Stagecoach

by Max Brand

  She was dabbled with crimson from head to foot, and she was quite white with the sight of so much of it. But she stuck to her work. Good work, too. It pays those who hunt and ride to understand first aid, and Anne Cosden had learned her lesson well. She was making every touch count, and every touch was dragging those two wretched farther and farther from the shadow of death. Yes, there was Andrew already bandaged. The deadly running of the crimson had been stopped. But still his eyes were closed and his pale forehead was puckered as it had been when he felt the strength of his life leaking swiftly out from him—ebbing away in great pulses. And now Lester Gunn was being saved.

  Furness stooped from the saddle above her. And he saw her shrink and shudder beneath the sense of his nearness. He undid with the deft tips of his fingers a clasp that secured a delicate little gold chain around her neck. There was only a little ornamental locket at the end of it. And she, with both her hands employed, merely said without raising her head: “It’s worth nothing in money. I’ll pay you to leave that with me, Mister Furness.”

  “I have to have it,” he said. “I don’t know just what it may mean to you, but I’m certain that it can’t mean so much to you as it does to me.”

  Only that—and then the stinging dust spurned into a cloud before her face as the stallion’s hoofs bit strongly at the road and shot him away at full speed from that standing start. Away down the road, swiftly, swiftly. And, from the corner, a crackling of guns to pursue him. She paid no heed to those guns. She did not even look up to see the result, for she knew he was safe. No man such as those in that stage could touch the life of this hero of the mountains, for she felt that he controlled his own destiny as surely as though it lay in the palm of his hand.

  They left the Gunn brothers there by the roadside. Two men volunteered to stay with them as nurses. Bedding was placed for them, and provisions, and the promise given that more help would be rushed back from the next relay station, only three miles away. And so the stage rolled on.

  No one did very much talking. Alec, because, with an aching heart, he was thinking of younger days, when his hands would not have been so slow in yanking up that sawed-off shotgun to fire. And the other men were silent because some of them had lost much money. All of them, too, were a little depressed, just as chickens, which fill a yard will cackle sharply when they see the topping hawk, and then are all hushed and still, and waiting for a long time after the sliding shadow has passed away.

  But Anne Cosden, sitting with bowed head, paid no heed even now to the terrible red stains on her clothes. But she rubbed slowly, patiently a red mark upon her wrist. It was where the edge of the palm of little Sammy Gregg had struck her.

  He, sitting beside her, could not help noticing. And he said softly, at last: “I’m sorry. I needn’t have hit you so hard, I suppose.”

  She raised blank eyes to him. It was as though he were miles away and she were staring to find a trace of him and his meaning. “Oh,” said Anne Cosden, “I wasn’t thinking of that.”

  What was she thinking of? Sammy Gregg was not a fool, and now he had something unusual working in his heart and head to stimulate him, so that he guessed well enough what it was. For there was everything about big Furness to make him a woman’s hero, thought Sammy. Size, courage, and that wonderful beauty of face, and above all the strangeness of soul in which he was wrapped. What, in contrast, was there in such a man as Sammy himself, and his wretched inches, and his starved body, and his unheroic soul?

  She need not have said any more, for Sammy was already perfectly convinced. But how was she, being what she was, apt to guess that this small creature was following the windings of her soul? So she said aloud, but more to herself than to him: “No, I’m glad that you thought quickly enough to strike my hand down. Otherwise . . . I . . . I might have . . . killed him. Think of it!”

  Was not Sammy thinking?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  If anyone could have said to Sammy Gregg that there could have come into his life, on that day, a thing greater than the stage line, he would have laughed them to scorn. But before they reached Crumbock on the next day—close to midnight—Sammy had been forced to confess to his heart of hearts that he loved that big, noisy, stalwart Anne Cosden more than he loved any other thing in the world. More, even, than he cared for the stage line and its success.

  Of course, it was a wretched confession to make, because he knew he had never a chance of winning her. He was ashamed of himself for being so absurd as to desire her, and he hoped, in his shrinking heart of hearts, that no one would ever guess at his secret. He had a miserable sense of guilt, when he saw big Hubert Cosden meet his daughter when the stage arrived under the big lanterns that illumined Sammy’s Crumbock terminal. What if she should tell her father something of the things that had happened during the ride—no, not the ridiculous maneuvers at the start, but what had gone on inside her spirit when she sat on the top of the coach and looked down to the handsome face of big Chester Ormonde Furness?

  However, there was some spark of joy for him. And that was the furor that Crumbock raised over him and his stage. To be sure, it was just half a day late, and it had been robbed on the way. But those, they assured him, were unlucky incidents that might happen to anyone.

  Sammy stayed in Crumbock for a while. He told himself, miserably, that it was because he wanted to work up the business at that most important end of the line—as though business needed any working up. But, in reality, he knew that it was because he wanted to be close to Anne Cosden.

  In a week, the four coaches were working steadily, and all the three hundred horses were being worked in turn. Aye, and a hurry call was sent to Gonzalez for more. And the dollars began to flow steadily into the pockets of Sammy, where they were needed so much.

  In the first seven days, he cleared $6,000—which gave some idea of how badly that stage line was needed at Crumbock. And during that first week nothing went wrong. There was not a single hold-up. There was not so much as a broken axle. And even the terrible mustangs from the Southland, once they had had a single turn at the work, became a smaller nuisance. Their deviltry was exhausted by their work, just as it should have been.

  On the eighth day there was the first sign of impending trouble. The northbound stage rolled into Crumbock bearing two extra passengers, in the form of the bodies of two would-be stage robbers.

  It was old Alec and his sawed-off shotgun, again. The old fellow was so proud of himself and his gun that he couldn’t help telling over and over again how it happened.

  “I seen a winkin’ and a quiverin’ of the leaves in a couple of bushes on a bank, over the road. I says to myself . . . ‘There ain’t wind enough to make that stir. Them there ain’t no tremblin’ aspens nor poplar, nor nothin’.’ And then I looked right close, and sort of inside the shadow of the greenery, I could see the outline of a pair of gents waitin’ there. And I sort of slipped my hand down on the old gun and got her ready, you might say. Sort of done it automatic. And just then the bushes was busted open and a couple of yaps jumped out with their guns at the ready. And they was yellin’ . . . ‘Stick up yuhr hands . . . pronto!’ Well, sir, I just swiveled the old cannon around and pulled both the triggers. Kick? Well, sir, I sure enough thought that my old arm was tore off at the shoulder. But them two rascals on the bank, they was tore right off at the foot, you can believe me, and they was throwed away into the scrap heap forever. They was sluiced right out of this here life and neither one of them didn’t feel a thing. It was plumb merciful, that was. I’d like to die that way myself. They was just killed in about ten places, each of ’em. And when I meet up with Mister Chester Furness the next time, you can lay to it that he’s gonna remember the day for a long time.”

  Poor Alec.

  On the very next day he insisted on driving the stage back again, instead of taking his lay-off. “You got to have one man,” Alec said, “that’s able to bring these here stages through all safe. And I reckon that I’m just about that man.”
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  Poor Alec.

  He got just three miles outside of Crumbock—hardly over the first rising range to the south, when a familiar form on a glorious dappled stallion rode out before the coach, a rifle at the ready. Alec reached for the mighty cannon, but as his hand fell on it, a bullet tore through his shoulder.

  And Furness lined up the passengers beside the road once more. He even paused to give kind words to Alec. “But after all,” Furness said in conclusion, “you’re a little too old to be playing a hand in this game.”

  But the loss of Alec was only one thing. In that stage there was the first shipment of gold that had been entrusted to the new line. Fifty pounds of dust, or more than $16,000 in value. And it was lost with the rest of the plunder. How much was taken from the belts of the men no one could more than guess, for each one put a pretty high estimate on his losses.

  However, it was a pretty bad loss to the miners, and it hit the reputation of the stage line pretty hard. One robbery was to be expected. It gave expectation and spice to a ride over the line, one might say, but two robberies, and a third attempted, all within the space of eight days, was a little too much. There was a lot of disagreeable talk in Crumbock, and Sammy knew from afar that the same sort of talk was going the rounds in Munson.

  Yet the patronage of the line did not fall off. Men still bought tickets, but they bought them with doubtful frowns, and the doubtful frowns were still worn all the way to the end of the trail.

  On the tenth day three worthies attempted to stop the southbound coach. They were armed with rifles, and they got the drop. But it happened that that stage was crammed with a dozen young men who had not filled their pockets with gold at Crumbock. They had lost their money, but they had not lost their desire for adventure. And when they saw the morning sun turning the barrels of those three rifles to diamonds, and when they heard the three youths in the road singing out, the men in the stage simply reached for their own guns.

  Four of them were badly wounded, but the three in the road were shot down, also. Two were killed. Another was taken to the next relay station, where he recuperated, and then escaped. But it was felt that this adventure might discourage further attempts upon the line.

  No, for the next day—the eleventh since the line was put in operation—the rider on the gray stallion appeared in the road and took the southbound coach almost exactly at the spot where the three desperadoes had appeared before. It was plain that he was saying to the world: What three cannot do when they don’t know how is ridiculously simple, if one simply understands how to go about the thing.

  For his part, he understood, and since the shooting of the two Gunn brothers and the bullet through the arm of famous Alec, resistance to the marauder was unpopular. He had taken three stages, now, and the men in Crumbock said: “He’s got enough to retire on, unless he’s in this game for fun.”

  However that might be, they were not willing to take the chance any more. Could they be blamed? There had been five attempts at robbery within eleven days. Three of them had succeeded, and, in one of the failures, four of the passengers in the coach had been wounded as they had fought off the robbers.

  The Western mind was made up with Western suddenness and Western thoroughness. The stage line to Munson was unsafe, and instantly no one would take a passage on it, except men who had not a penny to their names. They went gladly enough.

  Sammy, in despair, waited for three days and then announced the excursion rates, cutting the fare fairly in two. But still no one was willing to ride, and the receipts had fallen away to zero.

  “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with the fare, Gregg,” said one old-timer. “It’s the weather that you furnish along the road that makes us hold back. You give us too much scenery.”

  And the climax came when two reporters hurried out from the East solely for the pleasure of riding on this already celebrated line. By the time they got to Munson, they found that the hold-ups had become even more frequent than they had hoped. And they went over the line slowly, taking many snapshots. Oh, what labels for their pictures. “Dead Man’s Curve”—where Andrew and Lester Gunn were shot down by the famous desperado, Chester Furness, et cetera. Those were only samples.

  They took pictures of everyone, beginning with Sammy Gregg, and finishing up with the Gunn brothers, who were now sullenly convalescent. And then they published an account of the Munson-Crumbock trail that made little boys sit up late at night, staring at the blackness of the windows and wishing that they could grow up to be desperadoes, too.

  All this publicity might have been good to attract tourists if it had been just a little less recent. But battlefields are the popular spots for tourists—not battles.

  Sammy found that his stages were wandering slowly over the mountains—empty—and a payroll of forty men a day was rapidly consuming the cash in his pocket.

  Oh, a desperate time for Sammy, when good common sense was telling him that it was high time for him to surrender this losing venture, and when the gambling instinct assured him that, if he would hold on just a little longer, the luck was certain to turn.

  He grew hollow-eyed, nervous. The days were long nightmares to him. And so dull had grown the wits of Sammy that, when he encountered a certain young man on the long, winding street of Crumbock, he did not recognize that face, though it had played a most important part in the life of Sammy, you may be sure, and the stranger had to walk up to him and slap him twice upon the shoulder before Sammy rubbed his eyes and looked up from his daydream of misery.

  He saw a handsome youth before him, a slender, willowy figure of a man with soft, lazy brown eyes, and a cigarette, rolled Mexican style, dangling from his finger.

  “Jeremy Major,” Sammy said.

  “You look sick,” Jeremy said. “I’m coming to see you tonight. Start thinking for me. I’m terribly bored.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jeremy Major walked on down the street—for he seemed to be busy following a tall man in a white sombrero—and Sammy turned to stare hungrily after him. In all the world, there was only one Jeremy. He was a unique without a duplicate anywhere. And the world could wag on a thousand years and still there would be no second Jeremy to puzzle it. And yet, physically, Sammy could never understand him.

  Inch for inch, there was no vital difference of height between the two of them, and, pound for pound, there was no great advantage on the side of Jeremy Major. Still he was as physically superior to Sammy as a hundred-and-forty-pound leopard is superior to a hundred-and-forty-pound dog. The dog might hurt a man by chewing his leg badly. But the leopard would tear his throat open with one terrible stroke of its paw and then carry him away—silently, softly, out of a room filled with other men.

  Well, Jeremy Major was like that. Not that Sammy put him down as a mere murderer, but the possibilities of Jeremy were so infinite that Sammy’s imagination ran amok on them, for Sammy himself had seen enough strange feats performed by the slender youth. Sammy himself could never forget those various settings in which he had seen young Jeremy Major as the central figure. Gambler extraordinary, tramp and loafer par excellence, gunfighter, horse trainer, and, above all, unconscionable idler and pleasure-seeker. Such was the Jeremy Major that Sammy knew.

  What he was doing now, Sammy could not guess, unless it were that he had designs of inducing the tall man in the broad hat to enter a game of cards with him. But what advantage was it to the spendthrift to make money, when he cast it away again, like rain water falling back to the sea from which it came?

  But Jeremy was bored. It meant a great deal to Sammy to learn that. Jeremy wanted action and entertainment. And when the leopard begins to thrust forth its claws to try their edge, it is time for house dogs to hunt their kennels with all speed. If Jeremy took his exercise in Crumbock, great would be the noise thereof, beyond a doubt.

  And Sammy, with a somewhat malicious grin, cast his eye over the town. It lay sidelong by one edge of Crumbock Creek, which had given its name to the town and to the minin
g in that gulch. The creek wound, and so did the town. It was rarely more than one house deep, and it stretched for two miles along the creek. In the daytime it was a fairly quiet street, except for the creaking freight wagons and the cursing teamsters as they lurched in or out of the town. In the night, it was a hot slice of hell frying on earth. There was no other name for it. Though Sammy, who sought his bed early at night, had seen little of the carryings-on in the evening.

  But it was the world in which the gambler, Jeremy Major, could be expected to move altogether. And if Jeremy were sincerely bored with life, it was in that little night world at Crumbock that he would hunt for relaxation. Sammy instinctively sighed and shook his head; he was very glad that it was not his duty to keep that young man in order.

  For that matter, who was there in the world who could manage Jeremy? What man had force enough of hand and brain?

  A red-faced boy came tugging at his arm. “Hey, ain’t you Sam Gregg?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you must be pretty near deaf. I been yelling at you as hard as I could for a whole block. Mister Cosden, back yonder, he wants to talk to you.”

  Sammy went back and found the rich Hubert Cosden sitting sideways in a buckboard, dangling his feet over the side of the seat. He had two sweating buckskins harnessed to the light wagon, and when a buckskin sweats, as everyone knows, it is a sign that there has been some hard work behind the heels of those horses. A mass of dust and dried mud covered the buckboard, the driver, and the horses. He was talking eagerly but wearily with the Crumbock representative of a big powder company. But there was no use in wasting words on the powder man. He had taken the lip of every miner in camp and his only reply was: “If I can’t get the powder here, I can’t get the powder. I can’t work miracles, gentlemen. I ain’t here to do it. You fix up your stage line, and I’ll get in the powder fast enough.”