by Max Brand
Affectionately,
Jigger
There he was, off in a cloud of glory to his work, and there was I in the hotel, chuckling over my pipe and then hoping a humble hope that maybe the salvation of the kid might be worked out of this deal. If only Maybelle would play the game right—and not lose her head. And if only the kid didn’t learn where to find Harry Wayne. That was the main pinch, and I take a little credit to myself for seeing that much in the distance.
I knew that Maybelle would soft-pedal on the brutalities of Harry Wayne, for a time, but she had spread an overdose of poison on the subject of Wayne at the first meeting, and I knew it would crowd Jigger’s system for a long time.
However, I had a good sleep that night, and then I waked up in the morning to find that there was a new sensation that made poor Jigger Bunts look like a tallow candle by the side of a comet of the first magnitude.
I mean that this was the time of the Garm murders. You recall them—too doggoned awful and blood-curdling to be repeated here. What paralyzed me and everybody else at the time was the knowledge of Garm. I’d seen Wully Garm myself, not once, but half a dozen times. He was a plain half-wit. Never had done any harm in his life. He was as good a shepherd as a man could ask for, and that was the work that he stuck to.
How he should have got his grudge against the old man that hired him, I don’t know. I’ve always held that Garm’s mind just slowly turned from imbecility to insanity. First, he had no more mind than a brute. Then, the mind that grew up in him became an addled thing, with a devilish leaning toward mischief.
And so the first murder came, and after he had the taste of blood, the others followed as he roved. What made him so frightful hard to catch was just because he could live like a beast, and he could walk through a mountain storm that would’ve killed an ordinary man. Besides, he had no nerves. When he drew his bead on a target, nothing in the way of mercy ever came between him and the pulling of the trigger. He shot to kill, and he didn’t miss, because shooting a man was no more to him than shooting a pig.
Bad as New Nineveh was, it was stirred up by the news about Garm. It sent out its contingent to join in the hunt the next day, and I went back to the ranch, from which I had been away longer than I really had any right.
* * * * *
I had a busy ten days, following that, and all that I heard from New Nineveh was two letters from Maybelle.
The first one came at the end of about a week. It ran like this:
Dear Tommy,
The wild man is turning out pretty good. He still acts like I was something on top of an altar, and it is very funny to be treated not like a woman but like a sort of thing made out of china. I might as well be an image, so far as the kid is concerned. He comes to see me every evening after dark. And he tells me that I’m the greatest woman in the world and bunk like that. It’s a scream.
There was pretty near a tragedy the other day, though, and I see that my old Tommy is a pretty good prophet.
It was Ed Smith who dropped in for a talk about old times. I had him in for dinner and forgot all about the kid. I was having a good party talking to old Ed.
Well, things run along pretty smooth until after dinner Ed got a mite excited and started to kiss me. Well, you know that I never like to be mauled around. Some girls think that it’s a great game, but I hate to be fondled like a cat. Poor old Ed thought that I was only joking, I suppose, and then he grabbed me, and I got so mad that I squealed and took a slap at him.
It was all over in a flash.
Something streaked in through the window and a couple of yards of fist and arm shot over my shoulder. The spat of that fist against the face of poor Ed was like two big hands clapped together.
And there lay Ed on the floor and the kid standing over him, trembling.
I was too flabbergasted to do anything for a minute. I didn’t recognize the kid, and his face had something in it that scared me. Just plain murder, Tommy! It was an awful thing to see.
You know that Ed is a big man, but Jigger scooped him up in his arms like a mother carrying a baby. Of course I knew what it meant. He was going to take Ed out into the night and, when Ed waked up, the kid would kill him, because poor old Ed had gone a mite too far with me.
It made me feel pretty sick, but I stopped him.
“Maybelle,” says Jigger, “you owe it to the world to let me get rid of this swine of a man. He don’t deserve to live.”
Well, I was really scared, then, but finally I managed to persuade Jigger that Ed had once been a very good friend of mine and that he really hadn’t meant any harm—but that he was just a sort of a simple-minded fellow—you see? I persuaded him at last, but it was a mighty hard fight, I can tell you. And Jigger said that he would let Ed Smith be, if Ed left the house the instant that he got his sense back.
That wasn’t happening so quick, either. I swabbed off the blood from Ed’s face. I was all in a tremble, knowing that that young demon was waiting outside in the dark. It really paralyzed me. But it was sort of thrilling, too, to feel that the tiger that chewed up other folks was tame to me, you understand?
When I brought Ed around, I only hoped that he wouldn’t talk too much, and he didn’t, because he’s not really the talking kind. I whispered to him that I was sorry, terribly sorry, and I told him that we were watched.
He only gave me a sour grin, and then he got himself together and left without a word. Of course he hates my heart, now, and I’ll never see him again—which is a shame.
Otherwise, Jigger Bunts has made no trouble. He has fixed himself up in a little room in the top of the barn, a sort of attic, right under the roof. I’ve been up to see it today, and it’s quite snug. He begged for a picture of mine, and I have given him a couple—which he certainly deserves.
He’s just like a child, Tommy. I feel like an old woman when I’m around him, and I have to fight like a demon all the time to remember that I’m not that much older than him! That’s the way that I dressed the first evening that I saw him, and that’s the way that I should never have dressed for him. However, that milk is spilled, and there’s no use crying about it.
In the meantime, I have to listen to great yarns about Louis Dalfieri. He worships that man, Tommy. He says that Dalfieri and me are the two great stars that guide his life. You know how he talks, poor kid. Well, I’m terribly fond of him. This lonely life isn’t at all bad with him around. Only, I wish that he would treat me as though I were flesh and blood instead of a statue.
I’ve gotten to such a point that I can drill into him my ideas about the life of an outlaw, and of course I make those ideas pretty strenuous. I tell him that it’s a crime for a young man to throw himself away, and I point out the fact that outlawry, if nothing else, is what makes him skulk like a whipped puppy instead of being able to come to see me in the open day. He seems to see the point of that remark, and I really believe that the noble free life of a two-gun man is not such hot stuff in his eyes as it was when I first saw him.
So long, Tommy.
Maybelle
That was just the sort of a letter that I had wished for. I was glad and surprised to find that there had been only one casualty in the list of Maybelle’s men friends. There was only one point that she had failed to cover, and that was whether or not Ed Smith had had a chance to see the face of the man who had knocked him down, and that point was a good deal of importance.
Well, I read that letter once a day. And three days after it came, there was another in the mail from Maybelle. It was shorter and pretty near as exciting as the first one. It said:
Dear Tommy,
Come quick. I have a grand idea that I want to talk over with you. I think that I have a scheme by which the kid can get out of outlawry and back onto his feet again. It’s mighty simple. And the best of it is that the same talents that made him a successful bandit may be the means of making him over into an
acceptable member of society once more. Hurry and come to me at once. I can’t wait to talk it over with you.
Well, I wanted to hurry, but cows are cows, and I had some work waiting for me on the ranch that had to be done first. It was two days before I could make the long trek to New Nineveh, but when I made my start, I didn’t hitch a span to a wagon.
I just threw a saddle on the fastest horse on the ranch, that I borrowed from Sam Mitchell’s string, and then I made the road smoke all the way from the ranch to New Nineveh, wondering every minute if the delay was going to make it too late for Maybelle to work her fine new plan. And I didn’t stop worrying until I pulled up in front of her house and saw the smile on her face when she opened the door to me.
There was still time; that much was plain.
Chapter Twenty-Six
You would have liked to see Maybelle the way that she was that day, full of pep and snap and smiling. She hooked her arm through mine, and she led me into her house and sat me down and said to me: “What would you say, Tommy, to making this Jigger Bunts a plumb free man, without the shadow of the law over his poor head?”
I just closed my eyes.
“Maybelle,” I said, “ain’t I the man that turned him into an outlaw? And of course don’t I pray every day that he’ll have a chance to get back again where he was when I put him wrong?”
She canted her head on one side, like a dog seeing a new bone. Then she shook her head.
“I’d like to think that,” Maybelle said. “I’d like to think that Jigger is such a weakling that he could be molded back and forth by every man that met him. No, Tommy, I think that there was just so much reckless deviltry in Jigger Bunts and that it had to come out sooner or later. Well, you happened to be there to give him a headlong start toward foolishness … with that Dalfieri idea.”
She gave me a scowl.
“Why, Maybelle,” I said, “you got to admit that a man wants to have his joke, now and then.”
“Humph!” Maybelle said. “You fellows were grown men, and you took advantage of a mere child.”
I didn’t answer that with speed at all. I just hauled off and took a good look at Maybelle, to make sure that it was really her that made that remark. Because it didn’t sound like her. Beginning with herself and her own affairs, there wasn’t much in the world that Maybelle took seriously. But she was serious now.
“However,” Maybelle continued, more judge-like than ever, “I know that you’re the friend for Jigger. I wish that he had more like you. And I think that I’ve hit on the way to put him right.”
I said: “You mentioned something in your letter about using the same means for setting him right that was used for setting him wrong … a fast horse and a pair of Colts. Did you really mean that, Maybelle?”
She didn’t seem to hear me. She was sitting there looking past me, with her eyes screwed up, trying to get a distant shot in the future.
“He’s able to handle most other men, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Like they were children,” I told her.
“And after all,” Maybelle said, “nothing ventured, nothing won. He’s got to take one big chance. But the first thing is a trip for you to see the governor.”
“Me? The governor?” I gasped. “That would be a treat to him, to have a chance to sit down and talk to me, wouldn’t it?”
“You ain’t funny, Tommy,” Maybelle insisted, very cold. “You’re just silly, you understand? You’re too modest to go and see the governor. But you weren’t too honest to start in and run the poor kid hellward as fast as you and your gang of second-rate jokers, as you call yourselves, could do it.”
Well, I couldn’t believe that I was hearing her straight, because not a word of that lingo sounded a bit like the Maybelle Crofter that I knew, and that was such a good pal and square shooter.
She left me flabbergasted, and then she went on: “You’re to go to the governor, however, as fast as you can get, and when you arrive there, you’re going to break in and see him, if you have to kill a couple of flunkies to get at him. And when you see him, you’re going to get five minutes of his listening time, even if you have to take it at the point of your Colt. And you’re going to say to him … ‘Boss, do you want to be a mighty popular governor down in my neck of the woods?’ And when he says yes, you’re going to say to him …”
Well, I won’t tell you here what it was that Maybelle suggested to me. It was a rank thing to try on the governor of a state, and at first I said that it wouldn’t work, at all, but she insisted until I gave in, and after that, the more that I thought about the deal, the more I felt that it might work.
* * * * *
I had a thirty mile cross-country ride to get me to the right railroad to run to the capital of the state. But I made the ride on a fresh horse that I borrowed from Maybelle, and then I sat up all night, bumping over a mountain roadbed in a day coach that was filled with reprobates that had got themselves all filled up with vino. Funny thing how long it lasted those fellows. Of course, they got themselves as chockablock as a pot of blotters dipped in water. And every time anything happened, it just squeezed some more noise and good nature out of them. Those idiots, they didn’t mind the jolting of that car. And when the brakes went on with a wham! and piled up half a dozen of them on one end of the coach, they just picked themselves up, laughing, and they started singing a song. They knew all the songs that there were in the world outside of the English language, and they sung them so good that you wouldn’t believe it. They kept it up to the crack of dawn, and then just as they began to sober up enough to fall asleep in patches, here and there, the train pulled into the capital town.
But, oh my, I wouldn’t’ve had the heads that those muckers would own by the time that they got to the end of that day’s trip and the mines where they were to start working right away!
I got out, and I had my eye full of the city right away. I have been to Denver, but that’s just too big to understand. It’s like a world all by itself. It would take you a year just to memorize the names of the streets, and even then you wouldn’t know half of them! You could bust around and eat in a different place—a hotel or a restaurant—every day pretty near forever.
But Denver, as I say, is too big to understand. But the state capital, it had only about twenty-five thousand, which you’ll agree is a whopping big town. It had street cars, and pavements, and electric lights, and shops with wax models in the windows, and businessmen that wore rubber-heeled shoes and bright polishes, and high-
stepping horses, and pretty near everything that you could ever wish to see. But I’ll tell you, you could only hope to learn to understand a town like that, if you was to live the biggest part of your life in it!
I was terrible interested, and when I went up to the big white stone building where the governor’s office was, I hardly minded it when they told me that I would have to have an appointment made with his secretary before I could talk to him. I went in to see his secretary, which was a young man that smiled a good deal, but it didn’t seem to mean much, and he hoped that he would see me again, but he didn’t give me much hope that I would see the governor, which he said was suffering a lot from having shaken so many hands the week before at a reception. He kept right on talking until he talked me out of his office, and I went back and wandered around the town again.
Altogether, I was pretty well satisfied that there was only one way to manage, and that was to break in on the old governor when he wasn’t expecting me.
I walked out to his house that afternoon. And I walked around it until I had a pretty good idea of the lay of the land. I saw a man polishing the brass on the front door on which there was a hooknosed knocker and much trumpery all around, you understand? I told him that it was a mighty big house and that it must be a fine thing to work in such a big place. He said that it was, but that if I was looking for a job, it was no good, because there was a waiting list
. I said I was sorry to hear that because I had heard it was fine to work for such a kindhearted man as the governor.
He said: “Where did you hear that? The chief is made out of horsehide and iron. That’s all. He’s so mean that he don’t even mind the sunshine in the morning, and he sleeps on the east side of the house with the blinds all up!”
That was a good deal to learn, and that night I waited around in the back garden of the house for the light to flash on in that big set of windows on the second floor. However, I didn’t have to do no porch climbing after all.
Just before midnight, the governor and his wife came out for a breath of fresh air, as they put it, and they walked up and down with the moon on their silvery hair. What would you think that important folks like that would talk about? Important things, of course. Well, you would’ve been surprised!
“What a damned old bore the judge is!” the governor said to his wife.
“Would you mind not walking so fast?” said the governoress.
“Are your feet sore from those infernal tight shoes?” the governor asked.
“My shoes are not tight!” she said. “Heavens … at my age I hope that vanity …”
“Stuff!” he exclaimed. “There are a lot of queer things about you, Lizzie, but nothing quite so queer as your ideas about yourself. The trouble with women is that …”
“Harry,” she said, “I’ve sat on platforms and listened to your silly speeches, but I won’t listen to them in my own backyard. I’m going inside for a little peace!”
“Humph!” was the governor’s response to that.
And he let her go in.
Well, there you are! There was a couple of newspapers that always printed pictures of the governor and his wife with their two grandchildren on their laps, and their growed-up sons and daughters standing grouped around, trying to look like they didn’t know that they were in the papers. Thousands of votes the size of that family got for the governor. Because you take a big family man like that, people take it for granted that he hasn’t got such a lot of fancy brains, you know. It looks solid and simple. You even feel a little superior to him, and a little pity for him. And that’s the sort of people that we Americans like to elect to office to run us.