by Max Brand
They obeyed in the most perfectly regular fashion, doing as he directed them to do. They climbed down to the road and stood there in the gathering chill of the evening, listening!
He said to the girl, as she got to the ground, “Will you run to take a look at those two poor fellows? I don’t think they’re as badly hit as they sound!”
She gave him a nod. And as she went by he trailed his glance quietly over her and her eyes went wide under the touch of his, and how far he looked into her heart she dared not guess. But she ran down the road, and there she found her hands filled with work — gruesome work enough, at that!
Mr. Furness carried his rifle carelessly tucked under one arm. And yet it was held as lightly and as firmly and as surely, it seemed, as though he had gripped it in both strong hands. Also, his right forefinger was curled constantly about the trigger, and everyone in the group knew perfectly well that that finger was not there for nothing.
He lined them up with their faces to the side of the road. Then he went behind them and “frisked” their pockets. A neat little haul even for a Furness. Not so much as he would have taken, you would think, from a crowd coming back from the mines. But, as a matter of fact, there were no fewer than three professional gamblers in that shipment, and from them alone, on their way to work the rich gold diggings in their own peculiar fashion, he took more than fourteen thousand dollars in cash. There was that much more taken from the rest of the group. And now he paused behind Sammy Gregg.
“I suppose,” said he, “that you have a pretty considerable wad of money in your pocket, for a payroll, and what not. But I really don’t see how I can take from a man who brings me so many excellent customers. It would hardly be considered good etiquette on the road, do you think?”
He laughed, did Mr. Furness, and swung onto his gray horse with a movement so swift that even if they had had eyes in the backs of their heads, they would hardly have been able to seize the right moment to whirl and shoot. Also, their guns had been thrown in the middle of the road by his foresight!
Then he backed his gray stallion up the road. How beautiful and proudly disdainful that glorious creature seemed as he pranced in that fashion, backward, obeying the will of his master, but not his hand.
“After I am around the corner, it will be safe for you to move, but not before, if you please. And remember, my friends, that this is a rifle which I carry under my arm, not a revolver, you know. So if you want to hunt me up, don’t tread too close upon my heels, because you might have your toes barked!”
Then, there he was at the corner, and around it in a flash with the big horse.
He paused beside the girl. And she was a changed sight. She was dabbled with crimson from head to foot, and she was quite white with the sight of so much of it. But she stuck to her work. Good work, too. It pays those who hunt and ride to understand first aid, and Anne Cosden had learned her lesson well. She was making every touch count, and every touch was dragging those two wretches farther and farther from the shadow of death.
Yes, there was Andrew already bandaged. The deadly running of the crimson had been stopped. But still his eyes were closed and his pale forehead as it had been when he felt the strength of his life leaking swiftly out from him, ebbing away in great pulses. And now Lester Gunn was being saved.
Furness stooped from the saddle above her. And he saw her shrink and shudder beneath the sense of his nearness. He undid with the deft tips of his fingers a clasp that secured a delicate little gold chain around her neck. There was only a little ornamental locket at the end of it. And she, with both her hands employed, merely said without raising her head:
“It’s worth nothing in money. I’ll pay you to leave that with me, Mr. Furness.”
“I have to have it,” said he. “I don’t know just what it may mean to you, but I’m certain that it can’t mean so much to you as it does to me.”
Only that, and then the stinging dust spurned into a cloud before her face as the stallion’s hooves bit strongly at the road and shot him away at full speed from that standing start, away down the road, swiftly, swiftly. And, from the corner, a crackling of guns to pursue him.
She paid no heed to those guns. She did not even look up to see the result, for she knew he was safe. No man such as those in that stage could touch the life of this hero of the mountains, for she felt that he controlled his own destiny as surely as though it lay in the palm of his hand.
They left the Gunn brothers there by the roadside. Two men volunteered to stay with them as nurses. Bedding was placed for them, and provisions, and the promise given that more help would be rushed back from the next relay station, only three miles away. And so the stage rolled on.
But Anne Cosden, sitting with bowed head, paid no heed even now to the terrible red stains on her clothes. But she rubbed slowly, patiently, a red mark upon her wrist. It was where the edge of the palm of little Sammy Gregg had struck her.
He, sitting beside her, could not help noticing. And he said softly, at last: “I’m sorry. I needn’t have hit you so hard, I suppose.”
She raised blank eyes to him. It was as though he were miles away and she were staring to find a trace of him and his meaning.
“Oh,” said Anne Cosden, “I wasn’t thinking of that!”
What was she thinking of? Sammy Gregg was not a fool, and now he had something unusual working in his heart and head to stimulate him, so that he guessed well enough what it was. For there was everything about big Furness to make him a woman’s hero, thought Sammy. Size, courage, and that wonderful beauty of face, and above all the strangeness of soul in which he was wrapped.
What, in contrast, was there in such a man as Sammy himself, and his wretched inches, and his starved body, and his unheroic soul?
She need not have said any more, for Sammy was already perfectly convinced. But how was she, being what she was, apt to guess that this small creature was following the windings of her soul? So she said aloud, but more to herself than to him:
“No, I’m glad that you thought quickly enough to strike my hand down. Otherwise I might have killed him. Think of it!”
Was not Sammy thinking?
CHAPTER XIX. DOWN ON HIS LUCK
IF ANYONE COULD have said to Sammy Gregg that there could have come into his life, on that day, a thing greater than the stage line, he would have laughed them to scorn. But before they reached Crumbock on the next day, close to midnight, Sammy had been forced to confess to his heart of hearts that he loved that big, noisy, stalwart Anne Cosden more than he loved any other thing in the world. More, even, than he cared for the stage line and its success!
Of course, it was a wretched confession to make, because he knew he had never a chance of winning her. He was ashamed of himself for being so absurd as to desire her, and he hoped, in his shrinking heart of hearts, that no one would ever guess at his secret. He had a miserable sense of guilt, when he saw big Hubert Cosden meet his daughter when the stage arrived under the big lanterns which illumined Sammy’s Crumbock terminal.
What if she should tell her father something of the things that had happened during the ride — no, not the ridiculous maneuvers at the start, but what had gone on inside her spirit when she sat on the top of the coach and looked down to the handsome face of big Chester Ormonde Furness?
However, there was some spark of joy for him. And that was the furor which Crumbock raised over him and his stage. To be sure, it was just half a day late, and it had been robbed on the way. But those, they assured him, were unlucky incidents which might happen to anyone!
Sammy stayed in Crumbock for a while. He told himself, miserably, that it was because he wanted to work up the business at that most important end of the line, as though business needed any working up! But, in reality, he knew that it was because he wanted to be close to Anne Cosden.
In a week, the four coaches were working steadily, and all the three hundred horses were being worked in turn. Aye, and a hurry call was sent to Gonzalez for more. And the
dollars began to flow steadily into the pockets of Sammy, where they were needed so much.
In the first seven days, he cleared six thousand dollars, which gave some idea of how badly that stage line was needed at Crumbock. And during that first week nothing went wrong. There was not a single holdup. There was not so much as a broken axle. Even the terrible mustangs from the southland, once they had had a single turn at the work, became a smaller nuisance. Their deviltry was exhausted by their work, just as it should have been.
On the eighth day there was the first sign of impending trouble. The northbound stage rolled into Crumbock bearing two extra passengers, in the form of the bodies of two would-be stage robbers.
It was old Alec and his sawed-off shotgun, again. The old fellow was so proud of himself and his gun that he couldn’t help telling over and over again how it happened.
And on the very next day he insisted on driving the stage back again instead of taking his layoff.
“You got to have one man,” said Uncle Alec, “that’s able to bring these here stages through all safe. And I reckon that I’m just about that man!”
Poor Uncle Alec!
He got just three miles outside of Crumbock, hardly over the first rising range to the south, when a familiar form on a glorious dappled stallion rode out before the coach, a rifle at the ready. Uncle Alec reached for the mighty cannon, but as his hand fell on it, a bullet tore through his shoulder.
Mr. Furness lined up the passengers beside the road once more. He himself paused to give kind words to Alec.
“But, after all,” said Furness in conclusion, “you’re a little too old to be playing a hand in this game.”
But the loss of Uncle Alec was only one thing.
In that stage there was the first shipment of gold that had been entrusted to the new line. Fifty pounds of dust, or more than sixteen thousand dollars in value. And it was lost with the rest of the plunder. How much was taken from the belts of the men no one could more than guess, for each one put a pretty high estimate on his losses.
However, it was a pretty bad loss to the miners, and it hit the reputation of the stage line pretty hard. One robbery was to be expected. It gave expectation and spice to a ride over the line, one might say, but two robberies, and a third attempted, all within the space of eight days, was a little too much! There was a lot of disagreeable talk in Crumbock, and Sammy knew from afar that the same sort of talk was going the rounds in Munson.
Yet the patronage of the line did not fall off. Men still bought tickets, but they bought them with doubtful frowns, and the doubtful frowns were still worn all the way to the end of the trail.
On the tenth day three worthies attempted to stop the southbound coach. They were armed with rifles, and they “got the drop.” But it happened that that stage was crammed with a dozen young men who had not filled their pockets with gold at Crumbock. They had lost their money, but they had not lost their desire for adventure.
When they saw the morning sun turning the barrels of those three rifles to diamonds, and when they heard the three youths in the road singing out, the men in the stage simply reached for their own guns.
Four of them were badly wounded, but the three in the road were shot down, also. Two were killed. Another was taken to the next relay station, where he recuperated, and then escaped. But it was felt that this adventure might discourage further attempts upon the line.
No, for the next day, the eleventh since the line was put in operation, the rider on the gray stallion appeared in the road and took the southbound coach almost exactly at the spot where the three desperadoes had appeared before.
It was plain that he was saying to the world: “What three cannot do when they don’t know how is ridiculously simple, if one simply understands how to go about the thing.”
For his part, he understood, and since the shooting of the two Gunn brothers and the bullet through the shoulder of famous Uncle Alec, resistance to the marauder was unpopular. He had taken three stages, now, and the men in Crumbock said: “He’s got enough to retire on, unless he’s in this game for fun!”
However that might be, they were not willing to take the chance anymore. Could they be blamed? There had been five attempts at robbery within eleven days. Three of them had succeeded, and in one of the failures, four of the passengers in the coach had been wounded as they had fought off the robbers.
The Western mind was made up with Western suddenness and Western thoroughness. The stage line to Munson was unsafe, and instantly no one would take a passage on it, except men who had not a penny to their names. They went gladly enough.
Sammy, in despair, waited for three days and then announced the “excursion” rates, cutting the fare fairly in two. But still no one was willing to ride, and the receipts had fallen away to zero.
“There ain’t nothin’ wrong with the fare, Gregg,” said one old-timer. “It’s the weather that you furnish along the road that makes us hold back. You give us too much scenery!”
Sammy grew hollow-eyed, nervous. The days were long nightmares to him. And so dull had grown the wits of Sammy that when he encountered a certain young man on the long, winding street of Crumbock, he did not recognize that face, though it had played a most important part in the life of Sammy, you may be sure, and the stranger had to walk up to him and slap him twice upon the shoulder before Sammy rubbed his eyes and looked up from his daydream of misery.
He saw a handsome youth before him, a slender, willowy figure of a man with soft, lazy brown eyes, and a cigarette, rolled Mexican style, dangling from his finger.
“Jeremy Major!” said Sammy.
“You look sick,” said Jeremy. “I’m coming to see you tonight. Start thinking for me. I’m terribly bored!”
Jeremy Major walked on down the street — for he seemed to be busy following a tall man in a white sombrero — and Sammy turned to stare hungrily after him.
Sammy was walking on, when a boy brought him a message from Hubert Cosden. Sammy found him sitting on his buckboard in front of a powder store. Mr. Cosden began with Sammy by apologizing for sending for him. However, there was on the mind of the millionaire a weight so heavy that he had to get it off at once.
“What do you know about this man Furness?” asked Cosden.
“I know about as much as most people do,” said Sammy. “I arrived from the East on the same train that brought him. I saw him bullied by the first and last crowd that will ever try that trick on him. I saw him shoot the first man he killed in Munson. And I had a herd of two hundred broncos swiped by him, and I had him sass me to my face about the mustangs. I’ve seen him right from the start, so far as this part of the country knows him. What do you want to know about him?”
“You’re an intelligent man, Gregg. You wouldn’t let personal injuries prejudice you too much. Now, personally I know nothing about this fellow at all. I want to ask your opinion: Do you think that there’s a shadow of a reason to hope that he might ever go straight?”
There was something about the urgent tone in which this was asked that made Sammy suspect that Mr. Cosden wished him to say “Yes.” And so he answered:
“He’s not a boy, and he wasn’t a boy when he started in at Munson.”
“Nobody likes a man without some spirit,” said Mr. Cosden. “And nobody likes a man who won’t fight.”
Sammy smiled.
“Well?” asked Cosden sharply.
“Nothing. Except that I think you’re answering your own questions, Mr. Cosden. Nobody wants a coward; but nobody really wants a thief and a murderer!”
“Murderer? Murderer?” cried Mr. Cosden. “Isn’t that a very strong word to use? Has it ever been proved that Mr. Furness has ever taken a human life unless in self-defense?”
“I don’t suppose it has,” said Sammy. “But, you see, the trouble is that he’s had to defend himself so often!”
Mr. Cosden was gloomily silent and Sammy drove home the point. “You’d think,” said Sammy Gregg, “that once a man got the rep
utation that this Furness has, he’d have no trouble. People would dodge him like fire or poison. But that doesn’t seem to be the way of it. Poor Furness is being hounded all the time by bullies and gun-fighters, and he has to keep on killing people in self-defense — guards of stages, for instance, that he’s about to hold up.”
Mr. Cosden, turning very red, raised his hand. “That’s enough,” said he. I suppose I understand the rest of what you have to say, and I suppose I have to agree with it! And yet, confound it, one cannot help hoping that these strong young men — there’s a lack of strong men in this world of ours, Gregg!”
Sammy Gregg blinked and nodded.
“Although,” qualified burly Mr. Cosden in haste, “there are several kinds of strength — physical, mental, and all that, I am very well aware.”
But Sammy smiled, as one who would say: “I am not proud, even when you step on my corns!”
“Well,” said Cosden, “the idea just hopped into my head. But you’re right, I suppose. Yes, of course you’re right. The fellow is a rascal!” A mild name for the deeds of Mr. Furness, to be sure.
“That’s all right,” said Sammy good-naturedly, as he turned away. “I don’t blame you for wanting to know about him.”
He could have bitten out his tongue, the instant he had said that, and so he turned away hastily, hoping that what he had said in parting would not be noticed.
He got two strides away and then a ringing voice blasted after him: “Gregg!”
He whirled around as though he had been shot. His face was burning, and so was the face of Mr. Cosden. Mutually they read the thoughts of one another and grew redder still.
“Gregg,” said Cosden more gently, “I’ve got to know what you mean by that!”
“Why,” lied Sammy gallantly, “nothing, of course. But everybody in the town is interested in the man who’s held up three stages.”
Mr. Cosden shook his head. “Well done, Sammy,” said he, “but it won’t do! No, you had a particular thought in mind when you said that. Confess what it was!”