Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Well, boys,” said he, “you’re mighty welcome to anything that you can see around here. Just look around and help yourselves. But I guess that you ain’t gonna see nothing much worth carrying away, unless it’s some of my cans of jam or maybe the new saddle blanket.”

  “Leave off the guff, will you, Hobo, you old fool?” said one of the men. “We ain’t gunna do any of the looking tonight. You can do the looking for us!”

  You can wager that poor old Hobo Durfee was hard hit by that. But he blinked at them for a time and tried to smile around the well-chewed stem of his corncob pipe.

  “All right, boys,” said he. “I guess I know how to take a joke!”

  “Joke?” said another fellow, squeezing his way into the house, “you chuck out the coin, old bo, or you’re gunna find that this here is the hottest joke that you ever laid hold of in your life. And don’t you forget it!”

  It took the smile from the lips of Hobo Durfee and he stood rather weakly, looking from one black mask to another.

  “Show him what we mean,” said some one tersely.

  It was done in an instant. They seized upon Durfee, who made no resistance to such numbers, and they stripped off his boots. They then opened the fire box of the stove and carried him up to it until the heat burned his socks and he uttered a yell of pain and terror.

  They took him away from the fire at once.

  “All right, Durfee,” they told him. “You show us where the money is or you see what you get!”

  When poor old Durfee saw that they actually meant what they said, he was silent and stared at them. He simply could not believe. No matter what the first part of his life had been, the past fifteen years had been so flooded by kindliness that I suppose it was impossible for the ex-hobo to understand that this brutality was really intended or that there were creatures in the world capable of it.

  At any rate, he maintained that silence until they caught hold of him and actually thrust him up to the fire box so close that his socks caught fire.

  He screamed in earnest this time and they brought him away and demanded with a snarl if he were ready to give them what they wanted. But he was not ready! And they pushed him up to the blazing wood until his feet —

  But Munson saw those feet afterward, and it is better to leave that part until later.

  According to the approved story, Durfee fainted after one of the applications of the torture. But they threw a half-bucket of cold water in his face and waited for him to come to. Then they began again, and he stood the fiendish cruelty until the fire had actually —

  But this is unspeakable!

  All that one can say is that when he finally surrendered he was too far gone to walk. He was too far gone to creep. He had to be stimulated with whisky, and after he had half a pint of that under his belt he was able to whisper to them and they carried him with them out of the house and they brought him to the old shed where he kept his horse.

  It had once been a house. The shed was built up around the last standing parts of the chimney and a portion of the north wall. Inside that chimney, which no one knew about, by reaching down half an arm’s length and removing a few loose bricks, they found an aperture, and inside that aperture they found the treasure of Durfee.

  There were nothing but twenty-dollar gold pieces. And there were three hundred and eight-seven of these. Which made exactly seven thousand, seven hundred and forty dollars that they looted from him.

  There were six of them altogether.

  No, just at the end a big man came galloping up and when he found what they had been doing, he cursed them and said that he was through with them forever. But they pointed out that the business was done and that he might as well share in the profits and forget about it.

  Which he did.

  So that the total was only just a shade above eleven hundred dollars per thief, and for that small sum they sold their souls, certainly, into the deepest part of purgatory.

  CHAPTER XXV. ANNE TAKES CHARGE

  ANNE LEFT OLD Durfee lying in the horse shed, and that was what saved his life and brought danger to the gang. Because he managed to drag himself onto the bare back of his horse and he rode on into Munson. Or, rather, the horse took him there, for when Jack Lorrain found him in the night, Durfee had slid unconscious from the back of the old gelding and lay in the street, and the horse stood above his master with his head dropped wearily, looking uncannily as though he were grieving for the thing that had been done.

  Jack Lorrain, as he said afterward, thought that it was some drunk who had taken too much liquor and he was about to go on past, when something about the patience of the old horse standing there over its master and waiting for him to rise touched the heart of Jack. And he decided that a man who was worth the trouble of a horse, in this fashion, must be worth the trouble of another man also.

  So he went to the quiet form that lay in the dust and seized him by the shoulder, and the body was just as limp as drunkenness to his touch.

  Jack Lorrain was again on the verge of pacing on, but he decided to take a look at the “drunk” so that the boys could laugh about the thing the next day. He scratched a match, accordingly, but what the light of that match showed him kept him speechless until the flame pricked the tips of his fingers sharply. And then a roar broke from the lips of Jack, a roar that rang and reechoed through Munson and brought men tumbling out of houses all around. And when Lorrain had gathered quite a crowd, he lighted another match and showed them what he had found.

  They picked up Hobo Durfee with a womanish tenderness and they carried him into what had once been Mortimer’s saloon, famous for iniquity until big Chester Furness, the first day he came to town, shot Mortimer and treated the boys over the bar, leaving gold on the bar to pay for the drinks! Gold for a dead man!

  The saloon was somewhat less celebrated now, but truly it was hardly less wicked, and what transpired inside of its walls would have filled many a chapter in a wild history every day. It was filled with carousal even at that moment, but the procession silenced them suddenly and completely.

  They gathered with drawn faces and looked at the frightful thing before them. And all at once everyone became as busy as they were silent. Some dozen mounted horses and rushed away in varying directions to find Doctor Stanley Morgan. And some heated water and brought it. And one youngster newly in from the East offered a flask of fine old brandy, such as had not been seen in rough Munson town for many a day.

  Others cut the clothes from the body of Hobo Durfee. Others washed him. Others prepared his bed in the back room of the saloon, piling it thick and soft with blankets, and clearing all the rubbish from the chamber and all the dirt from the floor.

  Here the doctor arrived, just as Durfee began to groan his way back to consciousness, and by the doctor’s care the feet were thoroughly dressed before consciousness fully returned to Hobo. And all agreed that it was a mercy that his sleep had lasted until that dressing was completed.

  In the meantime, the boys of Munson wanted to know what would become of Durfee, and they were assured that he would never walk again without the aid of a pair of crutches.

  To the men of Munson it was a sentence almost worse than death, and they quietly interchanged glances. Morgan was not much of a doctor. He would hardly have dared to set up for anything more than a veterinary in any other part of the world. But his opinion about such a matter as those feet was not to be doubted.

  In the meantime, Durfee had regained consciousness completely. But the doctor had put enough opiates on his feet to keep him from torment. He was merely weakly drowsy, and kept turning his head slowly from side to side and staring at the faces around him in terror and in horror which would gradually melt away as Jack Lorrain or some other, sitting by his bed, patted his hand and would say: “Buck up, old-timer. You’re all right now. We’re gunna take care of you. Steady along, old buck. There ain’t nothin’ to be skeered of, Hobo. Nobody but your friends here!”

  So Durfee would manage a faint, i
ncredulous smile and then shake his head and frown while he closed his eyes and seemed to be trying to think back to the confusion of troubles which had closed around him.

  After a time they tried to press him for a little information. But he could only say: “Seems like I had a sort of fallin’ out with some of the boys, I dunno about what. I disremember exactly what the argument was all about. They was het up considerable, though.”

  That was all he could say, and the doctor decided that it would be wise not to press him too much that evening.

  Half a dozen volunteers decided to sit up, turn and turn about, with Durfee through the night and another half dozen mounted horses and dashed furiously out to the little Durfee shack in the bottom land.

  They descended into the damp, cool air of the riverside. They came to the cabin and found all neat and orderly there, with the lamp burning steadily on the table.

  Only there was a faint cloud of bluish smoke hanging in the corners of the room, and when they opened the doors of the oven, they found four big pans of pone burned to a crisp.

  Then, with lanterns, they went over the ground outside and very quickly they decided that someone had been there before them. A party totally indifferent to the condition of Hobo’s garden. For his choicest patches of ground had been trodden and torn by random tramplings of hooves. Being experts at this business, they very readily decided that seven horses had been there.

  “What were seven riders doing here,” they asked one another, “interrupting old Durfee while he was bakin’ his pone?”

  Jack Lorrain, who was one of the party, said solemnly: “Boys, I hate to think it — I ain’t gonna really think it till I’m cornered, but I got a hateful sort of lingerin’ suspicion that them burned feet of poor old Hobo’s ain’t no accident. It was done to him on purpose by them gents that rode in here over his garden!”

  No one answered Jack. Because it was a little too horrible for them to speak about. For though there has always been plenty of brutality in the West, following the frontier, yet it has been brutality of the “man-to-man” type. The Indians were never able to establish any precedents with all of their efforts!

  However, the searchers did not discover the plundered cavity in the chimney in the horseshed. They returned to spread a vague rumor of horror through the town of Munson.

  In the morning, people had come from a distance to learn the facts as soon as old Durfee was able to relate them, and among others, there were some celebrities recently come down from Crumbock. They came with the others to the saloon and with whispers in the front room they were told about the condition of the sufferer in the back room.

  They were Hubert Cosden, millionaire even before he struck it rich on the Crumbock Lode, and little Sammy Gregg, who had pushed through the celebrated stage line from Munson to Crumbock, nearly a year before. People said that Sammy was himself worth more than a quarter of a million, now, what with the stage line and little investments here and there among the mines, made at the advice of his friend, Cosden.

  With them came big Anne Cosden riding a strapping black horse on which she had kept pace from Crumbock with the stage, doing the hundred miles in a day and a half, a hundred miles of terrible ups and downs in thirty-six hours! One might have thought that she was tired out after such a performance, but she was not! Or at least, she seemed to forget about it when she saw the sick man.

  In ten seconds she was in charge of the room and Hobo Durfee in it. And before the first minute had elapsed, she had a bucket of hot soapsuds and was giving that floor the first scrubbing of its short but eventful life. She washed it until it dried white. And then she washed the walls. And when she was ended with that, she sent little Sammy Gregg forth to get wild flowers, and these she distributed around the room in any receptacles which she could get out of the saloon.

  About half an hour after these changes had been made, with the windows of the room opened, and the doors opened also, so that a refreshing wind could pass through, old Durfee opened his eyes and said in a tremulous voice: “Doggone me if spring ain’t come ag’in.”

  And then he saw the girl and flushed. He was not used to be tended upon by ladies.

  “Of course it’s spring,” said Anne Cosden, sitting down beside his bed. “It was just about a year ago in the spring, too, that I came by your house and you asked me in to have pone and strawberry jam.”

  “Ah,” said Hobo Durfee, abashed. “I disremembered for a minute. But I guess that you’re Miss Cosden, and—”

  A wave of pain struck him. He stiffened and fought out the battle.

  “Lord, man,” said Anne Cosden, “groan and that’ll let some of the corked-up pain out of you. When I was a youngster, I used to take pride in not making any noise when I was hurt. I was always spilling off a horse, you know, and breaking a collar bone, or something like that. But after a while I found that it did a lot of good just to lie back and shout when something hurt me!”

  Old Durfee chuckled. He had forgotten his pain. And little Sammy Gregg, noiseless as a shadow in a corner of the room, really worshiped big Anne Cosden.

  She flashed a glance at him and moved her lips in a whisper which the sick man could not hear, but which said plainly to Sammy Gregg: “Will you please get rid of that goose look?”

  Then suddenly old Durfee was saying: “I’m beginning to remember! It sort of begins to work back into my mind. I see ’em standin’ there outside the door of my cabin. And, oh, my Lord, they got all my money! They got fifteen years that I can’t never live no more and they put them years of my life in their pockets.”

  Anne Cosden, with a consolatory murmur, put her hand on the hot forehead of Durfee, and at the same time a slight nod brought Sammy Gregg instantly to her side.

  “You know shorthand, Sammy. Now he’s about to talk, and you get every word down.”

  “Paper,” said Sammy helplessly.

  “Darn it,” said Anne Cosden, “write on the floor, if you can’t do any better!”

  This was the fashion in which old Durfee told his story, slowly, stretching his tale over more than an hour, for often the horror of the thing that had happened would rush back upon his mind and stop his speech. But always Anne Cosden, sitting beside him, soothing him, letting him groan when he would, letting him speak when he would, sympathetic, gentle, filled with intuitions of the right manner of persuading him to talk, drew the story forth in every detail. While, in the corner, unheeded by the sick man, little Sammy Gregg writhed and listened and writhed again and, while his teeth were set, his rapid pencil took down the words of the sufferer.

  He had a little memorandum book which served him. Presently the memorandum book was filled with the questions of the girl, and the responses of the sick man. And then he took out old letters and scrawled upon the backs of the sheets and on the outside and on the inside of envelopes, the utterances of Hobo Durfee which were to bring death to so many men!

  One might not have realized, looking in upon this scene, that Justice was no longer a blind goddess but was opening her eyes and beginning to prepare to strike, while that rapid, cunning pencil made the swift signs which could be reinterpreted as speech.

  The thing was ended. Old Durfee lay exhausted, but happy at last now that the tale had been told. For, just as the girl had told him, some of the pain seemed to pass into the groans and the words with which he had expressed himself.

  Then Anne Cosden, stifled with anger and grief, with tears in her eyes and with her square chin thrust forward, nodded jerkily to little Sammy Gregg, saying as clearly as words: “Now go out and let the world hear what we have heard!”

  So Sammy went softly out and faced the dense crowd which waited, in a deadly silence, in the outer room of the saloon. Not a word had been spoken out there. Not a drink had been tasted. But every man had a pair of revolvers belted around his hips and most of them leaned upon rifles, and in the street each man had left his fastest and strongest horse.

  At the nod of Sammy, and seeing the paper in his han
d, they followed him forth from the saloon. They gathered again in the street around him. But he was not tall enough to let all their eyes find his face, and therefore stalwart Hubert Cosden caught him up and perched the little man upon one of his broad shoulders.

  From this position, Sammy read forth his account, giving each of the questions of the girl, and each of the answers of poor Durfee. And there was not a whisper from that crowd. But every crook in it, and there were many of them there, felt like an honest man when he thought of the horror of it all.

  They came to the end of the document. Sammy Gregg was reading out of an envelope, crowded with characters:

  “Miss Cosden: Did you recognize any of their voices?

  “Durfee: One of them I thought I did. I ain’t quite sure.

  “Miss Cosden: Who was that?

  “Durfee: It was him that come the last. It was the seventh man.

  “Miss Cosden: And who did he seem to you to be?

  “Durfee: I disremember. A name come into my mind at the time, but it’s slipped out again.

  “Miss Cosden: Don’t try too hard to remember. It may pop back into your mind again. What sort of a man was he? Tall or short?

  “Durfee: Oh, he was considerable of a tallish sort of a gent.

  “Miss Cosden: Young or old?

  “Durfee: Sort of betwixt and between.

  “Miss Cosden: And what did he say?

  “Durfee: First I thought that he was gunna take my money away from them.

  “Miss Cosden: Did you think that one man could take the money away from six?

  “Durfee: I dunno. He was sort of a leader with them.

  “Miss Cosden: What did he say to them?

  “Durfee: He cussed them out considerable and said that what they had done was an outrage. You see, that was when I begun hoping.

  “Miss Cosden: And then?

  “Durfee: One of them up and said that now that they had turned the trick and got the money that so many others had tried to get and failed, that the chief might as well take his share.