Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  The next morning I started at once for the Crothers Canyon. I had no expectation of trouble from Chet. I knew that he was a high-spirited youngster — a great deal too high-spirited to please his family, in fact. But, nevertheless, there was little chance that he would be waiting in the canyon to fight me hand to hand — even though the mountaineers had an idea that that was his purpose.

  I rode to the edge of the canyon, however, and looked over it. Half a mile to the right, I saw a man sitting in the shade of a tree with his horse beside him, and I guessed that to be O’Rourke. I looked up and down the valley, but there was no sign of an ambuscade.

  Sheriff Lawton considered me a good deal of a fool in many ways, but even Lawton did not think that I would be so foolhardy as to accept such an open invitation as young O’Rourke had extended to me.

  I sent Roanoke down the bluff like an avalanche, and trotted down to chat with Mike’s brother, if it were he.

  Even from a distance it was easy to see that this was the right man. For his hat was off and a patch of sun, dropping through the branches of the oak tree, shone upon a flaming red head — not the auburn hair of Mike, but purest flame. Certainly this was an O’Rourke.

  He climbed into his saddle and came to meet me, and when he drew nearer I was a little shocked by the look of him. He was as ugly as Mike was pretty. A typical “mug” was the face of Chet O’Rourke. He came to me with a vast grin, and his hand stretched out.

  “Some of these birds in the mountains around here,” said he, “figger that I’m layin’ out to get a crack at you, Porfilo. But I ain’t a fool. I hope you figgered that none of that talk started with me?”

  “I didn’t think that,” said I. “But I wondered what I could do for you?”

  “For me, you could give me a chance to have a slant at you. It’s worth while! Lemme see the backs of your hands!”

  I wondered at him a little and held them out to him, one by one — big, shapeless paws they are to this day.

  “Dog-gone my heart!” said Chet O’Rourke. “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it for myself! I seen the faces that you put on Joe and Willie Ricks. I figgered that you must have slammed ’em with a club, but they swore that it was only your fists.

  “But here I can see for myself that your knuckles ain’t even skinned. That’s something worth seeing, Porfilo. What are your hands made of? Iron?”

  I felt that he was chaffing me a little, but then I saw that his foolish grin was caused only by his very real pleasure at being with me.

  “I came out,” he continued, “because Mike wants to see you, and wants to see you bad. What shall I tell her? That you’ll come back?”

  It was the pleasantest news that I had heard in many a day since my last parting with Mike. It went like a song through me.

  “I’ll ride back with you right now!” said I.

  Chet O’Rourke laughed and shook his head.

  “This plug of mine ain’t no bird,” said he. “I seen you come wingin’ down into the valley a couple of minutes ago, and I know the way you travel on that Roanoke mule. Lawton says that the Negro that give it to you ought to be hanged for bein’ a public nuisance!”

  “I’m starting now, then,” said I.

  “So long, old-timer. I hear that Cummins is swarmin’ through these parts, tryin’ to get even with you for what you done to his man, Moyer.”

  “Thanks,” said I. “I’ll try to dodge Tex.”

  He laughed joyously, as though I were having my little joke — as though it were most absurd to think of me trying to avoid any man or group of men in the world.

  Although I was a happy fellow to be bound for another meeting with Mike, yet I was thoughtful and pretty blue, riding across the hills on that day. For I could not help telling myself that if other people felt about me as young O’Rourke did, I was not a great distance away from a calamity.

  They had put me up on too high a pedestal, and I knew that a man cannot stay on the heights very long without having an excellent chance to tumble down and break his neck. Chance and a great deal of gossip had made me into a giant in the imaginings of most of the mountain folk, and the knowledge of how they felt made me realize more bitterly just what an ordinary fellow I was.

  I suppose that some people would have been elated; and, from time to time, I had been pleased myself with the respect which strong men felt for me. But now it was becoming a great burden. Before long, every man would regard me as O’Rourke did. Every other word I spoke, if it were not perfectly courteous, would be considered as a bit of high-handedness; and I would be surrounded by men who felt it was their duty to fight me to save their self-respect!

  It was rather an odd thing. At the very time when men were saying that I was invincible and heaping up instances to prove it, I felt that I had my back to the wall. At the very time when it was said that I feared no living man or group of men, I lived in constant terror of the next five minutes.

  Because I was in that terror, I had to practice every day. This very afternoon, riding hard to come to the woman I loved, I had to pause and for an hour and a half work until both my guns were hot, and I had fired away many pounds of powder and lead. I had to work from horseback at the stand, at the trot, and at the gallop, snapping shots at a rock fifty yards away — then making a trip to inspect it.

  I would say to myself, if I had struck it five times and missed once: “I have killed five men, and I have been killed once.”

  That was the attitude that was forced upon me, and every time I gripped the delicately set trigger with my forefinger I told myself that I was shooting to kill or to be killed! When one has that attitude, one’s marksmanship improves by leaps and bounds; but how frightful is the nervous strain!

  XXV. TO KILL

  BUT, BY THE time I reached the valley, in the cool dusk of the day, my spirits rose. I think it is impossible to look on the stars and the deep night sky without a lifting heart. Moreover, I had Mike waiting for me at the end of the trail!

  I kept Roanoke in the trees among the foothills, gnawing my lip with impatience while the day faded from the mountains. The upper peaks were still rosy, but the valley was thick with shadow when I decided to cross it. So I shot Roanoke away at his driving trot which swayed us over the miles like the sliding of water down a steep flume, effortless and soundless, for those hard, shuffling hoofs never flipped down against the ground like the hoofs of a trotting horse of hot blood.

  We shot up the mouth of the ravine, and I reached the accustomed trysting place under the trees opposite the O’Rourke house. I whistled the signal — and in an instant she was out of the house, and hurrying toward me. Half my happiness went out when I heard her calm voice:

  “Will you come inside, Leon? Of course, the family knows all about how you’ve been coming to see me. I had to tell dad a little while ago, you know. Only I want to thank you, first, for coming to me at all!”

  I could not answer. Such coldness was worse to me than no reception at all! However, I swallowed hard and set my teeth.

  She took me into the parlor. It was a little, square room, all full of bright-colored window curtains, and a little rug with huge flowers on the floor, and a piano in the corner, dipping down with the dip of the crooked floor level, and photographs of the O’Rourke ancestors framed under glass on the wall — men with great, flaring mustaches and girls watching the camera with a scared look, and two or three vases with narrow throats, crowded with flowers. It was all so feminine and delicate and looked so beautiful to me, that I hardly knew where to stand or where to sit or how to hold my hands.

  “He’s here!” called Mike.

  A little, gray-haired woman hobbled into the doorway and smiled in a frightened way at me, and behind her there was a tall, blond-headed boy — Mike’s brother, as I could tell by his face. For he had her look; he was not a funny cartoon of a man like Chet.

  “This is my mother, Leon,” said Mike.

  She gave her hand a rub on her apron — she was ruddy from
the heat of the kitchen — and she came to me, nodding and smiling.

  “Margaret has told me such a heap about you — Mr. Porfilo. I’m sure I’m mighty glad to see you.”

  I loved that little, bent woman. I held her hand for a moment and wished that I could lift every burden from her tired shoulders. I don’t know why it was, but I thought suddenly of the worn face and the steady eyes of Father McGuire. Perhaps it was because there was so much goodness in both of them.

  “And here’s my brother, Tom!”

  The handsome blond youngster came up and gave me his hand, and all the while his excited eyes went over me, and up and down, measuring me, weighing me, noting my big hands and my bull neck and my blunt, fighting face.

  Why should I call him a youngster, when he was a full two or three years older than I? But he was a youngster, after all, in comparison. He was a manly chap, to be sure, but he had a smooth, well-kept look; he had that air about him which only a woman’s care gives to a young man. His eyes were softer and wider than the eyes of a man who has been through the sort of hell that I had seen for more than two long years.

  Ten minutes of the sort of target practice which I gave myself every day — life-and-death stuff — had more actual soul friction in it than he had known in his twenty-two years of existence, I suppose. I looked at him as I would have looked at a child, but in spite of his good looks, I liked him less than I had liked his ugly brother, Chet. A handsome face is something which I can’t help suspecting in a man. The sort of flattery which it is apt to bring him is not good for the soul.

  He had plenty of strength in his grip, and he used all of it, as though he wanted to show me how much of a man he was.

  I said: “Hold on, Tom! You’re breaking my hand!”

  They all laughed at that, and Tom looked as flushed and pleased as a girl with a new dress or a boy with a new pair of shoes. That silly little compliment set him up on end. Old O’Rourke merely glanced in from the other room and waved his stubby pipe at me.

  “Hello, Porfilo,” he called. “Don’t let that girl of mine make you too dog-gone serious!”

  “What a thing to say!” said Mike.

  But, though she smiled, I could see that she didn’t like that remark. She shooed the rest of her family out of the room, then, and closed the door behind them. Then she perched herself on the piano bench and frowned thoughtfully at me.

  “Aren’t you going to sit down, Leon?” said she.

  I remembered myself suddenly and sat down so hard that the chair groaned under me. Then I grew red and hot; I was conscious, all at once, of the dust on me — the dust even in my long, black hair and the unwashed look I had. I was conscious of the heavy cartridge belt around my hips by the way the holsters jammed against the seat of the chair. Mike looked wonderfully clean and fresh and dainty — like a new-laundered frock with a bit of scent sprinkled on it.

  Then I saw that she was smiling at me with her level eyes — that crooked smile that drilled a dimple deep in the center of one cheek.

  “You’re not comfortable, Leon,” said she.

  “Not a bit!” said I.

  “Well,” said she, “you’re a baby.”

  “I suppose I am,” said I gloomily.

  “But a nice baby,” said Mike.

  I roused myself a little. “You got a mean way of talking down to me, Mike,” said I. “Will you quit it?”

  She stopped smiling — in order to laugh.

  “How did you like Chet?” said she.

  “He’s a fine chap,” said I.

  “You’re saying that to flatter me.”

  It angered me a little, so much assurance in her. I could not help breaking out: “No, not a bit! What he’s got is his own — and all his own!”

  “Are you very cross, Leon?” said she.

  “I am very cross, Margaret,” said I, mimicking her as savagely as I could.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve ridden all day like the devil to get to you, and I’ve been feeling like a man just half a step away from a hangman’s rope — but hoping for a reprieve, you see! Now I get to you, and you treat me like a side show for a while and then like a little boy for the rest of the time. I want you to pretend that I’m grown up, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ll try to do whatever you want, Leon,” said she. “In the first place, I want to ask you if you would do anything reasonable to avoid meeting Andrew Chase?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Tell me honestly.”

  “I’d do nearly anything in the world, Mike. I don’t mind saying that I’m afraid of that man.”

  “I know that you’re not really afraid,” said Mike. “But I also know that, sooner or later, you two are sure to meet, and when you do there’ll probably be a double killing. I can’t imagine anything in the world beating either of you! Well, I’ve made Andrew promise that he’ll leave your trail and go back to Mendez for six months, if you’ll promise not to see me during that time. I sent for you today to ask you if you’d give me that promise.”

  It was rather a startler. I blinked at Mike like a child at a school- teacher.

  “For whose sake are you doing it?” I blurted out very untactfully, and she grew crimson.

  “Because I like you both, of course,” said Mike.

  “Look here,” said I. “You want frank talk, don’t you, and, talking frankly, I’ve got to ask you to see that I haven’t much of a chance to live another six months. They’re pretty hot after me.”

  “They haven’t cornered you for two years, and you know it!” said Mike.

  “That’s all very true. But it simply means that I’ve used up most of my good luck. By the time the six months are over, the chances are about ten to one that I’ll be under the sod or behind the bars waiting for a hanging day. That’s talking from the shoulder. Then all that Andrew is doing is putting off his lucky day. Doesn’t it look that way to you?”

  “You speak,” said Mike huskily, “as if you thought I were doing a favor to Andrew!”

  The torture in me came leaping out into words.

  “You are!” I groaned. “You can’t look me in the eye and tell me that you don’t love him!”

  “It’s not true!” breathed Mike. “I don’t love him, Leon! I swear I don’t!”

  “What are you so white about, then?” I snarled down at her. “What scares you so much? It’s his safety that you’re worrying over. It’s Andrew that you’re thinking about!”

  She was shaking like a dead leaf and clinging to my big hands.

  “Leon, dear,” she said, “once you said that you loved me!”

  “I said it once, and I said the truth. I’ll always love you!”

  “Then you won’t want to kill me with grief. You’re too big and too strong for that, and big, strong men are generous!”

  “Tell me what you want,” I asked heavily, for I saw that the worst was coming. “I want you to swear that you’ll not hunt him down.”

  “Tell me the truth first.”

  “What truth?”

  “That you love him!”

  Her eyes closed, and on her white face came a smile that made it beautiful in spite of her fear and her grief.

  “I do love him with all my heart!” said she.

  I brushed her away from me. Oh, if I could leave this thing unwritten!

  “Curse him!” said I. “He’s broken my life once and hounded me away from my home. Now he’s sneaked into your heart and taken you away from me like a dirty thief. Hunt him down? I’ll have him in my hands and kill him before the world is two days older!”

  I started for the door. She threw herself in front of me with a scream and tried to hold me back, and a wild babbling of words stumbled from her lips. I brushed her aside again and rushed into the darkness.

  Something told me that Andrew Chase must know that I was to interview Mike on this night, and that he would come before long to hear the result of the talk. Perhaps that movement of the lamp behind the parlor window even now
was a signal to him. I waited in the shadow of a hedge, for I was frozen with anger.

  I was not wrong. I knew the step of Andrew Chase long before I had a sight of him. The moon rode high behind a thin masking of wind-driven clouds, and now and again she dipped down through a crevice between clouds and gave the earth a flash of silver light. By such a flash as this I saw Andrew as he stepped through the gate. He was not a yard away as I rose beside him with my gun leveled.

  He did not so much as start; neither was he foolish enough to attempt to master that weapon or touch his own. For if he had made such a foolish move he would have died, surely. There was no more mercy in me than in a stone.

  He said simply: “You want to take it out on me, I see.”

  “Turn around and walk across the street and through the trees,” I commanded him.

  “Is it to be a more private murder?” said Andrew.

  But he turned and walked as I bade him across the soft, thick dust of the street and into the shade of the trees. Roanoke snorted in recognition of me and fell in behind my heels. I directed Andrew through the dark of the forest for a full half mile, climbing up most of the time until we came to a place which I had seen before.

  It was as perfectly arranged as though it had been planned for a battle. For thirty yards square the ground was covered with short, even grass. The sheep from the village knew that place and kept it eaten down as trimly as though a lawn mower worked regularly across the surface.

  The heavens were with me. The wind, increasing in the upper sky and swinging to a different direction, I suppose, though there was only a soft breeze among the trees, scoured away the clouds, and now the clearing was awash with a brilliant moonlight almost as keen as day. Men who have not lived in the high mountains have no thought how clear moonlight can be!

  “Now,” said I, as I halted Chase, “how shall we fight?”