Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  There was no doubt about it. It meant a thrashing, and Lee wondered if he would scream as the others screamed. The thought made him sick. He wanted to die before the test came.

  “William,” said his mother in that same terrifying whisper, “it wasn’t much he done wrong.” The big man only turned his head and looked at her, and his fingers worked deeper into the shoulders of Lee. “I’ll get the switch,” she said.

  “Switch? Switch nothing!”

  She was upon him with a cry, her hands clutching at the breast of her husband.

  “William, you ain’t goin’ to touch him? You ain’t in the right way for it. You — you’ll — kill him. My baby!”

  “Molly, you go sit down.”

  She wavered, and then dropped into a chair and hugged her face in her arms.

  “Don’t do it, Dad,” said Lee. “Don’t you see? She can’t stand it.”

  His father blinked as though a fierce light had been flashed in his face.

  “Good heaven!” groaned Willliam Garrison. “A coward, too!”

  By one hand he still held Lee, and now he turned and strode out of the kitchen and down the back steps, dragging the boy. He threw back the cellar doors with a crash and went down with Lee carried in front by the scruff of the neck. Below it was almost night, and now that the dimness covered the face of his father, Lee, standing in the corner, felt the horror slip from him. He remembered that worried, gentle face that had leaned above him when he had had scarlet fever.

  “Dad,” he said, “I’m not afraid, but wait till tomorrow. It’s worse on Mother than it is on me.”

  “The devil!” said William Garrison hoarsely, and he caught up a billet of wood from the floor. That voice told Lee plainly that he had to do with a stranger, an enemy. He looked about him, and in the corner stood the wooden sword that he had whittled when he first read the story of Excalibur. He caught it by the flimsy hilt.

  “I give you warning,” he said in a high, small voice, “I’m going to fight back.”

  “You are, eh? Come here!”

  Out of the dark a hand reached at him, but he struck it away with the wooden sword. That first blow was the last; Excalibur snapped at the flimsy hilt. A great black form rushed on him. He was whirled about. A bruising, cutting blow whacked on his shoulders. Lee could have wept with joy, for the pain, instead of leaping out at his teeth in a shriek, traveled inward, a deep, silent hurt. There was only the sound of the blows, the harsh breathing of his father, the staggering impacts, and shooting, burning pains.

  A pause with lifted hand. “Have you got enough?” gasped out William Garrison, and a great sense of unfairness rushed through Lee and made tears come in his eyes. He was not being punished; he was being fought as a grown man fights an equal, and all his fine boy’s sense of fair play revolted. If he could have spoken, he would have defied the giant in the dark, but he dared not open his lips for fear of the sobs that made his throat ache.

  “Have you got enough?” repeated William Garrison, thundering. Then: “I guess that’ll do you for a while.” He seemed to grow sober at a stride. “Son, I thought you was a coward — maybe I was wrong. You stay here and think it over — what you done and how you lied — I’m coming back later on.”

  Mr. Garrison disappeared up the steps, the cellar doors crashed shut, and the padlock snapped. At that Lee forgot his pain.

  “He wouldn’t trust me,” he whispered to himself. “He wouldn’t trust me. He locked me up like a dog that’s been whipped.”

  Lee shook his fist in a silent fury of shame and hate, and then sat down to think. Vital, deep emotions did not last long in Lee. His edge had been taken by romance, his sensibilities blunted, but, as he heard the noise of supper preparations begin over his head, he was sure of one thing — he would not face his seven brothers in the morning and see their half-sheepish, half-mocking grins. He was like them, now — something to be beaten into obedience. Then there was a deep rumbling — his father’s laugh.

  He could not believe it, for a time. Then silverware jingled faintly. They sat at the table; they had forgotten.

  “And I’ll forget you!” said Lee in a burst of sorrow and choking shame. “I’ll forget you all, forever!”

  It was a simple matter to escape through the cellar window, which, of course, his father had forgotten, and it was equally easy to steal across the kitchen floor while Paul was telling a noisy anecdote about the school. His voice covered the sound of Lee’s steps, but through the dining-room door Lee saw his mother’s sad face, and he blessed her for it.

  Once in the room that he shared with three of his brothers, he lighted the oil lamp and swiftly set about making up his bundle, for he knew exactly what should go into a bundle when one leaves home. He remembered what Billy had taken in The Adventures of a Young Miner and all the important things that the hero had forgotten. In five minutes his bundle was completed, and he was on his way downstairs.

  He stopped at the foot of them to listen. If there had been one word for him, one syllable to show they missed him, he would have turned back, but they were all exclaiming about something he did not understand, and Lee went out into the night.

  II. THE STAKED PLAINS

  THERE ARE SOME who alter little between youth and manhood, and Lee Garrison was one of these. He was thirteen when he curled up in the corner of a freight car and awoke a little later with the wheels jolting beneath him. A dozen years later, if anyone from Waybury had come across a certain tanned line rider in the Llano Estacado, he would probably have recognized Lee in spite of sombrero and chaps. His shoulders had broadened to the full of their early promise. His face was little changed. At thirteen he had looked much older than his age; at twenty-five he seemed much younger.

  Most cattlemen have to hold themselves to the monotony of their work by steady effort, consciously tensed to be prepared for little things, straining their eyes across miles of shimmering sand to watch the herds and mark the sick or the strayed, until the crowfoot wrinkles come, the brows draw down. Boys acquire a grim, wistful expression that should not be theirs until middle age. But Lee Garrison was not one of those who fight nature. He accepted it. His nearest approach to the alert was quiet watchfulness like that of the dog that sees the rabbit but prefers hunger to the long race in the heat. No doubt this accounted for Lee’s unwrinkled forehead. From a distance he appeared calmly dignified. At close hand his face was rather a blank, except for the occasional swift play of his eyes, and the Southwest, that has not time to ponder over idiosyncrasies or exceptions, put down Lee Garrison as a lazy man and filed him away in its memory under that heading.

  Even granting the celebrated vacuity of Lee’s mind, men wondered how he could stick to line riding. Hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, he journeyed up and down a hundred miles of fence, never visited except by chuck wagon, and traveling to the ranch house, fifteen miles away, only on state occasions. Even at roundup time, when he could have made his five dollars and head as a bronc’-peeler, he chose rather to keep up that deadly routine that drives more sensitive cowpunchers mad. Always he was loading down the fence with that infinite line of posts fogging into view, dipping now and again into a hollow, or swaying in or out to avoid a rock, but usually only a line that went straight across a flat earth, a string of heads dwindling and bobbing up and down to the trot of his horse.

  Twelve hours a day he kept the saddle with hammer, nail, pliers, wire stretcher, and boot sack full of staples. The posts were old, the staples worked loose, and it was a continual mounting and dismounting, a blow with the hammer, a staple sent home, and then back into the saddle again, only to see a strand sagging a dozen yards ahead. Off again, on again, all day, every day — the patience of Indians themselves often gave way to gibbering idiocy after a few months of this labor, but Lee Garrison held out. He stayed by preference. One might have thought that he loved the quiet and nature as the old trout fisher loves it — but the Staked Plains! Countless Spanish daggers were all that showed
above ground level. There were not mountains rolling against the horizon, cool and blue. For life, therefore, the prairie dogs.

  It was one of those that made Lee pause in the very act of lifting his horse into a canter to head for the nearest of his dugouts, for it would be dark by the time he had finished his supper and haste was needed. But the prairie dog stood by his mound, looking like a miniature beaver, his tail jiggering up and down with the fury of his barking. A companion jumped out of the hole and joined in the defiance.

  “Sassy little devil,” murmured Garrison, and jerked out his revolver. The bullet merely knocked a spray of sand over the prairie dogs as they whirled toward safety.

  It was a result that Lee had small time to observe, for his horse leaped straight into the air and came down stiff-legged, swallowing his head. Past five posts he bucked with educated viciousness, but at the sixth he tossed up his head and looked back at the rider as though asking pardon for such folly. Even a painful jab of the spurs only made him switch his tail and break into a perfectly measured lope. The face of the rider, that had lighted for an instant, now went blank again.

  “Of all the no-good horses I’ve ever seen,” said the master, “you’re the worst and the yellow-heartedest, Pinto. When you came out to me, I had hopes for you.”

  The pinto cocked a wary ear back and turned the corner of a red-stained eye.

  “But,” concluded the line rider, “now you can’t pitch enough to make conversation.”

  Yes, he undoubtedly could ride as well as the next man, but as a marksman he was distinctly ordinary. But the sigh he heaved was not on account of the missed shot. It was what that miss signified. When he first arrived in the cattle country, his boy’s mind had been filled with the glamour of it, and he had begun to school himself to be a model knight of the plains — expert rider, shot, and cattleman, knowing all the desert and the creatures of the desert. Only in one ambition had he succeeded — he could stick in a saddle as though he were glued to the leather — and all his other aspirations were so long dead that the thought of them barely served to awaken in him a faint melancholy regret. So an old man sighs as he thinks back to the star-storming aspirations of his youth.

  At the dugout he unsaddled his horse and hobbled him carefully, for Pinto’s chief talent and ambition was to break and run for the ranch house fifteen miles away.

  Next he prepared his supper from the food cached in the dugout, and within an hour after his arrival he had cooked and eaten his supper and spread his bed.

  It was a gray, cold evening, more like January than March, and the high mist that was hardly noticeable during the day now shut away the color of the sunset, and the sun went down red. The prairie dogs no longer chattered, but a bull bat sat on the nearest fence post wailing at him like a whippoorwill, and twice a prairie-dog owl, hunting close to the ground, skimmed past the dugout, a living shadow, uttering the sad cry that always seems to come from a great distance.

  Lee Garrison made himself comfortable in the dugout, lounging with a saddle for a pillow, and a clean lantern ready behind his head, although it was not yet dark enough for artificial light. Behind him lay three books that he touched after the manner of the after-dinner smoker, fingering his cigars and considering which flavor he will choose. It was some time before he made up his mind, and, indeed, to a lover of this sort of reading there was little measure of preference among three such fountainheads of romance as A Thousand Nights and a Night, Boccaccio, or Malory. These were his treasury, of which he never wearied, each of them inexhaustible in incident, thronging with pictures.

  But he suited his daily selection to his mood, having sometimes a taste for the voluptuous adventures of the Arabian tales, and often for Boccaccio, wicked, delightful, chuckling at sin and even smiling at virtue, but most frequently, as on this evening, he chose Le Morte D’Arthur. It was his first love among books and would remain his last, for although A Thousand Nights and a Night might cloy him, or Boccaccio grow tiresome, he never lost his passion for those whom Malory keeps alive in sword and armor at Whitsuntide in Camelot, or at the gate of some dark castle in the forest. He sometimes found the Nights over-rich and Boccaccio flat, but never the style of Malory, rippling alike over great and small, monotonous sometimes, delightfully archaic, but with phrases here and there like sword thrusts, and whole passages of exquisite harmony.

  Again on this night it was Malory. The ragged covers opened, the pages, chipped at the corners, yellowed, stained, slipped away of their own accord. In ten seconds he saw the knight with the covered shield send Tristan hurtling out of his saddlea mighty fall! And he rolled thrice over, grasping his hands full of dirt each time. Lee Garrison followed the fight with motions of his clenched right hand.

  Such was his absorption that he heard neither the rattling approach of the chuck wagon nor the long “halloo” of the driver. Not until Baldy stood at the door, filling it, and his shadow fell across the book, did Lee look up.

  “What I’d like to know,” shouted Baldy, without other greeting, “is why the devil you don’t have regular stopping places regular times. I started this morning right after chow, and I been on your trail ever since.”

  “Sorry,” said Lee, and, although he lowered the book, his forefinger kept the place.

  No human being had come that way in four weeks, and Baldy knew it. Therefore, he pushed back his hat, and his head was as red as his face, while he considered whether or not this indifference were an insult, and if he should take it up as such. He debated, glowering upon the bent head of Lee Garrison. But, after all, it was a man’s privilege to sit silently like a fool owl on a post when a chance for conversation came his way. In a word, the line rider was a nut, and not to be judged according to the standards of ordinary men. Baldy turned on his heel and without further attempt at speech unloaded his cargo and dumped it beside the dugout.

  “What do you want next time?” he snapped out, when the last box was deposited.

  “Nothing,” answered Garrison, and then roused himself a little. No matter how odd a man may be in Texas, he cannot safely forget all obligations of hospitality. “Maybe you’re hungry?” he suggested lamely.

  “I ain’t.”

  “Or needin’ a smoke?”

  “I ain’t.”

  It gave Baldy infinite satisfaction to demonstrate his own powers of curtness.

  “Or thirsty?”

  “Eh?”

  “There’s some water.—”

  “Water? The devil!”

  Garrison sighed with relief and returned with pacified conscience to the book. Here Baldy remembered in the nick of time the most important detail of his errand to the line rider.

  “I brought out another hoss for you,” he said.

  There was no answer.

  “Nice sleepy ol’ hoss,” continued Baldy invitingly.

  He himself and five others of the outfit had been pitched from the saddle by that same dull-eyed outlaw and now, as usual, the foreman sent his intractable mount to the line rider. For it was a well-established and significant detail of Garrison’s reputation that he had never been thrown, at least not to the knowledge of those who had seen him work for five years on the Llano Estacado.

  Baldy looked back at the old, brown horse that stood with drooping head tethered behind the wagon. Its lower hip hung pendulously, and it slept where it stood, but at the sight a sharp pain ran through the left shoulder and hip of the cowpuncher, and his face puckered at the reminiscence. He would have sold his shop-made boots for a quarter to see this silent fool in the saddle on yonder brown horse. He would have given away his vast sombrero with a joyous heart, if he could have driven back to the ranch and told the boys how the dummy was thrown on his head. But Garrison had heard the news without stirring.

  “Ol’ hoss is tied up behind the wagon right now,” went on Baldy with insidious smoothness. “Which you wouldn’t mind having him handy for saddling like that, would you? No work roping him, nor nothing. He’s jest all handy.”

>   The import of this drifted into the consciousness of Lee Garrison. He put down his book with a sigh, lifted his saddle and bridle, and climbed from the dugout. As for Baldy, he masked a smile by rubbing the back of his hand across his mouth while he made his eyes wide, childishly innocent. The brown horse was one of those rare outlaws that has not the slightest objection to the weight of a saddle. Lee Garrison, with his saddle over his arm, paused in front of the sleepy head and looked long and earnestly at the new candidate for his string.

  “Does he guess?” whispered Baldy. “Pray heaven, he don’t guess. He don’t.”

  This last came in the nature of an outburst of thanksgiving, for the line rider stepped carelessly to the near side of the brown and tossed his saddle upon it with such lack of precaution that the stirrup rapped the ribs of the horse loudly. But the outlaw only canted one long, mulish ear forward and opened the opposite eye. Baldy quivered with silent delight.

  “Don’t let there be no warning,” he continued in solemn invocation. “Let ’er hit like lightning at noon.”

  The dummy had foot in stirrup, and now it came — a creaking of leather, a snort, a winged leap into the air, and then came the thudding impact of four hoofs with four stiff legs above them and an arched back topping it all. The brown horse came down with its head between its forelegs, a pyramid, with Lee sitting on the apex.

  After that Baldy snatched his hat from his head, twisted it into a knot, and flung it on the ground. He went through odd motions, swaying from side to side, stiffening suddenly, jerking his hands in, pitching them out, like a cheerleader rousing a rooting section to frenzy, pushing the home team over the goal line. Presently he stood frozen in his last awkward attitude, his face illumined with that mysterious light of beatification that Rafael keeps playing about the eyes of his cherubs.

  “My heaven,” whispered Baldy reverently. “My heaven.”