by Max Brand
It was the blacksmith that told me this stuff, talking behind his hand. He was a hard one, that blacksmith, but he didn’t want his opinions to get aired.
“They got about that far in their yarning, and the boys was beginning to agree to everything that this here Hendon said,” the blacksmith informed me, “when doggone me if a shadow didn’t drop out of the branches of that fir tree, yonder, and right into the bunch of them. And it started a flock of trouble, because that shadow had the action of a wildcat and the shape of a man. It landed right on poor Hendon, first of all, and squashed his hat. And then it flickered around for about ten seconds, and everything that it touched went flat. Just about the time that the guns began to chatter, the shadow disappeared, and the boys have been milling around ever since, trying to locate it.”
Now, before that story was half told, a chilly idea had begun to percolate into my brain and send a shiver clean down the length of my spine. I said to the blacksmith: “Who could it have been? Some drunk having a party all by himself?”
“Drunk?” said the blacksmith, grinning sidewise at me. “Well, no drunk that I’ve ever seen was half as fast on his feet or hit half as hard with his fists. But my idea is that the shadow that dropped on those boobs and flattened them out was Jigger Bunts!”
It was my idea, too, of course.
I separated myself from the blacksmith as soon as I could, and I slid into the hotel and up to my room. The whole town was beginning to wake up all over again, and men were hunting everywhere for the fellow that had played the joke on the deputy sheriff and his gang of pals. Except that most of the people that I met in the lobby of the hotel swore that the shadow must have been wearing brass knuckles.
Well, I knew something about the strength in the hands and the shoulders of Jigger, and there was something so foolish and childish and useless about the whole proceeding that I could have sworn that it was Jigger and nobody else.
When I got up to the room, whatever doubts I had were put to rest. Because there I found Jigger walking up and down with a long, soft, easy stride, like a walking cat when it figures that a mouse is probably behind the next door.
When I popped in, Jigger whirled around on me as though he expected that I might be the mouse. The lamp wasn’t lighted. I could hardly see him, but his satisfaction sort of lighted up the room for me. He was as happy as a kid with a whole Christmas tree to himself.
“I thought you’d be having a sleep, Jigger,” I said. “Or cleaning your guns, or something like that.”
“I slept myself out,” said Jigger, “and I’d finished cleaning my guns … when I decided that a little air wouldn’t do me any harm. So I just went out for a little walk.”
“Jigger,” I said, “you swore to me that you wouldn’t leave this room until I got back to it, didn’t you?”
It knocked him all in a heap, as the saying is.
“Old-timer,” he answers, “I’m terribly sorry. I just forgot all about it.”
“Maybe you’ll explain how come that you forgot,” I snapped, pretty stern, “and maybe you’ll explain, too, what all of this shooting has been about? And finally, maybe you’ll tell me how a gent that acts the way that you’ve been doing the first day that you’re put on your good behavior is going to be able to play soft and low and take care of a poor lonely girl like …?”
He was repentant. He fairly crawled to get back into my good opinion. He said that as he sat at the window, he could hear them talking. And it was a little irritating to him. He didn’t intend to make any trouble. But he wanted to see them closer, and so he leaned out of the window and eased himself into the big fir tree that stood next to the wall—and after that—well, the temptation was too great.
I went to the window and looked out. The tip of the nearest branch of that tree was six feet away. How could anything but a bird or a monkey get into the tree at that distance.
Well, I don’t know to this day!
Chapter Twenty-Two
I waited about half an hour, and during that time some of the furor died away in the town. They were still hunting for the stranger who had broken up Hendon’s little party, but they weren’t hunting with half so much vim when I said to Jigger: “Now, son, I’m going to go down to the street and turn up to the right. In about five minutes, I’ll be at the second corner, and I’ll wait there for a minute or two. After that, I’ll expect that you’ll be watching and following me, though how you’ll get there, I leave to you.”
That didn’t seem to upset him at all. I went down into the lobby and there I found big Hendon. He was a mess. There was a big cut under one eye, and his nose looked like a red balloon moored to his face and about ready to rise. He was pretty hot, and he was telling the men down there that he was sure that the man who had done these things to him had gotten into the hotel. Hendon intended to search the place. In the meantime, he told what a cowardly thing it had been—for a man to drop out of a tree on top of him!
Nobody dared to smile, because Hendon was a known man. But I went out onto the street, and heard a fellow in a corner of the room saying softly: “It looks more like the work of Bunts than of any other man I know.”
It looked like Jigger Bunts to them, and that was the reason that New Nineveh was so worked up over a mere fistfight. For that town hated Jigger Bunts, as I’ve said before. The very fact that he was so decent in his very crimes was a thing that made the town hate him more than ever. And there were a full twenty real badmen in New Nineveh. The history of the town read like a few pages out of a jail record. But if New Nineveh had never done any other thing, it had always made itself respected as a fighting community—and yet here was a fellow who came along and made a mock of them and started to work first on the outskirts of the town with a stage holdup—and then came in and beat up their leading citizens with his bare hands—half a dozen of them at a time!
No wonder New Nineveh was angry. Any other town might have been, for a smaller provocation than this!
When I got to the second street crossing, I waited for a minute, making a cigarette, and then I went slowly on again. When I came to the house of Maybelle Wayne, I stood again just inside of the big hedge that circled the yard. There wasn’t a sound from the house. And its face was black, except for a single lighted window on the first floor. The smell of the wet lawn and the sound of the sprinkler that was still spinning with a hushing murmur in a distant corner of the yard made me feel like I had come back to a real home.
It was Maybelle’s work, of course. She knew how to play a part. And if she had to turn a whole house and lot into part of her stage, why, she could do it!
There was a soft, catlike step crossing the sidewalk, and here was Jigger Bunts beside me.
“Sorry I’m late,” he whispered. “But a fellow saw me down the street and started to hold me up …”
“Good God, Jigger, what did you do?”
“It wouldn’t do to have any noise. I knew that that might spoil everything. Besides, I knew that you were pretty mad at me because I’d … er … had a little party earlier in the evening. So I tied this chap up and left him there with a gag between his teeth. I’m terribly sorry that I’m late.”
That was like Jigger. He took himself and his ways for granted. He was the only living human being that could!
I took him up to the front door, but he wasn’t in any rush. He kept whispering: “Wait a minute, Tom. I want you to brush me off. I’m pretty dusty. This necktie doesn’t hang any too well … a man like Dalfieri … why, he’d never appear any place looking so rough as I do now.”
Dalfieri, Dalfieri, Dalfieri! How damned tired I was of that name.
After I had knocked at the front door, there was no answer, except that the light went out in the front room.
The kid grabbed me by the shoulder. “Look,” he whispered. “You’ve frightened her.”
“Go on,” I said. “What’s there to fr
ighten her in a knock at her front door?” I rapped again.
After a while, there was a rustle in the hall, and then as I knocked a third time, the door was pulled open about a quarter of an inch.
“Who is there?” said a whisper, very shaky.
“Tom Reynard,” I answered, swallowing a grin.
She was slick, was Maybelle, but I never imagined that she would stack the cards like this.
When she heard my voice and name, she jerked the door open wide.
“Oh,” Maybelle gasped, “a friend!”
She was revealed, as they say in the papers, all dressed up in white, with her hands clasped at her breast, breathing hard and fast.
“Were you scared, Maybelle?” I asked.
“Oh, Tom … dear Tom,” she said. “Thank God that it is only you … I thought … I thought; no … no, I can’t say it!”
The little cat! She was going it a bit strong. I was afraid that even the kid would begin to see through this.
I said: “I’ve brought a friend to see you, Maybelle.”
“A friend of yours, Tom,” she responded, “will be my friend, too, I trust and pray.”
Doggone her, where did she pick up words like that? Just plain book talk, near as bad as Jigger Bunts’ own kind.
“But I must get a light,” she announced. “When I first heard you come, I thought that the lamp might give an enemy light to …” She left that unfinished and went scuttling off down the hall with her dress whispering around her.
The kid grabbed me by the shoulder. “Oh God, Tom,” he whispered, “how terrible. Who would think it? A woman afraid of what men may do to her … afraid … that they’ll see her. Oh, I’d like to do ten murders on the strength of this.”
“Leave go of my arm!” I snapped at him. “Leave go of me before your fingers scrape the bone. Maybe you will do ten murders before you’re through with it!”
She got a lamp lighted, and came out into the black hall, and held the lamp up above her head so we could see our way—and see her, too.
She was worth seeing, I got to admit.
She was all dressed up in white, skimpy and slender. She had no color on her except a red rosebud with its whole green stem pinned across her breast, diagonal. She had that yellow hair of hers done into a pigtail that snaked down her back, and the lamplight flared and fluttered and sparkled on it, and turned it into gold.
I have always figured that there is as much in the way that a pretty woman holds herself as there is in her beauty alone. If a girl has a beautiful face, she’s got to have a beautiful way, too, or else she’ll never show it off. She’s got to learn to stand up in the eye of the world as much as to say: “Here I come. Now is your chance for a good look at me, boys. Don’t miss me, because I’m worth seeing!”
I mean, they don’t have to be artful other ways. But I’ve seen fourteen-year-old girls—yes, and little kids hardly more than able to toddle—that had that same air. They know that there is something doggoned neat about them, and they want the world to stand off and take a good look at them.
Well, I hardly need to say that Maybelle had this air. She kept it in her pocket most of the time, but tonight she had taken it out, and she wore it like a light in her face. I hardly looked at her. I kept my eye fixed on the kid, and doggone me if it wasn’t almost sad, he was so hard hit. He stood there in his waxed-up mustache and his wild reputation, and he gaped at her as though she had been a fairy and he a five-year-old kid.
She led us into the living room, and I had to support the kid. He was so weak and shaken that he was trembling. I don’t think he could have budged from the spot where she first hit him like a thunderbolt.
I pressed a mite ahead of him, and I said quietly to Maybelle: “Loosen up a mite, will you? You’ve got him paralyzed.”
Well, she turns around, with one of her hands resting on the table in the light of the lamp. Usually, she was pretty brown, because she loved the outdoors, and she wasn’t particular about a hat. That was how come that the sun had faded a good deal of the gold out of her hair. But tonight she had put the gold right back into that hair, and she had gummed up her hands and face and neck with powder so that they looked crystal white—but not a bit floury, the way that some girls do themselves.
She sure looked shrinking and delicate and so doggoned tender that she would melt in your mouth, so to speak.
“Maybelle,” I said, “I want you to know my friend Jerry Burns. Jerry, this is Maybelle Wayne.”
Of course, I couldn’t right out and introduce him by his outlawed name.
But what did Maybelle do? When I spoke her married name, she caught up both hands quick to her face, and she stood there sort of swaying for a minute at the side of the table.
“Oh, Tom! Oh, Tom!” she cried with a break in her voice. “Do I have to take that name even to your friends?”
When she covered up her face and registered pain, the kid reached her in one jump. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to help her. He wanted to support her. He wanted to show her that names didn’t make any difference to him. He wanted to make it clear to her that even if her name was mud, it wouldn’t keep him from knowing how beautiful and clean and good and wonderful she was!
He stood about, first on one foot and then on the other, like the worst young jackass in the world.
And then he would look at me, as much as to say: “Tell me what to do! Tell me what to do!”
I didn’t know myself. I only leaned close to Maybelle and whispered: “You’re laying this stuff on pretty thick.”
She whispers right back: “The poor kid is eating it up. Don’t tell me what to do. I know him like I was his mammy.”
Then she looks up and puts down her hands, and her eyes, they were all teary and bright and sad, and her lips were trembling, and her head was a little to one side, and she went up and held out her hand toward him a little ways, like she was afraid that maybe she wasn’t good enough to shake hands with him.
She said: “I don’t know that you can wish to … wish to …”
She was choked, she was.
What did the kid do? Oh, he done something out of a book, of course, because it was a lot too good an opportunity for him to miss. He drops on one knee and takes her hand in his and raises it to his lips.
It nearly floored me. Maybelle, she was as cool as marble, and there were no nerves added when the stuff that she was made of was first mixed up. But even Maybelle was a little staggered by this. She blinked, and she said to me with her lips: “Good Gawd, Tom, what sort of a fish is this?”
Right on top of that, she had to look down, and catch her hand away from him, and stand back, and be all confused and startled and embarrassed, and she done it fine, and the kid got up and looked like the “Boy on the Burning Deck” in that poem.
Well, it was just sickening. It’s like a moving picture close-up. I couldn’t stand it. I stood back behind the kid and made a face at Maybelle.
She only gives me a horrible sugar-and-water smile and she said: “Dear Tom, how kind and good you are to me. Have you brought another friend into my life?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
I suppose that she had a right to do the job in her own way, but, all the same, it was pretty hard on me, as you can see for yourself. I stood it as well as I could, but then I said to Maybelle: “I want you and Bunts to have a chance for a good talk. I’ll go out on the verandah in front … and watch in the dark.”
I said it real dangerous.
“Oh,” Maybelle said, “you always think of everything.”
And she ran along with me, real girlish, toward the door, saying: “You big fish, are you gonna leave me here with this tub of cold water? While you sit outside and listen? You’ll have bad dreams for this, Tom Reynard!”
Well, sir, I was so glad to be shut of that room and all of the foolery that was going o
n inside of it that I hardly knew what to do. And then l walked up and down the front lawn for the length of time that it took me to smoke one cigarette.
Then I heard the piano begin, very soft and light, and what do you think that she was playing? Some go-get-’em tune like she knew how to reel out? No, sir, I tell you that what that little devil was singing was “The Last Rose of Summer,” so doggoned sad and pathetic that it pretty near choked me—and not just with laughing, either! Well, after I had finished my cigarette, I walked up onto the verandah to see how the show was coming along, and what did I see?
There was the kid sitting at the table with his face dropped in both hands, and yonder was Maybelle Crofter leaning back in the couch, wringing her hands a good deal, and keeping her eyes closed and her brows lifted, real cinematic.
Now and then the kid jerked up his head and grabbed his heart and gave himself a look at her, and that would knock him all in a heap again, and he would start in again and hold his head.
It was pretty ridiculous. And yet I had to admire Maybelle. I had been wondering how she would cover up her slangy talk and her slangy way, but when I seen her that evening, she was pure Hollywood and nothing else at all.
Suddenly, the kid jumped up. He was facing the window direct, and so I could tell pretty clear what he said, which was: “Don’t tell me any more. I don’t want to hear. It just makes me sick!”
He looked like it did, too. But she went on.
“I want you to know. It … it would kill me to have you as a friend unless you knew all the terrible truth about me. And … and … you must know that I have been married three times.”
“Three times!” cried the kid, turning simply white.
I got a little pale myself. It looked to me as though Maybelle had chucked her cards right out through the window and thrown away a fine winning game.
She continued: “Yes. The first time was because my poor father was growing weak with sickness …”