The Red Well

by Max Brand

  “Whatcha mean?” exclaimed Slade angrily.

  “You missed me in the pass,” said Quick, “but you showed me part of your hand.”

  “Did I?” said Slade carelessly. “Well, brother, how do you want to fix this party?”

  He spoke as one who has no concern, and Quick was amazed. He had seen the courage of self-confident bullies before this. But Slade was more than a mere brute. He had brain enough to appreciate a danger that stood before him, and, no matter how he trusted his own skill, he must know that the slightest catch of the gun against the leather of the holster, the least slowness or uncertainty of hand, against such an antagonist as Quick, would be the end of his life. And yet he acted as though he were in the presence of a child armed with no more than a paper knife.

  What caused his sense of security? In the cloud that came over his mind, Quick remembered having heard of men who wore under their clothes a slab of steel that covered the vital center of the body. Perhaps the looseness of the vest of Slade indicated some such hidden protection. At any rate, Quick decided in that moment to shoot for the head only.

  The bellowing of a bull sounded, at this moment, above the mournful uproar of the herd.

  “Slade,” said Quick, “we’ll sit our horses face to face. And when that bull bellows again, we go for our guns. Does that suit you?”

  “Suit me?” Slade chuckled. “Why, anything suits me.” He added: “I take off my hat to a bright idea like that.” And raising his left hand—slowly for fear lest Quick should misunderstand the gesture—he lifted his hat right off his head. He looked at Quick with an odd mockery.

  At the same time a heavy blow struck Quick under the left shoulder—a club stroke that had in it the burning pain of a knife thrust. And as the shock swayed him sidelong in the saddle, he was aware, dimly, of a figure rising from the edge of the tank nearly five hundred yards away, rifle in hand.

  That was the reason Slade had been so sure of himself—he had known that his hidden marksman, at the given signal, would not fail to strike his mark even at a quarter of a mile.

  The sudden side sway of the body of Quick saved him from the first bullet of Slade, as the tall man snatched out a gun and opened fire.

  Pinto saved him from the second. For, as Quick pitched sidewise, his heel instinctively caught at the sides of the little mustang, and those heels were armed with powerful spurs. Pinto, burned with torturing pain, did not stop to argue. That is to say, he did not pause to buck. Instead, he whirled and bolted for home, trying to blow this clumsy, cruel rider out of the saddle by the sheer dint of hard running.

  Slade, yelling with triumph, poured in two more shots that hummed past Quick.

  But another rifle entered the battle, here. From the top of the house, Winchester in hand, big Jerry Finnegan had been watching like a hawk, and, when he saw the treachery that was being enacted in the hollow, he had the weapon instantly against his shoulder.

  He was no such expert marksman as to hit that very distant target, but the whine of a rifle bullet in the air above his head made Slade duck suddenly, instinctively. He jerked his horse aside, cursing, and, as he straightened the horse again, he saw that Pinto had snaked his rider already into long revolver range.

  Slade emptied his gun, but he knew that he had missed. He could see his bullets knock up little puffs of dust. Quick was already out of sight, now, around the corner of the house.

  “Five shots . . . and him right under my thumb . . . how could I have missed?” groaned Slade.

  But Quick, slipping out of the saddle behind the house, was staggering through the rear door of the kitchen.

  There Sarah Finnegan met him, her husband coming on the run. Above them, a shrill voice was screaming from the roof vast challenges and insults toward the distant outlaw. That was Jimmy overflowing with childish wrath.

  His father and mother made Quick sit in a chair while they cut away the sleeve and side of his shirt.

  Pain and shock had sickened him, but it was a familiar sickness. It was not the first time that a bullet had sliced through his flesh and battered against his bones.

  Finnegan, examining the bleeding wound with care, announced the result of his discoveries one by one. “It comes and socks him here, under the shoulder and behind,” he said. “It goes inside and it slithers along the ribs . . . and it comes out in front through this big muscle. You see, Sarah? And my partner ain’t hurt so dog-gone’ bad, after all. Quick, they didn’t get you. You’re gonna live to kill Mister Murderer Slade.”

  Quick, smiling through his pain, merely answered: “They’ll try to rush the place and wipe you out now, Jerry. Look lively. Sarah, hurry some kind of a bandage around that shoulder. I’ve got to be on hand for the fun.”

  VII

  In fact, the bandage was hardly around the shoulder of big Quick Kimball before hoof beats were drumming at racing speed toward the house.

  Jimmy went up the ladder like a rabbit for the roof. Sarah and her husband caught up rifles and ran with Quick to the front of the house. From the two windows, they could see a dozen men sweeping toward them on horses that were stretched out straight with the running effort. And as the charge developed, the dozen riders began to whoop like madmen.

  “What about it, Quick?” called Jerry Finnegan from the window where he stood with his wife.

  Quick looked across at them and saw that the woman was nestling a rifle at her shoulder. A sort of horror was whitening her face, but it was white iron. She would not flinch from her part in the battle. As for Finnegan, he was beyond fear.

  “Hold it,” said Quick. “We can’t let ’em know that I’m badly nicked. Wait till they’re in revolver range and then we’ll pepper them. Jerry, wait till I shoot. Slade will be my target. You take the fellow on the gray horse.”

  “And what’s my target?” asked Sarah Finnegan.

  “The air,” commanded Quick. “Shoot in the air.”

  “I’ve as good a right to fight as though they were Indians!” she cried.

  Quick answered briefly: “Tell her, Jerry.”

  “Shoot in the air,” growled Finnegan. “He’s right. He’s always right.”

  She uttered a faint moaning sound, but made no other answer.

  And now the riders swept big into the eye, but it seemed to Quick that Slade, because of the gigantic evil that was in him, was a mountain compared with the others. That tall, powerful figure he fixed in his eye. In another instant, he could open up with his revolver.

  And then, from the front of the roof above them, a rifle clanged loudly. The man on the gray horse dropped the gun he had been shaking above his head, clutched at his shoulder, and pulled his horse suddenly to the side.

  The rifle spoke again, and again, and again, but, although no other hit was scored, that charge split like water on a rock and poured off to either side.

  Finnegan, following the figures with his rifle, was desperately eager to shoot, but Quick told him to hold his trigger finger. There was not much ammunition in the house. Perhaps they had a hundred rounds, all told, and, if there was any amount of close fighting, the bullets would have to fly thick and fast.

  The riders of Slade, sweeping past the house, turned their savage yelling into a howling promise of future damage. They thundered away to the rear as the three shifted back through the house.

  The piping voice of Jimmy yelled from above: “The well! Pop, they’ve got the well! Quick, they’re in the well.” He came rushing down the ladder to explain. He did not wait to be complimented on his straight shooting or to be told that, if he had held his fire, there might have been three empty saddles among Slade’s horses.

  “Two of ’em pulled up, throwed some things down beside the well, and got into it themselves the next minute. They’re gonna use it like a fort to fight us, Quick! Is that what they’re gonna do?”

  “We knew that,” said Quick. He went to one of the kitchen windows.

  The glass crashed before his face, a bullet thudded into the inner wall of
the room, and the rifle clang sounded.

  Quick stepped back from the observation post. “They’re going to hold the well like a fort,” he said. “They’re digging inside it, now. You hear?”

  The strokes of a pick ringing against stone could be heard. Then sounds of heavy objects failing into water.

  Obviously the men in the well intended to fill up the bottom with stones, at least enough to enable them to stand in the water safely. They could, in fact, make of the well a strong fortress, an advanced station from which the house could be struck at any moment.

  Quick stretched himself on the floor and closed his eyes. “They’ll try nothing more till dark,” he said. “Call me if you hear anything.”

  He closed his eyes. They burned like fire, and the pain from his wound was circulating by unexpected channels, finding new nerves every moment. But he mastered the pain by degrees, driving it down, forcing it out of his mind. There was only one way to deal with shock, and that was to relax utterly.

  He heard Jimmy whispering: “We gotta get him onto a bed. Pop, we gotta move him.”

  “Leave him be,” said Jerry. “He’s asleep already, and he wouldn’t be moved from the place that’s closest to danger.”

  So they left him undisturbed, moving softly, never speaking above a whisper.

  Sometimes he dozed. But at last he slept, and when he wakened, there was a ringing as of bells in his ears. The room was dimly lighted by a single hooded lamp that seemed to cast more shadow than illumination. Fever burned and shuddered through the body of Quick. His throat was a fathomless desert of thirst. But the bells that had rung so loudly in his brain now receded into a noise of muffled strokes, outside the house, and the occasional chiming of steel against stone.

  He got up, went to the pail, and drank one dipper of water.

  Sarah and Jerry sat each at a window, each with a rifle across the knees. They were barely distinguishable, one from the other. Jimmy, said Sarah, was keeping watch on the other three sides of the house from the top of the roof, whose low, thick parapet of adobe sheltered him well.

  But the peril was great, every moment. For, if a rush came, it might strike through on any of the three sides that remained ungarrisoned before the warning voice and shots of Jimmy brought the defenders to the proper point.

  Sarah pointed this out. Then, looking suddenly up at Quick, she said: “But we’re going to win. God wouldn’t’ve sent you to us, if He didn’t intend us to win.”

  “What are they doing out there?” asked Quick.

  “Digging,” said Jerry. “Digging from the well. Toward the house.”

  “And they’ve got dynamite with them,” pointed out Sarah. “We know that, because they blew the dams of the tanks. They’re gonna mine under a corner of the house and then blow us at the sky, Quick.”

  He leaned at the wall, listening to the busy clinking noises of the picks and the slither and the crunch of shovel blades entering the loosened soil. He could hear, also, the thump of clods thrown out of the ditch.

  Quick went up to the roof, and there found Jimmy walking stealthily up and down. He turned with a gasp, when Quick first appeared, and his long rifle swung around with a flash in the starlight.

  “A friend,” said Quick, answering that unspoken challenge.

  “Gee, Quick,” said the boy, “I thought for a minute . . .” He paused, and added: “A fellow gets sort of nervous . . . I mean, by night, and everything, when your eyes don’t see very far.”

  “Aye, it’s a pretty nervous time,” agreed Quick.

  “How d’you feel, Quick?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I wish you’d tell me. It must hurt terrible. Will you tell me?”

  “It’s nothing that you couldn’t stand,” answered Quick.

  “Is it like a toothache?” asked Jimmy.

  “A bit like that. When a bullet rubs a few bones the wrong way . . . well, the fur stands up for a long time, Jimmy.”

  The boy chuckled. “You’d make a joke out of anything,” he decided. “Quick, what are they gonna do?”

  He pointed down over the edge of the parapet toward the ditch that was opening from the well toward the house. The starlight was crisp and clear, but even so the ground shadows were confusing. Quick, studying the line of the trench, saw that it was being made so that rifle fire from the roof of the house would not plunge down into it at such an angle that the workmen might be injured. To give more protection, all the loosened soil was thrown up on the side nearer to the house.

  The ditch was deep; only now and then, faintly, Quick could see the blade of a shovel rise above the mound of heaped earth, half glimmer and half shadow. Then there was the thump of the falling earth, the little rattling as the clods rolled down the near side of the bank.

  One of the workingmen began to sing:

  All day long on the prairies I ride,

  Not even a dog to trot at my side,

  My fire I kindle with chips gathered ’round,

  My coffee I boil without being ground.

  I wash in a pool and wipe on a sack,

  I carry my wardrobe all on my back,

  For want of an oven I cook bread in a pot,

  And sleep on the ground for want of a cot . . .

  Quick listened to the old song with a strangely dreamy feeling.

  “You lie down and take a nap,” he told Jimmy.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” said Jimmy. He added, with a sudden touch of mature gravity: “Maybe we’re all gonna do a lot of sleeping, whether we want to or not, before long. I wanna tell you, Quick, that you coming all the way here just to die with us . . . it sure means a lot to me. It kind of steadies me. No matter what happens, if you’re along with us, I don’t care.”

  Quick patted his shoulder. “We’ve got a chance, still,” he said.

  “How good a chance?” asked the boy.

  “One chance in about a hundred,” said Quick.

  There was a slight pause.

  Then Jimmy answered: “Thanks. Thanks for telling me that.”

  Quick knew the lad felt that he had received the accolade, that he had become a man worthy of receiving the confidence of other mature minds.

  After that, Quick went down the ladder and paused for a moment in the kitchen. He said nothing to the two silent, watchful figures, but stepped to the front of the house, slipped the bolt of the front door noiselessly back, and strode out into the dark of the night.

  VIII

  He kept close to the wall of the house, scanning the dark before him. As he reached the corner of the building, he squatted on his heels and looked at the mild loom of light that streaked the horizon dimly.

  Against it he saw, at last, a ghost of a shadow that stirred, and then seemed to slide suddenly closer to him. It was merely that his eyes were growing more accustomed to the light, and now he made out the entire outline of a rider who moved back and forth in front of the house at a sufficient distance to be secure against most attacks and yet close enough to discover any attempt of the besieged to flee.

  No Indian was ever more tempted than Quick to glide out, to wriggle snake-like along the ground, and then to drive a bullet into that prowling sentinel. He had to remember by force that he was a white man, even if the crew of Slade were devils incarnate. And he felt himself steadied and lifted strangely by the thought of small Jimmy Finnegan, who kept watch from the top of the house with a high faith in honor and the manhood of Quick.

  He moved slowly, now, around the side of the house, ducking as he passed the windows and grimly aware of the ease with which a soft-moving man or men could have entered the place. When he reached the rear of it, a monotonous voice was singing from the trench:

  ’Twas on a pleasant summer day

  When from my home I ran away

  And took unto myself a wife,

  Which step was fatal to my life.

  Oh, she was kind and good to me

  As ever woman ought to be,

  And might this day hav
e been alive, no doubt,

  Had I not met Miss Hatty Stout.

  To the rhythm of the old tune the digging went on. Quick lay down on the ground on his right side and peered long and earnestly at the growing ridge of earth that was being heaped up. He heard the fall of the lumps of earth more clearly. The gleam of the shovel blades was more apparent to him, now, and, seated on the ground near the bank of earth, keeping look-out, was a man who would have been passed unheeded except for the glitter of the stars on the barrel of his rifle.

  Quick began to slide along the ground little by little, striking out from the corner of the house at a wide angle. Instinctively he kept trying to use the wounded arm, and the pull of the muscles sent shooting thrusts of agony into his brain. It was very slow work. When he paused, he was certain that his panting could be heard. But the greater the distance between him and the house, the less likelihood that the look-out would be able to spot him.

  He passed the man and almost reached the distance of the well before he gave up that worm-like mode of progression and rose to his knees. The lowing of the thirst-maddened cattle came suddenly about him, more closely, as though they had commenced a stampede toward the house, but he knew that this must have been caused by a sudden rising of the wind that was hot against his face.

  He rose, drew his Colt, and walked straight down the side of the rampart of loosened earth toward the look-out.

  In the trench he could hear Slade saying: “What’s the matter with you, Rusty?”

  And another voice answered: “It’s the dog-gone’ blisters, Slade. You know how it is when you ain’t handled nothing much heavier than a pack of cards for a coupla years.”

  “Tie into that pick,” commanded Slade. “I won’t have no tramps around these diggings.”

  With short, careful steps, Quick came up behind the look-out, and the fellow turned his head at the last moment.

  “Yeah? Yeah?” demanded the sentinel.

  “Slade wants you,” said Quick.

  The look-out grunted. “I thought I was on for a three-hour watch? I done my share of the damn’ pick-and-shovel work before this.”