Crusader

by Max Brand

  “Maybe there is,” sighed Camden. “But I ain’t gonna bother them none.”

  “You’ll watch yourself?”

  “Every minute.”

  “Then, we’ll all be happy in Jericho, Harry. I’ve been lookin’ for hard times beginnin’ when you come to town. But maybe I’m all wrong.”

  He turned off on a byroad. Camden went on into Jericho by himself, and for the first time saw that queer little town, which lies curled around the foot of Jericho Mountain as though clinging to the great slope for protection. Everywhere he found that the streets were crowded, for the race had brought throngs. Every cow-puncher who could afford to waste a week had left his job and ridden in scores, perhaps hundreds of miles to see the race and enjoy the excitement, and place his bets before the contest took place. Every rancher within a mile radius, every miner, every lumberman was there. Reporters and sportsmen had come from distant cities, and the tourists, wide-eyed, smiling, a little weary, were everywhere.

  Through this crowd went Camden down the long, twisting street of the town. Beyond the double row of houses, and filling up the interstices between them, was every form of shack and lean-to and tent that could be imagined built or pitched for the convenience of the throng of visitors that, had Jericho been thrice its normal size, could never have been accommodated. He had not gone a block before he was recognized. In two blocks more the reporters were at him. They walked on either side of him, writing pads or cameras in hand. They shouted to him for statements.

  “Do you expect to win?”

  “Is Crusader in shape, do you think?”

  “Got a picture of yourself?”

  “What will Dinsmore pay you if you win?”

  “Have you ridden over the course before?”

  “Is Crusader too big for mountain work?”

  Thus came the first of a rattling volley of questions that went on and on in gathering importance and gathering loudness until he said, at the last: “Lemme alone, gents. I’m not here to talk. I’m here to ride Crusader.”

  Even so they would not desist, and he paused in front of the hotel to the tune of clicking cameras on every side. People already had heard the rumor of his arrival. They were pouring out of the houses behind him. They were swarming up around the big horse. Crusader, standing like an ebony statue, merely flattened his ears against his neck, but otherwise paid not the slightest attention to them all. Camden tethered him and went inside. He found that his friend, Ned Manners, had succeeded in locating the room that had been reserved long in advance by Colonel Dinsmore. To it he conducted Harry Camden. They sat on the edge of the bed and ate a hurried lunch.

  “The colonel doesn’t expect you until tonight, at the quickest,” Manners informed him, “and when. . . .”

  There was a tap at the door, which opened before an invitation had been given. A short, thick-set man with a wide, ugly face stood in the doorway.

  “Mister Peter Loring is downstairs asking for you, boy,” said this ill-omened visitor. “I mean you, big boy!” He pointed to Camden.

  Then, as he disappeared, Manners said: “D’you know Loring, Harry?”

  “Never heard tell of him before. Who is he? One of these reporters?”

  Manners grinned. “The most part of his talkin’ he does with his guns. He’s one of them busted-down gentlemen that ain’t forgot what their grandfathers done. The only thing that he warms up about, they say, is how great all the Lorings have always been. What in the devil can he want with you? You ain’t had no trouble with him, Harry?”

  “I never heard his name before.”

  “He wants to get down a bet with you, maybe. But if he does, don’t let him put up nothin’ but cash. His word and his note ain’t worth the time it takes to listen to ’em or read ’em. He’s a deadbeat, Harry.”

  This warning reached Camden as he strode to the door and so down the creaking stairs to the verandah of the hotel, and there, leaning against one of the fluted wooden pillars that supported the roof that extended past the verandah, and far over the watering troughs where fifty horses could drink comfortably at the same time, stood a slender man with a yellow skin, and eyes lost in the deep shadow of his brows.

  Camden, half a stride through the doorway, felt the stare of the other and knew that this was he who had sent for him, and that that errand was one of mischief. For there were instincts in Camden as keen as the scent is sharp in a loafer wolf. All of those instincts rose up in him to tell him that here was something foreign to his nature, something deadly dangerous. The stranger stood away from the pillar a little, thoughtfully smoking his cigarette and watching the big man.

  But when he spoke, his remark was addressed to the nearest cowpuncher. “My friend,” he said in his patronizing way that had earned him the hearty dislike of the entire countryside, “is that fellow Harry Camden?”

  It was very much like asking if a roaring fire were warm, for Harry Camden was known, and known with fear. It is not for nothing that a man sticks up such a sheriff as Tom Younger and breaks open such a jail as that of Twin Creeks. Harry Camden was known and dreaded.

  The cowpuncher gaped at the audacious questioner. “That’s Camden,” he muttered.

  Loring turned still more toward the cow waddie and still more away from Camden, but the latter could see that, from the corner of his eye, Loring was still watching him closely. That Loring’s right hand, carelessly resting on his right hip above the holster, surely had a meaning. Here was the very trouble that he had vowed he would avoid. Here was the very thing against which the honest sheriff had warned him. But what could he do? Could he advance? Could he retreat? He could only wait for the catastrophe to develop.

  “He’s Camden, is he?” said Loring. “Well, then, he’s the man I want to see. Because I understand that he has been circulating remarks about me. Very ugly remarks, my friend. Perhaps you have heard them.”

  “No,” gasped out the cowpuncher.

  “You are too polite,” Loring said. “Entirely too polite.” He whirled suddenly back on Camden. “You know why I called you down here?” he asked.

  “I dunno that I got any idea,” muttered Camden.

  “You haven’t? Think it over, Camden. I tell you everything you have said has been reported to me. Everything! And what I require, Mister Camden, is a public apology, spoken so that all of these gentlemen will be able to hear you when you talk!” He smiled as he said it, and flicked the ashes from the end of his cigarette, which was fuming busily in his left hand. But the right was still poised at the hip, the fingers working a little, fiercely, greedy to be at the butt of the heavy Colt that hung in the black leather holster just below their tips.

  A silence had followed the first speech of Loring. Now, hastily, softly, the spectators drew away from the line that ran from Loring to Camden, and packed in more closely on either side, making a human channel between the two men. To Harry Camden there came a passionate desire to take that slender form and break it in two. There was a still greater desire to whip out his own revolver. It might mean his own death, for he knew that in this quiet, composed man with the cold devil in his eyes, there was more danger than in all that he had ever encountered before. But there was his strong resolve; there was the recent warning of the sheriff. He drew a breath and then answered: “Stranger, I never seen you before. I got nothin’ ag’in’ you. What could make me want to spread any sort of lies about you?”

  The breath that he had drawn was suddenly echoed on every side, and then a sort of groan from the doorway behind him, and the voice of his friend, Manners, saying hastily:“Harry, what in the name of heaven are you sayin’? He wants a fight, that’s all he’s askin’for.”

  “Yellow, I see,” Loring said calmly, as before. “A very yellow dog, it seems. What I wonder at, Camden,” he went on, sauntering toward the big man, “is that you have been able to impose upon all of these people during such a stretch of time. There are men all around us who wear guns. How have you been able to pull the wool over their eyes?
Will you answer me that, my friend? What tricks have you used? And what lies?”

  He came squarely before Camden. The difference in their sizes was more shockingly apparent. Now that he was close, Camden could see the waspish malignancy of the smaller man. He was fairly trembling with it.

  “Stranger,” Harry Camden said bitterly, “I dunno what I ought to say. It looks to me like you was han-kerin’for a fight. But fightin’ain’t in my line till after the Jericho race is over and done with. After that, gimme half a chance to find you and I’ll talk this here thing out with you. But today is no time.”

  “No time for you,” Loring said with a snarl.“No time for an underbred, overfed puppy to concern himself with such a trifle, but where the honor of a Loring is concerned, it is a very vital matter, I assure you. I ask you for the last time, Camden, if I am to have that apology?”

  Harry Camden was silent. His face burned, and then grew white, for he heard a whisper on either side:“He’s quittin’. He’s bluffed down. He’s takin’in water.”

  He, of all men. He who had been raised on battle, like any wolf.

  “Very well,” said Loring as cool as ever, “perhaps this will spur you on a bit and loosen your tongue.” As he spoke, he raised his left hand, and with the flat of it struck Camden across the face so heavily that the sound was like the clapping of hands together. A white impress of the fingers stood out on Camden’s cheek.

  He hesitated for one instant, surveying the tensed, ready figure of Loring, whose hand was on the very butt of his revolver now. Then Camden turned on his heel and walked past the face of Manners, who stood at the door, in an agony of shame for his big friend. But Camden paid him no heed. He strode up the stairs and disappeared from view.

  GRIM RESOLUTION

  “On the whole,” philosophized Loring, “one may divide people of this class into two categories . . . those who are bullies and will fight when they have to, and those who are bullies without having the courage to strike a blow when they are up against someone of their own strength. To the last category belongs this Camden. I suppose that you gentlemen will agree with me on that point?”

  There was no answer, only a sick look of disgust and of horror on the face of every man, for in all the world the most fearful spectacle is that of a coward, and most cowardly, according to all their standards, had been the actions of Harry Camden upon this occasion.

  Then a door slammed heavily in the upper part of the hotel, and that sound served to waken one man into action. It was Manners, who started suddenly forward from the doorway toward Peter Loring. He came directly up to that destroyer of men.

  “Loring,” he said, “I dunno what it was that kept my partner, Camden, from breakin’ you in two, which it looks to me like he could of done it dead easy. But he had something else in his mind. And the way I look at it, partner, you and I are all fixed for an understandin’ of just what it was that you claim that he said about you?”

  Loring, as he looked at the other, surveyed him from head to heel with his usual consummate impudence. “Someone,” he said, “has mixed trouble with this young man’s gunpowder. Will some friend of his come and take him away?”

  “All right,” said Manners in a frenzy of shame and of rage at the disgrace that he had just received. “Maybe this here will waken you up.” He flashed his open hand into the face of Loring—then he reached for his gun.

  So vast was the difference between their speed that he had barely gripped the butt of his weapon when the other’s Colt was exposed. His own gun was never drawn, for Loring’s bullet ripped its way down the thigh of the younger man.

  Manners, with an oath of rage rather than of mere pain or fear, toppled forward on his face, struck his forehead heavily against the boards of the verandah, and lay still.

  There was a rush for him, in which half a dozen men even made so free as to elbow Loring in passing. For his part, he paid no heed to the fallen, but straightway approached one of those who had not been able to get in by Manners. He tapped the man whom he had selected—a substantial rancher of middle age—upon the shoulder and immediately copied down the name and the address of the other.

  “Because,” Loring said, “one never can tell. There may be some legal action following even an affair like this, although you yourself will be able to testify for me, I presume, that I did not make a motion toward my guns except after I had been struck. I fired only in self-defense, to avoid a cruel beating at the hands of a man much larger and stronger than I . . . a fellow like a madman, who had rushed in upon me.”

  It happened that he had cornered the worst selection that he could have made. Now the man stared back at him gloomily and was brave enough to say: “Loring, I know you better’n you know me. Don’t call me up on no witness stand, or else I’ll tell how you tried to pick a fight with one gent and used him so damned bad that his partner had to step in between you.”

  “You, too,” Loring said sneeringly, “seem remarkably interested in the affairs of Mister Harry Camden. Who is this other young idiot?”

  “His name is Manners. He’s a gent that Camden stood by. That’s why he’d stand by Camden.”

  “And Camden, I suppose, is a friend of yours?”

  “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about Camden,” said the cowman. “Maybe he’s a yaller skunk. Maybe he ain’t. He ain’t like the rest of us. Maybe he’s got special reasons for actin’the way he did. But the way I feel about it, I ’d rather be a dead man first . . . I’d rather be a damned ghost!”

  No doubt all who were in the town of Jericho felt the same way about it. There was universal pity for young Manners, stricken in the midst of an attempt to avenge the lost honor of a friend; there was universal detestation for the coward, Harry Camden; there was universal hatred for Loring, by whom the tragedy had been brought about.

  Not that the tragedy was brought to its ultimate end. Loring had fired with a good deal too much precipitation to bring about any such happy end. His very spite-fulness, his very surety that he had the younger man at his mercy, had made him strive with a double effort to murder the youth on the spot, and that venomous passion, perhaps, was the reason that his aim was bad and that the bullet went astray. As it was, the wound was terribly painful and accompanied by a great loss of blood, so that young Manners presently lay in one of the lower rooms of the hotel, very white of face, very set of jaw, while a surgeon probed and examined the wound, and told him that no bone had been broken. He would recover as fast as his strong young constitution permitted.

  When the doctor spoke, there was kneeling by the bed of her brother none other than Ruth Manners herself, for she had come up with her father for the sake of the week before the race. People usually tried to manage the affair in this fashion. Time was dated according to the race of such and such a year. In the single week at Jericho, there were more engagements announced than in a twelve month on either side of that period. For it was a time of excitement, of gambling, of the taking of chances.

  To the great social event, therefore, Ruth Manners had come up with both her father and her brother, and now, as she kneeled by his bed, almost as white of face as was he, she heard him pronounced in no danger and the first effect was a faint moan of joy.

  Afterward she thought of another thing, and, starting up with word that she would instantly be back again, she hurried through the thinning group of strangers in the room and went straight into the upper part of the hotel to find the room of Harry Camden. It was pointed out to her at once, and her knock brought big Camden himself to the door. He regarded her with such a start and with such a smile of joy that even Ruth Manners half forgot the purpose for which she had come there, to wonder over him. Then she remembered what she had just seen, including the settled agony in the eyes of her brother as he had laid enduring the pain of his wound.

  “Mister Camden,” she said, “isn’t this the proudest day of your life?”

  He seemed so unused to the sound of her voice, and so delighted with that, and her nearness,
that he hung over her for a time, still, before the smile faded from his face. He looked down at her with a bewildered face of sorrow.

  “Something has gone wrong, I guess,” he said in his mild, deep voice.

  There was swift relenting in her heart of hearts, so swift that she hardened herself and became more cruel than she would have been otherwise. The storm of her anger broke out at him.

  “Something has gone wrong? Not as far wrong as you’d like, I guess. You’d rather that poor dear Ned had been killed for you. For you! Oh, you great coward! They’ll never let you rest after this. They’ll hound you and work on you until they drive you to another name and another country. But, oh, you coward, you coward, to let him face that murderer . . . that Loring . . . that devil!”

  Having flung out at him in this fashion, she relented with a quick falling of the heart, and, because she feared what she had done and wished to escape from looking it in the face, she turned and fled down the hall as fast as she could go.

  Camden went slowly and heavily back into the room. He began to wander back and forth in the little chamber, touching the furniture with his hands, or standing at the window and staring across to Jericho Mountain with unseeing eyes of pain and of sorrow.

  He was there for a long time until there came a rap at his door, a firm-handed rap. He looked up and found the sheriff and Colonel Dinsmore both before him. On their faces was the very thing from which he had fled. Surely these men should have understood that there was something remarkable. The sheriff, at least, having already threatened him with what would happen if he so much as raised a hand, must now have known that his threat had taken effect. No, there was no understanding. There was only blank confusion and distress in both of their faces, and there was shame—shame that another man should have exhibited such cowardice as had been seen in Harry Camden on that day.

  Still, he endured. A big black vein swelled in his forehead. His heart thundered with a slow, tremendous pulse like a sea washed with a monstrous ground swell. But he said not a word.