by Max Brand
The nearer view bore out all that he had suspected from the distance. There was prosperity, to be sure, but an utter carelessness of appearance which spoke eloquently of the presence and the directing mind of Chris Venner. In the yard a number of chickens were scratching and the whole surface of the worn garden was pockmarked with their work. In the near distance there was the steady harsh music of swine from the pig pens. In the near pasture were yellow-wooled sheep. Milk cows, a half dozen of them, ambled through another pasture, pleasantly shaded with a scattering of trees, and the whole farm reeked with the air of plenty, and of confusion.
He was looking over this scene when he heard a voice behind him and turned to face Chris Venner in the door of the house. He was not changed an iota. His clothes were even a bit more shabby than they had been when he was on the road. His coat was off, his dirty vest was unbuttoned with the tag of a Bull Durham sack flapping down from it, and he might have been taken any place for a cow-puncher rather than a rancher—a cow-puncher out of luck, at that, and out of work.
He was astonished at the sight of the cripple, too astonished to speak, for a moment. Then he dragged Holden from the horse and almost carried him into the house. His delight was almost pathetic. He planted Holden in a chair and raised a full bellow which brought two Chinese servants running. One was dispatched for cold water from the well; one was sent for whisky. And presently Holden was equipped with his drink. It was old and respectable liquor, but to his unaccustomed taste it was a sort of disgusting fire, which scalded his throat and turned his stomach. Venner poured down his own dram with a single gesture and then dumped out another half tumbler for himself.
“I’ve been thinkin’ of you ten times a day, Holden,” he said to the cripple. “The address I give to you, I never thought of you using it. But what’s your game in these parts, partner?” he asked, leaning forward and lowering his voice. “What’s—”
“You’re doing well, here,” said Holden.
The other grinned. “I fell into this lucky, old son. Going crooked was hard work. Going straight is a cinch. They ain’t nothin’ to worry about. All I got to do is work. The devil, man, that’s easy. I’m all fixed up. Everything that I’ve started has turned out extra fine. First place, I came along here and find this here ranch owned by a gent that’s quit the West and gone East to live easy—because he struck it rich in the mines, darn his lucky hide! He didn’t care what he sold for. It was all auctioned off, from the land to the cows on it. Nobody else around here happened to be very flush. And I raked the whole thing in at about what I wanted to pay for it. I dunno. Maybe it’s only worth about twice what I paid for it. But I figger more’n that.
“Then I started lookin’ around at the chances on this here place. Nothin’ but cows been run on the place for fifty years. Well, old son, cows don’t do no harm to ground. They’re the makin’ of poor soil. And this whole dog-gone valley is rich as a mint if you could get enough rain to farm it. They ain’t enough rain, mostly, but they’s a lot of water that goes to waste in the creek. I got a smart gent in here from a college, full of talk right out of a book. He showed me pretty pronto where I could slap water out of the river right onto about five hundred acres of bang-up good bottom land. Richer’n gold! So I’m levelin’ off that ground. Needed ploughs and harrows and sowers and rakes and sub-soilers, and mowin’ machines, and a lot of other junk.
“Well, I went over to the big Crosby ranch, where they was havin’ a closing-out sale. I raked in about eight thousand dollars’ worth of stuff—it would of cost that new—for about six hundred dollars! You know the way second-hand farm tools go? It’ll cost me about fifteen thousand to level off and check up that bottom land; and after that, I got five hundred acres of the finest ground in the world. They’ll bring me in seventy-five or a hundred an acre every year of my life. Why, Holden, I’m coinin’ money!”
“How much was in that whole clean-up you made from the bank?” asked Holden.
“About fifty-eight thousand, old-timer. A pretty neat lift, eh?”
“Pretty neat,” said Holden.
“I’ve got a few thousand left; after the checking is paid for I’ll be in debt, but not for long. Everything is runnin’ pretty fine and smooth. I went over to the bank the other day and talks to the president. Can you imagine me settin’ down and talkin’ to the president of a bank, Holden? There I sat, all swelled up. He gives me a big cigar and lights it for me. ‘Put your feet on that chair,’ say he, ‘and make yourself real easy, Mr. Venner. And what might be your pleasure today, sir,’ says he. ‘Are you comin’ in to pay us a friendly visit, or maybe you are thinkin’ of opening business relations with us?’
“Can you get around a bank president talkin’ that way to a gent like me, Holden? No, you can’t. I sort of gagged, but I managed to keep a straight face.
“ ‘It’s partly friendship and partly wantin’ to open up business with your bank,’ says I.
“ ‘Mr. Venner,’ says he, ‘I am delighted.’
“He looks me over for a minute, while I aim to get hold of myself and recollect that this here is the same Chris Venner that I always used to know, that never had no money except on the last day of one month and the first day of the next one, him that never could get no credit from nobody for nothin’! I aimed to need, take it all in all, about thirty thousand dollars to clean off the last of the debts agin’ the ranch, finish the checkin’ up of the ground for the irrigation, putting in the irrigation pump, and lumpin’ the whole thing under one head, I seen that twenty-five thousand would be pretty much what I needed. Well, old son, if you know anything about the cow business—which you probably know a pile more than I ever did—you know that a banker always holds his head and makes a little prayer before he loosens up with any money, to a cowman. The cow business is too dog-gone uncertain. One year along comes blackleg and cleans up the cows. The next year there’s lots of cows and the prices is so low that it don’t hardly pay to ship, and the year after that, they ain’t no calves. You understand, I guess?”
“Of course,” said the cripple.
“I figgered on all this, but then I says to myself that while he’s actin’ so mighty generous, I could put up my figgers pretty high. It’s always best, you know, to ask about twice what you expect to get. Leastwise, that’s been my experience. So I sticks my thumbs into the arm holes of my vest and takes a pull on that there cigar for the sake of gettin’ up my courage. When I had worked up a cloud of smoke so’s he couldn’t watch my face none too close, I says to him, quick and snappy, like it didn’t mean nothin’ to me: ‘About fifty thousand is what I want.’
“He answers right up quick: ‘Fifty thousand?’ says he. ‘If you really need some spare cash, Venner, you’d better make it seventy-five.’
“I batted a hole in that smoke with my hand to have a look at him, but he was squintin’ at me as level and serious as though he seen all them little seventy-five thousand greenbacks all printed out in rows with six-per-cent blossoms on their heads every dog-gone year. I couldn’t help bustin’ out: ‘How d’you think that the ranch will stand a tax like that, governor?’
“He just gives me a smile.
“ ‘Venner,’ say he, ‘do you suppose that our eyes are shut? We’ve been watching every move you’ve made. We know you better than we know a good many men who have been familiar with us half of their lives. The reason is that we’ve had a chance to see the way your wits work. We’ve watched you pull in a ranch worth a hundred and a quarter thousand for about fifty thousand. We’ve watched you buy ten thousand dollars’ worth of machinery for a few hundreds, where most of the ranchers were too proud to be in on old, rusty, used stuff, not realizing that it was practically as strong as ever. We’ve seen you manage your profits without fuss and feathers. You haven’t been tearing down the old ranch house and putting up a new one, or even wasting a lot of time and trouble and hard cash painting up the old shack and trying to put a fine face on a bad business. You ain’t even bought no furniture�
�not a stick of it!’
“ ‘Look here,’ says I, ‘how come you to be follering me so dog-gone close?’
“ ‘It’s our business,’ says he. ‘Some folks think that a banker only sits down in a chair and figgers out ways to cut the throats of the widows and the orphans and to cheat hard-workin’ men out of a livin’. Matter of fact, we have to do everything from detective work to handing out soft soap. Every banker has to try to be a cross between a senator and a servant, and it’s mighty hard to hit it right. Most of us are too much one way or the other. I’m letting you in on a ground floor about us,’ says he, and he gives me a grin that makes me like him all the way down to the ground, ‘partly because you’re too smart to put up with any buncombe and partly because I want you to know the worst about us right now, because you’re going to do business with this bank the rest of your life, young man, though you may not know it just now.
“ ‘I say that we’ve watched you from the start. We know almost to the dollar what your actual needs are. Twenty thousand dollars are about all you want to push you through the pinch. I offer you seventy-five thousand. You wish to know why? In the first place, between you and me, because I wanted to surprise you and make you think that we’re a large-landed bank. But as a matter of fact we spend most of our time shaving the outside rims off of dollars to save cents. Then I know that we’re well secured even on twice as much as the sum I offered. That irrigated land will be worth not a penny less than four hundred dollars an acre, which means two hundred thousand or nearly a quarter of a million for the lot. Why under heaven none of us ever saw the possibilities in that dirty little yellow river before, I don’t know. Let that go. The fact of the matter is that at the present moment I’m willing to hand you seventy-five thousand dollars in cash or credit, whichever you choose. And if you want, I’ll make that a hundred thousand, or even a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Between you and me, there’s nothing this bank would like better, young man, than to get its hands on that ranch of yours. Because I have an idea that you can grow fruit trees on that ground, not merely alfalfa. And I have another idea you can expand the irrigated acreage in the valley from five hundred to nine hundred acres.’
“ ‘By jiminy,’ says I, ‘you been readin’ my mind. Lemme ask you how far back you been follerin’ me.’
“ ‘As far as we cared to,’ says he, and he grinned again.
“Holden, that grin of his has been botherin’ me a whole lot. What did he mean by it, d’you think? Was he aimin’ to tell me that he knows that I’d been—a crook?” Here Venner lowered his voice and leaned closer.
“Would you care?” asked Holden.
“Would I care? Heaven, yes! It’s a hell to me, just the thought of it!”
“You think that they’re still working down your back trail?”
“I think just that. And what’ll they find out?”
“Not a great deal,” said Holden, making a very broad guess. “They’ll find a few misdemeanors, a few gun fights, perhaps, and one or two rather shady attempts to make money faster than you ought to. But, on the whole, you never did anything big enough to be called really bad, until you met Blinky Wickson.”
Venner poured himself another drink and swallowed it hastily. “They’s no use trying to fool you. You know everything about me, Holden. Well, tell me what to do?”
“Would you do it?”
“To get shut of this name of a crook?”
“That’s it.”
“I’d give the next ten years of my life,” breathed Venner. “Oh, I’d give half of the time that’s left to me!”
CHAPTER 21
There is a strength about passionate language which often causes a surrounding silence to spread about it, and so it was with Chris Venner, that as he poured out the words in a low voice which was trembling and tense with emotion, Holden found it impossible to answer for the moment, but he looked down to the floor and then glanced around him. He saw the worn upholstery, its flowers more than half worn away, all the spring gone out of the roses, all the gold gone from the hearts of the daisies. He saw the carpet, polished and worn almost white along the seams; he saw the cracked windowpanes, one light entirely knocked out but filled in with oiled paper, which in turn had a hole punched through it; he saw a terrible old piano in the corner of the big living room, with the veneer lifting from the surface of the instrument, suggesting an interior condition which only the demons of discord could even faintly imagine. He saw the cracked and soiled ceiling from which half the plaster had fallen and exposed the bared slats and discolored mortar; he saw the reeling weakness of the chairs; he saw the spur scars along the mop board; he saw the spider webs in the upper corners. He heard the flies buzzing busily in the central stream of white-hot sunshine; and from the outside of the building he heard the chickens cawing and cackling drowsily, the shrill snarling of the swine, the low of a cow.
How could God have created so much horrible ugliness? And yet this man desired to live here—his heart was breaking at the thought of leaving it! No, hardly that. But the house was nothing to Chris Venner. Fill it from wall to wall and from ceiling to cell with noise and confusion and good cheer and food and voices of companions—this was all he asked. As for beauty or the lack of beauty, he had no eye for it. His soul was not tuned to that key! No, let the chickens cackle, let the pigs whine in the distance, and let the bull roar from the pasture. Their voices carried to the brain of Chris Venner the sweetest triumphs of music, singing one and all: “I belong to Chris Venner. My body is his. He may have me when he will. He may convert me into food. He may convert me into dollars. I am a living, breathing, audible part of his substance. I am almost part of his flesh already!”
Such was the message which each brought home to the big man, and young Tom Holden, watching and listening, saw and understood. Not that he had ever read any of this in a book, but pain opens in a sensitive mind many doors which are closed forever in the intelligence of most people. It opens many doors, or it closes them all! As for Holden, he could guess and feel with the instinctive adroitness of a helpless thing—an animal, say, or a child. But he could apply his man’s intelligence to what his senses taught him and his instincts urged. So, now, it seemed to him that he had taken the entire truth about Chris Venner inside his being. He knew all about that big, handsome, burly ruffian and reformed crook. He had Chris Venner in the hollow of one of his weak hands!
It was enough to have made another man feel like singing a song of triumph. But that was not so with Holden. He felt, rather, a deeply ingrained sense of humility and of sorrow. How much Chris Venner had achieved; how much more, still, could he go on achieving! He could add great things to his community. He could be a force in the world, therefore. But what could he, what could Holden do? Here was this strong-handed robber turning honest citizen at a rate that dazzled and bewildered Holden. Here was a valley quintupled in productiveness, so much taken from the desert and given to society—enough to support half a dozen or a dozen whole families, eventually, and one of those families might bring into the world a genius. Who could say in how much the production of that genius and the million blessings he would give the world was not the direct result of the big strong hands and the stupid, restless brain of Chris Venner?
These were the gloomy reflections of Thomas Holden. And they all flooded through his brain in the mere half second or second of silence which elapsed after the last sound of the voice of Mr. Christopher Venner had died away. Certainly he spoke long before Chris had a chance to become embarrassed.
“I suppose that there’s something in all this beside the valley and the ranch, Chris?”
“I dunno what you mean, partner?”
“There’s somebody you don’t wish to have her learn—”
“About what I’ve done?”
“That’s it.”
“You’re right, Holden. You’re always right. I ain’t said a thing about a girl, but there’s one messed up in this—all tangled up inside of my head, so�
��s I can’t never get rid of her, day or night. She sticks with me like a burr into the wool of a fool sheep. I can’t get her out, Holden. I can’t do it. And I don’t want to! I want to keep her. I want to have her and keep her the rest of her days and mine. I want her to have the burying of me after my time’s up. I want her to hear the drop of the dirt on my coffin and go home to comfort my kids. Y’understand me, partner? I want her for a wife, Julie’s a good girl! Too good, I’m thinkin’ half the time. Too good to stay with me a minute after she hears about what I’ve been and the things that I’ve done! What d’you say, Holden? What d’you think she’d do?”
Holden could barely repress a smile. It was a very like the babbling of a child which cannot end talking until it has spilled out all of its soul which it can put into words. Such was this outburst of big Chris Venner.
“Does she love you?” asked Holden and as he used the word, he could not help wincing, for he thought of the bright, scornful eyes of the lady of his heart, fixed irremovably upon his soul, withering it like a blast of fire.
“Love,” said Chris thoughtfully, “is something that I ain’t been bothering with enough to know much about it at all. But she’s got a way of lookin’ sort of friendly at me. I feel as if I could talk to Julie about most things. I feel as if she’d even understand if I was to talk to her about herself. There’s only one devil in it—what would happen if she was to find out—”
“About how you made your start?”
“Stolen money, Holden!”
“I understand. Well, there may be a way.”
“If you find it,” said Chris, a moisture of intense emotion springing into his eyes, “I tell you that I’ll go to hell and back again for you, Holden.”
“Suppose,” said Holden, “that the bank was to forgive you and dismiss the search for the criminal and even send you a private vote of thanks?”