The Red Well

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The Red Well Page 20

by Max Brand


  Slade’s voice answered. And big Quick, following into the dingy little room with the girl, saw Finnegan himself rise and stare at her like a ghost. Then he was introducing them. They would hardly hear the names of one another before they died.

  “Slade, do you hear me?” cried Sarah Finnegan. “There’s another person in the house . . . there’s a lady . . . a lady . . . you hear me?”

  “If she’s a lady, she’ll die smiling,” retorted Slade.

  Quick shouted: “Slade, it’s the daughter of Major Chalmers! They’ll never end hunting for her. They must be on her trail now. Slade, her people know where she’s gone . . . they’ll follow her here. They may be on the way now. If you carry through, you’ll be dead for murder. You hear me?”

  There was a bit of silence, after that. And in the silence of the human voices rolled the hoarse bellowing of the cattle, the long, low notes, infinitely filled with doom, so that it seemed more like the echoing of a storm in a cañon or of the waves through hollow caves than the utterance of throats.

  Eunice Chalmers, through that pause, seemed to come to the full realization of the position in which they all stood. There was a sudden enlarging of her eyes, a stiffening of her body, a parting of the lips to scream out. And then all the weakness of childhood and femininity died from her and left her as quiet and steady as a man.

  “It’s all right, Charlie,” she said. “No matter what happens . . . I’m glad that it’ll happen to us together.”

  The voice of Slade made answer in a sudden outcry of rage. “The female fools are the worst fools!” he yelled. “What does she mean by coming in here? Let her go the way of the rest of you. You got no more’n ten minutes. Use it any way that’s fit for you. In ten minutes, I’m gonna blow you and your house up! And the lady goes with them!”

  When that answer came, Sarah Finnegan uttered a cry and struck her hands up against her face.

  Eunice Chalmers went to her and put an arm around her. “I’m where I’d rather be than any other place in the world. If Charlie’s here, I want to be with him.”

  Outside, Slade was roaring: “Get out there with rifles, four more of you! If a head shows out a window, blast it off the shoulders of him that wears it. There’s two women in there, but women are as bad for us as men, if they live after today. A woman can talk as much as a man . . . aye, and a lot more!”

  Quick said: “Come back into the front room. Hurry.”

  They came with him hastily.

  “Line up against the wall,” said Quick. “Now lie down flat on the floor. There’s a ghost of a chance that the explosion won’t smash this part of the house. Hurry, I tell you.”

  For, outside the house, the loud voice of Slade was exclaiming: “Are you ready, out there? All right, Tom. Touch a match to it. There she goes!”

  They had lighted the fuse, of course.

  Quick, lying beside the girl on the floor, took her hands and kissed them; he kissed her face. And it seemed to him that a flame of happy exaltation was transforming her; both her lips and her eyes laughed at him with a sort of divine joy.

  “The living is only half of it,” she whispered to him. “The dying is the greatest thing of all.”

  “Mom, say a prayer, will you?” asked Jimmy Finnegan.

  She began to pray after no form in a book: “God, we’ve been trying to be honest folks. If we been wrong, we wanna die . . . but the poor, sweet girl, she’s gotta live, oh, Lord.”

  Suddenly the inside wall that partitioned the house split apart. Great chunks of adobe bricks began to fall. A sound so great that it made the very brain tremble boomed in the air. And then the whole upper part of the house seemed rushing to the ground.

  XI

  Thick, black dust filled the air, dust that whirled as though in a wind, although no wind was blowing. There was breathlessness, as though each body had been pressed by a heavy weight. And then they were rising, all of them, amazed to find that they were still alive.

  Outside, they could hear the brutal cheering of the ruffians of Slade. Then the howling of Slade himself: “Inside and see if they’re finished! Inside . . .”

  Another yell burst from the other men.

  “Water!” exclaimed one. “Here’s water jumping! Has the ground gone crazy?”

  For there was a noise very like that of a wind through leaves, and then an unmistakable rushing and gurgling.

  Standing with poised revolver at the door that opened on the kitchen, Quick saw that the entire rear end of the house had been blown away, leaving only great, rough, ragged edges of wall standing. The roof had spilled in, also, over some of the front section. But, what was like a miracle to his eyes, he now saw a fountainhead of water bursting upward from the yawning pit that the dynamite had blown into the ground. It came with a rush and a roar. It flung upward great white arms. It nodded a vast, rolling head of brightness in the center of the confusion. And the wide-spreading tide rushed across the floor and spilled outward from the house.

  What had happened? Had the downward force of the explosion found a vent in smashing through some hollow shell of rock that held the force of water underground? Was this the explanation of the life that in former centuries had filled the wide flat of Lonesome Valley?

  There was no chance to ponder the question. Men were charging in a mob to sweep the defenders from the ruins. And in the lead ran the gaunt body of Slade, with a revolver in either hand.

  Quick shouted. He saw the two guns jerk up, and he fired.

  Slade, half turned by the striking force of the big .45-caliber slug, ran on again toward Quick as though the bullet might have glanced off his body as off a steel column. His two guns spoke at the same instant that Quick fired his second shot. That second shot, he knew, smashed straight into the center of Slade’s body, and the double fire of Slade’s gun ripped the empty air beside the head of Quick.

  The next instant they crashed together. All about them there was a confusion, a riot of battling, but these two went down with no other concern than their own life-and-death struggle.

  Quick, falling, whirled his body and escaped a blow from one of Slade’s guns. He struck in turn, but crashed against the floor before his blow could go home. He had only one arm to work with. He cast that around the body of Slade and bound the arms of the outlaw against his sides. Death, surely, must be working inside the body of Slade like a mole underground, for that last shot had drilled clean through him. The hot, red blood came jerking out as from a pump. And yet there was power in the arms of Slade still. He writhed to escape from the hold that was fastened on him. Still Quick had a chance of winning when he saw fate loom above him in the guise of the red-whiskered face and the glittering brutal eyes of Sam Dillon. He saw the butt of Dillon’s rifle raised and closed his eyes to receive the stroke.

  It was not on his head, however, that the blow fell. He heard the shock of the stroke distinctly, and then the great body of Slade pressed upon him as an inert weight.

  As he rolled the body of Slade away from him, he saw the doorway filled with struggle, where men had fallen dead from the fire poured in on that vital spot by Finnegan, and little Jimmy, and Sarah. Dead or wounded men lay there. The living and the sound strove to press through to follow their leader.

  But Dillon now leaped through that doorway, yelling: “Run! Slade’s dead! Quick has killed Slade! Run for your lives!”

  They left Slade and two dead men in the ruined house of Finnegan. The rest were in the saddle in sixty seconds, and fleeing as though a troop of cavalry were at their heels. In one breath, the outcry of Sam Dillon had changed the course of the battle. Finnegan, his face crimson with the flow of blood from a scalp wound, looked only to see that his wife and son were unharmed. Then he rushed knee-deep into the water that flooded the kitchen. He fell on his knees. He washed hands and arms in the outflowing stream.

  “It’s Wilson River rising out of the ground for us!” he yelled. “Look, Mom . . . Jimmy . . . we’re rich . . . water . . . water . . . water . . . !


  They carried the two dead bodies, and the dying Slade out of the welter of water, and now they could see the exact extent of the change that the explosion had produced.

  Half the house was in ruins, or blasted completely away, and the boiling sweep of the stream promised to dissolve the rest of the adobe walls in short order. But the head of water itself, incredibly strong, was already sweeping far down the hollow toward the tanks, and in the air there was the pungent smell of the dry, cracked soil drinking deeply.

  The cattle saw the bright, life-promising sparkle of that stream and came galloping to meet it. Already some of them stood deep in mud and water, drinking. And the rest would soon be filled.

  But that was only the miracle of the moment. The other picture lay in the future, but the realization of it was already in the mind of Quick. It was not merely crops that would grow. In this bottomless, rich soil the finest fruit trees would take root and prosper. Ten thousand acres of deep verdure would cover the floor of Lonesome Valley!

  It would be lonesome no longer. Roads would cut through its fertile flat. Laborers would come thronging. A scattering of houses would spot the waste. The railroad would not be long in tapping this rich spot. The whole future unrolled like music in the mind of Quick.

  He could have stared forever into the heart of this coming time, but Eunice touched his hand. He could have told her touch in utter darkness, he thought, by the electric current of joy that leaped through him. For one instant her eyes met his, half happily, half in trouble.

  “He’s dying now, Charles,” she said.

  Slade was saying: “Take me down where I can touch the water, will you? Where I can touch it with my hand.”

  They carried him the few steps and laid him by the verge of the stream that had softened the adobe to mud and was beginning to eat out its channel. As he lay, the dying man threw out his arm so that the water washed over it.

  “It ain’t so bad to pass out like this,” he said. “I seen the chance a long time ago. I seen Lonesome Valley . . . what it might be. And it’s gonna be what I seen, what I dreamed. You, there, Finnegan . . . you’ll do a better job of turning it green than I’d ever manage. I’m dog-gone’ near glad that you’ve got it . . . if only I could take Quick to hell with me.”

  He turned his ugly eye toward Quick, and his face wrinkled with hatred. “Who hit me over the head when I was about to do you in, Quick?” he asked.

  “Dillon,” said Quick. “He paid you, Slade.”

  “He chose you, instead of leaving me?” demanded Slade. He closed his eyes for a moment and then he snarled: “I might’ve knowed that I was a fool to trust him after he’d been five minutes with you. You could make even a wild wolf eat out of your hand in ten minutes. It was Dillon, eh?” He paused before continuing. “I was gonna be king in here. I was gonna have the whole of Lonesome Valley to myself. There must’ve been ten thousand greasers that lived off this same land, once on a time. But where they all got a dollar, I would’ve got three. I would’ve been a king . . . a king. Listen, Finnegan. You be a king, too. Don’t sell no part, don’t give away no part.”

  “Save to Quick, who would I give it to?” asked Finnegan. “He gets all he’ll take . . . a half if he’ll have it . . . a quarter, anyway . . . because there was four of us ag’in’ all of you, Slade.”

  “He comes in for a split, does he? Blast him, anyway,” said Slade. He laid a hand over his breast where blood still drained from his mortal wound and, flowing down to the water, stained it a little.

  “How did you come by the idea, Slade? Making the water red?” asked Quick.

  “When I seen a spot of aniline dye put into water, and how far it’s able to spread,” said Slade. “And then that reminded me how many times I’d sat my hoss and looked at the Wilson River soaking into the ground. Well, there’s one spot in the marshes where the water is pulled straight underground with a whirlpool always sweeping above the spot. I got a lot of this aniline dye, and I put the stuff into the whirlpool. Then I sent gents out to travel down through Lonesome Valley and out into the desert beyond. I told them to look at every water hole . . . and if they seen one that was turning a little red, they was to come back and tell me about it. Because, if any water hole turned red, then I’d know that at that spot I could get down to the Wilson River, by digging. But the news that come back to me was that a well right there in Lonesome Valley itself had turned red.

  “I tried to buy the place from you, Finnegan, because I wanted to dig out that well and see if it didn’t run like an artesian. I couldn’t buy. But when I tried to blast you out, the blast went down into the ground and let the water come ripping out faster than it ever would’ve come out of any well. And there . . .” He choked at this point. But after a moment, catching his breath, he whispered: “Seems to me like the whole damn’ river is flowing down my throat, and it sure tastes a lot better’n whiskey. I’m a happy man, by thunder.”

  That was how Slade died, suddenly fixing his eyes as though on the distance, and never speaking again. They buried him just up the slope, and gave him a fine headstone that continued to see the bright flowing of the water.

  * * * * *

  Major Chalmers would have preferred to keep his son-in-law on the home ranch, but even Eunice chose to begin the great new adventure on the new soil. That was where they built their house, with twenty-five hundred green acres to pay them tribute every year. Water, which had flowed red, now was turning the earth green again. But, as Finnegan said: “You can’t get something for nothing. You gotta fertilize before you get a crop. And we fertilized Lonesome Valley with blood.”

  THE END

  About the Author

  Max Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, Destry, and many other fictional characters popular with readers and viewers worldwide. Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres. His enormous output, totaling approximately 30,000,000 words or the equivalent of 530 ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, and fashionable society, big business and big medicine. Eighty motion pictures have been based on his work along with many radio and television programs. For good measure he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in more different ways. Born in Seattle in 1892, orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At Berkeley he became a student rebel and one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. Denied a degree because of unconventional conduct, he embarked on a series of adventures culminating in New York City where, after a period of near starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful author of fiction. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, and finally in Los Angeles. Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world. A great deal more about this author and his work can be found in The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood Press, 1997) edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski. His website is www.MaxBrandOnline.com.

 

 

 
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