The Max Brand Megapack

by Max Brand

  For a moment panic brightened the eyes of Townsend, and then he shook the fear away.

  “I’ve done it now,” he said huskily, “and they’s no use talking. Let’s get down to the finish.”

  The crowd was streaming away from the start, and headed toward the finish half a mile down the street beyond the farther end of Lukin. Most of this distance Townsend kept his companion close to a run; then he suddenly appealed for a slower pace.

  “It’s my heart,” he explained. “Nothin’ else bothers it, but during a hoss race it sure stands on end. I get to thinkin’ of what my wife will say if I lose; and that always plumb upsets me.”

  He was, in fact, spotted white and purple when they joined the mob which packed both sides of the street at the finish posts; already the choice positions were taken.

  “We won’t get a look,” groaned Townsend.

  But Connor chuckled: “You tie on to me and we’ll get to the front in a squeeze.” And he ejected himself into the mob. How it was done Townsend could never understand. They oozed through the thickest of the crowd, and when roughly pressed men ahead of them turned around, ready to fight, Connor was always looking back, apparently forced along by the pressure from the rear. He seemed, indeed, to be struggling to keep his footing, but in a few minutes Townsend found himself in the front rank. He mopped his brow and smiled up into the cool face of Connor, but there was no time for comments. Eight horses fretted in a ragged line far down the street, and as they frisked here and there the brims of the sombreros of the riders flapped up and down; only the Eden gray stood with downward head, dreaming.

  “No heart,” said Townsend, “in that gray hoss. Look at him!”

  “Plenty of head, though,” replied Connor; “here they go!”

  His voice was lost in a yell that went up wailing, shook into a roar, and then died off, as though a gust of wind had cut the sounds away. A murmur of voices followed, and then an almost womanish yell, for Lightning, the favorite, was out in front, and his rider leaned in the saddle with arm suspended and a quirt which never fell. The rest were a close group where whips worked ceaselessly, except that in the rear of all the rest the little gray horse ran without urge, smoothly, as if his rider had given up all hope of winning and merely allowed his horse to canter through.

  “D’you see?” screamed Townsend. “Is that what you know about hosses, Mr. Connor? Look at Cliff Jones’s Lightning! What do you—”

  He cut his upbraidings short, for Connor’s was a grisly face, white about the mouth and with gathered brows, as though, with intense effort, he strove to throw the influence of his will into that mass of horse-flesh. The hotel-keeper turned in time to see Lightning, already buckling under the strain, throw up his head.

  The heavy burdens, the deep, soft going, and the fact that none of the horses were really trained to sprint, made the half-mile course a very real test, and now the big leader perceptibly weakened. Out of the pack shot a slender brown body, and came to the girth—to the neck of the bay.

  “The stallion!” shouted Townsend. “By God, you do know hosses! Who’d of thought that skinny fellow had it in him?”

  “He’ll die,” said Connor calmly.

  The bay and the brown went back into the pack together, even as Connor spoke, though the riders were flogging hard, and now the roan drew to the front. It was plain to see that he had the foot of the rest, for he came away from the crowd with every leap.

  “Look! Look! Look!” moaned Townsend. “Two for one! Look!” He choked with pleasure and gripped Connor’s arm in both his hands in token of gratitude.

  Now the race bore swiftly down the finish, the horses looming bigger; their eyes could be seen, and their straining nostrils now, and the desperate face of each rider, trying to lift his horse into a great burst.

  “He’s got it,” sobbed Townsend, hysterical. “Nothin’ can catch him now.”

  But his companion, in place of answer, stiffened and pointed. His voice was a tone of horror, almost, as he said: “I knew, by God, I knew all the time and wouldn’t believe my eyes.”

  For far from the left, rounding the pack, came a streak of gray. It caught the brown horse and passed him in two leaps; it shot by the laboring bay; and only the roan of Charlie Haig remained in front. That rider, confident of victory, had slipped his quirt over his wrist and was hand-riding his horse when a brief, deep yell of dismay from the crowd made him jerk a glance over his shoulder. He cut the quirt into the flank of the roan, but it was too late. Five lengths from the finish the little gray shoved his nose in front; and from that point, settling toward the earth, as he stretched into a longer and longer stride, every jump increased his margin. The nose of the roan was hardly on the rump of the gelding at the finish.

  A bedlam roar came from the crowd. Townsend was cursing and beating time to his oaths with a fat fist. Townsend found so many companion losers that his feelings were readily salved, and he turned to Connor, smiling wryly.

  “We can’t win every day,” he declared, “but I’ll tell you this, partner; of all the men I ever seen, you get the medal for judgin’ a hoss. You can pick my string any day.”

  “Eighteen years old,” Connor was saying in the monotonous tone of one hypnotized.

  “Hey, there,” protested Townsend, perceiving that he was on the verge of being ignored.

  “A hundred and eighty pounds,” sighed the big man.

  Townsend saw for the first time that a stop-watch was in the hand of his companion, and now, as Connor began to pace off the distance, the hotel proprietor tagged behind, curious. Twenty steps from the starting point the larger man stopped abruptly, shook his head, and then went on. When he came to the start he paused again, and Townsend found him staring with dull eyes at the face of the watch.

  “What’d they make it in?” asked the little man.

  The other did not hear.

  “They ran from this line?” he queried in a husky voice.

  “Sure. Line between them posts.”

  “Fifty-nine seconds!” he kept repeating. “Fifty-nine seconds! Fifty-nine!”

  “What about the fifty-nine seconds?” asked Townsend, and receiving no answer he murmured to himself: “The heat has got to his head.”

  Connor asked quietly: “Know anything about these gray horses and where they came from?”

  “Sure. As much as anybody. Come from yonder in the mountains. A Negro raises ’em. A deaf mute. Ain’t ever been heard to say a word.”

  “And he raises horses like that?”

  “Sure.”

  “And nobody’s been up there to try to buy ’em?”

  “Too far to go, you see? Long ride and a hard trail. Besides, they’s plenty of good hoss-flesh right around Lukin, here.”

  “Of course,” nodded Connor genially. “Of course there is.”

  “Besides, them grays is too small. Personally, I don’t hanker after a runt of a hoss. I look like a fool on one of em.”

  The voice of Connor was full of hearty agreement.

  “So do I. Yes, they’re small, if they’re all like that one. Too small. Much too small.”

  He looked narrowly at Townsend from the corner of his eyes to make sure that the hotel proprietor suspected nothing.

  “This deaf-mute sells some, now and then?”

  “Yep. He comes down once in a while and sells a hoss to the first gent he meets—and then walks back to the garden. Always geldings that he sells, I understand. Stand up under work pretty well, those little hosses. Harry Macklin has got one. Harry lives at Fort Andrew. There’s a funny yarn out about how Harry—”

  “What price does the mute ask?”

  “Thinking of getting one of ’em?”

  “Me? Of course not! What do I want with a runt of a horse like that? But I was wondering what they pay around here for little horses.”

  “I dunno.”

  “What’s that story you were going to tell me about Harry Macklin?”

  “You see, it was this way—”
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br />   And he poured forth the stale anecdote while they strolled back to the hotel. Connor smiled and nodded at appropriate places, but his absent eyes were seeing, once more, the low-running form of the little gray gelding coming away from the rest of the pack.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When he arrived at the hotel Ben Connor found the following telegram awaiting him:

  Lady Fay in with ninety-eight Trickster did mile and furlong in one fifty-four with one hundred twenty Caledonian stale mile in one thirty-nine Billy Jones looks good track fast.

  Harry Slocum.

  That message blotted all other thoughts from the mind of Connor. From his traveling bag he brought out a portfolio full of wrinkled papers and pamphlets crowded with lists of names and figures; there followed a time of close work. Page after page of calculations scribbled with a soft pencil and in a large, sprawling hand, were torn from a pad, fluttered through the air and lay where they fell. When the hour was ended he pushed away the pamphlets of “dope” and picked up his notes. After that he sat in deep thought and drove puff after puff of cigarette-smoke at the ceiling.

  As his brown study progressed, he began crumpling the slips in his moist fingers until only two remained. These he balanced on his finger-tips as though their weight might speak to his finely attuned nerves. At length, one hand closed slowly over the paper it held and crushed it to a ball. He flicked this away with his thumb and rose. On the remaining paper was written “Trickster.” Connor had made his choice.

  That done, his expression softened as men relax after a day of mental strain and he loitered down the stairs and into the street. Passing through the lobby he heard the voice of Jack Townsend raised obviously to attract his attention.

  “There he goes now. And nothing but the weight kept him from bettin’ on the gray.”

  Connor heard sounds, not words, for his mind was already far away in a club house, waiting for the “ponies” to file past. On the way to the telegraph office he saw neither street nor building nor face, until he had written on one of the yellow blanks, “A thousand on Trickster,” and addressed it to Harry Slocum. Not until he shoved the telegram across the counter did he see Ruth Manning.

  She was half-turned from the key, but her head was canted toward the chattering sounder with a blank, inward look.

  “Do you hear?” she cried happily. “Bjornsen is back!”

  “Who?” asked Connor.

  “Sveynrod Bjornsen. Lost three men out of eight, but he got within a hundred and fifty miles of the pole. Found new land, too.”

  “Lucky devil, eh?”

  But the girl frowned at him.

  “Lucky, nothing! Bjornsen is a fighter; he lost his father and his older brother up there three years ago and then he went back to make up for their deaths. Luck?”

  Connor, wondering, nodded. “Slipped my mind, that story of Bjornsen. Any other news?”

  She made a little gesture, palms up, as though she gathered something from the air.

  “News? The old wire has been pouring it at me all morning. Henry Levateur went up thirty-two thousand feet yesterday and the Admiral Barr was launched.”

  Connor kept fairly abreast of the times, but now he was at sea.

  “That’s the new liner, isn’t it?”

  “Thirty thousand tons of liner at that. She took the water like a duck. Well, that’s the stuff for Uncle Sam to give them; a few more like the Admiral Barr and we’ll have the old colors in every port that calls itself a town. Europe will have to wake up.”

  She counted the telegram with a sweep of her pencil and flipped the change to Connor out of the coin-box. The rattle of the sounder meant new things to Connor; the edges of the world crowded close, for when the noise stopped, in the thick silence he watched her features relax and the light go out of her eyes. It enabled him to glance into her life in Lukin, with only the chattering wire for a companion. A moment before she had been radiant—now she was a tired girl with purple shadows beneath her eyes making them look ghostly large.

  “Oh, Bobby,” she called. A tall youth came out of an inner room. “Take the key, please; I’m going out for lunch.”

  “Come to the hotel with me,” suggested Connor.

  “Lunch at Townsend’s?” She laughed with a touch of excitement. “That’s a treat.”

  Already she gained color and her eyes brightened. She was like a motor, Connor decided, nothing in itself, but responding to every electric current.

  “This lunch is on me, by the way,” she added.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I like to pay on my winning days. I cashed in on the Indian’s horse this morning.”

  In Connor’s own parlance—it brought him up standing.

  “You bet on it? You know horse-flesh, then. I like the little fellow, but the weight stopped me.”

  He smiled at her with a new friendliness.

  “Don’t pin any flowers on me,” she answered. “Oh, I know enough about horses to look at their hocks and see how they stand; and I don’t suppose I’d buy in on a pony that points the toe of a fore-foot—but I’m no judge. I bet on the gray because I know the blood.”

  She had stopped at the door of the hotel and she did not see the change in Connor’s face as they entered.

  “Queer thing about horses,” she continued. “They show their strain, though the finest man that ever stepped might have a son that’s a quitter. Not that way with horses. Why, any scrubby pinto that has a drop of Eden Gray blood in him will run till his heart breaks. You can bet on that.”

  Lunch at Townsend’s, Connor saw, must be the fashionable thing in Lukin. The “masses” of those who came to town for the day ate at the lunch-counters in the old saloons while the select went to the hotel. Mrs. Townsend, billowing about the room in a dress of blue with white polka-dots, when she was not making hurried trips into the kitchen, cast one glance of approval at Ben Connor and another of surprise at the girl. Other glances followed, for the room was fairly well filled, and a whisper went trailing about them, before and behind.

  It was easy to see that Ruth Manning was being accused of “scraping” acquaintance with the stranger, but she bore up beautifully, and Connor gauging her with an accurate eye, admired and wondered where she had learned. Yet when they found a table and he drew out a chair for her, he could tell from the manner in which she lowered herself into it that she was not used to being seated. That observation gave him a feeling of power over her.

  “You liked the gray, too?” she was saying, as he took his place.

  “I lost a hundred betting against him,” said the gambler quietly. “I hope you made a killing.”

  He saw by the slight widening of her eyes that a hundred dollars was a good deal of money to her; and she flushed as she answered:

  “I got down a bet with Jud Alison; it was only five dollars, but I had odds of ten to one. Fifty dollars looks pretty big to me,” she added, and he liked her frankness.

  “But does everybody know about these grays?”

  “Not so many. They only come from one outfit, you see. Dad knew horses, and he told me an Eden Gray was worth any man’s money. Poor Dad!”

  Connor watched her eyes turn dark and dull, but he tossed sympathy aside and stepped forward in the business.

  “I’ve been interested since I saw that little streak of gray shoot over the finish. Eighteen years old. Did you know that?”

  “Really? Well, Dad said an Eden Gray was good to twenty-five.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He didn’t know a great deal about them, after all, but he said that now and then a deaf and dumb Negro comes. He’s a regular giant. Whenever he meets a man he gets off the horse and puts a paper into the hand of the other. On the paper it says: Fifty dollars in gold coin! Always that.”

  It was like a fairy tale to Connor.

  “Jude Harper of Collinsville met him once. He had only ten dollars in gold, but he had three hundred in paper. He offered the whole three hundred and te
n to the deaf-mute but he only shook his head.”

  “How often does he come out of the valley?”

  “Once a year—once in two years—nobody knows how often. Of course it doesn’t take him long to find a man who’ll buy a horse like one of the grays for fifty dollars. The minute the horse is sold he turns around and starts walking back. Pete Ricks tried to follow him. He turned back on Pete, jumped on him from behind a rock, and jerked him off his horse. Then he got him by the hair and bent his head back. Pete says he expected to have his neck broken—he was like a child in the arms of that giant. But it seemed that the mute was only telling him in deaf-and-dumb talk that he mustn’t follow. After he’d frightened the life out of Pete the big mute went away again, and Pete came home as fast as his horse could carry him.”

  Connor swallowed. “Where do they get the name Eden Gray?”

  “I don’t know. Dad said that three things were true about every gray. It’s always a gelding; it’s always one price, and it always has a flaw. I looked the one over that ran to-day and couldn’t see anything wrong, though.”

  “Cow-hocked,” said Connor, breathing hard. “Go on!”

  “Dad made up his mind that the reason they didn’t sell more horses was because the owner only sold to weed out his stock.”

  “Wait,” said Connor, tapping on the table to make his point. “Do I gather that the only Eden Grays that are sold are the poorest of the lot?”

  “That was Dad’s idea.”

  “Go on,” said Connor.

  “You’re excited?”

  But he answered quickly: “Well, one of those grays beat me out of a hundred dollars. I can’t help being interested.”

  He detached his watch-charm from its catch and began to finger it carelessly; it was the head of an ape carved in ivory yellowed with age.

  The girl watched, fascinated, but she made no mention of it, for the jaw of the gambler was set in a hard line, and she felt, subconsciously, a widening distance between them.

  “Does the deaf-mute own the horses?” he was asking.

  “I suppose so.”