Black Thunder

by Max Brand

  Harrigan, turning with it as the tender went by, sprinted with all his might. He reached his full speed as the observation car went past and he leaped high and far for the iron balustrade that fenced in the rear platform.

  He caught with both hands. The grip of one was broken. For an instant his body streamed out behind the flying train. Then he drew himself lightly up and scrambled aboard.

  The conductor came on the run, half a minute later. He took Harrigan by the collar. “Bums like you oughta die,” said the conductor. “I’ve a mind to throw you off now. If we weren’t behind time, I’d stop the train on the trestle, and heave you off into the gulch. But when we hit the next stop, you’ll be on your way to jail, young fellow.”

  Said Harrigan: “You’re mistaking me, my friend. My brother-in-law, Mister Peter Van Houston Dyce, is on board this train. I had to ride fifty miles to get here to tell him that his father has just been roughed up by a bear on my ranch.”

  “Get out of this observation car and stand on the front platform, you lying bum,” said the conductor.

  So Harrigan stood for eighty miles on the front platform, and smiled as he heard the roar of the wheels and their rapid syncopation over the tracks.

  It was nearing dusk when they reached the next stop. Harrigan slid off on the blind side of the train, and walked ahead as far as the first signal light. When the train passed that point, gathering speed, it gathered Harrigan, also, into its blind baggage.

  The vigilance of the conductor, who was led by a spirit of eerie inquiry, found Harrigan on the blind baggage, fifty miles farther south. He tried to brain Harrigan with a signal lantern, but the red-headed man escaped. He rode another seventy miles on the tops of the coaches, or between them, but at the last he was driven from this refuge.

  The whole train crew, by this time, had sharpened its eyes, hardened its fists, and roused its soul for this contest with a daring tramp. But it was not until the gray of the dawn that Harrigan, after haunting that express all through the night, at last, left the Overland. He would not have left it even then, except that he began to feel that perhaps he had overstepped his proper distance south. Therefore, in fear that Black MacTee might have ceased traveling in this direction, he dropped off at the railroad yards of a big cattle-shipping town to look about him and make inquiry.

  Three railroad detectives closed suddenly on him like three little kingbirds on one big hawk. He did not run. He did not fight. He let two of them hold him by the arms while the third rammed the muzzle of a revolver into the pit of his stomach.

  “You’re Harrigan,” said the third man.

  “With that gun in front of you, you can call me worse things than that,” said Harrigan.

  “It’s a big rap that you’ve got to stand for,” said the detective.

  “What’s the charge against me,” asked Harrigan, “and who made it?”

  “You murdered Joe Chantry, up yonder,” said the man who carried the gun. “And the gent that told us about you is the man that you’re chasing south. He’s the next one that you want to bump off. He didn’t look like the sort of a bird who’d run away, neither.”

  Harrigan blinked.

  “As big as me, or bigger?” he asked. “Black hair and black eyes and a dark skin?”

  “Yes,” said the man with the gun. “Come along, Harrigan. He warned us that you’re likely to make trouble. But the first trouble you start with us is gonna break your back and split your wishbone. Understand?”

  “I understand,” said Harrigan, “that he’d have me hanged to get me off his trail, and be damned to him. It’s Black MacTee, and gone blacker than ever. Oh, yes, I understand. I never heard of a man called Joe Chantry . . . but I understand.”

  He was marching forward with a man on either arm, and the man with the gun behind him. Now he stumbled, or seemed to stumble, and kicked out behind him with the fine precision of an Army mule. The gun carrier shot a hole in the morning sky and went down with a pair of battered shins. Harrigan threw the other two detectives on top of him, collected three guns, and ran toward the rumbling sound of a long freight that was pulling out on the southern route.

  It was a train of empties. He hooked his ride, found a boxcar, and slipped through the open door. On the floor he sat while the dust danced on the trembling boards and the landscape swept by him. Mountains near and far, then a series of black tunnels, with open country beyond, a smiling land of rolling hills with groves of trees shading it, and the flash of water running in every valley.

  They passed the scattered houses of another large cow town. As the train slowed, Harrigan left two of the revolvers in the boxcar and swung down to the ground. He had to sprint hard, because the train was still traveling fast. And while he was still helpless with the speed of his running, trying to keep from pitching forward on his face, leaning back his head and shoulders, he saw a long, lean man, with a deep-visored cap pulled well over his eyes, come out from behind one of the piles of ties that were corded here at the end of the railroad yard.

  This man raised a hand with the bright flash of a gun in it. Harrigan had been running as fast as he could, before this. He tried now to increase his speed. The end of the freight train went by with a departing thunder. He heard the voice of the man with the gun shouting for him to stop. A gun barked. But Harrigan dived the next instant around the corner of one of the big stacks of ties.

  There he waited. He looked down at his shoulder and saw the glint of bare skin. The bullet had nipped away a bit of the strong flannel cloth.

  Footfalls rushed up, crunching on cinders. A shadow sloped over the ground around the corner of the ties. so Harrigan sprang at that instant and laid the barrel of the gun he had kept along the head of the pursuer.

  Afterward he sat the limp body on the ground and waited for life to return to the eyes. He picked up the man’s fallen revolver. Inside the coat of the man he found the shield of a railroad detective. Up the sleeve of the coat, he found a handy blackjack.

  His victim groaned. Harrigan took the man by his long chin and shook his head violently.

  “Brother,” said Harrigan, looking down into the bright, dangerous eyes, “you’re another that MacTee has made a fool of. He’s told you to look out for Harrigan. He’s told you that Harrigan is wanted for the killing of a fellow named Chantry. Well, boy, I never heard of a gent named Chantry and that’s a fact. But I’ve heard of Black MacTee. Where is he? Which way did he go? Further south?”

  The bright little eyes looked at Harrigan without expression. They were simply bright.

  “All right,” said Harrigan. “I hate to do it, but I’m fighting against time.”

  He took the hand of the detective, pulled his arm rigid, and then tapped him with the blackjack across the ridge of the tight shoulder muscles.

  The detective closed his eyes and turned gray-green. Harrigan took the other arm, jerked it tight, brought down the blackjack on a similar spot.

  “All right,” said the detective. “That’s enough.” His eyes opened again. “Why not?” he said. “I don’t know what the game is that you two thugs are playing, but I know that I want you to meet. He left the railroad line, right here. I dunno where he faded to.”

  Harrigan went to a barbershop for a shave. The barber was so fat that even the effort of standing made him pant a little.

  “I read something in the paper, a while ago,” Harrigan remarked, deciding to try a shot in the dark. “The news came from here. It was about a girl with an Irish name. Her name is Kate Malone. . .”

  “She ain’t from here,” said the barber. “You mean the schoolteacher that saved her pupils when the school caught on fire?”

  “That’s the one,” said Harrigan.

  “She ain’t from here,” said the barber. “She’s teaching a crossroads school, eight miles out on the Cullen Road.”

  Harrigan left the shop and went to a clothing store. He bought a necktie and a cheap coat, then found the Cullen Road. A buckboard drew up from behind, stopped, to
ok him in without a word. The driver was a grim-faced rancher who kept looking straight before him and never spoke.

  “I’m trying to locate my sister, Kate Malone,” said Harrigan.

  The rancher turned his head a little, but looked at the distance, instead of at Harrigan.

  “I reckon that she’s found a whole crop of brothers, since the school burned down,” he said.

  He spoke no more for an hour. The green hills drifted slowly behind them while the two mustangs dog-trotted sullenly along, heads down, enduring the miles.

  At last, the old rancher pulled up the team and pointed to a cluster of trees around a red roof.

  “That’s the Tyndale house,” he said. “That’s where Kate Malone is living while the school’s rebuilding. I hope she remembers your face, young man.”

  IV

  There was a pleasant wind that tumbled a few white clouds across the sky. The hills were the finest Harrigan ever had seen. Never had there been such cattle as those that dotted the wide range. The very air was different, for Kate Malone also was breathing it.

  He went up the side lane, opened the gate, and passed on to the house. A Negro in a cook’s apron was carrying stove wood from the woodshed toward the kitchen door. Down the slope behind the house Harrigan saw, through the tree trunks, the gleam of running water.

  “I’m looking for Angus MacTee,” said Harrigan.

  “Yes, sir,” said the cook. “I guess he ain’t here, sir.”

  “No?” said Harrigan. “Is Miss Kate Malone here, then?”

  “No, sir, I guess she ain’t here, neither.” The cook rolled his eyes. “She was called away, sir,” he said, “by a message from town, and. . .”

  Harrigan grinned suddenly.

  “How much did MacTee pay you for telling me that lie?” he asked. “Ten dollars?”

  “No, sir. Five dollars,” said the cook. “I mean. . .” He stopped short, his thick lips parted, his eyes perfectly rounded as he saw that he had been so easily trapped.

  “Is MacTee here now?” asked Harrigan.

  “He . . . be . . .” stammered the cook. “I guess so.”

  “Is he down there by the creek? Is he with her?” asked Harrigan, pointing.

  The cook was silent, agape. So Harrigan marched straight down the hill, through the heat of the sun and the cool touch of the shadows, until he came close to the edge of the water. Then he heard voices, and slipped from tree to tree until he could see Kate Malone herself sitting on a rock at the side of the stream. The current curved toward the other bank, at this point, and in the still eddy lay the image of the girl with a patch of sun in her hair. Black Angus MacTee stood beside her.

  Since she was turned away from him, somewhat, MacTee did not need to guard his facial expression. Under the great dark ridges of his brows, his eyes burned with a black fire.

  When Harrigan saw the man, it seemed to him that he was dwarfed by the dimensions of MacTee and by the pride and furious, headlong desire in the face of the man.

  “What I want to know is not much, Kate,” said Angus MacTee. “It’s only to find out if you mind me being here close to you. It’s only to find out if you care the least mite for me, Kate.”

  She looked up, not at MacTee, but at the long, bright slope of the hill beyond the creek.

  “I’ve owed my life to you, Angus,” said the girl. “How could I help caring for you? Except for you and Dan Harrigan. . .”

  “Poor Harrigan,” said MacTee. “There was a man.”

  The girl got up from her place and looked straight into the face of MacTee. And Harrigan would have given worlds to have been standing nearer to study her expression.

  “Is Dan Harrigan dead?” she asked. Her voice was level. Who could tell what emotion was behind it?

  “If he were dead, would it be breaking your heart, Kate?” asked MacTee.

  “He’s not dead, Angus,” said the girl. “I know the two of you. I know that better friends never lived in the world than you are. If Danny were dead, you couldn’t speak of him with a still eye, Angus.”

  “I was his friend,” agreed Angus MacTee, with a ponderous sigh. “But now I’m thinking that it might be better for Dan if he were under the ground.”

  He turned away, slightly, from the girl. And Harrigan closed his hands to fists.

  “What’s happened to him?” asked Kate Malone.

  “Whiskey got him,” answered MacTee. “Whiskey got poor Dan. It was so that I didn’t care to let him go to town alone. He’d spend the money I gave him for groceries, on nothing but whiskey. I’d have to go in afterwards, and I’d find him with his money spent, singing in a saloon for more drinks, or holding out his hand on a street corner. . .”

  Harrigan leaned his forehead against the trunk of a tree and fought back the growl that was rising in his throat.

  “Poor Danny!” cried the girl. “I know how it is with great big impulsive natures like his. Oh, poor Danny.”

  Life returned to Harrigan as he listened.

  “If that was only the worst.” MacTee sighed. “But it’s not the worst. Whiskey takes hold of a man, Kate, and rots the heart in him. Whiskey turns the soul in a man. Poor Harrigan. I’m afraid he’s done for now. The law’s after him, Kate.”

  “For what?” she cried.

  “Don’t talk of it, Kate,” muttered MacTee. “Don’t have words about it. I wouldn’t breathe it even to you. Murder’s not a thing to be talked about, is it?”

  “Murder!” she gasped. Then: “I’ve got to go to him, Angus. He needs me, and I’ve got to go to him!”

  “Eh?” grunted MacTee, staggered by this result of his talk.

  “I’ve always sworn that, if either of you were in trouble, I’d go around the world to help you. And he needs me now.”

  “You’d do him good if he were like his old self,” said MacTee, shaking his head. “But there’s little left of the old Dan Harrigan. Ah, when I think of the eye of him, and the fire in his hair, and the fire in his heart, Kate, it’s a pitiful thing to think of the man he is now, with his hair turning gray, and his eyes dim, and his face all bloated. He looks old, Kate, and weak. The soul’s gone out of him. He wouldn’t want to lay eyes on you, Kate. It would remind him of the man he once was, and he wouldn’t want to lay eyes on you. It would remind him of the days when he was a man, and when he loved Kate Malone . . . if he really loved you, Kate. But I’ve always thought it was just that he saw I wanted you, and so he wanted you, too. Except for him, tell me the truth of it, Kate . . . you and I would have been married long ago. You never would have run away from me, except for Dan Harrigan.” “I won’t talk of it, Angus,” said the girl. “If Danny were here, I might try. But not when he’s away.”

  “It’s Harrigan that you loved, then?” exclaimed MacTee, with a terrible scowl. “When you ran away and left word behind you, you said in the letter that you really loved one of us, but you wouldn’t choose him for fear the other of us would be murdering the lucky one.”

  “You know well how it was,” answered Kate Malone. “I owed my life to you both. You were greater friends than I’ve ever seen in the world. But if I married one of you, the other one would be unhappy. And men like you and Dan, Angus, are sure to use your hands, when you’re unhappy. That was why I ran away. But if Danny is ill, I’ve got to find him. You must take me to him, Angus.”

  “He won’t need to take you, Kate,” said the great Harrigan, and stepped out from his shelter.

  She put out her hands toward him. He saw the terror of inquiry turn to joy in her eyes. She ran to him and he leaned over her and kissed her.

  “Angus, Angus,” said the girl. “How could you have played such a joke on me, with Danny standing there all the time?”

  MacTee was black, indeed. His great hands hooked themselves into predacious claws. His body trembled with passion. But he strove to cover this emotion with a harsh, grinding laugh.

  “I wanted to surprise you, Kate,” said MacTee. “And then have old Danny jump out like a j
ack-in-the-box. Good old Danny!”

  Cheerfully he smote the shoulder of Harrigan, a blow that would have felled an ordinary man.

  “Damn your black heart, you sneaking traitor,” murmured Harrigan, adding aloud: “Well, well . . . old Angus! He carried it pretty far, though. ‘Bloated face’ . . . eh? There’s the bright young wit for you. There’s the boy to make the crowd laugh. Kate, let me look at you. Let me soak you up with my eyes. God bless me, it’s a happy day, even if there’s a Black MacTee in it!”

  Her blue eyes were shining into the blue eyes of Harrigan. But the joy bubbling up in her grew suddenly dim, when she heard Harrigan end on the remark about MacTee.

  “I wouldn’t want to spoil any party,” said MacTee coldly. “I’ll step along, Kate. You and Dan seem to have a lot to say to each other.”

  “Stop it, Angus!” she exclaimed. “Stop it, Dan. You’re glaring at one another like two wolves. Can’t we be three friends together? Can’t we . . . ?” She stopped, with a groan of despair.

  “Sure,” said Harrigan. “We’re all friends together.”

  But still his eyes were fastened on those of MacTee, blue fire on black fire.

  And the girl, glancing from one to the other, turned pale. The happiness was gone from her as suddenly as it had come.

  But she made herself say cheerfully: “We’ll take a walk together, and talk over everything since we were last together. I’ll just run up to the house for ten minutes to change these shoes, and then we’ll take a stroll over the hills. Wait here.”

  She hurried up among the trees toward the house, turning once to wave and smile toward them, before disappearing.

  V

  When they were alone, each of them took a long stride that left them closely confronting one another.

  “Only one of us is going to be here when she comes back,” said MacTee.

  “Aye,” answered Harrigan. “Only one of us. You murdering thug, I’m going to take everything out of you. You ran off with the mule. You left me to starve at the mine. You chucked away our money. You planted the railroad dicks along the trail to salt me down with lead if they had a chance. But all that’s nothing. You had to lie to Kate Malone about me. You had to tell her that I’m a worthless drunk. Damn you, I’m going to take all of that out of you.”