by Max Brand
He cut the face of Garm simply to ribbons, and the pain addled whatever little wits there were left to big Wully Garm.
I suppose that he would have been sure to win out in this sort of fighting, if he had just waited long and patiently enough. Because the cutting hands of the kid might hurt and sting him, but they couldn’t do him any real harm, any more than the talons of an eagle could do any harm to a bear.
But Wully couldn’t stand the gaff. Finally, he reached down and caught up a rock the size of half a man’s body and heaved it at the kid. The corner of it brushed his head and knocked him flat, and Garm rushed in to finish his job.
He rushed in, but here the luck was against him, just as he was aiming to finish the fight in grand style by falling on the kid and choking the life out of him with one mangling grip of his big hands.
He had made a mistake, as I was saying, because the spot where the kid dropped, half stunned, was where he had shed his guns when he shed them in standing up to face the challenge of Garm. And when the active hand of the kid fell on the cold steel of his Colt, there was a flash of light let into his brain.
Or maybe that hand of his acted almost automatically, it had been so well trained by Jigger Bunts for hour after hour, and for day after day.
And so, as Wully Garm threw himself through the air at the kid, the hand of Jigger Bunts flicked out faster than the tongue of a snake, and it came back carrying a .45 Colt that barked right into the hideous face of Garm.
Afterward, Jigger lay for a time, sick and done for. But he managed to pull himself out from under the weight of the dead. He was exhausted. But except for the scratch along his head, he wasn’t badly hurt.
When he was rested, he went back to his horse, and he rode on down to the nearest town.
“Is there an officer of the law in this place?” the kid asked the first person he saw.
The gent that had met up with him said there was, because a deputy sheriff had just come up there from New Nineveh on the trail of Wully Garm, and right now he was at the hotel.
To the hotel went Jigger and walked straight in.
It made a pretty good picture I’ll bet, and I’ll never forgive my luck for not giving me a chance to see it.
There stands Jigger Bunts, with the dust and the dirt brushed off of him, and his coat buttoned up high, and the big flowing black necktie done around his throat because his shirt had been torn to pieces. But he had gone over the rest of himself, and rubbed out and twisted his mustaches to as sharp a point as ever, and had combed his hair, and tied a handkerchief around the place on his head where the corner of the big stone had cut through to the skull.
And yonder stood Hendon, whose face was still swollen and purple and out of shape from the beating the kid had given him not so terribly long before.
Hendon let out a bellow and grabbed out two Colts. Gents who were there at the time say that his hands shook a lot, and he was so excited he probably couldn’t have hit the wall, let alone Jigger Bunts.
However, Jigger hadn’t come there to find more trouble. He just smiled at Hendon and said: “I’ve come to surrender myself, Hendon, and to tell you that your chase of Garm is ended.”
“Ended?” Hendon repeated, fair paralyzed, of course. “Has the brute fallen off a cliff?”
“More or less,” the kid answered. “I’ll tell you where to find him laid out.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Hendon came tearing back to New Nineveh like a conquering hero, with Jigger Bunts along with him, and he timed his entry so as to make it about noon, when everybody could come out into the streets and see him go by with his rifle balanced across the pommel of his saddle and Jigger, all covered with irons and guarded by gents with naked guns, riding behind.
Hendon got a lot of cheers for that bit of work. People sort of overlooked the fact that Jigger had come in and given himself up. And when that was suggested, Hendon allowed that Jigger had been scared into surrendering, because he knew that he, Hendon, was on the trail.
Anyway, there wasn’t a long time left for Hendon to lick his chops. The papers were all full of the news the next morning, and the message was telegraphed through to New Nineveh that evening.
It was all full of whereas’—extreme legal. And it set out that, since Jigger had only one death laid to him, and that being the death of another man in bad order with the law, and since he had voluntarily submitted to arrest and showed a willingness to stand trial and submit to punishment for his crimes, and most of all because he had done a lot for the people of the mountains by killing the murderer, Wully Garm, the governor felt that young Bunts was the sort of stuff out of which a good citizen could be made with a little care, and, above all, because Jigger had found out that he was not as strong as the law.
Well, that wasn’t a popular message in the town of New Nineveh. Maybe there was a lot to be said on the side of Jigger Bunts, but New Nineveh wanted the pleasure of having the trial and the hanging of a famous man to its credit and right in its midst. But certainly there was one man that didn’t flourish on the news that the kid was to be turned loose.
That was Hendon. He developed business in the far corner of the county, right away, and he rode off the morning that the kid was released. Everyone knew it was because Hendon had been talking a little bit too free, and he didn’t want to meet up with Jigger and have the kid ask him some pointblank questions.
Anyway, there was only one important thing to me. I came hiking into town as fast as I could whack the miles out of a tough-mouthed mustang, and I headed straight for the house of Maybelle Wayne, because I figured for sure that the kid would go there as soon as he got loose from the jail.
I found Maybelle, but Jigger hadn’t come, as yet. Maybelle was so excited that she was shaking. She was half laughing and half crying, and I shook hands with her hard enough to break bones.
“Maybelle,” I said, “I don’t give a damn what some folks hold against you. You’ve done such a good job of the kid that it would outbalance all the rest. I want to say that …”
She wasn’t even interested in praise. She just broke in, hollering: “But he ought to be here! Why doesn’t he come, Tommy? Why doesn’t he come?”
She was actually walking up and down and wringing her hands. And her, the coolest-headed woman that ever stepped!
I remembered then for the hundredth time what the governor had said.
“Maybelle,” I said to her, “do you mean to tell me that you’ve gone off your balance about this youngster … this kid, Jigger?”
“Bah!” she said in reply. “You make me tired, Tom Reynard! Who brought that kid to me? I’m flesh and blood, ain’t I? And wouldn’t anything human go crazy about him?”
It knocked me dizzy!
“All right,” I said. “But you’ll get over it quick enough. You’ll get over it, easy. You’ve got over things like this before.”
She laughed in my face.
“You don’t know nothing, dearie,” Maybelle said. “The rest were all pikers or meal tickets, or something, but this kid is the real thing. Get over it? I’ll be dead and buried before I’m over it, Tommy.”
“My God,” I muttered, “you’re really in love at last.”
Because I never would’ve believed it of her. She was a good pal and fine company, and all of that. But when it came to love … why, it didn’t seem to be in her. It was something that she knew about and looked at from a distance, and could always laugh at.
But now here she was, leaning up against the wall with her hands over her heart, and her head back, and her eyes closed.
And she said through her stiff lips: “Love him? Yes, I love him. And always have from the first moment that I saw him.”
“You laughed when you first saw him,” I reminded her.
“I laughed for happiness, because I knew that he was real, and that I would get such a hold on him
that he’d never get away. You understand, Tommy? Never get away! I’d … I’d kill him rather than let another woman have him. I don’t want him to know other women. I don’t want him to know men. I want to fill up his life. And I’ll make him happy. Oh, God, Tommy, I’ll pour out my heart like water for him. I’d want to die for him. I love him, and love him, and love him. It’s fire in me … it’ll kill me unless he comes soon! Go find him, Tommy. Quick, quick … because he’d be here with me before this if something serious hadn’t happened. Go Tommy … go quick!”
She just pushed me out of the house, and I went down toward the hotel, feeling pretty groggy.
I still couldn’t believe it. I still couldn’t believe that Maybelle had lost her head about any man, least of all about a youngster like Jigger … not just five years younger than she was, but fifty years younger. If he lived to be half a century older, he would never be as old as she was, because he didn’t have the kind of a mind that got old. He would stay young, half foolish, likeable, and silly and grand and proud and stargazing all his life, but Maybelle was born wise and had got wiser and wiser. There was nothing that she couldn’t see through—except this one thing—love. Or blindness, you might call it. Because that’s what love seems to be.
* * * * *
When I got downtown, I asked for Jigger Bunts, and the boys just laughed at me.
“He’s gone hunting for Hendon,” they said. “He just pulled out of town bound west on the train. And Hendon rode off in the same direction.”
That was a wild bit of news to me.
I couldn’t understand it. I knew that Jigger got ideas quick, and that he acted on them quicker. But it never entered my head that he would leave New Nineveh before he had seen me and Maybelle, and all for the sake of getting even with a no-account fellow like Hendon. No, I wiped Hendon off the books. There just had to be some other reason.
I got one, too, mighty quick. When I asked how he happened to start so soon, Bosco Jones, that run the hotel, told me that the kid had heard somebody mention Harry Wayne’s ranch and Jigger had turned around and said: “Where’s Harry Wayne now?”
“In Nevada,” said the cowpuncher, “in Carson City.”
“Are you sure?” Jigger asked.
“Ain’t I just mailed a letter to him?” said the puncher. “As sure as I’m working for him.”
And the first thing that you know, he had ripped out the name of the hotel where Harry Wayne was staying.
Well, when I heard that, I knew. The westbound train might go in the same direction that Hendon had ridden out of town that morning. But it also went on a long distance past the place where Hendon was riding for. It went on to Carson City. And I knew the reason. The worst pile of danger that ever came toward Harry Wayne was headed for him now, and unless he got help, he would be finished before another twenty-four hours.
You could see how the kid figured everything. He owed his return to a free life out of fear of the law to the wise ideas of Maybelle, and before he even so much as went to her to thank her for what her brains had done for him, he was going to manage to pay her back, if he could.
And how could he pay her back? Why, by making her as free as he was, and by removing the gent that was slandering her, and divorcing her, and hiring rascals to go after her peace and her good name! By killing Harry Wayne, he would be doing a good deed for the world, and he would be repaying the girl that he loved—worshipped would be the better word. Because I know now that Maybelle as a woman never even entered the mind of the kid. She stepped in as a goddess, and nothing else.
Well, I did three things quick.
I wrote down the street address of Wayne in Carson City, just as I had got it from the hotelkeeper.
Then I hiked to the telegraph office and wired to Wayne:
Watch yourself. Keep under cover.
You are running into danger for your life.
Then for the third thing, I started to find Maybelle.
She didn’t need a pair of opera glasses to read the importance of that news that I was bringing her. She knew right away that it was likely to be the beginning of the end—though of what sort of an end, she couldn’t guess, of course.
“If he kills Wayne, Jigger is no better than a dead man himself,” she cried, scared white, I can tell you. “Because Harry Wayne is no common man, and his killing would make a terrible stir. Tommy, you and me have to start for Carson City, and we start right now. Oh, I wish that I’d never been born! But how could I ever have guessed …”
It wasn’t like her to talk like that. But I didn’t stop to ask questions or to wonder at things like that. I hotfooted it to the station, and there I got some good news—that if we waited an hour more, we’d get an express that would hike overland and arrive at Carson City that night about eleven o’clock—a whole hour ahead of the jerkwater local that the kid was traveling on.
I busted back to Maybelle with the news, and you can bet that when the overland pulled out of New Nineveh that afternoon, she may have had a lot more important people aboard her, but she didn’t have no more anxious ones.
Chapter Thirty
We were right on time, and the way that we rolled along and clicked off the miles with the truck and the spinning wheels chuckling along under the train was a caution. And the yellow dust clouds flurried up past the windows on one side, and the white smoke scooped down on the other side. You couldn’t open a window on either side without getting your eyes and nose and neck and lungs all full of fine Nevada sand and that smoke.
All that we could do was sit there, and stifle, and sweat, and begin to stick to the seat, and turn red, and get mean, and start hating the whole world and each other most of all. That was the way that the trip started, but really we didn’t care much about the heat down in our hearts. All that we minded was the swift, smooth, steady way in which the miles were rattling out behind us.
All that afternoon we did fine, and during that time we climbed most of the grades, but in the evening—it was twilight at the time—we had to stop.
“There’s no station!” Maybelle saw, shaking all over. “Go out and see what’s happened, Tommy.”
I went out and dragged in a couple of breaths of the lukewarm air of that Nevada evening. I found out what was wrong. A hot box.
“It’ll be all right,” I told Maybelle when I went back inside. “They’ll get this thing fixed up, and, as soon as they do, we’ll snake along so fast that it’ll make your head swim, I tell you.”
That was what I had hoped, but my hopes didn’t pan out. For three hours we crawled. And I’m not going to write about those three hours. Maybelle had more nerve and more courage than any man or woman that I’ve ever known, but that nerve petered out here. She couldn’t stand the gaff, and I watched her lying with her head back against the seat, looking half sick and half ready to be hysterical, and very pale of cheek and red of nose.
She wasn’t pretty. She was homely. She was homely as the devil that afternoon. But the wonderful thing was that I knew one glimpse of the kid would make her even prettier than ever.
I got to wondering, too. Even if the kid did marry her—after her divorce—he might do worse. Because I didn’t have any doubt now. She was going to be straight with him, and she would never stop loving him till she was in her grave. She had said that, and I knew that it was true.
Well, at last they made a change, and we started to make up time. But there wasn’t much use. We got in ten minutes past midnight. Maybe the local had been delayed, too.
I jumped for the porter and shook half his wits out of his head, but he stammered out that the local had come in right on the stroke of midnight. And that was that.
We got a cab and went zooming for the hotel, with me sticking my head out of the window and cussing that driver and telling him that his horses were going to sleep between steps.
We got to the hotel, and at the desk the night
clerk told me that Mr. Wayne had left the hotel two days before, because he expected to be in Carson City some time and had rented a little cottage on the outskirts of the town.
“Has a young chap been here … about ten minutes ago?” I asked the clerk.
“Yes,” he said, “and he went on …”
“Gimme the address of the Wayne house … life or death!” I shouted.
I got it, and I made one jump to the door of the hotel and one more into the cab.
Then we started out again, just as fast as those horses could wing it along the streets. We sounded like a cavalry charge. And the echoes, they came flying and ringing and spattering around our ears.
We got to the house. I was out before the cab was stopped, and Maybelle was right there beside me, running.
There was a dark streak of young poplar trees, and behind them there was a little pink and blue stucco house—more like a girl would pick out than what a big roughneck rancher like Harry Wayne would be expected to want.
“It’s quiet … there’s no noise … thank God,” observed Maybelle.
I heard the last of that dying out behind me as I started sprinting. I cleared the hedge right in my stride like a hurdler, I made one jump to the middle of the lawn, and then I pulled up short, because right in front of me the big window was open and there at opposite sides of the table was Harry Wayne and Jigger Bunts. Perhaps Jigger had not been ten minutes in the house, but he had done enough in that time to make himself known. Harry Wayne was dabbing a handkerchief at a bloody place on his face, but he paid little attention to that, and, one by one, he was shoving certain papers across the table to Jigger.
They were the proofs of the guilt of Maybelle—the same proofs with which Harry was winning his divorce suit, of course—and that they were damning, I could see in the face of the kid. I heard a caught breath at my side—there was Maybelle, seeing all that I saw, and understanding, too.
And now we saw Jigger Bunts drop his head into his hands and cover his face. He had seen too much!