In The Dark

: 'firebrand' Trevison

Trevison faced the darkness between him and the pueblo with a wild hope

pulsing through his veins. Rosalind Benham had had an opportunity to

deliver him into the hands of his enemy and she had not taken advantage of

it. There was but one interpretation that he might place upon her failure

to aid her accomplice. She declined to take an active part in the scheme.



She had been passive, content to watch while Corrigan did the real work.

Possibly she had no conception of the enormity of the crime. She had been

eager to have Corrigan win, and influenced by her affection and his

arguments she had done what she could without actually committing herself

to the robbery. It was a charitable explanation, and had many flaws, but

he clung to it persistently, nurturing it with his hopes and his hunger

for her, building it up until it became a structure of logic firmly fixed

and impregnable. Women were easily influenced--that had been his

experience with them--he was forced to accept it as a trait of the sex. So

he absolved her, his hunger for her in no way sated at the end.



His thoughts ran to Corrigan in a riot of rage that pained him like a

knife thrust; his lust for vengeance was a savage, bitter-visaged demon

that held him in its clutch and made his temples pound with a yearning to

slay. And that, of course, would have to be the end. For the enmity that

lay between them was not a thing to be settled by the law--it was a man to

man struggle that could be settled in only one way--by the passions,

naked, elemental, eternal. He saw it coming; he leaped to meet it,

eagerly.



Every stride the black horse made shortened by that much the journey he

had resolved upon, and Nigger never ran as he was running now. The black

seemed to feel that he was on the last lap of a race that had lasted for

more than forty-eight hours, with short intervals of rest between, and he

did his best without faltering.



Order had come out of the chaos of plot and counterplot; Trevison's course

was to be as direct as his hatred. He would go to the pueblo, take Judge

Lindman and the record to Santa Fe, and then return to Manti for a last

meeting with Corrigan.



A late moon, rising from a cleft in some distant mountains, bathed the

plains with a silvery flood when horse and rider reached a point within a

mile of the pueblo, and Nigger covered the remainder of the distance at a

pace that made the night air drum in Trevison's ears. The big black slowed

as he came to a section of broken country surrounding the ancient city,

but he got through it quickly and skirted the sand slopes, taking the

steep acclivity leading to the ledge of the pueblo in a dozen catlike

leaps and coming to a halt in the shadow of an adobe house, heaving

deeply, his rider flung himself out of the saddle and ran along the ledge

to the door of the chamber where he had imprisoned Judge Lindman.



Trevison could see no sign of the Judge or Levins. The ledge was bare,

aglow, the openings of the communal houses facing it loomed dark, like the

doors of tombs. A ghastly, unearthly silence greeted Trevison's call after

the echoes died away; the upper tier of adobe boxes seemed to nod in

ghostly derision as his gaze swept them. There was no sound, no movement,

except the regular cough of his own laboring lungs, and the rustle of his

clothing as his chest swelled and deflated with the effort. He exclaimed

impatiently and retraced his steps, peering into recesses between the

communal houses, certain that the Judge and Levins had fallen asleep in

his absence. He turned at a corner and in a dark angle almost stumbled

over Levins. He was lying on his stomach, his right arm under his head,

his face turned sideways. Trevison thought at first that he was asleep and

prodded him gently with the toe of his boot. A groan smote his ears and he

kneeled quickly, turning Levins over. Something damp and warm met his

fingers as he seized the man by the shoulder, and he drew the hand away

quickly, exclaiming sharply as he noted the stain on it.



His exclamation brought Levins' eyes open, and he stared upward, stupidly

at first, then with a bright gaze of comprehension. He struggled and sat

up, swaying from side to side.



"They got the Judge, 'Brand'--they run him off, with my cayuse!"



"Who got him?"



"I ain't reckonin' to know. Some of Corrigan's scum, most likely--I didn't

see 'em close."



"How long ago?"



"Not a hell of a while. Mebbe fifteen or twenty minutes. I been missin' a

lot of time, I reckon. Can't have been long, though."



"Which way did they go?"



"Off towards Manti. Two of 'em took him. The rest is layin' low somewhere,

most likely. Watch out they don't get you! I ain't seen 'em run off,

yet!"



"How did it happen?"



"I ain't got it clear in my head, yet. Just happened, I reckon. The Judge

was settin' on the ledge just in front of the dobie house you had him in.

I was moseyin' along the edge, tryin' to figger out what a light in the

sky off towards Manti meant. I couldn't figger it out--what in hell was

it, anyway?"



"The courthouse burned--maybe the bank."



Levins chuckled. "You got the record, then."



"Yes."



"An' I've lost the Judge! Ain't I a box-head, though!"



"That's all right. Go ahead. What happened?"



"I was moseyin along the ledge. Just when I got to the slope where we come

up--passin' it--I seen a bunch of guys, on horses, coming out of the

shadow of an angle, down there. I hadn't seen 'em before. I knowed

somethin' was up an' I turned, to light out for shelter. An' just then one

of 'em burns me in the back--with a rifle bullet. It couldn't have been no

six, from that distance. It took the starch out of me, an' I caved, I

reckon, for a little while. When I woke up the Judge was gone. The moon

had just come up an' I seen him ridin' away on my cayuse, between two

other guys. I reckon I must have gone off again, when you shook me." He

laughed, weakly. "What gets me, is where them other guys went, after the

two sloped with the Judge. If they'd have been hangin' around they'd sure

have got you, comin' up here, wouldn't they?"



Trevison's answer was a hoarse exclamation. He swung Levins up and bore

him into one of the communal houses, whose opening faced away from the

plains and the activity. Then he ran to where he had left Nigger, leading

the animal back into the zig-zag passages, pulling his rifle out of the

saddle holster and stationing himself in the shadow of the house in which

he had taken Levins.



"They've come back, eh?" the wounded man's voice floated out to him.



"Yes--five or six of them. No--eight! They've got sharp eyes, too!" he

added stepping back as a rifle bullet droned over his head, chipping a

chunk of adobe from the roof of the box in whose shelter he stood.



* * * * *



Sullenly, Corrigan had returned to Manti with the deputies that had

accompanied him to the Bar B. He had half expected to find Trevison at the

ranchhouse, for he had watched him when he had ridden away and he seemed

to have been headed in that direction. Jealousy dwelt darkly in the big

man's heart, and he had found his reason for the suspicion there. He

thought he knew truth when he saw it, and he would have sworn that truth

shone from Rosalind Benham's eyes when she had told him that she had not

seen Trevison pass that way. He had not known that what he took for the

truth was the cleverest bit of acting the girl had ever been called upon

to do. He had decided that Trevison had swung off the Bar B trail

somewhere between Manti and the ranchhouse, and he led his deputies back

to town, content to permit his men to continue the search for Trevison,

for he was convinced that the latter's visit to the courthouse had

resulted in disappointment, for he had faith in Judge Lindman's

declaration that he had destroyed the record. He had accused himself many

times for his lack of caution in not being present when the record had

been destroyed, but regrets had become impotent and futile.



Reaching Manti, he dispersed his deputies and sought his bed in the

Castle. He had not been in bed more than an hour when an attendant of

the hotel called to him through the door that a man named Gieger wanted to

talk with him, below. He dressed and went down to the street, to find

Gieger and another deputy sitting on their horses in front of the hotel

with Judge Lindman, drooping from his long vigil, between them.



Corrigan grinned scornfully at the Judge.



"Clever, eh?" he sneered. He spoke softly, for the dawn was not far away,

and he knew that a voice carries resonantly at that hour.



"I don't understand you!" Judicial dignity sat sadly on the Judge; he was

tired and haggard, and his voice was a weak treble. "If you mean--"



"I'll show you what I mean." Corrigan motioned to the deputies. "Bring him

along!" Leading the way he took them through Manti's back door across a

railroad spur to a shanty beside the track which the engineer in charge of

the dam occasionally occupied when his duty compelled him to check up

arriving material and supplies. Because plans and other valuable papers

were sometimes left in the shed it was stoutly built, covered with

corrugated iron, and the windows barred with iron, prison-like. Reaching

the shed, Corrigan unlocked the door, shoved the Judge inside, closed the

door on the Judge's indignant protests, questioned the deputies briefly,

gave them orders and then re-entered the shed, closing the door behind

him.



He towered over the Judge, who had sunk weakly to a bench. It was pitch

dark in the shed, but Corrigan had seen the Judge drop on the bench and

knew exactly where he was.



"I want the whole story--without any reservations," said Corrigan,

hoarsely; "and I want it quick--as fast as you can talk!"



The Judge got up, resenting the other's tone. He had also a half-formed

resolution to assert his independence, for he had received certain

assurances from Trevison with regard to his past which had impressed

him--and still impressed him.



"I refuse to be questioned by you, sir--especially in this manner! I do

not purpose to take further--"



The Judge felt Corrigan's fingers at his throat, and gasped with horror,

throwing up his hands to ward them off, failed, and heard Corrigan's laugh

as the fingers gripped his throat and held.



When the Judge came to, it was with an excruciatingly painful struggle

that left him shrinking and nerveless, lying in a corner, blinking at the

light of a kerosene lamp. Corrigan sat on the edge of a flat-topped desk

watching him with an ugly, appraising, speculative grin. It was as though

the man were mentally gambling on his chances to recover from the

throttling.



"Well," he said when the Judge at last struggled and sat up; "how do you

like it? You'll get more if you don't talk fast and straight! Who wrote

that letter, from Dry Bottom?"



Neither judicial dignity or resolutions of independence could resist the

threatened danger of further violence that shone from Corrigan's eyes, and

the Judge whispered gaspingly:



"Trevison."



"I thought so! Now, be careful how you answer this. What did Trevison want

in the courthouse?"



"The original record of the land transfers."



"Did he get it?" Corrigan's voice was dangerously even, and the Judge

squirmed and coughed before he spoke the hesitating word that was an

admission of his deception:



"I told him--where--it was."



Paralyzed with fear, the Judge watched Corrigan slip off the desk and

approach him. He got to his feet and raised his hands to shield his throat

as the big man stopped in front of him.



"Don't, Corrigan--don't, for God's sake!"



"Bah!" said the big man. He struck, venomously. An instant later he put

out the light and stepped down into the gray dawn, locking the door of the

shanty behind him and not looking back.