The Vagrant Duke Part 41

"Very good. So long as we understand each other thus far, perhaps you will permit me to go on. As you know, I came to you in good faith. I wanted to help you in any way that a gentleman could do. Last night you tricked me, and put my life in danger. If you had killed Kennedy everything would have been all right for _you_. And I would have been accused of the killing. If _I_ had been killed no harm would have been done at all. That was your idea. It was a clever little scheme. Pity it didn't work out."

McGuire's faltering courage was coming back.

"Go on!" he muttered desperately.

"Thanks," said Peter, "I will. One shot of yours sc.r.a.ped Kennedy's shoulder. He was bleeding badly, so I took him to the Cabin and fixed him up. He was rather grateful. He ought to have been. I gave him a drink too--several drinks. You said he wouldn't talk, but he did."

"You _made_ him talk, d----n you," McGuire broke in hoa.r.s.ely.

"No. He volunteered to talk. I may say, he insisted upon it. You see, I happened to have the gentleman's acquaintance----"

"You----!"

"We met on the steamer coming over when we were escaping from Russia.

His name was Jim Coast then. He was a waiter in the dining saloon. So was I. Funny, isn't it?"

To McGuire it seemed far from that, for at this revelation his jaw dropped and he stared at Peter as though the entire affair were beyond his comprehension.

"You knew him! A waiter, _you_!"

"Yes. Misfortune makes strange bedfellows. It was either that or starvation. I preferred to wait."

"For--for the love of G.o.d--go on," growled McGuire. His hands were clutching the chair arm and there was madness in his shifting eyes, so Peter watched him keenly.

"I will. He told me how you and he had worked together out in Colorado, up in the San Luis valley, of the gold prospect near Wagon Wheel Gap, of its failure--how you met again in Pueblo and then went down into the copper country--Bisbee, Arizona."

Peter had no pity now. He saw McGuire straighten again in his chair, his gaze shifting past Peter from left to right like a trapped animal. His fingers groped along the chair arms, along the table edge, trembling, eager but uncertain. But the sound of Peter's narrative seemed to fascinate--to hypnotize him.

"Go on----!" he whispered hoa.r.s.ely. "Go on!"

"You got an outfit and went out into the Gila Desert," continued Peter, painting his picture leisurely, deliberately. "It was horrible--the heat, the sand, the rocks--but you weren't going to fail this time.

There was going to be something at the end of this terrible pilgrimage to repay you for all that you suffered, you and Hawk Kennedy. There was no water, but what you carried on your pack-mules--no water within a hundred miles, nothing but sand and rocks and the heat. No chance at all for a man, alone without a horse, in that desert. You saw the bones of men and animals bleaching along the trail. That was the death that awaited any man----"

"You lie!"

Peter sprang for the tortured man as McGuire's fingers closed on something in the open drawer of the table, but Peter twisted the weapon quickly out of his hand and threw it in the corner of the room.

"You fool," he whispered quickly as he pinioned McGuire in his chair, "do you want to add another murder to what's on your conscience?"

But McGuire had already ceased to resist him. Peter hadn't been too gentle with him. The man had collapsed. A glance at his face showed his condition. So Peter poured out a gla.s.s of whisky and water which he poured between his employer's gaping lips. Then he waited, watching the old man. He seemed really old now to Peter, a hundred at least, for his sagging facial muscles seemed to reveal the lines of every event in his life--an old man, though scarcely sixty, yet broken and helpless. He came around slowly, his heavy gaze slowly seeking Peter's.

"What--what are you going to do?" he managed at last.

"Nothing. I'm no blackmailer." And then, playing his high card, "I've heard what Hawk said about Ben Cameron," said Peter. "Now tell me the truth."

At the sound of the name McGuire started and then his eyes closed for a moment.

"You know--everything," he muttered.

"Yes, _his_ side," Peter lied. "What's yours?"

McGuire managed to haul himself upright in his chair, staring up at Peter with bloodshot eyes.

"He's lied to you, if he said I done it----," he gasped, relapsing into the vernacular of an earlier day. "It was Hawk. He stabbed him in the back. I never touched him. I never had a thing to do with the killin'. I swear it----"

Peter's lips set in a thin line.

"So Hawk Kennedy killed Ben Cameron!" he said.

"He did. I swear to G.o.d----"

"And then _you_ cleared out with all the water, leaving Hawk to die.

_That_ was murder--cold-blooded murder----"

"My G.o.d, don't, Nichols!" the old man moaned. "If you only knew----"

"Well, then--tell me the truth."

Their glances met. Peter's was compelling. He had, when he chose, an air of command. And there was something else in Peter's look, inflexible as it was, that gave McGuire courage, an unalterable honesty which had been so far tried and not found wanting.

"You know--already," he stammered.

"Tell me your story," said Peter bluntly.

There was a long moment of hesitation, and then,

"Get me a drink, Nichols. I'll trust you. I've never told it to a living man. I'll tell--I'll tell it all. It may not be as bad as you think."

He drank the liquor at a gulp and set the gla.s.s down on the table beside him.

"This--this thing has been hanging over me for fifteen years, Nichols--fifteen years. It's weighted me down, made an old man of me before my time. Maybe it will help me to tell somebody. It's made me hard--silent, busy with my own affairs, bitter against every man who could hold his head up. I knew it was going to come some day. I knew it.

You can't pull anything like that and get away with it forever. I'd made the money for my kids--I never had any fun spending it in my life. I'm a lonely man, Nichols. I always was. No happiness except when I came back to my daughters--to Peggy and my poor Marjorie...."

McGuire was silent for a moment and Peter, not taking his gaze from his face, patiently waited. McGuire glanced at him just once and then went on, slipping back from time to time into the speech of a bygone day.

"I never knew what his first name was. He was always just 'Hawk' to us boys on the range. Hawk Kennedy was a bad lot. I knew it up there in the San Luis valley but I wasn't no angel from Heaven myself. And he had a way with him. We got on all right together. But when the gold mine up at the Gap petered out he quit me--got beaten up in a fight about a woman.

I didn't see him for some years, when he showed up in Pueblo, where I was workin' in a smelter. He was all for goin' South into the copper country. He had some money--busted a faro bank he said, and talked big about the fortune he was goin' to make. Ah, he could talk, when he had something on his mind.... I had some money saved up too and so I quit my job and went with him down to Bisbee, Arizona. I wish to G.o.d I never had. I'd gotten pretty well straightened out up in Pueblo, sendin' money East to the wife and all----. But I wanted to be rich. I was forty-five and I had to hurry. But I could do it yet. Maybe this was my chance.

That's the way I thought. That's why I happened to listen to Hawk Kennedy and his tales of the copper country.

"Well, we got an outfit in Bisbee and set out along the Mexican border.

We had a tip that let us out into the desert. It was just a tip, that's all. But it was worth following up. It was about this man Ben Cameron.

He'd come into town all alone, get supplies and then go out again next day. He let slip something over the drink one night. That was the tip we were followin' up. We struck his trail all right--askin' questions of greasers and Indians. We knew he'd found somethin' good or he wouldn't have been so quiet about it.

"I swear to G.o.d, I had no idea of harmin' him. I wanted to find what Ben Cameron had found, stake out near him and get what I could. Maybe Hawk Kennedy had a different idea even then. I don't know. He never said what he was thinkin' about.

"We found Ben Cameron. Perched up in a hill of rocks, he was, livin' in the hole he'd dug where he'd staked his claim. But we knew he hadn't taken out any papers. He never thought anybody'd find him out there in that h.e.l.l-hole. It was h.e.l.l all right. Even now whenever I think of what h.e.l.l must be I think of what that gulch looked like. Just rocks and alkali dust and heat.

"It all comes back to me. Every little thing that was said and done--every word. Ben Cameron saw us first--and when we came up, he was sittin' on a rock, his rifle acrost his knees, a hairy man, thin, burnt-out, black as a greaser. Hawk Kennedy pa.s.sed the time of day, but Ben Cameron only cursed at him and waved us off. 'Get the h.e.l.l out of here,' he says--ugly. But we only laughed at him--for didn't we both see the kind of an egg Ben Cameron was settin' on?