“TWENTY-FOUR HOURS TO GET OUT”
Hugh wrote Scot from Aurora, where the boy was filling a wood contract. He proposed that Scot join him in the new camp. The older brother declined. He could not leave the neighbourhood of Mollie till he was assured she had the strength to manage her own affairs. He had once told her he meant to be her big brother. At least he could be that.
Aurora was a gold camp in the first flush of its prosperity. The town was built in a gulch, below which lie narrow, crooked cañons. The history of the camp, in its essential aspects, parallels that of a dozen others. Its first inhabitants were hard-working prospectors, prosaic grubbers who respected each other’s rights and lent a kindly hand to the neighbour in the next-door tent. But after the “glory hole” was struck and the population began to climb came an influx of parasites—gamblers, desperadoes, and road agents. A small percentage of the population, they leavened the whole. Down Virgin Cañon, by stage or on horseback, came John Daily, James Masterson, Sam Dutch, William Buckley, and John McDowell, alias Three-Fingered Jack. They were the advance guard of a hundred others of like mind, hard-visaged “man eaters” whose trigger fingers always itched. They made Aurora sit up on its hind legs and howl.
Two rival gangs operated, one from San Francisco, the other from Sacramento. Between them they ran the town. There was a reign of lawlessness. Juries were afraid to convict. Judges and sheriffs were timid about pushing cases. Sam Dutch, king of the killers, boasted that he was chief. He was suspicious of everybody and never sat except with his back to a wall. In the evening he always saw that the curtains were down. He was for ever watching for the inevitable hour when some other bad man would challenge his supremacy and perhaps cut short his career. This suspense increased his deadliness. He could not afford to wait for an even break because he could not fathom an opponent’s mind and know just when he might elect to draw steel. Wherefore, like the rest of his kind, he killed unnecessarily without provocation. His theory was that dead men are harmless.
When Hugh knew that Dutch was in town he prepared for the trouble he foresaw. Every day he practised with his navy revolver when he was up in the hills with his woodchoppers. Every night in his cabin he carefully oiled and loaded the weapon. He, too, improvised curtains of gunny sacks for the window. When he went down Main Street he had eyes in the back of his head. For he knew that Dutch would assassinate him if possible.
Winter hangs on long at Aurora. There is no spring. The dry, torrid summer with its parching heat follows on the heels of frost. When Hugh arrived in June the cañons still held banked the winter snow. By the middle of July the gulch was a bakeshop.
It was late afternoon one sultry day when Hugh walked down the crooked business street of the town. He stopped in the shadow cast by the false front of a store.
A dog up Virgin Gulch was howling monotonously. A long, lank man, carelessly dressed, sat in a chair tilted back against the wall. One of his heels was hooked in a rung of the chair.
“If I owned a half-interest in that dog,” he drawled lazily, “I believe I’d kill my half.”
Hugh grinned and looked at the man. He had yellow hair, a great mop of it, and twinkling eyes heavily thatched by overhanging brows. He learned later that the man’s name was Sam Clemens. The world came to know him better as Mark Twain.
A bearded miner who had come out of the store gave the remark his attention. “You couldn’t do that, Sam,” he said at length. “If you did that, don’t you see you’d kill the whole dog?”
Clemens looked at the miner. “Maybe you’re right. Anyhow, the other half would be too sick to howl,” he said hopefully.
“If you owned the tail you could cut that off. Or if you owned one of the ears, say,” explained the man with the beard. “I don’t reckon your pardner could kick on that. But if you killed half the dog the rest of it would sure die. Any one can see that, Sam. You sure made a fool remark that time.”
“Yes, I can see now you’re right,” the lank man agreed. “I must be out of my head. Probably the altitude.”[[9]]
[9] Mark Twain afterwards made use of this in one of his books. A good many bits of his humour can be traced to the days when he was a youth in Nevada.—W. M. R.
“O’ course you could buy the other fellow’s interest in the dog and then kill it,” pursued the literal-minded one. “No objection to that, I reckon.”
“Yes, I could do that—if someone would lend me the money. But I wouldn’t, come to think of it.” Clemens brightened up till he was almost cheerful. “I’d give the dog to you, Hank.”
Attracted by the lank stranger’s dry humour, Hugh reached for a three-cornered stool and started to sit down. He changed his mind abruptly. Out of a saloon next door, named the Glory Hole from Aurora’s famous treasure lode, a big bearded man in an army coat came slouching. It was the first time Hugh had seen Sam Dutch since their meeting at the Crystal Palace.
The boy stood, slightly crouched, his right thumb hitched lightly in the pocket of his trousers. Every nerve was taut as a fiddle string. The eyes of McClintock, grown hard as quartz, did not waver a hair’s breadth.
Dutch stood in front of the saloon a moment, uncertain which way to turn. He came toward the little group before the store. Apparently he was in arrears of sleep, for a cavernous yawn spread over and wrinkled his face.
The yawn came suddenly to a period and left the man gaping, his mouth ludicrously open. Evidently he was caught by complete surprise at sight of young McClintock.
“You here!” he presently growled.
Hugh said nothing. There is strength in silence when accompanied by a cold unwinking gaze.
Dutch made a mistake. He delivered an ultimatum.
“Twenty-four hours. I’ll give you twenty-four hours to get out. If you’re here then——” The threat needed no words to complete it.
Without lifting his eyes from the killer Hugh sidestepped to the middle of the road. If bullets began to fly he had no desire to endanger the bystanders.
“I’ll be here,” he said crisply. “If you feel that way, no use waiting twenty-four hours. Come a-shootin’.”
McClintock had no wish to start trouble. If he had known that Dutch was coming out of the Glory Hole he would have quietly absented himself. But the other man had forced the issue. The boy knew that any proposal to talk over the difficulty would have been regarded as a sign of weakness and would have precipitated an attack. Wherefore he had flung out his bold challenge.
The Chief of Main Street was startled. Some months since, this boy had tossed a defiance in his teeth. Before he had had time to draw a weapon two bullets had crashed into him. The psychology of a killer is peculiar. Down in the bottom of his heart he is as full of superstitions as a gambler. Dutch was no coward, though he fought like a wolf outside of the code that governed more decent men. But he was not used to men like the McClintocks. Other men, when he raved and threatened, spoke humbly and tried to wheedle him back to good humour. In the very silence with which these two faced him was something menacing and deadly that paralyzed his fury.
“Not now. Give you twenty-four hours,” the big man snarled through his beard. He used the fighting epithet, applying it to Scot McClintock. “Like yore brother did me when I was feelin’ sick an’ triflin’ an’ all stove up. Get out. Hit the trail on the jump. Or I’ll sure collect you, kid or no kid.”
“You’re wasting time,” Hugh said quietly.
The killer raved. He cursed savagely. But he did not draw his six-shooter. The man had his crafty reasons. This youngster was chain lightning on the shoot. The evidence of this was scarred on the body of Dutch. Moreover, he could probably take the boy at disadvantage later—get him from behind or when he came into a room dazed from the untempered light outside.
Spitting his warning, Dutch backed into the Glory Hole. “Not room for you’n me here both. Twenty-four hours. You done heard me.”
The red-shirted miner Hank turned beaming on McClintock. He could appreciate this, though Clemens’s humour was too much for him. “You blamed li’l’ horn toad, if you didn’t call a bluff on Dutch and make it stick.”
He used the same epithet that the desperado had just employed, but as it fell from his lips the sting of it was gone. A few years later a senator from the sagebrush state had occasion to explain away this expression on the floor of the upper house of Congress. His version of it was that this was a term of endearment in Nevada. Sometimes it was. Then, again, sometimes it was not.
Hugh made no mistake. He had won the first brush, but he knew the real battle was still to come.