Peyton

by Max Brand

  “The first time he wouldn’t pull his gun, Ed. The second time . . . well, I hit his gun with my slug the first shot and then . . .”

  “Well . . . ?”

  “I dunno. We just sort of parted, Ed.”

  “Is he good?”

  “Fastest I ever saw. But he tried a crooked stunt. It spoiled his aim. That’s why I’m here chinning with you.”

  “For a boy,” said Sturgis, “you’re a cool kid. I sort of like you, Jerry. What about this girl?”

  The question came so suddenly that Jerry winced. “What girl?” he said.

  “The one you talked about in your letter.”

  “What did I say in the letter?” inquired Jerry, dazed.

  “That you were out of your head about Langley’s daughter.”

  “Did I say that? I thought . . . well, I can’t answer you, Ed.”

  “The girl spoiled your play with Langley, is that it?” asked the sheriff.

  “How d’you mean?”

  “What’s she like?” asked the sheriff suddenly.

  “You mean what does she look like?”

  “Yep.”

  Jerry raised his head and studied the adobe wall. His restless right hand was still, and this the sheriff noted. “Suppose,” said Jerry, “that you’ve been to a party and your head is hot, and your mouth full of ashes . . . well, you step out into the morning and a cool wind hits your face. . . .”

  “Is she like that?” the sheriff inquired.

  But Jerry was still absent-mindedly studying the wall. “Suppose you’ve been riding the desert,” he went on slowly, “and you drop out of the mountains into a valley full of fruit trees and a spring . . . and you ride along with the blossoms dropping around you . . . and the birds fighting in the tops of the trees and . . .”

  “Is she like that?” asked the sheriff with increasing emphasis.

  “Suppose,” said Jerry, “that you’ve been playing poker, and the luck’s against you, and you step out into the night and look up and see how still the sky is with all the stars close down. . . .”

  “Oh, Lord!” the sheriff exclaimed without heat.

  “What’s the matter?” said Jerry, looking dazed again.

  “Do you see much of her?”

  “Her father’s against her seeing me, you know.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “She came down for a while where we used to meet. But I couldn’t fight it out with the old boy . . . he’s her father. Put a mist over his eyes and they’re about the same as her eyes, see?”

  “H-m-m,” said the sheriff.

  “I couldn’t fight it out with him, so I didn’t have any right to go sneaking around seeing his daughter. So I promised him that I wouldn’t talk to her any more.”

  The sheriff started violently. Jerry looked at him in surprise, but the sheriff was only crossing his legs, which was a considerable feat, owing to the size of his stomach and the shortness of the legs.

  “Well, Ed, the odds were sort of against me. I think he’s a crook. But I have no proof. I want to be able to go around and talk straight to him. I want to be able to say . . . ‘I haven’t a cent and I’ve been a rough one, but I’ve been clean. You’ve got a fortune, but you’re crooked. What you say about your daughter doesn’t make the slightest difference to me.”

  “I follow you,” said the sheriff. He added with his characteristic suddenness: “Does the girl miss you, Jerry?”

  “I don’t know, Ed.”

  “She came down to your meeting place even after you’d stopped going there?”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. She likes to see the sunrise there.”

  “H-m-m,” said the sheriff. “Well, I don’t suppose you could introduce me to this Langley?”

  “Not without a troop of cavalry, Ed.”

  “I’m going out to look him over.”

  “I’ll show you his house.”

  “You needn’t mind. I located that before I came to see you.”

  “Come back here for the night, Ed. Don Manuel will be glad to see you. Particularly if you know anything about Langley’s past. He’s interested, too.”

  “Come back here?” echoed the sheriff vaguely. “Oh, yes. Sure. Good bye, Jerry.”

  XXIV

  Langley was a strong believer in efficiency, and he knew that efficiency means a concentration of the executive authority in anything from a nation to a household. And therefore, shortly after their honeymoon ended, when his wife began a sentence with—“I think . . .”—he promptly answered: “My dear, you’re much too nice to waste your pleasantness thinking. Hereafter I’ll do your thinking for you.” Mrs. Langley was one of those calm-eyed women who know how to look the truth in the face and smile. She saw her husband for the first time, really, but she smiled when she heard him say this. After that she was never known to rebel against fate, and the word of Langley was fate in his household. Only of late, as Patricia grew into womanhood, there had been vague stirrings of revolt behind the calm eyes of his wife, and on this day the storm broke suddenly and without warning on the head of the rich man. She had placed herself between him and the door and lifted her head and told him that whether he willed it or not, her daughter was to be happy.

  “And will you tell me,” Langley replied, “what I’m grinding my heart out for if it isn’t her happiness?”

  “She’s been in her room . . . and hardly out of it . . . for forty-eight hours,” said Mrs. Langley.

  “She’s sick?” Langley asked, changing color.

  “The doctor told you that.”

  “Fever,” said Langley. “Nothing unusual at this season.”

  “The doctor is a fool.” It was a strong word for her. It made even J.P. Langley stop—mentally—and look at her again. He had known long ago that she had little tenderness for him, but he had been content with knowing that he controlled her. Also, she was decorative and knew how to make his guests happy; so that it came to him with a distinct shock, as he looked at her this evening, and discovered that she was very close to hating him. “The doctor is a fool,” repeated his wife, as though she feared he had not heard.

  “He is the best in Saint Hilaire.”

  “She has a fever,” said Mrs. Langley, “but it’s a fever of longing, James.” She made a little gesture with her palm up, but Langley was thinking so hard and fast that he did not notice. It was a gross error, for when her hand fell back to her side, it gathered into what was almost a fist. “She’s in love,” she added coldly.

  “Give her quinine just the same,” said Langley. “Give her quinine and rest. That’ll do the work.”

  “Do you really intend to make her marry who you wish?” asked Mrs. Langley calmly.

  “Of course I do. Good heavens, Mary, are you surprised by that?”

  “And yet,” she pursued, more to herself than to him, “she’s more your child than she is mine.” She added: “I think you’re breaking her heart, James.”

  “Not in this century.” Langley chuckled. “They may be strained, but they don’t break. It’s out of date.”

  “Ah,” said his wife, and smiled to herself.

  It was growing to be a habit of hers, this inward smile, and it always maddened Langley. He stood rubbing his mustache, and smiling in jerks. “There’s one trouble with you, my dear,” he said. “Ever since the first baby died.”

  “James!” she cried faintly.

  “I’ve got to say it,” he persisted. “Ever since that, you’ve an idea that every man is a baby. By heavens, I think you’re fond of this infernal snake in the grass without ever having seen him.”

  “I like what Patricia tells me about him. He has an honest way of talking.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because it’s just a little foolish. She’s told me all the silly things he’s said at least ten times over. She sees nothing funny in them, James.”

  “This ends it,” he said angrily. “I forbid you to talk to her about him, Mary.”

 
“It’s impossible for me to obey you,” his wife replied.

  He tried to speak, but could not. “Do you mean that?” he managed to say at last.

  “Yes.”

  He jerked open the door and fled, for he was in a panic, and the thing he feared was himself. As he went downstairs, every servant he passed was a blow. He hated their faces, and, to escape them, he fled into the night, down the road, and twisted off onto a bypath until he stood in a place where the evening light filtered softly and coolly about him. There he stood still, and tried to arrange his thoughts.

  “Pat!” called a voice. And the sheriff stepped out. “You’re losing the old quick eye,” the sheriff said. “I made as much noise as a herd of yearlings in stubble, but you never heard me.”

  “What in the name of the devil are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come down to see the other end of the joke I played on you in Sloan. Seems to have worked out, all right.”

  “I’ll send your man back to you wrapped up in wood before he’s a month older,” Langley retorted. “I’d have done it long ago, but he refused to fight. Yellow.”

  “Mostly,” said the sheriff, “you lie well. But now you’re mad. Going back to that joke . . .”

  “Confound you, Sturgis.”

  “Now, now,” said the sheriff soothingly. “Ain’t he a rough talker! I guess Jerry has sort of irritated you, Pat.”

  “I’ll give you two minutes to talk sense and get out.”

  “That’s plenty. I’ll tell you, Pat. When I sicced Jerry onto you in Sloan, I sort of thought I was usin’ one useless gent to wipe out another. Then I got a letter that made me think maybe I was wastin’ a man’s life to kill a snake. You bein’ the snake. Back in Sloan I thought Jerry was jest a public danger. Now I c’n see he’s just young. And all he needed was somethin’ to tie to. Can you beat the bad luck that makes him tie to your daughter?”

  “Is that bug in your fool head, too?”

  “You ain’t even got a sense of humor left, have you, Pat?” said the sheriff, wondering. “Funny thing, I figure. When a man’s crooked it’s a sort of cancer. It starts with a little thing and eats all the good right out of him.”

  “I can’t listen to your chatter any more, Sturgis. Finish and get off the place. I can’t waste time on you here.”

  “So,” went on the sheriff calmly, ‘‘I figured it this way . . . I’ll go down and see what the boy amounts to now. And I come and what d’you think? Jerry’s in love with your kid. Well, Pat, nothin’ but a man-size man can be in love with a girl the way he is with her. Now, it wouldn’t be right to throw him away to kill a skunk. No, it wouldn’t. I seen that. But look at me. You busted me up twenty years ago. I been just driftin’ along, mostly no good. And now I see it’s my job.”

  “Ah,” said Langley, “I begin to understand. You’ve come and brought your gun, eh? You really think you can beat me to the draw, Ed?” He smiled almost in friendship on the sheriff.

  “No,” Sturgis went on. “I know you’re faster and straighter. But always before I been figurin’ on gettin’ in the first shot and then comin’ away clean of hurt. Now I see that my one chance to get you, Pat, is to soak up about three of your slugs while I plant one in your innards. Is that straight?”

  “So you’re going to clean up, Ed?”

  “Sure am, Pat.”

  “When I had that affair with your girl twenty years ago I had an idea that it would end this way . . . I’d hate to wipe you off the slate. Yet in a way, Ed, I hate to do it, because . . .”

  He had extended his left hand as he spoke, and now he raised his right hand. It came past his waistline carrying a revolver, and the explosion tore off the end of his last word. Flinching from that glint of metal, the sheriff had turned, drawing his own gun. The slug struck him across the chest and the weight of it toppled him to the ground. He would have fallen prone, helpless, had he not struck a tree trunk as he fell, and he slid in a bunch to the ground. He began raising his revolver.

  As for Langley, he had paused to observe the effect of his shot, and now he drove in another. It was meant for the forehead of the sheriff, but at that moment he raised his head back with a jerk, and the bullet crashed down through his breast. It sent a quiver through the sheriff, as though he shook with cold. His face seemed already dead, and his mouth was hanging wide, but the muzzle of his revolver, tilted and pointed up, and, as Langley fired for the third time, the sheriff’s gun exploded, and the bullet struck Langley squarely between the eyes.

  Afterward the sheriff lived long enough to crawl over to the fallen body.

  “A good-lookin’ man like him,” said the sheriff, “had ought to make a good-lookin’ stiff.”

  So he took the arms of Langley and folded them across his breast. And he closed the eyelids, and the open, horrified mouth.

  “Now,” said the sheriff, “I’ll tell a man that was worth doin’. It makes him a picture.”

  He put his own back against the tree. Presently he felt his right hand growing cold, and, looking down, he saw the revolver that he had never dropped from his fingers.

  “Well, well,” said the sheriff, “The Voice of La Paloma come in for the last word, after all.”

  XXV

  It was a long time after this.

  The United States consul of St. Hilaire sat on the front porch and three Irishmen sat around him. They had been drinking for some time, and there was still liquor before them. They had passed the stage of hilarity; they had reached the stage of solemnity. The consul had just finished a story and he was telling them about it.

  “You see that boat?” he said.

  A long, low, graceful white launch of comfortable width was sliding up the bay. There happened to be no other boats in the bay except fishing smacks, tilting this way and that as they tacked to port. The wind was coming out from the land, and yet it allowed the murmur of the white boat’s engine to come distinctly to the house of the consul.

  “That, in fact,” said the consul, “is him now.”

  The three Irishmen did three things. After standing up, one of them raised his hand to his nose, another touched an eye, the third caressed the angle of his jaw. They looked and looked until the yacht was far down the bay.

  “That was Jerry standing on the poop,” they said in one voice. “And was that his wife?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, then,” said the three Irishmen, and sighed, “Patricia’s gone.”

  “It ought to be a good yarn,” they added, turning to the consul.

  “It’s a good story,” he admitted, “but there’s a missing link. I still don’t know whether he climbed the fence or busted it or mined it.”

  The three Irishmen made each their peculiar gestures.

  “He probably used all the ways,” they said. “He could do three things at once fairly well.”

  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 work 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 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.