Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

He was asked where he wanted to go, and, when he said his first need was a bunk for himself and a place for the horse, they brought him to a flat-roofed shack. They waited until the door was opened by a little gray-haired Jewess in blue gingham that shone with starch and ironing. She threw up her hands with a cry at sight of a wild-man riding a horse without a saddle or bridle, and the gesture made Moonshine whirl and leap away. The crowd scattered with a yell of pleasure to see the bucking, but they were deeply disappointed, for, when Lee slipped to the ground and approached the door on foot, Moonshine crouched against his heels, throwing his head high so that he could keep in view all the terrible strangers who stood behind him.

  In a moment the agreement was made. Mrs. Samuels, the landlady of the lodging house, led the way to the rear where a little corral had been fenced with smooth wire. Her son had built it for his horse, she explained, but her son’s horse could be tethered on the outside. So the gray stallion was led through the gate, and Lee closed it upon him. Moonshine bounded to the center, and then veered swiftly around the enclosure. He halted at last in terror, and Lee turned away sadly, for he knew that this was the end of their free companionship and the beginning of slavery for Moonshine.

  He was shown by Mrs. Samuels to her only vacant room. The price was three dollars for eight hours, and Lee, flushed with gambler’s luck, took all three shifts for himself. The room was exactly six by eight. It was partitioned from the hall by one canvas sheet, and separated from the adjoining room by another. The furniture was a cheap folding cot and a chair, constructed from a box. The distinguishing feature was that the canvas flap, that served as a window, opened upon the street.

  “The view would be pretty fine?” suggested Mrs. Samuels, cocking her head to one side as she smiled up to him. “You wouldn’t be getting lonely in a room like that, now!”

  One could not choose in Crooked Creek. She assured him it was the only available room in the town, so he paid his rent and went out to find clothes and a barber. In five minutes a hoarse-voiced, weary man in the store outfitted him with clothes, shoes, hat, cartridge belt, a revolver. In the corner of the store he threw off his old rags and stepped into his new costume. By the grace of chance it fitted him, fitted far too closely for the comfort of one grown accustomed to well-nigh skin-free abandon. The groaning tightness of the boots, the heat and weight of the clothes made Lee remember Moonshine and the encircling turn of the fence. Truly there was a burden in civilization. But somewhere in the background of noises in that busy little town a woman was singing an indistinguishable air. Perhaps it was she whose glove now rested in his breast pocket, for, since Moonshine had become his horse, all miracles were possible. He started eagerly on the trail of a barber.

  In such a camp one might have expected a barber shop to be a superfluous luxury, but luxuries outspeed many a necessity on the road to a gold rush town. There may be a vital shortage of canned beans, but there are sure to be diamonds. Lee found the barber in a shop made expeditiously by leaning a few planks against the side of a building. He sat down on a box to wait while the barber finished with another patron. They chatted busily the while.

  The barber was a stodgy man. His face ran down from a meager forehead into jowls that drooped loosely over his collar; his body sloped out from narrow shoulders to a great girth of abdomen. His lips were generally parted, and the lower one thrust out a little. In addition he had a habit of panting between phrases and motions. In spite of these handicaps, he was managing to do business in two ways with his customer. While he removed the hair from the face of the man, he struck terms for grubstaking the latter.

  “The last one started like a beauty, and then pinched out on me,” declared the man who was being shaved. “I was in bonanza for a day, and after that I was nowhere. You’re sure white for fixing me up for a new start, Gus, but you’ll get back a thousand percent. I know the place — I know the place for it.”

  He started clapping his hands on his knees and could hardly remain for the shaving to be finished, such was his eagerness to start out anew with pack and burro. When he left, he poured out one burst of frantic gratitude. The barber cut him short by thrusting a slip of paper into his hand.

  “You go to Swinnerton over in the store,” he said. “He’ll give you what you want, when he sees that. Now run along. And.—”

  He was interrupted by a crash of hoof beats in the street, and then a roar of voices that acted on the receiver of the grubstake like the reaching of an invisible hand. He lurched from the entrance and sped out of sight.

  “Somebody’s made a big strike,” interpreted the barber, motioning Lee into the chair, and then running a comb with affectionate dexterity through the long masses of hair. “Somebody’s made a big strike, and somebody else has grabbed the news and come in to spill it. What you want? All this taken off?”

  “A clean shave and a short cut,” answered Lee. “But how come you can stay in here, shaving people and grubstaking ’em, when they’re scooping the gold up in buckets at Crooked Creek?”

  Gus lifted a handful of the locks and shore them away with a grinding slash of the scissors.

  “I’ll get a handful out of some of them scoops,” he said. “I’ll get a little, if my luck lasts. Sure to, if I run into many like that Bill White that just went out.”

  “Good miner, eh? Known him a long time?”

  “About half an hour. Yes, he’s a good miner.”

  “Half an hour!” exclaimed Lee. “And yet you grubstake him?”

  “I’ve grubstaked some, five minutes after I met ’em. I’d rather know ’em short than long.”

  “Well,” murmured Lee sympathetically, “I hope you don’t lose your money.”

  “But you think I will, eh? Look here, son, if you got eyes to read with, you can see what’s on a page in a couple of seconds, can’t you? Same way, you can see what’s in a man, if you know the language he’s wrote in.” He grunted complacently.

  “You mean to say you look right through gents, maybe?” suggested Lee. “You can tell what he’s going to do? What luck he’ll have?”

  “No place better than a barber’s chair for reading a man,” said the other. “I been working the camps close onto thirty years, and I’ve always worked ’em with a razor.” He elaborated on his jest, chuckling. “Dig my gold with a razor — does a cleaner job!”

  “You generally win out?”

  “One in five pays me back — one in ten makes some money for me — one in a hundred hits it big. That’s good enough for me. No, son, a barber’s chair is my gold mine. See right through a gent when he’s got soap on his face. Maybe that’s because they got such a foolish look when they roll their eyes up at you.”

  Lee smiled in his turn, for with the haircutting accomplished, Gus was now working up the lather, walking back and forth from the chair to the little stove on which the hot water steamed.

  “Well,” said Lee, after he had puffed the soap from his lips, “what chance would I have of getting a grubstake?”

  The barber stepped back a little, poising his razor and thrusting out his lower lip. But in a moment he was smiling. When he smiled, his face was more frog-like than ever. He continued the shaving.

  “Well?” asked Lee.

  “Tut, tut,” chuckled the barber. “You ain’t a digger, son. You’re a spender. You ain’t a digger, and why should I give money to a spender?”

  “You don’t figure me to be very thrifty, eh?”

  “Look here,” Gus replied growlingly, his good humor vanishing as distinctly as a snap of the fingers, and as suddenly. “Look here, I ain’t a fortune-teller — I’m a barber. I get paid for taking the hair off a gent’s face, not for reading his palm. That’s the trouble with all you youngsters. So plumb wrapped up in yourselves, it tickles you right to the gizzard to have folks talk about you. Well, I’d rather talk about the weather.”

  He continued to mutter to himself, and Lee, abashed, attempted an expression of stern dignity, sadly marred when the barber slapped the
skin taut on one side of his face for a polishing stroke. At least, his fee was most moderate, when he had finished.

  “Well,” he said, as his customer rose, “you don’t look near so big, now that you got your whiskers off. Maybe you don’t feel so big, either. Whiskers are queer things. They fool the gent that wears ’em more than the other folks that see ’em. I got two boys, one as much like the other as two peas in a pod — both great talkers. Jerry trimmed his mustaches off short and fashionable, and darned if he didn’t get to be a traveling salesman and talks as smooth as you please. And Joe let his mustaches grow long at the ends and hang down, and so he had to go in for politics. Jerry saves dollars out of his talking, and Joe saves newspaper clippings. Jerry says he’ll sell twice as much when he can afford to buy a diamond stickpin as big as his thumbnail, and Joe is chewing his lip and waiting to get bald. He says a bald head is his ticket to Washington. You see what a difference it made to them kids, the ways they grew their mustaches?”

  Lee Garrison, listening and smiling in spite of himself, stroked his skin as though it were a newly acquired property.

  “Partner,” he said suddenly, “I guess you’re all right. Maybe I did feel a little big.”

  The barber nodded amiably, for nothing so softens the heart as criticism accepted. He even followed Lee to the entrance, and added: “And if I was you, son, I’d slip off that gun belt and gun and drop it private in a place where you wouldn’t find it in a hurry. Maybe you can use it well enough not to have to do any shooting, but the sheriff ain’t very active in Crooked Creek, my boy. We do our killing for ourselves. Gun play ain’t no more popular here than a rattler in a tea party. Why, one good killing up here, and we’d have more law than would choke a bull. Our whole party would be plumb spoiled. You go along and step soft and be a good boy.”

  So, with a playful little shove, he started Lee Garrison on his way into Crooked Creek.

  XIII. THE FIRST HOUR

  HE HAD BEEN too closely intent on changing his appearance to pay much heed to the town up to this point, but now he stepped out to observe and be observed. There was momently more to see, for now, as the evening drew closer, the men were beginning to come in from the mines. They were very much alike in spirit. Whether they had seen much or little yellow metal in the work of the day, each carried a high head and looked about him with a possessive eye, for, having been lately familiarized with magic visions of gold, all desirable things were only around the corner in their hopes. There was plenty to engage the mind along with that twisting, angling street of shacks and tents. The moment the news of the gold strike was verified, three jewelers had rushed extensive stocks to the valley. Now they were arrayed side by side, each vying with the other in the magnitude of his display in the unglassed windows. To guard the wares, two hard-faced men with sawed-off shotguns stood near. They had enough lead under trigger to wash the solid crowd from the street.

  These windows drew a continual audience in which the men stood in deep quiet, nearing the sparkler of his choice. In fact, the jewelers obtained a fat revenue from those who felt that the door of opportunity would open for them by the next day, at the latest, and made deposits to hold for twenty-four hours the dazzling transparency of a diamond.

  Lee Garrison peered for a while between heads and shoulders at the display, then turned with the rest to watch a monster wagon lumber past, drawn by twelve mules that leaned wearily into their collars. It was like a big ship in a small harbor. It fairly filled the street and jammed the crowd back on either side. The top of the load was well above the level of most of the roofs, and a shouting boy of twelve stood on the very crest, swaying back and forth against the sunset colors as the wheels, far below, dipped into the ruts through pools of dust. Besides the driver, who rode a wheel mule and managed the long jerk line in his left hand with the air of a master, there were six men who walked in a company before the team, waving their hats and yelling to the bystanders. A victorious troop of cavalry could not have raised a noisier jubilee or more dust.

  “That’s what I call a pretty turnout,” said a man beside Lee. “That’s coming to dig in style, I say.”

  “But style’s not the only thing that counts,” suggested Lee.

  “Some liquor on that,” said the miner, turning the weather-hardened face of one who has lived his fifty years in the open. “Couldn’t be truer, if you took it out of the Bible.” He hooked his arm through the arm of Lee. “Look at me,” he continued as they went on. “I come with the price of a pick and a prayer. Hit the stuff the second day — been in bonanza ever since.” His head jerked back with exultation. “After all these years,” said the miner. “After all these years!”

  The crowd immediately before them slowed and thickened around the only glassed windows in Crooked Creek, the windows that framed the brilliant display of the leading haberdasher of the moment. Gold and bronze and green and red and burning orange, the neckties and scarves and silk shirts flamed like autumn foliage of fiery mid-October. Against that glowing background stood a full-length model of a gentleman in evening dress, most formal from glimmering top hat down the broad-like front of the shirt, relieved with ruby studs, to a waistcoat made snug above an incredibly slender pair of hips, and so on to the trousers, pressed to knife-edge creases, and patent leather shoes. The dummy clasped white gloves in one pink hand, and the other — most life-like — was raised to toy with the stately, wide-sweeping mustaches. Lee’s companion puffed out his chest and drew in his chin, an unconscious imitation.

  The crowd kept silent.

  “There’s a high stepper, eh?” murmured the miner. “Now, how d’you think I’d look, turned out like that?”

  “Fine as silk,” answered the sympathetic Lee. “But do they ease around in togs like that in Crooked Creek?”

  “Not yet. That’s here for an ad, I guess. But one of these days they might start dressing up in the Frog Dump.”

  “What’s the Frog Dump?”

  “Monsoor Lefhvre’s dance hall. He’s got a slick place. Here’s another hold-up.”

  They heard a droning voice, so cunningly pitched that it floated through all the uproar of the crowd, and immediately they passed a white-headed man who bore in a tall legend upon his hat the following: “Blind by a powder burn. Please help!” The beggar extended alternate hands, for, no sooner was one stretched out, than it was filled with broad pieces of silver or rustling bills. Lee’s companion pressed a large donation into the claw-like fingers.

  “First real, honest-Injun blind man in Crooked Creek,” he said with pride as they went on. “Trouble is he’s making so much money he can afford to retire pretty soon, and then we’ll lose him. Hel-lo.”

  A crackling stream of curses, loosed by a shrill voice just in front of them, stopped the drift of the crowd, jammed it back, and then split it into a score of confused groups as though with an explosion. Lee Garrison saw a little red-headed man with his hat hanging on the back of a very long, narrow head. That head jutted forward as though its weight were too great for the supporting neck. Drunken rage rocked him back and forth, and he reminded Lee with horrible vividness of a mad dog he had once seen with frothing muzzle and bloodshot eyes. His curses were driven at the head of a youth who was obviously certain that he was about to die, and who was obviously determined to die rather than run.

  “It’s Red Billy Devine,” said Lee’s companion. “You and me’d better be sidetracking it, son. They’ll have their guns out pronto!”

  But now another man began shouting from the far side of the street. “Hey! Hey! Cut that out!”

  Behold the fat barber waddling through the crowd like a sheep dog through a flock. All the body of Red Billy was shaking with passion, save his right hand only, and that was locked around the butt of his pistol until the instant that his stream of insults should induce the boy to pull his own weapon. Let into the path of that impending lightning flash, the barber made his way straight to terrible Red Billy and laid his pudgy hand on the collar of the man of war.
Amazement set the crowd gaping.

  “Now look here, Billy, you little fool,” said Gus, “what you mean by making all this noise? Twice I sliced the gent I was shaving, listening to you holler!”

  The wild eyes fastened on the face of Gus. “All I do is ask him for a measly hundred bucks,” said the gunfighter. “He says he ain’t got it. Ain’t got a hundred dollars? Why, ain’t everybody here got thousands? Him with a white skin and talking white, but he wouldn’t give me a hundred dollars!” His voice broke with sorrow. “Gus, how come a man can be as low as that?”

  “You come along with me,” commanded Gus. “You’re drunk, that’s what’s the matter.”

  “Me drunk?” shrilled Red Devine. “Lemme show you how steady my hand is, Gus. Just lemme kill him — just that one skunk, Gus!”

  “Not a one,” said Gus. “You’d get a sheriff and a flock of deputies up here investigating, would you? They’d have this little old town starched as stiff as a Sunday collar.”

  “But he ain’t a man. He’s a hound, Gus. It cuts me all up to have something like him walking around, making folks think he’s a man.”

  “You shut up and come along with me,” broke in Gus, and, under the impulse of that arm, Red Billy turned and went with reeling steps beside the barber. The crowd flowed in behind them.

  “That’s nerve,” commented Lee’s new friend. “If I’d’ve had a gun, I might’ve — but Gus, he has the nerve.”

  “Funny that Devine let him manhandle him, though,” suggested Lee.

  “Funny? Devine knew damn well he’d get shot full of holes, if he tried to pull his gun. Gus Tree is fast as a wink. Here we are!”

  While Lee digested the astonishing news of the fat barber’s prowess, he was guided through a wide pair of swinging doors into a saloon and pressed among the drinkers, five deep at the bar. They reached a place where he could look into the only mirror that had as yet been brought to the camp.

  “You get better liquor over to Monsoor Lefhvre’s,” said Lee’s companion, who now introduced himself as John Patterson. “But they charge such prices that the damned stuff chokes me going down. Might as well turn some gold dust into your throat.”