The Max Brand Megapack

by Max Brand

  To the old, uniformed sergeant, Anthony told a simple lie. His father had gone for a walk through the grounds because the night was fine, and Anthony was to join him there later, but when he arrived he found a dying man who could not even explain the manner of his death.

  “Nothin’ surprises me about a rich man’s death,” said the sergeant, “not in these here days of anarchy. Got a place to write? I want to make out my report.”

  So Anthony led the grizzled fellow to the library and supplied him with what he wished. The sergeant, saying good-bye, shook hands with a lingering grip.

  “I knew John Woodbury,” he said, “just by sight, but I’m here to tell the world that you’ve lost a father who was just about all man. So long; I’ll be seein’ you again.”

  Left alone, Anthony Bard went to the secret room. The key fitted smoothly into the lock. What the door opened upon was a little grey apartment with an arched ceiling, a place devoid of a single article of furniture save a straight-backed chair in the centre. Otherwise Anthony saw three things-two pictures on the wall and a little box in the corner. He went about his work very calmly, for here, he knew, was the only light upon the past of John Bard, that past which had lain passive so long and overwhelmed him on this night.

  First he took up the box, as being by far the most promising of the three to give him what he wished to know; the name of the slayer, the place where he could be found, and the cause of the slaying. It held only two things; a piece of dirty silk and a small oil can; but the oil can and the black smears on the silk made him look closer, closer until the meaning struck him in a flare, as the glow of a lighted match suddenly illumines, even if faintly, an entire room.

  In that box the revolver had lain, and here every day through all the year, John Bard retired to clean and oil his gun, oil and reclean it, keeping it ready for the crisis. That was why he went to the secret room as soon as he heard the call from the garden, and carrying that gun with him he had walked out, prepared. The time had come for which he had waited a quarter of a century, knowing all that time that the day must arrive. It was easy to understand now many an act of the big grim man; but still there was no light upon the slayer.

  As he sat pondering he began to feel as if eyes were fastened upon him, watching, waiting, mocking him, eyes from behind which stared until a chill ran up his back. He jerked his head up, at last, and flashed a glance over his shoulder.

  Indeed there was mockery in the smile with which she stared down to him from her frame, down to him and past him as if she scorned in him all men forever. It was not that which made Anthony close his eyes. He was trying with all his might to conjure up his own image vividly. He looked again, comparing his picture with this portrait on the wall, and then he knew why the grey man at the Garden had said: “Son, who’s your mother?” For this was she into whose eyes he now stared.

  She had the same deep, dark eyes, the same black hair, the same rather aquiline, thin face which her woman’s eyes and lovely mouth made beautiful, but otherwise the same. He was simply a copy of that head hewn with a rough chisel—a sculptor’s clay model rather than a smoothly finished re-production.

  Ah, and the fine spirit of her, the buoyant, proud, scornful spirit! He stretched out his arms to her, drew closer, smiling as if she could meet and welcome his caress, and then remembered that this was a thing of canvas and paint—a bright shadow; no more.

  To the second picture he turned with a deeper hope, but his heart fell at once, for all he saw was an enlarged photograph, two mountains, snow-topped in the distance, and in the foreground, first a mighty pine with the branches lopped smoothly from the side as though some tremendous ax had trimmed it, behind this a ranch-house, and farther back the smooth waters of a lake.

  He turned away sadly and had reached the door when something made him turn back and stand once more before the photograph. It was quite the same, but it took on a different significance as he linked it with the two other objects in the room, the picture of his mother and the revolver box. He found himself searching among the forest for the figures of two great grey men, equal in bulk, such Titans as that wild country needed.

  West it must be, but where? North or South? West, and from the West surely that grey man at the Garden had come, and from the West John Bard himself. Those two mountains, spearing the sky with their sharp horns—they would be the pole by which he steered his course.

  A strong purpose is to a man what an engine is to a ship. Suppose a hull lies in the water, stanchly built, graceful in lines of strength and speed, nosing at the wharf or tugging back on the mooring line, it may be a fine piece of building but it cannot be much admired. But place an engine in the hull and add to those fine lines the purr of a motor—there is a sight which brings a smile to the lips and a light in the eyes. Anthony had been like the unengined hulk, moored in gentle waters with never the hope of a voyage to rough seas. Now that his purpose came to him he was calmly eager, almost gay in the prospect of the battle.

  On the highest hill of Anson Place in a tomb overlooking the waters of the sound, they lowered the body of John Bard.

  Afterward Anthony Bard went back to the secret room of his father. The old name of Anthony Woodbury he had abandoned; in fact, he felt almost like dating a new existence from the moment when he heard the voice calling out of the garden: “John Bard, come out to me!” If life was a thread, that voice was the shears which snapped the trend of his life and gave him a new beginning. As Anthony Bard he opened once more the door of the chamber.

  He had replaced the revolver of John Bard in the box with the oiled silk. Now he took it out again and shoved it into his back trouser pocket, and then stood a long moment under the picture of the woman he knew was his mother. As he stared he felt himself receding to youth, to boyhood, to child days, finally to a helpless infant which that woman, perhaps, had held and loved. In those dark, brooding eyes he strove to read the mystery of his existence, but they remained as unriddled as the free stars of heaven.

  He repeated to himself his new name, his real name: “Anthony Bard.” It seemed to make him a stranger in his own eyes. “Woodbury” had been a name of culture; it suggested the air of a long descent. “Bard” was terse, short, brutally abrupt, alive with possibilities of action. Those possibilities he would never learn from the dead lips of his father. He sought them from his mother, but only the painted mouth and the painted smile answered him.

  He turned again to the picture of the house with the snow-topped mountains in the distance. There surely, was the solution; somewhere in the infinite reaches of the West.

  Finally he cut the picture from its frame and rolled it up. He felt that in so doing he would carry with him an identification tag—a clue to himself. With that clue in his travelling bag, he started for the city, bought his ticket, and boarded a train for the West.

  CHAPTER VIII

  MARTY WILKES

  The motion of the train, during those first two days gave Anthony Bard a strange feeling that he was travelling from the present into the past. He felt as if it was not miles that he placed behind him, but days, weeks, months, years, that unrolled and carried him nearer and nearer to the beginning of himself. He heard nothing about him; he saw nothing of the territory which whirled past the window. They were already far West before a man boarded the train and carried to Bard the whole atmosphere of the mountain desert.

  He got on the train at a Nebraska station and Anthony sat up to watch, for a man of importance does not need size in order to have a mien. Napoleon struck awe through the most gallant of his hero marshals, and even the porter treated this little brown man with a respect that was ludicrous at first glimpse.

  He was so ugly that one smiled on glancing at him. His face, built on the plan of a wedge, was extremely narrow in front, with a long, high-bridged nose, slanting forehead, thin-lipped mouth, and a chin that jutted out to a point, but going back all the lines flared out like a reversed vista. A ridge of muscle crested each side of the broad jaws and
the ears flaunted out behind so that he seemed to have been built for travelling through the wind.

  The same wind, perhaps, had blown the hair away from the upper part of his forehead, leaving him quite bald half way back on his head, where a veritable forest of hair began, and continued, growing thicker and longer, until it brushed the collar of his coat behind.

  When he entered the car he stood eying his seat for a long moment like a dog choosing the softest place on the floor before it lies down. Then he took his place and sat with his hands folded in his lap, moveless, speechless, with the little keen eyes straight before him—three hours that state continued. Then he got up and Anthony followed him to the diner. They sat at the same table.

  “The journey,” said Anthony, “is pretty tiresome through monotonous scenery like this.”

  The little keen eyes surveyed him a moment before the man spoke.

  “There was buffalo on them plains once.”

  If someone had said to an ignorant questioner, “This little knoll is called Bunker Hill,” he could not have been more abashed than was Anthony, who glanced through the window at the dreary prospect, looked back again, and found that the sharp eyes once more looked straight ahead without the slightest light of triumph in his coup. Silence, apparently, did not in the least abash this man.

  “Know a good deal about buffaloes?”

  “Yes.”

  It was not the insulting curtness of one who wishes to be left in peace, but simply a statement of bald fact.

  “Really?” queried Anthony. “I didn’t think you were as old as that!”

  It appeared that this remark was worthy of no answer whatever. The little man turned his attention to his order of ham and eggs, cut off the first egg, manoeuvred it carefully into position on his knife, and raised it toward a mouth that stretched to astonishing proportions; but at the critical moment the egg slipped and flopped back on the plate.

  “Missed!” said Anthony.

  He couldn’t help it; the ejaculation popped out of its own accord. The other regarded him with grave displeasure.

  “If you had your bead drawed an’ somebody jogged your arm jest as you pulled the trigger, would you call it a miss?”

  “Excuse me. I’ve no doubt you’re extremely accurate.”

  “I ne’er miss,” said the other, and proved it by disposing of the egg at the next imposing mouthful.

  “I should like to know you. My name is Anthony Bard.”

  “I’m Marty Wilkes. H’ware ye?”

  They shook hands.

  “Westerner, Mr. Wilkes?”

  “This is my furthest East.”

  “Have a pleasant time?”

  A gesture indicated the barren, brown waste of prairie.

  “Too much civilization.”

  “Really?”

  “Even the cattle got no fight in ’em.” He added, “That sounds like I’m a fighter. I ain’t.”

  “Till you’re stirred up, Mr. Wilkes?”

  “Heat me up an’ I’ll burn. Soil wood.”

  “You’re pretty familiar with the Western country?”

  “I get around.”

  “Perhaps you’d recognize this.”

  He took a scroll from his breast pocket and unrolled the photograph of the forest and the ranchhouse with the two mountains in the distance. Wilkes considered it unperturbed.

  “Them are the Little Brothers.”

  “Ah! Then all I have to do is to travel to the foot of the Little Brothers?”

  “No, about sixty miles from ’em.” “Impossible! Why, the mountains almost overhang that house.”

  Wilkes handed back the picture and resumed his eating without reply. It was not a sullen resentment; it was hunger and a lack of curiosity. He was not “heated up.”

  “Any one,” said Anthony, to lure the other on, “could see that.”

  “Sure; any one with bad eyes.”

  “But how can you tell it’s sixty miles?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Well, at least the big tree there and the ranchhouse will not be very hard to find. But I suppose I’ll have to travel in a circle around the Little Brothers, keeping a sixty-mile radius?”

  “If you want to waste a pile of time. Yes.”

  “I suppose you could lead me right to the spot?”

  “I could.”

  “How?”

  “That’s about fifty-five miles straight north-east of the Little Brothers.”

  “How the devil can you tell that, man?”

  “That ain’t hard. They’s a pretty steady north wind that blows in them parts. It’s cold and it’s strong. Now when you been out there long enough and get the idea that the only things that live is because God loves ’em. Mostly it’s jest plain sand and rock. The trees live because they got protection from that north wind. Nature puts moss on ’em on the north side to shelter ’em from that same wind. Look at that picture close. You see that rough place on the side of that tree—jest a shadow like the whiskers of a man that ain’t shaved for a week? That’s the moss. Now if that’s north, the rest is easy. That place is north-east of the Little Brothers.”

  “By Jove! how did you get such eyes?”

  “Used ’em.”

  “The reason I’d like to find the house is because—”

  “Reasons ain’t none too popular with me.”

  “Well, you’re pretty sure that your suggestion will take me to the spot?”

  “I’m sure of nothing except my gun when the weather’s hot.”

  “Reasonably sure, however? The pine trees and the house—if I don’t find one I’ll find the other.”

  “The house’ll be in ruins, probably.”

  “Why?”

  “That picture was taken a long time ago.”

  “Do you read the mind of a picture, Mr. Wilkes?”

  “No.”

  “The tree, however, will be there.”

  “No, that’s chopped down.”

  “That’s going a bit too far. Do you mean to say you know that this particular tree is down?”

  “That’s first growth. All that country’s been cut over. D’you think they’d pass up a tree the size of that?”

  “It’s going to be hard,” said Anthony with a frown, “for me to get used to the West.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “I can ride and shoot pretty well, but I don’t know the people, I haven’t worn their clothes, and I can’t talk their lingo.”

  “The country’s mostly rocks when it ain’t ground; the people is pretty generally men and women; the clothes they wear is cotton and wool, the lingo they talk is English.”

  It was like a paragraph out of some book of ultimate knowledge. He was not entirely contented with his statement, however, for now he qualified it as follows: “Maybe some of ’em don’t talk good book English. Quite a pile ain’t had much eddication; in fact there ain’t awful many like me. But they can tell you how much you owe ’em an’ they’ll understand you when you say you’re hungry. What’s your business? Excuse me; I don’t generally ask questions.”

  “That’s all right. You’ve probably caught the habit from me. I’m simply going out to look about for excitement.”

  “A feller gener’ly finds what he’s lookin’ for. Maybe you won’t be disappointed. I’ve knowed places on the range where excitement growed like fruit on a tree. It was like that there manna in the Bible. You didn’t have to work none for it. You jest laid still an’ it sort of dropped in your mouth.”

  He added with a sigh: “But them times ain’t no more.”

  “That’s hard on me, eh?”

  “Don’t start complainin’ till you miss your feed. Things are gettin’ pretty crowded, but there’s ways of gettin’ elbow room—even at a bar.”

  “And you really think there’s nothing which distinguishes the Westerner from the Easterner?”

  “Just the Western feeling, partner. Get that an’ you’ll be at home.”

  “If you were a l
ittle further East and said that, people might be inclined to smile a bit.”

  “Partner, if they did, they wouldn’t finish their smile. But I heard a feller say once that the funny thing about men east and west of the Rockies was that they was all—”

  He paused as if trying to remember.

  “Well?”

  “Americans, Mr. Bard.”

  CHAPTER IX

  “THIS PLACE FOR REST”

  As the white heat of midday passed and the shadows lengthened more and more rapidly to the east, the sheep moved out from the shade and from the tangle of the brush to feed in the open, and the dogs, which had laid one on either side of the man, rose and trotted out to recommence their vigil; but the shepherd did not change his position where he sat cross-legged under the tree.

  Alternately he stroked the drooping moustache to the right and then to the left, with a little twist each time, which turned the hair to a sharp point in its furthest downward reach near his chin. To the right, to the left, to the right, to the left, while his eyes, sad with a perpetual mist, looked over the lake and far away to the white tops of the Little Brothers, now growing blue with shadow.

  Finally with a brown forefinger he lifted the brush of moustache on his upper lip, leaned a little, and spat. After that he leaned back with a sigh of content; the brown juice had struck fairly and squarely on the centre of the little stone which for the past two hours he had been endeavouring vainly to hit. The wind had been against him.

  All was well. The spindling tops of the second-growth forest pointed against the pale blue of a stainless sky, and through that clear air the blatting of the most distant sheep sounded close, mingled with the light clangour of the bells. But the perfect peace was broken rudely now by the form of a horseman looming black and large against the eastern sky. He trotted his horse down the slope, scattered a group of noisy sheep from side to side before him, and drew rein before the shepherd.

  “Evening.”

  “Evening, stranger.”

  “Own this land?”

  “No; rent it.”

  “Could I camp here?”

  The shepherd lifted his moustache again and spat; when he spoke his eyes held steadily and sadly on the little stone, which he had missed again.