Stagecoach

by Max Brand

  Munson was growing, but that thought brought no cheer to Sammy. He slumped gloomily down the street, ankle-deep in dust. And the dirt that his footfall loosened was combed up instantly and curled like a plume over his head by the wind. He was white with a thick layer of the dust before he got to the store that carried, above the door, the name of Rendell. One thing startled him. New-painted plows—gang plows of two models stood in the vacant lot next to Rendell’s—obviously a part of his stock. And Sammy looked at them in amazement. They were painted a shining yellow, and the seat of open ironwork was distinguished with a coat of crimson, and the lower tips of the plowshares were covered with paint of the same color. Very bright, but who under the wonderful heavens could want gang plows in the town of Munson?

  He stepped into the door of the store and there he encountered almost the last person in the range that he wanted to meet—none other than Cumnor, whose revolver had fired the bullet that had caused a furrow to be made down the side of his head not many months before. The hair was growing out now, along the scar, and that hair was a white slash in a brown head.

  The meeting seemed no more pleasant to Cumnor than it was to little Sammy Gregg. But Sammy looked him coldly in the eye and stepped to one side. Yet Cumnor did not pass. He stood there, ill at ease, combing his long, drooping, sandy mustaches.

  “Gregg,” he began.

  Sammy scowled, but said nothing, and a crimson tide washed across the heavy features of the rancher.

  “Gregg,” he repeated resolutely, “I got to tell you that I want to apologize for the downright low trick I done to you here a while back. Only, at that time, when you stepped up and claimed them horses that I had just bought from Furness . . . well, it went sort of ag’in’ the grain to pay out three hundred dollars twice for the same stock. Y’understand?”

  Sammy, watching him in wonder, nodded.

  “But here,” said Cumnor, “I’ve had a chance to think things over. I’ve had a chance to see that you’re a man of your word and a square-shooter. And I’ve got to say that I’m sorry about the shooting, and here’s three hundred dollars for those ponies. Gregg, I want to be friends with you.”

  It would have been a considerable speech in any part of the world, between man and man. But this speech was overheard by an audience, consisting of Rendell and a gaunt cowpuncher who was buying a yard or so of plug chewing tobacco. And in the far West apologies come hard. It is apt to be considered unmanly not to persist, even in error. For that, after all, is the unwritten law of the frontier.

  Now Sammy was not a man who forgot or forgave lightly. And during many a month he had taken home the thought of Cumnor to his heart and sworn that someday he would find a means of righting the wrong that had been done him. However, he had seen enough of the frontier and its ways to know that this apology from such a man as Cumnor meant almost as much as bullets themselves could write. And he stretched out his hand.

  “Cumnor,” he said, “I believe you mean it.”

  “Mean it?” Cumnor said. “I’ll tell you that I do.” And he clutched the hand of Sammy. “And the three hundred just to say for certain that I don’t lie.”

  “Keep it for me,” Sammy said, “until I need it. Be my banker to that extent, old-timer.”

  The big man regarded him for a moment in wonder, and then his glance passed over the head of Sammy and toward the rear of the store. “You were right, Rendell,” was all he said, and he hurried out from the store.

  The cowpuncher, staring at the little man, followed. And Sammy was left alone to shake hands with Rendell. That crippled hulk of a man heaved himself partly up on his counter and sat there grinning down at Sammy.

  “Where’s the wife?” he asked. “Back in the hotel?”

  “I don’t know what hotel she’s in,” Sammy answered. “She married, all right, but she married another man.”

  Rendell gaped—started to speak—and then busied himself biting off a great corner from a wedge of chewing tobacco. When he had stowed that great quid safely in a corner of his mouth, he said solemnly: “Questions is always foolish things to ask. I’m sorry, Gregg.” But Sammy was able to grin. “What the boys will want to know,” went on Rendell, “is what queer new dodge you’re gonna try on the town this time . . . after driving a few hundred horses clean up from the river to Crumbock.”

  “I could never have done it. It was a man named Major.”

  “Oh, he’s getting to be pretty well known, now . . . that same gent. But who would have figured that you would know a gent like him to help you out? Well, Gregg, what are you going to do this time?”

  “I don’t know,” Sammy said. “Something big enough and hard enough to keep me busy, hand and foot and brain, until I get over feeling the way I do.”

  “Something real hard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Start over Crumbock way and try to find the mother lode. That ought to be a job for you.”

  “It’s hard enough to get to the mines, let alone the lode,” said Sammy.

  “Aye, if you want a real man-size job, start a stage to the Crumbock mines, old son.”

  “A stage?” Sammy said doubtfully. “Is there money in it?”

  “Oh, I ain’t serious,” Rendell said. “Nobody’ll start a stage line in this part of the world while there’s so many gents like The Duke, hanging around.”

  “The Duke?” Sammy said.

  “That’s Furness.”

  “How did he get a title. Does he own one?”

  “No . . . it’s only a way he’s got, they say, when he shoves a gun under your nose and tells you to stand and hand over. He gets kind of high and lofty, like a duke would be, if he was a road agent, maybe.”

  Sammy whistled. “Have they got the goods on him?” he asked. “Is he living out?”

  “If there was a sheriff and a decent judge in the county,” Rendell answered, “they’d find that they had enough goods to nail him, right enough, but the law ain’t more’n a baby around here, and anyway that you look at him, The Duke is sure a growed-up man. Young Blythe and Harper was the last pair that started out to get him. We ain’t heard from them yet. But there is three other gents in the last three months that has gone out and started to get famous by bringing in the scalp of The Duke, and them three has all failed. Leastwise, they ain’t showed up lately, and I don’t look, personal, for Harper and Blythe to show up, neither. But nobody’ll start a stage and run men and money between Munson and Crumbock while birds like The Duke has got their wing feathers unclipped. Look at the Chadwick City bunch. They’ve closed down and offered their stages and their whole string of horses for sale. The horses has gone. But who the devil wants a stagecoach?”

  “I don’t know,” Sammy said, “but maybe I’m the man.”

  “Hey, Sammy Gregg! You ain’t taking me seriously about starting that stage line?”

  “No,” said Sammy. “I’m only thinking.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chadwick City was only seventy miles away. And it was forty miles farther away from Crumbock than was Munson. So Sammy rode over to find out what he could find out. He found four magnificently built coaches standing out in the open for the wind and the weather to wreck, though so far wind and weather had not accomplished much harm, for these were masterpieces of Yankee craftsmanship in the good old days when there still were Yankee mechanics who were proud of the things that they could shape by hand and hammer and lathe, instead of by machine. Those coaches were built of the very finest hickory, with a generation of seasoning to make it tough. Tough it was—light as dry wood should be, tough as leather, strong as iron.

  Sammy knew little about wood, but when he heard that those coaches had actually been used over the rough roads, he was amazed. Certainly there was little sign.

  “What might you want with them coaches?” asked the representative of the defunct stage company.

  “Nothing,” Sammy answered. “Nothing, perhaps, and yet the running gear might be useful for something.” For Sammy
himself was enough of a Yankee to know how to cheapen a price.

  “A hundred and fifty dollars will buy the lot,” said the other sadly. “And when I think of what it cost to build ary a one of them wagons, it makes me powerful sick, old-timer.”

  Sammy blinked and then drew a long breath—$150, for all four. “Hold out your hand,” he said. And he closed the money in the other’s palm. “Now,” said Sammy, “tell me if you have had any experience in the staging business?”

  “I’ve had enough,” the other said, “to keep me from ever wanting any more. How come you to ask?”

  “What broke up this line?”

  “There was a sort of a lack of things,” said the salesman. “There was a lack of cooks to work in the three eating houses that we had to build along the road. And there was a lack of drivers, too, for the driving of the stages. Drivers that a man could trust, I mean.”

  “Why,” Sammy contradicted, “the country is filled with good teamsters.”

  “Just so,” said the tall man. “But they found that stage driving was sort of unhealthy, by reason that now and then somebody would want the stage to stop where there wasn’t no regular station, and the most usual way he took of stopping the stage was to shoot the driver and then one of the lead team of horses. Mostly that would stop up the stage pretty quick. But it got the drivers to feeling sort of restless. We lost two in one week, and after that the boys got sort of sick of the work. Then there was a lack of passengers. They kept coming pretty good for a time, but then they sort of got tired of having their pockets looked into. I knowed one gent that made four trips on our stage and three times the stage was stuck up and he lost his wad each time. He was a gambler, so he took it pretty calm. But he says . . . ‘I never sticks in a game where the chances is three to one in favor of the dealer. And the crooks is the dealers in this game of riding on the stage.’ Which it sort of looked like he was right.

  “But outside of them things, and the lack of a few more, such like as the lack of any kind of a road, and the lack of hay to store in the sheds for the horses at the stage stops, and the lack of horses that was busted for the harness work, and the lack of harness to take the place of the leather that the broncos jumped through their first few times out . . . outside of them few lacks, there wasn’t much to keep the stage line from running, except that them that was putting up for it got sort of tired and pretty soon they lacked the money to keep on paying the losses.”

  To this original relation, Sammy Gregg listened with a smile, to be sure, but also with a falling heart. “Between you and me,” he asked, “what do you think of the chances of running a stage from Munson to the mines?”

  “I don’t think nothing about it. I know it couldn’t pan out. It’d break the heart of the gent that tried it. Break him inside of a month.”

  “All right,” Sammy said. “I’m thinking of it.”

  “Then I’m sorry for you.”

  “Will you tell me why?”

  “Your business is your own. But just the same, I got to ask you why a stage would have a chance from Munson when it’s failed from Chadwick City?”

  “We’re forty miles closer, for one thing, and most of the people bound for Crumbock come through Munson.”

  “You’re forty miles closer, but you got a road that’s twice as rough. If the freighters can hardly make it at a walk, how are you gonna keep passengers comfortable at a trot?”

  “I don’t intend to keep ’em comfortable,” said Sammy. “I just intend to get ’em there . . . if they hang on tight.”

  For the first time a light came in the eye of the other. “That’s a new idea,” he said. “But you’re gonna get ’em there with a lot of stops. There’s a good hold-up place every quarter of a mile along the whole road from Munson to Crumbock.”

  There is nothing more stimulating than opposition. The man who is winning at cards is the man who is able to stop play when he chooses. But he who is losing cannot let go. He has to keep on bucking fate. And the more the stage man of Chadwick City blasted the hopes of Sammy Gregg, the more the courage of Sammy rose. We will not believe a picture that is painted too black. Better to throw in some relieving touches. And Sammy, when he heard that there were no chances of winning through, began to feel that his companion was purposely making matters worse than they really and truly were.

  He hired four men and four spans of horses to drag the stagecoaches across the hills to the town of Munson, and when he arrived, riding proudly at the head of the procession, he had the satisfaction of having the town turn out to watch him pass.

  Neither did Munson laugh as loud as he had expected. The idea of a tenderfoot putting through the stage line was so very novel, considering that the experienced old hands at Chadwick City had failed, that Munson’s citizens shook their heads and postponed their decisions.

  “He drove the horses up from the river,” Rendell reminded, “and he got them safe to Crumbock, and one failure didn’t turn him back. How d’you know but that he’ll get the stage line through to Crumbock, too?”

  But the buying of the stages was only the first step in a long undertaking. He needed relay stations every eight miles—twelve stations between the towns, and a bigger station and stables at either end of the line. That meant twelve shacks, and two men in each shack, one to handle the work by day and the other to handle it by night. For, day and night, the stages must toil on. The start was to be at 4:00 a.m. The halt at night took place not before 9:00, with an hour’s halt at noon for the battered passengers to eat a meal and stretch their cramped limbs. Then, with a new driver, they scurried on again. At night they halted at 9:00 if they were near one of the two sleeping houses that had to be built. And so four stages should be constantly in use, each stage traveling sixteen hours a day.

  Nor was this all, for allowance would have to be made for the wastage in horseflesh that would be occurring constantly as the mustangs struggled forward among the rocks and up the terrible slopes of the mountains. Ruined shoulders and spoiled hoofs must be a common occurrence, besides those that wasted under the daily strain. He must have a reserve of stock to meet these contingencies—a reserve of sixty head, at the least. And, the instant that he started operations, he must have a payroll of at least thirty or thirty-five men.

  Now, with an overhead of this size looming above him, young Sammy Gregg could understand very well how the Chadwick City line had failed so quickly and so ignominiously. But it also occurred to him that he might be able to buy for a song the timber that they had used in the construction of their own way stations through the mountains. And other thoughts formed rapidly in the brain of Sammy.

  In the room of the hotel at Munson that afternoon he wrote the following letter to his old henchman, Gonzalez, at El Paso:

  Dear Gonzalez: I am back in Munson, and I want horses again. But this time I want horses that are broke, and that we can take to Munson on ropes. I want three hundred horses. For the purchase, $10 a head, and $10 more a head for the breaking, and $5 extra for bringing them to Munson. Does that sound to you? That will give you a chance to make a little profit on every horse. If everything goes through in good shape, I may be able to increase that price.

  As it stands, $7,500 for the herd of three hundred. Write to me that you want the contract and I’ll forward $5,000 to you. Get Pedro, if you can, to help with the work, and write back to me at once.

  Sammy Gregg

  Here Sammy shuddered a little. That amount in the hands of Gonzalez! But upon second thought, he decided that all life here in the West was a gamble, and he would have to go ahead taking chances.

  He sealed the letter when a strangely subdued murmur of noises rose from the street. He glanced out the window of his room and saw the tall form and the handsome face of him whom Munson now called The Duke, in other words, Chester Ormonde Furness. He was seated in a buckboard, driving a fine pair of horses, one of which was a great dappled gray that carried, in addition to harness, a saddle cinched around its belly.

 
; There was something covered in the body of the buckboard, and now the wind stirred that covering and revealed two pairs of boots—with the legs of men in them.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Two men, lying side-by-side in the bottom of a buckboard, with only a thin throw of blue calico between their upturned faces and the sun—that terrible, broiling, baking Western sun? No, it did not seem possible.

  Furness had stopped his team and the buckboard stood stationary with the sun still baking and broiling upon the calico—and the bodies that lay beneath it. And the horrible conviction entered the mind of Sammy Gregg that living they could not be, since nothing human could have endured that heat without stirring.

  Sammy was in the street in ten seconds, and he found himself a member of a crowd that was rapidly being recruited from every corner of the town. There was even old Rendell, who hated activity of any kind, now hurrying out of his store and swinging toward them as fast as he could move his crippled leg. And, old and young, the town drew swiftly together to stare at big Chester Furness as he took the harness off the near horse—the gray—and led it forth in the saddle. Then he climbed into the saddle and sat there with a hand upon his thigh and his calm eyes and his sneering smile fixed upon the crowd.

  What might have seemed wonderful to many was that fifty guns did not leap out of the holsters there in Munson that knew Furness so well and that had so many reasons for hating him—that fifty guns did not fly forth to shower lead upon him.

  But to Sammy and to the others who were gathered there, you may be sure that it did not seem strange, while the cold eye of Furness was wandering over their faces, dwelling a little on each one, as though he wished to remember. But, oh, how mightily they hated that handsome fellow. From the tips of his well-polished boots to his whipcord riding trousers and the neat bowtie at his throat, how thoroughly they detested even his neatness, as though that were a vice, also. And indeed, out here in the wilderness of the bare mountains, it seemed almost a vice. And between the rough, unshaven, sweating, hot crowd and that dapper fellow in the saddle, there was a wide ocean. And every wave in that ocean was purest hatred.