by Max Brand
It was a beautiful thing to see him dart in, wavering like a wind-blown leaf, but hitting, I have no doubt, like the stroke of sledge-hammers, for that monstrous Calmont reeled before him again, and suddenly there was no Calmont any longer!
He was down, I saw next. He was more than half-buried in the loose snow which they had kicked up into a dense cloud about them.
And now would Massey leap in to take advantage of a fallen enemy?
No, there was something knightly about Massey. Such a thing was simply out of his mind, and he kept his distance while Calmont struggled clumsily to his feet.
I should say that he was not actually on his feet, but only on his knees as I came hurtling down the hill toward them. I ran right straight between them and, as I did so, I saw that Calmont had pulled out from beneath his clothes that revolver whose possession he had denied. He pulled it out, and through the snow mist I saw him leveling it at Massey, and I saw the red-stained face of Calmont there behind the gun.
I shouted at him: “Calmont! Calmont! Fight fair!”
I shouted at him, I say, just as I came between him and his enemy, and made it so that at that moment he pulled the trigger.
At this time I don’t remember hearing the gun at all. I only saw the flash of the powder and a heavy impact struck me in the body.
That I remember, and with sickening distinctness the knowledge that I had been shot. The force of the blow whirled me half around. I staggered and was about to fall when I saw Calmont, through a haze of terror and of snow mist, leap upward from the ground and throw the revolver he had used far away, and come rushing in to me with his arms thrown out.
He caught me up. It was like being seized in the noose of steel cables. That man was a gorilla and did not know his strength compared with the frailty of ordinary human flesh and bone.
He caught me up, and I looked to his face and saw it through the swirling darkness that comes at fainting.
When I next saw with any distinctness, there was a frightful, burning pain in my side, and I remember that my throat was hard and aching, as if I had been screaming. And I suppose that was exactly what I was doing.
I looked up and saw Calmont’s face above me, contorted like a fiend’s. I thought, in my agony, that Calmont was a demon, appointed by Fate to torment me.
At that moment, I heard him cry out: “I’ll hold him, Hugh, and you do the thing. I can’t bear it!”
Then I saw that Hugh Massey was holding me, and that he was transferring me to Calmont’s arms.
I remember feeling that everything would have to turn out all right, in spite of pain and torment, so long as Massey was there. He was not the sort to deny an old friend and companion. He would rather die than do such a thing, but there was a profound wonder that the pair of them could have been working over one cause, and that cause myself!
This blackness into which I had dropped thinned again, later on, and I found myself looking up toward the ceiling of the room of the cabin. There was a vast weakness which, like a tangible thing, was floating back and forth inside me.
And then I heard the voice of Calmont, low, and hard, and strained, as he said: “Massey, I want you to hear something.”
To this Massey said: “I’ve heard enough from you. I most certainly wish that I could even forget the thought of you!”
“Aye,” said Calmont, “and so do I. I wish that I could forget, but I can’t. I’ve been a mean one and a low one. I was being fair-licked, today, and I took an underhand way of pulling myself even with you. You’ve been licking me twice, Massey, when I’ve tried an extra trick, outside of the game. And if we fought again, I couldn’t promise that I’d still be fair. But I want to say this to you—”
“I’ve heard enough of your sayings,” said Hugh Massey.
“You’ve heard enough, and I’m tired of my own voice,” said Calmont, “but what I want to say is this: Everything is yours. You’ve beaten me in everything, I dunno how. But it’s because you’re the better man, I reckon. Strong hands is one thing but goodness is another, too.
“I’ve missed that out of my figgering!” said Calmont, continuing. “I’ve figgered that I could take as much as I could grab — and carry. But I’ve been wrong. You’re a smaller man, but you’ve got Marjorie, and you have got Alec, and the kid there loves you like a brother. A good, game kid,” said Calmont.
I half closed my eyes, for it was a sweet thing to hear. I hardly cared whether I lived or died. I was too sick to care, much. And that is the consolation of sickness, to be sure! The fellow who is about to die is generally more than half numb and he does not suffer as much as he seems to.
“Shut up,” said Massey. “You’ll be waking the kid.”
“Aye,” said Calmont softly, “I’ll shut up. Only — I wanted to say something—”
“I’m not interested in your sayings,” said Massey.
A little strength came back to me at this. I managed to call out: “Hugh!”
There was simply a swish of wind, he came so fast.
He stood above me and looked down at me with the sort of a smile that a man generally is ashamed to show a man. He keeps it for children and women.
“Aye, partner,” says he.
I closed my eyes and let the echo of that go kindly through me. “Partner” he had called me, and no other man in the world, I knew, ever had been called that by Massey, except Arnie Calmont himself, in the old days. Old days that never would come again.
“Hugh,” I said, “will you give me your hand?”
He grabbed my hand. His grip was terrible to feel.
“Are you feeling bad?” he says to me. “Oh, Calmont, you’ll pay for this!”
Suddenly there was the terrible wolfish face of Calmont on the other side of me, leaning above. Except that he didn’t look wolfish then, only mightily strained and sick.
“I’ll pay on earth and hereafter!” said Calmont.
I stared up at them. I felt that I was dying, but I wanted only the strength to say to them what was in my mind.
They both leaned close. Massey suddenly slumped to his knees, with a loud bang, and gently slid an arm under my head.
“Hold hard, old boy,” he said to me.
“I’m holding — hard,” I said. “Will you listen?”
“Aye,” he said, “I’ll listen.”
“Yes,” said Calmont, “and more than that!”
Calmont had hold of one of my hands. Hugh had hold of the other. I pulled my two hands together. For I saw, then, that nothing in the world could stop them from killing one another. Most of the bitterness had been on Calmont’s part, before this. But afterward, it would be Massey who would never rest until he had squared accounts.
Alec, who always knew when something important was being said, came and laid his head on my shoulder in a strange way.
“Calmont — Massey,” I panted. “Don’t let me go black again before I’ve told you—”
“Don’t tell us anything,” said Calmont. “Close your eyes. Rest up. You’re going to be fine. You hear me? You’re right as can be, kid!”
I closed my eyes, as he said, because it seemed to rest me and to save my strength.
“Partners,” I said, “it looks to me as though you two would have to team together. You started together. You stayed fast together, till Alec budged you apart. Together, you could beat a hundred, but apart you’ll only serve to kill each other. I’m sort of fading out. But before I finish, I’d like to see you shake hands and see that you’re friends again.”
“I’ll see him hanged,” said Massey in a terrible voice. “I’ll see him hanged before I’ll take his hand. I’ll sooner take his throat!”
Well, he meant it. He was that kind of man.
I looked up at them, but I was dumb, and black was floating and then whirling before my eyes.
Calmont held out his hand.
“Aye, Hugh,” he said, “whatever you please, afterward. But this is for the kid.”
At that, I saw Massey gri
p the hand of Calmont in both of his. They stared at each other. Never were there two such men in the world as that pair who stood over me there in the cabin, with Alec whining pitifully at my ear.
“Maybe the kid’s right, and we’ve both been wrong,” said Massey suddenly. “Maybe we’ve always needed each other! Here’s my hand for good and all, Arnie, and hang me if I ever go back on my word!”
“Your word,” said Calmont, “is a pile better than gold, to me. And this is the best minute I’ve ever seen. Mind the kid — mind—”
The last of this, however, came dimly to me. I felt a vast happiness coming over me, but the darkness increased, and a sudden pain in the side stabbed inward until it reached my heart, and then the rest of the world was completely lost.
But I think that if I had died then I would have died happily, so far as happy deaths are possible, with a feeling that I had managed a great thing before the end of me.
At any rate, the world vanished from before my senses, and did not come back to me until I saw, over my head, the cold, bright faces of the stars, and heard Hugh Massey giving brief, low-voiced orders to dogs.
“How is he?” asked Massey from a distance.
“His heart is going still — but dead slow,” said the voice of Calmont just above me. “Go on, and go fast, and Heaven help us!”
XXXII. KING OF THE ROAD
SOMETIMES I THINK when I remember that ride through the winter cold and through the ice of the wind, that it could not be, and that no man — or boy — could have lived through what flowed through me, at that time; but the facts are there for men to know, in spite of the way the doctor cursed and opened his eyes when he looked at me in Dawson.
What had happened, I learned afterward from Massey, was that Alec, being left free to run as he would while Calmont and Hugh struggled to keep a spark of life in me during those first days, had gradually hunted through the woods until he called back to him with his hunting song the lost members of the team of Calmont, and the fragments of Massey’s own string. They came back, and they settled in around the house as if they had never been away. That was the influence of Alec, who had driven them wild and who was able, in this manner, to tame them again.
I never could say whether he was more man than dog, or more dog than man, or more wizard than either.
At any rate, the time came when Calmont and Massey decided that they could not keep the failing life in me with their meager resources, and so they took the great chance, and the only chance, of taking me off to Dawson.
I wish that I had had consciousness enough to have seen and appreciated that ride down to Dawson. It passed to me like a frightfully bad dream, for I was tormented with pain, and I know that I must have cried out in delirium many a time, and wakened, setting my teeth over another yell.
But how much I should have liked to see Calmont herding that team forward, and Massey breaking the trail, or Calmont driving, and Massey beside me.
They were men. They were hard men. They were the very hardest men that I ever saw in all that cold, hard country. But they treated me as if each of them were my blood brother.
When they got me down to Dawson and took me into the doctor’s office, I came to for fair, and I wish that I hadn’t, for I had to endure the probing of the wound, with both Calmont and Massey looking on.
If they had not been there, I could have yelled my head off, which would have been a relief; but both of them were standing by, and I had to grip my jaws hard together and endure the misery, and a mighty sick business that was.
I remember that Calmont assured the doctor that, if I died, there would be one doctor fewer in Dawson; and I remember that Massey told him that if I got well there would be a certain number of pounds of gold —
But the doctor cursed them both — which is a way that doctors have, and assured them that he cared not a rap for the pair of them, multiplied by ten.
Well, I was put away in a bed, and gradually life began to come back to me, though the doctor himself assured me that there was not the slightest good reason for me coming back to the land of the living, and that according to all the books I should have died. He even made a chart to show me all the vital parts that the bullet had gone through.
However, here I am to write the end to this story.
I write it, however, not in Alaska’s blues and whites, but among Arizona’s own twilit purples, with the voice of Marjorie Massey singing in the kitchen, and the voice of Hugh sounding in the corral, where he’s breaking a three-year-old, and I can hear the yipping of Alexander the Great.
I get up to look out the window, and see Alec perched on top of the fence, laughing a red laugh at the world, of which he knows that he is the master, the undisputed king of the road, boss of the ranch dogs for fifty miles around, slayer of coyotes, foxes, and even the tall timber wolves. He goes where he pleases. He opens doors to go and come. He thinks nothing of waking the entire household in the middle of the night. He knows that for him there is not in the world a stick, a stone, a whip, or a harsh word.
I think of this as I see the big rascal standing on the fence and then go back to my chair and take from my pocket a yellow paper. It is fraying at the creases as I unfold it and read in a heavy scrawl what Calmont left behind him when he departed one night from among us, after coming all the way from the white North to stand behind Hugh at his wedding as best man:
“God be good to all of you, but you’ll be better off without me.”
THE END
The Hair-Trigger Kid (1931)
CONTENTS
1. PLAIN POISON
2. THE KID ARRIVES
3. BATTLE ROYAL
4. DAVEY RIDES
5. THREE-CARD STUMBLES
6. WATCHING
7. TREED
8. A GREAT BUSINESS
9. A SUGGESTION
10. HANDMADE SHOE
11. CALLERS
12. NOTCHED GUN
13. BRANDING IRON
14. A COMPACT
15. LAND SHARKS
16. STORM CLOUDS
17. BAD NEWS
18. A VOLUNTEER
19. TWO REASONS
20. A CHALLENGE
21. WATCHING
22. THE CHASE
23. COMPLIMENTS
24. THE LAW
25. MIXED ANSWERS
26. PAST HISTORY
27. STRANGE TALES
28. THE FIFTH MAN
29. CATTLE LOVER
30. DOWN THE CANYON
31. THE FIFTH MAN AGAIN
32. MILMAN RIDES
33. DANGER AHEAD
34. THE APPROACH
35. HIDING
36. CHUCK
37. ONE MATCH
38. THE VERDICT
39. DAVEY RIDES
40. FOR THE SAKE OF COWS
41. TWO AGAINST TWENTY
42. HEROES
1. PLAIN POISON
TWO THINGS WAITED for John Milman when he got West. One was his family, and the other was the spring. When he got to the end of the railroad, he could see spring eating its way up the mountains, taking the white from their shoulders and streaking the desert itself with green. But his family was not on hand with means to take him out to the ranch, and therefore he had to wait restlessly in the hotel, pacing up and down his room, and damning all delays. Sheriff Lew Walters was in that room, trying to help his friend kill time and uselessly pointing out that in an hour or two, at the most, the wife and daughter of Milman were sure to arrive. He might as well have read a ter out of the Bible. Or better, perhaps.
“I haven’t seen them for six months!” said Milman.
This was a proof that he was still, to a degree, an outlander. Real Westerners will not give way to their emotions so readily. They have picked up some of the manners of the wild Indians. But the sheriff, who knew the worth of this man, merely smiled and nodded.
“A lot of things can happen in an hour,” said Milman. “I wonder what’s kept them hack? Elinore’s as punctual as a chrono
meter, always. And Georgia would never be late for me! A lot of things can happen in an hour around this part of the world. How is Mr. Law, and old lady Order, his wife, Lew? They’re still in your charge, I suppose?”
“They’re recuperatin’,” said the sheriff gravely. “They got a sort of shock and a setback a while ago, but they’re recuperatin’.”
“What gave them the shock?”
“Well, typhoid fever, smallpox, diphtheria, delirium tremens and muscular rheumatism all hit this town together, one day, when Billy Shay turned up and opened his gambling house. I had old Law and Order out, taking the sun and the air every day, but now they don’t dare to leave their beds till the sun’s at nine o’clock, and they creep back in around about sundown.”
“Who is Billy Shay?” asked Milman, willing to forget his trouble for a moment.
“Shay is poison,” said the sheriff.
“What kind?”
“Skunk poison,” said the sheriff inelegantly. “He’s just one of those mean, low-down, sneakin’ curs that has teeth and knows how to use ’em.”
“Then why don’t you run ’im out?”
“I can’t hang anything on him. I know that everything crooked in the town depends on Shay, but still I can’t get any information against him. He’s slick as a snake, and he could hide in a snake’s hole, if he wanted to.”
“How does the town take to him?”
“How does any town this far West take to a chance to spoil its health, throw away its bank account, wreck its eyes, and quit work? Why, this town of Dry Creek is crazy about Billy Shay.”
“Does everyone know that he’s a crook?”
“Of course, everybody does. That won’t hold your real hundred-per-cent Westerner from going to that gaming house and tossing his money away. Shay has such a good thing that he only has to use the brakes now and then to stop somebody on a big run. As long as a fool wins once in three times, he’s sure to come back for more. And one player out of ten always makes something worth while. They do the advertising for Billy Shay.”