by Max Brand
“Where you come from?” shrilled the voice.
“From the pass,” said Quick.
“Whatcha want here?”
“I was sent for, brother.”
“Who sent for you?”
“Finnegan.”
“What’s your name?”
“Quentin Underwood Inchley Charles Kimball.” He grinned as he rolled the long name out.
“What does that all mean?” cried the sentinel.
“Some people say it means Quick,” he replied.
“Hi!” yelled the voice.
And a ten-year-old boy rose from a hole in the ground behind a rag of mesquite bush. He waved a rifle above his head in greeting. “Hi, Quick! Is it sure enough you yourself?” He came running and grasped the hand of Quick.
“Me, I’m Jimmy,” he said. “Jimmy Finnegan. Gosh, but Pop is sure gonna be crazy glad to see you.”
“What’s all this about?” asked Quick as they went on toward the house.
On either side of them, now, lay the old ruins of the adobe town, sometimes lumpish heaps and sometimes long, regular lines. At one time there must have been thousands of people in the place. How had they supported life in such a desolation?
“Why, after the well turned red,” said the boy, “that was when everything went kind of queer. Everything started then. Hey, Pop! Hey, here’s Quick come to help us, sure enough!”
The door of the adobe house opened, and on the threshold appeared a powerfully made man of middle years with a broad white bandage wrapped about his head. He threw up both arms and uttered a wild shout of joy. Then he started on the run to greet Quick.
III
They sat in the dining room at the old, scarred table, while Sarah Finnegan brought in a great pot of coffee and served them in tin cups. She brought in soft pone, also, and some stewed, dried apples to eat with it. Jimmy sat in a corner and stared at the famous man and shook his head now and then at his mother, and she shook her head at Jimmy. It was their silent way of celebrating a great event.
She was one of those narrow women who are easily bent by labor, but never broken. At a few years over thirty, already she began to look old. She was as faded as the blue of the calico dress that she wore, but she was clean as a pin. Poverty and the long, long, unending struggle had worn her thin, but her spirit was always fresh. The blue of her eyes was not dimmed.
Big Jerry Finnegan, strong as a horse and big as a house, had forgotten how to smile, it seemed, only a grim satisfaction showed in his eyes as he looked at Quick.
“How old are you, Quick?” he asked.
“Twenty-five,” said Quick.
“You were only seventeen when you stood up to those Canucks? You hear that, Ma?”
There was a silence.
“I ain’t seen you often since,” said Finnegan, “but when I got into this trouble, I remembered that day eight years ago. And I sent off the letter.” He began to nod his head, watching always with that grim satisfaction the handsome face of Quick. “I used to tell Sarah, mighty often, that you was a gent to be trusted. And she would always shake her head.”
“Now, Jerry,” said the wife, “you know mighty well that I never laid eyes on Quick before this day. And how could a body tell?”
Quick smiled at her, and she smiled back.
“Where did you get that?” asked Quick, nodding at the bandage.
“Rifle bullet. It kind of glanced off of my thick skull,” said Jerry. He grinned slightly. “After I got that, I wrote the letter. There’s only the three of us. Jimmy can shoot as good as I can. Sarah can shoot a dog-gone’ sight better, because she hates to waste bullets. But if the crooks got me, then I figgered that they’d get Sarah and Jimmy, too.”
“You mean that they’d murder women and boys, eh?” asked Quick.
“They’ve tried to,” said Sarah.
“Suppose we start back at the beginning,” said Quick. “Jimmy told me something about the well turning red.”
“That was a funny thing,” said Jerry, nodding. “All at once, one day, the water of the well turned a kind of a pale red. And when we drunk the water, it turned us sick, all of us. We had to take water out of the tanks and filter it through cloth to get out the wrigglers for two, three days till the red kind of died out of the well again. There’s still some in it. Jimmy, fetch a bucket of it.”
“There’s some right in the kitchen now,” said Sarah. She brought in a bucket that was half filled, and, when it was held in a ray of sunshine, Quick could see a glint of reddish color in the water.
“There ain’t any bad taste and no bad effects from it now,” said Jerry.
“Was it always clear before?” asked Quick.
“Clear as day. Regular spring water,” said Sarah.
“And it turned red all at once?”
“The night before, it was like always. The next morning it turned reddish.”
“Minerals of some sort,” suggested Quick. “The seepage underground may have reached some sort of mineral.”
“What kind of mineral would be poison like that?” asked Jerry. “So dog-gone’ poisonous that maybe a teaspoonful might’ve killed a man. I mean of the real, thick, red stuff.”
“You think somebody might have dropped poison in the well?” asked Quick.
“I dunno what to think. Folks that wanted to poison you, they wouldn’t put in stuff that the eye could see so dead easy, would they?”
“No,” agreed Quick. “They wouldn’t do that.” He shook his head. “What happened after the well turned red?” he asked.
“A couple of days after that, a gent come riding by and stopped at the house. He come in and asked for a drink of water. We wanted him to set down, of course, and have a snack, but he just asked for a drink. Sarah told him that we couldn’t give him good water because our well had gone wrong, and that we had to use water out of the tank, but there was vinegar in it, so it tasted all right. And when he heard about the well going wrong, he was excited.”
“But he tried not to let on,” said Sarah.
“You noticed he was excited?” asked Quick.
“He looked like he was about to say something . . . and then he swallowed it,” said Sarah. “I began to think something, right then. Then he said that he knew something about wells, and could he see it. So we showed him the well, and he went down the old ladder and looked the thing over, very careful. He came up shaking his head and said it was mighty queer. That was all. Then he went away.”
“The next day,” put in Jerry, “along comes a gent with a slow sort of a way about him and the look of money, somehow, and he said that he wanted to get hold of a place where he’d get plenty of room, which he’d never had enough of all of his days. And he led right up to the point and asked what I’d take for the place.”
“You own all of this?” asked Quick.
“I got ten thousand acres,” said Jerry, “and I paid five thousand dollars for it. But I was cheated. There ain’t five thousand dollars’ worth of land here . . . there ain’t two thousand worth. At ten cents an acre it would be mighty expensive.”
“So you told him you’d sell?”
“I told him what I’d paid for the land, and he frowned and looked thoughtful and said it was a lot of money. But that wasn’t what he was thinking. No, old son . . . by a light that come in his eyes and a sort of a something in his voice, I seen that he was pretty cheered up. He said that he guessed I’d be glad to sell out and he’d pay me the same price that I’d put up.”
“Ah, Jerry,” said the wife. “If you’d only closed with that offer, it would’ve been fine.”
“But I knew that there was something queer,” said Jerry. “Why did he want the ranch? Just to get plenty of space? I ain’t fool enough to believe that. Gold has been found in queerer places than this black soil. I told him that I didn’t know about selling, and that the lowest price that I could consider would be ten thousand, considering the work I’d put in on the place. He gave me a mean look and argued a minute,
but he came right up to that price, too. Then I said . . . ‘Stranger, why in hell do you want this place?’ He told me that he had reasons of his own. If he had this place, he’d be king of what he surveyed, anyway. I told him that the land ought to be worth as much to me as it was to him, and that I wasn’t going to sell.”
“Oh, Jerry!” mourned his wife.
“He got so mad that he was in a sweat,” said Jerry. “His mouth begun to twitch, and there was a devil in his face if I ever seen one. And when he seen that I couldn’t be budged, he said that I’d hear a lot more of this, and that it would be before long.”
“What sort of a looking hombre was he?” asked Quick.
“Mighty tall, and yaller-faced, and thin-cheeked. His cheeks was so holler that you’d think he was biting them when he talked. And he had a mustache across his upper lip, so short and black that it looked like it was painted on the skin. And . . .”
“Slade,” said Quick.
“Who?” exclaimed Jerry Finnegan.
“Slade,” said Quick. “It’s Slade that tried to buy the place.”
“You mean . . . him? The Sl-Slade?” stammered Finnegan. He was staring like a child as the terrible name got hold on his mind.
“That’s the one I mean,” said Quick. “He’s the fellow who’s making trouble for you.”
“But why?” asked Sarah Finnegan. “What have we done . . . ?”
“Be still, Sarah,” said the husband. “It don’t make no difference what we done. Slade ain’t no judge . . . he’s just an executioner. He’s a hangman, and he does the hanging for fun.”
“There might be gold somewhere in the valley,” observed Quick. “I know that the Wilson River used to run through the valley, a long time ago. And where there’s running water, there’s always a chance of finding gold.”
“Who told you that there was ever a river running through?” asked Jerry Finnegan.
“Why, it stands to reason,” said Quick. “In the old days, there must have been thousands of Mexicans living here . . . and they couldn’t have farmed the valley without water.”
“Where’s the course of the river?” asked Finnegan.
“The bed of it might have silted over,” suggested Quick. “It wouldn’t have been a very big stream, I suppose.”
“That must be true,” remarked Sarah. “We’ve found a lot of little humps of ground that look like the remains of irrigation banks. The ground is all checked over with them. If a rain falls, you can see the land shinin’ in patches, where the water collects into sort of pools. Jerry, we should’ve thought of that before. They used to irrigate all of this land around here!”
“They never irrigated it from the river,” said Jerry. “I know dog-gone’ well that no river ever flowed through here. Maybe they got the water down here all the way from the pass.”
“Irrigation,” murmured Sarah, her eyes shining. “Why, there ain’t no bottom to this black soil. This ’dobe would raise twenty sacks to the acre forever.”
“Yeah. Sure it would,” said Jerry. “But where would the water come from now? Have we got the money to put a dam across the pass?”
Sarah sighed and shook her head.
“After Slade went away, what happened?” asked Quick.
“The kid was out riding herd, one day,” said the father, “and he seen a couple of gents riding in the distance. You tell it, Jimmy.”
“I dunno why, when I seen them, my blood begun to have the creeps in it,” said Jimmy. “That sounds a fool way to talk. But I started Pinto . . . that’s my horse . . . for home. And, my gosh, if they didn’t turn and head the same way. I started the pony racing . . . and they raced, too. My heart begun to thump . . . I thought it would jump out my throat. Then they begun to shoot.”
“They began to shoot . . . at you?” said Quick in a small, hard voice.
“I heard the bullets sing. I guess I know now how a deer feels when the guns start hammering away at it. But Pinto was cutting along pretty fast, and he never stopped till I was safe home . . . and, when I looked back, I seen them fading away to the edge of the sky.”
“After that,” Jerry said, taking over the story, “Sarah was out hoeing in the truck garden . . . we got a patch behind the house . . . and, while she was working, a bullet come slam into the bucket that she was filling with potatoes. She cut and run for the house, and before she got to it, another rifle bullet cut through the kitchen door ahead of her and showed her the way in, you might say.”
Quick nodded his head in understanding. “All that shooting was a bluff,” he said.
“You mean that, if they’d wanted to, they could’ve killed the kid and Sarah?”
“Slade doesn’t miss,” stated Quick. “When the bluffing didn’t work, he shot you, Jerry, and he didn’t miss you. How did that shooting happen?”
“I don’t know. I’d walked out into the back yard, one morning. And the next thing I knew, I was picking myself up off the ground with a terrible headache.”
“Somebody must’ve hid in the well to murder Pop,” said the boy.
“There’s the well again,” answered Quick. “Let’s go out and have a look at that well. What you say?”
IV
It was a big-throated well about eight feet across, walled with well-cut rock that must have been hauled from a distance.
“It must’ve gone down a long ways, in the old days,” said Sarah. “But now it ain’t more’n twenty feet, I suppose.”
“Yeah. There was a time when they hauled a lot of water out of that well,” said Jerry Finnegan. He pointed to the circular track that hoofs had eaten deeply into the ground. It went around and around a central post. Oxen, no doubt, had furnished the power that brought a continual stream of water out of the well. There were even remnants of the big stone gutters into which the water had spilled.
And into the mind of Quick came a picture of the old days. The village rose again from ruins. The whitewashed houses stood in rows, shoulder to shoulder; the children and the dogs ran noisily through the streets, and women came with jars to get water at the well and carry it home, women in long troops and trains. This must have been the central focus around which the life of the town gathered. But probably the water supply dwindled, failed, and that was why the place was wiped out. Of the complicated irrigation system, which probably had been drawn all the way from the pass, few traces would remain. Time had stamped its heel heavily, and the result was Lonesome Valley.
There was a ladder down each side of the well. Quick climbed down one of these and examined the masonry. It was so strong and well-fitted that there seemed small chance that it might have developed a leak lower down. The water itself was quite shallow. When he climbed up again, Sarah told him that sometimes in the summer months the level sank and the well almost ran dry. It could not be depended upon to take care of the cattle during the worst of the dry weather.
They were still standing about the well when two reports boomed through the air, made the ground tremble. And the four looked at one another with apprehensive eyes.
Then young Jimmy hopped on his pony and darted away.
He came back again in a moment, yelling words from a distance. It was the mother who understood their meaning first.
“The tanks!” she exclaimed. “The tanks! They’ve blown up the dams!”
There was a winding stairway that ran up from the kitchen to the flat roof of the adobe house. The three of them raced for that point of vantage, and from it they could see the disaster plainly.
Both dams that held in the precious water that had been saved from the spring rains had been burst in the center, and the water had rolled away across the thirsty soil. It had not traveled very far. Into cracks inches wide and of unfathomable depth the flood had sunk away and disappeared. And already there were cattle lowing with disappointment, standing knee-deep in the mud and smelling at the water that they could not drink.
The deep, mournful voices of the cattle had commenced a song of wailing that was not to die
away until the end; it was a music that would never be forgotten in the mind of Quick. He could not speak. The dastardly nature of the crime choked him. Certainly this was a way to make the Finnegans abandon their place. As for the cattle, they would die, every one.
Finnegan himself was the one who realized the completeness of the defeat. He said, calmly enough: “Well, Sarah, we’re beat. I didn’t think that there was skunks that mean in the whole world. But I didn’t know until today that it was Slade that was ag’in’ us. We better pack and git.”
Sarah looked at her husband with vague eyes. “I gotta go and think,” she said, and she disappeared down the stairs.
Little Jimmy had come up to the roof by now. His face was strained, his eyes were big with tears, but he made no sound. His eyes never left the face of Quick, as though he hoped to find in this man a miracle.
Finnegan said, keeping his voice under complete mastery always: “Well, Quick, I sent for you, and you come. Maybe if I’d had the sense to call for you a little sooner, you would’ve managed to fix this here thing for me. But I sent too late. However, what I want you to know is that I’m as much obliged as though you’d saved everything for us. And when I say it, I mean it. You been a friend in need, and I’ll never forget it.”
Quick said nothing. He was staring out into the distance, toward the wide, black stain that the water had made on the dry soil of the valley.
“You and your family pack up and move along,” he said at last. “But I’m going to stay here.”
“Hi!” exclaimed Jimmy, his voice crowing with joy. “I knowed that Quick would say something like that.”
“You stay here?” asked the rancher. “But there’s a whole gang of them, Quick.”
“It’s my fault,” said Quick heavily. “I saw Slade up there in the pass, and if I’d killed him then, this would never have happened.”
“You seen him up there? Well, that’s past. There ain’t any use mourning about that, Quick,” said the rancher. He put his big, sun-reddened hand on the shoulder of his friend. “Why, hell, Quick,” he said, “why should you be grieving about this so much? Me and Sarah is young, and we got Jimmy, here, that’s the finest boy in the world. And if we’re cleaned out here . . . why, we can go ahead and make a new start, somewhere. I’m as strong as I ever was. God didn’t give me much of a brain, but he sure passed me a fine pair of hands!” Finnegan, looking down at his big paws, smiled and shrugged his shoulders. But his face was white; his eyes were empty.