by Max Brand
So Givain decided that, since he could not protect Mundy in the town, he must take Mundy away from the town, and the danger of Richards. The novelty of his scheme lay in the manner in which he proposed to execute the measure. It would be a kidnapping without a mate in history.
From the edge of the hill he overlooked the place for the last time and laid his plans, one by one. He selected the post office from its fellow shacks on either side. He picked out the best tree to the rear of the post office under which he could leave the mare — for plainly he and the mare must not appear at the same instant. Then he went forward at a gallop.
Givain threw a loose girdle around the town, drew up behind the post office, and dismounted. Then he shook his revolver loose in its holster and tugged his hat a little lower across his eyes. Its wide brim and a downward cant of his head would prevent people from recognizing him too hastily. With these preparations complete he went on to the side of the building and saw the smithy.
His worst anticipation was realized at once. The crowd was there, and with a vengeance. It was not gathered densely around the smithy. Indeed, not half a dozen were near the place. But people were everywhere where a good view could be obtained. In the windows of the houses across the street many faces moved. A little farther up the street there was a crowd of horses around the verandah of the hotel. And he could see what this meant. If they could not prevent the fight, the men of the town were determined to revenge any wanton killing. That, again, would complicate his own work, but not, he hoped, very greatly. He sauntered to the front of the blacksmith shop. There was young Bob Mundy. There was no mistaking him. In his working clothes he was as distinctive, compared with the other workers, as was his sister compared with all the other women whom the gambler had known.
“Are you Bob Mundy?” asked the newcomer from the doorway.
At his voice, a worker in the rear of the shop looked up and then hurried forward, staring, and Givain knew by his expression that within ten minutes he would have remembered the central figure of the most sensational brawl that the town had ever known. Within ten minutes — or ten seconds, just according as the wind blew.
“I’m not Bob Mundy,” said the big, thick-shouldered man to whom Givain had addressed himself. “There’s Bob, over yonder.”
Givain turned to Bob, who was now approaching him. “The devil,” groaned Givain, “are you Bob Mundy?”
“I am,” said Bob. “Doesn’t it please you?”
“I should say not. I should say not! Why, son, I have money riding on you.”
Such insolence brought a gasp from the spectators.
“Well?” asked Bob, controlling himself with apparent difficulty.
“Well,” said Givain, sauntering boldly nearer, and measuring him up and down with contemptuous eyes, “when I heard that a man named Mundy was going to fight Richards, I liked the name and took a ten-to-one chance that you’d win. And now I see that I’m a fool and a hundred dollars poorer than I might have been!”
He was prepared for the explosion, even then. But Bob was showing rare new metal this morning. He had his mind fixed on graver trouble than this quarrel could possibly be, so it seemed.
“I’m willing to hear that explained,” said Mundy, and waited, tapping his chin with a nervous, slender forefinger.
But all the while a spark of fire was in his eyes. And Givain was fascinated. This was the true fighting spirit. He recognized it as brother blood.
“I’ll explain,” he said brutally. “I came here looking to find a man!”
“Well?”
“Instead of a man, I find a kid who only needs to shave twice a month. Man? The devil, son, in my part of the country they wouldn’t use you for a chore boy!”
An oath spat out from the lips of Mundy, and his hand twitched back for his gun, but here the worker who had come from the rear of the shop cried out: “Hold on, Bob! I’ve something to say to this stranger!”
V. AL RICHARDS ARRIVES
THE RECOGNITION THAT had been working blindly toward the surface of the workman’s mind had at last come into full being. There was scorn in his eye and anger in the set of his jaw as he now came to confront the gambler. And the latter saw that he must use a few priceless seconds or else be baffled entirely.
“Not for a chore boy,” he repeated contemptuously to Bob Mundy. “The devil, man, Al Richards will turn you over his knee and spank you. You’re in no danger of being bullet fodder.”
Bob Mundy had endured enough and more than enough to class him with the most patient men on that morning. But now, his patience had run out like the sand from an hourglass. He uttered a faint moan, that showed the torment which he had suffered. Then, without a word, he reached for his gun.
It had once been said of Larry Givain that in moments of danger he turned himself into a bullet. And so he seemed to the bystanders at that moment. So, most of all, he seemed to Bob Mundy.
What he did was simple enough, but the manner in which he did it was consummate art. As the fingers of Mundy curled around the handle of his gun, Givain was taking one lightning step forward. With the iron-hard edge of his open hand he struck Bob on the outer side of the right arm, just where the long shoulder muscles slope away to nothing and the biceps are beginning. Here there is a deep indentation in a man’s arm, with only a shallow surfacing of flesh over vital nerves. Against the bone, the blow of Givain struck those nerves. The right arm of Mundy was paralyzed instantly for half a second, and, before that half second was over, he had been spun around, the gun had been snatched from his unnerved fingers, and a foot planted in the small of his back had kicked him headlong, so that he ran a few long strides, stumbled over an iron fragment, and then pitched upon his face.
Any scientific wrestler could have done things more marvelous, but the speed of Givain was reinforced by the magnificent carelessness of his demeanor. He turned now deliberately on his heel and sauntered toward the door of the shop.
“In my part of the country,” he told the dumbfounded men, “that’s the way we treat the boys when they begin to talk too loud!”
But here his poise was shattered by the voice of the workman crying: “Don’t let him get away! It’s Givain! It’s the crooked gambler, Givain!”
Like a spur pricking, it started Givain into full speed. It started the others into motion behind him. Not a man there but had heard of the spectacular poker game, and how the culprit had been apprehended by the town’s best and bravest, and how he had, afterward, slipped through their fingers like fluid sand.
All these things were at work in them. But, most of all, they ran because Larry Givain fled before them. And he fled like a rabbit that has felt the breath of the greyhound, panting behind it.
He swerved away from the door of the shop. He saw before him three stalwarts, fumbling for guns with their right hands and stretching out their left hands to seize him. He chose the central figure, gave him a piston- shooting fist as he came near, then shot on through the gap that the fellow’s fall made, stepping once on soft flesh and then dashing away over the sand again.
Someone behind tried a snap shot. It chipped a comer off the post office wall as Givain darted around it. He made for Sally like a badly frightened rabbit, indeed, and, just as the head of the pursuit shot around the edge of the post office, he reached her.
Good horse! She was trembling with eagerness the instant she saw him coming. For he had taught her a hundred times how to act, which was to turn away from her master as though she would abandon him in time of need, to turn away and begin to canter softly, with her head well held around so that the dragging reins would not entangle her feet. In this way she had gathered headway, and Givain, rushing beside her, mounted like a circus performer. He simply hurled himself through the air, gripped mane and pommel, and so dragged himself into place, and, before he was fairly on her, he was jammed back into the saddle by the pressure of her speed as she gathered incredible headway.
In three strides she was away at full speed, lik
e a racer leaving the post. And behind her the crowd of the pursuit was snatched into an ineffectual distance. One or two random shots were fired, but that was all. Men were not quite sure whether or not it was lawful to fire at a man who was wanted for cheating and for nothing of more serious moment. Some of the crowd stopped to stare at the gymnastic feats of the fugitive as he gained his horse, running at well-nigh full speed. Others turned and ran for their horses. But all paused to behold young Bob Mundy, his face contorted with unspeakable rage, the brim of his sombrero blown sheer up from his face, a revolver clasped in one hand and the reins of his speeding horse in the other, dash through their midst on his gray gelding, famous through all the country for its matchless speed.
There was death in the face of Bob. When a man has been shamed to a certain point, he no longer blushes, but begins to lose color, and Bob was white as the sands over which he was sprinting his horse now.
Instead of trying to join in a pursuit in which they knew that they would be outdistanced, men began to rush for points of vantage to behold the race. They climbed trees. They hurried to the tops of the nearest hills. They clambered upon rooftops, and from these high points they observed the pair sweep away toward the far-off desert horizon, swinging up and down over the rolling sand like a pair of stormy petrels over the waves.
“But the gray don’t gain!” they called to one another. “Bob Mundy’s Captain is plumb beat!”
And beaten, indeed, the Captain was. Strain and labor as he would, that streaking mare shot away before him and opened a widening gap. Slowly it grew at first, but after the mile had gone, she began to stream away like a piece of cloud blown on the wind, while the gelding labored sullenly, manifestly beaten, behind.
They had hardly turned from the observation of this exciting race, as the mare faded into the horizon, when Rose Mundy arrived. What was it all about? They told her. She listened with astonishment, with anger, and then with a glint of understanding in her eyes, to be followed with more wonder of a deeper dye.
“What a man,” she breathed at last. “Why, he sifted through the whole crowd of you like a grown man through a lot of boys.”
“He took us by surprise,” they told her sullenly. “Let him come back, and we’ll be ready for him — we’ll show him then!”
But Rose understood so well that her heart was brimming over with thankfulness. This was the strange way her rescuer had chosen to do his work — to drag her brother away to follow an irresistibly tempting bait. Somehow, it matched with the flickering will-o’-the-wisp fire that she had seen in the eyes of Larry Givain the night before, in the house.
“Besides,” said someone in the crowd, “you can’t expect us to match a crooked gambler. It takes a crook to beat a crook, you know, and I guess we’re a shade too honest to deal with this Givain.”
“A crooked gambler?” echoed the girl. “Why, he’s a cowpuncher who works with—”
She got no further than that. There was an uproar of laughter, for they were all rejoiced to have turned the tables on her.
“Cowpuncher? Him? Ever see such hands on a cowpuncher?”
She remembered, then, those remarkably slim and delicately made hands of Larry Givain. They would have done credit to a woman, except that there was little flesh upon them. And this explained, too, the aloof and restless manner of the man, and the strange way he had of looking at her that had reminded her so strongly of something in fear or about to become dangerous. It was simply the look of a man who lived outside the law.
“Where’s the kid?” called a heavy voice.
The group in front of the blacksmith shop turned and saw, advancing toward them, the badman of badmen, the destroyer of destroyers, Al Richards himself. On the farther side of the street he had left his horse, hardly less famous than himself, not for brilliant speed such as the Sally of the gambler, but for dogged and incomparable powers of resistance that enabled him to plod on for hours at unbroken dog-trot, if his master so willed it. He was an ugly brute of a horse, with bony, projecting hips, and a sharp ridge of backbone and a pot- handle belly and big shambling feet and an ewe neck and a huge, misshapen head with an ugly Roman nose and little, brutal, wicked eyes, glittering under a great brush of forelock. He matched his master in ungainliness.
Al Richards was dressed like a miner, which was his chosen profession. The reason he did not work as a cowpuncher, it was said, was because of his build. His short legs were further diminished in gripping power by the fact that they were oddly bowed out. They were made for strength, rather than for beauty, and their strength was required to support the unwieldy bulk of his body. Above the hips, in chest and arms and huge throat, he was like a gorilla. His face, however, was well-featured, almost handsome, except that there was a peculiarly animal flare to the nostrils and that the eyes had a brute boldness, a sort of flat look, into which no glance could penetrate in order to make out the workings of the mind beneath them.
“Where’s the kid?” he repeated, as he came forward. “Where’s the blacksmith that’s going to chew up poor old Al Richards?” He accompanied that speech with a loud laughter, and at the same time his eyes glanced swiftly over the faces of the crowd, drinking in their horror, their anger, their fear, as another man would have drunk in words and looks of the profoundest admiration. “He don’t seem to have waited for me,” he said, grinning. “Kind of looks to poor old Al Richards like the boy had some business that took him some place else.” And he laughed again, gloating over his prowess and that dreadful name of his that struck men down long before he came on them.
“He was waiting for you,” said Rose Mundy suddenly, when she could endure the shame of her brother no longer. “He was waiting, but he was insulted by another man and has chased him—”
“Insulted by another man? Ain’t I enough of a fight for him in one day? Has he got to go around hunting up trouble in other places?” His voice had become like the voice of a bull.
“He’ll be back to face you — if there were ten men with you,” said Rose Mundy, shivering with her horror of the man.
“He’ll be back? Well, I can’t wait for him to come. I’m just that plumb anxious to find him that I got to go out and camp on his trail until maybe my old Joe hoss gets up to him. And then him and me can have a little talk all by ourselves and settle these things between us quiet and proper, like gentlemen should. That’s my way, always — a little talk, quiet and proper, to set all things right.”
He chuckled, like a brooding growl of a beast of prey, and he ran his brute eyes slowly back and forth across the faces of the men as if hunting half in despair for some remonstrance, some opposition among them.
Still they shrank from him as though there were leprosy in his very breath.
VI. GETTING THE DROP ON BOB
FOR FIVE MILES the gambler had been the hunter and not the hunted. He had trailed softly and easily behind the weary gray gelding, while the master of the gray forced his staggering horse relentlessly on into the desert. It was as though the younger rider had determined, like a child, either to find his enemy or kill his horse, and, while he had not a chance of succeeding in capturing the gambler, he was in an excellent way of destroying the honest Captain.
But at length, by the grace of blind fortune and not through any skill of his own, he found a patch of grass growing around a spring and a feeble trickle of water. Here was water, the prime necessity for himself. And here was water and fodder for his gallant gray. But as for food for himself, he had not brought a crumb of it.
Larry Givain, sheltered comfortably behind some rocks on a neighboring hill crest, looked down on the scene with a grim smile and a shrug of the shoulders. For his own part, he had long since learned never to leave his saddlebags unstored with certain light and highly concentrated nourishment. Parched corn, some dried raisins, a little coffee, and salt were always at his command, at the very least, and with these be could defy hunger for many days.
But he now saw that the blacksmith, although hot-headed, w
as not actually cruel or neglectful. When he finally saw that he could not press on any longer through the thickening evening and on the back of an exhausted horse, he dismounted by the spring, allowed the hot gelding only a small swallow of the water, and then unsaddled his mount. With a twig from a tough mesquite he whipped the sweat off the horse, rubbing him down with even more care that the gambler usually showed to Sally. But, perhaps, that was because Sally was tough as wrought iron and resisted weather and winds and temperatures with equal indifference.
After he had assured himself of the comfort of the gelding and hobbled him, there was nothing left for him to do for himself. He rolled himself wretchedly in a slicker — cold comfort in that for a desert night — and stretched out, prepared to endure the worst. But a long night it promised to be for poor Bob Mundy.
Sleep came slowly to him. He tossed and twisted here and there, and the patient gambler, watching from above through the dim twilight, knew that pangs of rage with minglings of shame and pangs of hatred were disturbing the younger man. But at last he lay still, and Larry Givain went down the slope to capture the enemy.
He sat down on a stone beside the sleeper and touched him with his foot, and Bob Mundy, leaping to his feet, found himself confronted with the all- expressive mouth of a revolver held in a steady and yet very casual hand. And above that gun was the face of the man he had been hating with all his soul that afternoon. The hatred leaped back upon him and took him by the throat, so to speak. It set him trembling. It was all he could do to keep himself from leaping straight at his enemy.