaking away from the house right now!”

  It was. Across the moonlight, between the house and the barn, we had a glimpse of Pepillo walking through a gap in the trees. Well, I wanted to go after him and try to keep him back, but I didn’t budge, because I knew that it would be useless. When Shorty saw the kid, he let out a sort of a howl, like a wolf, and he lit out for him.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Well, the kid knew that yell of Shorty’s, and he turned and tried to head back toward the house. After he had gone half a dozen jumps through that pale, misty moonshine, he saw that he could never make the house, because Shorty was running wonderful fast, just throwing himself across the ground and seeming to touch it with his dangling hands, monkey-like.

  Pepillo turned around and struck back through the trees toward the barns, where he’d been headed when I first saw him, but that false move and the change of direction lost him a terrible lot of ground and brought Shorty almost up to him.

  They shot away, with the kid seeming to be almost in the hands of Shorty half a dozen times, but still he would dodge away around a tree and escape again. Just as they went around the corner of the first shed, I could see Shorty run right over Pepillo and scoop him up off the ground. The scream of Pepillo come tingling and ringing in my ears, making my heart jump very queer.

  Then there wasn’t any sound. What was happening behind that barn, there wasn’t any token of. Just the silence, which was harder to bear.

  I tried to figure Pepillo taking the hammering of those big hands of Shorty’s without crying out, but the only picture that would fit was of the Blue Jay lying on the ground, and the thumbs of Shorty gripped into the hollow of his throat, shaking his head, with its long, black hair, up and down. That picture would explain everything. It was about the only thing that would explain the silence.

  I yelled, “I think that Shorty is killing him!”

  “I hope he does,” said Rusty through his teeth. “I hope he enjoys the job, too, and I only wish that I was there to help him.”

  With that he turned around and strode off into the bunkhouse. When I saw all of this, I made up my mind that I would have to get up there to the spot in time to help Pepillo a little, if I wasn’t too late.

  You’d think it hardly possible that Shorty would really try to kill the Blue Jay. But I knew how delicate Pepillo was under all of his sassiness, and the others didn’t. I saw that the only way to really handle him was to handle him gentle.

  I made time, I can tell you, between that bunkhouse and the corner of the shed. When I come closer, I heard the voice of Shorty break out into a sort of a wail.

  “My heavens … how could I have knowed?”

  It stopped me like a punch in the face. He’d killed the kid, then. And he was saying that he didn’t guess that Pepillo could possibly die so easy?

  I took out my Colt. One thing was sure. If Pepillo was dead, Shorty should die beside him. No, I would do it with my hands. I put up that gun and I sneaked a few steps forward toward the corner of the barn.

  Suddenly the voice of Pepillo answered Shorty, “Now that you know, you’ll keep quiet about it, Shorty?”

  “Aye,” Shorty said. “I sure will. I’ll never open my mouth, if you don’t want me to.”

  First, my heart swelled up to twice its normal size, I was so tickled to hear the kid speaking and to know that he wasn’t bad hurt. Then I was pretty near paralyzed with astonishment to hear the way that Shorty was talking.

  Who could this runt of a kid be, that knowing him made Shorty act like he had touched holy fire? That’s just how he was acting, because when I came into view of them, around the corner of the shed, as I crouched there, spying them out, I give you my eternal word that I saw Shorty standing first on one foot and then on the other, holding his hat in his hand, with his head bare and his long, rough hair bristling in the night wind.

  A queer picture. I could’ve laughed my head off if I hadn’t been so curious and so baffled.

&nb
sp; Who was Pepillo, really? I didn’t know that there was any royal family in the world that could make Shorty so filled with awe and with wonder as he seemed to be now.

  “I would ask you believe something,” said Shorty—and I swear to you that his voice was shaking. “If I had guessed who you was, I would rather have cut off my right hand than to have ever touched you.”

  “I believe you,” answered Pepillo.

  “Here,” said Shorty, “will you lemme brush you off?”

  “Thank you,” replied Pepillo.

  Well, there was Shorty actually getting down on his knees all the better to dust off that kid!

  Maybe I haven’t been able to give you the right idea about Shorty. But I tell you that I stood there and wouldn’t believe what I was seeing with my own eyes. He was rough, that Shorty. He was about as rough as they make ’em. But I saw what I saw and I heard what I heard.

  Only I think that what beat me most of all was the easy, careless way that the kid accepted the attentions that Shorty was giving him, accepting them as though he was used to such attentions, and as though he was born with a right to them from any man—instead of being just a little vagrant guttersnipe, the way that I had found him.

  Shorty stood up, and he backed away a little, like he wouldn’t want to force himself on Pepillo too close. Then he saw something that made him start. He pointed to the face of the kid.

  “Excuse me,” said Shorty. “Did I do that?”

  “No … it was Big Boy,” said Blue Jay.

  “A whip!”

  Pepillo nodded.

  “I’ll fix him for that,” Shorty said, and doggone me if he didn’t yank out his big, black Colt and swing around and start away.

  He meant to murder me, and that was all that there was about it.

  Pepillo got in front of him in two jumps. “You mustn’t harm him,” said Pepillo. “I deserved it, after all … I think.”

  “You … deserved it?” asked Shorty, groaning.

  “I spoiled all of his plans.”