Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

They stared at one another, too deeply moved for the use of explosive words. The sham melted from the face of Magruder and left there only cunning and hard malice.

  “Well,” said he, “I’ll tell you this. There’s only one thing that keeps me from taking you by the heels and slinging you over the edge of the cliff here to mash on the rocks underneath, and then to wash away down the river.”

  “The one thing is the way that I’m needed at the hotel,” said Phil.

  And even Phil blinked with surprise when Magruder answered as calmly as he: “Ay, kid; you’ve hit the nail on the head!”

  CHAPTER VII

  AFTER THIS, A pause fell between the two and into the pause ran the deep voice of the river, humming like a chanted chorus far below them. But the mask was now thrown off, and each saw the fact as the other revealed it.

  “That’s good,” said Phil, at last. “Now we’re open and square with each other. Dog-goned if it don’t tickle me to see how plain and open you’re hating me with your eyes!”

  “It tickles you, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll tickle you less before I’m through. I say that you’ve put your finger on the sore place. I need you at the hotel. Everybody wants to have a look at the son of Jack Slader. They know him, by the pictures, anyway. And they can see him all over again in you. They come along there to study the makings of a bad man. If it wasn’t for you, my hotel wouldn’t take in five dollars cash in a week!”

  “Aye,” said Phil. “I know that.” He added with heat: “And there’s one thing that the fools don’t understand — that I won’t turn out crooked. I’m gunna go straight in spite of what everybody expects out of me. I’m gunna go straight as a string!”

  His enthusiasm was all boyish, now. It faded as the other replied:

  “I’ve told you why I need you and need you bad. I like the easy life there at the hotel. Nothing for me to do. The colored boy does all the care of the hotel. The chink does the cooking. You do the chores, and all that I got to do is to lie back and count out the money, as she rolls in, and play the big man in front of the crowd.”

  Phil nodded, smiling a little for the first time. “Why, Uncle Doc,” said he, “if you’d always be fair and square and in the open with me, like this, I’d pretty near come to like you! It ain’t your crookedness that I hate; it’s the sneakin’ way that you have of pretending to be a regular saint that makes me sick of you!”

  Magruder waved this pleasant comment aside. He went on: “I’ll be frank and open enough with you, kid. You’ll wish for some kind lies, before I’m through with you! You’ll wish for them a whole lot! I say that those are the reasons why I need you. Then I’ll tell you what’s against you. I know that you hate me, I know that some day you’re going to turn bandit and crook, just like your old man. It’s in your blood — bad blood, and it’s sure to come out!”

  He smiled a little with a savage satisfaction as he brought out this point, as though he knew beforehand exactly how the taunt would affect the boy. He was not disappointed; it brought a yell of rage from Phil.

  “You lie!” cried the son of Jack Slader. “You lie like a coward. Let me get away from these here ropes, and I’ll make you eat them words like a. . . .”

  He choked with his blind fury and then leaned back in his cords, panting, and crimson of face.

  “You’ll go crooked,” went on Magruder, with the same fierce delight in the pain which he was inflicting. “You’ll go crooked, because all of the crooked signs are in you. What makes a man a crook? Knowing that he can shoot straighter and hit harder and run faster than other folks. That’s what makes him a crook. He says to himself, why should I go ahead and work my hands off to make a few dollars — no more than the rest of these bums are making? All that I got to do is to lie back easy and let them make their wages. And when they’ve collected, then I’ll just go around and collect from them — with a gun!”

  “That’s the way that you’d work it out!” cried Phil, trembling. “You’d work it out that way, if you had the nerve to try it!”

  The big man waved this taunt away from him. “I’m getting down to the brass tacks, now,” said he, “and I want for you to listen like you’d never heard me speak before. I say that you’re going crooked, and when you do you’ll come for me like a cat for milk. I’ll be older and slower and not so strong, then. I’m thirty-two now. In another ten years, I’ll be forty-two, and there ain’t so many springs in the muscles and the nerves of a man, when he’s forty-two. You understand me? And when you come for me, most likely you’d get me good. You’d murder me, Phil!”

  The boy waited, saying nothing, watching with a consuming interest.

  “Now,” said the hotel keeper, developing his idea slowly, “to keep you from murdering me, one day, the main thing is just to pick you up by the heels and heave you into the river down there. If you’re ever found, what’ll people say?”

  “Don’t you say it!” cried Phil, writhing as under lash. “Don’t you dare to say it, or I will find a way to kill you!”

  “They’ll only say,” said Magruder, choosing his words with a devilish care, “that the son of bad Jack Slader was picked up dead — and a lucky thing that the hangman was saved work by that.”

  “No!” screamed the boy. Tears of passion and of helpless revolt stood in his eyes. “No,” he shouted again. “Curse you, I say no! They won’t dare to say it! I’ve never done a man harm; I’ve never so much as hit a boy, even if he was bigger than me!”

  Big Magruder rocked himself back and forth and chuckled. “You’re poison, kid, and you know it. You’re poison and the other folks can see what you are. It’s written right there in your face for them all to read. But do you have to ask me? Can’t you see in their eyes what they think of you? Can’t you hear it in their voices when your back is turned?”

  The head of Phil dropped upon his breast.

  “Now listen to me,” went on Magruder. “I want you to understand that I could throw you over the cliff, and nobody would so much as guess what had happened. If they did, they would only be glad that the world was saved from seeing you grow up as bad as you promise to be — and I tell you, kid, that the fear of you as you may be one day would make me a fool not to kill you. But there’s one thing that stands in my way. There’s one thing that holds me up.”

  “You like your easy time!” said the boy, sneering. “Oh, I knew that that would come out some day.”

  “I like my easy time,” admitted Magruder without the least trace of shame, “and I know that there is one thing that I can trust to in you. If I get a real promise out of you, you won’t break your word.”

  “Would you trust the oath of a crook?” muttered the boy.

  “I don’t try to explain it,” said Magruder. “All I know is that it hurts you like the devil to break your promise. I don’t know that you’ve out and out lied in these four years — which is pretty near more than human!”

  The boy sat a little straighter.

  “Now, kid,” said Magruder, “I make you a good bargain. You give me your word to stick by me — not forever, but until you’re growed up and my hotel is so dog-gone well established that folks won’t have to be dragged there to see you. Say you swear that you’ll stick by me for ten years at the hotel, and then you’ll be free. And besides that, you’ll swear that no matter what happens, you’ll never raise a hand against me.”

  “Or else?” questioned the boy.

  “Or else I chuck you over the edge of the cliff and lean over to watch you splash down there below. You understand me?”

  “Suppose,” said Phil, apparently finding this a reasonable bargain enough, “suppose that I find out, some day, that you did murder dad, instead of fighting him fair and square?”

  “I’d have your oath to protect me, if you was to get such a fool idea into your head,” said Magruder. “What’s your answer, kid?”

  “I couldn’t do it,” said Phil. “I wouldn’t give you no oath. If I found out. . . .” />
  Magruder, with a shout of anger, caught up the boy and swung him back and forth.

  “Now talk turkey and talk it quick,” said he.

  “I’ll see you cursed first,” said Phil Slader. “Do you think that I’m a welcher, to be bluffed out like this?”

  Magruder flung him down with a groan. “I’ll have your oath — for ten years you work for me and never leave me, no matter what happens. For ten years, you’re my man, kid. You take care of me — fight for me — stick right by me through thick and thin. And no matter what you might get against me, you pocket it up. At the end of the ten years, you’re free to murder me the next day, if you can!”

  “Ten years,” said the boy slowly, and he closed his eyes in thought. “It’s being a slave, pretty near, for ten years,” he translated. “But I got to do it, I suppose. Magruder, cut this rope, and I’ll shake hands with you on that deal!”

  CHAPTER VIII

  IT IS NOT pleasant to skip ten whole years in a life as eventful as Phil Slader’s. There was hardly a month that something did not happen to him, in one way or another. But there are ways of summing up even such a period as this.

  For instance, one might say that he spent the ten years working for Uncle Doc. Or again, one might say that he spent those ten years fighting silently to win public opinion to his favor. Each of those remarks could stand a great deal of expanding.

  He worked for Uncle Doc Magruder afield and in the house, and as time went on he became not a dulled attraction, but an exceedingly greater one. For, as he stretched up out of boyhood to youth and then toward man’s estate, a keen expectancy began to develop. Here and there were people who pointed out that the boy had done nothing wrong, and there was at least a chance that he might turn out as well as another. But for one who retained such flattering ideas, there were a hundred who shook their heads when they looked at the boy and then compared his features with those of the pictures of his father.

  “Or worse!” was the common remark. “As bad as Jack Slader or even worse. Because there was something gay about Jack. But there’s nothing gay about this gent. Mean looking — that’s what he is.”

  Again and again turned up the phrase which Magruder had put into circulation so often.

  “Bad blood will out!”

  So they shook their heads, and the word went far and wide that if men cared to look upon the face of the next outlaw who would terrorize the mountains, they had better ride their horses in the direction of the hotel near Crusoe, where Doc Magruder was the host, because they would see, in the flesh, young Phil Slader, son of Jack of the same dreadful name!

  And they came in steady shoals. One might think that fourteen years would have dimmed their memories. But memories do not dim in the great West — not when they have to do with a figure of such epic proportions as that same Jack Slader. They had heard their fathers and grandfathers speak of him. He was as familiar a picture as ever, and when they rode out, their eyes bright with the memories of him, and saw young Phil, they came away again speaking in voices ominously low.

  “The sheriff should keep a close eye on that young man!” was the common opinion.

  Then they would carry their doubts and their head-shakings to Sheriff Holmer, the fattest and the most cheerful sheriff who ever groaned on the saddle of a Rocky Mountain trail. From Sheriff Holmer they met no very great encouragement, for he was as apt as not to say to them: “I hear you folks talk. But what’ll you have me do? Put him in jail before he’s done something wrong?”

  “Well, sheriff,” they would say, “you know that ‘an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.’”

  “Cure him of what?” the sheriff would make answer. “What’d you ever hear of him doing?”

  “Look at his face, and you’ll see what I mean!” they would caution Holmer.

  But Holmer invariably replied: “He’s the only kid in the county that don’t pack a gun, and that don’t go shooting.”

  “Rabbits ain’t the kind of game that he’ll be after!” they said to Holmer.

  “Well,” said Sheriff Holmer always, in concluding these debates, which were apt to grow extremely heated, “all I can say is that that lad walks quiet and talks quiet and never passes any lip to his elders and never fights. Have you ever heard of him pulling a knife or a gun on any one? Have you even so much as heard of him using his fists on anybody? I tell you that I’ve kept my eyes open and my ears open, and I ain’t heard or seen anything like that connected with young Slader. No two men are alike. Not even father and son. Leave the kid be, say I!”

  These friendly speeches on the part of the sheriff did not change the course of public opinion. Let a few think what they would, the great majority were prepared to hear of some dire catastrophe enacted by the hands of Phil.

  He knew it, of course. And it was for that very reason that he watched himself with a more than scrupulous care. No doubt he had as many hungerings after a day of sport with his gun as any other youngster in the whole range. But he never let a gun come into the grip of his fingers. Frankly, he was afraid of himself. For who can be so thoroughly sure of himself that public suspicion, long maintained, will not at the last eat into his soul and make him afraid of what may come out of his own hands? The same stern self-control which had prevented him from striking young Sammy Newell on another day, kept him from entering into other quarrels. As a matter of fact, he did not need to be overcareful in this for the simple reason that other young men of his own age refrained from suggesting disagreeable subjects to Phil Slader.

  I suppose, on the whole, that there was never a more thoroughly unhappy young man in this world than was Phil, as he lived through his novitiate.

  He was twelve and a month more, when he had entered into that ten-year agreement with Uncle Doc Magruder. His twenty-first birthday found him still living according to the letter of his promise. He hated Magruder; he knew that the hotel keeper was making daily capital out of his ward. He knew that a thousand insidious lies were being circulated about him by Magruder’s sinister tongue. But still he controlled himself.

  Work was his refuge. Magruder had nothing to say against schemes of labor which were for his own benefit. The result was that the forty acres around the hotel were improved as no other forty acres in the whole county, though the county was as large as an Eastern State. There were thrifty rows of apple trees flourishing at a great rate, hardy stock which endured the sharpness of the winters and in the autumn bore a great, red-cheeked fruitage, so many tons of it, in strong barrels, that Magruder could not use all of the fruit for cider and had to send some away to sell in the towns, getting such a price for it that he was amazed. Besides the orchards, there were some smooth acres along the creek which were flattened and checked by Phil with much labor, and brought into bearing of alfalfa.

  When water was needed for the various crops during the summer, a neatly arranged dam piled up the waters in the bed of the creek until the alfalfa stubble could be flooded. Beside apples and alfalfa, he kept cows enough to turn out a good supply of butter — far more than the hotel could use. And another handsome profit, from the excess, flowed into the pockets of Magruder. For all of these affairs cost him very little.

  At the urgent and repeated plea of Phil, he had finally allowed him a little spare money. With that money Phil Slader had fitted up a forge and blacksmith shop. Plowshares were sharpened there, and the rickety, rolling stock on the little ranch was repaired with fresh ironwork. The neighbors, too, came into the habit of bringing down their broken wagons and their disordered mowing machines to Magruder’s place. Magruder’s price was no cheaper than that of the Crusoe blacksmith, but the work was better, and besides, it was a pleasure to be able to say: “That rake was fixed up for me last week by Jack Slader’s son!”

  All of these avenues of revenue constantly increased, at a rate which astonished even the optimistic mind of Doc Magruder. He should have accumulated a fat bank account on the strength of all this income, piled on top of the tidy s
ums which the hotel itself brought to him, but one of the little weaknesses of Doc was poker, a habit which tends to keep a man’s purse as thin in the ribs as a healthy dog.

  If you wonder why men did not attribute more undoubted virtues to such an industrious youth, the key was, on the one hand, their natural suspicions of Jack Slader’s son, and on the other hand the tales which Magruder was constantly pouring into their ears.

  “He’s just preparing himself for a break,” Magruder would say. “Look at those hands of his! They got to be busy. He’d die if he didn’t have something for them to do. Jerking a gun out of a holster would please him a lot better than any other kind of exercise, of course, and since he can’t do that, he falls back on nursing the handles of a plow or swinging a sledge hammer. Listen to him yonder. Listen, will you? D’you think that that’s a tack hammer that he’s rattling out the strokes with so fast? No, sir, that’s a fourteen-pound sledge. Wait till I open the window and you’ll hear it more plain. Fourteen pounds, and he handles it like a feather — like a feather, gents!

  “No, sir, he’s got to let off his steam some way, and what the jangling of that iron on iron means is: ‘Some day I’ll take this out on all the suckers that have let me grow up to be a man! I’ll show them what they’ve done!’ Because this here kid is a thinker. Silent and dark is what he is, and always thinking. He ain’t busted loose yet. The reason is that though he looks close to thirty, that’s because he has the habit of frowning, which had made him more serious. Matter of fact, he’s not quite twenty-two. And he wants to come fully into himself before he cuts away! And, in the meantime, he keeps busy with work the hands that he means to keep filled with mischief, one of these days!”

  Who can doubt a father when he speaks of the faults which he admits in a son? And who could have doubted big, hearty Magruder, lamenting the sad qualities of the lad that he said he groaned in trying to raise right for fourteen years?