Black Thunder

by Max Brand

  And the breath went out of me. It seemed to me that death was running toward us, and we were running toward it.

  I caught myself shouting, with words that the wind blurred together: “Reverse the engines! Reverse the engines!”

  Nobody heard me, I hope.

  Then the low mouth of the cañon leaped away behind us.

  Great Scott, I didn’t believe it! It was like a dream to see that we were safe and sure through that mile-long flume!

  I heard a tingling cry above me and looked up, and there was old White-Water Sam leaning out from the pilot house for a moment to take a side shot with his eyes down at the course before him, laughing and crying out with joy because of what he had done.

  I felt a stab of joy, too, because I felt then that Larry Decatur must have accomplished what he had set out to do. We might all die. We might all be broken up in the White Horse, but one among the dead would not be a madman. He would be as sane as ever in all his days.

  Now, if I tell you that the fear dropped away from me and that suddenly I forgot my miserable, selfish soul and was able to be glad in this miracle of White-Water Sam, I hope that I’ll be believed, and that I’ll be believed when I say that as we hit the White Horse Rapids, I was not afraid.

  It’s the truth.

  Those rapids are well named, for the water leaps in them like wild white horses, dashing together, flinging up their manes, and thundering like all the cavalry of all the armies of the world.

  Through that white mist of spray I saw a rock loom like a gigantic spear, held ready to rip us open from head to heel. Then a bell rang, and the engines backed with all their might.

  We seemed to be hurling down on the rock broadside. But no, with wonderful delicacy and sureness, White-Water Sam flanked that rock, and down we shot into the currents and the dashing water beyond. Beyond that, like people stepping through a nightmare into the beautiful peace of a sunny morning, we came out into the still waters below.

  We were through; we were safe. Voices came to us from the shore, and I saw dancing, wildly gesticulating men, prancing up and down and yelling their heads off.

  I looked at them as Columbus or one of his crew might have looked upon the savages of the unknown shore. For those men might have been far and done much, but they never had traversed the swift and arrowy maëlstrom through which I had just gone.

  I started to go up to the pilot house again, but, when I heard Nelly crying, and the steady, strong, reassuring voice of her father comforting her, I judged that it would be better to keep away.

  Going aft, I saw that Big Ed Graem had come up from below and was standing with his arms folded, his face turned toward the white dashing of the rapids above us.

  I did not feel that he had failed, because he had had a hand in the accomplishment of a great undertaking. But I knew the bitterness of his heart and pitied him.

  The voice of Larry called my name happily from the pilot house. I hardly wanted to go to join that noisy, laughing, weeping party. But something compelled me, and I went.

  Black Thunder

  The year 1933 was a prolific one for Frederick Faust with twenty-seven short novels and thirteen serials being published. “Black Thunder” appeared in the July issue of Dime Western under his Max Brand byline. It was one of three stories to appear in the publication that year as Faust began to branch out from Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine once his word rate was decreased, first from 5¢ to 4¢, then to 3¢. It is both a pursuit story and a love triangle as two prospectors vie for the woman they both love.

  I

  The stone was quartzite and the drill was dull—yet Harrigan sank the hole rapidly, swinging the twelve-pound hammer in a sort of fury.

  The hillside was a burning furnace of noonday heat—yet Harrigan would not abate his labor.

  The sweat blackened the back of his flannel shirt in an irregular pattern that was water-marked with salt at the edges. That back rose and fell a little with every stroke. The shoulders worked. Two mighty, elastic ropes of muscle sprang up from the waist and spread powerful fingers across the shoulder blades. But in spite of the strength of this man, one could not help expecting him to weaken and seek rest.

  Yet he did not rest. He continued steadily at his labor. An inexhaustible fuel, in fact, was being fed into the furnace of this man’s strength, and the fuel was anger.

  It was not merely the heat of the sun or of his labor that kept the face of Dan Harrigan red. It was not the effort of his labor that made his blue eyes gleam. It was a steady passion of anger that set his jaws and lighted his eyes from a fire of the soul. Rage was to him like a sustaining food.

  A mule brayed in the valley, and Harrigan leaped to his feet. He looked down toward the water hole in high hopes. But those hopes vanished. It was not MacTee, returning at last from town. Their mule was a piebald brute, and this was the usual dust-covered beast of burden, with a man on its back. The rider, plainly not MacTee, had just left the water hole, and was heading his mount up the half-mile grade toward the mine.

  Harrigan pondered this. For twenty-four hours, MacTee had been due back from town, with supplies. Yet he had not come. What, then, had happened? Had he fallen into a brawl in the town? Had the dark passions of his Scot nature boiled up until a .45-caliber bullet quieted them forever? Had that great soul, that stark and terrible spirit vanished from the earth?

  Harrigan was stunned by the mere suspicion that such a thing might be. He looked up at the sky, which was pale with the flood of the sunlight, and told himself that, if MacTee had died, those heavens would be overcast by thunderheads. There would have been a sign of some sort even in the middle of the night. Lightning and sounds of doom would have accompanied the passing of MacTee.

  And yet what could this be but a messenger to tell him of MacTee? What else would bring a man into the white heat of this desert? Not even buzzards wheeled in the air above the waste. Only the partnership of a MacTee and a Harrigan could have produced enough vital energy to drive men out here prospecting for gold. For two months they had broken ground, hoping that a thin vein of ore would widen. It had been bitterly hard, but Harrigan and MacTee were used to bitter hardships. They were, in fact, used to one another.

  The mule came nodding up the slope. The rider had bent his head. His hands were folded on the pommel of the saddle. He would be terribly thirsty. Harrigan turned with a sigh and contemplated the jug wrapped in sacking that was placed in a shadowy nook where the wind would strike it.

  The man came nearer. The bristles on his unshaven face glinted in the sun. He was as big as MacTee, Harrigan decided. He carried a rifle in a long saddle holster. There was a gun belt strapped about his hips. A big canteen bumped against the front of the saddle.

  That was good. At least, he carried his own water with him.

  Now he pulled up the mule close by the mine and dismounted. He looked young in years but old in the West. He stood still for a moment, staring at Harrigan, and the waves of heat rose with a dull shimmering from his sombrero. He was as lean as a desert wolf, all skin and bones and sheer power.

  “Howdy,” he said. “This is about the middle of hell, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah,” said Harrigan. “This is the corner of Main Street and First Avenue, in the center of hell. You couldn’t be wrong.”

  “All right,” said the stranger. “Then you’re Harrigan.”

  “Yes. I’m Harrigan.”

  “If you’re Harrigan, where’s MacTee?”

  “He’s not here,” said Harrigan.

  “You lie,” said the man of the guns.

  Suddenly Harrigan straightened. He seemed to grow younger. A tender light came into his eyes.

  “Brother,” he said, in the softest of voices, “did you call me a liar?”

  “I asked for MacTee, and you say that he ain’t here,” protested the other. “If he ain’t here, where is he?”

  “He’s in Dunphyville, yonder.”

  “You lie again,” said the stranger. “There
ain’t hardly enough left of Dunphyville to cover a prairie dog. If a jack rabbit tried to hide behind what’s left of Dunphyville, his ears would stick up behind the heap.”

  “That’s twice in a row that I’ve been a liar,” counted Harrigan, rubbing his hands together and looking rather wistfully into the face of the newcomer. “What’s your name?”

  “Rollo Quay,” said the big man.

  “Rollo,” said Harrigan, “it’s a funny name. It ain’t the only funny thing about you, neither. But before I make you funnier, I want to find out what happened to Dunphyville.”

  “It was wrecked,” said Quay.

  “I don’t know how God, man, or the devil could want to waste time to wreck that dump,” said Harrigan.

  “It wasn’t God, man, or devil that wrecked the place. It was MacTee,” said Quay.

  Harrigan nodded. “MacTee got restless, did he?” said Harrigan. “Well, if he got careless and stubbed his toe on a place like Dunphyville, I guess there’s not much left of the town.”

  “There ain’t gonna be much left of MacTee, when I find him,” said Quay. “Not when I meet him, there ain’t gonna. I’m gonna take payment out of his black hide for everything he did to my saloon back there in Dunphyville.”

  “Brother,” said Harrigan, “I hear you talk, and I’d certainly like to save you till you had a chance to meet him. But I don’t think that I can wait that long. What was the last seen of MacTee in Dunphyville?”

  “The last seen of him,” said Quay, “was a cloud of dust with a streak of lightnin’ through it. Nobody knows exactly where it landed. And nobody knows exactly where it disappeared to. But before I talk about Black MacTee any more, I’m gonna do something to make Red Harrigan a little bit redder. You Irish son of a hoop snake and a bobtailed lynx, I’m gonna take you apart, first, and find out where that skunk of a MacTee is, later on.”

  He stepped straight forward, feinted in workman-like manner with his left, and drove an excellent right for the head.

  Harrigan ducked his head half an inch and shed that punch as a rock sheds water.

  “Here’s the same sock with a hook to it,” said Harrigan, and knocked Mr. Quay under the hoofs of the mule.

  Rollo Quay sat up half a minute later and laid one hand on the side of his jaw. Then he saw that Harrigan was sitting on the back of the mule. The revolvers that Quay reached for were gone.

  “I’ll leave the mule in Dunphyville, safe and sound,” said Harrigan.

  “Damn the mule,” said Quay. “What I want to know is . . . where did you hide that blackjack when your sleeves was turned up to the elbow?”

  “That was no blackjack. That was the hook in the end of that punch,” said Harrigan. “I’m going to look for MacTee. If he happens to drop in here while I’m gone, talk soft and low to him, brother. I’m only a sort of chore boy around here. But Black MacTee is a man.”

  II

  There were only a dozen buildings in Dunphyville but they all seemed in place to the eye of Harrigan, as he drew near the town. In spite of the storm of which Quay had spoken, nothing appeared wrong, until Harrigan entered the single street.

  Then he noted sundry details of interest. Most of the windows were broken. The chairs on the front verandah of the hotel were missing one leg or two, and several of them had been converted into stools. All the Es in the sign General Merchandise Store had disappeared and were represented by ragged eyeholes of light. And the whole side of the blacksmith shop was scorched and the ground blackened beside it, as though the dead grass had been kindled in an effort to burn the town.

  Harrigan stopped the mule in front of the saloon. The two swinging doors were gone. The two front windows were smashed out. Broken glass glittered in the dust of the street. One of the frail wooden pillars that held up the roof over the verandah was broken in the middle and sagged to the side. The darkness inside had about it an empty air of desolation.

  “Yes,” murmured Harrigan, “it looks like Black MacTee.”

  He dismounted from the mule, made comfortable the revolver that was under his coat, and entered the saloon through the open doorway.

  It was indeed an empty spot.

  Of the long mirror that had reflected so many sun-burned faces, there remained against the wall only a few shreds of brightness and gilding. Of the long array of bottles whose necks and brilliant labels had shone on the shelf behind the bar, all were gone except half a dozen lonely last survivors. The brass rail was bent and broken from its brackets. Bullets had ripped the polished surface of the bar itself. And behind the bar leaned the one time stalwart figure of a fat man in a dirty apron. He wore a plaster over one cheek, a leather patch over one eye, a red-stained bandage around his head, and his left arm was supported in a sling.

  “Hello,” said Harrigan. “What happened?”

  The barman looked toward Harrigan with one dull eye.

  “Hullo,” he said in a hollow voice. “There was a kind of an explosion. After that, I don’t seem to remember nothin’ very clear.”

  “Let’s have a drink,” said Harrigan, putting one elbow on the splintered edge of the bar.

  “There ain’t nothing to drink except brandy at a dollar a throw,” said the barman. “All the rest. . .” He made a vague gesture with one hand. He turned to follow his own gesture and survey the destruction.

  “We’ll have the brandy, then,” said Harrigan.

  The barman found one of the few bottles that remained and set it with a glass before Harrigan.

  “You’re drinking, too,” said Harrigan.

  The barman filled a glass for himself, sadly.

  “Now,” said Harrigan. “What happened the other day when Black MacTee was here?”

  “It all started right over there in the corner,” said the barman. “MacTee was loaded up to start for his mine. His mule was hitched outside the door. And MacTee was settin’ there in the corner, readin’ a stack of the old newspapers that we keep there. There was a dozen of the boys in here, most of them from the Curley Ranch.” He paused, re-filled his brandy glass by sense of touch while his eyes still contemplated the memory. “All I recollect after that,” said the barman, “ain’t very much. I remember that MacTee come over here to the bar and set ’em up all around for the boys. They all drank, and he set ’em up again. And then he lifted up his whiskey glass and he hollered out . . . ‘To Kate, boys. . .’”

  “My God,” said Harrigan. “What was it he said? To Kate? What put him on that track? What newspaper was he reading? Tell me, man . . . what newspaper was he reading?”

  The flame of his hair was the flame of his eyes. He devoured the very soul of the man before him.

  “Wait a minute. Don’t hurry me or I’m gonna have a relapse,” said the bartender. “He ups with his glass and says . . . ‘To Kate.’ And everybody hollers out and downs the drink, except me. And when he sees that my glass is still full, he says what’s the matter with me, and I say no disrespect to the Kate that he knows, but that once I got tangled up with a freckle-faced snake by that name, and, ever since, when I heard the name of Kate, I got shootin’ pains and colic. Well, I no sooner says that, than he reaches across the bar and slams me, and I drop off into a deep sleep. When I wake up, this here is what I see.”

  “Kate,” said Harrigan. “He’s spotted her. He’s gone. For the love of the dear God, tell me, man, where’s the newspaper that he was reading when he let out that Indian yell?”

  “Where’s the beer gone, and the soda, and the bar whiskey, and . . .?”

  “Shut up,” said Harrigan.

  And the barman was silent, for he found in the eye of Harrigan something that was hard to meet. The blank fury of the great MacTee was not as terrible as the blue lightning that was now in the eyes of Harrigan.

  “How far to the railroad?” demanded Harrigan.

  “Seven miles,” gasped the barman.

  “Tell Quay, when he comes back, that his mule will be over at the railroad. So long.”

  And Harrigan f
led through the doorway and leaped into the saddle on the mule’s back.

  III

  The town of Caldwell Junction contained not a great many more buildings than Dunphyville, outside of the railroad station and the sheds. In such a small town it was not surprising, therefore, that the first thing Harrigan saw was the pinto mule with the black and white tail, standing outside of the grocery store. The grocer himself was loading a wicker basket, filled with supplies, into a cart to which the mule was hitched.

  “Where’d you get the mule?” asked Harrigan.

  The grocer was pink and white. All grocers have that complexion. His pink turned to red, and his white turned to pink, when he faced Harrigan.

  “There was a man here the other day,” he said.

  “Big . . . black hair . . . drunk . . . happy?” asked Harrigan.

  “Yes,” said the grocer. “What has he done? Are you after him? Who is he?”

  “He’s a double-crossing Scotch black-souled hound,” said Harrigan. “Did you buy this mule from him?”

  “Yes,” said the grocer, shrinking from the red and blue flame of Harrigan.

  Harrigan groaned—in his mind’s eye was the haunting picture of a lovely girl whose given name was Kate.

  “The big man with the black eyes, he pulled out of this town on a train, I don’t doubt. What train was it?”

  “It was headed south. It was a freight,” said the grocer, rather

  “What train is this one?” asked Harrigan suddenly, as a whistle shrieked up the track.

  “That’s the Overland, bound south,” said the grocer.

  “Then it doesn’t stop here?”

  “No. It just takes the grade slow, and. . .”

  But Harrigan, without waiting to hear more, without waiting for the money that had been promised, turned and sprinted down the street. He saw the engine’s head come nobly into view, swaying with speed. He saw that speed quenched somewhat by the upgrade passing the Junction. But still the train was thundering along, dust and cinders whipping under its wheels as it shot by the station.