Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  Having been shoved off his chair and seeing Bud rushing toward him, Allan walked with measured steps toward the center of the ring — with his hands hanging idly at his sides!

  “He don’t know nothin’!” screamed Casey. “Put up your mitts, you fool, you—”

  “What did you say?” said Vincent Allan, and turned his head toward Casey.

  At the same instant Bud struck with all the energy of a hundred and ninety pounds. He had to finish this contest in short order if he wished to get any glory out of it, and into that first blow he put all of his might. He did not need to feel out his antagonist with any artistic sparring for an opening. He had only to drop his head, lunge with all his weight behind the point of his shoulder, and drive his right fist with a straight piston movement into the chin of the greenhorn. And straight and true sped that terrific right-hand drive. The head of the kid was turned toward Casey. Therefore the “button” was exposed and upon the button landed the punch. That is to say, it struck an inch from the point of the jaw and the thud of that impact was as audible as a hammer blow throughout the big gymnasium.

  The audience rose upon its knees with an indrawn breath and then emitted a wild “wow!” of fury and joy. It is the same cry which rises from the crowd during the ninth inning rally; or when the touchdown which will win the game is in the making. The whole half-hundred of the onlookers tilted to one side as though in sympathy with the coming fall of the kid.

  He did not fall.

  Instead, the blow seemed to pick him up, put wings beneath his feet, and float him back across the ring until his shoulders pressed against the padded ropes. There he stood, looking with the same mild blue eyes toward his foe, a little surprised, rubbing with the tip of his glove the place which had just been struck.

  If there had been a shout before, there was furious babel now. “He can take it! Oh, how that kid can take it!” they yelled. And Casey turned a handspring! As for Bud, he looked down in amazement upon the good right hand which had failed him.

  “He’s got sawdust in his jaw!” he grunted at last and moved onward, daunted but still ferocious, to the attack.

  He washed young Vincent Allan before him with a shower of blows. He stood at long distance and smashed across tremendous facers and body punches which sounded on the ribs of Allan like beating on a drum. So Allan leaned through the hurtling gloves and clutched his opponent. He felt that stalwart body give in his clutch. There was a frightened gasp from Bud and then: “Take that bear off of me! Is this a wrestling bout?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Allan, stepped back.

  “Soak him, kid!” screamed Casey.

  Allan, obediently, tapped the other upon the cheek.

  “No! All your might!” shouted Casey through his cupped hands. But the other shook his head. “He’s no good after all,” groaned Casey. “The stiff ain’t got no fightin’ heart!”

  In the meantime. Bud had recovered a little from the effects of that tremendous hug. He pushed out an automatic straight left, that keystone upon which all good boxing should be built; he stepped in, rising on his toes, and as he descended to his heels, his right fist darted out, stooped over the shoulder of Allan, and landed solidly upon his jaw. It was a right cross, delicately executed, with nearly two hundred pounds of brawn to give it significance, and it rocked Vincent Allan like a ship in a gale.

  “Fight! Fight! Fight!” yelled Casey, seeing his protege driven into retreat.

  Instinct and imitation were teaching Allan. He put up his hands as his opponent did; he began to strike out with a straight left arm; but there was no spirit in his blows, and Bud shook them off and slid in for further execution. He came to half-arm distance, dropped a fist almost to his knee, and whipped it to the head. It landed on the point of Allan’s jaw and tilted his head back on his shoulders. He was not stunned. These heavy blows in a shower had not affected his brain. But the scraping glove had flicked off a bit of skin. He touched the stinging place with his glove and, lowering it, he saw a dark little round spot. In that instant one self died and another self was born, for the gentle lessons of pity, of mercy, of human kindliness were shed from his mind into a deep oblivion. He had been aware, before this, of driving fists, of the perspiring, shining body of Bud, of the yelling voices around the ring, of the snarling, lashing voice of Paddy Casey, but now all of this was forgotten. He stood in the midst of a thick silence and there existed before him only the bright, battle-eager eyes of Bud; there existed within his heart only a ravening desire to make those gleaming eyes dark as night, helpless, blank.

  Bud came in, with both fists whipping to the mark, but Allan put a hand against his breast and pushed him away. He seemed to float off like a feather. Before he was settled, Allan was at him. He came as the tiger comes, with every nerve tingling, with every muscle working. He was inside the reach of those milling gloves. His feet gripped the floor as though glued there, his toes digging for a hold, and then he struck. His fist struck; something cracked. The fist sank in, in to the very vitals, and Bud sank in a writhing heap on the floor.

  He became aware of the shouting through its cessation, then. Half a dozen men swarmed through the ropes and lifted Bud while Vincent Allan stepped closer and looked down into dull, dead eyes which gazed up to him without recognition. It would be pleasant, now, to say that Vincent Allan felt pity and remorse, but if the cruel truth must be told, he tasted only an incomparable sweetness of victory. He wanted only one thing from the bottom of the animal heart which had awakened in him, and that was to fight again.

  They carried Bud from the ring; they stretched him on a couch; a doctor hurried in with a satchel in his hand and kneeled by the motionless figure.

  “Two ribs gone,” he said. “A lucky thing he was not hit on the left side or you would have a dead man here, Casey.”

  Then they carried Bud out.

  No one carne near to Allan during all of this time. He knew their eyes were feeling him over from head to foot, watching the easy rise and fall of his breast, studying the smooth rippling of those mysterious muscles which clothed his arms and padded his chest, and lay thick and dimpling across his shoulder blades. But no one came to him with a friendly word or a hostile one, and their eyes reminded him of the eyes of children watching the black panther of the zoo asleep in a shadow of his cage, himself deeper black than the shadow.

  Then Casey, without a word, grappled his arm and dragged him back to his private office. There he searched Allan from head to foot, white-faced, tight lipped. He kept mumbling to himself: “I dunno how it is — I dunno where it comes from. How d’you feel here? And here?”

  With a hard forefinger he prodded the jaw and the body of Allan where the crashing blows of Bud had landed.

  “Don’t you feel nothin’?” he asked almost savagely.

  “Oh yes,” said Allan. “My chin stings a great deal.”

  “Your chin stings a great deal!” mocked Casey with a snarl. “Oh, the devil! And don’t you feel nothing here on the jaw — or where he soaked you in the stomach?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “You’re afraid, are you? So’s a buzz saw afraid of wood! What you thinkin’ about now?”

  “I was only wondering when the next man boxed me,” said Allan.

  “You’d like to start ag’in?”

  Allan sighed. The whole picture of that boxing contest was flashing again and again through his mind. He was seeing all the intimate little details without missing one, just as his practiced eye could run up a column of figures with dazzling speed and then put down the total without an error. There was the time when Bud had struck so heavily at him the very first time. Suppose that he had ducked under that driving punch and then hit up sharply at the lunging body? Or when Bud dropped the right cross upon his jaw, what if he himself had flicked his left hand straight into the face of his foe, with a shoulder twitch behind it?

  “I’d like to do that over again,” said Allan. “I see so many places, now, where I could have struck
him.”

  There intervened a long moment of silence.

  “Do you know who Bud is?” asked Casey.

  “No.”

  “He’s a crackerjack heavyweight. He’s a comer. Fought eighteen times. Four decisions, two draws — and twelve knockouts! He ain’t never been beaten — never! And then this — this! One round!”

  “It wasn’t a minute,” said Allan anxiously. “I was just beginning, you know. And if—”

  Paddy Casey groaned.

  “You go home,” he said. “To-morrer you trot down to that bank and tell ’em that stayin’ behind a counter ain’t your line. Look, kid! I been waitin’ for five years for this to happen. I been waitin’ for a right one to come along. And you’re it. Not too big to be chain-lightnin’ with feet and hands. Nothin’ hurts you. And thunder in both fists. In six months d’you know what? The Garden for yours and the championship of the world! Go home. Be a good kid. Tomorrow you and me start!”

  4. ALLAN WINS MUSTARD

  ALLAN WENT HOME and sat by the window, in his little room. He had not turned on the light, though the darkness was thick as ink in the chamber, for he wanted to look out on the night world. It was the first time in his life that he had such a desire. As a rule, there was supper to eat, and then a certain necessary chapter in a book to read, for he must not cease pushing his dull brain ahead. After the reading ended, he must undress and go to bed, according to that maxim of his dead father: “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise!” But his father used to add with a bitter significance: “Except fools — except fools!”

  “Hush, father,” Vincent’s mother used to say, “how can you talk so — of your own boy — your own dear son!”

  “Truth is like murder,” his father would answer. “It will out!”

  Neither of them had ever loved him. He had had an elder brother, graceful in body, quick in mind. On him all their hopes and their affections centered until scarlet fever carried him off. “If he had had Vincent’s constitution, he would have laughed at the fever,” the doctor had said. And from that moment they had rather held it against their younger son. They could not help letting him guess that, in their estimation, a whole gross of Vincents would not have been worth a single Ralph. So his home life had been a curse to him. Indeed, how little joy there had been in his life, either before or after the death of his parents. In fact, he could remember nothing so important as this day of days. He was revealed to himself as a new man. There was power tingling in his hands great enough to have struck down a professional pugilist so much larger than he. There was power in his heart, too, as untapped as the power in his hands had ever been. Romances of others had often appealed to him; suddenly he wakened to the belief that there might be romantic possibilities in himself, and the thought was stunning.

  A block away the Third Avenue elevated roared and whined and rattled. It was hurrying throngs of men and women and children — alas! — back to their homes from the work of their day. To each of them the night had some meaning. There was a family to see for which they provided; there was a brother or a sister to greet; there was a table around which faces of dear ones smiled upon them. Oh, to Vincent Allan how dear was that picture! He had yearned to be a part of it all his life, but instead he had never been more than tolerated to his face and despised in secret.

  On this magic day, however, a new avenue of escape was opened to him. Something might be done. There was strength in his hands — how much strength he himself could not so much as guess, but it haunted him. It was a domain which he would explore. Its distant borders he would examine and define. For what he had done against Bud was nothing. That final blow, he felt, could have been thrice as hard. Up his arm the muscles flexed and leaped at the thought, and fire came into his heart.

  He could not stay in his room after that. Yonder m the street men were stirring, talking, laughing. He had a place among them now. They might supply the friction out of which he would be able to discover all the power that was in these hands of his. So he tugged his hat upon his head and went down the stairs to the street, now that his course was decided.

  He began to wander idly, letting the streets lead him. He reached the Bowery where the congested traffic thickened from Fourth Avenue and Third and where the people swarmed like flies on the sidewalk. Three ruffians came before him, arms locked together, sweeping before them a wide swath. He braced himself — he dug for a foothold with gripping toes — the trio cracked open, and he was through. Vincent Allan stopped and turned and laughed. It was an invitation, but the three suddenly dropped their heads and hurried on.

  He went on. — 4 Out of all these hurrying thousands surely there was some one, or two, who would stand against him, and let him vent the newly found power of his arms, so long wasted. He turned a corner and wandered down a dim alley.

  There came a chorus of shrill cries behind him; he turned and saw a child down and an automobile speeding on. Allan was off the curb in an instant. He raced at full speed in the direction of the speeding car. As it shot up beside him, he leaped onto the running board and caught at the wheel.

  The driver crouched lower, barking at his companion. The companion whipped from a pocket a gleaming bit of steel, and Allan had no chance to see that it was a revolver. He struck as his eye caught the first flash, and the other crumpled in his seat. Then he seized the driver and the latter jammed on the brakes. They came to a halt bumping on the cobbles. He dragged the man from his seat onto the pavement. Behind them a hundred furious men and women were rushing, but they were still far away when the crisis came, for though the man whom he held twisted and writhed ineffectually in the grasp of Allan, like a child held by a man, his companion had now recovered and lurched from the automobile with the gun held stiffly before him. What was to be done? For the fastest hand could not outspeed a bullet. He thought of one thing only, and, lifting the man with whom he had grappled, he heaved the body around his head and flung it at the assailant. The flying mass struck home. Down they went in a heap, with the muffled roar of the gun booming at the ear of Allan.

  Then the van of the approaching crowd swept up on them, engulfed them. He saw the two fallen men picked apart. The foremost of the crowd washed back. Some one gasped: “He’s dead!” And Vincent Allan slipped back into the throng which had piled up even in this breathing space of interruption.

  A man was dead; he had been the cause of that death; and for one killing the law exacted another. Such was the working of his mind as he hurried down the alley. He felt, vaguely, that he had been justified, and that he had only striven to bring punishment upon these brutes who had knocked down a child with their car and yet had driven recklessly on. But no matter what his intentions might have been, the fact remained that a man had died because of his intervention and because of that death he himself might be sent to the chair.

  He thought of only one thing, and that was to flee as fast as he could. He had in his pocket all his cash which was not deposited to his bank account. That cash was woefully little, and yet it might carry him to a distance. He went straight to the Grand Central as fast as a taxicab would carry him. There he bought a ticket to Boston; in an hour the wheels were roaring under him upon the steel rails, and Manhattan had become a ghost of danger behind him.

  The next morning he left Boston for New Orleans; and he reached New Orleans without a cent in his pocket. The tip to the porter had exhausted his exchequer. But still he had not placed a sufficient distance behind him. For it was in a New Orleans paper that he read the first account of the killing. It struck him like a blow — a headline on the third page.

  “Man Used as Club” ran the headline. And beneath it: “Speeding Bandits Knock Down Child. Man Stops Pair Single-handed. Disappears.”

  The article beneath it ran:

  “When Steve Martin, twenty-seven, of 92 West Charlesworth Street, New York City, and Mike Hanery, twenty-five, alias, ‘Dan, the Mug,’ of the same address, held up the paying teller of the Wheat Exc
hange Bank, Seventh Avenue Branch, Manhattan, they were given the cash which was on hand, amounting to seventeen hundred and forty-eight dollars. They did not stay to congratulate one another on their haul, but ran out of the bank before the alarm could be given and jumped into a stolen car which was waiting at the curb with the motor running.

  “They sped down Seventh Avenue, soon eluding pursuit in the first traffic jam. Then they turned east, passed down Fourth Avenue to the Bowery, and left that famous street for a side alley running to Second Avenue. As they swung into the alley little Rose Kochansky, 192 Little Hanover Street, ran out on the cobble stones to escape a playmate who was attempting to tag her, and the machine struck her a glancing blow which knocked her down, inflicting severe bruises and perhaps dangerous internal injuries on account of which she now lies seriously ill in a hospital.

  “The robbers, however, did not pause. They had other things to think about and gave their car the gas in spite of the shout of rage which arose from the pedestrians up and down the block. They would have escaped beyond doubt had not an unknown decided to take the affair into his own hands. He jumped on the running board of the automobile, stopped the car, and when the two attacked him, he picked up Martin and threw him at Hanery. The bullet from Hanery’s gun passed through Martin’s heart. The police are now searching for the man who used Martin as a club.”

  There was the significant sentence left to the very end like the snap and cut of the whiplash. The police were looking for him!

  Let them reach far, then! That same day a freight train rattled West through the embowering green of Louisiana plantations and carried Vincent Allan on its rods. At the end of the first division, a brakeman discovered him, pulled him forth, and swung his heavy lantern to knock the hobo down the steep bank. So, before the lantern landed — weighted and reinforced with iron as it was — Vincent Allan stabbed his left fist into the shack’s stomach and drove him into space. There was a roll down the lower bank, a half-stifled shout of fear and surprise, and then the splash as the green waters of the marsh received him.