Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Pretty far north for that kind of fun,” he said.

  I kicked at the snow and said nothing. What was there to say?

  “Ammunition makes heavy luggage,” he said, “and at a dollar a pound for freight, I don’t see how you can afford to bring in so much of it.”

  “Aw, I don’t bring in much,” I said.

  “I’ve seen you out here a dozen times if I’ve seen you once,” he said, “and every time you’ve shot off enough powder and lead to keep a whole tribe in caribou meat for the winter.”

  “Well, I gotta have my fun,” I said.

  He nodded at me again. “A man ought to live near water,” he said, “if he expects his house to catch on fire.”

  He waited for me to say something. I could only scowl and wish that I’d never met him. He went on, asking questions, mostly. That was his way. He made every one who talked to him feel like a patient.

  “You’ve just come in from a trip?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good pay?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “And all the profits to be spent on Massey again, I suppose?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and was silent.

  “What did Massey ever do for you?” said the doctor.

  “Aw, he just took me in when I was starving. That’s all,” I said. For it made me mad, this hard, critical, probing way of Forman’s.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  “Twenty,” I said, and looked him in the eye.

  But it was no good. He knew that I was lying, and he merely grinned at me.

  “Twenty,” he said, and nodded once more. “But pretty soon you’ll hear from the girl, and she’ll send up enough money to get Massey out of Alaska.”

  “What girl?” I said.

  “Why Massey’s girl,” he said.

  I scowled at him, blacker than ever. “I don’t know nothing about that,” I answered.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Forman, dry as a chip. He shrugged his shoulders to settle the furs closer to his skinny, shivering body.

  “You come out here to see me about something?” I asked.

  “Me? No, I just wanted to see the shooting,” he said.

  He smiled, to let me see openly that he did not mean what he said. But I knew that already.

  “This all started about a dog, I believe?” he said.

  “A dog?” I asked him, dodging as well as I could.

  “You don’t know anything about that either, do you?” he said.

  I stared at him.

  “Isn’t it a fact,” he said, “that Calmont and Massey were once great friends?”

  I said nothing. Of course, all Alaska knew that.

  “And that they spent a winter out from Nome, and that one of Calmont’s dogs in the team had a litter, and that Alec the Great was one of the puppies.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that,” I said.

  “The rest of the country does, though,” he said.

  “That’s none of my business,” I said.

  “Murder is every man’s business, my boy,” he barked at me suddenly.

  I winced. It was an ugly word, but it fitted the case.

  “That dog grew attached to Massey, not to Calmont,” went on the doctor, hard and sharp as ever. “They fought about Alec, finally, and Calmont laid him out, and tied him on the floor of the igloo, and went off to leave him to starve or die of cold. Is that wrong? No, it’s not wrong! And then the dog broke away from Calmont and got back to Massey, and somehow, Massey managed to get free of the cords, though I don’t believe what people say when they tell that Alec chewed the cords away to set the man free. Do you?”

  I stared at him again. “Well,” I said, “you don’t know Alec as well as I do.”

  “All right,” went on the doctor. “The fact is that Massey got back to Nome with the dog, which Calmont claimed, but the jury in Nome awarded the dog to the man it loved, eh? Touching idea, that!”

  He gave a cackling laugh and clapped his hands together.

  “Now, what’s the rest of the story, my lad?” he said.

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you, then,” he said. “A girl shows up in Nome in a desperate need of money, and sells herself to the highest bidder. To be the wife of the man able to bid her in, eh? Now, then, Calmont is the man who gets her, for eleven thousand dollars. A high-priced wife, even this far north! Can’t eat wives — or diamonds either, for that matter. And after the girl’s sold, you and Massey steal her away and cart her south, and Massey’s hope is that Calmont will overtake them and the two of them can fight it out. But, on the way, he takes a few practice shots, and with one of them he burns his eyes with a back fire. Is that right?”

  “Massey can tell you better than I can,” I said.

  “Then Calmont does overtake you. He finds Massey blinded. He won’t take the girl in spite of the way she’s double-crossed him. He won’t take a woman who loves another man, eh?”

  I only shrugged again. It was pretty clear that he knew nearly everything. I suppose that he had ways of finding out part of it, and the rest he guessed. He had a brain in his head, no matter what I felt about him.

  “But he does take that dog, Alec the Great, and you and Massey and the girl come on here. She goes south the first chance she gets, to rake together money and send it to you two for the trip out. You stay here to take care of Massey. And Massey sits still and eats his heart out because of Alec the Great. Am I still correct?”

  “I got nothing to say,” I said.

  “Now, then,” went on Forman, “if I succeed in my work, and if Massey sees again, the first thing that he will do will be to take the trail of Calmont. There’ll be a fight. And most likely the pair of them will be killed. They’re too tough to die easily. Very well, that’s the reason that you’re out here practicing with your rifle. You have an idea that you’ll be traveling on the trail with Massey, before long.”

  I sighed at this. It was perfectly true.

  “Well,” I said, “is he going to be able to see?”

  Forman puckered up his face, and swayed his head from side to side.

  “If I let him see, I’ll practically be responsible for the lives of two men — to say nothing of a boy or two thrown in for full measure. I imagine that there wouldn’t be much left of you, if you were tangled up in a battle between that couple, eh?”

  I shuddered. It was exactly my own idea.

  “Well,” said Forman, “I don’t think there’s much wrong with his eyes, after all. It was a shallow burn. At any rate, I’m taking the bandages off in about five minutes, if you care to come along and see the result.”

  Care to come along? I ran at Forman and caught him by the arm.

  “D’you mean that Hugh Massey has a good chance?” I shouted at him.

  He grinned sourly down at me. “Considering what’s likely to follow, do you think that you’d be glad of it?” he said.

  That stopped me. He was right. I hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry.

  XVIII. HOW REPAY?

  WE WENT BACK into that silent town, the doctor slipping clumsily on his snowshoes. I wonder whatever could have brought him up here into the bitter, long winter of Alaska, he was so unfit for the life.

  He had only one quality of the frontiersman, a bitter, hard temper that never gave way. But as for strength, vitality of body, youth — he had none of these things at all. Nevertheless, he was an exceptional man, as he had just proved by recounting to me almost the entire strange story of Calmont and Massey. Of course, some of the headlines, as one might say, of that story, had been known to every one for a long time — that is, such features as that they had once been great friends and that they had afterward become great enemies and that only the blinding of Massey had prevented the final battle between them.

  There were some people who swore that the only reason Massey remained in Alaska was not that he couldn’t get out, but because he wanted to b
e close to Calmont and his chance for revenge. Well, I suppose I knew Massey about as well as any one in the world did — outside of Calmont himself — but Massey was not a talking man, and he never had made a confidant of me. I don’t think that he ever would have paid much attention to me, if it had not been for the fact that I once helped Alec the Great from a mob of hungry huskies.

  So, as we went along, I kept giving this doctor side glances, for I half felt that he was more fiend than human.

  As we passed Don Lurcher’s house, we heard them shouting and singing inside. They had their own supply of alcohol in that place, and the amount of noise that they squeezed out of themselves through the entire winter was a thing to hear, but not to believe. Everything else was cold, white, and still, for the soft snow ate up the sound of the footfall, except for the little metallic squeaks and crunchings, now and again.

  We got to our shack.

  It was a fairly comfortable one, with very thick walls of logs that had been rafted down the Yukon. On the outside of the logs, there was a thick layer of sod, which helped to turn the edge of the wind.

  Inside, everything was fixed up pretty well. There were two comfortable bunks, and a stove that was not big, but that heated that little place as well as the sun ever heated the earth on a spring morning, say. Yes, we were pretty comfortable — for Circle City.

  But there was one figure in the shack that was not at all comfortable to see. I had looked at him every day for months — except when I was making a freighting trip — and I never could get used to the sight.

  I mean Massey.

  The grim, enduring look that pinched the corners of his mouth never had altered since the first day of his blindness. Of course, he could not read, so I often read aloud to him. And he had only one occupation all the day long. That was to keep himself fit, and how he did it!

  Once he had been more tiger than man. He was not very big, but I never saw more concentrated essence of sheer power than he showed. Calmont, perhaps, was stronger in his hands, but then Calmont was a good deal bigger. When the pair of them were together as friends in the old days, there was a saying in Skagway — when Skagway was toughest — that the two of them were equal to any four in the world in a rough and tumble. And I believe the legend.

  Now, Massey spent long hours every day doing calisthenics, and we had rigged a bar across one corner of the room on which he performed all the antics of a monkey on the branch of a tree.

  That was to keep himself right and in trim, and why? Well, he never spoke about it, but I knew. Massey felt that he had one chance in ten of getting back his eyesight. And if ever that returned, he did not want to find himself soft. He wanted to start immediately on the trail of Calmont.

  He was fit as a fiddle, therefore, physically, and I’ve always thought that this good training kept him from going despondent as he sat there through his long night.

  This day the doctor said as we went in: “Well, Massey, how are things going?”

  Massey lifted his head and nodded. ‘T can’t complain,” he said.

  “Complaints never cured a wound, though tears may have washed a few,” said the doctor in his harsh voice. “I’m moving to take the bandage off you, now. Boy, close that door, and put a blanket over the window. Too much light might be a torment to him — if he’s going to see!”

  Massey said not a word. I went to do as I was told, trembling with excitement, and that confounded Forman was whistling idly as he laid out his things on the deal table in the center of the room. He had no more soul than a snake, I thought at the time.

  With the door closed, and the window veiled, there was no more light in that room than the red streaks that showed around the stove, and one glowing spot where the handle of the damper fitted into the thin chimney.

  Then I stood by, waiting, while the doctor worked at the bandages. He said: “Keep your eyes closed while I take the bandage off. Then open your eyes very slowly.”

  I saw a movement of the dull shadows, as the doctor did something with his hands and then stepped back. And suddenly Massey stood up.

  Neither of them spoke for a long moment. My heart got so big that I thought it would break.

  “Huh!” I screamed out suddenly. “Can you see? Can you see anything?”

  Now, imagine that man having sat there through the dull, endless hours of every day, looking at the empty thought of his young, ruined life, with no more hope for the future than a drowning man where help is not in sight — imagine that, and then conceive of the iron grip that he kept on himself.

  He answered in the calmest voice in the world: “I can see perfectly, Forman. Thank you.”

  ‘Take the blanket off the window, boy,” said Forman.

  I did it.

  And now I could see the unveiled eyes of Hugh Massey for the first time, with recognition in them as he looked at me. Even this dim twilight through the window, however, was almost too much for him, and he shaded his eyes as he looked at me.

  I have never seen anything so exciting. The Yukon breaking up in the summer was nothing compared to the making of this man whole again. I ran to him and shook his hand. I threw my arms around him and hugged him. I laughed. I shouted. Tears of pure joy ran down my face, and in general I played the fool.

  But Massey was as calm as steel.

  When he talked, it was to the doctor. He said that he realized he owed a great deal to the doctor, and that it would not be forgotten.

  “Massey,” said the doctor, with such a changed voice that I should not have recognized the sound of it, “up there in Nome, one evening, old ‘Doctor’ Borg, as they called him, made you and Calmont swear that you never would attack one another. What about it now?”

  “Attack him, Forman?” said Massey, very gently. “Why, I never would think of breaking my word — unless he attacks me. Of course, a man is allowed to defend himself. Am I right?”

  “Do you think Calmont will come hunting you?”

  “Do I think? Oh, I know! Besides, I’ll probably not be hard to find.”

  “You mean what?”

  “Why, man, I simply mean that Calmont has a dog of mine! Keeping it for me, as you might say. Of course, I’ll have to go to get the dog back. Calmont’s over on Birch Creek, I believe?”

  The doctor said nothing. He got on his coat and went to the door, which he jerked open. As he stood there in the entrance, he half turned, and he snapped over his shoulder:

  “If there’s murder in this business, I, for one, wash my hands. They’re clean of it!”

  A staggering thing, in a way, to hear from him. I mean to say, all at once I realized that under his hard exterior the doctor was a law-abiding man, and that he actually was interested in something higher and stronger than human law, at that.

  Massey, when the door closed, went over to the stove and took off the lid. Shading his eyes and squinting, he looked down into the red heart of the fire. Then, as though this satisfied him in a way that I could not understand, he replaced the lid and returned to his bunk, where he sat down.

  I said nothing, this while. I was somewhere between joy in the moment and fear for what was to come.

  At last he said to me: “Well, old son, we’re together again, at last!”

  As though we had been apart all these weeks and months! But I knew what he meant. Whole mountain ranges of misery’ had grown up between him and the rest of the world, even including me.

  “I can’t really wish,” he said, “for you to get into the state that I’ve been in but, otherwise, I don’t think that I can ever repay you, Joe.”

  It was the first time that he ever had said so much as “thank you.” I had almost thought, at times, that he was taking everything for granted. But that hardly mattered, because I had owed my life to him, that horrible day, long ago, in Nome.

  But this gratitude, from a man of iron, affected me a good deal more than I can explain. I merely said: “It’s all right, Hugh. There doesn’t have to be any talk about repaying — not between you a
nd me.”

  He considered this for a moment in his deliberate way. Then he answered: “No, I never could repay. I’ve been helpless in your hands. You’ve had to nurse me, feed me by hand, shave me, dress me, partly. There never can be any repaying. Except with bloodshed!” he added in an off inflection. “Except with bloodshed, Joe, old fellow!”

  The tears were in my eyes, listening to him. I knew exactly what he meant. And I knew that he was a man to be believed. And it’s not a light thing to hear such a man as Massey say that he’s ready to die for you — almost anxious to.

  “We’re only even,” I said. “I don’t forget that day in Tucker’s boarding house in Nome. I’ll never forget that!”

  At this, he laughed a little. “All right,” he said. “We’ll talk no more about it.”

  And from that day, we never did.

  XIX. WELCOME TO DAWSON

  OF COURSE, CIRCLE City knew all about the affairs of Massey and Calmont or enough, at least, to expect the sparks to fly so soon as ever the pair of them met, and the expectation got high and drawn. But, in the meantime, Massey was as calm and deliberate as you please.

  There were several things that he wanted to do. He used to talk matters over with me, and I would sit listening, with my eyes popping.

  In the first place, he wanted to get his eyes accustomed to light, and his hands accustomed to a gun.

  In the second place, he wished to wait until the Yukon was frozen, which would make distance traveling a lot easier. Already the ice was forming and floating in blocks and jams down the river, like white logs. Hardly an hour went by without giving us the vibration and the thunder of a shoal of ice, grounding against an island. The cold got greater and greater, and Massey went into the pinch of it regularly, giving himself larger and larger doses, so that he would become inured.

  In the third place, he said to me: “Even a rattlesnake gives you a warning, and so I’ll give one to poor Arnie.”

  He had a fiendish way of giving pet names and speaking gently about Calmont. He used to smile with a very peculiar sweetness when he talked about Calmont, and I hated to face him or to hear him, at such times. This warning he sent in due time.