Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “That was enough for me. I figgered that I’d killed him sure, and I run out and made a grab for my hoss. I made such a dog-gone fast reach for that ol’ hoss that he threw up his head and bolted. And I could hear old man Prevost yellin’ and cussin’ and hollerin’ murder on the inside of the house.

  “Seemed to me like all of El Ridal must be hearin’ him. I jumps across the street to the hotel. I didn’t wait none to ask questions. I could hear old man Prevost yellin’ ‘Murder!’ right behind me.

  “They was a line-up of hosses at the rack in front of the hotel. I picked out the best with my eye as I come flyin’. Long as I was to be a hoss thief, I might as well steal a good one.

  “That sounds like fool talk to you, I guess. You’re a plumb honest man, Al, and I suppose that you would of stayed and stood your trial and took your chances of provin’ that you was no worse than the gent that you’d shot. I tried to make myself stay. But it looked like stayin’ to die, and I wasn’t ready to stay and die — not even for Marie’s sake!

  “I picked out old Hank Moon’s cream and made the saddle in one jump. Then I skinned out of El Ridal before they knowed that I was more’n started. That’s how I come to leave El Ridal. I’d shot a man and stole a hoss — I dunno which is much worst to of done.”

  “Did Charlie Prevost die?”

  “That’s the joke. Sure he didn’t die. It was only a graze. He’s got a scar on his face and a dog-gone good will to kill me one way or another if his luck don’t play out on him. He spends his time workin’ out ways of snaggin’ me. You can lay to it that he was ridin’ in the lead when the boys hit the trail after me tonight!

  “That’s the joke. Because I thought I’d killed young Prevost, I busted loose and went rampagin’ around. When a gent has killed a man and stole a hoss, it don’t make so much difference what else he’s done — and a little thing like jumping your old board bill — that don’t amount to nothin’ — you see?”

  “I see,” said Allan.

  How very perfectly, indeed, he understood all that had passed in the mind of the unlucky fellow!

  “First thing I know, I get cornered by two different posses squeezin’ in on me from two sides while I’m ridin’ about takin’ my pleasure of the country. I rode the old cream hoss ragged. It was near dead, and they was sure to catch me when here come a gent leadin’ a hoss — a big, strappin’ bay hoss. He comes up to me, gives me the hoss, and him and me, we slide away from the rest of ’em like they’d been anchored to the ground.

  “That was Harry Christopher. D’you wonder that after meeting up with him like that, I’d give him my promise to follow him for a year, anyway? I wanted to make it a lifetime, but he said that a year was enough. If I liked the life after that, I could sign up for the rest of the time. You see? Now you come, partner, and tell me that you’ll give me a new grip at life if I’ll promise to do what you want me to do. I didn’t think of my promise to Christopher while you were talkin’. That’s the straight of it, partner!”

  It was impossible for Allan to doubt him. Good faith and sincerity rang in his voice as truly as the hollow voice of El Ridal River spoke of death and danger in the deep of the valley before them.

  “How long do you have to stay with Christopher?” he asked at last.

  “Five months more,” said Jim Jones.

  “Then,” said Allan, “I have to stay with you!”

  12. “YOU’RE AN ACE”

  IT WAS IN vain that Jim plied him with arguments, questions, and even with entreaties.

  “If it’s ever knowed that you’ve rode with Harry Christopher and his gang,” said Jim finally, “it’s enough to lynch you in nine states west of the Rockies. I know what I’m talkin’ about!”

  “Why, then,” said Allan, “I suppose I’ll have to take care that I’m not caught in any one of those nine states. Is that right?”

  “But what in the name of Heaven makes you want to come with me? What good will it do you, Al?”

  There was one of those pauses which were very frequent when any one talked with “Slow” Allan, or Slow Al, as he came to be better known by that name.

  “It’ll give me a chance to become a friend of yours, Jim.”

  “You’re that now, if ever a man proved that he could be the friend of another. Look what you’ve done, Al!”

  “I’ve only undone the trouble that I made for you myself. There’s no credit coming to me for anything like that. I’ve played an extraordinarily foolish game. But we begin now at evens. In fact, Jim, I won’t let you shake me off!”

  “What started you feelin’ so dog-gone friendly to me, old-timer?”

  There was another pause, while Allan slowly pushed the name of Frances out of his mind.

  “When I learned that you were so young, Jim; and when I saw how brave and quiet you were in the face of the danger that I had left you in, I couldn’t help admiring you for that.

  So I decided to help you if I could. And the more I see of you, Jim, the better I’d like to have you for a friend. You go back to Harry Christopher. You can’t help that. But I’ll go with you, if Christopher will let me come into his gang.”

  “You’d play a game with that gang of crooks on account of me, Al?”

  “If you’ll let me stay along.”

  He heard Jim mumbling softly in the darkness.

  “You’re a queer one,” said the other at last. “But I’d rather have you with me than ten fightin’ men,” he added, chuckling: “I got a reason. I’ve felt the grip in your hands!”

  With that, he prepared to venture across the narrow ledge and out of the trap again, with Allan walking close behind him, leading the roan mare. For the sounds of the pursuit had died out; it had broken into two streams, sweeping across the head of the mountain and still combing the night for the fugitives. The passage across the ledge was almost easy, now, after the first grim rehearsal had been finished, and now they sat the saddle on the farther side, with two fresh horses under them, and no enemy in sight. Jim Jones led straight down the mountain.

  “But that’s toward El Ridal!” objected Allan. ‘Sure,” said Jim. “That’s the last place they’ll be lookin’ for us.”

  Allan set his teeth to keep from gasping. He felt, on the whole, like a small child following an older and adventurous brother through unknown perils, compelled to keep up simply because he would be too ashamed if he failed to keep pace with the other. Yet so serene was Jim as he rode down into the den of his enemies from which he had barely escaped, and so recently, that he whistled softly as he jogged along with the stallion turning his beautiful head anxiously from side to side as though he understood the burden of peril which his master accepted with so light a heart.

  Not only did they aim straight at El Ridal, but when they came near the town, Jim skirted recklessly behind the houses until the shambling breadth of the hotel was spread before them. There he dismounted. To the hasty question of Allan he replied that having failed to see his sister in the first attempt, he would double back among the very teeth of his foes and attempt to see her a second time. The piece of arrant foolhardiness left Allan speechless for an instant, and before he had recovered, Jim was lost in the black of the night.

  There began a long vigil between the two shacks where he held the horses, straining his eyes through the night, straining his ears to catch every approaching sound. Once a dog bayed and was answered with mellow music by two or three of its kind; whereat he thought, with a shiver, that they were surely trailing the fugitives with hounds. But the dogs became quiet.

  Still, though it was far, far past the usual sleep-time of El Ridal, voices and lights stirred through the town. At length horsemen began to come in from the mountain. They were the riders returning. He could hear the older citizens calling out for news; he could hear the grumbled answers of the riders, disgusted with the failure of their quest.

  The door of the house just before him opened and a woman came out bearing a lantern at the same time that a rider, doubtless h
er husband, came through the yard. They both approached the shed to the right of Allan, and he groaned in his quandary.

  He could not draw back with two horses without making enough noise to betray himself; and if he had to flee again, Jim was cut off without a means of escape from the town. Yet if he stayed where he was, the chances were great that one of the two horses would neigh or stamp or in some other manner draw attention. He stood, therefore, with the head of a horse caught within each arm, whispering softly to them while they pricked their ears and nosed cautiously at him. Fear, being the most vital and the most common of all the emotions is also the one which dumb beasts understand the best, and these two horses knew very well that the master who held them was afraid. So they nosed at him gingerly, asking with glittering eyes and sensitive nostrils what the danger could be and still listening to the faint cautioning hiss of his whispers.

  The sliding door of the shed had been banged open. The woman was holding the lantern, and across the side of the shack, through the great cracks, he saw the shadows rise and fall in waves as her husband unsaddled and fed his weary horse, whose panting was plainly audible.

  “We give ’em a hard run up the mountain,” the man was saying in response to breathless inquiries. “Pretty nigh to the top. Tom Gilbert seen the pair of ’em scooting through the shadows of a bunch of trees. He turned loose his gun at ’em and called to the boys. We made a rush and burnt a lot of powder, but I guess we didn’t hit nothing. The trees an’ the light was ag’in’ us.”

  “A pretty piece of work,” said the woman, moaning. “This’ll get us all murdered in our beds by Harry Christopher.”

  “There’s got to be a change,” said the citizen. “We got to get together and run down them wolves.”

  “Johnston and Jardine have got a pretty good deal to answer for!” said the wife. “Do you think maybe that they was bought off?”

  Her husband groaned. “There ain’t no use in thinkin’,” he said. “What beats us all is this Allan Vincent, as he calls himself. There’s some that thinks that he’s Lew Ramsay!”

  “No!” breathed the wife.

  “I dunno. That’s what some says. Don’t look like there’s nobody but Ramsay that could handle Johnston and Jardine — unless them two was bought off first. But what did Vincent mean by catching Jones if he wanted to have him loose afterward? It looks all kind of mysterious. None of the boys can work it out. But Jardine and Johnston says that they’ll keep on the trail of Vincent a hundred years if they have to, but they’ll run him down in the end; and they sure talked like they meant it. I guess that they wasn’t bought. Somebody seen Jardine’s right hand. It was all swole up and mashed and purple lookin’. And he had a big lump on the side of his head.”

  “I seen this Vincent. He don’t look none too big.”

  “He can do big things, though, and that’s what counts. Come on back to the house.”

  The sliding door was slammed again. They went up the path to the house with the man carrying the lantern, now, and his legs changed into immense, stalking shadows that swept the trees at the side of the yard with light and shade. The screen door to their kitchen jangled behind them, and they were lost to the eyes of Allan, who had been watching closely and listening carefully.

  They left him with enough food for thought, however. For if Jardine and Johnston were determinedly upon his trail, his life was not worth a counterfeit dollar unless he hurried from that region as fast as a horse could carry him. Such a retreat he could not make. He had given his word to young Jim, and that word he must keep.

  To that point in his reflections he had arrived when there was a low-voiced: “Hands up!” behind him.

  He wheeled, ready to dive at the knees of the enemy, when he saw the handsome face of Jim laughing in the starlight.

  “Frontways ain’t the only ways that danger comes,” chuckled Jim.

  And he vaulted lightly into his saddle. In another moment they were weaving along through the dark behind the town, with Jim chatting constantly and gayly. He had gone up the side of the hotel at the very place where he had been climbing before when the strong hand of Allan plucked him down like a dead branch from a tree. One tap had brought his sister to the window and through it he crept. In the gloom of her unlighted room they had embraced, and there they had talked.

  “She told me a pile of things,” said Jim, laughing to himself so that he could hardly continue. “She told me about the way some gents can watch and keep the coyotes away while they’re sound asleep; and how a rabbit can be caught by hypnotizin’ ’em; and how to ride a buckin’ mustang; and how’s the best way to slide money under a door for a girl that ain’t got none to go on. I’ll say that was mighty decent of you givin’ her money that a way. But I’ve give her plenty now so she won’t have to worry none for some little time to come.”

  He fell silent. The face of Allan was hot with shame, and he blessed the covering curtain of the darkness.

  “I told her about some things,” said Jim, much more soberly. “I told her about how a gent could be took out of jail by a man that only used bare hands against two that had guns. I told her about a man that would find a friend in just half a day and know him well enough to go outlaw with him. Well, Al, before I got through what d’you think she done?”

  “I haVe no idea,” said Allan faintly.

  “Dog-gone me if she didn’t bust out cryin’. Can you lay over that?”

  “Well,” sighed Allan, “she seems to be a person who’s full of contradictions.”

  “She’s worse’n that. She’s a Sunday newspaper riddle,” declared his friend. “After that she says to me: ‘Ain’t he the most wonderful man you ever met, Jim?’ I allows that you got your points. ‘They’s nobody like him!’ says she. ‘Just as simple as a girl, an’ braver’n any man!’

  “‘Well,’ says I, ‘I’ll go down an’ get him and bring him up to see you again, if you feel that way!’

  “‘Jim,’ says she. ‘How can you talk that way?’

  “‘What’s wrong?’ says I.

  “‘It ain’t modest,’ says she, ‘to see a gent in a lady’s bedroom.’

  “‘I ain’t goin’ to disappear,’ says I.

  “‘Besides,’ says she, ‘I don’t want to see him.’

  “‘Why didn’t you say that first?’ says I. ‘You kind of rattle when you talk tonight, Frank.’

  “She didn’t say nothing, but sits there beside the window, lookin’ plumb sad and plumb happy all at once. The way ma used to look when dad was sick in bed and all in her hands.

  “‘You got to send him away, so’s he’ll be safe,’ says she to me, after a while.

  “‘He looks like he’s able to take care of himself better’n anybody I ever met,’ says I.

  “‘Jim,’ says she, ‘you talk like a fool! He ain’t no more’n a baby! He dunno how to fry bacon, even, without burnin’ it!”

  “She jumps up and grabs hold of me.

  “‘Jim, Jim!’ says she, all teary, ‘you promise me that you won’t leave him!’

  “‘I’ll stay as close as he’ll let me,’ says I. ‘What’s the matter with you? You act like you was in love with this gent?’

  “I thought she was, too, the way she was actin’ and carryin’ on about you. But now she pushed herself away from me and says: ‘It ain’t gentlemanly to talk like that to your sister, Jim, and you know it.’

  “‘Dog-gone it, Frank,’ says I, ‘what’s wrong with that I said?’

  “‘He ain’t no more’n a stranger to me,’ says Frank. ‘Besides, I really don’t care if I never see him again!’

  “That was too much for me. After her carryin’ on about you bein’ the best gent in the world, it beat me. Don’t it beat you, Al?”

  Allan sighed again. His heart and his brain had been in such a dizzy whirl during this related conversation that he had hardly been able to draw a breath; now the ending let him down so abruptly that he could hardly believe what he was hearing.

  “I’m af
raid that I could never understand her, Jim,” he said.

  “Forget her,” said Jim, chuckling. “She was always that way. You never could get her cornered. She was meant to be a man. She rides like a man and she shoots like a man and dog-gone me if she ain’t as square as a man!”

  “Ah, yes!” said Allan. “I would wager my life that she is all you say.”

  “By the way, before I left, she scratched a couple of words on a piece of paper and give them to me to give you. Here they are.”

  He took an envelope from his pocket which Allan received with trembling hands and opened gingerly, as though precious gold dust might be wasted from the interior if due care were not used. He spread out the sheet of paper which was contained within, lighted a match, and therein he read only this:

  Dear Old Al: You’re an ace. Frank.

  This cryptic document he perused thrice over, with blurred eyes, until at last he folded the paper carefully, inserted it in the envelope, and replaced the letter in his pocket.

  “After all,” said Allan thoughtfully, “there are some things which one hardly cares to understand. Don’t you think so, Jim?”

  13. SLOW ALLAN MEETS CHRISTOPHER

  TWO DAYS LATER Allan sat with his back against a scrub oak, watching roan Mustard nibble at the tough, sun-dried grama grass; and when he tired of watching Mustard, he turned his attention to his target practice. For he was working assiduously and had been for two days, to master the intricacies of gunfire with a long-barreled Colt. Young Jim Jones, a master indeed with all manner of firearms, had taught him methods of sliding a revolver swiftly out of the holster into the hand and firing so that the draw and the explosion of the gun came at one and the same instant, so to speak. But Allan could not imitate the smooth, lightning flash of which Jim’s draw consisted; he was not one of those who have within them stores of nerve energy, like static electricity, ready to flash into convulsive action. His draw was terribly slow, and he knew that it always would be slow. But another trick had been successfully taught him by Jim, and that was to point his gun instead of sight it.