by Max Brand
Then all the boys swallowed hard and somebody remembered that sailor Charlie had been about to tell a whopper when he was interrupted by the poor victim—I mean me!
That fellow said: “Charlie, what was that fight that you was going to tell us about that the chief had in Boston?”
“Oh, yes,” said Charlie. “But I guess that all you boys have read all about that fight in the papers. They was full of it at that time.”
“I recollect reading about it,” said Dago Pete, very serious. “But I never before had the luck to bump into anybody that was right there at the ringside.”
And somebody else put in: “You’d think that old Tom, there, would loosen up once in a while and tell us a little something about himself. Wouldn’t you, kid?”
Jigger looked over at me with a silly smile, as much as to say that it was just my modesty. And at that everybody had a choking fit again.
“I recollect the gent that fought him was an English heavyweight named Jimmy Carson. You remember?”
“Sure, we remember,” said those bland liars, and they looked the sailor right in the eye and nodded. And he went right along, confound him!
“This Carson was going to cut up a great name for himself on our side of the water. He had licked about everything that they had in old England. And when there was nobody else worthwhile over there for him to beat up, he landed in the USA. Well, it happened along about that time that our partner, here, old Tom Reynard, he was out of a job and broke. And when he seen the papers about this Englishman landing in Boston, he up and went to a fight promoter and said he wanted to try his hand at licking Carson. And he showed what he could do in the fight line by knocking out two of the fighters that was in the training quarters. Or was it three that you knocked out that afternoon, Tom?”
It was against our unwritten law for any of those blackguards to appeal to me like that in the midst of their lying. I was about to rip into Charlie, but he saw danger in my eye, and he went along, quick and easy.
“Anyway, he got the job. And I paid good money for a seat near the ring, and I seen Tom and the Englishman come into the ring to put on their bout.
“The Englishman, he had an advantage of about thirty pounds in weight. He came in at two hundred and ten and Tom only stacked up at a hundred and eighty.”
That was plain silly, of course. There was never a time in my life when I stripped at more than a hundred and fifty. And all those boys knew it, and the kid should have known it as well as anybody else.
But he never thought of doing any criticizing, of course. He just sat there with a fool grin on his face, admiring me and whispering: “I never would think you weighed that much. You must be terrible solid, Tom.”
“But what Tom lacked in weight,” Charlie continued, “you’d better believe that he made up in muscle. He looked like Hercules … that was about all that he looked like, and you can believe me when I say it. He was just plain strong. It was sticking out all over him. And though he ain’t quite the man that he was then, I guess most of you boys have seen Tom stripped and know what I mean.”
Of course they knew what he meant—all of them except the kid. They knew that I had skinny arms and a sort of caved-in chest—from the time when a horse fell on me—and the kid must have seen me stripped along with the rest of them. But that didn’t make any difference to him.
Every eye was fixed on him, sort of in fear, because it looked like Charlie was laying it on a lot too thick and that the kid would sure break in and ask some dangerous questions.
But not the kid. He just lay back and nodded his head and looked over and worshipped me some more.
And he says: “Yes, I would hate to have the chief lay hold of me in earnest.”
Him with six foot of leathery muscle and iron bone to talk about and me with—all that God gave me, which wasn’t very much. The boys looked at each other and choked again, and some of them got pretty red in the face. It was too much even for that devil, Charlie, he had to cut the story short.
“Well,” he said, “of course you all know how it turned out. In the first round, the chief hit the beef-eater in the ribs, and after that John Bull skipped around and did a lot of fancy boxing for seven or eight rounds. But along in the ninth, I think it was, the chief thought that the crowd had had about enough for their money, and he stepped in and popped John Bull right on the mug.
“It was a terrible sight to see what happened. He busted Jimmy Carson’s jaw in three places, and Jimmy lay there on the floor of the ring, gagging and gasping … because outside of his jaw being broke, he had a set of false teeth knocked down his throat.”
Chapter Six
That remark about the false teeth gave the boys the chance that they had to have, or otherwise they would have laughed themselves to death, I suppose. They lay back and yelled and shouted and beat each other on the back and cried for joy. And they looked at me, and they looked at the kid, and they went into convulsions again, until it was sort of dangerous to let it go on anymore.
And all the time what was the kid doing? Was he looking at them and seeing that there wasn’t enough in that fool remark about the false teeth to have caused all of this laughter? No, sir, that is exactly what he was not doing. Like a miserable half-wit, he was looking at me and shaking his head and smiling at me and wondering that God had ever made any men as big and as strong and as dangerous and as all-around perfect as I was.
Until I wanted to take him by his thick neck and choke him to death. And when the others looked at him and saw that fool expression on his face, they just about died, it pleased them so much. But you can understand why I didn’t laugh much. No, I could have killed them all before I was really cooled off good.
Well, after a time they were able to pull themselves together. And right away the kid says to Charlie: “And what happened then?”
“What happened then? Oh, nothing,” says Charlie, “except that we in the crowd got old Tom up on our shoulders and carried him around Boston’s streets until we come to the mayor’s house, and there we stayed and hollered and cheered, and finally the mayor came out and made us a speech and invited Tom to come into the house and shake hands with him, and then Tom made a speech …”
“What did you say, Tom?” busted in the kid.
“I forget,” I said, and I gave Charlie a walleyed look that promised him a beating the next time that I got him alone.
“It was a pretty slick speech,” said Charlie. “One of the best that I ever heard, especial the part that was about Bunker Hill. That part was as good as out of a book.”
Once more they gave a look at the kid to see whether he had swallowed this.
Yes, sir! Impossible as it might seem to you, confound me if he didn’t sit right there and swallow the whole yarn without so much as saying: “How queer!” Oh, at eighteen he was a jim-dandy! I never at any other time in my life ever wanted to be an Indian. But if I could have been a chief with a band on the warpath, just then, I would have scalped the whole lot of them, but I would have turned the kid over to the women for torture—for being such a number-ten-sized fool!
No, all he did was to say: “I guess that stopped the John Bull from fighting for a while.”
“Why, I suppose that you never had a fight with a man that could even warm you up, did you, chief?” says Charlie to me.
It was breaking the rule. As I said before, it was breaking the unwritten law that we had established, that no matter how they lied, they were not to ask me to back up what they said about me. But here was Charlie, as I’ve told you, breaking the rule right and left and asking me one question after another. And that was why—though I’ll regret it right up to my dying day—that I turned loose and gave Charlie and the crowd the same coin that they had been paying out to me—lie for lie!
I said: “Yes, I was warmed up enough for once!”
The boys saw that I meant trouble, and sailor
Charlie broke right in with a sea story to shut me off. He said: “Speaking of being warmed up, reminds me of a time that I was sailing in the Flying Mist, from New York to San Francisco, around the Horn …”
“Hey, Charlie!” broke in the kid.
Charlie tried to go right on talking, but the kid got red and stood up and walked across the room and put his big hand on the shoulder of Charlie.
And Charlie looked up to him and said: “What’s the matter?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear who was speaking when you interrupted him,” said the kid.
“Well, who?” says Charlie.
“He was speaking,” said Jigger Bunts. “The boss was speaking.”
Just as he might have said: “You’ve barely missed thunder and lightning.”
Well, to talk like that to any cowpuncher was talking pretty big and dangerous, and it was hard medicine for any man to take. And Charlie was a tough one, you can be sure. So he looked Jigger up and down from the mizzenmast to the foremast, and backward again. And he saw those big boots—red-leather boots, the same as Tom Reynard’s, of course. And he saw the old blue jeans, the same as mine. And the corduroy shirt, the same as my shirt was. And he saw, too, the bandanna that Jigger wore—with the knot that tied it, copied exact after mine. But most of all, he saw the man inside of those clothes, and as I’ve mentioned before, it was a very considerable man!
It was too much man for Charlie, and he swallowed and said: “I didn’t hear that Tom was talking. Go ahead, Tom, if you remember.”
There was something impudent about his way of saying that that made the kid hesitate and frown down at Charlie, as though he wasn’t quite sure, but really thought that he ought to take a second off and tie Charlie into a bowline—a running bowline knot, at that!
But he finally seemed to decide that he would let Charlie live. And the kid went back to his corner, and he sat down there and kept a dark eye on Charlie for a while.
The stage was cleared for me, and I prepared to knock about half the spots off of poor Jigger’s hero—meaning myself.
“Yes,” I said, “there was at least one time when I was warmed up, as you were saying. There was one time when I was licked fair and square by a better man than I ever dreamed of being.”
The faces of the boys dropped in chunks about a mile long. They saw that their winter’s sport seemed about to be done for.
But their long faces were nothing compared with the face of Jigger. He fair turned white, and he looked at me with his eyes staring out of his head.
“Licked?” he said. “Licked? Fair and square, did I hear you say?”
“Fair and square,” I averred.
There was a minute of terrible silence. The kid was blinking at me, and it was easy to see that he was a sick boy. The wrecks of what he had thought me to be were toppling around his mental ears, you might say.
“It was a fellow smaller than I am, too,” I said.
That was putting the crown on the horror for poor Jigger. I could see the boys in the background behind Jigger shaking their heads at me like mad and holding up their hands in dumb prayer for me to stop and not go any further in ruining their indoor sport. But I wouldn’t stop. It gave me a mighty lot of pleasure to sit there and torture them a little.
“Do you mind,” Jigger said “waiting for a minute? I’d like to … To hear about that … but … I’ll be back in a minute.”
He got up and stumbled out of the bunkhouse. I suppose that he was needing the fresh air pretty bad. And the minute that he disappeared, those cowpunchers came swarming around me and begged me to turn the thing into a joke. They begged me pretty near with tears in their eyes not to have myself beaten up by somebody imaginary. But I just shook my head and told them that the game had gone far enough and that now I was going to step out of the picture and let somebody else be the hero.
They were mighty downhearted, and Pete busted in.
“All right. If you’re gonna step out of the picture, only give us a chance to make up a hero out of the gent that beat you up. Ain’t that reasonable, Tom? Is that any more than reasonable … to make us a new hero for the kid?”
“Who shall it be?” I asked, weakening a little.
“Anybody,” said Pete. “Anybody will do better than nothing. Anybody will fit in fine. Anybody you say.”
“Give me a name for the gent that licked me so bad,” I said.
There were a lot of pictures pasted against the inside walls of that bunkhouse. There were mostly pictures of pretty girls and actresses that had been clipped out of newspapers and magazines, and things like that. Pretty girls in wedding veils, and all that sort of thing. Because you’ve got no idea how sentimental a lot of horny-handed working men can be.
One of those pictures had been tacked up and it had blown down and was fluttering around on the floor with a big wet heel mark on it. And Pete, being sort of desperate, scooped that picture up and held it in his hand. And the underside of it was what he saw.
“Here,” he said. “Here’s a name that will do as good as anything, I suppose. Louis Dalfieri. How does that sound to you?”
“It sounds rotten!” says somebody.
But just then, back comes the kid.
He looked white, and he looked sick. And he had a stately way about him, such as folks have when they’ve been through a tragedy. He walks in, and he sits down, and he drops his head, and he stares at the floor.
I know that if you had handed him a letter saying that all his family had just been murdered, he wouldn’t have looked half as sad as he did just then. And finally he said: “It doesn’t seem possible! I can’t believe it, Tom. I … I almost think that you were joking!”
“About Dalfieri?” I ask.
“Dalfieri?” he said, sharp and quick.
I had a sort of falling of the heart, because I suspected that that was a name that he might have heard. Because that was a big magazine photograph, and a picture of that size would hardly be given to anybody except a pretty important person—a statesman or an actor or a murderer, or some such sort of a thing.
And I couldn’t see any caption under the picture. There was only the name, and the rest of the paper had been clipped away.
But the kid said: “Dalfieri! That’s a sort of a weak,
foreign-sounding name. It sounds more impossible than ever that you should have been … defeated … by a man with a name like that.”
Poor Jigger! He couldn’t say licked. It didn’t have enough dignity. He had to talk about beating as though it were the fall of an empire.
Chapter Seven
I saw that the coast was clear for the making of my lie. I just handed that picture across to the kid.
“Maybe you wonder why I would keep a picture like this hanging around on the wall,” I said. “But read the name underneath it, and you may be helped to understand.”
He gave the picture one look, and then he laughed in a sick fashion.
“Is this the fellow who beat you?” he asked.
“Doesn’t he look like much to you?” I said. “Well, he didn’t look like much to me, either … not at first.”
It was a shame to do it. And mind you, I would not have done it if I had been able to guess then what was going to happen later on. But that would have been asking too much. You can’t expect a man to be a mind reader.
The kid seemed more serious, then, and he took another long squint at that picture.
It was a pretty sad-looking sort of a man, between you and me. I’ve never seen one that I liked much less. This Dalfieri had one of those thin, dark-looking French-Italian sort of faces, with hollow cheeks, and little mean-looking eyes set close together, and a superior smile on his thin lips, and a little short mustache with the ends just pointed out a bit and rolled down sharp as needles with wax. No wonder the kid was pretty sick when he looked over that face. So was I. B
ut you see, that was to be the point of the new joke—to take a silly-looking imitation man like that and make a hero out of him right from the start for young Jigger Bunts.
“I don’t know,” said Jigger,” but he doesn’t seem like a very great fighting man, to me. How come this Dalfieri wears a big necktie like this?”
The fellow in the photograph maybe was an artist or wanted to be one. He wore long hair—very long, so that it came curling and swooping down and around his neck and his ears very grand. And he matched that hair off with a big black necktie that must have had about a yard and a half of silk in it. It fair flowed all over his chest. I never seen such a tie.
“Partner,” said the kid to me, “you mean to say that anybody ever wore a tie like that out on the range?”
“Do I mean to say it?” I said. “I do. Why, yes, I suppose that all the boys saw Dalfieri wearing that necktie.”
The kid looked around the circle, and they all nodded, perfectly grave. They had a fine talent for keeping their faces straight, that gang of crooks and thugs did! Nary a one of them so much as winked an eye, but they all stared straight back at him. Oh, they were a great lot.
“Without being laughed at?” the kid pursued.
“Without being laughed at,” I said.
“Laughed at?” broke in Pete. “Laugh at Dalfieri? Why, kid, nobody was ever fool enough to laugh at Dalfieri after he made a name for himself.”
“Where was that?’ the kid asked.
You could see that he had forgot to be critical right away. As soon as he began to ask questions, he was a goner, and anybody could pull the wool right over his eyes.
“Down in Tucson,” said Dago Pete. “I was down there, then. Dalfieri come into town looking just the way he does in that picture. Sort of weak and effeminate, he was to look at him. And when he come into the saloon where some of us boys was standing, we had to laugh. I never seen such a joke as that fellow was!
“He looked us over, standing there nice and easy with one elbow on the bar, and while he put his drink down, he was marking us, one by one. Very calm and savvy, for a gent in clothes like those!