by Max Brand
I
His day had begun at 5:00 in the morning, but 11:00 at night found Jefferson Peters still at work over his ledger. Sometimes, out of the upper story and rear rooms of the old crossroads hotel and general merchandise store, a piercing, small rhythm of sound worked down to him. Whenever he heard it, Jefferson Peters dropped his pen and folded his hands with nervous fingers and looked into the future with a falling heart. Upstairs were newborn twins, small, pink bodies possessed of strangely lusty lungs. Over them leaned Kate, his dear wife. Three lives depended upon young Jefferson Peters.
No wonder, then, that his stomach grew hollow and his throat dry. The day when the minister pronounced them man and wife had been bad enough, for on that day he had taken upon his not overly broad shoulders the responsibility of another life. But that day was nothing compared with this. Two lives, although so new, two mortal souls although so lately come into the world—it seemed to poor Jeff Peters that their smallness was a dreadful thing. Out of his work, their bodies must find the means to live and grow; out of his soul, their souls must have sustenance.
A wan ghost of his face suddenly stared out at him from the wall. He saw colorless lips, thin, pinched cheeks, hollow eyes. It was his image in the little mirror that hung on the opposite wall, but nevertheless, it seemed to Jeff Peters a ghost portentous of ruin and dismay. He stood up from his desk where he had labored so long and so futilely to make the figures for that month show a real profit, and lifting the lamp above his head, he looked eagerly about him.
It was a large room, filled with salable articles. He took heart at once. Yonder, blue and red and yellow rolls of ginghams and calicoes should clothe the figures of the women of the town of Custis sooner or later. There were sleek-barreled Colts to make the hearts of young cowpunchers jump, to say nothing of long, spoon-handled spurs, rifles, and shotguns, ropes, boots, and a thousand articles of saddlery. In a far corner glimmered the steel blades of hoes and spades and shovels for those who kept vegetable gardens. There were augers for digging postholes, saws, hammers, barrels of nails.
Adjoining this came the hardware department, where one could find anything from pairs of Dutch ovens to rolling pins. Beyond this, again, was the colorful and shimmering department of the little pharmacy, rich in patent medicines—a thousand bottles, and each with contents of a different hue. Every inch of the floor space was crowded with the necessaries of cow-country life. And from the very ceiling hung a myriad other things. Yes, there was a plentiful stock on hand, and it would sell at handsome prices. But, alas, it would not sell at all until the gala days of the fall roundup. Could he hold out that long? He lowered the lamp with a sigh, while the shadows swept across all the colors in his store and illumined no more than the one, sharply defined circle upon the desk where he had been working.
There came a knock at the door, and Jeff Peters jerked up his head in surprise, for the men of Custis had various bad habits, such as taking goods and failing to pay for them until two or three years later, but they had never yet shown a fondness for late shopping hours. Red-eye was the only thing purchased after dark. It was probably someone who wanted a room for the night, and although this was not the entrance to the hotel section of the building, Jefferson Peters hurried to the door and unlocked and opened it, holding the lamp high, partly to illumine his smile of welcome and partly so that he could see the other.
He found himself looking up half a head higher than he would have looked for the average man. The stranger brushed past him into the room and, with a flirt of his heel, smashed the door shut. He was broad in proportion with his height, a man so large that, although he was hardly as old as the storekeeper, his bulk gave him great dignity. He was dressed in a cowpuncher’s usual outfit, well-made boots covering his feet, while a great slicker, gleaming with rain, swept over the rest of his body and masked his arms, which seemed to be folded. The rain had soaked the brim of his sombrero until it drooped about his face—a wild and handsome face with sleek black mustaches and long black hair and black eyes, now glimmering at Jefferson Peters in the lamplight.
“Ah, Lord!” groaned the poor storekeeper as he looked upon the giant. “I’m done for.” And, stepping back, he threw up his arms as far as he could strain them above his head. “Don’t shoot, Muldoon,” he began to gasp out. “Don’t shoot. I’ll show you where the cash …”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Muldoon. “I don’t want your cash. You know me, then?”
“Of course I remember you, Bill,” said the storekeeper, bringing down his hands by inches and keeping them in a quivering state of alertness to jerk them above his head at the first command. “I remember you at school, Bill, as well as I remember myself.”
The other produced a hand from beneath the slicker and pushed back his mustaches until they glistened again and bared a smile that was half amusement and half pure contempt. There was a stir beneath the slicker and a faint sound. The smile of Muldoon vanished, and, tossing the oilcloth over his shoulder, he revealed that he carried in his left arm a young infant. It put out both tiny fists and began blinking at the light. Muldoon thrust an immense forefinger in front of the child, and the finger was instantly clutched.
“Got a fine grip,” asserted Bill Muldoon. He lifted his head and grinned at Jeff. “Hangs on like a bulldog … hanged if he don’t. He’s going to have the grit, this kid.”
“Most likely he will,” said Jeff Peters flatteringly. “He sure will have it if he’s got any of your blood in him, partner.”
Muldoon received this communication with an undisguised sneer of scorn. “Peters,” he said, “the kid’ll be yapping in a minute or two more. And I got to be away before that happens. Listen to me! You remember two years back when you come down one morning and found the lock on your door busted?”
“I remember.”
“That was laid to me. The fools! If I’d busted the lock, wouldn’t I have gutted the store, no matter if the sheriff was in town that night? Sure I would. Matter of fact, the boys started to raid the store, but I recollected you at the school and the way you used to help me at arithmetic. Figures never done no good with me, anyhow. I say, I remembered you all at once, and I decided that the gang could get along without ruining you.”
“That was mighty good of you, Muldoon. It sure was,” said Jeff, his voice shaking under his effort to seem cordial. He did not believe a word of it, but it might mean death if he seemed to disagree.
“Well,” said Muldoon, “you might say I done you that good turn, looking to the future for a time when maybe I’d have my back against the wall and would need a friend.”
“Nobody would ever say that,” said Jeff Peters, forcing a noiseless laugh. “What could I do for a gent like you, I want to know?”
“More than you ever thought of doing,” said Muldoon. “Look at this here.”
He moved his hand from the grip of the child and doubled it into an immense fist. Instantly the baby balled its own pudgy fists and struck at the hovering threat. Bill Muldoon chuckled softly at the sight.
“All nerve and fire,” he declared, “that’s what little Jerry is made of. Now step up and take a closer look at him.”
“He’s sure a buster,” said Jeff, bending a little as though on rusted joints.
“Does he look like any other Muldoon you ever seen or heard tell of?” went on the big man.
“Why, come to think of it, he’s got the same sort of look around the head.”
Muldoon broke into hearty-but-controlled laughter. “There ain’t any chance of the womenfolk coming down here, is there?” he asked, breaking off his laughter and frowning.
“I dunno … no, I hope not,” said Jeff Peters, turning deadly pale. “Leastwise, they wouldn’t tell nobody that they’d seen you here, Bill.”
Muldoon cursed in a heavy whisper, as though a sudden rage half stifled him. “You little fool, Peters,” he said when he could speak. “D’you think that I’d harm womenfolk? Man, ain’t you got no sense?”
Jef
f Peters was paralyzed by the dread of what his mistake might now bring forth. He could not speak.
“I ask you to look again,” he said. “D’you ever hear of a Muldoon that didn’t have black hair and black eyes?”
“I disrecollect,” said Peters, choking. “I dunno that I ever have, now that you mention it.”
“Lord,” groaned the giant, “what a man to have the bringing up of a Muldoon! But look again. Ain’t them eyes as blue as the sky in the evening, I ask you? Or blue as a lake in the mountains?”
“They sure are.”
“Jeff,” said the other suddenly, with such a change of voice that Jeff Peters for the first time had the courage to look up into the eyes of his guest, “old man … he’s the son of Mary Conrad, that was my wife.”
“That girl with the yaller hair that lived over to Coffeytown? I ain’t heard that you married …”
“Nobody else ain’t heard. And she died giving birth to Jerry, and so we can’t prove to ’em, now, how happy we’d’ve been. I got the marriage certificate, though, and nailed it to the door of the church in Coffeytown. Then I stole Jerry, and I come away.”
He began to breathe very heavily and walked up and down the room with a rapid and irregular step. Jeff Peters turned his head to glance after the outlaw, and he dared not speak. He winced away when Muldoon paused before him.
“Jeff, when I come riding through the night, I got to thinking that what kills the Muldoons is the knowing that they’re Muldoons. There ain’t been a one of ’em for nigh onto fifty years, now … not a single one of the menfolk of the Muldoons … that have died peaceable in bed like a man should. They’ve gone with their boots on, speaking by and large, and they’ve gone down hell-raising. But I ask you man-to-man, Jeff, is it the blood that does it, or ain’t it just that they know they’re Muldoons? And when they walk out with other gents, they’re watched all the time like they were snakes about to strike. Yes, sir. When I was a little kid in the school, you remember how the whole tribe of the Saunders boys jumped you that day, and how I come running to help you? And, just because I was a Muldoon, not one of the Saunders tribe would stand to me. They all turned and run. Well, when a man grows up, feeling all the time that he’s stronger than other men, the time is sure to come when he can take what he wants by might. D’you understand the drift of this, Jeff?”
“It’s all clear, Bill.”
“It does me a pile of good to hear you talk up like that, Jeff. Well, when I come riding through the night, I say with the wind in my face, and poor Mary … Lord bless her … lying dead behind me … and looking down on me out of heaven, if there is a heaven, d’you see? When I come through the night thinking to myself, Jeff, what I done was to say that Jerry must change his name and live his life never dreaming that he’s a Muldoon. Could that be done? It didn’t look none too easy to work. And then I asked myself who would take the upbringing of him? Who would want to do a kindness to a black Muldoon? I says that to myself, and then I recollected your face, Jeff. I remembered some good turns that I’d done you in school, and I remembered some good turns I’d done you since … like the night when I kept the gang from cleaning up on your store … d’you see?”
Jeff Peters tried to speak. His throat was so dry that he could not utter a sound and only nodded.
“And so I’ve come to you, Jeff … and now that I’m here, tell me what you’ll do?”
Still Jeff could not speak. Was he asked to raise a Muldoon? He hardly knew what was asked.
“Will you raise him as your own son, and tell nobody in the world where you got him, more’n that you found him on your steps?”
“Bill …”
“And here’s something that would go along with him.”
He tossed a thick bundle of bills into the hands of Jeff Peters. The glance of Peters, falling, clung upon the denomination of the outer bill … fifty dollars on that slip of paper, and so many other slips beneath.
“That whole roll … I dunno how much there is in it … if you swear to me that you’ll raise him and not ever tell a soul who is his father.”
“Kate …” began Jeff Peters.
“Not even your wife. She’s a good woman, but there ain’t no woman good enough to hear the secrets of a black Muldoon and keep ’em.”
“Give me the boy,” said Jeff Peters. “And, so help me heaven, I’ll try to raise him like my own boy, by the name of Jerry Peters.”
“And if it should come out that a story was to go about saying what his real name was, d’you know what I’d do, Peters?”
“But it’ll never come out!”
“If it did, Jeff, I’d ask no questions, but I’d come gunning straight for you. D’you understand?”
“I understand, Bill.”
“Then take Jerry.”
The soft, warm bundle was placed in the arms of the storekeeper.
“Now swear, Jeff.”
“I swear, Bill.”
“May the money do you a pile of good,” said the big man with a peculiar smile. That smile vanished as he leaned and looked closely into the face of the strangely cheerful and silent infant. “And may Jerry see little of me? Between now and the day I bump off, hang me if I don’t hope, for Mary’s sake, that he never lays them blue eyes on me.”
He turned and strode out of the room. The instant the door was closed, the storekeeper, devoured with anxiety, placed the child on the desk. There he rolled unheeded, scattering the precious papers over which Jefferson Peters had been working so patiently.
With his hands free, the latter hurriedly opened the roll of bills that the outlaw had given to him. The wrapper bill, as he had seen before, was a wrinkled fifty … but the bills within were simply a sheaf of $1 notes. Even in so great a crisis of his life, a black Muldoon had been a rascal. The poor little storekeeper raised his despairing hands to the heavens. Here was an added mouth in the nest. And, besides, what earthly explanation could he offer to Kate?
II
Eight years showed Jeff Peters at exactly the same poundage, with exactly the same puckered and wistful brows. His hair had grown a little gray. His cheeks were a trifle more lean and wrinkled, but otherwise his face was the same. His back was somewhat bowed, now, but on the whole he seemed no nearer the breaking point than ever. For he was one of those men who anticipate the worst, always. And therefore, when the worst came, it was never a shock. It was impossible for him greatly to succeed, because he never dared greatly hope, but for the same reasons, more or less, he could not possibly be a complete failure. For eight years he had carried the burdens of a wife, his twin boys, and Jerry Muldoon who had been left to him, and who passed in the eyes of the world as an adopted son calling himself Jerry Peters. He was never given cause to doubt that his parentage was other than that of the two husky youngsters who played with him every day. So far no one in the village of Custis had taken upon himself to tell Jerry of his mysterious origin.
It was recess at the school, and Kate and Jeff Peters sat by the teacher’s desk. She was the proper mate for her spouse. Her square and placid brow as yet showed no sign of a wrinkle. For his wasting form she made amends in a steadily increasing amplitude of the waistline. She was not yet exactly ponderous, but neither could she be termed active. She carried with her one remaining quality from her girlhood spent on a ranch, and that was a straight and piercing glance that, on occasion, thrust her husband through to the soul and made that soul tremble. But, although she understood her power, be it said in her favor that she rarely abused it. She exercised her strength not more than once a year, as a sort of secret holiday pleasure.
But she had no reticence about abashing the schoolteacher. The latter was newly out of normal school, a mere child, eager as a hawk and keen as a whip, but rather painfully conscious of her youth as a handicap placed between her and the accomplishment of great ambitions. And schoolteaching was to Elsie Dennis a great ambition accomplished. Three generations of drudgery lay in the immediate past of Elsie. If instinct is an inherited
thing, all of Elsie’s desires should have turned in the direction of scrubbing floors or, at most, cooking in ranch grub wagons. Instead, she had risen by force of detestation of all she found around her and had turned to a future of higher education. Had Elsie been equipped with a pretty face, her way would have been far easier.
As it was, Elsie’s round, serious countenance was set on the end of a long, scrawny neck, along which the unfleshed tendons played in and out whenever she moved her head. Weak eyes, outworn by the labors of prodigious reading, blinked feebly behind the great lenses of her glasses. Her skin was sallow. Her forehead was wrinkled with the anguish of mental labor. Her bony hand was tremulous and cold. Her figure was chiefly a matter of lines running straight up and down.
In spite of appearance, Elsie Dennis had a soul of fire. She could speak of an example of arithmetic or a lesson in geography with a flaming enthusiasm that shortened the breath of her pupils. She felt her inward fires quenched, well nigh, by the presence of Mrs. Jeff Peters. That lady, knowing nothing of books, had fortified herself with a high disdain. As a matter of fact, she was afraid to praise the gaunt schoolteacher, because she feared that an expression of praise would be for the wrong thing and thereby expose her ignorance. But she knew, as many wiser persons have also learned, that it is easy to damn with criticism and appear intelligent.
“As for Harry and Jack,” said Elsie Dennis, “I don’t know which is the better.” She was answering one of Mrs. Peters’s very direct questions. “Harry is slower, but then, he works harder. Jack is much quicker, but he is a little lazy …”