Outlaw's Pursuit

by Max Brand

  There I held them. With all my force centered in one single leg, I thrust back at them, and a giant came into me and made the door lock in its place. Here a hand appeared around the edge of the door and a gun in it. The gun fell, undischarged, and the hand was withdrawn with a scream of pain, for Rosa Caporno had buried the length of a keen knife in the wrist.

  The exclamation of the wounded man—and perhaps he stumbled against one of those who were thrusting at the door—made them relax their efforts. Or perhaps it was the confusion, for every man down in the sub-cellar seemed to know what the meaning behind that closing door was—sure death or capture for them.

  They came in a massed swarm up the steps, yelling with desperate fear. In that instant of weakness—of confusion—of alarm—whatever it was, I leaned all my weight against that door with a lunging force that made the tendons crack in my leg. Yes, if I had had a sound body to throw into my work, I think that I could have made head against twenty of them, I was so desperate. But even as it was, I seemed to take balance—and the door shuddered its way shut. Only an instant, but in that instant the ready hand of the girl had turned the great key and the lock had immediately shut home with a loud clang.

  Like the distant murmur of bees blown on a wind from the lowland, so we heard the wild scream of despair that rose from the men in the treasure chamber. And yet they were a scant foot away from us. But what a foot of solid steel. Sound could not penetrate it. Rather it was a small vibration rather than a sound.

  Then I turned to the girl, and she—well, I suppose it was the hot Spanish blood in her that made her impulsive—but she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

  It isn’t very gentlemanly to confess, but I have to say that I merely pushed her away from me. I had started the double wound in my leg bleeding by the strain of closing that door. More than that, I had started a ready flow of the keenest agony. And I was a sick man as I thrust Rosa Caporno away from me.

  “Get me up,” I said faintly. “I feel that I’m dying, Rosa Caporno.”

  “You’ll not die. A hundred like Lewis Vidett and his kind could never be the death of such a man as you. You can’t die.”

  She locked my left arm over her back and so we struggled toward the head of the stairs—but I was dreadfully weak now with the labor, the nerve strain of that horrible night, and the drain of lost blood.

  And then, as we gained the top of the stairs—surely there was a providence in that—a light, bounding form of a man came hurrying toward us.

  “Lewis Vidett!” gasped the girl at my side, and by the strangled sound of her voice I knew that she had seen and heard enough to kill all her old love for the man at last. There was only horror of him remaining.

  I felt my own strength flood back on me. “Vidett!” I thundered at him.

  He stopped and leaped to the side like a dodging rabbit.

  I held my gun poised. I cannot tell why I did not shoot at once. I knew the man was a deadly fighter. But somehow, as the girl shrank from my side, a frightful sense of certainty came upon me, and I knew that I had the life of Lewis Vidett in my hand. I knew that I could kill him if I chose to kill. And I chose.

  He had fired as he dodged, fired with a cry of savage hatred. That bullet plucked at the clothes at my side—a narrow miss. I pulled my own trigger, then—the hammer stuck, and then descended slowly. The gun had gone wrong.

  His weapon spoke again, and this time a ripping pain sawed through my body—I did not know where. Sawed through me, as a lightning flash saws through the heart of the heavens.

  There was nothing left for me to do. I hurled the gun in his face, and he went down heavily on the floor. Then I lurched toward him, falling as I lurched, for I was quite off balance, on my one leg.

  And he? He was wriggling up the instant his knees struck the floor of the hall.

  My frantic reach toward him secured no more than a tip of the finger’s hold on the edge of his coat. But that was enough.

  First he strove to spring back, but in that instant I freshened my grip to a whole handful of the cloth. He fired a second bullet into my body.

  Too late, my beautiful Vidett.

  The sway of my shoulder jerked him down into my arms. No matter if my body were gone—sick and numbed with pain. For my arms were still sound and strong. And under the pressure of their grip, like the weight of tons upon him, Vidett crumpled. I heard him gasp against my breast. His gun slid out of his lifeless hand. I could have picked it up and put a bullet through him, but I did not. For I thought that as I lay there, throwing all my might into that mortal grip—I thought as I lay there that I felt his heart beat heavily once against mine, and then stop.

  And I was right.

  * * * * *

  They put us in one room. On one bed lay Sam Clyde. On the other bed lay Hugo Ames, alias Francisco Mendez. But as I came out of the time of fever, I found that Sam Clyde had quite recovered and sat up by my bed—recovered so far, at least, that he could sit up with his wounded leg resting on another chair and his crutches resting behind his shoulder. There he was sitting when the good, clean senses returned to me at the end.

  “Well, Ames,” he said, “how are you now? Better, lad?”

  I stared feebly up at him, trying to rally my wits, and the first thing I realized was that he should be calling me Mendez rather than Ames.

  I raised a hand to my face and it touched the naked skin. Then I saw it all. They had shaved my face on account of the wound in my cheek, and that shaving had exposed to their eyes a face that was too well known by poster in a hundred crossroads. Ames, with $15,000 on his poor life.

  “They know,” I said.

  “Everything,” he said, grinning, “and the whole household knows.”

  “I’m done, then?” I said.

  “Son,” he said, “these here yaller-skinned folks ain’t like us whites. Some ways they’re worse. And some ways they’re better, and, if one of the servants in this here house was to blow the truth about you, he’d have his throat cut by one of his pals, and he knows it. ‘Specially a nigger named José. He has been tellin’ tales about how you took care of him and how he paid you back by swiping Spike.”

  That was enough. I saw old Caporno afterward and he told me that I had saved his fortune, his life, and his daughter’s happiness. He said it as shortly as that.

  “And now,” he said, “will you settle down with us, my son? I want you, because of all the chance investments I ever made you were the most chancy, and you worked out the best. Because, my boy, from the first day I knew that you were Ames.”

  That was enough to stagger me. If I had not been sick, I suppose that it would have made me sick to hear him say that. I told him, however, that, although I appreciated his kindness, his ways were not my ways, and that the best thing for me was to get well and travel back north to my own mountains.

  I was surprised when he agreed with me very heartily.

  “Horses with horses and dogs with dogs.” Caporno chuckled. “You’re right. The first day you can ride, you start.”

  And I started. But, in addition to Spike between my knees, I carried away with me a bank receipt for $5,000.

  Altogether, I was a lucky fellow. But I was glad to be done with it all, and I never left any place so gladly as I left the great house and the kind smile of Caporno. May I never see him again.

  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 30,000,000 words or the equivalent of 530 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 work along with many radio and television programs. For good measure he also publ
ished four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in more 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, 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 four 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. His website is www.MaxBrandOnline.com.