IV
THE MAN UNDERNEATH
There were many people who said that Tom Willett was a man of no account; that he was a worm, and a legal book-worm at that—a mere husk, a straw, a student, a born dweller in dusty caves in the Temple—a creature of pleas and precedents and cases, an admirer, in his very marrow, of the Dead Sea fruit of the law.
And yet—and yet there was something in Willett that made it worth while to abuse him, worth while to sharpen one's tongue on him, and worth while to dig knives into him. What it was nobody knew but myself, and I always tried in vain to make other folks see that underneath the leather and the vellum and the paper burnt a fiery spark that made Tom a man. Even in law-books there is one spark that means, however translated and transmuted, primæval force. I never see a judge but I see underneath him palæolithic man with a stone-axe in his claw, working out revenges, and scattering brains with a blow. Even ermine is the skin of a wild beast.
I had the clue to Tom, for I knew his brother, and the others didn't. Jack Willett was as like Tom as a fresh pea is to a dried one, and sometimes it seemed to me that if Thomas Willett had had his brother's life it would have been difficult to know them apart. And Jack was curiously lawless—he could not stay in England a month without danger. As he said, with a quick glitter in his eye—people don't jostle one in Texas unless they're looking for death, and can face it smiling.
And one day he said: "Tom is as bad as myself underneath. Only he doesn't know it."
They were always together when Jack was in England, for Tom looked after him. With his arm locked in his brother's, he bade him remember that Law and Order were most respectable creatures, and formidable. And when I called him a dusty legal imp, he smiled and told Jack that he had hopes of me. I showed signs of becoming a good citizen.
And then Jack went off to Texas again, just in time to prevent him breaking out and assaulting a policeman. Tom and I saw him off at Euston, and Tom's eyes were as moist as dewy morn when the train left the platform. He loved his brother dearly.
"But all the same it's a relief for him to go, and a relief for me," said Tom. "His notions are so extraordinary. He never seems to understand that a man in no circumstances is justified in taking the law into his own hands."
"He lives mostly where the justification lies in the necessity," I said sententiously.
"And thereby makes things worse," said Tom. "The steady appeal to law even where law is weak increases its authority."
"I believe you'd stand to be shot to give the law a good case," I said carelessly. "What's the use of law without a sanction? And in parts of the West every man is his own law-giver. You get there down to first principles."
"One can't admit first principles in a civilised society," said Tom.
"Exactly so, my boy."
He looked at me. "You mean they are not civilised there?"
I nodded.
"They have judges and a judicial system. Jack told me so."
He made me smile, and I left him convinced that I had no answer. But what do judges and a judicial system matter when they don't work? Out in the borderlands tame justice walks with so slow a foot that only dead men can't escape. But wild justice grows redly and sometimes rankly. He was to know it. He knew it very soon.
It was six months before I saw him again, and he came across me as I was lunching in a big West End restaurant.
"You're the very man I wanted to see," said Tom.
There was something strange about him, and the strangeness was not the fact that he was in mourning. I looked at him curiously, but said nothing. He sat down by my side and put a dusty legal bag at his feet.
"Have you heard about it?" he asked.
"I've heard nothing."
"Jack's dead!"
He spoke very quietly, but I could see he was badly hurt. Yet that was not the difference in him.
"I'm very sorry," I said. "How did it happen?"
'He was killed—murdered," said Tom steadily.
"And the murderer?"
"He's walking about," said Tom.
I saw where the difference lay. He was younger, in spite of the shock. And—well—there was something else. I eyed him curiously, and he looked at me steadily. There was nothing soft about his eyes now.
"I never saw you look so like him," I said. I had hit it that time—"plumb-centre" as they say out West.
"I got a letter from a chum of his," said Tom, "and I wanted to see you. You understand the country there."
He pulled out his pocket-book, and extracted a dirty half-page of lined paper, which was dated two months earlier from Painted Rock in Texas. I read it with difficulty, for it might have been written back-handed with a skewer. It ran thus—
"N.B.—I'm very sorry for your brother's death. He was a fine and clever boy, and I liked him. And now I can't shoot worth a cent owin to my havin no right hand to speak of.
"N.B.—It was dynamite as wrecked my shootin.
"N.B.—A letter to the Arizona House will always find me.— Yours truly, S. N."
The restaurant roared about us, and outside London's organic drone bore the burden of the music. But for me the walls fell down and London died, and I saw the vast expanse of the burnt and Texan plateau, the grey-brown brush, the thin grass, the gaunt mesquite, the long-horned steers and the prairie ponies. Then I saw the Californian mountains by Flagstaff shining with winter snow, and further still the Colorado River spread out glittering where it came through from the Grand Canon. I saw adobe Mexican townships and dark Mexicans in silver-braided hats; and cowboys loping into town to paint the place and themselves red as blood, and such a man as Silas Northrop, with one lonely finger on a scarred stump, and such another as "Cow Creek Briggs," a Colonel of swift Western promotion, with his "gun" in his hand. And I saw Jack too, and sighed.
I lifted my eyes and started, for it seemed to me that though the face I looked at was the face of the lawyer, the eyes I saw were the eyes of the man who fell by the alkaline waters of Cow Creek.
"What am I to do?" said Tom.
But Jack's eyes knew.
It's a strange thing how little one knows of oneself in civilisation. I meet civilised and peaceable citizens every day who are capable of killing an enemy under the open sky, and of sleeping soundly after his death, who yet denounce the least infraction of the meanest rule that ever masqueraded as law. It is fine to sit with a man who might have been a desperado if he had been born where the sun shines, and to hear him talk so peaceably that one might believe he was meant for a wet-nurse, and only missed his destiny by being changed at birth. And here was Tom Willett asking what he was to do.
"When do you start?" I asked.
In another sense he started then. "Why—what?"
"When do you sail?"
"I want your advice. You know these places; I want to bring this man to justice."
I told him he couldn't do it. There was no evidence.
"He killed Jack and owns to it."
"But he says Jack pulled on him—that is, got his six-shooter out."
"I don't believe it."
I patted his shoulder. "Oh yes, you do. He might have done, at any rate. And if he did"
"But if this Colonel has a bad character?"
"Doesn't your correspondent say he's popular? You can't touch him legally. It's too late. In Texas this is ancient history by now. And if you go out and let folks know who you are, he'll lay for you and blow a hole through you."
"I want him hanged."
"You'll have to hang him yourself, then."
He picked up his law-bag.
"Have you given it up? Or when do you sail?"
He sailed a week later, and two months afterwards I got a letter from Painted Rock, and reading underneath the words I seemed to see something that the lawyer did not know he wrote. He was set in his mind and curiously cheerful. He looked upon his enterprise as a legal job, and meant to carry it through as if some client had given him the task. I had looked for some discontent at Texas and its conditions. He showed none; he never even growled at the sand and alkali; he related small and painful experiences with prickly pear in the spirit of no tender-foot.
"Now I know what you meant when you said that there were more men in the West than in any place you ever 'struck.'"
He wrote 'struck,' for he never used slang in England. But I noticed that he said that Silas Northrop was clear grit all through without any inverted commas. Northrop and he were working together, and in order not to alarm Colonel Briggs, "Willett isn't my name just now. It's Thompson. Write to me, care of Silas Northrop, Arizona House."
His letter gave me a touch of "Western fever." If I hadn't been hobbled and picketed by circumstances I would have come out to him and taken a hand in the deal. For I liked Jack very much. He was a "clever" boy. And in the vernacular of the United States "clever" means "kindly."
Silas Northrop's new partner wrote to me almost every week, and I could see the scales of civilisation dropping away from him. He soon came to the conclusion that the law as he understood it was a kind of plant that did not flourish in the sun-dried spaces of Texas and the West. It tickled me fairly to death when he called a person learned in the law "a law-sharp" for the first time, even though he put it in "quotes," and added that Silas said, "My son, I'd never have taken you for a law-sharp."
"I'm in great doubt as to what I can do," said the new man underneath Tom Willett, "for the law can't be made to work here. I took the advice of a notary in Painted Rock on an imaginary case, as I didn't care to give anyone a chance to put this Cow Creek ruffian up to my being on his trail, and he was very unsatisfactory. I'm thinking about what you used to say of the law. There seems something in it here. I used to think you talked rot when you came to me in the City. Do you remember saying that the seeds of law grew everywhere, but that the Attorney-General himself wouldn't recognise the relationship between his fine conservatory products and the seedlings on the prairie? There's a lot to this notion of yours."
The man was thinking and growing. What an infinite pleasure a foolish double dahlia must take in reverting to its simple primitive type in a wild, neglected garden. My double and triple petalled Willett was going back to type very fast. I hankered frightfully to see the working out of the drama, for I knew matters must be getting unhealthy for Colonel Briggs. I wrote to Tom a little nervously. I said—
"Go slow, my son. I see the ferment working in you. By the time Silas (give him a shake for me) by the time Silas and the clear atmosphere of the prairie have worked you clear of your legal trappings, you'll be on the trail with a gun. Don't hurry, learn to shoot, and for choice take a shot-gun; it requires an education to use what you have now learnt to call 'a gun.' If you are sure that your friend of 'Cow Creek' was in the wrong—and it should be easy to find out—kill him first and explain why afterwards. And if he is popular, explain it by a wire when you are well in the offing."
A letter from him crossed this salutary advice of mine. Tom Willett said the law was no good in Texas! He seemed sorrowful about it. There was no doubt that Briggs ought to be hanged. That was as plain as anything could be. But Briggs had friends, and was very quick with a pistol. And he had money.
"You can't hang a man with money in the West," said Willett. "I seem reduced to first principles. And first principles here are made of lead and powder and steel. I suppose they're made like that in most places."
I often think I have no luck to speak of, but I have to own that fate treated me with extraordinary indulgence the very day after I got this letter. A man with some mining interests in Mexico asked me if I would undertake to go out there for him and make a few investigations into the ways of his English manager. As the money was sufficient I closed with him right off, pulled up my picket pins, and started for Liverpool that night. I cabled to Willett, "Don't hurry; I'm coming." You see, I liked Jack Willett and I was interested in the game, and the Western fever had been burning up my vitals for three years. I could take Texas on my way,
There is no drug in the pharmacopœia which has any effect upon that disease of desire. The only thing is to give way and get the thing over, or to get old and die.
To be in London, that whirlpool, that Cloaca Maxima of mankind, that main drain of civilisation, and then to land suddenly in the burning sun of a late Texan spring, is to leap from darkness into light. So might a sad imp sit inside a camera and weep till fate squeezes the ball and lets the sunlight in. For an hour, a day, even a week I sat exposed, I the imp and the plate, and there are pictures printed on me, some of them so over-exposed that they have run into blackness. But that quick week was a long film; its hours biographic, swift, fluctuating, jerky.
I saw Silas Northrop before I met Tom Willett, and found him less than I had imagined him and more. He was thin and little, hard as a keg of nails, blue-eyed and ruddy-bearded. Some called him Ginger. Tom did for one. His right hand was a wreck, a jagged, fired stump; his left was strong as steel. In his eyes was the Western look; those who have seen it know it. Those who haven't seen it have missed something that makes for human dignity. He spoke little.
"Tom Willett has told you that I was coming?" I asked.
Northrop nodded. "He said he had a cable from you."
He eyed me with that clear and calm aspect of curiosity which never offends. He was "sizing me up."
"Do you mean to take a hand, sir?"
He accentuated the "sir" heavily, marking nothing thereby but a double interrogation. I shook my head.
"It's not my line. But I reckoned on hearing how things stood."
We were standing outside the hotel on the wooden side-walk that was full of traps for the "full" and the unwary. The road was yellow dust; a yellow mongrel lay in the middle of the track; two cow-ponies were hitched to a rail; stray citizens went by in their shirt-sleeves, some dressed in the black that civilisation puts on as mourning for primitive colours. I saw ancient types that I had known long years before. I was in a dream.
And suddenly I saw a ghost.
That is it—I saw a ghost; it was the man beneath Tom Willett, and Northrop said casually, without a glance at me—
"My new partner—Thompson!"
I might have been shaking hands with Jack Willett, with the man that Briggs had "thrown lead" at!
"I'm glad—glad to see you," said Tom; "what's brought you, and what's wrong?"
For a moment I really couldn't speak; the likeness was so extraordinary, so almost appalling. The new man was brown as a berry; his eyes were clear; the look of the West had come there more swiftly than I had ever seen it come. And it is to be remembered that it only comes to men; cowards don't get it, and those whose souls are soaked in percentages don't raise it. It is the gift of the wild life to such as have not been destroyed utterly by the baser uses of the life in towns.
I gasped, and then held out my hand. Then I had to laugh.
"You lawyer," I said, "you legal imp, you dusty creature of calf-bound, hide-bound books, you haunter of courts, you case of precedents, you jargon-loving solicitor, where did you dig yourself up?"
And Tom looked at me oddly. His very smile was Jack's.
"Haven't you seen this?" I asked Northrop.
"Seen what, partner?"
"Has Briggs seen him?"
They both said, "No."
"But I've seen him," said Tom.
"Haven't you seen, Mr. Northrop, that our friend Thompson is too like your late partner?"
But the man beneath had come out too slowly under Northrop's eye for him to see it as I did.
"If Briggs sees him, he'll know," I said. "Let's walk where we can speak freely."
We went down the middle of the street, westward to the open prairie. For the little hotel was on the borders of the town.
"Is anything laid up for Briggs?" I asked.
Tom didn't answer, but he was playing with something which I knew would fit a forty-four Smith and Wesson.
"Thompson is going to kill him first chance," said Northrop quietly.
"What about the law?" I asked, a little satirically, and Tom snapped his fingers.
"That for the law!"
He looked at me with an almost shamefaced smile.
"First principles, old man," he said. "But I don't want you in it. Northrop and I are playing this game."
I own I wanted to see the end of it; I would have attended Colonel Briggs's funeral with a deal of quiet satisfaction.
"I'm not married and you are," said Tom. "This is not your game. Go on to Mexico; when you come back we may have it finished. I've a plot laid to get Briggs off his ranch into the Rock!"
He spoke with a fine calm. It was quite a pleasure to hear him, though there are folks who cannot understand any man doing his own law work if there is no one to do it for him. I've even heard men state that it is wrong to kill anyone except in battle, or without using the judge and an executioner. I have seen some get so excited about this that I have feared for my own life during the argument. There is considerable human nature yet extant. There was a powerful amount of it in Thomas Willett of the firm of Willett & Gray (now Gray & Son) in London Town.
I stayed that night in a rather better hotel than the Arizona House, for some years in England had made me over particular as to cleanliness and certain small details which did not trouble Northrop. As to Tom, he would have laid out on the prairie for six months without blankets to get at Briggs. He was a man of one idea by now. I remembered the same trait in Jack. He was accustomed to do one thing at a time, and do it thoroughly. His nature was evidence to me that Briggs had taken him at an advantage. Now Tom was Jack, and had been warned.
But there was no one to warn Briggs.
I stayed four days in the Rock, and saw my two friends every now and again. Tom would not allow me to come and see him too often.
"I don't want you to be in this trouble," he said. He was so hard and firm about it, and so able to take care of himself, that I did just as he wanted. I should have done so with Jack when he and I were in Texas together.
And yet, after all, I didn't miss the tragedy, though I came in time for it by accident.
It was just about noon on the fourth day since I landed in the town that the affair came off. As I had not seen either Northrop or Thompson for twenty-four hours (I had been out of town with some old friends) I walked down for a bit of a palaver, and found both of them standing under the verandah over the rotten side-walk of their old shack.
"You get," said Tom coolly, when I walked up alongside and slapped his shoulder. "Get, quick; there's going to be trouble."
I wanted to go, and yet I didn't. I did not hanker to be killed or to get in the calaboose. After all, it wasn't my affair. Jack had been my partner years ago, but Northrop was in that position when he had been killed. And here was Tom. Still I had to stay and see the thing out, and I said—
"Go to thunder, old man!"
And I stepped back against the wall and rolled a cigarette. There were three other men outside the hotel besides Silas and Tom. I had never seen any of them, but I could pick them out of a thousand now. I noticed a shot-gun leaning against the little rail on the edge of the side-walk. But there was no Briggs in sight. Tom was in his shirt-sleeves, and wore a big cow-hat rather over his eyes. He had no weapon on him, pistols in sight not being allowed in town at that date. Just at the end of the verandah there was a very good horse standing ready saddled. There was a coat strapped lightly to the horn of the saddle. It was a kind of blue-grey cloth, and I remembered that Tom often wore one of that colour.
I stepped up to Tom again. "So you've learnt to ride?"
His eyes snapped rather nervously. "You still here? Oh yes, I can ride—some!"
And I saw a little dust fly round the corner of the next street. The wind was pretty strong from the south-east. A man came following the dust. He was riding a good horse, and had the easy seat of the old frontiersman; one could see that though he came at a walk. He wore a loose jacket and a cow-hat the fellow of the one Tom had, though there were more leather and silver trappings on it than Tom's had. Indeed, to most men's taste it was too Mexican.
Now, this was Briggs, and I knew it. How I knew it I can't quite say. Perhaps a certain rigid set of Tom's shoulders told me so. At any rate I knew it, and though I wasn't in the game I saw my own pistol was ready to pull. When shooting begins there is never any knowing when it will end. And I was wondering how it would begin. I felt sure that Tom wouldn't shoot him at sight and without a word, and yet I feared that if he spoke Briggs would get his work in first.
There was some stress in waiting, and my nerves set themselves like strained wire. It was odd to hear the three men I didn't know gassing away to themselves, quite unconscious that lead might be flying in a moment. They turned and saw Briggs coming.
"That's a daisy of a horse the old chap's got," said one. I noted that one man said "cayuse," and I thereby judged he'd been in British Columbia.
I saw Briggs now plainly. He looked as if he was one of those hard old-timers who can stand up to a bar and keep a bar-tender busy. He had a red face and a hard eye touched with blood. It is wonderful how these drinkers can last, nerve and all, if they live on horse-back all the time they are not soaking. He looked by no means the man to scare. I owned that, and then all of a sudden I knew he would be scared. I laughed, and Tom turned. There was a look in his eye such as might have been in Jack's when he saw that Briggs had the dead-wood on him and meant killing.
"Oh, he'll be scared right enough," I said.
And the Colonel rode up alongside the verandah coolly enough, though it was so hot.
"Good-day, gentlemen," he said. "Is Mr. Hopkins in?"
He ran his eye over all of us, and I remembered that he didn't know Northrop.
It was Tom who answered. "I guess he's out, Colonel," said Tom. But it was his brother's voice that Briggs heard and his brother's eye that Briggs saw, and the blood ran out of his face and his jaw fell. Things and thoughts moved swiftly enough, but for me the intense moment was magnificently spacious—a thousandth part of a second held concentrated drama. I saw not Tom, but the dead man; I heard him speak.
"I guess he's out, Colonel!"
The words came slowly, and the men who were not in the game felt that there was a game. They had lived where life is living; where the instant may mean death, where comedy laughs tragically; where tragedy sometimes paints her royal face and fools in sawdust and a ring.
Here was tragedy imminent and instant. This was a resurrection. I read an awful script on Briggs's face; strange writing and reminiscence of a bloody day and a bloody mind. Fear grew there that was half supernatural; and again the fear which was recognition of righteous revenge. Was the man dead? There never was such likeness. He moved his right hand. It went swiftly, and yet slowly. I nearly called out to Tom, and then remembered that if I drew his attention I might be led to shoot. Or I might have to. And I remembered England.
Northrop was as quiet as a carved man. But his eye was on the Colonel.
And once more I understood. This was a game, a legitimate game too. For Northrop spoke.
"Look out, Jack!"
But for that last word I think Briggs might have got the first word after all. He had his "gun" out, but not so quickly as he would have done, as he might have had it. As the sun touched the bright octagonal barrel I saw the dead man's brother lift his shot-gun, and the next moment a full charge of shot hit the murderer under his left breast and lifted him down from the saddle. The horse wheeled round and galloped as his rider fell clear of him into the piled soft dust of the beaten road. And Tom stood with the barrel smoking and with his face as hard as the face of Justice throned upon immemorial law.
And Northrop cried out: "You all saw him pull his gun on my partner?"
And I said: "I saw it."
The other men said they saw it too.
But Northrop said in a low voice to Tom, "You won't need the horse. We'll walk down with you to the City Marshal's."
And I helped to carry the Colonel's body in out of the sun.