Black Jack by Max Brand (interesting novels to read TXT) 📖

table in the hotel. “You got a system, I figure.”

 

“A new one,” said Terry. “I’ve never played before.”

 

The other blinked.

 

“Beginner’s luck, I suppose,” said Terry frankly. “I started with fifty,

and now I suppose I have about eight hundred.”

 

“Not bad, not bad,” said the other. “Too bad you didn’t stop half an hour

before. Just passing through these parts?”

 

“I’m looking for a job,” said Terry. “Can you tell me where to start

hunting? Cows are my game.”

 

The other paused a moment and surveyed his companion. There seemed just a

shade of doubt in his eyes. They were remarkably large and yellowish

gray, those eyes of Joe Pollard, and now and again when he grew

thoughtful they became like clouded agate. They had that color now as he

gazed at Terry. Eventually his glance cleared.

 

“I got a little work of my own,” he declared. “My range is all clogged up

with varmints. Any hand with a gun and traps?”

 

“Pretty fair hand,” said Terry modestly.

 

And he was employed on the spot.

 

He felt one reassuring thing about his employer—that no echo out of his

past or the past of his father would make the man discharge him. Indeed,

taking him all in all, there was under the kindliness of Joe Pollard an

indescribable basic firmness. His eyes, for example, in their habit of

looking straight at one, reminded him of the eyes of Denver. His voice

was steady and deep and mellow, and one felt that it might be expanded to

an enormous volume. Such a man would not fly off into snap judgments and

become alarmed because an employee had a past or a strange name.

 

They paid a short visit to the gambling hall after dinner, and then got

their horses. Pollard was struck dumb with admiration at the sight of the

blood-bay.

 

“Maybe you been up the Bear Creek way?” he asked Terry.

 

And when the latter admitted that he knew something of the Blue Mountain

country, the rancher exclaimed: “By the Lord, partner, I’d say that hoss

is a ringer for El Sangre.”

 

“Pretty close to a ringer,” said Terry. “This is El Sangre himself.”

 

They were jogging out of town. The rancher turned in the saddle and

crossed his companion with one of his searching glances, but returned no

reply. Presently, however, he sent his own capable Steeldust into a sharp

gallop; El Sangre roused to a flowing pace and held the other even

without the slightest difficulty. At this Pollard drew rein with an

exclamation.

 

“El Sangre as sure as I live!” he declared. “Ain’t nothing else in these

parts that calls itself a hoss and slides over the ground the way El

Sangre does. Partner, what sort of a price would you set on El Sangre,

maybe?”

 

“His weight in gold,” said Terry.

 

The rancher cursed softly, without seeming altogether pleased. And

thereafter during the ride his glance continually drifted toward the

brilliant bay—brilliant even in the pallor of the clear mountain

starlight.

 

He explained this by saying after a time: “I been my whole life in these

parts without running across a hoss that could pack me the way a man

ought to be packed on a hoss. I weigh two hundred and thirty, son, and it

busts the back of a horse in the mountains. Now, you ain’t a flyweight

yourself, and El Sangre takes you along like you was a feather.”

 

Steeldust was already grunting at every sharp rise, and El Sangre had not

even broken out in perspiration.

 

A mile or so out of the town they left the road and struck onto a mere

semblance of a trail, broad enough, but practically as rough as nature

chose to make it. This wound at sharp and ever-changing angles into the

hills, and presently they were pressing through a dense growth of

lodgepole pine.

 

It seemed strange to Terry that a prosperous rancher with an outfit of

any size should have a road no more beaten than this one leading to his

place. But he was thinking too busily of other things to pay much heed to

such surmises and small events. He was brooding over the events of the

afternoon. If his exploits in the gaming hall should ever come to the ear

of Aunt Elizabeth, he was certain enough that he would be finally damned

in her judgment. Too often he had heard her express an opinion of those

who lived by “chance and their wits,” as she phrased it. And the thought

of it irked him.

 

He roused himself out of his musing. They had come out from the trees and

were in sight of a solidly built house on the hill. There was one thing

which struck his mind at once. No attempt had been made to find level for

the foundation. The log structure had been built apparently at random on

the slope. It conformed, at vast waste of labor, to the angle of the base

and the irregularities of the soil. This, perhaps, made it seem smaller

than it was. They caught the scent of wood smoke, and then saw a pale

drift of the smoke itself.

 

A flurry of music escaped by the opening of a door and was shut out by

the closing of it. It was a moment before Terry, startled, had analyzed

the sound. Unquestionably it was a piano. But how in the world, and why

in the world, had it been carted to the top of this mountain?

 

He glanced at his companion with a new respect and almost with a

suspicion.

 

“Up to some damn doings again,” growled the big man. “Never got no peace

nor quiet up my way.”

 

Another surprise was presently in store for Terry. Behind the house,

which grew in proportions as they came closer, they reached a horse shed,

and when they dismounted, a servant came out for the horses. Outside of

the Cornish ranch he did not know of many who afforded such luxuries.

 

However, El Sangre could not be handled by another, and Terry put up his

horse and found the rancher waiting for him when he came out. Inside the

shed he had found ample bins of barley and oats and good grain hay. And

in the stalls his practiced eye scanned the forms of a round dozen fine

horses with points of blood and bone that startled him.

 

Coming to the open again, he probed the darkness as well as he could to

gain some idea of the ranch which furnished and supported all these

evidences of prosperity. But so far as he could make out, there was only

a jumble of ragged hilltops behind the house, and before it the slope

fell away steeply to the valley far below. He had not realized before

that they had climbed so high or so far.

 

Joe Pollard was humming. Terry joined him on the way to the house with a

deepened sense of awe; he was even beginning to feel that there was a

touch or two of mystery in the make-up of the man.

 

Proof of the solidity with which the log house was built was furnished at

once. Coming to the house, there was only a murmur of voices and of

music. The moment they opened the door, a roar of singing voices and a

jangle of piano music rushed into their ears.

 

Terry found himself in a very long room with a big table in the center

and a piano at the farther end. The ceiling sloped down from the right to

the left. At the left it descended toward the doors of the kitchen and

storerooms; at the right it rose to the height of two full stories. One

of these was occupied by a series of heavy posts on which hung saddles

and bridles and riding equipment of all kinds, and the posts supported a

balcony onto which opened several doors—of sleeping rooms, no doubt. As

for the wall behind the posts, it, too, was pierced with several

openings, but Terry could not guess at the contents of the rooms. But he

was amazed by the size of the structure as it was revealed to him from

within. The main room was like some baronial hall of the old days of war

and plunder. A role, indeed, into which it was not difficult to fit the

burly Pollard and the dignity of his beard.

 

Four men were around the piano, and a girl sat at the keys, splashing out

syncopated music while the men roared the chorus of the song. But at the

sound of the closing of the door all five turned toward the newcomers,

the girl looking over her shoulder and keeping the soft burden of the

song still running.