by Max Brand
I felt a twitch at my coat and turned in time to see Maybelle with my Colt in her hand. I thought that what she intended was to take a potshot at Harry Wayne, and I jumped in her way. Because I knew that there was temper and spirit enough in that girl to lead her to try almost anything. But I was wrong. It wasn’t Wayne that she intended to use the gun on.
Before I could stir a hand, she clapped that gun against her head and fired!
* * * * *
It was sort of fitting, in a way, that it was Jigger Bunts who got to her first and picked her up in his arms. He carried her into the house and put her on the bed of Harry Wayne. She was still breathing, and her heart was fluttering, though how she could live after such a wound I couldn’t guess. It seemed to me that the slug must have passed straight through her brain, but as we washed the wound and examined it more carefully, we could see how the bullet had turned against the skull and glanced away.
And who was the man there that felt the most sorrow for Maybelle?
Well, I’m ashamed to say that it wasn’t me. Because as I looked things over, it seemed to me that Maybelle had saved Jigger Bunts from himself, and with that bullet she had tried to turn Harry Wayne free, also. And if she had to die, there was no better time than this, before she did anything else more foolish.
It wasn’t Jigger who grieved the most. In that second when he covered up his face with his hands, he must have been wracked with grief and disgust by what Harry Wayne had told him and proved to him. At any rate, as he leaned over Maybelle, he looked five years older, and a century sterner, but there was no tenderness in him.
He helped to take care of her wound, and he did a better job than either of the others of us who were there, but that was simply because he did everything better than we could manage it. But all the time he was as cold as ice. He was like a doctor with a charity case on his hands, and a damned disagreeable one at that.
Well, as I watched Jigger at that moment, I saw what was wrong with him. He couldn’t stand reality. He had to have a dream made to order for him by someone else, and then he would live in the middle of that dream perfectly happy. But show him the facts in the daylight, and he was done for—he wasn’t interested.
Who was the hardest hit? It was Harry Wayne who was the hardest hit.
The blood was still trickling down his face from the place where Jigger Bunts had hurt him, and here was Maybelle bleeding, too, even through the bandages that Jigger had put around her head with such a lot of skill. Like he had been a doctor.
It seemed to me to mean something—that the two of them that were wounded were Maybelle and poor Wayne. Jigger and me seemed just to be outsiders, looking in. Wayne and Maybelle were the ones that really counted. And the kid seemed to understand it, too. I was glad to leave before Maybelle’s senses came back to her. Jigger followed me out.
There stood the kid and me under the stars, he with his sombrero in his hand.
“God forgive her,” Jigger said, very solemn.
I couldn’t speak back to him. I was too choked. But I knew that Jigger would never be a real man until he had to ask forgiveness for himself, not for Maybelle.
* * * * *
There you are. I suppose that there is nothing so important as the beginning of how a good man turns crooked. And what had hounded me is that part I had in it—and how much was I to blame? Nobody, I suppose, is very well able to judge me. But anyway, I am mighty glad that at last I have got it all wrote down.
THE END
About the Author
Max Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, Destry, and many other fictional characters popular with readers and viewers worldwide. Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres. His enormous output, totaling approximately thirty million words or the equivalent of five hundred thirty ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, and fashionable society, big business and big medicine. Eighty motion pictures have been based on his works, along with many radio and television programs. For good measure, he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in such a variety of different ways.
Born in Seattle in 1892, orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At Berkeley he became a student rebel and one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. Denied a degree because of unconventional conduct, he embarked on a series of adventures culminating in New York City where, after a period of near-starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful author of fiction. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, Italy, and finally in Los Angeles.
Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every six months for seventy-five years. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world. A great deal more about this author and his work can be found in The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood Press, 1997), edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski.