CHAPTER XVI.

THE MAN WITH A PAST.

The man who answered to the names of Tom Conover and Toltec Tom squared his drooping shoulders and stood up more sturdily on his shaking legs.

“No,” he said to the man who asked him to have a drink at the bar of a cheap saloon near by, “I’ve cut it out!”

The tempter laughed skeptically, and Conover lurched past, his face flushing to a deep red.

It was already flushed and somewhat swollen from the effects of alcohol. High on the forehead was a scarlet nick—a three-cornered scar—extending well up into the hair.

Conover pulled an old brier pipe and a handful of loose tobacco from a side pocket of his corduroy coat, filled the pipe and thumbed the tobacco down in the bowl as he went on, his hands trembling.

“Yes, I’ve cut it out—for good!” he muttered. “I’ve been a fool for the past month, but I won’t be any longer. I’ll straighten up and be a man again, if I can, and then I’ll get back to God’s country. No more of this for me—I’ve had enough of it.”

He stopped, at the foot of the street, and swept a glance over the town and surrounding country, at the little, sunburned valley below, and the ragged hills beyond rolling away into higher and higher elevations, which were rimmed in and ringed by scarred and splintered mountains. The sight of those mountains depressed him.

The view of the town was not more prepossessing. It was a straggling mining camp, without beauty of outline or architecture. The houses were cheap affairs, half of them on the main street being saloons or gambling dens where the miners from the mountains spent their hard earnings riotously.

“I’m sick of it,” he said, “and I’m goin’ to git out of it.”

For the first time he lapsed into a hint of the dialect to which he had so long been accustomed.

Again he looked at the desert reaches of the scarred mountains, where it would seem that even a crow would have hard picking to get a living.

Then he took from an inner pocket of the old corduroy coat a single playing card—the queen of hearts; and he looked at it, with a strange emotion showing in his puffed and scarred face as he passed on down the slope.

He was soon at the edge of the town, though cheap Mexican houses, chiefly of mud, stretched on still farther. Before the doors dark-faced children played in the dust, and now and then from some deep window was visible the swarthy, Indianlike face of a Mexican woman.

Where a mesquite tree grew at the side of the road he stopped. No house was near, and he sat down on a stone, dropping heavily as if tired.

Though he had sturdily refused a drink that morning, his mind was not yet relieved of the effects of recent potations. For a month he had been on a “spree,” and the results showed in his face and general appearance, and still more in the workings of his mind.

He held the playing card out before him and looked at it steadily, clutching it in one trembling hand, and as he did so tears came into his red eyes and trickled down his swollen cheeks. To a certain extent they were maudlin tears, yet they testified to a real and deep emotion.

“The queen of hearts,” he said; “the only picture I’ve got of her—ever had of her; it don’t look like her, yet it makes me think of her. And I don’t want to think of her no more; it’s bad business, and it don’t do me no good. It’s what set me to drinkin’ and howlin’ round like a locoed Injun. I reckon I played the fool ginerally and made a swath-wide nuisance of myself. But no more for me—this is the end of it.”

Rising, he stepped up to the mesquite tree and pinned the card to it; then he went back and sat down again on the stone.

After staring at the card a while he drew out his revolver and began to shoot at it. His hand was unsteady and his first shot went wide, but the next cut through the middle of the card.

“She’s dead, and the past is dead, and now I’ll kill even the memory,” he muttered. “I’ve hung to that card a long time, and it was all I had that suggested her; now even that goes. I don’t want to think about it any more. I didn’t treat her right, and she didn’t treat me right; and—but what’s the use o’ thinkin’? It’s all gone, and dead; and she is dead; and here goes the only thing that’s left to remind me of her.”

Again his revolver cracked spitefully in the clear air of the morning.

The bullet nicked a hole in the forehead of the picture.

He stared at it, his face paling a little.

“Just where I got the lance head of old Fire Top that time,” he said. “That was a stem-winder—wonderful that it didn’t finish me! If it was that old heathen who was dead, instead of her! But he’s still livin’ to do more meanness in the world. Yes, I wisht it had been him; or that this card was his ugly, painted mug that I’m shootin’ at. He wouldn’t be waitin’, though, for me to set here and plug him like this; he’d be doin’ something himself, like he did before.”

His revolver swung between his knees, in his right hand. With his left he touched significantly the scarlet scar on his forehead.

But for that disfiguring scar and the marks of dissipation revealed so plentifully in his countenance, Tom Conover would not have been a bad-looking man. There was a week’s growth of stubble on his face, but with that cut away, his features would have been comely enough. His eyes were of a steely blue. They were watery now, but normally they were keen and farsighted—the eyes of a man long used to looking on the vast reaches of the mountains and deserts, where for so many years he had made his home. He was tall and straight, too, with a symmetry of form which his recent debauch, and the baggy clothing he wore, could not wholly hide. As for his years, he was probably fifty, or near it; and his hair was tinged with gray. It had been black, and round the edges of that livid scar it still showed black, thrusting the scar out by way of contrast, so that it seemed to stand forth as vividly as a cattle brand.

His face hardened as he touched the scar with his finger and old memories swept over him, and once more he looked off at the serrated mountains against the sky line. A notch there drew and held his gaze, and in imagination he traveled along it, by way of a trail he knew well, far into the ragged range.

There had been strange doings in some of the valleys of those mountains, and he had taken part in them. His mind began to fill with unpleasant pictures.

He frowned as they trooped in on him; then, snatching up his revolver, he fired again at the queen of hearts. Shot followed shot in roaring succession, until the revolver was emptied and the playing card was torn into shreds.

His fusillade drew Mexicans to the doors of their huts and shabby jacals. The playing children scampered out of the street dust and out of sight. There were also cries of indignation, and of fear, together with some sharp commands laid on him to desist.

But he only laughed with unnatural recklessness and gayety as he proceeded to empty his revolver and shatter the card.

When the last cartridge was spent and the card hung but a thing of shreds, he got up from the stone, pulled the remnants of the card from the trunk of the mesquite, and ground them out of sight into the deep dust of the road.

“The bullock carts will make a finish of it, if I haven’t,” he said, as he looked at the hole his heel had gouged. “And now maybe I can git away from them old memories. When I go back East I want to be another man—a new man altogether, and I don’t want to think even of the things that’s happened out here. I was in the wrong, of course; but not all in the wrong. And I don’t want any more gold—I mean any more hunting for gold, or nothing. I jest want to git away—away—away!”

His voice rose.

At the end of this outburst, as he turned about, he became aware of a commotion in and about the huts and jacals, and in the road which led to the town. Mexican women were shrieking and wailing, and the voices of Mexican men rose in curses in the local patois. Some of the men were issuing from the huts in a threatening manner.

“Well, what’s up?” said Conover, staring. “My shots have been scaring these greasers, I reckon.”

He laughed harshly, and turned toward the town, having thrust his revolver out of sight.

Some of the men issuing from the huts now dashed up to him and sought to lay hands on him. He threw them off.

“What’s up?” he demanded.

One of them drew a knife and sprang at him.

He laughed again, bitterly this time, and, catching the little Mexican by the arm, he twisted the knife out of his hand and threw it into the roadside chapparal.

“Oh, no!” he said. “I don’t let any pig-eyed greaser stick his dirk into me. What you want?”

“_Diable!_” the man grunted, picking himself up and making a dash for the tall, shabby American, naked-handed.

Conover again threw him off, as easily as he would have hurled aside the attack of a child.

He was aroused now, and his appearance had changed. Though his face was still puffy and his eyes watery, his tall form straightened into sinewy outlines; the trembling, too, had gone out of his hands and arms.

“You devil!” he said to the fallen man. “Keep off, or——”

He looked up the road toward the town, where a crowd had appeared, a crowd which increased in numbers, and was led by a man Conover knew to be the town marshal.

With one eye on the howling Mexicans, who were trying now and then to get at him, Conover stared at the advancing crowd.

“What’s Ben Woods want? Coming for me, is he? Well, that’s queer! They don’t pull a man in this town for a little shooting, as a usual thing, unless he kills somebody; and all I’ve been potting is an old playing card. I was a fool for even doing that—a fool and drunk, or nigh it! A man can’t slay a memory by shooting a card to pieces.”

He stepped with quick stride to the side of the road, where he had a mud wall at his back; so that he was now able to face the Mexicans and also watch the crowd that hurriedly approached from the direction of the town.

The patois of these peons was strange to him, but he was beginning to catch words that he understood, and slowly the meaning of what they meant filtered in.

One of his bullets, glancing against a rock, had entered a Mexican jacal and struck a Mexican woman, injuring her severely. It was the husband of the woman who had tried to knife him; and her brother had run into the town and summoned the marshal with a direful story.

The marshal was now coming, with a posse, to arrest the “wild American” who was supposed to be shooting up the Mexican portion of the town. The reports of the revolver had given point to the story of the woman’s brother.

“Hit a woman, eh?” said Conover incredulously. “Hit a woman when I was merely shooting at the representation of one? Is that what you’re howlin’ about?”

He flung a glance at the woman’s husband, who had crawled out and recovered the knife, and was again trying to get where he could use it.

“Keep off!” he snarled to the man with the knife. “If I shot a woman, it was an accident, and a fool thing to do; but it wasn’t meant; and I ain’t goin’ to let you drive your sticker into me because of it. Keep off, or I’ll choke you!”

The Mexicans, gaining courage by reason of the approach of the marshal and his men, began to crowd Conover, gathering in a gesticulating and frantic mob between him and the tiny Mexican huts where the women stood and yelped like coyotes.

Seeing that the Mexicans were in a murderous mood, Conover now drew his revolver, coolly thrust cartridges into it, and, cocking it, he threatened them with it, as he began a slow retreat.

Thus retreating, he came up against the forces of the marshal.

“I surrender!” he said, turning and holding his revolver toward Ben Woods. “Whatever I’ve done was a fool trick, and unintentional.”

Ben Woods, the marshal, a wiry, middle-aged borderman, came up and took the extended revolver.

“What’s it mean?” he said, his men crowding in behind him and looking curiously at Conover and the excited peons. “You’ve had a fight down here?”

“No,” said Conover.

“It’s reported that there was a fight, and you shot a woman.”

“Let me explain,” said Conover. “You know me, and you know that when I’ve been boozing, or coming out of one, that I’m a fust-class fool; and not always responsible at other times. I’d been drinking until I got up against the Woozy-wooz.”

“You mean you’d had the D. T’s.”

“That’s what I mean; I didn’t just have ’em, but mighty near it. I would have, if I hadn’t stopped. And the stoppin’ was almost worse than goin’ on. You know how ’tis; you’ve seen lots o’ the boys that way. Well, them’s me; and I was nighabout crazy, I reckon. But I’d cut the stuff out, and meant to stay by that resolution.

“So I ambles down here a while ago feelin’ about as good-humored with myself and the world as a she-wolf that’s lost her cubs. And because I was nervous, and didn’t know what to do with myself, I began to shoot at a target. It was a card that I had stuck up on that mesquite; if you’ll look at the mesquite you’ll see where some o’ my lead plunked into it while I was shooting. I wasn’t shooting at anybody, nor dreaming o’ harmin’ anybody.

“Then these wild men jumped out at me, slingin’ their crazy lingo; and I’ve just waked up to the discovery that some o’ my lead must have went astray. They say I hit a woman. It’s the first time for me, Woods, and I’m sorry if it’s so. I didn’t know it, and didn’t mean it.”

Ben Woods looked at him intently.

“That sounds straight, anyway,” he said.

“It’s the truth, and the whole truth!” asserted Conover. “What would I want to be shootin’ a Mexican woman for, anyhow? Ask these chaps if the woman wasn’t in her house? I never seen her, and she must have been.”

The marshal turned to the Mexicans.

“Was the woman in her house?” he demanded fiercely.

They pressed forward and began to make excited statements; yet out of what they said he managed to extract the confession that this was so.

“There wasn’t any crazy shootin’ up of this part of the town, then?” he said. “It was reported there was.”

The Mexicans clamored about him, declaring that the woman was dying, and demanding the immediate punishment of the man who had shot her.

“But if he didn’t shoot at her, and hadn’t any intention of hittin’ her?” said the marshal, trying to lull the storm.

They still clamored.

Woods turned from them to the man who was now his prisoner.

“This thing will have to be looked into, anyhow, Conover,” he said regretfully. “If the woman dies it may make trouble for you. But we’ll hope she’ll git well. Anyway, I don’t see but I’ll have to take you to jail until the thing can be looked into.”

His tone was almost an apology, and Conover understood it as such.

The deep flush, accentuating the liquor-red of his face, noticed once before that morning, came again; his blue eyes contracted and narrowed; for a moment he looked defiant, his hand dropping toward the revolver pocket hidden by the corduroy coat. He forgot for the instant that he had surrendered the weapon.

Then his mood changed, and he laughed, a harsh sound that had no merriment in it.

“Oh, all right, Woods!” he said. “Just as you say. I wouldn’t shoot a woman—not even a Mexican one; I ain’t that kind, and you know it. I’ll go with you.”

He stepped forward, almost as if pushed by the yelping Mexicans who crowded his heels; and the marshal’s men surrounding him, he was led away into the town, and cast into the town jail.

“Hard luck!” he said, when the marshal’s men were gone.

He looked disconsolately about his cheerless quarters—a narrow room, dingy and disreputable, with one high, barred window, and a heavy, barred door. It held nothing but a broken-legged stool and a shaky wooden cot on which was a tattered government blanket and a makeshift of a pillow.

“I dunno as it’s any use,” he muttered when he finished his survey. “I intended to try to be a decent man, and here I am. When a man’s down, even Fate kicks him. I didn’t even know there was such a creature in the world as that Mexican woman, but one of my bullets goes huntin’ for her, and finds her; and it lands me here. And if she dies——”

He shrugged his shoulders and dropped to a seat on the cot.

“It come about, of course, all of it, because that other woman died; that got me to thinking again, and then I got to drinkin’ to keep from thinkin’. I’m all sorts of a fool, on general principles, and when I go to loading up with liquor I’m even a few more.”

Restlessly he got up from the cot, and, putting the broken stool against the wall, he mounted it, and looked out from the barred window.

At first his gaze took in the town, and particularly that portion which held the Mexican huts. He could even see the little mesquite tree where he had stuck up the queen of hearts and fired at it.

Following the road which ran there, he looked off toward the ragged hills and the mountains looming beyond them, his thoughts bitter.

As he did so, he became aware that horsemen were approaching the town along that road.

He stood on the stool staring at them until they came up to the Mexican huts and on into the street which led to the center of the town.

The horsemen broke into a canter.

“Injuns,” he said, “and three white men.”

He strained his eyes to make them out.

Suddenly a low whoop broke from his lips.

“Buffalo Bill, or I’m a sand hog!” he exclaimed, striking a palm against the bars of the window.

He rubbed his eyes, and looked again.

“And the two white men with him are Wild Bill and that old trapper they call Nick Nomad. Whoop! I reckon the Injuns aire some o’ Buffalo Bill’s scouts.”

A change passed over his face.

“But mebbe they won’t help me. When Fate kicks a man she kicks him hard. Yet there was a time when Buffalo Bill and me were pards. But that’s long ago, long ago.”