WINDY MOORE was the herald of adventure. He had been born to announce, rather than to share, the adventures of other men's lives. Added to this distinguishing favor of the gods was a sharp-nosed, gossiping, wide awake disposition for pry ing into the troubles of other people and spreading them abroad with colors retouched by a reckless imagination. Windy was always on the lookout for a sensation; for ever standing sentinel at the outpost of scandal; cease lessly applying his ear to the window-shutter in sly footed eavesdropping, his eye to the pane in despicable spying.
Following close on Tom Laylander's prank at Windy's expense, the little brakeman had been promoted from the local run to a high-ball freight. He had made his first run on the new assignment, and was back in McPacken for his layover. He had come in about breakfast-time that morning, which was the sixth day after the bank robbery in which Windy had lost his watch and roll.
Windy was so full of importance over his upward step in the calendar of railroad nobility that he could not hide his new brilliance in bed very long, no matter for having been awake all the way from Argentine to McPacken the night before. Eleven o'clock saw him out of bed and shaved, and down to the front sidewalkporch with a pair of blue suspenders, blue sleeve-holders to match, enough pomatum on his sleek, short-cut black hair for two bigger men, and perfume in excess for a dozen.
His nellygee shirt, as he called it, making two words of it, like the name and initial of a lady friend, was pink-striped. Windy wore it without a necktie, the soft collar open on his classical throat, the sleeves turned back midway of his forearms, in the accepted railroad style. He was very satisfactorily arrayed, and altogether irresistible.
Banjo Gibson was not gracing a bench in front of the hotel that morning; Angus Valorous was still pounding his ear in dreams of conductorial eminence. Windy had the whole thing to himself, a little pink spot against a big green background of hotel, like a chigger on a leaf. It was a fine arrangement for the vanity of Windy Moore, suitable to his new importance.
Windy had a cigarette plastered to the corner of his sneering, disdainful mouth. What little of the world was not his a man could have put into a gunny sack and carried away. He was ready for the noon whistle, all set and waiting to pass out patronizing nods, high-signs and greetings by word of mouth to the unfortunates tied down to earth in shops and roundhouse when they came in for dinner. For dinner fell at noon in that part of Kansas then; it keeps the same cycle now.
It wanted a quarter to twelve when Pap Cowgill came limping out of the dining-room, walking with a piece of broom handle to ease the weight from his crippled foot, heading for the cigar case to help himself to the best. Pap was still in the door, his mother and the new biscuit-shooter crossing and re-crossing each other in the background like botflies circling a horse's ear, when Windy Moore came in from the porch with a slam of the screen door at his heels. Windy was white to the gills; there was a look about him of a man who had been bitten by a rattlesnake and was racing for the jug.
Pap was as uncertain of Windy's intentions as he was ignorant of the cause of his panic. He thought maybe Windy had swallowed something and was coming for water, or had cut himself and was running for help. Pap side-stepped to let him go by, meeting him at the foot of the stairs, which came down, indeed, just at the side of the dining-room door. Windy jumped in the same direction that Pap sidled, and then, in the foolish way that people do in such sudden and embarrassing situations, they sawed and balanced like partners in a clumsy dance.
"Let me by!" said Windy frantically. "I tell you, let me by!"
"What in the hu-hu-hell's a bitin' you? G-g-go by!" said Pap.
At the same time he stepped this way; Windy sprang in the same direction, nimble as a bee.
"Let me up them stairs!" Windy demanded, sweat on his face, desperation in his breath. "I tell you that cow jerry just rode by—I'm goin' after my gun!"
"The hu-hu-hell you say!" said Pap. He dropped his broom-stick cane and made for the front door in a jump.
Mrs. Cowgill appeared in the dining-room door, a wisp of hair dangling down her face, as usual when she was undergoing the labor of breaking in a new girl. Windy Moore stood with one foot advanced to the first tread of the stairs, but appeared to be in no great rush now to push his way to the top.
"Is he—did you say—"
"Just rode by," said Windy, still as white as suds. "I'm goin' after my gun!"
He went on, bounding up the stairs like a valiant and determined man. Mrs. Cowgill stood as if stricken; opened her mouth wide, her eyes wider, raising her hands as if she surrendered everything. If facial expression and manual signs spoke truly, Mrs. Cowgill did not reserve one little gasp of astonishment for future use.
She followed Pap to the door, Goosie coming running from the dining-room. A cowhand-looking man was riding up the street toward the square, sight common enough, to be sure. Whether he was Tom Laylander, none of them could say. Pap said he'd go on up to the square and find out, but he thought Windy Moore had got something crossways in him. Mrs. Cowgill sought to restrain her son, who put her hand away with scorn.
Windy Moore was a good while about getting his gun. Pap was half way to the square, where the rider had disappeared, when Windy came down the stairs with a sideways trip to him that was very neat and elegant.
"Where's he at?" Windy asked, gun in hand, caution restraining him in any headlong dash.
"Gone around the corner," said Goosie, pointing.
"He'll go around, another one!" said Windy, a big threat in his voice. He followed Pap, still with a cautious casting around him, an unaccountable deliberation in his pace for an avenger going out with his bulldog in his hip pocket, looking for a man to slay.
Mrs. Cowgill lifted her hands again, opened her mouth and her eyes in repetition of her former silent surrendering up of every emotion of surprise, turned and hurried back to her dining-room to see if the new girl had put on the pickles.
Goosie remained outside a little while, looking up the street, listening, to see and hear if anything broke loose. There was no excitement in town. If the cow jerry had passed, he had gone by unrecognized by anybody but Windy Moore. Goosie believed Windy had been mistaken, having rather a low regard for his reliability at the best.
Cow jerry, or plain cowhand as the rider might prove to be, the hungry railroaders would break across the yards in a few minutes, coming like a flock of chickens when they hear the dishpan on the fence. Dinner must be laid out on the long table, let even Gabriel come riding his white horse up the main street of McPacken.
Crowley, the bank cashier, felt a skittishness come over him every time he saw a big hat come in the door. Yet a man could not very well greet every wearer of a big hat with a gun presented between the bars of the cage, in a country where some of the biggest hats had the biggest accounts. A man had to sweat it out and run his chances. Crowley got the jump of his life as he was arranging things in his cage after the morning rush of business that day.
He had turned to look at the clock—it was ten minutes to twelve—and did not see the man enter the door, which stood open to the breeze, a brick holding it back against the wall. The fellow was half way between the door and Cashier Crowley's window when first seen, coming in softly, as if he walked on his toes. Crowley did not hesitate. He grabbed his gun and leveled it between the shining brass bars.
It was not an unknown face under the big white hat; a good-humored, round, ruddy young face, but with a certain weariness and strain in it, especially around the frank blue eyes. A growth of virile sandy beard, several days old, added a comical roughness to the otherwise ingenuous face. The cashier knew it was not a strange face, but he could not remember where he had seen it before, nor call up a name to fit it. But he didn't like that silent tip-toeing across the floor. It wasn't his day to take another chance.
The visitor did not appear at all impressed by the cashier's gun, nor the desperate look in the man's scared white face. He held up one hand in a gesture of indulgent admonition, grinning a little, the disturbance in his dusty whisker stubs running up to his eyes, making them seem to laugh. The young man was carrying a grain sack, about half full of some lumpy matter; the horse that had brought him there stood before the door.
The president was sitting in his little railed-off place beside the cashier's cage, perplexities marshalled before him in long lines of figures, and short groups of fat figures, showing sums in addition and subtraction. There was plenty for the president of a bank that had stood a loss of over forty thousand dollars, cash, to think about in a town like McPacken, where the directors were not any too brisk about coming up with an assessment to cover it.
There was a little tin sign with gilt letters tacked on the gate opening into the president's pen, labelling him as neatly as a jar of jam. The man with the grain sack on his shoulder turned from the cashier's hostile embrasure as he read this word President. He turned his back to the cashier's gun with the nonchalance or ignorance of innocence.
That moment the cashier called a sharp warning to his superior, who raised his weary head, and sprang to his feet like a man aroused to flee for his life. He stood with hand on the pistol that lay on the flat desk before him, seeming to wait his moment, rather than to rush to meet it. He—was a different sort of man from the one in the cage; a man who would not lift his weapon until he was ready to shoot. So the visitor with the sack on his shoulder said to himself, feeling a warm admiration for the lean, harassed-looking president of the bank.
"What do you want?" the president demanded, as the young man, a stranger to him, approached the rail.
"I just want to turn this money over to you," the stranger replied wearily, as if worn by a thankless vigil over something in which he claimed no share.
"Money? Whose money? What money?"
"That's one of them! That's one of them!" the cashier warned. He came out of his cage, gun in hand.
"Put up that gun, Crowley!" the president ordered, his command sharp as a blow 'in the cashier's broad flat face.
"They forced me to assist them that morning, sir," the young man said, his voice low in what seemed a shameful confession, the blood of humiliation rising in high tide to his face.
"I see," said the president, but, far from seeing, puzzled to-get the drift of this extraordinary young man's words.
"It's one of that gang!" the cashier whispered, hold—ing his gun ready to use at the first wink.
"Oh, I see," the president repeated, really beginning to see.
"They got the swing on me and took my gun away from me while I was standin' there cashin' two little checks," the stranger went on. "The amount was a hundred and ten dollars. When you come to it, just lay it to one side for me, please sir."
The visitor put his sack on the rail near the president's hand, and turned to go his way in the manner of a man whose task was finished.
"You must be Tom Laylander?" said the president, opening the little gate, his hand extended to check the stranger's going.
Tom Laylander stopped, turned again in dignity, his weary body drawn up to the last fraction of an inch that it would stretch.
"Sir, that is my name," he replied.
"Wait a second," the bank official requested, with a little gesture of attention toward the door.
Tom had not noticed before that the beginning of a crowd had collected in front of the bank. He saw Pap Cowgill there, close by the open door, and a man with a badge on his vest, and Windy Moore coming pushing among the others, who seemed to be blowing there like leaves on a sudden gust of wind. Windy had his hand on his hip pocket; he was puffing as if he had run a mile. Tom understood the president's gesture. It seemed to say: "I believe you, but they want to see the proof before you leave."
The president had taken his knife from his pocket, the sack from the rail, as cool and steady as if about to open a sack of wheat. He cut the string, carried the sack to the middle of the floor and emptied it, full in the sight of such of McPacken as had assembled there, and were coming every second as fast as their shanks could carry them.
"By cripes! There's my watch!" said Windy Moore.
A heap of money, such as few in the crowd ever had seen before, lay on the bank floor. There were bundles of currency, loose bills of currency flooding them like the sauce of some delectable pudding; several little bags which everybody knew contained gold, a few gleams of white where silver dollars had got mixed in the hasty harvest.
The president stood looking at the heap of money, the empty sack in his hand, his head bent as if overwhelmed by some emotion that he dared not allow the world to see in a bank official's face.
"I think it's all there," said Tom, turning again to go.
"How in God Almighty's world did you do it, Laylander?" the banker asked, wonder so great in him that it was almost awe.
"You'll excuse me for hurryin' off," said Tom, that painful flood of crimson in his face again, "but I think this is the day I've got a case comin' up in court."
The crowd was flooding into the bank, filling the room, gorging the door. The new city marshal, the butt-end of a billiard cue in his hand, pistol by his side, appeared to think this was the proper moment for him to push into the bank and take a hand. Windy Moore and others had been giving him an earful as they stood outside. Following the custom in filling the office of city marshal, the job had been given by the mayor to the next most worthless citizen in town. This fellow was a barber. He had a soapy, sloppy shop next door to the county jail.
This officious person now planted himself in front of Laylander, barring his way to the door, hand laid tohis gun.
"You want me to take him up?" he asked the banker.
"Let that man pass!" the banker ordered, something more than authority in his tone.
The city marshal subsided; others drew out of the way. Tom Laylander, his own pistol again in the leather against his leg, hurried out to the court house to see about his case.