The Cure of Silver Cañon Read online

  The cashier was a fellow named Clement Stevenson with a big reputation. He was in that Perrytown bank in 1927 when Sam Candy and his gang stuck up the place. Clem Stevenson pulled a gun and fought it out with them. They shot the legs out from under him and he still fought from the floor until Candy and his men had enough and lammed. With a hero like that inside the cage of Foster’s bank, you would have thought that no robber could do a thing, single-handed, but as a matter of fact poor Stevenson simply put up his hands and begged the hold-up man not to shoot. Perhaps all the red had run out of his blood back there in Perrytown.

  He was not a very experienced robber, or else he was a bit nervous. He could have had what was in the safe, which ran up to more than $18,000, but, instead, he took only what was in the cashier’s cash drawer. Afterward, rumor fixed the loss at only $2,700. He took this with the heel of his left hand, without putting up his second gun, and pushed it down into a coat pocket just as Henry P. Foster came out of his office with a double-barreled riot-gun in his hands. The robber beat him to it with a comfortable fifth of a second. He put one bullet under Foster’s collarbone and a second one right between his eyes.

  Then he ran out and swung onto the back of a gray horse at the curb and galloped away around the first corner. People wandered around in confusion. They talked a considerable bit about outrages and the dilatory law. After a couple of hours somebody remembered the gray mustang that belonged to Frank Pollard, whose place was off on the edge of town.

  That was enough to start them off. The sheriff didn’t need to ask for volunteers. As a matter of fact the whole town wanted to be in on the show; fifty of the boys went out with Sheriff Chris Tolliver.

  Pollard’s shack stood on the edge of a deep gully, a big draw where the water ran with a rush in the spring flood time. The boys surrounded the other three sides of the cabin while the sheriff and a couple more went up to the front door. Perhaps Chris Tolliver made a mistake in saying why he had come. At any rate the first thing they knew there was a crash down the side of the gorge through the bushes.

  They got there too late.

  Frank Pollard had jumped right out through a window. He should have broken his neck, but the bushes broke his fall. He legged it down the windings of the draw into the dusk, and, while the posse scattered and pursued and shouted and fired a lot of shots at shadows, only a few of them saw Pollard gallop away on a gray horse into the willows down by the creek.

  They spent two days searching the willows but they never found Frank Pollard. It made a good-size bit of talking. A lot of people were glad that the banker was no longer with them but on the whole it was considered a slap at the reputation of San Jacinto and a black eye for the old town at the very moment when the fiesta was about to begin.

  The bank itself offered $1,000 as a reward, and then some of the heartier merchants and ranchers around San Jacinto got together in town and built that reward clear up to $5,000.

  About three hundred of the lads went right out on the man trail. But along came a sandstorm the very next evening and swept the entire crowd back into town with red eyes. And when the next morning came, there was the opening of the fiesta and all that to think about so that hardly a single manhunter remained on the trail that afternoon. Nearly everybody was out on the fiesta grounds when Liddell rode into town with Pollard’s gray mustang on a lead and went to the sheriff’s office.

  That office is in one of the few San Jacinto buildings that is not of adobe. It is a small frame shack that started out as a school, turned into a grocery store, and wound up in the hands of the sheriff.

  Liddell went up the steps and walked into the big, echoing, single room. It offered merely the imaginary privacy of corners for the clerk and the two deputies. Only the clerk was there with the sheriff on this day, and the sheriff was standing at the window looking out at the street.

  This fellow, Sheriff Chris Tolliver, had that winey, sallow, sour Italian look about him, with plenty of end to his nose, bulge to his eyes, and pout to his lips. He had one of the biggest mouths you ever saw and the middle of the lower lip was always cracking to the raw so that it was a painful thing to see him smoke a cigar.

  He turned now and said, “I see you found Pollard’s horse.”

  Liddell nodded. He went over to the sheriff’s desk. The clerk was standing up, looking rather frightened.

  Liddell took out a pair of spurs and laid them on the desk. They were expensive spurs, gold-plated except for the rowel that stood out at the end of a long spoon-handle curve.

  “Kind of pretty,” remarked the sheriff.

  “Pollard thought so,” stated the clerk.

  “Did those belong to Pollard?” asked Sheriff Tolliver.

  The clerk answered again, saying, “They sure did. I remember them fine.”

  Liddell laid an old-fashioned single-action Colt on the desk, and then he paused to wink his eyes and dab at them with a fingertip. He must have been through the thick of the sandstorm. The whites of his eyes were pink and he could not see very well.

  “Here’s the initials carved into the butt,” observed the sheriff. “Did this belong to Pollard, too? I thought you were his friend.”

  “Did you?” asked Liddell.

  Some heavy footfalls came up the steps and across the porch where Liddell was squinting the water out of his eyes. The door was nudged open.

  “Hey, look!” shouted the clerk.

  The golden-bay head of a horse was looking in through the doorway.

  “Is that your mare?” asked the sheriff. “Tell her to come on in.”

  “She’s just a young fool,” Liddell said with disgust. “Come on in, Sis, while you’re about it.”

  She came in. The floor was old and had a slant to it. Sis did not trust the creaking of the boards. She studied them with a lowered head, sniffing. She picked her hoofs up and put them down with intelligent care, like a good mountain horse.

  “And shut the door behind you,” said Liddell, still with a face of disgust. “Where were you raised, anyway? In a barn?”

  She turned, taking delicate care of her footing, and with a swing of her head she shut the door. Then she came to Liddell. When she reached him, she uttered a little whinny, no louder than a man’s chuckle.

  “She’s spoiled,” said Liddell. “No mare has as much sense as a horse, and this is just a young fool that’s been spoiled.”

  “I can see that,” said the sheriff. His clerk made a step or two away from his desk, grinning enormously with joy.

  “Back up!” commanded Liddell.

  The mare backed up half a step. She stretched out her neck and nibbled at the rim of Liddell’s hat.

  “Quit it,” said Liddell.

  She quit it and tossed her head high in the air as though he had struck at her with his hand.

  “She’s spoiled a hat or two for me already,” said Liddell. “I’m trying to get rid of her but nobody wants her.”

  “Maybe not,” agreed the sheriff. “Not at your price, maybe they don’t. If there was an inch more on her legs, she’d be a Thoroughbred.”

  “She has the inch more on her legs,” answered Liddell.

  He took a wallet out of his inside coat pocket and laid it on the desk. There was a thick wad of bills in it and through the lower part of the wallet and the bills drove a half-inch hole, or nearly half an inch.

  The clerk swore.

  He had the seen the blood on one side of the wallet that glued the greenbacks together. There was plenty of the dark stain on the yellow of the pigskin. The sheriff picked up the wallet.

  “You aim to say that this is Pollard’s wallet?”

  Liddell said nothing. The sheriff opened the flap of the wallet and began to count the money inside, flipping the corners of the bills without withdrawing them. “There’s twenty-seven hundred and fifteen dollars in here.”

  “That’s
what Pollard stole from the bank, isn’t it?” asked Liddell.

  “That’s what the bank was saying yesterday,” agreed the sheriff. He took out a cigar and bit the end off it. He stuck out his tongue and moistened the ragged end of the cigar. Then he lit his smoke while Liddell watched the crack in the middle of the lower lip.

  “Where’s the body?”

  “In the San Jacinto,” said Liddell.

  “How come?” asked Tolliver, looking at Liddell with his tired, bulging, sour-wine eyes.

  “I came up with him at the mouth of the cañon,” answered Liddell. “After he dropped, I thought it was too bad to leave him out there for the coyotes … and the flies. The river was jumping and yelling its head off. I just rolled him down the slope.”

  “It was a fool thing to do.”

  “Why? He used to be a friend of mine.”

  The clerk made a face like he had swallowed acid.

  “A friend of yours … an old friend, wasn’t he?” asked the sheriff, studying Liddell. He licked the crack in his lip and waited.

  “There’s a five thousand dollar reward offered for Pollard,” remarked Liddell without the slightest emotion. “I’ll take that along with me.”

  “Maybe you will”—Tolliver nodded—“but just wait till I look the thing over, will you? The people that are putting up the cash will want to be sure that Pollard is dead. The bank will want to be sure, too.”

  “The bank won’t care, so long as it gets its money back,” stated Liddell, “and the rest of the people will take your word. Are you going to give it?”

  The sheriff said, “Don’t get tough with me, Slip.”

  Liddell answered, smiling, “I never get tough with anybody.”

  The sheriff said, “All right. Only don’t ever think that you can get tough with me. You can’t get away with it.”

  Liddell was smoking a cigarette. He took a puff of the smoke in his hand and threw it gently toward the sheriff, still smiling. The smoke made a dim streak in the air to mark the gesture.

  “Old Tolliver,” said the mild voice of Liddell. Then he walked out of the office. The mare followed him. She went down the front steps gingerly and on the street below she cut a caper or two as though she were glad to be out of there.

  The sheriff shut the door. He took out a handkerchief and scrubbed a sudden sweat from his face. He said to his clerk, “I thought for a minute the hellion was going to be tough with me.”

  The clerk, who was watching with a sick smile, answered, “Yeah, so did I.”

  III

  Out there in the street, staring at Pollard’s gray mustang and looking white around the gills, was young Mark Heath. He looked at Liddell with eyes that kept on seeing trouble.

  “Has he come in and given himself up?” asked Heath. “Is he in there?”

  “Who, Pollard? He’s dead,” answered Liddell.

  “Dead?” Heath gasped.

  He caught hold of a stirrup leather and leaned against the gray old mustang, and the mustang leaned back a little.

  “Did you like him a lot?” Liddell wanted to know.

  “He was swell to me,” said Heath. “He was swell to everybody, but he was fine to me. Did he have the bank’s money on him?”

  “Yeah. Twenty-seven hundred dollars.”

  “Twenty-seven hundred …”

  “That’s just what the bank missed.”

  “Sure. Sure. That’s right,” agreed Heath. “Only it seemed like a pile of cash for poor old Frank Pollard to get all at once. He was a kind old boy, all right.” He half closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths.

  Liddell said, “You’re a good fellow, Heath. I like you. I believe in you. That’s why I’m sorry to tell you that I was the one who killed Frank Pollard.”

  He went off down the street and left Heath stunned behind him.

  The mare followed Liddell. Now and then she pretended to be afraid of the flapping of the pennants and streamers that decorated the street, and, breaking into a gallop, she went a jump or two beyond her master and then turned and waited for his comments. He said, “You’re silly. You’re silly, is all you are.” But she did not seem to mind these remarks.

  From the far side of the town automobile horns honked and there was a rapid muttering of hoof beats as the people came back from the races. The thirsty ones were traveling the fastest, but everybody was pretty thirsty. And there were ten horses to one automobile.

  The way San Jacinto lies with only a bit of flat laid down in a junk heap of mountains, not much of 1938 can leak into the atmosphere. The only direction you can use an automobile is right up and down the river windings but, if you travel toward any other points to the compass, a horse is better and a mule is best. That is why San Jacinto keeps its flavor like an old story that children love.

  When there are two thousand more added to its population one of the big airlines intends to make it a stopping point so that air tourists can get a glimpse of the old color, but probably San Jacinto never will add the needed two thousand. It goes on living on sheep and goats and cattle and mules and burros and that sort of thing, although the Mexicans raise some good crops on the irrigated flats below the town. So when the population came in from the races at the fairgrounds, most of it was aboard mustangs; they were what made the rapid drumming to which Liddell listened as he passed on through the town.

  It was hard for him to believe that he was escaping all notice, and now, in fact, he discovered a pair of people on saddle mules, following behind him, kicking their short-stepping animals into a trot to keep up with him. One of the two was an old man with a humped-over back and a gray spade of a beard and a long face, pulled out far in front. The other was a raggle-taggle youngster in blue jeans and a cap. It seemed apparent that they had recognized him but he turned out of the main avenue before they could overtake him.

  The streets of San Jacinto wind about as though they were laid out by the maundering leisure of grazing cows. They are narrow streets. In some of them two riders hardly can pass without touching stirrups. Liddell turned down one of the darkest of these alleys until he came to the shop of a silversmith that had a window full of silver wheelwork and other intricate spiderwebs of metal. There was even cloth of silver and gold woven by the wife of the smith.

  Liddell went into the shop and saw in a corner among the shadows the immobile figure of the silversmith’s wife. She was a pyramidal creature, declining upward from large hips to narrower shoulders that supported a head without the column of a visible neck. She wore a mustache of formidable black hairs. Her complexion was that of an old chamois that has been used for years to polish automobiles. Everything about her was gross, heavy, and static except her hands that seemed to have been kept delicate by the nature of her work. Her fingers were aflash with rings and she gestured a great deal when she talked.

  Liddell said, “Juanita, I am very tired. Show me where I may sleep.”

  “Armando!” called Juanita. No emotion could struggle through the fat of her face, but her voice went up a half octave with each word and her shoulders hunched as she repeated: “Armando! Armando!”

  Armando Pinelli rushed out of the inner shop. He wore a leather apron and glasses. He was no bigger than a wasp, a dingy wasp that tunnels in the earth. When he saw Liddell, he threw up both hands and cried out, “Saint Anne … Saint Mary of God … it is the señor!”

  Juanita said, “Take him to the rear room where he can sleep. His eyes are sick, so call Dolores to put something on them. He is very tired, so hurry.”

  Armando Pinelli was all voice and hands as he led Liddell out of the shop through the cramped little courtyard where the paving stones were always as damp as winter, and so into the shed where a mule stood in a dark stall. They put Cicely, the bay mare, in the adjoining stall, and Pinelli took his guest across the court and into the house again. He was about to climb the stai
rs, but Liddell said, “A downstairs room, Armando. Any place will do. But the idiot mare gets lonely and has to have a look at me from time to time. Otherwise she grows nervous.”

  Armando was distressed. There was no place on the first floor worthy of a dog’s kennel, he said. He had no choice but to show Liddell into a little room whose low, unshaded window opened on the court. There was a washstand in a corner and a ledgeless box spring laid on the floor against the inner wall. Liddell groaned at the sight of it and fell flat. The springs creaked up and down under his weight.

  Armando, at the door, shouted, “Dolores! Dolores!” When he had no answer, he named two or three saints with a good deal of violence and shouted again. But it was not until three or four outbursts followed by the bringing in the name of St. Christopher, the patron of travelers, that a casual step came down the stairs. Her hands were raised to her hair, and at the same time, with a girl’s multiplicity of mind, she was arranging a lovely mantilla of black lace.

  “Idiot,” said her father. “I haven’t asked you to go out on the promenade. Why have you loitered to make yourself fine?”

  “Do you think I want to look like an Indian squaw when I see him?” she demanded, without being in the least degree perturbed.

  “How do you know it is he?” demanded her father with an instant suspicion.

  “I heard his voice in the court,” she answered. “Besides, for what other person in the world would you be rushing about and shouting?”

  “Ha?” said Armando. “Nevertheless, run instantly and get something to wash and comfort his eyes.”

  “Dios,” said Dolores. “Do you mean to say that he can’t see me, after all?” But she ran up the stairs again as lightly as a dancer, and when she came down again, she was carrying a bowl of warmed water and cloths. Even with that to bear, she made an important entrance, holding the basin on her fingertips as though it were a precious vase, and crying out, “Señor Jimmy! Welcome to San Jacinto!”