Sun and Sand Read online

“Hold on,” said Jigger. “Let the tassels stay on it, too. They make it look better.”

  “You want to mix them up with your own keys?” asked the pawnbroker.

  “I haven’t any keys of my own,” said Jigger, laughing, and went from the pawnshop at once.

  As he walked down the street, the stallion followed him, trailing a little distance to the rear, and people turned to look at the odd sight, for the horse looked fit for a king, and Jigger was in rags. There were plenty of men in the streets of Tucker Flat, because since the bank robbery of three months ago, the big mines in the Chimney Mountains north of the town had been shutting down one by one. They never had paid very much more than the cost of production, and the quarter million stolen from the Levison Bank had consisted chiefly of their deposits. Against that blow, the three mines had struggled but failed to recover. And the result was that a flood of laborers was set adrift. Some of them had gone off through the mountains in a vain quest for new jobs; others loitered about Tucker Flat in the hope that something would happen to reopen the mines. That was why the sheriff had his hands full. Tucker Flat always was as hard as nails, but now it was harder still.

  The streets were full, but the saloons were empty, as Jigger soon observed when he went into one for a glass of beer. He sat at the darkest corner table, nursing the drink and his gloomy thoughts. Doc Landy had appointed this town and that evening as the moment for their meeting, and only the devil that lived in the brain of the pseudo peddler could tell what new and dangerous task Landy would name for Jigger.

  He had been an hour in the shadows, staring at his thoughts, before the double-swing doors of the saloon were pushed open by a man who looked over the interior with a quick eye, then muttered: “Let’s try the red-eye in here, old son.”

  With a companion, he sauntered toward the bar, and Jigger was at once completely awake. For that exploring glance that the stranger had cast around the room had not been merely to survey the saloon, it had been in quest of a face, and when his eye had lighted on Jigger, he had come in at once.

  But what could Jigger be to him?

  Jigger had never seen him before. In the great spaces of his memory, where faces appeared more thickly than whirling leaves, never once had he laid eyes on either of the pair. The first man was tall, meager, with a crooked neck and a projecting Adam’s apple. The skin was fitted tightly over the bones of his face. His hair was blond, his eyebrows very white, and his skin sun-blackened. It was altogether a face that would not be forgotten easily. The second fellow was an opposite type—fat, dark, with immense power swelling the shoulders and sleeves of his shirt.

  The two looked perfectly the parts of cowpunchers; certainly they had spent their lives in the open, and there was nothing to catch the eyes about them as extraordinary, except that both wore their guns well down the thigh, so that the handles of them were conveniently in grasp of the fingertips.

  Having spent half a second glancing at them, Jigger spent the next moments in carefully analyzing the two. Certainly he never had seen their faces. He never had heard their names—from their talk he learned that the tall fellow was Tim and the shorter man was called Buzz. They looked the part of cowpunchers, perfectly, except that the palms of their hands did not seem to be thickened or calloused.

  What could they want with Jigger, unless they had been sent into the town of Tucker Flat in order to locate Jigger and relay to him orders from Doc Landy?

  Several more men came into the saloon. But it was apparent that they had nothing to do with the first couple. However, a few moments later both Buzz and Tim were seated at a table with two more. By the very way that tall Tim shuffled the cards, it was clear to Jigger that these fellows probably had easier ways of making money than working for it.

  Hands uncalloused, guns worn efficiently though uncomfortably low, these were small indications, but they were enough to make Jigger suspicious. The two looked to him more and more like a couple of Landy’s lawbreakers.

  “How about you, stranger?” said Tim, nodding at Jigger. “Make a fifth at poker?”

  “I’ve only got a few bucks on me,” said Jigger. “But I’ll sit in if you want.”

  He could have sworn that this game had been arranged by Tim and Buzz solely for the purpose of drawing him into it. And yet everything had been done very naturally.

  He remained out for the first three hands, then on three queens he pulled in a jackpot. Half an hour later he was betting his last penny. He lost it at once.

  “You got a nice spot of bad luck,” said Buzz Mahoney, who was mixing the cards at the moment. “But stick with the game. If you’re busted, we’ll lend you something.”

  “I’ve got nothing worth a loan,” said Jigger.

  “Haven’t you got a gun tucked away somewhere?”

  “No. No gun.”

  And he saw a thin gleam of wonder and satisfaction commingled in the eyes of Tim Riley.

  “Empty out your pockets,” said Tim. “Maybe you’ve got a picture of your best girl. I’ll lend you something on that.”

  He laughed as he spoke. They all laughed. And Jigger obediently put the contents of his pockets on the table, a jumble of odds and ends.

  “All right,” said Tim at once. “Lend you ten bucks on that, brother.”

  Ten dollars? The whole lot was not worth five, new. But Jigger accepted the money. He accepted and lost it all by an apparently foolish bet in the next hand. But he wanted to test the strangers at once.

  “I’m through, boys,” he said, and pushed back his chair.

  He was eager to see if they would still persuade him to remain in the game. But not a word was said, except that Buzz Mahoney muttered: “Your bad luck is a regular long streak, today. Sorry to lose you, kid.”

  Jigger laughed a little, pushing in his cards with a hand that lingered on them for just an instant.

  In that moment he had found what he expected—a little, almost-microscopic smudge that was not quite true to the regular pattern on the backs of the cards. It was a tiny thing, but the eye of Jigger was a little sharper than that of a hawk that turns its head in the middle sky and sees in the dim forest of the grass below the scamper of a little field mouse.

  The cards were marked. Mahoney or Tim Riley had done that. They were marked for the distinct purpose of beating Jigger, for the definite end of getting away something that had been in his possession. What was it that they had wanted so much? What was it that had brought them on his trail?

  II

  It was pitch dark when Doc Landy reached the deserted shack outside the town of Tucker Flat. He whistled once and again, and when he received no answer, he began to curse heavily. In the darkness, with the swift surety of long practice, he stripped the packs from the mules, hobbled and sidelined them, and presently they were sucking up water noisily at the little rivulet that crossed the clearing.

  The peddler, in the meantime, had kindled a small fire in the open fireplace that stood before the shack, and he soon had the flames rising, as he laid out his cooking pans and provisions. This light struck upward, only on his long jaw and heavy nose, merely glinting across the baldness of his head and the silver pockmarks that were littered over his features. When he turned, reaching here or there with his long arms, the huge, deformed bunch behind his shoulders loomed. It was rather a camel’s hump of strength than a deformity of the spine.

  Bacon began to hiss in the pan. Coffee bubbled in the pot. Potatoes were browning in the coals beside the fire. Soft pone steamed in its baking pan, and now the peddler set out a tin of plum jam and prepared to begin his feast.

  It was at this moment that he heard a yawn, or what seemed a yawn, on the farther side of the clearing. The big hands of the peddler instantly were holding a shotgun in readiness. Peering through the shadows, on the very margin of his firelight he made out a dim patch of gold, then the glow of big eyes. At last he was aware of a big horse lying motionless on the ground while close to him, his head and shoulders comfortably pillowed on a hummo
ck, appeared Jigger.

  “Jigger!” yelled the peddler. “You been here all the time? Didn’t you hear me whistle?”

  “Why should I show up before eating time?” asked Jigger. He stood up and stretched himself. The stallion began to rise, also, but a gesture from the master made it sink to the ground again.

  “I dunno why I should feed a gent too lazy to help me take off those packs and cook the meal,” growled Doc Landy. And he thrust out his jaw in an excess of malice.

  “You want to feed me, because you always feed the hungry,” said Jigger. “Because the bigness of old Doc’s heart is one of the things that everyone talks about. A rough diamond, but a heart of gold. A . . .”

  “The devil with the people and you, too,” Doc said.

  He looked on gloomily while Jigger, uninvited, helped himself to food and commenced to eat.

  “Nothing but brown sugar for this coffee?” demanded Jigger.

  “It’s too good for you, even that way,” answered Doc. “What makes you so hungry?”

  “Because I didn’t eat since noon.”

  “Why not? There’s all the food in the world in Tucker Flat.”

  “Broke,” said Jigger.

  “Broke? How can you be broke when I gave you fifteen hundred dollars two weeks ago?” shouted Doc.

  “Well,” said Jigger, “the fact is that faro parted me from five hundred.”

  “Faro? You fool!” said Doc. “But that still left a whole thousand . . . and from the looks of you, you didn’t spend anything on clothes.”

  “I ran into Jeff Beacon, and old Jeff was flat.”

  “How much did you give him?”

  “I don’t know. I gave him the roll, and he took a part of it.”

  “You don’t know how much?”

  “I forgot to count it, afterward.”

  “Are you clean crazy, Jigger?”

  “Jeff needed money worse than I did. A man with a family to take care of needs a lot of money, Doc.”

  “Still, that left you several hundred. What happened to it?”

  “I met Steve Walters when he was feeling lucky, and I staked him for poker.”

  “What did his luck turn into?”

  “Wonderful, Doc. He piled up nearly two thousand, in an hour.”

  “Where was your share of it?”

  “Why, Steve hit three bad hands and plunged, and he was taken to the cleaners. So I gave him something to eat on and rode away.” Jigger paused, then added: “And when today came along, somehow I had only a few dollars in my pocket.”

  “I’d rather pour water on the desert than put money in your pocket!” shouted Doc Landy. “It ain’t human, the way you throw it away.”

  He continued to glare for a moment, and growl. He was still shaking his head as he commenced champing his food.

  “You didn’t even have the price of a meal?” he demanded at last.

  “That’s quite a story.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” snapped Doc Landy. “I’ve got a job for you.”

  “I’ve just finished a job for you,” said Jigger.

  “What of it?” demanded Doc Landy. “You signed up to do what I pleased for three months, didn’t you?”

  “I did.” Jigger sighed. He thought regretfully of the impulse that had led him into putting himself at the beck and call of this old vulture. But his word had been given.

  “And there’s more than two months of that time left, ain’t there?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then listen to me, while I tell you what I want you to do.”

  “Wait till you hear my story.”

  “Rats with your story. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Oh, you’ll want to hear it all right.”

  “What makes you think so?” asked the peddler.

  “Because you like one thing even more than money.”

  “What do I like more?”

  “Trouble,” said Jigger. “You love it like the rat that you are.”

  In fact, as the peddler thrust out his jaw and wrinkled his eyes he looked very like a vast rodent. He overlooked the insult to ask: “What sort of trouble?”

  “Something queer. I told you I was broke today. That’s because I lost my last few dollars playing poker. I played the poker because I wanted to lose.”

  “Wanted to?” echoed Doc Landy. “That’s too crazy even for you. I don’t believe it.”

  “I’ll tell you how it was. I was sitting with a glass of beer when two hombres walked into the saloon . . . by the look they gave me, I knew they were on my trail . . . and I wondered why, because I’d never seen them before. I let them get me into a poker game and take my cash. I knew that wasn’t what they wanted. When I was frozen out, they were keen to lend me a stake and got me to empty my pockets on the table. I put a handful of junk on the table, then they loaned me ten dollars, and I let that go in the next hand. They didn’t offer to stake me again. They wanted something that was in my pockets. When they got that, they were satisfied. Now, then, what was it that they were after?”

  “What did they look like?” asked Doc Landy.

  “Anything up to murder,” said Jigger promptly.

  “What was the stuff you put on the table?”

  “Half a pack of wheat-straw papers, a full sack of tobacco, a penknife with one blade broken, a twist of twine, sulphur matches, a leather wallet with nothing in it except a letter from a girl, a key ring and some keys, a handkerchief, a pocket comb in a leather case, a stub of a pencil. That was all.”

  “The letter from the girl. What girl?” asked Landy.

  “None of your business,” said Jigger.

  “It may have been their business, though.”

  “Not likely. Her name wasn’t signed to the letter, anyway. She didn’t say anything except talk about the weather. Nobody could have made anything of that letter.”

  “Any marks on the wallet?”

  “None that mattered, so far as I know.”

  “I’ve seen you write notes on cigarette papers.”

  “No notes on those.”

  “What were you doing with a key ring and keys? You don’t own anything with locks on it.”

  “Caught my eye in the pawnshop today. Little, silver snake with green eyes.”

  “Anything queer about that snake?”

  “Good Mexican work. That’s all.”

  “The letter’s the answer,” said Doc Landy. “There was something in that letter.”

  “They’re welcome to it.”

  “Or in the keys. What sort of keys?”

  “Three for padlocks, two regular door keys, something that looked like a skeleton, and a little, flat key of white metal.”

  “Any marks on those keys?”

  “Only on the little one. The number on it was one-two-six-five.”

  “You’ve got an eye,” said Doc Landy. “When I think what an eye and a brain and a hand you’ve got, it sort of makes me sick. Nothing in the world that you couldn’t do if you weren’t so dog-gone honest.”

  Jigger did not answer. He was brooding, and now he said: “Could it have been the keys? I didn’t think of that.” Then he added: “It was the keys!”

  “How d’you know?” asked Doc.

  “I remember now that when I bought them, the pawnbroker said that he had just put the ring out for sale a couple of hours before.”

  “Ha!” grunted Doc. “You mean that the two gents had gone back to the pawnshop to redeem the key ring?”

  “Why not? Maybe they’d come a long way to redeem that key ring. Maybe the time was up yesterday. They found the thing gone . . . they got my description . . . they trailed me . . . they worked the stuff out of my pockets onto the table . . . and there you are. Doc, they were headed for some sort of dirty work . . . something big.”

  Doc Landy began to sweat. He forgot to drink his coffee. “We’ll forget the other job I was going to give you,” he said. “Maybe there ain’t a bean in this, but we’ll run it down.”<
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  “I knew you’d smell the poison in the air and like it,” said Jigger, grinning.

  “What would put you on their trail? What would the number on that little key mean?”

  “Hotel room? No, it wasn’t big enough for that. It couldn’t mean anything in this part of the world . . . except a post-office box. No other lock would be shallow enough for it to fit.”

  “There’s an idea!” exclaimed Doc Landy. “That’s a big number . . . one-two-six-five. Take a big town to have that many post-office boxes.”

  “Weldon is the only town big enough for that . . . the only town inside of three hundred miles.”

  “That pair is traveling for Weldon,” agreed Landy. They wanted that bunch of keys. Get ’em, Jigger! That’s your job. Just get those keys and find out what they’re to open. And start now.”

  III

  Buzz Mahoney, opening the door of his room at the hotel in Tucker Flat, lit a match to ignite the lamp on the center table. Then he heard a whisper behind him and tried to turn around, but a blow landed accurately at the base of his skull and dropped him down a well of darkness. Jigger, leaning over him, unhurried, lit another match, and fumbling through the pockets, found almost at once the silver-snake key ring. Then he descended to the street, using a back window instead of the lobby and the front door. Before he had gone half a block, he heard stamping and shouting in the hotel, and knew that his victim had recovered and was trying to discover the source of his fall.

  Jigger, pausing near the first streak of lamplight that shone through a window, examined the keys with a swift glance.

  There had been seven keys before; there were only six, now. That was what sent Jigger swiftly around the corner to the place where Doc Landy waited for him.

  “I’ve got them,” he said, “but the one for the post-office box is gone. Mahoney had the rest, but Tim Riley is gone with the little key.”

  “There’s something in that post-office box,” answered Doc. “Go and get it.”

  “He’s got a good head start,” answered Jigger.

  “He’s got a good start, but you’ve got your horse, and if Fanfare can’t make up the lost ground, nothing can. Ride for Weldon and try to catch Tim Riley on the way. I’m heading straight on for Weldon myself. I’ll get there sometime tomorrow. Quit the trails and head straight for Weldon Pass. You’ll catch your bird there.”