Golden Lightning E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 390

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Menneval, the most feared killer in Alaska, had sent Lefty Bill Ranger all the way to California looking for two men. Their names were Peter and Oliver Crosson, father and son. Menneval just wanted information—he said. But when Lefty got to where the Crossons were supposed to be, nobody could tell him anything about them.

Then he stumbled upon them himself and became involved in a fantastic adventure. There was death in the air and blood on the wind, and at the last moment—there was Menneval, in person, come to seal his bargain.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

GOLDEN LIGHTNING

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

GOLDEN LIGHTNING

Max Brand

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Originally published in 1931.

CHAPTER ONE

Honesty is accepted as the best policy, but it turned out the worst policy for Bill Ranger, who was famous for his integrity and as a “dog puncher” from Dawson to the Arctic Ocean.

“Lefty” Ranger, as he was sometimes called, had had bad luck—the bad luck to arrive in Circle City, on this mail trip, on the very same day that Menneval reached the town. That could not be put down to anything other than an unkind fate, for Menneval flew as the swallow flies, on swift wings, dipping through the white, silent land as the swallow dips through the vast, free bosom of the sky. He paused in Circle City as a swallow pauses on a branch before it swings off again for the horizon; and in that brief pause he met Lefty Ranger and changed the course of his life.

Lefty had made good time. He started from Breakwater with six dogs, and he got to Circle City with five, which was a tribute both to his luck and to his management. The last day, in a sense, was the hardest. There had been little food for men or dogs during the last three days, and on this last day of all there was none at all. So, though the trail went over easy levels, the labor told heavily. Men in Alaska are burned so thin by their labors and their privations that there is little fat for them to burn up when the pinch comes. In time of need, where softer peoples live on the fat that covers their sleek ribs, the north man has to eat and work on surplus nerve energy. If he lacks that, privation kills him like a bullet through the brain.

Lefty’s last march on this trip was made further difficult by a steady fall of snow. There was not a touch of wind, but the snow fell down in a steady mist out of the shadow of the sky. On the ground it lay not in the broad, soft, spongy flakes which are familiar to dwellers in more southern climates. It disintegrated into tiny crystals as hard as rock, and the steel-shod runners of the sled, instead of sliding with an easy hiss over the surface, grated and ground as though running through sand. The dogs leaned hard against their harnesses, and the man helped them along. Another forty-eight hours of expectation would almost have killed Lefty, but he knew that Circle City was close at hand.

At length he entered the town.

Through the snow mist he saw lights dimly, the rays shattered as they came through the white fog. They split into reds and blues and yellows, as though cast from a prism of glass. And there was no sound. It was a silent city. It did not seem an empty place; it seemed rather a figment of the imagination, or a city of eternal sleep.

Lefty Ranger was not dismayed. He had been here before, and he knew how the snow muffles footfalls, muffles voices. Once a great dog came out of the mist and stood there on the edge of Ranger’s vision, bristling its hair, snarling silently. He merely smiled and went on. He was very cold. He was hideously tired—that weariness which goes deeper than the muscles and finds the heart and numbs it.

At length a brighter light struck at him from the left, and an actual murmur of human voices. This was the place. This was Spooner Joe’s saloon, of course.

He halted the team. The light showed him the frame of a door with the snow softly furring it all over, particularly in the corners. This door he threw open, and thought that he saw heaven. Then he took three paces forward.

The frightful cold entered with him, dissolving into a mist like the breath of cattle on a frosty morning. In the center of the room there was a big stove, with a fire that roared in it and kept its chimney trembling. He looked at that stove as a miser looks at gold. He had not been warm for six weeks; he had not escaped from a deep-seated chill for a month and a half; and yet the other men in the room were not hugging the stove. They were scattered here and there. They were standing at the long bar where Spooner Joe presided, lofty as a mast and ugly as a death’s-head. They were scattered at the tables, playing poker. They were betting gold dust at the roulette wheel. The night was still young.

“Hey, you, shut the door!” yelled one or two.

Lefty Ranger merely stood where he had halted and laughed thunderously through the mist which he had brought in with him. That mist began to dissolve, falling away from his head and shoulders, from his body, as though it were a heavy gas. Then it slid out along the floor. He waved to the crowd, right and left, shouting: “Mail!”

* * * *

There were some who knew his face. Others knew his voice. They greeted him with a great roar of welcome. They laughed and sang. They rushed out and tore the heavy mail sacks from the sled. They carried them into the room. They opened them; they spilled the contents along the bar. Names were shouted.

Some of the men were busy opening their own mail. Others hurried out and roused the town. Circle City began to pour into the saloon of Spooner Joe.

It was a great night for the Spooner. Those who had letters bought drinks to celebrate the great occasion. Those who had good news set ’em up for the entire house. Those who had no mail and no message drank to forget their disappointment.

As for Bill Ranger, he went to the sled team, carrying out a quantity of dried fish. They should eat before he did, and eat they did, while he stood grinning at their joy and their appetite, throwing the fish to them one by one, and watching those experts snatch their meals out of the air. Their hunger was a bright light which showed them what was coming.

He fed them well, almost dangerously well.

Still he had something to do before he ate. He could subdue his appetite until that other thing was accomplished. So now he strode into the saloon, again bearing with him a small but ponderous canvas sack which he put down upon the bar with a thump.

For a time he looked around him at the faces of those who were opening mail and celebrating along the bar. The room was filled with the blue-brown shadows of tobacco smoke. Through that mist it was difficult to make out features. His own face, as he pushed back the hood, was masked with a grizzled covering of uncropped beard and whiskers. His smile, beneath that growth of hair, was a distorted grin, strange to see. There was starvation in his eyes, but there was a smile in them also.

At last, tired of searching with his eyes, he called in a loud voice: “Doc Harness! Doc Harness! Where are you?”

At this one of the men standing close to him looked hastily, critically, up toward the mail carrier. With equal haste he turned his attention down again to his drink. Half a dozen glasses of the same concoction were standing before Bill Ranger, untasted by him. He had this other errand to perform before he could drink, eat, or enjoy himself in any way. Only the starved dogs had taken preference over it.

Trouble and impatience combined in the eyes of Ranger as there was no answer to his call.

“Doc Harness!” he shouted more loudly. “Where’s Doc Harness? Why don’t some of you fellows go and give him a rouse? Tell him that I’m here and that I got news for him that’ll make him stand three inches taller. I got news for him that’ll take the kink out of his shoulders for good and all, and—”

No one answered. Each man appeared to be busy with his letter or with his drink, and yet, in fact, no one tasted a drop and no one read a word after that cry from Bill Ranger.

Then Spooner Joe, looking more like a death’s-head than ever, came down the bar and paused opposite the mail carrier.

“Partner,” he said gently, “the kink is already taken out of old Doc’s shoulders. You don’t need to go on worrying about him any more!”

“Just what d’you mean?” asked Ranger, peering at the saloon man as if the face were barely visible and at a great distance.

“Bill,” said the Spooner, “the fact is that Doc Harness up and left us all. We’re sorry to have to tell you. Doc has left us, and he ain’t never coming back.”

Ranger passed a hand over his face.

“He’s gone and left us, eh?” said he.

“Yes, he’s gone and left us. Steady, old-timer.”

“I wouldn’t’ve expected it,” muttered Ranger. “Not just when his ship come in like that. I wouldn’t’ve thought—”

He caught firm hold on the edge of the bar and then drooped in a half faint.

“Grab him, a coupla you!” said the Spooner, watching the mail carrier closely. “He was old Doc’s partner, you know!”

Strong hands reached for Bill Ranger. His head had sunk far forward; he seemed to be studying his feet. His knees, also, gave and trembled.

But he shrugged the hands from his shoulders, and gradually, by a great effort of the mind and of the body, he straightened again and stood erect.

“I wouldn’t’ve thought it,” he said. “I got onto a hundred pounds of dust in that sack for Doc Harness. That’s what I got for him. I got onto a hundred pounds. Doc, he could’ve laid back and took it easy the rest of his days.”

“Doc Harness is takin’ it easy,” said another. “Don’t you take it too hard, old son. Doc is takin’ it easy, all right. You remember, Lefty, that Doc was always a great hand for sleep. He’s havin’ the long sleep now. Take a drink, old man. It’ll do you good.”

Instantly came a deep-throated, murmuring chorus from many voices.

“Take a drink, Lefty. It’ll do you a lot of good.”

He took a drink. He closed his eyes while he felt the burn of it sweltering down into his stomach.

“Just how did it happen?” he asked.

“Why, he just got tired. Got a little sick, but nothing much. He just got tired and give up.”

“He never had no luck,” said Lefty. “There was no luck laid out for old Doc Harness so far as I could see. But he was never one to give up, not breakin’ trail, or with a pick, or no way. He never was in the way of giving up a fight.”

“Well, Bill, a man only has to give up once in this neck of the woods.”

“Aye, and that’s true,” said the mail carrier.

He drank again. His beard bristled fiercely, so that it was plain that he had set his jaw like a rock.

“Well,” said the Spooner, “it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. Old Doc has got no children and no relatives. He always used to say that all by himself he was father and son, cousin, aunt, and uncle. You’re the nearest to him, old son. You get that sack of dust for yourself!”

“Me?” said Lefty Ranger.

He lifted his grizzly head and stared.

“I’d never touch an ounce of it!” said he.

CHAPTER TWO

This announcement caused the others to stare. But they were not greatly astonished. For when one has lived long enough in the great white North, the peculiarities of men are not underlined. They are accepted rather as a matter of course. One takes the exception as the rule, and the perfectly normal man in all his reactions begins to seem the freak.

So they stared at Lefty Ranger, and not a word was said. Merely, they watched him critically, nodding a little, as people do when they expect something interesting to follow.

There was only one person who stirred. This was a man of middle height, rather slenderly made, if one could judge his bulk under the heavy coat which he was wearing, the collar turned up so that the lower part of his face was shielded. This man rose from a chair where he had been sitting in a far corner of the room. He laid aside the newspaper of ancient date which he had been reading, and, crossing to the end of the bar, he leaned there, so that he could stare up the long, varnished pavement of the bar and look straight into the face of the mail carrier. He seemed fascinated. But the shadows which crossed his face were so deep that one could not accurately read his eyes.

“If you wouldn’t touch it,” said the Spooner to Lefty Ranger, “tell us what’s the matter with it. Is it blood money, old son?”

Lefty Ranger looked fixedly at the saloon keeper.

“Doc’s blood is on it,” he said solemnly. “It’s soakin’ in Doc’s blood.”

“So you won’t have it?”

“No.”

“Then what’ll come of it? Give it to the government?”

“A curse on the government!” said one. “What does the government do for us up here? What did the government ever do for old Doc Harness?”

Ranger turned his head a little and looked at the man.

“I guess the government has done plenty for us all,” he said. “The government is like trees. You can’t see ’em grow from day to day, but they’re workin’ while you sleep. But this here stuff?”

He gave a tap with a forefinger to the canvas sack. The dust was packed so tightly in it that the weight of the stroke made not a dimple in the surface of the canvas.

“Well, you figger out on giving it to the government?” said Spooner.

“I’m tryin’ to figger what Doc Harness would want me to do with it.”

He canted his head. He was like one trying to hear a far-off voice. “Doc was a good old sport,” said one meditatively. “There was only one of him,” said another. “How many down-and-outers has he staked?”

“That’s just it!” exclaimed Lefty Ranger. “How many down-and-outers has he staked? A thousand, just about! That’s where his pile always went. Roulette didn’t get much out of him. Faro didn’t, nor the booze. He never wanted much. Two or three times he had enough stake for him to want to pull out of the country and go south to the cattle range. He wanted to buy a place and get to work on it. That was always his idea.”

“He’ll never see the cattle that sack buys, nor the range that they run on,” said Spooner.

“He never will,” said Ranger. “Twice before he had nigh onto this much. Though when he give that claim to Dummy Miller for half the dust that come out of it the first year, I never thought that Dummy would play so straight. But straight he was! He turned this over for me to bring on to Doc. And now Doc is gone when he sure had his chance to start south instead of west.

“Well, God knows the meaning of these things, if meaning they have. But Doc always give his chances away. He couldn’t say ‘No,’ no matter what a loafer the gent was that asked him for a lift. I reckon that’s the way this pile oughta go, too! I dunno any more likely way that Doc would’ve spent it.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said one of the men.

“Well, I’ve made up my mind,” said Ranger. “I’m gunna leave this sack in Circle City. It’s to be sieved out to those that need it the most.”

“Who’ll you trust that to?”

“I dunno. Spooner is always around here, and Spooner can tell a straight man from a thug, I reckon.”

There was a sudden, hungry flash in the eye of Spooner.

“I dunno about that,” said he. “I reckon I could tell a straight man from a thug, all right. I’d take charge of that for you, son!”

Lefty Ranger looked wistfully at him. Then he drank again.

“Spooner,” he said at last, “you’re about as hard as they make ’em. There ain’t a man under the sky that you’re afraid of. Not even a ghost. How’d I trust this to you if you had a need of dippin’ your hands into the bag?”

The insult made the saloon keeper neither flush nor pale. He merely smiled. “I’m afraid of Menneval,” said he.

“What, him?” exclaimed Ranger. “Yeah. I reckon you’re afraid of Menneval. I reckon that everybody else is. But is Menneval gunna come here to Circle City and check up what you do with that money?”

“Menneval will never be seen in Circle City again,” said one.

“Not while we got any guns with us,” declared another.

“How can he live out there by himself?”

“He ain’t by himself. He’s got his dogs.”

“And they’s a pet demon in each dog.”

“I’d like to turn over this here money to you,” said Ranger. “You could do a lot of good with it, givin’ the boys a drink when they’re feelin’ down and low, and passin’ out chow to them that are hungry, whether they’re honest or not. But I’d like to have somebody put a guarantee on it and a check on you. I don’t mean you no slander and no insult, Spooner. Your drinks is honest enough, anyway!”

Spooner Joe seemed totally unaffected by these remarks. In fact, his record was so notoriously black, and had covered so many crimes, from petty larceny to murder and bank robbery, that the words of the mail carrier had a little less sting than might have been supposed. Besides, how could he vent any spite on the person of Lefty Ranger, who was middle-aged or more, one of the best-liked men in the north, and above all, one who notoriously went unarmed all his days and all his ways.

So Spooner Joe merely smiled a little.

“I guess you’ll wait a long time before Menneval shows up here,” said he.

“No, not a moment,” said a voice at the farther end of the bar.

Every one looked with a start in the direction from which the words had come, and there they saw the middle-aged, slender man who was leaning on one elbow against the foot of the board. He pushed back his hood a little, and the staring eyes of the others saw a clean-shaven, lean face. It was very brown. It was as brown as the face of an Indian almost, not with the reddish, weathered look familiar in those travelers over the snows of Alaska, but a deep mahogany. So dark was the color of his face that the blue of his eyes shone with an electric brightness against that background.

It was more than the mere contrast of color, perhaps. Certainly those eyes had meaning for almost every man in the room. They did not shout the name, but the mere whisper of it clove from wall to wall: “Menneval!”

Spooner Joe grew rigid. He was half turned toward the man, and a covert hand, slowly, softly, drew a Colt revolver from the shelf beneath the bar.

“I’ll put my guarantee on that sack of gold,” said Menneval. “I’ll guarantee that Spooner Joe will spend it fairly and squarely on the right people and never put an ounce in his own pocket. Why should he when most of it will go right back over his own bar again?”

His voice changed a very little.

“Spooner, put down that gun. Don’t be a fool!”

The bartender, with a gasping sigh, restored the gun to the shelf.

“Now, boys,” said Menneval, “as long as I’m here for a few minutes, we might as well liquor together. Spooner, throw us some glasses and a few bottles, will you?”

Drinks of the so-called whisky at the Spooner Bar were fifty cents apiece; at that time the current rate in Circle City. Afterward the prices were to soar again.

Menneval threw out a small poke, solidly filled, but when the bartender, coming out from his trance, spun out the bottles down the bar and the clinking glasses after them, the men who stood in the long, irregular line touched neither the glasses nor the bottles. They looked before them as men in a dream, seeing strange visions.

Menneval filled his glass without appearing to give it a glance. Then, slowly, he raised the glass toward his lips.

“Boys,” said he, “here’s how. And who says ‘No’ to Menneval?”

His glance ran up and down the line.

“I’ll drink with you!” exclaimed Lefty Ranger.

He pushed his hood clear back. His bald head glistened like a pale, polished rock. And, snatching up the bottle nearest him, he filled his glass.

“Nobody else? Nobody else?” said Menneval.

One by one, sullenly, as the quiet pressure of his eyes fell upon them, they filled their glasses, and in silence they raised them to their lips and swallowed.

“And you, Spooner Joe?” called Menneval.

There was still no anger in his voice. But under that quiet challenge the Spooner broke out into a profuse sweat that made his face shine. He poured out three fingers and swallowed them like a man who needed the stimulant, not the pleasure of the drink. Then he measured out the gold dust from Menneval’s bag.

“That’s better,” said Menneval. “That shows that we’re all friends. All friends here together. Now some of you are free to hurry off and tell the authorities that I’m here. Run along. Any of you are free to go. I won’t follow you. And I’ll be here when the crowd gets back. Spooner, you heard my guarantee on that sack of gold. If I hear that you’ve gone crooked with any part of it, I’ll drop in and give you a call. Now send some food into the back room. Ranger needs a meal, and I’m going to watch him eat it. I’ll be in there sitting between the door and the window, waiting for them. That’s all.”

He restored the poke to his belt, and turning on his heel, he walked slowly out of the room, without even a glance over his shoulder. Spooner Joe reached again for the gun, now that the back of Menneval was turned; but the fingers seemed to freeze on the handle, and he could not raise the weight of the heavy Colt. Another man, with a faint snarl, actually jerked a weapon from under his coat and leveled it at the retreating form. But he did not fire. Enchantment seemed to make his forefinger helpless, and Menneval walked undisturbed out of the room.

CHAPTER THREE

No one stirred, aside from the Spooner and the other who had drawn the gun, until Menneval was out of the room.

Then a weight seemed to be taken from every mind. Suddenly they turned their heads to one another. And yet few words were spoken. One or two turned and looked suddenly toward the door.

The man who had drawn the gun hastily swallowed another drink. Then he muffled himself in his parka and went straight to the outer door, opened it, and leaned against the whirl of snow which blew about him, for a slight wind had risen.

He closed the door after him, and again the men at the bar looked at one another solemnly and with meaning.

“It ain’t right,” said Lefty Ranger suddenly. “It ain’t right. He’s said where he’ll be. It ain’t right to take advantage of him. It ain’t fair. You wouldn’t fight dogs a hundred against one.”

“You’d fight wolves that way, though,” said the Spooner coldly.

“Well,” said another, “are you gunna go back in that room with him, Ranger?”

“Why not?” asked Ranger. “I dunno what he’s done that’s so bad.”

“Murder ain’t much, I guess,” said some one with a forced casualness.

“I dunno how much murder he’s done,” said Ranger. “Maybe he’s all right. I’m gunna go back and talk to him, anyway.”

“You got a nerve,” said a friend. “Don’t you go and be a fool. You keep away from Menneval!”

“What’s he done?” said the mail carrier. “I don’t see no reason. I been inside as long as any of you, I guess. What’s he done that you look at him like he was leprosy?”

“Oh, he ain’t done much,” said the Spooner. “He ain’t done much!”

He laughed, soundless. Then he gave an order to a waiter. Food was to be taken into the back room. Menneval had ordered that this be done.

“He’s had four partners,” said a man who was older than any one present. He was a hardy old prospector with a face like a mangy squirrel—the gray hair grew only in tufts on it.

“And where are them four?” some one asked.

“I’ll tell you,” said the old prospector. “He’s had four partners. There was Charley Harmon, the first. Charley was the cleanest kid that ever got this far north. There was no better than Charley Harmon. Everybody knows that. Well, he was the first, and he just disappeared. Got pneumonia, they said.”

“There was that fellow that we called Chuck Spenser, or Tiny for short. What become of him?”

“Oh, he got pneumonia,” said the prospector sourly. “There was Garry O’Day. He had a terrible accident with a gun, it turned out. Menneval said that was pneumonia, too. But Shamus and Terry March found the body of Garry O’Day in the ice, and there was a bullet hole right between the eyes.”

“The last was Lew Pollard,” said the Spooner.

“Pollard was a thug, a thief, and a hard-boiled egg,” said the prospector. “He wasn’t no help to have around. The only reason that he took on Menneval as a partner was because he figgered that no matter how tough Menneval was, he was a little tougher himself. Well, nobody has heard of Lew Pollard for quite a spell. And nobody is gunna hear of him again.”

He raised his hand high and dropped it soundlessly upon the bar. His voice softened to the greatest gentleness.

“And nobody,” said the old-timer, “is ever gunna get anything good out of Menneval—because he ain’t like us. He ain’t a bit like us; he is plumb different!”

“All right,” said Ranger. “Let him be different. I’m gunna eat my meal, and I’ll take my chance with Menneval.”

Straightway he left the room and went to the little apartment to the rear which was often used by gamblers who wished to escape from the disturbance of the crowd.

At the door of this room Ranger paused, shocked to a standstill. On a small table at the side of the room, between the door and window, stood a tray heaped with food. A vast platter of steaming beans particularly fed his eyes. But near the table sat Menneval. He had taken off his outer garments. He sat bareheaded, in a light, closely fitting jacket. It showed the slender, trim body of a boy, but in actual years he might be forty-five, or closer to fifty, even; there was in him a potential age which was incalculable. His hair was perfectly white, close-cropped, and so sleek and thin that it fitted him like a smooth silver cap; but it was not the white of the hair that gave the sense of years to that face. There was hardly a line in it. But it looked as though it were hammered out of a metal, delicately and carefully, by the infinitely small hammers of time.

Ranger, after that hesitation, nerved himself. If he had seen without being seen, he would have turned about and gone back to the bar, or actually fled from the building. But he had been seen, and shame supplied the warmth of a courage that had failed him. He went on to the table and sat down before his tray of food, clearing his throat.

From the big barroom there was not a sound. In place of the usual riot, particularly the riot of a mail arrival, a waiting silence filled the Spooner Saloon.

“Ranger,” said Menneval, “don’t be afraid. I mean you no harm.”

“Afraid?” said Ranger. He was about to deny it, but then he felt that it would, indeed, be foolish to try to deceive those keen, steady blue eyes.

“Yes,” he said, “you threw a scare into me when I come into the doorway. But I’m over it mostly.”

“Good,” said Menneval. “Go ahead and eat your meal.”

It embarrassed Ranger for a time to eat with that eye watching him. But presently a great surge of hunger overcame all sense of place and time. He ate like a starved wolf, and, looking up once or twice, he saw that the other was watching him with the faintest smile of amusement, like a father watching a child at the table.

And yet he was the full age of Menneval, or very nearly so. He knew that mere years are no measure, however. If he had fifty full lives, he never could pour into them what already had poured through the blue eyes of Menneval. What they had said in the barroom was right. The man was simply different.

He went to the kitchen, got himself a second cup of coffee, and looked hard at the Chinese cook. The latter merely shrugged his shoulders.

“They are all round!” he said.

Lefty Ranger went back to the table.

He felt much better. There was vital warmth in him now. It seemed as though a comfortable fire was glowing right under his heart. It seemed as though he never could be cold again. The fumes of the coffee were in his nostrils, and the fumes of the whisky were in his brain.

“Menneval,” he said, “they’re all around the place, waiting for you!”

“Of course they are,” said Menneval. “They’re all around the place, with their trigger fingers growing numb. That’s why I’m waiting in here. And now, Ranger, I want to speak to you for one minute.”

He laid the poke from which he had paid for the drinks upon the table.

“I want six months of your time,” said he. “In this poke there are not quite twenty pounds of gold. That means six thousand dollars. Will that pay you for six months?”

Ranger stared.

“What you want me to do, Menneval?” he asked, and he swallowed hard.

It was high pay. It was the highest pay that ever had been offered to him, and for what? “I want you,” said the other, “to go outside. I want you to go clear down to California. I want you to go up into the hills to the town of Tuckerville. In the country near Tuckerville you’ll hear of a man named Peter Crosson. He lives on a small farm. He’s half scientist, half farmer, half hunter, half nature-lover. With him there’s a lad of twenty-one or two. That’s his son. His name is Oliver Crosson. I want you to find those people, and I want you to talk to them. I want you to find out everything you can about both of them. You’re to act as though you simply chanced on them. When you’ve found out everything about their occupations, their habits of mind, their entire character, you’ll come back here to Circle City and tell me all that you know.”

The mouth of Ranger fell agape with wonder.

“What’s it all for?” said he.

“I’m curious. That’s all. I offer you six thousand dollars. Will you take the pay?”

“Is it gunna bring harm to the Crossons?”

“Harm?” said the other.

He became thoughtful.

“No,” he said, “I really think that I could not possibly harm them in any way.”

He said it quite solemnly.

“Will you tell me why you should pick me out for a spy?” asked Ranger. “There’s plenty more here that you could send twice as foxy as I am.”

“I’m sending you because you’re an honest man,” said the other. “And there’s nobody else in Circle City that I’d trust—as you trusted Doc Harness, and as he was right in trusting you.”

He got up from the table.

“That’s all,” said he. “Will you go?”

“Yes,” said Ranger. He was bewildered. He could not escape from the will of his table mate.

“Good-by, then,” said Menneval.

He left the poke on the table. He inclosed himself in his furred coat and drew the hood over his head. Then he jerked wide the door just beside the table. He jerked it wide, and stepped quickly back as three rifles rang out in rapid succession beyond the door, and three bullets humming through, lodged with separate, heavy shocks in the logs of the opposite wall.

Menneval laughed, and now he glided through the doorway into the whirling of the white snow dust, light and rapid as the shadow of a bird.

Other rifle shots followed; they diminished in the distance. And Ranger heard a hoarse shouting pass away. But he was not disturbed. The laughter of Menneval was still in his ears, and he knew that the man had escaped unharmed.

CHAPTER FOUR

Alaska was so in the blood and in the bone of Lefty Bill Ranger that he could not get it out of his mind. Even after he arrived in Tuckerville, he would still awake with a start in the middle of the night, with a nightmare dread that he was freezing to death because there was not a sufficient weight of blankets upon his body. But he was not freezing. On the contrary, he was sweltering with heat. Even when the cold wind blew down from the snows of the Sierras, Ranger could go abroad in his shirt sleeves, so powerfully was the resistance to cold built up in his blood and in his nerves; exposure which would have given another man pneumonia was to him no more than a comfortable coolness.

He did not stay long in Tuckerville, with its pleasant peach and plum orchards and genial sense of well-being in the air. He only waited there long enough to find out about the Crossons. As a matter of fact, it seemed as though Tuckerville hardly knew that the Crossons existed; it was only from the owner of the general-merchandise store that he could pick up any facts of importance. To that store, as to the only port within many miles, all the outlying people through the hills and mountains near Tuckerville and Tucker Flat had to come sooner or later. The half-wild trappers, the still wilder and more lonely prospectors, the sheepherders, loneliest and wildest of all, now and again had to come to the general-merchandise store—once a year, let us say. And Sol Murphy, who ran the store, kept these vagabond peoples charted in his mind as a ship’s chandler keeps a reckoning of the various tramp freighters which have made his port and taken supplies from him.

So he remembered the Crossons, but even he remembered them vaguely. Nevertheless, he said several things. One was that the Crossons were “queer.”

“Queer” is a word which may mean almost anything out west. It may mean strange. It may mean spiteful. It may mean dangerous. It may mean half-witted. “Queer” is the term of last resort for people whose vocabularies are short, and when Sol Murphy attached the words to Crosson, he both shook and scratched his head.

“What d’you mean by queer?” asked Ranger.

“What makes you wanta know about ’em?” asked the storekeeper.

“Oh, I just heard somebody speak of the Crossons.”

“Crossons? Are there two of ’em?”

“I don’t know. I thought there was.”

“Come to think of it, I think old Pete Crosson has a boy.”

“But what d’you mean by queer?”

“Wait till you see Peter Crosson and you’ll know what I mean. He ain’t like other folks. He don’t care.”

“He don’t care?”

“No,” said Sol. “He don’t care about nothin’. You’ll see! He runs his cows in the hills. Suppose that a bear comes down and raids him; why, he don’t care. Suppose that a mountain lion, it comes down and slaughters a few colts and calves; why, he don’t care. He don’t hardly bother to go and set traps for ’em.”

Sol continued to shake and scratch his head, so that Ranger began to feel that the heart of the mystery was about to be exposed to him. He waited patiently, on the watch, and suddenly Sol Murphy broke out, leaning a little across the counter. “I tell you something—you’re a trapper, ain’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Ranger.

For that was the character which he had assumed, and he had gone so far as to buy a few traps from Sol. In fact, he had done a little trapping in the old days, the day divorced by more than time from his present self, which had been made by the white northland.

“If you’re a trapper, you get into the hills by the Crosson ranch and you’ll find that the dog-gone animals ain’t got no fear of you hardly. Seth Thomas, he was up there in them hills a year or two back, and dog-gone me if a grizzly didn’t come right out and give him a run!

“Charged him? Yeah. Hunted him down and charged him, and didn’t care shucks about his rifle. He put Seth up a tree, and Seth dropped his gun, and that bear, he batted that rifle to rags and then went off, and Seth come back to town mighty mad and swearin’ he was gunna go back and lift that bear’s hair. But he never went back, some reason or other!”

He laughed a little at the thought, but instantly he grew serious again.

“Look at here, stranger,” he said to Ranger, again leaning across the counter.

“Well?” said Ranger, pretending indifference, although the lowered voice of Sol Murphy made the beat of his heart quicken.

“Fact is,” said Sol Murphy, “there ain’t a gun on the Crosson ranch!”

He stared as he named the hidden mystery, and, keeping his face a blank and his eyes wide, he waited for similar astonishment to possess the listener.

Ranger did not need to pretend or to act a part. He gaped in turn. The two men presented perfect pictures of the same emotion.

“Yeah,” said the storekeeper, “it’s a funny thing!”

“Funny?” said Ranger. “I dunno that I see much that’s funny about it. Those hills back there look pretty wild to me. Looks to me like a real wilderness where a man could find some pelts. That’s why I want to trap it.”

“Of course they’re wild, those hills. And got some wild men in ’em, too.”

“What do the gents up that way say about Crosson?”

“They don’t like him,” said Sol Murphy with decision.

“Don’t they? And why not?”

“Well, he ain’t neighborly,” said Sol.

“Ain’t a friendly kind of a gent, eh?”

“No, he ain’t,” said Murphy with quick decision. “There ain’t no friendliness in him. Not that he’s a mean man, though,” he added hastily, as one who does not wish to be guilty of an injustice.

“What does he do to them?” asked Ranger.

“Well,” said Sol Murphy, “that’s what I never could find out, but I know that none of the thugs ever bother him.”

“They got a lot of thugs up there, have they?”

“Sure they have. They got a lot of thugs. Why, it’s a regular hole-in-the-wall country, what with the canyons and the brush and the woods. You could hide ten thousand men in almost any square mile of that country. If a posse chases a man that far, he stops right there. It ain’t anything but a clean waste of time to try to chase into the Tucker Hills. Everybody knows that that knows anything!”

The mere thought definitely irritated Sol. He swore once or twice under his breath and glared at Ranger as though he resented the presence of the stranger.

“Why,” said Ranger, “I wouldn’t think that anybody would wanta take up a holding right up there among them thieves.”

“Would you? No, you wouldn’t,” said the storekeeper. “You wouldn’t think so at all, and neither would I. But there they be! Right up there.”

“Maybe the Crossons are thugs themselves?” suggested Ranger.

Sol Murphy shrugged his shoulders.

“How do I know?” he asked, with the petty anger of a man who dislikes a question which he already had often asked of himself. “Nobody knows nothin’ about the Crossons. All I know is that nobody visits the Crossons twice.”

This information jarred suddenly home in the mind of Ranger. “Why, that’s kind of interesting,” said he.

“I think that it is,” agreed the storekeeper.

“Nobody ever gets to see ’em up there on the ranch?”

“No.”

“How do they drive strangers away—them not having any guns?”

“Dog-gone it!” exclaimed the irritated Sol Murphy. “How do I know? Wouldn’t I give my front teeth, and my grinders, too, if I could find out what they do to strangers? All I know is that when Charley Moore come back from a hunting trip up that way, he had a scared look that didn’t wear off for mostly six months, and every time anybody mentioned the Tucker Hills he lost most of his summer’s tan and got up and left the room. Nobody knew what to make of it. But I reckon that he run into the Crossons!”

The hair began to prickle along the scalp of Bill Ranger.

“It sounds sort of ghostly,” he declared.

“Yeah, don’t it?” said Sol Murphy.

He went on slowly: “There was Jerry Hanson, too. He heard something about the Crossons, and he said that he didn’t believe that there was any such kind of people around there in the hills. He said that he was gunna ride right up there and have a look at things. And Jerry Hanson, mind you, is a fightin’ man.”

“Real one, eh?”

“Well, they say that he’s killed three. I dunno nothin’ about it, but that’s what I’ve heard. I know that I don’t want no trouble with Jerry Hanson. Anyway, I seen Jerry start. He had a hoss and a pack mule. He had a good Winchester, and a pair of .45s which the triggers and the sights was filed off of them, that bein’ the kind of a hombre that Jerry Hanson is. He don’t trifle none at all! Well, he started off like that, not sayin’ nothin’ to anybody but me, because Jerry ain’t a talking man. But he went up there to find the Crossons, because he told me so. And Jerry was the kind that would either do or die, I’ll have you know.”

Sol Murphy paused.

“And what happened with him?” asked Ranger, itching with uneasy curiosity.

“Well,” said Murphy softly, “I didn’t see nothing of Jerry Hanson till about six months later I was down at Hampton Crossing, and there I seen a freight train go by, and one of the doors of the box cars was open, and setting inside was a man, cross-legged on the floor, his head in his hands, his face lookin’ sort of cadaverous and sick. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I would’ve said that that poor, starved-lookin’ gent, that a child would’ve had the nerve to go up and punch the nose of, I would’ve said that that was Jerry Hanson!”

“You don’t say!” breathed Lefty Ranger. Then he added, with a rickety laugh: “I reckon that I’d better keep away from them hills!”

“Oh,” said Sol Murphy, “outside of a coupla dozen thugs and yeggs, them hills are safe as can be.”

CHAPTER FIVE

When Lefty Bill Ranger packed his roll and left Alaska, he had felt that Menneval’s offer was the very height of romantic generosity—a thousand dollars a month for nothing more than travel, together with a little information to be picked up at the end of the trail.

But when he drove his loaded burro out of Tuckerville and steered his course for the ragged Tucker Hills, he felt that Menneval probably had driven a shrewd bargain with him. He was more excited than ever he had been in Alaska, whether fighting a storm or striking gold. There was danger ahead, and there was mystery ahead. And though he carried with him a good Winchester and an excellent Colt revolver as well, and though he was a master of both weapons, yet mere powder and lead seemed a very small comfort to Ranger.

Other men had come up here into the hills. They had possessed arms equal to his; they had possessed skill greater than his, no doubt; and yet none of them had seen the Crossons without becoming changed men. A mark had been put upon them—a mark about which they would not talk. A horror so great that it was beyond speech had closed over them, and he was to put his foot upon the threshold of the same mystery, and the very thought of it sent cold prickles up his spine.

The Crossons might be madmen, able to overwhelm the minds of others by the insanity of their fury, their strength, their animal cunning.

The Crossons might be clever, hard-headed exploiters of something which the rest of the countryside knew nothing about. They might, for instance, be working quietly at some rich digging, piling up gold month by month, extracting a fortune which they guarded as dragons guarded hoards of old.