'Firebrand' Trevison - Charles Alden Seltzer (top 10 books of all time .txt) 📗

“YOU MEN ARE BLIND. CORRIGAN IS A CROOK WHO WILL STOP AT NOTHING.”

“Trevison did not kill Braman—it was Corrigan. Corrigan was in my room in the Castle last night just after dark. When he left, I watched him from my window, after putting out the light. He had threatened to kill Braman. I watched him cross the street and go around to the rear of the bank building. There was a light in the rear room of the bank. After a while Braman and Corrigan entered the banking room. The light from the rear room shone on them for an instant and I recognized them. They were at the safe. When they went out they left the safe door open. After a while the light went out and I saw Corrigan come from around the rear of the building, recross the street and come into the Castle. You men are blind. Corrigan is a crook who will stop at nothing. If you let him injure Trevison for a crime that Trevison did not commit you deserve to be robbed!”

Lefingwell swung her down from his shoulder.

“I reckon that cinches it, boys!” he bellowed over the heads of the men nearest him. “There ain’t nothin’ plainer! If we stand for this we’re a bunch of cowardly coyotes that ain’t fit to look Trevison in the face! I’m goin’ to help him! Who’s comin’ along?”

A chorus of shouts drowned his last words; the crowd was in motion, swift, with definite purpose. It melted, streaming off in all directions, like the sweep of water from a bursted dam. It broke at the doors of the buildings; it sought the stables. Men bearing rifles appeared in the street, mounting horses and congregating in front of the Belmont, where Lefingwell had gone. Other men, on the board sidewalk and in the dust of the street, were running, shouting, gesticulating. In an instant the town had become a bedlam of portentous force; it was the first time in its history that the people of Manti had looked with collective vision, and the girl reeled against the iron wall of the shed, appalled at the resistless power that had been set in motion. On a night when she sat on the porch of the Bar B ranchhouse she had looked toward Manti, thrilled over a pretty mental fancy. She had thought it all a game—wondrous, joyous, progressive. She had neglected to associate justice with it then—the inexorable rule of fairness under which every player of the game must bow. She brought it into use now, felt the spirit of it, saw the dire tragedy that its perversion portended, groaned, and covered her face with her hands.

She looked around after a while. She saw Judge Lindman walking across the street toward the Castle, supported by two other men. A third followed; she did not know him, but Corrigan would have recognized him as the hotel clerk who had grown confidential upon a certain day. The girl heard his voice as he followed after the Judge and the others—raucous, vindictive:

“We need men like Trevison in this town. We can get along without any Corrigans.”

She heard a voice behind her and she turned, swiftly, to see Hester Harvey walking toward her. She would have avoided the meeting, but she saw that Hester was intent on speaking and she drew herself erect, bowing to her with cold courtesy as the woman stopped within a step of her and smiled.

“You look ready to flop into hysterics, dearie! Won’t you come over to my room with me and have something to brace you up? A cup of tea?” she added with a laugh as Rosalind looked quickly at her. She did not seem to notice the stiffening of the girl’s body, but linked her arm within her own and began to walk across the street. The girl was racked with emotion over the excitement of the morning, the dread of impending violence, and half frantic with anxiety over Trevison’s safety. Hester’s offense against her seemed vague and far, and very insignificant, relatively. She yearned to exchange confidences with somebody—anybody, and this woman, even though she were what she thought her, had a capacity for feeling, for sympathy. And she was very, very tired of it all.

“It was fierce, wasn’t it?” said Hester a few minutes later in the privacy of her room, as she balanced her cup and watched Rosalind as the girl ate, hungrily. “These sagebrush rough-necks out here will make Corrigan hump himself to keep out of their way. But he deserves it, the crook!”

The girl looked curiously at the other, trying hard to reconcile the vindictiveness of these words and the woman’s previous action in giving damaging testimony against Corrigan, with the significant fact that Corrigan had been in her room the night before, presumably as a guest. Hester caught the look and laughed. “Yes, dearie, he deserves it. How much do you know of what has been going on here?”

“Very little, I am afraid.”

“Less than that, I suspect. I happen to know considerable, and I am going to tell you about it. My trip out here has been a sort of a wild-goose chase. I thought I wanted Trevison, but I’ve discovered I’m not badly hurt by his refusal to resume our old relations.”

The girl gasped and almost dropped her cup, setting it down slowly afterward and staring at her hostess with doubting, fearing, incredulous eyes.

“Yes, dearie,” laughed the other, with a trace of embarrassment; “you can trust your ears on that statement. To make certain, I’ll repeat it: I am not very badly hurt by his refusal to resume our old relations. Do you know what that means? It means that he turned me down cold, dearie.”

“Do you mean—” began the girl, gripping the table edge.

“I mean that I lied to you. The night I went over to Trevison’s ranch he told me plainly that he didn’t like me one teenie, weenie bit any more. He wouldn’t kiss me, shake my hand, or welcome me in any way. He told me he’d got over it, the same as he’d got over his measles days—he’d outgrown it and was going to throw himself at the feet of another goddess. Oh, yes, he meant you!” she laughed, her voice a little too high, perhaps, with an odd note of bitterness in it. “Then, determined to blot my rival out, I lied about you. I told him that you loved Corrigan and that you were in the game to rob him of his land. Oh, I blackened you, dearie! It hurt him, too. For when a man like Trevison loves a woman—”

“How could you!” said the girl, shuddering.

“Please don’t get dramatic,” jeered the other. “The rules that govern the love game are very elastic—for some women. I played it strong, but there was no chance for me from the beginning. Trevison thinks you are Corrigan’s trump card in this game. It is a game, isn’t it. But he loves you in spite of it all. He told me he’d go to the gallows for you. Aren’t men the sillies! But just the same, dearie, we women like to hear them murmur those little heroic things, don’t we? It was on the night I told him you’d told Corrigan about the dynamiting.”

“Oh!” said the girl.

“That was my high card,” laughed the woman, harshly. “He took it and derided me. I decided right then that I wouldn’t play any more.”

“Then he didn’t send for you?”

“Corrigan did that, dearie.”

“You—you knew Corrigan before—before you came here?”

“You can guess intelligently, can’t you?”

“Corrigan planned it all?”

“All.” Hester watched as the girl bowed her head and sobbed convulsively.

“What a brazen, crafty and unprincipled thing Trevison must think me!”

Hester reached out a hand and laid it on the girl’s. “I—there was a time when I would have done murder to have him think of me as he thinks of you, dearie. He isn’t for me, though, and I can’t spoil any woman’s happiness. There’s little enough—but I’m not going to philosophize. I was going away without telling you this. I don’t know why I am telling it now. I always was a little soft. But if you hadn’t spoken as you did a while ago in that crowd—taking Trevison’s end—I—I think you’d never have known. Somehow, it seemed you deserved him, dearie. And I couldn’t bear to—to think of him facing any more disappointment. He—he took it so—”

The girl looked up, to see the woman’s eyes filling with a luminous mist. A quick conception of what this all meant to the woman thrilled the girl. She got up and walked to the woman’s side. “I’m so sorry, Hester,” she said as her arms stole around the other’s neck.

She went out a little later, into the glaring, shimmering sunlight of the morning, her cheeks red, her eyes aglow, her heart racing wildly, to see an engine and a luxurious private car just pulling from the main track to a switch.

“Oh,” she whispered, joyously; “it’s father’s!”

And she ran toward it, tingling with a new-found hope.

In her room at the Castle sat a woman who was finding the world very empty. It held nothing for her except the sad consolation of repentance.