Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “You remember the story I once told you, my dear?” he asked her. “About the thief and the emerald? Would the thief have cared where the emerald wanted to go or what the emerald felt about him?”

  “You don’t mean it,” said Sylvia. “You’re not as hard as you make out. You’re a terribly great fighting man, Cobalt, but your heart is not so hard as you make out. It does make a difference to you. Particularly when you know that it’s a friend of yours.”

  “Ah? And what do you mean by that?”

  “A friend whose life you’ve saved, and who has saved yours. That’s what I mean.”

  Cobalt stood up at last and gave me such a look as no man receives twice from another. “You mean Chalmers?”

  “Yes,” said Sylvia. “That’s who I mean.”

  I could not speak. I wish to heaven that I could have spoken. It would have meant all the difference afterward. I could only stand there mute, like a fool, with a ringing in my ears that came from the thunderstrokes of my heart. I heard the voice of Cobalt speaking, and the sound of it was wooden and dead, saying: “Well, that’s right, Sylvia. You’ve picked out the right club. It’s the only club in the world that would have stopped me, I suppose. But you’ve stopped me now. I’ll go out and get a little air.”

  He went past us, three standing clay figures, and the door closed gently behind him. Baird recovered himself before I did. He was greatly excited and, going up to Sylvia, he caught her by the hands and shook them, not in congratulation but with a vigorous impatience.

  “Did you honestly mean it, Sylvia? Or was it only a ruse?”

  She nodded her head. She had the look of a sleepwalker. “Yes, I mean it.”

  Baird seemed to feel that he could get no more out of her. He turned back to me, crying: “How long has this been going on? What’s been between the two of you?”

  I made a helpless gesture. My brain was still spinning. “I don’t know anything about it. She’s flirted with me a little. She’d flirt with a wooden Indian for lack of something better. But I never knew that she cared a rap. I still don’t think she does.”

  “I do,” stated Sylvia, “but I’ve been shameless. I haven’t asked if you care a rap about me, Tommy.”

  “This is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever heard of,” said Baird. “You mean Tom Chalmers hasn’t spoken to you, and yet you talk like that to Cobalt?”

  “Do you want to call Cobalt back?” she asked him.

  He threw up both his hands. “Great heavens, no! Let him stay away. I’d rather have you committed to the arms of an avalanche than to see you married to that man. But Chalmers — why, he’s older, he’s married, he has children.”

  “He’s only thirty-two,” said the girl. “He has a pair of darling youngsters. Don’t you think that I’ll be glad to have them for mine and mother them?”

  “I’m beaten!” said Baird. “I don’t know what to think or to say.”

  “Don’t you think or say a thing,” she commanded. “Let water run downhill. That’s the best way. Tommy, you tell me, and let father hear. Do you think you can come to care about me?”

  She came across the room toward me. I stepped behind a chair. At that she stopped. She let her head fall a little on one side. Her great blue eyes were soft with a sort of despair.

  “You don’t want me, Tommy. Is that it?”

  “Look here, Sylvia, you know mighty well what I mean.”

  “I’m going to get out of here,” said Baird.

  “You stay right where you are,” I called after him.

  He turned at the door and looked back. “I don’t want to interfere in your private affairs with Sylvia. I can’t stay here.”

  “You can though,” I insisted. “I want you to stay long enough to explain why you’re in a sweat.”

  “I’ve heard and seen enough in the last five minutes to make an Egyptian statue break out in a sweat,” he answered.

  “Then I’ll tell you why you’re in a sweat. You’re thinking that I’m nothing but a fellow on the make. A chap with a small bit of money, no great ambitions, and nothing but the hope of running cows on some range land ahead of him. Am I right?”

  He came half way back across the room.

  “Oh, talk to him, Daddy,” pleaded the girl. “Try to persuade him for me. I know that you love Tom.”

  “I respect you, Tom,” said Baird. “I have an affection for you. You’ve done a grand thing for me and for Sylvia, and I realize it. Don’t think I don’t. There’s no other man in—”

  “That’s all right,” I broke in. “Now let’s have the other side.”

  “You’ve expressed the other side,” replied Baird. “I mean, Sylvia is growing up toward another sort of life than what you offer to her.”

  “You mean, you don’t want to picture her in the kitchen of a small ranch house, washing dishes and turning around to see that the boiling beans still have enough water on ’em. Is that it?”

  “Well, that’s about it.”

  “You see how it is, Sylvia,” I said to her.

  “All of this has nothing to do with it,” argued the girl. “You have to tell me whether you care about me, or not.”

  “You’re wrong again,” I told her. “You know that every man in the world who has seen you cares about you, either as the thief cared for the emerald or as someone he wants for a real wife. I care for you in both ways somewhat. You know that I do. But I’m afraid of you. Besides, you’d always be in second place in my home.”

  “Is there someone else?” Sylvia asked.

  “There’s my dead wife.”

  Baird muttered: “This is too painful. I’m going out, Sylvia. Perhaps you’d better talk about this another time?”

  “We’ll talk it out now,” insisted Sylvia, “if Tom doesn’t mind.”

  “Go on,” I said. “I’m glad to talk it out and have it done with.”

  “I swear,” said Sylvia, “that I never would be jealous of her poor, kind ghost.”

  I shook my head. “But I would always be making comparisons. You’re ten times cleverer than she was. And you’re a thousand times more beautiful. But she was as clear as crystal. You take a mountain spring, Sylvia, — it may not be very big, and it may not be very important, but almost anybody could sit a day and look down at the water bubbling and listen to its song.”

  “You mean,” she said, “I’m complicated? I’m really not. A little play- acting — I’ll wipe that out, if you want.”

  “To change your mind would be to spoil you,” I told her. I think that I was right. “Great Scott, Sylvia, to kiss the tips of your fingers would be joy enough to make me giddy. That’s all very well. But I see the truth of this situation. You’ve only used me to shunt poor Cobalt away. You’d — by heaven, now I think that I see the truth!”

  “What is it?” asked Sylvia.

  “Stand away from me, then,” I said. “When you’re so close, Sylvia, I begin to forget everything. I can’t think. But isn’t this true? There’s another man you like a lot better than you like me.”

  “I? Nonsense!”

  “There is. Confess it!”

  “You’re an odd man, Tommy.” There was a shadow in her eyes. “But you know, I think if we lived together, we would each grow to love more and more. I’ve never met anyone so gentle and understanding as you are.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But now, look here! Suppose I name the other man for you, the man you like better but are afraid of.”

  “Stuff!” Sylvia went back a step from me and seemed alarmed.

  “I saw it in your face a while ago,” I declared. “I saw it when you stood yonder and parted the smoke and looked down into his face. You’re afraid he’s too great a force, that he’d dash you around the world, you don’t know where. You’d rather dodge him and attach yourself to me, because I’m harmless, and because somehow Cobalt won’t persecute you so long as you’re with me. But Cobalt is the man you love. Stand there and honestly tell me whether I’m right or wrong?”r />
  XXXIII. SYLVIA GOES NATIVE

  I CANNOT SAY exactly how the idea came popping into my brain. Perhaps it was the memory of a certain curious tenderness I had seen in her face as she stood before Cobalt. I was continually studying her expression. Her words mostly told you nothing. Sometimes they would be expressing only the shadow of the real truth about her and, when that thought came leaping into my mind, I threw it at her. The result was a shock to me and to Baird.

  For Sylvia, the keen, clever, invincible Sylvia, who all her life had done exactly as she pleased, who was strong by nature and strong by habit of thought, no matter how delicately she disguised her power of brain, this Sylvia now looked rather wildly about her, and then she ran to her father and like any tiny child threw herself into his arms and began to sob and sway and tremble with a passionate grief. The Lightning Warrior came out of the corner in which he had denned himself all this time and crouched nearby, studying the situation, trying to make out whether or not the girl was being attacked and ready to cut the hand of the attacker.

  That was a picture and a thing to hear as well, what with the wild sobbing of Sylvia, and the voice of the storm wind that was mourning outside. I started out of the room, tiptoeing. Baird stopped me.

  “You’d better stay here and see this thing through with us. You’re qualified, I’d say, as a sort of second father to her, Tom. You’ve seen through her as I never would have.”

  I stopped, of course. Sylvia left her father’s arms, went over, and threw herself on the bed. There she lay, still shaken by her sobbing. Baird wanted to go to her, but I held onto him.

  “Don’t you go,” I said in a whisper. “She’s having it out with herself. There’s a pack of wildcats screeching and clawing in her just about now.”

  He mopped his wet face and grunted, but he took my advice. The storm in her ended. The sobbing ceased. She lay still for a moment, and then she got up and went to the washstand. I poured some water into the bowl. While she washed her face, lifting the icy water in her cupped hands and holding it a long moment in place, I picked a towel off the rack and gave it to her so she could dry with it. Then I got a cup of coffee for her.

  She sat down at the table and reached blindly for me, giving my hand a squeeze. Baird stood by as one who looks from a distance on a strange happening. At last the tremors left her, and the cup of coffee was finished.

  “I wish that I smoked,” said Sylvia. “I wish that I smoked! That would be comfortable now. I’m going to learn.”

  She never would, I knew. She never would foul her hands with yellow or stain her lips with tar and nicotine.

  “You talk, father,” she proposed. “You suggest what we should do.”

  Poor Baird had remained standing stock-still. Now he shook his head. “You know, Sylvia, that there’s not much in me that can be useful for you in the way of advice. I’ve never really understood you.”

  “Oh, that’s why I’ve always loved you so,” said Sylvia. “You try, Tommy.”

  “I think Cobalt ought to be in on this,” I said.

  “No!” she cried out hoarsely.

  I was astonished and shocked by her vehemence.

  She went on: “You’re tired, Tommy, or you wouldn’t suggest that, since you’ve seen so much. You know I’ve been hypnotized by Cobalt from the first. But I feel that it’s merely hypnosis and, if ever I belonged to him, some terrible thing would happen. I think of him as one might think of murder.”

  I stood up and said I was going to bed. My poor brain was not worth a rap, it was so befogged. So I went to the door and got to the room which Baird and I occupied. He followed me in just as I covered up as warmly as I could. Both in brain and body, all the strength was out of me.

  “She wants to be alone,” said Baird. “I don’t know why. I wish to heaven I could see a way out of this. But I can’t. There are too many threads. While we struggle with our own little problems, we forget that we’re all caught in the spider’s web, Soapy and his Skagway gang. That would be enough by itself, but with this other added — I don’t know, not unless Cobalt himself breaks the web.”

  I shook my head. Sleep was coming over my mind like dark clouds in the sky. “He can’t do that. Not even Cobalt can do that. One man, two men, even half a dozen. Yes, he could handle them. But this is different. Here you have something extra. Here you have Soapy and his cohorts. And there is that smiling young demon, that Jess Fair.”

  “The bartender with the buck teeth?” asked Baird. “What of him?”

  “Oh, you’ll hear of him before the wind-up,” I remember muttering. Then blessed sleep came over me, as rain comes over a dry land.

  XXXIV. BUCKING THE THUGS

  I SHOULD HAVE been there, though I have heard accounts from so many eyewitnesses that my absence hardly matters. After all, I could not have been inside the brains of those who were in action. Each word, look, gesture, intonation has been mentioned to me, I’m sure, at one time or another. For what did Skagway have to think about afterward? What else was there to talk about? At any rate there is no use crying over spilled milk. I was asleep when the crash came. I was up there in my room, sound asleep, and poor Baird was in the same room also, softly cursing my snoring but too sympathetic to awaken me.

  I slept and dreamed of Sylvia, of course. Her delicate grace, as I remember, I found turned into a beautiful painting all the life of her transformed into a brilliant shadow by the grace of the powers of this world who wanted to preserve her as she was forever, never aging, undying. While I dreamed, Cobalt was in the street.

  When he got to the entrance of the hotel, he paused for a moment in the doorway and looked over the men who were lounging there. They were chattering, laughing, joking. When they saw him, they became silent. Skagway knew Cobalt by this time, you may be sure! The latest comers and the oldest dwellers knew all about him. He had split open the mind of the town and put a new picture inside of it, so that the murders and the robberies of Soapy’s gang were no longer the only important themes of current news about which to gossip.

  One of the men by the stove said: “I beg your pardon, Mister Cobalt, but is it true — ?”

  “Not ‘mister,’” said Cobalt. “I never wear a title, man. This is a little too far north for titles.”

  He went out into the street without waiting for the other man to complete his remark. I suppose it would have been a question about one of Cobalt’s famous feats on the inside.

  There in the street, where the wind howled and beat, Cobalt was seen to stride up and down for some time. What was going through his wild brain at that time? Well, I suppose that it was the same theme that filled my poor brain as I slept — beautiful Sylvia. Perhaps he had a few thoughts for me also. I dare say, he must have wondered how she could give herself to an unimportant chap like me, a comparative weakling. It must have been the bitterest gall to him. A sense of vast defeat too must have been in his mind. He had never failed before, when he bent all his will to the work, but now he had failed miserably.

  I don’t know what he would have done, if chance had not given a direction to his misery. As he walked through the cold, driving mist of the storm, he heard a groaning, cursing voice ahead, and a big man came stalking through the dimness, walking with uneven strides. Cobalt listened, drinking in the sound of another’s sorrow. Then he took the other by the arm.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  The big man cursed him and tried to shake him off. Of course, he merely shook himself, not Cobalt.

  “What’s the matter?” persisted Cobalt.

  “Get your hand off me,” shouted the big man, all his grief turning into rage, and he raised a big fist to strike.

  Cobalt picked the fist out of the air and pulled it down. “Now tell me, what’s the matter?”

  The other grunted. “It’s Cobalt,” he said. “I didn’t know you in the whip of the wind. Aw, it’s nothing, Cobalt. They’ve trimmed me. That’s all. Not much. I had a hundred ounces. It ain’t a fortune. But it w
as all that I brought out with me.”

  “Soapy?” asked Cobalt.

  “Yeah. Who but him?”

  “One of the crooked machines? You gambled on ’em?”

  “I started. I wasn’t losing fast enough. They rolled me. They soaked me and rolled me for my wad. That’s all. It happens every day.”

  “It’s too bad,” said Cobalt.

  “It ain’t the money,” said the stranger. “It’s me being such a fool. That’s what grinds on me. Look at me! Forty-eight. Born with nacheral good sense. Now, see what’s happened to me. I’ll have to go back inside. I’d rather walk into fire and brimstone.”

  “Why not go another place for your money?”

  “Hey? What?”

  “Why not make a shorter trip to get your dust?”

  “I dunno what you mean.”

  “Go to those who have it now. That’s a shorter trip than Dawson or Circle City.”

  The stranger laughed. “I’m to go in and ask them for it, eh?”

  “Why not?”

  “Nothing wrong with that, except that I’d just get rolled again.”

  “Everybody gets rolled a few times in his life. Let’s go back and see what happens.”

  “In Soapy’s place?” gasped the other.

  “Why, where else? Come along. We’ll both ask for it. Two hands are better than one.”

  “By thunder, I see what you mean. But I’ll tell you what. You have nerve to do anything, but I haven’t. I’ve had enough of Soapy Jones and his gang. I like life pretty well. That’s all. I won’t go in there again.”

  “You don’t know yourself,” persuaded Cobalt. “The fact is that you’re aching to get back in there and hand ’em some talk. Tell ’em that they don’t play fair. Tell ’em anything surprising and new.”

  The other laughed. “You’re a card, Cobalt. There’s nobody like you.”

  “Come on, then. You come back with me, and I’ll get your money for you.”