by Max Brand
That was bad for me, of course.
Beyond a doubt, there would be occasions when I would have to face armed men again, and on those occasions, every man would feel it his point of duty and of pride to take a fair crack at me with guns. All that was in my favor was this false reputation I had built up. I knew that there were fifty men in that one county who could shoot the eyes out of my head, who were far faster and surer in every way with a weapon of any kind. But the nerves of a good many of them would be upset by merely the reputation which was behind me, just as the nerves of young Harry had been broken for the moment, or strung to wire tension as he faced me.
You can see that matters were becoming rather complicated for me in Piegan, and I decided that as soon as the next few days had passed and the election was over, and Maker given his freedom, I would get out of that town and leave it my blessing and a long back trail. For that purpose, I determined on studying the adjacent country thoroughly. In case I had to make a start, I must know where to travel, and how.
I had come, in my thoughts as I went back towards the hotel, to the conclusion that I would have to inure myself to horse and saddle, and build up endurance for the crisis which was almost sure to arrive, and just at this time I saw a form looming in my way and looked up to see Harry.
I could hardly recognize him. His face was no longer pinched and white. His eyes were no longer insane with determination and terror. Instead, he was just a big, heavy-shouldered kid, with the brownest, most handsome face you ever saw. I stopped short, but he stuck out a big hand towards me.
“I hope you’ll take it, Mr. Ash,” says he.
Of course I took it, and no one with a readier will. He almost smashed the metacarpal bones in my right hand. I have never met with such a terrible grip as he had!
I endured this for the long moment that it lasted, and then managed to keep on smiling back at him.
He said: “That was a hefty sock that you handed me, Mr. Ash. My head’s still got an open roof on it. But that’s all right. I’m glad you hit me with a fist instead of with a bullet. I’m glad to be still on earth. That was the first time that I ever pulled a gun on another man,” said he, “and I wouldn’t have done it to-day, only”
He paused, and I finished off for him:
“That’s all right. I understand about that. You thought it was a question of taking water or not taking it. I don’t blame you a bit. Forget about it, Harry. We’re friends, now.”
“Forget about it?” says he, in a ringing voice. “I’ll never forget about it! The boys tell me that what you did was the gamest thing ever — that I had my gun out before you moved. You ought to ‘a’ killed me, for a fool. But you didn’t. You simply trusted to your fist. Well, I owe you my life, Mr. Ash, and I’ll never forget that!”
You see how he took it! Somehow, I couldn’t explain to him that I had not had a gun on me. I knew that he would not have believed me.
“Drop that ‘Mister,’ Harry,” said I. “My name is Jerry Ash. Or Poker-face, if you please. About the other thing, I’m going to forget it, even if you won’t.”
“It was like this — Jerry,” said he, hesitating a little over the name. “Some of the boys had been talking you up, and I had heard you talked down, here and there, and I was saying what I had heard. Besides, I had had a few drinks under my belt, and I knew that that always makes a fool of me. I ain’t asking your pardon. It’s too deep for that. Only, the next time that there’s trouble and you’re near it, you see which side I’m on!”
A tremor came into his voice. So I shook hands with him again, and said that I believed him, and off he went, stalking.
He hurried across the street, and I went back to the hotel more thoughtfully than ever. It was occurring to me that that youngster had been blooded, on this day, and the next time that he pulled a gun, there might be a shake in his voice, but there would be none in his hand! Perhaps I had looked in on the making of a man!
When I got back to the hotel, Colonel Riggs was there sitting on the veranda, and he stood up and spread his legs in his manner when he was about to make a speech. Instead of making the speech, however, he took me by the arm and went slowly inside the hotel with me. He said, in a quiet voice, a voice that sounded new to me:
“I’m not surprised, Jerry. They’ve told me all about it. But I’m not surprised. Nobody else would have done it. But there aren’t many like you, in this world. Don’t forget it. There are not many like you in this world!”
This was too thick for me. I said: “Oh, rot. How’s Hooker?”
“Hooker is going to pull through,” said Riggs. “Never give him a thought. After this morning, nobody will ever hold last night against you. Nobody but me!”
He looked down at me with a whimsical smile and added: “You know why, Jerry?” I stared back at him, and saw the trouble and the shadow behind his smile.
“I can guess, colonel,” said I. “It’s Maker.”
“Ay, it’s Maker,” he admitted. “He’ll never forgive me, as long as there’s life in his body. And he’ll never be satisfied until he’s drawn out the last blood that’s in my withered old veins. Well, well,” he went on, with a sigh, “I’ll have to stand for that danger, too. It’s not the first time that I’ve been in danger, Jerry.”
“And I hope,” said I, “that it won’t be the last time that you coin money out of it.”
His grin was as sudden and bright as the grin of a boy.
“You’re right,” said he. “I’m going to com money, now. And so are you. So are you!”
I left him on that note. It wasn’t money that I cared about. It was only safety for my neck, and a chance to keep my infernal heart quiet. Upstairs I went and found Maker, still heavily manacled, but perfectly cheerful, with a heavy growth of beard darkening his face, and making him look like a pirate. I set his hands free, and brought him hot water to shave with.
He whistled while he was lathering himself. He hummed while he was actually shaving.
“Your heart’s up, Sid,” said I.
“My heart’s up,” said he, “because my fortune’s down, just now. But it won’t stay down. It can’t stay down. I know about that sort of thing. Life is a seesaw, my lad. Now down, and now up. Turn and turn about. Riggs is now in the air. Pretty soon he may touch bottom again!”
And he went on chattering, as cheerful as could be. He had had a good breakfast, he said, and every one treated him with courtesy. He needed no gun to guard him.
I asked him why not, and he said:
“Because they’re too afraid of you, my lad. They’d a lot rather jump off a cliff than start you on their trail. And that goes from Riggs down the whole list of the blackguards! But one of these days I’m going to be out of this, Poker-face. And then I’ll raise so much hell as they’ve never dreamed of in this country!”
I could believe that. He was cheerful because he was seeing the future. I almost felt that it would be better for me to let the murderers into that room and finish Maker then and there. But I knew that I could never do that. I was pledged to him, without words spoken. He knew it, and I knew it. And we never spoke of the thing, for that reason; but his life was in my hands.
“They tell me,” said Maker, “that you’ve done another pretty little trick this morning, and tapped one of the strong boys on the chin.”
I shrugged my shoulders. The tale was too complicated for repetition.
“Tell me this, Jerry,” said Maker. “Did you have a gun with you?”
I shook my head, and suddenly he scowled blackly, and began to nod.
“I understand,” says he. “You left the gun with me!”
I jumped up and stamped both heels down hard on the floor.
“If you start making a hero out of me,” said I, “I’ll walk out of here and tell the boys to come in and cut your throat for you!”
CHAPTER XXI. THE ELECTION
THE DAYS DRIFTED on towards election. There was a grand whirl of excitement in the town, of course. The colonel
was always away, riding or driving, with relays of horses that tore him across the length and the breadth of the county. Was it to be called Maker County, or Piegan County. Was it to be Makerville for the county seat, or Piegan? Well, the colonel was writing pamphlets, news articles, making speeches, talking to individuals, persuading this man and bribing the next. All means were good means, in the eyes of the colonel, so long as they helped him towards the accomplishment of his object.
They were not days of excitement for me, however. I spent most of the time playing two-handed poker with Sidney Maker, in his jail room. I asked him if he would give me his parole to stay put until election day, and he flatly refused. So I kept his ankles shackled, and was jailer to him. The people left him strictly alone, except that the colonel, whenever he was in town, was sure to look in, and say ten words. And Maker would look at him with bright, thoughtful eyes and never say a word in return.
If ever he met Riggs with free hands!
Then came the election day. The town was wild with excitement from the morning on. Rumors came sweeping up all the time. In the middle of the afternoon election returns began to come in, and the numbers from the voting districts were chalked up on a big blackboard in front of the hotel.
The first district to be counted and registered, of course, was Piegan itself, and it was pleasant to see the large zero that had voted for Makerville as county seat, and the scores who had voted unanimously for Piegan. That gave the colonel a good, fat lead, and he kept it until evening, though it diminished with every return. Finally, in came the Makerville report, and everybody held breath, expecting to see the colonel wiped out. But we were amazed when fifty-odd votes were cast for Piegan in Makerville, itself!
We were amazed, I say, all of us except the colonel.
“I paid highest of all, for those,” he told me. “But they’re worth it. They cost me hard cash, but they make the election a sort of a moral victory for me over Maker, no matter how the whole thing turns out.”
The colonel’s idea of a “moral victory” bought with hard cash amused me a good deal, but I said nothing. There was no good in arguing with him. I was always afraid to unloose the large torrent of his vocabulary, you see.
As the evening wore on, there were only two precincts to be heard from, places which voted a good number at their mines, and where the voting had undoubtedly been done in the early morning, but fast riders, with relays of horses, could not get the news home to us any faster than this!
That was the sort of a county it was — spilled out all over the map, with Piegan about in the center.
It was ten in the morning when the first of the two missing returns came in, and the groans that went up from the town of Piegan fairly made the heart ache. Sid Maker, listening in his room, grinned like a child, with his pleasure.
“He’s lost, the infernal old grafter!” said he.
I nodded.
“Ain’t you glad of it, Poker-face?” asked Maker.
“No, I’m not.”
“Why not?” he argued. “You know that he’s a crook and a cheat, don’t you?”
“Well,” I said, “I’m not logical about it: I’m fond of him, in spite of everything. I don’t want to see him with a broken heart! You, Sid, you have the kind of heart that won’t break. Not hard, just tough.”
“You have me beat, kid,” said Maker. “You’re a cross of everything that I don’t expect to find in a man. I can’t make you out.”
I left him to puzzle out my character as well as he could, and down I went to find out how things had actually gone. All of the inhabitants of Piegan were gathered in the street or around the veranda, watching the blackboard. But they were as silent as a funeral. A good deal of free whisky was passing on the rounds, but it couldn’t lighten the gloom.
Up to this point, there had been a lot of shooting off of rifles and revolvers, a lot of yelling and whooping, and impromptu speeches telling the world what a fine place Piegan was.
Now all of that was gone and ended. All that remained was a sickening depression. There was a single ray of light in Piegan, and the colonel furnished it.
He stirred about through the crowd and talked to every man and woman in it, and to the children, too. He remembered them by name. He said flattering things to them.
I drifted about in his wake and listened, and his talk ran like a brook, downhill.
The election returns, plainly posted in large chalkings, showed that Makerville was running exactly twenty-eight votes ahead of Piegan. Not a great deal, but enough to win the election, with hardly a doubt. For there was only one distant mining camp remaining to be heard from, a little place called Wayne Hollow. It seemed that the poor colonel had been to every other spot in the county, but not to Wayne Hollow, and therefore he could only reasonably see that the day had gone definitely against him. Maker would probably win by something like fifty or a hundred votes. Not much, but enough.
In the face of the certainty of defeat, the colonel kept up his cheer. I heard him say: “Mrs. Thompson, this is the fortune of war. We have the consolation of knowing that we fought to the last ditch, however.”
That was not all.
He said to one of the men: “You know, partner, that a good fight is the best thing in life. We’ve made the fight together. I’ve lost, but it has made me rich. Rich in friendships!”
I admired him, I tell you, when I heard the old rascal going about like that. He might be rich in friendships, but it did not require a prophet to foretell that he would be broke in everything else. He had begged, borrowed, and stolen, in order to keep cash in his safe, and he had spent that cash like water in order to make the prospects of Piegan grow.
He had failed. Well, still he kept his head up, and did not let the crowd down. Finally he saw me at the edge of the crowd, and came over to me, nodding, smiling, weaving his way through the crowd.
No one made any response to him. They did not seem to feel as he did about the virtues that lie in a “good hard fight, fought to a finish.”
When he got to me, he said in passing: “Come in with me!”
I went into the office with him, and there he slumped into a chair and lay with his head far back, his eyes closed, his face looking like soap.
“Give me some whisky, Jerry,” he whispered.
I got him some, and held his head while he sipped it. My heart ached with pity and with sorrow for him.
He swallowed the whisky and thanked me, in the same whisper.
“Don’t leave me, Jerry!” he murmured.
He made a slight gesture with his hand, and I caught it and gave it a grip.
“I won’t leave you, chief,” said I.
“Chief?” said he, as faintly as ever. “Not your chief, Jerry. But never tell about this. Never tell a soul. Promise!”
He opened his sick eyes to watch me promising, and I swore that I wouldn’t, and I haven’t, until this moment that I write it down. He’s where such writings as mine won’t bother him a great deal, I dare say.
After a time, he could lift his head from the back of the chair, but it only slumped far forward, as though the spinal column were broken. Nevertheless, he could speak now, and his voice was perfectly steady, though small.
“You see how a small hole may sink a large ship, Jerry? Wayne Hollow! I was too confident. I shook my head when they told me that it was thirty rough miles farther up that trial. I turned back. If I had ridden on, that day, I might still be out there with the crowd, hoping. But now I’m lost, and so is poor Piegan!”
“You have a thousand better schemes than this in your pocket.”
“This is my last deal,” he replied calmly. “I’m too old. I’ve used up my enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is the chief stock of a booster like me, Jerry. It’s gone, now. And my money’s gone. Jerry, the money you gave me to keep for you, that’s gone, too. In my safe there’s a stack of papers, and nothing else. And that paper with worth nothing. Piegan will be blotted off the map.”
“It’s all right,
colonel,” said I.
“I spent your money,” he said, meeting my eye with a strange, whimsical look, “but I gave you, in exchange, six of the best lots in the town. They would have made you a fairly wealthy man, Jerry. I gambled for you. I had no right, I know. But I did. Can you forgive me?”
“Of course I can,” said I. “I’ve forgotten about it already. Don’t have that on your mind.”
“Ah, Jerry Ash,” said he, “if I had taken the right road when I was your age, perhaps” He paused.
“I must not be sentimental,” said he, to himself. “Tut, tut, one must be a man. Jerry, help yourself to that whisky and pass it to me again.”
I was pouring his second drink when there was a sudden yell from the crowd outside.
The colonel stood up, the whisky glass steady in his hand.
“I suppose the fools want to loot my place, now?” he suggested calmly.
I gloried in the calm of the desperate old rascal.
But then that yell from the crowd turned into a plain screech of whooping joy, a cowboy yell of triumph. You can bet that the colonel and I got out to that porch in a hurry, and there we found that the crowd was all milling around a rider on a sweating horse. His report was being chalked up in huge letters on the blackboard, and those letters announced that Wayne Hollow voted thirty-three for Piegan, and zero for Makerville.
By five votes Piegan was to remain upon the map; the colonel would be a millionaire; the whole camp was made. No wonder that the crowd went mad and tried to drown that messenger with whisky.
“Why, what would you expect?” said he, rather bewildered. “Wayne Hollow wouldn’t vote for an earthquake trap like Makerville!”
The colonel leaned lightly on my shoulder, saying at my ear:
“You see, Jerry, that a good lie in the bush is better than a bird in the hand!”
CHAPTER XXII. MEN WITH SHOTGUNS
I LEFT THE crowd yelling. Rather, I left them just beginning to yell, knowing that they would keep it up all the rest of the night, and I eased straight through that mob towards a little fellow on horseback, whom I had just spotted. He wore a good, long black beard, such as some of the old-timers away back in the mountains raise, just getting careless, at first, and afterwards sort of liking the grandfatherly look that it gives them.