The Message to Buckshot Jim/Chapter 4
IV.
Moran passed his hand over his face once more, blinked a .few times, laid his powerful hands upon the table in front of him, and his eyes became vacant. He was plainly "fixing his mind" to the best of his ability and the operation seemed to require considerable muscular rigidity. There was a short period of complete silence, broken at last by a hoarse, barking laugh from the distant bunk-house. The State's road-builders were making merry. Moran winced and shook his head in evident annoyance.
"It is beginning," whispered Gilmore drowsily. "The influences must be—exactly right. Control is very strong—very strong—yes, I feel it—I feel—"
His body began to twitch gently, his head fell back, and a sigh came from his lips. His eyes closed until they showed nothing but threads of white. From time to time he groaned and struggled slightly, and the convict, between fright and fascination, sat rigid in his chair, staring straight in front of him, hardly daring to breathe.
Into the deep quiet of the room there came a strange humming sound, a faint, far-away singing in the air, like the first whining of the steel rails at the approach of an express-train. In the beginning, Moran was not sure that he heard anything. The sound increased slightly, and the convict's head jerked back to an attitude of attention. It couldn't be a bottle-fly; yet it was something, and it was in the room! What was it?
Moran stared at the relaxed form across the table. He could not see that it breathed. The face was calm; the lips were set in a peaceful line, and closed.
Even as he stared at those quiet lips, the sound swelled into a sobbing wail until the very air throbbed with it. John Moran leaped from his chair, and, as he whirled to face the shadows behind him, out of the dark corner there came a voice—a woman's voice, no more than a breath from a great distance, but the pain in every word cut like a knife.
"Oh, Billy! Billy! Why didn't you give them the keys?"
It turned John Moran into a statue of terror, done in gray stone—terror in every frozen line of his crouching body, terror in his crooking fingers, dumb terror in his pale gray eyes. The written message was to be expected, bad as it might be; but this woman's voice!
It took him back sixteen years to a boy bank-cashier lying murdered in the street, and the fair-haired girl wife who ran to him, screaming. Billy Hayden had shown fight, and John Moran and the Whistling Kid had fired at the same instant. The Kid had always taken the credit, but Moran had never been sure. And now he knew!
Were all the ghosts coming home? It seemed so, for there was a low, rustling sound in the room. Buckshot John turned in his tracks, ready for flight, but it was only the paper on the table, disturbed by groping fingers.
The convict hesitated an instant, and then, setting his teeth, forced himself to obey orders. He placed the pencil in the clawing hand and immediately it began to move in regular lines. Moran, breathing in great gasps, saw the message begin with the rude drawing of a heart with a knife thrust into it. Underneath were the initials "B.J.K." It was Bad Jake's receipt, the only one he ever gave, and the symbol which, out of sheer bravado, it had been his practise to leave upon splintered express-cars or rifled safes before he rode for the hills.
Moran clutched the edge of the table for support, as the fingers wrote in a large, open script:
Hello, Buckshot, old boy! Getting nervous in your old age, ain't you? This party is all right. I've been trying to get word to you for years, and this is the first chance. We left you in such a hurry that night at Clayton that we didn't have time to say good-by. The boys wouldn't wait.
Moran's pale gray eyes were wide with horror, but to save his life he could not have taken them from the pencil as it hitched across the sheet.
We heard them say you were dying anyway, but I reckon old Doc Pattee must have pulled you through. It would have saved you a lot of trouble, John, if he hadn't been so game with that old shotgun of his. Well, old boy, it wasn't such a bad way to go, after all, but that yellow cur of an Elms lost his nerve, just as you always said he would when his time came.
The pencil reached the bottom of the sheet. The hand groped for an instant; then a twitch of the fingers sent the written sheet flying, and the pencil began on a fresh page. There was not a sound in the room but Moran's labored breathing as he crouched over the table.
I suppose they told you I died game. Jordan did, too. The last thing he said before they strung him up was "Good-by, Jake! See you later!" He did, too. Then they let me go last, after they got through with Charley. That Trinidad sheriff was all right. He handed me his flask. One big drink, and then it was all over. After the first choking, it was just like going to sleep.
Moran moistened his dry lips, and one hand stole up to his throat. He turned his head slightly, and looked intently into Gilmore's calm face. The sightless eyes were turned toward the ceiling; the features were as expressionless as a wax mask. There was no sign of breathing, or of life itself, save in the steady twitching of the hand and forearm. The convict's eyes returned to the paper again.
You remember the night we held up the D. and R. G. West-bound and killed that fireman? We ought to let him live. He was a game man, or he wouldn't have went after Jordan with a shovel.
Big drops of sweat stood out on Moran's forehead. Slowly he stretched out his right hand, and his fingers closed over the pocket Bible with a crushing grip.
And Billy Hayden, the bank-cashier. He left a young wife and a kid. You remember how she came running out into the street when the shooting commenced?
Once more from the corner of the room came the woman's voice, calling for "Billy," and Moran threw his arms across his face, trembling like a leaf.
"Take 'em away!" he sobbed. "Take 'em away!"
The hand continued to write steadily.
John, if I could live my life over again, I never would have left my wife and the kids in Texas. I'd act mighty different. So would you, I reckon. Listen, John. Listen!
From the dark corners of the room came half-intelligible whispers, audible mutterings. Something seemed to be whimpering under the table. To one man, at least, the bare little room was uncomfortably full of the ghosts of the dead. A third voice spoke faintly from the air over Moran's head—a man's voice, high-pitched and defiant, but barely audible.
"Shoot, you dirty thief! You'll have to kill me before you get at this safe!"
Buckshot John cried out in the midst of his torture.
"I never shot you, Cullen!" he gasped. "Honest! It was Charley Elms did that!"
Thus he was made to remember Pat Cullen, an express messenger who met his death in an almost forgotten hold-up, nearly seventeen years before. Quivering on the verge of total collapse, Buckshot John dropped to his knees and began to pray aloud. Tears were streaming down his gray cheeks.
"Tell me what I must do!" he begged. "I'll do anything, anything! Only take 'em away!"
Gradually the whisperings and the mutterings ceased. The gasping of the tortured man kneeling by the table was the only break in the silence. Something struck the pine board three sharp raps. Buckshot John stiffened to meet this new manifestation, but it was only the hand, writing again.
What's the use of your praying, unless you tell the truth about that stuff?
Every nerve in Moran's body tightened, as a violin-string answers the twisting-peg. Here was his message at last.
You've been lying for fifteen years.
As the accusation was spread on the paper. Buckshot John bowed his head and wrung his hands.
You'll never be able to die clean unless that money and stuff goes back to the owners. Give it back to the people we stole it from. Mind, no lawyers and no sheriffs! Send a man you know you can trust. You talk to this medium about it. I don't suppose he'd want to touch dirty money, or mix up with a murderer, but this is a job that needs an honest man. If you get that stuff back to the people we robbed, your mind will be easy, and you won't lay awake so much nights.
Buckshot John drew a deep breath and expelled it with a sigh that was almost a groan of relief. Little by little the lines of suffering faded out of his face, and into that heavy mask there crept a strange expression. By the look in his tired eyes, he might have been another man. The pencil wrote on.
You'll do the square thing, John. But don't make any mistakes. It won't do any good to have it stole again by some lawyer. SEND THE RIGHT MAN.
The last sentence was laboriously printed in capitals. There was nothing more but another drawing of the heart and the knife, and the initials underneath it. Plainly the communication was at an end. The doctor stirred slightly, and began to groan as if in pain. Once he muttered to himself:
"Yes! Yes! I've delivered the message. Let me go!"
Buckshot John seized the written sheets and crushed them in his hand, retreating to a far corner of the room. The figure in the chair continued to writhe and groan and cry out at intervals; but at last it yawned, stretched, blinked sleepily for several seconds, and then jerked itself into an upright position.
Hello!" said Gilmore, thickly, in the tone of one aroused from deep sleep. "Is it over? Did you get a message?"