The Black Rider

by Max Brand

  “‘I dunno,’ says Bill.

  “‘Gordon Macdonald has been sitting in it,’ says Abe.

  “‘Who’s Gordon Macdonald?’ says Bill.

  “‘A nacheral born man-killer,’ says Abe, ‘and the worst man with a gun that ever was born.’

  “Bill sits and thinks a minute.

  “‘I don’t know how much gunfighter he is,’ says Bill, ‘but he sure ain’t got this chair mortgaged. If he happens to sit down in it in the morning, he ain’t going to have it kept for him here all day!’

  “Abe didn’t say no more about it. He went off and sat down to watch, and pretty soon a big man comes out through the door of the hotel and taps Bill on the shoulder.

  “‘Excuse me, partner,’ he says, ‘but this is my chair!’

  “Bill answers without turning his head. ‘D’you think that you can hold down a chair all day by just sitting in it once?’

  “‘I was fixing my spurs,’ says the big man, ‘and I left one of ‘em lying on each side of the chair. Ain’t that enough to hold down a chair for a man for two minutes? Besides, there’s other chairs out here on the porch, and you could have sat in one of them, couldn’t you?’

  “Bill looks down and he sees the spurs for the first time. He looks up to the face of Macdonald, and he said later that it was like looking up into the face of a lion. His nerve sort of faded out of him.

  “‘Maybe you’re right,’ says he and gets up and takes another chair. But, while he’s sitting in the other chair, he sees half a dozen of the gents that have watched the whole thing sort of looking at him and then at one another and smiling. A shiver runs up Bill’s spine, and he starts asking himself if they think he’s taken water. He’s got half a mind to go over and pick a fight with Macdonald right there, to show that he has nerve enough to suit any man. But then he remembers that he’s going to marry poor Jenny inside of a week, and he decides that he ain’t got no right to fight a gunman.

  “He goes on home. As soon as he sits down to the supper table in comes his cousin, Jack, over yonder…oh, Jack, it was a poor part you played that night!…and started joking with Bill because he’d give up his chair to Macdonald. Bill didn’t say a word to nobody. But he gets up from the table and goes out and saddles a hoss and starts for Sudeth town. He runs down the street, jumps off’n his hoss, and dives into the hotel.

  There he looks up this Macdonald. He starts in cussing Macdonald, with his hand on the butt of his gun. He says that Macdonald must have started talking about him and calling him yaller. But Macdonald talks back to him plumb soft and says that he don’t want no trouble, and that the matter about the chair don’t mean nothing. Pretty soon Bill got to thinking that Macdonald was yaller, I guess, from the soft way that Macdonald talks. Anyways he goes up and punches Macdonald on the jaw. Macdonald knocks him down. While Bill lies on the floor, he pulls his gun, and Macdonald waits till he sees the steel, then he pulls his own Colt like a flash and kills poor Bill.”

  Charles Gregory paused, looking down to his withered hands, clasped above the table. There was no sound in the room.

  “That’s the straight of that killing of Bill, and it sounds like Bill was simply a fool. But since then we’ve heard a lot about Macdonald, and we know that he’s one of these gents that goes around hunting trouble, and when he gets into trouble he backs up and talks soft and tries to make the other gent lead at him, but the minute anything is started, Macdonald does all the finishing. He lives on murder! We’ve traced him a ways, and we’ve planted twenty dead men to his credit! Now, folks, this Macdonald is the man we told to get out of Sudeth and never come back, and here he is in town again. I seen the sheriff today. All he said was that he had a long trip to make and was leaving pronto, which was the same as saying that he knew that Macdonald was a plumb bad one, and that he wouldn’t dislike having us wipe him out. Ain’t I right? The only question is: How are we going to do it?”

  There was a small, respectful pause at the conclusion of this speech, and finally Henry Gregory, a wide-shouldered, gray-headed man, spoke from the farther end of the table. No one in that room was more respected by the others.

  “I’ve had my storms,” he said, “and I’ve done my fighting. But the older I get the more I figure that no good can come out of the muzzle of a Colt with a forty-five slug. And I say short and pronto: no more fighting! Let Macdonald stay. Poor Bill is dead. There ain’t no doubt that it was no better than murder. There ain’t no doubt that this Macdonald is a professional, and before we could get rid of him, a couple of our boys are sure to go down. I say: hands off of Macdonald.”

  “There’d be a lot of talk!” exclaimed half a dozen voices in a chorus.

  “Nobody but a fool would accuse the Gregorys of being cowards,” said Henry. “What fools say don’t bother us none. We can let ’em chatter!”

  Someone stepped forward from the wall of the room with a clank of spurs. It was the face of Jack Gregory that came out of the mist of smoke.

  “Folks,” he said, “I’d ought to wait until my elders have finished talking, maybe, but I got something to say that needs saying pretty bad. Grandfather Charles was sure right when he said that it was me joking Bill that sent him into town to fight. God knows that I didn’t mean no harm. Me and Bill was always pals, everybody knows. But it was me that got Bill killed, and I’ll never live it down with myself! What I got to say is this. Let me go in and face the music. Let me meet Macdonald and try my luck. It’s my business!”

  There was a stern hum of dissent, and Mack Gregory, the father of Jack, turned and glanced gloomily at his son.

  “No,” said old Charles Gregory, speaking again, “we’ve passed our word that Macdonald should never come back to Sudeth, and he’s done it. Right or wrong, we’ve passed our word. It ain’t the business of Jack. It’s the business of all of us! Speaking personal, I say that it would be suicide to send only one man. We need more! Macdonald is a lion!”

  There was another growl of agreement.

  “Are we going to let folks say that the Gregorys have to fight in twos?” protested Henry Gregory, but he was not heard.

  In another moment they were busy preparing the lots and then making the draw. By weird chance it fell upon both the sons of the peacemaker, Henry Gregory. Steve and Joe were his only children, great-boned, silent fellows, as swarthy of skin as Indians and as terrible as twin wildcats in a fight. Certainly the choice could not have fallen upon two more formidable men.

  “But it ain’t right,” protested Jack. “I sure ought to have a hand. If Steve and Joe are hurt, the blame of it will come back on me, and I can’t stand it!”

  “Shut up!” snarled his father. “You’re playing the fool, son. Are you wiser than all the rest of us?”

  So Jack was cried down, but his mind was not put at rest by all the talk. He heard it decided that the attack on Macdonald should be made in the morning. He heard the farewells, as the party broke up. And, witnessing all these things through a mist, all he saw clearly was the stern face of Henry Gregory, now wan with sorrow for his sons. He saw that, and it determined him on the spot. He waited until the assembly had scattered, then he took his horse, fell to the rear, and presently had turned down a path and started for the town of Sudeth.

  VII “Between the Eyes”

  In the meantime Macdonald had waited until the night. Yet it was not wasted time. In anticipation he was turning over the danger in his mind, as a connoisseur turns over the thought of the expected feast. He had put his head into the jaws of the lion, as he was well aware. How those jaws would close was the fascinating puzzle. They might attack him by surprise, or in a crowd. They might wait for the night, and then they would be truly terrible, or else they might strike boldly in the day, when he would have a better fighting chance.

  Such surmises filled his mind all the late morning. In the early afternoon he fell asleep and, the instant he closed his eyes, he was once more traveling up the river in the mountains, with the voice forming out of the soundi
ng current: “Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!” in endless reiteration. Once more he climbed to the headwaters of the stream; he crossed the divide; and he saw before him the same sunny plain, exactly as it had been before.

  He wakened suddenly; and that afternoon he slept no more, but went down into the lobby of the hotel and then onto the verandah in front, where there would be other men around him.

  The evening came, and still there was no sign of the coming of the Gregorys. But word was brought to him that the sheriff had left the town. And then new word came that the Gregorys were meeting that evening. For, wherever Macdonald went, though he had no friends and no companions, there was always a certain number of men, like the jackals who follow the king of beasts, ready to carry information to the great man, ready to cringe and cower before his greatness. He treated them, as they needed to be treated, with a boundless contempt; but on occasion they were invaluable to him. They were very necessary on this day, for instance, with their eager whispers to and fro. And it was one of these fellows who brought the word about Rory Moore.

  “If anybody was to ask me where there was going to be trouble first,” said this sneak of an informant, “I’d say it would come right here in Sudeth. And the second place it’s going to come is to Rory Moore in his own town!”

  “Rory Moore? Rory Moore?” asked Macdonald sharply “What the devil do you know about him?”

  “Nothing but what everybody will know pretty pronto. I ain’t doing you no favor telling you this. Twenty men could tell it to you pretty soon. Rory Moore is telling folks around his home town that you stole his hoss, Sunset, from him!”

  It brought a growl from Macdonald, and he dropped his cigarette to the floor and smashed it with his heel.

  “I stole his hoss? It’s a lie! I bought it from a man who won Sunset from him in a gambling game.”

  “It was a frame-up,” said the informer. “Moore swears it was a frame-up. He says that he’s found out that Jenkins, who won the hoss from him, was really a professional gambler, a crooked player whose real name is Vincent. Is that right, Macdonald?”

  “Hang Jenkins and Moore both!” cried Macdonald. “Where does all this rot come from?”

  “The telephones have been packed with it all morning. Seems that this fellow Vincent…was it really Vincent?”

  “What if it were?”

  “Nothing except that Vincent is an old hand. He was run out of Sudeth a couple of years back, and he’s been tarred and feathered a couple of times for his dirty work with the cards. And one of these days they’ll talk to him with a gun, they will! Anyway, it seems that this Jenkins, as he was calling himself, started right out of town after he’d cleaned Rory Moore up at the cards. But early the next morning Moore heard some talk about town that Jenkins was really Vincent, the crooked gambler. It took Moore about one second to see through everything, the way he’d lost the night before. He started on Jenkins’s trail. By noon he’d run him down. He put a gun on Jenkins, and the hound got down and crawled and said he’d confess everything, if Moore would let him live.

  “So Moore let him live, and Jenkins told him a crazy yarn. Said that you’d come to Jenkins the night before and found him broke. You offered to stake him to five hundred dollars, if he’d use it to clean out Moore and make him put up his horse at the end of the game. The horse was what you wanted. You’d tried to buy it and, when Moore wouldn’t sell, you schemed to get Sunset this way. And the scheme worked, according to Jenkins. He got the money and hoss. He put the hoss in the stable, told you where it was, and then run for his life. And Moore swears that you rode out of town before morning, which shows that you were afraid to stay. Anyway he got all his money back from Jenkins, and now he’s hunting across country to find you and Sunset. I’m wondering if he’ll have a hard time finding you?”

  Here the speaker laughed hugely at the poor jest, but Macdonald found the story no laughing matter. If this story were out, if this story were proved—and who could doubt the confession of Jenkins, alias Vincent, the card shark?—then Macdonald would be established in the eyes of the men of the ranges not only as a man-slayer, but as a scheming rascal; and men who would never combine against one who merely took lives could immediately gather together to run to earth a crafty schemer. Decidedly it was tidings of the most serious import. Macdonald gritted his teeth, as he thought it over. If he could tear Vincent to small pieces and scatter the remnants to the dogs, there would be some satisfaction. But Vincent was a poor mongrel not worthy of a blow.

  Meantime there was a pleasanter side to the story. Of all the men he had faced in the past half dozen years, there had been none to compare with Rory Moore in dash and spirit. He had not the slightest doubt that the young rancher was a warrior of parts. And a battle against him would be distinctly a pleasure worth a search of a thousand miles. If he came alive from this affair at Sudeth, he would be instantly back in Moore’s home town and await him there in the hotel. What could be better than that? And in wiping out Moore, he would wipe out the person chiefly interested in telling that ugly tale about the crooked gambler’s work.

  It was evening, and he was back in the lobby before he came to all of those conclusions. And they were hardly formed, when his attention was sharply called by a silence which had fallen over the room. There was a soft and sudden shifting of positions. Macdonald, looking into a small mirror which was hanging on the wall in front of him—a little diamond-shaped affair meant to be a decoration—saw a big fellow striding through the door and into the room. He did not need more than one glance to make sure that this was a man come on desperate business. The pale, rather drawn face, the glaring eyes, the jaw set hard and thrust out a little, were all the features of a man on the verge of meeting death itself!

  “Macdonald!” called the stranger.

  As Macdonald rose slowly from his chair, he stretched his arms.

  “Look out!” gasped the voice of the human jackal who had brought him so much news that day. “Look out! It’s Jack Gregory, and he’s a fighting fool!”

  But Macdonald turned with glorious unconcern.

  “Calling me?” he asked cheerfully.

  “I’m calling you! Macdonald, I want to talk to you outside the hotel!”

  Macdonald hesitated. One who dreaded Macdonald’s speed and his accuracy with a gun often sought to equalize matters a little more by bringing him into the darkness. But, after all, he had fought a score of times in the light of the stars. He had made a point of doing as much target practice by night as by day, and the chances, which were heavy against any foe in the daylight, were even heavier against them in the dark. After that moment of delay he nodded and crossed the room to the other.

  “I don’t think I remember meeting you,” he said.

  “You don’t,” said the other. “My name is Jack Gregory!”

  And, as he spoke, his body drew stiff and straight and his right hand trembled near to the butt of his gun. But such a killing was by no means in the mind of Macdonald. With the blandest of smiles he held out his hand.

  “Very glad to meet you, Gregory,” he said.

  His hand was disregarded.

  “I want to talk with you outside. Will you come?”

  “Certainly.”

  They passed through the door and descended the steps. They stood in the street. Instantly the door of the hotel was packed with a blur of white faces, watching eagerly. Macdonald looked about him with infinite satisfaction. It was a moonless night, to be sure. The moon would not be up for another hour; but the sky was clear, and the stars were shining as clear as crystal. Certainly there was light enough for Macdonald to shoot almost as straight as by daylight, at such close range. But what was this Gregory saying?

  “Macdonald,” he said, “I’ve come to beg you to leave the town.”

  “Beg me to leave it?” asked Macdonald with the slightest and most insulting emphasis.

  “Just that,” said the other.

  “And if I don’t go?”

  “We fi
ght!”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Macdonald, and in the starshine he smiled evilly upon Jack Gregory. “But as for leaving,” he continued, “you must admit that this is a free country and a free town. Why should I leave, if you please?”

  “Because,” said Gregory, “my family has sworn that you cannot stay here.”

  “Interesting,” said the mild, soft voice of the man-killer, “but unimportant, Gregory.”

  “Macdonald,” pleaded the other, “it was some fool joking of mine that drove Bill Gregory, five years ago, to come in and have it out with you. I got his death on my conscience. Now some of the rest of the boys are going to try to get you out of town, but it ain’t their business. It’s mine. If you should kill them, their ghosts would haunt me! So I’ve come in to try to persuade you!”

  “I’m listening,” said Macdonald.

  “Everybody on the range knows that you’re a brave man, Macdonald. If you leave town, nobody’ll think any the worse of you, and I’ll let the folks know that I asked you to go and didn’t drive you out by threats.”

  “Who’d believe you?” asked Macdonald grimly, as he saw the bent of the conversation. “You’d get a big reputation cheap. But what would I get?”

  “A cold thousand. I’ve saved that much, and….”

  “You fool!”

  “Listen to me! I’m not trying to insult you, but I’m trying to think of everything in the world to persuade you. If you don’t want the money, forget that I mentioned it. But I’m desperate, Macdonald. I know that I can’t stand up to you, but if you won’t go by persuasion, I got to try my gun!”

  It was a situation unique in the experience of Macdonald, and he hesitated. But what cause had he to love the world or trust or pity any man in it? From the very first his life had been a battle.