by Max Brand
At the hitching rack in the front of the Peters house, he saw a horse that he did not recognize as any of theirs. He paused to look more closely. There was something very familiar about the neat-limbed creature—he looked more closely still, and his heart leaped, for it was the mare that Lou Donnell rode.
He circled hastily to the side of the house and then slipped up onto the side veranda, his blood turning cold as he realized that this was only the first of a thousand similar maneuvers that he must execute in his life as it now promised to stretch before him. The sound of voices came out to him through the opened window. Lou had just arrived. Mrs. Peters was busy making her welcome and at the same time herding the Peters men out of the room. The door closed behind the last of them as Jerry reached the window, and looking in, he saw Lou drawing off her riding gloves and wringing them nervously.
“Missus Peters,” she said, “I have to see Jerry.”
“You haven’t seen him already?” asked Mrs. Peters.
“I … yes, but I must see him again … at once. Where can he be if he isn’t here?”
“I can’t say. He’ll come back, I suppose, in a short time.”
“Then … ?”
“Shall I give him a message?”
“Yes … no … but tell him that I came and that I’m very eager to see him at once and … but, oh, if he doesn’t understand!”
“Lou, I think I know what he went to talk to you about this evening.”
“He came to tell me that his father is the Black Muldoon.”
“Yes.”
“And at first it was a horror to me. I turned away from him … I … I …”
“You either fainted or you called for help.”
“I called for help. Dad came out. And then Jerry swore he was proud of being a Muldoon, and he turned away with a face as black as thunder and went off into the night. The moment he was gone, we all tried to call him back, but it was too late … and here I am, Missus Peters. And I must see him!”
“Does Mister Donnell know that you’ve come?”
“Yes. He sent me. He was the one who vowed that it made no difference. He said, too, that any man was a cur who was not proud of his father’s blood, no matter what that father might have done, and the rest of us agreed with him. I agreed, at least. What difference is it to me if Jerry’s father is the Black Muldoon? The Black Muldoon is simply a man who was stronger than other men and has not been careful enough of his strength. Suppose my father grew up wild? Might he not have been just like the Black Muldoon? At least, that’s what I feel and why I have to find Jerry, so that I can tell him.”
Jerry stepped back from the window. He was almost too stunned with surprise and with anguish to keep from following the first wild impulse to rush into the room. But he ruled himself. His decision was not to be made here. It was made long before, when he promised his father liberty. And what was a woman, no matter how he loved her, compared with the tie of blood between him and his father?
He staggered across the veranda, dropped to the ground beyond, and then made for the corral. Even in that anguished moment, he made sure that the horse his father was to bestride was the best on the place. What matter whether or not that horse belonged to him? They could pay for that horse later out of Jerry’s own money.
He chose a mighty, gray gelding strong enough to drag a plow but surprisingly fast, likewise. That gelding he roped and saddled at the barn, and then he made a long detour back to the jail, cutting around behind the houses so that there should be a smaller chance of detecting him. He tethered the gelding beside his own horse, and then, with a last, agonized look down the street, where the twinkling lights of Peters home told that Lou Donnell was waiting for him, he entered the jail.
There was no Black Muldoon waiting for him. The great outlaw had ridden his last ride, fought his last fight, cursed his last oath. He lay prone on his back in the middle of the floor, with the Colt clasped in one hand and the other relaxing from a bit of paper. And when Jerry examined the fingers of the left hand, he discovered that they had been gripped around the picture of Lou Donnell.
* * * * *
They buried the Black Muldoon on the highest hill overlooking Custis, and they heaped for him a great monument of rough stones. Sometimes, in the days that came, Jerry would say to his wife: “But, Lou, how can we tell the children everything that my father did?”
“Are you yourself ashamed of him?” she would say.
“No,” he would always answer.
“Then,” said Lou, “tell them everything from the first. Half-truths don’t help. Because, you see, no matter how many crimes he committed during his life, he knew how to die like a brave man for the sake of others, and I think that death makes his whole life beautiful.”
There were others, and they were numerous, who did not agree with Lou. They held that the Black Muldoon had been terrible and graceless to the very end, and they explained his death as an accident. But as for Jerry—as for the Red Muldoon—if any had their doubts of his virtue, if any waited for the bad strain to show, at least they were afraid to speak up where other men could hear them talk.
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 popular-prose writer. 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, 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.