BUCK THORNTON, MAN'S MAN
Those who had rushed into the outer darkness in the wake of the
highwayman returned presently. Mere impulse and swift natural reaction
from their former enforced inactivity rather than any hope of success
had sent them hot-foot on the pursuit. The noisy, windy night, the
absolute dark, obviated all possibility of coming up with him. Grumbling
and theorising, they returned to the room and closed the door behind
them.
Now that the tense moment of the actual robbery had passed there was a
general buzzing talk, voices lifted in surmise, a lively excitement
replacing the cosy quiet of a few moments ago. Voices from the spare bed
room urged Ma Drury to bring an account of the adventure, and Poke's
wife, having first escorted the wounded man to her own bed and donned a
wrapper and shoes and stockings, gave to Lew Yates's women folk as
circumstantial a description of the whole affair as though she herself
had witnessed it.
After a while a man here and there began to eat, taking a slab of bread
and meat in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other, walking
back and forth and talking thickly. The girl at the fireplace sat stiff
and still, staring at the flames; she had lost her appetite, had quite
forgotten it in fact. At first from under the hand shading her eyes she
watched the men going for one drink after another, the strong drink of
the frontier; but after a little, as though this had been a novel sight
in the beginning but soon lost interest for her, she let her look droop
to the fire. Fresh dry fuel had been piled on the back log and at last a
grateful sense of warmth and sleepiness pervaded her being. She no
longer felt hunger; she was too tired, her eyelids had grown too heavy
for her to harbour the thought of food. She settled forward in her chair
and nodded. The talk of the men, though as they ate and drank their
voices were lifted, grew fainter and fainter in her ears, further and
further away. Finally they were blended in an indistinguishable murmur
that meant nothing.... In a doze she caught herself wondering if the
wounded man in the next room would live. It was terribly still in there.
She was in that mental and physical condition when, the body tired and
the brain betwixt dozing and waking, thought becomes a feverish process,
the mind snatching vivid pictures from the day's experience and weaving
them into as illogical a pattern as that of the crazy quilt over her
shoulders. All day long she had ridden in the swaying, lurching, jerking
stage until now in her chair, as she slipped a little forward, she
experienced the sensations of the day. Many a time that day as the
racing horses obeying the experienced hand of the driver swept around a
sharp turn in the road she had looked down a sheer cliff that had made
her flesh quiver so that it had been hard not to draw back and cry out.
She had seen the horses leaping forward scamper like mad runaways down a
long slope, dashing through the spray of a rising creek to take the
uphill climb on the run. And tonight she had seen a masked man shoot
down one of her day's companions and loot the United States mail.... And
in a register somewhere she had written down the name of Hill's Corners.
The place men called Dead Man's Alley. She had never heard the name
until today. Tomorrow she would ask the exact significance of it....
At last she was sound asleep. She had found comfort by twisting sideways
in her chair and resting her shoulder against the warm rock-masonry of
the outer edge of the fireplace. She awoke with a start. What had
recalled her to consciousness she did not know. Perhaps a new voice in
her ears, perhaps Poke Drury's tones become suddenly shrill. Or it may
be that just a sudden sinking and falling away into utter silence of all
voices, the growing still of hands upon dice cups, all eloquent of a new
breathless atmosphere in the room had succeeded in impressing upon her
sleep-drugged brain the fact of still another vital, electrically
charged moment. She turned in her chair. Then she settled back,
wondering.
The door was open; the wind was sweeping in; again old newspapers went
flying wildly as though in panicky fear. The men in the room were
staring even as she stared, in bewilderment. She heard old man Adams's
tongue clicking in his toothless old mouth. She saw Hap Smith, his
expression one of pure amazement, standing, half crouching as though to
spring, his hands like claws at his sides. And all of this because of
the man who stood in the open doorway, looking in.
The man who had shot Bert Stone, who had looted a mail bag, had
returned! That was her instant thought. And clearly enough it was the
thought shared by all of Poke Drury's guests. To be sure he carried no
visible gun and his face was unhidden. But there was the hugeness of
him, bulking big in the doorway, the spare, sinewy height made the
taller by his tall boot heels, the wide black hat with the drooping brim
from which rain drops trickled in a quick flashing chain, the shaggy
black chaps of a cowboy in holiday attire, the soft grey shirt, the grey
neck handkerchief about a brown throat, even the end of a faded bandana
trailing from a hip pocket.
He stood stone-still a moment, looking in at them with that queer
expression in his eyes. Then he stepped forward swiftly and closed the
door. He had glanced sharply at the girl by the fire; she had shaded her
eyes with her hand, the shadow of which lay across her face. He turned
again from her to the men, his regard chiefly for Hap Smith.
"Well?" he said lightly, being the first to break the silence. "What's
wrong?"
There are moments in which it seems as if time itself stood still.
During the spellbound fragment of time a girl, looking out from under a
cupped hand, noted a man and marvelled at him. By his sheer physical
bigness, first, he fascinated her. He was like the night and the storm
itself, big, powerful, not the kind born to know and suffer restraint;
but rather the type of man to dwell in such lands as stretched mile
after unfenced mile "out yonder" beyond the mountains. As he moved he
gave forth a vital impression of immense animal power; standing still he
was dynamic. A sculptor might have carved him in stone and named the
result "Masculinity."
The brief moment in which souls balanced and muscles were chained passed
swiftly. Strangely enough it was old man Adams who precipitated action.
The old man was nervous; more than that, bred here, he was fearless.
Also fortune had given him a place of vantage. His body was half
screened by that of Hap Smith and by a corner of the bar. His eager old
hand snatched out Hap Smith's dragging revolver, levelled it and
steadied it across the bar, the muzzle seeking the young giant who had
come a step forward.
"Hands up!" clacked the old man in tremulous triumph. "I got you, dad
burn you!" And at the same instant Hap Smith cried out wonderingly:
"Buck Thornton! You!"
The big man stood very still, only his head turning quickly so that his
eyes were upon the feverish eyes of old man Adams.
"Yes," he returned coolly. "I'm Thornton." And, "Got me, have you?" he
added just as coolly.
Winifred Waverly stiffened in her chair; already tonight had she heard
gunshots and smelled powder and seen spurting red blood. A little surge
of sick horror brought its tinge of vertigo and left her clear thoughted
and afraid.
"Hands up, I say," repeated the old man sharply. "I got you."
"You go to hell," returned Thornton, and his coolness had grown into
curt insolence. "I never saw the man yet that I'm going to do that for."
He came on two more quick, long strides, thrust his face forward and
cried in a voice that rang out commandingly above the crash of the wind,
"_Drop that gun! Drop it!_"
Old man Adams had no intention of obeying; he had played poker himself
for some fifty odd years and knew what bluff meant. But for just one
brief instant he was taken aback, fairly shocked into a fluttering
indecision by the thunderous voice. Then, before he could recover
himself the big man had flung a heavy wet coat into Adams's face, a gun
had been fired wildly, the bullet ripping into the ceiling, and Buck
Thornton had sprung forward and whipped the smoking weapon from an
uncertain grasp. Winifred Waverly, without breathing and without
stirring, saw Buck Thornton's strong white teeth in a wide, good
humoured smile.
"I know you were just joking but..."
He whirled and fired, never lifting the gun from his side. And a man
across the room from him cried out and dropped his own gun and grasped
his shoulder with a hand which slowly went red.
Now again she saw Buck Thornton's teeth. But no longer in a smile. He
had seemed to condone the act of old Adams as a bit of senility; the
look in his eyes was one of blazing rage as this other man drew back and
back from him, muttering.
"I'd have killed you then," said Thornton coldly, his rage the cold
wrath that begets murder in men's souls. "But I shot just a shade too
quick. Try it again, or any other man here draw, and by God, I'll show
you a dead man in ten seconds."
He drew back and put the bar just behind him. Then with a sudden
gesture, he flung down the revolver which had come from Hap Smith's
holster and more recently from old man Adams's fingers, and his hand
flashed to his arm pit and back into plain sight, his own weapon in it.
"I don't savvy your game, sports," he said with the same cool insolence.
"But if you want me to play just go ahead and deal me a hand."
To the last man of them they looked at him and hesitated. It was written
in large bold script upon the faces of them that the girl's thought was
their thought. And yet, though there were upward a dozen of them and
though Poke Drury's firelight flickered on several gun barrels and
though here were men who were not cowards and who did not lack
initiative, to the last man of them they hesitated. As his glance sped
here and there it seemed to stab at them like a knife blade. He
challenged them and stood quietly waiting for the first move. And the
girl by the fire knew almost from the first that no hostile move was
forthcoming. And she knew further that had a man there lifted his hand
Buck Thornton's promise would have been kept and he'd show them a dead
man in ten seconds.
"Suppose," said Thornton suddenly, "you explain. Poke Drury, this being
your shack.... What's the play?"
Drury moistened his lips. But it was Hap Smith who spoke up.
"I've knowed you some time, Buck," he said bluntly. "An' I never knowed
you to go wrong. But ... Well, not an hour ago a man your build an' size
an' with a bandana across his face stuck this place up."
"Well?" said Thornton coolly.
"At first," went on the stage driver heavily and a bit defiantly, "we
thought it was him come back when you come in." His eye met Thornton's
in a long unwavering look. "We ain't certain yet," he ended briefly.
Thornton pondered the matter, his thumb softly caressing the hammer of
his revolver.
"So that's it, is it?" he said finally.
"That's it," returned Hap Smith.
"And what have you decided to do in the matter?"
Smith shrugged. "We acted like a pack of kids," he said. "Lettin' you
get the drop on us like this. Oh, you're twice as quick on the draw as
the best two of us an' we know it. An' ... an' we ain't dead sure as we
ain't made a mistake."
His candidly honest face was troubled. He was not sure that Thornton was
the same man who so short a time ago had shot Bert Stone. It did not
seem reasonable to Hap Smith that a man, having successfully made his
play, would return just to court trouble.
"If you're on the square, Buck," he said in a moment, "throw down your
gun an' let's see the linin' of your pockets!"
"Yes?" retorted Thornton. "What else, Mr. Smith?"
"Let us take a squint at that bandana trailin' out'n your back pocket,"
said Smith crisply. "If it ain't got deep holes cut in it!"
Now that was stupid, thought Winifred. Nothing could be more stupid, in
fact. If this man had committed the crime and had thus voluntarily
returned to the road house, he would be prepared. He would have emptied
his pockets, he certainly would have had enough brains to dispose of so
tell-tale a bit of evidence as a handkerchief with slits let into it.
"Maybe," said Thornton quietly, and she did not detect the contemptuous
insolence under the slow words until he had nearly completed his
meaning, "you'd like to have me tell you where I'm riding from and why?
And maybe you'd like to have me take off my shoes so you can look in
them for your lost treasures?" Now was his contempt unhidden. He strode
quickly across the room, coming to the fireplace where the girl sat. He
took the handkerchief from his pocket, keeping it rolled up in his hand;
stooping forward he dropped it into the fire, well behind the back log.
Then for the first time he saw her face plainly. As he had come close to
her she had slipped from her chair and stood now, her face lifted,
looking at him. His gaze was arrested as his eyes met hers. He stood
very still, plainly showing the surprise which he made no slightest
effort to disguise. She flushed, bit her lip, went a fiery red. He put
up his hand and removed his hat.
"I didn't expect," he said, still looking at her with that intent,
openly admiring acknowledgment of her beauty, "to see a girl like you.
Here."
The thing which struck her was that still there were men in the room who
were armed and distrustful of him and that he had forgotten them. What
she could not gauge was the full of the effect she had had upon him. He
had marked a female form at the fireside, shawled by a shapeless
patchwork quilt; out of it, magically it seemed to his startled
fancies, there had stepped a superb creature with eyes on fire with her
youth, a superlatively lovely creature, essentially feminine. From the
flash of her eyes to the curl of her hair, she was all girl. And to Buck
Thornton, man's man of the wide open country beyond the mountains, who
had set his eyes upon no woman for a half year, who had looked on no
woman of her obvious class and type for two years, who had seen the
woman of one half her physical loveliness and tugging charm never, the
effect was instant and tremendous. A little shiver went through him; his
eyes caught fire.