'Firebrand' Trevison - Charles Alden Seltzer (top 10 books of all time .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Alden Seltzer
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“I’m sorry, Miss Benham,” he mumbled. “I lost some blood, I suppose. Rotten luck, isn’t it. I shouldn’t have stopped.” He turned to go, lurched forward and would have fallen out of the door had not the girl seized and steadied him.
He did not resist when she dragged him into the room and closed the door, but he waved her away when she tried to take his arm and lead him toward the kitchen where, she insisted, she would prepare a stimulant and food for him. He tottered after her, tall and gaunt, his big, lithe figure strangely slack, his head rocking, the room whirling around him. He had held to the record and the rifle; the latter by the muzzle, dragging it after him, the record under his arm.
But his marvelous constitution, a result of his clean living and outdoor life, responded quickly to the stimulation of food and hot drinks, and in half an hour he got up, still a little weak, but with some color in his cheeks, and shame-facedly thanked the girl. He realized now, that he should not have come here; the past few hours loomed in his thoughts like a wild nightmare in which he had lost his sense of proportion, yielding to the elemental passions that had been aroused in his long, sleepless struggle, making him act upon impulses that he would have frowned contemptuously away in a normal frame of mind.
“I’ve been nearly crazy, I think,” he said to the girl with a wan smile of self-accusation. “I want you to forget what I said.”
“What happened at Manti?” she demanded, ignoring his words.
He laughed at the recollection, tucking his rifle under his arm, preparatory to leaving. “I went after the record. I got it. There was a fight. But I got away.”
“But the fire!”
“I was forced to smash a lamp in the courthouse. The wick fell into the oil, and I couldn’t delay to—”
“Was anybody hurt—besides you?”
“Braman’s dead.” The girl gasped and shrank from him, and he saw that she believed he had killed the banker, and he was about to deny the crime when Agatha’s voice shrilled through the doorway:
“There are some men coming, Rosalind!” And then, vindictively: “I presume they are desperadoes—too!”
“Deputies!” said Trevison. The girl clasped her hands over her breast in dismay, which changed to terror when she saw Trevison stiffen and leap toward the door. She was afraid for him, horrified over this second lawless deed, dumb with doubt and indecision—and she didn’t want them to catch him!
He opened the door, paused on the threshold and smiled at her with straight, hard lips.
“Braman was—”
“Go!” she cried in a frenzy of anxiety; “go!”
He laughed mockingly, and looked at her intently. “I suppose I will never understand women. You are my enemy, and yet you give me food and drink and are eager to have me escape your accomplice. Don’t you know that this record will ruin him?”
“Go, go!” she panted.
“Well, you’re a puzzle!” he said. She saw him leap into the saddle, and she ran to the lamp, blew out the flame, and returned to the open door, in which she stood for a long time, listening to rapid hoof beats that gradually receded. Before they died out entirely there came the sound of many others, growing in volume and drawing nearer, and she beat her hands together, murmuring:
“Run, Nigger—run, run, run!”
She closed the door as the hoof beats sounded in the yard, locking it and retreating to the foot of the stairs, where Agatha stood.
“What does it all mean?” asked the elder woman. She was trembling.
“Oh, I don’t know,” whispered the girl, gulping hard to keep her voice from breaking. “It’s something about Trevison’s land. And I’m afraid, Aunty, that there is something terribly wrong. Mr. Corrigan says it belongs to him, and the court in Manti has decided in his favor. But according to the record in Trevison’s possession, he has a clear title to it.”
“There, there,” consoled Agatha; “your father wouldn’t permit—”
“No, no!” said the girl, vehemently; “he wouldn’t. But I can’t understand why Trevison fights so hard if—if he is in the wrong!”
“He is a desperado, my dear; a wild, reckless spirit who has no regard for law and order. Of course, if these men are after him, you will tell them he was here!”
“No!” said the girl, sharply; “I shan’t!”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” acquiesced Agatha. She patted the girl’s shoulder. “Maybe it would be for the best, dear—he may be in the right. And I think I understand why you went riding with him so much, dear. He may be wild and reckless, but he’s a man—every inch of him!”
The girl squeezed her relative’s hand and went to open the door, upon which had come a loud knock. Corrigan stood framed in the opening. She could see his face only dimly.
“There’s no occasion for alarm, Miss Benham,” he said, and she felt that he could see her better than she could see him, and thus must have discerned something of her emotion. “I must apologize for this noisy demonstration. I believe I’m a little excited, though. Has Trevison passed here within the last hour or so?”
“No,” she said, firmly.
He laughed shortly. “Well, we’ll get him. I’ve split my men up—some have gone to his ranch, the others have headed for Levins’ place.”
“What has happened?”
“Enough. Judge Lindman disappeared—the supposition is that he was abducted. I placed some men around the courthouse, to safeguard the records, and Trevison broke in and set fire to the place. He also robbed the safe in the bank, and killed Braman—choked him to death. A most revolting murder. I’m sorry I disturbed you—good night.”
The girl closed the door as he left it, and leaned against it, weak and shaking. Corrigan’s voice had a curious note in it. He had told her he was sorry to have disturbed her, but the words had not rung true—there had been too much satisfaction in them. What was she to believe from this night’s events? One thought leaped vividly above the others that rioted in her mind: Trevison had again sinned against the law, and this time his crime was murder! She shrank away from the door and joined Agatha at the foot of the stairs.
“Aunty,” she sobbed; “I want to go away. I want to go back East, away from this lawlessness and confusion!”
“There, there, dear,” soothed Agatha. “I am sure everything will come out all right. But Trevison does look to be the sort of a man who would abduct a judge, doesn’t he? If I were a girl, and felt that he were in love with me, I’d be mighty careful—”
“That he wouldn’t abduct you?” laughed the girl, tremulously, cheered by the change in her relative’s manner.
“No,” said Agatha, slyly. “I’d be mighty careful that he got me!”
“Oh!” said the girl, and buried her face in her aunt’s shoulder.
Trevison faced the darkness between him and the pueblo with a wild hope pulsing through his veins. Rosalind Benham had had an opportunity to deliver him into the hands of his enemy and she had not taken advantage of it. There was but one interpretation that he might place upon her failure to aid her accomplice. She declined to take an active part in the scheme. She had been passive, content to watch while Corrigan did the real work. Possibly she had no conception of the enormity of the crime. She had been eager to have Corrigan win, and influenced by her affection and his arguments she had done what she could without actually committing herself to the robbery. It was a charitable explanation, and had many flaws, but he clung to it persistently, nurturing it with his hopes and his hunger for her, building it up until it became a structure of logic firmly fixed and impregnable. Women were easily influenced—that had been his experience with them—he was forced to accept it as a trait of the sex. So he absolved her, his hunger for her in no way sated at the end.
His thoughts ran to Corrigan in a riot of rage that pained him like a knife thrust; his lust for vengeance was a savage, bitter-visaged demon that held him in its clutch and made his temples pound with a yearning to slay. And that, of course, would have to be the end. For the enmity that lay between them was not a thing to be settled by the law—it was a man to man struggle that could be settled in only one way—by the passions, naked, elemental, eternal. He saw it coming; he leaped to meet it, eagerly.
Every stride the black horse made shortened by that much the journey he had resolved upon, and Nigger never ran as he was running now. The black seemed to feel that he was on the last lap of a race that had lasted for more than forty-eight hours, with short intervals of rest between, and he did his best without faltering.
Order had come out of the chaos of plot and counterplot; Trevison’s course was to be as direct as his hatred. He would go to the pueblo, take Judge Lindman and the record to Santa Fe, and then return to Manti for a last meeting with Corrigan.
A late moon, rising from a cleft in some distant mountains, bathed the plains with a silvery flood when horse and rider reached a point within a mile of the pueblo, and Nigger covered the remainder of the distance at a pace that made the night air drum in Trevison’s ears. The big black slowed as he came to a section of broken country surrounding the ancient city, but he got through it quickly and skirted the sand slopes, taking the steep acclivity leading to the ledge of the pueblo in a dozen catlike leaps and coming to a halt in the shadow of an adobe house, heaving deeply, his rider flung himself out of the saddle and ran along the ledge to the door of the chamber where he had imprisoned Judge Lindman.
Trevison could see no sign of the Judge or Levins. The ledge was bare, aglow, the openings of the communal houses facing it loomed dark, like the doors of tombs. A ghastly, unearthly silence greeted Trevison’s call after the echoes died away; the upper tier of adobe boxes seemed to nod in ghostly derision as his gaze swept them. There was no sound, no movement, except the regular cough of his own laboring lungs, and the rustle of his clothing as his chest swelled and deflated with the effort. He exclaimed impatiently and retraced his steps, peering into recesses between the communal houses, certain that the Judge and Levins had fallen asleep in his absence. He turned at a corner and in a dark angle almost stumbled over Levins. He was lying on his stomach, his right arm under his head, his face turned sideways. Trevison thought at first that he was asleep and prodded him gently with the toe of his boot. A groan smote his ears and he kneeled quickly, turning Levins over. Something damp and warm met his fingers as he seized the man by the shoulder, and he drew the hand away quickly, exclaiming sharply as he noted the stain on it.
His exclamation brought Levins’ eyes open, and he stared upward, stupidly at first, then with a bright gaze
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