Magic Gun by Max Brand

Author:Max Brand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2019-10-07T20:26:09+00:00

XVI

Now Collier heard Jack Memphis speaking close beside him. He saw the sheriff remounted, but this time on the horse of the dead man. And with bowed head, Lassiter gripped the pommel of the saddle.

“You’ll get to the prison soon enough for them to fix you up,” Memphis was saying, “and when that happens, you’ll be able to take a rest pretty nigh as long as you need. When you lay there, spell the thing out for yourself. Ask yourself if hunting men ain’t worse than what I do, which is hunting money. So long, Lassiter. Here’s hoping that there ain’t no third meetin’ between us.”

In a half trance, Collier watched the sheriff ride off down the road, first at a walk, and then at a trot. The voice of Memphis broke in at his side.

“Leave Gadsden lay here,” he said. “Lassiter will send back for him. We gotta get on. But what’ll this mean to you?”

“Nothing, I suppose,” said Collier. “I don’t think Gadsden has had enough time to tell Lassiter who I am. I think there may have been enough shame in him to keep him from that. And so no one knows Hugh Collier. I can fade out of the picture.”

“What was in Gadsden? Was he crazy?”

“I don’t know. I suppose he was one of those danger lovers that I’ve heard people talk about. Poor Gadsden. He wanted to be on both sides of the fence, and now he’s dead, and heaven forgive him.”

They mounted and turned back up the road.

* * * * *

They made no haste in that progress, but jogged the horses slowly forward, stopping to make supper, before daybreak, on some provisions which were in Collier’s saddlebags for that purpose. And it was the brightest and most colorful moment of the morning when Kate Memphis found them rounding a curve on the upper trail.

Collier was a few lengths behind, at the moment, and he drew rein to watch her throw up her hand and then to see her lost in the arms of her father. It came to him with a sense of wonder, like a thing read in a book, that it was he who had done this miracle and had brought the man home to her. He waited with a foolish smile, half in dread of the moment when she should notice him.

But when that moment came, she was wonderfully cold and casual. It was merely a cheerful good morning, and no more—no melting of the eyes, no trembling of the voice, nothing to show that she was more than politely grateful to this unhired deliverer.

He gritted his teeth. He was shamed by the very height of his expectations.

The rose left the morning, the sun was growing warm, the birds had ceased from the first ecstasy of their singing, and the eyes of Collier fell down to the rutted road, watching the sinuous trails which had been cut in the surface and the little trickles of water which ran here and there across its surface.

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