Crusader

by Max Brand

  But even a deer could hardly dodge Crusader. He had been in hunts enough, by this time, to know the will of the master. Such was his confidence in the long tooth that the master struck with, or the still more terrible death which spoke from his hand, that he would have charged straight at a couchant lion, with no doubt of what the outcome might be. He loved the hunt, this great, fierce horse, and, loving the hunt, he was eager for the death.

  He doubled back on the buck that was scattering for the open with the speed of a winged shadow. Not fast enough for Crusader, however. The down-pitch of the slope gave length to his leaps. In the heart of the hollow he dashed beside the fugitive again, the knife flashed with that sinister speed, and went out.

  That evening Camden ate venison.

  THE FOX SKIN RETURNED

  He reached the rim of the hollow, but there he paused with Crusader, for he found that his excitement was increased to such a point that he was afraid. He was blind and deaf with a furious tide of happiness. It was like the joy that comes to the traveler who sees the green promise of water not far away. It was like the joy of the first view of home to the homesick. Yet it was more, and far more, than any of these. So, little by little, wondering at himself, half sick, and weak with joy, he let the stallion go up the slope until he saw the shack beyond and one starry eye of light looking forth from a window.

  A horse was tethered at the hitching rack before it. Camden, leaving Crusader in the pine trees as before, went down to investigate.

  They were in the living room of the house. The father sat in a corner, his chin resting on his sun-blackened fist, his face grown old since Camden looked in on him. His daughter faced him while she talked. The person with whom she talked was none other than that dapper, handsome young youth whom Camden had seen before in the box stall of Crusader. It was Mr. Charles Mervin, clad in whipcord riding breeches, and wearing an old-fashioned, high white stock that gave him an 18th-Century look. That air was accentuated by the long, lean, aristocratic face of Charles Mervin, and a certain half weary, half naïve arch of the brows of that gentleman. Even Jake Manners, the father of the house, was able to recognize something of another century in the presence of Charles Mervin. He reminded Manners of “somebody else . . . I dunno . . . Washington or something like that, if you know what I mean. I mean he looks like he didn’t care much about nothin’.”

  This was the feeble expression of a thing after which Charles Mervin had been striving for a long time. He knew himself, it might be said, by heart. He knew exactly how his face would look, no matter from what angle it was viewed. An actor could not have been more practically aware of himself. But neither could an actor have been more totally without essential vanity. Mr. Mervin was proud of the rôle that he had created. He was not proud of himself.

  The same creator who had furnished him with that lean, Old-World, lost-century face, had furnished him, also, with a very wide-awake 20th-Century set of muscles. He could ride across country with any man, play an excellent game of tennis, and drive a golf ball three hundred and twenty yards, to say nothing of undoubted talents at poker and bridge, and a willingness to bet everything he inherited from his father on the turn of a card. In a word, under the exterior of an archaic face and a casual manner, he was as alert a youth as one could find in a thousand-mile search.

  He was conducting the conversation, at the present moment, with the older man and the girl as listeners. The father of the house was his apparent object, but it was at the girl, now and again, that he cast certain penetrating side glances that made Camden wince and set his teeth, although why such a small thing should irritate him he could not tell.

  The window was wide open. Camden could hear every word.

  “It is a matter, after all, of the sheerest inference,” he said. “The trail led here, do you see?”

  Jake Manners raised his troubled face, seemed about to speak, and then looked down again with a shake of his head, as though he realized that words were of very little practical value at such a time as this.

  “Why must it have been Ned?” asked the girl. “Would Ned have brought a hoss like that straight home? And left such a trail behind him? He would of known that Crusader would be followed!”

  The father raised his head again and eyed the youth expectantly.

  “You see,” explained Charles Mervin, “people want to know how it came about that Ned Manners happened to be at home when he was supposed to be up in the mountains trapping.”

  “Because he’d caught a silver fox, and he wanted to bring the pelt home to us. I guess that’s enough reason to suit almost anybody.”

  “If they could see the fur . . . yes!” said Mervin.

  “It was stole by the same man that stole the hoss, I guess!” cried the girl. “I told you how he managed it.”

  Charles Mervin looked fixedly at her for a moment. It seemed to the accurate eye of Camden that there was a shadowy smile about the corners of his mouth.

  “People have heard that story, too,” he said. “Of course, you understand that I credit every syllable you have spoken. But other people don’t. They seem to be a hardheaded lot in this neighborhood. Especially the sheriff. He declares that it’s incredible that you should have been so frightened that you were unable to make even an outcry until such a long time after he left that your father and brother couldn’t get trace of him as he. . . .”

  “What do they know?” the girl stated hotly. “They didn’t see him. They didn’t feel the grip in his hands. It was like iron. I almost . . . I almost thought he was going to tear me to pieces!”

  Camden glowered in the darkness as he heard this description of himself. For though there was enough in her words, there was a thousand times more in her manner of speaking and the shudder with which she mentioned him.

  “He wasn’t like a man. He was like a bear!” she gasped out.

  “Steady, Ruth!” called the father suddenly. “It ain’t any use arguin’, because. . . .”

  “Why,” broke in Mervin, “of course, I believe every syllable of what has been said. I’m simply telling you the manner in which the sheriff looks at this thing. The matter of the silver fox skin is the point at which they all seem to stick. It seems very odd, they all say, that such a fine horse and such a fine pelt should have been stolen on the same night by the same man.”

  “Sure it’s queer,” declared the father of the house grimly, “and when they’ve got my boy Ned locked up in prison . . . I’ll take the trail of the thief and run him down. I’ll. . . .” His voice died away. His fierce eyes said the rest as he stared straight before him, looking, as it chanced, full at the window outside of which the true thief stood.

  “In the meantime,” said Charles Mervin in a businesslike fashion, “I’m very happy to do whatever I can to be of service to you. I have engaged a lawyer who. . . .”

  “Hold on a minute, young man,” Jake Manners said, lifting a great blunt hand. “I ain’t told you I could afford a fancy lawyer. And the good ones come high, by what I’ve heard tell about ’em. Them that can make a judge and a jury think what they want ’em to think, costs like a gold mine.”

  “My dear Mister Manners,” protested the youth gently, “I hope you will not take offense when I tell you that I have grown so much interested in this case, and at the dangerous . . . er . . . injustice that seems in danger of being done to your son, who now sits in jail, that I . . . in fact, I have been bold to engage the lawyer personally and request him to do what he can for your son at my expense.”

  He said this so suavely, so smoothly, that it would have been difficult to take any exception to it. Only gradually the farmer understood the full meaning, and then a brick red glowed in his face.

  “I’ve never took charity,” he said. “I dunno that I’m ready to begin using it for my own boy, Mister Mervin,” and he added slowly:“Ned would be pretty mad if he heard about that, I guess.”

  “Ned will have a long time to think about the whole affair in prison if he is not helped
and helped strongly at the present moment,” Mervin responded sharply. “As for your pride, I assure you that I respect you greatly for your attitude. But I am thinking of Ned himself, and of how a prison term would ruin his life. Things go rather badly for an ex-convict in these uncharitable times, Mister Manners.”

  Jake Manners settled back in his chair, silent, beaten, but unwilling to admit it and writhing at the thought of accepting aid from a stranger. Camden, all of this time, had not been regarding Jake with more than a glance or two. His chief attention was centered upon the girl and the youth, and he found enough passing between them to reward all of his observations.

  Those occasional flicking glances of young Mervin had whipped the bright blood up into the face of the girl and set a glow in her cheeks. Again the anger of Camden waxed, he knew not why. But he felt the necessity of action on his own part, and action at once.

  He did not wait to hear the end of the interview between Charles Mervin and the Manners. He rounded the house to the girl’s room, and through the window he tossed the pelt of the silver fox. He saw it land on the bed. Then he went back to Crusader among the pines.

  AMENDS ARE MADE

  The county jail in the town of Twin Creeks was behind the courthouse. The courthouse was a rambling, wooden affair, the jail a neat little modern structure with concrete walls and cells protected with tool-proof steel in thick bars.

  Such was the place before which Harry Camden stood. All was dark except for the rectangle of a window shade lighted from the room within, the shade half drawn and the window half open. To that window went Camden and saw, within, the guard seated, tilted far back in his chair, with his heels dropped upon the varnished top of the desk. A sawed-off shotgun rested, also, upon that same desk. Camden regarded this with a peculiar interest. There is this point of interest about a sawed-off shotgun. One does not need to aim with any particular accuracy. One may turn the muzzle of a gun of that nature toward the mark as confidently as one turns the nozzle of a hose toward a rosebush, confident that at least one drop will strike the mark. One drop of lead will be sufficient to splash out the life of the victim. Such a weapon has the obvious disadvantage of having no effective range beyond an immediate and point-blank volley. His eye was still upon the shotgun when Camden spoke.

  “Hello!” he called.

  The guard lurched forward in the chair and rocked to his feet.

  “Hello!” answered the guard.

  “I’ve come along from the sheriff.”

  “The devil you have!” said the guard. He came to the window, knocked it fully up, and, with the shotgun tucked under one arm, he rested the other hand upon the sill. With the light behind him, he looked a monster leaning there above Camden.

  “The sheriff left here about five minutes ago!” he exclaimed, staring at the stranger.

  “Sure,” answered Camden. “I know about that. He was tellin’me.”

  “Who might you be?”

  “I guess you dunno me. I used to know the sheriff about fifteen years back.”

  “You did. When he was over in Roscoe County, maybe?”

  “That was it.”

  “Well, what happened to him that he couldn’t come here himself and had to send you, stranger?”

  “Dog-goned if he didn’t slip in the street and drop his knee on a point of a rock. It laid him up pretty bad.”

  “Them rocks in front of the Gregory place?”

  “That’s it.”

  The guard began to laugh. “For different kinds of lying,” he said, “I’ve heard some of the dog-goned smoothest and slickest that they is in the world, and I guess that I’ve heard some of the worst, too. But takin’ ’em, by and large, I got to admit that you lay it over anybody I ever seen for plain bad lyin’. Look here, young feller, I’ve knowed Sheriff Tom Younger runnin’ on to twenty-two year, ever since one day we give each other black eyes in school. Well, sir, far as I know, he never was in Roscoe County . . . but fifteen year back he was down in Mexico. And them rocks in front of the Gregory place . . . why, stranger, lemme tell you that the Gregory place is away off along the south creek.”

  He laughed again uproariously. His amusement over the baffling of the stranger, and his appreciation of his own cleverness in thwarting Camden, had put him into the most perfect good humor.

  “Maybe,” he continued, “you was comin’to ask me in on a little game of shootin’ craps, me holdin’ the dice and you holdin’ the guns? Or maybe,” he went on, still chuckling, “you want to ask me for the keys to the jail, or any little old thing like that!”

  He laughed again. He had put himself into a high state of humor. As for Camden, in the dark of the night he had snarled at the first hint that he was exposed to the ridicule of the other, for ridicule was the one thing that cut him to the quick. But the guard talked too long, as triumphant men are apt to do. He talked long enough, in fact, to allow Camden to rally his native wits again.

  When the guard ended, Camden said simply:“Well, partner, I guess that you’re a little too smart for me. I was aimin’ . . . well, it wasn’t no go.”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday,” said the guard complacently. “Who might you be, stranger?”

  “My name’s Petrie.”

  “Petrie, what’s your game, if I may ask you?”

  “Something you could make a little money out of, partner.”

  “Tryin’bribery, now.”

  “Maybe you’re too rich to want money?” Camden asked.

  “I dunno that I am. Lemme hear what you got to say, anyway.”

  It was such a palpable lure to draw out whatever criminal purpose might be in the mind of Camden that he could not help smiling a little. “Lean down a mite,” he said, “I ain’t gonna holler this out so’s the whole town can hear me.”

  “All right, kid, whisper it, then.”

  “Ain’t there nobody in the room behind you, there?”

  “D’you think that I have to have help to keep this here jail safe? I guess not, old son, I guess not.” Again he chuckled.

  “This is the way of it,” began Camden, stepping closer, and, as he stepped in, his long right arm shot out. It was a trick that Cyclone Ed Morgan and Sparrow Roberts had taught him, years before. Once learned, it could never be forgotten. His fist chopped down at the end of the punch on the very tip of the guard’s jaw. It seemed hardly more than a grazing punch. The head of the guard bobbed far back on his shoulders, loosely, and Camden was bringing a crushing left across to finish the work that the first punch had started, when the guard collapsed and slid down through the window, head first. He was caught in the arms of Camden and cradled there, lightly as a child.

  Camden looked around him. The only people were two men who lounged at a distant corner, talking and laughing. Their laughter had not ceased, which meant that they had not heard or seen anything to arouse their suspicions. His maneuver had escaped their notice.

  Around the corner of the jail, and out of sight, Camden bore the guard. He placed him on the plot of shaven grass that was kept around the county buildings, and, by the time the man of the law revived, Camden had found the bunch of keys in his pocket and drawn them forth. The awakening guard he confronted with the tickling point of his knife in the ribs.

  “I’ll have young Manners out,” he announced.

  The other took stock of things stupidly, but then his brain cleared with a jerk. The tickling edge of the knife was a quick restorer of scattered thoughts.

  “All right,” he said. “But lemme find out where you hid the club that you soaked me with. I didn’t see nothing but your hand comin’.”

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Camden. “Now lemme have Manners.”

  They went in through the side door of the jail, the guard handling the keys. Straight to the dimly lighted corridor between the cells he led the way, and then to Manners himself. That hardy youth lay face downward on his bunk, but it needed only the sound of a step to waken him from his fast sleep. He started to his feet, and, when
the door was opened, he walked out as one dazed.

  “What’s this for?” he asked. “What deviltry have you gents got up your sleeve for me now?” Puzzled yet defiant, he looked about him.

  “We got a silver fox for you,” said Camden.

  At this the other winced and turned a dark red.

  “You lead us out,” Camden said to the guard. The latter, obediently, led forth from the jail to the outer air once more.

  “You got a stable near here?” asked Camden.

  “Right yonder.”

  “Is they anybody there?”

  “I dunno. Not at this time of the night, I guess.”

  “Any hosses in there?”

  “Sure. Half a dozen.”

  “Take me in there.”

  A single lantern hung in the stable. By its light they clearly saw a dappled gray in the first stall, a bright pinto adjoining.

  “Look ’em over,” Camden said gruffly to young Manners. “Pick out the one that looks good to you.”

  Ned Manners had marched ahead, without orders, at the side of the guard, as if he took it for granted that this was an escort arranged to guard him. Now he saw that the revolver that the stranger had drawn was leveled at the guard only, and the light began to break on his brain. He leaped down the row of horses. In another moment he was dragging a saddle from the peg.

  “Here’s my own hoss . . . here’s Fanny,” he said, “and I guess that she’s good enough for me.” He saddled her quickly and led her back to the door. “Where’s your hoss?” he asked.

  “I’ll show you later,” Camden replied. He turned on the gloomy guard. “You was askin’ about that club that I used?” he queried.

  “It was quick work,” said the guard. “The boys’ll make life hard for me, soon as they find out what’s happened. But show me how you did it.”