by Max Brand
The governor threw away his cigarette as soon as his wife was gone inside of the house, and he got out an old black pipe and whittled up some plug and stuffed that pipe and lighted it up, and I tell you what, that pipe was a snorter, even out there in the open airs; I got a lot more respect for the governor right away. Then he walked up and down with a frown on his forehead, and the moon on his face, and his hands folded behind him.
“Now he is working out a pretty important point,” I mutter to myself, but just then he began to move his lips and then I heard him singing very soft.
Hey, diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such sport
And the dish …
I got a whiff of his pipe smoke, and it brought a sneeze ripping out of me before I could do anything to control it. The governor turned around with a grunt, and there was me stepping out of the shrubbery behind him.
He made a grab at his hip pocket, and gave a little squeal of excitement, more like a pig than a governor, but I made free to grab his right wrist.
“Chief,” I warned, “let’s talk it over friendly. I don’t mean you no harm at all.”
He was as cool as the devil after the first fluster.
“I don’t think you do,” he says. “But why are you back here like a sneak thief?”
“Because your secretary says that you’re engaged until the end of the year.”
“God bless him,” the governor said more to himself than me. “The tonnage of lying that he’s able to do would sink an ocean liner. Well, sir, what do you want of me now that you have me? I only make one bargain with you … that you don’t keep me here more than ten minutes.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
That was a pretty fair bargain. Ten minutes was really enough for me to tell my yarn in, and as I accepted, the governor pulled out his watch and wound it, looking me in the face.
“Now,” he said, “what do you want?”
“I’m here,” I explained, “to make a bargain for an outlawed man.”
The governor was pleased right away. He dropped the watch into his vest pocket and put his hands on his hips. He looked a square shooter.
“Who’s your man?” he asked.
“Jigger Bunts,” I told him.
The governor shook his head. “You’re aiming to die,” said he. “I don’t mind being held up for the sake of some common or garden criminal. I have a lot of sympathy with the crooks. Every honest man ought to have, if he’s taken enough fair looks into his own heart. But in the meantime, what I want to know is how I could strike any sort of a bargain with a desperado who has been making fools out of my sheriffs, laughing at our posses, and cramming the newspapers with accounts that make the law and the governor of the state look very foolish indeed. No, sir, you can’t talk to me about a fellow like Bunts, who I have an almost personal grudge against. I don’t mind saying that I feel a record like his is a blot on the record that I have made as an officer upholding the law with my whole strength!”
That was pretty much of a facer for me, but I wasn’t to be beaten off at the very beginning.
I said: “Your honor, you were under twenty once.”
“Don’t talk to me like a judge,” he said, and grinned. “Yes, I was once under twenty. What follows from that?”
“Nothing, except that you know that when a man is under twenty, he’s apt to be a good deal of a fool.”
The governor grinned.
“Do you know that Jigger Bunts was under twenty when he started?” I asked.
“Billy the Kid was only thirteen or fifteen when he started,” said the governor. “But he killed more than one white man for every year of his life, before he was through with his career. And there were Negroes and Indians and Mexicans thrown in for full measure without being counted at all. No, sir, I know that some of these rascally gunfighters are precocious, but that doesn’t incline me to be more merciful. What is your name?”
“Tom Reynard.”
“Reynard,” the governor repeated. “I’ve never heard your name before, but you’ve got a clean pair of eyes in your head, and you ought to know that a gunfighter is a detestable cur, as a rule. He spends his life practicing with his weapons instead of working honestly. And when he can think of nothing else to do, he starts out and finds himself a fight. What chance would I have against a real gunfighter? I can’t hit the side of a barn with a revolver, and I’m inclined to thank God for it. Rifles are meant to bring down game. But revolvers bag nothing but human beings … and I wish that the sale of them were prohibited by a most stringent law!”
It was my luck to run into a governor for our state who was so red hot against desperadoes and gunfighters.
“Well, sir,” I said, “I want to ask you to remember in the first place that you can’t count the time that you talk out of my ten minutes.”
He wasn’t offended. He chuckled and nodded. “I guess I’ve been at the stump again,” he admitted. “It’s a bad habit that we politicians have. We can’t think except in headlines. Go on, Mr. Reynard.”
He was a real good one, was that governor. The sort that you wouldn’t mind having in camp, even in winter. You could lay to it that he would lift his share of the work.
I said: “You got to make a distinction between a gunfighter and a man who shoots straight.”
“Perhaps, perhaps,” he said. “But what are you driving at?” “Well, I want you to notice that the kid … I mean, Jigger Bunts … shoots so doggoned straight that he hasn’t killed a man yet …”
“Hold on! He’s wanted for murder!” barked the governor.
“That was a sneaking headhunter … a no-good swine!” I let him know. “No district attorney in the state would dare to try him for that. The jury would wind up by voting the kid their thanks, I tell you. No, I want to get a pardon for the other fracases, but I’d as soon see him step to the tune for that killing!”
The governor was pretty interested by this time.
“Are you an uncle of Bunts?” he asked.
Then I opened up, and I told the story. As fast as I could, but even at that, the story didn’t fit into any short space of time. I tell you, I left out nothing, from the first time I met the kid, up to the time that I said goodbye to Maybelle. The governor listened like a good sort. He laughed at me and Louis Dalfieri until there was tears in his eyes.
Then he said: “Reynard, this is the queerest story that I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m flabbergasted. But I believe every word that you’ve said. But what can I do? I’d like to help that boy. I’d … I’d like to have a talk with him, even. But show me a loophole through which I can step with any dignity and pardon him.”
“I’m going to make you a loophole,” I said. “This Jigger Bunts isn’t the only critter that’s roaming around in this here state and messing up the face of the law and cramming the newspapers.”
“It’s true,” the governor agreed.
“Now,” I told him, “suppose that I get Mrs. Wayne to take this job up with the kid and to tell him that he has to make his peace with the law and to start him after one of these crooks … these real crooks, that shoot to kill every time they get their fur up? If he brings in one of those badmen, dead or alive, will you write him a pardon?”
He considered this thing up and down. “It’s damned illegal!” he hissed.
“But natural,” I said.
“Tell me, is this Mrs. Wayne’s idea?”
“Yes,” I said. “Every word of it. I wouldn’t have the nerve to think out a whole idea like that.”
“Humph,” the governor said, adding: “You go back and tell her to go ahead. If your man Bunts can land Croydon, the counterfeiter, or that scoundrelly kidnapper Loftus, or, of course, the abysmal brute, Wully Garm, I’ll sign a pardon for him. Wil
l that suit you?”
I said that it would—that it would suit me all over, and I couldn’t help throwing in that it would make me and a lot of other honest men the friends of that governor for life.
“Humph,” he repeated. “Now about this Mrs. Wayne. What’s to become of her?”
“She’ll have her divorce and be free, in a little while,” I told him. “Then she can go on making business for the lawyers, I suppose.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But I wonder if mothering this Jigger Bunts may not make everything else pretty dull for her?”
I had never thought of that, and I told the governor that the whole thing was just a joke.
“A joke?” he exclaimed. “Now let me tell you, Reynard, that you’re old enough to know that women have no sense of humor … inside their own affairs. They’re too damned serious, even the best of them, and you put that idea in your pipe and smoke it for a while, will you? But as for this business, you’ve taken an hour of my time, not ten minutes. Goodnight, Reynard. God be with you and the boy. I wish you all the luck in the world!”
He was such a straight shooter, so simple and so damned fine, that it just brought the tears to my eyes. I shook hands with him, and then I went to find a hotel.
* * * * *
The next morning I was driving south as fast as a train would carry me, and that same night I was in the house of Maybelle again. What would you think that I walked in on?
Well, it was Jigger Bunts sitting in a corner of the room, with his mustaches more waxed out than ever, and Maybelle had a book under her arm when she opened the door to me and led me in.
“Hello,” I said, after I’d shaken hands with Jigger. “Are the pair of you back in school? What’s the book?”
“The most wonderful book in the world,” Maybelle gushed. “It’s all about Tristram and Lancelot and Arthur and Guinevere, and the rest of them. They were a happy lot of high-steppers, Tommy! Sit down while I read to you and Jigger about …”
“Have you been reading aloud?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “and never had such a …”
I just stood there and wondered at her, because I knew that the only reading that she every cottoned onto was the ads in the fashion magazines, and such like things. But here she was sober enough to do knitting, and wearing glasses!
I cut in on that reading and pulled her to one side.
“It’s fixed,” I told her. “Garm … or Loftus … or Croydon, the counterfeiter, dead or alive. Garm doesn’t count, of course. Don’t sic the kid after him, because Garm is too damned dangerous, even for the kid. But if he fetches in either of the other two … dead or alive … there’s a pardon waiting for him in the governor’s office. You understand?”
“Thank God,” said Maybelle. “Then he’s saved.”
“There’s only one dead gunfighter between him and another even start,” I said.
And I left her to work up the idea with the kid in her own way, because there was something about this bartering of one life for another that I didn’t like, particular, as you may understand for yourself.
It had been a rough, long trip, and an anxious one, and I was mighty glad to hit the hay that night.
* * * * *
The next day I sashayed out to the ranch without even stopping to call on Maybelle before I left. I didn’t have to. There had been something close and chummy in the air of the room the night before that made me know that what one of them wanted, the other would be sure to try to do.
But all the way out to the ranch, I kept remembering what the governor had said—that the kid wasn’t the only one to be thought of in this game. And that Maybelle counted, too, and counted pretty big! Perhaps he was right. How right he was, I never guessed till the end.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
What happened was what we might have known beforehand, if we had used any sense. When we turned loose the kid, like a hawk he sighted the biggest quarry and went after it.
He had Loftus and Croydon, big enough quarry for any man, you would say, but the kid had a different opinion. I got part of the history from Jigger himself and part from others. And part of it you could deduce from what was known.
Before Maybelle got through with him that night, there didn’t seem anything strange in bringing in one man to stand for him—turning over one outlaw to take the place of the kid’s own danger. He was off in the dark, before morning, riding hard, but the direction that he picked was not that in which Croydon or Loftus had been seen last. He galloped for the region where the brute—Wully Garm—was last seen.
Even Jigger Bunts must have felt some fear while he was riding on that trail. He wouldn’t’ve been human if he hadn’t. But he got into the mountains just after the worst of all of Garm’s crimes had been committed—I mean the murder of the three Chippendales in their ranch house. No reason for that killing. Wully was simply running amuck, now, and killing for the sake of the slaughter!
Jigger Bunts followed the trail of Garm, hard and fast, and he came about even of the fourth day from the Chippendale house, in sight of the carcass of a deer. The way that deer had been butchered was so rough and showed such a strong hand that the kid made up his mind, on the spot, that Wully Garm must have done that work. And having done that work, it occurred to Jigger that Wully would probably have eaten a bellyful and gone into the woods somewhere pretty near to sleep off his meal.
Well, Jigger was a great hand at following a trail. Under some fallen leaves, he picked up the mark of a great sprawling foot, and in ten minutes of careful work, he came onto the sound of a heavily breathing creature. When he stepped out into a little clearing and in the shadow at one side of it, he had his first view of Garm.
It must have been a horrible thing to see that great loose-lipped face even when it was quiet in sleep. And Jigger told me afterward that the face was not really quiet, but working a little all of the time—the jowls quivering, or the big lips twitching a bit, or the fleshy brow being disturbed into a wrinkle.
Just the way that a wild dog acts by the fire—jerking open an eye every now and then and looking around out of his sleep with a start.
But, anyway, there was Wully Garm found at last, the whole two and a half shapeless hundredweight of him. I think that if I’d been the lucky fellow who made that discovery, I should have put a bullet through his head while he lay there and never let him see the light of the stars again.
And even the bravest man wouldn’t have wanted to do anything bolder than to tie the hands of the giant while he was sleeping. But that wouldn’t suit Jigger.
Louis Dalfieri, according to the yarns that the boys and me told about him, would always fight any man in any way that he wanted to fight, and with any weapons. And so the kid sat down on a rock and waited while the moon rose and shone bright over the trees.
At last, there was a grunt and a snort, and the sleeper was awake and rolling to his knees.
He wasn’t confused. He was too near to the brute to have his brain numbed by sleeping, but, like a wolf, the moment he opened his eyes, he was himself.
He reached for his revolver—his rifle—his knife.
They were all gone, of course. The kid had had the sense to see to that.
Jigger stood facing the big, squat beast of a man, and he said: “Garm, I’ve come to take you to jail. Will you go along quietly?”
Garm showed his yellow, pointed teeth.
Imagine asking Garm to come along to jail! However, that was the way of the heroes in the books that the kid had always been reading. And that would have been Louis Dalfieri’s way, of course. He was going to be knightly or bust.
“Do you hear me?” Jigger said, with a shudder going through him, I suppose, as he saw the brute stand up on its hind legs and snarl at him.
“I hear you,” Garm said. “But I’m not going. If I got to be murdered, I’ll be murdered he
re.”
“Murdered?” the kid said, and I can see how his head would have gone up and how his lip would have curled. “Murdered? There’s to be no murder, Wully Garm. We’ll fight it out fair and square in any way that you choose.”
Of course, Garm wouldn’t believe him. But when he finally got the idea through his head, he went almost crazy with joy, and reached out his long arms and his great thick, wiggling fingers.
“No guns … no knives … hands!” Garm shouted, and his mouth gaped with a wolf’s grin. “Hands, hands!”
And what did Jigger do?
Oh, he simply threw aside guns and knives and rifle and all, and he stood up to the giant with his bare hands!
I’m glad that I didn’t see that fight. It must have been too horrible. Not like man and man, but like an eagle and a bear, say. With Garm the bear and the kid the eagle.
The kid tried to close with his man and grapple. I suppose he felt that the only real knightly thing was to do just exactly as Garm did, but the instant that those great fingers closed on him, he knew his mistake.
I knew that the kid could turn himself into a greased snake when he wanted to get away from anyone. I’d seen him do it at the ranch, when half a dozen of the boys tried to get him down, but he would have died this time, if, as he twisted about, his shirt hadn’t torn to threads and so let him out of the hands of Garm, half naked. Garm rushed on in, fair slavering with joy and running on his great, crooked, thick legs.
He caught at the thin air and got a blind pair of slashing punches across the face. The kid stood off and began to box. He slammed Garm with both hands until his arms ached, but he couldn’t put the big fellow down.