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  What fools the officers of the law had been not to suspect that the job was that of Mendoza. Three men shot down wantonly. That was like Mendoza, and Riley and Mahoney were no doubt of the murderous crew that attended the chief on that day of the holdup.

  It all made a simple picture, now. Escaping with their spoil, Mendoza had attended to the hiding of it. They would disappear from the face of the land for a time. Then, at an appointed date, they would re-gather.

  But in the meantime, Mendoza had been captured on some other charge; he had been put into the prison, and when he attempted to break out at the allotted moment, he had been shot. He had passed on his information, loyally, to his two men.

  That was the story, and Jigger knew it as well as though he had heard it from the lips of the pair.

  And now, at last, the two came up over the edge of the draw and started toward the mountains, one of them in the saddle, the other riding behind.

  Jigger fell in behind them.

  That terrible dryness of the air, that flaming of the sun no longer seemed hostile. It was performing his work.

  At the end of a long, long hour, the mountains seemed even farther away than they had been at the beginning. And Jigger saw the pair halt. They took off the big canteen from the side of their horse, drank, and then appeared to be measuring out some of the liquid for the horse.

  From half a mile away, Jigger distinctly could see the flash of the priceless water as it was poured. He could see the poor horse shake its head with eagerness for more. Then tall Tim Riley fastened the canteen back in its place beside the saddle.

  This was the moment that Buzz Mahoney, snatching out a holstered rifle from the other side of the saddle, dropped to his knee and began to pour shot after shot at Jigger.

  But Jigger, at a thousand yards, laughed, and the laughter was a dry whisper in his throat.

  He took off his hat and waved it, as though in encouragement. And the two remounted and went on.

  VII

  For nearly another hour, Jigger traveled in the wake of the pair, and still they seemed to be laboring in vain, never bringing the mountains closer.

  Then trouble struck suddenly. They had dismounted to take water and give it to the horse again when Jigger saw by their gestures that they were in a heated argument. Two guns flashed like two dancing bits of blue flame. Then he saw Mahoney fall on his face. Afterward the swift rattle of the reports struck his ear.

  Tim Riley mounted and continued on his way, looking back toward the spot where his victim lay.

  Jigger, for some reason, looked suddenly up toward the buzzards that wheeled softly in the sky above him. They would be fed, now.

  But the figure of Mahoney lifted from the ground. He ran a few steps in pursuit of Riley, and the small sound of his distant wailing came into the ears of Jigger.

  To get mercy from Riley was an impossibility that not even the bewildered brain of a wounded man could entertain long. Jigger, with a queer sickness of the heart, saw Mahoney tear the shirt from his back and fall to digging in the sand.

  Already the shock and the pain of bullet wounds, the swift loss of blood, and the burning caustic of the heat of Alkali Flat had reduced him to the madness of famine.

  Jigger came up rapidly, calling out. He was almost at the point where Mahoney groveled in the sand on his knees, scooping at the earth with his hands, before the wounded man looked up. He saw Jigger with the bewilderment with which he might have stared at a heavenly angel. Then he came with a scream of hope distending his mouth and eyes, his arms thrown out.

  Blood ran down his body, which was swollen with strength rather than with fat. But he disregarded his wounds until he had drunk deeply. Then, recovering his wits a little, he looked rather vaguely up to Jigger.

  “You’re still back on the trail, eh?” said Mahoney. “Leave me ride that other horse, will you?”

  “You can ride it if you want,” agreed Jigger.

  There might have been twenty murders on the hands of this fellow, but still Jigger pitied him.

  Mahoney grasped the pommel of the saddle on the led horse, but suddenly weakness overcame him. He looked down with a singular wonder at the blood that rolled down his body. Those wounds were beyond curing, as Jigger had seen at a glance. Mahoney realized it now, also, and the realization struck him down to his knees. He slumped to the side, his mouth open as he dragged at the hot, dusty air.

  Jigger, dismounting, kneeled by him.

  Mahoney cursed him. “Leave me be. I’m cooked,” he said. “Go get Riley. Riley . . . he murdered me. I’m the eleventh man on his list. Him and Mendoza was like a coupla brothers. If I could live to see Riley crawl . . . But I sure snagged him with my second shot. He’s hurt. And them that are hurt in Alkali Flat . . .”

  He dropped flat on his back, and Jigger thought that he was gone. But after a moment he spoke again, saying: “He thinks he’ll get loose . . . but in Alkali Flat . . . death . . . death . . . will get through a scratch on the skin. Riley . . . Riley . . .”

  A little shudder went through him, as though he had been touched by cold.

  And Jigger turned to remount, for he knew that Mahoney was dead.

  Had Buzz really struck Tim Riley with one of his bullets? It seemed very likely, considering that they had exchanged shots almost hand to hand. And yet Tim Riley was voyaging steadily on across Alkali Flat.

  The mountains were closer now. They had lost their blueness entirely and turned brown. Clouds covered the heads of some of the peaks—a paradise of happiness to wander, however blindly, through the cool dampness of a fog like that above. But in Alkali Flat the heat increased. The life was gone from the air, like the taste from overcooked food, but as the sun slanted from a deeper position in the west, a sort of mist seemed to cover the desert. That was the dust, made visible in the slanting sun rays just as the motes grow visible in the sun shaft that strikes through a window in winter. And this film of dust was what made breathing so difficult, perhaps.

  Mahoney was dead. A division of the buzzards had dropped toward the ground, but still others trailed after Tim Riley.

  Had they scented the death that might even now be working in the body of Riley?

  As Mahoney had well said, through the smallest scratch death could enter the bodies of men in Alkali Flat. Where the struggle for mere existence was so hard, the slightest wound, the slightest extra drain on the strength might prove fatal.

  Yet Tim Riley, so far as Jigger could see, even through the glass, rode erect and steady.

  Jigger closed his thousand yards of safety to a quarter of a mile, to study the gunman. But he had a strong feeling that he was about to lose his long battle. For now the mountains rose like a wall against the sky; the heat of the sun was diminishing; twilight would unroll like a blessing across Alkali Flat before long, and Tim Riley would be among the slopes of the foothills, hunting for the sound of running water in the night, climbing steadily toward a purer, cooler air.

  Where the flat ended, Jigger saw the white streak of it just ahead, like a watermark drawn across the hills. And Tim Riley was approaching that mark when, all at once, Jigger saw that the horse was plodding on with downward head, as before, but with an empty saddle.

  But no, it was not empty. The rider had slumped well forward and lay out on the neck of the horse.

  It might be a bit of playing ’possum, Jigger thought. For Riley must have realized that his pursuer was not armed, and now this might be a device to draw the other into easy range.

  So Jigger pressed forward only slowly until he noticed that the buzzards were swaying lower and lower through the air above the head of the fugitive.

  As though they conveyed a direct message to him, Jigger lost all fear at once and closed in abruptly.

  As he came, he saw the rider slipping slowly, inch by inch, toward the side.

  When Jigger came up, he waited until he actually had a hand on the shoulder of Tim Riley before he called out. But Tim Riley continued to lie prone, as though re
sting from a great fatigue.

  He was resting indeed, for he was dead.

  When Jigger stopped the horses at the base of the first foothill, he found that Tim Riley had been shot deeply through the body, a wound that might not have been fatal under ordinary circumstances, but which surely meant death in Alkali Flat.

  And Riley had known that. He had lashed himself in his saddle. With his hands on the pommel, he had ridden erect, keeping his face toward safety and the mountains.

  The mere instinct to keep on fighting had driven him on. A queer admiration crept through the heart of Jigger as he looked at the lean, hard face of Riley, still set and grim and purposeful in death, with a long-distance look in his eyes, as though he were sighting some goal on the great journey on which he was now embarked.

  In the saddlebag strapped behind the saddle was what Jigger had struggled and striven so hard to reach.

  He knew that but left the thing untouched, while he urged the tired horse up the hill. He walked beside the horse that carried the dead man to make sure that the body did not slip to the ground. A last, grim hour they struggled up that slope until Jigger heard the sound of running water. A moment later the horses were standing belly deep in a pool of blue, while Jigger drank and drank again from the rivulet that fed the little lake.

  By the side of that lake, he buried Tim Riley by the simple device of laying the body under a boulder above which a little slide of rocks was hanging. A few stones moved and that slide was launched. Fifty tons of débris rushed down over the spot where Riley lay. His funeral oration was the flying echoes that talked and sang busily together for a few seconds all along the canyon.

  By the little pool, when it was holding the stars and the thin, yellow flickering of the campfire, Jigger ate hardtack, drank coffee, and examined the contents of the big saddlebag.

  It was, in fact, the savings of an entire life of crime. He counted, bill by bill, $315,000 of hard cash. In addition, there were a number of jewels, choice stones that had been broken out of their settings.

  The blood began to beat fast in the temples of Jigger.

  VIII

  Levison, president and chief shareholder in the Levison Bank of Tucker Flat, still went down to his office every day. He carried himself exactly as he had done when the lifting of his finger was enough to control the wild men and the strong men of Tucker Flat.

  He had a short, black mustache, his eyebrows and eyes were black, but his hair was a thin cloud of white. He was a narrow, tall, straight man who had looked the world in the face for so many years that disaster could not teach him to bow his head. When he walked down the street now, people scowled at him, and they cursed him in audible undertones, but he walked neither more quickly nor more slowly. His wife knew that Levison was dying of a broken heart, but he was dying on his feet.

  Every day he went down to the bank, unlocked the front door, walked past the grille work of gilded steel, past the empty cages of the cashier and clerk, and into his own office, where he unlocked his desk and waited.

  Sometimes he was there all day and nothing happened, but often someone entered to talk over the recent robbery and to curse Levison for not guarding the treasures of others more securely.

  Levison used to answer: “If there is any fault, it is mine. You have a right to denounce me. No man should dare to fail in this world of ours.”

  And he kept his chin high, while grief like an inward wolf devoured his heart.

  On this day, his walk down the street had been particularly a trial, for the unemployed from the closed mines were thick in the street, and they had learned to attribute their lack of a job to the failure of the bank that had shut up the mines. So they thronged thickly about Levison, shook their fists in his face, cursed him and all his ancestors. He went through them like a sleepwalker and never answered a word. Perhaps he hoped that one of the drunkards would strike him down and that the rest would pluck the life out of his body—it was not rooted very deep in his flesh, these days.

  When he came to his office, he sat with his head bowed a little and his hands folded together on the edge of his desk. He wanted to die, quickly, but there was that hollow-checked woman who waited for him in the house on the hill from which the servants had been discharged. Wherever she went, even into death, she would follow him not more than a step behind.

  He heard the front door of the bank open in the middle of the morning. A step sounded in the emptiness of the big outer room, and then a hand tapped at his door.

  “Come in!” called Levison.

  The door was pushed open by a slender young fellow with black hair and blue eyes. He was very brown of skin, erect of carriage, and his clothes were mere ragged patches. Over his shoulder he carried a saddlebag.

  “Were you a depositor in my bank?” asked Levison, opening the usual formula.

  “I never was, but I intend to be,” said the stranger.

  Levison frowned. “The bank has failed,” he said gravely.

  “Then we’d better bring it back to life again,” said the other.

  “Who are you?” snapped Levison.

  “Name of Jigger. And here’s the stuff that Joe Mendoza and Tim Riley and Buzz Mahoney stole from your vault. All of that and a little more. How much did you lose?”

  Levison rose slowly from his chair. He stared into the blue eyes of this young man, and it seemed to him that they were the blue of flame before it turns yellow.

  “Two hundred and fifty-two thousand, five hundred and fourteen dollars,” he said. That number was written somewhere across his soul, as across a parchment.

  “Count it out of this lot, then,” said Jigger. “There’s plenty more. And then tell me where the rest of the cash ought to go . . . or have I claim to it? It’s the life savings of Mister Murderer Mendoza!”

  * * * * *

  At the little shack outside the town of Tucker Flat, big Doc Landy strode back and forth and up and down. Three men waited near the small campfire, never speaking, looking curiously across at Landy now and then.

  “I been double-crossed,” said Doc Landy. “I ought to send you out on his trail right now. But I’m gonna wait to see has he got the nerve to come here and face me. I’m gonna wait another half hour.”

  “Hark at them singing!” said one of the men, lifting his head.

  For from the town of Tucker Flat, there poured distant rumblings and even thin, high-pitched, half-hysterical laughter.

  For the bank of Levison had reopened, and the mines that had recovered their deposits were reopening, also. That was reason enough to make the men of Tucker Flat rejoice.

  Here there was a slight noise of rustling leaves among the shrubbery, and then into the dimness of the firelight rode a man on a great, golden stallion.

  “Jigger!” exclaimed Doc Landy.

  “Get the three of them out of the way,” said Jigger, halting Fanfare.

  “Back up, boys,” said the peddler. “Wait somewhere . . . somewheres that I can whistle to you.”

  The three rose, stared an instant at Jigger like dogs marking a quarry, and then stalked away.

  Jigger went to the fire, rinsed a tin cup, and filled it with coffee. He made and lit a cigarette to accompany the coffee and blew the smoke into the air after a deep inhalation.

  “Well?” said Landy, growling. “You done yourself fine, I hear?”

  “Who told you I did?” asked Jigger.

  “Nobody else would’ve got the money back. Nobody else would’ve got it back for Levison and then told him to swear not to use the name. You got the money Mendoza stole.”

  “Levison has his quarter of a million,” said Jigger. “And there was something leftover. You get half.” He took out a sheaf of bills tied about by a piece of string and threw it like a stick of wood to the peddler. “There’s a shade over sixty thousand in that,” said Jigger. “Count out your half. Besides, there’s this stuff. Levison says that I have a right to it. So you take half of this, too . . . seeing that I’m your hired man.”r />
  He threw a little chamois sack into the hands of Landy, who lifted his head once and thrust out his long jaw before he began to reckon the treasure.

  After that, he was employed for a long time. At last he looked up and said hoarsely: “Where’s Mahoney?”

  “In Alkali Flat,” said Jigger.

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s Tim Riley?”

  “In the hills near Alkali Flat.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “You let ’em find the stuff, and then you took it away from ’em?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t use a gun?”

  “No.”

  “What did you use?”

  “The sun and the buzzards,” said Jigger.

  Landy rubbed a hand back across the bald spot of his head.

  “You had the brains to do that . . . and you was still fool enough to turn back a quarter of a million to that Levison?”

  Jigger sipped black coffee.

  “You don’t even get any glory out of it!” shouted Landy. “You won’t let Levison tell who done the job for him. There ain’t a soul in the world but me that knows what you done!”

  “Pop,” said Jigger, “glory is a dangerous thing for a fellow like me.”

  The peddler stared at him. “A hundred and twenty-five thousand to you . . . the same to me . . . and you threw it away! You ain’t human! You’re a fool!”

  Jigger sipped more coffee and drew on his cigarette.

  “Tell me,” growled Doc Landy. “What you expect to get out of life? If you don’t want money, what do you want?”

  “Fun,” Jigger said thoughtfully.

  “This here hell trail, this here work you done in Alkali Flat that even the birds . . . save the buzzards . . . won’t fly over . . . was that fun? Where was the fun in that?”

  “The look in the eyes of Levison,” Jigger said thoughtfully. “That was the fun for me, Doc.”

  THE END

  About the Author

  Max Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, Destry, and many other fictional characters popular with readers and viewers worldwide. Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres. His enormous output, totaling approximately 30,000,000 words, or the equivalent of five hundred and thirty ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, and fashionable society, big business and big medicine. Eighty motion pictures have been based on his work, along with many radio and television programs. For good measure he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in more different ways. Born in Seattle in 1892, orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At Berkeley he became a student rebel and one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. Denied a degree because of unconventional conduct, he embarked on a series of adventures, culminating in New York City where, after a period of near starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful author of fiction. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, and finally in Los Angeles. Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials, unpublished manuscripts, or restored versions continue to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world. A great deal more about this author and his work can be found in The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood Press, 1997) edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski. His website is www.MaxBrandOnline.com.