Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

The cold-bloodedness of this staggered me. I had been a twentieth part of a second from having my throat ripped wide open, when the leader started to spring; and still the man had not fired, or rushed in with so much as a shout, but in a calm silence he had stood off there and watched the wrangle.

  There was still a smile on his face, so that I knew he had been enjoying the little battle as if it had been staged for fun.

  His face was pretty well muffled in fur cheek flaps, but I could see that he was young, and that he had a pair of eyes as hard and cold as the light that gleams on a steadied rifle barrel. He was not the sort of a man that one would reproach about anything, not unless one wanted either a fight or chilly contempt. I have seen that look in the faces of a few other men, and always they are the fellows who have been at danger’s door and had a good chance to admire the interior.

  He came up to me while I was still agape. “Who are you?” he said.

  I started to answer, but the cold, the relief from terrible danger, and the sense of uncanny awe that was in me made my lips too stiff for words.

  It was only after a second effort that I managed to say: “I’m Joe May.”

  “You’d better go home and put on something warm!” said this fellow. “Got no more sense than to come out in that sort of rig?”

  There was so grimly commanding an air about him that I muttered something and turned on my heel and did as he had told me to do. I was too numbed in the brain not to do as he commanded, for I realized that this was no other than the great Massey himself. That being so, it explained why he ventured to stand by and reserve his fire until the last split part of a second, for they said that he was one of those men who cannot miss.

  It no longer seemed strange to me that he had not offered any reward for the care I had taken of Alec. As a matter of fact, Alec had taken just about as much care of me! However, Massey had the reputation of being a fellow who cared for only two things in the world — Alec the Great and fighting. He was not the one, I supposed, to bother about sentimental payments such as charity to a ragged kid he had run into on the street.

  I went back to the lodging house, therefore, simply because I saw that there was nothing else for me to do. I was paid up until that night, and at least I could keep the gnawing, painful, bitter spark of life alive in my breast until that time, lying crouched under my blankets.

  So I went down the dark, cold dampness of the hallway and came again to the room where I had spent the night. Despair came over me as I entered that room, and the rank foulness of the air struck me in the face. Let them tell of the good, brave days of Alaska, but ah, the horrible pain I have known there.

  I got to the bunk, but did not lie down at once. Instead, I sat on the edge of it with my face in my hands and my closed eyes looking at death, which I hoped would not be far away. Out of the naked earth of the floor, I felt the cold pass up into my feet, and higher, until my ankles ached. And I calmly wondered if it would not be better, really, to get to the outer margin of the town and simply lie down in the snow.

  Of all deaths, it is the sweetest. I had heard it described. The pangs of the cold soon pass. There comes a delicious, an enormous wave of drowsiness. Pleasant thoughts move warmly through the soul. And that is the end. It is exactly like dropping off to sleep in a warm bed.

  At this moment, a stone was dropped into the stagnant pool of my life. The harsh voice of a man spoke to me from the doorway.

  “Going to lie down and die like a sick puppy?” asked that voice.

  I looked vaguely, without resentment, toward the form in the doorway. There was no pride in me to bruise. I was only sixteen, and I had been pretty well rubbed down to the core.

  A wet nose touched my hand. It was Alec the Great, and I saw that Massey had followed me home.

  “Have you paid your room rent?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are those your blankets?”

  “No.”

  “Get up, then, and follow me out of this pig-sty.”

  I got up without a word and walked at his heels down the hallway and, when we came out into the street, I still floundered at his heels, blindly, like a dog behind a master. In some manner, the question of the future had been slipped onto his shoulders. He would have to solve it, and numbly I rejoiced at getting rid of the weight. This is not a heroic admission, but it is the truth. An empty stomach, I have found, is a famous corrupter of both pride and virtue.

  We went down the street through the snow for a way, then he stopped, took me by the shoulder, and gave me a hard shake. I was loose in his grasp, which was like iron.

  “Stand up beside me and walk out like a man!” said he. “Don’t trail at my heels like a beaten cur!”

  That was a little too much. The words, you might say, tilted back my head and threw up my chin like a straight left to the button.

  “I’m not asking your advice about how I walk!” I said.

  His gleaming, steady eyes looked through me like a glancing knife blade. A sneer formed on his lips, and disappeared slowly.

  “Then hold up your head and walk beside me,” he said.

  I did as I was told. But anger was beginning to warm me inwardly. I set my teeth hard and strode along. I wondered if I should challenge him to a fight. At least, my pride was now not quite dead.

  A little farther along, we were met by a man who was running at full speed, head down. When he saw Massey, he halted with a jerk.

  “Massey!” he said. “Did you see my string of dogs?”

  Massey answered not a word. He walked straight on and, when I would have blundered out an answer, Massey took me by the arm and dragged me forward.

  I saw that the other fellow was gaping angrily after us, on the verge of shouting an insult which he controlled. Men did not shout insults at Massey. Not in Nome, where they had cause to know him. Half a dozen gunmen had started to make a reputation at his expense at one time or another, and they had all become mere footnotes in the story of his life.

  But this little incident started me wondering what was wrong with the master of Alec. I could see that he was wearing a grim little smile, as though he actually had had a touch of enjoyment out of keeping back information from that dog-puncher.

  I wonder if it were mere justice — punishment for a man who had allowed his team to get loose and thereby had endangered the life of the great Alec, who was more valuable than five times the entire lot? But it seemed to me that it was no mere matter of justice. Something more was involved. There was the question of that cruel, cold little smile.

  I had heard, as every one in Nome had, the terrible tale of how Massey and Calmont had lived together until they hated one another because of Alec. They had been old, tried, proven friends. They had gone through everything together. Life and honor and everything they had owed to one another repeatedly. I could not help wondering, as I slipped and skidded on the icy snow crust beside Massey, if something had gone out of this man’s life because of that breach between him and his old friend. Stranger things than that have happened. However, certainly I never met a man who, at first glance, appeared to be so entirely devoid of the ordinary gentler human emotions.

  I was to know him much better and, the longer I knew him, the stranger the picture of him became. There was enough here to look at from a thousand angles, but never enough to show me the entire man. You would have said that he possessed some great secret on which he had locked his lips and which the world could never get at. For my own part, I am convinced that it was the wound made when he found his old partner and bunkie untrue to him. Enough to make even a saint put on a bit of a shell, I should say.

  All these thoughts were struggling through my brain as I marched up the street beside him.

  We turned a corner. A gust of icy wind struck strongly at me. I staggered. My feet went out from under me, and I fell flat. There was a solid whack about that fall, and I lay limp for a moment until I heard the harsh voice of Massey calling out:

  “Pick yours
elf up! If you’re not able to do that, you’re not able to live, anyway, and I’ll be hanged if you’re worth wasting time over!”

  I got to my feet, somehow, though now between cold and hunger and utter weakness I was pretty far spent. But the anger swallowed my other sensations. That fellow Massey had deliberately walked on ahead of me after his last remark, and I hated him with a power that gave me strength.

  I ran after him. I shouted.

  He pretended not to hear, or else the whistling of the wind may have drowned my words.

  At last I stumbled up to him at the door of a sod house and touched his shoulder.

  “I want to tell you,” I shouted at him, “that I don’t want your help! You and your help can both be hanged!” I yelled at him and shook a blue hand in his face.

  He kicked open the door. He took me by the shoulder, and I still can see the sneer on his face as he hurled me before him into the room.

  IV. FOR A STAKE

  WHEN I HAD stumbled into that one-room house, Massey entered and locked the door behind him. I was still hot and angry. I turned around and began to demand that the door should be opened, but he paid no attention to me whatever. The smell of food, too, was making my mouth water, and inside that house it was quite snug, for a fire had been banked down in the stove in the center of the room.

  No palace ever looked to me as comfortable as the inside of that place. There were two bunks, though only one had blankets on it, but such a heap as might have served for three beds instead of one, it seemed to me. From pegs on the wall hung enough clothes to keep half a regiment warm. Good, strong boots were lined up underneath, and soft slippers for tired feet to take their ease in. Over in a corner provisions were heaped. I smelled ham, bacon, the perfume of dried fruits, and I could see the delicious labels of canned jams and jellies. These were tremendous luxuries. But all I could think of, just then, was a fine, fat slice of bacon and a chunk of bread, washed down with tea. The mere mental picture of such a feast made me fairly dizzy.

  I slumped into a chair and waited there, watching Massey with haunted eyes. I got almost exactly what I wanted, but in the meantime some interesting things happened.

  Massey pulled off his heavy coat and furred cap and the long boots. The dog took those things one by one and carried them across to a bench beside the wall pegs. The way he handled that big, ponderous coat was a caution. He gave it a flip and threw it across his shoulder, the way a fox will carry a heavy goose, and he unloaded it carefully on the bench. The unloading was harder than the carrying. A sleeve or a flap of it kept sliding off. The thing seemed to be made of sand, the way it kept running down toward the floor.

  But Alec kept after it. He got so impatient and excited that he bounced up and down and whined, but finally he had that coat duly tucked away in place.

  Back he raced for the cap and snatched that away to the bench, then took the boots both at once — a tag in either side of his mouth — and dragged them off to the line. He took something with him on each return journey — a sort of pull-over knitted cap for the head, a light jacket, and that pair of loose, soft slippers which I’ve spoken of before.

  I suppose that a thousand dogs have been trained by patience and some skill to do much harder tricks than these, and afterward I saw Alec do infinitely more difficult things, but nothing in the animal world ever impressed me more than this housekeeping by a dog, and the joy and shining eyes and wagging tail with which he went about it. I found that I had forgotten all about my grievances against Massey, and that I was looking across to him with a smile and an overflowing warmth of heart. His own face, however, showed not the slightest relaxation. It was like ice.

  “Pull off those shoes,” he directed. I obeyed dumbly. “Are your feet frozen? Get that brown coat and put it on. Here’s a pair of socks. Pull off those wet things and put on these. And here’s a pair of slippers.”

  I still obeyed. My pride was in my pocket. Besides, I was telling myself that Alec the Great had never been trained by cruelty, and that a man who had done so much with a dog by patient gentleness could not be the cold-hearted brute he wanted to appear to men.

  I had enough strength, now, to get up and stamp my feet to help the circulation along, and I began to feel a lot better, though just a bit shaky in the knees.

  Massey had the fire built up by this time. The crackling of it, the fuming of the smoke through the crack, the tremor and the roar of the draft up the chimney, sounded a great deal sweeter to me than any chorus of Christmas hymns. He put on the kettle of water to boil, and sliced some great pieces of bacon into a frying pan. Then he made a flapjack by pouring water into the top of a flour sack after he had mixed in some salt and baking powder. In this way he composed a great ball of dough, which was fried out in the bacon fat and turned brown there. So I had exactly what I wanted — bacon, fried bread, and a quantity of tea.

  It did not occur to me at the time, but now I can remember that Massey hardly touched the food. He pretended that he had been cooking for us both, but really he had been cooking for me only.

  When I was warm and full inside, then I began to pay more attention to my host. I cared less about his harsh words and gestures, now. To a boy, actions mean a great deal more than words, and all Massey’s actions had been kind. Besides, he was famous, and he was a mystery. Every moment I grew more deeply and affectionately interested in him.

  “What brought you to Alaska?” he asked me.

  I considered. And then I felt like a fool as I answered:

  “Well, I wanted to make some money.”

  “Have you?” he asked in the same unrelenting tone.

  That certainly was an unnecessary question. Tears stung my eyes suddenly, so that I had to scowl as I answered: “You can see for yourself.”

  “Where’d you come from?” he asked me.

  “Arizona.”

  “Where you going?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “On to Russia, or back to Arizona?”

  I set my teeth. “Not back to Arizona. Not yet.”

  “When?”

  “When I can show something more than my face.”

  “When you can come back rich, eh?”

  Well, as I watched his sneer it occurred to me that he was not sneering at me alone, but at all humanity, including himself. There was a sort of general disbelief in him concerning every one and everything. This made it less of a personal insult. I could talk straight out at him seriously, with a vague belief that under the surface this man was good and kind.

  Goodness and kindness matter most to hungry young boys and wise old men, it appears to me. In the stage in between, were more interested in smartness and strength.

  “Maybe I won’t be rich. I just want a stake,” I said.

  “For what?” he snapped.

  “To get a piece of ground and a few cows.”

  “That your ambition?”

  “It doesn’t sound much,” I admitted, “but it’s the life that I want to have ahead of me.”

  “A shack to live in, and a couple of mustangs to ride, and a couple of dozen mangy cows to herd around?” he suggested.

  “A herd that’ll grow, and time to grow it in,” I said, “and to be my own boss. That’s what I want. And to see my own land, and to ride on it. Put up my own fences. Break my own horses. Brand my own cattle. Have some good shooting, now and then. Get some bounties on coyote scalps. Trap a wolf or two. I know it doesn’t sound much, but there’s more fun on the range than you can shake a stick at.”

  He turned his back on me and rattled at the stove. Suddenly he astonished me by saying: “Aye, that’s what I’d like to do, also. And here I am in Nome.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “For a stake,” he said.

  He turned and surprised me more than ever with a broad grin. But he made no further comment on me or on himself. He simply said: “You better turn in and sleep till you’ve digested that meal. Have you got a mother and a father alive?”
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  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do they know where you are?”

  “They’ve an idea.”

  “Well, you turn in and sleep,” he repeated.

  And he fixed some blankets on the second bunk for me.

  I did as he said, and by the time I had stretched myself out, I was dead to the world. I had done my share of sleeping in the days that went just before, but starvation sleep means miserable nightmares. This time, I dropped away into a happy land.

  I dreamed that I had gone into a country where the dogs talked English, and where the king of the dogs was all white except for a smutty tip to his tail and ears and muzzle. I woke up finally, and found that Alec the Great was sitting beside my bunk with his bright eyes only inches from my face. He grinned at me as only a dog can, and then I sat up and looked around me.

  The world looked pretty good, I can tell you.

  I had lain down as gorged as a snake, but now I was hungry again. The strength was back in my knees. There was contentment in my mind. I looked upon Massey as my savior, and that is what he was. It never occurred to me that in meeting him I was meeting the wildest adventures of my life.

  I got up and walked around the cabin. I picked up a rifle in the corner and admired the make of it. I stopped to admire the little stove, too, and then put more wood in it. It was one of the traveling variety, which will fold up small enough to put in your pocket, almost, but which shed enough heat to warm up a barn.

  Massey, I decided, was a man who knew his business. If a fellow like him could not make a stake in Nome, nobody could, except some fool with beginner’s luck, perhaps. While I was in the midst of these wanderings, I came to the place where his clothes were hanging and touched a jacket.

  A deep snarl from Alec the Great warned me that I had stepped across my bounds. That young dog was crouched and showing his teeth at me in the true husky style. But I did not argue. He was watching his master’s things, and I admired him for it. Such a dog I never had seen, and such a dog I never will see again!

  After a little while, Massey came back. He said to me: “How are things with you now?”