by Max Brand
“Merciful heavens!” cried Mrs. Holden.
He whirled to the direction which her frightened eyes indicated; and there he saw the wolf dog stealing on him. And behind the dog, framed in the doorway, saw the slender body of Tom Holden, with a great blue-barreled Colt hanging down from his right hand. Mr. Curtis grasped the rifle which was on his knees, dropped it again, and leaped back into a corner with his hands above his head, his monstrous hands, which touched the ceiling above him as he stood there. And the flicker of the open fire made his face black and red by turns.
“Call off that dog—that wolf!” groaned Cousin Joe. “I’m an old man—I’m a father, Tom. You ain’t gunna try to murder me like—”
“Turn your face to the wall,” said Tom quietly, and as the other obeyed, he turned to his mother. So confident was he that the giant would not dare to stir, that he even embraced her.
“Do up the things you need. Not too much, because we’re traveling tonight,” he told her.
She looked at him in a bewildered way. “But what home—” she began.
“I’ll provide the home and do the worrying about it,” said he. “Now go along and bring down what you need.”
He watched her hasten from the room, shaking her head but too much accustomed to obedience to even question him. Then he went back to Cousin Joe and stood close behind him.
“I’ve thought this thing over, back and forth,” he said. “And I’ve had a hard time deciding. At first I thought that nothing would ever satisfy me except to flog you with a blacksnake until you crawled up to my feet and begged me for mercy.”
He added, sharply: “If you stir like that again, Sneak will put his mark on you. He’s a very nervous dog, Cousin Joe. He hates hasty movements.”
There was a groan from Cousin Joe.
“But after all,” went on Holden, “I decided that it would be for the best, perhaps, to let you go on as you have gone in the past. Let you live here, but without my mother to cook for you and slave for you and keep your house without pay and without gratitude. And without your son to take a pride in; your true son, Cousin Joe, a coward like you, a bully like you.
“Sometimes, when I think this thing over, I wonder what under heaven is so fearful a poison to the world as the sight of a creature like you living in it and calling himself a man. There’s nothing very greatly worse, I suppose. Nothing very greatly worse, sir! What a gift to society to remove you, like a stain from a clean white page. A touch of a knife, or a touch on a trigger would do the work so neatly. It would be so soon over. And the whole range of the mountains would be easier because of it.
“However, death is too easy. You have to have pain. A worm that will bully a woman—a weak woman made helpless because she has a child to take care of, a crippled child at that, well, well, Cousin Joe, I had better not think about it or talk about it.
“Now stay where you are, for I warn you, if you stir, Sneak will have you by the back of the neck. And I’ll not be here to stop him.”
For he heard, now, the tapping of feet on the stairs, and the creaking as his mother descended. Then she came out into the room with fear in her face, and an old bonnet, some twenty years out of fashion, but ridiculously new and bright, on top of her head with a red feather sticking up from the one side.
The cripple looked at her with a heart breaking with amusement, pity, love, and sorrow. For what if Alexa should see her in this array?
But he took her inside his arm. How very small she was! Smaller, even, than Alexa, and her poor back bowed with long labor. He kissed her forehead, he kissed the smile that was trembling on her lips, and led her out into the night.
At the copse he brought out the red stallion.
“Dear heavens, child!” cried she, clasping her hands. “Do you expect me to ride that monster?”
“He will be as gentle as a lamb to you,” said the cripple. “It’s only the strong people in the world he hates and dreads. There’ll be nothing for you to tremble at, I promise you!”
She could not help but believe him. And she could not help but sigh as at last she sat aloft in the saddle, holding fast to the pommel.
“Ah, Tommy dear, look at the sky! I’d almost forgot that there was stars!”
Holden looked up to her, smoothing the neck of the stallion. It was really most wonderful. He had expected some trouble, at least, but there was not a stir of great Clancy. He merely tossed his head and pricked his ears; and when he stepped away, with Holden hobbling before him down the road, he went as softly as a lamb.
Then Holden whistled. A short howl answered him from the house. Sneak came like a gray bolt from the rear and shot away into the lead. All through the night he circled about them, cutting far ahead, and then to the side, and then falling to the rear, to report anything which the nose of a wolf might find and which the brain of a man might recognize as an enemy.
But there was not a thing. The night lay quiet about them. The wind was breathless in the trees. A broad moon, deepest orange, at first, came up to light them, then turned to white and rolled through the black of the heavens where all the stars went out.
“It’s the beginnin’ of a new life,” whispered Mrs. Holden.
But her son thought of Alexa. “It’s the end of everything for me,” he told himself. “And yet, what hope did I have, after all?”
CHAPTER 31
A dozen times every hour he changed his mind and made it up again. They slept at a little town twelve miles from the house of Cousin Joe. And when they wakened the next day, he finally reached his decision in the gloom of the morning, when the mind of a man is only half his own.
He decided that he would scorn a sham. He would enter Larramee with his mother dressed in this same ridiculous costume, perched high in the saddle on great Clancy, with Sneak for their bodyguard. Let the world laugh at him—if it dared!
So thought Holden, like a sulky boy shaking his fist at the whip which is about to strike. But when he came to the top of the hills overlooking the town, his heart failed him. They would see with such bitterly critical eyes. And the secret smile behind their hands, how could he endure that?
Yes, some one might laugh aloud, and when he wanted to destroy the offender, he would be powerless, for, after all, there was never a moment of the day or the night when he was not conscious that all of his strength was a gigantic pretense, a huge sham!
He had gone too far to turn back now, however. So down the hill he went, working hard with the staff, exhausted by his day’s march, and he came into the main street to be greeted with a whoop of exultant laughter by a dozen youngsters who instantly gathered around him. They dared not laugh aloud, when they were close, but their snickering behind his back was incessant. And Holden, his face pale after the first burning, went slowly on down the street. Clancy grew skittish in the uproar and began to dance, so he helped his mother down, and they walked side by side. Surely as absurd a pair as ever walked elbow to elbow!
“What is the matter with those children?” she asked him.
“They’re glad to see us, that’s all,” said he.
Jeff Carter, the cow-puncher, came by with a companion, stopped to stare, and then rolled in their saddles with laughter of the silent kind as Holden went on down the street at the side of that bobbing, ridiculous red feather. Others came out to their front porches and to their windows to observe. The whole town seemed to know instantly, as though the big black crow which was constantly croaking around them gave a warning of their coming.
“Tommy,” said his mother, “they’re laughin’ at something. I don’t see nothin’ wrong with you. Is there something wrong with me?”
“Not a thing in the world,” lied Holden bravely. “And here,” he added, “is the house of a friend of mine. And there she is in the garden.”
He paused at the gate, groaning inwardly, but forcing a smile. “Miss Davis,” said he. “I’ve brought my mother to town with me to keep house, d’you see? I want you to meet Mrs. Holden.”
He watched Aunt Carrie’s eyes widen over the red feather, the old, bedraggled clothes. Then she dropped the watering can with a crash, kicked the trowel from the redbrick path, and advanced with the broadest of smiles, stripping off her man’s stiff gauntlet glove as she came. She took Mrs. Holden’s hand and smiled, indeed, but with such tenderness that the head of Holden spun. He could not understand.
“Come in,” said the witch. “You must be tired out, poor Mrs. Holden.”
“I’m fair to middlin’ petered out,” admitted Mrs. Holden. “But I get along. I tell my boy that I ain’t much tired by nothin’ while I have him along with me.”
The witch blinked a little at this vocabulary and at this grammar, but she took Mrs. Holden in hand at once and guided her into the house.
“An old friend of mine is here,” said the witch in her loud voice, as she opened the door and brought Mrs. Holden in.
Holden himself paused in the doorway, bewildered, shocked. For he guessed what had happened. Alexa was there; and the witch had brought in his mother in that ridiculous garb only to show her to the girl, that they might laugh about it, afterward.
“Close the door, Tom,” said Aunt Carrie.
“Is she here? Alexa?” asked Tom with his lips.
“Close the door!” cried the witch. “Half the dust in the town is blowing in on me!”
He obeyed, and as he trailed on after them, he saw her standing up from a chair—Alexa in a riding suit, with her crop still in her hand, and wonder still in her eyes as she recovered from the first glimpse of Mrs. Holden. But after that, while the witch was introducing them, and while Holden was nerving himself desperately to encounter terrible Alexa’s blue eyes face to face, he discovered suddenly that he had ceased to exist; for in that room there was only one concern, whether for Alexa or Miss Davis, and that concern was the little old woman with the red feather in her old-fashioned hat. Too much attention they seemingly could not pay her.
And while Miss Carrie Davis prepared coffee in the kitchen with her accustomed lightning dexterity, the beautiful Alexa, in the front room was sitting close beside Mrs. Holden, chatting in the gayest possible manner, until Mrs. Holden herself forced attention upon her son.
For she said: “Dear Miss Larramee, I’m a glad woman that my boy has fallen in with such good friends; and him never no sort of a man to pick up friends among girls!”
Poor Tom Holden could have shrunk through the back of his chair, but behold, Alexa turned upon him a smile so frank and so radiant that no one in the world could ever have guessed that there might once have been a cruel scene between these two. One might have sworn that they were old friends!
And what was she saying?
“We are all very proud to have Mr. Holden in our town, Mrs. Holden. Because, you know, every real town needs a giant killer, don’t you think?”
“Dear Miss Larramee,” said the old woman, raising a work-roughened hand, “I dunno how all this talk about Tom and fighting could of started. Because I know that he never had a gun in his hands all the days of his life; and as for ridin’ a hoss, he was hardly ever in a saddle. Books was all his life. Books, books, books, till I used to think he was bewitched. And now they tell me that he’s a fighter; and that big strong men are really afraid of him. Well, I would be seein’ that before I’d believe it. Though he has changed a mite; bein’ a lot browner and more cheerfuller now than I ever seen him, dear boy!”
And turning to Tom with a motherly smile: “Fetchup your necktie a mite tighter, Tom. It’s all askew.”
Poor Tom was utter crimson, now, and dared not look at Alexa saving from the remotest corner of his eye; and he found that she was in a brown study, frowning and scrutinizing him. He felt that he was more lost than even he could have expected. And if he felt no resentment against his poor mother, it was because he pitied her as much as he pitied himself.
But the gloom of the fair Alexa ended in a moment. Then she was chatting as gaily as ever; and when the coffee came, she had to pass sandwiches to Mrs. Holden and pour her coffee with her own hands. And, then would not Mrs. Holden take off her hat for the sake of growing cooler?
Mrs. Holden answered; “It’s real kind of you, ma’am. If I ain’t botherin’ you none—”
And off came the hat, revealing a broad, smooth brow beneath, sharply cut across by the red incision of the hat’s lower edge. Holden breathed a little more freely. Surely, unless they were blind they would see the eternal goodness in those mild eyes and in that timid smile, and in the whole shrinking form of the little woman.
“Get me some fresh flowers for that vase yonder in the corner, Alexa,” said Miss Davis in her most dictatorial manner.
The beautiful Alexa arose with a smile and went into the garden.
But what was this?
“Tom Holden!”
“Yes?”
“Are you blind, man?”
“I don’t know—” began he, at a loss.
“You act like it! Let a girl go out alone into a garden to pick flowers and dirty her fine hands among weeds and—what not?”
“Miss Davis—” he began.
“Bah!” said she. “Go out there this minute!”
CHAPTER 32
She spoke with such withering severity, that little Mrs. Holden winced and looked from one to the other to make out whether or not they were really in the midst of a bitter argument. Tom stood up, slowly, leaning heavily on his staff.
“Maybe Tom’s a mite tired, walking all those miles!” said the little mother, creeping feebly to his defense.
The witch struck that feeble protest brutally to the ground.
“Stuff!” said she. “That man’s as strong as a giant. He can do what he wants to do, and that’s as much as the best giant could do in any fairy story. Tom Holden, go out there and help her pick flowers!”
So Tom limped across the room, and just outside the door he stood for a moment leaning upon his staff and trying to fortify himself. For this was far, far more awful than any ordeal through which he had ever passed in his life. This was more dreadful than that frightful moment during which he had faced Crogan through this same doorway. Because in that time of stress, Sneak had come beside him to help, just as Sneak came now, with wicked little eyes on his master’s face, trying to read the mind and the need of the human.
But Sneak was no help now. There was no place for a brute intelligence here! He drew a great breath, therefore, looked pitifully down at the dog, and then hobbled down the steps and up the gravel. Alas, how clearly now he could remember Alexa dancing in the schoolhouse, like a windfloated feather!
She was in a corner of the garden, where a tree sprinkled the ground with a black patterning of shadow; she was on her knees, stooping over some little red flowers with yellow throats. He had not the slightest idea what they might be termed. And he wondered, vaguely, why one should pick such short-stemmed blossoms to fill so large a vase as that which the witch had pointed out to the girl!
His shadow fell across her.
“I think these will do, Aunt Carrie,” said the girl, and then she looked up and saw Tom and opened her eyes in surprise.
“Oh,” said she, “is it you?”
“It is I,” said Tom, feeling his own insufficiency more terribly than ever, and yet wondering in his heart of hearts that her absorption in the picking of the flowers had been so great that she had not heard the noise he made dragging down the path—so unlike the long, light step of the witch! And indeed, no matter how intent she had been upon her work, she had not as yet plucked a single flower!
“May I help you?” he asked, with the gentleness of one who expects a refusal.
At this, she looked up to him again.
“I suppose so,” she said critically. And forthwith she rose.
How gracefully, how lightly she moved! And he labored down upon his knees, lowering himself down the staff like an old man!
“Are your eyes very sharp?” she asked him.
“Does one need to be very
keen?” he asked her.
“Of course. You want the young flowers.”
“How does one tell that?”
“And you a great woodsman? A great trailer?”
She stood over him, laughing. “I’ll tell you. The older ones are just a little wrinkled at the very lip of the petals. Can you see which is which now?”
He took off his glasses. He leaned a little lower. “I think I can make them out,” he said, eager to succeed.
He began to pick them. A little silence came. At last he held up a hand half filled with fresh young flowers.
“I think those will do,” said he hopefully. “Do you think so?”
To his immense surprise he found that she had dropped her chin upon a doubled fist and was staring down at him, and not at the blossoms. It was an attitude which she had copied, no doubt, from that excessively mannish Miss Davis, but what was mannish in the witch was only the more delightfully girlish in Alexa.
“Is there really no malice in you?” she asked sharply of him.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said he very truthfully.
“About the house; the way I treated you; and John Cutting striking you—”
“I deserved trouble,” said he. “I was very presumptuous. And I’ve wanted to explain, you know, that I never really—I mean that what I said—it was rumor that mixed up everything and made such a mess. And then I didn’t know how—because it was all so—”
“I’m sure,” said Alexa, “that I don’t know what you’re driving at. I don’t understand.”
“I’m not a bit good at these things,” said Holden. “I’m trying to apologize, because—”
“Why did you bring her here?” asked Alexa.
“My mother?” he asked huskily, turning white.
“Yes.”
“She’s very alone without me. She is happy with me, I trust.”
“And you?”
“I?” said he, somewhat through his teeth. “Of course, I’m happy with her! Of course! Besides—”
“Well?”