The Cure of Silver Cañon

by Max Brand

  After a while he went down to the station, taking empty byways because he had no wish to be recognized again, but most of the people were away at the fairgrounds and the streets were clear enough. He had been looking at his mental map of the country all the way, and he was quite clear as to what he would do. He found out at the station that no passenger train went east for some time but while he was asking questions a long freight came around the bend like thunder out of the west. It came closer, the empties in the string rattling like snare drums.

  Liddell walked away from the station platform until some stacked piles shut him away from the view of San Jacinto. The big engine passed him at that moment, struggling powerfully against the grade, and a moment later he spotted a brakeman, a big man with arms akimbo and a deep-visored cap.

  To him Liddell signaled a high sign that every tramp and every brakeman understands. The answer was a favorable wave of the hand and Liddell decided on the next empty flat car. The train was not doing more than thirty miles an hour. When he sprinted, the procession of cars slowed up perceptibly. Then he turned and jumped for the steel ladder with arms and legs stretched out before him, as a cat jumps when it goes into a fight. Feet and hands struck their chosen rungs of the ladder. He swung violently back to the left, then clambered up the side and sat down at the end of the flat car.

  The high sides kept him from seeing anything except the ridges of Monte Verde and the sun-faded blue of the sky with two or three buzzards adrift in the high light like a few ugly words on a blank page of white. Then the rattling of the flat car began to shake his wits into a thoughtless jumble for it was a rough bit of roadbed and the heavy flat car crashed and shook like a vast cargo of tin and iron junk. The vibration set the sky trembling.

  It shivered the teeth of Liddell together and set a tingle in his lips and eyelids. No shadow of warning came over him, but he turned his head about suddenly and saw the big brakeman coming up behind him, still with the same smile. This fellow had a pair of small, watchful eyes that had no relation whatever to the smile on his lips. Liddell stood up and held out a dollar bill.

  “OK, chief?” he asked. “I’m dropping off a few miles up the line.”

  The brakeman took the bill, looked at it a moment, tucked it into a trouser pocket, and struck Liddell violently across the head with a leather-covered blackjack. The blow knocked him back against the end of the car. He teetered far over, out of balance. Part of his brain remained alive to tell him that if he fell the wheels that rushed behind the flat car would finish him, but his hands had no sense of them. They would not grip the edge of the car and maintain a secure grip. The heavy jolting was helping to unbalance him. And then he saw the big brakeman coming at him again with the blackjack in the hollow of his hand, the knob of it just inside the tip of his fingers. Still only a small instinct in Liddell told him to fight. The rest of his mind was telling him that this was a dream and that the still-smiling face of the brakeman was that of a friend.

  The brakeman took his time. He set his feet wide apart. His smile broadened. Even the little eyes twinkled with pleasure, now. Then he slapped the blackjack at Liddell’s head. He was so sure of himself that it was easy to duck the blow. Liddell spilled forward and threw his arms around the fellow’s body.

  It was like embracing a barrel sheathed with India rubber, the bones were so big, the muscles so hard. He took Liddell by the throat, pushed him off to arm’s length and struck at his face with the blackjack.

  The car heeled at a curve. That was why he missed that stroke. Otherwise he should have smashed Liddell’s face to a pulp. As it was, he not only missed but lost his grip and Liddell hit him twice about the head.

  There was no force in the punches. His shoulders were soggy and his elbows were cork. The brakeman kept on smiling. Some of the deliberate surety had left him, however. He freshened his grip on the blackjack. He came in like a boxer, with short, shuffling steps, his long left hand out.

  Liddell paid no heed to that. A man with a club strikes hard only with the club hand. Liddell watched the blackjack. The life was coming back to him. The pain in his head was burning away the fog. The top of his skull seemed to be off. But he was glad of the torment. It was whiskey to him.

  It made him hot all over with strength. The wits came back into his feet. They made sense as they leaped to the side and let the brakeman’s rush go by. Liddell buried his fist in the soft of the body. It went right in, deep. It creased the brakeman like a piece of paper and doubled him over.

  Liddell crouched. Only the shudder and jouncing of the car unsteadied his target. So he got in two lifting punches that straightened his man. The brakeman was back on his heels making a futile swipe through the air with the blackjack. A thin line of blood, like a stroke of red paint, appeared on his mouth.

  Liddell hit for that mark. Then he stepped back and let the brakeman fall on his face. The blackjack, as though there was intelligent malice in it, flew out of the nerveless hand and rapped against Liddell’s shin. He picked it up and threw it away, then he sat down to wait.

  He was scarcely aware of the weariness in his body because the pain from his head was reaching down through him and touching all his nerves. Each rattling bounce of the car brought him taut with pain.

  The head of the brakeman kept jouncing up and down. He had red hair, long and thin. The dust on the floor of the car blew into it and clogged with the blood, for he was still bleeding. A good pool of it gathered around his head. When he tried to sit up, his hand slipped in the blood. He fell on his face again. He lay there for another long moment, his body jouncing loosely. After a while he managed to sit up and his face was bad to see. He covered it with his hands and sat there with his back bowed as though there were no spine in it.

  Liddell squatted on the quivering car, leaning on one hand to steady himself, and stared at the man he had beaten. The brakeman was silent and slack, as if he were still unconscious.

  He was very big. He must have weighed two hundred and twenty or thirty pounds and Liddell knew that he had never been beaten before. Now the manhood was gone out of him. This shack never would be able to bully a tramp again. Before long he would not be able to look any angry man in the face. It made Liddell sick to think of what was coming. Still the fellow sat there with his hands over his face and the blood leaking out between his fingers and running down over his wrists.

  Now the ridges of Monte Verde were diminishing rapidly in height; the country began to smooth out. Off to the left lay a flat land with a reddish-brown mist gathered low down over it. It made the throat of Liddell dry to look at it for he had spent time enough on the desert.

  The wheels of the train began to rattle in an increasing staccato. They had passed the long grade, at last, and were heading down. He went over the side of the car, hung on the lowest rung of the ladder, and looked back to see if the brakeman were in sight, but the big man was still hidden from view.

  The rough of the tiles beside the track now gave way to a broad, cinder-spread shoulder. Liddell swung back, slanted his body, and let go. By the time he had come to a walk the caboose of the train was going by, with a dirty flag blowing and snapping off the rear of it.

  Now that he was on the ground, there was no wind whatever. The sun burned down through his hat. Two hot thumbs pressed against the top of his head as though there were no bone to shelter the brain itself. His right hand was painful, also. He had used it for the last, finishing punch and one of the brakeman’s teeth, cutting straight through his lip, had driven into Liddell’s middle finger just below the knuckle, cutting to the bone. It still bled. His whole hand was red.

  For a hundred yards or so he followed the rails until he came to a faintly traced path. He thought, as he turned into the rough along the side of Monte Verde, that brakemen are a queer lot. Usually they are as tough as shoe leather but this fellow had been too big. All big men are soft, somewhere. They have some small dimension somewher
e. Usually it’s the neck. Big heads set on small necks are no good. Even he himself was too big. He was three inches too tall. Five feet ten is plenty. Condense a hundred and eighty pounds in five feet ten and you have plenty of man, rubbery with strength, compact, hard all over. If you’re closer to the ground, you don’t have so far to fall. If you’re closer to the ground, you’re not apt to break your back when you lift.

  He kept thinking of these things in a monotone of the mind, a dreary repetition, pacing out the words of his thinking with the steps he took, and the pain got worse and worse in his head.

  He came near to a little song of running water. It was a rill that went among the rocks quick as the flash of a fleeing snake. The water was no good for drinking. It was brackish with alkali. But it did pretty well for washing his hand and his head. There was not much of a lump on top of his head but the scalp was cut, and he was perfectly certain that the skull was fractured. At last he made himself take the full strength of his hands and work on each side of the pain. He had a feeling that if there were a fracture, he would feel and even hear the bone edges rasp together. When he heard nothing, he felt much better. The seasickness left the pit of his belly when he stood up and marched ahead.

  When you go west out of San Jacinto, there is only one easy way of climbing Monte Verde. If you take the easy way, it leads you off into a shallow depression that deepens and narrows to a valley and at last the valley cuts down to a gorge that is not twenty feet wide in places. It is cut by water that only runs down that draw during the spring rains. In seasons of light rainfall there is no run of water at all.

  The gorge has straight sides. The bottom of it is set with boulders as big as a horse and rider, and there are some shrubs growing, too, because the rain water never runs down the draw long enough to drown a plant. But it’s a desolate gorge.

  Up the mountain sides there is some smoky green of paloverde, and cactus sticks out catclaws at you, and the rocks are hand-polished by the sun so that they hurt your eyes at midday. This was where Liddell sat down on the shady side of the boulder to wait.

  VII

  He worked himself up to such a point as he sat there in the airless swelter that it seemed to him the brakeman, who he’d fought on the freight, had not used the blackjack. It was as though Skeeter had beaten him over the head. Then he began to feel a horrible riot of nerves as he realized how the time was drifting past him because there were other ways, of course, by which the mare could have been taken out of San Jacinto and into the west. He had come to a grim certainty that he never would see the silk and shine and beauty of Cicely again, when he heard a horse dog-trotting down the gorge, and of course that was Cicely with blue-jeaned Skeeter on her back.

  He got himself back behind the rock and coiled his strength into one big spring. He had made up his mind that he would make Skeeter take all that was possible. There would be no more horse stealing in that career after he had tied Skeeter’s hands to that thorn bush and used the buckle end of a belt thoroughly.

  That was the trouble with youngsters. They could not even be disciplined. There was nothing you could close your hands on or sink your teeth into, so to speak. But Cicely’s hoofs rapping over the rocks were like beats on a drum, coming closer and closer until the noise was right upon Liddell.

  Then he leaped out.

  Cicely was a little quicker than a cat, but she was not quick enough to get away from that surprising charge, or perhaps she recognized her master even faster than she felt fear. At any rate, he got in a flying leap, fastened his hand on the nape of Skeeter’s neck, and brought that young rider to the ground with a sound like a loud hand clap.

  Breath and senses were knocked out of Skeeter at the same instant, and as the body turned inertly from the side to its back, the big cap spilled off the head and allowed the hair to go tumbling down around the ears.

  Well, some of the boys, when they feel their blood, can wear hair as long as that, but Liddell was using his eyes all the way, now, and as he looked at the hands and the turn of the throat and the delicate care with which the nose and the lips had been fashioned, he felt a strong, new horror come up in him.

  His mark was distinctly on this act. It was the little red trickle of blood that formed at the corner of her mouth, exactly like the line of red that had been the target on the brakeman’s face not so very long before. Liddell fell into a mighty sweat, for it seemed to him that heads were lifting from the shadows of the rocks and staring at him, and that a whisper ran up and down the gorge.

  Once, in his earliest school days, he had seen a boy hit a girl. Her head bobbed right back as though her neck were only a loose spring. She hadn’t run away. She hadn’t even screamed. She just stood there, bewildered. And then the whole schoolyard descended on that lad and winnowed him small with fists and feet. Once in his life, also, he had seen a man who was known to beat his wife.

  Liddell, before the girl was half conscious, had her up off the ground, not at all worried about her health but only concerned to get the dust brushed from the blue jeans and the blood from her face. When he handled her, the soft of her body sort of slid from his grasp and he kept swearing under his breath and sweating. He felt as though he were losing a frightful race against public opinion.

  All at once, he saw that although she let her body remain as limp as ever, she was smiling a little. He sat her down rather hard and stood back. He took off his hat. She permitted herself to be conscious.

  “I’m seven kinds of a fool,” Liddell said in an uncertain voice, “but this morning I wasn’t half awake when you were sitting up there in the window … the dust storm had knocked the tar out of my eyes.”

  He picked up her cap, dusted it conscientiously, and gave it into her hands. She kept on smiling a little, and looking him up and down. He said huskily, “I’m giving you my word of honor … I didn’t see you well enough. I thought you were a boy. I beg your pardon,” said Liddell.

  She pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at her lip, and then looked at the drop of blood on the white cloth. She said nothing.

  “If I’d known … if I’d guessed … if I hadn’t been such a stupid fool,” said Liddell, his agony increasing with her silence.

  He hoped that her smile meant kindness, but he could not be sure. She kept looking at the drop of blood on her handkerchief. Another speck of blood was forming at her lip. “Suppose I’d just been a boy …?” she suggested.

  “Why, that would have been different,” said Liddell. He started to make himself a cigarette with nervous hands. He offered the makings to her.

  “I don’t smoke,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Liddell.

  “If I’d been a boy, you’d have torn the hide right off my back, wouldn’t you?” she asked, still with that smile. It was like the smile of the brakeman. It could mean anything in the world.

  “I didn’t guess,” stammered Liddell. The cigarette went to pieces in those sure fingers of his.

  “Man or woman, I’d still be a horse thief, wouldn’t I?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t dream …” said Liddell. “Of course everybody likes a joke.”

  “How’d you get here, anyway?” she asked.

  “I hopped a freight,” he answered. “When I found out that you’d ridden west, I hopped a westbound freight, because I remembered how this trail came to a narrow …”

  “Tell me,” asked Skeeter, “why I grabbed that Cicely mare of yours?”

  “You had to get somewhere and you didn’t have time …” he began politely.

  She put her chin on her fist and studied him curiously. The wind kept knocking her hair to one side. Sometimes a flicking of it came across her face. Even the stillness was gone from the air, since she arrived.

  “I stole that horse because I knew you’d follow,” she said. “And if you stayed in San Jacinto, I knew that those apes would do you in sooner or later. So
I thought that I’d lead you a paper chase. Because I knew that you wouldn’t give up Cicely without a fight. Believe me?”

  “Certainly,” said Liddell. “Of course I believe you.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked the girl. She stood up suddenly. She put her fists on her hips—what a fool he had been not to see at a glance the woman in her—and said, “I see what it is. You’re afraid that I’ll go back and tell people that you beat me up. Afraid I’ll say that you manhandled a girl, eh? Listen, Slip, what sort of a hound would that make you?”

  He was pale with the thought of it. His face was the color of grease.

  “Go on and tell me,” insisted the girl. “If I went back and said that, and showed ’em the place on my mouth, what would they think of you?”

  “You wouldn’t do it,” said Liddell. “Of course it’s a joke.” He tried a laugh that was a poor, staggering excuse for mirth.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she answered, “if you try to turn back into San Jacinto now, I’ll spill the news all over the place.”

  He made a two-handed gesture of appeal clumsily, because he was not used to making gestures of appeal. “But I’ve got to go back,” he said.

  “You gotta go back, why?” she demanded. “You gotta go back and be lynched, why? Mind you, those fellows Pudge and Soapy and that bright young Mark Heath, they won’t stop till they’ve started a lynching mob after you.”

  “Were any of the three of them spending a lot of money last night?” he asked.

  “No. But what’s that got to do with it?” she asked. “I’m saying … how’ll you have it? Do you keep away from San Jacinto or do you have me spill the beans about how the big guy slammed the girl around?”

  He fought through a real agony. He sat down on his heels and took one of her hands in his. “There’ll be nothing hard for me in San Jacinto,” he said. “And I’ve got to get back there and stay until …”