by Max Brand
He lived. There was not a scratch on him to show what he had done. And the thought of Dorothy Martin rollicked through his mind like the music of game old Pop McKenzie. Once more he realized that he should take the northern trail. But he was more than ever loathe to leave. If he could continue to bluff his way out of situations as tight as that one tonight . . . So he went straight back to the shack on the side of Old Smoky.
VIII
He awakened the next morning with the sense of something missing. Before he tasted food, he sat down at his table and wrote a letter. He could not sweep it off in a few easy gestures, as letters had formerly been for him. The right hand could not manage the pen. Therefore, with the left, he printed out the words as neatly as he could.
Dear Dorothy:
You pulled me through the worst of it. You were great.
I’m not riding north. This range is good enough for me as long as you want me on it. If you can see me, say when or where. Address me at General Delivery, Crooked Foot.
Yours,
Cheyenne
Instead of cooking a breakfast, he took some jerky and chewed it on his way down the mountain to Crooked Foot, on the western side of the peak. There he mailed the letter to Miss Dorothy Martin, at Martindale. The whole sound of the name was different to him, now. A light had been shed from within upon all the Martins, young and old. They were distinguished people in the eyes of Cheyenne.
In the days that followed, Cheyenne fell into a frenzy of labor again. It had been important enough before to restore his right hand and put cunning in his left; but now there was a double necessity, for he carried the voice of Dolly Martin in his ear, and the picture of Dolly Martin in the forefront of his brain. He would not willingly have been without that extra weight, but because of it he wanted to redouble his strength.
Once an hour he massaged his right arm, chiefly about the scar tissue in the shoulder. He used hot water, as much as he could stand, then kneaded the flesh with grease. Sometimes sharp tingles shot through the entire arm as his fingers touched a nerve. After each massage the arm was sure to feel lighter, more alive.
And every day there was the constant practice. He used his gun with either hand. He tried chopping wood, hewing to a line, also, with either hand. And he was constantly writing, big and small. The result was that the left began to improve rapidly. When he used axe or gun in it, he no longer had such a strange feeling of being off balance, of being only half present. But in the right hand he could see little improvement or none at all.
He endured that disappointment without the leaden falling of his heart that he had felt at first. This was a task that might take a year, two years. It was one to be persisted in. And he had a goal before him.
After three days he went down to the post office in Crooked Foot, but there was no letter waiting for him at General Delivery. He came slowly back up the hill, walking most of the way. He liked to have the pretty head of Sideways at his shoulder, nodding as she worked up the slope. Whenever he looked at the gray mare now, he would think of Dolly Martin, and that made him turn perhaps fifty times a day and whistle to her, so that she would jerk up her head from grazing and look back at him with those bright, steady, fearless eyes.
Old Sam was waiting at the shack when he got there. Sam was the trapper of Old Smoky. He was associated with the mountain almost as closely as the mists that blew around its head. When Cheyenne came in, the old fellow was leaning his height above the stove, cooking. He had bacon in the pan along with plenty of squirrel meat. Squirrels are good eating if you know how to cook them properly.
Sam, without turning his head, greeted Cheyenne by name.
“Eyes in the back of your head, Sam?” asked Cheyenne.
Sam turned slowly. His face was covered with beard that began just below the eyes. It was like gray wool, never barber-trimmed, but hacked off to a convenient length from time to time with a sharp knife. The result was a series of gray knobs and hollows.
“Cheyenne,” he said, “there’s a deer out yonder, somewhere. I got a look at it through the door a while back. Go and fetch it in.”
Cheyenne went outside. It was the heat of the day, and a gray mist was rising from the ground that had recently been soaked with rain. Only the mountains close by could be seen; the more distant hills were lost. He hunted casually up the mountain for the deer, then turned a bit to the east and circled back toward the hut to report failure.
He was drawing near the shack, when saw a man skulking ahead of him from rock to rock and from bush to bush, with a rifle pushed before him. Cheyenne, frowning, shifted the revolver to his left hand.
“After something, partner?” he asked.
The other jumped. As he turned, Cheyenne had sight of a handsome young face as brown as his own. But the sudden start of the stranger made him step wrong. A stone rolled from under his feet. His rifle exploded in mid-air and its owner rolled twenty feet down the slope before he was able to halt his fall.
Then he stood up, dizzily. “Kind of didn’t expect you behind me,” he said.
“Were you expecting me in front?” demanded Cheyenne.
“I was deer-stalking,” said the other. He came up the slope in small steps, the way a mountaineer should do.
“Good thing you weren’t carrying dynamite,” said Cheyenne. “Time for you to eat?”
“I could eat raw meat,” said the stranger.
“You can have cooked squirrel instead,” said Cheyenne. “Come along.”
He took the stranger into his shack. “I’m John Jones,” he said. “This is Old Sam, who owns Old Smoky.”
“Jim Willis is my name,” said the stranger, and instantly made himself useful in bringing wood to feed a failing fire in the stove.
“You seen a deer out there, did you?” asked Old Sam.
“Coming over the eastern shoulder. I thought it must be heading this way. Of course, if I’d known about the cabin being here, I would have cut down the slope and across the ravines. That’s where he is, by now. A big devil,” he commented ruefully.
“You from these parts?” asked Old Sam as he began to dish out food.
“I’m from all around,” said Willis.
They sat down to eat in front of the cabin. Cheyenne found himself operating on the meat without thought. The last thing that he wanted was to permit people to see his more than childish clumsiness with a fork, but without thought he had already skewered a squirrel with an iron fork held dagger-wise, while he slowly carved the meat with the knife in his left. Once having started, it was foolish to try to hide the facts; Willis had already marked them with a blue-eyed stare that sent ice worms up the spine of Cheyenne. But Old Sam was too busy talking about the reduction in the bounty on wolves to take heed of other things, apparently.
Willis went on to find his venison immediately after lunch. He thanked the two hosts, and was gone quickly.
But Old Sam remained to smoke a pipe. “Some folks would have stayed to clean up the dirt they made,” he suggested.
“There’s only a tin plate and a cup and a fork,” said Cheyenne.
“Little things make a big difference, sometimes,” observed the trapper. “Right hands is one of them. Who took your arm off at the shoulder, Cheyenne?”
The blunt question made Cheyenne start. “It’s a little out of kilter, is all. I . . . sprained the shoulder a while back.”
“Sprained it?” said the other. “Humph!”
Then he went on, as he finished his pipe and rose to go: “You’d think that a gent that comes from all around would be finding his venison down on the hills, without having to stalk all the way up the side of Old Smoky.”
“Something wrong about that Willis?” asked Cheyenne sharply.
“I dunno,” said Sam. “I was just thinking.”
“Thinking what?”
“That they’ve lowered the bounty on wolves, but there’s still a mighty high bounty on a lot of human scalps.”
“What’d you mean by that, Sam?”
>
“Well, there’s some gents that are free targets. Some have a bounty on their heads that’ll be paid by the law, and some have a bounty that’s only the glory that the killer gets.”
Cheyenne stared. “Meaning me?” he asked.
“Son,” said Old Sam, “I been looking down through the brush up there day after day and seen you waltzing around down here. I seen you shooting. I seen you chopping wood. And that right arm of yours ain’t worth a damn. Me seeing it don’t matter, but another gent has seen it, now. If I was you, I’d head right pronto for some healthier climate.”
IX
Cheyenne determined to take Old Sam’s good advice and move on, while he still could. Also, he definitely shifted the holster that carried his Colt from the right thigh to the left. Since one stranger knew that his right hand was a numb, half-dead thing, would not the whole range know it soon? It was time for him to travel. He would, he decided, go south, passing the town of Crooked Foot so that he might inquire once more for a letter at General Delivery.
Crooked Foot was well away from the realm of the Martins, but even in this town there was danger. It was not from the Martins only that he could expect trouble. That was why he spent one solid hour on the shoulder of the mountain working with the gun in his left hand. What he should have learned before became apparent now. Any attempt at speed was fatal. The swift throw of the gun ruined the aim, but, if he pulled out the Colt with a calm and unhurried precision, he could rock the hammer with a touch of his thumb and crash a bullet into a target almost as accurately as he had been able, in the old days, to turn loose the deadly stream of lead from the right.
It was consolation, but a small one. For in that interval that was filled with deadly slowness, any man familiar with the quick draw was certain to begin pumping lead into him. And how did men quarrel? A chair pushed screaming back from a card table, followed swiftly by the thunder of guns.
Speed was the thing that meant life or death, and for speed he needed brains in his fingers. But the brains of his right hand were gone, and the left, it seemed, would never be more than a half-wit.
It was hard to keep smiling on the way down to Crooked Foot that day, but he managed it. Half the strength of character is the force of habit, perhaps. It was a day half dark, because of the steaming clouds that poured away from the white head of Old Smoky. Crooked Foot itself lay in the shadow, and Cheyenne, with a rather childish touch of superstition, felt that this was a friendly omen.
But at the post office there was nothing. He had turned gloomily away from the door of the little building when a bright voice hailed him—a cheerful voice with just a slight element of strain in it, which might be surprise only. It was Willis, striding across the street toward him, waving a hand.
“Hello, Jones,” he said. “Glad to see you again. Step in and have a shot of red-eye with me, will you?”
Cheyenne accepted with a wave of his hand. He was still lost in wonder because his letter to the girl had brought no response. It was the sort of a note that demanded an answer. It was the sort of a note she would have been sure to answer, he kept telling himself.
They went into Tom Riley’s saloon. Half a dozen cowpunchers were in there, off the range. It was a bad season with less work to be had than there were workers. In the old days Cheyenne would not have worried about that. No matter how pinched a rancher’s wallet might be, he was always glad to find room for a man like Cheyenne. But all of that was ended now.
He might be a damned dishwasher, somewhere. No, because he’d break too many dishes. In some far away camp, he’d become the clumsy greenhorn—the “Lefty” of the outfit.
He was at the bar, leaning not his left but his right elbow on the varnished top of it. He took the whiskey.
“Here’s how,” they said together in deep, rather apologetic voices, putting down that brown-stained fire at the same moment.
As he put the glass back on the bar, Cheyenne saw that the eyes of Willis were dropping to his left thigh, where the Colt now rode. There was a meaning in that glance. There was a stinging meaning in it.
“Have one on me,” suggested Cheyenne.
Willis did not answer. A cold light made his blue eyes paler. His nostrils flared.
Then an unseen man entered through the swinging door.
“Slip Martin!” he called. “What you doin’ in this part of the range? Why . . . ?”
“Hello, yourself,” said the man who had called himself Willis. But his eyes never left the face of Cheyenne. And he raised his voice to say in the snarling tone that means one thing only: “You’re Cheyenne.”
It was the invitation to the fight. Old Sam had been right. There was no good in this Willis. He had not been stalking deer on the shoulder of the mountain. No, it had been other game that he had been after. A scalp with a price of high glory on it.
But how had he known that his quarry was on Old Smoky? How could he have known that Cheyenne was near Crooked Foot, unless the girl had published her information?
“Cheyenne?” someone said in a corner of the saloon. “It is Cheyenne.”
“If it’s Cheyenne,” said Tom Riley, behind the bar, “and if you’re really a Martin, don’t you go and make a damn’ fool of yourself. Don’t you go and get your insides spilled all over my floor.”
“Keep away!” shouted Slip Martin.
He leaned forward a little. His right hand hovered, wavered like a stooping bird, over his gun. It was not a clumsy, half-witted left. It was a right hand that was poised there.
“Keep back and gimme room!” Slip Martin was crying. “I got him where I want him. I’m gonna open him up, and I’m gonna show you that Cheyenne’s a dirty, sneaking, yellow dog!”
Cheyenne said nothing. Slip Martin had him. There was no doubt about that. He was gone. He was already as good as dead. And somehow that would have been all right, too—if only the girl had written back to him, if only that hollow uncertainty and disappointment had not been in his soul.
With every second of his silence, of his immobility, he could see a savage hysteria of joy working more and more deeply into the face of Slip. The man looked like a beast now.
“If you’re a man, and not a dirty, low, sneakin’ murderer, go for your gun. Fill your hand, or I’ll . . .”
Slip paused there, trembling on the verge of the draw. And Cheyenne did not move.
“My God,” said a sick voice, “Cheyenne’s gonna take water.”
It was only a murmur, but it fitted perfectly into the sickness of Cheyenne’s soul.
“Yeah . . .” gasped Slip Martin. “I was right.” Murder was in his eyes, and then something more cruel appeared there. “I was right. You’re only a yellow dog.”
He took a quick half step forward and flicked the back of his left hand across the face of Cheyenne. It was the ultimate insult. Cheyenne thought of Chuck Martin in the crowd at the dance. Chuck had stood, white and appalled, working physically to burst away from the controlling hand of awe that gripped him. But he, Cheyenne, was still smiling. The smile would be the most horrible of all. Punch-drunk men in the ring smile like that as they stagger before the conqueror.
“He is,” said someone. “He’s yellow. Cheyenne’s taking water.”
Cheyenne straightened. He turned to the swing door. He turned toward all those faces—his back was to the gun of Slip Martin who had called himself Willis.
The world would never know how Slip had learned that this famous gunfighter was now helpless. Slip Martin would become famous. It was better than shooting a man—to make him back down by the sheer force of cold, hard nerve.
Between Cheyenne and the door there stretched the distance of five paces, but they were five eternities to him. On either side were the horrified faces, but the grin of a ghastly pleasure was beginning to dawn on some of them.
This was a thing to remember. This was a thing to be talked about. Eyewitnesses of the fall of Cheyenne would be valued all over the range. And hungry-eyed men would listen, their lips curli
ng with disdain. And other men of guns and might throughout the mountains would listen with horror, wondering if their own nerve might one day run out of them like water through a sieve.
He got to the swing door, pushed slowly through it into the open day. He would never again be a happy man. He would fear the eye of every man, because every man might know. He halted, standing stiff and straight.
It was better to go back into the saloon and have the thing over with. It was better to rush back. Then he heard the outbreak of the voices inside, a noise that rose, and one man began to laugh, pealing laughter.
“Slip!” shouted one. “That was the finest, coldest piece of nerve that I ever seen. You’re the greatest fellow that ever rode this range.”
The king was dead. Another king was reigning. . . .
Cheyenne knew that now, if ever, he ought to ride south. He knew—but the face of Old Smoky, above him, was like that of an old friend. He turned toward it for comfort, and kept traveling up the trail in that direction.
A cottontail jumped up from behind a rock. He pulled the revolver with his left hand and counted: “One.” Then he fired. The cottontail turned over in mid-leap, struck a rock heavily, and lay still, a blur of red and fluffy gray. Cheyenne pulled Sideways over to the spot and picked up the meat.
If he practiced with a rifle, he might become a hunter, because his eye seemed even better than ever. It had to be, now that the hand was gone. But whatever he hunted, it could never be a man.
X
Every day Cheyenne tried to leave Old Smoky. Every day the thought of the outer world was poison in his brain. But on the evening of the third day, he went down the trail at last to make a third and final try at the post office in Crooked Foot. He came in from behind the building, waited until there was no one in sight, then walked in to ask. The postmaster was a cripple, with a pale and sneering face. His deformity was in his eyes as well as in his body.
“You’re John Jones, are you?” he asked. He leaned forward a little to scan the man. “You look big enough,” he sneered. Then he threw a letter across the counter. It skidded down and hit the floor.