Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  He wrote out a letter and spent a lot of time composing it, and making the copy neat. He showed it to me with anxiety, hoping that I would point out anything that might be wrong about it.

  This is the way it ran:

  DEAR ARNIE:

  It’s a long time since I’ve seen you, and I haven’t had a chance to thank you for the good care that you’ve been giving to Alec all this time. He must have grown, but I hope that he’ll remember me.

  However, now I can see again, and I may be of use to Alec, and he to me. If you are coming in to Circle City, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll come out there to call on you and to get my dog.

  Please figure out your bill. I have an idea as to how much I owe you, but I would like to know exactly what you think on the same point.

  Always thinking of you,

  HUGH MASSEY.

  This letter gave me a chill. It sounded so friendly, I mean, and there was such a purring malice between the lines. Why, that letter would have fooled any outsider, I suppose, but of course it would not fool Calmont. He knew that the one comfort Massey could have had in his blindness would have been the dog. And he knew that all Massey owed him was a perfect and gigantic hatred. However, this note was sent off to Birch Creek by a man who was just starting out in that direction.

  We waited for word to come back. Calmont probably would not overlook this warning. He would come in or else he would ask Massey to go out.

  Gun practice went on every day outside of the town with Massey using a revolver or a rifle like a master. I was a clumsy hand with any gun, compared with him. He had a natural talent for weapons, and he had cultivated his gifts.

  Even when he was back in the shack, he used to do knife tricks, throwing a heavy hunting knife across the width of the room into the trunk of a sapling not two inches thick. I almost began to think that the knife would be his best weapon at close quarters.

  His spirits were rising, all this while. The prospect of the fight that was coming was like a secret joy constantly being whispered into his ears.

  He told me that I was to leave him. I could have half of the dog team and wait there in Circle City, in case he had to go out and find Calmont. That was what I wanted to do; but I pointed out that Calmont had a new partner up on Birch Creek, and that the odds would be two to two, no matter how the fight came off. He admitted this, but he swore that he would never let me get into action on his behalf.

  This problem haunted me.

  To go on the trail of Calmont was a nightmare to me in prospect, but I did not see how I could let Massey go out there by himself to fight two men. Two pairs of eyes are a lot better than one, and so are two guns, even though young hands are gripping one of them. It was my duty, according to the code, to go with Massey when the pinch came.

  The code I mean is the law of the frontier, where the fellow who leaves his bunkie in the lurch is branded for all his life. A year before this, I would still have been young enough to escape from too much blame. But now I was seventeen, and pretty well hardened and bronzed by that last year of Northern life, so that I looked older than the fact. I was treated like a man. I had been doing a man’s work in the freighting, and I would be expected to act like a man in the extreme pinch.

  Well, duty is as cold a judge as Judge Colt. It held me up, but it made me mighty queer in the pit of the stomach.

  Finally, I said to him, one evening: “Look here, Hugh. Suppose you were standing in my boots. What would you do? Would you let yourself be left behind? What would people think of me? They know that Calmont has a partner.”

  “Oh, dang what people think!” said Massey.

  But he said this without conviction and, after that, he talked very little on the subject.

  I found a couple of men in Circle City who knew Calmont’s partner, however, and from them I got a good description of the man who was to be my half of the fight. A tough bit of meat for any man’s eating was what he sounded to me.

  Sam Burr was his name. Down around the Big Bend country they still remember him. He had a reputation there so bad that there was a time when any decent man could have taken a shot at Sam Burr without being so much as arrested for a killing that everybody thought was needed. The truth is that Sam was not quite right in the head, to my way of thinking. He was a mental defective. The only thing that gave him any real pleasure was fighting. And his idea about fighting was that of an Indian of the true old school. A bullet through the back was better than a bullet through the forehead. To stalk a man like a beast gave him the joy of a beast. As a matter of fact, there was Indian blood in him, and, like some half-breeds, he had the bad qualities of both bloods.

  I asked why Calmont had ever hitched himself up to a man of that caliber.

  “I guess,” said the fellow who was telling me, “that Calmont needed some excitement, when there was no Massey on his trail. He picked up Sam Burr, and Sam will sure be a hypodermic for him!”

  They said that he was a thin, stringy man, a great runner and packer, and a natural-born gunfighter.

  So, from that moment, I had nightmares, and day horrors, with a thin-faced, dark-eyed fellow always playing the part of the fiend to toast me on the coals of my imagination.

  The Yukon was well frozen over, when surprising word came in from Birch Creek that Calmont was no longer there. It made a sensation in Circle City. Calmont had pulled out some time before, and rumor said that he had trekked for the Klondike, and that he and Sam Bun had staked out a claim not on Bonanza Creek, but on another run of water not far away.

  I was the one who brought news of this rumor to Massey, and I saw his features contract and a perfectly fiendish hate and malice come into his eyes.

  I knew his thought. He was wondering whether or not Calmont had heard of his cure, and had purposely cleared out of our neck of the woods; but a moment of reflection was enough to clear away that doubt. Calmont would not run a mere couple of hundred miles, or so. He would go two thousand, at least, if he wanted to get rid of Massey permanently.

  Massey said nothing at the time. He only took a couple of turns through the shack, and went to bed early that evening. I did the same, after getting my pack together, because I guessed that we would be making an early start.

  We were, as a matter of fact. We got out after about five hours’ sleep, and I started catching up the dogs. Massey wanted to stop me.

  He said: “Old son, what kind of a man would I be if I let you go along on this little job and get your head shot off?”

  “What sort of a man would I be,” I said, “if I let you go, with both Calmont and Sam Burr ahead of you?”

  “Oh, Sam is no job at all, Joe,” he said. “He won’t trouble me at all.”

  “Then he’ll be easy for me,” I said. “If you stop me, Hugh, I’ll follow along after you without dogs.”

  “Well,” he said, “Dawson will be a better place to argue this.”

  Afterward, I found out what he meant by that. At the time, I really thought he spoke only words.

  We hit the river ice. It was new and slick and smooth, but pretty dangerous in spots. But we had six dogs in our team, two having died, and those six were as fast and strong a lot as I ever saw. Then we had a leader who was a marvel, and could read the mind of the ice, not like Alec the Great, but about as well as any other dog I ever saw.

  Day by day, as the trip progressed, the ice got stronger and safer. We marched ourselves into high spirits, too.

  The weather was good; the dogs were well and strong; we had good camps. Plenty of tea and flour and bacon, and under circumstances like those, conditions were about as good as a man could ask for. It doesn’t take much to make a man happy, when he’s been used to the arctic. It’s the absence of misery rather than the presence of comforts that counts.

  As we got along up the river, on excellent going and with the ice growing thicker every moment, Massey was so happy that I found him with a contented smile on his face, more than once. Besides, he was often humming. And it’s rare that y
ou catch an Alaska dog-puncher in such a frame of mind, or ready to waste any energy on music making. For my part, I just closed my eyes to tomorrow and took every moment as it came.

  At last we got up to sight of Dawson itself, a glad thing to Massey, and a horrible one to me. That huddle of houses dwindled in my eyes and I half expected that a gigantic form would stride out from it, wearing the wolfish face of that fellow Calmont.

  We passed the mouth of the Klondike. It was fully a hundred yards from bank to bank, and its currents rushed along so fast that there was only a thin sheathing of ice across the top, though the Yukon was well crusted over. But the Klondike was only beginning to freeze, the black ice covering it with a sort of white dust. There were distinct sled marks up this creek, and the tracks went out at a big, irregular break. There was no need to ask what had happened to some poor puncher, sled, dogs, and all.

  That, you might say, was our welcome to Dawson.

  XX. SAM BURR

  AT THIS TIME, Dawson was running pretty wild. It was not as bad as Nome, because Dawson lies in Canada, and the Mounted Police had their eye on the place. There are police and police, but the Northwest Mounted were always all by themselves. Three of them were worth thirty of any other kind, unless it were the Texas Rangers, in their palmy days. Still, Dawson was so full of pep, and people, and money, that it was hard even for the Mounted to keep the town in order.

  Imagine what had happened.

  Men who had starved and toiled on Birch Creek and thanked Heaven for twenty-five-cent pans were now up there on the Klondike washing five and six hundred dollars to a pan. They had their smudgy fires going to thaw out the soil down to bed pan, and there they literally scooped out the treasure. Money came in so fast that the men did not know what to do with it.

  We got into Dawson when everything was in full blast. The strange thing was that there was so little talk about claims and gold. Gold was everywhere. It was like dirt under the feet. But imagine dirt that is dynamite, and that men will sell their souls for.

  People talked about “outside,” and the news they had got out of papers two months old, and which was the prettiest girl in such and such a dance hall, and whose dog would pull the heaviest load, and which dog was the smartest leader, but there was not so much talk about gold. If you heard a man talking at the bar about the richness of such and such a claim, you could put it down that he was trying to sell that claim, and that it was probably a blank.

  Not always.

  Right after we got to Dawson, we went into the Imperial bar and got some food and bought a drink. Not that Massey was a drinking man, but because that was the only way to enter into talk, and it was gossip about big Calmont that he wanted to hear.

  Just after we had lined up at the bar, a fellow came in whom the bartender knew.

  Their talk went something like this:

  “Hello, Jack,” said the bartender.

  “Hullo, Monte,” said the miner.

  His face was covered with six inches of hair. His furs were worn through at the elbows and patched with sackcloth. He was the toughest, most miserable-looking man that I ever saw.

  “How’s things?” said the bartender.

  “Fair to middling,” said Jack. “How’s things?”

  “Busy,” said Monte. “Down for a rest?”

  “Down to quit,” said Jack.

  “Got through the gold dirt?”

  “Naw, it’s panning faster’n ever. But I’m tired.”

  “Of what?”

  “Gold,” said Jack.

  I gaped at him. But nobody else seemed to notice. Imagine a man being tired of gold! And such a man — looking like a second-hand clothes dealer.

  “What you taken out?” said Monte.

  “About fifty thousand dollars,” said Jack. “Gimme another and have one with me.”

  “I ain’t drinking. But here’s yours. Is fifty thousand your pile?”

  “Yeah, that’s about right.”

  “Couldn’t use no more?”

  “No more than that. Twenty thousand for the ranch that I want down there in Colorado, and thirty thousand to blow thawing out the ice that’s been froze into me up here in Bonanza Creek.”

  “Gunna sell the claim?”

  “Yeah, I reckon.”

  “What’s your price?”

  “I dunno. Whatever I can get for it.”

  Well, I heard afterward that Jack sold his claim for fifteen thousand dollars, but he did not leave Dawson with his money. He was not robbed, either. But he got too much whisky aboard and gambled his whole sixty-five thousand dollars away in a week. The people that bought the claim for fifteen thousand dollars on straight hearsay cleaned up another fifty thousand in a few weeks out of it, while Jack went up the creek and located again. This time he stayed for three months, and came out with a hundred thousand flat. He was lucky, of course. But there were a good many stories like this floating around when I was in the Klondike. People got so that gold, as I said before, was not really interesting. You have to translate the metal into houses, acres, clothes, jewels, and such things, before it grows exciting, and it was hard to visualize home comforts when in Dawson.

  This yarn of Jack’s about his profits made my eyes pop, but my interest did not last, for I knew that there was something else that meant a lot more to me.

  It was the news about big Calmont. Out of that same bartender we got it.

  “Partner,” said Massey in his gentle, persuasive voice, “know anybody around here by the name of Calmont?”

  The bartender was spinning out a row of eight glasses down the bar, and the way he gave those glasses a flip and made them walk into place was a caution. Then he fished out two glasses and rocked them down the bar the same way. He was proud of his art and too busy to pay much attention to Massey.

  “Partner,” said Massey again, “I just asked you a question about Arnie Calmont. D’you know him?”

  “Busy!” barked Monte.

  Massey reached a hand across the bar and taps the other on the shoulder.

  The fellow jumped as though a gun had been nudged against his tender flesh.

  “Hey, what’s the matter?” he said.

  “I was asking for a little conversation,” said Massey.

  Monte gave him a look, and gave me a look, too. What he saw in me did not matter. There was a certain air about Massey that was enough for him.

  “Calmont’s up the creek,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Not on Bonanza. Off in the back country. I dunno where. Sam Burr could tell you that.”

  “Where’s Sam Burr? With Calmont?”

  “No, he’s over to Parson’s boarding house.”

  Massey did not stop to thank Monte or to finish the whisky. He turned on his heel and strode from the room, with me at his heels.

  We found Parson’s boarding house, a low, dingy dive, and asked for Burr. He was there, all right.

  “Are you doctors?” asked the fellow who met us at the door.

  We said that we were not, but that we wanted a friendly word with Burr.

  “Calmont ain’t sent you?”

  “No, we sent ourselves.”

  With that, he took us into a small room where I had my first sight of Sam Burr. He was all that I had expected to find him. He was simply a lean, greasy, good-for-nothing half-breed, with poison in his eye. When I had a look at the yellow whites of his eyes, I was glad that I was not apt to have to stand up against him with a gun, a knife, or even empty hands. He looked tricky enough to lick Jim Jeffries, just then, and that was when Jeff was knocking them cold. However, he was not apt to be doing any fighting, for a time. He lay in his bunk with some dingy blankets wrapped around him. There was a bandage around his head and a settled look about him that told he had been badly hurt.

  This fellow lay back in his bunk, as I’ve said, and looked us over at his leisure. He had been reading a dog-eared old magazine, which he lowered and stared at us curiously. He was like a savage dog that stand
s in its own front yard and wonders whether you’ll come close enough to have your throat cut. That was the calm, grim way that he drifted his glance over us.

  “Hullo,” said Massey.

  Sam Burr made a slight movement with his hand that could have been taken to mean anything — and it was clear that he didn’t care how we interpreted it.

  “You’re not with Calmont,” said Massey.

  “Unless he’s under the bunk,” said Burr.

  He was one of those cool, sneering fellows. I hated him at the first glance, and hated him twice over the moment that he spoke.

  Massey went closer to him.

  “Do you know me, Burr?” he said.

  “No,” said Burr. “I ain’t got that — pleasure.”

  Why, he had to sneer and scowl at everything. Whatever he touched had to be made sticky with his tarry innuendoes.

  “My name is Massey,” said Hugh.

  This jolted Burr in the right place. He let out a grunt and blinked up at us.

  “You’re Massey? You’re the fellow!” he said.

  “You busted with Calmont?” asked Massey.

  “I’m gunna finish him,” declared Sam Burr. “I’m gunna get even with him. He jumped me!”

  “Is he here in Dawson?”

  “Ah,” said Burr, staring at Massey thoughtfully, “you want him all right, but I dunno that you’ll get him. He’s a hard case, that fellow Calmont.”

  Massey dismissed the idea of difficulty. His nerves were as tight as strings on a drum. He showed it. Have you ever seen a hound trembling against the leash?

  “Well, he ain’t here,” said Burr at last.

  “Where is he, then?”

  “Up the creek.”

  “Can you tell me where?”

  “Yeah. I can tell you where. I reckon that I will, too.”

  “Good,” said Massey, and sat down.

  He seemed more at ease, now, and spared time to ask: “What was the trouble?”

  “Why, you wouldn’t believe!” answered Sam Burr. “There we was getting along pretty good. He’s a grouch, but so am I. We done fine together. But he exploded all account of a dang dog that he has along with him, or that he used to have. Alec the Great, is what I mean.”