Bad Man's Gulch

by Max Brand

  “Billy Angel!” cried the girl. “Don’t you hear me?”

  “I’ll hear you beg like a coward and a sneak and a cur. Will you beg like a dog for your life, Charlie? Will you beg?” His right hand fumbled at her throat. It was a hand of ice, and it brought the chill dread of death into her soul.

  “Billy, Billy,” she gasped out, “don’t kill me!”

  His hand fell away. He sank back on the bed. “I knew all the time,” he said, “that you was yaller inside.” His voice fell to a mumble: “But if you say you’re beat . . . you’re safe from me this time. Until one day I’ll corner you, and make you . . .” The strength crumbled out of him. He fell sidewise on the bed and lay motionlessly.

  After that, half reeling with weakness and with relief, she turned up the flame of the lamp. And then she went toward him as one might go toward a sleeping tiger. He was quite unconscious. His hands, she knew, were icy cold, but his head was fiery hot to the touch. A new fear came to her. If she called a physician, she might make sure of helping him from the fever, but would she not certainly be fitting a rope around his neck?

  She sat down by the bed to watch, telling herself that only if the delirium returned would she send for the doctor. And there she watched the hours out. It was a broken sleep. Often he stirred and stared and muttered to himself. Once he sat bolt erect and stared at her with terrible eyes, but he sank back again and slept once more.

  It was after midnight, well after, before he settled into a quiet slumber, the muscles of his forehead quite relaxed, and his breathing regular. Then she tried his pulse, and found it firmer and more regular. She laid her hand lightly on his face, and it was no longer of such burning heat. So she stole back to her attic room and slept out the remainder of the night.

  But there was little sleep in Derby that night. Men had something to think about in the recent murder, and the northwester had settled to a howling demon that wailed and screamed with double force between midnight and morning. With the dawn it sank in force, but it was still whistling fitfully when Sue Markham awakened and looked out her window upon a dull gray sky stretched across with blacker, low-hanging clouds that threatened more snow. With what had already fallen, the hollows were already filled, although the gale had scoured all away from the highlands and the exposed places. All was stark mud, black rocks, or the crusted snow in the hollows. A miserable world to waken into, surely.

  She went down to the lunchroom. It was a grisly sight to her. For some reason the squalor of the place had never struck home in her before. Cigarette butts were everywhere, some mere streaks of ashes and black charred places in the wood where the butts had been dropped by careless hands. Others had been fairly ground into the very texture of the floor by wet, heavy heels. There were new smudges on the counter where the thickly oiled jacket sleeves of the trainmen had rested. There were half-washed dishes, too.

  Then there was a trip before her to the woodshed, wading through the gripping cold of the morning and through the snow, drifted knee deep behind the fence. As she came back, her arms aching with the weight of wood, she turned her head to the east and looked down to the great valley below her. There was a break in the leaden color of the sky there to the east. There was a streak of shining sun and gentle blue along that eastern horizon, and in the big valley itself was not the sun shining brightly?

  No doubt to those dwellers in a better land, looking out from their cozy homes, old Derby Mountain was a pure and a grand picture on this morning, his white cape lower around his shoulders, and with a wreath of smoky clouds around his brow. How little did they know of the miseries of mountain life.

  She built the fire in the stove. It sent up first a fume of smoke, until the draft cleared and began to pull on the flames. In the meantime, she jerked all the windows wide, and with the pure wind scouring through the place, she set to work sweeping and scrubbing with might and main, loathing herself for the work that she was compelled to do, hating the world for the fate that it had unjustly bestowed upon her.

  Even while she worked, she wondered at herself. This humor had never come upon her before. She had gone cheerfully to the dull beginning of every day. But now, all was sad effort. She told herself, mournfully, that blue days must follow such a night as the last one had been. But that explanation was not satisfactory. Something had been added or subtracted from her existence since yesterday dawned, and she could not yet tell what it was. But was it not, perhaps, the consciousness of the rift that had come in her old friendship with Jack Hopper?

  So, half dreamily, half wearily she went to the kitchen and started to cook breakfast.

  V

  UNCLE PETE TELLS A TALE

  But when the water was boiling and the coffee steaming and pouring its thin, piercing fragrance through the room, a joy came back to her. By the time that she had finished setting out the breakfast on the tray, she told herself that this was a game worth playing more than anything she had ever done before in her life.

  She bore up the tray to Billy Angel and found him lying, pale and weak, on the bed, hardly able to lift his head while he watched her out of dull eyes.

  “Where am I?” he asked. “This ain’t the jail.”

  “This is my room,” she told him. “And I’m gonna keep care of you till you can handle yourself.”

  She expected a tide of protestation to come from him. But he merely turned a dark red and said not a word. He did not even thank her for bringing the breakfast to him, but worked himself slowly up on the pillows and ate the food that was before him. She was half angered, half amused by his pride, and, with the amusement, there was mingled a sting of fear. As she watched his set and gloomy face she told herself, more than ever, that here was a man capable of anything.

  She went back to the lunch counter. Already, about the stove, half a dozen laborers in the yards were gathered, blinking sleepily at her. She served their orders in silence, knowing well that men do not wish to talk in the morning when the steel edge of the curse of Adam is eating into their souls.

  In the mid-morning, the wind swung sharply around to the southwest again, and in an hour the mountainside was covered with rivulets of water running down from the melting snow. By noon the report had come in that the fugitive had probably escaped. If he had been able to live through the bitterness of the night, he was now far away. For the horses were unable to make any progress through the slippery slush. The sheriff, to be sure, and three helpers were working rather blindly through the mountains, trying to pick up some sign of Billy Angel. But there was little hope of that. All that remained was that some outlying town might catch a glimpse of Angel as he fled toward safety.

  Old Pete Allison, tending the fire in the big stove and vainly trying to make himself useful, offered a target for conversation when the breakfast time was done.

  “How long’ll it take them to catch this Billy Angel?” she said.

  “Not for a long time,” said Pete Allison. “Folks can’t hope to run down a gent like that right offhand.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, we all got something comin’ to us. Some folks live quiet lives for a short time. But everything is balanced up. God plans it all, I reckon.”

  A man must be old and must have passed through great sorrows before he can speak of the Creator as Pete Allison did, with a sort of gloomy surety and understanding.

  “But, Pete, think of the men who simply run into a bullet . . . and that’s the end of them!”

  “Because there wasn’t anything left in ’em,” declared Pete Allison with conviction. “When you light a candle, it’s gonna keep right on burning until the wax is all used up. Same as with a man. The minute he’s born, the wax begins to be used up. If the flame burns high, he’s gonna die young. If the flame burns slow, he’s gonna die old. Or, if there ain’t much wax, he’ll die soon. If they’s a lot of wax, he’ll die late.”

  “But when a bullet hits . . . ?”

  “Every bullet,” said the old man, “is sent by the Almighty. D
og-goned if He don’t direct everything. The sin of the killin’ lies with the gent that pulled the trigger, but the death is by the orderin’ o’ Him.” He made these strange pronouncements in a quiet voice, not as one who prophesied, but as one who was acquainted with the facts of the case.

  “There was Sam Lever,” said the girl. “Never was such a big, strong fellow as Sam. He fell off the cliff last winter. . . .”

  “He was ready to die, then. God was done with him. You can’t tell by the outsides of a gent. The wax is on the inside. It’s the heart and the soul that counts. The wax must have been burned out of Sam Lever without us knowin’ it. Look at this here Billy Angel. He’s loaded with wax. Maybe he ain’t gonna last long, but he’ll make a darned bright light while he’s burnin’.”

  “Do you know him, Uncle Pete?” she asked eagerly.

  “Ah,” said the old man, “you’re took a lot with him, ain’t you? Girls is like moths. Them that burn with a bright light attract the calico to ’em. No matter whether the flame is red or white. Well, yes, I know Billy Angel.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “This was ten years back. I had two arms, then, and I was a piece of a man, anyways. I come ridin’ down that trail along Old Timber Top . . .”

  “You mean the narrow trail?”

  “Six inches of rock for a hoss to walk on, and next to that, hell is only two thousand feet away, air line! I come around a elbow turn, with my mule steppin’ halfway out into the next world, and I come bang into a kid ridin’ a mustang. Says I. . . ‘Son, back up your pony.’

  “‘It ain’t a pony,’ says he. ‘It’s a hoss.’

  “‘Back up your hoss,’ says I, ‘to that wide stretch behind you, where I can pass, and hurry it up. This here mule of mine is gettin’ plumb restless.’

  “‘This here mustang of mine,’ says he, ‘don’t know how to back up.’ And he adds, givin’ me a ugly look . . . ‘Nor neither do I!’

  “I looks this young brat over. He had an eye like a fightin’ dog’s eye, sort of bright and sad-lookin’, as if wonderin’ where he would get a whole handful of trouble in the world. He has an old gun strapped onto him, and he begins to play with the butt of it, sort of beggin’ me to start some trouble.

  “‘Kid,’ says I, ‘I’ll teach your hoss to back up.’

  “‘Old man,’ says he, ‘this here hoss don’t take to nobody’s teachin’ except mine.’

  “‘What d’you aim to do?’ says I, sort of wonderin’.

  “‘Never give no inch to nobody in the world,’ says he through his teeth.

  “I couldn’t help grinning, and, at that, he got white, he got so mad. Nothin’ makes a proud kid so mad as not to be took serious.

  “‘Do we have to fight about this?’ says I to him.

  “‘Are you scared to?’ he says to me, sneerin’.

  “‘Why, you little rat,’ says I, gettin’ sort of mad, ‘hop offen your hoss, so’s, when you drop, you ain’t sure to splash yourself all over the bottom of that ravine.’

  “He just tucks in his chin and laughs at me. And then I seen red. After all, he was man-sized, and he had a man’s meanness. I got hot and grabs my gun.

  “‘You young fool!’ says I, and jerks out my gun. What I mean to say is, that I jerked at it. But the front sight caught in the holster and didn’t come free. And, quick as a wink, I found myself lookin’ straight into the muzzle of a Colt, and that kid’s hand was as steady as murder, lemme tell you! I could see myse’f about an inch from kingdom come. Then, he drops his gun back into the holster.

  “‘Partner,’ says he, as sweet as you please, ‘you had a mite of bad luck. I guess that’s a new gun.’ And, sayin’ that, he backs his mustang as slick as a circus rider over a ledge that wasn’t fit for the hoss to walk forward on. So he comes to the wide place and waits for me to pass.

  “‘There ain’t no bad feelin’s?’ I says, goin’ past him.

  “He gives me a grin as broad as the moon. ‘None in the world!’ says he, and I knew that he meant it.

  “Well, sir, he was a fine-lookin’ kid, straight as a young pine, strong as the devil, quick as a lightnin’ flash. I never seen a pair of black eyes that looked so straight and had so much fire in ’em. And that was Billy Angel. Ever since then, I been waitin’ for an explosion back in the hills. And now it’s come.”

  She listened to this tale with a painful interest, dwelling upon every word of it. “But what else do you know about him?”

  “That’s all. That’s enough. You could live elbow to elbow with a gent for a year and never know as much about him as I found out about Billy Angel in them thirty seconds. After that I knew he was mean and proud enough to fight a army of giants, and kind enough to jump into a river to save a cat that was drownin’. I knew that he was able to burn a town, if he had a spite at the folks in it, or else he was capable of riskin’ his life to keep it from burning. That’s enough to know. The rest is only that he was an orphan and that he was brung up by his uncle, Ormond.”

  “But to have killed his own cousin!”

  “Girl, I ain’t said that he was a good man. I been sayin’ that he was a strong one.”

  “Stabbin’ him in the back?”

  “That sort of looks like a stickler for me. But, after all, he looked pretty near ready for anything even when he was a kid. He might have turned sort of sour when he growed up. But what I say is that they ain’t gonna capture him none too easy. His wax ain’t burned out yet.”

  “Tom Kitchin is a smart man,” said the girl tentatively.

  “Him? He’ll break Tom Kitchin between his fingers . . . like that. Tom Kitchin? He ain’t nothin’ to a gent like that young feller.”

  Such was the opinion of Pete Allison. And he was not a talkative old man, which gave the more weight to his ideas. As for the girl, she locked up each one of his words in her breast and pored upon his sayings in her spare moments as if they had been Bible talk.

  Those spare moments came few and far between to her. In the days that followed she was extraordinarily busy. For work is slowly accomplished when half of one’s mind is on something else, and that was the case with Sue Markham. She could not help thinking of her gigantic protégé in the room upstairs—her own room, brightly touched up with color here and there, an incongruous setting for huge Billy Angel.

  For three days he did not seem to gain at all. He grew actually thinner in the face. But then he changed. Every hour, almost, made an alteration in him for the better.

  In those days, she found that she was not taking a single step toward a better understanding of him. When she came into the room, he did not speak, and he answered her direct questions with monosyllables. He took the food that she gave him without thanks. He refused the books that she brought to him to pass away the long hours of his imprisonment. Instead, he seemed to prefer to lie flat on his back, staring at the ceiling.

  What thoughts went through his mind at such times as these? In the dull, weary hours of the day, was he determining to leave the course of lawbreaking on which he had embarked, or was he resolving more wickedness? In spite of herself, she could not help feeling that the latter was the truth. Silence is always more or less dreadful, and his silences seemed particularly so. She never went through the door into that room without a paling of her cheeks and a quickening of her heart, as though she were stepping into a tiger’s lair. A dozen times, when she passed the cheerful face of Tom Kitchin or the thoughtful one of Jack Hopper, the engineer, she was on the verge of calling in the law to take this ominous care off her hands.

  Then all her fears were redoubled by a most strange happening.

  VI

  SUE RECEIVES HOMAGE

  Steve Carney returned to town. Steve was the brightest star in the village of Derby. His father had been a fireman of long standing whose wits were a little too dull for him to advance to the trusted post of engineer in charge of a train. However, he was a man full of honest labor, and to the day of his death he had a gre
at compensation for his own lack of brains, and that was the surpassing intelligence of his son, young Steven. In the school, Steve stood at the head of his class, and, when he had finished the grammar school’s eight terms, he went on to high school, and, when high school was ended, it was the plan of the honest fireman to send Steve to college. For that purpose he had saved a considerable sum of money, but, in the very summer after the boy’s graduation, the father died—a death brought on, to some extent, by the wretched life to which he had condemned himself in order to lay by the more money for the sake of his son.

  When that money came into the hands of Steve himself, he decided that he would take the rest of his education by a short cut in the ways of the world. He left Derby, therefore, in the beginning of his eighteenth year and was gone nearly a twelvemonth, at the end of which time he returned somewhat out at elbow but with a new light in his eyes. The very first night after his arrival, falling into a poker game, he walked away with all the money in the party, and the town of Derby was forced to admit that Steve’s year of education had been by no means wasted. The admirable Steven then remained only a short time in Derby in order, as the old stories have it, to recruit his spirits, before adventuring further.

  But when he had renewed his depleted stock of money and when he had engaged in a knife fight and a gunfight, in both of which he came out unscathed, something prompted him to leave Derby for parts unknown. He left half an hour after a band of determined men with shotguns under their arms and with lariats handy for various uses called at the door of his father’s shack, which Steve had inherited, of course. He was not seen in town again for another year, and this time, when he returned, it was in a condition that made men forget his errors of the previous visit. Money flowed like water from his hands, and he brought a warmth of good cheer with him that penetrated to the farthest limits of the town.