by Max Brand
“Jerry is your name? You maybe ain’t out of Custis?”
“I am.”
The Black Muldoon, to the utter astonishment of Jerry, turned white. Then he stepped closer.
“Keep away,” said Jerry, “or I’ll knock you down with a gun barrel.”
Bill Muldoon, upon whose lips eloquent words had been trembling, halted and closed his mouth. After a moment he said: “Well, let’s be starting on.”
But there was something new in his manner. There was something repressed and hidden that alarmed Jerry. It was as though the great outlaw had suddenly discovered that his captor was helplessly in the hollow of his hand.
They mounted, took the other three horses in lead, and started on down the mountain trail with big Bill Muldoon riding in the lead, his feet and hands free, although his weapons had been taken from him.
Behind rode Jerry, his revolver in its holster. And behind him came the horses of the dead men.
VII
It so happened that the worthy sheriff, having changed his mind about continuing to the far side of the range and there awaiting the possible coming of the brigand and his followers, had decided that the best possible move would be to ride straight back to Custis and there organize a larger and more efficiently mounted band, at the same time getting in touch, through telegraph, with other communities in the mountains so that they could move in harmony and throw a cordon around the probable location of the outlaws. He had ridden into Custis, therefore, with his hot and dusty followers behind him, and the townsfolk had merely sighed in their disappointment. Because, of course, there had been no real expectation that this expedition would end in the destruction of the outlaws. That would have been too much distinction to fall to the posse of any one small mountain town. No, the sheriff was not considered any the less worthy because of this failure, and indeed, when the townspeople looked up to the lofty tops of Custis Mountain and Mount Black and saw that the summits were wrapped above timberline in black storm clouds, the sheriff was simply praised for a discretion that had kept him from exposing his posse to such hard weather.
It was in the midst of such feeling that a strange murmur ran down the single street of Custis, a dumb rumor that began because a half-naked urchin had galloped bareback into town with a report that he had seen, coming down the road—but no matter what he had seen. It was disbelieved, contorted. And the rumor suddenly took form that the terrible Muldoon, the Black Muldoon himself, was about to rush upon the village with his desperate retainers and distribute death as he whirled through their midst. That rumor, in an instant, searched out every man in the village. It roused them. It put loaded guns in their hands. It made them mutter to one another: “By heaven, that Muldoon is going too far. This time we’ll finish him, unless he has a charmed life.”
The sheriff himself heard the story. He had just enough imagination to believe that it might be possibly true. And, gray with the shame that such an attack would bring to him, whether Muldoon fell in the attack or survived it, he got out his best rifle, looked to his revolver, and came out armed and stood at the door of his house, a conspicuous and rather absurd figure, if anyone had had an eye for humor at that moment.
Into this picture, then, came a procession, and what a procession it was. First of all came the terrible figure of the Black Muldoon, looking no less mighty in reality than he had been painted in a thousand stories about him. For thirty years he had carried terror through the mountains. Two generations had told their stories of him. And it was wonderful that he should seem as heroic in fact as in fancy.
Behind him came the conqueror, the late, treasonable defector from the sheriff’s posse. Behind him came flame-haired, blue-eyed Jerry, sitting erect and jaunty on his horse, keeping his joy under restraint as befits men in great hours. And behind him came three horses. Did that mean that, besides the great leader, three of his followers had been struck down, and by the hand of that one youth? What triumph had David compared with this?
People started out into the street. Women who had been whispering together ran forth, clutching one another, and they, in turn, saw the miracle. They saw young Jerry spring down from his horse and walk up to the sheriff. They saw him point to the prisoner. They saw the sheriff wring Jerry’s hand—and then all was a joyous tumult that swerved and swirled around Jerry, the foundling. Mrs. Jefferson Peters came and paraded where all the village could see her. And Elsie Dennis, who had been held to the teaching of that same school all of the last dusty, hopeless fifteen years, confined to it because her spirit was not hard enough or her face pretty enough to make her a way to greater places—poor Elsie Dennis came running out with her prematurely white head bare and found Jerry, and cast her arms around the neck of her favorite and wept on his neck.
But that was only one of many wild actions in Custis that day. For the town had awakened to the fact that it had a celebrity in its environs. No more talk of riding championships—here was a man made of that heroic clay out of which other noble forms had been molded in the history of the frontier. Here was material for the making of the youngest sheriff in the history of the West. Here was the man whose terrible name would keep all outlaws at a safe distance from Custis.
At the end of that day, Jerry sat at the table with his foster brothers and his foster mother. He said nothing at all about his exploit except to belittle it to cheer up Jack and Harry, who were terribly downhearted at this latest feat. But all during the meal, no matter what words were spoken, they all had had but one thought in their minds until Jeff Peters came home late, hungry, and tired from a day of riding.
He had not heard. Oh, the joy of telling such news to one who had not heard even an inkling of it. With compressed lips and shining eyes, they endured during the dinner he ate until he was midway in his second piece of pie, his third cup of coffee. And then they exploded.
“Dad, have you heard?”
“Heard what?” he said petulantly. “What the devil is eating you folks? You sit there and stare at me like I could be eaten.”
“It’s Jerry!” chanted three voices. Even Harry and Jack had lost their jealousy in a wave of family pride.
“What have you been doing, Jerry? You been out buying another hoss, maybe?”
“No, he got three hosses for nothing!”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“Jeff, how can you use such language?”
“I can’t help it, dear. It sure riles me to hear such talk. Three hosses for nothing! What d’you mean by it, Jerry?”
But Jerry, pink with happiness and dumb with modesty, was rolling a cigarette and waiting until the ordeal should be completed. He could not answer.
Mrs. Peters rose from her chair. She stood like one presiding at a meeting held to defend the rights of downtrodden American womanhood.
“It just means, Jeff, that we got a hero with us.”
“Mother!” exclaimed Jerry in faint protestation.
“I mean it. That word ain’t none too good for you, Jerry boy. Jefferson, today this Jerry of ours went on the trail of the Muldoon gang that raided New Custis.”
Jeff Peters arose from his chair likewise. He rose as one being dragged up by the hair by an invisible hand. He said nothing. His joyous anticipation had very much the look of speechless horror.
“Go on,” he urged. “Hurry.”
“The sheriff missed Muldoon and Muldoon’s four desperadoes,” went on Mrs. Jefferson Peters, “but our boy would not follow him when he turned back. Instead, he stayed behind by himself. By himself. I’m covered with gooseflesh at the thought of it. One boy against five terrible men! But there he stayed. And the first thing you know, down they come, and out stands Jerry, and down they go, one and all.”
“No!” shouted Jeff Peters.
That cry might have been taken for incredulous joy. At least, Mrs. Peters so took it.
“He killed four men and captured the Black Muldoon in a hand-to-hand fight and didn’t get a scratch himself, and now Bill Muldoon is down in the ja
il in this very town. And six men are guarding him day and night.”
She crowded the cream of all her tidings into that one great sentence. The effect upon her spouse was strange indeed. He rushed around the table to her with both hands raised high in the air as though to beat back the words he had heard and destroy the truth that they represented.
“Don’t say it,” he said. “For God’s sake, don’t say it.”
“Don’t say what?” shrilled his wife. “Are you gone crazy, Jefferson Peters? Ain’t you got any realization of what our Jerry has done for us, and Custis, and the whole of the mountains? Why, there ain’t a paper in the country that won’t have a long story of this.”
“You fool!” gasped out Jefferson Peters. “Heaven help us … poor Jerry.”
Jerry came suddenly before him. “Tell me what’s up,” he said. “Have I done something that’s wrong?”
“Done something that’s wrong?” echoed the storekeeper. “Why, ain’t it liable that they’ll hang him?”
“Hang the Black Muldoon? Of course they will, unless he’s lynched first.”
“They’ll hang him,” wailed Peters, “and the hand that puts the rope around his neck will be yours!”
“Doesn’t he deserve hanging?” asked Jerry sternly. “Is he a friend of yours? Was it by his help that you managed to buy the store when … ?”
“No, no …” stammered Peters.
“Then what do you mean by such talk?” asked his wife, advancing into the fray.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t talk like a fool, Jefferson. You sure got some meaning in what you’ve been saying.”
“I don’t mean nothing. I don’t want to talk to you. I got to be alone … and heaven guide me to what’s right.”
The great body of Jerry blocked his path. The great hand of Jerry held his shoulder. “I’ve got to know,” he said simply.
A sudden fury came over Jeff Peters, one of those passions with which weak men, relying on their known weakness, bully men far stronger. He tore himself away from the detaining hand. He shook his fist in the face of big Jerry.
“You blockhead!” he shouted. “You big blockhead! When they hang Bill Muldoon, they’re hanging your father, and you’re his murderer!”
Jerry staggered back to the door and leaned against it, weak, still blocking the escape of Peters from the room. “Say it over again,” he gasped out. “Say it slow … so’s I can understand. You ain’t meaning that the Black Muldoon … but I knew it when I faced him. I knew it when I couldn’t send the slug home into him. Oh, heaven help the two of us now.”
VIII
He left those four tortured and shocked faces and stumbled out into the night. The air struck suddenly cool and sweet against his eyes. He realized that they had been on fire—that his whole body was on fire. He was in a fever of anxiety, grief, terror.
He was a Muldoon then. He was one of those terrible man destroyers, the Muldoons! He looked back over the years of his young life. When we are young, we are not fitted to criticize ourselves. And it seemed to Jerry that there were scores of facts that fitted in with what had now been told him. There were those fierce and sudden passions of his childhood, for instance. There was that murderous attack on William in the schoolyard on the never-to-be-forgotten day when he had been first told that he was really not the son of Jeff Peters. And there were other occasions when his temper had risen to a white heat. It had been bitterly hard to control himself on those occasions. The explanation was simple in the light of what he had learned on this day. It was simply the instinct of the Muldoons urging him to strike.
A black Muldoon! They would call him the Red Muldoon, after this. Jerry Muldoon. The very ring of the name dwelt in his mind with sinister implications. It would be a good name to give a murderer.
Jerry Muldoon, stand up! Those were the words the judge would speak. The last scene flittered before his eyes. He blotted it out with a savage oath, and, running to the barn, he saddled his strongest horse and led it out. There, the sound of softly rustling skirts met him in the darkness.
“Jerry … Jerry … Jerry!” he heard the voice of Mrs. Peters calling to him.
And to think that he had once thought of this woman as his mother.
She found him. She threw her arms around him. “Jerry, where are you going?”
“I’m going to see the girl I love.”
“Ah, that’ll be Louise Donnell.”
“Yes.”
“Jerry, don’t go to see her tonight. Wait until word has been sent to her. Wait until she’s been prepared.”
“I’m not ashamed of being a Muldoon,” he said bitterly. “I ain’t a bit ashamed of it. Maybe they’ve been bad men, mostly, but that don’t keep them from once in a while turning out an honest man, too. Am I right?”
“Of course you’re right. But people won’t stop to think … at first. There’s been a horror around that name … Muldoon. Maybe there’s a lot that’s untrue blamed onto them. I don’t doubt that there is. But they’ve got the bad name for them things, just the same. D’you see how it is, Jerry?”
“Oh, I see, right enough, but listen to me. Bill Muldoon … my father … he’s a real man. When I captured him today, he found out my name and that I come from Custis, and he knew right then that I was his son. And right then he could’ve got clean off by telling me. But he wouldn’t tell. He decided that he’d take his medicine.”
“Aye, that was a terrible thing to do … and it was a fine thing to do, Jerry dear.”
“Only a big man could’ve done it. He gave me to you and Jeff in the hopes that I would be raised honest. And he wouldn’t spoil my life to save his own, if the name of Muldoon might spoil a man’s life.”
“But you ain’t going to take that name, Jerry? You’re still going to call yourself Jerry Peters, ain’t you?”
“Lord a’mighty, d’you think that I’m ashamed of my father’s name? I’m not. I’m wild proud of it.”
“Jerry!” Her voice was a wail of sorrow. “Jerry, oh, Jerry boy, you’re going to leave us!”
“You’ll not be sorrowing very long for that,” said Jerry bitterly. “I guess I’ve been a weight on you all these years. Keeping back Harry and Jack.”
She clung to him. “Don’t be saying that, Jerry.” She began to weep. “Oh, Jerry, I ain’t been as good to you as maybe I might have been. I’ve been real hard and mean to you more’n once. But when I seen you leaning against the door after Jefferson told you … when I seen you so sick and weak from what the words had done to you, but what the fear of bullets couldn’t do … when I seen you standing there, Jerry dear, all at once I loved you as though you were my own child, like Harry and Jack. Can you understand, dear boy? No, no man would understand … but, oh, Jerry, if you’re leaving us now, it’s my flesh and blood that I’m losing. Stay with us, and let me show you that I love you, Jerry.”
“I’m coming back, I guess,” he said. “Only I’m going to see Lou Donnell first …”
“Won’t you listen to me, Jerry?”
“Of course. But that can’t change me. Besides, it’s a good test. If she cares a single flip for me, this won’t make any difference.”
“Now you speak only because you’re bitter, dear.”
“No, it’s the straight truth. If she was to marry me, would she be marrying my father? What difference does it make, what my father may have done?”
“The Donnells are terrible proud folks, Jerry.”
“And so are the Muldoons,” said Jerry.
“Are you going to talk to her like that?”
“Why not? I’m not ashamed of my blood.”
“But the shock of what she hears … remember how the shock of it hurt you, Jerry.”
“It didn’t hurt me. It only staggered me sort of, for a minute. But after that …”
“If you go tonight, you’ll lose her. Trust a woman’s judgment that far, Jerry.”
“If I lose her, I’ll never come back to win her again.”
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She only sighed.
“Good-bye, and God bless you for coming out to talk,” he said. “I’ll never forget it, not in a hundred years.”
He took her in his arms, kissed her, and then took the saddle and drove away at a smashing gallop over the gravel road. And on through the night, he never let the horse slacken until he had passed Custis, and the big, blunt outlines of the house of the Donnells rose before him. Then he stopped, threw the reins, and approached the veranda more slowly.
Luck favored him here, at least. He came through the darkness just in time to see Lou’s father disappear into the house, leaving Lou herself alone on the veranda. When he walked up the steps, she rose with a cry of surprise.
“Jerry, Jerry! You’ve remembered us even on your great day.” Then, as he came closer and into a keener light, she cried: “Jerry, there’s something wrong! What is it?”
Clothes, says the resolute Westerner in his overalls and flannel shirt, clothes make no difference in man or woman. But the feeling of Jerry, at that moment, belied that maxim. For Lou Donnell was dressed all in white. Neither was it the sort of white that Jerry was used to. It was not crisp and flouncy, and apt to blow askew in the wind. Instead, it was of shimmering silk, and when Lou moved, she was accompanied by a hushing whisper of the fabric. And this dress was made, also, in a manner that suggested money—much money. Jerry knew that although he saw no details. But the clothes of Lou Donnell removed her to a strange distance. He could not talk to her with assurance. He became stiff and wretchedly self-conscious.
“I’ve come over to tell you some queer news,” he said.
“But I know all about the fight,” said the girl. “Dad was in Custis today, and he heard everything, and he’s come home chanting your praises. He says that you’re a hero, Jerry, and everyone else in the house agrees. Dad went to the jail with the sheriff and heard that terrible Black Muldoon tell everything. And even Muldoon didn’t take away any of your credit.”
The head of Jerry fell. But how could she know how cruel a cut she was giving him?