The Rubber Band by Rex Stout Read Free Book Online

deathbed. I was seventeen years old. I loved my mother very dearly.”
    She stopped. It would have been a good spot for a moist film over her eyes or a catch in her voice, but apparently she had just stopped to swallow. She swallowed twice, ha the pause I was looking at her. She went on.
    “I didn’t read the letter until a month later. I knew it was a letter father had written to mother eight years before, and with mother gone it didn’t seem to be of any importance to me. But on account of what mother had said, about a month after she died I read it. I have it with me. I’ll have to read it to you.”
    She opened her alligator-skin handbag and took out a folded paper. She jerked it open and glanced at it, and back at Wolfe. “May I?”
    “Do I see typewriting?”
    She nodded. “This is a copy. The original is put away.” She brushed her hair back with a hand up and dipping swift like a bird. “This isn’t a complete copy. There is—this is—just the part to read.
    “So, dearest Lola, since a man can’t tell what is going to nap-pen to him ‘here, or when, I’ve decided to write you about a little incident that occurred last week, and make arrangements to he sure it gets to you, in case I never get home to tell you about it. Ill have to begin away hack.
    “I’ve told you a lot of wild tales about the old days in Nevada. I’ve told you this one too, hut I’ll repeat it here hriefty. It was at Silver City, in 189?. I was 25 years old, so it was 10 years before I met you. I was broke, and so was the gang of youngsters I’m telling about. They were all youngsters but one. We weren’t friends, there was no such thing as a friend around there. Most of the bunch of 2000 or so that inhabited Silver City camp at that time were a good deal older than us, which was how we happened to get together—temporarily. Everything was temporaryi “The ringleader of our gang was a kid we called Rubber on account of the way he bounced back up when he got knocked down. His name was Cole-man, but I never knew his first name, or if 1 did 1 can’t remember it, though I’ve often tried. Because Rubber was our leader, someone cracked a joke one day that we should call ourselves The Rubber Band, and we did. Pretty soon most of Silver City was calling us that.
    “One of the gang, a kid named George Rowley, shot a man and killed him. From what I heard—I didn’t see it—he had as good a right to shoot as was usually needed around there, but the trouble was that the one he killed happened to he a member of the Vigilance Committee. It was at night, 24 hows after the shooting, that they decided to hang him. Rowley hadn’t had sense enough to make a getaway, so they took him and shut him up in a shanty until daylight, with one of their number for a guard, an Irishman. As Harlan Scovil would say—I’ll never forget Harlan—he was a kind of a man named Mike Walsh.
    “Rowley went after his guard, Mike Walsh. I mean talking to him. Finally, around midnight, he persuaded Mike to send for Rubber Cole-man. Rubber had a talk with him and. Mike. Then there was a lot of conspiring, and Rubber did a lot of dickering with Rowley. We were gathered in the dark in the sagebrush out hack of John’s Palace, a shack out at the edge of the city—”
    Clara Fox looked up. “My father underscored the word city.”
    Wolfe nodded. “Properly, no doubt.”
    She went on: “—and we had been drinking some and were having a swell time. Around two o’clock Rubber showed up again and lit matches to show us a paper George Rowley had signed, with him and Mike Walsh as witnesses. I’ve told you about it. I cant give it to you word for word, hut this is exactly what it said. It said that his real name wasnt George Rowley, and that he wasn’t giving his real name in writing, hut that he had told it to Rubber Coleman. It said that he was from a wealthy family in England, and that if he got out of Silver City alive he would go hack there, and some day