Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  But now that he had come and seen Richards, being unseen himself, he had discovered a thing that washed away the last of his strength. And he knew with a deadly and sickening certainty, not only that he would have no chance in battle against Richards, but that he could not even find the wretched courage in his soul to go to the place of meeting and die like a man.

  For there was no facing this demon after the scene that Givain had just witnessed. It seemed to his shattered imagination that he was being picked up in the hands of Al Richards and broken to shards upon the stones. He could see his body flattened in the street before the blacksmith shop of Bob Mundy.

  Yet his reason did not give up the battle easily. It assured him again and again that, big as he was, Richards could be killed as easily as any other man by a bullet. It told him that in every, fight there is a chance that a good shot and quick draw may kill, and that luck might help him. But, in spite of that, the horrible foreboding was fixed in his mind and would not go out of it — he had two days and three nights to live, and on the third morning he was to die at eleven o’clock in front of Bob Mundy’s shop. And as he thought of that, the whole affair became dream-like to him. He could see his first meeting with the girl in Jim’s house like events dimly pictured — pictures out of a story book, and no flesh and blood reality.

  Then he went slowly, very slowly, down the hill, aching with terror lest his foot should displace a stone and that small noise bring the monster flying down after him.

  That was the first night of Givain’s vigil. The second night he came up again and saw Al Richards ride out early and saw him come home again late, drunk. And he seemed to Givain, as the latter stole to the window and looked in upon him, lighting the fire upon the hearth, like a great, fire-breathing dragon out of some fairy tale. As for the wood for the fire, he tore boards from the walls of the room and pitched them, crashing upon the hearth. They smashed upon the fire and cast out big showers of sparks. Ah, would that one of those sparks might start a conflagration which would instantly involve the house in flames and burn with it the evil spirit that now dwelt there.

  But he waited for no more. Instead, he turned sick at heart and went down the hill and to his sleep for the night. But he could not sleep. He sat up beside his small fire among the woods and hugged his knees and looked at his death in the darkness until Sally came and put her soft muzzle upon his shoulder and nibbled carefully at his ear.

  Yet once more crouched outside the house, he waited and watched the movements of Richards until, finally, the big man kicked off his boots, threw his blankets on the floor near the fire, and jerked open his shirt at the throat preparatory to sleeping. But, as he did so, he appeared to break a thread that was tied about his neck. Something bright and yellow was flicked from his bosom and rattled on the floor, and Richards uttered a cry of horror and of fear. He stood like a child, seeing a ghost, his eyes dilated and his hands extended with stiff fingers. Then he dropped upon his knees and began to search the floor, groaning with dread. He tore up the boards with his steel- like fingers for wedges, and looked down the cracks. At length he scooped up something with a strangled yell of relief and joy.

  When Richards sank down cross-legged upon his blankets, however, all that Givain saw with his startled eyes was a twenty-dollar gold piece, twisted out of shape and with a large hole driven through the center of it. Yet the giant cradled it in his palm as though it was a diamond of untold value.

  At length he set to work to tie a new and stouter string through it. And the knot of the string, as he tied it around his neck again, was drawn tight and tied again, half a dozen times. Certainly there was small fear that such a knot would unravel, and as for the string, it was of the stoutest twine. With this strange talisman fastened about his neck, he lay down upon the blankets. He wrapped himself in them and seemed sound asleep, yet, now and again, he started violently, and his big right hand flew up to clutch at the place beneath the flannel shirt where the twenty-dollar piece must lie. And each time there was a groan of relief and of content as his fingers touched the metal.

  Then Givain, turning from the window, hurried down the hill. He had no great hope, but even a small one was like a glimpse of heaven after the despair in which he had been plunged through all of these days. He went straight to that small, hidden camp of his, took from his little pack his razor, tested it upon a hair and found that its edge was as keen and as biting as hate. Then he closed it, pocketed it, and went back up the hill.

  By the time he arrived at the house on the hill, the fire had burned low upon the hearth. It was either dead or else the dying coals were filmed over with the gray of ashes through which a dull and uncertain glow was thrown across the room. Yet, now and then, when a draught pried at the embers, a flame was wakened for an instant, illumining every corner of the room brightly.

  Givain took note of these surroundings calmly, gravely. Then he unbuckled his revolver and dropped the cartridge belt upon the ground, for, if the giant wakened, Givain must not be tempted to kill a man by surprise and by treachery. Better by far to be himself killed by those great hands. After this he removed his boots, took off his hat, and gave the bright stars one look. Then he entered the room.

  There were seven paces from the door to the spot where the big man snored. There were only seven small paces, but at the fifth the fire gleamed, and at the seventh the tongue of flame started up, and Givain, looking down, thought that the glittering eyes of the other were fixed upon him. Was the giant playing ‘possum?

  But when he leaned and peered, it seemed from the relaxed muscles and the steady breathing that Richards still slept. So Givain knelt beside him, and, so kneeling, he was within the circle of the left arm of the prostrate man. One sweep of that hand would gather him in, no matter how blindly made. Then a fumble of the big fingers, a crunch of bones, and his neck would be broken.

  Givain was whipped on by the dread of the meeting in front of Mundy’s shop. With fingers nerved to steadiness, he fumbled beneath the collar and found the thread of twine. With set teeth, with a prayer and despair in his heart, he softly drew that thread forth. But how could he keep the rough twine from chafing, however softly, against the skin of the sleeper? There with a gasp and groan, and the right hand of the killer clapped against his breast.

  XI. REMOVING A TALISMAN

  HOW GIVAIN JERKED his own hands away, swiftly, and without a jar, he did not know. But certain it was that Richards did not strike them. But his hand struck his breast, and apparently he felt the coin, and, reassured in the midst of his nightmare, he dropped his hand again, turned with a groan of relief upon his side, and was instantly asleep again.

  Givain went swiftly and calmly ahead with his work now. Having succeeded in passing this crisis, it seemed to him that he was guaranteed against further interruption. With a deftness incomparable he drew forth the coin. A touch of the razor’s edge parted the twine, and now both twine and coin were his.

  But being his, such an ecstasy of relief and of weakness passed through him that he felt he could never find the strength to rise from his knees. His legs were shaking, and his teeth were chattering in his head. His whole body trembled. It was a long effort before he rose. And he began to move backward toward the door, keeping his eyes fixed upon the bulk upon the floor, more dimly outlined now by the dying firelight. Once a tongue of flame stood up, quivering inches high above the ashes. It showed the rugged face of the sleeper, but his eyes were closed, and Givain, being now in the doorway, whirled, leaped into the night, felt the firm ground beneath him, and rushed down the hill as though assisted by wings. No one could have caught him then, he felt. For, crushed against his palm, eating into his flesh, was the curved edge of the coin that, in some mysterious manner, represented the whole strength of Al Richards. He was as certain of it as though he had seen a spell breathed over that piece of money.

  At last he sat by the ashes of his own fire in the woods. He fanned it to life again. He cast handfuls of dead shrubbery upon it, until t
he fire rose recklessly high and Sally came sniffing and nosing toward him. Then he took the bit of gold in his hand. The date was clear — it had been coined in 1892. And the hole that was drilled so clean through it might have been punched by a Thirty- Two caliber bullet — a rifle bullet, say. The impact that had forced it through the metal had twisted the coin at the same time out of shape.

  How could this trinket have anything to do with the powers of Al Richards? And yet he felt, as he stared down at the thing, that he had trimmed the hair of Samson and found, indeed, the heel of Achilles. He felt freed. If, at that instant, he had seen the vast and unwieldy bulk of Al Richards looming through the darkness, he would have gone to the attack on the great man with a feeling of perfect confidence, so much was he assured that the hands of the destroyer were unnerved.

  But what would happen when Richards wakened in the morning? What would the big man do? What would he say? He was urged by an invincible curiosity that made him rise from the fire he had just kindled. Now he saddled Sally, flung himself upon her, and jogged easily up the slope of the hill. He dismounted at a little distance from the house.

  To the same door to which he had gone in such a horror of fear before, he advanced again. He sat upon the sill and looked calmly into the shadows. There was Richards, still sleeping, still a shapeless mound of blackness rising from the floor.

  So Givain went out again, and he remembered that he had made this second perilous journey even without his revolver. At that remembrance he merely laughed, and, passing around the house, he picked up the belt and the gun where he had unbuckled and dropped them. As he picked them up, he wondered if such a scruple as had moved him, when he gave up his weapon, could ever have entered into the brutish brain of Richards.

  Yet that brain was not all brute. There was that which assured him that the love of this mere coin would be the undoing of the monster. Therefore, there was an instinct in him that said that Richards was capable of highly strung efforts of the imagination.

  And now, with his gun buckled upon his thigh, he sat down to watch the morning grow, and smoked a cigarette. He was hungry. He had not tasted food for twenty-four hours. But food was not what he needed. He was tasting, in all its sweetness, the surety of life restored — the sweetest of all life, his own. And how dear to him was the growing of that dawn behind the mountains, striking them out in quick and bold strokes, as though he watched some worker in black and white sketching in a picture of mountains at dawn, rescuing new details at every stroke.

  But now it was more than a rough and wildly imposing sketch. Behind the mountains was welling up flood upon flood and wave upon wave of tender color — of pink transfused with yellow, of rose so lovely that it opened his soul as though there was a fragrance emanating from it, and of tides and tides of exquisite, pure, white light. How beautiful it was, and how it rolled upon the heart of Givain for the first time, until it seemed to him that, after the three days of torture, he was being born again and into a world all new to him. There would be a thousand things to mark and to look for thereafter. He told himself that, having tasted the bitterness of death for three whole days, he would make a new path for himself through the world. What he had kicked aside as worthless before, he would stay to watch closely. And if he had gone through his days prizing, first, fox-like cunning, and secondly, fierce skill in battle, he would revise his ideas, open his eyes, and see if there was not something in life like the light that was rushing up over the eastern peaks — something good because it was beautiful, and beautiful because it was good.

  It seemed to Givain, indeed, that now for the first time he was getting at the heart of an understanding of the girl, Rose Mundy. He had thought that he knew her before, but how small had been his knowledge, He had seen and admired her prettiness, her clever mind, her subtle ways of eyes and hand and thought, but he had never been aware of something else that he was now beginning to sense as he. watched the birth of the morning, and that was a deep and perfect purity. So that her greatest strength was not her cleverness, but her very lack of knowledge. And she seemed to the ecstatic mind of the gambler, now, half child and half saint — half to be adored and half to be worshipped.

  Of at least one thing he was sure. If he were ever to touch her hand with this newly saved being of his, it must be as one who had put his criminal existence behind him. It must be as one who had vowed an honest labor to make an honest life. He rose. He stood upon tiptoe. He stretched out his arms to the east, all golden now, and rose, with one streaming cloud of fire blown westward. And he felt that the cold air he breathed went through and through him and purged him forever of the thing that he had been.

  And in the very midst of that ecstasy he heard the deep voice of Al Richards cry out, half groan, half scream — half fear and half the wildest rage.

  XII. THE MAN-KILLER FLEES

  IT BROUGHT HIM back with a shock and a start to the cruel facts of that last night. For a moment he was on the verge of running to peer through the window and watch. But then something held him back. The shouting of Al Richards was like the crying of a stricken beast. As he raged, it seemed to Givain that looking in upon him would be like looking in upon a man transformed into an animal. And he had no right to do that. After all, it was through a piece of wicked theft by night that he had disarmed the soul of the man killer of its old confidence.

  And there was something magnificent, also, in the passion of the destroyer. He was tearing up the planks of the floor, now. He was dashing them about. The house shook and moaned under his passion as though a storm wind were harrying it with a strong hand. And the thunder of the giant’s voice rose and raged.

  It all stopped suddenly. The roaring and the smashing stopped. It was as though a pointed gun had halted that big man. And in Givain it was as though a sudden realization of weakness had come upon Richards.

  So the gambler turned the corner of the house. What he saw was Richards shambling across the field with his saddle and bridle dragging after him, making toward the huge mustang. He was half running, like a man in the most mortal fear. And Givain grew sick at heart as he watched. For, after all, although the strength of Richards had been terrible, it had been magnificent, also. And now the fellow was a mere skulker. He was transformed from a lion to a jackal.

  He was busy at the mustang now. His deep voice rolled back to Givain in mutterings, confused, subdued, hurried, as he cursed his horse one moment and implored it to stand quiet the next. For the mustang hated the sight of the saddle and the bridle and showed its hatred even with its hobbled feet.

  It was saddled, however. And finally its wicked teeth were pried apart and the bit forced between them. So, saddled and bridled, the giant now unhobbled his horse and slung the ropes behind the saddle. This done, he was in the act of mounting, when his eye lighted on the form of Sally, as she grazed calmly along the side of the hill. And that sight seemed to crush him.

  Richards glanced wildly around. And then, in the door of the house that he had just left, he saw none other than the young gambler, dapper, alert, slender, exactly as he had stood upon that other day when his gun had struck Richards down. And the power of mystery fell suddenly and heavily upon the big man.

  The mustang seemed to feel his weakness, for now it veered suddenly away. Richards lunged in pursuit with a muffled cry, but he received the heels of the mustang as the brute lashed out. One grazed his head and one grazed his body and hurled him flat, and, before he could rise again, the horse was gone. Al Richards cast one terrified glance behind him to make sure that the enemy was not pursuing him, and then he rushed down the hill after the horse.

  But Richards never again sat the saddle on that animal. All day he kept up the vain labor upon the mustang’s trail. At night he gave it up. He slunk to the nearest town, took the first freight that left the place, and was swept north. Five hundred miles away, and two days later, he was arrested for vagrancy in a little Montana town, arrested by a new constable and a young one.

  In the jail they
learned the truth from the cowering bulk. He was Al Richards, famous in story for a dozen years. He was Al Richards, or, rather a wreck who swore that the name belonged to him. And when the reporters came to question him, he refused to talk. But to his cell mate he told a strange story.

  It was of how, years and years before, he had entered his first fight, and of how the bullet of the other man had struck him and hurt him in the side. But he had not been pierced by the slug, and his own shot had killed his enemy. And when he examined the place where he had been hit, he found that the bullet from the other’s rifle — for they were firing at a distance from one another — had pierced his wallet, cut through the leather, and then, in cutting through a golden twenty-dollar piece, had been turned to the side.

  So his life had been saved by that bit of soft metal, and it had seemed to Richards like a sign of power given to him. He felt, thereafter, that he was invincible. He attached all the belief in his own strength to that bit of gold, and, so long as it was strung around his neck, he was secure. But when it was gone, he was helpless. And, in fact, the instant that the piece of money had been taken from him, the belief that punishment for all his crimes was about to overtake him had crushed him as if under a great weight. In a moment he was unmanned. And now the man killer was serving a thirty-day term for vagrancy.

  After that, Al Richards was never heard from again.

  Whether he came to a sudden end, when one of his numberless enemies took heart at his downfall and pursued him to the ground, or whether Al Richards had slunk out of the cow country and was rushed far away by the speed of trains to begin a new life as a laborer, where his mighty strength of hands would stand him in better stead, remained a mystery even to those who most carefully strove to delve into the facts. But certain it was that he never again appeared in the West with his flat, brutal eye, his voice of thunder, mounted on his terrible horse, and with his ungloved right hand swinging near the handles of his gun.