Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  He began to kick at the loose planks, grumbling so that Moonshine came halfway through the door and set up a tremendous din, pawing to find out what was the matter, until the first word Lee had ever spoken to him in a harsh voice reduced the horse to a high-headed silence. Lee continued to explore. In one corner a cheap little cast-iron stove sagged toward the floor. Beside the window hung a strip of what had once been a curtain, of a weather-faded pink. A bit of yellow paper fluttered in the corner, and he picked it up. He could make out the accurate delicacy of a girl’s handwriting, but the ink was too blurred for reading. A moment later he kicked away a section of the fallen roof and found beneath it a glove, uncrushed. Garrison picked it up. It was a woman’s glove, for the right hand, and made of tanned kid. The frayed tips told why it had been abandoned. The leather was femininely soft as he drew at the glove aimlessly and squeezed three fingers into the palm. At this a foolish thrill brought him out of his daydream. He hurried over to the corner and found the bit of paper once more. It was the beginning of an unfinished letter, and it proved that she who lived in this cabin, who wore this glove, who wrote this letter, was young. If she were young, might she not be beautiful? Yes, a sweet and startling surety came to him as though her bright ghost whispered from a corner. But where, where was she now? He brushed past Moonshine into the open.

  Below him in curling range on range the hills poured down to the plain. Men lived there, men labored there, wedded in yonder blue distance.

  A soft nose touched his shoulder. Guiltily he began to caress the stallion, but at length his hand fell away, and he found himself staring once more into the horizon. So he folded the glove and stowed it in his hip pocket with a frown.

  “Why, Moonshine,” he said, “I’ve been cussing out the world without remembering that I don’t know a thing about it. I’ve never known a man, really. I’ve sure never known a woman. Mountains are all well enough. But they can’t talk to you. They can’t smile at you. Why, partner, you and me have got a lot to find out about. Let’s start the trail.”

  If Moonshine did not fathom the peroration, he at least understood the act that followed it, consisting of a leap onto his back and a touch of heels on his flank. He was down the valley with a toss of the tail and a lift of the head.

  Until the dusk they traveled south over the hills, but in the first soft falling of the dark Lee made for a campfire that twinkled in the distance and then shone out like a huge yellow star. The star grew into a leaping fire, with a man moving in black silhouette on one side and a pack mule cropping dead bunch grass, on the other.

  Moonshine began to dance in anxiety, and Lee, to encourage him, dropped to the ground and walked on ahead. His own heart was warm long before he came into the heat of the fire, it was so marvelously good to see a human being again. As he came into the circle of the firelight, he called out a greeting, and the camper whirled with an exclamation. The sight of him stole half of Lee’s joy for such a starving bit of manhood he had never seen before. He was, perhaps, an inch or so over five feet, and so thin that even under heavy cloth one was constantly aware of hunched shoulders, elbows, and knees. So shrunken was his flesh that one could see the death’s head through his features.

  His greeting for the newcomer was a shrill cry and a reaching for a gun. Indeed, the appearance of Lee was by no means reassuring. His long hair was blown forward about a face covered with ragged beard; he was more than half naked; and he was attended by a gray horse out of a dream, that was ridden, apparently, without reins. Moreover, this fellow was brown as an Indian, and his eyes by the firelight seemed as wild and bright as the eyes of the horse.

  The pistol wobbled in the shaking hands of the little man, while he cried: “Keep off, chief! I need plenty of room, understand? Don’t crowd me, because, if you try to jump this gun, you’ll finish off. Heap plenty room, chief, understand?”

  The big gun in the unpracticed hand set Lee trembling, but, although he pushed his hands above his shoulders, he could not help smiling at the stranger’s fear of Indians.

  He explained amiably that he was a cowpuncher, not a redskin wanderer, and briefly told how he had trailed Moonshine and worn him down at the expense of months of labor. Perhaps his smile was the only necessary part of his explanation. The first mention of the horse was the concluding touch, for the little man forgot about his gun and stepped closer to Moonshine. The stallion crowded up to the back of Lee in fear, snorting and stamping, while the man of the campfire moved about him.

  “Nice show horse,” said the little stranger at length, nodding his head, “and he’d do for a lady’s saddle work, I guess. But what he needs is legs. That’s what a horse runs with — how can he get along without ’em?”

  “Get along?” cried Lee, “why, man, this is Moonshine! Get along? He can get along all day and.—”

  The other raised his hand. “What can he do six furlongs in?” he asked. “Suppose I was to try to work him a mile in forty-five? Why, he simply couldn’t stretch it, that’s all! I could fan dust in his face with a five-year-old maiden that never limped a half in fifty-two! You walked a thousand miles for — that?”

  Lee was blind with anger, but the usefulness of the man tied his hands. The little man took the silence for surrender, and he continued more kindly. “But I always say that a man’s horse is like a wife, you can’t judge him by what he plays. I seen old Sure-shot Billy himself drop ten thousand on a three-legged filly, Mischief, to beat Kitty Bellairs, herself. I seen Sure- shot lay that wad myself. ‘Billy,’ said I, ‘if you want to get rid of some money, for heaven’s sake, remember your friends and let the bookies go.’”

  He laughed prodigiously at his story, his laughter sounding like the crowing of a rooster, and, when Lee chuckled at him, it did not occur to the man at the campfire that a few moments later Moonshine had eaten his first grains of barley from the hand of Lee, and Lee himself was supping on the fare of Buddy Slocum.

  The withered little man was so glad of company, so full of talk, that he gave Lee no time to answer an opening volume of questions, but followed at once with an account of himself. He was an ex-jockey who, having made a few thousand dollars by a lucky coup on a long shot, had read at the same time an obscure account of the strike at Crooked Creek, and had resolved that while his lucky spell was on him he would go West to dig gold from the ground, instead of out of the pockets of the bookmakers. It was a sad decision, said Buddy Slocum. Everything had gone wrong from the first. Finally he had reached a town within striking distance of the mines and had crowned the follies of his expedition by buying a pack and pack mule and going off among the hills. Of course, he had lost his way, and, after rambling four days, a horseman, bound for Crooked Creek, had passed him and directed him again. Now the mines were only a short distance south, and they were marked by a mountain nearby whose summit glittered with an outcropping of white rock, visible afar. In the meantime, his stock of money was shrunk from several thousands to hardly as many hundreds.

  However, now the mines were not far off. Before the week was out, who could tell? He might be rich and already started back for Broadway.

  To this tale, that lasted until the tins had been washed after the meal, Lee Garrison listened with a growing dissatisfaction. This ugly hard-eyed cheat began to seem typical of the entire race of men to which he was returning. He only saved himself from heavy melancholy by concentrating on the speech of the ex-jockey and trying to forget the speaker. The name of the mines gave him a chilly sense of the length of time he had been away from the world. Before he started on the trail of Moonshine, many weeks before, there had been no word in the West of such a place as Crooked Creek. Buddy Slocum now reached a stopping point and proposed a game of stud poker.

  “I been playing solitaire,” he said, “and that’s like Christmas without turkey.”

  Lee refused; he had no money.

  “Stake a share in Moonshine,” pleaded Buddy. “We’ll start as small as you like,” urged the man of the racetrack. “There’
s a rope on the gray that’s worth a dollar. Put that up. You’ll have poor man’s luck.”

  It was true prophecy. He could not lose. That last of the deal, that fluttering fifth card that decided one’s fate in stud, was always a lucky card for Lee. In five minutes his dollar was twenty, and Slocum promptly raised the stakes with a sigh of satisfaction as he saw the game take on some semblance of real earnest. His new energy, however, brought him no better fortune. His losing was not a fixed habit. From twenty to a hundred was a quick step for Lee. From one hundred his winnings rose to two, while the manner of Buddy Slocum gradually changed from careless assurance to a cold and sneering intentness.

  “Beginner’s luck,” suggested Lee.

  “Beginner’s luck?” echoed the other with emphasis. “Beginner’s luck? I guess not, Garrison. But go on with the game. I ain’t howling. First time I’ve been the fall guy in quite a while. Keep right on trying, pal!”

  Just what Slocum meant, Lee could not understand for a time, but it was easy to see that the ex-jockey was in a silent temper. A few minutes later Lee won a fat bet with four little sevens over three jacks and a pair of aces, and Slocum rose to his feet.

  “I’m through,” he said. “I’ve got fifty left, and I’ll keep it for luck.”

  Lee dragged the entire quantity of his winnings from his pockets. It was more cash than he had ever seen before. The bills were fives and tens, and now he crunched scores of them under his fingers. One escaped and tumbled away across the tarpaulin on which they had been playing. Buddy Slocum’s foot stirred, but he resisted the impulse and let the greenback roll past.

  “I can’t start with a rope and get all this,” said Lee frankly. “Besides, I was playing for fun, not for the coin. Take it back, Slocum. You’re mighty welcome to it.”

  This brought a snarl from Slocum, a veritable animal whine of rage. Instantly he was in a trembling, panting fury. He was no cheap sport, no yellow four-flusher, he declared. But from the very first he had suspected Lee was crooking the deal. Now he knew it. But let it go. The world was a small place. They would meet again, and then let Lee beware! In the meantime, the mountains offered plenty of room for them both, and he invited Lee to start for new quarters.

  Lee started, of course, and that night he was for long unable to sleep when he finally found grass for the gray and shelter for himself under the lee of a hill. Shame and disgust, as he reviewed the scene with Buddy Slocum, kept him awake, turning from side to side and gritting his teeth. This, then, was a foretaste of what he was to expect in the society of his fellows?

  Here he drew out the glove and ran the soft leather through his fingers. The strange-hearted hope rose again, and with it the feeling between sorrow and laughter. After all, there was a rustle and crisping of money in his pocket, and that meant feathering for his arrow that would carry him far in the pursuit.

  He began to try to visualize her face. Before he succeeded, he was asleep.

  XII. CROOKED CREEK

  IT WAS NOON before Moonshine topped the northern ridge overlooking Crooked Creek. Darting back and forth among the boulders, a tan-colored stream, frothy here and there with the speed of its going, Crooked Creek had torn for itself a sharp-lipped caqon.

  From ridge to ridge the gulch had been hewn through solid rhyolite. How many thousands of drillers, how many tons of dynamite would have been needed to duplicate that excavation? Lee wrinkled his brow. There was pain of labor even in the thought. But the beauty of that rock! Wherever erosion had trenched away the stone were pigments unrusted and undimmed. Weathering could not tarnish that pale straw yellow or canary tinted with green. There was a lilac mist, streaked through and through with heavy cardinal, and yonder a lavender haze with chalk-white strata above it. And all these colors in solid rock. To Lee it seemed rather a bank of fog pierced with sunset colors, living with beauty.

  But between him and the creek the soft and mingling hues of the rhyolite were cut athwart by a fish-fin ridge of dirty, yellow porphyry. Two miles up and down the gorge it ran with the mines distributed about it — forty or fifty dumps, Lee estimated, and over each was a gallows frame for the whip or upright for the windlass, and every stick of these timbers were painted dark red. As if color were needed in Crooked Creek.

  There were myriad noises afloat in the gulch where a hundred double jacks rang on the drill heads, where men were shouting, where windlasses squeaked and the horse-turned drums were groaning. Moreover, all these voices struck through the rarified mountain air. But though cables shrieked and hammers rang, the desert silence was more powerful than all the uproar. From the opposite cliffs, echo melted ten voices together and flung them across the valley tenfold magnified. Yet the mountain quiet cradles the noise into harmonies. Half a mile away a miner was shooting eight ringing blasts, but they blew to the ear of Lee like eight notes of music.

  The mines themselves were of the least importance to Lee. It was the town he wished to see, and what a town it was. It ran the full length of the gulch, not more than a stone’s throw in breadth at any point, but two miles long, an amazing huddle of tent tops and roofs, given a living shape by the sinuous twisting of the river. Below the town the hills fell away at once to the flat, and the rock-tearing river became a placid little stream, and by its left bank a road wound away into the lowlands.

  It was an amazingly busy thoroughfare over the naked plain. The air was so thin, so dry, that distance reduced objects in size, but did not blur them. Five little wagons, each drawn by six or eight Lilliputian nags, pushed up the slope. The dust clouds rose and melted away. He felt the labor of the team, nodding in rhythm. It seemed surprising that he could not hear the creaking of single-tree and wagon bed. Farther off some riders singly, or in groups, and another caravan were working out of the blue horizon. Another sound of blasting struck up the slope at him like a giant shouting to the world in a great, thick accent — gold!

  With joy in his throat he sent Moonshine down the slope. He wanted to sing, to shout, for under the morning shadow that was sinking in the gully was power which could be dug out of the earth and held in his hands — gold! That great magician could find him the lady of the glove and make the road to her only a step. Moonshine swayed on a perilous course among the boulders, but Lee Garrison had raised his face to the glove that he flaunted on high, and she whose hand had once filled it was now so clear, so smilingly near, that he could almost see the gleam of her eyes at the end of this trail. She had been etched in his brain before with delicate touches, pale as a vapor in moonlight, but now she was just around the corner from his hope.

  He dropped into an increasing uproar in the heart of the valley. It seemed that so many men breaking ground must surely sink a way to the very roots of the hills. In the meantime, he had no opportunity to look about, for Moonshine was dancing like a cat on wet ground or crouched with shuddering fear under a sudden weight of racket. With soothing hand and voice Lee kept him on the trembling verge of panic, but it was growing doubly difficult. Men began to tumble out of the mines and came to watch the passing of the half-naked brown man on the white stallion. Never were such men as these miners, so huge, so grimy, their faces besmudged with a stubble of beard. They came, some of them, with the eight-pound hammer still weighing down their hands. Every face was a new dread to Moonshine. He went along with tensed, cat-like steps, and now and again, pausing an instant, he jerked up his head and looked with wild eyes toward the blessed peace of the mountains. Yet he did not bolt, not even when the miners laughed and pointed at the rider.

  As for Lee, he accepted that laughter with an ease that was amazing to himself.

  It had been so long since he had seen men — except the rat-like countenance of Buddy Slocum — that he overflowed with good nature. In the other days he would have been tortured with shame to be made such a public show, but men who are starved forget fear, and Lee was famine-struck with need of human society. He laughed back at the crowd and waved a brown arm to them. Then someone in the background shouted: “M
oonshine!” It was a fellow with a face pinched up into the shadow of a vast sombrero. “I’ve seen him with binoculars. I’ve seen him as clear as a picture. It’s the Moonshine hoss.”

  A whisper, washed out from that speaker, spread up the slope on either side and from the distance, where the double jacks were beating, new voices shouted, other men came running. A solid wall of the curious men closed across Lee’s path. He stopped the terrified gray.

  “He isn’t trained to stand for his picture, yet. Let me through, boys,” called Lee. “It’s Moonshine, right enough.”

  What admiration and wonder shone in their eyes.

  They gaped up at him like children, and a path split through the crowd. They volleyed their questions as he rode through. How had he captured the famous horse? What wild work had given him the semblance of a red Indian? How long had he been on the trail? Would he stay in Crooked Creek? There was not time to answer. Many went back to their work with a shouted promise to see him again. But a round dozen remained to escort him in triumph. The dozen in that escort became five hundred by the time they had passed half a block up the dusty, rutted street of Crooked Creek, for, if there were fifteen thousand in that strange city, fourteen thousand five hundred had no better occupation than to rush from point to point to hear or see the latest sensation. All that Lee saw, in his first intimate glimpse of the mining town, was an acre of upturned, grinning faces.