by Max Brand
Indeed, the widow could only endure one glance at that frightened face. Then she turned away and rested her hand on the arm of the sheriff. “It sickens me,” she breathed. “Oh, to see the poor child crushed down by the weight of—” She could not finish. But suddenly she said to the sheriff: “I’ve seen enough — Sheriff Maine, I’m going to bring him home and raise him so that a few years of happiness will shine into his life.”
“Ma’am,” said the sheriff, “that’s sure a kind thought.” He turned to the cell. “Pierre!” he called.
“Ah!” breathed Pierre and shrank away, sheltering his face behind the crook of his arm.
“Sheriff,” whispered the widow softly and furiously, “what have you been doing to that child?”
And the sheriff could not make an answer.
That day the “poor little orphan” was taken from the jail — allowed his freedom because there was no one to press a charge against him, because the sheriff had reason to believe that the whirlwind would tone down and not go gunning for a Lee. At any rate, Pierre was garbed in the best that the town store could afford, and placed in a buckboard to be driven to the new home. It was the foreman of the ranch himself who escorted the boy out. Afterward, he gave the report that the house servants had passed on to him concerning the new arrival of the orphan at the Winton house.
“He went sneaking around on tiptoe alongside of Missus Winton,” said the foreman. “And every time he seen anything new, he’d let out a little holier — like a girl, seeing a new party dress. When he come to one of them big upholstered chairs, he feels of the cushions first with his hand, and then he shakes his head and sits down cross-legged on the floor.
“‘Pardon me, ma’am,” he says, ‘but I dunno that I can trust a thing like that.”
“‘The poor child,’ says Missus Winton, ‘he’s had the rearing of a savage Indian!’
“And before night she’d got the whole story out of him, about how he’d been kicked around from one place to another and bullied and treated plumb terrible by cruel men—”
The foreman got no further, for his audience broke into a universal groan.
“And that night,” said the foreman, “he shows up in the bunkhouse, just as the boys was turning in. He lights a cigarette and laughs at Missus Winton and himself, and he allows that it’s a pretty hard game to play. He says that she has sent him to bed and come in and kissed him before he went to sleep. Then he busts out laughing and asks the boys who’s game for a round of dice. He shoots craps with us for an hour, cleans up about fifty dollars, and then goes back to the house.
“I sneaked along behind him to see how he’d manage to enter the house. But he went right up the wall of the house like the wildcat that he is. In through the window, and then, while I was standing in the blackness under a tree, wondering at him, something comes humming past my head and goes smash on the tree trunk behind me. That young devil, he’d knowed that I was following, and his way of showing me that he knowed it was by throwing a glass at me hard enough to’ve brained me!”
This was the introduction of Pierre to the house of Mrs. Winton. He was like a young savage, roaming through the rooms at first. But, although every servant in the house knew perfectly well that he was only playing a part, Mrs. Winton herself had not the slightest idea of it. And when a chambermaid attempted to tell her what she thought, the poor girl was discharged promptly because she was accused of being part knave and part fool. After that no one in the employ of Mrs. Winton cared to take the risk that would accompany the revelation.
About a month later, however, John Bender, of the Bender Ranch, rode across to the Winton place and told Mrs. Winton all he knew concerning her protégé. Mrs. Winton went to bed with an hysterical attack as soon as Mr. Bender left — and for three days Pierre Delapin was constantly at her bedside. At the end of that time he could leave her, and he went across country as fast as his horse would carry him to the Bender Ranch. He found that Bender himself was gone.
Pierre turned his horse about and galloped for town. But even in town he could not find John Bender. It seemed that the veteran rancher had decided that this community might not be altogether safe for him once the “poor little orphan” struck his trail. But, while he was searching, Pierre found John’s son, Pete Bender, in front of the store, exchanging bits of gossip. All talk stopped and was supplanted by broad grins as Pierre approached, for he was dressed like a youth about to swing onto the back of a blooded horse for an exercise jaunt through New York’s Central Park.
His riding breeches were works of art. Flaring wide over the thighs and coming neatly and closely about the knee. And his boots shone with hours of careful polishing. For was not a man servant assigned to the sole task of dressing young Pierre Delapin? All these lesser marvels, however, gave way to awe at the sight of the soft white collar of his shirt, and the deftly arranged black bow tie. This in place of a bandanna! Wonder and mirth went hand in hand as they saw these things.
And behold, in his hand was a riding crop with which he idly tapped his shining boots as he stood on the verandah of the store and looked coolly up and down the row of faces where the idlers lounged. He looked extremely young. He looked very boyish, indeed. But everyone sitting on that verandah could recall events in which this same youth had participated. Although there was no revolver in sight on his person, they would have wagered their lives, every one of them, that he was armed secretly to the teeth, and that a long, black-bodied Colt would slide into his hand at need. Therefore, the smiles gradually went out as he picked out his man and walked up to Pete Bender.
“Your dad come over to Missus Winton,” he said, “and told her a whole string of lies about me.”
He waited, but, although Pete had heard his father had given the lie, he did not strike back. He listened, white of face.
“He said,” went on Pierre Delapin, “that I’ve been simply a vagabond and a tramp all this here time — he says that I been nothing but a troublemaker and a fighter all the time. Matter of fact, I don’t know one end of a gun from another. Understand? I don’t know nothing about fighting at all, and if I hear of anybody coming out to her with such lies again, I’m going to — send in a friend of mine to clean ’em up!”
With this he favored them all with a smile, turned on his heel, and walked out to his waiting horse. He sprang into the saddle and was gone in a flash.
For a week the country talked of nothing but the effrontery and the cold nerve of this boy. But not a syllable of that talk was carried to Mrs. Winton.
III. A HEAVY BLOW FALLS
ONLY A MONTH was Pierre Delapin kept at the great ranch house.
“The poor, frightened child,” said the widow, “must be taken away from the country where he has suffered so much, and where his nerves have been so ruined.”
None of the ladies to whom she confided this decision so much as smiled. Although some of them bit their lips till the skin cracked, they managed to control their expressions. In fact, they had been previously warned in the most solemn fashion by their husbands.
“If you chatter about Pierre Delapin,” the husbands and brothers and sons and fathers of these ladies had said, “we’ll have Pierre himself after us — and we’d rather have poison in the air.”
So they allowed Mrs. Charles Hancock Winton to take her own way. Perhaps they were glad to see her make so a huge a blunder, for they had never been able to forgive her for that alien skin that refused to yellow and wither in the dry, southern air of the desert and the mountains. They allowed her to go down her own path of folly, and, even if they had tried to open her eyes, something told them — for they were women, also — that she was too much in love with her illusion to welcome the common face of truth.
Mrs. Winton left the next day for the East, and Pierre Delapin was with her. In the meantime, she had employed a tutor who struggled not so much to teach lessons of the school to Pierre, as to improve his manners and teach him to wear his clothes. It was hard work, but Pierre flung
himself into it with enthusiasm. And, when the month had ended and he stepped onto a train bound for the East, the long, flying hair had been trimmed to a modest length and taught the purpose of brush and comb — he was clad in a well-fitted suit — even the black- brown of his complexion had grown a little paler, and the sunburned, sun-faded eyebrows were beginning to darken. Altogether, if there was still something of the wildcat about him, he was at least a wildcat that could safely be put upon the leash.
Those who saw him appear at the station were amazed. With hungry eyes, they noted down every detail of his appearance. Certainly he looked smaller, slenderer in civilized attire. But, as he was clambering up the steps of the train in the rear of Mrs. Winton, the wind pressed against him, and they saw beneath his clothes the definite imprint of a revolver.
Mrs. Winton had hesitated between two or three tutors and a private house for her protégé, and a berth at a boy’s school of the finest type where he could also get private instruction. When she reached the East, her advisors told her by all means to put him with other boys, and that was how Pierre Delapin reached the academy of St. James.
This was an ancient and estimable institution. The Greek department excelled that of almost any university in the country, and the register of the students was a roll call of names musty with age and heavy with importance. Here, Pierre was to be given careful, private tutoring. He could read, and he could write. But that was all. The rest he must make up and bridge the long gap between six and fourteen. Mrs. Winton abandoned him with a sigh, for it seemed to her that, in placing him in a situation where he was actually inferior to companions of his own age, she had belied his real nature.
Pierre, however, was instantly at home. St. James was aristocratic to a degree, but it was filled with extremely human boys, who had to test all the powers of Pierre at once. They let him pass through the first day without disturbance, except for sundry witty remarks about his large, dreamy blue eyes.
But about midnight three of the older boys entered the room of Pierre to introduce him to the hazing tactics of the school, which were so venerable and so respected that even the teachers did not interfere. The hazers accordingly stole into his room, variously equipped for the scene of torture. But, when they were halfway across the floor, they were somewhat amazed to hear a sound as of the door being locked behind them. They turned to investigate, but now, in the utter darkness, they were attacked by a demon who seemed to have the power of vision where there was no light. He fought in silence and with incredible savagery. His hands and his feet were bare, but they were as hard and as heavy as four clubs. In three minutes one of them was unconscious, and the other three were shrieking for help.
They continued to scream, although their yells grew fainter and fainter, while in the air sang the whistling of a Western quirt. At length the door was broken down by the terrified master, and with his flashlight he illumined a strange picture.
In a corner lay one boy, his head opened with a long gash where it had collided against the edge of the wall, having been impelled by a kick in the stomach. And in another corner lay two of the best-known and most athletic of the older lads of the school, each tied hand and foot, while above them stood a half- clad, brown-bodied youth who wielded in his right hand a quirt that broke skin at every stroke.
It was, of course, a tragedy. They carried the fainting victims out, and the next morning Pierre Delapin was summoned to the office of the headmaster of the school. There he heard the sermon on brutality with sad and wide-opened blue eyes. He hardly understood, it seemed. He only knew that his door had been opened by stealth in the middle of the night, that he had wakened full of terror, and in a frenzy of fear he had attacked dim figures that he saw moving before him.
Here the headmaster interrupted him. He pointed out that a frenzy of terror hardly went with the cool proceeding of locking a door behind three invaders, then binding two of them and laying on the whip. “But how,” he said, overmastered with curiosity, “were you so confident that you could handle the three of them? How did you know that they wouldn’t break you into bits, if you started to lay hands on them?”
“I didn’t know,” said Pierre innocently, “but I hoped that they might be punished for entering my room. That was why I locked the door — so that they would be found—”
“I hope,” said the headmaster gravely, “that you have not done a thing that will make the older boys keep after you until they have turned the tables.”
“Oh,” said Pierre, “I hope not!”
For a single instant a gleam of unutterable and devilish joyousness had lived in his face as he spoke. It took away the breath of the headmaster. He dismissed Pierre with no more words and called in some of the upper classmen. They departed with carte blanche to administer chastisement to the haughty spirit of Pierre, and three days later the punishment was given. This time seven strong football players entered the room of Pierre and fell on him in unison, with bright electric light to aid them.
The story was told long afterward in old St. James of how he thrice worked himself free, even from that mass of strong hands; of how, like a snake, he slipped through arms and legs; of how he kicked and struck with his fist with an equal abandon; of how smashed noses and split mouths and blacked eyes and swollen faces were the fruit of this mighty encounter; of how the clothes were stripped from the body of the fighting Pierre by the hundred of grips which fastened upon him, and which he wriggled away from; of how at last he went down under the weight of persistent force and combined poundage, and, finding himself on his last legs, of how he selected one choice victim, the biggest boy in the school, the center of the football team, and, fastening his lean hands on the throat of the football hero, crashed to the floor with him; and of how, when they beat him senseless and tore his hands away, the football hero was as nearly dead as Pierre.
But St. James believed in heroic measures. They put Pierre to bed for five days, and, while he lay there, his tormentors came to call on him, one by one. They brought him fruit. They brought him confections. They sat by his bed and regaled him with their best tales. When he issued, battered and blue of eye, from the infirmary, he found that the marks of battle and beating upon him were not pointed at with laughter but were praised as proofs of courage.
After that he had no more fights. Even two at a time, the young warriors of St. James had no desire to tackle this fighting demon. After he had tried out for the football team, it was reported that he was a gift from heaven and not a plague. When the spring came and it was found that he had a natural ability as a sprinter, his fame and place in the school were secured.
In the meantime, according to the reports of his progress that his two tutors sent to Mrs. Winton, he was swallowing knowledge whole, not little by little. Those senses that had been trained on the desert were as fine an equipment as a human being could have asked for. He who had read trails so many years found it not difficult to read history. He who had learned to trail and wait patiently had the steady nerve that is necessary for toiling at hard problems in mathematics.
In four years he swallowed the entire course that is generally spread out over eight years in grammar school and four years in high school. In four years he had written his name in brilliant red into the athletic records of St. James. He was the kingpin upon four of their teams, and the entire school worshipped him, while, in the offing, wolf-eyed scouts for universities hovered and made him tempting offers. For, as was universally admitted, here was the finest shortstop, end, sprinter, and tennis player that had heaved in view among the secondary schools in many a year.
It was at this very moment that the blow fell. He was at the end of his last year in the school when Mrs. Winton died. Pierre jumped a train and whirled into the Southwest in time to find her senseless and at the last hour. And for a month he mourned for her with a terrible and silent intensity. At the end of that time a crisp-spoken lawyer informed him that he was staying in the house at the courtesy of the heirs only. For, with characterist
ically slipshod business methods, Mrs. Winton had neglected to mention a syllable about him in her will.
To this announcement Pierre replied by shrugging his shoulders and lighting a cigarette. There was a greater significance in this than a casual observer could have known, for Pierre had been keeping the strictest training for four years, and cigarettes had been banned. He was still smoking a cigarette when, a week later, a prominent alumnus of a great university approached him with a query. The great college was waiting eagerly for his arrival the next fall. In fact, the entire student body was holding its breath in expectation.
Pierre answered that he was grateful, but not interested. He loved the sunshine. He loved the Southwest. And there he would stay. The alumnus was frankly shocked. He had heard a rumor of certain failing of funds, but funds were a small thing. He himself was embarrassed with an overplus of the coin of the realm. He would be delighted to assist him into the blue by meeting all expenses. Moreover, he would even have an eye to the future of so splendid an athlete. But Pierre lighted another cigarette.
“When a man leaves his country,” said Pierre, “and goes to live in England, say, what do you say about him?”
“He’s expatriated, I suppose. He’s sort of a man without a country.”
“Well,” said Pierre, “I have been expatriated, and now I am coming back to my homeland.”
“I don’t understand,” said the other. “I’m as much from the Southwest as you are.”