Elizabeth left the ordering of the guests at the table to Vance, and she
consulted him about it as they went into the dining room. It was a long,
low-ceilinged room, with more windows than wall space. It opened onto a
small porch, and below the porch was the garden which had been the pride
of Henry Cornish. Beside the tall glass doors which led out onto the
porch she reviewed the seating plans of Vance. "You at this end and I at
the other," he said. "I've put the sheriff beside you, and right across
from the sheriff is Nelly. She ought to keep him busy. The old idiot has
a weakness for pretty girls, and the younger the better, it seems. Next
to the sheriff is Mr. Gainor. He's a political power, and what time the
sheriff doesn't spend on you and on Nelly he certainly will give to
Gainor. The arrangement of the rest doesn't matter. I simply worked to
get the sheriff well-pocketed and keep him under your eye."
"But why not under yours, Vance? You're a thousand times more diplomatic
than I am."
"I wouldn't take the responsibility, for, after all, this may turn out to
be a rather solemn occasion, Elizabeth."
"You don't think so, Vance?"
"I pray not."
"And where have you put Terence?"
"Next to Nelly, at your left."
"Good heavens, Vance, that's almost directly opposite the sheriff. You'll
have them practically facing each other."
It was the main thing he was striving to attain. He placated her
carefully.
"I had to. There's a danger. But the advantage is huge. You'll be there
between them, you might say. You can keep the table talk in hand at that
end. Flash me a signal if you're in trouble, and I'll fire a question
down the table at the sheriff or Terry, and get their attention. In the
meantime you can draw Terry into talk with you if he begins to ask the
sheriff what you consider leading questions. In that way, you'll keep the
talk a thousand leagues away from the death of Black Jack."
He gained his point without much more trouble. Half an hour later the
table was surrounded by the guests. It was a table of baronial
proportions, but twenty couples occupied every inch of the space easily.
Vance found himself a greater distance than he could have wished from the
scene of danger, and of electrical contact.
At least four zones of cross-fire talk intervened, and the talk at the
farther end of the table was completely lost to him, except when some new
and amazing dish, a triumph of Wu Chi's fabrication, was brought on, and
an appreciative wave of silence attended it.
Or again, the mighty voice of the sheriff was heard to bellow forth in
laughter of heroic proportions.
Aside from that, there was no information he could gather except by his
eyes. And chiefly, the face of Elizabeth. He knew her like a book in
which he had often read. Twice he read the danger signals. When the great
roast was being removed, he saw her eyes widen and her lips contract a
trifle, and he knew that someone had come very close to the danger line
indeed. Again when dessert was coming in bright shoals on the trays of
the Chinese servants, the glance of his sister fixed on him down the
length of the table with a grim appeal. He made a gesture of
helplessness. Between them four distinct groups into which the table talk
had divided were now going at full blast. He could hardly have made
himself heard at the other end of the table without shouting.
Yet that crisis also passed away. Elizabeth was working hard, but as the
meal progressed toward a close, he began to worry. It had seemed
impossible that the sheriff could actually sit this length of time in
such an assemblage without launching into the stories for which he was
famous. Above all, he would be sure to tell how he had started on his
career as a manhunter by relating how he slew Black Jack.
Once the appalling thought came to Vance that the story must have been
told during one of those moments when his sister had shown alarm. The
crisis might be over, and Terry had indeed showed a restraint which was a
credit to Elizabeth's training. But by the hunted look in her eyes, he
knew that the climax had not yet been reached, and that she was
continually fighting it away.
He writhed with impatience. If he had not been a fool, he would have
taken that place himself, and then he could have seen to it that the
sheriff, with dexterous guiding, should approach the fatal story. As it
was, how could he tell that Elizabeth might not undo all his plans and
cleverly keep the sheriff away from his favorite topic for an untold
length of time? But as he told his sister, he wished to place all the
seeming responsibility on her own shoulders. Perhaps he had played too
safe.
The first ray of hope came to him as coffee was brought in. The
prodigious eating of the cattlemen and miners at the table had brought
them to a stupor. They no longer talked, but puffed with unfamiliar
awkwardness at the fine Havanas which Vance had provided. Even the women
talked less, having worn off the edge of the novelty of actually dining
at the table of Elizabeth Cornish. And since the hostess was occupied
solely with the little group nearest her, and there was no guiding mind
to pick up the threads of talk in each group and maintain it, this duty
fell more and more into the hands of Vance. He took up his task with
pleasure.
Farther and farther down the table extended the sphere of his mild
influence. He asked Mr. Wainwright to tell the story of how he treed the
bear so that the tenderfoot author could come and shoot it. Mr.
Wainwright responded with gusto. The story was a success. He varied it by
requesting young Dobel to describe the snowslide which had wiped out the
Vorheimer shack the winter before.
Young Dobel did well enough to make the men grunt at the end, and he
brought several little squeals of horror from the ladies.
All of this was for a purpose. Vance was setting the precedent, and they
were becoming used to hearing stories. At the end of each tale the
silence of expectation was longer and wider. Finally, it reached the
other end of the table, and suddenly the sheriff discovered that tales
were going the rounds, and that he had not yet been heard. He rolled his
eye with an inward look, and Vance knew that he was searching for some
smooth means of introducing one of his yarns.
Victory!
But here Elizabeth cut trenchantly into the heart of the conversation.
She had seen and understood. She shot home half a dozen questions with
the accuracy of a marksman, and beat up a drumfire of responses from the
ladies which, for a time, rattled up and down the length of the table.
The sheriff was biting his mustache thoughtfully.
It was only a momentary check, however. Just at the point where Vance
began to despair of ever effecting his goal, the silence began again as
lady after lady ran out of material for the nonce. And as the silence
spread, the sheriff was visibly gathering steam.
Again Elizabeth cut in. But this time there was only a sporadic
chattering in response. Coffee was steaming before them, Wu Chi's
powerful, thick, aromatic coffee, which only he knew how to make. They
were in a mood, now, to hear stories, that tableful of people. An
expected ally came to the aid of Vance. It was Terence, who had been
eating his heart out during the silly table talk of the past few minutes.
Now he seized upon the first clear opening.
"Sheriff Minter, I've heard a lot about the time you ran down Johnny
Garden. But I've never had the straight of it. Won't you tell us how it
happened?"
"Oh," protested the sheriff, "it don't amount to much."
Elizabeth cast one frantic glance at her brother, and strove to edge into
the interval of silence with a question directed at Mr. Gainor. But he
shelved that question; the whole table was obviously waiting for the
great man to speak. A dozen appeals for the yarn poured in.
"Well," said the sheriff, "if you folks are plumb set on it, I'll tell
you just how it come about."
There followed a long story of how Johnny Garden had announced that he
would ride down and shoot up the sheriff's own town, and then get away on
the sheriff's own horse--and how he did it. And how the sheriff was
laughed at heartily by the townsfolk, and how the whole mountain district
joined in the laughter. And how he started out single-handed in the
middle of winter to run down Johnny Garden, and struck through the
mountains, was caught above the timberline in a terrific blizzard, kept
on in peril of his life until he barely managed to reach the timber again
on the other side of the ridge. How he descended upon the hiding-place of
Johnny Garden, found Johnny gone, but his companions there, and made a
bargain with them to let them go if they would consent to stand by and
offer no resistance when he fought with Johnny on the latter's return.
How they were as good as their word and how, when Johnny returned, they
stood aside and let Johnny and the sheriff fight it out. How the sheriff
beat Johnny to the draw, but was wounded in the left arm while Johnny
fired a second shot as he lay dying on the floor of the lean-to. How the
sheriff's wound was dressed by the companions of the dead Johnny, and how
he was safely dismissed with honor, as between brave men, and how
afterwards he hunted those same men down one by one.
It was quite a long story, but the audience followed it with a breathless
interest.
"Yes, sir," concluded the sheriff, as the applause of murmurs fell off.
"And from yarns like that one you wouldn't never figure it that I was the
son of a minister brung up plumb peaceful. Now, would you?"
And again, to the intense joy of Vance, it was Terry who brought the
subject back, and this time the subject of all subjects which Elizabeth
dreaded, and which Vance longed for.
"Tell us how you came to branch out, Sheriff Minter?"
"It was this way," began the sheriff, while Elizabeth cast at Vance a
glance of frantic and weary appeal, to which he responded with a gesture
which indicated that the cause was lost.
"I was brung up mighty proper. I had a most amazing lot of prayers at the
tip of my tongue when I wasn't no more'n knee-high to a grasshopper. But
when a man has got a fire in him, they ain't no use trying to smother it.
You either got to put water on it or else let it burn itself out.
"My old man didn't see it that way. When I got to cutting up he'd try to
smother it, and stop me by saying: 'Don't!' Which don't accomplish
nothing with young gents that got any spirit. Not a damn thing--asking
your pardon, ladies! Well, sirs, he kept me in harness, you might say,
and pulling dead straight down the road and working hard and faithful.
But all the time I'd been saving up steam, and swelling and swelling and
getting pretty near ready to bust.
"Well, sirs, pretty soon--we was living in Garrison City them days, when
Garrison wasn't near the town that it is now--along comes word that Jack
Hollis is around. A lot of you younger folks ain't never heard nothing
about him. But in his day Jack Hollis was as bad as they was made. They
was nothing that Jack wouldn't turn to real handy, from shootin' up a
town to sticking up a train or a stage. And he done it all just about as
well. He was one of them universal experts. He could blow a safe as neat
as you'd ask. And if it come to a gun fight, he was greased lightning
with a flying start. That was Jack Hollis."
The sheriff paused to draw breath.
"Perhaps," said Elizabeth Cornish, white about the lips, "we had better
go into the living room to hear the rest of the sheriff's story?"
It was not a very skillful diversion, but Elizabeth had reached the point
of utter desperation. And on the way into the living room unquestionably
she would be able to divert Terry to something else. Vance held his
breath.
And it was Terry who signed his own doom.
"We're very comfortable here, Aunt Elizabeth. Let's not go in till the
sheriff has finished his story."
The sheriff rewarded him with a flash of gratitude, and Vance settled
back in his chair. The end could not, now, be far away.