Curry Read online

  The cigarette dropped from the fingers of the lad and the paper unfurled and fluttered daintily down to the floor. But Jimmie did not answer. He was thinking intently, and a dark flush gradually mounted to his cheeks.

  His father suddenly relented.

  “Don’t take what I say too serious!” he exclaimed. “You know me, Jimmie. Buck up! I love you, lad, and I’d be with you through thick and thin. D’ye hear?”

  His great hand fell on the shoulder of the youth, who looked up, as pale as he had been red the moment before. His eyes were slightly suffused, and his lips trembled. But this show of emotion occurred for only a second and was so slight that his father did not note it. Moreover all things were forgotten a moment later as Jimmie raised his right hand for silence, and into that listening wait poured the drumming of the hoofs of many galloping horses.

  Jim Curry rushed to the door, threw it half open, and then staggered back, as if blinded.

  “What is it?” asked the son.

  “Look for yourself,” said the father. “Look for yourself. I’ve seen enough to suit me. Oh, if that’s what they want, they’ll find that they’re hunting a wolf. They’ll sure find that.”

  By this time Jimmie Curry had slipped to the window and peered out. He found a spectacle fitted to freeze his heart as well as that of his father. Down the road, not a quarter of a mile away, streamed a score and a half of riders, bending over the necks of shimmering horses, wet and foaming with the speed at which they had been ridden the half dozen miles out of the town. The manes blew back against the breasts and shoulders of this group, but, most significant of all, the face of every man was obscured, or partially obscured, by some sort of a mask. With some it was a strip of black cloth, perhaps torn from the linings of their coats. With others it was a bandanna fastened inside the hat, and falling loosely across face, with owlish eye holes cut in it; again the bandanna was drawn up to the eyes, as if they had been riding herd through thick, blowing dust. But, in one shape or another, every man he saw wore a mask, and the meaning was clear. They had come to take the law into their own hands; they had come to strike while the iron was hot.

  Jimmie Curry slammed the door shut, locked it, and propped a loose board against it. Then he ran to the small window and drew across it the thin hood of slats, which served to shut out wind and rain, for there was no glass in that primitive habitation.

  His father had been busy taking down loaded rifles and revolvers from the well-stocked racks. He turned, gun in hand, to observe his silent, swift-moving son.

  “What d’ye mean to do, Jimmie?” he asked.

  “Well?” asked the boy in return.

  “D’ye mean to stay here and be killed like a rat in a trap? There’s no crime on your head, my boy.”

  “What’s crime on your head is crime on mine,” answered Jimmie. “I’ll stay.”

  “You fool …” began the father.

  He was cut short by the rush of hoofbeats around the cabin.

  “We’ve got no time for talk,” said Jimmie Curry, and his father stepped to his side and silently wrung his hand.

  “Boy,” said the elder man, “why ain’t we found each other out before this?”

  “We been too lazy,” answered Jimmie huskily. “But chiefly it was because I ain’t much good at talking.”

  III

  Before they could speak again, there was the heavy beat of a hand against the door. “Hello,” said a voice outside. “Will you come out, Jim, or do we have to bust down the door and take you?”

  The deep hum of agreement that rose from the mob at the end of this speech meant much to the two who listened breathlessly inside. That mob of armed men had been raised suddenly in answer to a fierce impulse when the sheriff was found with a fractured skull, only able to whisper to the first man who found him, “Curry did it and Curry killed Dad Jackson. Get him and …” The sheriff had intended to say, “Do no harm, but put him in jail.” But the men did not wait for him to complete his speech. In five minutes, thirty excited fighters were on horseback, pouring out of town. They paused at Jackson’s shack, saw the dead body, and continued, hungry to get at the slayer and hang him to the nearest tree.

  “What would happen if I opened the door?” asked Jim Curry.

  “You’ll have to take a chance on that.”

  A stream of curses was Curry’s answer to this suggestion, but he was stopped by the raised hand of his son.

  “Who accuses Jim Curry,” asked the boy, “of murder?”

  “And who’s talking so big about Curry? Who’s asking?”

  “It’s the young rat talking for the old rat,” answered one of the posse. “It’s Jimmie, and by my way of thinking it would be a good thing if we put him out of the way along with his father. He’s got the making of the same sort of stuff in him, except that he won’t be apt to wait so long before he starts raising trouble.”

  “You keep your thoughts about Jimmie to yourself,” said the first speaker, “until we get our hands on the old man. Then the boy can be taken care of, but nobody’s to lay a hand on him until he’s done something that calls for trouble.”

  “Thanks!” called Jimmie Curry. “I sure take that kind of you.”

  “Keep your thanks. Open the door.”

  “Show us the warrant for the arrest.”

  “The warrant for the arrest is the killing he’s done. It’s warrant enough to suit us.”

  The growl of assent on the outside fell away as Jimmie called sharply, “The killing that’s been done is plumb nothing to the killing that’ll take place if you gents try to force that door. We got the guns, and we got the will to shoot. Gents, the minute you lay a hand on that door and try to break it open, you go against the law, and we got a right to shoot in self-defense. There ain’t no officer of the law that I hear talking on the outside. If there is, let him come around to the window and show himself.”

  “And get shot?”

  “You know well enough,” answered Jimmie hotly, “that, whatever you have against my father and me, you can’t say that we ever, either of us, have broken our word or took unfair advantage. Isn’t that straight?”

  “Except murdering white-headed old men.”

  “Will you hear the truth about that?”

  “I’ll hear the lies that you got to tell … or some of ’em.”

  “My father was with old Dad Jackson. They was talking about old times. Dad showed a couple of gun tricks. Father done a double roll, and one of the guns went off by mistake. Is that tolerable clear to you?”

  “A tolerable clear lie!” shouted someone. “Boys, are you going to let that stand?”

  Their cry of denial was ample answer.

  “It’s going to be a fight, after all,” whispered Jimmie softly as he turned to his father. “Here’s goodbye.”

  “Lad,” murmured the father, “how can I let you stay and …?”

  “Hush,” said Jimmie. “They’re talking it over. Maybe they will change their minds.”

  For on the outside the men had drawn back and were arguing.

  “If we tackle that house,” they growled, “there sure is going to be some killing done, and the killing ain’t going to fall on our side. They’re fighters, both of ’em, and they come out of a fighting stock. Besides, they got the right on their side. They can kill us off like dogs, and it’ll still be legal. On the other hand, if we let ’em bluff us out, we’ll be laughingstocks. Jeffersonville has had a chance to laugh at our post office, and now it’ll sure have a good chance to laugh at the way we go out and capture killers. But it’s up to us boys to decide if we want to risk some of our own men.”

  The argument ran in this manner, but here it came to a point where a decisive answer had to be made, and the answer was not long in coming. A murmur, a growl, and then it was decided unanimously that so many men would be shamed if they met together, rode t
o execute vengeance, and then were foiled by the opposition of two wretched men. And one of these was less than a man—he was only a boy.

  One more demand that Jim Curry go out to meet them, and then they started to draw back. Jim Curry, watching through a crack, pulled up his Colt to fire, but his son knocked his hand down.

  “They ain’t going to fire,” he assured his father calmly enough.

  “Why, you idiot,” replied his father, “ain’t they getting back into cover behind the woodpile and the barn? What does that mean?”

  “They’ll just throw a few shots into the top of the shack to try to make you come out,” said Jimmie Curry. “They ain’t going to open up and fire on this house blindly. Why? Because I’m in here, and one of them shots might hit me.”

  “D’you think they’d care about that?”

  Jimmie flushed with rather scornful anger as he stared at his father. “Of course they care. They ain’t murderers, Dad, not a bit of it. They’re all heated up, just now. That’s all that’s wrong with ’em. They think you’re a killer and they want to get you. But they ain’t going to shoot to kill. They might plug me, and they know that I ain’t done nothing.”

  “It’s too late now,” replied the elder. “They’ve all took to shelter. But I tell you, Son, you figure that mob has got brains and thinks. You’re all wrong. Them gents out yonder mean to fight until they get me, and, if they have to get you before they get me, why, they’ll go right ahead and do it. Nothing can stop ’em. A mob ain’t got any more brains than a blind bull.”

  He had hardly ended before a gun exploded in the near distance, and the report was followed by a rolling volley.

  “Shooting through the roof, eh?” shouted Jim Curry excitedly. “Look at that, will you? D’you call that the roof?”

  For the bullets had smashed through the walls of the shack, breast high, and in the first glance the two besieged men could distinguish a dozen little round eyeholes, which the slugs had punctured through the thin boards.

  Jimmie Curry glanced around, amazed. There was a trickle of crimson down the back of his hand where a bullet had grazed the skin. The wound was of the most trifling nature, but the boy looked down at it as if it had been mortal.

  “They are shooting to kill,” he said. “They are doing that.”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” asked his father as he threw himself on the floor. “They’re shooting to kill, right enough, and, if they don’t get us quick enough, they’ll fire the shack and plug us by the light of the flames as we run out, because it’s getting pretty dark in here now. About sunset time, I think.”

  Jimmie dropped down beside his father. His Colt was in his hand. “I don’t believe it yet!” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe it!”

  “Can’t you? Then look at that … curse ’em. They’re shooting high and low.” As he spoke, bullets began to smash through the sides of the shack only a few inches above the floor. The posse had foreseen, doubtless, that the men inside might lie flat, and they were guarding against that maneuver.

  “Get up, Jimmie,” said his father. “Get up before they finish you like a dog. They …”

  As he spoke, he was rising to his knees, but he never was able to finish his sentence. His head toppled back and he fell across the body of his son, shot squarely through the temples.

  As for Jimmie Curry, he sat for a moment, stunned, with the shoulders of his father in his lap, heedless of the roar of the guns and the noise of the bullets, as they crunched through the sides of the little shack. Then the dead body quivered under the impact of another slug, and Jimmie started to his feet, groaning with rage.

  He ran to the window. That side of the house and the door side were commanded by the men hiding behind the woodpile and in the barn. The sun was just below the horizon, but there was still ample light. If there was to be an escape, he must get through on the other side, which would be swept only at an angle by the fire of the besiegers. But that side of the house was blank wall. He rested his hand thoughtfully against the thin boards regardless, or nearly regardless of the hum and smash of bullets around him. They snapped through the very wall before him, and that revealed to him that the thin boards were rotten, that the nails were rusty. Suppose he were to throw himself at those boards at the far end of the shack, close to the place where they were fastened to the beams with the old nails?

  In a moment he had put the plan into execution. Starting the full width of the shack, he ran with all his might, threw himself sidewise, his shoulder first, like a football player giving interference, and struck the boards with all his might. They groaned back, far back on the nails. He instantly repeated the attack, regardless of the danger of breaking half of his ribs and injury to his shoulder. The second assault succeeded better than his dreams. In another instant, covered with scratches from the broken ends of the boards, Jimmie rolled head over heels in the sand beyond.

  An explosion of a half a dozen guns simultaneously covered the noise of his exit, and, before the posse was aware of his flight, he was on his feet and running at the top of his speed toward a group of horses that the avengers had foolishly left without guard on the road.

  The moment they sighted him, sensing at once that he had bolted because the second man was incapacitated by a wound and therefore would not be able to cover the flight, the entire posse rushed from behind the woodpile and out of the barn and poured across the open space after Jimmie.

  He had a vital lead, however, and the accuracy of their fire was disturbed by their running, by the poor light, and by the distance. In another moment they dared not fire at all because he was directly in line with the horses. Besides, their only motive in dropping the fugitive was the fear that it might be the elder Curry himself. And when two or three made out for certain that it was the son, they attempted to check the others.

  It was hard to check a flood of thirty men, however. They streamed on, shouting and firing their guns, while Jimmie Curry leaped into a saddle, twitched his horse halfway around to avoid a group of its companions, and then, driving his mount into a gallop, whirled and fired pointblank at the pursuers.

  One man threw up his arms, fell with a scream, and lay still. Another doubled up in a knot and writhed this way and that, after his tumble.

  That spurt of fire drove the pursuers to the ground, and, before they could open and maintain a dangerous fire, young Curry was beyond reach in the rapidly increasing gloom of the evening.

  The pursuit that streamed after him was only half-hearted. And ten miles away, shaking off the last of those who hung at his heels, Jimmie Curry looked back and shook his fist from the top of the hill, on which he sat his stolen horse, to the glimmering lights of the village in the hollow below.

  His hand, indeed, was against all the rest of the world. They had murdered his father, and he in turn, as he then thought, had killed two of the slayers. Afterward he was to learn that neither of them had died of their wounds. But when he learned this, it was too late to take him from the course to which he committed himself.

  Without rudder or purpose, he was sent adrift. He could not even properly avenge the fall of his father. Masked men had killed him—that he knew—and two of those masked men had fallen in exchange.

  So it was that Jim Curry the second set his face to the world for the first time.

  IV

  Six years had come and gone over the head of the village of Chester in the Southland. A thousand miles north, on a fresh day in May, the stagecoach rolled with beat of hoofs and rumble of wheels down a steep grade, roared across the inevitable bridge at the bottom of the gulch, and then labored up the other slope. It was a stiff climb. The bright, hot sun of the mountains and the hard lug upgrade started the horses steaming and grunting before they had gone a hundred yards; they were so badly spent when they reached a nearly level stretch of road, winding up the mountain, that the stage driver halted the coach to give his nags a chance to
catch their wind.

  “It’s the green feed,” he said commiseratingly to his passengers, swinging around in the seat and dangling one heavily booted leg over the side. This maneuver displayed spurs. Why a stage driver should wear spurs no one of his passengers could guess, and the driver knew as little as they. “It’s the green feed,” he said, “that knocks the stuffing out of a hoss. Makes ’em all soft and mushy. They got no heart when they come off pasture. Takes a couple of weeks of work and graining ’em before they’re up to mountain work. Look at old Bess, that near leader. She’s the best of the lot when she gets ripe. But it’ll take her another month to round into shape. A plumb crime, I say, to catch a hoss up and send him into the traces right out of the pasture. Ain’t I right, chief?”

  The chief thus appealed to was a leathery, tobacco-chewing individual, very tall, very slender, and gaily dressed. He was busy manufacturing a cigarette, for he was engaged every moment of the day in smoking a cigar, a cigarette, or chewing tobacco. He alternated these forms of the same diversion. His little, bright-blue eyes glittered down the slope, then turned and dwelt on his companion, the stage driver.

  “I dunno,” he said. “All I know is that I want to get through to Baxter City, and I want to get through before dark. The Red Devil is around these parts. Be soft for him to land us if he got a chance in the dark.”

  There were two schoolteachers-to-be in the stage, brown-faced mountain girls with eyes as big and gentle and timorous as the eyes of deer. They caught their breath at this ominous speech. The third occupant of the stagecoach was an old rancher, whose single ornament was a wallet so stuffed with money that it swelled against the side of his coat. Age had taken the hair from his head, leaving a red, polished skin, with a sparse tuft of white whiskers decorating the end of his chin. His mouth was continually pressed tight, partly because of the uncompromising sternness of his character, partly because he was toothless. The fourth passenger was a youth in his middle twenties, a handsome fellow in a coat that fitted so well around the collar and shoulders that it could have been picked at a great distance as a tailor-made garment. He was a gay, careless chap, one of the sort that girls are apt to look kindly upon. The two incipient schoolteachers had more than once glanced closely at him, but each time they had chosen an occasion when he seemed to be occupied with other things, but he was perfectly aware of every glance that came in his direction. Charlie Mark had been raised in a rough school, the West of the cattle country, but he had chosen a different environment for the display of his talents.