by Max Brand
“El Tigre?” repeated the girl.
“That’s what Charlie Kimball is called south of the Río Grande,” said her father.
“Have you had detectives looking into his past?” she asked.
“No, I’ve simply asked some questions in well-informed places. That’s all. And I’ve learned quite a lot, my dear. Quite a lot. The Mexicans called him El Tigre for reasons of their own. Up in Montana he’s known as Chinook. In Nevada they call him Diamondback. In Wyoming they refer to Mister Kimball as Whiskey Charlie. In Oklahoma they have many memories of the Streak, and over a great part of the West men refer, here and there, to Mister Quentin Underwood Inchley Charles Kimball as Quick. Quick, it appears, he is. Quick in repartee . . . quick with his hand . . . quick with his gun . . . quick to laugh . . . quick to fight, and quick to leave for parts unknown.”
The girl had listened with a darkening face. “He loves me,” she said at last.
“I know that’s more important than anything else,” replied her father. “A lot of girls have thought that about Quick.”
“Girls?” she exclaimed in horror.
“Come, come,” said the major. “Do you think other girls have failed to pay attention to six feet of man with a shine in his eye and a crook in his smile? You ought to know better than that.”
“I’m going to marry him,” said Eunice Chalmers.
“Of course you are . . . if he stays here for three months.”
“As if that proved anything, really,” said the girl. “How could he be dragged away? He has a whole string of thoroughbreds to ride, a servant to take care of him, a rack of guns to use and plenty of game to use them on, fish in the streams, good liquor in the cellar, and the whole Kimball Ranch to inherit, one day. Why, we have a whole world here, and it’s the sort of a world that he likes.”
“You’re wrong,” said the major. “He’s a hunter of big game.”
“There are plenty of grizzlies up there in the mountains,” she answered.
“Of course there are,” said the major, “but the kind of game he likes is the sort that looks at you down the barrel of a gun.”
“You mean that he has to fight?”
“He has to have danger,” said the major. “That’s all I mean.”
“Hush,” said the girl. “Here he is.”
A man on a horse that was polished and blackened with sweat galloped over the brow of the hill and pulled to a halt in front of the verandah. He tied the horse to the hitch rack, and it stood there with hanging head and heaving sides, a stallion made in the school of the mustang, all hammered iron, but standing well over sixteen hands.
“It’s Champion!” cried the major. “Good heavens, what have you been doing, Charlie?”
“Riding him,” said Quick Kimball, coming up the steps, laughing. “I was riding him when he wasn’t riding me. He had me down a couple of times, and it was touch and go. But we’re on the way to being friends, now.”
“You might have killed him, and he’s worth ten thousand dollars in this herd!” exclaimed the major.
“He might have killed Charlie!” exclaimed the girl.
In fact, Quick was a mass of tatters, and through the rents of his shirt could be seen red flesh that was already turning blue with many bruises. But now he made and lighted a cigarette, still smiling at them.
“Champion ought to be something more than the father of a family,” he said. “That’s no career for a horse or for a man, you know.”
“But he’s a man-killer, Charlie!” cried the girl.
“Tut, tut.” Quick laughed. “He never killed anything but Mexicans and Indians.”
Even the major laughed at this. “There’s some mail in there for you,” he said, and Quick went into the front hall.
“You can’t help loving Charlie yourself,” said Eunice.
“I like him as well as any man I’ve ever known,” said the major. “But I don’t want my girl to be married today and widowed tomorrow. This ranch won’t hold him. There’s not a wild stallion to break every day. But . . . by thunder, Eunice, I never thought that Champion would be mastered . . . and no whip welts on his flanks . . . no cuts from the spurs. Just as velvety as ever . . . but a little wet.”
Quick came out again to the verandah holding an open letter. “Major Chalmers, read that, will you?” he asked.
The girl rose slowly from her chair, sensing danger ahead.
The major read aloud, frowning:
Dear Quick:
Come as fast as you can jump.
I’m here at San José in Lonesome Valley trying to keep my place together, but somebody is trying to run me out and somebody is going to do it unless I get help.
Hurry, hurry, hurry!
Jerry
“Well?” said the major, looking up. “Who’s Jerry?”
“Jerry Finnegan. An old friend of mine,” said Quick.
“Finnegan? Ha!” said the major. He cast a shade of suspicion upon the entire character of Mr. Finnegan.
“Charlie,” said the girl suddenly.
He turned on her an eye made dull by trouble.
“You’re not thinking of leaving the ranch?” she cried.
He made no answer; pain was drawing his face with strange lines.
“Who is Jerry Finnegan?” demanded Eunice.
“Once half a dozen crazy Canucks had me against a wall. Canucks mean knives. These fellows had them out, and I would have been a goner, but a stranger stepped in from the side and helped me out. A fellow I’d never seen before. That was Jerry Finnegan.”
“Then . . . you have to go to his help,” said the girl.
Quick drew a long breath. “I’m glad you see that,” he said.
“Charles, you can’t go,” snapped the major.
Again Quick was silent.
“You don’t mean that, Father,” said the girl.
“Suppose you were in the Army. You couldn’t leave when you pleased. And this is the same. You’ve signed up for three months on the ranch, Charles. I expect you to stay here. That was our bargain.”
“But when his friend is in desperate need . . . ?” began the girl.
“How do we know that the need is desperate?” said the major. “And suppose that this case is disposed of and Charles manages to come back with a whole skin, how do we know that another emergency of the same sort won’t pop up?”
“There never could be another time like this,” said the girl. “Charlie, you don’t owe your life to more than one friend?”
“I’ve never been able to figure out what a man owes to his friend,” said Quick. “I don’t know what friendship is worth, but it must be everything or nothing, I should say.”
“You mean,” argued the major, “that if a friend of yours crooks a finger, you feel you ought to run to him?”
Quick considered for a moment. Then he said: “Yes, I mean that.”
“From the other side of the world, even?” said the major.
“Yes”—Quick sighed—“I suppose that I mean even that.”
“Great heavens, man,” said the major, “how would married life be possible for you if you’re to be drawn this way and that by your friends?”
“I don’t know,” said Quick. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
“It seems to me,” concluded Major Chalmers, “that the thing reduces to an absurdity. My dear lad, I wish you every joy and happiness and success, but, if you leave this ranch, I shall take it for granted that you are leaving Eunice, also. I think that was our bargain.”
“It was,” said Quick, turning pale. “I made that agreement.”
“Charlie!” cried the girl again.
He bowed his head as he answered: “It’s hard, but I have to make a choice.”
“What of me?” exclaimed Eunice Chalmers. “Are you going to throw me away like a thought? You’ve said that you loved me more than life, and now . . .”
“I have to go. All I know is that I have to leave and reach Jerry Finnegan.”
“It’s our whole future! If you go now, you never can set foot on the place again!” she cried. “Charlie, look at me . . . love me again . . . don’t stare at the ground that way.”
He pulled up his head and saw again her beauty, her courage, her gentleness. It seemed to him that he never had cared for her so much. “I can’t explain,” he said. “I love you, and yet I have to go. You’ve seen that yourself.”
But, instead of agreeing, she dropped into a chair and began to weep.
Quick leaned over her and touched her hair with his lips.
II
Lonesome Valley had its name from a party of ’Forty-Niners who had passed with their ox teams across the desolate place. It was one of those regions where the bunch grass grows just thick enough to furnish provender to tough, active, Western cattle that are inured to much wandering and that can live on one drink of water for four days. Some cactus, a bit of greasewood, some bitter mesquite grew here and there, tufting the soil, but from a distance it seemed as bare as the palm of the hand.
So it looked to big Quick as he sat his horse at the edge of the little town of Wilson Gap and looked down from the mountainside into the far-rolling nakedness of Lonesome Valley. A little chill went through his blood, and he turned back to have one drink at the nearest saloon before he finished his journey.
As he passed through the swing doors into the barroom, a tall fellow with a cadaverous face and a sooty streak of mustache across his upper lip rose from a shadowy corner and strode across the floor. Quick stopped short. There was only one man in the world that he feared. This tall fellow was the man.
“Hi, Slade,” he said.
“’Lo, Quick,” said Slade. And he held out his hand.
“Didn’t know we were friends,” said Quick, taking the hand. “But I’m glad to find out.”
“You mean that runt of a cross-eyed sucker down there in Santone that you done in? That Carrick?” said Slade. “Hell, Quick, I don’t think nothing of that. He got careless when he was dealing the cards, didn’t he?”
“It was blackjack,” said Quick, “and, when he commenced to deal ’em off the bottom of the pack, I felt a little queer.”
“I don’t mind a gent crooking the cards,” agreed Slade. “But when they do it slow and bad, it gets me irritated a little myself. Well, Carrick won’t deal no more cards. When you made your play, he turned it into guns, didn’t he?”
“I reached for his chin with my fist,” said Quick, “and he slid out of his chair and started shooting. You know how it is.”
“Sure do I know,” agreed Slade. “You split his wishbone, and what the hell? Have a drink?”
They stood at the bar together, each eying the other. If Quick feared Slade, it was also highly probable that Slade feared Quick. Plenty of stories about both of them were afloat, but Quick fought with guns only when he had to, and Slade killed promptly for the joy of destruction. There was no color in his sallow cheeks. There was no life in his eyes except when, now and again, a point of light glinted from the pupil. He was a man of slow speech and shambling gait, and this deceived many men. The cat, also, moves with an almost sleepy leisure until it sees a mouse.
“Where are you bound?” asked Quick.
“I’m just looking things over around here,” said Slade, and Quick wondered what rascal scheme might now be uppermost in the mind of the killer. “Where you drifting, Quick?”
“San José.”
“California?”
“No. Right down there in Lonesome Valley.”
“Yeah?” said Slade.
Quick tingled with a sudden interest, because he had seen the bright needlepoints of light in the eyes of Slade.
“Friend of mine been trying to ranch in Lonesome Valley,” explained Quick. “He’s in some kind of trouble, and he sent me a hurry call.”
“Yeah?” said Slade. He tossed off his drink. The speed of his hand made the whiskey flash red in the glass before it disappeared, thrown down like a stone.
Quick finished his drink and offered to treat in his turn.
“One’s enough. One at a time,” said Slade. “Who’s this sucker that tries to raise cows in Lonesome Valley?”
“Finnegan. He’s a hard-boiled Irishman, but he’s a good fellow.”
“If he’s in Lonesome Valley, he’s in plenty of trouble . . . you can’t get him out. Thing for you to do, Quick, is to throw in with me. I got a big job on hand.”
“Finnegan is a friend of mine,” said Quick.
“Yeah?” drawled Slade once more. “Meaning that I ain’t?”
Cold shot through the heart and the brain of Quick. He looked down at the bar, and then slowly lifted his eyes to those of Slade. “Take that any way you please,” said Quick. “Finnegan has the first call on me.”
He waited three vital seconds, then he turned on his heel and went out of the saloon with a horrible feeling that a bullet might strike him from behind at any moment. But he found himself presently in the open street with the strength of the sun on his face and shoulders, but even that honest heat could not pierce the chilly shadow that had swept over his soul.
There was danger, and it would come from Slade. A bright devil had been in the eyes of Slade when Quick last looked into them. And the man was capable of anything. He could kill man to man and face to face, or else he could slaughter from ambush, like an Indian. Quick rubbed the soft nose of his mustang, mounted, and rode slowly from the town, deep in thought.
Slade had not wanted him to go to Finnegan. That had been clear. Slade had been on the verge of fighting the thing out right there in the barroom, but one moment of indecision had kept him from the draw, perhaps. Therefore, if Finnegan was in trouble, might it not be that Slade was the source of it? With all his heart, Quick hoped not. The cunning of a cat and the poison of a snake were in Slade. Of all enemies, he would be the worst to encounter. There was no decency, faith, honor, or truth in the man. He was simply an animal, intended to live by slaughter.
These thoughts overcast the mind of Quick as he rode down through the crooked windings of the pass, which gave from time to time widening glimpses of Lonesome Valley, beyond. The Wilson River, which made music in the ravine, poured down it with such an abounding current that it promised to water all the valley beyond, but, like many other rivers in the West, it dived underground at the foot of the pass, and no man knew what its hidden destination might be.
Something winked like a bright eye on the right. Only on the outer edge of his vision did Quick see the thing, but instinct, swifter than mind, told him that it was the flash of the sun on naked steel. Instinctive, also, was the reaction that flattened him along the back of his mustang as four rifles opened in a swift blast.
He heard the bullets sing just over him. Light fingers plucked at the loose back of his shirt. And already his spurs were driving his horse to full speed.
Looking back, he saw one man rise, kneel, drop a rifle deliberately to the level for good aim. That fellow would not miss.
Quick, straightening suddenly in the saddle with a Colt in his hand, sent a stream of bullets from the gun. The rifleman leaped up, hurling his weapon into the air. Then he leaned forward, striking at the air with his hands like a swimmer in water. He was still falling forward when the mustang jerked Quick out of view behind a big boulder.
The noise of the firing ceased, although the echoes prolonged the sounds for a moment. And then the good horse snatched Quick down the rest of the pass and out onto the levels of Lonesome Valley. There was no pursuit.
But how swiftly Slade had acted. The moment Quick left the saloon, the murderer must have made up his mind. He had gathered some of his men—he always had brutal hangers-on around him—and down the pass he had planted them for the killing. Instinct and a fast horse and a lucky shot had saved Quick. That was all. He had not seen the last of Slade. The man-slayer would be on his trail again, of course.
But already there wa
s a mystery to be solved. Why was Slade persecuting Finnegan? Why was Slade trying to cut off all help from the rancher?
Now Quick passed the wide, ugly marshes, the stretches of green water, where the Wilson River spread its rushing stream and disappeared from the face of the earth. Quick had seen more than one other stream sink into the desert, but none quite so quickly as the Wilson. At one point it was a large stream; two miles farther on, the marshes ended and the desert began.
For desert was the proper name for Lonesome Valley. The soil was very dark, so that all growth on the face of it was easily marked, but, although there was often a slight sheen of sun-dried grass in the distance, when a rider looked down at the ground he covered, there was only a feeble scattering to be found. A cow would have to walk ten steps to get a single mouthful.
Well, the steers he began to pass showed the effects of the walking and the fewness of the mouthfuls. They were long and lean, some of them gaunted and with roached backs; they looked hardly strong enough to hold up the great, massive spread of their horns.
He saw the old, jumbled adobe ruins of the ancient Mexican town of San José, at last, and amongst them rose the squat outlines of the ranch house.
Off to the left and the right, in low depressions in the ground, appeared two tanks of water that were dammed up and saved from the winter rains. The water had a greenish look even from the distance. Toward it came thin clouds of dust that developed into cattle at a lope. They were coming out of the distances, mad with thirst. Perhaps they would journey an entire day at a canter, or a rapid trot, in this fashion, until they got to water. And after they had filled themselves like barrels with liquid, they would lie about to rest, then return to the distance where they had found better pasture.
It meant a continual and frightful struggle, and only the gaunt, hardy Western steers could have endured the fight.
The knowledge of that misery darkened the mind of Quick still more, as he pressed on toward the house. He was quite close to it when a shrill voice sang out: “Halt!” He could see nothing, but that voice, young as it was, meant business. Quick stopped the mustang. Was this the hand of Slade appearing again? he wondered.