Max Brand

Outlaw’s Code

Warsaw 2019

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

CHAPTER XLII

CHAPTER XLIII

CHAPTER I

MARSHAL NEILAN had slept eight hours a night for two weeks. He had eaten three square meals, and had a full hour’s siesta after each lunch, and yet the marshal was tired. He looked tired, and he was tired. He had a battered face and he had a battered soul. He was mortally weary, and his weariness came from walking constantly in danger of his life.

They were all out for the marshal. The drug runners, and the smugglers of Chinese across the border; the yeggs and thugs of the river towns; the horse thieves and the cattle rustlers; and all those clever internationalists who occasionally drifted in the direction of El Paso and points east and west of that cheerful city; all of these and many odd types had it in for the marshal.

He was tireless, he was unforgetting, he was unforgiving, and he was incorruptible.

Men said that Steve Malley, the great smuggler, once laid a stack of a thousand hundred-dollar bills on the marshal’s desk and got it back the next day. After that, they gave up trying to bribe him. But everyone wondered why he kept on at the job. Certainly it was not the money involved. His salary was beggarly small; if he wanted to turn back to his law office, he could make ten times as much with the greatest ease. Neither did he enjoy great fame; he was rarely in the papers.

In fact, what kept the marshal at his post was an odd thing–a sense of duty so pure and noble that his labors rewarded themselves. But still he could be tired, and he was especially weary this morning, as he wrote on a slip of paper:

“Dear Bill, Will you send Lawrence Grey over to my office?”

He dispatched this note by his office boy.

Then he turned and looked out across the roofs, and listened to the murmur and the rumblings of the city, until the sound took on another character and seemed to him like the drumming sound of bees in the sunshine, and the still, ominous purring of the mosquitoes in the river flats. He looked at the yellow sands of the desert beyond the town, and the rock faces of the hills that made his horizon. That was where he wanted to be–anywhere out there, in the open. But his work was too great and spread over too wide a field. Electricity had to carry his thoughts, and this was the center of power. He had to sit here in the center and send out emissaries to spin the farther margins of his web.

He was in the midst of these melancholy thoughts when his office boy returned and opened the door for an excited man who came with him, Deputy Sheriff Sam Tucker, late of Tucson, and other points west where trouble was in the air.

Sam Tucker said, “‘Lo, Marshal Neilan. Look a’ here, Marshal, is it a joke?”

The marshal, by painful degrees, dragged his thoughts back from the great open places and turned his tired, battered face toward the other.

“Is what a joke, Sam?” said he.

“You wrote a note over. You sent it over, and you says that you wanta see Rinky Dink. Is that right, or is it a joke?”

“It’s not a joke,” said the marshal. “How many people know that you’ve got young Lawrence Grey?”

Sam Tucker looked uneasily over his shoulder toward the door. He looked toward the ceiling, and he looked also toward the floor. It seemed that he suspected everything around. Then he stepped closer and laid a brown hand on the edge of the marshal’s desk.

“Not a damn soul,” he whispered. “And thank God for it! Nobody knows, and nobody’s gonna know till we have to let it out. That’ll be time. The fool newspapers, they’ll blow the word around. They’ll be shoutin’ out loud, and his friends will hear. It’ll be harder and worse to hold him then, than it is to hold freezin’ nitroglycerine. And–”

“How did you get Grey?” asked the marshal, curiously.

“Didn’t the chief tell you?”

“No. I haven’t heard. You fellows have been very close-mouthed.”

“Smythe and Ridgeby and Allen and Fulton and Meggs, they went out. They all went out to make the plant,” said the deputy sheriff.

“About the five best men you have,” suggested the marshal.

“Not about; they are the best,” said Sam Tucker. “They’re clean and away the best. Who else would we be sending for Don Diablo?”

“I suppose so,” said the marshal. “And what happened?”

“Well, they got a good start. The Mexicans had framed him,” said Sam Tucker. “They took most of the punching, too.”

“How bad was it?” said the marshal.

“A couple of Mexicans will never eat frijoles any more,” said Sam Tucker, carelessly. “Meggs is in a pretty bad way, but they say he’ll pull through. Smythe and Allen, they’re laid up, but they’ll be reporting back for duty in about a month, I guess. The whole bunch was lucky, any way you take it.”

The marshal half closed his eyes and seemed to be dreaming.

“Yes,” he said, “they were a lucky lot.”

“About that note, now,” said Sam Tucker, with a forced laugh. “The chief, he just wanted me to drop over and find out what the joke was.”

“There’s no joke,” said the marshal. “I want to see him. I want to see him here.”

The jaw of the deputy sheriff dropped.

“You don’t mind if I ask again, sir,” said he. “It’s Rinky Dink that you mean, all right? It’s Don Diablo, is it?”

“Yes,” said the marshal. “It’s Lawrence Grey. Tell your chief that I have to have him here. And your chief along with him, if that’s possible.”

Sam Tucker left. He slid through the door with an alarmed glance behind him, as though he were departing by the skin of his teeth from the presence of a madman.

And the marshal turned back in his chair and continued to stare out the window, blankly, sadly, for nearly an hour.

In the meantime, there were many calls on his telephone, and many taps at his door. But he refused everyone. He was saving himself. He was too tired a man for more than one interview such as he intended to have that morning.

Eventually they came.

First, two guards came through the doorway. Each wore revolvers; each carried a sawed-off shotgun. They entered, stepped half a pace to either side of the door, and faced inwards, holding their shotguns at the ready.

Behind them appeared the sheriff, who came in, nodded briefly at the marshal, and, taking up his position in the center of the room, faced the door in his turn. He allowed no weapons to be visible, but the bulges under his coat were not made by packages of candy.

When these preparations had been made, two more men appeared, assisting between them, as it seemed, a third, whose wrists were held together by heavy irons, connecting through a powerful double chain with other manacles that fitted over the ankles.

He was bundled through the doorway.

The door was then closed, and the key turned in the lock.

“Well, Neilan,” said the sheriff. “Here he is. I’ve known you close onto twenty years, Neilan–and so I’ve brought him when you called.”

He was panting. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. But the movement was furtive, and his eyes never left the face of the prisoner.

The guards looked only at the man in chains, and so did the marshal. Yet Lawrence Grey was no abysmal brute in face or body. He was a slenderly made youth who might have been twenty-one when he smiled, and twenty-five when he was serious. But generally he was smiling. He had one of those pink and white complexions which refuses to be tanned by the fiercest sun; it merely becomes pinker–and whiter. His blond hair, to be sure, seemed rather sun-faded at the outer margin.

Lawrence Grey was dressed in neat flannels, and he wore a white shirt with a soft collar, and black tie of silk tied in a big flowing knot, such as Bohemians and artists are so fond of affecting. He wore a jaunty slouch hat, with the brim turned up on one side. And in general his appearance was that of a pleasant, casual young man. In New York he would never have drawn a second glance. For El Paso, he was just a trifle precious in his make-up.

“Thank you for bringing him,” said the marshal. “You might introduce me to him, though.”

“As if this hombre didn’t know you,” growled the sheriff. “But you tell him, Rinky Dink. You tell him if you know him.”

“Of course I know Marshal Neilan,” said Lawrence Grey.

And he smiled at the marshal, as if to say that he was honored to meet him, and that he was also, perhaps, honoring the marshal just a little.

In fact, he seemed a modest young man, and yet he gave a second impression of being rather sure of himself, in a quiet way. Young Englishmen often give the same effect.

“And I know you, Grey,” said the marshal, “although this is the first time I’ve seen you. One hears about one another.”

“Yes,” said Grey, with another of his charming smiles. “One does.”

“Listen at him talk,” said the sheriff, half grinning and half snarling. “Sweet, ain’t he? Look at him, Neilan. Butter’d melt in his mouth, all right.”

“You don’t need to point him out,” said the marshal. “Now that you’ve brought him here, I want to ask another favor of you, old fellow.”

“Go on,” said the sheriff. “You know the sky is the limit, between you and me–only, don’t spring another like this one!”

“I want you to send your strong boys back home, and I want you to go and sit in the outer office, yonder, and leave Grey in here alone with me.”

The sheriff started to speak, and then stared. But he stared at the prisoner, not at the sheriff. He still looked at Grey he answered:

“Leave you alone with Rinky Dink? You’re crazy, Neilan. You know you’re crazy to ask that!”

“I’m asking just that,” said the marshal. “He’s loaded down with iron and I’m well-armed, you know.”

The sheriff shook his head, as a man does when he cannot offer a logical objection, though he feels resistant still.

“I don’t like it. Fact is,” he said, “I hate the idea of it!”

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