Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Humph!” said she, and put her hands on her hips with a very fine air. “Do you say good morning to most folks with a gun in your hand?”

  “That was just for luck,” said I, “to cheer things along a little.”

  “You’re a nervy kind,” said she, and she chuckled a little. She even walked back up the slope and stood in front of me so close that I could watch the green of her eyes. For lack of something else to do, she took the thick length of silken red hair over her shoulder and began to braid it; watching me all the time the way one man watches another man — with suspicion, you know, and a sort of hostile interest.

  “Maybe you expected someone else,” said she, and she gave me a crooked little smile that sank a dimple in one cheek.

  “Maybe I did,” said I, grinning at her.

  “Maybe a gun would’ve been in order for him,” said she.

  “Maybe it would,” said I.

  But I didn’t like this thread of conversation at all. She was trailing too close to the truth. While I thought it over I took another tuck in my belt. It was already drawn up fairly tight, and this reef bit pretty deep into my waistline. She nodded at me as though she understood.

  “Hungry, eh?” said she.

  “Yes,” said I. “Excuse me!”

  For just then I saw a pair of long ears flicked behind a stone. I glided out my Colt just in time to sink a bullet through the head of a big jack. It rolled ten feet down the hill before it lay still, with the echoes still barking back at us from the upper hills. I got the rabbit and brought it back. I cleaned it while she talked to me. It was breakfast, lunch, and dinner to me, and I worked fast.

  “You might bring up a bit of a fire for me,” said I, “if you need something to do.”

  “You are crusty,” says she. But she chuckled again and built the fire in the center of the clearing. I had rabbit meat roasting in two snaps of your fingers. It was a sweet smell to me.

  “What are you doing so far away from home?” said I.

  “Riding herd,” said she quick as a wink, and she waved to a score or two of cows browsing two miles away.

  I saw that she was not going to talk any more than she felt was healthy.

  “What’s your name?” said I.

  “Margaret O’Rourke,” said she.

  “What does that make for short?” said I.

  “A man with a good education,” says she, “can pronounce the whole thing.”

  “I was always too lazy to study,” says I. “I hate making a speech. Suppose I call you ‘Mike?’”

  She blinked at me for a minute.

  “Do you think I’m in disguise?” says she.

  She was a sassy young thing, but there was never anything more feminine in the world, from the turn of her ankles to the tilt of her nose.

  “You ran like a boy,” said I. “I didn’t know, Mike, but what you might be one.”

  “Well,” said she, “you’re cool! I think I’ll step along.”

  But I knew by the way she gathered herself together and stood up, that she didn’t intend to go.

  As a matter of fact, I had never before talked to a girl as I was talking to her. I think that I had even been a bit backward with them, particularly after my years with Father McGuire took me away from the company of them so much. But when a man has his mind full of the danger of the law, and squints twice at every bush on the hillside to see if there isn’t a shadow of a man behind it; and when the flash of every leaf in the forest may be a glint of a gun with an eye squinted at you behind it — one forgets a good deal of self-consciousness even at eighteen.

  I merely grinned at Margaret O’Rourke again and said: “I’m sorry that you can’t stay for the rabbit.”

  It was nearer the eating point every second. Now she wrinkled her nose to smell the fragrance of it.

  “I might stay, after all,” said she.

  I began to whistle a tune and stirred the fire, while she turned the sharp stick on which the meat was spitted.

  “I suppose you won’t urge me,” said she.

  “A girl named Mike,” said I, “is pretty apt to do what she pleases. I’ve invited you once!”

  She kicked at a pebble and sent it spinning off. It darted under the nose of my gray gelding as he was reaching for a tuft of bunch grass, and he tossed up his head and danced back, snorting. Then she stared down at me for a minute, but I could see her fighting against a smile.

  “I’ve never met up with any one just like you,” said she.

  “Thanks,” said I.

  “I didn’t say that I meant it that way,” murmured Mike. “What might your name be?”

  “Smithers,” I told her. “Larry Smithers.”

  “Where do you hang out?”

  The only town I knew of in the mountains was called Camden. I told her that I came from that direction.

  “Been long on the trail?” said she.

  “Just a spell,” said I indefinitely, for I had not the slightest idea how many leagues Camden might be away.

  “Which trail did you come?” said she. “The short one or the long one?”

  “The short one,” said I.

  “That’s why your horse looks so spent, I suppose,” said she.

  Of course that made me open my eyes at her.

  She explained: “Because if you hit north through these mountains without knowing the trails, it’ll be rougher and leaner work than you ever did before, I suppose.”

  “Mike,” said I, “didn’t you hear me say that I’m drifting south?”

  “Drifting,” said she, with a neat little emphasis, “is a pretty good word for it. You wouldn’t call it really riding, I guess.”

  She jerked a thumb over her shoulder toward the gelding. Of course, the good horse was a bit tucked up from his work of the night before, and he was pretty heavily marked with the salt of the sweat that had worked out on him.

  I was worried. Not so much by what she said as by her manner of saying it. Those green eyes had a twinkle in them as they watched me, and I knew that she was seeing my trouble and preparing to make the most of it.

  “That horse is soft,” said I.

  “I could tell that,” she answered, throwing the ball straight back to me so that my fingers stung. “I could tell that by the look of his shoulders — and his quarters, too.”

  I couldn’t help taking a look at the gray. He was in the very pink of the best condition, and there was not the least doubt of it. It stood out all over his body. On the quarters of the shoulders the long, ropy muscles slid into tangles and out again every time he took a step.

  But how could I expect a girl of fifteen or sixteen to know so much?

  “How old are you, Mike?” said I.

  “Sixteen, Joe,” said she.

  “I didn’t say my name was Joe.”

  “I know it isn’t Larry,” said she.

  “How do you know that?”

  “By the black of your eyes,” said she. “You never got that very far north of the Rio Grande.”

  “My family have always been travelers,” said I.

  “There’s no clay between here and Camden,” said she, and jerked her thumb at the gelding again.

  It was braided and tangled in his fetlocks. I saw that she knew a very great deal too much. Half an hour after she left me, she might have the sheriff on my trail.

  “I took a detour,” said I.

  I hoped that might serve to put her off, but she was back at me in a flash with: “Were they following you as close as all that?” said she.

  I blinked at her again. Then I laughed and chucked all the cards on the table face up; not all at once, however. I was willing to let her know that I was in the wrong, but I didn’t want her to guess in what way.

  “As a matter of fact,” said I, “I got into a fracas with the son of the sheriff down yonder.” Here I waved to the south. “I took a punch at him. He hit his head on the floor as he went down, and it opened up the claret. The sheriff swore I’d used a club and
started hunting for me. So I thought I might as well slide out for the tall timber. Sheriffs have a nasty way of soaking a fellow when they feel like it.”

  I said it very confidentially, and she nodded in a most friendly way.

  “I suppose,” murmured Mike, “that you used the same sort of a punch that dropped the rabbit?”

  In boxing parlance — and that comes naturally to me after three years with Father McGuire — it was as though she countered with a nice right just as I led with a straight left. She caught me flat-footed and put me back on my heels, pretty groggy. I could only stare at her for a moment.

  She was too clever not to follow up her opening. She hit me again before I could put my hands up.

  “I suppose you hit him from the hip, just the way you did the rabbit?” said she.

  From the time I began to live in fear of my life from the gun of Harry Chase and started practicing every day with a Colt, I had worked at a quick draw, and I suppose that shot had seemed rather neat to Mike. At any rate, it was plain that I couldn’t bamboozle her. I simply blurted out:

  “Do all the girls up here grow this fast above the eyes?”

  “I have two brothers,” said Mike.

  She said it in a way that was as much as though she had explained that they had put her through a pretty stiff course of sprouts.

  “They’ve stayed up nights studying with you, I guess,” said I.

  “They’ve been a pretty liberal education,” admitted Mike. “Did you kill him, or just wing the sheriff’s son?”

  She asked it as any other girl might have asked if I had killed or winged a wild goose.

  “It wasn’t the sheriff’s son,” said I.

  “You’ve got me all tangled up,” said she. “Which is the right story, after all?”

  “The one you haven’t heard,” said I. “Do you want it?”

  She knew by the straightness of my eye that I meant business this time, and she flushed with excitement. But then she set her teeth and shook her head, almost as though she were angry.

  “Look here,” said she, “of course I want to know. But you don’t have to tell me. I’m not a sneaking quitter. Whether you’re in the right or the wrong, I don’t know. But I like — the way you roast rabbit!”

  She gave me that twisted smile again with the dimple drilled right in the center of one cheek. I loved that smile this time, you can be sure.

  “Whether you talk or keep still,” said she, “I won’t go blabbing. The sheriff doesn’t have me on his payroll.”

  I reached her in one jump. I took hold of her two hands and looked her in the eye.

  “Green eyes,” said I, “you’re a square shooter! I’d back you for a good scout against the best man that ever stepped!”

  She was a little pleased, I think, but she only said: “You’ve dropped your rabbit in the dirt!”

  It took a bit of the gimp out of me. But I went back and found that the meat had only dropped in a clean bunch of grass. I picked it up and sat down.

  “All right,” said I, “I’m going to tell you the whole yarn.”

  “Wait till you’re outside of that rabbit,” said she. “And then you can talk.”

  A starved dog doesn’t wait to be asked twice when it sees a bone. I was picking the small bones of that rabbit about a minute later, and I only had to let the belt out one notch. That rabbit simply evaporated inside me.

  “How is it?” said Mike, licking her lips. I had offered her a section of the meat two or three times, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “It’s a good beginning,” said I.

  “I know,” said Mike. “It simply fills up the holes and gets the ground all leveled out for a real meal.”

  “Darn!” said I. “Here I’ve wandered away without the makings.”

  A moment later she got a sack of Bull Durham and brown papers from somewhere and chucked them to me.

  “D’you smoke?” said I, chucking about half that sack into a paper. I squinted at her. According to the sayings of Father McGuire, ladies don’t smoke outside of big cities. Leastwise, they shouldn’t.

  “No,” said Mike. “But I have two brothers.”

  I lay back and gave her a look from head to foot.

  “I like you,” said I.

  XII. A STOCKHOLDER

  IT ISN’T HARD to have to talk about oneself, when you’re eighteen. As far as that goes, it’s never so very difficult. But I took a slant at the sun, and by the hang of it in the sky, I knew that it was about time for Mike to trot back home. So I had to boil down my story into a nutshell.

  “My name is Leon Porfilo,” said I. “My mother was Irish. My father came within a split second of being all white, too, but the last fraction of him was Mexican Indian. That’s where I get my black eyes and my dark skin. Some people have called me a greaser!”

  I stopped here for a minute and looked at her.

  “I admire them for that,” said Mike. “They were brave men.”

  It was a neat way of making a compliment; it tickled me in just the right place, and I was a little red when I went on. I told her of my training with Father McGuire, and my three encounters with Harry Chase. And I told her what had led me to the mountains.

  She sat and thought it over for a moment with her square chin resting on her brown fist.

  “It was that rich man named Chase, I suppose,” said she. “I suppose he bribed Niginski to get you into trouble so that Harry wouldn’t break his neck falling off a cliff named Leon Porfilo.”

  It staggered me again. It was a conclusion that I myself had not had wits enough to reach. It was Tex Cummins who had given me the first hint of that idea. Here was a little kid in her teens who popped right onto the truth at the first jump. At least, I had a pretty good idea that it was close to the truth.

  “You ought to be a weather prophet,” I told her. “You could read the mind of a northeaster, if it has a mind.”

  “I’ve got two brothers,” said this queer girl. “So now you’re all set to blow north?”

  “That’s it. With the horse Tex Cummins gave me.”

  “Who is this here Tex Cummins?” said she, pointing a finger at me.

  But by this time I was beginning to be afraid of her. She knew too much for me. She was so much smarter and quicker than I, that, beside her, I felt like a fat steer beside a cow pony.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “Is he an old friend?”

  “I’ve only seen him a couple of times.”

  “Humph,” said the girl, and began to prod at the gravel with a stick.

  “It’s about time for you to be drifting home, Mike,” said I.

  “Look here,” said Mike, “how did Cummins get to know you?”

  “He saw me fighting Harry Chase the second time, and he bet on me when the rest were backing Harry.”

  “Well,” said Mike, “I don’t like the sound of him.”

  I gasped at her: “Why, he’s taken me out of jail, fixed me with a horse and blankets, and”

  “And turned you loose without a cent in your pockets. You haven’t a penny!”

  “Darn it!” said I. “How do you guess that?”

  Instead of answering, she twisted away from me, and a minute later she turned around and tossed me a little rolled-up greenback. I unfurled it and read “twenty dollars.” It was the prettiest little poem I had ever read in my life, but of course I held it out to her.

  “I can’t take charity,” said I.

  “Jiminy,” said Mike, laughing at me, “you are silly. Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Why should I?” said I.

  “Oh, I have two brothers,” said she.

  “That doesn’t answer everything in the world.”

  “It nearly does,” said she. “If you knew them, you’d understand.”

  “You pack around a bit of spare change for them when they’re in a tight corner?” said I.

  She paid no attention to me. Her eyes were shadowy with more thinking, and although I fe
lt pretty small about it, I tucked that money into a trouser pocket and wished that God could show me how any angel could be finer than this girl.

  “I’m wondering about this Chase family,” said she. “How many are they?”

  “Three,” said I.

  “You’ve licked one of them three times,” said she. “What about the other two?”

  “Harry is about enough for me,” said I. “I’ve licked him, but it’s always been a tight squeeze. He’s bigger than I am. His father is rich and seems a pretty straight shooter. Then he has an older brother called Andrew.”

  “Andrew Chase!” cried Mike.

  I was not surprised that she had heard of him. Not very surprised. I knew that everyone in the desert stretches of the range was familiar with his reputation, and it would have been strange if the stories about him had not wandered a little way into the mountains.

  “That’s the one,” said I.

  “Poor Leon Porfilo” said she. “If Andrew Chase starts after you, I suppose that’s the end? Now that the law is against you, I suppose he wouldn’t mind a little hunting trip?”

  It didn’t stir up my pride. I knew that I was a pretty good fighter, gun or knife or fist — but I knew that Andrew Chase was just a thousand times better. I simply shook my head.

  “If he comes after me,” I admitted, “I suppose that I’m done!”

  “It’s hard luck,” said Mike. “Tell me one thing more.”

  “Blaze away.”

  “Are you going to go straight, Leon?” I had not thought particularly about that. To save my hide was my chief concern.

  “I suppose that I am,” said I. “I want to.”

  “I want you to,” said she. “I want my part of you to go straight as a die! I’ve bought twenty dollars’ worth of you, Leon!”

  It was an odd way of looking at the affair, but then, everything about Mike was odd.

  “All right,” said I. “You have twenty dollars in me. I’ll try to keep that much straight.”

  “Oh, Leon,” said Mike, and she came a little closer to me, “keep all of yourself straight! The mountains have enough crooks scattered around through them already. I see them now and then. They fry in the sun all summer; and they freeze all winter. They ride a hundred miles to get drunk on moonshine whisky; and then when they’re full of it, they ride another hundred miles to murder an old friend. They start out just sort of naturally sliding downhill. They mean to be honest, at first, but once they’re outside of the law — what can they do?”