by Max Brand
“Pretty soon he says … ‘Bartender, your place is rather crowded.’
“‘That’s the way that I like to have it,’ the bartender says.
“‘What you want is interesting, but not important,’ says Dalfieri. ‘Kindly ask some of them to step outside.’
“Coming from a fellow like that, it was staggering of course. That was the reason that nobody stepped right up and hit him. But before anybody got that idea into their heads, a pair of guns jumped from nowhere into the hands of that Dalfieri. I don’t know where he was keeping them, and I still don’t know how he got them out. But the important thing was that one minute there was no gun to be seen any place on him, and the next minute there were a pair of big Colts in his hands, and he was waving the muzzles of them slow and easy over the whole crowd of us. I remember that he had one heel cocked up on the bar rail. And the corner of his eye was glued down on the bartender, over to the side and behind him. But still he seemed to have plenty of eyes for the rest of us.
“‘You heard me talk,’ he said. ‘I said that I wanted air. And now, get out of here, and let a gentleman drink in peace.’”
Here Pete eased up and took a breath, which you’ll agree that a man would need after telling offhand a lie of the size of that one. And we all sat around pretty still, waiting to see if the kid would swallow it.
Well, he was so easy that there was hardly any fun in it. He was simply petrified, he was so amazed and so interested. And he could barely whisper: “Well, did you all walk out?”
“Young fellow, we did,” said Pete very quiet. “We walked right outside of that saloon!”
“Wonderful!” the kid said, with his black eyes burning and blazing. “It doesn’t seem possible.”
“We stood around outside of that saloon for a while,” Pete continued, “and pretended that the only reason that we had walked out in the first place was because we wanted to figure out what would be bad enough to do to a fellow that had the nerve to step in and talk like that to a bunch of real bad actors like we were. But speaking personal, I have to admit that I knew from the start that I didn’t want any part of his game. He had that nice, quiet, cold look in the eye that means nasty work when you got him cornered. I didn’t want to do any of the cornering. And most of the other boys must have figured him the same way, because after he had finished his drink very deliberate, standing up there and chattering away with the bartender, he turned around and come sashaying out of that saloon and walked through what was left of the crowd.
“Most of the boys had sneaked away. But still, there must have been seven or eight left. And not a one lifted a hand, and not a word was said, and nobody so much as met his eye. I was there, and I know.
“But that same night, some greasers from over the river met up with our friend Dalfieri and got a foolish idea about running him around a little, because in their part of the country, they were looked up to a whole lot for being real bold bad actors. All that Dalfieri done was to kill two of ’em and wounded another so bad that he had to have his arm cut off … and two more was not shot up so bad, but that they could ride out of town. Which they done and never bothered anybody in Tucson again.
“But after we heard about that, we didn’t feel so bashful about the way we had let that fellow walk over us. We just felt that we had used mighty good sense, y’understand?”
The kid was simply paralyzed.
“Five men!” he kept saying over and over again. “Think of standing up to five white men all at the same time … and beating them all!”
He sat there letting that grand idea soak in.
“What became of Dalfieri?” he asked at last. “But still … did he really beat you, Tom?”
You could see that Pete had warmed up the youngster to the point where it was possible for him to believe that somebody might have beaten me. But still, it was bitter medicine.
I decided to bury myself six feet under the ground, so far as being a fighter in the estimation of young Jigger Bunts was concerned.
I said: “I had sense enough not to step out with guns when Dalfieri was around. He and I had it out with fists, and what he did to me was enough till I hollered quits …”
Jigger Bunts jumped up out of his chair. His voice was full of agony. Real pain.
“You don’t mean that you asked him to stop?”
“Don’t I?” I said. “But I do, though, and if you had been there, you would have done the same thing. It was like trying to tag a lightning bolt, or wrestling with a panther.”
The kid sat down very slowly. And all the time he was staring at me, and all of the time I could feel myself sinking millions of miles out of the place where Jigger’s stars was kept and down past the moon, even, and right down to the earth, where he shrugged his shoulders and gave his eyes a rub and looked at me, and saw me for the first time—saw my caved-in chest and my skinny neck, and—the fact that I carried only one gun. In fact, saw that I was just a common or garden variety of cowpuncher such as you could pick up a hundred of in any little range town.
You might think that it would have grieved me some to lose out in his respect so far. No, it didn’t. I was tired of wearing wings and claws and epaulettes, and such stuff. And I wanted to appear just as myself. I had been through too much grilling to enjoy being famous—in the eyes of one man.
“I don’t think,” says Jigger Bunts after a while, and in a very soft voice, “I don’t think … that all the hell that there is could make me give up. I don’t think that I could holler quits.”
He shivered. The idea seemed to make him sick. Because he was just eighteen, and at eighteen a man is prouder than a lion and an eagle rolled into one.
And then—well, he turned his shoulder toward me a little, and he started asking Pete some more about Dalfieri.
And Pete had had a chance to think up a lot of new things.
In another minute Pete was telling the kid how Dalfieri could work two six-guns from the hip.
And there sat the kid, shaking his head and smiling and wondering and enjoying this new hero, just as much as he had ever enjoyed me.
The boys picked up heart again. Because they saw that though I had stepped myself out of trouble, I had put in a substitute who was almost as good fun. They didn’t have the pleasure of laughing at the kid and at me, but they made up for that by concentrating all the harder on Jigger Bunts.
Chapter Eight
This Dalfieri began to get more terrible than you can imagine, right away. There was still the biggest part of the winter to work away on the kid, and the boys fair spread themselves to do a good job. The first thing you know, they had turned Dalfieri into an outlaw, because they got him into so many shooting scrapes and had him killing so many men that they had to make him an outlaw.
But that was all the better. After he became an outlaw, he began to hold up stages and rob banks and raise hell generally for the benefit of that poor loon of an eighteen-year-old boy and the rest of us in the bunkhouse.
The reason that I take so much of the blame is because I began to guess that serious consequences were coming long before the truth was known. I began to guess that this would not be such a pretty story when we got all through.
It was not so bad at first. By degrees we could see the kid turning himself into Dalfieri. The way it began was that one day, Pete noticed that the kid had not shaved his upper lip. He whispered the news around, but none of us would believe it. But the day after, there was no doubt at all. There was a fine black shadow on the kid’s upper lip.
It grew very fast. He was always combing it and brushing it and taking fine care of it, and almost before you knew it, there he was with a short little black mustache, as close to the mustache in the picture as you could imagine.
That was rich cream for the cowpunchers, of course. I suppose that no mustache from the beginning of the world ever made so many grown men happy as that on
e did.
How could a proud and sensitive youngster act like that? I don’t know. Unless it’s true that men really are a little crazy when they’re young—which it is my conviction that they are. But there was the mustache for us to look at, as big as day. And that was not all. Nor hardly the half.
He began to take a lot of care of his hair, we noticed. Week by week, it grew longer and longer. And there was a natural wave in it, which he had been ashamed of before and which he was always trying to sleek out of his hair. He stopped sleeking it, now. He let those waves begin again and he gave them a lot of encouragement, and pretty soon when he was galloping along in the snow, there was a little flutter of hair behind the nape of his neck.
He took a lot of care of himself in other ways, too.
He had two pairs of boots. One pair of cowhide he used to wear to work. The other pair he kept in the bunkhouse and he took mighty good care of them. Every day he gave them an extra coat of polish, and he rubbed them and suppled them up. Can you imagine that young fool coming back from the range and shining himself all up for a bunkhouse? That was exactly what he did!
I don’t think that he was exactly conscious of what he was doing. And if you had asked him if he was trying to make himself look like Dalfieri, he would have said that he wasn’t, but that he had just taken a sudden interest in well-polished boots and in long hair with a curl in it.
But the crowning stroke is something that I can hardly believe even after seeing it and which I hate to write down here, because it may make everything seem untrue.
However, the fact is that he got hold of an old black silk shirt that one of the boys had. It was worn out, and so he got it cheap. Then we saw him working at that shirt every day. And pretty soon he had made a long strip of silk, bound up with thread on each side. And the next night after that, at the same time that he put on his shined up boots, he got out that black silk and he spent a long time over himself, so that he was late for dinner. And when he did come in, I had to bury my face behind my big tin coffee cup, even though I scalded myself very bad and some of the coffee went down the wrong way, so that I began to cough and sputter. But I noticed that a lot of the other boys were the same way, and there was one—I think that it was that sailor, Charlie—who swallowed half of a hot boiled potato and went hopping around the floor on one foot, holding his stomach with both hands and hollering that he was burned to death inside.
By this you can judge that there was a lot of commotion, but there was a pretty good cause for it, because there was our kid as big as life, with his short mustache all waxed out with candle grease at the ends, and with his long hair all brushed back and curling past his ears, and with a great big black silk necktie, done into a big flowing bowknot!
Even now, at this distance, even though I have thought about it a lot of times since, I can hardly persuade myself that anybody could be foolish enough to do such a thing in such a place. But there he was—really a sight for sore eyes.
After a while we were able to go on with supper, but all the way through the meal, somebody would begin sputtering. And Pete just had to get up and leave the table. And then, outside, we could hear a sound that was like the baying of a wolf—except that it was Pete’s way of laughing.
I muttered something about Pete maybe being sick and going out to look after him, and I went outside, and Pete and I braced up against each other and held each other up as we laughed and cried and laughed again.
After a while we came in, and the kid asked me very sad and serious and quick if I had been sick—my face was so red and swollen up and my eyes was so full of tears. You see, the kid had not entirely dropped me. I wasn’t a real hero to him anymore, but still he felt very friendly toward me. I had meant so much to him once that I couldn’t be shut out of the picture, as they say, altogether.
That was a wild evening!
But the necktie was not the worst of it. It was not more than the beginning, in a manner of looking at it.
Because, a little while before that, we had noticed that the kid was now spending a lot of his time off by himself. And then, one day, one of the boys, riding up behind a hilltop, saw the kid pacing on the other side with two revolvers strapped onto his saddle. And every minute he was snatching out those two guns, one in each hand, and snapping them, hip-high.
Shooting from the hip, you see, after the style of the great Dalfieri.
Of course that made a pretty good story when it was told in the bunkhouse the same evening, and I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, except to laugh, just as everybody else was laughing. But a little while later, as I was saying, I got my first hint of what was coming.
* * * * *
We had a bright, rather warm day—for February! And in the middle of the afternoon, we heard a couple of shots behind the barn. A little while later, one the boys, named Chuck Narvin, a Canadian, came running into the bunkhouse, looking pretty queer.
He said that he had been in the barn, cleaning out, and that he had looked outside and seen the kid come up and begin to go through a whole lot of antics, snatching out his guns, and aiming them from the hip at a couple of tin cans that he stuck up on two posts a good distance away.
And then both of those guns went off—Bang! Bang!—and he looked out, laughing to himself—and what he saw was one of the cans standing on the post the same as before. But one of those cans was on the ground!
You had better believe that it took the wind out of our sails when we heard that.
Of course, there is a lot of talk about two-gun men, but mostly it is just plain nonsense. And, really, I don’t think that what they call a two-gun man in the storybooks ever existed. That is to say, a man who could take aim with two guns at the same time and hit two different targets in the same pull of the triggers. However, I may be wrong, because now and then you’ll see some very fancy trick shooting done. I only mean to say that in all my days, I’ve seen quite a few who packed two guns, but that was only because it gave them twelve shots instead of six—but they did all their shooting with one hand.
That is to say, all except maybe three or four. Now and then you would run into a fellow who was naturally ambidextrous, and that fellow could handle two guns, but the way that he did it was just to fire off one gun and then the other—hip-high or breast-high, I don’t care which. That way they could keep up a pretty quick stream of lead flying. Though for my part, I think that they might have done just as well or better if they had left the second gun in the holster and concentrated on shooting straight with just one kicker at a time. It is all well to throw a lot of lead into the air, but one bullet in the right spot is just as satisfactory as a thousand spread out over the corners of a target.
However, what I am driving at is that it was a mighty rare thing to see a two-gun man make his Colts talk together. And here was this kid, Jigger Bunts, right among us, who was able to do that thing! You can bet that we began to look with a different sort of an eye at him.
It wasn’t accident, his hitting that can, either.
I think it was only two or three days after that that I myself saw him blaze away at a couple of stones that he had put up on a bank. And that time he got both of the stones—one right after the other, shooting so quick that the explosions stumbled one on top of the other. Those were big stones, and at short range. And the kid was one of those naturally left-handed people who have been forced to learn to use their right from the time they are babies—so that he could think about as well with one hand as with the other.
So it wasn’t so very wonderful, after all. However, there was enough to it to make me see the danger.
Chapter Nine
What it showed me was that Jigger was blazing away pounds and pounds of powder and lead trying to make his skill something like the skill of Dalfieri. But no matter how many hours a day he practiced, he never could come anywhere near to it. The reason was that we had Dalfieri doing things that t
he devil himself would have gaped at. Nothing was too much for Dalfieri, and poor Jigger was trying to model himself after a man that never was! However, when a bright boy like that started after a goal, he was apt to go a long distance toward it, and the farther off it was from him in the beginning, the greater distance he would go. He was beginning to look a little tragic, now, because he saw that he could never be a regular storybook dead-shot Dick, like Dalfieri. But still he set his teeth and kept plugging.
And I got the boys together one day and said to them: “What if this kid should one day cut loose and start smearing somebody up … according to the pattern that this here Dalfieri of ours has been using?”
It was old Tod Minter of Chicago who spoke up and said: “There’s no danger of that. The kid is too damned good-natured and kind to ever do anybody any harm.”
I am glad that I can write down that I gave that warning. It takes some of the load off of my shoulders. And I remember that we all talked it over, beginning to end, and the boys all swore that there would never be any harm done, because Jigger was just a kid who was playing a game of suppose right out loud, as you might say. But they all swore that he would never let it go too far. And they said that it was a good thing for him to be making a damned fool of himself out there where we all knew him and liked him and where nobody had any malice against him.
I thought that they were right. I thought that there was just that much idiocy that Jigger Bunts had to get out of his system, and so I let them go right on with their one-ring circus through the rest of the winter.
Not all the way through the winter, though, because it was early in April that the bust came.
* * * * *
It had been a pretty hard winter. And now the cows were getting thin and pretty down at the head, and the snow was packed and jammed down, so that the poor devils could hardly paw it away from the bunchgrass that was lying underneath. Take a general look around, and you would say that this was the real heart of winter—January, say. But it was April, and the big thaw couldn’t be very many days off.