“Annister,” he said suddenly, as if he had abruptly come to a decision, “I’ll lay my cards on the table with you: I need a man, and he can not afford to be too—scrupulous, do you understand? The—the doctor tells me I have been overdoing it.” He gave a faint, wintry smile. “We are—out of the beaten track here—southwest of the law, as you might call it....”
He lowered his voice to a faint, hissing sibilance:
“I will expect you to ask no questions. You have been a cow-man; there are certain interests to the north and the north-east of us; I am naming no names, understand? There is a good deal of range left, as you know, and—now, listen to me....”
His voice went on. For perhaps five minutes Annister listened in a heavy silence. And all that time, although the lawyer had not once called a spade a spade, the thing that he had unfolded was clear enough:
It was the old story; with something of a novel twist. First, there were the outfits scattered north and north-east, as Rook had said. The running off of a few cows, for instance, re-branding, and the rest of it—it was an old story to Annister—but there was something more. Annister, as he listened, realized that the thing was big, worthy, indeed, of the keen, devising brain that had evolved it.
A good many of the ranches had, for some time past, been owned and operated by the packers themselves; three of these: the Bar T, the Cross Circle L, the Flying U, were northward from Dry Bone scarce a hundred miles. But there were still other outfits. And, as Annister listened, he was hearing again a name, or, rather, a symbol, the name and the symbol of masked and hooded violence, and it was “S. S. S.”
Rook, it appeared, was the moving spirit of it, in Dry Bone, at any rate, but as the tale unfolded Annister, putting two and two together, supplied for that cryptic symbol a name, nation-wide and respected: the name of a great Company, an Octopus indeed, which, with Hamilton Rook as its agent, planned nothing less than the ruthless despoiling of those independent cattle men who, out of a desert of sand and sage, had won a living for their stock and for themselves, the rear guard of the order, now, as it seemed, indeed, caught in the far-flung tentacles of a monster, unscrupulous and without soul.
Annister’s part in it was to be simple. He was to do nothing as yet until the lawyer should give the word. But a man was wanted: a gun-fighter; a man bred to violence who would not consider too closely the method or the means. For, as Rook had said, his eyes upon Annister in a sudden, biting scrutiny:
“If, as a first step, say, the owners of these outfits should—ah—disappear....”
There was to be no outright violence, it appeared; murder—that was an ugly word; but it was of course possible that there might be—resistance. But—there would be a fortune in it.
Annister’s part would be comparatively simple. He would merely carry out his orders. Rook, eying him now in a close-lipped silence, watched as a spider watches from his ambush. Annister would be needing money; if the lawyer knew his man, and he thought that he did, here was something that would be a lever, and a powerful one.
Annister lifted his head, then he brought his hand, palm downward, to the desk-top. It was a movement, slow, even, controlled.
“I’m with you,” he said.
“Good!” exclaimed the lawyer. “Now—I want you to go over to the club; there are a few men there I’d like you to meet. _Ha!_”
At his exclamation Annister, turning, followed his rigid, pointing finger.
The huddled figure on the carpet had disappeared. There had been no sound, no sign. The Indian had vanished.
_CHAPTER FOUR_
THE FACE IN THE MOONLIGHT
Annister had thrown in with Rook, but he trusted him no further than he would have trusted a cougar, a mountain cat.
At the club, as the afternoon wore on to evening, he had met four or five men: Beaton, the county judge, a red-faced tippler with, on the surface, a heartiness that was repellant; Lunn, the hotel proprietor, a vast, asthmatic man with a small, porcine eye; Daventry, the Land Commissioner, whose British accent, Annister noticed, would on occasion flatten to a high, nasal whining that was reminiscent of Sag Harbor or Buzzards Bay.
The rest, hard-faced, typical of their environment, Annister put down for the usual lesser fry; hangers-on, jackals, as it might chance, “house-men,” in the parlance of the “poker-room”—Annister knew the type well enough.
They seemed hospitable, but once or twice Annister had thought to detect in their glances a grimly curious look: of appraisal, and of something more.
There had been a game going, but he had not sat in, nor had the lawyer invited him. The visit had been meant, plainly enough, as a sort of introduction.
“We’re all here,” Rook had said.
But it was apparent, too, that there were one or two others who were absent; Annister heard several references to “Bull”; but for the most part there was a silence, beneath which Annister could feel the tension; it was like a fine wire, vibrating, deep-down; almost, he might have said, a certain grimly quiet anticipation of that which was to come.
Presently the telephone tinkled, loud in the sudden stillness; Annister could hear the voice at the other end: harsh, strident, with a bestial growl that penetrated outward into the close room.
“He can’t come,” came from the man at the telephone. “Bull—yeah—an’ I reckon he seems some disappointed.”
Annister noticed that the tension had all at once relaxed, and with it, as he could see, there was plainly visible in the faces about him a certain disappointment. It was as if they had been waiting for something—something, well, that had not materialized. There was a laugh or two; a word stifled in utterance; one or two of the men, glancing at Annister and away, gave an almost imperceptible head-shake. Even Rook, as Annister could tell, appeared relieved as the newcomer rose, turning to the company with a conventional good-night.
For just a split second it seemed to Annister that something _was_ about to happen; for a moment he saw, or fancied that he saw, a quick, silent signal flash, then, from eye to eye; Lunn, the hotel man, had half risen in his chair; out of the tail of his eye, as he was turning toward the door, Annister was aware of a quick ripple, a movement, the shadow of a sound, like the movement of a conjuror manipulating his cards, white hands flashing in a bewildering passade.
But nothing happened.
Leaving, he had walked slowly toward the hotel, turning over in his mind the story that had been told him by the lawyer. And there was one more question he wanted to ask him: a question that had to do with a square of paper that he had come upon among his father’s papers in New York, for it had been this chance discovery that had sent him, post-haste, to Dry Bone, and the lawyer’s office.
Thinking these things, he was turning the corner to the hotel when, out of nowhere as it seemed, a man had passed him, walking with a peculiar, dragging shuffle. Seen under the moon for a moment, this man’s face had impressed itself upon Annister: it was dark and foreign, with high cheek-bones, and—what seemed curiously out of place in Dry Bone—a black moustache and professional Van Dyke.
Annister, watching the man, saw him turn into the doorway he had just quitted; it was the entrance to the “club”—two rooms above a saddler’s shop at the corner of the street.
Halting a moment to look after the man, Annister was wondering idly who he might be—certainly not the man called “Bull,” if there was anything in a name. And then, abruptly, he was remembering what the lawyer had let fall about the “doctor”; perhaps that was who he was; he had had a distinctly professional air.
The man’s eyes had lingered upon Annister for a moment, and for a moment the latter had been conscious of a curious shock. For it had been as if the man had looked _through_ rather than at him; those eyes had glowed suddenly in the darkness, gray-green like a cat’s, in an abrupt, ferocious, basilisk stare.
Annister, in his day, had seen some queer corners and some tight places; in Rangoon, for example, he had penetrated to a certain dark house in a dim backwater stinking and dark with the darkness of midnight even at high noon.
And it was there, in that dark house, with shuttered windows like blind eyes to the night, that he had seen that which it is not good for any white man to have seen: the rite of the Suttee; the blood-stone of Siva, the Destroyer, reeking with the sacrifice—ay—and more.
And something now, at that time half-perceived and dimly understood, came again with the sight of the dark face with its high cheek-bones, and black, forking beard; for he had seen a creature with a face and yet without a face, mewling and mowing like a cat, now come from horrors, and the practitioner had been—
The man who but just now passed him at the corner of the street, the man with the dark, foreign visage, and the eyes of death.
_CHAPTER FIVE_
PARTNERS OF THE NIGHT
Annister, pausing a moment at the corner of the street, was conscious of a feeling of coldness, like a bleak wind of the spirit, as if death, in passing, had touched him, and gone on.