Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Well,” said the Kid, “after a couple of days, I got sick. Very sick. My mother began to worry. There was hell in the air!”

  He looked up, as one suddenly struck to the heart by an irresistible pain.

  “Yes,” said the girl, barely whispering. “Yes?”

  “The cows kept plugging along. I was sick, but my brain was all right. I mean, I knew everything that was happening around me. I watched those cows get thinner and thinner The flesh melted off them like the tallow off candles. They turned into skeletons. It was a terrible thing to sit there on the wagon seat and watch them dying on their feet. It was a terrible thing to sit and watch it.”

  “Go on!” breathed the girl. “What happened?”

  “One of them died. I remember her. She was big Spot, we used to call her. She was hard milking, and she was mean with her horns. But we got to love her on that march through the desert. She pulled two thirds of the load. Then she didn’t get up one morning. She was dead.

  “There we were, stuck in the sands. There wasn’t very far to go, now, to get to the grasslands, and one night I heard my father begging my mother to go ahead and get to safety. He would wangle me through — me and the wagon.

  “Well, after Spot died, there was no chance of that. Mother wouldn’t leave. They made a pack of everything that they dared to carry along. They left the old wagon. They loaded me onto the back of the other cow. She was old Red. One horn had been broken off. The other one curled in and touched her between the eyes. She had eyes like a deer and a shape like a coal barge. You know the way cows are.”

  “Yes,” said the girl.

  “They loaded me and part of the pack on top of old Red. Well, she was pretty far gone. Her backbone stuck up like a ridge of rocks. I was pretty weak. They had to hold me on her. They didn’t dare to tie me, because every minute they thought that she might drop. And I could feel her weaving under me. Staggering, and then going on. She was used to pain, I suppose. It never occurred to her to lie down and give up.

  “We went on for two days. At night, I used to stand in front of her and rub her face, and she would curl out her long, dry tongue, and it felt like a rasp on my hand.

  “The third day, she went down with a bump and a slump. She was stone dead.

  “But she had done her part.

  “Over to the north, we could see a green mist, and we knew that that was the grass country. The edge of it.

  “My father took me in his arms. I was too weak to walk. We went across the rest of the desert and got to the grasslands, all right. My father and I did, I mean.”

  “Your mother—” said the girl, in horror.

  “Oh, she came through, also,” said the Kid. “But a good deal of her was left behind on that trail. She lasted through to the winter. I could see her dying from day to day. So could my father. After a while she stayed in her bed, and then died. The trail took too much out of her. She never could get rested again.”

  The girl placed her hands over her eyes.

  At last she said: “And the men who did it? The cowards — the devils who stole your stock?”

  “Well,” said the Kid, “that’s a funny thing. You know that a mule lasts a long time. Nine years later, when I was fifteen, I saw the mule that had been stolen, and naturally I was a little curious. I started following its back trail, and I looked up the five men, one by one.”

  “They were all alive?” she asked.

  “Only one is alive now,” said the Kid, and, lifting his head, he looked at her in such a way that the blood turned to ice water in her veins.

  27. STRANGE TALES

  TO THINK OF this matter calmly and from a distance, there was nothing strange in the fact that the Kid had just implied that he had killed four men, one after another. He had a reputation that attributed stranger and more terrible deeds than this to him. But to be there in the quiet of the woods alone with him was another matter. The friendliness in his blue eyes upset her. And then he seemed amazingly young. There was not a trace of a wrinkle about his eyes, and the only line in his face was a single incision at the side of his mouth which appeared, now and then, when the rest of his features were gravely composed, and gave him a look of smiling cynically to himself. Whatever cruelties and desperate actions he was guilty of, it seemed also manifest that he was as generous as cruel, as manly as fierce.

  Then, suddenly, she asked him: “Did you kill all of those men?”

  “I?” said the Kid.

  He smiled at her.

  “You don’t think that I ought to ask you that,” she agreed, “and I don’t suppose that I should. You’ve never told a soul, I suppose?”

  “No, I’ve never told a soul, and I never intend to.”

  She took her place on the log, she turned about on it to face him, and, resting an elbow on her knee and her chin in the cool, slender palm of her hand, she studied the Kid as he never had been studied before. He looked straight back at her, but it was not easy.

  “Well,” said she, “I don’t lose anything by asking, I suppose.”

  “Are you asking me to tell you?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m asking.”

  He still had in his hand the knife with which he had been whittling. That whittling, she now saw, was no real use of the edge of the steel, but a mere testing of it, while the whittler produced long, translucent shavings which fel! as light as strips of paper to the ground, and slowly dried, and warped, and curled. Now he flicked the knife into the air. It whirled over and over in a solid wheel of silver that disappeared with a thud. The blade had driven down into the earth its full length, and the hilt had thumped heavily home.

  “That’s a weighted knife,” said the girl.

  “Yes. It’s weighted.”

  He pulled it out and looked down the steel, which was hardly tarnished by the moisture of the ground. He began to wipe and polish the blade slowly and carefully.

  “I asked about the four killings,” said the girl. “You won’t talk about it, Kid?”

  At this, he laughed a little.

  “Do you expect that I’ll answer?”

  “I sort of do expect you to,” said she.

  “Well, tell me why.”

  “Because I want to get to know you, and I hope that you’ll want to get to know me.”

  The Kid started a little. He looked at her in amazement, and in bewilderment, and suddenly he seemed to her younger than ever before. There was actually a slight tinge of red in his cheeks, and at the sight of this color, she could have laughed, outright. But she swallowed her triumph with a fierce satisfaction.

  In fact, he was taken quite off balance.

  “That’s fair enough,” said the Kid. “Friends as much as you like. Do you have to know my story, first?”

  “I’d like to, of course.”

  “Would you have to?” asked the Kid.

  He smiled in the way he had, secretly, to himself, as though he were criticizing both himself and her, and wondering at the way he allowed himself to be drawn out.

  “Yes,” said the girl, calmly and firmly.

  “Well,” said he, “the newspapers have written me up a good deal, and what they leave out, you’ll find almost anybody willing to fill in — on a good long winter evening when the fire’s burning well and the pipes are drawing.”

  She nodded.

  “I know that sort of talk,” said she. “But I’m after facts.”

  “You’d make an exchange, I suppose?” said the Kid.

  “Of course I will. I have some dark spots of my own to show.”

  He balanced the knife on the tip of a forefinger. It stood up as straight and steady as a candle flame upon a windless night. “Well,” she said. “I’m waiting to make the bargain. You ought to have me for a friend.”

  “Yes?” said he, in query, but very politely.

  “Yes, because I’m straight.”

  He blinked a little, as though he had seen a sudden light. Then he said: “Suppose that I tell you the story of the four
men? Will you let me off with that ter?”

  “What am Ito offer in exchange?”

  “Nothing,” said the Kid. “I’ve seen your story, and I don’t need to hear it.”

  She blushed in her turn, but without lowering her eyes.

  “The first man,” said the Kid, striking at once into the middle of his story, “was a fellow named Turk Reming. He was a darkish man, with a mustache that he twisted so much that it curled forward instead of back. He had three wrinkles between his eyes, and he always seemed to be smiling like a devil. I found the Turk doing business as the chief boss, gunman, and professional bully of a big mining camp — a new strike up in Montana—”

  “How old were you?” asked the girl.

  “Well, the age doesn’t matter,” said he.

  “You were fifteen,” she insisted.

  “I suppose I was.”

  He seemed irritated by this.

  “I took my time with Turk. I wanted to take my time with all of ’em. My mother had died by slow torture. My father had died after forgetting how to smile for nine years. And Spot and old Red had died slow, too.”

  The girl jerked in a little, gasping breath, and then the Kid went on:

  “I got a job digging and mucking around in the mine. It was about the last honest work that I did in my life!”

  He looked at the girl, and she looked straight back at him, studious and noncommittal.

  “While I was working, I spent the evenings and Sundays and all my wages burning up gunpowder. My father had raised me with a gun in my hand, and besides, I had a natural talent. People in that camp got to know me. They used to come out and watch me shoot, and laugh as I missed. Then there were competitions in the camp, pretty often. Shooting at marks of all kinds, you know. But I stayed away from them until I had my hand well in. Then I found a Saturday afternoon, when Turk was trying out his own hand, and showing up a lot of the boys. They were shooting at an ax slash on the breast of a tree. The tree was pretty well peppered, but Turk was the only one who had nicked the mark. So I took my turn, and snaked three bullets into that ax cut in quick time. That’s not boasting,” he added. “I’m only fair with a rifle, but I can hit nearly anything with a revolver — up to about twenty yards. This shooting attracted a good deal of attention, and when I’d landed the three slugs in the mark, I turned and smiled at Turk — I mean to say, I smiled so that the rest of the boys could see me. He got pretty hot. He tried to laugh the thing off, but the men stood around and watched, and waited. I thought that he’d pull a gun on me, but he didn’t.

  “After that, I still kept on in the camp for months. I haunted Turk. I haunted him so that he never knew when I’d show up. I stood around and smiled at him, with a sneer in my eyes; and I’d measure him up and down. The boys began to be interested. They waited for something to happen, and Turk knew they were waiting. He wanted to get rid of me, but his nerve was bad. He’d seen those three bullets go home. It had shaken him up a good deal. He lost a lot of prestige in the camp, right away, but he stayed on. They were a wild mob up there in those days, but Turk ruled them. He was tougher than the toughest. The more afraid of me he became — I mean, the more afraid of his idea of me — the harder he worked to make trouble with the others. In that month, he picked three fights that turned into shooting scrapes, and in those scrapes he sent four men to the hospital, and one of them died there. In the hospital tent, I mean. But every day Turk’s face grew thinner, and his eyes more hollow. He wasn’t sleeping much at night. One evening he rushed into the shack where I was sitting alone, and cursed me and told me that he’d come to finish me. He was shaking. He was crazy with drink and with anger and hysteria. So I laughed in his face. I told him that I didn’t intend to fight him until there was a crowd to watch. I told him who I was then, and how the cows had died, and then my mother and my father. I told him that I was going to make him burn on a slow fire, and when I chose to challenge him, he’d take water, and take it before a crowd.”

  “Good heavens!” said the girl. “Did he draw his gun on you, then?”

  “No. He turned as green as grass, and backed through the door. He looked as though he had been seeing a ghost. He ran off through the camp. I think he was more than half crazy with fear. Superstitious fear, you know. But the fellows that he started the fight with that night, they simply thought that he was crazy drunk. They shot him to pieces, and that was the end of Turk Reming. Do you want any more?

  “Harry Dill was a fellow with a lot of German blood in him. And he had the sort of a face you often see among Germans — round and pink-cheeked, with the eyes and ears sticking out a good deal. He’d given up guns and taken to barkeeping. He had the most popular saloon in the town. Everybody drank there. He’d about put the two older places out of business. He knew everybody in town by a first name or a nickname. He had a house, he had a wife, he had a pair of children with round, red faces. His wife was a nice Dutch girl, with a freckled, stub nose. She was scrubbing and shining up her house and her children all day long. And she kept Harry as neat as a pin. That was the way he was fixed when I walked into his bar, one day. I beckoned him down to the end of the bar. He came down, still laughing at the last story he had been telling, and wiping the beer foam from his lips. He wheezed a little; he was shaking with good nature and fat.

  “So I leaned across the bar and told him in a whisper who I was, and what I’d come for.”

  “Did you tell him that you’d come to kill him?”

  “Yes. I told him that. But I told him that I hadn’t yet figured out the best way to do it. I would take my time, and in the meantime, I’d come in and visit his place every day. It was hard on poor Harry. He couldn’t be jolly when I was around. I used to sit in a dark corner, where I could hardly be seen, but Harry was always straining his eyes at that corner. He’d break off in the midst of his stories. When people told him jokes, he couldn’t laugh. He simply croaked. He got absent-minded. And there’s nothing that people hate more than an absent-minded bartender. Some of his old cronies still came around, but in three days, that bar was hardly attended at all. The cronies would tell him that he was sick, and ought to take liver pills, but that wasn’t what was on Harry’s mind.

  “He knew that I was the trouble, and he made up his mind to get rid of me. So he sent a couple of boys around to call on me one evening. However, I was expecting visitors. I persuaded them to confess how much he’d paid them, and how much more he had promised. They wrote out separate confessions and signed them. Then they got out of town.”

  “How did you persuade them?” asked the girl. “You mean that they tried to murder you?”

  “They came in through the window,” said the Kid. “They came sneaking across the room toward the bed where I was supposed to be lying, and pretty soon they stepped on the matting. And I’d covered that matting with glue. In two seconds they were all stuck together; and then I lighted the lamp.”

  He chuckled. The girl, however, did not laugh. She merely nodded, her eyes narrowing.

  “The next day,” went on the Kid, “I strolled over to the bar and read those two confessions aloud to Harry Dill. He took it rather hard. He’d turned into fat and beer, in those ten years or so since he’d been a bold, bad horse thief and baby murderer. He got down on his knees, in fact. But I only told him that I was still busy figuring out the best way to get rid of him.

  “This went on for another ten days. Harry Dill turned into a ghost. I used to go in there and find him standing alone, his head on his hands. He tried to talk to me. He used to cry and beg. On day his wife came to me. She didn’t know what the trouble was, but she knew that I was it. She begged me to leave her Harry alone, he was so dear and good! I read her the two confessions, and she went off home with a new idea in her head. A little after that, Harry offered me a glass of beer in his saloon. I took it and poured some out for his dog, and the dog was dead in half an hour.

  “That upset Harry some more. He was very fond of that dog! And, after I’d been two wee
ks in town, poor Harry shot himself one evening. He’d been having a little argument with his wife, the children testified.”

  “And the poor little youngsters!” cried the girl, her heart in her voice.

  “Oh, they had a good mother and a fine fat uncle, who took them all in, and they were happy ever after. Do you want any more?”

  She passed handkerchief across her forehead.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t think that it was going to be like this.”

  “Is it going to make you feel a lot closer and more friendly?” he asked, with a faint and sardonic smile.

  “It makes me shudder,” she admitted, “but I’d like to hear some more. Do you mean that you drove every one of those men to suicide, or something like it?”

  “If I had simply shot them down,” said the boy, “would that have been punishment? Why should I get myself hanged for their sakes?”

  “I suppose not,” she answered. “Who was next?”

  “The next was a sheriff,” said the Kid. “I’ve had a good deal of experience with sheriffs, but, take them by the large, I’ve found them an honest lot — very! But there are exceptions. And Chicago Oliver was one of them. He wasn’t calling himself Chicago Oliver any more, when I found him. No, he had a brand-new name, and it was a good one in the county where he was living. They swore by their sheriff; he was the greatest man catcher that they’d ever had. Of course he was, because he loved that sort of business. Particularly when he had the law to help him.

  “I met the sheriff on the street one day. He’d just come up for re- election. Every one knew that he’d get the job, but every one was campaigning for him and making speeches just to show him how much they appreciated his good work. Oliver was a solemn, sad-looking man, with eyes that were always traveling around, quietly anxious to pick up even the smallest crumb of admiration. I stopped him on the street and told him who I was.

  “It seemed to upset him a good deal. In fact, I went off down the street and left him leaning on a fence post, trying the best he knew not to drop on the sidewalk.