by Max Brand
The eyes of Turk Melody widened. His face drained of color, became white and drawn. Then his glance slowly wavered to the side and found the blacksmith. It was pitiful, as though he wanted advice, and the blacksmith gave it.
“If this here is Cheyenne,” said the smith, “don’t you go and make yourself a dead hero. Go on away and wait till you’ve growed a bit.”
The right hand of Turk Melody left his gun. The gun sank slowly, as though reluctantly, into the holster. And then Turk turned his back and walked out of the shop, leading his horse. He had turned his back on praise. He was walking into scorn and infamy.
“No more sense than a mule, that Melody,” said the blacksmith.
Cheyenne said nothing. He could not speak. His tongue was frozen to the roof of his mouth, and he dared not turn around at once, for fear that the blacksmith might see the departing shadow of terror on his face.
III
There was no joy in Cheyenne as he rode out of town, for he knew that a man cannot keep on bluffing forever. Not on his home range, for there were too many fellows like Buck, always ready to gamble with life and death for the sake of making a quick reputation. His eyes were dim as he headed Sideways vaguely towards Old Smoky.
Something began to swell in his heart and, although he kept on smiling, his teeth were set hard. He had heard Blackfeet squaws screaming a dirge for a dead man, a chief, and that lament kept forming in him and rising into his thoughts. For he was dead with life still in him. He had been a master of men. He had always been able to herd them as sheepdogs herd sheep. But now any fifteen-year-old stripling could knock him out of the saddle or beat him hand to hand in fair fight. Moreover, the sheep had felt his teeth too often; they would be ready to rush him and drag him down when they learned that he was helpless. But looking back, he could honestly say that he had never sought out trouble. When trouble came his way, he had accepted it. That was all.
He determined to make a compromise between a straight retreat from his home range and a direct return to it. Into it he dared not go, because the Martins would certainly get him. They were a fighting clan, and they would never forgive him for that day when Danny Martin and Chuck attacked him, full of red-eye and murder. He had killed Danny. But Chuck lived, after putting the bullet through Cheyenne’s shoulder. With the pain of the wound grinding like teeth at his flesh, he had waited for Chuck to go on with the gun work. But Chuck had lain still and played ’possum—the dog! And Cheyenne could not pump lead into a man too yellow to fight.
Well, the Martins would certainly be at his throat if he returned to the range, but he felt that he had to ride once more under the mighty shadow of Old Smoky mountain. He could take a course that angled off the base of the peak and soon find himself headed far into the north. Perhaps in another day he would see the last of his mountain turning blue on the southern horizon. After that, he would pass out into a foreign world.
Clouds began to roll out of the northwest. They closed over the head of Old Smoky. They rolled down across the wide slopes, like the dust of a thousand stampedes roaring into the north.
Cheyenne was in the pass before the shadow swept over him. Looking back, he could see it slide over hill and valley, while the voice of the storm began to reach him, then an occasional rattle of raindrops that made him unstrap his slicker and put it on. Small whirlpools of dust formed over the trail, blew toward him, expanded, and dissolved. The whole sky was darkened, by this time, and the dust that had been sun-whitened was now gray, speckled with black. The acrid smell of it under the rain joined with the wet of the grass. A troop of crows flew low over a hill, flapping their wings in clumsy haste, and dived into a heavy copse.
Then the heart of the storm came over Old Smoky and blotted it out to the feet. Behind that running wall of shadow, glistening with the streaked and sheeted rain, Cheyenne could still draw accurately the picture of the mountains. But it was time to get to shelter. The long southward slant of the rain showed the force of the wind that had hitherto reached him only in occasional gusts. He remembered a nearby cave that as a boy he had often explored and made for it now.
The brush at its entrance had grown taller in the years since he had last seen the cave. His mustang held back, snorting and suspicious, at that mouth of darkness. But a heavy cannon shot of thunder, followed by a drum roll of distant echoes, drove her forward into Pendleton’s Cave. Then the rain fell against the cliff face, like wall against wall, an unending roar of ruin.
Jets of light sprang from heaven to earth. The brush at the cave mouth flashed from blurred shadow into flat silhouette and back again. Hail came, blast on billowing blast of it, making the cave icy cold in a breath or two. So Cheyenne got the little hand-axe out of his saddle pack and chopped down some brush. When he used his right hand, the blade kept turning. Once the force of the stroke knocked the tool out of his nerveless grasp. And his heart sickened as he began the work with his left hand only. There was no sense, no power of direction in that hand. Yet it was surer than the right. It seemed to Cheyenne that half his brain had resided in the exquisite precision, the delicate touch of that hand. Now half of his brain was gone.
Awkwardly he managed to get a fire going in the cave. He was standing before it, his hands stretched toward the warmth when, outside, a horse whinnied through a thunder roll. Hoof beats came crackling over the rocks. Cheyenne, now at the mouth of the cave, saw the misty figure of a rider heading toward him. Lightning poured down on the night, cracking the sky with a jagged rent, and the rider swayed to the left, suddenly shrinking.
Cheyenne wondered at that. Riders of the hill trails are not usually ones to fear lightning. But the speed of the horse rushed this stranger into his vision, and he saw at once that it was a girl. She swung out of the saddle and ducked forward as though not rain but bullets were showering around her. Her horse came right in behind her. It went over and touched noses with Cheyenne’s mustang, while the girl threw back her dripping slicker and crouched down instantly beside the fire.
She was in a blue funk. She seemed to think that the fire would give her protection from the lightning; the hands she held over the warmth she lifted as extra shields against those sky-ripping thunderbolts.
Cheyenne looked down on her with infinite disapproval. Women had never entered a page of his life except for a sentence or two. If he went to a dance, it was because there was an excitement in the air, and whiskey, and music, and many men with the look of adventure in their eyes. He held his dancing partners lightly, both with the hand and with the heart.
He felt he knew a lot about girls and he had always thought them both weak and foolish. When Cheyenne looked down upon this girl who had sought refuge from the storm, he saw that she had all the weakness of her sex. Her eyes were not bad, because they were the blue of a mountain lake—although they were foolishly large. Her lips had not yet been stiffened and straightened by the labors, the dangers, and pains of life. Her mouth was softly curving, like the mouth of a child. Her first words revealed all her weakness in one breath.
“Isn’t it terrible?” she said, and sobbed in fright.
And Cheyenne, with mounting contempt in his heart, suddenly found his thoughts journeying inward through his own soul. The lightning out of the sky filled her with fear. Yet he, like the coward he had become, was ready to run away from the lightning that came from the eyes of angry men. This thought staggered and sickened him. The stature of his soul was no greater than that of the trembling girl beside him, and, if he gave her comfort now, it was a cheap gift from a weak nature.
IV
The sky opened now, like the mouth of a dam, and let fall a blinding cascade of lightning. Thunder shook Old Smoky to the roots. The vibration was great enough to detach a few rocks from the ragged roof of the cave and drop them heavily.
The girl had sprung up as the explosion began. With its continuance she shrank against Cheyenne. He put his arm around her, loosely. She was all full of twitching and shuddering like the hide of a sensitive horse. A
nd, after all, there are even quite a few men, otherwise courageous, who are afraid of thunder and lightning.
“Hey, it’s going to be all right,” said Cheyenne.
“I . . . I’m afraid,” she whispered, and it took her seconds to get the last word out, she stammered so badly on the “f.”
“You want company, eh?” said Cheyenne. “Come here, Sideways.”
His gray mare came over at once, sniffed at the fire, pricked her ears at the next river of lightning, then gave her attention to the girl. She put one hand up and gripped the mare’s mane.
“What’s your name?” asked Cheyenne.
She said her name was Dolly.
“Dolly is short for Dorothy, isn’t it?” asked Cheyenne. “Well, Dorothy, get hold of yourself.”
“I shall . . . I’m going to,” she declared. But she only got a stronger grip on Cheyenne. “I’m going to be all right,” she said. “You won’t leave me, will you?”
“No,” said Cheyenne.
“Oh, what must you think of me? What can you think of me?” she moaned. Cheyenne, thinking of his own weakness, colored but said nothing. “Say something,” she demanded. “Talk to me. I’ll get hold of myself, if I have something besides thunder to listen to.”
He sighed. A child might have talked like this. And except for years, of course, she was nothing but a child. He said: “When you came and leaned on me at first, I was sort of reminded of something.”
“Do tell me,” pleaded the girl.
“Yeah, I’m going to,” said Cheyenne
A new outbreak of madness in the sky knocked Dorothy into a shuddering pulp again. He patted her shoulder, which seemed to have no bone in it. Strange to say, it was a compound of softness and roundness. Stranger still, from the patting of the girl’s shoulder, a ridiculous feeling of comfort and happiness began to run up the arm of Cheyenne to his heart.
“Up Montana way,” said Cheyenne, “I was riding one time with some hombres who were aiming to run down a big wild mustang herd that didn’t have a stallion at the head of it. There was a gray mare, instead. She had black points all around, and she was smart as a hellcat. Many a remuda she busted up and took away the faster half of it.”
There was such a frightening downpour of lightning and thunder here, that the cave was revealed in one continuing, quivering glare of white brilliance, and the uproar stifled the outcry of the girl. So Cheyenne, with a sigh, sat down on a rock. It would be much easier to endure the leaning in that posture. She sat beside him, using his shoulder and one of her hands to shut out the sight of danger.
“Go on, please . . . don’t stop talking,” she said.
He went on: “We got on the heels of the herd and followed it for quite a spell, and one day, with a good relay of horses, we gave the mustang herd a hard run. Then I discovered that the gray mare was no longer leading. Instead, she’d come back to the rear of the herd, and, as the rest of the band shot by, there she was left, standing, looking at us, pricking her ears. It was the queerest thing I ever saw. Horses have fast legs so that they can run away, but it looked as though that she-devil intended to charge us to drive us away from her herd.
“I just had time to notice that she was big with foal when Art Gleason, off on my right, jerked up his rifle and sank a bullet in her. Well, she didn’t budge. She didn’t even put her ears back. She just stood there and looked.
“Gleason and the rest, they went charging along, but there was something about the way the old girl pricked her ears and faced the world that stopped me. I pulled up and saw the blood running out of her where Gleason’s bullet had gone home. I wanted to go up and help her, and try to stop the bleeding, and then I saw that she was hurt where help would do her no good. As a matter of fact, she should have been dying right then and there. You understand?”
“No,” said the girl faintly.
“The maternal instinct . . . it was stronger than death. She was dead, all right. Gleason’s bullet had killed her. But she wouldn’t die. She kept her ears pricked forward, looking at happy days, it seemed to me. And when the foal was born, that mare laid down and died. While I stood by and wondered over her and damned the buzzards that were beginning to sail into the sky, that foal came over and leaned on me. It was a queer thing . . . soft . . . it was all soft. It poked its nose into my hand and sucked my thumb. It had its legs all spread out to keep on balance. And there I was, a thousand miles from no place.”
The lightning shot from the sky in such a mighty stream that all the other displays had been nothing. The thunder plunged like iron horses in an iron valley. But through the tremendous tumult the girl, as though unaware of fear now, threw back her head and cried to Cheyenne: “But what did you do?”
Not by the glow of the fire but by lightning he saw her face suffused and her eyes shining wide open. “I started to go for the nearest ranch,” he said. “But the dog-gone’ filly started after me, with its legs sprawling every which way. It was the dog-gonedest thing.”
“And then?” said the girl.
He found that he had been dreaming the scene all over again, silently. He smiled back into the face of the girl and she smiled, in expectant excitement, in return. “Well, we both got to the ranch,” he said, at last. “It was a pretty tight squeeze, and that filly needed a good lot of helping along the way. She pretty near had to be carried the last stretch. But we both got there, and, with a few days of care, she began to come around on cow’s milk, with some sugar added.” He kept on smiling at her, and she smiled back.
“I know something,” she said.
“Do you?” said Cheyenne, with something in his voice that had never been there before—an uneasy joy working in his throat.
“Yes, I know something. That filly of the poor gray mare . . . she’s the very one you have here. This is that same filly grown up.”
“Not so grown up, either,” said Cheyenne. “She still doesn’t know enough to keep her nose out of my pockets. She’ll try anything from Bull Durham to paper money.”
“Ah, the darling!” cried the girl, and she sprang up and put her arms around the neck of the gray mare.
Something had been filling the heart of Cheyenne for a long time, perhaps, and now he discovered that it was full to the brim and running over with a foolish excess of happiness. He stood up, also. Thunder pealed more gently, running to a distance in the south. Plainly the storm was no more than a heavy squall. And now, far beyond the mouth of the cave, he saw a shaft of golden sunlight streaming down on the earth.
After putting out the fire, they went out with the horses into the open. The northern sky was tumbled white and blue; to the south the storm fled, with its load of thunder.
The girl could hardly leave the gray mare. “What’s her name?” asked Dorothy.
“Sideways. Sideways is the way she bucks. She’s got some pretty mean twisters up her sleeve, too.”
They mounted and rode out onto the trail. The rain still dripped on the cliffs, and the sun made them shine like dark diamonds.
“You haven’t told me your name,” she said.
“John Jones,” he said.
“Is it? Well, I never would have guessed that. I would have guessed something . . . well, something else.”
“Which way?”
“I’m taking the southern pass.”
“I ride north,” he said gloomily.
“You’re not leaving this part of the range? You’re not just riding through, are you?” she entreated, and she held out a slim brown hand toward him to prevent the wrong answer.
“Well . . .” he began.
“I wish you were going to be somewhere around till Saturday,” she told him. “There’s going to be a dance that day. How I wish you were going to be there.”
“I shall be,” said Cheyenne. He listened to his voice say that, and was amazed. It could not be coming from his own throat. If he were to go on living, he must be far away by Saturday.
“You will come? How happy I am! The dance is at Martind
ale.”
He heard the word, but would not believe it. The picture of the old town ran again through his mind. He knew every inch of the place, and Martindale knew him. It had been named by the first of the Martin clan to settle in the mountains. It would be far better for him to attend a dance in a nest of rattlesnakes than to go to Martindale.
“And you? Your name?” he asked slowly.
“I’m Dolly Martin. I’m Ned Martin’s daughter,” she said.
He pulled off his hat and took her hand in his. The warmth of her touch seemed to re-sensitize that half-dead right hand of his. “Saturday night,” he said.
“I’ll be looking for you every minute. Thank you a lot. I’m sorry I was so silly.”
He could not believe what he was saying: “Lots of men are afraid of lightning, too. A fellow can’t help being that way.”
“It was a beautiful story,” said Dorothy Martin. “I loved it. I love Sideways, too, the darling. Good bye.”
That was Monday. It gave Cheyenne five days to get his right hand in working shape.
V
He found a deserted shack up on the south shoulder of Old Smoky and lived there. The forage for Sideways was good. There was a bright little cascade, making its own thunder and lightning, not far away. As for game, he could go to chosen spots and wait, his revolver, in his left hand, steadied across a rock until meat walked into view. This was not sportsmanship, but perhaps he was never again to be a sportsman.
He began his days with the first faint light of the morning and ended them very late, by firelight. He practiced writing, left-handed and right-handed—and found that left-handed was easier. He tried his axe left-handed and right-handed. Left-handed was easier. Whatever he did with his right hand seemed to blur his brain with the effort. It was like walking over a straight road that is deep with mud.
Once—it was on the third day—as he patiently worked the pencil with his left hand over the paper, he looked down at the formless, scrawling line that he had made and suddenly leaped up with an oath. He beat his fists against the wall of the shack and cursed the Martins, the girl, the doctor—and finally himself.