Stagecoach

by Max Brand

  “And how are you now, kid?” Rendell was asking.

  “I’ll do fine,” Sammy Gregg said. “Ah, there’s a man that I want to talk to.” He started up and confronted big Furness. “Furness,” he said, “I had nearly two hundred head of horses stolen from me this morning. Five men did the trick. They killed my chief helper and they scared two more of them nearly to death. I’ve seen six of those horses that were stolen. No doubt about them. I know them as well as I know my own hand. On account of those horses I’ve just been shot down. Well, Cumnor did the shooting, and Cumnor says that he bought those horses from you.”

  Furness bit his lip and then drew in his breath with a sound that was very much like the moan of wind through thin branches. He sat down upon a stool and he removed his hat and he mopped his forehead. “Stolen horses. Good Lord,” Furness said. “No wonder the scoundrels were willing to sell those horses to me for twenty-five dollars apiece.”

  “Was that what they asked?”

  “That’s it. Twenty-five dollars. And of course I knew that almost anything decent in the line of a horse will sell for fifty dollars a head. I saw a quick profit. Heavens, youngster, it never came into my head that the horses might be stolen. You see, I’m almost as much of a greenhorn around here as you are. I paid cash for the horses and landed the whole lot of them.”

  “I suppose that I ought to be sorry for you, then,” Sammy said. “Because I’m afraid that I’ll have to claim the entire lot of them.”

  “I wish you luck,” Furness said. “I wish you luck, upon my soul of honor. But I’m afraid that you’ll have to do a tall bit of scrambling for them. Not thirty minutes ago three horse traders who were bound north came up with me and looked the lot over and they offered me forty dollars a head spot cash. The profit was too good to be true. A quick turnover better than a long deal, you know. I took that money and they split the herd into three chunks and rattled them off through the cañons to the north.”

  Gregg clutched his hands together. “North,” he said. “They’re bound for Crumbock and seventy-five dollars a head!”

  “Eighty dollars, my friend,” put in the gentle voice of Furness. “The price is going up and up at Crumbock.”

  Gregg groaned. “Will you tell me what the five thieves looked like?”

  “There were only two that I saw anything of.”

  “Well?”

  “They were very well mounted, for one thing.”

  “Not on mustangs?”

  “No, there was a lot of hot blood in the horses they were riding. Long-legged steppers, they were.”

  “I saw them and I watched them move.” Sammy sighed. “Yes, they’re fast. But what of the two men?”

  “I could pick them out from any crowd for you, Gregg,” said the big fellow, “and I should be delighted to do so. Delighted! One was rather young . . . the other middle-aged. Both Mexicans. The older fellow has a pair of scars that look like knife-work on his right cheek. He must have had a fight with some left-handed man. And the younger chap is distinguished for a very long chin and an overshot lower jaw. Unmistakable, both of them. We’ll get up some posters to spot them . . . you might offer a reward. Yes, by Jove, I’ll put myself down for a hundred on that same reward. I want to help you out, Gregg. I sympathize with you, my friend.” And he stood up and clapped a kindly hand upon the shoulder of the smaller man, and then turned to leave the store.

  He had reached the door before Sammy had the courage to cry out: “Just one minute, Mister Furness!”

  The big man turned with a pleasant smile.

  “You see,” said Sammy, “a man can’t keep the proceeds from the sale of stolen goods.”

  “I don’t understand,” Furness said.

  “I mean, Furness,” Sammy insisted, “that the money that was paid to you for those horses really belongs in my pocket.”

  Furness laughed, but without much conviction. “I see that you’re a wit,” he said. “But after all, that’s rather a queer joke.” And he stepped away from the door of the store and his whistle came blithely back to them.

  Sammy, with an exclamation, started to run in pursuit, but the quick hand of the storekeeper caught him and held him back.

  Chapter Eight

  It seemed to Sammy, for a blinding instant of wrath, that even big, good-natured Rendell had joined in the conspiracy to drive him mad with persecution. But one glance at the frowning, unhappy face of the cripple convinced him.

  “Don’t you see, kid?” said Rendell. “It’s no good. No good at all. It’s Furness . . . that’s all there is to it.”

  “Furness? But Furness simply doesn’t understand the law on that point, and he doesn’t see that the law will really restore to me . . .”

  “Furness understands everything,” said Rendell. “I always knew that from the minute I laid eyes on him. I knew that he understood everything. But I never quite got onto his dodge. I didn’t see what side of the fence he was on. But today I see, and I see it mighty plain.”

  “What, Rendell?”

  “Look here, kid. If you run after Furness and stop him with your talk, d’you know that you’ll only collect another chunk of lead? Cumnor missed, but Furness ain’t the kind that misses.”

  “You mean he’s crooked?”

  “He is. But smooth. Crooked as a snake . . . and softer and smoother than a snake. That’s all the difference there is between ’em.”

  “Furness? Why, Rendell, I’ve seen him . . .”

  “Kill Mortimer and run that cur Lawson out of town. Yes, but a crook can be a brave man, you know. I say, Gregg, that you’ll never get a penny out of Furness.”

  “I remember, now,” Sammy said gloomily, “that when he tried to laugh, there was no ring to it, at all. No ring at all. But . . . it don’t seem possible that he’s a crook. Nobody could suspect it.”

  “Not until I begin to let the news of this drift around the country,” Rendell declared. “Then there’ll be a little change in the feeling about Furness. But you, kid . . . what are you gonna do?”

  “I’m going back,” Sammy said gravely.

  “Back to Brooklyn? You’re wise, at that. This sort of a country ain’t made for your kind.”

  “Back to Brooklyn? No, sir, I’m going south and buy me another herd.”

  “Not again?”

  “I’ve got a shade more than two thousand left. And that’s enough to get what I need. I got within a hundred miles of Crumbock last time, nearly. This time I may win all the way through.”

  Rendell was more than impressed. He was frankly amazed and admiring, and he said so at once. Because it was no more his nature to disguise admiration than it was to disguise disapproval.

  “Why,” he said, “you’re a bulldog, son. With twenty more pounds of beef on you, you’d be at the throat of this here Furness, I got an idea. Going south for more horses. Why, dog-gone me, kid, you’ll be taking them wet, I suppose, this trip.”

  “What does that mean?” asked the innocent Sammy.

  “Taking them with no papers at all. Taking them just the way they’re drove up out of the Río Grande. Wet. That’s all.”

  Sammy was interested. He wanted more information and he got it.

  “I’m the fountainhead for all the talk you want about the border crooks,” said Rendell. “I used to work and run horses in them ranges. And that’s where I was used up. Up here, maybe you think that some of the boys is a mite rough. But they ain’t rough enough to be called men, even down in my home country. They’d use these here blooming heroes for roustabouts, and don’t you forget it. Why, when I come up here, I found that they figured on me for a man, even when I was only no more than a cripple. Well, down yonder on the border they didn’t think shucks of me. Not a bit. They used me up so bad that I had to move out.

  “Well, sir, down yonder they’re all fire-eaters. But right along the river itself is the worst land of all. That’s the place where the boys go that ain’t got any home. The boys that need more freedom than they can get i
n this here free country. There’s districts down there where they draw a deadline that no sheriff is allowed to pass. And the minute a deputy or a sheriff shows up, anybody is free to pull guns and start blazing away.

  “And down in them parts they go in for the horse business pretty frequent. Mostly it ain’t Texas mustangs that they’re after, but Mexican devils dressed up in the hides of horses. Them boys just ride out in a party twenty strong and they spot a place that’s famous in north Mexico for having a good set of ponies, and they kill the greasers that are riding herd, and round up the horseflesh and slide it off toward the river.

  “Them that want to buy horses, and good horses, and buy ’em cheap, goes down to the badlands, there, and buys ’em up mighty reasonable. I’ve knowed three-dollar horses from them parts that looked a pile better than any of them fifty-dollar horses that Cumnor got today.

  “But when you buy them horses, you buy ’em pretty cheap, but you don’t get no papers. I don’t have to tell you . . . you take your chances. And the first gent that comes along and takes a fancy to your herd, he can cotton onto them horses of yours, if he’s able to lick you. And you can’t complain to no sheriff because you can’t prove that them horses really belong to you by rights.

  “Besides, after you’ve drove them horses five hundred miles into the country, they’re liable to stampede and run all the way back to their own pasture lands on the south side of the river, and then you got a thousand miles extra to ride and considerable hunting to do after you arrive.”

  Such was the story of wet horses and cheap ones that Rendell told to Sammy Gregg, but Gregg listened with the fire in his eyes once more. The morals of the matter did not trouble him. If it were wrong to buy stolen horses, Sammy did not pause so much as to consider the subject. He had had a herd of horses stolen from him. Therefore the world owed him another supply. And it made very little difference where he got them so long as he was not the actual thief.

  He went to sleep to dream of $5 horses that night, and the next morning he was on the train once more and headed for the southland. Poor Sammy Gregg, bound for the land where men were really bad. But perhaps you begin to feel that Sammy deserved something more than pity. And I think he did. The storekeeper was right. There was a great deal of the bulldog in Gregg, and there was fire, too—fire that would not burn out.

  After he arrived, he spent a week or more learning what he could of the best district that he could head toward on the river. He learned that. He found a bank to which he could entrust his money, and then he set out to see the sights of that frontier town. He saw enough, too, but the thing that filled him with the greatest marvel was the second glimpse he had of his flute player of Munson.

  But, oh, how changed! The difference between a dying, tattered moth and a young, brilliant butterfly. He fairly shimmered with gold work and with silks. He sat at a table gambling with chips stacked high before him, and with every gesture he seemed to sweep fresh oceans of money toward himself.

  There was little else that stirred in that room, filled with drifting smoke oceans from cigars and cigarettes. No other games were in progress. Men stood about in banks and shoals watching the progress of the campaign of the flute player, studying his calmly smiling face and the desperate eyes of the other four who sat at the table with him. There was a mortal silence while the game was in active progress. It was only during the shuffling and the dealing that any talk was allowed, and in the first of these intervals Sammy spoke to his nearest neighbor: “Who are they?”

  The other did not turn his head. He answered softly: “Look at ’em hard, tenderfoot. The chap with the long white face is Boston Charlie. And him with the pair of blond-looking eyes is Don McGillicuddie. The big gent with the cigar stuck in the side of his face is Holcum. I guess you’ve heard of him, all right. And there’s Billy Champion . . . him that made the gold strike in the creek last year. And the one with the chips in front of him is the king of ’em all, poor kid. He’s Jeremy Major.”

  “Why do you call him poor kid, then,” asked Sammy.

  “You see him now. He’s got them eating out of his hand. They’re all crooks, and he knows it. They’re rich, and he knows that. And he’ll trim them out of every cent they got, because he’s a slicker and a cooler gambler than the best of ’em.”

  “Is that why you pity him?”

  “No, but after he has a million in his poke, he’ll let it drift out again like water running through his fingers. They’s a curse on poor Jeremy Major. He’s the only man in the world who can’t say no. And when he’s flush, he hands out the stuff with both mitts. Listen to me, kid. I’ve seen a gent step up and touch him for ten thousand in cold cash . . . and get it. And him one that Major never knew before that day. Aye, them same four skunks that are getting busted now . . . they know that they can go around to him tomorrow morning and beg back most of what they’ve lost.”

  “But if he’s so sure of what he does with the cards, why do they play with him?”

  “Because they are gamblers, even if they’re crooked. And every time they figger that they sure got some new tricks that’ll beat Jeremy Major. And so they come and try their luck with him. Why, look at Holcum, there. He’s been away in the East, and they say that he cleaned up more’n a quarter of a million there. Besides, he got some new ideas, and he come all the way back West to see if he couldn’t be the first man that could say that he had busted Jeremy Major at a card table. And now look! Look at the chips in front of Major. And Holcum has got one pile left. That’s all.”

  Another new and dazzling sidelight had been thrown upon the men of the West for Sammy. He could not tell how deeply this young beggar-gambler-musician was to enter into his life. But he took one more long look at the youth, and then he turned out into the night to find his bed and go to sleep.

  He did not like the way his pulse was racing. He did not like the lift and the giddy whirl of his spirits. For the first time in his existence, temptation had deeply entered the heart of Sammy Gregg. He, with the burden of an unmade $10,000 upon his soul—what had he to do with games of chance?

  But he slept little that night, and when sleep did come, it was broken by evil dreams in which he saw a vision of a hill of gold toward which hungry thousands struggled. But they got nothing of it, except what coins were carelessly flung to them by a laughing youth who sat on the top of the golden hill with a richly laced sombrero pushed far back on his head.

  Chapter Nine

  All was arranged almost without the volition of Sammy, and certainly without any effort on his part. How the news was spread he could not, of course, guess. But a whisper seemed to have passed around, for the next morning a smiling fellow appeared before him—a brown-faced, good-natured-looking chap who said: “I hear that you’re trying to find cheap horses, Mister Gregg?”

  “I’m looking for them. Cheap good ones,” Sammy Gregg averred.

  “Which is exactly the kind that me and my friends handle,” said the stranger. “But there’s only one peculiarity about ’em.”

  “What’s that?” Sammy asked.

  “They got sort of sensitive natures. You see, they don’t like to have questions asked about ’em.”

  Even so green a tenderfoot as Sammy could understand this innuendo. And he grinned with perfect comprehension and raised his hand to adjust the bandage that encircled his head.

  “All right,” said Sammy. “I don’t intend to talk them to death. Their family affairs are their own business.”

  The other nodded. “How many, and what’s your price?” he asked.

  “I want about three or four hundred,” said Sammy. “What sort of a price can you make me on that lot?”

  “Three or four hundred,” said the other, and whistled. “Why, that’s quite a handful. Suppose we say two thousand for four hundred head . . . all warranted sound?”

  Sammy, who saw nearly his entire block of remaining capital involved, and who knew that he needed leeway for herding expenses, fought for a margin.

/>   “Sixteen hundred dollars,” he said. “And I’ll take my chance on the sort of horses you give me.”

  The other frowned, but only for a moment. “Is that your top price?” he asked.

  “Partner,” Sammy said, “I’ve just lost two hundred head. And I’ve got to pay heavy for good hands to drive this lot.”

  “I’ll send you three Mexicans . . . born in the saddle. They’ll drive ’em north for you at thirty dollars a month. Does that sound?”

  It sounded very loud to the ear of Sammy Gregg, and he closed with the proposition at once. The rest was arranged in a trice. He was simply to head for the river at once, and a week from that night, at a named point, a herd of horses would be driven across the Río Grande with three Mexican cowpunchers in their rear. After that, the rest was in the hands of fate and Sammy Gregg. He need not pay a cent until the horseflesh, every bit of it, was north of the river.

  So Sammy made his preparations, and on the appointed night he sat in the saddle on a long, lean bay mare as ugly as a caricature and as fleet as the wind, under a little hill of sand beside the river, with a sack of gold tied to his saddle bow and a pair of heavy Colts weighing down the two saddle holsters.

  It was well past midnight before anything stirred on the south side of the little stream, so muddy that it would not take the glitter of the stars on its face to show them back to the sky. But when there was a stir it was a sudden upheaval out of the dark and then a noise like a great rushing wind, and after that a volley of shadowy forms that plunged into the water and dashed it to clouds of milky foam. Out of the river, squealing, snorting, neighing like a small pandemonium, the charge continued onto the northern bank and then past the amazed Sammy Gregg and thundering away into the darkness of the northern night. Behind them rode three cursing cavaliers, and, without a word to him, they spurred past on the trail of the mustangs.