The Fugitive

by Max Brand

  The public opinion was put in the greeting of an old acquaintance of Chris who rode in from Cedar Creek that day.

  “I hear you’ve gone out and bagged a couple more, Chris. Having a kind of a nice little game all by yourself, ain’t you?” It was spoken with a faint, ironical smile.

  Old Chris answered with a grunt. He had received nothing but black looks from the entire village ever since old Hank Ballon vanished.

  “Time takes care of hard feelings,” he was heard to murmur.

  As for his villagers, they would not dare to revolt against him. They were deeply in his power, and they were not freehanded, like Hank. They had wives and children, and they dared not defy him. So secure was he in his hold upon them that he began to relish this new situation. It proved so conclusively who was their master. Every hour of the day he had a new testimony concerning his position. He was, in fact, the undisputed tyrant of the town, and the realization was sweet to Chris Martin. He went home that night whistling half the way, and actually forgot to light a cigar.

  The foreman came out and watched him unsaddling his horse, for Martin was at least enough of a democrat not to make any of his cowpunchers do menial work.

  “I hear they got Willie,” said the foreman.

  “When any young fool,” said the rancher, “runs into a stone wall, he’s going to get knocked down.”

  That, for him, ended the narrative of Willie Merchant.

  “He’ll go up, all right,” said the foreman. “Sure he will. He’s done.” “How many years?”

  “I dunno,” said Chris. “It’s pretty serious. Cutting wire and then swiping water . . . that’s as good as burglary right there, ain’t it? And then rustling cows on top of all that . . . the law is pretty hard on cattle rustlers, partner.”

  “The law’d rather see cows starved to death, I reckon,” mused the other.

  “Eh?” said Chris.

  “Law’d rather see ’em starved,” repeated the foreman steadily.

  “You aim to be one of them that waste time pitying a blockhead?”

  “I do.”

  “I got no time for soft heads, son.”

  “I got no time for you, neither,” said the foreman. “You can find somebody to take my job. I’m through.” And he turned upon his heel and walked away.

  Chris was dumbfounded. Here was a new expression of public opinion. Here was a man whose hair was grizzled, whose step was no longer light, who had, for many and many a year, labored like a slave in the service of a hard master. But now he was willing to sacrifice the pension that, in a few years, was sure to come to him, in order to enjoy the exquisite satisfaction of telling the master that he disapproved of his conduct. It was almost bewildering to Chris, but he put it into a maxim and threw the fact behind him.

  Some fools blossom early and some blossom late, said Chris to himself, and went to the house.

  There was Jennie waiting. She was dressed in riding togs, her best outfit. There were yellow gloves on her hands, and a black, snaky quirt was dangling from her fingers. Her head she held very high. And in her eyes there was something that made him a stranger. It troubled Chris.

  She’s sulking, said Chris to himself. When a woman is sulking, the thing to do is to act damn’ serious. Like you had a toothache or something. They sure hate a smile when they’re on a grouch.

  With this in mind, he shied his hat into a corner and slumped into a chair as though the weight of the world had crushed him. But the eye of Jennie remained as frosty cold as ever. It seemed to the old rancher, as he watched her, that she had never been so beautiful. For to him she was beautiful. A man who called her nose too short would have been damned by him as blind to begin with, and a fool to finish. Even her freckles were, to him, each a separate grace. He wondered, as he watched her, how God could have given him the joy to be bound by a blood tie to this marvelous creature.

  “Uncle Chris,” she said, “I’ve waited for you to come home before I left.”

  He refused to admit the meaning of the words. “Left for where, Jen?”

  “For Cedar Creek first, I suppose.”

  “Going to visit the Lorings?”

  “No. I’ll stay in the hotel for a while.”

  “Bad place, Jen.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “How long d’you aim to be gone?”

  Forever.”

  He peered at her with a squint, as though he were looking across the blazing sand of the desert at the far, cool image of mountains.

  “Forever, Jen?” he murmured.

  She rose. “Forever,” she answered.

  “You ain’t joking, honey?”

  “Joking?” she said savagely. “No, I haven’t your sense of humor. It doesn’t make me smile. I . . . I . . . “She shook away tears that were coming, and then stamped a foot to drive away the coming weakness.

  “Jen,” he told her, “you sort of stagger me. What have I done except love you like you was my own?”

  “You’ve ruined my life,” she told him. “You’ve ruined it. You lied to me about poor Will and sent me there to scorn him and break our engagement . . . and that drove him to all the rest. You called him a coward . . . a coward and . . . ” She choked with the immense injustice of it. “And I’ve learned the whole truth. A coward? He was brave enough to defy the whole law . . . and you . . . and all the rest. A coward.”

  Public opinion, said a still voice in the heart of Chris. She’s only a part of it. Public opinion. “Jen,” he said aloud, “suppose that you and me was to talk all of this over, slow and easy.”

  “There’s nothing left to talk about. Will’s gone from me. The prison will have him. The prison. And you . . . it’s all you . . .”

  After that, what happened was too stunningly swift for Chris to follow. But it was all stormed out at him. She was going, and never to return. She would stay at Cedar Creek until she had fought the case for Will with her money. For now those old investments that he had made for her had flourished and grown into a small fortune. And she, being of age, would claim them. She would do this, and then, when Will was gone, she would take herself she cared not where, so long as she never had to see her uncle’s face again.

  Then she was gone, and he watched her throw herself on the back of her horse and gallop away with her head down into the wind. At that he weakened enough to run outdoors after her and cry out, but his throat was cramped and small—not a whisper’s volume issued from it. And she did not pause to look back at him, not even when her horse had galloped over the top of the hill to the west. She drove straight on, and presently the horse and rider vanished.

  He went back slowly into the house. The screen door stuck, and he plucked at it with numb fingers, rather wondering why he did not curse it. When he went in, the shuffling feet of Wing, the old Chinaman, whispered past him. He saw that the eyes of Wing were wet. At this he wondered, rather dimly. That the very cook should weep because she was gone, and yet from him there came not a vestige of a tear.

  Her glove lay in the middle of the floor, where it had fallen, and he plucked it up. He had a foolish pang as he saw it, a desire to go out and call her back. As though she would return for the sake of a riding glove.

  So, instead of going out, he sat down, with the glove in his hands, and fell to smoothing it with his stubby fingers. He began to look at it with a new wonder, for it was so small that it seemed to him that Jen must be still a child if her hand could fit into it. She was not a child, however. It was a woman who had raged at him. It was a woman who was about to fight her best for Willie Merchant and save him from the prison if she could.

  When he looked up again, the Chinaman was moving softly about the room, laying the table; the thick dusk was everywhere.

  “I ain’t eating,” he told Wing, and went outside again.

  He felt at first that it was better outdoors. He could breathe more easily in the freshening wind, and he said to himself: “Time’ll take care of all this. I ain’t broke. Not yet.”

&nbs
p; Then, turning the corner of the house, he came on the swing under the mulberry tree. It still hung there in the blackened ropes, although it was ten years since it had been used. It seemed to Chris suddenly that it was ten years since he had been deserted. He turned hastily back, lighting a cigar. But it had no taste. He began to crumble it, bit by bit, in his fingers. He began to think of that old trip to Havana; his interviews with the cigar manufacturers. . . . That was in the newness of prosperity; that was when Jen had first come to him. Time could never heal him, he knew at last.

  “I’m too old,” said Chris, and he tossed away the fragments of the Havana.

  Chapter 11

  “I want acquaintances,” Chris used to say. “I’ll get along without friends. I want folks around me that need me . . . not them that I need.”

  He had lived on that basis so successfully that now he found there was not a friend in the world to whom he could turn, and yet he knew that he needed a friend most desperately. There was no advice that could help him, but although he was aware of that, he felt that he must talk. The mere utterance of words would lift some of that mysterious weight that pressed down upon his heart.

  Nothing would do. There was not a living soul to whom he could turn. He spent two days revolving his misery in his mind. Each day he continued his usual routine. He went into the town in the morning and returned in the evening. But now he spent his day not in the office, but wandering around through the village. What he was hunting for, he himself did not know. But finally he made sure that he was looking for one kindly eye, and he found none. There was nothing but the bitterest resentment and suspicion in every face he encountered.

  On the third day, his strength melted away, and he surrendered. He would go to Cedar Creek and tell Jen that he must have her back; that he himself would throw all of his giant strength into the battle to save Willie Merchant, but that she must come back to him and stay with him.

  So he drove to Cedar Creek that day and actually up to the hotel, before his heart changed. It was not that he minded humbling himself to Jen. It was that some other person might hear how he debased himself and cringed. The walls of that hotel were paper-thin. Even a whisper might be heard in an adjoining room. So he drove on past the hotel, through the town, with his hands cold and his face hot. He drove five miles out on the farther side of the town. By the end of that distance he had made up his mind. He turned the team around and drove them, smoking, back into Cedar Creek.

  Martin went to the jail and asked for Sheriff Champion. That veteran upholder of the law was not there. He went to the home of Champion, and the old man came out on the porch to meet him. It seemed a little strange to Chris that he was not asked inside to talk. It seemed a little strange, also, that there was no smile on the face of the sheriff. Yet they were men of the same period. Together they had fought in the cohorts that won the West. Together they had seen the great men of the border rise and fall.

  But the sheriff greeted him with a distant eye, as though he were a stranger.

  “Sheriff,” said Chris, “what’ll happen to Merchant?”

  The sheriff turned that cold eye upon him, and then looked away again. “About ten years, maybe,” he said. “Maybe more.”

  “Mightn’t he wriggle off?”

  “Sure. Anything’s possible. If you wasn’t to appear against him to press the charge . . . if the sun was to stop shining . . . sure, he might get off.” And the sheriff smiled, without mirth.

  “Well,” said Chris tentatively, “he’ll learn something in jail, that kid.”

  “He’ll learn to be a bad one,” answered the sheriff. “I know the makings of men. Willie had the getup of a man-killer, Chris. He’s high-strung. And he thinks too much. A hard worker will make a hard fighter . . . pretty near every time.”

  “He’ll be still young,” said Chris. “He’ll be young enough to make another start.”

  “A gent like you,” said the sheriff, “can make a new start any time. But this here setback has made Willie an old man.”

  Old Chris took his way back to the street and to his team. He had enough to think over. Willie as an old man. Jen would be happy with no other for a husband. What was to be done? After all, the whole problem ceased to be a problem. It became exceedingly simple as he put it to himself in short words.

  If he stayed in that country, he could not live unless he were known as Chris Martin, the ruler of men. If he surrendered his case against Willie, he would be broken. The old halo of terror that surrounded him like a mystery would be vanished. He would be a common creature like a hundred other men. And he could not face that end to a long career. But there was another possibility. As the sheriff had said, a man like Chris could never be too old to make a new start. And there were new countries, too; far north among the snows of Alaska there were immigrants conquering a new country. Suppose that he were to surrender here, but go North to make himself as strong and as terrible there as he had been in the southland?

  He went back to his own town; he retired to his own office, and there he wrote a letter in his wide, sweeping hand.

  Dear Jen:

  I’m pulling out for the north. Things have got sort of stale and tame here in the south. This is to say good-bye.

  Merchant will come off clear. I won’t be here to press the charge. When he’s free, go to my lawyer, Benedict. He’ll have something to tell you. Good luck.

  Uncle Chris

  Martin mailed that letter. Then he wrote another to Benedict, which would make that iron lawyer stare, and then swear with astonishment. But when that was mailed in turn, he felt that he could breathe again for the first time since Jen had left him.

  He took for himself $5,000 in cash. He had not had $50 with which to make his first start in the West. Then he went down to the buckboard, gave the team the whip, and whirled out of the town—his town no more—and north and north.

  They heard of him no more. Not even Jen could get trace of him. For the northland and a new name had swallowed him. Although they continued to hope for news, none ever came.

  As a matter of fact, according to his own maxim, time took care of that. He grew into a legend long before his death, and the children of Willie Merchant and Jen, on the old Martin Ranch, listened to tales of Chris as they listened to tales of fairies, strangely evil, and strangely good.

  The Crystal Game

  Frederick Faust’s saga of the youthful hero Speedy began with “Tramp Magic,” a six-part serial in Western Story Magazine, which appeared in the issues dated November 21, 1931 through December 26, 1932. As most of Faust’s continuing characters, Speedy is a loner, little more than a youngster, able to outwit and outmaneuver even the deadliest of men without the use of a gun. He appeared in a total of nine stories. The serial has been reprinted by Leisure Books under the title Speedy. The first short story, “Speedy—Deputy,” can be found in Jokers Extra Wild, “Seven-Day Lawman” can be found in Flaming Fortune, and “Speedy’s Mare” appears in Peter Blue. “The Crystal Game” was originally published in Western Story Magazine in the issue dated April 2, 1932.

  Chapter 1

  Council Flat was one of those railway stops in the West where it seems that the planners of the road had grown tired of stretching the steel rails straight across league after league of desert and had marked with a cross the place where a little station house covered with brown paint should be. It was merely to please their fancy, and not out of any necessity or possible use it appeared, they built the place, and there it stood, to make a brief blur before the eyes of transcontinental passengers, shooting past.

  No road led down to the station house of Council Flat; there were only three winding trails that, uniting a short distance from the station, led up to it, still winding slightly and without reason over the perfectly level surface. Beyond the point of junction, still meandering as though over rough and smooth ground, the trails separated and wound away into a distant horizon, which was still blurred by the aftereffect of a recent sandstorm.

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nbsp; Inside the station, there were three people who had already waited an hour for a train that was two hours late, and therefore they had come to know one another, at least, by name. The middle-aged man was one Benjamin Thomas, and the girl who accompanied him was Jessica Fenton. The big young man, with the rather stylish clothes and fastidious, supercilious manner, was John Wilson. The three had a common destination in the mountains that were turning from brown to blue in the milder light of the late afternoon.

  That destination was Trout Lake, in the middle of those brown-blue mountains. Since they were all bound for the place, the talk turned chiefly on the tales that had come down out of the hills about the gold strikes and of the $300 pans that had been washed at the side of Trout Lake itself, and all around the creeks that wandered down into it through the forest.

  They were in the midst of this talk when they heard the thunder of a train. It could not be their own, which was not due to come for another hour, but they went out and stared hopelessly toward the small spot that was swelling out of the horizon, seeming to grow larger without actually drawing nearer. It was a way of killing a few brief minutes, at least, to watch that train come and go, and it would be a melancholy pleasure to see it dwindling down the tracks where they should have been speeding an hour ago. All the time that they had waited, they had a sense of time rushing past them at a frightful rate, time hurtling toward glorious possibilities in the future, and they, in the meantime, were caught and held in wretched stagnation.

  So with irritation, with amusement, with sympathy, they saw the train approach. It grew so slowly before the eye that it was apparent almost at once that it was merely a freight train that was coming. This, however, was very much better than nothing at all. They would try the sharpness of their eyes in reading the signs along the sides of the boxcars. They would try to recognize the initials and names that might represent lines as far away as Florida and Maine, and they would guess at the contents.