by Max Brand
“Why,” said Sammy, “there’s no law against guessing, is there?”
“I suppose not. But, what is your guess?”
“Miss Cosden.”
“Good Lord!”
“Only a guess, and it’s legal to take a guess, Mr. Cosden.”
“Does the whole town know?” gasped Cosden miserably.
“Nobody dreams of it!” said Sammy.
“But you—”
“I was sitting in the seat beside her, when the stage was stopped by—”
“Well, I suppose you did your guessing then!”
“Yes.”
“You are a good guesser, Gregg,” said the older man gloomily. “And at that rate, you ought to make a success on the Street. You could read the minds of the stocks. You guessed, but you said nothing to me!”
“Mr. Cosden, you wouldn’t have believed me. And it was none of my business to guess out loud!”
The other nodded.
“The first I knew of it was last night. The scoundrel sneaked down to the town, and I actually found him as big as life in my house talking to my girl. I came in and took them unawares. He was as cool as the devil. I half think that he is the devil! And of course there’s no nerves in Anne. I had a fine talk with them, you may be sure. And for all I know, Anne may be riding away over the edge of the world with him at this moment — curse me for a talking idiot — why am I telling you all of this?”
“I could guess,” said Sammy, very white and sick of face.
“There’s nothing to be done,” said Mr. Cosden gravely. “All I can do is to wait and pray that she will have good sense and do nothing rash. But if I oppose her — ah, Gregg, if only we could find a way of killing him off to save her!”
“He has a habit of defending himself,” said Sammy.
“I know that. But surely there must be in the world some man or men able to fight fire with fire.”
Then the great thought struck Sammy.
CHAPTER XX. A TALK WITH JEREMY
ONE HUNTS FOR opposites as antidotes — the fat to counteract the acid, the boxer to beat the slugger, the bird to kill the serpent. And so Sammy, thinking of the big shoulders and the heavy body of handsome Chester Furness, naturally and instinctively turned in his mind toward the opposite of so much brute force and what he thought of was the slender, supple body of young Jeremy Major.
Not that one thought of Jeremy Major as being young, any more than one thinks of a statue of a youth as being young. It may date from the fifth century, B. C.! And so with Jeremy, he simply was, he existed as fire exists, without an age.
Thinking of him, it seemed to Sammy that he had the solution. And suddenly he began to chuckle.
“Has it turned into a laughing matter?” asked Mr. Cosden bitterly. “Is it worth no more serious thought than this?”
“I was only wondering what would happen when they meet!” said Sammy.
“Who?” asked Cosden.
“Did you ever see an old cat tackle a dog in earnest?” asked Sammy rather dreamily.
Mr. Cosden gaped; he felt that the youth was possibly taking leave of his good wits.
“Well,” went on Sammy, “he’s like that. Only bigger. And not a house cat. No, because he’s wild from the heart out!”
“Who? Who under heaven?” cried Mr. Cosden. “Who is wild, and what difference does it make to me?”
“The man who will beat big Mr. Furness for you, I think,” said Sammy.
Mr. Cosden showed signs of interest at once.
“Tell me about him!” said he. “Is he another one of these men who have to defend themselves often?”
“Oh, no,” said Sammy. “It doesn’t happen very often. He’ll duck out of the way of trouble, you see, the way a jack rabbit will double away from a dog. Trouble doesn’t get him into a corner very often, but when it does—” He paused significantly.
“Some honest, honorable fellow?” asked Cosden.
“A crooked gambler,” said Sammy, “when he meets other crooked ones. A loafer who never did a lick of work in his life. A good-for-nothing tramp, king and spendthrift. That’s all you can say for him, logically.”
“Very well,” said Cosden. “If it’s matching one of that kind against the big fellow, I suppose I may call it fighting fire with fire. It doesn’t make much difference which of them goes down. The world will be benefited by it.”
“Oh,” said Sammy, “there’s no doubt about who’ll go down. No doubt about that at all!”
“Is this friend of yours such a terrible fighter?”
“He’s terrible enough. I never saw him fight. But I know about him! The only trouble will be about getting him to take the job.”
“If that is all,” said Mr. Cosden, “then we can stop worrying. Money is no object to me in a matter like this. If it will bring my girl over the rocks safely, I’ll spend it like water. You yourself, Gregg, hire him and promise him anything you like. If he wants an advance — that sort of a man usually does — tell him to name his own figure.”
Sammy shook his head. “Money will never turn the trick,” said he. “Never in the world. Money isn’t what you want. He’s had as much money in his hands as you’ve had, I suppose. Millions must have drifted through him at the gaming tables. But it’s dirt to him. It’s water to him. He’s thrown it away. Given it away. No, money will never tempt him.”
“The devil take him! This fellow seems to be a freak! What will bring him, then?”
“Partly because he’s getting bored.”
“He won’t do a killing for money, but he might do it for pleasure?”
“Exactly.”
“A pleasant man!” shuddered Cosden.
“But I think,” said Sammy, “that the only way to go about it is for you to hunt him out and tell him the truth.”
“The truth — Gregg, are you quite mad? The truth to such a fellow?”
“It would be safer with him than with me or you!” said Sammy.
Mr. Cosden threw up his hands. “I give it up,” said he. “Everything that you say about this fellow is at outs with everything else you say. He seems to be made up of nothing but opposites.”
“That,” said Sammy, “is exactly what he is!”
So it was that Mr. Cosden, the millionaire, went down the street with Sammy and found the goal of his search in a gaming room, sitting idly on a bench at the side of the room. And a big, bearded fellow beside him was pouring forth a tale of hard luck.
“Look here,” Cosden heard the youth break in upon the miner, “what would it cost you to tackle that job again, with the right sort of help?”
“Here’s millions lyin’ idle, goin’ to waste, because there ain’t nothin’ legitimate to put ’em into. But fifteen hundred would stake me. But can I get anybody to give my idea a try?”
“Here,” said slender Mr. Major, “is the fifteen hundred and a little extra. So long. Run along. I don’t want your thanks. Never mind the contract. Your word suits me. I don’t want a witness — goodby!” And so he fairly pushed the man away and the prospector ran, red-eyed and joyous, into the street.
“And he’s not a fool?” asked Cosden.
“It looks that way, but he’s not. Here, I’ll introduce you.”
Men did not take long to get down to even the most important business in those days in the West. Mr. Cosden found himself taking a hand no larger and just as soft as the hand of his daughter, Anne. He found himself looking down into dark, melancholy brown eyes. Then he was walking forth in the street with Mr. Jeremy Major at his side. Gregg had gone off and left them to their own devices.
It was a very hard story to tell, but then the need behind it was very great, and Mr. Cosden brought out the tale haltingly, stiffly. When he finished, Jeremy Major made a brief “sum.”
“This fellow Furness you think needs killing, and I’m to do the job. Partly for any sum I want to name and partly as a soil of a public benefaction.”
That summed it up neatly enough, and Mr. Cosden smil
ed and nodded.
“Well,” said Jeremy, “I’m not a public benefactor. And I never was. And, in the next place, I am not so sure that your daughter is worth all this fuss. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But I might as well tell you right now, to begin with, that the only person I’d tackle big Furness for is the lady herself.”
It was rather bold talk — much bolder, at least, than Mr. Cosden was accustomed to hearing. But there was really nothing for him to do except to bear it as best he might.
“I suppose,” said he patiently, “that the thing for me to do is to take you home and introduce you to my daughter?”
“It won’t do at all,” replied this calmly self-assured Mr. Major. “She’s a rough sort, and hard to know. Of course I’ve seen her. Everybody has seen her riding that black horse that she brought on from Munson. But one doesn’t feel like tackling Furness for the sake of a girl that seems to care about nothing in the world except the highest fence that she can jump her horse over. Suppose you get short of help in your house and suppose you give me a job, something sort of easy, if you don’t mind. Because it kills me to work!”
Mr. Cosden smiled grimly at the thought of the gunfighter trembling over the prospect of work. And yet, in spite of himself, he could not help wondering if Sammy Gregg had not been covertly amusing himself in presenting this fellow to him as a destroyer of men.
“You can do what you like,” said he. “Pick out any kind of job around the house that you want to. My cook quit this morning, and my daughter is doing the cooking and the rest of the work. Which is plenty, because we have to feed eight men!”
Mr. Major writhed at the thought. “Eight men!” sighed he. “And this sort of weather!” He glanced deprecatingly up at the blazing sun. “Well,” said he, “I’ll tell you how it is — work doesn’t agree with me, somehow. I have bad nerves, d’you see? And work interferes with them a surprising lot!”
“Name what you please,” said Cosden. “Or, if you want, I’ll bring you up there as a visitor or a driller waiting for a—”
“Could you do that?” said Jeremy, brightening. “But, no, I should be working. Working, so that I’ll have a chance to talk to her. I’ll tell you, washing dishes is about my speed, if you have a good airy kitchen with plenty of windows and doors to it. Or chopping the kindling wood, maybe. I wouldn’t mind that sort of work.”
“Young man,” returned Cosden, “will you tell me how you ever managed to get along as a boy, or were there no chores around your house?”
“There were chores,” said Jeremy, with a pained sigh of recollection. “And there was a stepmother who had a special talent for getting those chores done by her stepsons. But somehow, after she had tried me out on the jobs for a long time, somehow she came to decide that maybe it was better for someone else to do the work, because I was so clumsy that I was always breaking something and after a while, there wasn’t much work for me to do, and I was raised easy. But it took a lot of thinking, always, to get out of that work!”
Cosden took Jeremy Major up the hill to introduce him to Anne Cosden.
CHAPTER XXI. THE FIGHT
THE BEST THAT could be said about that combination was, briefly, that it did not work. When Mr. Cosden came wearily home from the mine that night, and eight weary, dirty, hungry men with him, and when he slumped through the door of the shack, he found his daughter with a face white and pinched with anger.
“What’s wrong with you, Anne?” said her father.
“I thought I had seen men of all kinds,” said Anne in a wild explosion. “I thought I had seen the most worthless types in the world. But this precious good-for-nothing that you found for me is the worst yet! A helper? He’s not even a shadow of an excuse for a man! Why, dad, he can’t even chop kindling wood straight or without going to sleep over it. I’m sure he hasn’t slept a wink for a month!” She groaned through set teeth to express the greatness of her disgust.
“I’m not going to quit on the job, dad,” she added hastily. “I don’t mind cooking for hungry men. But I hate having that creature around. And impertinent, too! When I told him that I’d pay him off and he could quit, he told me that he would take orders from nobody but the man who hired him, when it came to stopping his job!”
There was a growl of rage from one of the men, a big, two-handed fighting man, with a shock of hair as red as Anne Cosden’s and a chin of wood and a nose which was obviously a pliable button of India rubber.
“Let me go out and handle him,” said the big fellow. “You’re a tired man, Cosden. Let me go and take care of him.”
Cosden weakly gave way to temptation, because, be it understood, he did not really believe that Sammy Gregg had told him the truth about this strangely lazy lad. And though there was that about the youth that gave him an odd, eerie feeling, still, he was not quite sure. And he was rather glad to have his warrior from the mine try out Mr. Jeremy Major.
So tall Dick Harrison paused in the door of the kitchen and scowled into the interior.
“A bum,” said he, speaking his thoughts with unnecessary loudness. “A plain, good-for-nothing tramp!”
The others crowded as close to the door as they could, and they saw the slender, shiftless-looking fellow at the sink glance hastily around over a hunched shoulder as in fear. And then the work of washing the pans was resumed with a sudden flurry of noise and a splashing of greasy dish water. Yet the work did not seem to get forward any faster.
Dick Harrison strode into the kitchen. “Look here, bo,” he roared, “I hear you’ve been talking back to the lady?”
“Mister,” said the shrinking form of Jeremy Major, “I’m doin’ no harm.”
“You rat!” said Dick Harrison, nodding with the conviction of his emotion. “Just plain worthless rat.”
“Dick! Dick!” cried Anne Cosden. “You won’t be too rough with him! He’s not very big, after all. And he really didn’t say much back to me!”
“Oh, I’ll be gentle, I will!” snarled Dick. And he reached out a brawny hand and fixed it upon the shoulder of the new kitchen helper.
“You get out where I can have a look at you,” he said. And he dragged Jeremy lightly forth from the kitchen and out into the light of the dying day. Oh, how fresh and how bright and how gay was the evening, and from up and down the street of the town there was a subdued rattling of contented voices of hungry men, back from their labor on the lode above them, and ready to eat as only laborers know how.
“Dick Harrison!” cried the girl in a fresh alarm. “You won’t hurt him, really?”
“Don’t you worry about him,” said Dick over his shoulder. “I know how to handle this kind, if I don’t know anything else. You leave him be to me!”
“Leave Dick to look after him,” said others among those who stood about. “He won’t give him any more than is good for his troubles, you can bet. That’s just an ordinary, greasy, low-down hobo!”
“Now,” said Dick Harrison, “I hear that you wouldn’t be fired today!”
“I was hired by a man,” said the shrinking Jeremy, giving the effect of dangling bodily from the thick, suspended arm of Harrison. “And I thought I ought to be fired by a man, too.”
“Well,” said Harrison, “you were hired by a man, and now it is a man who fires you!” He added: “Get out!” and he swung his heavy hand through the air.
It just missed the head of Jeremy as that young worthy ducked toward safety. The hand of Harrison carved the air only, while Jeremy, having slipped oddly from the grip of the other, stood at little distance saying humbly: “I’m sure I don’t wish any trouble, you know. But I have to wait to be fired by Mr. Cosden.”
“You have to wait?” shouted Dick Harrison, more than a little flustered because that swinging, open hand of his had not cuffed the cheek of the tramp. “Then wait and take this!”
He ought not to have done it, considering the superiority of his size and the thickness of his athletic shoulders, and the length of his heavy, muscular arms. Certainly he sho
uld not have struck with all his might at an opponent so much smaller.
But Harrison was a hot-tempered man, and now his anger quite got the best of him. Besides, he was of the school which strikes first and thinks afterward.
He struck with the precision, too, of a trained boxer. No lumbering, round-about, clublike blow, but a snapping punch from the shoulder with half the back muscles rippling into it.
One looked to see that terrible plunging fist dash tight through the meager body of little Jeremy Major. But, no, by some lucky chance he seemed to have blundered out of the way of the blow. Or was it entirely by chance?
“Won’t somebody please take him away before there’s any trouble?” cried Jeremy Major.
“Dick Harrison!” cried Anne Cosden, who saw that the matter had gone too far, and that Dick’s wild temper was apt to do the smaller man an injury. “Dick Harrison, that’s enough. Don’t you dare to touch him again.”
As well have called to the stormy wind. Dick Harrison, with a snarl of growing fury, rushed wildly in!
There was something terribly brutal in the charge of that big body upon the smaller man, when the mere weight of his hand seemed so amply sufficient to put an end to the fight, if fight it could be called.
And then the oddest thing happened. For it seemed that Jeremy Major, as he huddled away from the other, with his hands raised timidly before his face in a most unmilitary posture, it seemed that Jeremy Major, as Harrison rushed in, stumbled, and stumbled forward, and he seemed to reach out his left hand to stop himself, clutching at the empty air, as a man will do.
Except that this time, by the veriest accident, of course, the knuckles of that flying left fist clicked just upon the ridge of Harrison’s jaw bone. And his rush stopped!
Indeed, he was brought up standing, as the saying is, and rocked back upon his heels. And from the spectators, who indeed were seeing stranger sights than they had ever dreamed of seeing, there broke a groan of wonder. From Harrison came a roar of bewildered fury.