Clattering Hoofs. William MacLeod Raine

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СКАЧАТЬ a good deal to blame yourself. You act like a small boy with a chip on his shoulder. If you were more frank and friendly ——”

      “Friendly with the fellows who want to hang me for something I didn’t do?” he inquired with his sardonic smile.

      “Sheriff Norlin isn’t trying to hang you,” she said sturdily. “I don’t want to find out anything you don’t want to tell. I’m on your side anyhow. But since I’m not a complete fool I can see you are holding something back.” She raised a hand quickly to head off his interruption. “You have a right to your secrets. That’s not the point. You were dodging Sheriff Norlin’s questions just to irritate him. What difference does it make whether you did or didn’t come through Globe?”

      “No difference,” he admitted. “But Norlin had just one legitimate point of interest in me, my connection with the Scarface gang. When he discovered I hadn’t any he ought to have been through. But after he got Mosely’s letter he rode twenty miles to see me.”

      “To make sure you fitted the description Mr. Mosely gave of you. That was his duty.”

      “After he saw me he still wasn’t satisfied.”

      “Because of your . . . evasions.”

      He brushed the sheriff out of the picture. “In spite of those . . . evasions . . . you are still for me. Isn’t that what you said?”

      His cool hard eyes drilled into her. She felt a pulse of excitement begin to beat in her throat. No balanced judgment would ever decide her feelings toward this man. It was not only that he had done her a great service at much risk to himself. Something reached out from that lean body with the whipcord muscles, from the strong reckless face, that drew her irresistibly to him.

      She said, in a low voice: “I think you have been wild and lawless and that there is something . . . shocking . . . in your past. But whatever you have done, you are not evil. A man’s actions, at some crisis, and what he really is, are two different things. I don’t have to be told what is troubling you to know that I am on your side.”

      Swiftly she turned and walked into the house. The man’s gaze followed her. He was astonished at what she had said, at the insight which had probed through the incriminating facts to the essential truth. She lived on the other side of a gulf he could not cross. None the less a warm glad excitement filled his breast.

      He beat it down, almost savagely. His way of life was chosen. It was one that probably would include violence and bloodshed. There was no room in it for a woman like Sandra Ranger, nor for any of the pleasant and kindly friendships that might temper his ruthlessness. He was in a tight spot from which he did not expect to get out alive. But he had set himself to a task. He meant to go through with it unless his enemies destroyed him first.

      9. Concerning a Gent on the Make

      THE NAME OF JUG PACKARD CAME UP ONE EVENING WHILE the Ranger family were sitting with Cape Sloan on the porch facing the shadowy outlines of the Huachucas. The ranch guest had dropped a casual question to which he knew the answer.

      “Yes,” replied John. “There’s right smart ore there. Copper, and some gold.”

      “In paying values?”

      “You must have heard of the Johnny B—near the mouth of Geronimo Gulch.”

      “Seems to me I have. Is it locally owned?” Cape kept his voice indifferent. Nobody could have guessed by hearing him that he was doing more than making talk to pass time.

      “Jug Packard holds a controlling interest.”

      The young man stifled a yawn with his forefingers. The obvious lack of interest was fraudulent. He had not heard the name for years, but the sound of it set a pulse of excitement strumming in him. “Lives in New York, with an office on Wall Street, I reckon,” he suggested.

      “No, sir. Lives at Tucson, when he isn’t at the mine, Mostly he stays right at Jugtown, where the works are. His family put on considerable dog at Tucson, but the old man dresses like he did when he didn’t have a nickel. A tramp wouldn’t say “Thank you” for anything Jug wears.”

      “I see. An old-timer, a diamond in the rough.”

      “An old-timer all right. He’s been here since Baldy was a hole in the ground, but I wouldn’t call him exactly a diamond or rave about his heart of gold.”

      “A millionaire?”

      “He’s got money enough to burn a wet mule.” Ranger added, after a moment: “Jug is a crabbed old tightwad. Hangs on to a dollar so hard he squeezes the eagle off it before he turns it loose.”

      “But otherwise an estimable citizen,” Sloan commented. His sardonic face was in the shadow of the vines and told no tales.

      “Hmp! Not unless rumor is a lying jade,” returned Ranger. He was a man who spoke his mind, and he did not like the mine owner. “I wouldn’t trust him farther than I could throw a bull by the tail. Some nasty stories about Jug have floated around. By the way, your friend Uhlmann used to be a foreman or pit boss or something or other for him.”

      “Did he mention that he was my friend?” the younger man asked with frosty irony.

      Ranger leaned back in his chair, drew on his pipe, and released the smoke slowly. “Jug came in as a mule skinner for a freight outfit,” he said. “The pachies ambushed the party on the Oracle road and would have got the whole caboodle if Bob Webb and two-three of his boys hadn’t happened along and drove them off. Jug was wounded, so Bob took him to Tucson and looked after the bills till he got on his feet again. They say Mrs. Webb nursed him. Anyhow, later Bob took him down to the Johnny B and gave him a job.”

      “Mr. Packard seems to have made good there,” Sloan said dryly.

      “Jug is one of those fellows born to make money. If he sees a dime around that isn’t nailed down he gets it. No doubt he saw right away that there was a fortune in the Johnny B. Jug is mighty competent, the kind that is bound to get to the top. Webb was kinda easy-going. He relied on Jug a lot. In three-four years he was superintendent and had a small interest in the mine. All he needed was that toe-hold.” The cattleman stopped talking. He put his boots on the porch railing and relaxed.

      His daughter prodded him. She was in the lane of lamplight that streamed from the window of the parlor. “Well, go on,” she urged.

      It was her eyes, Sloan decided, that quickened a personality interesting and exciting. They were shining now like pools of liquid fire. He did not know that she had divined intuitively that this story somehow concerned him greatly.

      “Webb was killed when a charge exploded unexpectedly in one of the drifts,” her father continued. “After that Jug took charge, though Mrs. Webb still owned most of the property. He organized it into a stock company, and by that time he held the next biggest interest to Mrs. Webb. The mine ran into a streak of bad luck. They lost the pay vein, and none of the drifts seemed to have much ore. For a couple of years the Johnny B shut down. The stock went down to almost nothing. Jug bought it right and left, a good deal of it from Mrs. Webb, who had to get money to keep herself and her two kids. When the mine opened up again Jug owned nine-tenths of the stock. Almost right away they struck a bonanza.”

      “Fortunate for Packard,” Sloan remarked.

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