by Max Brand
It was just at that time that Jigger Bunts came riding up to the bunkhouse with a stranger along by his side.
Now I wish to God that I never saw that man!
He was one of those lank, yellow-skinned, greasy-looking sort of handsome fellows. Dirty-looking and handsome. And he had a smile that the ladies might have liked, but which I didn’t. He looked smart. And if there is anything in the world that I hate, it’s a smart fellow.
We were all gathering around the kitchen and getting ready for supper when the pair of them came riding up. I remember remarking that it was kind of funny to be eating supper by daylight, after taking our chuck by smoky lantern light for so many months. And Minter of Chicago laughs and says that it all depends on the kind of chuck, whether it’s better to see it by daylight or by lamplight. Which he thought that in this camp, lamps might be good enough.
Not very much of a joke, but it doesn’t take much of a joke to get a laugh out of a cow outfit that has a whole long winter behind it. On top of this, somebody came in and let the kitchen screen door bang behind him.
“Here’s the kid coming along, and he’s picked up a stranger,” says the fellow that came in. To this day, I can’t recollect his name. And he says: “I hope to God that he ain’t spilled all that he knows about Dalfieri to this new gent and got himself waked up to the facts!”
We all tried to jam ourselves into the doorway, wanting to see who was coming, but not wanting to get out too far into the cold wind that was tearing over the snow.
I remember saying that by the way the pair of them were pounding along, they were riding for something more than supper. They came smashing up to the door and tumbled out of their saddles, and I took a good long look at this stranger and, as I said before, didn’t like anything that I saw.
He said: “Are these the fellows that have been giving you that guff?” And he laughed a little.
“These,” said the kid, as stiff as a poker, “are the men who have told me. They will tell you, too.”
Jigger walked the stranger into the kitchen. He said: “Partners, I want you to meet a gentleman that I picked up today while I was riding herd. This is Bud Crandall. Crandall, I want you to meet …”
And he went the whole circle of us, beginning with the cook, and doing it in a sort of proud, deferential way that he had, to show how proud he was that he knew men like us. Oh, the kid could make you feel like a king with that manner of his! And he wound up with me, and he stepped back and said: “And I suppose that even if you have not heard of Louis Dalfieri, you have at least heard of Tom Reynard.”
“I’m glad to know you, Reynard,” says the stranger, “but I got to admit to this kid, here, that I’m damned if I ever heard of you before. But I hope that you ain’t in a class with the sort of history that Bunts here has been filling me full on.”
I could see the kid just reach for the shoulder of Pete and squeeze it, to sort of steady himself, and by the look on Pete’s face, I knew that every one of those five fingers must have gone clear to the bone. Oh, the kid had a grip and a half, I can tell you.
But when he had cleared some of his heat out of himself, he was able to say, very stiffly: “I told this gentleman, while we were riding along, that story that you were telling last week, Tom, about how Dalfieri shot the three sparrows for the three thousand dollars. And Mr. Crandall seemed disposed to doubt the story, and he wished to meet the men who had told it to me. And so, Mr. Crandall, I have had the pleasure of bringing you here.”
The more politer the kid got, you could lay to it to the madder he was. And now he was boiling for certain. But this Bud Crandall was cool. He had plenty of nerve. I have to say that for him. He just looked us over and shrugged his shoulders.
“It can’t be done,” he said. “Not with a revolver. And I doubt it with a rifle, even. I doubt it a lot!”
“It was a Colt, Tom, was it not?” confirmed the kid.
I was in a sweat, I had almost forgotten that idiot story that I had told the week before about how Dalfieri the Great had made a bet with somebody that he could shoot a sparrow in a cluster that was across the road from him. And the man bets Dalfieri that he would give him a thousand dollars for every sparrow he hit, and Dalfieri was to pay five hundred for every shot that didn’t bring down something. So out with his Colt, the great Dalfieri whacks off the head of one sparrow while they’re perched across the road on the fence, and then as they flutter away in a cloud, he smashes two more of them all to smithereens, and not much more than two puffs of feathers come floating down to earth. I had told the story, all right, and it was considered such a mild lie to tell about our Dalfieri that the boys would hardly listen to me as I finished it off. Well, I had told the story and here were the big, bright black eyes of the kid fixed on me.
“I suppose it was a revolver, all right,” I said, pretty unhappy.
Of course Crandall could see that I was lying, and he started in to ride me for it. Yes, he had plenty of nerve. He didn’t care whether he was in a strange camp or not. He didn’t take anything from anybody.
He started to say: “Well, Reymond …”
“Reynard is the name,” Jigger said, very nasty. “I wish that you could remember …”
That tone would never do for a minute, and I stepped in and said: “Jigger, Crandall is our guest, and I guess that you’ve almost forgotten it. I think that you’d better take the horses and put them up.”
That was a good deal to say to a man-eating, young ripper with an ambidextrous pair of Colts wandering around himself.
But the kid looked on me as a sort of mixture of elder brother and uncle, you might say. All he did was to give me a sad, reproachful look, and then he turned around on his heel and took the horses away.
As soon as he was gone, we all got to work and explained things to Crandall. And he understood right away. He laughed until the tears came, and then he let up, and then he laughed some more. He said that he wouldn’t give us away, and he didn’t. But the way he acted was all the worse. He sneered at the kid all the way through supper, and I could see Jigger getting more and more hot and more and more restless.
The way that Jigger had when he was mad was to lift up his head a little higher, then look you right in the face with his eyes extra wide open, as if he were saying: “You seem to be a stranger to me. What are you doing in this house?”
He gave this Crandall a few looks like that, but Crandall just laughed in his face. And I could see the nostrils of the kid quiver.
I knew right then, as I sat across the table from him and stared at his face, that this kid was apt to be a dangerous customer someday. And the day was perhaps not so far off. And while I sat there watching him, I decided that we had been playing with a young bear cub and not with any house dog at all.
So I made up my mind that I would call the pack off this young bear before he put his teeth in somebody and spoiled them for life.
Those were good resolutions. The only trouble with them being that they were just too late. One day sooner, and everything might have been saved. But as a matter of fact, the danger itself was right on top of me before my eyes were opened to it.
Chapter Ten
Right after supper, the kid got up and lined away for the bunkhouse, instead of sitting around the table the way we always did at night, telling stories—and most of the stories about Dalfieri, of course. Pete loosened up with a yarn right after supper, but the kid wouldn’t even stay to hear it halfway through. He got up and stalked out of the room.
“The kid don’t like me,” Crandall observed. And he laughed in a damned mean way.
“Stranger,” I said to him, “I want you to be comfortable here, and I hope you get along all right with everybody. But I’ve got this to say that may sort of put you on the right track. We’ve had a lot of fun with the kid, but we all like him a lot. I guess that I can speak up for myself and say that I like him ab
out as well as any man that I ever sat across the table from in my whole life!”
That should have been enough to make him see what I meant, but it wasn’t. There was something just mean in that Crandall. He liked trouble. He would go down a rabbit’s hole to find trouble, if he couldn’t get it any other way.
“Well,” he said, “I guess that’s your business. I can’t say that he looks more than any other young fool to me!”
A pretty nasty remark, but I let that remark slide, me being the boss and Crandall our guest. A man has to look over a whole lot when he is the host—particularly in the West. And so, right after supper, I started a little game of cards and got the stranger into it.
That was another bad lead on my part, because I should have known by one look at the ratty eye of that Crandall and his long, thin, soft hands, that he was probably a cardsharper.
And he was, too. He turned the game into poker in about five minutes, and with their cash on the table before them, my men started trying to beat Crandall.
It was like a trout trying to catch a shark. He simply tied them in knots. I don’t know how many crooked tricks there are in cards, but I’ll guess that that rat used about nine-tenths of them before the evening was over. And all for about sixty-five dollars. That was not much, you’d say. But it was a good deal to a lot of cowpunchers, who worked for less than half of that a month.
When the game had gone that far, I saw that the rest of the money in camp was pretty sure to go the same way, and so I broke up the game and got a pretty hard look from Crandall on account of it.
He went to the bunkhouse with us and took the blanket and the bunk that we offered to him without thanking us.
When he was undressing, he produced a couple of revolvers. One was shoved inside his trousers, and one was slung under the pit of his left arm. He showed them to us, pretty proud of the way he had them packed away.
“I’ve never shot sparrows like this … Dalfieri,” Crandall said, “but I’ve shot things with less feathers on them.” And he laughed in that mean way of his.
Of course that remark was aimed at the kid, and I could see Jigger twitch in his bunk as the shot went home, you know.
The next morning I made up my mind that I would see to it that the pair of them didn’t spend too much time close together. So I herded the kid through an early breakfast and sent him off to do something—I don’t remember what—that should have taken him a long distance from the house.
He knew why I was sending him, I suppose, and he was very glum about it.
He said in that dignified way of his: “Tom, I feel that I’ve been insulted by that Crandall.”
I said: “Old-timer, now don’t you be a damned fool. You run along and mind your own business. I tell you, he’s a rat.”
“All right,” said the kid. “You wouldn’t want me to do anything that wasn’t honorable, I guess.”
“Of course not,” I told him, and away he sails for the barn. But he turns sharp around and comes back to me.
“I hear that he has taken a lot of money off of the boys while they was entertaining him,” he says.
“Do you hear that?” I said. “You hear too much. You run along, and don’t bother me. The boys haven’t lost anything they didn’t deserve to lose, so far as you’re concerned.”
Which was nothing but the truth, of course.
But the kid went off, very thoughtful. However, I would not have dreamed that he would disobey me. He had always used my commands like gospel law. I had no real reason to suspect him.
After breakfast, Crandall hung around for a while and got the cook to put him up a snack, because it was such a long ride to town. Then he suggested another game of poker, but I told him that we had lost enough for one trip, and I saw him off and wished him luck.
Not that I really wanted to see him have good luck, but because I was just so glad to have that loafer off my hands and out of the camp before he and the kid got tangled and had to be cut apart with a pair of wire tweezers.
So I saw him ride away, with his two guns shoved away out of sight in his clothes, a plain bad actor if there ever was one. And then I went back into the kitchen to sit by the stove and figure up some accounts, because I had to do the clerking as well as the bossing, and a lot of hard riding, and all the rest. Yes, the Bar L certainly made a man work for his extra fifteen dollars a week, and I’m here to state that fact.
It was slow work. I suppose that I was a couple of hours in there, and when I got it all straightened out, I went out and saddled up a horse for myself and got ready to ride. I had the saddle on the horse when the fool—it was a Roman-nosed, high-headed idiot—began to buck and didn’t leave off until it had sucked the saddle off, and trampled on the saddle, and had an all-around good time.
I stood by and let him work it out of his system, and at the same time, I promised him that he would go on the kid’s string the very next day. Because it seemed that he was full of the stuff the kid liked to practice on.
He eased off, and I had the saddle on him the second time and everything cinched up, and just as I was about to work the bit between his teeth, the cook came running out to me and showed me a handful of gold pieces.
“Where the devil did you get those?” I asked him.
Because he had no right to have sixty or seventy dollars in his hands.
The cook was Chinese, you see, and he never could speak very good English at any time, and when he was excited, like this, he could hardly talk anything.
He said: “You frien’, all-same lil’ Jigger … he bling …”
Well, I can’t write that lingo down and the funny sound of all the words.
I said: “Wong, will you shut up, and take a breath, and try to talk straight, dammit.”
I never did have any patience with the Chinese, I don’t know why. But Wong was a particularly aggravating one, he talked with a lisp, among other things. Whoever heard of a Chinese man having a lisp wished into him.
The only man in camp who treated Wong decent was the kid, because the kid was decent to everybody and everything. Why, he couldn’t even climb on a horse without patting him on the neck and calling him: “Good boy.” And even when a horse had bucked him off and landed him on his head—which happens to everybody now and then when they’re learning the ways of Indian ponies—the kid would get up and just grin. You never saw him taking out his bad temper on a horse. Same way with Wong. Everybody else used Wong to unlimber their tongues, because he didn’t understand much of the way he was cussed, and because it didn’t make much difference if he did. But the kid was different. I think I mentioned how he introduced Wong to that rat, Bud Crandall.
“Mr. Wong, Mr. Crandall.” Like that.
But anyway, Wong loved the kid. I suppose we all loved the kid. But as the Frenchmen say, the way Wong loved him was something extra special. He would smile all over his ivory face every time he heard the name Jigger.
So he had to get himself untangled from a lot of wasted emotion before he could tell me the story, which was that the kid had come riding up to the door of the kitchen and told Wong that here was the money that the boys had lost to the gambler. He said goodbye to Wong, and he wanted Wong to say goodbye to all the boys from him, particularly to me. He had written out a little note for my benefit,
I grabbed the note from Wong and ripped it open. It said:
Dear Chief,
I am sorry that this has happened. Most of all, I’m sorry that I broke my word to you and went after him. But I couldn’t help it. I got to thinking it over, and the more I thought about the way he had talked to you and the way he had sneered at everything that was said to him, the angrier I got. Finally, I just had to light out after him. I had a little talk with him, and he was hurt. I am going to get him into town and, with a little doctoring, I think that he will live. Of course, I regret everything. Most of all, I regret having to go
away so that I can no longer have your example to live up to and follow. Chief, I have to tell you that you have been a grand man for me to know, and I think that remembering you will keep me from ever sinking too low!
Affectionately,
Jeremy Bunts
P. S. I suppose that it isn’t necessary for me to tell you that I shall not submit to arrest. Of course, no man of honor could allow a sheriff to capture him. Goodbye, Tom. Someday I’ll see you again, unless they hunt me down in the meantime.
I leaned on Wong, waiting for my head to clear. The poor man was pretty sure that something was wrong with the kid, but he didn’t know what. And he kept blubbering and wanting to know is: “Lil’ Jigger plenty seek … no?”
Finally, I got my wind, grabbed that Roman-nosed fool of a horse, and started burning the quirt into him while I headed for town.
Chapter Eleven
There was only one town that any sensible man would start for from the ranch, and that was Marion Crossing, down on the river. So I headed for that town, and I rode all that day cursing the stiff gait of the pony and wishing that snow would all be damned. I started about midmorning, and I got there about midnight. There was a good stiff wind out of the north and the snow was coming down just fast enough to be miserable, trickling down your neck and swirling in front of your eyes. And when I saw the lights of Marion Crossing, they looked pretty comfortable to me, and the poor pony was so doggoned tired that he just stopped right there on top of the hill and stretched himself out and neighed to tell how mighty glad he was that there was an end to that trail.
But while that fool bronco was neighing his head off and while I sat there looking at the winking of the lights, something spoke up inside of me and told me that I would never get to the kid in time to head him off from doing something foolish.