Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  He had a great proprietary, possessive air which was not really offensive. Now with one hand he turned Ronicky Doone around. With the other hand he struck a match and lighted a lamp and then held the light high, so that in the dusk he could examine the face of the youth. In another man it would have been intolerable impertinence, but in Al Jenkins it was simply an idiosyncrasy with which Ronicky for one was quite willing to put up. He even broke into laughter, as Al Jenkins stepped back and lowered the lamp, shaking his head in bewilderment.

  “What plumb beats me,” said Al Jenkins, “is how he can keep a straight face when he tells them lies, that Tompson! He said that you — why, half of the things that he said about you would have filled a book, Ronicky. How much of ’em are straight? What’s all this about you being a fire-eating, man- killing terror? Is that the truth about the time when you—”

  “It’s all wrong,” said Ronicky instantly. “I’m the most gentlest, peaceablest, law-abidingest gent you ever seen, Mr. Jenkins. You can lay to that! I dunno where old Tompson got hold of his yarns about me, but—”

  “He got ’em down south. Says that once on the Staked Plains—”

  “Oh, he don’t know what he’s talking about,” said Ronicky calmly. “There ain’t no use talking about what he said.”

  “For the first time I begin to think that there’s something in what he told me,” replied Jenkins.

  He now folded his arms above his stomach and planted his legs well apart. “Doone,” he said, “I guess this is a lucky day for both of us.”

  “I hope so,” said Ronicky politely.

  “Well, I’m going to make it so!” boomed the big man. “Hope is all well and good. But it’s better off when it’s left inside the covers of a book. It ain’t a good word for a man to use. He’s got hands to make things and to take things with. That’s better than a dreamer’s head to hope!”

  He brought his sentence to a conclusion by crashing the flat of his hand down upon the table, so that that flimsy article of furniture sagged sadly to one side with a great groan. Al Jenkins straightened it with a jerk that set the lamp to dancing, and the flame to leaping in the glass chimney’s throat. But Jenkins allowed the lamp to stagger unregarded. He was already pacing up and down the room, now and then coming to a pause in front of Ronicky and directing the full power of his resonant voice and his bright, clear eyes upon the younger man.

  “Here’s what I’m driving at,” said Jenkins. “You been in town long enough to know what I’m doing around here?”

  “I got a general idea,” said Ronicky, fumbling to find the words which would most gently approach the truth. “They tell me that you’re sort of interested in road building and real estate and that you are buying a good deal of land.”

  “Thunder!” burst in Jenkins. “They tell you a lot of rot. What I’m after is old Bennett, and, if they talked to you about me at all, they told you that first off. I’m here doing things for the town, and maybe some of them are done because I do like the place. But right down in the bottom of your heart you can get to the real facts, which I don’t try to hide: that I’m in here helping Twin Springs because I want Twin Springs to help me. And why do I need help? Because I’m smashing Bennett — because I’m smashing him root and branch!”

  As he spoke he crashed his fist into the palm of his other hand repeatedly with force enough to have knocked down an ordinary man. The energy of the rancher was amazing. No wonder he had succeeded in tearing wealth out of the frozen land of Alaska. He put enough effort into five minutes of conversation to have enabled another to run a mile.

  “H’m.” said Ronicky, “I see. Well I did hear a little about that—”

  “And you thought I was a mean old scoundrel for doing it, eh?”

  “Why—”

  “Don’t deny it! That’s what you thought! Well, there’s no harm in thinking what you please. This is a mighty free country, son, and I want it to stay free so far as I’m concerned. Think what you please, Doone, but just listen to me while I talk sense to you. Ronicky, I’ve got a need of you. I want you on my side!”

  Ronicky Doone regarded him with wonder.

  “You got the wrong idea about me,” he said. “I ain’t floating through here aiming to get into trouble on one side or the other. Matter of fact all that I want to do is to get even with big Blondy, and then I’ll be traveling along, I guess.”

  “Sure,” said Al Jenkins hastily, waving his hand in large agreement with this statement. “Don’t I know what’s going on inside of your head, boy? You’re plumb peaceable. All you want to do is to finish up Blondy. But, Ronicky, I aim to tell you that before you’ve finished up Blondy you’ll be a mite older than you are.”

  Ronicky shook his head.

  “I finish my business quick,” he declared. “Either he gets me, or I get him. That’s all there is to it. As soon as he finds out that Oliver Hopkins ain’t dead, he’ll be back on the Bennett place as big as life. So I guess it won’t be long before him and me meet up.”

  Al Jenkins shook his head.

  “Son,” he said, “I’d like to trust you to do the right thing, but I can’t. You go to kill Blondy — don’t shake your head and cuss because I say that. You’re going to fight him, and the only way you can stop one of Blondy’s kind is to kill him. I know! But when you go out to the ranch, nine chances out of ten, the person you run into will be old Bennett, with a tongue slicker than a snake’s tongue. And he’ll talk you around onto his side quicker’n you can wink. Oh, he’s a fine talker, old Bennett is. Why he picked a job where he’d have to talk to cows instead of to men, I can’t make out! He could steal a baby out of the arms of the judge, if he was a lawyer, and have the jury weeping and swearing that the kid belonged to him, all inside of the shake of a lamb’s tail. That’s the sort of a pizen gent this Bennett is!”

  “But I’m not going out to talk,” said Ronicky. “I—”

  He might as well have tried to stop the rush of an undammed stream. Al Jenkins when he began to talk kept on until his mind was empty of ideas.

  “Or if it ain’t the old man, then his girl will get you. Have you heard anything about his girl?”

  “Only that she’s pretty,” said Ronicky.

  The older man stared at him in disgust.

  “What kind of men do they breed nowadays?” he roared at last. “I’ll tell you all about Elsie Bennett, son. She’s the living image of her mother. Oh my, oh my, oh my!”

  He brought out the exclamations partly as devout sighs and partly as groans.

  “Know what that means? That means that she’s one of them deadly blondes. She’s one of them kind that got hair that’s a sort of a palpitating gold. Pale gold, you see, with the sun in it, is what her hair is. She’s got blue eyes. She may be thinking up more kinds of deviltry than there are underground, but all the time she’ll have a look in her eye that makes a man think of heaven. She’s got a dimple tucked away in one cheek and a sort of a little crooked smile. That smile always seems to be at you as much as it is with you. She ain’t got one of these tissue-paper skins with color in her cheeks like it was slapped on with a paint brush — one of them skins that fade and wrinkle up by the time a girl’s thirty, in this here climate. No, sir. Her skin is just sort of creamy, with a look like it had been rubbed and sponged till it was fresh and clear as crystal. D’you foller me, son?”

  He had changed his tone wonderfully in speaking of the girl. He stood with his head thrown back, so that the immense column of this throat was exposed. But out of that great throat came a voice soft and deep and tremulous with an edging of emotion that cut to Ronicky’s quick.

  “Oh, lad,” said the big man, “a girl like her hadn’t ought to belong to no one man. Why, she should be private property. She’d ought to be taken around where everybody could see her and be happy looking at her. A sight of her is better than good news. And a picture of her smiling, or the hearing of her laugh, is like striking gold in the desert.”

  He raised his head a
gain and scowled at Ronicky Doone.

  “Why ain’t you standing on tiptoe, champing and chawing the bit to get out and see her, you young rapscallion?” he roared.

  “I can get along tolerable well without seeing her,” admitted Ronicky Doone.

  “Bah!” said Al Jenkins. “You maybe think that you’re in love with some other girl, but you ain’t! It ain’t no ways possible for a man to be really in love except with a woman like she is, or her mother was before her! Why, I got more reasons for hating Bennett and the Bennett stock than a spider has got for hating a wasp. But I don’t dare get within range of that girl. All my hate would wither up. I’d soften up like a sponge. I’d begin to grin and gape at her. And I’d be lost, and she could do what she wanted with me. Inside of a minute I’d be signing over half of my land to that skunk of a father of hers. That’s the sort of a girl she is!” He concluded with another explosion of sound.

  “And you think that you’d be safe if you went out to shoot Blondy and met her instead? Bah! She’d make a fool of you. You’d crawl around on your hands and knees begging for a chance to work for her and fight for her!”

  “How does it come,” suggested Ronicky, “that she doesn’t have the same effect on the other men around these parts? Why doesn’t she get a whole army of ’em for her father?”

  “I’ll tell you why: folks are blind to what they grow up next to. I was born by the sea. And I never seen nothing in it. I come west and went plumb batty with a case of desert fever, and here I stick. And do you hear them that are born on the desert talking a lot about it? No, you don’t. They’re too used to it. When you take ’em away from it after a while, they may begin to mourn for it. But it’s the things you ain’t never lacked that you can’t appreciate. Same way with the young folks around here and that flower of a girl, Elsie Bennett. They’ve growed up in the same schools with her. They’ve seen her playing dolls with other little girls and putting on long skirts to play grownups. They’ve seen her get into the feet-hands-and-elbows stage, when all girls look plumb ugly. They’ve seen all that, and no wonder they don’t know what she is! One or two have rubbed their eyes and waked up and found out the truth and gone batty about her for a while, but she gives them the cold shoulder when they come talking marriage, and they wander off some other place to keep from busting their hearts. That’s why they don’t know what she is.”

  Ronicky had listened with the most profound interest, not so much caught by the warnings and the pictures of Jenkins, but intrigued by the revelation of the old man’s character.

  “But why are you so set on getting me?” he asked at length.

  “I’ll tell you why. Because things ain’t now the way they used to be. I don’t mean to speak light of you, Doone, after all that I’ve heard about you. But I just want you to know that twenty years ago I wouldn’t have given a shake which side you joined, because with my money and my men I could wipe out old Bennett any time I took a mind to it. But them days ain’t no morel Them days ain’t no more! They’re gone!”

  He groaned bitterly.

  “When Bennett wanted to run me out of the country twenty years ago, what did he do? He simply hired a bunch of men and run off my cows in a gang. He didn’t waste no time thinking and planning. He scooped what I had and left me busted. Easy for him! Oh, curse his hide! But when I come back with some money of my own and find him down, times have changed. A gent can’t come in and do what he pleases. No, sir; he’s got to wait around and see what the public sentiment is. Like as not, if he lifts a hand, he’ll get hanged for it. So I’ve been laboring here these years working up my case against Bennett. I have things all worked up fine and ready to squash Bennett when along comes this big Blondy and makes this play of his. Well, folks didn’t take him none too serious before. But they begin to now, and they take Bennett serious along with Blondy. And now if you go in and join up with Bennett — why, it’d be a mighty serious thing, and it might stall me altogether! You got brains, both you and Blondy, and you’re both born fighters. And if you teamed it on the same side you might bust up my little game for me and spoil things all around.”

  His frankness made Ronicky gasp. Certainly there was an old-fashioned honesty underlying the malignant hatred with which Jenkins pursued Bennett.

  “Talk straight out,” he said finally. “I don’t mind saying that I like you, Mr. Jenkins, and I’d like to please you. Just tell me where I could fit into your plans, and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  “That’s talk of the right kind!” cried Al Jenkins. “It’s taken a long tune to get around to it, but I seen when I laid eyes on you that I couldn’t get you in a second. Ronicky, d’you ever ride the range?”

  “That’s my regular way of making a living.”

  “Are you aiming to take a job pretty soon?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then line up for a month under me, Ronicky. I just want to make sure that you ain’t going to be against me. I ain’t buying you, and I ain’t offering to, because I know that money couldn’t do it. I’m just saying: Will you come out and hang up your saddle in my bunk house for a while?”

  “And if I don’t?” asked Ronicky.

  “If you don’t, and particular if you line up with Bennett, it’s going to go hard with you. I’m ready to close in on them, son. I’ve got public opinion switched over my way. We’re a long, long ways from the law. And if I should clean up Bennett’s beef now, the way he done with mine, I don’t think he’d have much of a chance to prove anything against me and my men. What d’you say, Ronicky?”

  “I’m going to take a ride around tonight,” said Ronicky, checking himself on the verge of agreeing. “When I come back I’ll let you know.”

  “Right!” said Al Jenkins. “A gent that thinks before he does a thing is a gent that don’t change his mind afterward. Good-by!”

  VIII. A CRY FROM THE SHRUBS

  AFTER AL JENKINS left the room there were still a few moments during which Ronicky Doone sat by the black square of the window, staring out on the shadows of the street, broken by the bars of yellow lamplight. The acrid scent of dust impregnated with bitter alkali floated toward him in thin drifts from time to time, after a horseman had lurched up or down the street, his hoofbeats muffled to soft thuds by the thick layer of dust through which they struck. While he sat there, letting the peace of the village steal over him and all the quiet of the mountains, he revolved in his mind what Al Jenkins had said to him, and the more he pondered the stranger the position seemed to him.

  Yet what Jenkins wanted was understandable. He had reduced Bennett to such a point that he could soon crush his rival. But the addition of the slightest strength might unbalance the scale and postpone the destruction of Bennett for an indefinite period. One more daring deed performed in the name of Bennett, as Blondy had performed his deed this day, would convince the men of the village that Bennett had under him something beside a number of tramps. Public sentiment might swing mightily toward the opposite side. Therefore Jenkins had tried to make doubly sure of Ronicky.

  As for Ronicky, the old urge to go on and on and on which whipped him remorselessly through the mountains, was now dying out. Twin Springs was becoming a focus around which his thoughts gathered and centered. Just in this fashion men find a new place strange and desolate which, after a little living, seems to become the center of the world, all their lives moving within its bounds. And Ronicky, looking out of the window, felt that he was looking into the heart of the town and the country around it.

  Necessarily he must join the forces of honest Al Jenkins, if he stayed. And he must stay to fight big Blondy. And if he stayed to fight Blondy he must be with those who were opposed to Bennett. What could be more logical than this strain of reasoning? And yet, because he hated alliances of all kinds, he delayed and determined to have that ride before his mind was made up.

  When he went down to the veranda of the hotel a score of heads — for the porch was well filled — turned toward him at once in greeting. Th
at day’s work had got him known. More than that, those who had heard of him had been about buzzing the rumors which they had picked up. He was a known man, indeed.

  He stepped down through a murmur of greetings and went out to the shed, where Lou was stabled. He groomed her by lantern light. For, though she was one of the tough mustang breed that live as happily without brushing as with it, yet it was a custom which Ronicky had started and could not stop. He worked until the red bay was a shining velvet, with high lights from the lantern splashed along the silk of her flanks. Then he saddled her and swung up in the stirrups.

  She slipped out from the shed, as light of foot and eager on the bit as though she had been in pasture for a month. Truly she was made of watch springs and leather, a tireless mechanism! At the trough he gave her one swallow of water and then sent her across the country. He picked the course at random. East and west rose rough-sided mountains. He did not wish to break the heart of Lou with such work. They were out for a pleasure walk, so to speak, not for labor. To the south the hills separated in uninteresting monotony. But to the north a valley lay like a funnel into the heart of the mountains. And into this funnel he sent Lou.

  There might be no road at all. But for that he did not care. Straight across the country fled Lou, running among shrubs, with a smoothly wavering line, just as a dry twig is floated down among stones by the current of a brook, twisted here and there quickly, but with never a jar. When a fence rose before her, she rose and cleared it in lovely style, tucking up her heels beneath her in the most approved manner, which a trained hunter might have envied. Over the meadows she struck a hotter pace; in the rough ground she went more slowly, but still fast enough. And all this while the rein was dangling loose on her neck!