Out of the Wilderness

by Max Brand

  “I’ll tell you what that man did…not a man, a gorilla…he got to the house of Rézan and climbed up the wall clear to the top story…holding onto the crevices by the tips of his fingers only.”

  “Aye,” Peggy said, a faint fire coming to her eyes. “I knew that he could do a thing like that. There’s the strength of a giant in him. I could tell that by the first glance.”

  The sheriff bit his lip. “There he tore out the iron bars that the old don put up at the time of the feud with the sheepmen.”

  “With his bare hands?”

  “His bare hands.”

  “Wonderful!”

  “Wonderful? Then he swung himself into that room, and I tell you that he dropped to the floor and ran at Don José.”

  “Was Don José asleep while the bars were being torn from his window?”

  “No, he was awake and shooting.”

  “Ah, good heavens!”

  “But Sweyn got him by the throat and….”

  “Sandy was not hurt, then?”

  “Confound it, Peggy, you really act like an idiot. Have you no sympathy for poor Rézan?”

  “Of course…of course. But what happened then?”

  “Two more men that Rézan had wisely posted in the hall of his house came running in and tried to handle this Sweyn. He smashed them almost to bits, and it took the whole household to beat Sweyn down and tie him. I got him then, and put him in the jail. Confound me if the madman doesn’t talk as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

  “And wasn’t it?” asked the girl.

  “What!” cried her father.

  “Why, Dad, he had tried to have his men destroy….”

  “Confound it, Peggy, you talk like…. Well, now I have to tell you the rest of the story…the reason why he really wanted to kill Rézan.”

  He had hoped that he would not have to use this weapon against her. He had hoped that the picture of Sweyn, like a long-armed gorilla, climbing the wall of the house, and tearing his way in to murder a man, would have been enough to revolt her. Apparently she was not touched.

  “It was because the marriage of Don José and little Catalina was set for tomorrow.”

  Now he had touched her, to be sure. The color that had been surging back into her cheeks, making her pretty face almost beautiful, now was being swept away, again, at a stroke.

  “Because of that?” Peggy murmured, looking suddenly down at the floor.

  “You’ll never believe it, Peggy. But this wild man had climbed to the room of Catalina…seen her…gone mad with the love of her….”

  Peggy reached for the wall, found it, and steadied herself against it. “And then?” gasped out poor Peggy.

  “Finally the madman decided that the only thing that was left for him to do, was simply to murder this Rézan, so that the girl, if you’ll believe me, would not have the trouble of breaking her word to José Rézan. Yes, sir, he considers that Rézan is his by right…and with Rézan dead, he, Sandy Sweyn, will marry the Mexican beauty. Isn’t it enough to make you laugh?”

  “Yes,” Peggy said faintly. “Enough to make one laugh…but…it’s pretty late. I’m going to bed.” She went slowly off toward her room.

  The sheriff closed his teeth upon his pipe so hard that the stem splintered in a dozen shards under the pressure. Then, stealing down the hall, he leaned his ear at the door of his daughter’s room. For a moment, he heard nothing, and then there was a muffled pulse of sound, hardly louder than the beating of his own heart. Poor Peggy was inside there, almost sobbing her heart out, he knew.

  The sheriff went to his room and paced up and down, full of anxiety. He knew that Peggy was deeply in love with this strange fellow from the wilderness, who charmed animals with his voice and eye, and stirred the hearts of impressionable girls with a glance. He was determined to keep the wild man behind the bars so long as he honestly could do it.

  He went back to the jail at once, and there he found Sam, the keeper, just finishing his rounds. Sam was very glad of company.

  “Just sits and looks at me,” Sam stated, “and never closes his eyes, so far as I can see. Never even winks them. I offered him a cigarette, but he laughed and said that he wasn’t smoking. There he sits still on his bunk, and when I come in with the lantern, the first thing that I see is the yaller light of his eyes. When I go out with the lantern, the last thing that I see is still the yaller in the same eyes. It’s the spookiest job that I ever had in my life, and, by the looks of this fellow, I’d say that he wasn’t no half-wit, but a lot more like a fellow that knowed that before morning some of his pals would come along and crack this jail like a walnut and take him out with them. Which is one way of saying that I ain’t having a very pleasant night here, old-timer.”

  The sheriff grinned. “Watch him like he was your right hand, Sam,” he said. “Now bring me all the keys…those to his handcuffs and his cell door…set an extra pair of irons on his legs, and bring me the key to that, while you’re about it.”

  Sam obeyed, and, when the keys had been brought, the sheriff pocketed them with a grunt of satisfaction. He returned at once to his house. There he found Peggy, fully dressed, waiting in the kitchen. She came to him with a gasp.

  “Was there another telephone message, Dad?” she asked him. “Has something gone wrong again?”

  “Nothing has gone wrong. I was simply making a little surer of our friend, Sweyn.”

  “What has he done now?”

  “In the jail? Nothing, and I don’t intend that he will do anything. I have the keys in my vest pocket that unlock his irons, honey, and, no matter what happens, I’m sure of keeping him safe till the morning, now.”

  “But could he in any way have escaped?”

  “How can I tell what friends he has that might break in to him?” asked the sheriff. “No, Peggy, I want you to go back to bed. Sweyn is in that jail for keeps.”

  He set the example by going to his room. There he lay awake until he heard Peggy stirring about in her own chamber, and finally he closed his eyes. He wakened once, a little later, with a start, and reached to make sure that his coat and vest were still hanging on the chair at the side of his bed. Then he turned over and fell asleep in real earnest, as one who had performed a hard day’s work successfully.

  In the morning he wakened and listened for a moment, surprised by the silence, for in the kitchen there was generally the stir of Peggy, at this hour, busy about her task of preparing his breakfast. There was no sound now.

  He rose, feeling that the evening before had been too hard on her, and deciding that he would let her sleep as long as she might. He reached for his coat, to feel the familiar jangling of the keys. To his horror, there was no responsive sound. He felt hastily in the pockets—the keys were gone!

  Forty-Four

  The keys were gone, and not by chance. In the black hour that precedes the rising of the sun, a figure skulked close to the wall of the jail, until it came to the little rear door, set strongly into the wall, and secured by an outward tangle of strong iron bars.

  It was Peggy Kilmer. From beneath her cloak she produced, now, a number of keys, tried two or three, and finally fitted one to the lock. It opened easily, noiselessly for Sheriff Kilmer was not one to allow the locks at his jail to grow rusty. So she drew the door wide, and a whistling gust of wind rushed into the interior of the jail. Closing the door hastily behind her, she leaned for a moment against the wall, faint with fear, listening to the beating of her heart.

  The whistling burst of wind had not caused alarm, apparently, within the jail. There was no sound of voice or footfall. When the silence had continued for a moment, she began a stealthy progress toward the nest of cells.

  She had not taken half a dozen steps when a door at the farther side of the big apartment opened suddenly, and a shaft of yellow light struck her full in the face. Terror made her co
llapse. She dropped to the floor, and waited, unnerved, for discovery. It did not follow.

  Sam carried his lantern into the place for his final tour of inspection, stepping along with a weary stride. The swinging lantern that he carried threw waves of barred shadows up the walls and flooded onto the white ceiling. At the coil of Sandy Sweyn, he paused and held the lantern high.

  “Still awake, eh?” Sam asked. “Still waiting?”

  There was no answer. Peggy, looking through the forest of crossed and intercrossed bars before her, could see the prisoner sitting erect, his arms folded, with a flame in his yellow eyes as he smiled at the guard.

  “Well,” Sam said, “in half an hour more there’ll be sunrise light, and that’s the end of your hopes, young feller. Keep that fact in your mind, will you.? And…if I was you, I’d go to sleep. You must be plumb tuckered out.”

  Sam turned away, and his hobnail shoes gritted upon the concrete floor as he left the room. The heavy door closed with a ponderous sigh behind him and showed, at last, only a thin rim of light outlining the rectangle of the door.

  Peggy crept to her feet and hurried softly to the cell. There was a night light in the jail—a single smoking lamp—that burned in a far corner, making the cells and the steel bars seem ten times their normal size. By that light, it seemed to the girl that it was a monster rather than a man who was waiting there in the cell.

  She had studied the keys before. One was for the door; this for the leg irons. When the irons were loosened, and fell away heavily into her trembling hands, she looked up, and saw the faint glimmer of those yellow eyes above her. Still Sandy had not spoken. She fitted the last key of all into the handcuffs, and now the man was free to do as he pleased. He did not rise.

  “Hurry,” whispered Peggy Kilmer at last. “The irons are off. The door is open. I left my own horse outside, and I think that he’ll carry your weight…for a ways. Here’s an ammunition belt and a Colt. Don’t use it unless you have to, Sandy Sweyn.”

  He would not take the proffered weapon, but reached out and took her face between both his hands. “What’ll they be doing to you, Peggy, when they find out that you’ve turned me loose?”

  “I don’t know,” Peggy admitted, “and I don’t care. They’ll never find out, if I can get back, quickly enough.”

  “I got a feeling,” Sandy said, closing his eyes in intense thought, “that maybe it would be best if I was to stay here and see this thing right through. Better than letting a girl save me from the jail.”

  “Don’t you understand? It’s not a question of fairness. They’ll put you in prison for years and years. I’ve heard my father talk. They’ll coop you up in the darkness, Sandy. Maybe they’ll never let you out. They can do queer things if they want to.”

  “But you see,” Sandy said earnestly, “I had to do it. I had to try to kill that José Rézan, didn’t I? It was the only way, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know…I don’t know. But hurry, Sandy. Sam may come back any minute. And if he comes…if he comes and finds me here….”

  “You’re right,” Sandy said. “If the sheriff wouldn’t believe that I’m right, and Rézan is wrong, would any judge believe it, either?”

  “No,” Peggy said, “no judge would be as easy on you as my dear old dad.”

  “I believe you, and I’m going with you, Peggy.”

  He glided beside her from the jail, and she turned the key in the lock. All seemed blackest night still.

  Sandy raised his head and took a breath. “The dawn’ll be up in another minute,” he observed. “D’you smell the morning coming? Aye, there’s the rim of it beginning.”

  It seemed impossible to detect the change. Only, the eastern mountains were a little blacker than the western, and the eastern stars were turning pale, while the western stars still shone bright. It was the faint beginning of the dawn.

  “I’ve got to hurry,” Peggy Kilmer gasped. “Good bye, Sandy. Take good care of that mustang.”

  “I don’t need your horse,” Sandy said. “My own must be somewhere around here, waiting for me.”

  “Your own? Waiting for you?”

  “Don’t tell me that they caught her.”

  “Caught her? Not that I know of.”

  “Then she would follow them along like a dog, when they brought me away from Rézan’s house, and she would have stayed just out of sight behind them until she seen them bring me into this place. Then she would stay around and wait, because that’s her way. Come over that next hill, and I’ll try to call her.”

  They crossed the low, wooded ridge, side-by-side, with the slippery pine needles under their feet, and the pure sweetness of the pine trees in their nostrils.

  Where the trees hung like a veil around them, she heard Sandy Sweyn whistling, long and shrill, like the whistle of a bird. It did not jar against the ear of the night. It melted into it, and she could only judge of its strength and carrying power by the echo that presently came faintly flying back to them from across the little valley.

  In the blackness, they waited, and while they stood, a rosy pencil streaked the horizon line in the east, just above the hills as they joined the sky. Presently a distant rhythm was felt rather than heard, and then came the unmistakable noise of a galloping horse.

  “It’s Cleo,” Sandy confirmed with a sigh of relief. “I knew she wouldn’t fail to come to me.”

  Here was the blue roan. She came like a winged thing out from the shadows of the trees and plunged at her master. Now he stood with one arm thrown over her head.

  “What I don’t make out, though,” Sandy said, “is how you could do this for me, or why you should do it?”

  “A woman doesn’t have to have reasons for everything,” said Peggy.

  “That doesn’t go,” Sandy said. “I can see through that. I’ve got one more thing to do, and then I’m coming back to see you. May I come?”

  “I can’t keep you away. I’m not a whole posse,” Peggy said, laughing. “But before you go, you’ll give me one promise?”

  “I’ll give you a hundred.”

  “That you’ll not use that gun against another man, unless your back is against the wall, Sandy.”

  “It’s a good deal to ask,” Sandy said. “What if they hunt me?”

  “You can keep away from them, if you want to. You know that you can.”

  “Tell me this. Is Rézan to marry Catalina tomorrow?”

  “No, of course not. He’ll spend a week in bed, they say. Or maybe a month. He’s badly hurt where you struck him in the body.”

  “Then,” Sandy said, “I’ll promise to do no harm with this gun for a month.”

  Peggy gasped. “But you do promise, Sandy?”

  “On my honor.”

  “Then…so long.”

  “So long, Peggy. You’ll be late home. The sun is pushing a lot higher.”

  She realized that, as she swung into the saddle on the mustang that she had intended should carry Sandy away to freedom. When she came to the next hill and looked back, there was plenty of light to show her Sandy Sweyn still standing at the side of Cleo. He took off his hat and waved to her. Then she was swinging away on the straight road toward her father’s house.

  As she galloped the mustang fiercely on, hoping against hope that she might arrive before her father’s wakening time, she realized that Sandy Sweyn had given her no thanks for the help that she had brought to him on this night. However, manners were not what one expected from him, or the usual way of doing anything.

  The east grew rosier and rosier with flooding light. When she came in sight of the house, her heart sank, for she saw the smoke rising slowly from the kitchen chimney, and sloping in a long, white column across the valley. She did what one would have expected from Peggy Kilmer. She went straight up to the kitchen door, and there she threw herself from the saddle. The door opened at the sa
me moment, and there stood the sheriff before her.

  There was no torrent of questions or guesses or reproaches from his lips. There was merely: “’Morning, Peggy. Where the devil is the sharp butcher knife? I can’t get the bacon cut with that other infernal thing.”

  She brought the sharp butcher knife, and she sliced the bacon, waiting in a tremor for the trial to begin. As she poured his coffee and finally sat opposite him at the table, watching him eat, she began to realize that there would be no crisis. Her father simply sat with a pale face, and lips compressed with an iron determination.

  By that she could guess how deeply she had cut him. It had been a necessary act from her viewpoint; from his it was a betrayal.

  She endured it until she could stand the pain no longer. Then she stood up and placed the keys on the table. “He’s gone away on the roan mare, Dad,” she said at last. “I don’t know where. I only know…that I wish that I were a man, and a stranger, so that you could treat me the way that I deserve.”

  The sheriff did not so much as look up. He kept his glance fixed upon his coffee cup, into which he was stirring the sugar industriously.

  Forty-Five

  The whole valley learned the news before the morning was an hour older. The sheriff sent the tidings far and wide, sitting at his telephone and ringing number after number. He talked to the judge, first of all. His honor listened to the story with many most illegal curses.

  “What’s in the girl’s idiot head?” asked the judge. “Has she lost her mind about a half-wit, Kilmer?”

  “I’m not guessing,” the sheriff said sadly. “I’m telling what she did, and not why she did it. The question is…what should we do with her? She’s broken the law, Your Honor. She’s broken it bad.”

  “Leave her be,” said the judge. “When a fool girl gets sentimental, there’s no use in trying to discipline her back into her senses. No use in the world. Cheer up, Kilmer. This will turn out for the best. By the way, who’s laying the charges against Sandy Sweyn? We ought to know that.”