Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  It was not a great deal. But it was plenty, in such a crowd as that, to show that he had completely forgotten himself, and that his heart was all wrapped up in the girl who stood on the bar there.

  “Going at nine thousand and fifty!” says the announcer. “Going at nine thousand and fifty!”

  Blondy looked up again, and even through the smoke, and in the distance, I could see the desperation in his face.

  As for the girl, actually she smiled at him, and such a wistful smile that it drew tears into my eyes.

  “Nine thousand five hundred!” sings out Blondy, choking on the words a little.

  You could see that it was about all he could afford, or beg, borrow, or steal, in this world.

  And the crowd, which had been standing as still as so many mice when the cat is by, let go of themselves and their emotions in one wild whoop that must have budged the solid rafters overhead. I would have mortgaged ten years of my life, just then, to help Blondy win that contest.

  “Redhead,” forgetting the crowd and the eyes on her, made the smallest little gesture toward Blondy and smiled at him.

  Yes, it is strange how that gesture and that smile strike back at me across the years, vividly, and sadly.

  “Nine thousand five hundred offered,” said the announcer. “Only nine thousand five hundred for the finest bit of auburn hair that I ever—”

  Massey turned his head and said quietly: “Stop that.”

  The room was so still that I could hear him perfectly.

  The announcer, staggered in his speech, gulped as though he had seen a leveled gun, and then went on rather shakily: “Going at nine thousand five hundred dollars—”

  “And fifty!” said the giant.

  There was a groan from the crowd. I groaned with them, as a matter of course.

  The girl stood up straight and looked at Blondy as though the light of salvation were shining from him.

  “Ten thousand dollars!” shouted Blondy wildly.

  There was another yell that shook the walls of The Joint!

  “And fifty!” said the imperturbable giant.

  Blondy suddenly turned on his heel and waded through the crowd, head down, toward the door. He was finished, and I could see men slap him on the back and shoulders.

  “Going at ten thousand and fifty,” said the announcer. “Two times going at ten thousand and fifty. Going three times, and—”

  He took it for granted that the bidding was over. So did we all, when a voice cut in quietly — though with a growl in the tone: “Eleven thousand.”

  The giant’s imperturbability was gone. He jerked around. So did every one, and we saw in the corner of the room a big man with an almost inhuman look of strength about his jaw and throat and his thick, smooth shoulders. He had a face like a wolf, heavy at the base of the jaws and rather sharp in front.

  The giant, after one look, followed the example of Blondy, and waded for the door.

  “By gravy!” said a man near me. “It’s Calmont! He gets her!”

  VII. A CHANGE OF MIND

  AS SURELY AS one bell stroke answers another, so that name of Calmont brought into my mind the thought of Massey. It was the same with every one in Nome, their suspended feud was so famous. I, jumping up on my chair, looked across the heads of the crowd and made out Massey again, near the bar. But he showed no interest in anything around him, except in keeping the place in order.

  Calmont got the major part of the attention of the crowd. He had come well heeled for the thing that was to be done, and he plumped down a heavy canvas sack on the bar. It was plain that he either had known beforehand what was going to take place, or else at the beginning of proceedings he had slipped away home and come back with his treasure.

  I think that gold went at something like seventeen dollars an ounce, and around thirty-three pounds were weighed out. Plenty was still left in the canvas sack to begin housekeeping, for that matter. Yes, I heard men say that Calmont had struck it quite rich and that, if he wanted to, he could have paid down ten times as much as this for the girl.

  These things I heard close up, for I had made use of my small size and lack of thickness to slide through the jam like a snake, and so get to the bar, where the weighing out took place. Calmont stood by with an immobile face, the most formidable-looking man I ever have seen. If Massey seemed cold and hard, Calmont was plain mean, by the look of him, and my heart ached when I thought of the future that stretched ahead of that girl.

  This may sound as though I were a bit dizzy about her, and, as a matter of fact, I was. Sixteen is the most sentimental age in the life of man, and the redhead was pretty enough to soften harder metal than my heart. The more hopeless I was about her, of course the more I mourned, like a great calf.

  The girl had disappeared, and Calmont did not ask for her, but Doctor Borg was heard to say that she would be in his office the next morning before noon, and that a minister would be on hand to perform the wedding ceremony.

  After this the majority of the crowd seeped away to the chairs and tables, but my excitement did not fade out so readily. I could not find Massey, in order to ask questions of him, so I began to do a little scouting on my own account.

  When Borg took up the paid-in sack of gold, I saw that he went back to his office, and I waited below the horizon, so to speak, until I saw the door open a minute later, and the girl came out.

  She went out through the deserted restaurant, casting guilty, secret looks about her.

  The moment I spotted the way she was walking and acting, I knew that something was mighty wrong. It flashed into my mind that she might be a clever crook, who had played up the part of the innocent girl so as to raise a higher price. She was lugging a sack that was slung across her shoulder; but I would not have been surprised if that sack contained only a half of the money she had taken in. The rest was as likely as not to be resting in the cash drawer of Doctor Borg. He had not hesitated to take into camp men almost as formidable as Calmont, before this.

  Yes, it looked to me very much like a put-up job, and in an instant I was after her down the aisle of the shadowy tables, for there was only a single lantern burning in the restaurant at that time of the evening.

  She went out the side door onto the street. A blast of wind whistled past her and started me shuddering, but I hardly waited for her to get to any distance before I opened the door in my turn. I wanted desperately to follow her fortunes, on this night.

  When I stepped outside, in my turn, there was nothing to be seen in that street except a whirl of snow dust that strode across the roofs like a phantom giant. But an instant later I had a sight of the girl as she hurried along straight into the eye of the wind, keeping close to the face of the buildings. I knew that it was she from her size and the weakness with which she kept her own against the gale. No man would have gone so slowly in such cold weather.

  Out from a doorway stepped a man who looked to me about middle height, and nothing strange about him except, perhaps, the great swathing of furs that he wore. She gave him the sack from her shoulder, and I said to myself that this was the trick made clear — the money was for this fellow, and the two of them would get away together.

  I halted. I despised her a good deal for the trick she had played, and myself for having been taken in by her good acting. But I did not have in mind to go back and tell that wolf-faced Calmont what I had seen.

  Instead, I was about to turn and go on back to Massey’s house, when I saw the fellow walk straight across the street and disappear down a lane. And the girl went on without him, alone!

  When she turned at the next corner, I was close behind her, and behind her I kept as she turned and twisted. I could not make out the direction in which she was going, at first, but eventually I saw that she seemed to be drifting toward the edge of the town.

  A little later, she was past the last house, and leaning well forward against the sweep of the wind.

  That gale was strong enough even inside of the city, but where the fla
t plain let it go, it ran whooping and stamped in my face with both heels.

  It was hard for me to keep my footing; the girl was fairly staggering, and as I peered through the storm until my eyes threatened to freeze in place, I wondered where on earth that girl could be headed for. Another explanation jumped into my mind, then. She had a confederate, out there in the storm who was to take her away from Nome, and Calmont, and her wretched bargain.

  I was quite right. There was something waiting for her out there that she was very anxious to find, but it was not a man, though you might call it a confederate.

  Pretty soon I lost sight of her, and this amazed me, because the surface of the snow was pretty flat, except for a low wind hummock here and there. I stumbled on, getting colder and colder with every step until it seemed that my vitals were being covered with frost. But I had food inside me now, and that’s the fuel to turn the edge of a zero wind.

  A moment later I had the solution of the mystery in my hands — literally. I nearly fell over the girl as she lay huddled in the snow. For half a second I thought that she had stumbled and knocked herself silly. Then the truth went home like a knife blade. She had lain down to die; death was the friend who was to take her away from Nome and Arnold Calmont.

  It sickened me and it scared me, this knowledge. I had been pretty close to the same thing, that very day.

  Now I caught her by the shoulder, but I did not have to pull her up. She leaped to her feet with a shriek and tried to tear herself away from me, but I kept a good grip on her.

  She was wonderfully strong for a girl, but I managed to pull close to her, and all at once she cried out: “It’s only the boy!”

  And she stopped trying to tear herself away.

  I shouted in her ear: “You’ve got to come back!”

  “I’ll never come a step,” she said, “and you’re not strong enough to carry me!”

  It was true enough. If I tried to drag her back, she would be dead of the cold long before I got her there. Any way I looked at it, she had the game in her hands.

  Then, cuffing my brain for a thought, I shouted again: “Come back with me and I’ll promise that you won’t have to go with Calmont!”

  She caught hold of my coat and pulled at the lapels frantically.

  “Do you mean it? You can’t mean it! There’s nothing that you could do! What could you do with Calmont?”

  As she stammered and gasped these words at me, I saw that some small hope had jumped into her mind, even though she was arguing against me. I combed my mind. There was nothing in it. I simply shouted back that I would swear she would not have to go to Calmont if she would come back to Nome with me.

  Well, it did not need much hope in a girl of that age to make her cling desperately to life again. In another instant, I had her started back toward the lights of the town, sparkling through frost, and the wind drove us along at a good clip, like small boats in a smooth sea.

  We left the tundra edge and climbed down among the houses, and now with the edge of the gale turned by the high bank, we were able to talk more easily.

  She had hold of my arm now, though I had been amazed by the speed with which she had walked. It had been plain that she was not one of those hothouse weaklings, but a free stepper, made with bone and muscle worthy of an athlete. Now, however, she seemed to lose her strength, and I could understand why. It was because she saw the houses of Nome closing around her, and to her they must have seemed like armed enemies.

  She asked me again and again what my plan was. I had no plan. I could only mutter that everything would be all right and that she would soon see what I intended to do. Finally she stopped short.

  She would not go another step, she said. She had been a fool to trust to the word of a mere boy. She felt that I meant well, but she knew that I could do nothing. She had been wrong to take the money from Calmont. But she had seen no other way! All that she knew now was that she would a thousand times rather die than fulfill her bargain.

  “You’ve got to trust me,” I said to her.

  I looked wildly around me, but I could see nothing to help, nothing that I knew, except the face of Massey’s familiar house across the way. I pointed to it.

  “If you’ll go in there,” I said, ‘Til explain what we’re going to do.”

  ‘Til not go in,” she said. “Heaven knows, I want to live, but I won’t be trapped into living as Calmont’s wife!”

  “D’you think,” I asked her, “that I followed you to bring you back to him?”

  She hesitated. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t think you did.”

  “Come with me, then,” I said. “We’ll talk the thing out. There’s no one in the shack. Come inside with me, and we’ll have a chance to consider whether my plan’s worth a cent. If it isn’t, you’ll be free to leave and do as you please.”

  Still she paused, staring at me as though she were trying to read the future in my face. Then she nodded.

  “If it’s only a shadow of a chance — ,” she said.

  And she went across the street with me to the house of Massey. I knew where the key was kept, and unlocking the door, we both stepped inside.

  It was pitch-black, of course, and the darkness made her gasp, at which I freshened my grip on her arm.

  “It’s a trap — a trap!” she said, and pulled violently back.

  “Be quiet!” I snarled at her, but I was too cold and tired to be polite, just then. “There’s going to be no harm come to you here. Be quiet, and let me get a light going.”

  She got control of her nerves, after that. I closed the door and lighted the lantern in the corner, and put some wood into the stove and opened the dampers.

  In a moment, the fire was hissing. The damp wood crowded some smoke out through the cracks in the stove, and then heat began to come out to us. I kept myself busy at the stove. I dared not, for some reason, look at the girl.

  VIII. TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM

  AFTER A TIME the room began to warm up. That is to say, it got warm above the level of the top of the stove, but it was still icy toward the floor. It takes a long, long time and a red-hot stove to get a shack of any size warm down to the ground. However, when things were more comfortable, and I could no longer find an excuse for busying myself putting in more wood, or fooling about with the drafts, I had to turn about and face the girl at last.

  She was looking straight at me. She had thrown back her heavy coat. Her hair hung down about her face, windblown and bedraggled. She was still as close to despair as a human being can come, but yet she was a long distance from being homely — or even plain looking. In fact, she was a lot prettier to my eye now than she had seemed in the barroom, and a thousand times more so than she had appeared this morning.

  It was rather staggering to think that that morning I had seen her for the first time.

  “Will you tell me your name?” I asked her.

  “My name’s Marjorie,” she said.

  “It’s a nice name,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling a little at the absurdity of my compliment. But then, what were compliments to her?

  After a moment, she said: “Joe, you might as well confess.”

  “What?” I said.

  I was half-hearing her voice, and chiefly concerned with wondering why she had only given me one name. Of course, there were plenty of reasons. People who are ready to take their own lives are not apt to worry about names. She gave me one as a convenient handle in conversation; the second name might be Jones or Shakespeare. It made no difference, this far north, to a girl betrothed to that wolf of a Calmont.

  “What?” I said, again.

  “You’ve been bluffing,” she said.

  “I? Bluffing?”

  “You have no more plan that a snowshoe rabbit.”

  “If we were a pair of snowshoe rabbits, we could hop back to God’s country,” I said.

  She tipped back her head in a spasm of pain. She said not a word, but I knew that her very soul was melting
and burning at the thought of the joy of being South, there in the land where we belonged.

  “What part do you come from?” I asked her.

  “Texas,” she said.

  “Texas!” I shouted. “Why, we’re neighbors!”

  “Are we?”

  “Yes. I live in Arizona!”

  She smiled faintly, but there was a wonderful lot of sweetness in that girl’s smile. Yet it made her seem a good deal older than I. I looked at her again, and felt that I had been pushed off to a distance. Then it occurred to me that Arizona, after all, is a fairish distance even from the butt of the panhandle of Texas.

  “Well,” she said, “I’d trade all the Northland for one acre of Arizona’s most barren desert. But what’s the good of talking about that? I want to know what plan you have, if you have any plan at all. Joe, don’t try to beat about the bush and deceive me and waste time. You have a mighty good heart. I know that. But tell me quickly what’s in your mind.”

  I stared at the walls to get an idea. The clothes of Massey and his rifle in the corner were the only answer that I saw.

  So I said: ‘T think I know what will help you. I’m not dead sure. But it’s a fairish chance, I guess. You’re willing to wait here on a chance?”

  “Yes. Tell me what it is.”

  “D’you know who this shack belongs to?”

  “No. But somebody who’s not a beggar, at least — and he keeps house neatly.”

  “Well, I’ll go at it another way,” I said, willing to use up a good many words for the simple reason that I was arguing myself into a certain frame of mind as I talked and listened to her, and answered back.

  “Go any way you want about answering me, so long as you do that, Joe,” said the girl.

  Her voice was patient. Her eyes were literally burning with fear. Whenever the wind cuffed the door and rattled it on its hinges, her glance flashed away to it. Once, when it was violently shaken, she actually reached for the rifle in the corner nearest to her. That poor girl was already haunted, I could see.

  “Well, you’ll have to go back to Calmont for a minute,” I told her. “Did he ever see you before tonight?”