Sunset Wins

by Max Brand

  “Jerico,” he whispered, “give all you’ve got. It may be enough. It’s got to be enough. Go after ’em. Go after ’em.”

  It had seemed impossible for the stallion to gain another particle of speed, and yet there was a perceptible response now. He streaked around the turn. The three-quarters post gleamed and fled behind them, and the shout of the crowd at the finish crashed up the track and thundered in the ears of Orchard.

  The bit was no longer in the teeth of Jerico. He had loosed his grip as though he felt that there could be no danger in the guidance of this rider. He had surrendered himself to the will of a master as though he knew that will would lift him on to overtake the flying bay.

  The eager eye of Jim Orchard saw the distance between them diminish. Long Tom was still running nobly, but he was not ready for such a test as this. His strength was failing and Jerico, like a creature possessed with a devil, seemed to gain with every stride he made. Well did the rider know the secret of that strength. It was the strength which men use in lost causes and forlorn hopes; it was the generous last effort of the fighter.

  Now he heard Tim Hogan cursing—a shrill voice that piped back at him, the words cut short and blown away by the wind of the mad gallop. And then the yelling of the crowd drowned all other sound.

  One name on all those lips. It roared and beat into the very soul of Orchard. One name all those frantic hands were imploring: “Jerico! Jerico! Jerico!”

  Tim Hogan glanced back for the third time, and Jim Orchard caught a glimpse of a white, convulsed face. Then the jockey whirled and was back at his work, lifting Long Tom ahead with savage slashes of the whip.

  The seven-furlong post shot past. The finish lay straight ahead. Two breaths and the race would be over!

  The cry of the mob became Orchard’s cry in the ear of the straining stallion: “Jerico! Jerico!” Every time there was a quiver of the thin ears that flattened against the stallion’s neck.

  Now they were on the hip of Long Tom, and the tail, flying straight back with the wind of the gallop, was blowing beside Jim Orchard’s stirrup.

  “Jerico! Jerico!”

  For every call there was an effort like the efforts which answered the whip of Tim Hogan! Orchard felt that his voice had become a power. It was pouring an electric energy out of his body, and out of his soul into the body and soul of his horse. It lifted him past the hip of Long Tom; it brought the black nose to the flank of the bay—the flank so gaunt and hollow with the strain of the gallop. It carried him to the saddle girth.

  Too late, for the massed faces at the finish line were straight before them. “Jerico!”

  Oh, great heart, what an answer! The scream of Tim Hogan and the sting of his whip brought no such response as this. Foam spattered the breast of Long Tom, and still he labored, still he winced under the whip, but his speed was slackening, his head was going up, up—the head of a beaten horse. Beaten he was in spirit, whether he won or lost.

  Would he win? There was Judge McCreavy standing at the finish post with his arm extended, as though to point out to them that this was the end.

  “Jerico!”

  Past the girth and to the shoulder with one lunge.

  “Jerico!”

  And now only the snaky head of the bay is in the lead.

  “Jerico!”

  They are over the finish. The shout of the mob was a scream and a sob in one.

  But who had conquered? There stood Long Tom, with dropped head, and here was Jerico, dancing beneath him, as he drew to a halt and then turned and faced the crowd with his glorious head raised. He waited like a gladiator for their judgment, and with what a voice they gave it, all in a chorus, thundering in waves around Jim Orchard.

  “Jerico!”

  Jerico had won. After that, all things grew hazy before the staring eyes of Jim Orchard. He was searching in that crowd for one face.

  He saw Tim Hogan slowly dismounting. He saw Garry Munn standing like one who has been stunned. And then she came to him through the mob. For all their excitement, they gave way before her as though they knew it was her right.

  Here was old Tom with the terrible head of Jerico in his fearless arms, weeping like a child.

  Here was Sue Hampton holding up both her hands to him, with a face that opened heaven to Jim Orchard.

  “Jerico’s won,” he said miserably, “but I’ve lost … everything.”

  “But nothing matters … don’t you see? … except …”

  She was sobbing, in her excitement, so that she could scarcely speak.

  “Except what, Sue?”

  “Except that Jerico has won, Jim … for you and for me.”

  Sunset Wins

  I

  His father was a Macdonald of the old strain which once claimed the proud title of Lord of the Isles. His mother was a Connell of that family which had once owned Connell Castle. After that terrible slaughter of the Connells at the Boyne, those who were left of the race fled to the colonies. After the Macdonalds had followed Bonny Prince Charlie into England in that luckless year, 1715, the remnants of the proscribed race waited for vengeance among the Highlands, or else followed the Connells across the Atlantic.

  The Connells were great black men, with hands that could crush flagons or break heads. The Macdonalds were red-headed giants, with heaven-blue eyes and a hunger for battle. But the passing of generations changed them. They became city dwellers, in part, and those who dwelt in cities shrank in stature and diminished in numbers. They became merchants, shrewd dealers, capable of sharp practice. They lived by their wits and not by the strength of their hands. They gave corporals and raw-handed sergeants to the war of the Revolution, and to the Civil War, nearly four generations later, they gave majors and colonels and generals. Their minds were growing and their bodies were shrinking.

  And so at last a Mary Connell, small, slim-throated, silken black of hair, wedded a Gordon Macdonald, with shadowy red hair and mild, patient, blue eyes. They were little people. He was a scant five feet and six inches in height, and yet he seemed big and burly when he stood by the side of his wife. What manner of children should they have? For five years there was no child at all, and then Mary died giving birth to a son. He was born shrieking rage at the world, with his red hands doubled into fat balls of flesh, and his blue eyes staring up with the battle fury—he was born with red hair gleaming upon his head. His father looked down upon him in sadness and bewilderment. Surely this was no true son of his!

  His wonder grew with the years. At thirteen, young Gordon Macdonald was taller than his father and heavier. He had great, long-fingered bony hands and huge wrists, from the latter of which the tendons stood out, as though begging for the muscles that were to come. And his joy was not in his books and his tutor. His pleasure was in the streets. When the door was locked upon him, he stole out of his bed at night and climbed down from the window of his room, like a young pirate, and went abroad in search of adventure. And he would come back again two days later with his clothes in rags, his face purpled and swollen with blows, and his knuckles raw. They sent him to a school famous for Latin and broken heads. He prostrated two masters within three months with nervous breakdowns, and he was expelled from the school weak, bruised, but triumphant.

  “Force is the thing for him then,” said his weary-minded parent. “Let us discipline his body and pray God that time may bring him mildness. Labor was the curse laid on Adam. Let his shoulders now feel its weight.”

  So he was made an apprentice in a factory, at the ripe age of fifteen, to bow his six feet two of bones and sinews with heavy weights of iron and to callous his hands with the rough handles of sledgehammers. But though he came home at night staggering, he came home singing. And if he grew lean with the anguish of labor in the first month, he began to grow fat on it in the second. His father cut off his allowance. But on Saturday nights Gordon began to disappear. Money rolled into h
is pockets, and he dressed like a dandy. Presently his father read in one paper of a rising young light heavyweight who was crushing old and experienced pugilists in the first and second rounds under the weight of a wildcat onslaught. In a second paper he saw a picture of this Red Jack and discovered that he was his one and only son!

  After that he took his head between his hands and prayed for guidance, and he received an inspiration to send his boy away from the wiles of the wicked city for a year and a day. So he signed Gordon Macdonald on a sailing ship bound for Australia. He bade his boy farewell, gave him a blessing, and died the next month, his mind shattered by a financial crash. But he had accomplished one thing at least with his son—Gordon Macdonald came back to Manhattan no more.

  In the port of Sydney, far from his homeland, he celebrated his seventeenth birthday with a drunken carousal, and the next day he insulted the first mate, broke his jaw with a pile-driving jab, and was thrown into the hold in irons. He filed through his chains that night, went above, threw the watch into the sea, dived in after him, and swam ashore.

  He was hotly pursued by the infuriated captain. The police were appealed to. He stole a horse to help him on his flight. He was cornered at the end of the seventh day, starved, but lion-like. With his bare hands he attacked six armed men. He smashed two ribs of one, the jaw of another, and fractured the skull of the third before he was brought down spouting crimson from a dozen bullet wounds.

  The nursing he received was not tender, but he recovered with a speed that dazed the doctor. Then he was promptly clapped into prison for resisting arrest, for theft, and for assaulting the officers of the law.

  For three months he poured upon the cross-section of the world of crime that was presented to him in a wide, thick slab in the prison. Then, when he was weary of being immersed in the shadows of the world, he knocked down a guard, climbed a wall, tore a rifle from the hands of another guard, and stunned the fellow with a blow across the head, sprang down on the farther side, dodged away through a fusillade of bullets, reached the desert land, lived there like a hunted beast for six months, with a horse for a companion, a rifle for a wife, and a revolver for a chosen friend. At last he reached a seaport and took ship again on the free blue waters.

  When the ship touched at Bombay, the hand of the law seized him again. He broke away the next night, reached the Himalayas after three months of wild adventure, plunged into the wastes of Tibet, joined a caravan that carried him into central Asia, came to St. Petersburg a year later, shipped to Brazil, rounded the Horn on a tramp freighter, and deserted at a Mexican port.

  At the age of nineteen he rode across the border into Texas for the first time. He stood six feet two and a half inches in his bare feet. He weighed two hundred pounds stripped to the buff. He knew guns and fighting tricks, as a saint knows the Bible, and his whole soul ached every day to find some man or men capable of giving him battle that would exercise him to the uttermost of his gigantic strength.

  But on his long pilgrimage he had learned a great truth: no matter how a man defies his fellows, he must not defy the law. For the law reaches ten thousand miles as easily as a man reaches across the table for a glass of water. And no matter if a man has a hand of iron, the law has fingers of steel.

  Suppose the mind of a fox planted in the body of a Bengal tiger, a beast of royal power and a brain of devilish cunning. Such was Gordon Macdonald. He looked like a lion, he thought like a fox, and he fought like ten devils, shoulder to shoulder.

  First he joined the Rangers, not for the glory of suppressing crime, but for the glory of the dangers to be dared in that wild service. He gained ten commendations in as many months for fearless work, but in the eleventh month he was requested to resign. The Texas Rangers prefer to capture living criminals rather than dead ones.

  So Gordon Macdonald resigned and rode again on his friendless way. He rode for ten years through a thousand adventures, and in ten years no man’s eyes lighted to see him come, no woman smiled when he was near her, no child laughed and took his hand. The very dogs snarled at him and shrank from his path. But Macdonald cared for none of these things. The spirit that rides on a thunderbolt does not hope for applause from the world it is about to strike. No more cared for Red Macdonald. For he was tinglingly awake to one thing only, and that was the hope of battle. Speed, such as hides in the wrist of a cat, strength, such as waits in the paw of a grizzly, wisdom, such as lingers in the soul of a wolf—these were his treasures. Through all the years he fought his battles in such a way that the lie was first given to him by the other man, and the other man first drew his gun. Therefore the law passed him by unscathed. And all the years he followed, with a sort of rapturous intentness, a ghost of hope that someday he would meet a man who would be his equal, some giant of force, with the speed of a curling whiplash and the malignity of a demon. Someday he would come on the trail of a great devastator, an incarnate spirit of evil, and these men who now ceased talking and eyed him askance when he entered a room, these women who grew pale as he passed, would come to him and fall on their knees and beg him to spare them. He carried that thought always in his heart of hearts, like a secret comfort.

  Such was Gordon Macdonald at the age of thirty. He was as striking in face as in his big body. That arched and cruel nose, that long stern chin, that fiery hair, uncombable on his head, and, above all, his blue eyes stopped the thoughts and hearts of men. One felt the endless stirring impulse in him. To look in his eyes was like looking on the swift changes of color that run down the cooling iron toward the point. It was impossible to imagine this man sleeping. It was impossible to conceive of this man for an instant inactive of mind, for he seemed to be created to forge wily schemes and plan cruel deeds.

  He had crowded the events of a dozen ordinary lives into his short span of years. And still, insatiable of action, he kept on the trail which has only one ending. One might have judged that with such a career behind him, some of it would have been written in his face, but even in this he was deceptive. To be sure, when he frowned, a thousand lines and shadows appeared in his face—he might have been taken for a man of forty. But when he threw back his head and laughed—laughed with a savage satisfaction for work accomplished, or for danger in the prospect, he looked no more than a wild youth of twenty.

  Such was Macdonald in his thirtieth year. Such was Macdonald when he saw Sunset, and at once he sensed that the fates had arranged the encounter.

  II

  The horse had his name from his color. When the brilliant colors at the end of the day begin to fade from the clouds, and when they are only shimmering with a rusty red, such was the tint of the hide of the horse, and yet the mane and tail and the four stockings of the stallion were jet black. It was that rich, strange color that first startled Macdonald and held his mind. It was like the thick blood with light striking across it, he thought, and that grim simile stayed in his mind.

  The thought struck an echo through his brain at once. There was something of fate in this meeting, he felt. A strange surety grew up in him that his destiny was inextricably entangled with Sunset. An equal surety came to him that that destiny was a gloomy thing. If he had that horse, evil would come of it, and yet the horse he must have.

  He rode closer to the edge of the corral and examined the stallion more in detail. It was not color alone in which Sunset was glorious. He was one of those rare freaks of horseflesh in which size is combined with an exquisite proportion and fine working of details. It is rare to find a tall man who is not poorly put together, whose legs are not too long, or whose arms are not too lean; there are sure to be flaws and weaknesses when a man stands over six feet in height. And, rare as it is to find a big man who conforms to the Greek canons, it is rarer still to find a tall horse neither too long nor too short coupled with bone to support his bulk, but not lumpy and heavy in the joints, with a straight, strong back, with a neck neither too heavy nor too long and gaunt to balance comfortably a head that
is apt to be as big as the head of a cart horse, or as ludicrously small as the head of a pony.

  Sunset avoided all these possible defects. One knew at a glance that he would fit the standard. So exact, indeed, were his proportions that it might have seemed with the first survey that he was too lean and gangling of legs, but, when one drew closer and gave more professional attention to his survey, one noted the great depth of body where the girth ran, the wide, square quarters, rich in driving power, the flat and ample bone, the round hoofs, black as ink, the powerful sweep of the long shoulders, dimpled over and rippling with muscles like the tangled lashes of a thousand whips. He stood a scant inch under seventeen hands, but he was made with the scrupulous exactness of a fifteen-hand thoroughbred, one of those incredible carvings of nature that dance like little kings and queens about the turf at a horse show, or take the jumps as though winged with fire.

  And here were the same things drawn to scale and made gigantic. The great heart of Macdonald contracted with yearning. He looked down with unspeakable disgust to the nag that bore him. Big-headed, long-eared, squat and shapeless of build, the gelding had only one commendable quality, and that was an immense strength which was capable of supporting even the solid bulk of Macdonald, with a jog trot that might last from morning to night. But on such a steed he was a veritable slave. If he offended, a swift-riding posse might swoop down and overtake him in a half hour’s run. No wonder that he did not violate the law when he was damned by slowness of movement. And what availed him all his prowess, if he could neither pursue nor flee? Were there not a score of men who had insulted him and then avoided the inevitable lightning flash of his revenge by springing upon the backs of neat-footed horses and darting away across the mountains?