Daring Duval Read online

  The voice grew very near. With horror in her heart, and unspeakable shame, Marian saw the big shoulders of Jude strain still further back.

  “But you’ve come hunting in the wrong place, Jude. Here in Moose Creek we don’t keep rats and toads even to feed the Judes with. You’d starve here, partner. So leave your teeth behind you and...get out!”

  Jude did not stir.

  Marian, one hand pressed against her face, wondered how a brother of hers could have endured such a crisis, and if he would have acquitted himself better than this monster, Jude. But from her very heart rose a great revolt against the strength of the conqueror.

  “D’you hear?” said Duval. “Drop your gun belt and move.”

  There was a heavy clatter on the floor.

  Then she could see Jude stumbling toward the distant door, with the back of one hand raised across his eyes as though he wished to cover his shamed face from the sight of men.

  He who stood at the very end of the line that was watching by the wall stepped out in the path of that retreat.

  “A sneak!” he shouted. “A yellow sneak!” And he struck the big man across the face.

  There was no answering blow from Jude, the tyrant. Instead, he shrank cowering to one side, and then ran — fairly ran! In his blindness, he struck the doorjamb, staggered, and then pitched forward into the street, with both his arms cast out before him as though the darkness were more precious than all the treasures of the world.

  Chapter Eight

  Not at once did Marian go, partly because she was too weak to move from her supporting hold on the window sill, and partly because an unhealthy fascination kept her there to look once more on Duval and wonder again who he could be, and what. She had seen murder done in the streets of Moose Creek. She had heard men scream and pray, and had watched them fight for breath — aye, and when she was only a child. But this was worse than murder that she had seen this night. Murder slays the body, but Duval had dared to put out his hands and lay them on a man’s soul.

  He did not allow the grisly suspense to end in any prolonged depression, but waved the spectators forward to the bar.

  “We need to drink together, friends,” he declared. “And you with us, Pete. I want to thank you.” He reached his hand across the bar and gripped the most willing hand of the bartender.

  “I should’ve said more,” Pete said honestly. “I tried to say more for you, but I was plumb scared and couldn’t choke out the words. D’you hear me, partner?”

  “I waited out there beyond that window and watched and listened, mighty scared myself,” answered Duval, “until I seen that all of you boys was behind me.”

  Marian, who eavesdropped, pressed her hands suddenly together, for she had wondered how he would do this thing and rescue their self-respect for the loungers in the room. But he had done it. There was not one of them that would not suspect the lie, but there was none who would not wish to believe, and so in time would end by making capital out of his real shame.

  Yet, as she watched the actor, with lips compressed and blazing eyes, she admired him for the magnificence of that acting. He was stretching out both hands and gripping theirs.

  “Good old Jerry! When I saw you, Mike, it gave me a lot of heart...and old Sam wouldn’t let me down, I was right sure. Nor Josh, nor Cap Sloane, and Bud Granger never said no to a friend.”

  He stood by the bar and with a tender eye embraced their foolish, grinning faces. They began to excuse themselves for their great courage, their dauntless bearing — these sheep! They began to make small of their achievement. They began to tell this cunning man that what they had done was nothing compared to what they would have done if the need had arisen. They were only leading on that fellow Jude and were prepared to crush him when the master came in to act for himself.

  So they lied to him, and half knew that he saw clearly through their lies, except that his attention to each spoken word was so serious, and his eager eyes seemed to be reaping the harvest of their friendship.

  Only Pete, who had dared to speak for his absent friend in the moment of need, now sat on a whiskey keg with his face in both hands, trembling.

  “One of you come and pour the drinks,” he said. “I’m tuckered out. I feel right bad. My stars, Duval, how glad I was when I seen you come in, but how scared, too. I didn’t see how even you could handle him...and then to do it without nothin’ in the way of a gun or a knife. Not with your hands, even! I’m kind of sick. Jerry, you take my bar, tonight, and if you don’t charge for the drinks, I don’t care. I’m gonna go to bed. I’m mighty tired.” He left the room.

  The girl heard him stamping slowly, sluggishly up the stairs to his room. With a warm rush of emotion, she said to herself that Pete was too good a man to be bartender in Moose Creek, or in any other town.

  The street door was cast open again. This time young Charlie Nash came into the room, high-headed, bright of eye, like a thoroughbred groomed for a race, and expecting one.

  “It ain’t over yet, is it?” he cried. “That...that thing that I passed slumping down the street...that wasn’t him, was it?”

  They hailed him with a joyous shout as Jerry poured the second round and assured him that it was indeed him, and the him was none other than Larry Jude. But the master had met him, and faced him, and crushed him.

  They reached their hands to Duval. They patted his shoulders, they waved in honor to him as though their hands supported standards. Ah, they were glad to look up to him as their captain now. How willingly they would die for the sake of this great man’s friendship.

  These thoughts Marian furnished to them, in her bitter scorn of the crowd as they flocked around Duval. They had not even noted that while he encouraged them, he had not tasted the liquor himself.

  She saw Charlie Nash brush them aside and confront Duval.

  “How did you do it, Duval?” he asked. “How did you do it, David?”

  The girl, listening, was oddly startled to hear that name. For some absurd reason, it seemed out of place for Duval to have a first name like other men.

  “All I know,” Duval said in his quiet way, “is that he was here, and now he ain’t. But how it happened, I dunno.”

  “He stood up there at the end of the bar...,” began Jerry.

  Duval raised a hand that stopped this rehearsal. “My old man,” he said with a faint smile, “always used to say that the dirty laundry should be done up on Mondays, so’s the rest of the week could be clean. Well, boys, this ain’t Monday, you know. Drink hearty! Step up, Charlie, boy! Jerry, come here.”

  He drew Jerry aside, close to the window. Marian heard him say: “Don’t take money for these drinks. But keep a reckoning, and let me know what it comes to, will you?”

  “Chief,” Jerry said, “what you say is all the law that I want for what’s right and what’s wrong. Hey, boys, drink up, and have another!”

  “Let everybody that comes in have what he wants,” said Duval. “Bottoms up, boys! Good luck all round. Who can start us a song? You, Mike. Start us a chorus, will you?”

  The song began with a rouse. It rose to a roar.

  When Marian Lane looked again, she saw that newcomers were surging through the street door to join the fun. But the whole aspect of the crowd had changed, unknown to itself. For Duval was gone.

  While he was there, it had been a play upon a stage with a chief character present who was either a hero or a villain, she could not tell which.

  But now it was simply a confused and stupid drunken party, and she hurried away with a sense of shame that she had remained so long. It was not so easy to go as it had been to enter. In the other days, when she wore overalls like the boys of the town, she had been able to swing herself lithely up from the ground to the projecting kitchen eaves, and from the kitchen roof to that above. But now it was a great strain.

  Twice she failed in her effort, an
d then, resting, panting, she looked up to the broad, bright face of the heavens and told the stars that she was not half of what she once had been. This touch of scorn seemed to nerve her, and the third attempt was successful, and thereafter she rapidly gained the upper roof, stole along the gutter to the place above the wall, and lowered herself to it. She dared not walk boldly along it now, however, as she had done in coming. Something had gone from her in the meantime, and she had to crawl on hands and knees, gritting her teeth with self-contempt the while.

  A moment more and she had dropped down outside the wall. She did not start off at once, but leaned against it for a moment, taking breath, adjusting herself to the miracle that she had seen. It was a bitter task, for she was one who professionally disbelieved in miracles.

  However, she gathered herself together presently as one willing to leave some of the problems of today for the meditations of tomorrow, and started for home. It was not until she had made a step that she realized someone was standing before her, almost lost in the darkness of the trees — someone who must have been there all during the time she scrambled down the wall and then rested against it.

  A scream leaped into the throat of the girl and died behind her set teeth. The impulse to run merely made her sway and was equally mastered. Yet she could not help drawing back from him, though Duval was no giant, and she knew it was he.

  “Yes, sir,” drawled the voice of Duval, “dog-gone me if it ain’t hard to find a quiet place for a stroll around Moose Creek. A gent or a lady that kind of wants to promenade a bit, he has to look around for a place where there won’t be somebody else.”

  “You saw me through the window,” she declared. “But you couldn’t have seen my face.”

  “There wasn’t nothing to that,” he declared. “But I thought that I saw something like a khaki sleeve and figured it might be you. So, I bring around the horse to give it back to you. And thanks a lot, Miss Lane.”

  He tugged at something — and there came the pinto, which had been standing all this time beneath the trees, at the end of the long reins.

  “Them that start out on horseback hadn’t ought to come back on foot,” Duval said gently, “just because they loaned a horse to a friend. Good night, ma’am.”

  “Duval!” she called to him as he turned away. “Mister Duval.”

  He came back to her at once, though keeping his distance. It was hard to talk to him, but she felt that this was the time to make an effort.

  And Duval, after one instant of pause, spoke to fill in the silence and put her at ease. She was grateful for that. “I haven’t thanked you either for the pinto. He runs mighty straight and fast for me, though I near beaned myself on one of them branches.”

  “You waited for Charlie. Was that it?” she asked him.

  “Why,” said the drawling voice, “it was kind of partly that I didn’t want Charlie busting into my party, and partly that I wanted to size up Jude through the window. It isn’t an easy thing to be thrown into the ring with a gent whose style you don’t know.”

  She knew it was not true, but that, as appeared to be the rule with him, he was hiding his real scorn of all other men beneath an apologetic manner. From the same source had sprung his desire to put the men of the barroom at their ease and recall their self-belief. For he who possesses the key to a treasure can afford to throw coppers to beggars.

  Then all the other questions that had been brooding in her mind, not yet come to words, drew back, and became more nebulous than ever. She knew that he had erected a wall between them, and she said simply: “Good night, Mister Duval.”

  Yet, as he went off through the night, there was fierce indignation rising in her. He had feared her because she had seen a little through him and his disguise that day in the store. If he despised her now in her new rôle as eavesdropper, she bitterly resolved to make him change his mind. So, jerking at the reins with cruel impatience, she started back for her house.

  Chapter Nine

  It is true that in the West, alone of all places in the world, a man is assumed to be innocent until he is proved to be guilty. And, in the West, it is even true that guilt of certain kinds does not make a whit of difference. It is also true that one good action will establish a Westerner for life. He is said to have been tested and to have stood the fire. But two such actions, in one small town, under the eyes of one audience, were more than enough to place Duval upon a pedestal. The uncritical audience of Moose Creek believed, and perhaps they were wise, that it is folly to criticize, and that it is infinitely better to live than to talk about living. With the exception of Marian Lane, who had no confidants, probably there was not a soul who felt that there was anything evil in the power of Duval. He had picked young Charlie Nash out of the slough and set him on the high road. He had met the juggernaut, Larry Jude, and crushed him in the palm of his hand.

  Besides, he minded his own affairs but was willing to listen to those of others. He worked hard, improved his house and his fields, never wore a sour face about weather or people, continually smiled on the world, and, above all, treated his bad bargain with Simon Wilbur as a joke of which he, Duval, was the point.

  The old man, pricked in conscience, had gone to offer a reduction in the price he had accepted, though in mortal dread of what his wife would say afterward. But Duval insisted that finished business is dead business, and must not be brought to life again.

  Moose Creek learned of this and, adding it to the other established virtues of Duval, decided by an almost unanimous vote that the town had acquired an ideal citizen.

  Nevertheless, no matter how greatly they appreciated Duval, they could not help being curious about him. He was, in Moose Creek, what reporters would have called “a headline every day.” And when it was learned that Duval had been in New York before he came West, that he had there seen a beautiful horse at a horse show, that he had now bought that horse and was having it shipped to Moose Creek, was it any wonder that half of the town assembled on the morning the train was due?

  When the train arrived, it was almost characteristic of Duval that he was not present and had sent down Simon Wilbur to bring the horse home. So, when the door was rolled back and the gangplank fixed, the representatives of Moose Creek saw a tall, lean, smooth-shaven man, who looked sixty but might be seventy, issue from the shadows of the car and lead down the plank a most disappointing chestnut mare.

  It was true that she picked up her feet daintily going down the plank, but she had a long, ugly head, her withers were high, and her neck was painfully long. So were her legs. As Doc Murphy put it, if they had been cut off at the fetlocks, she would have looked “nearer to something like.”

  “Duval’s been sold,” was the opinion of everyone, except Pete, who walked around her with care, lifted her blanket, thumbed her shoulders, felt her bone.

  The old man who accompanied her — a marvel to Moose Creek that any man should be so extravagant as to ship a horse from New York and a man to take care of it! — turned to Pete with a smile that appeared crookedly, and only upon one side of his mouth. He had a secretive way of winking and speaking from the side of his face opposite to that on which the smile appeared.

  “You know a horse, I guess,” he said. He immediately added that he would like to know the way to Duval’s place, and Simon Wilbur at once took charge.

  They went up the street, the two old men in the seat of the buckboard, and the mare led behind, going at a rather shuffling trot that knocked up the heaped and rutted dust into a cloud. She pulled back lazily at the rope, moreover, and with her lower lip flopping as she went by the grocery store, she looked to Marian Lane like a cartoon of a horse.

  “What did he mean?” asked Doc Murphy of Pete. “What did he mean? As if we that been pretty nigh born on horseback didn’t know a horse when we seen one?”

  Pete grew remote and almost surly. “Aw, I dunno,” he said. “Maybe she can move.”


  “Not more’n barely,” Doc said. “You seen her go down the street?”

  The answer of Pete was considered very odd indeed. “Picture horses never carried my money.”

  For Pete had been East, and had bet and lost his one big roll on the ponies. The name of the mare was considered odd, also. For her old groom had said she was called Discretion, or Cherry, for short.

  But the general opinion was that Duval had been sold indeed. It was a complacently taken opinion, for though no one liked to see Duval injured, it was pleasant to know that he was human. It was like hearing that Rembrandt could not paint a house.

  In the meantime, the buckboard jogged up the hill and Simon Wilbur tried his expert hand on the new arrival, the chestnut’s guardian. The latter was perfectly willing to talk about himself, and how many years he had been a groom, and in what stables, but on the important point, which was Duval, he knew nothing. He never had heard the name before. He never had seen the man. He did not know whether Duval was young or old. All he knew was that he had been hired to take the mare all the way West.

  “Is she worth it all?” Simon asked rather spitefully.

  “Well,” said the groom, considering, “she can jump enough to make the hind legs follow the forelegs.”

  Simon Wilbur fell into a disgusted silence, for he had expected to take home to his wife an entire story, and now he felt that he could bring only an installment.

  At last they reached the old, sagging, wooden gate through which one entered the Duval place, and here Wilbur drew up.

  “You’ll be goin’ back soon, I reckon?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” said the groom, who had said that his name was Henry. “Might be that he’d like to have me handle the mare for a few days and get her on her feet.” Then he waved good bye to Wilbur and advanced through the gate, leading the mare. He took the trouble, however, to call out: “Hey, Duval! Here she is!”