Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “I’ve had enough,” said the other, “to keep me from ever wanting any more. How come you to ask?”

  “What broke up this line?”

  “There was a sort of a lack of things,” said the salesman. “There was a lack of cooks to work in the three eatin’ houses that we had to build along the road. And there was a lack of drivers, too, for the driving of the stages. Drivers that a man could trust, I mean.”

  “Why,” said Sammy, “the country is filled with good teamsters.”

  “Just so,” said the tall man. “But they found that stage driving was sort of unhealthy, by reason that now and then somebody would want the stage to stop where there wasn’t no regular station, and the most usual way he took of stoppin’ the stage was to shoot the driver and then one of the lead team of hosses. Mostly that would stop up the stage pretty quick. But it got the drivers to feelin’ sort of restless. We lost two in one week, and after that the boys got sort of sick of the work.

  “Then there was a lack of passengers. They kept coming pretty good for a time, but then they sort of got tired of having their pockets looked into. I knowed one gent that made four trips on our stage and three times the stage was stuck up and he lost his wad each time. He was a gambler, so he took it pretty calm. But he says: ‘I never sticks in a game where the chances is three to one in favor of the dealer. And the crooks is the dealers in this game of ridin’ on the stage!’

  “Which it sort of looked like he was right!

  “But outside of them things, and the lack of a few more, such like as the lack of any kind of a road, and the lack of hay to store in the sheds for the hosses at the stage stops, and the lack of hosses that was busted for the harness work, and the lack of harness to take the place of the leather that the broncos jumped through their first few times out — outside of them few lacks, there wasn’t much to keep the stage line from running, except that them that was putting up for it got sort of tired and pretty soon they lacked the money to keep on payin’ the losses.”

  To this original relation, Sammy Gregg listened with a smile, to be sure, but also with a falling heart.

  “Between you and me,” said he, “what do you think of the chances of running a stage from Munson to the mines?”

  “I don’t think nothin’ about it. I know it couldn’t pan out. It’d break the heart of the gent that tried it. Break him inside of a month.”

  “All right,” confessed Sammy. “I’m thinking of it.”

  “Then I’m sorry for you!”

  “Will you tell me why?”

  “Your business is your own. But just the same, I got to ask you why a stage would have a chance from Munson when it’s failed from Chadwick city?”

  “We’re forty miles closer, for one thing; and most of the people bound for Crumbock come through Munson.”

  “You’re forty miles closer, but you got a road that’s twice as rough. If the freighters can hardly make it at a walk, how are you gonna keep passengers comfortable at a trot?”

  “I don’t intend to keep ’em comfortable,” said Sammy. “I just intend to get ’em there if they hang on tight!”

  For the first time a light came in the eye of the other.

  “That’s a new idea,” said he. “But you’re gunna get ’em there with a lot of stops. There’s a good holdup place every quarter of a mile along the whole road from Munson to Crumbock!”

  There is nothing more stimulating than opposition. The man who is winning at cards is the man who is able to stop play when he chooses. But he who is losing cannot let go. He has to keep on bucking fate. And the more the stage man of Chadwick City blasted the hopes of Sammy Gregg, the more the courage of Sammy rose. We will not believe a picture which is painted too black. Better to throw in some relieving touches. And Sammy, when he heard that there were no chances of winning through, began to feel that his companion was purposely making matters worse than they really and truly were.

  He hired four men and four spans of horses to drag the stagecoaches across the hills to the town of Munson, and when he arrived, riding proudly at the head of the procession, he had the satisfaction of having the town turn out to watch him pass.

  Neither did Munson laugh as loud as he had expected. The idea of a tenderfoot putting through the stage line was so very novel, considering that the experienced old hands at Chadwick City had failed, that Munson’s citizens shook their heads and postponed their decisions.

  “He drove the hosses up from the river,” said Rendell, “and he got them safe to Crumbock, and one failure didn’t turn him back. How d’you know but that he’ll get the stage line through to Crumbock, too?”

  But the buying of the stages was only the first step in a long undertaking. He needed relay stations every eight miles, twelve stations between the towns, and a bigger station and stables at either end of the line. That meant twelve shacks, and two men in each shack, one to handle the work by day and the other to handle it by night. For, day and night, the stages must toil on.

  The start was to be at four in the morning. The halt at night took place not before nine, with an hour’s halt at noon for the battered passengers to eat a meal and stretch their cramped limbs. Then, with a new driver, they scurried on again. At night they halted at nine if they were near one of the two sleeping houses which had to be built. And so four stages should be constantly in use, each stage traveling sixteen hours a day.

  Nor was this all, for allowances would have to be made for the wastage in horseflesh which would be occurring constantly as the mustangs struggled forward among the rocks and up the terrible slopes of the mountains. Ruined shoulders and spoiled feet must be a common occurrence, besides those which wasted under the daily strain. He must have a reserve of stock to meet these contingencies, a reserve of sixty head, at the least. And, the instant that he started operations, he must have a payroll of at least thirty or thirty-five men.

  Now, with an overhead of this size looming above him, young Sammy Gregg could understand very well how the Chadwick City line had failed so quickly and so ignominiously. But it also occurred to him that he might be able to buy for a song the timber which they had used in the construction of their own way stations through the mountains. And other thoughts formed rapidly in the brain of Sammy.

  He sat him down and in the room of the hotel at Munson that afternoon he wrote the following letter to his old henchman, Gonzalez, at El Paso:

  Dear Gonzalez:

  I am back in Munson, and I want horses again. But this time I want horses which are broke, and which we can take to Munson on ropes. I want three hundred horses. Ten dollars a head for the purchase, and ten dollars more a head for the breaking, and five dollars extra for bringing them to Munson. Does that sound to you? That will give you a chance to make a little profit on every horse. If everything goes through in good shape, I may be able to increase that price.

  As it stands, seven thousand five hundred for the herd of three hundred. Write to me that you want the contract, and I’ll forward five thousand dollars to you. Get Pedro, if you can, to help with the work, and write back to me at once.

  Sammy Gregg.

  Here Sammy shuddered a little. Five thousand dollars in the hands of a reckless Mexican! But upon second thought, he decided that all life here in the West was a gamble, and he would have to go ahead taking chances.

  He sealed the letter when a strangely subdued murmur of noises rose from the street. He glanced out the window of his room and saw the tall form and the handsome face of him whom Munson now called The Duke, in other words: Chester Ormonde Furness, seated in a buckboard driving a fine pair of horses, one of which was a great dappled gray which carried, in addition to harness, a saddle cinched around its belly.

  There was something covered in the body of the buckboard, and now the wind stirred that covering and revealed two pairs of boots with the legs of men in them!

  CHAPTER XV. A THREAT

  TWO MEN, LYING side by side in the bottom of a buckboard, with only a thin throw of
blue calico between their upturned faces and the sun, that terrible, broiling, baking Western sun? No, it did not seem possible.

  Now Furness had stopped his team and the buckboard stood stationary with the sun still baking and broiling upon the calico and the bodies which lay beneath it. And the horrible conviction entered the mind of Sammy Gregg that living they could not be, since nothing human could have endured that heat without stirring!

  Sammy was in the street in ten seconds, and he found himself a member of a crowd which was rapidly being recruited from every corner of the town. There was even old Rendell, who hated activity of any kind, now hurrying out of his store and swinging toward them as fast as he could move his crippled leg. Old and young, the town drew swiftly together to stare at big Chester Furness as he took the harness off the near horse, the gray, and led it forth in the saddle.

  Then he climbed into the saddle and sat there with a hand upon his thigh and his calm eyes and his sneering smile fixed upon the crowd.

  What might have seemed wonderful to many was that fifty guns did not leap out of the holsters there in Munson which knew Furness so well and which had so many reasons for hating him, that fifty guns did not fly forth to shower lead upon him.

  But to Sammy and to the others who were gathered there, you may be sure that it did not seem strange, while the cold eye of Furness was wandering over their faces, dwelling a little on each one, as though he wished to remember.

  So, in a breathless silence, they watched him. If there had been a dozen sheriffs there, they could not have arrested him, because there were no proved crimes to charge to the account of Mr. Chester Ormonde Furness. He was not fool enough to sin recklessly in daylight without a mask drawn over his handsome features. He had a way of roughening and sharpening that smooth voice of his so that no one could be sure that the ruffian behind the mask was really this dapper Furness. No one could be sure, but they could guess near enough. The whole county could not have delivered testimony enough to have hanged this man, but the whole county did assuredly know one thing, which was that Mr. Furness deserved to die with a rope around his neck!

  “Gentlemen, neighbors,” said Furness, “and I had almost said friends! A pity, too, that I cannot say it. For I am sure that I have done my best to win your respect!”

  He paused and laughed softly in their faces. And a stir of anger worked through the crowd; and terror with the anger.

  Oh, what a man was this, to play with these fifty human tigers as Chester Furness was playing!

  “But though I trust,” went on the mocker, “that I may have won your respect, still it seems that you cannot be persuaded to keep at anything but a formal distance. However, you still remain, if not my friends, at least, my neighbors and gentlemen!”

  He laughed again, filled, certainly, with an exquisite devil. And Sammy heard an iron-faced man beside him murmuring: “I wish to heaven I had the nerve to try him, but he’s got his eye fixed special right on me — he knows!”

  So it seemed to them all, no doubt, as though that omnipresent eye were fixed steadily upon them, each face singled out particularly by The Duke.

  “But lately,” said Furness, “it seems that there has been a growing habit among you of sending out people to call upon me, to come unannounced and give me a pleasant surprise!”

  He paused, and there was just a little less amusement and a little more cruel edge in his smiling.

  “The young men of Munson and of Chadwick City,” went on The Duke, “have made it a point to drift about through the hills and through the forest hunting for me, to pay their respects. Very kind of them. But it keeps me rather nervous. It keeps me, in short, feeling that I must always have my house in order, seeing that I never know when to expect callers. The result is that I rarely rest, and I really have to keep watchful.”

  All of those innuendoes were patent enough, and they might have brought a snarl from the crowd, but it was too fascinated with his narrative, now, to pay much attention even to his insults. Something was coming, something of dreadful moment. They could guess it, and they wondered from what direction the trouble would strike Munson.

  “Finally,” said The Duke, “when others had failed to find me at hometwo young gentlemen of Munson decided that they must try their hands and come up to have a look at me. So they came up and, in the middle of last night, they dropped in upon me, oh, most unexpectedly! I could only sit up in my blankets and stare at them. And they stood there and stared back at me.”

  He paused to light a cigarette, while the crowd held its breath. But Sammy, who already guessed the point of the tale, was turning sick with sorrow and with disgust.

  “Of course,” said The Duke, “I wanted to make them at home, but they insisted upon doing the honors for me. They made me sit quietly there by my fire with one of them on each side of me. We were all very quiet, for a time!”

  He laughed again. And when he stopped laughing, his nostrils were quivering, and his eyes flashed like whips across the faces of the crowd.

  “They could not think of very much to say, so it seemed, and so they filled in the interval toying with their Colts. And as for me, I was so pleased and surprised to have them with me, that you can imagine that I was quite dumb! However, they presently fell into a discussion as to which of them could rightly claim the honor of having found my campfire. And, after that, they grew quite hot over the point of which of them had the pleasure of first confronting me in my camp.

  “You will not believe me when I tell you how irritated they became. Suddenly they had jumped to their feet. They declared that they had had enough of one another. I, sitting on the ground between them, begged them to lower their voices, because the buzzards might be listening!”

  The Duke tilted back his head and laughed, with a sound like the snarl of a wolf buried deep in his throat.

  “But all I could say was as nothing to them. I have told you already that they had their guns out. Now they jerked them up to the hip. I think young Harper fired twice; and young Blythe fired only once. But, unfortunately, both of them shot too straight!”

  He paused and looked with mock sorrow around him.

  “To my most stinging grief, I found myself suddenly sitting with a dead man upon either side of me, each shot cleverly through the head.

  “Imagine my confusion and my sorrow!

  “But as I sat there through the night with the dead men, it occurred to me that I really owed it to the town of Munson, and my acquaintances there to let them know just how these poor young men had stumbled into the arms of death, so to speak, in spite of my protests against it!

  “It seemed to me that I should try to find some way in which I could discourage those fine young men of the towns from wandering through the hills trying to catch me unawares. Because I was afraid lest they might, also, quarrel with one another, just as poor young Harper quarreled with poor young Blythe about which of them should take precedence in my camp.

  “Finally, it seemed to me that the very best way I could manage the thing would be to carry Harper and Blythe into the town and let their friends see just what they did to themselves. And so, gentlemen, here they are.”

  He snatched the blue calico sheet away from them and let the staring, horror-stricken people look on the dead faces of the two boys. Their guns were still in their hands, placed there by the devilish forethought of Mr. Furness.

  “It is my modest trust,” went on Furness, “that the other young men from the towns in this neighborhood will be deterred from following the same example, because I really should not like to waste many more days carting the poor young men back to Munson or to Chadwick City. Gentlemen, I make a present of the buckboard and the bay horse to the town of Munson. Until old Mr. Graham happens along, as no doubt he will before long, to remark that I was forced to borrow it from him. Tell him, then, that the roan horse broke its legs, and so I put it out of its pain and harnessed my own galloper in its place. However, he need not thank me for that!

  “Gentlemen,
good day. May we continue to be just as neighborly as ever. But let my next callers announce themselves to save confusion!”

  Here he was reining his great gray horse backward down the street. No, he dropped the reins, and so perfectly trained was that magnificent stallion, that it continued to back gradually down the street, leaving the left hand of Mr. Furness free to take off his hat and salute with it the staring crowd, while his right hand still rested jauntily on his thigh, near to the butt of a Colt revolver. He reached the next corner. A sway of his body caused the well-trained stallion to leap sidewise, like a cat, throwing the master behind cover. And so he was away.

  Of course there was a reaching for guns the instant his terrible eye was removed from them, but by the time they reached the corner, the stallion was already out of view behind a hill.

  There was no pursuit of The Duke, for, as Rendell remarked, though every one knew that Mr. Furness had lied rankly and that the bullets which killed the two adventurous youths had come from his own revolver, yet what way had they of proving what they felt to be the truth? They could only think their thoughts, but so far as a legal case against Furness was concerned — they had not the shadow of a ghost of one!

  CHAPTER XVI. THE STAGE LINE

  SAMMY HAD TO employ teamsters, in the first place to bring the lumber of the station houses of the Chadwick City Company, which he had bought for a song. And when the timber arrived in Munson, he had to send it out to each of the stations which he had selected for his own route. He had picked those stations with much care, sometimes making a long distance between points of relay, but always striving, if possible, to give each station plenty of wood and water and grazing land, which must next be fenced in for the horses.

  He had heard from Gonzalez. By the grace of good fortune, that able cavalier had come to Juarez in time to get the letter. Now he was busy gathering mustangs and breaking them, using a hardy crew of men for the work. But it was difficult. To break a horse to the saddle was one thing. To break it to pull a wagon was quite another, most fabulously considered to be an easier task!