Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Hold on!” said the rider, keeping his eye fast on the boy’s face. And Davey had not altered a trifle in color. He merely set his teeth and then grinned.

  “Would you like to ride her?” asked the Kid suddenly.

  “Why? But nobody but you has ever been on her back!” cried out Davey.

  “You’re there now,” said the Kid.

  He whispered something in the ear of the mare and rubbed her muzzle. And then young Davey rode the terrible fleet mare of the Kid across the road. She slid over the fence, unexpectedly, but as smooth as running water, and turning in the field beyond, she floated back across the fence again and halted beside her master.

  “Now you know what she’s like,” said the Kid.

  “Golly,” said the boy, “now I know what heaven’s like.”

  5. THREE-CARD STUMBLES

  THE WATCHING POPULATION of Dry Creek had moved across the street to the house of Billy Shay.

  It was not merely an interest in the welfare of the wounded man who had been groaning inside the place, but rather an inescapable curiosity to be on the site of the Kid’s latest exploits. They were anxious to pick up first-hand details with which to furnish the stories which each and all of them would one day find an opportunity of telling to strangers.

  In the Far West there is one thing which is more fabulously valuable then gold, even. And that is a story, whether it be truth or good, true-sounding fiction. Stories in the West are of two varieties. The first is the openly and the humorously exaggerated. These are not greatly considered except when they are really funny. But the staple Western story is one which clings so closely to the truth throughout most of its telling, that the embroidering of the main truth with fancy in the vital point of the tale will be overlooked by the listener. If only one shot is fired, there is no good reason why two Indians, Mexicans, or thugs should not be in line with its flight; but the narrator is sure to express astonishment before he tries to arouse yours, and he will carefully explain, with a false science, just how the odd position came about. There is the story-teller who never speaks in his own person, too. All of his stories begin, end, and are supported in the middle by “they say.” “They” of “they say” is a strange creature. It has the flight of a falcon and the silent wings of a bat; it speaks the language of the birds and bees; it can follow the snake down the deepest hole, and then glide like a magic ray through a thousand feet of solid rock; it can penetrate invisibly into houses through the thickest walls, in order to see strange crimes; it can step through the walls of the most secretive mind in order to read strange thoughts. “They” has the speed of lightning, and leaps here and there to pick up grains of information, like a chicken picking up worms in a newly turned garden; “they” throws a girdle around the world in a fortieth of Puck’s boasted time. Those who quote “they,” who quote and follow and mystically adore and believe in “they,” sometimes do so with awe-stricken whispers, but there are some who sneer at their authority, and shrug their shoulders at the very stories they relate. Such people, when questioned, yawn and shake their heads.

  “I dunno. That’s what ‘they’ say.”

  You can take your choice. Believe it or not. Most people choose to believe, and therefore the rare information of “they,” thrice, yes, and thirty times watered and removed, is repeated over and over until it becomes a mist as tall as the moon and as thin as star dust.

  There were gossips of every school in the crowd that poured into Shay’s house. The moment that they drew open the front door, they found a scene which was interesting enough to charm them all.

  The furniture which first had been piled against the door to secure this point against the entrance of the Kid, was now cast helter-skelter back against the walls. Much of it was broken. The legs of chairs seemed knocking together, or else they bowed perilously out. And one chair, as if it had taken wings, had become entangled in the good, strong chains which suspended the hall lamp near the door. For this was a very pretentious house.

  Some strong hand had flung that chair!

  No wonder that chars had been thrown, though. For the ceiling, the floor, the walls, were ripped and plowed by many bullets. It looked as though half a dozen cartridge belts had been emptied here alone.

  And at the foot of the stairs lay “Three-card” Alec, who no longer groaned, but had braced himself with his shoulders on the lower stair. His right leg extended before him with a painful ‘crookedness, but he had a cigarette between his fingers, and he was smoking with deep, almost luxurious breaths, his eyes half closed. For “the makin’s” is a greater thing in the West than whisky, chewing tobacco, and chloroform all rolled into one.

  The crowd, entering, looked about with awe at that wrecked and ruined hallway. Turning, they could stare straight through the front wall of the house and see the little, white, round patches of daylight that streamed through the bullet holes. A long strip of plaster, loosened by raking shots from the ceiling of the hall, fell now with a noisy crash.

  Some people grew afraid, and would not enter the place, even with such a crowd. There was a baneful influence still in the air, and the odor of gunpowder was severe in every room and hall from the cellar to the attic.

  “Is there anybody else in the house?” asked the sheriff of the gambler.

  “Say, whadya think?” replied Three-card Alec sneeringly. The sheriff went on by him.

  So did every one else, waiting for the “other fellow” to take charge of the hurt man. The “other fellow” is well nigh as ubiquitous and certainly of far better character than “they.”

  No one went near poor Three-card Alec to help him, until Georgia Milman squatted beside him and looked into his narrow, beady, winking, uncertain eyes.

  Three-card looked like a bird — and a very bad bird, at that. His nose was long enough to make a handle for his whole face. Behind it his face receded toward the hair and toward the chin. The latter feature hardly mattered, and the face flowed smoothly, with hardly a ripple, into the throat. Three-card had two big buckteeth. Like all buckteeth, they were kept scrupulously white, but they looked, somehow, like the upper part of a parrot’s beak. His mouth was generally half open, and he had the look of being about to give something a good hard peck. Three-card had little, overbright, shifty eyes; and he had a yellowish skin, and on his receding brow there were a maze of lines of trouble, pain, greed and envy. His body was as bad as his face, for it was starved, crooked, hollow-chested, weak-backed, humped, skinny, and generally half deformed. His only redeeming feature was his hands, and these were beautiful objects for even a casual eye to rest upon. They were graceful, long, slender and white — which proved that they were kept scrupulously gloved except when there was a need of them in action. Those delicate and nervous hands of Three-card were in fact his fortune, whether they were employed with cards, dice, the handle of a knife, or on the grip of a revolver. Three-card was only a wicked caricature of a man. There was hardly any good about him, but he had been brave as he was wicked, and therefore he was respected in a certain way.

  Georgia merely said: “Is it pretty bad?”

  For reply he stared at her and puffed on his cigarette again. There was no decent courtesy in Three-card.

  “Do you want any special doctor? Doctor Dunn has his office just across the street, you know,” said Georgia.

  Three-card deigned to speak.

  “I wouldn’t let that crook mend a sick canary for me, leave alone put a hand on my leg. That leg is bust. I’ll have Doc Wilton or nobody.”

  Georgia pulled out of the passing file of the curious a sunburned young cow-puncher. His nose was toasted raw, which always makes young men appear cross but honest.

  “Sammy, you go and get Doc Wilton like a good fellow,” said Georgia.

  The face of Sammy fell at least a block. He was enjoying this battle site. But Georgia was not a girl to be refused. With a sigh, Sammy departed for the doctor, and Georgia impressed four more men to carry Three-card into the little adjoining room
, while she gingerly, with a white face and compressed lips, supported the broken lee. She had him put on a table, and placed a cushion under his head. She borrowed a whisky flask from another puncher and gave Three-card a good swig of it. She wiped the sweat of pain from his face. She unloosed the shirt at his throat. With unexpected skill, she rolled another cigarette for him and lighted it.

  “You’re a bit of all right,” said Three-card, his bird eyes glittering at her suddenly in an unwinking stare, like that of a hawk.

  “Are you comfortable? More comfortable, I mean.” Three-card closed his eyes. He did not answer, but began to chuckle softly.

  “You wouldn’t ‘a’ believed,” said he. “I guess that he never pulled the trigger.”

  Georgia looked at the smashed window glass at the end of the room.

  “You don’t mean the Kid?” she said.

  “Don’t I?” snarled Three-card.

  Then he seemed to remember that she had been kind.

  “Yeah, that’s who I mean,” said he.

  She tried to understand, but her mind whirled. With her own eyes she had seen the results of the explosion which occurred when the Kid had entered this house. She had seen men hurled out from it through windows and doors as if dynamite were bursting within.

  “What did he use, if not a gun?” she asked.

  “He used his bean,” said Three-card.

  This answer he seemed to think sufficient, and he nodded in satisfaction.

  “Aces will always take tricks,” said Three-card. “He was all full of aces.”

  He chuckled again. He seemed to forget his own predicament.

  “He was always in the next room,” said Three-card. “I wasn’t proud. I went down into the cellar, but the cellar window was too narrow to squeeze out.”

  “Did the Kid follow you down there?” asked the girl.

  She tried to make the picture bright in her mind, of the terrified men in the cellar, and the fear of the Kid upon them.

  “All he done was to open the door at the head of the stairs and wait!” said Three-card, still chuckling in admiration of his enemy’s maneuvers. “Somebody said that he was gunna throw a can of oil down and a lighted match after it. Then we charged up those stairs and crushed out through the doorway — and found that he wasn’t in the upper hall at all! Then we bolted for the upstairs, because it seemed like the Kid was always just about gunna step through an open door and start shooting.”

  She caught her breath. She understood that nightmare fear which had possessed all in the house.

  “On the way up I heard a sound. I looked back. I was the last of the hunch going up, and there was the Kid in the hall right at the foot of the stairs, with his gun ready. I pulled mine and turned to shoot, and just fell down the stairs and busted my leg. The Kid goes on up. Hell busts wide open all over the house. Pretty soon there’s quiet. Down comes somebody walking, whistling. It’s the Kid. He stops and makes me a cigarette.

  “‘Hard luck, Three-card,’ says he.”

  Three-card paused. He looked into the face of the girl.

  “You’d ‘v’ liked to see,” said Three-card.

  “Yes,” said Georgia beneath her breath. “I would!”

  6. WATCHING

  THE KID HAD stopped with red-headed Davey Trainor long enough to give him a ride on the Duck Hawk. Then he brought from one of his pockets a small knife. It had three blades of the finest steel, which he displayed and illustrated their uses. Then he mounted.

  Davey stood by him, bending back his head and looking up at the picture of the hero against the blue sky.

  “You wouldn’t be comin’ back here one of these days?” he asked.

  “Sure I would,” said the Kid. “Don’t you be forgetting me.”

  “Me?” said Davey. “Golly, I should say not. So long, Kid.”

  “So long,” said the Kid.

  Then he took off his hat and waved it toward the window of a neighboring house, over which honeysuckle vines descended in a thick shower.

  “Ma’am,” said he, “you’ve been aiming too low.”

  With this he rode off down the street whistling.

  Old John Dale saw him go by, with the Duck Hawk cakewalking in time and rhythm with the whistled tune. They seemed to be having a gay time of it, these two.

  They crossed the bridge over the creek, and there they were seen by the Warner boys, Paul and Ned, who were fishing off the old ruined landing which had been built there in the placer days. They both got up and shouted — regardless of spoiling their fishing prospects for the rest of the morning. And the Kid turned in his saddle and waved down to them. He seemed in the highest and most childishly gay spirits, for he made the Duck Hawk rear so that she stood with her forehoofs resting on the edge rail which guarded the bridge.

  That rail was made of old and time-rotted wood, and the boys held their breath at this madness of the Kid’s.

  Then he whirled the Duck Hawk away, and with a wave of his hand he disappeared, taking the Langton Trail through the hills.

  That trail the Kid followed until after noon. By this time he had climbed the trail to a height above Dry Creek. He paused at a point where the trail looped out around the shoulder of a hill, so that he had a clean view of the path for a distance, going and coming. Moreover, this was a spot from which he could survey all the country lying back toward Dry Creek.

  He watered the mare at a small creek, which had been one of his reasons for pausing there, and then he took out a pair of field glasses and first picked out the northerly hills, the mountains behind them, finally moving his view down again to Dry Creek, and its shining windows.

  He smiled a little when he saw this town, as though of itself it were something of a joke; then he shifted his view out into the desert, lingering his eye along the smoky foliage of the draws, and particularly studying certain dust clouds which, by careful observation, he discovered were not wind pools, but clouds in slow motion toward Dry Creek.

  There were three of these dust clouds. They might be riders, freighters, almost anything. Carefully estimating distances from point to point, away out there on the plain, he then timed each of the three dust clouds across certain stretches.

  This had to be inaccurate work, for he could not estimate with any surety the distances over which the clouds were passing. Yet he knew that those draws were of about such and such dimensions. He could see, also, that two of the dust clouds slanted back, and one rose straight up like smoke from a chimney on a windless day.

  He decided that the two slanting clouds were made of horsemen traveling either at a fast trot or at a gallop. The other dust cloud might be either quite a large party with their horses at a walk, or, more probably, it was the sweating team and the rumbling wagon of a freighter.

  He put up his glasses and looked more intimately around him. This was the sort of country that he loved. It was neither the eye-hurting sweep of the dusty desert, nor the damp gloom of the great forests. It was a broken sweep of hills, pouring away in a pleasant variety of shapes, and dressed with patches of high shrubbery and low, while the forest proper was chiefly confined to the gulleys and the ravines between the hills. In such a region as this there were a thousand cattle trails weaving through the maze of hills; there were ten thousand modes of being lost in every ten miles of travel. It was a place where one needed to know the lay of the land, and have under one a good horse, with sure footing and a wise way of taking the ups and downs of a hill journey. The Kid knew this region well, and he had a wise horse beneath him, that knew how to take the constantly recurring slopes easily, but at a brisk walk, with a trot on the summit, and a break into a rolling lope on the downward slope, moving all the time so softly that there was no danger of battering shoulders to pieces. Such a horse can cover not twice, but three times as much ground as an animal not accustomed to the hill country.

  But though the Kid knew this country well, he did not know it well enough to suit him. He never knew any stretch of land well enough. Nothi
ng could exhaust the patient, the almost passionate interest with which he studied a landscape in detail. The position of every tree might be worth knowing, if he had time to get down to the most minor details.

  This was almost his profession. The thick roll of his memory could unfold a scroll which was an endless map of desert, rolling plain, hills, mountains, wilderness of trees, the courses of rivers, the sites and the street maps of towns, dottings of ranches and ranch houses, intimate details of confused trails.

  Like a hawk, when he flew into a new region, he first flew high, and from the summits of the high places he charted the lower regions with an exquisite precision. The result was that hardly any district could be strange to him for more than a day, and he had amazed certain ardent pursuers, over and over again, by his ability to disappear from under their very noses in a region where they knew, or thought they knew, every gopher hole.

  So the Kid, as the mare grazed eagerly on the fine grass of that hillside, with the saddle and the bridle both removed, looked carefully and lovingly over this landscape. There were many creeks where one could find water, and by those creeks were many dense thickets where man and horse could hide — particularly a horse taught to lie down in time of need.

  There were high points for spying in this landscape, and there were crooked and straight ways across the country. That is, there were safe and leisurely ways, and there were short trails which condensed many miles of distances into a certain amount of eerie twisting through ravines and flirting with precipices.

  All in all, he felt that this district was made for him. It was “home” to the Kid.

  He had other homes, of course, but they were not quite so satisfactory for many reasons.

  He took out his lunch. It consisted of a ration which an Arab would have known and appreciated. That is to say, his food was simply dates and old, stale, tough bread. A morsel of bread, a morsel of date, he chewed them slowly, with the enjoyment of a hungry man, for already he had ridden far on this day.