The Blue Jay E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

If Randal could make his ranch pay, he stood to inherit his grandfather’s fortune. But a cattle-rustling band of ranch-hands were robbing him blind, and he had to do something to stop them. He sent for Kitchin, the toughest man he knew—the man he had once sent to Fulsom Penitentiary.

Leseprobe

FULSOM JUSTICE

Rusty came at Kitchin like a clawing tiger. He was strong, and as fast as chain lightning, but he didn’t have in his arms the seasoning of two years of hard labor like Kitchin did.

It was Fulsom Penitentiary that was fighting now—Fulsom, and the sight of “Blue Jay.”

Rusty lunged again. Kitchin hit him away like a spinning top.

“Rusty,” he said, “you’re beat. I want you to take some time and come to. I’m going outside to wait till your head is cleared. This time it was fists; the next time it’ll be guns. You get ready for the guns! Or else get ready to tell me that I’m the boss!”

Max

Brand

THE

BLUE JAY

1926

© 2021 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383831266

THE BLUE JAY

CHAPTER I

Nobody has to tell me. Because I know.

If I had stayed on the range, I would of been all right, because mixing around in my own crowd of folks, they would of understood that I was just extra happy and letting off steam. But you take a gang of city people, they got no sense of humor. Neither do they care none about what other folks would be thinking. The only street that they’ve any interest in is the one that they live on, and the only house of that street that amounts to a damn is the number where they stay.

I mean, the usual city folks. Not you! But you got to admit that the ordinary pavement walker is ornery.

I don’t want to get mixed up. I want to tell this straight.

It begun with when I hit the pay dirt on the back of old Champion Mountain. I thought it would be one of those damn pinch veins. It started too good. But it didn’t pinch. It strung out and got wider. I ground up a terrible lot of dust with my coffee mill and before that vein disappeared I had the haul of my life.

My haul was just too big. The idea of staying on the range or in a range town wouldn’t fit up with a load of hard cash like that. I needed a lot fancier corral to show my stuff, and so I started for the City.

I didn’t have no idea of spending everything that I had, of course. I figgered that my wad was so thick that I could paw at it for six months and never more than raise the surface. After that, I would go back to the range, where my own country is, and grab me a ranch and a gang of cows and start in reglar to be a real man. Prospecting was never more than a side show, to me.

When I got to town, I got myself fixed up with some clothes. They wasn’t quiet, either. They was calculated to match up with the way that I was feeling inside, which was just gay, you understand? I didn’t miss no tricks. Gloves and such went in with the lot and I had a vest that fair palpitated good cheer. I got me a cane, too—which they call them sticks when they speak polite. I even got down to spats, though I never got used to wearing cloth on my feet.

However, I want to say that where I appeared I was a noise that made folks look round, and I begun to have a real gay time. I set myself up at a hotel where you could spend five bucks for a meal without no particular pain and where the elevator boy looked like the son of a college president. After a while I collected some friends, too, and they showed me how really to part yourself from coin.

So I woke up one morning and pulled out my wad and I was pretty near beat to see that it had melted down to three hundred-dollar bills.

That wasn’t enough to make a dent on the range. So I decided that it might as well go chasing after the rest of the gold dust. I rung up a couple of the boys and we started on a party.

I made my second big mistake before I started out. I was feeling a mite reckless but I figgered out that I wouldn’t really want to hurt nobody’s feelings, and so I left my Colt behind in the bureau drawer. That was sure a fool idea, as you’ll see in a minute.

Anyway, we skidded around the town for a while and about midnight we found ourselves in a gambling joint. I seen my last twenty go across the green felt just at the same time that the dealer done a funny pass. I reached out and grabbed his hand, and down from his sleeve there come—oh, nothing much—just a couple of aces. You understand?

I was not really peeved. I had aimed to spend the last of my coin that night, and it didn’t much matter how it went, but I seen that this discovery of mine give me a chance to make that party real. I just peeled off my coat and stood up on the table and told the folks in general what I thought of them and their ways. The boss of the joint, he sicked a couple of bounders on me, and so I dived off the table at them to make a beginning.

But they didn’t make a beginning. They just flattened out on the floor and I had to walk on their stomachs to get at the crowd. That’s where the damage begun.

You see, if I had had the old Colt with me, there wouldn’t of been any trouble. There rarely is with guns. Revolvers is not deadly weapons. They’re just noise makers. Some folks fires off crackers on the Fourth; on the range, they’re more partial to Colts. You get heated up and you pull your Colt and you blaze away. You don’t hit nothing, because revolvers ain’t meant for hitting targets except by accident. You just bust a couple of mirrors and windows and plough up the floor, and rake the ceiling, and everybody whoops and dances around and limbers up, and a good time is had by all and nothing in the way of damage done that a carpenter can’t fix in half a day’s work.

But I didn’t have any Colt on me, as you’ve noticed in what I said before. All I had was my hands. And that was where I made my mistake.

I’m not small; and working a single jack and grinding pay dirt hadn’t made me no smaller. When I stepped into that crowd and laid my hands on a couple of the boys, I could feel them give under my grip like their bones was made of India rubber. More than that, they got scared, and they begun to yell: “He’s gone mad. Get the police!” It was disgusting to hear the way that they carried on because I was taking a mite of exercise. One of them got so excited that he hit me over the head with a chair, and after that I let that crowd have both fists. I waded through them across the room. Then I turned around and made a furrow back the long way of the place, and when I come to the door, there was a couple of cops.

What difference was cops to me? I bumped their heads together, took a breath of fresh air from the outside, and went back to finish scrambling up the eggs inside. But I’d hardly got started when one of the coppers crawled onto his feet and pulled a gun and I had to take it away from him. Then his buddy got funny with his night stick and busted it over my head, and I had to take him up and throw him through the window, with the glass and the frame carried along in front of him.

Then the lights went out, and right after that I skidded on something and went down on the back of my head. When I come to, I was riding on a wagon with a couple of boys in blue coats and brass buttons sitting on my chest and stomach. I says to them, would they please mind shifting off my stomach, and one of them says: “He’s waking up. I told you that he would!”

“Sure,” says another, “you can’t kill a Swede by hitting him over the head. He ain’t vulnerable there.”

I says: “Gentlemen, did you sort of refer to me by speakin’ of a Swede?”

They allowed that they did, and I got real irritated. The size of that patrol wagon, it cramped my style a good deal, but I managed to have a pretty good time, taking all things together, and the five coppers was pretty groggy when we got to the station-house. Then about a dozen fresh hands turned out and they grabbed me.

“Use gun-butts on him,” says the sergeant, where he was lying on the floor holding his stomach with both arms. “Clubs ain’t nothing but matchwood to him!”

That was a mighty practical police force. They took his word for it and they tried out my head with gun-butts. I come to in a cell with my head feeling like two, and all wrapped up in bandages. My clothes was tore up, too, which hurt me more than the feeling of my head—a whole lot! Because that outfit was something that the boys up there on the range would pretty near have paid admission for the sake of having a look at it!

However, the next morning I had to see the judge. He looked me over and wanted to know if I had resisted arrest, and the sergeant said that here was fifteen members of the force that would testify that I had and there was five more that he wanted particular to bring into the court-room, but the doctor said that they was not fit to be allowed out of bed right then.

“And how about the prisoner?” said the judge. “He looks as though he had been sent down a flume!”

I said that I was all right and that I was sorry that I had messed up any of the boys.

“Are you a professional wrestler?” says the judge.

“With doggies and drills,” says I.

The judge give me a grin. “You are just down from the range?” says he.

“My first and last appearance here, you bet,” says I.

“All right,” says the judge. “By the looks of my police force, it had better be your last appearance. Thirty days!”

“Thirty days?” sings out the police force, when they got me outside the room. “Thirty years would be more like it! I never hear an old sap like that judge. He had ought to be in an asylum for crippled brains!”

Thirty days didn’t seem like very much, between you and me, but that was right where I made a terrible mistake. I thought that a month in jail would be nothing, but by the time that the first week was over, and the swellings and the bumps on my head had sunk down pretty near to the bedrock of my skull, my patience was all used up. Besides, the fare was pretty poor in that jail. It’s hard to keep two hundred and twenty pounds of bone and meat working on the sort of a diet that they handed me. So the night of the eighth day, I tried the bars. I found a place where the stuff give a little when I pulled, and pretty soon I had worked a bar out of its socket.

My hands was bleeding before I got through working that bar loose, but after that, I had a sort of a can-opener to use on the rest of the prison. I never seen a lever that was handier for the forcing of doors than that bar was. It just worked fine, and I simply tore myself out of that jail, as easy as anything you would want.

I got to the street, when I remembered that my clothes wasn’t any too good. I went back and tied up one of the guards and put on his suit and borrowed a hat from a peg on the wall of the office, and took a handful of smokes off the desk of the judge’s room, and started out again.

I got eleven blocks and was due to make a clean break, when what should bump into me as I turned a corner but the night patrol! There was no reason why they should of suspected me. I was walking along brisk and sober, but they asked me what I was doing at that hour of the night, and when I started to tell them that I was a milk-wagon driver and that I was reporting for the morning beat, one of the coppers recognized my voice, and that patrol spilled all over me, yelling, “The Swede!”

My hands was sore from my work eight nights before, but I did pretty well until one of the flatties sank a forty-five calibre lug through my left thigh. They took me back and got me ready for the judge. It was pretty tough. The first time was just riot and resisting arrest, but this time it was breaking jail; assault on a guard; burglary; and resisting arrest all over again.

The judge says: “One year!”

Oh, why should I string this story out? I tried to bust loose again, and the result was that I wound up in Fulsom for two years!

I don’t know how it is now, but in those days, Fulsom was a nest of pretty hard birds. I was not any softy when I went into that penitentiary, but I was a hard-boiled, tool-proof bad one before I had been in there six months. The work was just hard enough to keep me fit and my appetite good enough to enjoy the prison grub—and I got meaner and harder all the time.

After I had served out a year of my sentence, I was headed for being a real bad one, but then I bumped into the chaplain. He went by the name of Maxim, and he was a rare good old boy with a white head and a cool blue eye. Him and me hit it off first class. We used to have boxing shows at the prison games, once a month, and that chaplain, he used to umpire the bouts. Says he, the first time that I showed, and when I was whaling the ribs out of a big two hundred and fifty pound Finn: “Kitchin,” says the chaplain, breaking us out of a clinch, “you’re not getting paid for this!”

That struck me funny, and I got to laughing so that I couldn’t do the Finn no real harm, after that, aside from busting his nose in the last round. But the chaplain and me become friends. He got to talking to me regular and pretty soon he got me a soft job as a trusty, working in his office. It panned out pretty good, too, because when he called in a bad-actor it sort of helped the thug to take religion serious, seeing me in the background. I wasn’t never a pretty man and having my head clipped didn’t improve me none—it made my ears stick out most amazing.

The chaplain got me to reading books, too, and he educated me pretty thorough all round—which is why I can write so good about everything that I done and seen.

And when I left the prison, I was pretty near sorry to go. First of all, I had planned to go in with a couple of yeggs, and work the small towns in the backcountry with them, but the chaplain, he talked me out of it altogether. He said that the range was the place for me. And so, back to the range I went.

But none too proud. Jail-birds is not popular on the range. And I was known pretty well by my riding and by my being so big. But I looked over the map and I picked out a corner of the mountains where I had never been before. I picked out the town specially because it had such a funny name, which was Sour City. And three days later, I crawled out from the rods and stretched myself and looked over my new country.

It was a pretty good little town. It was set down in the corner between where Sour Creek runs into the Big Muddy. It wasn’t any “sour” city, either. It was as neat a little town as you’d ever like to see, with some paving, and street lamps, and good shops, and one brick hotel and two that wasn’t brick, and pretty nearly everything that anybody could want to have in a town. Over the hills that rolled up all around there was a fine big sweep of cattle country, and behind that the mountains went sashaying up to the sky with black pines most of the way, and a white-headed summit, here and there.

Altogether, it looked good to me. I stopped in at a blacksmith shop to see for a job, but they was full handed; anyway, they couldn’t see past my peeled head, and so I went out on the street and the first person that I bumped into was the sergeant—I mean, the police sergeant that I had laid out in the patrol wagon down in the city!

CHAPTER II

Aiming the way that I was towards starting at the bottom and working my way up, with a new name the same as the chaplain had planned for me to take, I wasn’t any too tickled to see the face of that sergeant, of course, but I was plumb happy compared with him.

He give me a wall-eyed look and then he side-stepped right out into the gutter. I started to pass on, but then I changed my mind and turned around and I went back to where he was still standing and looking back at me. He acted like he expected me to hit him.

“I’m armed, Kitchin,” says he. “Don’t try nothing! I’m armed and I won’t take anything from you!”

“Sergeant,” says I, “you got me wrong!”

He put up his hand quick. “I’m not a sergeant, any more,” says he. “I’m doing some ranching up here, Blondy, and it don’t help any to bring up the past!”

I hadn’t liked him when I met him back there in the city, because he took it to heart so mean, the way that I laid him out in the patrol wagon. Now I could see that he was even worse than I had thought.

You take them by and large, the cops are a pretty good lot. Here and there you may run across a rotter, of course. Here and there you’ll find a pretty bad grafter who plays in with the crooks; but it’s never as bad as the newspapers would like to make out, I’ve always thought. A policeman, he’s a fellow that is willing to risk his life for his job, and mostly men that do that sort of work have got to have something that is worth while in them. Take most of those boys down there in the city, they didn’t hold no grudge against me because I had spoiled a few of their faces for a while. One fellow that had a nose out of place used to make a point of coming around to see me, and he used to chat with me, real cheerful. He would tell me how that he was taking boxing lessons, and how he hoped that when I got out of jail, I would drop around to see him, and then he would peel off his uniform and him and me would have it out, and he would try to do for my nose what I had already done for his. I intended to give him the chance, too, and if things ever get laid so that I can take some time off and get back to that time, I’m sure going to call on him and give him his chance at me.

Well, most coppers are that way—clean, hard-hitters—but now and then you’ll come across an exception to the rule. That sergeant had got a busted rib where I hit him in the police patrol. Not really clean busted, but only fractured; nothing hardly worth speaking about at all, between men, but he laid on about it a lot, and he used to come and tell me that when I got out of that jail, I would be lucky if he didn’t have me in again so fast that my head would swim!

Now, all of these things come piling back through my head when I met him up there in Sour City. I seen where he hated to have it known that he had ever been a sergeant, because he felt that he had raised himself a whole long ways above those old days, and that made me dislike him a lot more than I ever had before. Because about the lowest thing that a man can do is try to cut himself loose from what he used to be in his past.

I says: “Randal, if you want me to forget that you used to be a police sergeant—”

“That’s exactly what I want you to do!” says he. He was pretty eager about it, too. “However,” he went right on, “I don’t suppose that you’re going to be staying around Sour City very long?”

The minute that I seen him, I had decided that I would be moving on as soon as the next freight pulled out from the station, but the way he talked, it made me think that maybe I had better stay on right where I was. It looked like a chance was opening up; and I decided to talk straight to him. The chaplain, he had pretty well persuaded me that you don’t gain anything by talking around the corners about folks.

I says: “Randal, it ain’t hard to see that you want to get rid of me, from here?”

“Not at all!” says he, and he waved his hand; but I could see a fairly sick look on his face. I knew that I was weighing on his mind, pretty bad.

I says: “Now, Randal, you’ve got and worked yourself up to where you’re a rancher that can afford to wear real solid silver spurs, as I see, and handmade boots, and all the rest, and you ain’t fond of the idea of having the folks around here ever know that you used to wear a night stick, quite a bit.”

“You may put it that way,” says he. “I really welcome frank talk!”

“The hell you do!” says I, “but you’re gunna get it! I don’t like you, Randal, and I never did. You was low and mean and ornery, and there ain’t hardly anything in the world that would do me so much good as to sink a hand in your ribs again!”

He give a little grunt and a step back, at that.

“But,” says I, “I know what I can do and what I can’t. And what I can’t do is to make any more trouble. I’ve had my dose. I’ve been licked good and proper and I ain’t gunna forget it. Nothing is ever gunna give the law a chance to send me back to Fulsom, again. Now, Randal, I’m up here not on a bat, the way that you seen me down in town, but mighty quiet and sober. I’m a hard-working man, and I want to get a job and I want to stick to it. You understand? Now, the folks around here ain’t any too fond of employing jail-birds, and you know it. And the easiest thing in the world would be to get me out of this section of the country by just letting the word get out that I’ve been serving a prison sentence. But the minute that I hear any talk like that, I’m gunna know who started it, and I’m gunna come for you. And when I get to you, I’m gunna forget all about prison. If they get me and send me back on account of you and that sort of talk, it’ll be murder, Randal—and I mean it!”

I did mean it, too. Because when I thought of losing a chance to go straight on account of a rat like this here Randal, it fair sickened me. I would like to of wrung his neck right then and there. But Randal understood me. He was pretty grey as he stared at me. Then he begun to nod. He had a long, thin face with deep-set eyes, and now an idea begun to work up in those eyes. All at once, he fetched a hand into a vest pocket and brought out a wallet and he sifted a few bills out of the leather. He holds it out to me.

“Here’s seventy-five dollars,” says he.

“And that’s my price for beating it and keeping my mouth shut?” says I. “I’ll see you in hell first, Randal. Your money is dirt, to me!”

That was pretty free and independent talking, and in more than one part of the range that I could name, it would of got a man shot, right there and on the spot, but it looked like this was not one of them parts of the range. Randal, he just smiled back at me.

He said: “Now, don’t you be a damn fool, Blondy. The thing for you to do, kid, is to step into that store up the street and get yourself a suit of clothes. They’ve got a big assortment, and maybe they’ll have a suit that’ll fit you. They carry hats and shoes, too, and shirts and neckties. You haven’t got enough money there to buy the world, but you got enough to fit yourself out decently. Well, Blondy, that’s what I want you to do, and after you get yourself made up, you come over to the hotel, and you’ll find me waiting for you in the lobby. It’ll be lunch time, then, and you and me will go in and surround some chops, or whatever looks good to you in the eating line. You do what I tell you, and don’t ask any questions until it’s all over.”

I shouldn’t of taken that money, of course. Looking back on it, I can see that I was a fool and sort of a crook to take it, but I’ll give you my word that it wasn’t the idea of getting something for nothing that appealed to me so much. What flabbergasted me, really, was the mystery that was behind all of this, because, mind you, this ex-sergeant of police wasn’t any extravagant, generous sort of fellow. I aim to believe that you can mostly spot a generous man by a sort of a stupid wall-eyed look that he has. You try your hand at it. Just look over the men that you know and you’ll see what I mean quick enough, because the tight-fisted fellows are apt to have a pretty wideawake look—as if they were trying to make out whether you were worth noticing or not—but the generous folks have a sort of a stupid look. When you ask them for something they get a sort of a sick expression.

Now there wasn’t anything stupid about this here fellow Randal. He was as sharp as a rat. There was something up his sleeve. He wanted to get something out of it, and I naturally wondered what it could be. It was a case of my wits against his wits, and I was willing to bet that my brains were as hard as my fist, so far as he was concerned. I decided that I would do what he said. I went up the street to a store and by the grace of God I found out a pretty good-looking brown suit and I got right into it. There was a hard job finding shoes that would fit, but I managed it at last after a pretty tight squeeze, and I sashayed out of that place with a new hat on the side of my head, looking like a new million, you bet.

I found the ex-sergeant in the lobby of the hotel and he give me one squint up and down and nodded:

“You take to it easy,” said he. “You got a knack for spending, I see.”

Then he led me into the dining-room and we settled down to see how much food could be got onto one table, and after that, we seen just how quick that table could be emptied again. And so pretty soon he came around to cigar time and set back and clamped his teeth in a nice-looking black cigar. But I stuck to cigarettes that I rolled myself, because I wanted to keep my head clear.

CHAPTER III

He said: “Now, big boy, you figure that this is all pretty queer, and after I’ve handed out enough money to dress you up, you wonder what I’m going to try to get out of you. Ain’t that right?”

“I dunno,” says I, “but maybe it’s just because you’re a nacherally generous chap and you’re willing to let bygones be bygones.”

Because, you see, I wanted to bluff him out and make him think that I was about ten shades simpler than the fact. But he just leaned a bit over the table and puffed out a cloud of smoke and grinned at me through it.

“You lie like hell!” says he.

And I couldn’t help grinning back.

“Maybe you and me are gunna be able to understand each other,” says I.

“I guess we are,” says he. “I hope that we are. But the first thing for you to write down in red is that I haven’t forgot a thing. I still wear a strip of tape on my side where you busted me in the ribs, and after I take that tape off, I’ll still remember. I’m not a friend of yours, big boy, and don’t you forget it.”

“Randal,” says I, “for a crook, you talk like an honest man. You sort of warm up my heart. Now start going and spill the beans. You want my scalp, and you’ve bought me a new outfit. When do you pull the knife?”

He grinned again. He seemed to like this aboveboard talk as much as I did. Then he said: “I don’t know when the scalping will take place. You’re a pretty hard one, Kitchin, and I don’t know just how I’ll be able to go about cracking you. But in the meantime, I have to forget about what I want to do to you. I have to think just about what you can do for me.”

“Go on,” says I. “This sounds all better and better, I got to admit. Where does the music and the dancing begin?”

“Poison is bad stuff,” says he, “but when you want to get rid of the ground squirrels, it has its uses—and you’re the poison that I want to use now. You hear me talk?”

“I hear you talk. You got a poison job and I’m to be the goat. Go ahead!”

“That’s exactly it,” says Randal, working into the fat of his cigar and enjoying it with his eyes half closed. “I’ve got a bad job on my hands and I need somebody like you. But first, I have to put the cards on the table. Not that I want to, but that I have to in order to get you interested.”

I nodded. It looked pretty clear that he was talking honest. Not because he liked honesty, but because he saw that it was the only policy that would work in this case.

So he went on to say that he had come out of a family where everybody was pretty well fixed, and that when he was a youngster, just out of college, his dad had set him up in business and given him a flying start. But his ways weren’t saving ways. He liked the things that money give you but he didn’t cotton to the ways that money is made. So, pretty soon, he went bust.

Right about then, his father went on the rocks, too, and it busted the old man’s heart. He died and there was nothing in the estate for young Randal, so he looked around and got him a job on the side in the police force of the big town, without letting any of his family know what he was doing. Maybe it was take a thief to catch a thief. Anyway, he done pretty good as a policeman and worked up to a pretty good job as a sergeant, when he got word that his dad’s brother, Stephen Randal, had died, and lacking any other heirs that he was fond of, had split his cash between Harry Randal’s brother and sister and what he left to Harry (my friend) was his ranch.

It was a going ranch and very prosperous, and when Harry had a look at it, he felt that everything was pretty fine for him. Then, about a month after he took possession, over came his grandfather, Henry Randal.

Says the ex-sergeant: “This old goat, my grandfather, is one of those foxes that lose their strength when they get old but that don’t lose their wits, y’understand? He has about three millions in land and money, and when he visited me, he opened up and showed me his bank account and the statement of the stocks and the loans that he had outstanding. It was a list as long as your arm, I tell you! He said to me:

“ ‘Harry, I think that you’re a bright boy, but I don’t know about your working qualities. This ranch of your uncle’s was always a hard proposition to make pay. Your uncle did well here because your uncle was a man who worked about twenty hours out of every day. One reason that this ranch is hard to make pay is that, though the grass is good here and there is plenty of water for the cows, the ranch backs up on a regular hole in the wall country, and it’s pretty hard to keep the rustlers from edging in and getting away with the cream of the calf crop every year. Your uncle Stephen managed to scare the rustlers off because he was a hard-boiled fellow, as maybe you know, and they feared him morning night and noon, and don’t you forget it! But, Harry, I don’t know that you’re going to do so well. You are bright, but I don’t see you working twenty hours out of every twenty-four. You are brave enough, but I don’t know that you’ll make the rustlers lose any sleep. So you see that I understand what troubles you have ahead of you.

“ ‘Now, Harry, I’ve showed you a property worth three millions. I can go another step and tell you something else, and that is that I don’t like your brother. He’s gone in for a banking job in a city; and I hate the cities and the people that stay in them. Your sister has married a fat-head who doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. And neither of them are going to get a penny of my money. That leaves you, Harry, as the sole natural heir, so far as I’m concerned! But, mind you, I have a lot of doubts about you; and the way that you can clear those doubts up is to take hold on this ranch and make a paying proposition out of it. Every quarter I’m going to send out an expert accountant that I can trust to go over your books, and if those books don’t balance on the right side, you’ll hear from me to the effect that you needn’t worry about your inheritance any more. But, Harry, if you can take hold of that ranch and work it satisfactorily to me—and well enough to make a real profit out of it,—you are going to get every penny of my money. You understand? I have a heart that is due to stop working in about a year or two. I haven’t any illusions about my future, at all. I’ll die within about twelve months or two years, at the outside, and I want to leave my fortune in one lump to a man who can take good care of it. Think it all over, my boy, and when you’ve finished thinking, start in and work like the devil. You have to have patience, courage, and brains, and strength to win out. What your other moral qualities may be, I don’t know, and I don’t give a damn—I’m not any saint, myself—but if you can make this ranch pay, you’re as good a man as your uncle Stephen was, and he was my favorite son.’

“Right there he finished. He wouldn’t stay to dinner. He got onto his horse in spite of his eighty years and his bad heart and he rode twenty-five miles back to his own ranch. And there you are, Kitchin. You know me. You think I’m a crook. Maybe I am. I know you. I know you’re a crook, too, and there hasn’t been time for you to let your hair grow since you got out of the pen. Besides that, you hate me because I made things hard for you in the jail, and I hate you because you broke a rib for me and fractured a good deal of my self-respect. Very well. Let’s look at the other side of the picture.

“You’re broke. You need a job. You know the cattle country and the cattle business. I got that much out of you, listening to you in the jail. On the other hand, I’m in a bad boat. I have a big ranch, and I’ve loaded up my staff of cowpunchers with regular two-gun bad-men—hard-boiled eggs with reputations that need a shorthand reporter working a week to write them up. I got those hard fellows because I wanted to run out the rustlers in the backcountry. You see? But now that I’ve got them in, I’ve found out that they work hand in glove with the rustlers themselves. At least, that’s my suspicion. I dread the next round-up, because I know that it’s going to show me short of hundreds of cows—and that will be where my pretty dream busts all to pieces and the three million goes up in smoke.

“I got my place full of these hard-boiled fellows, but now that I have them, I can’t run them. If I fire them, they’ll simply go over to the rustlers and I’ll be in worse than ever. Fire one, and they’ll all quit, because they’re as thick as thieves. I can’t show my face in the bunkhouse without getting laughed at, now. I’ve hired three ranch-managers in the last three weeks, and not one of them has lasted twenty-four hours with that crew of yeggs.