Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Nobody’ll ever get anything on you,” he ventured at length.

  “But what about myself?” cried Jack Chapel. He threw out his hand, but there was no oratorical suggestion in the gesture. It was simply the appeal of one seeking aid. “They took us in and didn’t ask any questions. Why, if the old man had asked questions, he could have punched my story full of holes. But he’s so honest, he doesn’t bother himself doubting. Well...” He stopped.

  The sneak thief once more huddled deeper into the clothes. “Well?” he echoed faintly.

  “Don’t talk. I’m filled full of something... deviltry, I guess. I’m about ready to bust, Alp!”

  V. VICARIOUS VIRTUES

  A STILL SMALL voice warned Lou Alp to be silent and let the mind of his companion work by itself. As one sees lights through a fog and cannot tell whether they mean ships or land or danger, so he stared at the gloomy face of Jack Chapel and wondered what passed behind his eyes. Secretly he rather despised Jack. Such exhibitions of emotion seemed ludicrous to Lou Alp.

  Only one thing could extract any great display of his own inner self, and that was his overlord: fear. Yet, at the end of the chase when he found himself hopelessly lost, he could display the stoicism of an Indian. No third degree could make him betray the secrets of himself or of a confederate. Nothing under heaven could make him talk when he was helpless. The consequence was that each arrest was for a new and different crime, and not once had the police been able to link together a complete record of his doings from his testimony.

  That day, for instance, up to the time when he was shot he was a coward, a trembling, rank coward. But the moment the bullet plowed through his flesh and made him helpless, he became brave. He had endured the torture of the ride with few murmurs, and only the new danger of Chapel’s imminent desertion had shattered his nerves.

  He was, indeed, the exact opposite of Chapel. To Lou Alp the exciting moment was the approach to this house where they knew no one, and where they might be betrayed and exposed. Once they were inside the place, helpless, hopelessly consigned to one course of action, fear departed from Lou Alp just as the fear which made the Indian flee in battle left him when he was in the hands of his enemy. On the other hand, Jack Chapel was perfectly at home meeting active danger, but this house closed around him like a new prison. The storm had been nothing except sound and fury, against which one could battle; but the silence of the house lay heavily on him. He was tormented by thoughts which could never enter the cramped forehead of Lou Alp. Under the sting of those thoughts he writhed. One room held the two men, but a world separated them.

  In a few moments there was a tap at the door, which Jack Chapel answered. Katherine Moore entered with a steaming tray of food and her glance went pleasantly toward the wounded man, so that Lou Alp raised himself on one elbow, expectantly, and smiled back. Chapel took the tray.

  “Thanks,” he said. “But I’ll take care of Lou.”

  The girl glanced at him in bewilderment, his tone had been so sharp. She apparently struggled against a touch of irritation, and then the feeling of a hostess overcame her scruple of anger.

  “We’ll see that he’s comfortable,” she suggested, “and then we’ll both have to go down to dinner. Everything’s about ready.”

  Chapel, on the way to the bed, turned back on her. “I’d better stay here till he’s through. He might want something.”

  She paused, then, “We can leave the door open and hear him if he calls.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll bring a tray up for myself and stay with Lou.”

  This stark bluntness astonished Lou. It was almost as if Jack Chapel considered the girl an enemy. Katherine Moore continued to examine their strange guest in silent surprise. She said at last, laughing a little: “It will be a terrible disappointment to Dad. He’s been congratulating himself on having someone to talk to. As a matter of fact, he’s waiting for you now in the front room.”

  “Then I’ll go,” said Jack sullenly. He eyed his companion with a hopeless eye. “Get along without me, Lou?”

  “Sure,” said the other. “Sure, I can get along without you. ‘S a matter of fact, I’d kind of like to be alone, not meanin’ no offense to you, Jack.”

  Jack favored him with a brief glare and turned on his heel. The girl took the tray and placed it on the table beside the bed while she stacked pillows behind Alp. He watched the movements of her hands in a happy trance. Sometimes as she leaned her hair came close to his eyes, and the firelight was in it. She hummed a little, working over him, and the sound completed the charm for Lou. It seemed to him that he was swept outside of himself and carried away. Something was taken from him, and in its place a light and heady happiness began to run into him. She built up the pillows behind him; she took him under the shoulders and helped him to sit up higher; she put the tray across his knees.

  “Are you comfortable?”

  “Yes.”

  “Need anything more?”

  “Nope.”

  “You must eat as well as you can. Mother says that’s the thing for you. Have to build up lots of blood, you know, to take the place of what you lost.”

  Under his eyes she uncovered the dishes. The fragrance spoke strongly to the famished Lou Alp, and still he could not eat.

  “Let me see you start,” she was saying.

  The sneak thief folded his hands and smiled vaguely at her. “Somehow, I can’t,” he murmured.

  “It’s the pain,” nodded the girl. “I know how it works on one’s appetite. You’re mighty brave not to complain about it. Never a word all this time.”

  Lou Alp was dazed. He, brave? Since his earliest recollection he had been kicked about by stronger men. Brave? One flash of fire in the eyes of another man had always made him sick at heart. Brave? He looked sadly at the girl, for she seemed so bright, so clean eyed, so beautiful, that the old rhyme ran into his head: “None but the brave deserve the fair.”

  “Oh,” said Lou Alp, “I don’t mind the pain, hardly. I’m kind of used to it, you know?”

  A little impulse of sympathy moved the girl to lay her hand over his and press it warmly. “You’re the sort of man my father likes,” she declared, and her smile went through the eyes of Lou Alp and embraced his whole soul with warmth. Something akin to fear was in him and an enormous happiness wavered in front of him. A dream-happiness, and he trembled for fear the delicate illusion should vanish. The world-shattering truth came home to him. He, Lou Alp, was respected and admired as a brave man.

  She was speaking of something else. What she said did not matter. The important thing was to keep her talking.

  “Your friend is a little shaken up, I guess. Must have been an awful shock to hear that gun explode and see you fall!”

  “Him? Shaken up?” gasped Lou Alp. He laughed faint and shrill. “Lady, you don’t know him.”

  He observed that she was frowning thoughtfully, and began to regret what he had just said.

  “He wasn’t nervous?” she asked.

  “He ain’t got any nerves,” declared Lou Alp.

  “Hmm,” said the girl.

  Lou Alp gathered that in some cases she considered nerves a commendable possession. He felt that she was forming a strong prepossession against Jack Chapel, and for some strange reason this fact pleased him greatly. Indeed, Lou Alp would gladly have destroyed her good opinion of every man in the world except one.

  “I’ll tell you how it is with Jack,” he said. “He’s hard. You see?”

  “Ah?” said the girl.

  It occurred to the thief that he must not go too far, for a suspicion of one would embrace them both.

  “But he’s square,” added Lou. “He’s terrible square in spite of the fact that he’s hard.”

  “Terrible square is a good way to put it. He surely has a cold eye.”

  Lou Alp became alarmed. “You don’t see under the surface,” he declared. “In a pinch he’s the best pal that ever stepped. No boastin’, no braggin’, but when the t
ime comes he steps out and does his part. Steady as a rock, true as steel, honest as the day, that’s the sort of a gent Jack is.”

  If he praised his friend, was he not removing the foundation of any suspicion she might have? Was he not, by allusion, strengthening his own safety and good repute in this household? “Birds of a feather,” etc. Then he observed that readily as the girl had been prejudiced against Jack Chapel, she was equally ready to be prejudiced in his favor.

  “Is he all those things? In fact, I guessed at part of them.”

  “Look at the way he done for me,” went on Lou Alp. “It wasn’t his fault I got shot. Then, when a lot of gents I know would of sat down and let me freeze to death, he starts right out to carry me and get me to some sort of help. Tears up his own shirt, makes a bandage, starts the long pull up that hill....”

  “Uphill?” echoed Kate Moore.

  “Downhill, I mean. I got my tongue twisted. But he took me a long way. Most men would of buckled before they carried me half so far. Then he saw the house. Didn’t leave me there in the snow to freeze while he went and got help, but he carried me right down, with his breath comin’ more like a rasp every step. That’s the sort of a gent...”

  His voice faltered and died away, for he looked more closely at her and saw that her eyes were on fire.

  “It was a fine thing to do,” declared the girl. “It was a fine thing. Sounds simple, but I know how hard it was. No wonder he was gruff after all that hard work. And he wanted to stay with you! Why, he has a lot of affection for you, Mister Angus.”

  “Him and me... pals,” murmured Lou Alp.

  He felt, miserably, that the light was gone for him. She stood up. “I’m going down, now. They’ll be waiting for me.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Lou.

  “For what?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  She went lightly out of the room, smiled back at him from the door, and was gone. A weight settled on the heart of the thief.

  VI. CHAPEL’S CHANGE OF HEART

  ALP HAD THAT surpassing mortification, the feeling that he had been defeated with his own weapons, that he had overreached himself. He had talked so hard to remove her dislike of Jack Chapel that he had overshot the mark and made her just as keen in an opposite direction. Before she left she had been looking at Lou through a film, and he knew perfectly well that on the other side of that film was the face of Jack Chapel.

  He writhed in his bed and forgot the tray of food before him. If he had only dismissed Jack with a careless word of reassurance, but he had drawn a clear and strong portrait. Even now she would be downstairs studying the man. This thought led on to further misery, for Lou felt that there was much to be studied in Jack. If she once seriously turned her attention upon him it would be long before she finished the examination.

  Turning restlessly in his bed, he saw that the last light of day was gone and the early winter evening, almost as black as night with the storm, had come. The window was white and sparkling with the crusted snow, but behind it was a field of dark. The fire, dying toward a bed of coals, no longer held the room in shadow but sent a steady glow over the opposite wall and kept the ceiling dim. It was a big, square, old-fashioned chamber with plenty of reach overhead, yet for all the solidity of the wall, the storm pried through crevices, perhaps around the window, and sent probing, cold fingers about the room. These icy touches of the air chilled the heart of the thief. He began to eat but without tasting his food.

  Perhaps in all his life Alp had never seen a thing he desired to possess in another manner than taking it in his hands. The pinnacles of his life had been the moments when a weight of gold glided over the tips of his fingers, or when the cold surface of a rare jewel set the skin of his hand prickling with delight. He looked at those agile, lean, pale hands of his now with dumb lack of understanding. They were his weapons, his only weapons. They were his “open sesame” with which he set ajar the doors to his desires. They were his livelihood. They comprised his profundities and his subtleties. They were almost detached intelligences. They could glide over human skin without alarming the person he touched. They could gesture with the speed of a camera shutter, eluding the most trained and vigilant eye. The nerves of those sensitive finger tips informed him of the mechanism of a lock at the first turning of a knob. In the center of his palm a mind seemed to work.

  Now Alp sat in his bed staring wistfully at the capable hands and realizing that the new thing which he desired was beyond the power of instruments ten times more gifted. In a word, it was something which could not be grasped, which eluded the usual methods of acquisition, which could not be bought or traded for, or stolen. Lifting his eyes again, Alp heard the storm go whining past the house, a lonely sound, and he felt here was music made to order for him.

  What was the matter with him he did not know. Indeed, in all matters of emotion he was younger and less developed than a child. He knew fear from the ground up, but beyond that he was uneducated in matters of the soul. In a vague way he knew that the girl was at the root of his trouble; and yet in what way he could not tell. He had known other girls before. There was the one whom he had taken to the theater out of the slums, where she lived a soiled, small life bounded by the reaches of a dozen streets around one central place of noise, scrambling children, drunken men, scolding women. To that girl he had been a superior power, a voice of all knowledge. They had had a few weeks of intimate companionship, but he soon tired of her and made it very plain to her that she had become an annoyance. The effect of this experience was the crushing of all her ideals and aspirations to lead a life of the better sort. If Alp had been told that he was connected with her failure, or even to blame for it, he would have been the most astonished man in Manhattan. But of such experiences his knowledge of women was built, and therefore it was no wonder that he found a new world in Katherine Moore. She possessed a combination which upset and startled him. He finally sank into broodings over his half finished tray of food.

  How long he remained there without lifting his head he could not tell, but it must have been a long time. When he was roused by the entrance of Chapel, he felt as though he had been wakened from a deep sleep. He instantly straightened among his pillows. Into his thoughts of the moment before, the growing pain of his leg had entered, but now the pain was clean forgotten. An air of excitement had entered with the form of Chapel, and Alp, with his usual sensitiveness to changes, shared the unexpressed emotion.

  It showed in the light, quick step of the larger man. It showed in the manner in which he walked swiftly back and forth through the room. Now and then he stopped in the midst of his pacing, and then went on again. Not gloomily, but as one rapt in a happy mood. Now and again a smile flashed on his lips and his eyes danced. The light murmur of his humming came to Alp in the bed. For some mysterious reason he connected that humming with the humming of the girl. He listened again. It seemed to be the same tune. It went through the heart of Lou Alp with a bitter pang.

  As a matter of fact for the first time in his life he was jealous. In his small soul each emotion was over-mastering. In his narrow heart every desire was a cloud-sweeping thing. Before Chapel spoke, the sneak thief knew that the girl was at the bottom of this sudden mood, just as he suddenly realized that she had been at the bottom of Chapel’s previous depression.

  Suddenly the larger man started and became aware of his companion. He hurried across to him and took the tray. He was filled with concern that his friend had been left alone so long. He apologized because he had not seen that the tray was still burdening his knees.

  To all of this Lou listened in silence. He felt that something was beneath the rush of good feeling. It impressed him as penny alms thrown to a beggar by a newly-made millionaire. He had to cast a film over his eye to keep its coldness from being apparent. Chapel carried the tray out of the room and, when he had done that, he hurried back and sat down on the side of Lou’s bed.

  “Been lonely up here, old man?” he asked, and then wi
thout waiting for an answer: “Pretty clubby supper we had downstairs. These people are all to the good. Fine crowd. No dog. Plain, straight from the shoulder, don’t turn corners when they talk. The old man is a world-beater outside of his stale yarns. His wife is a lady... a lady!”

  He repeated the word with a singular softening of face and voice, but Lou Alp waited for something else, and presently it came.

  “You dropped some pretty good words for me with the girl, didn’t you?” he said, and his eyes were actually moist with gratitude. “Tell you what, Lou, you’re such a silent gent that sometimes I hardly know how to make you out. About as noisy as a snake, not meaning that in an ugly way.”

  “‘S all right,” said Lou quietly.

  He felt like a snake at that moment, and he would gladly have struck Jack Chapel with poison fangs.

  “I made a fool of myself when I met her,” went on Jack. He rocked back on the bed and gathered his knees within his strongly interlaced fingers. “But she dazed me a bit. I wasn’t set for her, you see, and she made me feel that I’d been a skunk. You know how a good girl makes a gent feel?”

  Lou did not know, but he kept his ignorance under a discreet veil. He knew only one thing now, and that was a raging hatred.

  “I guess you made up for the way you met her later on,” he suggested, and smiled for fear that he could not control a sneer.

  Chapel flushed at the memory. “I dunno how it was,” he said, nodding. “She seemed to sort of like me. Kept looking at me in a bright sort of way. You know?”

  Alas, Lou Alp did know, and inwardly writhed in pain. “Go on,” he said rather hoarsely.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Chapel.

  “Matter? Nothin’. I’ve got a bit of a cold, that’s all,” replied Alp.

  “Hmm!” murmured Chapel. Every now and then he forgot what he was about to say and sat smiling into space. “What a girl!” he said at length. “Anyway, she began talking after a while. Sat next to me at supper, you see? I ain’t much at talking, and I had the handicap of knowing that I’d almost insulted her when we first met. But it don’t take any sense to talk to her. She leads the way and a gent can just sort of follow along easy on the trail she makes. She sure carried the lantern for me and told me where to step. Right off she spilled out all the nice things you said about me, partner. Mighty decent of you, too. Fine of you to come out with a bunch of stuff. Somehow,” he paused, and his glance flicked across the face of Lou with a shade of its old coldness, “somehow I didn’t expect anything like that out of you.”