Black Thunder

by Max Brand

  Now, as he beached the canoe, I began to see something familiar about the face, too. For one thing, it was clean-shaven, and it was almost a shock to see anybody come to the landing, that far north, without a shadow of beard all over the face. Yes, it was a clean-shaven face, and a very ruddy, brown skin—the complexion I recognized, also. But the next moment, when a white bull terrier jumped out of the bow of the boat and climbed in front of his master up to the level of the dock, I knew my man.

  I might forget the master, but I’d never forget that dog. Neither would you, if you could see him—fifty-five or sixty pounds of dynamite all fitted snugly under a glove of white velvet. He shone like marble, as he came waltzing along before his boss.

  “Hello, Larry!” I called out.

  I laughed as I said it, for I saw the man stop, in the same half-indifferent, half-smiling, half-pleased, and half-bored way, and wave a hand at me.

  “Hello, Joe,” he said.

  I was surprised that he remembered me. But he was the sort of fellow who was always coming up with a surprise. That was one of the pleasant things about him.

  He came over and shook hands with me. I looked him up and down, but he only looked me straight in the eye; yet, like a boxer, I knew that he was seeing every bit of me. He was smiling.

  “What are you doing ’way up here, Joe?” he asked.

  “I’m being an ex-deck hand,” I said, “and I don’t like the job, either. What about yourself?”

  “I’m looking for a fortune,” he said.

  I laughed at that, as though everybody in Alaska were not doing the same thing.

  “That puts you in a class by yourself, Larry,” I said. “Hardly anybody else up here is after gold.”

  “It’s different, Joe,” he said. “You know, I’m tired of bumming around. I’m going to settle down now. I don’t want much. They can keep their millions. I only want about a hundred thousand, working at interest. That’s all. And a quiet life.”

  I laughed again. He kept on smiling, but I could see, or thought I could see, that he was more than half serious.

  “What are you going to do?” I said. “Go out and dig it out of the ground?”

  He shook his head. “I never believed in manual labor, Joe,” he said. “It’s hard on the back, and it dulls the wits. No, I won’t do any digging.”

  “You’ve got to dig a little,” I said, “even if you go prospecting.”

  “Do you?” said Larry Decatur. “Then I won’t go prospecting.”

  “Oh, won’t you?” I said.

  “No,” he said, “I won’t.”

  There was a deal of finality about him. And I don’t know why what he said didn’t seem to me more absurd. But there was about him a certain quality that makes a man succeed in what he wants to do. The trouble with Larry Decatur, Laughing Larry, as a lot of people called him, was that he had never wanted to do very much. He was contented to sit a great deal of the time in the sun and let the world go by him. He was a sort of a tramp, not the kind that goes mooching around, you know, but the fellow who stumbles onto a packet of money here and a run of faro luck there. He is always getting flush, and then dropping everything little by little, never caring about what happens tomorrow.

  Have you ever taken a cat by the four feet and held it upside down with the ridge of its back six inches from the floor?

  Try it. When you let go of the cat, although it has only a hundredth part of the second to turn in, and it’s thin air that it’s twisting in, that cat will manage to wriggle over, and what hits the floor is not the backbone, but the four padded feet.

  Well, Laughing Larry was that sort of a fellow. You could hold him in any position and, no matter how far you dropped him, he’d land on his feet. That was why I took his casual lingo, rather seriously, up there on the shore of Lake Bennett. There were always possibilities of serious meanings under his jesting.

  “If you pass up the gold-digging business,” I said, “I don’t know where you’ll start.”

  “I’m a capitalist,” he said. “I’m just looking for the proper place to invest my money.”

  “Have you got a big wad?” I asked.

  “The roulette was pretty kind to me, one day several weeks back,” answered Laughing Larry. “So when I counted over my spuds and saw that I had a couple of thousand, I thought that I might as well invest the coin, instead of sitting down to spend it. It cost me five hundred, one way or another, to get up here, and I’ve got fifteen hundred left.”

  I laughed in dead earnest this time.

  “Why, man,” I said, “what are you talking about? The only thing that’s cheap in Alaska is money. Fellows make fifty thousand one day and spend it the next. They’d pay fifty thousand for an idea, maybe. And you’ve got fifteen hundred?”

  I laughed again.

  The bull terrier growled up at me, softly as a purring cat.

  “Stop it, Doc,” said Larry Decatur. “This is a friend of mine. He doesn’t like you, brother. But I’ll fix that. Give me your hand.”

  He took my hand and brought it down on the head of Doc. The dog blinked, sniffed at my hand, and then lay down at his master’s feet.

  “Is that the same one you had down there in Phoenix, six years ago?” I said.

  “Oh, was that where I knew you?” answered Larry Decatur. “No, this is the grandson of that dog. They come and go pretty fast, bull terriers do. They have a way of stepping into hot water and staying in it too long. But this one I’ve trained carefully, since he was a puppy. Doc stands for Docile. That’s his real name. And docile he is. At least, he is to me. And that’s what counts. He obeys me as far as he can hear me, and he’s almost as useful to me as a valet. Yes, a valet with a gun that he knows how to use.”

  “He’ll fight men, will he?” I said.

  “He’ll fight men,” said Larry, with pleasure in his eyes as he glanced down at the dog, “and he’ll fight dogs . . . he’ll take a horse by the nose and hold him for you. He’ll also throw a bull. He’s an educated dog, brother, and only two years old. When I think how much more he knows than a two-year-old child, for instance, I wonder where we get this stuff about the superiority of humans. Docile, here, knows how to fight a man with a club, or a man with a knife, or a man with a gun.”

  “How does he fight a man with a club?” I said.

  “Waits till he hits, and then goes in for him, for the club hand.”

  “And a knife?” I said.

  “That’s different. He jumps in with a couple of feints, and then he jumps straight for the knife.”

  “That would cut him up a good deal, wouldn’t it?” I suggested.

  “No, not much. That skull of his is close to the skin, and it’s all casehardened steel. He gets a slit across the skull, and the next moment he has the hand of the knife artist in that long fighting jaw of his. Look at that jaw, will you!”

  I looked. One look was enough. “And when it comes to a gun?” I said.

  “He dodges and runs for it,” said my friend. “But then he comes shifting back in and jumps from behind. The nape of the neck is his objective, when he jumps at a man with a gun.”

  “D’you mean to say,” I said, “that he’s ever taken a man by the nape of the neck?”

  “Mostly only the dummies that I’ve trained him on,” said Laughing Larry, “but there was a fool of a Portugee that had a big Dane, and, a few weeks back, the great Dane tried to eat Docile and was strangled while eating, so to speak. The Portugee came out to shoot Doc, and I told Doc to go for him. It wasn’t pretty, but the Portugee was a bad actor and a gunman. It didn’t break the fellow’s neck, because his neck was too thick. But it was a terrible shock to his nervous system, and I don’t think that he’ll ever pull a gun again, not on man or dog. Joe, isn’t it time for me to buy you a drink? And isn’t that a saloon over there?”

  I nodded and walked across the dock with him toward Bridgeman’s place.

  On the way, I said: “Don’t be surprised if you see a girl shelling out
the liquor behind the bar, because that’s White-Water Sam’s place.”

  “Who’s White-Water Sam?” he said.

  “Don’t you know?” I said. “He’s the fellow who tried like a crazy fool to run a paddle steamer through Miles Cañon. He got off the center of the boat, and the steamer wedged crosswise, and the current smashed it in two. Five men drowned, in that party, and only White-Water was pulled out by luck and a long rope. He’s never been the same since. He lost his nerve . . . and he’s a little batty. But there was a time when he was the greatest pilot in Alaska. His girl runs the bar, most of the time.”

  II

  There were a dozen men in front of the bar. Big Ed Graem was the chief center of attraction. He always was, wherever he showed up. I supposed, when I was inside, that everybody in the world knew about Ed and his dog teams, his gold strikes, and the fortunes that he was always making and losing. But I’ve discovered, on trips to the outside, that the world doesn’t know much about Alaska, after all.

  Ed Graem was as big as a mountain, hard and heavy. He was as strong as the Yukon when it sends the spring flood smashing out to the sea, with a hundred million tons of ice groaning and leaping and heaping on it. He was wild enough to be at home in the wilderness of Alaska, and that’s as wild as any man can well be.

  He was absolutely honest; he was square and faithful to his friends; he never refused money to people who were down and out. He had been down and out himself enough times to know all about how it felt.

  Of course, he had faults. He gambled away hundreds of thousands, literally, but in Alaska, in those days, we never considered gambling a fault. Money had to run wild in that country; it had to flow, as blood flows in the body. The real fault and the worst fault of big Ed Graem—Big Ed was what we mostly called him—was that he had a temper that was hung like a hair-trigger. He was always flying into a passion, and, when he was hot, he was sure to get into a fight.

  He’d forget that he stood six feet four inches and weighed two hundred and forty pounds. I don’t mean to say that he’d pitch into little fellows. No, but he’d charge a whole crowd of small fry and beat them up. There’s the story of how he cleaned out a barroom in Circle City, in the old days, by picking up a Swede by the heels and using his body as a club. He cleaned out the bar that day, and the Swede was laid up for a year.

  Big Ed pensioned him, and that was all right. But you couldn’t blame men for being a little nervous when Graem was around. Ed in a barroom was like a stick of dynamite in a fire. He might simply make everything brighter and ten times warmer than before. Also, he might explode at almost any moment. But the fellows who stood in real danger were not the little chaps. It was the big ones who were liable to have a bad time.

  You see, he seemed to go blind, and anybody, reaching up one to three inches over six feet, looked to Ed Graem like a fair match. I was around six-three myself, and I’d saved my own scalp from him twice by being able to run faster than that demon behind me.

  The next day he always apologized and did his best to patch up the damage he had done. Although you may be able to salve a man’s broken skin, it’s hard to salve his broken pride. That’s why there were scores of men in Alaska, in those days, who admitted all of Big Ed’s good qualities, but who nevertheless hated him.

  I thought of these things, as I took Larry into the barroom. And I couldn’t help noticing that he was hardly more than an inch shorter than the giant, and within some thirty pounds of the weight of Graem, too. But I flattered myself that everything would be all right, because there, behind the bar, just as I had expected, stood Nelly Bridgeman, serving out the drinks.

  She was rather a damper on the natural flow of conversation. Some fellows, who were used to swearing with every other breath after living in mining camps for years, were simply tongue-tied when she was around. But I’ve known fellows to travel two hundred miles just for the sake of sunning themselves for a couple of days in Nelly’s presence.

  She was no beauty, either. She was just a pretty girl, rather on the big side, with sandy-colored hair and gentle green eyes. She had a placid way of moving and speaking; her voice went easily into your ears, and the thought of it stayed in your mind for a long spell. She was simple-hearted and good. She was so simple that, on my word, I don’t think she realized that whiskey is likely to addle the brains of a man. As a matter of fact, she never had much chance to see the effects of it, even when she was serving behind the bar, because the moment anyone got glassy-eyed or began roaring, two or three of the boys would be sure to lead him outside, where he could cool off.

  But the chief reason that I was glad to see her behind the bar on this day was that I knew Ed Graem was crazy about her. He’d been trying to marry her for a year, and the only reason he didn’t succeed, we all believed, was because she didn’t want to saddle her father on any other family until his wits were less addled. Until he came through his mental sickness, therefore, she was there to care of him. No one else could do the job.

  I depended upon Nelly to keep the atmosphere calm. I was the only man, besides Larry, that stood tall, and Ed had seen me around enough—chased me around enough, you might almost say—to know me and be friendly even when he was in one of his wild tempers. Yes, Ed would know me. But he did not know Larry.

  I wonder if it’s right for me to say, also, that I wasn’t altogether without a sort of curiosity, wondering if big Larry could run fast enough to get away from Big Ed.

  Some of the others in the barroom were curious, too, as I could see from their grins. Particularly, there was that rascal of a Thomas Drayton, my old boss, standing in a corner of the bar and grinning from ear to ear, as he looked Larry up and down.

  It wasn’t the men who started the trouble, though. It was the dog. Right at the heels of Big Ed sat his newest and best leader, a hundred-and-fifty-pound brute of a MacKenzie Husky. And already that dog was rolling its red eyes toward Docile.

  Well, I paid no great attention to that, as I edged into the bar and waved to Nelly Bridgeman.

  She came down at once, leaving Big Ed leaning with his elbows on the bar, like a falling tower. I introduced her to Larry, and she shook hands and gave him a smile. She said that she was always very glad to meet any friends of Uncle Joe.

  It irritated me a good deal to be called that. I was about forty, in those days, and I really felt that I was hardly entering middle age. No man is ready to be called middle-aged until he’s made some sort of a position for himself. Joe Palmer, ex-deck hand, wanted some other title before being referred to as Uncle Joe.

  That scoundrel of a Larry Decatur saw how I felt, too, and he was chuckling as the girl gave us our drinks, collected the money, and went back to continue her chat with Big Ed. But even that short interruption had been enough to put him on edge, and started him glowering up the line toward Larry.

  Larry didn’t notice it.

  He turned to me and said: “You’re not as old as you seem to twenty. I suppose she’s twenty, eh?”

  “I suppose so,” I growled, still feeling a bit hurt, and herded out of things.

  “She’d make somebody a wife,” he said. “She has the look of a wife in the making.”

  “Ed Graem’s going to marry her, I suppose,” I grunted.

  Larry turned and surveyed the situation.

  “That fellow?” he said. “He’s a mountain, not a man.”

  “He’s got half a million or so, for the tenth time,” I said. “That’s Big Ed Graem. He’s famous all over the country.”

  What Larry said next surprised me.

  “It’s easy to get famous,” he answered. “He’s got too much muscle to have much brain. By the time his blood’s through nourishing that hulk, there’s nothing left to feed his gray matter.”

  “Isn’t there?” I asked. “You’d better not let him hear you say that, though. His temper is as short as his body’s long. And he’s likely to tie you in knots.”

  “No, he won’t tie me in knots,” answered Larry.

&
nbsp; I looked sharply up at him, and he repeated: “He won’t tie me knots. It takes a clever fellow, with a lot of luck, to tie me in knots. Just so many pounds of Percheron won’t turn the trick.”

  He said this not half as softly as he ought to have said it. And little red-headed Mickey Callahan, standing next to us, gave a long, hard look at my companion.

  I didn’t like that look. Mickey was the sort of a boy who would talk free, wide, and handsome. And a couple of words in the ear of Graem might be enough to wreck the whole place,

  I was glad to hear the voice of Tom Drayton, saying pretty loudly at the far end of the bar: “What good is she to me now? Nothing to run her for on Lake Bennett, any longer, and there’s no way of getting her down into the river without running Miles Cañon and the rest of it. That can’t be done. I’d give her away for a thousand dollars.”

  Then Larry lifted his head.

  “I have a thousand dollars, stranger,” he said.

  III

  That was an odd remark, considering that we were in Alaska. It was not odd in my ears, because I knew something of the nature of Larry Decatur, but the others did not know him. They laughed and then they whooped.

  The grin widened still more on the face of Tom Drayton.

  “If you got as much as a thousand bucks, you’re a lucky boy,” he said.

  Everyone laughed some more. Big Ed Graem turned his head, brooding on Larry, and the sound of his jeering laughter cut through the rest of the noise and zoomed above it. He could be an irritating fellow all right. He looked to me, just then, like a cross between a wolf and a bear. There was a look in his eyes that I had seen there before, and I didn’t like it.

  “What’s the her that you’ll sell for a thousand dollars?” asked Larry perfectly calm in the midst of the laugher, and smiling himself, and at ease.