The Hair-Trigger Kid - Max Brand (uplifting novels .TXT) 📗
- Author: Max Brand
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dissolving, so that it seemed quivering with blue flames.
This heat was hard enough even on a sound man like Trainor, but it turned
the wounded captive white with suffering and distress. When they reached
the house, Bud had to help him down from the saddle, and through the door
into the dining room, where he slumped down on a couch.
Mrs. Milman and Georgia came hurriedly to help.
“I’m all right,” said the white-faced Chip. “I dunno what’s the matter
with me, cracking like this. Gimme a drink of water, and I’ll be fine as
silk in a few minutes.”
Georgia took charge. She made him stretch out on the couch, and arranged
a pillow under his head. At her command, Bud Trainor pulled off the
boots. The shirt was opened at Chip’s throat, and his head raised so that
he could take a swallow of water.
His face, however, began to assume a more and more set expression of
suffering, and, avoiding their faces, he stared fixedly up to the
ceiling.
Mrs. Milman dressed the wound with care, putting on a pad of the softest
lint, and she declared, after manipulating the arm a little, that there
was no danger at all. No bones had been crushed by the bullet in its
passage. There had not been enough loss of blood to make serious trouble.
“Are you still in great pain?” asked Georgia, leaning above him.
He drew his eyes from the ceiling to her face, and flicked them hastily
back again.
“Poor fellow!” said Georgia. “Poor chap! Won’t you tell me what’s the
trouble—where the pain is the worst? We might try a cold pack, Mother.
He’s in a fever!”
“Aw, I’m all right!” declared Chip in a husky murmur.
Here Bud Trainor touched the arms of the two women and drew them to the
farther side of the room.
“Leave him be,” he suggested. “You dunno what’s the matter with him, but
I do.”
“What is it?”
“He’s one of Dixon’s crowd that’s been trying to throttle your ranch.”
“Well, I guessed that.”
“But to see you treatin’ him so like a white man, it’s sort of hard on
his nerves.”
“What do you mean?”
“It cuts him up a good deal. He don’t deserve to be treated no better
than a dog, and he knows it.”
The women exchanged glances.
“How was he hurt?” asked Mrs. Milman.
“And where is the Kid?” broke in Georgia. “Oh, good heavens, Mother. He’s
got to be warned away if he’s coming back here!”
“He’s not coming back in a hurry,” answered Bud Trainor. “He’s taking his
time and waiting for a signal to call him.”
They went into the next room.
“What’s happened?” they asked of Bud.
“Why, the Kid went out explorin’. He wanted to lead Dixon into makin’ an
attack on us, and then he thought that the law could be pretty useful to
you all. You could put an injunction on ‘em—kick ‘em off the land by
process of law, or something like that. Anyway, you could switch the law
on ‘em and get it around to our side of the fence.”
“And so? You mean that he went out there, and dared the lot of them?”
demanded Georgia.
“Aye, that’s what he sure enough done.”
“But that’s—”
“Aye, that’s crazy. But he done it. They tried to sneak some men
out on both sides of the fence and slip around us. Oh, they wanted
the Kid’s scalp pretty bad, all right. We come back flying. The Hawk, she
could wing away from ‘em any time, but my gelding didn’t have enough foot
for that sort of work. They gained on us—”
“And the Kid wouldn’t leave you?” cried Georgia, with a shining face.
Her mother looked sharply across at her, but said nothing.
“The Kid.” said Bud Trainor, speaking slowly, and rather softly to keep
the emotion out of his voice, “is the kind that’s always better than
anybody else, in a pinch. No, he wouldn’t leave me, even when I told him
to go.”
“That’s grand!” said Georgia.
There were tears of pleasure and excitement in her eyes. And again her
mother saw them.
“It was grand, all right. And dangerous, too. This here Chip Graham. he
was on that hoss of his, the Silver King. And the King stepped out pretty
fast. He got ahead of us. He aimed to turn us or to hold us till the rest
of the crowd came up. There was seven of them, all told. But then the Kid
went out and dropped Graham, and got the King for me to ride. And when
the rest of ‘em came too close, he just up with his rifle and shot the
hat off one of their heads!”
He laughed with a fierce pleasure.
“He didn’t kill that man?” gasped Mrs. Milman.
“Him? Of course not,” said Bud Trainor with an almost religious and
devoted belief. “He could snuff a candle at about a thousand yards; I
guess. But when we came back near to the house, he wouldn’t come in with
us. He thought there might be trouble waiting for him here.”
“He’s right! He’s right,” said Mrs. Milman. “Nothing but trouble for him
here. My husband and Chet Wagner are in the front room with the sheriff
and a deputy, right now. They’ve come out for the Kid; or Mr.
Beckwith-Hollis, as he calls himself.”
“Stuff!” said Georgia. “He was only joking.”
Mrs. Milman shrugged her shoulders.
“I wouldn’t try to read the mind of that young man,” said her mother.
“But what are we to do? The sheriff is here with a warrant for the arrest
of the Kid, alias I don’t know how many other names and nicknames, for
breaking the peace, forcibly entering a house, attempted murder, and a
good many other things. All because he drove Billy Shay—the
scoundrell—into the street!”
“Is that Sheriff Lew Walters? What kind of a man is he, then?” demanded
Bud Trainor angrily.
“He doesn’t like the business, but as he points out, he’s a servant of
the law,” said Mrs. Milman.
She leaned a hand suddenly against the wall and supported herself there.
“It looks like a lost cause,” said she. “The neighbors won’t help us. Not
till the law is clearly on our side. Georgia brought back poor Chet
Wagner with her, and that’s the only man who would come. The rest—oh,
they’re playing safe!”
“We can go in and try the sheriff,” said Bud Trainor. “That was the idea
of the Kid. He’s safe enough out there. They’ll never catch the Duck Hawk
and the Kid, together. The Kid’s idea was that if we could bring in one
of ‘em, it would be a proof that Dixon had started a fight on your
ground. And that would be pretty hard for him and Shay to get out of.
Let’s go tell the sheriff what’s happened!”
Mrs. Milman shook her head.
“We’ll try, however,” she said grimly.
And, as they started for the next room, Georgia murmured to Bud Trainor.
“I wish I’d been there to see it!”
“Aye,” sad Trainor. “It’s all right to look back on. But it wasn’t so
slick going through it. I ain’t the same sort of steel that the Kid is
made of. I was scared sick!”
She merely laughed.
“I know,” said she. “It’s a point of pride with you fellows to understate
things. We’ll see what the sheriff says.”
In the front room, accordingly, they found Lew Walters and his deputy,
who was a timid-looking young man, with a frightened eye and an apparent
desire to squeeze himself through the wall and away from the presence of
the two women. But they could guess that the sheriff would not have
selected this youngster for dangerous business like this without a good
cause. His big wrists and long fingers were suggestive of more strength
than he showed otherwise.
Lew Walters met Trainor with a nod and a smile.
“How’s your ma and pa?” he asked. “And how’s yourself?”
“Everybody fair to middling,” admitted Bud. “I’m out here tryin’ to give
a hand agin’ the Dixon crew, sheriff. Now, how come that the law is agin’
an honest man like Milman, and behind a crook like Dixon?”
The sheriff shrugged both shoulders and made a weary gesture with his
hands.
“The law,” said he, “is somethin’ that I never been able to understand at
all. No, sir, I can’t foller the workin’s of the law, young feller. All
that I can do is to ride when the law tells me to ride, and to arrest
what the law tells me to arrest. Heaven knows that I ain’t willin’ to
side agin’ my old friend Milman, but the law tells me to arrest the Kid,
and that’s why I’m here. Where is he, Bud?”
At this direct appeal, Bud looked around him. On the wall, by way of
decoration, there were some elk heads, badly mounted, and therefore
coming to pieces before their time. And, on the floor, there was the
enormous pelt of a grizzly bear which Indians had cured, and which was
therefore in an excellent state of preservation. From these adornments,
or from the old-fashioned Kentucky rifle and powderhorn across the door,
Bud received no ideas.
At last he grinned and waved his hand all around the horizon.
“Oh, he’s out yonder,” said Bud.
The sheriff grinned in turn.
“And in there,” said Bud, “is one of Dixon’s men that jumped us and tried
to run us down when we went up to see the creek and what was happening
there.”
The sheriff got up from his chair.
“One of Dixon’s men? How come he’s here?”
“The Kid nudged him off of his hoss with a bullet. Chip Graham is his
name.”
“Hah!” exclaimed the sheriff. “That wo’thless Chip Graham? I’ve had room
in my jail waitin’ for him since—”
He clapped a hand over his mouth.
“I’m gettin’ old, John,” he said to Milman. “My tongue, it takes charge,
and is always runnin’ me downhill. Well, the Kid knocked Chip off of his
boss, did he? Off of the Silver King, d’you mean?”
“Aye.”
“And then you took the hoss, I reckon?”
“Aye, to get away from the crowd that was follerin’ us.”
“Humph!” said the sheriff. “Now, to be honest, Bud, wasn’t that crowd
follerin’ you because you had grabbed the hoss first?”
“Hey,” exclaimed Bud Trainor. “Are you tryin’ to make me into a hoss
thief?”
“I’m not tryin’ to make you into nothin’. All I know is that if the Kid
was to see the Silver King, it’d wring his heart plumb to the backbone to
let it get away from him before he’d give it a try under the saddle.”
“I tell you—” exclaimed Bud Trainor.
“Never you mind your telling, Bud. Don’t you go and talk yourself into
jail, which is something that a lot of folks is fond of doin’. You say
that the Dixon bunch tackled you and the Kid. You, maybe; but folks
around these parts don’t go tacklin’ the Kid offhand, just for fun. Not
by a long shot, they don’t.”
“We’d gone down and told them what side we were on,” said Bud, growing
hot and angry. “They just wanted to bag us and—”
“Here, here, Bud,” answered the
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