by Max Brand
There was no question that the doctor held them all, easily, in the palm of his hand, and the girl began to get back on her feet.
“Cheyenne,” she said to the doctor. “Do you mean that he’ll never be well again? Do you mean that his right hand will never be good again?”
“He has one chance in three . . . or in ten,” said Walter Lindus.
“I knew he had a need of me!” cried Dolly Martin. “That was why I was starting to go to him tonight. There was a voice in my heart that told me to go . . .”
Her father, at this, turned as pale as a blanched stone. But before another word could be spoken, the kitchen door was dashed open and the voice of Sanders, one of the hired cowpunchers, roared out in the next room: “Wong, gimme a hunk of cheese and a lump of bread. No supper for me. Ted Nolan’s gone by with the word that Cheyenne is in Rafferty’s place! Cheyenne is there . . . waiting for Slip Martin to come. My God, think what a fight it’ll be! Cheyenne ain’t a yellow dog after all, it looks like. He’s right there in Rafferty’s, now. Gimme that bread and cheese. I’m gonna get goin’. It’ll be the greatest fight that ever was! It’s a duel, Wong!”
Dr. Lindus was struck aghast. “Cheyenne waiting? Cheyenne challenging Slip Martin? Cheyenne standing up to a normal man? He’s mad!”
“No, no!” cried the girl. “Not mad . . . but he’d rather die like a normal man than live to be shamed. And here we stand . . . while he’s being murdered!”
She went swerving past her father and raced through the kitchen and outside. The door creaked slowly back behind her and struck with a heavy bang.
XII
Martindale converged on Rafferty’s saloon. Not all of Martindale, for the women and the children remained at home, of course, and they formed the whispering chorus against which the tragedy was to be enacted. The men headed for Rafferty’s saloon, quickly, in steady streams.
Rafferty had found Slip Martin in a lunchroom, eating pork chops and sauerkraut and French fried potatoes. Slip was washing down a mouthful with a good swallow of coffee and hot milk when the barman came in. He kept the cup at his mouth for a moment while his eyes dwelt on the face of Rafferty.
In that moment his mind jumped like a running rabbit through many ideas. The whole affair up there in the cabin on the side of Old Smoky had been a lead-on and the affair in the saloon at Crooked Foot had been a fake. These affairs were to draw him on for a killing—because nobody would blame Cheyenne if he killed Slip Martin, now. No, everyone would praise him.
And yet that business of managing the fork in the right hand, that surely had not been faked. The wobble of the fork, held like a dagger—that was not play-acting. Perhaps like a beaten champion, the injured Cheyenne could not resist one more call to the ring. Well, this time Slip would kill him. This time Slip would put him down and out forever.
Rafferty left the lunchroom, and a murmur began to spread up and down the street. The murmur would grow into shouting, later on, when Cheyenne was dead.
And Slip Martin went on with his meal, slowly. People would talk about that, later. They would tell how Slip Martin received the news about Cheyenne, and calmly finished his meal, then went out and killed Cheyenne like nothing at all. It isn’t what a man does so much as the way he does it. The style is the thing.
His meal done, Slip made a cigarette. He felt fine. He went out across the dark of the street and around the back way, then looked into the side window of Rafferty’s place. He saw the whole room filled with people. They were plastered up against the bar and they were pooled against the side wall, but no one stood near the end wall, opposite the swing door, for Cheyenne sat there at a small table, sipping a glass of beer. Cheyenne was turned a little to the left, in his chair. And Slip Martin saw now that the holster was on his left hip.
Therefore Cheyenne was a dead man. Slip Martin, grinning, went on studying details. He saw the beer glass raised in the right hand of Cheyenne. The glass wobbled. Cheyenne dipped his head a bit to meet the drink.
Slip could not help laughing. If he had been privileged to set the stage, he would have put no other people on it. Everyone in front of whom he wanted to appear great was there. Everyone, that is, except Dolly Martin. But a man can’t have the world with a fence around it.
Slip turned away and rounded the front corner of the building. Against the darkness he could still see the image of Cheyenne’s handsome face, perfectly calm, with a faint smile carved about the mouth. The man was brave. If only those people inside could know how brave he was.
Slip pushed open the swing door and stepped inside. It was so easy that he could not help smiling. There was no hurry. He could beat any left-handed draw by half a second, and he could not miss a target that was only ten steps away. He would reduce that distance to make sure.
But, as he took one stride forward, Cheyenne said: “Stand fast.”
Cheyenne was rising, and Slip halted. At the authority in that voice, something stopped in his heart. For Cheyenne spoke like one who cannot fail, who must be right. Slip was still smiling. When he had both hands at his service, who in all the world would be fool enough to go up against this great champion?
He could not believe his ears—he could not believe that the deep, calm voice of Cheyenne was saying: “Friends, this fellow called me a yellow dog once. I’ve been trying to keep that down, but it won’t stay. Slip, I’m going to do my best to kill you. Fill your hand.”
What made this man so calm, so sure that he offered the first move to an enemy? Had he managed to conjure into his left hand all the skill that had once resided in the right?
He stood, tall and easy, close against the end wall of the room. His quiet smile had, surely, both disdain and surety in it. And the courage in Slip Martin rushed out of him, suddenly. He wanted to run. He knew that if he did not act quickly, he would flee. His own garb of hero was being torn to pieces, and his fear could be seen by everyone through the rents.
He screeched out in a queer, womanish voice: “Then take it, damn you!”
His gun was out as he yelled. But he triggered too rapidly. The first bullet ripped a long furrow down the flooring. The second was wide to the right. He was shaking. He could never hit his mark. And then he saw that the gun of that smiling, tall, handsome man was only now, gradually, leaving the holster. Left-handed? Cheyenne might as well have been trying to use the gun with his foot. That was why the third bullet from Slip’s rapidly firing gun tore through the left thigh of Cheyenne.
Low, and too far to the left—even so, the man should have gone down. But he did not fall. His wide shoulders were pressed back against the wall, and his gun was tipping smoothly forward out of its holster.
Higher this time, thought Slip Martin, and more to the right. One more slug, properly placed, will fix Cheyenne for all time.
The fourth bullet, more truly aimed, crashed straight into the body of Cheyenne. Why didn’t he fall? Why didn’t he crumple, or pitch forward, or slump weakly to the side? No, the wall upheld him—and the fourth bullet had only drilled through his right shoulder. And with the wall supporting him, as a screech of horror came from the throats of all who saw this smiling giant, slow of movement, endure without reply the fusillade from the weapon of Slip—now, as that yell began, and as the fourth bullet drove home, Cheyenne fired.
The bullet jerked the gun out of Slip’s right hand and flung it back into his face. The impact knocked across his eyes a cloud of darkness mixed with sparks of shooting fire.
He was on his knees when his vision cleared. Blood streamed down his face from a rent in his forehead. And through the whirling mist he saw not the body of Cheyenne, still erect, but only the stony, smiling face, and the poised revolver.
“Don’t shoot!” screamed Slip Martin. He wallowed on his knees in an agony. All of life that was about to leave him imprinted its sweetness on his lips. The taste of it made him shriek again: “Don’t kill me, Cheyenne! I’ll tell ’em I was a yellow dog. I’ll tell ’em how I knew your right hand was no goo
d. Don’t murder me, Cheyenne! I give up . . .”
He began to crawl toward the swing door, and the gun of Cheyenne did not explode. Slip leaped to his feet and fled. The impact against the swing door let him escape, staggering, into the open might. And he ran for his life, with the blood from his forehead blinding him.
Inside the saloon, Cheyenne was saying: “You fellows have chalked Danny Martin up against me. I give you Slip, for an exchange. Does that make us square?”
He had no answer to this. For the Martins, with sick faces, were pouring out of the saloon into the open. So he got hold of the chair from which he had just risen, and lowered himself into it. The warmth of his blood was flowing all over his body and streaming down on the floor. Numb agony wakened momentarily into living pain.
He picked up his beer glass and drank off what remained in it, tipping his head back slowly. That was what Dolly Martin saw as she sprang through the doorway. She saw big Rafferty, like a portrait in stone, leaning paralyzed over his bar; she saw the crimsoned clothes of the wounded man, and the beer glass tilting at his lips.
Jefferson Martin and Ned strode in beside her. But she was the first to reach Cheyenne.
He said: “Dolly, things are all right. I’m only winged in a couple of spots. Don’t look like murder . . . there’s nothing very wrong. Only, the old left was pretty slow.”
They laid him out on the bar. The blood ran down onto Rafferty’s floor and into his wash sink, as they cut away clothes and got at the wounds to stop the bleeding. And as they got off his shirt, the letter came with it, half soaked in crimson.
The Martins have no use for cowards. Then Cheyenne was adding, faintly: “Leave that with me. It’s the reason I had to come.”
“I wrote it, Dolly,” admitted her father, with a wretched face. “When I saw the writing of a stranger on an envelope, I looked inside. And I couldn’t have you writing to Cheyenne . . . not after what you did that night of the dance. I was too scared.”
She waved him away. Because what he had done was in the past and all that really counted was the present and a certain golden glory that, she knew, was to make the future.
“I didn’t write it, John!” she cried above Cheyenne. “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t mine! It isn’t my handwriting!”
His eyes had been closing and glazing with pain and with weakness. Now he opened them and looked suddenly up at her with understanding. “I should have known,” he said. “You’d write a bigger hand. You’d write a lot bigger hand.”
* * * * *
The buckboard of Dr. Walter Lindus, by the grace of chance, came through Martindale some time later, and it was Lindus who searched and bandaged the wounds of Cheyenne. It was he who said to the girl at Cheyenne’s side: “I don’t know. That wound in the right shoulder may counteract the effects of the old wound. Or it may make the effects worse, but, after this, he’s safe enough on this range. No man will ever take another chance against him, my dear girl.”
“Dolly,” said Cheyenne, “could you keep on caring for a one-handed man?”
She drew her breath in sharply, instead of letting it go out in words. He looked up into the blue of mountain lakes. He could keep on looking into them for miles and miles. He began to smile. The girl smiled back like an image reflected. They said nothing.
As this silence endured for a time, the doctor saw that it was full of a meaning greater than music or speech, so he withdrew softly from the room and went into Rafferty’s kitchen. There he stood as one stunned, unheeding poor Mrs. Rafferty who was busily offering a chair, and a drink beside it. The doctor was seen to look down at his own pale, thin hands. Then he said a thing that the Raffertys never quite understood.
“The great heart,” said the doctor. “Never the hand, but always the great heart.”
Torridon
This story, the first of four stories in the Paul Torridon saga, appeared as “Coward of the Clan” in Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine in the issue dated May 19, 1928. It was published under Faust’s George Henry Morland byline. It tells the story of how Paul Torridon came to spend twelve years of his young life with the Brett family, mortal enemies of the Torridons. The second Paul Torridon story, “The Man from the Sky,” is published in Peyton (Skyhorse Publishing, 2015).
I
The first thing that Paul Torridon remembered was being led by the hand to a tall man with long hair and a short gray beard, a beard that was chopped off brutally, for convenience rather than for appearance. Seen from the back with his curls flowing down over his shoulders, John Brett looked the portrait of some chivalrous cavalier. Seen from the front with that blunt stub of a beard, he seemed partly grotesque, partly savage. To heighten the contrast, his beard had turned while his hair still remained a glossy, youthful black.
Of what had gone before, Paul Torridon had no idea, but something about the face of this giant pierced his mind and remained in his thoughts forever.
“Is this one of them? Is this one of them?” shouted John Brett. “Why did you bring this thing home to me?”
“Shall I take him back and turn him loose in the woods?” asked the man who held the hand of Paul. “That’ll answer the same purpose.”
“You fool!” cried Brett. “You blathering, hopeless fool. You’ve brought him inside my house, haven’t you? Turn him over to the women and never let me see his face.”
How the women received him, Paul Torridon forgot, except for one flash of recollection that had to do with an old crone who shook her finger at his head and groaned: “He’ll bring harm to us all!”
Then the mists closed again around the mind of Paul Torridon.
He should have remembered much more, for he was well over seven years of age and, of course, far advanced into the period of full memory, but something had shocked the past into total oblivion, or else there was a sense of mere shadows moving among shadows, in the beginning.
His recollection of the past was cut like a thread, and at the same time his knowledge of the present washed away in waves, today carrying off in its withdrawal yesterday, and all the days before, so that for some time to come his only surviving sense of that period was that he had been surrounded by cloth, a world of homespun in drab colors, the enormous skirts of the women, and the bulky coats of the men.
He could see, later, that this was the time during which he was left exclusively to the hands of the women, and so he voyaged by degrees out into the open light of full memory, full understanding.
He used to help the women at the milking of the cows. Once, as he was bringing in a three-gallon pail half filled, the giant, John Brett, loomed suddenly before him.
“What’s your name?” asked John Brett.
“Paul Torridon.”
The face of John Brett grew black.
“As quick as the bell answers the bell hammer,” he said.
He turned away, but poor little Torridon was so frightened that the milk pail fell to the ground and spilled a white tide across the mud. He knew that he would be beaten, but a whip could not fill his mind with terror as did the mere echo of the voice of John Brett.
He came upon one great and important truth—that there was something wrong with the name Torridon, and there was something right in the name Brett. Everyone around the place was a Brett. The house of John Brett, in fact, was hardly a house so much as it was a village gathered hodge-podge under one roof. There was a blacksmith, a carpenter, a shoemaker, for instance. There was a storekeeper, even. And all these people, and those who plowed in the fields and rode off hunting through the mountains, bore the name of Brett. To the dawning intelligence of Paul Torridon it appeared that the world was filled with the name of Brett, for on holidays and Sundays, sometimes, strangers rode up. They were all big men on big horses, like those who lived under the roof of John Brett. And these visitors, too, carried the name of Brett.
Paul began to feel that his name was a freak, just as he himself was a freak compared to the sons of the house—he was so slenderly made,
so delicate, and they were so big and brawny. Once Charlie Brett, who was a little younger than Paul, took both the boy’s hands in one of his and crushed them with his grip. Paul wrenched and pulled. At last he cried out with the pain and began to weep. Charlie Brett looked at him, agape, and dropped the tortured hand.
“You’re just like a girl, ain’t you?” remarked Charlie.
There were other Torridons. But they were far away. All by that name on the western side of the mountains had been wiped out in that night of blood and fire that had blotted the mind of Paul. The only Torridons who remained in all the world lived on the eastern side of the mountains. There let them remain, unless the Bretts should decide to strike even at that distance and, riding through the passes, storm down on the enemy and smash them.
Charlie Brett used to talk about that. And he would end: “Then there’ll be no Torridon left but you!” With that he would laugh triumphantly, mockingly.
Later Paul learned that in the distant past the Bretts and the Torridons had been so matched in strength that each side occasionally won a battle.
John Brett kept Paul for two years without further important remark. Then he met little Paul in a hall of the house and seemed startled at seeing him.
“Are you still around? Are you still around?” he exclaimed gloomily. “You’re growin’ up, too.”
He took Torridon by the shoulder and pushed him toward the light. There he examined his face thoughtfully.
“You’re growin’ up,” he repeated. “In a couple of years there’ll be enough poison in you to kill a man . . . and a Brett!”