Stagecoach

by Max Brand

  There was counted into the hungry hand of Sammy, $18,280. It was a golden dream to Sammy—a golden dream edged with a crimson joy. He took $16,000 dollars—$1,000 for expenses and $15,000 to redeem his promise to Susie Mitchell. He gave the remaining $2,280 to Major, to be divided as he saw fit between himself and the two Mexicans. And he did not remain long enough to see Jeremy Major split the pot in two equal parts and present it to wonder-stricken Gonzalez and the awed Pedro. He did not wait to see these things, for south, south, south was the railroad that would carry him to the house of his bride.

  He crossed the terrible mountains to Munson in three short days, but in doing so, he well-nigh ruined the tall mare. She was a staggering wreck when he rode her to the station. And when the station agent remarked on the leanness of the poor creature, he was astonished to receive the mare and saddle and bridle and two good Colts that occupied the holsters, as a present from Sammy. For, with a ticket in his pocket, what more could Sammy wish? There were twelve days to the end of his contract time. And in only ten days the train was due in New York. Only ten days!

  There was one letter at the post office from Susie—a very brief and unhappy letter that said: I haven’t had a letter from you in a month. What has happened? Write at once!

  What had happened? He lay back in his seat in the railroad coach and laughed softly to himself. What had happened? If she could see the brown hand that was now holding her letter, she might understand. If she could remember as he did, the slender pipe-stem wrist with which he had come West—was it not nearly doubled in size now? What with the bigness of the tendons from pulling at the reins all day long, and the cordage of swollen veins that surrounded the flesh—was it not transformed? And the hand itself, all reddish brown on the back and gray with work on the palm and fingers. Who could know that hand as the hand of Sammy Gregg?

  Aye, and the shirt that he wore was uncomfortably tight. It seemed a little short in the sleeves. It clasped his shoulders too tightly. And it nearly choked him at the neck, until he unbuttoned the top hole.

  “These infernal cheap laundries in this wild country,” growled Sammy Gregg, “they’ve shrunk my shirts. I’ll have to get a new lot of them when I land in Brooklyn.”

  But it was not the shirts that had changed size, if Sammy could only have guessed.

  If she could only know what had happened to him. He was no artist to tell her how the gun in the hand of big Cumnor had looked him in the eye. In fact, the best that he could do would be to hint at a few things and let Susie guess the rest, and, after all, she was usually a pretty good hand at guessing close to the truth.

  Trains of those days were not all that fast, but when Sammy walked the streets of New York again, there were still thirty-six hours between him and his time limit. He had not wired nor written from the West, because he felt that he might as well give himself the small extra reward of surprising Susie.

  Horse and cab could not rattle him over the streets fast enough. And so he saw the cab turn down the familiar street. He dismissed it two blocks away. He wanted to walk to steady his nerves a little. He wanted to drink in the familiar sights. And, ah, who but a returned wanderer could have guessed with what joy he would notice that the Murphy house on the corner had been recently painted. With what a sense of pain he observed that the tall elm trees in front of Mr. Holden’s place had been cut down. They had long been ailing.

  And there, poised on the top of the back fence of Mr. Jones, was the same brindled cat that, two years before, had made itself famous by biting and scratching a fat bulldog until the poor dog ran for help. It looked as lean and as formidable as ever as it turned its big yellow eyes upon Sammy.

  All of these little details were mysteriously comforting, because each of them added a touch that helped to assure him that he was indeed home at last. How far, far away the West was—and how barren, and how bold, and how filled with wicked, brazen men.

  It was Saturday afternoon, and here the good citizens of the town of Brooklyn were out to mend their fences and mow their lawns and trim their hedges. And Sammy, as he listened to the whirring of the watering hose, felt sweet peace sink into his soul.

  He turned up the steps of the Mitchell house. He was almost loath to arrive there so soon, for there had been such happiness in the stroll down the old street that he would willingly have extended it another mile in length.

  However, here he was. The meal, prosaically speaking, was finished, and only the desert remained to be eaten. Only Susie to take in his arms. And it filled him with wonder, now, when he recalled that he had never taken Susie in his arms before this day. Not in both arms, strongly, as he meant to do today.

  The door opened, and Mrs. Mitchell loomed broad and low in the doorway, like an overloaded barge in a narrow canal.

  “Heaven save us!” Mrs. Mitchell cried. “You ain’t little Sammy Gregg!”

  “Oh,” Sammy said, “have I changed as much as that? But I am Sammy, just the same. I hope Sue is home?”

  Mrs. Mitchell seemed totally overwhelmed. She merely backed down the hall, gaping at him. “I’ll send Mister Mitchell to you,” she said, and whirled and fled.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sammy walked into the front room and looked at himself with a grin in the gold-gilt mirror between the two front windows. Many a time, in his boyhood, he had seen his frightened face in that mirror when he had ventured into that sanctum of sanctums with Susie Mitchell. And now he could sit here at ease, and admire his new, ruddy complexion. Ah, could this quiet household see the scenes in which that tan had been acquired.

  The heavy step of Mr. Mitchell himself approached, and now he entered in the act of settling his spectacles upon the bridge of his nose and smiling with professional courtesy upon his visitor. For Mr. Mitchell was a grocer by trade, and his smile was a noted asset. Furthermore, he had a ruddy, healthy complexion. If he had said—“I use these groceries on my own table.”—no one could have resisted the temptation to buy at once and on a large scale. How is it that so many grocers have complexions modeled after the shade of big red apples? Such was the hue of Mr. Mitchell. It was even a little redder than usual as he clasped the fingers of Sammy in a moist, fat oozing palm.

  “Little Sammy Gregg,” Mr. Mitchell murmured. “Turned into a wanderer . . . and then come home again. After such a steady life, too.”

  Sammy was a little taken aback. He had hardly expected such a reception from his future father-in-law.

  “However,” Mr. Mitchell went on mildly, “I suppose that even the quietest of us have a small patch of wild oats that need sowing. Isn’t that so? But I never thought it of you, Sammy. However, I was sorry to hear from the mill people that they have no place for you now.”

  “No place for me now?” Sammy echoed, turning pale. “You mean to say that in spite of their promises . . . when I left . . . ?”

  “It’s a shame how people will make promises and never intend to live up to them, isn’t it?” Mitchell said sympathetically. “But it seems that the manager had thought it all over. Good, conservative, close-headed businessman, I have to call him. He says that when a young man takes six months in which to turn five thousand dollars into fifteen thousand . . . why, it shows what the manager calls a little streak of foolishness . . . besides a desire to take a gambler’s chance.”

  Mitchell’s own opinion was so apparently tucked into this same speech that Sammy was more amazed than ever. He was glad, at least, that Susie remained for him to give him comfort.

  The paper mill, however, had closed him out. After ten years of faithful, most faithful service. Oh, all the nights when he had remained after hours, hoping against hope that his bulldog devotion to work would take the eye of one of the upper members of the firm. And now this ambition was wiped away.

  “It’s a very hard blow to me,” he confessed to Mitchell. “I didn’t expect that of my employers. They know how I’ve slaved for them.”

  “It’s always this way,” Mitchell said. “Unfortunately the wo
rld is so made that one stroke of folly will erase a hundred strokes of good sense and industry. Only one match need be lighted, my boy, to ignite the greatest building in the world.”

  In the far West, from which he had just come, Sammy was well aware that such talk would cause men to say: “Aw, cut out the Sunday-school stuff, partner.” And he had an almost irresistible temptation to say the same thing on his own behalf. However, he checked himself and remarked: “It’s a hard thing, Mister Mitchell, if a young man is not to be allowed to step out and take a chance for himself now and then. Otherwise, how is he to get on?”

  Mitchell leaned forward in his chair and pressed his fat hands upon his fat knees, until the palms squeezed out on the sides, white as the belly of a fish. “Young man,” he said, “slow and steady is the word . . . slow and steady is the word that builds life in the way it ought to be built. Now tell me, frankly . . . out of the five thousand dollars in honest money that you took West, how much did you lose?”

  Sammy closed his eyes to calculate. “Nearly three thousand,” he said. For, up to the day of his arrival at the Crumbock lode he had, indeed, been that much cash out of pocket.

  Mitchell writhed in his chair. “Three thousand,” he groaned. “Three thousand honest dollars . . . thrown away! Why, with that money I could have built a new wing . . . oh, Sammy, this is a thing for which you will grieve in years to come. Three thousand dollars at six percent is a hundred and eighty dollars a year. Many a poor man in Europe is toiling fifteen hours a day for smaller pay than that.” He closed his eyes and fairly groaned aloud in the pain that the thought of such waste gave him. “Ah, well,” he said, “it is a fortunate thing for Susie that I warned her and opened her eyes.”

  “Warned her?” Sammy murmured.

  “That this would be the probable outcome . . . wild adventures in the West. Fifteen thousand out of five thousand. Stuff and nonsense! Why, young man, even I, at my time of life and with my experience in the business world, would not attempt to accomplish a thing of such a magnitude. It argues a wild brain on those young shoulders of yours, Sammy, my boy. A very wild brain, but I thank heaven that poor Susie will never bear any of the painful results of such folly.”

  A terrible thought blasted its way into the mind of Sammy. “Where is Susie?”

  “Not here,” Mitchell said gravely.

  “Not here?” echoed Sammy in a whisper. “But she’s . . . out shopping . . . out calling . . . she’s over at the Johnson house, maybe . . .”

  “Oh, Sammy,” Mitchell said, shaking a fat white finger at him, “how I hope that this will be a lesson to you never again to venture all and lose all.”

  “My Lord,” Sammy breathed, “you mean that she has left home?”

  “Yes . . . but not alone.”

  Sammy, perfectly white by this time, stood up from his chair, “Mister Mitchell,” he gasped.

  “Sammy,” said the grocer, “I grieve for you. Upon my soul, I grieve for you bitterly. But I trust that the lesson will not be wasted upon you.”

  A bright spot of color came back in either of Sammy’s cheeks. There was in his eyes such a fire as Brooklyn had never seen there before. And when he spoke, his voice was suddenly rough and harsh. “I hate to think it,” Sammy said, “but it’s forced on me that you . . . you fat sneak . . . may have advised your daughter to marry another man.”

  The grocer rose, also, and stood, big and towering and fat as butter, above little Sammy. “Samuel Gregg,” he said, “can I trust my ears?”

  And those astonished ears drank in the following unholy words: “You can trust your ears, you blockhead. But tell me if I have guessed right? Have you really told Susie to marry another man?”

  “Yes!” Mitchell shouted in a voice that Mrs. Mitchell, in the back yard, heard and knew and quailed beneath. “Yes! I have told her to marry another man.”

  “And the little fool,” Sammy said, “the little fool has taken your advice?”

  Mitchell raised both fat hands. No, rage and bewilderment had paralyzed him. His thick arms fell with a wheeze to his sides again and left Sammy intact.

  “My guess is a good guess, I think,” Sammy said. He stepped to the mantelpiece and lifted the picture that stood where his picture had once reposed. And out of the frame he saw the chinless face of young Tom Hooker, the dentist’s son—a pleasant, smiling, useless face. “My Lord,” Sammy said, “is this my substitute?”

  “Young man,” shouted Mitchell, “leave these premises! You are a worthless young reprobate. Never return to this place again, or with my own hands . . .”

  “Stuff,” Sammy declared. And he dropped his brown fists upon his hips. “Stuff, you fool,” he said. “I’ve killed men twice your size, Mitchell. And men twice as good as you. Why, in the country where I’ve been, we use fellows like you . . . for grease. Sit down, before I wring your stuffy neck for you. Sit down, while I talk to you.”

  Mitchell turned flabby, like a punctured balloon, and sank, almost lifeless, into a chair. His pale, fishy eyes beheld Sammy Gregg in the act of taking a wallet from his pocket. From that wallet Sammy counted forth, one by one, fifteen new, crisp, banknotes of $1,000—oh, magic word!—to the note. A treasure—$15,000. And then a handful of smaller currency.

  “And another thousand, just for luck . . . another thousand to paint the house, maybe,” Sammy Gregg said, thrusting out his jaw. “Luck was with me. And tomorrow I’m going back to the free country. I’m through with you people back here. Why, you choke me. I can’t talk and I don’t seem to be able to think. I’m glad that Susie has that pinhead. She’d look up to a wooden image, I suppose, and call it a man. And you can pay the bills for the party. I wish you luck. As for me, I’m going back to the West, and roll this fifteen thousand into a couple of million, maybe. And when I get that, I’ll have just about enough to marry one of those Western girls. And they’re worth it. Mister Mitchell, I hope you have luck.” He settled his hat upon his head, he turned his back, and he swaggered deliberately out the front door, and only one sound pursued him—the faint whisper of the grocer, moaning: “Six-teen thou-sand dol-lars!”

  Then Sammy found himself in the familiar street once more. But the joy had gone out of it. Only, in the first place, he felt a burning fierceness in his soul. And in the second place, he began to discover that what he had said to the grocer had not been altogether a bluff.

  How small, after all, had been his hold upon the life in this street when one conversation of five minutes could suffice to root up all his interests here. But out West—aye, that was different.

  Gamblers, hobos, thieves, horse rustlers, miners, teamsters, villains—he felt suddenly that they were his brothers.

  And that night the westbound train took Sammy with it from Manhattan.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The trip Sammy Gregg took to Munson for the second time was a melancholy affair, by no means comparable with his first excursion to the West. Granted that on the second occasion he had some $16,000 of well-earned money in his pocket, still, there was a difference. The first time, with less than a third of that sum in his wallet, he had come West to find enough money to make his marriage with Susie Mitchell a possibility. And he had come with an outlook on the world that was gay and careless, to say the least. Now he returned with three times as much capital and less than a third as much self-confidence.

  He felt like a fish that is half in the water and half on dry land—in a word, he was not at home. He needed friendship, gentleness, and enough comforts to smooth his path before him. Not many months before, when he had started West to conquer a fortune, he had left behind him the consciousness that Brooklyn was his home. Nothing but a wedding ring was needed there to complete that portion of his destiny that usually makes the last chapter in a romance. But now that Susie Mitchell had married another man, Brooklyn was literally wiped right out of his life. There was nothing to take him back to that place, and he was finding, as he sat in the train, that there was very little to make him turn toward Mu
nson as a substitute.

  It was simply the only other town with which he had ever associated himself. And yet, as he told himself in the train, what prospects had he there, and what friends? Certainly he could not look forward to establishing a business by bringing up fresh herds of horses from Texas to the mountains, as he had done before. The mere thought of the trials through which he had passed on the desert and in the mountains was enough to make his blood run cold. And he knew, in spite of all the money and the conscientious labor that he had invested in that exploit, that there was only one good reason why it had succeeded, and that reason was Jeremy Major and his black stallion, Clancy. That singular youth had rescued Sammy, and Sammy very well knew it. So he could tell himself that he had won his little fortune by luck, pure and simple.

  As for friends, upon whom could he count? There was Rendell, the storekeeper. But was he not rather a conversationalist than a friend? And there was Jeremy Major, to be sure. But Jeremy could not be counted. Probably, by this time, that free-handed youth had been stabbed in the back during some gambling brawl. As for the rest—well, there was no rest. He would arrive in Munson to play a lone hand.

  There were half a dozen people at the station when he dismounted from it, suitcase in hand. A brown-faced half dozen who looked at him without recognition and without interest. A brisk north wind was curling about the little station house, keeping the eyes of everyone squinted half shut, and tugging at coattails and bandannas, and covering Munson with a sweeping mist. No, it was not a pleasant picture.

  The hills were sunburned and bare at this season, and the more distant summits lifted rocky heads and cliff-like shoulders, as though to say: Yes, the Crumbock lode lies in this direction . . . reach it if you can.

  As for Munson itself, it had grown even since he had last seen it. Here, there, and again, he saw the white faces of new buildings, all of raw, unpainted pine boards, with cracks between them so wide that they could be distinguished a block away. For no nails in the world could keep the half-seasoned timbers from warping, once this hot sun got in its work on them.