by Max Brand
“If I go down and I’m flattened — even if I’m on the floor wriggling but beaten, I put a curse on any man who steps in to help me. Let Mister Carney go safely out of this place. And you there behind the bar, if I’m beaten, before he goes, see that Porter gets his sixty ounces. No, make it a hundred and sixty — for luck!” He laughed as he said this.
Porter said that his excitement was so intense that he simply forgot to think of what the wager meant to him. He could only stare and gape from one of these men to the other, wondering at the polite, circuitous way in which they expressed themselves and wondering still more at the fierce emotion which was in both of them. This miracle already had been accomplished. Cobalt had come into the spider’s den, and the spider had consented to fight without using the advantages of his web. And here Jess Fair came for the first time into the picture.
XXXVIII. TERMINUS AD QUEM
WHEN FAIR CAME in, he walked right up to the shoulder of his master and was heard to say: “Leave it, Soapy. This is my job.”
“It’s my job,” replied Soapy. “Your job is only after the finish, to see that the pair of them get safely out of here after you’ve paid them what I’ve promised. There’ll be no crawfishing today, Jess. This is my day. I feel it in my bones. Old Lady Luck is smiling at me. Don’t worry about me, because you’ll see me turning up on top.”
Jess Fair in reply murmured — so at least one of the nearest bystanders said: “Look at his heart, not at his face. Let his eyes alone, and shoot for the heart.”
The man who heard this looked across the room to where Cobalt was standing, and he said that he could understand the warning for the eyes of Cobalt were blue lightning.
“What rules do you want?” asked the gambler, turning back to Cobalt.
“We’re in your own house,” replied Cobalt.
“Nevertheless, we won’t use the rules of the house,” said Soapy Jones. “We’ll try a new set, like a new pack. We stand, back to back, in the middle of the room. We step off ten paces which are counted by anyone — say by Jess Fair.
At the tenth step, we turn and start shooting. If we can’t finish with shooting, we take the knives. If the knives won’t do, we end with our hands. Is that agreeable?”
“That’s agreeable,” said Cobalt.
“And if hands are not good enough, then anything we can get hands on will serve as a weapon.”
“Anything from poison to dynamite. Why, we agree so well it’s a pity that we haven’t worked as partners, Mister Jones.”
At this, Soapy’s face grew as black as his beard. “You’ve been the one man to thwart me and beat me. You’ve smashed up my men. You’ve walked alive through Skagway as if Satan were giving a charm to you. I’m going to have your heart for it, Cobalt!”
“All right,” agreed Cobalt. “There’s a heart in me to get, if you can win. It’s free for you to have. You’ve been liar, murderer, thief, and sneak all your days. You’re a greasy scoundrel, Jones, and we’ll see the end of you. Commence when you’re ready. Fair, will you give the signal?”
“Yes,” said Jess Fair.
For an instant the two glared at one another. Then they came together, making the last few steps slowly, their eyes glaring straight at one another. For the gambler disdained to accept the advice of Jess Fair.
They turned their backs on one another, and Jess Fair said in the most casual way: “All right, friends. One! Two! Three!”
He counted out the paces, and they took them, Cobalt stepping short, and the gambler stepping long. A grim thing it was, Porter said, to see those two men, hardly matched in the whole world, walking so stiffly away from one another, while the only man who could have made a third to them stood by and quietly gave the measure of that dance.
“Ten!” came from the lips of Jess Fair as quietly as any other number in the count, and the two turned.
Porter said that he expected them to side-step — or that one of them would throw himself to the floor, but he was amazed to see that neither of them did such a thing. They whirled and stood as straight and tall as fencers, their guns whipping into their hands and their arms flying straight out. It was marvelous, the speed with which each turned, and still more marvelous that they seemed to do it in a single beat, like trained dancing partners. Their revolvers exploded to punctuate the measure. Neither man fell at the first shot, but the Colt dropped from Cobalt’s hand. A sound like a weird, high-pitched moan came from the crowd.
Cobalt leaned for his fallen weapon, but he was beaten, it seemed, by the bad start. Perhaps by one millionth of a second, the bullet of the gambler had been fired first and leaped across the room in time to strike the very gun that was in the hand of the enemy. For there was Cobalt, leaning, the red blood running from the shattered hand with which he reached after the weapon on the floor. The second bullet fired by Soapy slashed the shirt of the other across the shoulder, but the sudden stoop forward of Cobalt saved his life for another instant. He scooped up the fallen Colt and, without straightening his body, he flung the heavy gun straight at Soapy. The whirling revolver struck not the head or arm, but merely the powerful body of Jones. Yet, even so, a full-weight Colt .45 is not a toy when it is hurled from the hand of a fellow like Cobalt. It banged into the body of Soapy and staggered him just as he was firing his third shot.
Thus there came about the miracle of that battle: of the first four shots fired only one reached a mark and that mark was only the hand of the enemy. The hurled revolver was followed by the tigerish leap of Cobalt. Porter swore to me that it was not a run across the room but a single, terrible bound that brought him upon Soapy Jones. The impact knocked them both from their feet, and thus entangled they rolled over and over and struck with a crash against the wall. The dust puffed up about them.
Then it was seen that they lay, each on his side, facing one another. The revolvers had been dropped, but Soapy, with a great, bent-bladed Bowie knife, was striving to cut the throat of Cobalt, and Cobalt had caught the moving knife hand in his left, not in his right. The crimson, fast bleeding right was merely good to control the other hand of the gambler.
The moan of the excited, frightened crowd rose to a higher key. Porter said that it was like the keen wind on an autumn day, the last day of the whirling leaves and the first of the black winter. But the knife was not traveling toward the goal at which Soapy had aimed it. Instead, it wavered for a moment in between, its point a scant inch from the throat of Cobalt. Then it was seen that the knife was turning. It wavered and shuddered, but turn it did, while those two mighty men struggled for its possession. The point crooked back toward the breast of Soapy Jones, and it was Cobalt’s hand which turned it. He was the master now.
Then, Porter told me, he could not look, so unnerved was he by the hideous slowness of the thing. He glanced away across the room and saw Jess Fair standing nonchalantly against the bar, his legs crossed, the buck-toothed smile flashing about as usual. Then, in a rush, the color left the face of Jess. Porter knew what it meant. At the same moment, he said, there came from the crowd of watchers a faint sigh in unison, as though drawn by a single throat, and the sound froze him to the very marrow of his soul. It lifted him out of his chair and, looking back toward the corner, he saw Cobalt rising to his feet, while big Soapy Jones remained motionless on the floor, looking at the ceiling, a high light gleaming on his forehead. Porter knew very well that the upturned eyes saw nothing, and that the tremor was in the light and not in the flesh. Soapy Jones had breathed his last.
The next thing that Porter knew he was being led to the bar by Cobalt, as if for a drink, while every man in the room remained rooted to his place by the terror and horror of what had been seen. Only one man moved, a big, husky miner who slumped to the floor in a dead faint. It was not a drink that Porter got at the bar. Behind it stood Jess Fair, marble-white but with his buck-toothed smile still flashing. He laid a ten-pound gold belt before Porter, and the latter took it. He said that Jess Fair did not look at him at all but only at the fac
e of Cobalt. His eyes wandered curiously from feature to feature, as if he were an artist and strove to remember that face, that he might sketch it later on, though Porter very well knew that it was not as an artist, with brush or pen, that the barkeeper stared at Cobalt.
They turned toward the door together, Cobalt and Porter. As they did so, pandemonium broke loose in the saloon. The bouncers, the strong-arm men, all had quietly vanished, and the crowd which had been like sheep under the eye of Soapy Jones alive, now roared like lions when they knew that he was dead. They paid no attention to Cobalt and his red-dripping hand. They were only intent upon smashing and looting the saloon, and they did a good job of it. Chairs were used as clubs. Glasses were smashed. Men pulled open the cash drawers behind the bar and looted them. They rushed in swarms to do the same thing at the gaming tables.
No one opposed them. The organization of Soapy Jones was just as strong as it had been before his death. There were just as many bloodthirsty and expert criminals, but the head had been struck from the body. At one blow Soapy’s gang was dispensed.
At the door, Porter said, he looked back and the swirl of the crowd, like the dashing of water in a cataract, parted before his glance for an instant and gave him a view of Jess Fair, on his knees beside the body of his dead master with one hand upon his face. It was a gesture of infinite gentleness and grief, and Porter never could speak of it without amazement and a shake of his head.
When they got into the street, he did a foolish thing. He told Cobalt that he had received two for one, two ounces for every ounce of dust that had been stolen from him. He offered half of the loot to Cobalt and even remarked, like a tactless fool, that it might be some time before his right hand was in working shape again. Some time, indeed!
Cobalt made no answer. I don’t suppose that he ever had been in the least interested in Porter and Porter’s loss or gain. It was merely the small entering wedge which he had used to topple over the huge structure of Soapy’s organization.
XXXIX. THE MONARCH BEATEN
ALL THIS HAPPENED while I had been sleeping. What could I have done, had I been awake and on the spot? Well, nothing, perhaps, but it was a time when a man would wish to be on the ground where the action took place. What wakened me was Baird’s shaking me by the shoulder.
“The town is on the loose!” he said. “And hell’s to pay! Listen! Look out the window!”
I sat up in the bed. The noise from the street instantly cleared the fog of sleep from my brain and left me perfectly alert. I heard the dull roar of many voices. I looked through the window as I jumped up from the bed, and there I saw a tall red flame leaping into the sky.
“What is it?” I asked. “Have the fools set the town on fire?”
“It looks like Soapy’s place,” said Baird. “I can’t quite make it out, but it looks about the location of Soapy’s place. Let’s find out what’s happening. I’ll get Sylvia.”
Sylvia did not need to be fetched. She was tapping on the door of our room as her father spoke, and he let her in. We went down together. There was no one in the lobby except a small, greasy-looking boy who was rummaging through the desk of the proprietor. He had half the drawers out and their contents scattered over the floor. When we spoke to him, he jumped up and looked at us like the guilty little rat that he was. Then he gathered courage. The boss was gone, and he would not come back.
“Not even come back for the rent that’s owing to him?” I asked the youngster.
“Naw! He’ll never come back. He’s started overland. All that he wants is fast mushing and a good dog team. He’d rather have a good dog team than all of the rent in the world.”
“What in the world has happened?” Baird asked him. “What buildings are burning down there?”
“Soapy’s gone up in smoke,” replied the boy and deliberately turned his back on us, starting to rummage once more through the ravished drawers of that desk.
We went out into the street. There was a crowd running about, breaking into buildings, shouting and screeching with an insane pleasure. We managed to find one man who was an onlooker, like ourselves. He told us the story in brief. It was not until a long time afterward that I gathered the full details from Porter and many others. It was far more impressive, when one heard it from that stranger briefly, for he made the thing more of a miracle. With the details stripped away, it seemed Herculean, inhuman, the courage and the power that a single man had shown in advancing into the house of the gambler and killing him there in the presence of all his followers.
“Did Jess Fair do nothing?” I remember asking.
“Jess Fair? Sure. He buried his boss!” He laughed in a strange way.
“Buried already?” I asked.
“Yeah. In fire.”
“Did Jess set fire to the gambling house?” I asked.
“Yeah. That’s what they say,” replied the other. He was indifferent, but he chuckled every now and then, looking up and down the street at the smashing going on and the crowd dashing about.
“Tell me something,” I said to him.
“Well?”
“You’re a newspaper reporter, aren’t you?”
“The hell! How did you guess that?”
Then we asked where the hero was to be found. Certainly, the best that Skagway could offer would not be too good for him now. But our reporter friend of the detached manner and the chuckle had not been able to find Cobalt.
“I’d rather listen to him for five minutes now than to have a five-column head!” he said.
We went on, pursuing our inquiries, and the story grew and grew with every step that we made. We went down to the gaming house, and there we saw a number who, like ourselves, were gazing with wonder and a little awe upon the crimson and black, fast-dissolving remnants of the famous house of crime. I asked one of them who stood nearby if it was really true that Jess Fair had kindled the fire to cremate the body of his master. He said that it was true and that he had started the fire in order to drive out the crowd which was getting rough and looting the place. In other words, he preferred to let the flames take the gold of his crooked master.
“What’s made Jess Fair so devoted to Soapy Jones?” asked Baird of another man.
“Well, Soapy got him young,” said the other. “That’s all. If you start early enough, you can make any pup into a one-man dog.”
That was the only explanation I ever heard of the singular attachment which the gunman showed for the master criminal. We were to learn more later on.
We were standing there, watching the crumbling of the last of the ruin, out of which there came small explosions from time to time, and leaping columns of sparks, fire, and smoke. The heat was welcome and bathed us in a blood-red glow.
“You see?” said Sylvia aside to me. “That’s the reason. You see what he’s done?”
“You mean Cobalt?” I asked.
“Yes. That’s what I mean. You see how he’s smashed that place?”
“I see that he’s removed a curse from Skagway,” I told her. “I see that he’s done what the whole mob of the so-called law abiding, including your father and myself, never had the courage to attempt. I see that he’s given Skagway a chance to draw a breath and make of itself a decent place. That’s what I see, Sylvia.”
“Don’t be so indignant,” she replied. “I hoped you’d see what I mean.”
“I think you’re only blind, Sylvia. You won’t open your eyes to the truth about him.”
“I won’t give myself into the hands of a hypnotist,” she replied. “That’s all. If I’d let myself go, I could be mad about him. But there’s no check on him. There’s no rein that would hold him in. He’d run away. He’d be apt in a crisis to smash things right and left. A man who wronged him would be apt to lead him into a murder. There’s no holding him.”
“You could hold him,” I told her.
“I? Why, he saw through me at the first glance. He wasn’t fooled by my little airs. Not a bit! He saw there was trouble in me. I was the first w
oman that looked strong enough to amuse him, strong enough to give him a little occupation in mastering her. That’s the whole trouble. He’d have me mastered soon enough, and then he’d lose interest.”
I wondered if she were right. She had a keen way of looking into things, I must say, even from the first. She could be a doctor who prescribed for the physician. She had prescribed me as an antidote for the great Cobalt, simply because I was the reverse of him in every way.
A pair of men came up and stood beside us and talked about the fire and the cause of it. They mentioned Cobalt, of course. Both of them had been in the gambling den when the fight took place. It was from one of them that I first heard of how the knife had been turned in Soapy’s hand and used to take his life. It was a neat and horrible detail, and I looked askance to see how Sylvia was taking it. Her lips curled.
“Like a dog fight?” I heard her faintly whisper.
That enraged me suddenly.
Then one of the two strangers said something about its being the end of Cobalt, too. You can imagine how that interested all of us.
“What do you mean?” asked Baird sharply. “What do you mean by its being the end of Cobalt?”
“Well,” said the other, “he had two hands, didn’t he?”
“Of course, of course!” snapped Baird impatiently.
“Well,” said the stranger, “now that he has only one hand, wouldn’t you say he’s divided in two?”
“Only one hand?” asked Sylvia in a quiet voice but one that set my teeth on edge. “Has he lost a hand?”
“Yes, it’s practically ruined. Where the bullet tore the gun out of his hand. They say the cords are cut inside the palm. I saw it dripping red. It was bleeding pretty fast, and he went right out into the cold with it. I reckon he’ll never use that hand again.”
Sylvia took her father and me, each by an arm, and drew us together.