Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  Through the trees at the next bend appeared the body of a great dappled gray horse with a tall rider in the saddle — Furness, with his rifle at the ready — Furness with the rifle butt against his shoulder.

  It cracked; a sound as of a whirring hornet darted into the ears of Sammy Gregg; and Jeremy Major was out of the seat and lunging down with a bullet through body or head!

  No, for he had landed astride of the near wheeler and then flicked off again onto the ground, and while he was still in the air a bit of steel gleamed in his hand. It spoke as the feet of the owner touched the deep dust. And Sammy Gregg saw the rifle slip from the grip of Furness, saw it hang from the fingers of one hand, and then the Winchester dropped while Furness clutched at one arm with his other hand.

  At the same time, he swung the gray about with a sway of his body and a twist of his knees, and the forest closed instantly behind him. Through the silence which fell with a sudden weight as the jangling noise of the coach stopped, Sammy Gregg could hear the horse of the fugitive crashing through the underbrush.

  Was this the end of the battle toward which he and the other people of the mountains had looked forward with so much eagerness and dread? No, for here was Jeremy Major catching the black stallion, Clancy, and leaping with a catlike lightness into the saddle. Another instant and the black was sweeping down the road, his head a little turned and his mouth opened to receive the bit of the bridle which his master leaned forward along his neck to fit between his teeth. In an instant the bridle was in place, and Major had twitched the stallion from the road into the brush.

  There was one more glimpse for Sammy Gregg. He could look from his high seat far down the hillside to a clearing among the trees and an instant later he saw the gray horse dart across the opening, dodge through a thick hedge of bushes, and pass on out of sight.

  An instant later the black flashed into view, with Jeremy Major pitched forward like a jockey on the neck of the stallion. There was no dodging for Clancy. He rose like a steeplechaser at the hedge and cleared it with an arrowy leap. Then he, too, was lost in the forest beyond.

  There was no doubt in his mind about which horse would win the race. The gray was a grand runner and a good mountain horse, used to this work. But he might as well have been matched against a hawk as against the black! But as for the battle which would ensue when the two met, that was a different matter. For it was the left arm of big Chester Furness which had been wounded and his right, his revolver hand, would be as accurate as ever. It seemed to Sammy Gregg that the power of Furness and the terrible speed of Jeremy Major would make a resistless force and an immovable object meeting somewhere yonder in the wilds.

  In the meantime he had many thousands of dollars worth of gold in the stage. There was no guard to help him. A gun was useless in his hands. And the management of the coach team was a very sufficient mystery to him. At the first open space he turned the stage and its six horses laboriously around and started back for Crumbock.

  What difference did it make whether or not the stage was pushed through to its destination? He and everyone else understood perfectly that what was of importance was not the traveling of the stage, but the defeat of Chester Furness, if that could be arranged.

  But when his team was seen cresting the slope above Crumbock, that busy town suspended all work and flocked in a noisy mass to learn the news.

  Was the gold gone?

  Had they seen Furness?

  Where was Jeremy Major? Dead on the road and his horse stolen by the outlaw?

  All they got for an answer was that the great pair had clashed, and that the first round of the battle had been a victory for Jeremy Major, and that the last seen of the outlaw, he was riding away for life, with the black stallion in swift pursuit.

  That was the story he told over again to Mr. Cosden, when the miner came to ask hasty questions and receive back the gold which had been for the baiting of the trap.

  “And Miss Cosden?” asked Sammy timidly.

  “She has set her teeth and will not show a thing,” said Cosden. “But come up to the house tonight. I want to talk to you and get all the details over again. Now I’m busy. But I want to hear everything, and you can wager that Anne wants to hear it, too!”

  So that eventful morning ended, and the roar of the mining town began again, and the mere thought of what had happened seemed to be lost.

  Not lost to Sammy Gregg, however, as he sat in his “office,” which had once been so thronged with business, and which was now so empty of all interest.

  CHAPTER XXIII. ANNE GOES EAST

  AT LEAST HE had the night to wait for, the talk with Cosden, and perhaps a glimpse of Anne. But, oh, how slowly the day waned, and how many hundreds of times he looked wistfully and vainly toward the dark forests of the southern hills, hoping against hope, still, that the rider of the black horse might emerge, unscathed, and triumphant. Or perhaps was Cosden right? Would it be better for everyone if both of those warriors fought until the two lay dead in the woods, with only the owls to watch them fight and die?

  The evening came at last. Sammy saw the men from the mine come for supper to the Cosden house. He waited nervously until they left, and then he climbed the slope and presented himself at the door. Cosden took him in. The rattle of pans in the kitchen died away, and big Anne Cosden came swinging in and sat down on the arm of a chair improvised from a packing case and some supple, bent boughs.

  “I’m mostly interested in just one thing,” said Anne Cosden. “When they fought, is the story true that Chester Furness turned and rode away?”

  “With a bullet through his left arm,” said Sammy honestly. “I saw the red stain.”

  “Then,” said Anne Cosden with a firm conviction, “they are both dead!”

  There was a sharp exclamation from her father. “What makes you think that, Anne?”

  “If Furness couldn’t beat him in the first fight, he could never beat him after once turning his back. And he could never escape. Nothing that lives could escape from that black horse, with a cat like Jeremy Major in the saddle. And I’m going back to work. I don’t want to hear any more about it!”

  She was as good as her word. She returned to the kitchen and left her father staring gloomily back at the door.

  “I don’t know,” said he to Sammy Gregg. “I can’t tell. Sometimes I think that she doesn’t care a whack about either of them. But I’m not sure. She beats me!”

  The last was whispered, and his eyes fixed upon the outer door of the cabin and grew wide with staring. Sammy Gregg turned with a start, and he saw over his shoulder the slender form of Jeremy Major standing in the doorway. Beyond, there was the stamp of an impatient horse, Clancy, standing dimly in the night!

  Then Jeremy came in and slumped into a chair.

  “It was mighty hot this afternoon, wasn’t it?” said Jeremy. “I lay up on the edge of the woods for a long time waiting for it to cool off. There was a pair of gray squirrels that couldn’t agree which owned the tree I was lying under.

  “They kept paying visits to each other. And finally they clinched. They made the fur fly, I can tell you. Finally they tumbled off their branch. I thought they’d drop eighty feet to the ground and break themselves to a pulp. But they didn’t! Did you ever see a squirrel dive for the ground?

  “The fellows hadn’t fallen twenty feet when they shook themselves apart, and spread out their tails and flattened their bodies, and fluffed out their tails behind them. Those big tails were like balloons, holding them back when they fell. Oh, they dropped with a chunk, of course, but they weren’t hurt. They scampered up the trunk of the same—”

  “Wait a minute!” broke in Mr. Cosden.

  “Well?” said Jeremy blandly.

  “Do you think we give a continental damn about the pair of gray squirrels in their infernal pine tree?”

  “Ah,” said Jeremy a little sadly, “I suppose you don’t!”

  “Then tell us what we want to know, in the name of Heaven. What happened bet
ween you and big Furness?”

  “Why,” said Jeremy, “we met each other, after a while, and we had quite a talk. We came to a sort of an agreement.”

  “Go on, Major!”

  “And he gave me a note to take back to you here. Let me see. I hope I haven’t got it all rumpled up. Here you are.”

  It was a single sheet of paper, folded twice and pinned with a sliver of wood. And it was addressed to Anne Cosden. Her father took it with a scowl and carried it silently out to the kitchen. And by the sudden whitening of her face, he knew that she recognized the handwriting.

  She opened it eagerly, swept through it with a glance, and then ripped it across and threw it on the floor.

  “What in the world,” asked Cosden, “has Furness got to say to you?”

  “The man is a coward!” she cried in bitterest scorn. “What do I care what he has to say? Read it, if you wish!”

  He picked up the pieces of torn paper humbly enough and read it over slowly to himself.

  “Does he call you by your first name, girl?”

  The letter read:

  Dear Anne:

  I have just finished a long talk with Jeremy Major. I have to admit to you that he is a most convincing talker. And, after listening to him, I have decided that I must give up this foolish amusement of keeping the stage from running.

  Also, I think it is rather dangerous for me to linger near Crumbock. So I suppose this little letter must serve to say good-by to you.

  A thousand regrets that we have not had an opportunity to come to know each other better.

  Chester Ormonde Furness.

  “And there we are!” murmured Mr. Cosden. “The end of that chapter. What the devil will the next chapter turn up? But I think you understand, Mr. Major, that I am eternally grateful to you, because it was Gregg’s stage, but it was my money!”

  But that was not the end of the stage.

  The next morning there was a change at the Crumbock office of the Crumbock-Munson stage line. Men were waiting. And the gold shipment of Mr. Cosden, doubled in size, was joined by two other shipments, hardly smaller. It was a jammed, packed stage that finally crawled up the slope, and dipped into the woods beyond.

  Three days later word came whirling back to Crumbock that the trip had been made in perfect safety and in excellent time. Business thrived, and rates climbed. And Sammy Gregg saw the swift hundreds pouring into his hands every day and mounting to thousands each week.

  “If you’ll stay on as regular guard,” he cried to Jeremy Major, “I’ll pay you a hundred a week with nothing to do except to trail the crooks, if they ever try to hold up the stages again.”

  “It’s sort of a hard life,” sighed Jeremy, “cooking chuck for oneself.”

  “I’ll hire you a cook,” said Sammy, “above your wages! And a servant, if you want, to take care of your horse and your guns for you.”

  Jeremy Major sighed and stared up at the pale blue sky, where the sun was burning.

  “Matter of fact,” said Jeremy, “I’ve made up my mind that I’d better be traveling south. You see, I have a touch of rheumatism up in these northern countries.”

  So Sammy attempted no longer to persuade. Jeremy was gone. After his departure, Anne Cosden suddenly took the stage for Munson, bound East. And suddenly all that was left for Sammy was to sit quietly wherever he pleased and watch the gold flood flow steadily into his coffers. He had won, but the glory was small in his eyes. For Sammy had been growing since he first left Brooklyn, and now he had reached a certain pitch of mind where money alone could not satisfy him.

  The one thing he wanted was Anne Cosden; and were she East or West he felt that she was beyond his dreams. There was only one bitter satisfaction, that through his engineering he had put her beyond the dreams of handsome Chester Furness as well.

  CHAPTER XXIV. TORTURE BY FIRE

  TO UNDERSTAND THE extent to which the mountains were shocked, one must consider what “Hobo” Durfee was, before the tragedy happened to him.

  His nickname of Hobo had been honestly earned. He had been nothing but a tramp, a lazy, good-for-nothing scamp who wandered about the country inventing new methods for avoiding labor in any form.

  This continued more than halfway through his life, but when he was forty years old, Hobo Durfee suddenly contracted what might be called the industry fever. Some said it was due to the fact that he had loaned a friend a dollar and that the man paid him back two dollars the next month. At any rate, Hobo Durfee never forgot. He laid the thought of that dollar of “interest” away in his memory, embalmed in myrrh and spikenard. And that even started his interest in accumulating money.

  He began to put away every bit of it that he could lay his hands on. But he did not really have the courage to be a stirring thief. So presently he learned that his love of money was greater than hatred of work, and he began to work, steadily, earnestly.

  He accumulated more and more money. In five years he had a shade over a thousand dollars in a bank, and then the bank failed! Durfee got his money out, because he was one of the first to call with a check when an evil rumor got abroad. But he never forgot how close he came to losing his money on that day, and thereafter, nothing in the world could persuade him to trust his money in hands other than his own. It was known that all his wages were turned into gold, and that all of that gold was hidden away in some secluded place on his own land.

  For he had a little shack of his own and a patch of ground down in the river bottom. It was just as much as he was able to cultivate by himself. On it he raised, during a part of the year, vegetables for the market in Munson, which was fairly near his place. No one else, in that region of timber and mines, had even so much as thought of raising vegetables, and therefore his labor brought him quite a rich reward.

  Besides, he was working on his land only a part of the year, and the rest of the time, even now that he was fifty-five years old, he proved himself a good cowhand in every sense of the term by his work on the cattle ranches. So that it was estimated that Hobo Durfee, in the last years of his life, must have laid up between five and ten thousand dollars in gold, all hidden some place on his little estate.

  Of course that brought the crooks in a swarm, and for years they almost literally plowed the ground of the Durfee ranch to get at his treasure every time he left his house. They never found it. Old Durfee was too foxy to leave his precious money without having it so securely tucked away that not even an eagle’s eye could have located it. And so, after a time, the crooks left off trying and Durfee was in peace. A pretty well-deserved peace, too, as everyone agreed.

  The old man liked to talk to people about the money he had saved and about the good old foolish, happy, sunny days in trampdom. He liked to talk so well that he kept open house and would entertain anyone who came by with food and chatter.

  Well, in the West they appreciate hospitality. In a country where men know desert travel and the heart-stopping joy of coming in sight of a human habitation with smoke curling out of it, they put a high rating upon sincerely hospitable folks. And such a value was placed upon Hobo Durfee.

  He grew a lot of strawberries in the spring of the year, and as they came ripe, he used to gather them and stew them into a delicious jam. That Durfee jam became famous for more than a hundred miles around. Literally hundreds and hundreds had taken a trip scores of miles out of their way in order to come at Hobo Durfee, sit by his stove, eat his pone and delicious strawberry jam, drink his coffee, and then go their way.

  He was very happy when he was talking about the good old days when he never used to turn a hand at work. He had never stopped hating work. He had simply come to love money more! And when he began to turn to the subject of how he learned to labor and to save, the boys used to sit around and laugh at him a good deal. But he was willing to be laughed at. It was part of the game, and he liked company so well, and liked an audience so well, that he was very willing to have them laugh at him.

  It would have done you good to see the r
ed-brown face of that old chap with a grizzled fringe of whiskers more or less long, for he was not like most misers. The point was, some said, that the knowledge that he had a quantity of gold hidden away kept him bubbling over with so much happiness that he just wanted others to hear about it. So the door of his shack was never closed.

  You must know all this to understand how old Hobo Durfee jumped up, one night, and laughed and nodded to some horsemen who had stopped outside of his shack and then had crowded into the doorway. There had been no other callers there on this day, and Hobo Durfee was warmed clear down to his boots when he saw so many forms of men outside his door.

  He called out: “Come on in, boys! I’ve just finished making up some of the most sizzling good jam that you ever seen. And I’m just after finishing mixing up some pone and shoving the pans in the oven. And outside of that, I’ve got about five minutes to start the coffee. Which there ain’t never been no better coffee than I make, and there ain’t gunna never be none better never made.”

  Then a voice outside the door said, “Tell the old fool that we ain’t come to eat his chuck tonight. And tell him it’s something else we want.”

  Then the leading two men crowded in through the doorway and old Hobo Durfee saw that there was a mask on the face of each. A real hundred percent mask made of black coat lining turned into a sack and pulled down over the head with just a couple of big holes left for the eyes to look through and for air to come in. I suppose it was right then that Hobo guessed what was coming.

  He saw that he didn’t have a chance. His gun was clear across on the far side of the room. And I suppose there was no particular desire in Hobo to get the gun, at that. All he wanted to do was to make people happy. And besides, what could they get in his house except jam and pone and coffee, which he offered them just as freely without any sign of a mask or a gun?