by Max Brand
“I know why you’ve come,” she said, “and I’ve come down to tell you that I’d rather work for a man like Timothy Kenyon than be the wife of a man like you.”
“He’ll make a slave of you,” breathed Jerry.
“I’d rather be his slave, then!” Mary cried tremulously.
When he attempted to speak again, she turned her back on him and went up the stairs. And Jerry Swain sneaked out of the house and back to his father. “They’ve all gone crazy,” he reported. “They don’t want me to marry her now.”
“Crazy?” his father said bitterly. “They’re just beginning to show good sense. Get out of my sight. I need to be alone.”
So Jerry Swain promptly got. As for Jerry Swain Sr., he had something new to think about, and that was what would happen if the Landers family were caught, and old Landers confessed who had hired him for the work of the previous night.
But the Landers family was never caught. The three remaining sons, separating each to a different direction, melted away among the mountains. Only the father of the family was run down, three weeks later, and cornered by a whole posse. The fight that followed was a terrible page in history, but Landers died before he would surrender. Jerry Swain was not betrayed.
It was to announce that death that Mary Carver broke the rules and entered the room of her patient in the midmorning. Since he had so far recovered that he could sit in bed, propped with pillows, he had laid down a strict law that no one should enter the room save with his meals. And now, when she tapped, he bade her enter with a sullen growl of leonine depth and power. When she stepped inside the door, she found that his scowl matched his voice. He stared silently, waiting for her to speak.
Never once had he relaxed in this attitude. Never once had he expressed to her gratitude for what she had done for him, even though he had learned from the doctor how he had been saved in the crisis, and how she had kept him, afterward, from bleeding to death.
“They did it to make sure of their places,” he had told the doctor, and she had overheard.
But in spite of that insult she had continued to nurse him with perfect devotion and with a sort of curiosity, feeling that he could not keep up the barriers forever.
Now he listened without interruption to the account of the fall of Landers, closing his eyes and lowering his book while she talked. When she had finished, she slipped back toward the door, but he surprised her by calling her to him.
“I’ve made up my mind,” he said, “that you deserve some reward for this nursing. Casting around for what it should be, I’ve decided to send you to Denver and let you hunt around there until you find the sort of position you’re equipped for. I’ll stand the expenses.”
But she shook her head.
“You’d rather stay here, I suppose,” he sneered, “and take care of me?”
“Yes,” she said meekly.
All at once he exploded. “Don’t you suppose I know what’s in your mind?” he roared.
She stepped close, raising her hand with a frightened face. “You mustn’t do that,” she warned him. “It may throw you into a fever. I’ll go out at once. I’m only sorry that I troubled you, but I thought you might wish to hear …”
She retreated as she spoke, but his call stopped her and brought her back to him, anxious and unwilling. As she came to the bed, he caught her wrist with his lean hand, in which there was only a ghost of his old power.
“I’ve been making you out a devil on the inside and a saint on the outside,” he said gruffly. “It’s just popped into my head that you may mean what you say. Mary, where do you get the strength to listen to me?”
“It needs no strength.”
“But you’ve worked to save my miserable self.”
“I saw you fighting like a hero,” she said with a sudden warmth. “Is it strange that I have tried to help you? Oh, if you would only believe …” She stopped, but he urged her on.
“Talk,” he said. “Get it out of your system.”
“You hate everyone,” she said. “You trust no one. You take your pleasure in tormenting us. But, oh, don’t you see that there’s a thousand times more good in you than you yourself will admit?”
“Where did you learn that?” he asked.
She stepped back again. “I’m going to show you,” she said. “But if you laugh at me, then I’ll hate you and despise you.”
She left the room, and he heard her heels tapping swiftly as she ran down the stairs. In a minute or more she was back, a little breathless, flushed, but walking with a sort of defiant pride that he had never seen in her before. Her right hand carried something concealed in the fold of her skirt, but, when she was close to him, she drew out and placed in his hands a little battered time-yellowed Bible.
He slid open in his hands the thin sheets, flowing like water. And his eye struck like a blow on the line so long ago familiar to him that each word was like a well-remembered human face. “I will sing of loving kindness and justice …”
He crushed the book shut with such force that the binding was wrenched and torn, and that sight drew a cry of pain from the girl. She tried to seize the book from him.
“Oh,” she cried, “there is no soul in you, then … only brute force. Give it back to me. Give it back to me!”
He pushed her away, but she struggled to get it back.
“I’ve thought there must be kindness and gentleness in a man as big and as strong as you,” she sobbed, the tears beginning to stream down her face. “Because the man who owned that book was to me as big and as strong …”
Her words suddenly were converted into a stream of musical sound with meaning in the syllables.
Through the brain of Tom Keene a thousand recollections were running. The book that had sent him out to bring loving kindness into the world had fallen from his hands into hands of another. And what he had failed to be, she has proven. This was the mysterious source, then, of her courage, her divine patience, her exhaustless sweetness of nature.
Once more he had sat beside her and talked in another year. That spirit that had been in him, and which he had considered as empty as wind, had sown the seed in this girl, and in her it had grown. This was the source of the difference between her and her parents, the pure spirit, the self-respect, the holy dignity of young womanhood. It was something that he had given her.
There was a mighty melting of the heart in Tom. It was as though the work of the long, lazy, warm spring were done in a day, melting the winter from his nature. He had felt himself always beaten, hopelessly defeated, shamed. And now he looked back to what had been a glorious victory. Suddenly his hands were loosened, and he gave back the book to her.
“Keep it,” he said. “In the name of heaven, keep it. It was my father’s before me. I give it to you freely.”
It struck Mary Carver to her knees. The Bible slipped to the floor. Their faces were close. Their spirits were unguarded.
“Oh, Tom Keene,” she cried, “I’ve been waiting all this time. Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
But it seemed to poor Tom that the weight of all his sins was dropped upon his shoulder. He looked up from her.
“Lord God,” he said, “I believe. Help thou mine unbelief!”
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 and 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.