The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 1
THERE was a good deal of loose skin on Charley Thomson's neck, dry wrinkled skin, which caused one to wonder how he stretched it to shave. That he managed it someway, day by day, was as evident as the hills around Saunders, for never a hair had grown long enough to interfere with his mouth in all his years in the town.
A great avid mouth, like a cannibal fish, elongated by wrinkles at the corners, which bent it downwards with a sneering cast; a clubbed, fleshy nose, purple, immense; small eyes, squinting from a life-long habit of drawing them to points to increase his look of shrewdness and inscrutability. Not a handsome man in one line of his rascally old face, not a nice man in one habit of his daily life, yet a man with something about him that caught upon the perception like a burr, and argued convincingly for some strength which lay beneath the smoky rind.
As long as he had practiced law in Saunders, and that ran back to the territorial days of Wyoming, and far back into them, at that, Charley Thomson had garbed himself with unvarying sameness, A blue woolen shirt, loose about his lean neck as the folded skin for which he had no use, nearly always lumpy in the corners of the collar, as a woolen shirt becomes after much washing; a black necktie, pulled almost as tight as the hangman's noose which he had helped so many who deserved it to escape, the ends of it tucked into his bosom; a long black professional coat, glossy on the back from long rubbing against various articles of, furniture, even church pews; an old black hat, weathered and rain-beaten, sweated and greasy, deplorable and disgraceful altogether.
Charley Thomson was the only man in Saunders, or perhaps in Wyoming from one end to the other, who could catch fish like an Indian. That is to say, with a hook bound to a long pole, which the artist introduces into the water and slips under the fish as he dozes in depths of pellucid stream or lake, in that country commonly glass-clear. How craftily a man must go about this to land the fish by raking the hook into its keel, requires no very active imagination to understand. Charley Thomson could do it; he could land the fish down to the very last one in the school worth carrying home.
Similarly, he had some undefined adroitness in his practice of the law by which he reached his hook into the very shadow of the gallows and jerked men back to the safety of liberty and life. He had been doing it a long time in that mountain-bound county seat, but, though his fame had grown, his fortunes seemed to run backwards, Thomson drank a quart of whisky a day. Perhaps that had something to do with it.
On the afternoon of this summer day, Thomson was closeted in his office in consultation with a client. The lawyer's window was open on the street, the acrid smoke of his greasy cob pipe trailed out to assail the nostrils and eyes of those who passed. The client, who sat between the lawyer and the window, turned his head uneasily as the footsteps of passengers in the street sounded in the room. Thomson, hand at the bowl of his pipe, eyes fixed in keen, probing directness on his client's troubled face, nodded toward the open sash he client rose with alacrity and pulled it down.
This client was a young man, tall, lithe, sinewy; with the pliant grace of a horseman in his sinewy back. He was coatless, his shirt was open at the neck, showing his brown bosom; a pistol was belted about him, leather cuffs protected his wrists. His bearing and trappings proclaimed him cowboy, common among his kind in that country in his day, which was the day of the cattle barons, as they were called both East and West.
There was a shadow of trouble in the young cowboy's face, which was an ingenuous face, and mild, with a cast of unawakened humor about the mouth, an eager alertness in the clear blue eyes. He held his hat respectfully in his hand, although Charley Thomson kept his own on his head, after his manner in the presence of all men, great and small. The young man resumed his chair uneasily after closing the window, the shadow of troubled earnestness deepening on his face.
"Huh!" said Thomson, grunting meditatively around the stem of his pipe.
The client lifted his eyes expectantly. The lawyer said no more, but sat with frowning eyes fixed in abstract gaze on whatever hypothetical situation he may have conjured up in his crafty mind. Presently he put his pipe on the cluttered table, where the handle of a notarial seal lifted out of the drift of old papers and tattered books like a smothered word of truth appealing its own sad case.
"I don't like for a man to come to me and tell me he's goin' to kill somebody," Thomson said, severely. "It ain't my business to give advice on how a man can be killed with the minimum of risk and the maximum of justification. My business is to get him off after he's done it."
He looked sharply at the young man, who moved his feet uneasily, colored hotly, dropped his eyes.
"Yes sir, Mr. Thomson," said he.
"So the only thing I've got to say to you, Mr. "
"Dan Gustin is my name." The young man gave it to him straight in the eyes, with head lifted quickly, as a man delivers something of which he is not ashamed.
"Mr. Dan Gustin, of"
"I'm with the Elk Mountain Cattle Company, over on the Big Wind—the Diamond Tail brand."
"Of the Diamond Tail brand, is to go out and kill your man, then come to me. That is—" turning again from the table, as with an afterthought—"if you've got to kill him. I'm not advisin' you to go and do it, but if you've got to work it out of your system, my part in the transaction is after, not before, the fact."
"Yes sir," said Dan Gustin, in the same respectfully perfunctory way as before. He stood a little while turning his hat in his hands. Then: "Thank you, Mr. Thomson, for puttin' me right. I thought if it wouldn't be too much bother to you to git me off—if I wouldn't have to lose too much time"
"It would be a lot of bother to get you off, it's gettin' harder every day to get 'em off," Thomson replied crabbedly.
"Yes sir," Dan Gustin said, respectfully confused.
"They might keep you in jail six months before trial, that's a scheme this new prosecutor's got to break a man and make him so weak he'll convict himself. My advice to you is keep out of it. A cowpuncher's got no business to set up as a killer in these degenerate times, Gustin; that's a luxurious distinction only a man with money can afford. Let that feller go. If he deserves killin', somebody'll come along in time and do it, and save you the trouble and expense."
"He sure deserves it, all right!" Gustin declared, twisting his head in great earnestness.
"Who is he?"
"Feller up in our country," the cowboy replied, evasively.
"All right," said Thomson, after boring him with a gimlet look; "you let him live on. How much money have you got?"
"About sixty dollars."
"That wouldn't patch a bullet—that wouldn't patch a bullet! Killin' isn't as cheap in this country as it was five years ago, young man. What do you reckon it costs to get a man off these times?"
"I don't know, sir, but I thought maybe a hundred dollars or so."
"A hundred dollars or so wouldn't grease one hinge of the jail door! If I can get a man off before the trial jury it lets him out for about a thousand; if we have to appeal, it'll run up to five. It's not a game for cowpunchers, kid. You keep out of it."
The young man stood fingering the leather band of his big hat, his weight thrown first on this foot, then on that. He looked up after a spell of cogitation, a sheepish grin clearing the trouble out of his eyes.
"I guess I'll let him live on," he said.
Thomson bent that frowning, sharp, half resentful gaze on him again.
"Girl back of it?"
"Well sir, we did have words over a lady."
"Who? Who's over there in that God-blasted country you inhabit worth pullin' a gun for?"
"She's a lady they call Cattle Kate."
"What other name?" the lawyer asked, showing a frowning, dark interest.
"Medford's her old man's name."
"Huh! married, is she?"
"I mean her paw."
"Is he the man you want to kill?" Thomson inquired, looking up in sudden severity.
"No sir!" the cowboy denied frigidly. "I wouldn't hurt a hair of his head."
"No, of course you wouldn't, you young gourd!" said Thomson, turning his grim old eyes to shoot his contemptuous ridicule into the cowboy's face. "Well, you let Cattle Kate and her daddy do their own killin'."
"Yes sir," Dan Gustin agreed, with a very foolish look about him. "Much obliged, Mr. Thomson."
"Twenty-five dollars," said Thomson, severely, holding out his hand. "I haven't got any advice to give away."
Dan Gustin got out his money, very red in the face, looking more foolish and chastened than ever, and left twenty-five dollars in the lawyer's not over-clean fingers.
"I'll let him live a good while!" said the cowboy, with a wry grin, stuffing his wallet into his inner vest-pocket.
"It would pay you," Thomson nodded, raising his eyebrows with his eyes to look into the tall young man's face, but not moving his head at all.
"It'd be cheaper for me to throw my stuff into a gunny-sack and hit the breeze out of this country," the cowboy figured, making for the door.
"And wiser," the lawyer shot after him, moved somewhat out of his habitual attitude of contempt for the weaknesses of men by the honest simplicity of the one at present before him. "So you're ridin' the range for old Dale Findlay?"
"I'm makin' a stagger at it."
"Give him my regards," said Thomson, a mocking sarcasm in his tone that won for him another deepfathoming glance from the cowboy's baffled eyes.
"I'll mention you sent 'em," Gustin agreed, one foot outside the door.
"There's a feller down at Grimmitt's inquirin' the way out to your God-forsaken ranch."
"I guess he's the man I come down here to meet—I've got a wagon to haul him out there in," Gustin confessed, with no small indignation.
"Expectin' him, huh?"
"The big boss, Hal Nearing, sent me. This feller belongs to some high-up lady back East, a pardner in the ranch, or something. He's her only dear child, brung up back of the kitchen stove. She's sent him out here to grow hair on his shins and learn to be a man."
"Well, he's goin' to a heavenly atmosphere!" Thomson said.
"There's worse outfits than the Diamond Tail, mister," Dan said, turning with a bristling attitude of defense that was as good as a threat.
"Yes," the lawyer granted, thoughtfully, "and you wouldn't have to go far to find them, from what you've been tellin' me. So you came down to meet that boy, huh?"
"That was my aim and object, pardner."
"I thought it was for legal advice. Or is the matter of shootin' a man off just incidental with a fresh young blood like you?"
"I thought I'd kill two skunks at the same shot," Dan returned, quite innocent of either intent or expression of offense.
Thomson accepted it as delivered, knowing the breed too well to raise a question.
"I see," said he, his wide mouth clamped for a moment upon its ugly secrets, his eyebrows lifted as he slewed his eyes to look at what now plainly had become an object of contempt. "And if you hadn't been drivin' down to haul out this greenhorn you'd 'a' gone gunnin' for that feller up there without countin' the cost."
"I sure would, mister!"
"Well, you've paid for my advice; what're you goin' to do with it?"
"I'll let him live on," Dan declared, twisting his head in expression of deep seriousness.
"Stop in and see me when you come to town," Thomson invited, offering his hand with his words.
This unaccountable unbending from what had appeared to Dan a scornful coldness, winded him for a moment, paralyzing all effort of response. He appeared to stand doubting, as if charges were expected to go with this approach to friendliness and well-wishing.
"I sure will, Mr. Thomson," he responded heartily, grasping the lawyer's hand as warmly as if it had dragged him from the gibbet and restored him to the joyous ways of life.
As Dan Gustin went his way down the street, Lawyer Thomson stood in his door looking after him, no line of disdain, amusement, satisfaction, or any emotion that the eye could interpret in his inscrutable face. Presently he turned into his office, where he began to pry dustily into his records contained in a little set of drawers that once had held spool cotton thread. With chair drawn close against this homely little cabinet, which was nailed to the wall and braced by two rough boards on long slant to the floor, Thomson thumbed his untidy papers until he came at last to that which he sought. This he drew from its sheaf of like frayed and yellowed documents, glanced over it to verify its contents, and then put it in his great flat, gaunt wallet along with Dan Gustin's fee, struck match to his outrageous pipe, and sat glooming in a reverie.