by Max Brand
He mounted the horse, blindly. Mickey’s freckled face appeared vaguely before his eyes. They were riding down, down, the horse skidding over loose ground. Now they were under trees. But still his brain was functioning only by half. Pain numbed it, and the knowledge that he had lost Sally seemed to carry away half his soul.
He heard the shrill voice of the boy commanding him down from the saddle. “Or you’ll bleed to death, Sandy. You’re all running blood. The whole side of you’s covered.”
Through the vagueness that veiled Sandy Lane’s mind and the eyes, he realized that the bleeding must be stopped, a bandage must be made. He could help, as he sat with his back to a tree, with his right hand only, and even that hand was weak and trembling. He was stripped to the waist, now, and Mickey was making a clumsy bandage of his undershirt. The kid pulled the bandage so tightly agony burned through the core of Sandy’s nerves and sent red flashes into his brain. He was dripping with sweat before the bleeding had ceased and they could venture on the trail once more.
“There!” cried Mickey’s shrill voice. “Look ahead of you, Sandy. There . . . through the trees . . . you see the hills down there? That’s where the ranch is. Sandy, why don’t you say something? We’re gonna get through, all right. We’ll sure get through.”
“Sure we will,” muttered Sandy.
He was sickened. Too much blood had flowed from the double mouths of the wound. There was no bone broken. No vital organ had been grazed. But the big caliber bullet had torn the flesh horribly.
He had to grip the pommel of the saddle with both hands. They were coming down a long draw when the mustang shied at something and Sandy fell like a log, flat on his back, striking his head on a rock.
* * * * *
When he wakened, the darkness was thick over him. He could see no stars. But Mickey’s thin voice came to him like a light: “Thank God you’ve come to, Sandy. You wouldn’t move so long . . . but I heard your heart beating, and I knew you’d get there. There’s still time. There’s still barely time. Lean on me. I can lift a whale of a lot.”
He hung his right arm, loosely, over the boy’s shoulders and struggled to his knees—to his feet. There was only one way of mounting the horse, and that was climbing a rock where he stood wavering, while Mickey led the mustang beside it. Then he slumped down into the saddle and they trekked through the endless agony of the night.
Sometimes he saw the stars as points of light. Sometimes he saw them as shooting fires. One star, wobbling greatly from side to side, began to grow before him. Then he was aware that Mickey was screaming at him: “That’s the place, Sandy. That’s your home. That’s your uncle’s ranch house. Pull yourself together. We still got half an hour to midnight!”
They might gain the house—but Sally was gone. She was snatched away a million miles into the life of another man.
The light grew bigger. It showed the square frame of the window through which it shone. And now here was Mickey’s voice yelling: “Slide down, Sandy! Sandy, slide down! Help! Help!”
Footfalls came running. He could recognize, dimly, the voices of some of the men from the bunkhouse. And one of them said: “There’s gonna be a hanging for the gent that done this to Sandy.”
“There won’t be a hanging,” shrilled Mickey, “because the man’s dead! It was Tom Dexter. That’s who it was. And Tom Dexter’s dead. Sandy killed him sure as shootin’.”
They got Sandy inside the house. The warm air half stifled him. Someone poured whiskey between his teeth and the stuff gave him a burst of sudden strength. His brain cleared. He was able to walk, a little unsteadily, down the hall, where a door burst open and Henry Barnes stepped out into the lamplight. When he saw big Sandy Lane, he threw up both hands before his face to shield him from the nightmare. But he did not matter. From that moment he was brushed out of Sandy’s life.
What was important was the old man, and now, from the doorway, Sandy looked in and saw the pale stone of Oliver Lane’s face. He saw the closed eyes open, and the sudden breaking of a smile.
“Why,” said Oliver Lane, “I’ve been having the ideas of any old fool. I might have known that the Lanes always arrive on time. Mickey . . . there’s the boy who turned the trick. Sandy, don’t be forgetting . . . I owe him a thousand dollars . . . and more.”
* * * * *
It was some weeks after this night that Sandy Lane rode again up the mountainside and into the narrow main street of the town of Cherrill. He rode a fine gelding that was quite up to the lithe weight of its master. But that horse was nothing in looks compared with the flashy red mare that Mickey bestrode. Mickey himself was a gaudy figure. His taste ran to reds and yellows, and his bandanna, his silk shirt were loud enough to drown a band. He had always yearned for golden spurs—golden spurs were on his heels, and rows of silver conchos decorated his trousers. More costly metal flamed on the bridle of that thoroughbred mare, and the saddle glittered with the best of Mexican art.
Mickey was sure that he was almost the center of the universe. Not the exact center. No, the exact middle point of the universe in Mickey’s eyes was Sandy Lane. And all the days of their inseparable companionship, Sandy had grown greater and greater to Mickey, until he stood among the stars.
When they came to the hotel, Sandy dismounted, tied his horse, and left Mickey to stroll up and down the street, positively striking the boys of the town dumb with admiration and awe.
Sandy himself strolled into the lobby and paused beyond it at the dining room. There was no sight of anyone in it. He returned to the desk.
“A while back,” he said gravely to the clerk, “there used to be a girl working here. . .. Sally was her name . . .”
“Yeah, sure. She’s somewhere around,” said the clerk.
“Where?”
“Search me. She’s a lively cricket,” said the clerk.
She was not hard to find, after all. Behind the hotel and pumping water into a five gallon bucket was Sally herself. When she saw Sandy, she started erect and let the handle of the pump fall. A last gush of water ebbed slowly into the pail.
He stood before her with his hat in his hand, speechless, his eyes full of pity. “I wanted to come before,” he said. “But I had to wait . . . till I could ride. And afterwards to settle things on the ranch. Uncle Oliver is still pretty weak.”
“He didn’t die, after all?”
“No, thank God. He’s going to live another ten years, I hope.”
Then, because she was silent, he went on: “I can’t ask about you, Sally. You’re hating me, I know. You’ve got reason to.”
She shook her head. “You mean, because of Tom?” she asked.
“I mean that.”
“You didn’t kill Tom,” she said. “You gave him a second chance to live. That’s the fact of it. But not a soul must know, Sandy.”
He was dumb with wonder.
“I thought so, that day,” she said. “It looked as though . . . but I was wrong. He had three broken ribs . . . that was all. And he mended perfectly. And then . . . why, there wasn’t any more Tom Dexter, you see? Tom Dexter had been killed by Sandy Lane . . . that famous man.” She smiled genially at Sandy. “And people only see what they expect to find. So Tom is working on a place up in Montana, and doing mighty well, too.”
He caught her hand. “It’s the best thing I ever heard,” he declared. “It warms my heart, Sally. As much as the sight of you does. Is Tom through with the old life?”
“He’s finished with that forever.”
The next question was hard to ask, but he asked it: “I want to chip in and help . . . now, Sally. I want to give you and Tom a start. You know that’s easy for me to do. Uncle Oliver would give me the top of his head if I asked for it. I’d like to make you a wedding present when the time comes. When will the wedding be?”
“I don’t know,” said Sally, her green eyes growing a little wider.
“You don’t know!” exclaimed Sandy.
“No,” she said.
“But
what keeps you and Tom from . . . why, what prevents you, Sally?”
“You do,” said the girl.
“I do? What do you mean? Sally . . . great God, you mean that after all you care about me, too?”
“When I heard that you’d been wounded, too . . . and that my blind eyes didn’t see it . . . and that you were almost dead before you reached home . . .” Her eyes filled with tears.
“Sally!” he cried. “You mean that I can go on hoping?”
“I don’t know,” said the girl. She shook her head. “I’m such a fool, Sandy. Whenever I see you, I think of dear old Tom, and, when I see Tom, I think about that crazy Sandy Lane.”
“I’m less crazy now, Sally.”
“So is Tom,” said the girl.
Sandy Lane stared hard at her. It seemed to him that a forgotten happiness was again restored to his heart in a great riot.
“You can’t make up your mind?” he demanded.
“I simply can’t,” she said.
“Then I’ll make it up for you,” said Sandy Lane, and caught her in his arms. It was a long moment later before he exclaimed: “Sally, answer me now! Do you love me? Have you made up your mind?”
She kept her eyes closed, and sighed. “You’ve made it up for me, Sandy,” she said. “But . . .”
“But what?” he demanded.
“Well, you seem to be just about as crazy as ever,” she said.
And they began to laugh together.
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.