Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “They’re wild, I suppose.”

  “You suppose, son, but I know. I’ve rode ’em, I’ve broke ’em; and then they broke me!”

  “Really?”

  “I got a hip smashed as flat as a pancake. That’s one thing. My ribs is mixed up worse’n a mess of eggs scrambled in a frying pan. And my head is set on crooked. All from mixing too long with them mustangs.”

  “But if one just herded them along?”

  “Herded the devil!” said the storekeeper with a weary sigh. “I herded six of them twenty miles, once. It took me a month!”

  “A month!”

  “And then I only delivered seven of the twenty.”

  “Good heavens!” cried Sammy Gregg. “Did you lose the way?”

  The storekeeper stared at him. “Lose my way traveling twenty miles? Son, I ain’t that kind of a gazoop. Not me! I pack a sort of a compass in the back of my head. But lemme tell you about a mustang, that everything that you want to do is just what the mustang ain’t got any idea of doing.”

  Sammy was amazed.

  “They stampede,” said the storekeeper, “from hell to breakfast and back ag’in. That’s their nature. Promiscuous and free and easy. Where they want to be is always just over the edge of the sky away from where you want ’em to be. You can write that down. Besides, even if a herd was drove up here by good hoss hands like some of them Mexicans are, still what chance would there be of it getting safe to Crumbock.”

  “I can’t see why not?”

  “You’re young, son, but I’ll make you a little older in a minute. Lemme tell you that this ain’t no open level plain around here.”

  “I can see that,” said Sammy seriously.

  “It’s all gouged up and crisscrossed by gullies and canyons every which way, ain’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “And them gullies and ravines is all slithering with hoss thieves, old son!”

  “You don’t mean it!” cried Sammy.

  “Don’t I, though?”

  “But why doesn’t the law—”

  “The law is a thousand miles away, son! Didn’t I lose eight head of good hosses six weeks back?”

  “And never could get a trace of ’em?”

  “Trace of ’em? Sure I did! I brought four of ’em back!”

  “Good heavens!” cried Sammy. “You knew the men who stole them and didn’t—”

  “Didn’t what? Try to chase them?”

  “Perhaps, with help.”

  “Where would you get the help? Besides, you chase these crooks away into the hills, and they’re plumb gone. You could hide twenty thousand head in any square mile of them bad lands. And then after you’ve got back home, somebody all unbeknownst sneaks up to your window and puts a bullet into the small of your back.

  “‘Murder by men or man unknown,’ says the jury.

  “‘Poor old Bill!’ says my friends. ‘He wouldn’t let well enough alone!’

  “No, sir, the best way is to keep hands off of them thieves. They’s too many of them, and they got this advantage, they hang together and work together, and the honest folks don’t!”

  “But suppose that one hired a strong guard to herd the mustangs across the hill country?”

  “Herd it across a hundred miles of mountains? A guard for a few hundred mustangs? Son, you’re talkin’ mad! You’d need a whole company of soldiers to watch every mustang, and even then you’d come in with only the tail of your hoss in your hands. Them thieves are that slick that they would steal your hoss right from under your saddle and leave you ridin’ along on a one-eyed maverick that you never seen before!”

  By this time Sammy began to wonder not that the price of horses in Crumbock was seventy-five dollars a head, but that it was not a hundred and seventy-five. He went off by himself and sat down for a cigarette and a think.

  “The first idea is as good as the last!” said Sammy to himself. “As good as the last, most of the time! So lemme see what I can make out of the horse idea!”

  He turned it back and forth. In the first place, it was plain that Mr. Storekeeper had exaggerated somewhat. According to him, a man was a fool who tried to drive horses to Crumbock, and yet horses were certainly there, great numbers of them. Some people, then, were making money by sending live stock there. How did they manage it? Simply by doing what his friend the storekeeper swore could not be done — guarding their horses through the mountains, and herding them successfully across the great Texas plains.

  What others could do, Sammy could do, if he only knew where to hire the right men, the right Mexicans, if they were the best!

  The thought of large profits will lead on like the thought of a promised land. And so it was that they led Sammy. For two long hours, with the map in his hands, he made his calculations.

  Before that day ended, he was on board a train away from Munson, and the next morning he had changed trains and was shooting in a roundabout way toward the southland of cheap horses.

  Six months to go when he left New York City. Five months and three weeks when he left Munson. Could he make it? Yes, confidence arose in Sammy as he computed the distance. A month, say, to gather the herd. That left four months and a half. Then an eight-hundred-mile drive. Suppose they journeyed only twenty miles a day. Still, at the end of forty days they would be at their destination.

  It seemed simple. Allow a month for mistakes. Allow another month for unknown bad luck. Still he would have time to get back in Brooklyn under the wire of the six months with some twenty thousand dollars weighing down his pocket!

  He was in San Antone now. He spent five desperate days trying to interview Mexican cow-punchers and getting no further than:

  “Si, señor. Mañana!”

  Always, they would meet him tomorrow, but tomorrow, they did not appear. What was wrong with him?

  Finally, in a San Antone hotel, he confided his troubles to a sharp-eyed man with a fighting face. A man too stern to be trivial.

  He said to Sammy: “You’re bound for a losing game if you’re bound to drive horses to Crumbock. But if you want a man to handle your herd, there’s one now!” He pointed to a dark-faced man in a corner of the room.

  “He!” gasped Sammy. “He looks like the king of Mexico more than like a cowpuncher.”

  “You go talk to him,” said the stern-faced man. “And tell him that I sent you. He’s a crook and a scoundrel. He’ll either rob you or else he’ll see that you don’t get robbed. It’s six of one and a half a dozen of the other. If you can trust Manuel, you can put your life in his hands with perfect safety. But if he decides to trick you, well, as good be done by him as by a dozen others.”

  So thought Sammy and, sitting beside the handsome young Mexican, he poured forth his plans and his desires, while Manuel, stiff with gold-laced jacket and collar, listened smiling, and dreamed over the idea, through a thin blue-brown cloud of smoke.

  He said at last in good English, “I hire the right men — men who can ride and who know horses. I buy the right horses for you. I drive those horses to Crumbock. You pay me five hundred dollars. But if I can’t drive those horses to Crumbock, you don’t pay me a cent. Do you like this idea, señor?”

  The thought of five hundred dollars in wages to a single man was a staggering thought to Sammy Gregg. And yet, the more he pondered, the more it seemed to him that this was his only solution for the problem.

  So he closed with Manuel on the moment, and went up to his room and wrote out a careful contract and offered it to Manuel.

  “Ah, no,” said Manuel, still smiling through a mist of smoke. “I do not wish it in written words. If I fail, so! But if I succeed then I shall trust myself to get the money — not a piece of paper!”

  CHAPTER IV. THE HERD

  THERE WAS ONLY one fault which Sammy was inclined to find with Manuel. He was everything but swift in his motions and in his appearance, but nevertheless he accomplished a great deal. He spent three days sorting over his acquaintances until he picked out a pair of v
illainous-looking rascals — in the eye of Sammy Gregg — of the roughest peon class.

  However, they could ride anything and anywhere. They could shoot well and they were willing to obey orders from the mouth of Manuel. Also, they knew horses.

  After the assistants had been chosen, a central corral was picked out and toward this, presently, Manuel and his men began to drift horses by the score and by the fifty. It was all Manuel. Very soon Sammy Gregg found that he might as well stop worrying and simply submit to the thorough management of Manuel, who went straight ahead doing what he wanted to do, and if Sammy made suggestions, Manuel received them, always, with a beautiful smile that showed his flashing white teeth. That smile might have meant anything, but before Sammy was through with his Mexican, he knew that it meant: “You are a fool and all of your ideas are worthy of a child only!”

  This did not trouble Sammy. He was not interested in the scorn of Manuel. He was only interested in the speed with which he gathered horses.

  What horses they were! At first, when he saw a section of the brutes driven in, Sammy threw up his hands in despair and asked Manuel if it were not a joke. Manuel assured him that these were selected animals. Selected from what?

  Lump-headed, roach-backed, thick-legged, pot-bellied creatures were these, with Roman noses and little wicked eyes that glared tigerishly out from beneath a shag of forelock. One could believe nothing about them, at first glance, except tales of evil temper. But when Manuel saw that his boss had no opinion at all of the purchase, he simply had the most tractable of the lot saddled and gave it to his boss to ride. Although Sammy had already learned to ride, he spent three days struggling with this “well broken” animal; but after that his eyes were opened.

  He discovered that the ugly little monster could rock along all day at an easy canter which ate up mileage as swiftly as the gallop of a wolf. The bronco could stop in his own length while going at full speed, turn his body faster than a man could turn his head, and be off in a new direction. He found that the body of the mustang was like his temperas tough as rawhide, than which there is nothing tougher.

  He discovered, too, that there was no gentling these creatures. They remained to the end enslaved barbarians always hungering for the moment when they could plant their heels in the stomach of the master and then knead his body soft and small with their sharp hooves while he lay on the ground.

  These were the animals which Manuel and his two assistants collected, but not at ten dollars a head. The price had risen. It was almost a twelve-dollar average which Sammy had to pay, so he contented himself with a herd of two hundred, and with these he started out with the three cow-punchers on the long trek north toward the mountains.

  They had luck enough across the great Texas plains. For mishaps they had half a dozen stampedes which lost thirty horses and cost them altogether a good additional three hundred miles of going. But by the time they got to the hills, the herd was in fairly good shape for traveling. The running edge had been taken out of their temper, and they had learned to troop along obediently enough. Manuel had turned out to be the king of the herdsmen, and his two assistants were masters of the same work — delicate, delicate work indeed.

  Whoever has ridden herd on a bunch of wild mustangs knows that above the mind of the brute there is the mind of the whole mass of animals, blind and deaf and enormous, and sensitive. Ready to stampede straight over the face of a cliff at a moment’s notice; or just as ready to trample down a town.

  Sammy had come to be of a little use before the trail was ended. And he was even trusted with the dangerous work of riding night herd on the horses, which is that portion of the work that requires the most skill.

  By this time they were looking forward to the end of their trail. Munson was a scant march of thirty miles away. Beyond Munson was another hundred miles of mountains, and then the end of their labors! So that Sammy, from time to time during the day, could not help letting his thoughts run ahead of him. A hundred and seventy horses at seventy-five dollars a head made twelve thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars.

  Just enough, just enough. And so to return to his Susie Mitchell not in six months, but in two. He would appear before her startled eyes like a hero indeed. He would be invested with a veil of glory; yes, even in his own eyes!

  They had bedded down the herd in a sort of natural corral. It was as though some great hand had scooped a basin among the hills. There was a broad, flat-bottomed meadow in the midst, and around the sides, half a dozen throats of canyons yawned black upon the little amphitheater.

  They could not have found a more ideal location, and to make perfection a gilded wonder, there was a little shallow stream of water, glimmering in the starlight as it trickled musically along over a bed of hard gravel. No danger of broken legs on steep banks, no danger of horses bogged down in quicksands here!

  “We won’t even need to ride herd tonight,” suggested Sammy Gregg. “This place is so made to order!”

  “Ah, señor,” murmured Manuel, “you are full of trust. Perhaps it is well in some places, but not here. Here, even the mountains are watching you and hating you, señor!”

  That was a sentence which young Sammy Gregg did not forget. And, that night, he himself prepared for riding herd as a token that he was willing to take advice. But Manuel was also in the saddle.

  “Why?” asked Sammy Gregg. “Surely at the worst, one man is enough here!”

  “If they should shoot off toward one of those canyons they—”

  “They are not as restless now as they used to be.”

  “They are always restless in their hearts, no matter how tired and how quiet their bodies may be!”

  Before that night was over, Sammy had to agree with his hired man. A nervous devil seemed to have possessed the herd. Once, at the hoot of an owl, every one of the beasts started to its feet. There they stood poised, as you might say, and ready for everything. But the voices of the men soothed them.

  They rode clockwise and counter-clockwise around the edges of the herd, and their voices were never still, talking, talking, or singing softly all night long — a weary work. And, at length, the herd sank down again on the ground, as though at another signal.

  When Sammy reached Manuel at the next circle of the herd, he paused to ask: “What could have made them jump up at the same minute?”

  “There is something in the air, tonight,” said Manuel. “You and I cannot tell, but the broncos certainly can tell.”

  For his part, Sammy was willing to believe. He had seen enough of these wild little animals to begin to have an uncanny respect for them. In a way, they seemed to be as full of wisdom as they were filled with meanness. So he rode on in his work, still singing — it did not matter what, so long as the song was soft. As he passed, the pricked ears of the prone horses would flatten in recognition of the human voice which they hated, but which nevertheless reassured them.

  Give a horse something to occupy his mind and you can do anything with him. If it is only a bit to chew on and chomp and worry while you are giving a colt his lesson. But don’t try to occupy the whole attention of a dumb beast with your teaching. Sammy was beginning to understand this, too.

  After all, there was something charming about this scene. He had a vague wish that Susie Mitchell might be riding by his side, here, looking at the black, gaunt, treeless hills; or watching the faint shine of the running water, with the lumpy forms of prone horses dimly silhouetted against it here and there, and always the broad, bright beauty of the stars overhead. The alkali scents and sharpness was taken from the air, now that it was night. The wind was cool, almost cold. It touched the hands and flowed across the face like running water. It brought peace to the heart of Sammy Gregg.

  Day was not far off, now. There was no coming of light, but there was a change in the air, which Sammy was beginning to know as the forerunner of the sunrise. Just when he told himself, with relief, that there would be only another hour of darkness to watch through, the two hundred leap
ed suddenly to their feet again.

  There had not been a sound this time, not even the hoot of an owl, and yet here were the horses bolt upright, heads raised, and all turned toward the west where the black mouth of one of the canyons yawned wide upon the meadowland. Out of that canyon, at last, Sammy heard a noise like a far-off clapping of hands. Then he heard a thin sound of a horse neighing, and after that, five horses shot out of the blackness into the light of the stars, five horses with a man on every back, and the crashing of the flying hoofbeats rang and echoed in the ears of Sammy.

  The thieves, the horse thieves of whom Manuel had spoken so often, of whom the storekeeper had warned him!

  There was a shrill, universal squealing that broke from the herd. Then they whirled and fled at lightning speed from this sudden horror which had leaped out of the heart of the dark night. They ran with heads stretched forward, ears flattened, tails streaming straight out behind them — they ran blind with speed. And, in an instant the meadow was swept as bare as the palm of Sammy’s hand. And, on the heels of his disappearing herd, five riders were spurring along, not mounted on broncos, but upon tall, long-legged blood horses which sprang across the ground with a tigerish grace and swiftness.

  Sammy himself spurred wildly in pursuit. Up to his lips rose a harsh cry, such a sound as he had never uttered before. Here was Manuel close beside him, his teeth glinting, but not in a smile. Sammy reached across and tore a Colt from the saddle halter nearest to him. Another weapon gleamed and spoke from the hand of Manuel.

  For answer, there was a blasting volley from the scurrying shadows far up in the ravine, first the brief, wicked humming of bullets, wasplike, in the air about the ears of Sammy, and, after that, a rattling of long echo above the thunder of the flying herd.

  But what was that to Sammy?

  They had missed him. He felt that he had a charmed life, that it would be given him to ride through a steady rain of bullets until he came up with these villains, these robbers. He raised his Colt and with the heavy weapon wabbling in his weak, untrained hand, he fired, and again and again.