Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Turn around,” commanded Givain.

  The other obeyed.

  “By the heavens, you went to sleep without a gun on you!”

  The other turned back on him, in silence.

  “The devil,” said Givain, “you aren’t a man — you’re a baby! Man? You’re a selfish young jackass, that’s all!”

  “You rat-faced skunk of a crooked gambler,” said the blacksmith with coldly calculated and deliberate insult, “what you think of me makes no difference at all! If you’ve come here to murder me, pull the trigger. I won’t beg off! Not if that’s what you’re waiting for!”

  “A fool,” said Givain meditatively. “Not only a fool, but a selfish one!”

  “Listen to me,” said the boy hoarsely. “If you think you can sit there and insult me, you’re mistaken. I’ll run in on you and your gun, and either get you or else be gotten!”

  It was not a sham. Even the dim light of the evening could not hide from the gambler the berserk madness in the face of his companion.

  “You have nerve,” said the gambler calmly, “I admit that.”

  “I don’t care a damn what you admit!”

  “Of course not. But you will after a while. Do you know why I came to you today?”

  “Because you’re a—”

  “Easy on that. I’m mild-tempered, Mundy, up to a certain point, and after that — but to come to what I started to say, I came to you to get you out of that town and away from our mutual friend, Al Richards. I hadn’t a chance to try to persuade you. I’m too well known in that village and able to raise a mob on my own account in a moment’s notice, as you saw for yourself.” And he chuckled at the memory.

  “People are queer in my town,” admitted the blacksmith sarcastically. “They hate a crooked gambler worse than they hate a snake.”

  “No doubt,” said Givain smoothly. “But to come back to yourself. I had to get you out of town. There was really no other way than to make you hate me worse than you hated Richards. And that was what I did.”

  “D’you think you can pull me off your trail?” sneeringly replied young Bob Mundy.

  “You blockhead!” cried Givain. “D’you imagine that I fear what you can do? Because you’ve manhandled a few old men and young idiots, do you think that you’re a man? Al Richards would have eaten you up!”

  “At least he’d’ve found me waiting! Besides, every man has a chance with every other man, when it comes to guns! If you doubt that, let me get my gun, and we’ll fight it out right here and now!”

  His voice trembled with eagerness, but Givain laughed.

  “Here’s my matches,” he said. “Rake a fire together. Don’t go near your saddle and your guns, though, or I’ll shoot without warning, Mundy.”

  “I know your kind,” said Bob, and went away to execute the order. He got fairly out of range of the revolver, considering the darkness of the night, now, but he could not bolt and run for it without leaving the gray gelding behind him, and the gray meant as much to Bob as his own life. So presently he came back with a huge load of dried shrubbery and heaped it up, touched a match to it, and the flame was instantly soaring and making the good Captain toss his head and snort with fear, while the two big eyes were turning into balls of reflected fire.

  “Now,” said Givain, “I’m going to show you something. You see that black rock with the point sticking up?”

  “I see it.”

  “Watch the point.”

  He tossed up the muzzle of the gun and fired almost without taking aim, so it seemed. The point was clipped squarely off the rock. There was a gasp from Bob Mundy.

  “Anybody can hit a stationary target,” he declared.

  “Throw that white stone into the air.”

  Bob Mundy tossed it twenty feet high, and, as it hung in the zenith of its rise, the gambler fired, and the little stone was jerked away into nothingness. Presently a fine shower of sand puffed down upon them.

  “Well,” said Bob Mundy, “you can shoot, right enough.” And he said it reverently, as one who understands the importance of gun play well enough.

  “I can shoot,” admitted the gambler, without overdue modesty and yet without excitement. “But I’m not a patch on Al Richards. Listen to me, Mundy. If I faced a hangman with a rope around my neck, I’d feel as much hope for life as if I faced Al Richards with a gun in my hand and a gun in his hand.”

  And he put up his weapon. Bob Mundy gazed upon him in utter wonder.

  “I see,” he said slowly, thinking aloud, as it were. “You really don’t need to have that gun out to have me in your power. And — I guess you’re right. I guess that I have been a fool.” He groaned out the words.

  “You’ve been a fool to start with,” said the gambler. “But the start isn’t the finish.”

  “Givain, what made you start to get me away from Al Richards?”

  “That doesn’t matter. The question is, what are we to do with Al Richards now?”

  “I’ll tend to him later on.”

  “You mean that you’ll go back and let yourself be killed?”

  Bob Mundy was silent.

  “It isn’t a question of chance,” said Givain. “I met Al Richards once before.”

  “You did!”

  The gambler hesitated. Then: “I’m the only man who ever wounded him in a fair fight,” he said soberly at last, “and I’m the only man that ever faced him in single fight and got away with his life. But — I’m not proud of it. Luck helped me out.”

  “What?”

  “His gun hung a little in the holster. My slug glanced off his skull. I thought he was dead, when I left him. But the dead man started walking again. The only thing that has saved my life is that he doesn’t know my name, or how to ask after me. I met him by night.

  “There was another silence.

  “It seems,” said Mundy, “that we’re in the same boat, and neither of us can paddle.”

  “And what we have to do,” said the gambler, “is find a way to shore.”

  VII. A COCK-AND-BULL STORY

  THEY TALKED UNTIL the dawn began in the gray east. And by that time the younger man had agreed to do what the elder advised, and that was to put his shame in his pocket and stay away from home for a few days.

  “Because, inside of that time,” Givain assured him, “Al will have forgotten all about you. He’ll have another trouble in his mind and be off across the mountains in one direction or another. You can depend on that. I’ve known the brute and the brute’s mind for a long time.”

  He could hardly believe his ears when young Mundy agreed. He would not make a pretense about it, however, he said. He would go over to the mountains and write home that he would be gone for three days, simply because he wanted to dodge Richards. If, at the end of that time, Richards was still in the town, he would face him on his return. It was rather a shorter space than the gambler had hoped for, but he had to content himself with what he had gained without pushing the point.

  “But will you tell me,” asked young Mundy, “what makes you do all of this on account of me?”

  “Because when I heard of your meeting that was to be with Richards, I decided that something had to be done about it. I knew how it would turn out. . . with another grave in the town cemetery and another notch in Al’s gun butt. Did you ever see that gun butt?”

  “No,” answered Bob Mundy.

  “It looks like the mouth of an old dog, full of short teeth.”

  * * * * *

  So it was that they parted. Mundy would have had his new companion ride on the way with him. But Givain insisted that he had work ahead for himself. He watched Mundy disappear into the north. Then he swung sharply around and went south.

  It was in the sunset that he came on the town, and, just as he glimpsed it, he found the person in all the world whom he most desired to meet. And that was Rose Mundy, cantering slowly across a hill edge against the sky, and seeming to float into it with every upward sway of her horse. Sally might have had an excu
se as a very weary horse, but one word from her master sent her away like a swallow. She dipped over the hills and cut across the path of Rose Mundy on the side of the third. Givain stopped her with a touch of his knee and swept off his hat cavalierly.

  Rose Mundy drew rein with a jerk and a gasp. “Oh, Larry Givain!” she cried to him. “Where is my brother?”

  “Riding north, comfortably out of danger,” he said.

  “That’s like those other stories you told me last night about yourself’ and Jim.”

  “Why are you sure?”

  “Bob Mundy would never turn his back on a danger.”

  “He could not be persuaded?”

  “Never, except with iron chains.”

  I persuaded him — with only words,” said Larry Givain, and smiled at her so frankly that the color came back a little into her face. She was even able to smile faintly back at him.

  “How did you do it?”

  “I showed him it was foolish to face such a murderer as Richards.”

  “You couldn’t convince my brother of that.”

  “I tell you, I did.”

  “How did you argue it?”

  Her head was high, now, and her eyes shining with indignation at the thought that her brother might have showed fear.

  “Do you really want your brother to meet Richards?” he said. “Only last night you seemed to want nothing less in the whole wide world.”

  “Only last night,” she said, “I was out of my head with terror, but today I know that there is one thing worse than everything else in the world for a man, and that is to lose his honor.”

  “Do you think they will taunt him in the village for turning his back on Richards?”

  “He will taunt himself — it will be a torture to me. You couldnot persuade him?”

  “I did, however. I told him, for one thing, that I had run away from Richards myself.”

  She was abruptly silenced, but she began to regard him darkly. “That’s another thing I can’t believe. You wouldn’t fear a thing in the world.”

  “Are you sure?” he said pleasantly.

  “Otherwise, how could you have done the wild, crazy suicidal thing you did for my brother?”

  “That was only a game.”

  “And is it only a game, coming back to this town where a score of men are hungry to get at you?”

  “One must take a chance, now and then.”

  “There is something on your mind. Did you — did you come here simply to bring the tale that poor Bob is safe? Oh, if he were to come to harm, I should die.”

  “Rather dishonor for him than that?”

  “Rather anything.”

  “I see,” said Givain smilingly, “that you are logical.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care for anything, except that Bob must not be hurt.”

  “Not even for Jim?”

  “Bah!” she laughed at him. “Do you still believe that cock-and-bull story? Jim is nothing to me. I’ve never seen him in my life.”

  Givain clasped the pommel of his saddle, and, thus steadied, he stared out at her from beneath his sombrero. And it seemed to him that a cooling wind touched upon his face and made his blood jump.

  “I knew that my best friend was engaged to a fighting man. I went to her to have her enlist him. She was sick, but she sent me out to him with that picture of him that she wore. That was why I carried it. Simply as a sort of passport from his lady to him to carry me into his confidence. But when I got there — I found that my sham was shown to another sham.”

  And she laughed again, whole-heartedly, her eyes dancing. As for the gambler, his head was singing with a thousand new and sudden hopes.

  “But, oh,” she said, “if you had not done that wild thing yesterday, poor Bob would be a dead man now, and that great brute would not be lurking yonder in the old house.”

  “Richards?”

  “Yes, yes! That horrible creature. My blood runs cold when I think of him.” And she pointed to a rambling old house that ran up one side of a hill, the highest hill in the town.

  “They say it’s haunted,” she said. “But what do ghosts matter to that demon? He’s living there, and says he’ll stay there forever, unless Bob comes back. You see he started out to get Bob, but he lost the trail and returned to wait it out.

  “So Richards is waiting there?” Givain murmured. And he stared vaguely up to the house. It had once housed a large family, no doubt. Now this great wolf of a man had crouched there like a beast in a den, waiting for his prey to come within leaping distance. He stared harder, and it seemed to him that he could make out the outlines of the ugly mustang, ranging near the building.

  All his presuppositions were upset, then. There was nothing in what he had told young Bob Mundy and had half hoped might be true. Richards had come to stay, and now he was feeding on the notoriety of his position. It was manna and honey to him. Every day he would be stared at. Every day hundreds would talk about him. Every day the little children would flee from him, as he rode through the streets of the town. And there was a touch of consummate craft and artistry in thus barring the youngster from his home village.

  Of course, the moment that such tidings came to young Bob Mundy, he would come down like a storm to meet his death. But, in the meantime, there would be surely a full three days. Three days in which to move Al Richards from that house and send him headlong out of the town and never to return. It was like moving a mountain, that picture of effort to the gambler.

  He found that the girl was studying him seriously.

  “What wild scheme is in your head, now?” she asked him.

  “Another game.”

  “Not for Bob’s sake. You’ve risked enough for him.”

  “Not for his sake,” he answered, and looked at her just as steadily.

  She flushed, but shook her head violently. “You mustn’t be — foolish,” she said.

  “I always play safe,” said the gambler with a touch of bitterness. “I suppose you’ve heard that about my games?”

  “I’ve heard — that you’re a strange fellow;” she admitted. “But—”

  “Well?”

  “I take people as I find them.”

  “Thank heaven for that!” He spoke so fervently that she flushed still more.

  “Suppose,” he said, “that Richards were to be persuaded to leave that house and never come back?”

  “Ah!” she cried.

  “Well, if this were in a fairy tale, there would be half a kingdom for the hero, eh?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “half a kingdom, at least.”

  “And what else?”

  “It is hardly safe to say,” said Rose, and yet she was not too embarrassed for laughter.

  “Well,” said the gambler, “of course, that is something that no one can ever do.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The only person who could beat Richards would have to be a greater brute than he. He isn’t a man. He hasn’t a man’s nerve or a man’s weaknesses.”

  “And yet,” she pondered, “Achilles had one vulnerable heel. Somewhere there is a flaw in the armor. And that’s the thing to aim at. Once the flaw is found, the spear will go through.”

  “But who can stay near such a brute long enough to discover what weaknesses are in his mind? For, I suppose, that’s what you mean?”

  “Of course.”

  “And yet,” muttered Givain to himself more than to her, “there must be a way of studying it out. Except that the time is terribly short — short. And young Mundy will be coming back again.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What sort of a man is the sheriff?.”

  “The flaw in his armor is horses,” she told him.

  VIII. A VISIT TO THE SHERIFF

  WHEN HE WATCHED her go, a few minutes later, it hardly seemed possible that he could have let her escape so easily. But, after all, she had said all that he most wished to hear. Although she were half in jest, she was half
in earnest also, when she hinted that, if Al Richards were routed out of the town, never to return, she would marry the hero who had conquered the giant.

  And most like a giant to a boy did Al Richards seem to the gambler as he cantered his horse along the side of the hill and looked up to the gloomy and staggering old house which crowned it. But it was not to survey the house or to encounter the giant that he rode in that direction. He wound around the hill and went on through the outskirts of the town until he came in sight of Sheriff Campton’s house. He remembered having looked it up of old, on his first and most famous visit to the town. He found the place in the gathering dusk. A lamp was lighted in one window, and, when he looked through, he saw the sheriff sitting alone, a long and sprawling man, stretched out in a rocking chair that was tilted far back on the ends of the runners. His feet rested on another chair — long, ungainly feet. His body was hunched in the rocking chair so that he looked more like a poorly stuffed image than a real human being. The gambler could not help smiling as he regarded the man of the law.

  Then he went boldly to the front door, knocked, and waited. As he expected, the sheriff himself opened to him, and, shading his eyes to peer into the wall of dusk, he stared at his visitor.

  “Who might you be, stranger?” he said.

  “I’m Larry Givain,” said the gambler.

  “The devil!” gasped out the sheriff. “What brings you down here?”

  “Two things,” said the gambler. “The first is to have a talk with the sheriff, and the second thing is to borrow a feed of oats for my horse, Sally, while I talk with you.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” exclaimed the sheriff.” But he added, to the surprise of the other: “What makes you think that I keep oats and not barley?”

  “No real horseman feeds barley,” said Givain calmly.

  The sheriff swore again, but there was a touch of gratification in his voice. “I’m giving comfort and aid to the enemies of the law,” he said growlingly to Givain, “but I never yet turned a hungry man away from my door, and I’m damned if I’ll turn a hungry hoss, either. Come along, Givain, and let’s have a look at this Sally hoss. The town ain’t talking of much else besides her, just now.”