Fightin' Fool

by Max Brand

  That was the grim expression of the Parson as he brought out a hunting knife and with it slashed through the ropes that tied his legs. Almost with the same gesture he was rising to his feet. Why, the mere shadow of his coming, the mere wind and stir of the rising of the giant should have made those others turn toward him. But they did not turn! They were too utterly fascinated by the words and the actions of Wheeler Bent, and the murder that he was weighing in his hand above the head of Jingo. There was interest and some cruel satisfaction in their faces, and a sick distaste, as well. Only the butcher was going to enjoy the actual process of the butchery.

  “Now you tell me, and stop sneering up at me!” cried Wheeler Bent. “You tell me your last prayer; you hear? I want to know it. I want to hear how you’ll beg and ask for mercy.”

  “Don’t be a fool!” said Jake Rankin.

  “Then he gets it now!” shouted Wheeler Bent. And he swayed up the heavy revolver to the full stretch of his arm.

  The Parson struck them then. He came in with his arms spread out wide. He looked like a father about to sweep up his family of little boys. Such was the vast size of him. And as he came running in, bent to the shock, Jingo could still see the blood dripping fast from the rope ends that festooned his wrists.

  He struck them all in a heap. All except Boyd. The rat-faced man had the least bit of instinct working in him, the electric thing that made him leap suddenly to the side, and the reaching hand of the Parson just swept by and missed him with its clutch.

  The others went down in a crashing, squirming, shouting heap on top of Jingo. A hand reached in for him and jerked him out with the resistless sway of some great steam derrick. The hand caught his clothes at the breast and nearly ripped them off his back. He came clear of the heap in time to see Boyd shoot a bullet right into the body of the Parson.

  Jingo had time to say to himself that that was the end. That was all he had time to say before the arm of the Parson flew out with the walking-beam weight of his shoulder behind it. His fist spatted against the face of Boyd. It seemed as though there were no weight to the head of the rat-faced man. It seemed as though he would not, therefore, receive any real damage from the blow—no more than a light image stuffed with sawdust, say.

  His head flicked back—so far back that he looked like a headless image for an instant. Then he was falling.

  That living heap of men was surging up around Jingo as he saw Boyd knocked flat. Something glinted—a revolver in the hand of Wheeler Bent. Jingo got that gun in his two manacled hands as the Parson swung his weight up and over his shoulder, like a sack of bran. Jingo lay on his stomach over the vast, boardlike bones of the Parson’s shoulder, with a snaky cushioning of muscles to make his resting place easier.

  He saw, as the Parson sprang away with him, how Boyd lay on his back, with his head supported against the base of a boulder. His neck looked as though it were broken. His eyes were open, empty. His face no longer looked like the face of a rat. It looked simply like an incomplete thing—a mangled thing.

  Jingo saw that and knew that Boyd would give no other person any trouble; not on this night, at least. But Boyd was not worth noticing, compared with the upspring of three wild-cat forms out of the heap of humanity that the Parson had struck to the earth. He had only needed two or three seconds to strike, grab Jingo, and leap away among the shadows of the boulders. He had pounced as a tiger might spring. But Jingo heard a wild yell that could not come out of any throat except that of Jake Rankin. He saw Jake come up off the ground as though flung from a springboard.

  And right at him, Jingo fired the first shot from the gun which he held in both hands.

  He missed his target. He knew that he had missed. To fire with both hands ironed together was no easy trick. Besides, lying on the shoulder of the Parson as he ran was no smoother than lying across the back of a trotting horse. That was why Jingo missed an easy shot at five yards. Then the raw, ragged edges and the faces of the boulders came in between. He could not see anything more. He could only hear the monstrous yelling of Jake Rankin, like a beast driven mad with a torturing disappointment. Jake was like a cat that had played with a mouse until the mouse escapes. He was simply screaming in a blinding passion.

  Aye, and running. Wheeler Bent’s voice was shouting something. Yes, something about more money to them all if they caught the runaways.

  Well, they could be caught, all right. Jingo was sure enough. The Parson was a giant, but, after all, he had not the strength of a horse. Not even the Parson had as much strength as that. He had, besides, a bullet somewhere in his huge body. Jingo had seen the bullet strike. He had heard the thud of it, like a blow on a filled barrel. In a moment or two the Parson had to curl up and quit.

  Jingo said at his ear, while the Parson raced with immense strides among the rocks: “Chuck me, Parson. They’ve got us now. Chuck me. You can save yourself then. Get away. Then start on their trail and finish them all, Parson!”

  The arm with which the Parson was gripping him, holding him in place on that vast shoulder, was like the weight of a beam. It was crushing the breath out of Jingo. A little more pressure from that arm was his only answer, as though the Parson had felt him slipping.

  To Jingo, suddenly, to die was nothing. When two friends face it together, what is death more than a joke?

  He had a split part of a second for that thought, and then he saw Oliver spring around the side of a boulder as big as a house and come right at them. Oliver had a gun out. He was leaning so far forward with speed that he seemed with each step barely to save himself from falling on his face. He was shooting every time his foot struck the ground.

  Jingo saved his own bullet through half a count, to get the sway of the Parson’s running balanced in his mind, his eye, his manacled hands. Then he fired.

  Oliver kept right on running, but he kept on falling, too. His arms stretched out. The gun slid down from one of them, like a drop of liquid brilliant with moonlight. Oliver struck the ground. He turned a somersault. He lay bunched like a wounded spider, his legs drawn up, his arms wrapped around himself.

  Wheeler Bent and Jake Rankin were in full view for an instant. Then they were out of sight. The Parson had dodged behind another of those vast fragments of mountain, and now he dropped to one knee and let Jingo slump off his shoulder.

  The thumping and grinding of footfalls sped past them.

  Jingo stood up with his back against the rock, the gun still clutched with both hands. He and the Parson were on a little strip of gravel beach, so to speak, at the edge of the waters of the creek. The moon shadow fell thickly over them, but the light of the moon danced up like the ghostly image of firelight and threw from the stirring face of the creek a changing, wavering, dim pattern over the boulder and over the Parson.

  He leaned his shoulder and his head against the rock. He was stifling the noise of his panting and the groaning of his pain, so that his face was made frightful by the struggle. He had both his immense hands pressed against his side, where the bullet had struck him.

  The noise of Rankin and Wheeler Bent was gone out in the distance. There was only the smooth sound of the creek as it slipped among the rocks and the cool dashing of it far away, at the end of the flume. There were these sounds and the small throttling noises that came out of the distorted mouth of the Parson.

  But he was not an ugly mask to Jingo. Instead, he was something more than handsome. If Jingo lived to tell of that night, he knew he would always remember, every day of his life, with awe and a great swelling of the heart, the exact look of the Parson. Because that was the way a man looked when he was dying for a friend.

  It was not the face only that was distorted. The great bare throat of the Parson was swollen with the might of his effort.

  Jingo laid the gun on the ground, filled his cupped hands with water, and dashed it into the face of the Parson, and the Parson suddenly seemed able to breathe. He closed his eyes. His mouth was open. His jaw worked as he bit at the air and swallowed it and r
egained life.

  Jingo, on his knees, pulled the hands of the Parson from the place of the wound. The whole side of the giant was sopping and running with blood. He ought to be dead, Jingo told himself. Surely any other man in the world would be dead.

  He caught hold of the shirt and tore it from the Parson’s body. Then he could see what had happened. The bullet had glanced on the ribs and furrowed under the flesh and jumped out again toward the back. If it had pierced through the ribs, it would have found the heart.

  “Thank Heaven!” whispered Jingo. “I thought they had you. But you’re going to live, Parson!”

  “Sure—I’m going to live—you fool!” breathed the Parson. He kept leaning against the rock, his head and shoulder both, but he put out his other arm and hung it loosely over Jingo and let the weight of that arm speak for him more than any words that he could have dug up out of his soul.

  The little lines of reflection from the water kept running over that big, ugly face. They made the Parson seem about to speak. But still the only voice was the running of the stream.

  Jingo looked out at it and saw how the current cut around the great stones that were scattered through the bed of the stream. He saw how the speed of the stream made the water lift a little as it leaped away from the rocks on the lower side, streaking out a wake. It was strange that the creek could run so fast and so smoothly—so smoothly that it kept throwing back the trembling reflection of the moonlight. But for all its speed, he saw the one thing that they could do.

  “Parson,” he said, “you can’t break the chain that holds my feet together—or my hands together? Can’t you do that? Smash the links between a couple of big rocks?”

  The Parson had his eyes closed. He did not open them again, but he reached out and fumbled the ankle chains with his fingers. Then he shook his head in dissent.

  Jingo looked down at the vast, moving head and understood. There was no hope of freedom for him. The key lay somewhere in the bottom of the creek. Not for the first time, he struggled to pull his hands through the grip of the manacles, and failed.

  Then he heard footfalls coming back toward them among the rocks.

  CHAPTER 25

  Into the Stream

  “They’re going to hunt us down, and we got one gun between us—and three slugs in it,” muttered the Parson. He kept his hand on his wounded side, and the blood steadily welled out between his fingers. But there was no use attempting to make a bandage to gird that vast barrel of a body—not until they had time to do the job thoroughly.

  Jingo, staring down at the great, ugly face, wanted to find words so that he could speak what was in his heart, or a little of it. But then he knew that words were not necessary. They understood one another, and they would always understand. “Parson,” he said, “there’s only one way out for us. They’ll search till they find us. But if you can get across the stream and go down the farther side, you’ll be able to get help here from the Tyrrel place.”

  “Yeah, sure. A coupla hours from now I could get help here from the Tyrrel place.”

  They had to whisper. The sound of footfalls no longer approached them. But they whispered at the ear of one another.

  “And you’d be dead a long time before that,” said the Parson.

  “There’s no other way,” said Jingo. “You’ve got to take your chance, and I’ll stay here and take mine.” He nodded toward the stream. “Plenty of rocks out there in the center. Once you get on the farther side of them you’ll be all right, Parson. You’ll be fixed, all right. The boulders will shelter you from gunfire. The trip out to the center of the creek ought to be the only dangerous part of the business.”

  “All right,” said the Parson. “Here goes.” He stood up and raised the revolver.

  “Take the gun,” said Jingo. “It’s no good to me now. I could only absolutely—”

  “You’d want me to walk off and leave you, would you?” said the Parson. He added sternly: “Take hold of that gun!”

  Jingo meekly grasped the rough handle of the Colt.

  Then he was raised suddenly and thrown over the wide shoulder of the Parson. He tried to protest, but already the Parson was striding into the stream. The water deepened. It reached the feet of Jingo. It soaked him to the knees. Water rose to the very chin of the Parson, and Jingo felt the strong pulling of the current. If he felt it at all, how was the Parson able, in any way, to keep his footing?

  Jingo scanned the shore they had left. As they advanced, it seemed that the boulders grew greater. He stared at the gaps between them, but there was no sight of the man hunters.

  Aye, but there they were, suddenly—Wheeler Bent standing on top of a low rock, looking slowly up and down the ravine. Then there was Jake Rankin beside him. The moon glimmered on their guns.

  Jingo looked behind him, over the shaggy head of the Parson. They were not many steps from the central rocks of the stream, but to a man carrying a heavy burden, and immersed to the chin in a strong current, every yard is a dangerous distance.

  He was about to tell the Parson to hurry if he could—when the gunfire started.

  A sightless something knifed through the water at the side of the Parson. Instantly came the report, flinging off the face of the stream and slapping against the ear of Jingo.

  The Parson reached out his long arm, leaned as he strode forward, grasped the lower edge of the nearest rock, and swept himself and Jingo to the shelter behind it. A bullet, at the same time, stung the ear of Jingo like a wasp. It had clipped away a bit out of the lobe.

  Then he found himself with the Parson behind the comfortable bulwark of the rock, safe.

  But not really safe. There was only a narrow distance between them and the opposite shore, but that distance, small as it was, was totally impassable. Here the current had been compacted in a narrower throat, and the surface of the stream was streaked with little telltale bubbles of speed. The force of the creek pulled at the legs of Jingo and carried them out aslant. The weight of the irons on his ankles became a trifling thing compared with the sweep of the water.

  All that Rankin and Wheeler Bent needed to do was to wait on the opposite shore until the two were finally torn from their grip on the rock.

  The Parson, shuddering as the cold of the water entered his wound, said simply: “All right, Jingo. I guess we’re gone. See if you can send the last three shots out of that there gun. Then we might as well take what’s coming to us.”

  “That would only show that we’re stuck here,” said Jingo. “Otherwise—well, they won’t know what’s happening. They can’t see what this water is like any more than we could when we were over there. They think that we’re crawling ashore by this time.”

  “Aye, and what’ll be done then?”

  “Maybe they’ll give up. Then, when they leave, we can go back across the creek the way we came.”

  “Maybe they’ll come over after us,” suggested the Parson.

  “Maybe,” agreed Jingo.

  He added: “Push me up a little, Parson. I’ll take a look as carefully as I can and hope that they won’t see me.”

  He was being lifted in the great hands of the Parson when the catastrophe came on them suddenly. Right over the brim of the big rock appeared the dripping body of Jake Rankin, with Wheeler Bent at his side.

  Their guns were slung around their necks. They had only their hands to use against the Colt of Jingo, but the hand of Jake Rankin was as swift as the head of a striking snake. He caught Jingo’s gun. One futile bullet rose at the face of the moon. Then Jingo, torn from the grasp of the astonished Parson, whirled down the current with Jake Rankin gripping him close.

  The gun was the prize that Rankin wanted. And he had two hands to use. He kept his grip on the weapon with one hand. With the other he tried to beat Jingo to senselessness. And that while the current swept them over and over. There was only a random chance now and then for Jingo to gulp in a breath of air. They swung round and round slowly. The force of the stream threw them to the side i
n a freakish eddy toward the shore from which they had come. Suddenly they were standing breast to breast, shoulder-high in the stream.

  Well above them, Jingo saw the Parson standing up on the rock that had given them a moment of shelter. He saw Wheeler Bent entangled in the terrible arms of the giant. He heard the wild screech out of Bent’s throat, and saw the limp body of the man flung down into the creek. Then the Parson plunged in and came toward his friend.

  He saw that as he ducked under the water to avoid a strangle hold that Rankin was trying to fasten on him.

  Still his grasp was on the gun. They were staggering in toward the shore, through rapidly shoaling water, as Jingo received a heavy blow on the side of the head.

  His wits spun. The clubbed hand of Rankin fell on him again. They were only knee-deep, with the shore beside them. Out of the distance, the tremendous lion’s roar of the Parson gave promise of instant aid. Another voice, on a thinner and a higher note, was crying to him from the shore.

  Through the whirl of his mind, moonlight and darkness and many images thronging across his eyes, he saw the girl coming toward him, running. She was in the water now, stretching out her hands, when another blow took the last strength out of the hands of Jingo. He had his wits and his eyes about him still. But he was loose as a wet rag, and out of his numbed fingers Rankin tore the revolver easily.

  Jingo saw the gleam of it; it would be the last sight that came to him in this world, he was sure.

  Something then came in between him and the sheen of the dripping Colt. That was the girl, flinging her arms back around his body, and with her head strained back as she strove to cover him from Rankin, whom she faced.

  He saw the big hand of Rankin go out to tear her away from his quarry. He heard her crying out like a frightened animal. The sound seemed to go through Rankin like a knife. His hand fell. He tried once more, and the scream stopped him.