Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  Phil Slader smiled and clucked to the horse. He always drove, for the very good reason that he could get more mileage out of a horse than even the whip of Magruder could manage.

  “My heart aches for you, Doc,” said he.

  “You young whelp!” muttered Magruder. “Well, I hope that this here loss puts a crimp in the pocket money of Alden Turner.”

  “He’s the president of the bank?”

  “He is just that, old son. He is just that, and nothing more, except that he’s the worst skinflint, and the hardest-boiled pig that ever made life miserable for the folks that might happen to owe him a mite of money, here and there along the way. No good — all mean — iron all the way through. That’s the style of that fellow, my boy, and don’t you forget it!”

  Some rumors to the same effect had reached even the rather removed and unworldly ears of Phil Slader; therefore he nodded and digested the tidings.

  He merely said: “But of course you’re joking, Doc. If you got your hands on a hundred thousand of stolen money, you’d be sure to take it right in to the sheriff to be returned to the rightful owner?”

  Magruder laughed and glanced aside until he saw what was at least a semblance of calm gravity on the face of his companion. And then he burst forth into curses.

  “Take it back to the rightful owners!” he cried. “Why, son, folks that are weak enough to let a hundred thousand out of their hands, they don’t deserve to have it. A bank that would lose that much of the coin of its customers — why, it’s a duty to make that bank suffer, I tell you, because it teaches a lesson to the rest of the banks. I never had no use for banks, anyhow. They run people to death. And that’s about all! Push on them reins, kid. We got to get to town!”

  Phil Slader obediently hurried the buckskin along, and they presently turned into the long main street of the little town of Crusoe. But there was no echo of the bank robbery remaining here. If any one expected to learn much about anything except a rodeo in this town and on this day, he was sure to be greeted with a disappointment. All was lost and swallowed in the pervading excitement. And every head that they passed, was turned in the direction in which they were riding.

  CHAPTER XI

  THOSE HEADS BEGAN to turn toward them, after a time, and the boy grew restless. He endured half a dozen gestures that pointed them out. Then he said:

  “There’s a lot of folks in this town, Doc. They all know that you killed my father. And now that you ain’t in any danger of meeting up with Lon Kirby, I’ll just leave you here for a while. I ain’t anxious to be pointed out as the son of bad Jack Slader that was tamed down by the same gent that killed my dad. I’m sort of sick of that, you know!”

  “Are you?” said the big man, with a species of sympathy. “Then run along, old son. You just run along, and I’ll take the hoss out to the grounds myself. Meet you back here about . . . .”

  “I’ll walk,” said the boy.

  “All right, then.”

  “Unless you want to buy me that new hat that’s to keep the sun out of my eyes?”

  Magruder reached into his pocket and sighed.

  “Never mind,” said Phil Slader, smiling. “You’ll be late for the rodeo and the bucking, if you don’t look out. We’ll fix up the hat some other day.”

  Magruder, with a sigh, nodded in great relief.

  “All right, kid,” said he. “So long. Don’t do no fighting. And keep going straight.”

  He laughed as he said it and drove hastily on down the street.

  Phil, standing in the street and looking after the disappearing form of his guardian, had no doubt about the date on which he would receive that promised hat. There had been other promises of a similar nature before this, and usually they came to the same result.

  As for Phil, he would have been glad enough to find himself once more back in the alfalfa field, holding the uneasy handles of the big plow, but now that he was in Crusoe, he could hardly turn about and walk the weary distance. It would be too much like turning his back upon a trial by fire. That, indeed, was what such a visit as this amounted to, to him. And as he started on for the rodeo grounds, he was stepping into the very flames.

  People seemed to have eyes in the very backs of their heads. The moment that he came up from behind, many eyes were fixed upon him. Men and women glided from his path as though he had been some dreadful force of nature — a thing to be wondered at. Only the children stood to stare at him. And he could hear the comments from them as he passed:

  “There’s him, now!”

  “That’s young Slader.”

  “He’s like his dad, only he’ll be worse when he gets started, everybody says.”

  “Jiminy, he ain’t so big looking, is he?”

  “He’s big enough to make trouble, my dad says!”

  None of those voices were intended to reach his ears, but the whispers of children are not expertly controlled. For that matter, he had heard the same things many and many a time before. He knew what the people were feeling and thinking concerning him. And as he stepped among them, the resolution grew greater and greater in his soul to conquer, in spite of all of this doubt and silent opposition. He would go straight, if the very devil himself should come to tempt him — the very devil himself!

  So thought poor, young Phil Slader as he walked through the streets of Crusoe on the very day when the seeds of mischief were to be planted in him — seeds that inevitably had to sprout and grow tall and blossom and bear fruit.

  In this manner, alone even when he was in that gay, chattering crowd, Phil Slader came to the rodeo grounds. The show was already starting. There was a grand parade of contestants of various kinds — ropers, horse breakers, bulldoggers, and what not. Phil Slader, standing well back from the fence, regarded them with an aching heart. He wanted to be in that crowd. He wanted to feel a dancing horse between his knees; to spring into action there before them all and show them certain qualities which he felt surely were in him.

  The procession ended in a great chorus of shouting. And Bill and Joe and Jack and Lefty and the rest had the calls of their admirers in their ears, telling them to do well and bravely.

  He, Phil Slader, was neither cheerer nor jeered. But he stood alone in the crowd, envying the others with all his heart. He would have been happy, he felt, if he had had only so much as a single friendly face to whom to call. But he had no such friend.

  A wild horse race — in which all the horses were untamed, began the program. A rifle cracked to start them. They came in a surging line, with a pony in front — and then a darting mustang lurching into the lead until the five-hundred-yard mark was reached. Aye, still in the lead as they rounded the post which marked the end of the first half of the race.

  A scooting, roan-colored, ugly brute of a mustang, that might have carried an Indian of a past generation on its back, so well did it live up to the strain of its ancestors; this was the horse which turned the halfway mark with two lengths of daylight showing between it and the rest. It looked like a certain winner as it straightened out for the finish line.

  But here young Phil Slader heard a girl’s voice behind him, shrilling musically high above the roar of the crowd: “Go it, Sammy! Go it, old bay! Shake him up, Sammy! Get Rooster going!”

  There was such a savage energy in that feminine voice and so much strength and determination, that Phil felt himself plucked halfway around to look at her. At this moment a thing happened which rooted all his attention to the race. A big, gray horse, which had been lost in the ruck, rounding the halfway mark, now lifted itself into such sudden action that it seemed to be magnified in size two or threefold. It dwarfed the rest of the field.

  The girl was screaming: “Go it, Rooster! Good old Rooster! Go it, boy! Go it, honey lamb!”

  She had stopped calling on Sammy. Indeed, it was plain to the first and most casual glance that Sammy had little or nothing to do with the change. Rooster was running his own race.

  There was revealed some sixteen hands and odd inche
s of glorious horseflesh, head stretched out, ears flattened, foam streaking from his mouth, and that mouth pulled wildly open by the desperate tug of the rider.

  Far from jockeying his horse along to get the utmost speed out of it, Sammy sat braced in the saddle, as though he were astride of a thunderbolt just hurled from the hot heart of heaven. His feet were firm and deep in the stirrups, his straining weight was thrust back, and one could see that he feared the power of the horse, once aroused, might rise to such a scorching speed that man, saddle and all would be swept away, with Rooster going wildly on by himself, naked and free.

  Rooster needed no jockeying. In half a dozen strides he shook himself free from the pack of horses in the race. In half a dozen more, he shot past the flying mustang which had the lead. As he shot by, the smaller animal bolted to one side in uncontrollable fear. It was as though a tremendous lion had just leaped past his view!

  Like a lion, big Rooster went on. He ran by himself. All the sunshine and all the glory was his. Far back behind him came the rest of the horses, worrying their way home unregarded, as best they might. But the center of attention was Rooster, with his rider still braced far back in the saddle and sawing from side to side on the iron jaw of the stallion in a frightened effort to check his final rush.

  A wild yell of laughter and delight burst from the throat of the crowd. The laughter was not at the poor rider — they could sympathize with the fear that was in him — but laughter of joy to see such an incarnation of the wild spirit of the West, made visible.

  Rooster had won. Far away past the finish line, the winner was finally brought up, not by the hand of his rider, however. He had jammed himself through a line of waiting cow ponies and thrown them into confusion. One was flat on its back, pawing and squealing, and two more were crushed low by his charge. But this impact checked him a little, and before he could straighten out in full flight once more, a dozen ropes were on the gray devil and he was brought under control, while lucky Sammy hastily dropped to the ground.

  The rest of the world had ceased, for Phil Slader.

  “If a man had a horse like that!” he said to himself. “If a man had a horse like that — well, what couldn’t he do? What couldn’t he do?”

  He went slowly back among the crowd; he wanted to blind himself to the beauty and wild splendor of that creature. It roused in him an emotion that frightened himself and made him feel as though he were standing in an undiscovered country of his soul. In spite of himself, he could not keep from turning again and looking back.

  “Good old Rooster!” cried that same girl’s voice, so neatly edged that it cut without difficulty through the masculine roar of the crowd. “Good old boy; didn’t I know? Didn’t I know?”

  Phil Slader looked askance, and there he saw her standing on the seat of a buckboard. The horses were unhitched, and moving restlessly back and forth. The wagon was cramped and threatened to be overturned at any moment. In spite of all that, she stood serenely in her place on that seat, laughing and shouting and waving her hand. It was Nell Newell again.

  CHAPTER XII

  SHE WAS CHANGED, of course. You couldn’t pass ten years, or near it, over the head of a child without altering her a good deal. Still, in the main, her heart was unaltered. In the essential person, it was the same Nell Newell that he had first glimpsed on that wintry evening when the wind had howled so loudly and cut so deep.

  He had never forgotten her, and yet he had not known how deep she had sunk in him. For the music which we love best is sometimes unnoticed until it is heard the second time.

  She saw Phil in the same instant, and she recognized him with even more ease than he had recognized her.

  “Hello!” she called, as though they had separated half a day before. “Hello! Yank those horses of mine straight, will you, Phil? Thanks a lot. Jump up here and tell me about yourself, Phil. Here you are. Hello, again! Why, you’re not so big as they’ve been telling me, after all!”

  All this she said, as she ordered him to jump up beside her. As he did the thing which she commanded, she shook hands vigorously, and then balanced herself in her lofty station by resting a hand familiarly upon his broad shoulder.

  “Did you see that Rooster horse run away with that race?” ran on the girl. “Oh, but ain’t he a jim dandy, though? Oh, but ain’t he a sweetheart? Did you ever see such a horse, Phil Slader?”

  “No,” he said faintly. “I never saw such a horse. He’s like a tiger — a regular tiger!”

  “They told me that you were that way now,” said the girl, still smiling and bubbling. “They told me that you could tear things up, just the way that Rooster did when he hit that line of runty cow ponies. But you don’t look changed any. Just the same. Glum and thinking about something around the corner! Oh, you’re not a very happy fellow, Phil, are you?”

  “You make me sort of giddy,” said Phil Slader honestly. “But I have to go now . . . .”

  “Go? Why do you have to go? I have to keep you here. I want to keep you here. I’ve heard so much about you and I was such a nasty little cat when I saw you the last time — a billion years ago, wasn’t it? Oh, what a shoulder you have, though! When I dig my fingers into that shoulder and feel the muscles, I can believe some of the stuff that they tell about you being three men rolled into one!”

  And she did dig her fingers deeply into the shoulder muscles of Phil Slader until the tips of them came close to the quick and in self-defense he had to tighten his arm which threw up a few great, twisting slabs of rubbery muscle that bulged fairly out of her grasp.

  “I better go,” said Phil Slader again.

  “Do I scare you?” said Nell Newell, laughing down at him and patting that mighty shoulder. “Don’t be afraid, Phil. I’m not going to run you away and disgrace you. Only — I’m glad to see you, that’s all!”

  “I’m thinking of the other side of the question,” said Phil Slader. “They’re beginning to stare at you — standing up here with the sort of a man that I am.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked Nell Newell, fixing her bright eyes on him.

  “I’m the son of Jack Slader,” said Phil. “D’you understand?”

  She merely laughed.

  “I know. Slader was the gun fighter.”

  “He was the gun fighter,” said Phil with his usual gravity.

  Her laughter went out. She looked steadily into the eyes of Phil, and suddenly Phil remembered that there was no other person he had ever met who could look into his eyes in this fashion. Other people were apt to glance suddenly aside when he fixed his glance upon them. The eyes of others shrank from him as though there were fire in his look, but this girl eyed him with perfectly easy security.

  “Did your father kill men, really?” said she.

  “Haven’t you heard?” asked Phil, much amazed that there was any person in the world who did not know the full details of the story of his parent.

  “Oh, yes, I’ve heard. But that doesn’t mean much. You know how people will lie when they get half a chance to make a good story out of anything. I thought that maybe they were making a story out of your dad. Weren’t they?”

  “I guess not,” said Phil.

  “You’re proud of it, aren’t you?”

  “Proud of it? Of course not!” He blinked at her, dazed by the very suggestion of such a thing.

  “You’re not, eh?” said Nell Newell. “Maybe you’re ashamed of him, then.”

  “Why,” said the son of the man killer, “he broke the law. He stole things. He killed people. He did all sorts of things that he shouldn’t of done!”

  “I say,” cried the girl in her loud, unsubdued voice, “are you ashamed of him?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose so!” said Phil Slader. For he had never thought of these things by such a light as this.

  “Bah!” exclaimed Nell, snapping her fingers. “If I had a father like that — that tore through other men the same way that Rooster tears through other horses, I’d be so proud of him that I wo
uldn’t be able to sleep at night, I tell you. And you’re ashamed of him! Hello, Sammy! Were you scared to death? But I told you that you could do it! I told you that you could do it, and that he’d win, bless him!”

  “You’ll fall and break your neck,” said Sammy with a brother’s sharpness. “Get down off that seat, Nelly.”

  She was too filled with questions to stop to argue the point. She sat down obediently in the seat, and Phil Slader jumped down to the ground. He felt that it was time for him to leave them, but still he could not take himself away. He wanted to talk more to this free-swinging, careless girl. He wanted to talk about Jack Slader, but most of all, he had never felt such an overwhelming desire to talk about himself!

  The girl was babbling: “How did it feel when he began to run, Sammy?”

  “It felt as though I was hitched to a cyclone,” said Sammy, taking off his hat and wiping his forehead. “It felt terrible, I tell you. That confounded horse just ran right away with me. I thought that he’d jump out from under me and the saddle and all! I tried to pull him up. Might as well have sawed away at a piece of iron. My shoulders still ache. Needs a giant to ride that horse, and I’ll never try it again.”

  “Sammy!” cried the girl, striking her hands together. “Just after you’ve learned how to handle him.”

  “Learned nothing!” said Sammy. “Learned how close I could come to getting my neck broke. I’d give that horse away for ten dollars!”

  “No!” cried Nell.

  “I would though. I offered him to any of the boys, yonder, for ten dollars. But they didn’t want him. They’d seen enough of him in the race, besides what they’d heard of him already. They all know that he’s a bad one!”.