Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  In Eagle Falls I saw a large axe blade whose head was completely buried in hardwood and the handle shattered. This had been accomplished, it was said, at a single stroke by Cobalt. I examined the head of the axe carefully, and it seemed to me that I could detect the evidences of hammering to force the axe deeper into the wood.

  These anecdotes may help to prepare the reader for the state of mind through which the men of the arctic looked at Cobalt. In person he was not a giant. I never heard his exact height or weight, but he looked not an inch over six feet, and his shoulders were by no means as massive as many I have seen. In fact, there was nothing remarkable about him except when he got in action. To see him sitting, Cobalt was nothing unusual. When he spoke, there was an odd quality about his voice that made men turn their heads and women also. When he walked, his step had the quality of one about to leap away at full speed.

  He came in during the early days, well before the Dawson rush. He was twenty-two when he reached Circle City, and he mined there for two years before the Bairds arrived. That was the turning point in Cobalt’s life. Most of the men who have been in Circle City can remember Henry Baird, his rosy face, his lack of eyebrows, and his wonderful luck at the mines. And even those who never saw her know all about his daughter, Sylvia.

  I suppose she was what a scientist would have called a biological “sport,” a freak, a sudden throw forward from her ancestry. Certainly there appeared to be nothing of her father about her. Her hair was glistening black and fine as a spider’s web. She had black eyebrows, beautifully arched, and under the brows were blue eyes not gray blue, not sky blue, but the lustrous and unfathomable blue of the sea. She was rather small; I don’t think that a big woman could have been made so exquisitely. It was enough for me to sit at Henry Baird’s table and look at her hand alone, at the luster of the pink nails and the white glow of the skin. She was a radiant creature.

  Nearly everyone in Circle City went mad about her, but I don’t think that even the most audacious thought of making love to her. She was too beautiful. Her beauty set her apart. We looked up to her as to a being of another world. We talked to her with an odd respect, as if to some famous sage or reverend divine. Then young Cobalt came in and saw her.

  Some people said that he did not need to go mad, because he had always been mad. Nobody but a madman would have done the things he had accomplished or tried to accomplish. Nobody, for instance, would have driven a team of six timber wolves and treated them like dogs. So it followed, as a matter of course, when Cobalt saw the girl, he tried to scale heaven and get at her. He saw her once and went right down to see Henry Baird. Baird was new to the country, but naturally he had heard a great deal about Cobalt.

  He was rather frightened when the famous young man came in, took his hand in that terrible grasp of his, and looked him in the face with those steel-gray eyes which turned to pale-blue flame when he spoke of Sylvia. However, Baird was a sensible man. He said that he had not the slightest objection to Cobalt. For his own part he hoped that his daughter would not marry a man with less than a hundred thousand and a home to offer her. Of course, a hundred thousand meant a great deal more in those days than it does now. But everything really depended upon Sylvia herself. Had Cobalt spoken to her before on the subject? Did she care for him?

  Cobalt said that he hadn’t, but that he would make her care. That was how the trouble started. He went to Sylvia and spoke to her. And Sylvia laughed!

  “Are you doing this on a bet, Cobalt?” she asked.

  II. MODERN GAL

  I CAN SEE Sylvia as she must have been that day, muffled in that fine suit of brown furs, with her lovely mouth, and her shining eyes glowing like heaven’s light through a cloud. Cobalt stared at her as no human being ever had stared at her before.

  “Do that ag’in,” he said.

  “What?” asked Sylvia.

  “Laugh at me!”

  She looked him up and down. No one ever had looked at him in such a manner before that moment no one at least in his right mind. A man did not have to know about Cobalt beforehand. His strength advertised itself, as fire is advertised by its flame. Sylvia was not afraid. Why should she be? Men were merely men! Cobalt might bend steel bars, but Sylvia had bent and molded whole brigades of young fellows and oldish fellows, too. Millions had been offered to her. She had stepped through rivers of gold and diamonds and never allowed the stuff to stick to her. She looked at Cobalt with the double strength of the proud and the good, with a spice of malice thrown in. How could she help being spiteful, when this fellow came along and dared to look at her as though she were merely a desirable girl?

  “Will you slap me if I laugh?” asked Sylvia, and with that she let her laughter peal.

  She had a way of putting up her chin a little and lowering her eyes when she laughed. Cobalt stood there and watched her.

  “It’s good,” said Cobalt. “It’s dog-gone good. It’s like medicine to me.”

  “Is it?” she inquired.

  She must have widened her eyes a trifle when she heard him speak like this. If she had any wit at all, she knew that he was out of the common run of men.

  “Yes,” he said, “it does me good to hear you laugh. You’re pert, aren’t you?”

  “Pert?” asked Sylvia, her spirit beginning to rise toward anger.

  “You know,” said Cobalt. “You’re a little sassy, but I don’t mind it. It’s spice in you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re proud, too,” said Cobalt. “You’re proud as Lucifer. I can see that.”

  “Do you always talk to people like this?” asked the girl.

  “Yes. Of course, I do. How else should I talk to them?” stated Cobalt.

  He meant that. He always said what he thought, straight out. Often it was a shocking thing to hear him, a brutal thing. That was why so many people savored respect for Cobalt with a good dash, not of envy, but of hate. Only a few of us endured and loved him in spite of the way he trod on our toes.

  “Almost any other way,” said the girl. “Almost any other way, I should think.”

  “You tell me how.”

  “Why, make them happy, of course. That’s what most people try to do when they’re talking to others.”

  “No,” said Cobalt, “that’s not right.”

  “Don’t you think so?” questioned Sylvia, beginning to smile and freeze.

  “No,” said Cobalt, “because mostly people are lying, and the ones they talk to know they’re lying.”

  “Ah, and you always tell the truth?”

  “Nobody could always tell the truth,” he replied, “but I try my best to do it.”

  “I must have read that somewhere,” said Sylvia. “Where did you get it, Cobalt?”

  “Out of my heart,” he said, as grave as you please, and pointed at his breast, as though she could look through bones and flesh if she chose. “You’ll find a lot more in there.”

  “I only see a parka,” said Sylvia.

  “There you go again,” said Cobalt, “but, when you’re sassy like this, you ought always to laugh.”

  “Ought I?” she asked, lifting her brows to freeze him again.

  But Cobalt didn’t freeze. No, no, you might as well have tried to frost the equator.

  “You ought to laugh and show that you’re joking,” Cobalt told her, “because, if you’re serious, you simply need a spanking.”

  “You make me feel very young,” said Sylvia, letting the temperature drop another hundred degrees toward absolute zero.

  “Oh, don’t stick up your nose and look down at me. It doesn’t amuse me when I see you acting like that. You’ve learned that attitude out of your mirror, I suppose, but don’t use it on me. Don’t talk down to me because, after all, you’re only a woman.”

  “I’m only a what?”

  “You’re so mad now that you can hardly hear me,” went on Cobalt. “Get the cobwebs out of your mind and listen to the truth. I said that you’re only a woman and, therefore, you’ve no
right to look down your nose at anybody.”

  Sylvia must have nearly fainted. I know how other men were in front of her like lambs, like poor willing slaves, cluttering up the heavenly ground on which she deigned to put her feet.

  “I see that you’re a profound fellow,” Sylvia said to him. “You can see at a glance that I’m only a woman. What did you expect to find me?”

  “I expected to find you a good deal better than you are,” he said. “I saw only the shine of you from a distance. Now that I get up close, I see that the wick needs a lot of trimming.”

  “You men,” Sylvia said as sardonic as you please, “are such masters. Of course, women always look up to such wonderful—”

  “Don’t do that,” urged Cobalt. “If you talk like that, I’ll begin to despise you so much that I’ll never look at you again. There’s not much to women, you know. There’s almost nothing — except loving ’em.”

  “True,” said Sylvia, beginning to shake a little in the fury that was gripping her. “Of course, we’re just mirrors, and nothing else. Mirrors for the parents, then for the great husband, then for the children. Is that it?”

  “You mighty well know it’s true,” said Cobalt, “though, just now, I see that you’re ready to scratch my eyes out.”

  “Not at all. I was only about to remark that my time is not entirely my own.”

  “No,” said Cobalt, “that’s true. A good part of it is mine.”

  “Ah?” said Sylvia, blinking a little, beginning to think him mad.

  “Of course it is. One of these days, Sylvia, if you turn out to be half what I think of you, I’m going to marry you.”

  “I’m astonished and delighted,” she said, forcing herself to smile at him again in such a way that any other man would have backed up as if from a tiger’s claws. “Are you really going to marry me, Cobalt — I don’t know any other name to give you, you know.”

  He merely grinned at her. “You handle a whip pretty well, but you can’t cut me through the skin with your little turns and flips of the tongue. It won’t do any good to flog me with ironies, Sylvia.”

  “As if I would attempt such a thing! Of course, I don’t know what you mean, Cobalt, but then a woman never understands more than a part of what a man says. She only sees the feet of the god, I dare say.”

  “You’ve got a lot of stuff in you, but you need to be taken apart and put together again.”

  “Poor Dad. He’ll be terribly upset when he hears that I have to be brought up all over again.”

  “I like you better and better.” Cobalt was grinning again.

  “Oh, how can you!” exclaimed Sylvia, putting her two little hands together in admiration.

  “Dog-gone you’re a feast for me. I could spend my life eating you, sauce and all, and spite, and malice, and thorny ironies, and all of that. Now let’s get down to brass tacks.”

  “You mean, to name the wedding day?”

  “That’s the main idea. Your father says that your husband ought to have a home for you and a hundred thousand dollars. Now, what do you want?”

  “I only want a great, big, wonderful, masterful man.”

  “You’re going to be mastered, all right,” said Cobalt. “Is that all you want?”

  “Oh, yes. Just somebody I can look up to.”

  “You can look up to me, Sylvia. You can stand on your tiptoes, and still you’ll have to look up.”

  She teetered up on her toes. “My gracious, you’re right. I dare say that you’re always right!”

  “I’ll have a hundred per cent average with you.”

  “Then I suppose that we’ll have to be married at once. I can hardly wait and, of course, you have the lovely home and the hundred thousand waiting for us?”

  “You she-wolf!” replied Cobalt, his grin flashing down at her. “I have a dog team, some dried fish, and my two hands. I’m going to rip that hundred thousand out of the ground this year.”

  “Oh, Cobalt,” she asked, “do we have to wait a whole year?”

  She made sad eyes at him. Cobalt drank it all in.

  “What kind of a house do you want?” he asked her.

  “Oh, for myself, just anything would do, but I’d never be happy unless I knew that my husband had the right surroundings. I wouldn’t set a diamond in base metal. There’d have to be a night park for him to walk in when he’s in the garden in the evening with his own thoughts. A good library for his study. Or do you need to study any more, Cobalt?”

  “Go on,” said Cobalt. “You write down the items, and I’ll add up.”

  “Then you’d want two or three good servants to look after you properly, and a maid to dress me because I’d have to appear as well as possible in the eyes of such a husband. We’d need rooms for those servants, of course, and a good dining room because a little dining room is so stuffy and lacks dignity.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, you can fill out the rest a great deal better than I can. The stables, the horses and such things — you would know exactly what to have. You’d need more, but three or four good hunters are about all that I would have, unless you wished to be too generous. But for myself I wouldn’t want jewels.”

  “No?”

  “Oh, no, nothing to speak of. Just a few nice, big, simple stones. Not emeralds. Oh, no! They’re too expensive. I like rubies better myself. Just a few to help me catch your eye when you’re losing yourself in meditations, you know.”

  “Now I begin to see the picture.”

  “Of course you do,” said Sylvia, giving him a smile of childish adoration. “I shouldn’t have said a thing. You would have known from the first, ever so much better than I do.”

  “Well,” said Cobalt, “what do you think?”

  “Why, I wouldn’t try. I’d just leave all of that to you, dear! I know it won’t take you long to make enough.”

  “Not long at all. Good bye for a little while, Sylvia.”

  He held out his arms to her. And she? Why, she stepped right inside them and let him kiss her. Then she followed him to the door and told him that she could hardly wait. That’s the sort of stuff of which she was made.

  III. THE LIGHTNING WARRIOR

  COBALT WENT DOWN to the saloon and staked his dog team against six hundred dollars as a start. Before the next morning, he had won forty thousand dollars. He took a week spending that money. None of it went in dissipation. Everything was sunk in the preparation to get more gold out of the earth. Then he disappeared from Circle City and went to the diggings.

  Everyone knew about that conversation he had had with Sylvia Baird. That talk was so typical of Cobalt that people could not help repeating the details of it and laughing heartily. They even asked Sylvia about it, and Sylvia would laugh in turn. But Circle City stopping laughing, and so did Sylvia Baird, when it was learned that Cobalt was organizing his expedition and hiring many hands. Circle City stopped smiling because it very well knew that, when Cobalt bent his energies in any direction, the time for foolish comment had ended. I think that Sylvia began to worry almost at once.

  I saw her shortly after Cobalt went into the wilderness, and I chatted with her a little about Cobalt. Her way of putting the thing was characteristic.

  “I hear that Cobalt is a great friend of yours,” I said.

  “Friend?” replied Sylvia. “Oh, not at all. I’ve only met him once, you know. Yet he means a good deal to me.”

  “Does he?” I asked.

  “Yes. Because he’s going to marry me it appears.”

  “Great Scott! That’s exciting!”

  “Isn’t it?”

  She joked about it so openly that everyone could speak of it freely, but all the while she was uneasy. I could see that because I had come to know her very well.

  “Suppose,” she said one day, “that Cobalt should come back from the mines with a fortune and hold me to my joke?”

  “Then he would have a chance to do the laughing,” I said.

  “Are you serious?” she asked.r />
  “Are you serious?” I replied.

  “I’m frightened, a little. For once he gets a thing into his head—”

  There was one comfort, and that lay in the reports that came back to us. Cobalt and his crew were tearing up the ground and getting hardly a taste of color. In the meantime Circle City had something that drowned out even Cobalt as a topic of interest, and that was the appearance of a white wolf the Indians were said to have named the Lightning Warrior for so swiftly did he attack and parry. Having seen him, I can give an authentic account of his looks. He was closer to a bear in bulk than to a wolf. Those who know wolves realize that it is a goodish-size beast that has a footprint four inches across. When it is a giant, it has a spread of five inches. There have been some half fabulous reports from time to time of wolves with paws of more than five inches’ measurement; but the Lightning Warrior of Circle City marked out a six-inch circle as he put down his paw. This I know because I measured the thing myself, not once but twenty times.

  A wolf which makes a four-inch track is big enough to cause plenty of trouble. Swell the beast to the dimensions of the Lightning Warrior and the dangerous possibilities are multiplied by ten. When I saw that fellow standing in front of a wall of brush, with the wind ruffling his mane, he looked to me like the god of wolves. His whiteness was the amazing thing, the incredible thing. He shone as snow shines. His eyes and his tongue were bloodstains in the fluffing radiance. One hears of white wolves very often, but usually they are the color of coffee and milk or simply a dirty yellow, but this lord of wolves was entirely and purely white.