by Max Brand
“I leave it, and you be... “ But Wisner checked the oath.
Another glance at the grotesque face of the mulatto frightened him into a momentary silence, out of which his voice roared again: “A thousand for that?”
“Is he fast enough to run races on a track?” growled the mulatto. “Or can he do tricks on a stage? Or is he handy enough and trained enough for a cutting horse? What is he good for?”
“Good to carry two hundred pounds all day long, uphill and down, like it was a feather. Good to never peg out on you. Gentle as a lamb. Afraid of nothing. And you talk a thousand dollars.”
“It’s more,” ventured Soapy, “than anybody ever offered you for the horse before... more cash, I mean!”
“That’s a lie,” replied the rancher hotly. “The fat man... Jarvin... offered me twelve hundred the other day. I laughed at him. The same way that I laugh at you. It’s five thousand or nothing for Larribee.”
“It’s nothing, then,” murmured Soapy. “But I ain’t going to be cheap. If somebody else offered you twelve hundred, I’ll offer you twelve hundred and fifty. But there’s where I stick. You go into the house and talk it over with your old woman, will you? You’ll never get more. Who’d give it?”
Mr. Wisner swore under his breath. But he went to the house and came back again at the close of a quarter of an hour.
“Me and the wife have settled it,” he said. “We sell him for two thousand, and not a cent less.”
“Two thousand,” Soapy said. “Am I a millionaire?”
“You can’t talk me down.”
“I’ll give you one last boost,” said the mulatto. “Fifteen hundred. That’s my last.”
“It ain’t gonna do.”
“So long, then,” Soapy announced, turning his mule abruptly away, toward the road.
He did not ride fast, however. So slowly did he go that a moment later, when a voice rang through the night behind him, he could turn and holler in answer. And he knew that Larribee was bought.
CHAPTER XVIII
FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS was a very neat profit, all things considered, and Soapy was in a fairly blithe humor when he strapped the saddle upon the back of the big stallion. Well above his head rose the withers of, the monster. Certainly he was not an inch short of eighteen hands, and, as he tossed his head, he looked like a dreadful monster in the night.
But all that Wisner had said of the gentleness of the horse was true enough. It went away up the road at a long, stretching canter that made the mule pull back strenuously against the lead rope. Far behind, from the house of the rancher, Soapy heard the broken-hearted wailing of a child.
Well, the stallion might have been a pet in the farmer’s household, but he was going toward an unpetted life at this moment, Soapy could swear. For he knew Jarvin, and he knew the friends of the fat man. Only one thing puzzled him immensely, and that was to learn what person in the world was so dear to Jarvin as to be worth the gift of a $2,000 horse.
He reached the mine again not long after midnight, stabled the giant, and returned to his bunk where, without food or drink having passed through his throat in the last twenty-four hours, he was instantly asleep. For Soapy was so strangely gifted that he could take the necessities of Nature in great drafts, instead of from time to time. He could abandon himself to delicious idleness for days and weeks at a time. But during that interval he was simply building up in himself an electric store of power, to be drawn forth and used at will. Perhaps that immense force would be expended in one huge labor, and then he would be ready to rest again.
Soapy had been known to go for five days with no more sleep than he could get while nodding and swaying in the saddle in the hot middle of the day. That five days’ ride of the mulatto’s had not so much exhausted him, however, that he was unable to prove himself a man of many devices at the end of it. He had trailed two enemies through 300 miles of mountains, and at the close of the fifth day he killed them both, slept beside their bodies while the clock went around — turned to the mountains, and slept again.
It was known, too, that during the five-day ride he had had not enough really to nourish a single small man through a single day of such labor. But at the end of the great ride the mulatto was not weakened. He was merely made thinner. And the layers of fat that ordinarily coated his body were consumed away as in a fire. It was the fuel by which he lived through such a time of stress.
When the time came for eating, no three men could sit at the board and devour pound for pound with Soapy. He ate as a wolf eats and, like a wolf, he slept and was ready to eat again. The flesh seemed to appear sleekly upon his body, again, almost as swiftly as huge exertions had been able to whip the surplus away.
So Soapy slept until the dawn peered down upon the camp. Then he rose and went to the cook house. All others were forbidden such privileges. But Soapy was different. Of all the strange charms that this mining camp could hold forth to the mulatto, there was only one, Jarvin knew, that had potency enough to retain the yellow man there. That was his simple privilege of going to the cook house whenever he chose and eating until his raging hunger was satisfied.
It had worked havoc, at first. The despairing cook had seen two or three dinners thrown away down the gullet of the monster, and an outraged gang of miners threatening to strike for better chuck. But after that the cook learned wisdom. On the back of his stove, or simmering in the oven, there was always a vast iron pot filled with beans. A few rough lumps of fat pork — the fatter the better — were thrown into the pot. The mess was seasoned and sweetened with a quart of the cheapest molasses. This was fare that Soapy preferred to almost any other food.
On this morning, when Soapy entered the cook house, he reached for the first provisions that he happened to see before him. That, by unlucky chance, was a great apple pie, intended to make a dozen men rejoice at the noon of that day. But it was in the clutches of Soapy before the poor cook could snatch it from ,the path of danger.
By the time the pie was gone, however, the cook was prepared. He wasted no time in offering plate and knife and fork. He set out the huge iron pot itself and thrust into it a formidable iron spoon whose ponderous weight had ended more than one incipient kitchen brawl.
Before that yawning and cavernous pot Soapy sat down with a brief-drawn sigh of pleasure, and then the work of destruction began. Twice and again the belt of Soapy, first drawn as tight as the belt about a monkey’s waist, was loosened. Still Soapy devoured and found room for more. The spoon had grated upon the bottom of the pot before he made the first pause, and the cook with a sigh of relief rubbed his hands together and smiled upon his guest.
“More, Soapy?” he asked.
Soapy looked about the kitchen with a wandering eye, but the light of interest had fled from it. “Look here,” he said, lolling back in his chair, “the next time I tell you what you do... you throw in a handful of lard, will you? These here beans, they’re kind of edgy, you understand?”
Lard was cheap. Far cheaper than apple pies in both cost and labor, and the cook grinned as he nodded assent.
“What’s the news, Soapy?” he asked.
The giant stretched forth his vast hand. “Gimme smoke,” he said.
The cook obediently produced a sack of the inevitable tobacco. It was accepted, a cigarette made from its contents, and then the sack was dropped into the pocket of Soapy. But the cook made no protest. There was apparently news forthcoming that would be worth a greater sacrifice than this.
In two or three whiffs the cigarette was consumed to a butt. The long, red- hot ash was dropped to the floor and ground under the heel of the yellow man. He made himself another smoke, and already the process of digestion was far enough advanced to permit speech.
“The boss is bringing up a prize boob to trim,” said Soapy.
“A prize?” echoed the cook politely, jotting down mental notes.
“Something pretty sweet,” said Soapy. “He’s got somebody that can be squeezed for forty or fifty thousand, ma
ybe.”
“What’ll be the gag this time?” asked the cook.
“How can I tell?” asked the mulatto. “Maybe a fake mine. That’s one of the deals that he likes best. Maybe just poker. He’s been practicing stacking the deck a good deal lately. Getting his hand in, you might say. Or maybe he’ll just tap the sucker on the head and let it go at that.”
“Aye,” said the cook, “that’s pretty likely, too. Who might it be?”
“I dunno,” Soapy said, “but I’ll tell you that he’s due today. The boss rushed me out last night to get him a two-thousand-dollar horse for a present to this friend of his.”
“Two thousand bones,” the cook groaned. “All that blowed in on a horse?”
“You go out to the stable and you’ll see why. This here is a horse that’s a horse. The rest, they’re only imitations of the real thing.” He heaved himself to his feet. “So long!”
A large cake of gingerbread, freshly steaming from the oven, lay cooling on the windowsill. The great hand of the mulatto gathered it in as he rose to his feet, and half of it had disappeared into his maw before he crossed the threshold.
So it was that expectancy was raised to the fever point at the mine. All of his men were more or less familiar with the scoundrel activities of the boss. They knew that nothing was too small and that nothing was too great to interest his rapacity. They knew that the world was fairly paved with his enemies, but still they had never yet known him to use a $2,000 bait upon his hook. Great was the excitement to see what the nature of the fish might be for which this bait had been prepared.
Then, in the midmorning, a horseman labored up the steep. Soapy, stretched upon his back on his bunk, drawing sleepily at a blackened pipe, filled with soggy tobacco, liberally seasoned with perique, had this information brought to him in haste.
“What sort of a looking gent?” said Soapy.
“I put the glasses on him. Looks a biggish sort. And heavy.”
“That’s him,” said Soapy. He heaved himself onto his feet. The lethargy disappeared. And he, with a dozen others, watched the stranger ride into the circle of the shacks.
“What’s he got on his legs?” asked someone in a muttering whisper.
“Hello,” called the stranger, “where is the house of Mike Jarvin?”
Soapy, for an answer, hooked a thumb over his shoulder in the proper direction. They watched the stranger swing rather clumsily down from the saddle. His legs appeared of little use to him. Leaning against the horse, he unshipped a pair of long, strong crutches, then he swung himself across the ground with a wonderful dexterity.
“A cripple by heaven,” whispered Soapy. “Damn me if the boss ain’t throwing away two thousand on a cripple. Boys, are we seeing straight? Or who might this here gent be?”
“It’s something queer,” said the cook. “I got a sort of ticklish feeling in the stomach that we’re going to have some surprises sprung on us around here before long. Where’s the Buttricks?”
CHAPTER XIX
THE BUTTRICKS WERE found, of course, with much ease. They came forth the instant that the rumor began, but too late to see the stranger disappear into the house of Jarvin himself. But they made their inquiries, and it was observed that they changed color when they heard the size of the stranger and the breadth of his shoulders. And, most of all, the mention of his crutches seemed to have an odd effect upon them.
They retreated to their own shack, next to Mike Jarvin’s, and there they remained, although someone, who had a glimpse of them through the window, declared that they were busy furbishing their guns as though in a time of most desperate need.
“They know him,” declared the mulatto, logically enough. “And then why ain’t nobody here ever heard of him? He ain’t the sort of a gent to be forgot, once heard of.”
Said the cook: “What do any of us know, except the mine, and the crooked work of old Jarvin? What do any of us know, I say? We keep tight by the mine. He keeps us too broke to do much traveling, and that’s why we know him so much better than the rest of the folks in the world does. If they knowed what we know, wouldn’t there be a law passed by Congress, or something, to put him in jail, and hang him by his thumbs and toes for an hour a day, as long as he lives the rest of his life? Sure there would.”
It was felt that this remark had not wandered far from the point. But presently all occasion for thought was dismissed. It was a time for observation, pure and simple, for the big cripple was observed emerging from the house of Mike Jarvin.
Mike himself stood in the doorway, smiling upon the back of the newcomer. Then he glanced apprehensively aside to the house where the Buttricks had their quarters.
“It’s got something to do with the Buttricks, the coming of this gent,” said the cook. “And maybe now we’ll find out.”
The cripple was seen going toward the door of the next cottage. He managed himself, now, with only one crutch and yet he swung himself along with wonderful dexterity. Nothing could have been more painfully clumsy than the idea of such a movement, but, as a matter of fact the big fellow handled himself with such smoothness that he seemed to be covering the ground with perfect ease.
“An acrobat, that’s what he is,” said the cook, who usually pronounced an opinion upon all difficult matters. “You can see by the way that he handles himself that he’s been trained all his life to the doing of stunts. I’ll tell you what he’s been... he’s been one of those trapeze artists... you know, in a circus. And he’s had a fall that’s knocked out his legs. But you see how plumb easy that he handles himself.”
They could see and they could wonder at what they saw. Then they observed that the big man had his right hand free from a crutch, free to swing at his side, near the hip, and at that hip there was a well-worn holster of a revolver.
He tapped at the door of the Buttricks.
“Who’s there?” called Lefty Buttrick, after a pause.
“It’s Peter Hale,” said the big stranger. “I’ve come to bring you word that Jarvin doesn’t need you any longer. He expects you to leave at once and he says that you’re paid ahead of time, already. Is that right?”
There was a torrent of oaths from both the Buttricks. They heard what Jarvin had said. But they would not leave. There was an agreement that Mike would give them a month’s notice. They’d had no time to look around, and finally they did not care what message he brought. It was from Mike alone that they would take their orders.
“Sweet, ain’t it?” asked the cook breathlessly. “You might say that for a cripple he’s got himself into a pot of boiling water. How’ll he come out?”
Said the deep, quiet voice of the cripple: “From now on it’s to be understood here that what I say is the wish of Jarvin. There’ll be no going behind my back and waiting for him to give his commands over again. And I’m starting with you two, Lefty and Dan. Do you hear me?”
A fresh current of lurid oaths was listened to in the utmost patience by the big fellow, but when it had ended he remarked: “I’ve heard you, and I think that you’ve nothing fresh to say. Also, if you wish to speak to me face to face, I’m waiting here on the verandah of your house. I won’t run away, my friends.”
“Hark at him sing,” whispered the cook. “He’s the representative of the boss around here, is he? And he’s gonna begin by giving the Buttricks the run? Well, more power to him, I say... but is the world coming to an end?”
“Shut up,” muttered the mulatto. “I want to hear what Lefty Buttrick is gonna say to that.”
It was amazingly apparent that Lefty had needed a moment of thought before replying to this latest sentence — Lefty, who had ever been as a roaring lion in the camp, Lefty, whose strong right hand and ready gun had flashed terror into so many eyes since the moment of his first coming into the employ of Jarvin. They expected to see him leap through the doorway and tear the cripple limb from limb. They expected to see Dan Buttrick come shooting from either hand beside or behind his brother.
Instead, they he
ard Lefty saying: “Come through the door and get shot down one by one as we come? We ain’t fools, Hale!”
It was the crown upon the climax!
No, there was another thing to come, for they heard the cripple say: “I don’t want to make any trouble with you fellows. I’m going back to Jarvin’s house, and I’m going to wait there for half an hour. That ought to give you a chance to move your things out of your place. At the end of the half hour I’m coming back, and, if you haven’t started, I’ll throw you out. This is Jarvin’s property. He orders you off. You stay after a half hour at your own risk.”
He left the verandah and walked back to the house of Jarvin — not straight away, but with a peculiar side-long hitch, his face turned back toward the window that watched him from the Buttrick place, and his right hand swinging steadily beside the holster on his hip.
There was no burst of shots from that window. There was only silence. Then Jarvin’s door closed and the cripple was gone to safety.
“What’ll happen?” asked the cook in an agony of delighted anticipation.
“Lefty’ll cut him to pieces,” the mulatto declared through his teeth. “Don’t I know what Lefty is?”
“We got to wait,” said the cook. “We got to wait and see. I told you that queer things was gonna start happening around this here camp.”
CHAPTER XX
OF ALL THOSE breathless watchers of this odd scene there was not one so interested as burly Soapy. He knew the Buttricks just a shade better than any other man in the camp. As a matter of fact, they had caused him to spend more than five months in bed. That enforced rest had been divided into two periods of almost equal length. Because after he had tackled them the first time and been literally shot to pieces, he was no sooner patched up and on his feet again than he tried his hand with the Buttricks for a second set-to. It was most strange that he was not killed in that second battle royal. The doctor who came to see him gave him an hour to live, at the most. But he lived out the day. The appalling vitality that was living in the deeps of his vast body kept him still alive at the end of forty-eight hours, and the doctor said, shaking his head: “This fellow has used up a dozen lives already, but since he refuses to die, let’s treat him as though he were going to get well. Give him some food. Give him what would be a comfortable meal for an ordinary mucker.”