Smoking Guns by Max Brand

Author:Max Brand
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781428518278
Publisher: Dorchester Publishing

Will He Come Back?

“In all of this,” said Aunt Emily Ingall, “you will see for yourself, Jimmy, that luck has been overwhelmingly with you.”

“Luck,” Geraldi answered with his flashing smile, “is another name for what the hard worker gets. We’ve worked hard, Mary and I.”

Mary, by the window, tried to smile in turn, but smiles came hard to her now. The terror of the long adventure was too recent.

“As a good, honest laboring man, then, Jimmy,” went on the older woman, “you should see that you can’t reap such large returns forever. We won’t call it luck, then. But suppose Mary hadn’t found the black horse?”

“She found him because he was a return horse, and was bound to go back past Kimber Creek. That wasn’t luck.”

“Suppose she hadn’t been so alert, though, and hadn’t chosen to walk out there by herself through the heat of the day?”

“That’s what any high-spirited girl would have done. The cowards are the ones who stop hoping. She hoped, and so she kept moving. And that took her out of the hands of Shanks. It wasn’t even coincidence.”

“You’re a convinced optimist, Jimmy. But look at Mary now! You can stand such things . . . do you think she can?”

Geraldi rose from his chair and went with his quick, soundless step across the room until he stood behind the girl and leaned over her.

“You’re tired, Mary?” he asked.

“A little,” she admitted.

“Aunt Emily,” he continued, “thinks I’m going to carry you through one adventure after another, like this last one. She doesn’t realize it’s the end.”

“Really the end?”

“Of course!”

“But,” Aunt Emily said, “how can it be the end, when you still have what you took from Pike Naylor?”

Geraldi went to the table and, pulling open the drawer, he took from it the chamois sack that had seen so many hands. He had ripped it from the pocket of old Naylor as he felled him with the revolver stroke, unseen by the watching eye of the girl.

“Fair earnings,” he said. “Simply fair winnings in this gamble.”

“Will Pike rest content so long as you have it?”

“Are you suggesting,” Geraldi asked, laughing, “that I should give it back freely to that murdering old vagabond?”

“Give it to charity, then,” said Aunt Emily, “so that he’ll know you haven’t it still.”

“Do you mean it?” asked Geraldi.

“Ask Mary.”

Geraldi looked down with a frown at the girl.

“What do you say?” he asked curtly.

She closed her eyes.

“I don’t want to say,” she returned faintly. “I only know that so long as we have it, every time you pass through the door out of my sight, I think I’ll never see you again.”

Geraldi looked across at Aunt Emily, and that grim veteran nodded briskly at him.

“I understand, now,” Geraldi said. “This must be the end. A man can’t lead two lives. A married man can’t.”

“Of course not,” said Aunt Emily. “A married man is simply an appurtenance of the home. I hope you understand that? That’s why I never would have a husband. I pitied the poor creatures too heartily.

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