by Max Brand
So here they parted, and Hubert Cosden began with Sammy by apologizing for sending for him. However, there was on the mind of the millionaire a weight so heavy that he had to get it off at once. “And what do you know about this man Furness?” asked Cosden.
“I know about as much as most people do,” Sammy replied. “I arrived from the East on the same train that brought him. I saw him bullied by the first and last crowd that will ever try that trick on him. I saw him shoot the first man he killed in Munson. And I had a herd of two hundred broncos swiped by him, and I had him sass me to my face about the mustangs. I’ve seen him right from the start, so far as this part of the country knows him. What do you want to know about him?”
“You’re an intelligent man, Gregg. You wouldn’t let personal injuries prejudice you too much. Now, personally I know nothing about this fellow at all. I want to ask your opinion. Do you think that there’s a shadow of a reason to hope that he might ever go straight?”
There was something about the urgent tone in which this was asked that made Sammy suspect that Cosden wished him to say yes. And so he answered: “He’s not a boy, and he wasn’t a boy when he started in at Munson.”
“Nobody likes a man without some spirit,” Cosden said. “And nobody likes a man who won’t fight.”
Sammy smiled.
“Well?” Cosden asked sharply.
“Nothing. Except that I think you’re answering your own questions, Mister Cosden. Nobody wants a coward . . . but nobody really wants a thief and a murderer.”
“Murder?” Cosden answered. “Isn’t that a very strong word to use? Has it ever been proved that Furness has ever taken a human life unless in self-defense?”
“I don’t suppose it has,” Sammy said. “But you see . . . the trouble is that he’s had to defend himself so often.” Cosden was gloomily silent, and Sammy drove home the point. “You’d think,” he continued, “that once a man got the reputation that this Furness has, he’d have no trouble. People would dodge him like fire or poison. But that doesn’t seem to be the way of it. Poor Furness is being hounded all the time by bullies and gunfighters, and he has to keep on killing people in self-defense . . . guards of stages, for instance, that he’s about to hold up.”
Cosden, turning very red, raised his hand. “That’s enough,” he said. “I suppose I understand the rest of what you have to say, and I suppose I have to agree with it. And yet . . . confound it . . . one cannot help hoping that these strong young men . . . there’s a lack of strong men in this world of ours, Gregg!”
Sammy Gregg blinked and nodded.
“Although,” qualified burly Cosden in haste, “there are several kinds of strength . . . physical, mental, and all that, I am very well aware.”
But Sammy smiled, as one who would say: I am not proud, even when you step on my corns.
“Well,” Cosden said, “the idea just hopped into my head. But you’re right, I suppose. Yes, of course you’re right. The fellow is a . . . rascal.” A mild name for the deeds of Furness, to be sure.
“That’s all right,” Sammy said good-naturedly as he turned away. “I don’t blame you for wanting to know about him.” He could have bitten out his tongue the instant he had said that, and so he turned away hastily, hoping that what he had said in parting would not be noticed.
He got two strides away, and then a ringing voice blasted after him: “Gregg!” He whirled around as though he had been shot. His face was burning, and so was the face of Cosden. Mutually they read the thoughts of one another and grew redder still.
“Gregg,” Cosden said more gently, “I’ve got to know what you mean by that.”
“Why,” Sammy lied gallantly, “nothing, of course. But everybody in the town is interested in the man who’s held up three stages.”
Cosden shook his head. “Well done, Sammy,” he said, “but it won’t do. No, you had a particular thought in mind when you said that. Confess what it was.”
“Why,” Sammy said, “there’s no law against guessing, is there?”
“I suppose not. But what is your guess?”
“Miss Cosden . . .”
“Good Lord!”
“Only a guess . . . and it’s legal to take a guess, Mister Cosden.”
“Does the whole town know?” Cosden gasped miserably.
“Nobody dreams of it,” Sammy assured.
“But you . . .”
“I was sitting in the seat beside her, when the stage was stopped by . . .”
“Well . . . I suppose you did your guessing then?”
“Yes.”
“You are a good guesser, Gregg,” the older man said gloomily. “And at that rate, you ought to make a success on the street. You could read the minds of the stocks. You guessed, but you said nothing to me.”
“Mister Cosden, you wouldn’t have believed me. And it was none of my business . . . to guess out loud.”
The other nodded. “The first I knew of it was last night. The scoundrel sneaked down to the town and I actually found him as big as life in my house talking to my girl. I came in and took them unawares. He was as cool as the devil. I half think that he is the devil. And, of course, there’s no nerves in Anne. I had a fine talk with them, you may be sure. And, for all I know, Anne may be riding away over the edge of the world with him at this moment . . . curse me for a talking idiot . . . why am I telling you all of this?”
“I could guess,” Sammy said, very white and sick of face.
“There’s nothing to be done,” Cosden said gravely. “All I can do is to wait . . . and pray that she will have good sense and do nothing rash. But if I oppose her . . . ah, Gregg, if only we could find a way of killing him off to save her.”
“He has a habit of defending himself,” Sammy said.
“I know that. But surely there must be in the world some man or men able to fight fire with fire.”
And then the great thought struck Sammy.
Chapter Twenty-Six
One hunts for opposites as antidotes—the fat to counteract the acid—the boxer to beat the slugger—the bird to kill the serpent. And so Sammy, thinking of the big shoulders and the heavy body of handsome Chester Furness, naturally and instinctively turned his mind toward the opposite of so much brute force and what he thought of was the slender, supple body of young Jeremy Major.
Not that one thought of Jeremy Major as being young, any more than one thinks of a statue of a youth as being young. It may date from the 5th Century B.C. And so with Jeremy—he simply was—he existed—as fire exists, without an age.
And, thinking of him, it seemed to Sammy that he had the solution. And suddenly he began to chuckle.
“Has it turned into a laughing matter?” Cosden asked bitterly. “Is it worth no more serious thought than this?”
“I was only wondering what would happen when they meet,” Sammy said.
“Who?” asked Cosden.
“Did you ever see an old cat tackle a dog in earnest?” Sammy asked rather dreamily.
Cosden gaped; he felt that the youth was possibly taking leave of his good wits.
“Well,” went on Sammy, “he’s like that. Only bigger. And not a house cat. No, because he’s wild from the heart out.”
“Who? Who under heaven!” Cosden cried. “Who is wild, and what difference does it make to me?”
“The man who will beat big Furness for you, I think,” Sammy answered.
Cosden showed signs of interest at once. “Tell me about him,” he said. “Is he another one of these men who have to defend themselves often?”
“Oh, no,” Sammy said. “It doesn’t happen very often. He’ll duck out of the way of trouble, you see, the way a jack rabbit will double away from a dog. Trouble doesn’t get him into a corner very often, but when it does . . .” He paused significantly.
“Some honest, honorable fellow?” Cosden asked.
“A crooked gambler,” Sammy replied, “when he meets other crooked ones. A loafer who never did a lick of work in his life.
A good-for-nothing tramp king and spendthrift. That’s all you can say for him, logically.”
“Very well,” said Cosden. “If it’s matching one of that kind against the big fellow, I suppose I may call it fighting fire with fire. It doesn’t make much difference which of them goes down. The world will be benefited by it.”
“Oh,” Sammy said, “there’s no doubt about who’ll go down. No doubt about that at all.”
“Is this friend of yours such a terrible fighter?”
“He’s terrible enough. I never saw him fight. But I know about him. The only trouble will be about getting him to take the job.”
“If that is all,” Cosden said, “then we can stop worrying. Money is no object to me in a matter like this. If it will bring my girl over the rocks safely, I’ll spend it like water. You yourself, Gregg, hire him and promise him anything you like. If he wants an advance . . . that sort of a man usually does . . . tell him to name his own figure.”
Sammy shook his head. “Money will never turn the trick,” he assured. “Never in the world. Money isn’t what you want. He’s had as much money in his hands as you’ve had, I suppose. Millions must have drifted through him at the gaming tables. But it’s dirt to him. It’s water to him. He’s thrown it away. Given it away. No, money will never tempt him.”
“The devil take him. This fellow seems to be a freak. What will bring him, then?”
“Partly because he’s getting bored.”
“He won’t do a killing for money, but he might do it for pleasure?”
“Exactly.”
“A pleasant man.” Cosden shuddered.
“But I think,” Sammy said, “that the only way to go about it is for you to hunt him out and tell him the truth.”
“The truth . . . Gregg, are you quite mad? The truth to such a fellow?”
“It would be safer with him than with me or you,” Sammy said.
Cosden threw up his hands. “I give it up,” he announced. “Everything that you say about this fellow is at outs with everything else you say. He seems to me made up of nothing but opposites.”
“That,” Sammy said, “is exactly what he is.”
So it was that Hubert Cosden, the millionaire, went down the street with Sammy and found the goal of his search in a gaming room, sitting idly on a bench at the side of the room. And a big, bearded fellow beside him was pouring forth a tale of hard luck.
“Look here,” Cosden heard the youth break in upon the miner, “what would it cost you to tackle that job again . . . with the right sort of help?”
“Here’s millions lyin’ idle, goin’ to waste, because there ain’t nothin’ legitimate to put ’em into. But fifteen hundred would stake me. But can I get anybody to give my idea a try . . . ?”
“Here,” slender Jeremy Major said, “is the fifteen hundred and a little extra. So long. Run along. I don’t want your thanks. Never mind the contract. Your word suits me. I don’t want a witness . . . good bye.” And so he fairly pushed the man away and the prospector ran, red-eyed and joyous, into the street.
“And he’s not a fool?” Cosden asked Sammy.
“It looks that way, but he’s not. Here, I’ll introduce you.”
Men did not take long to get down to even the most important business, in those days in the West. Cosden found himself taking a hand no larger and just as soft as the hand of his daughter Anne. He found himself looking down into dark, melancholy brown eyes. And then he was walking forth in the street with Jeremy Major at his side. Gregg had gone off and left them to their own devices.
It was a very hard story to tell, but then the need behind it was very great, and Cosden brought out the tale haltingly, stiffly. When he finished, Jeremy Major made a brief resume.
“This fellow, Furness, you think needs killing, and I’m to do the job. Partly for any sum I want to name and partly as a sort of a public benefaction.”
That summed it up, neatly enough, and Cosden smiled and nodded.
“Well,” Jeremy said, “I’m not a public benefactor. And I never was. And, in the next place, I am not so sure that your daughter is worth all this fuss. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But I might as well tell you right now, to begin with, that the only person I’d tackle big Furness for is the lady herself.”
It was rather bold talk—much bolder, at least, than Cosden was accustomed to hearing. But there was really nothing for him to do except to bear it as best he might.
“I suppose,” he said patiently, “that the thing for me to do is to take you home and introduce you to my daughter?”
“It won’t do at all,” replied this calmly self-assured Jeremy Major. “She’s a rough sort, and hard to know. Of course I’ve seen her. Everybody has seen her riding that black horse that she brought on from Munson. But one doesn’t feel like tackling Furness for the sake of a girl that seems to care about nothing in the world except the highest fence that she can jump her horse over. Suppose you get short of help in your house . . . and suppose you give me a job . . . something sort of easy, if you don’t mind. Because it kills me to work.”
Cosden smiled grimly at the thought of the gunfighter trembling over the prospect of work. And yet, in spite of himself, he could not help wondering if Sammy Gregg had not been covertly amusing himself in presenting this fellow to him as a destroyer of men.
“You can do what you like,” he said. “Pick out any kind of job around the house that you want to. My cook quit this morning, and my daughter is doing the cooking and the rest of the work. Which is plenty, because we have to feed eight men.”
Major writhed at the thought. “Eight men.” He sighed. “And this sort of weather.” He glanced deprecatingly up at the blazing sun. “Well,” continued, “I’ll tell you how it is . . . work doesn’t agree with me, somehow. I have bad nerves, d’you see? And work interferes with them a surprising lot.”
“Name what you please,” Cosden said. “Or, if you want, I’ll bring you up there as a visitor . . . or a driller waiting for a . . .”
“Could you do that?” Major said, brightening. “But, no, I should be working. Working, so that I’ll have a chance to talk to her. I’ll tell you . . . washing dishes is about my speed . . . if you have a good airy kitchen with plenty of windows and doors to it. Or chopping . . . the kindling wood, maybe. I wouldn’t mind that sort of work.”
“Young man,” Cosden returned, “will you tell me how you ever managed to get along as a boy, or were there no chores around your house?”
“There were chores,” Major answered, with a pained sigh of recollection. “And there was a stepmother who had a special talent for getting those chores done by her stepsons. But somehow, after she had tried me out on the jobs for a long time, she came to decide that maybe it was better for someone else to do the work . . . because I was so clumsy that I was always breaking something. After a while, there wasn’t much work for me to do, and I was raised easy. But it took a lot of thinking, always, to get out of that work.”
“Well,” Cosden said grimly, “if you had been around my father’s house, you would have done your chores or taken some mighty tall lickings in the place of them.”
“As a matter of fact, I was never licked, after I got to be boy size,” Jeremy said.
“Never licked!” Cosden cried. “Well, that explains it. I’d as soon try to persuade a mule with pleasant talk as to try to persuade a boy.”
“I suppose,” Jeremy said, but there was an odd little smile in the corners of his lips, and Cosden thought he saw a flickering yellow light glint into the eyes of the young fellow, and out again. He could not be quite sure about it, but it gave Cosden a distinct pang of uneasiness. And, filled with all manner of odd thoughts, he took Jeremy Major up the hill to introduce him to Anne Cosden.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The best that could be said about that combination was, briefly, that it did not work. When Cosden came wearily home from the mine that night, and eight weary, dirty, hungry men with him, and when he slumpe
d through the door of the shack, he found his daughter with a face white and pinched with anger.
“And what’s wrong with you, Anne?” her father asked.
“I thought I had seen men of all kinds,” Anne said in a wild explosion. “I thought I had seen the most worthless types in the world. But this precious good-for-nothing that you found for me is the worst yet. A helper? He’s not even a shadow of an excuse for a man. And . . . why, Dad, he can’t even chop kindling wood straight or without going to sleep over it. I’m sure he hasn’t slept a wink for a month. And . . . or . . .” She groaned through set teeth to express the greatness of her disgust. “I’m not going to quit on the job, Dad,” she added hastily. “I don’t mind cooking for hungry men. But I hate having that creature around. And impertinent, too. When I told him that I’d pay him off and he could quit, he told me that he would take orders from nobody but the man who hired him, when it came to stopping his job.”
There was a growl of rage from one of the men—a big, two-handed fighting man, with a shock of hair as red as Anne Cosden’s and a chin of wood and a nose that was obviously a pliable button of India rubber. “Let me go out and handle him,” said the big fellow. “You’re a tired man, Cosden. Let me go and take care of him.”
Cosden weakly gave way to temptation, because, be it understood, he did not really believe that Sammy Gregg had told him the truth about this strangely lazy lad. And though there was that about the youth that gave him an odd, eerie feeling, still, he was not quite sure. And he was rather glad to have his warrior from the mine try out Jeremy Major.
So tall Dick Harrison paused in the door of the kitchen and scowled into the interior. “A bum,” he said, speaking his thoughts with unnecessary loudness. “A plain, good-for-nothing tramp.”
The others crowded as close to the door as they could, and they saw the slender, shiftless-looking fellow at the sink glance hastily around over a hunched shoulder as in fear. And then the work of washing the pans was resumed with a sudden flurry of noise and a splashing of greasy dishwater. Yet the work did not seem to get forward any faster.