"The very thing," said King eagerly. "That"s just what I want."
But Gaynor shook his head and his thin, aristocratic face was briefly overcast, and for an instant shadows crept into his eyes.
"No can do, Mark," he said quietly. "Not this time. I"ve got both hands full and then some."
King leaned forward in his chair, his hand gripping Gaynor"s knee.
"Ben, it"s there. I"ve always known it, always been willing to bet my last dollar. Now I"d gamble my life on it."
Gaynor"s mouth tightened and his eyes flashed.
"Between you and me, Mark," he said in a voice which dropped confidentially, "I"d like mighty well to have my share right now. I"ve gone in pretty deep here of late, a little over my head, it begins to look. I"ve branched out where I would have better played my own game and been content with things as they were going. I----" But he broke off suddenly; he was close to the edge of disloyalty now. "What makes you so sure?" he asked.
"I came up this time from Georgetown. You remember the old trail, up by Gerle"s, Red Cliff and h.e.l.l Hole, leaving French Meadows and Heaven"s Gate and Mount Mildred "way off to the left. I had it all pretty much my own way until I came to Lookout Ridge. And who do you suppose I found poking around there?"
"Not old Loony Honeycutt!" cried Gaynor. Then he laughed at himself for allowing an a.s.sociation of ideas to lead to so absurd a thought. "Of course not Honeycutt; I saw him last week, as you wanted me to, and he is cabin-bound down in Coloma as usual. Can"t drag his wicked old feet out of his yard. Who, then, Mark?"
"Swen Brodie then. And Andy Parker."
Gaynor frowned, impressed as King had been before him.
"But," he objected as he pondered, "he might have been there for some other reason. Brodie, I mean. Remember that the ancient and time-honoured pastimes of the Kentucky mountains have come into vogue in the West. Everybody knows, and that includes even the government agents in San Francisco, that there is a lot of moonshine being made in out-of-the-way places of the California mountains. There"s a job for Swen Brodie and his crowd. There"s talk of it, Mark."
"Maybe," King admitted. "But Brodie was looking for something, and not revenue men, at that. He and Parker were up on the cliffs not a quarter-mile from the old cabin. They stood close together, right at the edge. Parker fell. Brodie looked down, turned on his heel and went off, smoking his stinking pipe, most likely. I buried Parker the next morning."
"Poor devil," said Gaynor. Then his brows shot up and he demanded:
"You mean Brodie did for him? Shoved him over?"
"That"s exactly what I mean. But I can"t tie it to Brodie, not so that he couldn"t shake himself free of it. Parker didn"t say so in so many words; I saw the whole thing from the mountain across the lake, too far to swear to anything like that. But this I can swear to: Brodie was in there for the same thing we"ve been after for ten years. And what is more, it"s open and shut that he was of a mind to play whole-hog and pushed Andy Parker over to simplify matters. In my mind, even though I can"t hope to ram that down a jury."
"How do you _know_ what Brodie and Parker were after?"
"Andy Parker. He was sullen and tight-mouthed for the most part until delirium got him. Then he babbled by the hour. And all his talk was of Gus Ingle and the devil"s luck of the unlucky Seven, with every now and then a word for Loony Honeycutt and Swen Brodie."
"If there is such a thing as devil"s luck," said Gaynor with a sober look to his face, "this thing seems plastered thick with it."
King grunted his derision.
"We"ll take a chance, Ben," he said. "And, after all, one man"s bane is another man"s bread, you know. Now I"ve told you my tale, let"s have yours. You saw Honeycutt; could you get anything out of him?"
"Only this, that you are dead right about his knowing or thinking that he knows. He is feebler than he was last fall, a great deal feebler both in body and mind. All day he sits on his steps in the sun and peers through his bleary eyes across the mountains, and chuckles to himself like an old hen. "Oh, I know what you"re after," he cackles at me, shrewd enough to hit the nail square, too, Mark. "And," he rambles on, "you"ve come to the right man. But am I goin" to blab now, havin" kept a shut mouth all these years?" And then he goes on, his rheumy-red eyes blinking, to proclaim that he is feeling a whole lot stronger these days, that he is getting his second wind, so to speak; that come mid-spring he"ll be as frisky as a colt, and that then he means to have what is his own! And that is as close as he ever comes to saying anything. About this one thing, I mean. He"ll chatter like a magpie about anything else, even his own youthful evil deeds. He seems to know somehow that no longer has the law any interest in his old carca.s.s, and begins to brag a bit of the wild days up and down the forks of the American and of his own share in it all; half lies and the other half blood-dripping truth, I"d swear. It makes a man shiver to listen to the old cut-throat."
"He can"t live a thousand years," mused King. "He is eighty now, if he"s a day."
"Eighty-four by his own estimate. But when it"s a question of that, he sits there and sucks at his toothless old gums and giggles that it"s the first hundred years that are the hardest to get through with and he"s gettin" away with "em."
"He knows something, Ben."
"So do we, or think we do. So does Brodie, it would seem. Does old Honeycutt know any more than the rest of us?"
"We are all young men compared with Loony Honeycutt, all Johnny-come-lately youngsters. Gus Ingle and his crowd, as near as we can figure, came to grief in the winter of 1853. By old Honeycutt"s own count he would have been a wild young devil of seventeen then. And remember he was one of the roaring crowd that made the country what it was after "49. He knows where the old cabin was on Lookout; he swears he knows who built it in that same winter of "53. And----"
"And," cut in Gaynor, "if you believe the murderous old rascal, he knows with sly, intimate knowledge how and why the man in the lone cabin was killed. All in that same winter of "53!"
King p.r.i.c.ked up his ears.
"I didn"t know that. What does he say?"
"He talks on most subjects pretty much at random. He knows that the sheriff only laughs at him, since who would want to s.n.a.t.c.h the old derelict away from his mountains after all these years and try to fix a crime of more than half a century ago on him? But as the law laughs and at least pretends to disbelieve, his pride is hurt. So he has grown into the way of wild boasting. You ought to hear him talk about the affair at Murderer"s Bar! It makes a man shiver to stand there in the sunshine and hear him. And, with the rest of his drivelling braggadocio, to hear him tell it, hinting broadly it was a boy of seventeen who, carrying nothing but an axe, did for the poor devil in the cabin."
"And I, for one, believe him! What is more, I am dead certain--call it a hunch, if you like--that if he had had the use of his legs all these years, he"d have gone straight as a string where we are trying to get."
He began to pace up and down, frowning. "Brodie has been hanging around him lately, hasn"t he?"
"Yes. Brodie and Steve Jarrold and Andy Parker and the rest of Brodie"s worthless crowd of illicit booze-runners. They hang out in the old McQuarry shack, cheek by jowl with Honeycutt. I saw them, thick as flies, while I was there last week. Brodie, it seems, has even been cooking the old man"s meals for him."
"There you are!" burst out King. "What more do you want? Imagine Swen Brodie turning over his hand for anybody on earth if there isn"t something in it all for Swen Brodie. And I"ll go bond he"s giving Honeycutt the best, most nourishing meals that have come his way since his mother suckled him--Swen Brodie bound on keeping him alive until he gets what he"s after. When he"d kick old Honeycutt in the side and leave him to die like a dog with a broken back."
"Well," demanded Gaynor, "what"s to be done? With all his jabberings, Honeycutt is sly and furtive and is obsessed with the idea that there is one thing he won"t tell."
"Will you go and see him one more time?"
"What"s the good, Mark? If he does know, he gets lockjaw at the first word. I"ve tried----"
"There"s one thing we haven"t tried. Old Honeycutt is as greedy a miser as ever gloated over a pile of h.o.a.rdings. We"ll get a thousand dollars--five thousand, if necessary--in hard gold coin, if we have to rob the mint for it. You"ll spread it on the table in his kitchen.
You"ll let it c.h.i.n.k and you"ll let some of it drop and roll. If that won"t buy the knowledge we want----But it will!"
"I"ve known the time when five thousand wasn"t as much money as it is right now, Mark----"
"I"ve got it, if I sc.r.a.pe deep. And I"ll dig down to the bottom."
"And if we draw a blank?"
But there was a step at the door, the k.n.o.b was turning. Mark King turned, utterly unconscious of the quick stiffening of his body as he awaited the introduction to Ben"s wife.
_Chapter IV_
At first, King was taken aback by Mrs. Ben"s youthfulness. Or look of youth, as he understood presently. He knew that she was within a few years of Ben"s age, and yet certainly she showed no signs of it to his eyes, which, though keen enough, were, after a male fashion, unsophisticated. She was a very pretty woman, _pet.i.te_, alert, and decidedly winsome. He understood in a flash why Ben should have been attracted to her; how she had held him to her own policies all these years, largely because they were hers. She was dressed daintily; her glossy brown hair was becomingly arranged about the bright, smiling face. She chose to be very gracious to her husband"s life-long friend, giving him a small, plump hand in a welcoming grip, establishing him in an instant, by some sleight of femininity which King did not plumb, as a hearthside intimate most affectionately regarded. His first two impressions of her, arriving almost but not quite simultaneously, were of youthful prettiness and cleverness.
She slipped to a place on the arm of Gaynor"s chair, her hand, whose well-kept beauty caught and held King"s eyes for a moment, toying with her husband"s greying hair.
"She loves old Ben," thought King. "That"s right."
Mrs. Ben Gaynor was what is known as a born hostess very charming.