Stagecoach

by Max Brand

  Dick Harrison strode into the kitchen. “Look here, bo,” he roared, “I hear you’ve been talking back to the lady?”

  “Mister,” the shrinking form of Jeremy Major said, “I’m doing no harm.”

  “You . . . rat,” Harrison said, nodding with the conviction of his emotion. “Just . . . plain . . . worthless . . . rat.”

  “Dick!” Anne Cosden cried. “You won’t be too rough with him. He’s not very big, after all. And he really didn’t say much back to me.”

  “Oh, I’ll be gentle, I will!” Harrison snarled. And he reached out a brawny hand and fixed it upon the shoulder of the new kitchen helper. “You get out where I can have a look at you,” he said. And he dragged Jeremy lightly forth from the kitchen and out into the light of the dying day. Oh, how fresh and how bright was the evening, and from up and down the street of the town there was a subdued rattling of contented voices of hungry men, back from their labor on the lode above them, and ready to eat as only laborers know how.

  “Dick Harrison!” cried the girl in a fresh alarm. “You won’t hurt him, really?”

  “Don’t you worry about him,” Harrison said over his shoulder. “I know how to handle this kind, if I don’t know anything else. You leave him to me.”

  “Leave Dick to look after him,” said others among those who stood about. “He won’t give him any more than is good for his troubles, you can bet. That’s just an ordinary, greasy, lowdown hobo.”

  “Now,” Harrison said, “I hear that you wouldn’t be fired today.”

  “I was hired by a man,” Major said, giving the effect of dangling bodily from the thick, suspended arm of Harrison. “And I thought I ought to be fired by a man, too.”

  “Well,” Harrison said, “you were hired by a man, and now it is a man who fires you.” He added—“Get out!”—and he swung his heavy hand through the air.

  It just missed the head of Major as that young worthy ducked toward safety. The hand of Harrison carved the air only, while Major, having slipped oddly from the grip of the other, stood at a little distance saying humbly: “I’m sure I don’t wish any trouble, you know. But I have to wait to be fired by Mister Cosden.”

  “You have to wait?” Harrison shouted, more than a little flustered because that swinging, open hand of his had not cuffed the cheek of the tramp. “Then wait and take this.”

  He ought not to have done it, considering the superiority of his size and the thickness of his athletic shoulders, and the length of his heavy, muscular arms. Certainly he should not have struck with all his might at an opponent so much smaller. But Harrison was a hot-tempered man, and now his anger quite got the best of him. Besides, he was of the school that strikes first and thinks afterward. He struck with the precision, too, of a trained boxer. No lumbering, roundabout, club-like blow, but a snapping punch from the shoulder with half the back muscles rippling into it.

  One looked to see that terrible plunging fist dash right through the meager body of little Jeremy Major. But, no, by some lucky chance he seemed to have blundered out of the way of the blow. Or was it entirely by chance?

  “Won’t somebody please take him away before there’s any trouble?” Major called.

  “Dick Harrison!” cried Anne Cosden, who saw that the matter had gone too far and that Harrison’s wild temper was apt to do the smaller man an injury. “Dick Harrison, that’s enough. Don’t you dare to touch him again.”

  As well have called to the stormy wind. Harrison, with a snarl of growing fury, rushed wildly in. There was something terribly brutal in the charge of that big body upon the smaller man, when the mere weight of his hand seemed so amply sufficient to put an end to the fight, if fight it could be called.

  And then the oddest thing happened. For it seemed that Jeremy Major, as he huddled away from the other, with his hands raised timidly before his face in a most unmilitary posture—it seemed that Major, as Harrison rushed in, stumbled, and stumbled forward, and he seemed to reach out his left hand to stop himself, clutching at the empty air as a man will do. Except that this time, by the veriest accident, of course, the knuckles of that flying left fist clicked just upon the ridge of Harrison’s jaw bone. And his rush stopped.

  Indeed, he was brought up standing, as the saying is, and rocked back upon his heels. And from the spectators, who indeed were seeing stranger sights than they had ever dreamed of seeing, there broke a groan of wonder. From Harrison came a roar of bewildered fury.

  Jeremy Major had leaped back an astonishing distance. He seemed to have grown, suddenly, two or three inches in height. He filled his clothes more sleekly. And he was poised on his toes with the lightness—well, with the lightness of nothing human, you may be sure.

  “Will you take that clumsy fool away from me before I do him any harm?” Major said in a peculiar voice. “Will you take him away before I have to . . . ?”

  It was Cosden, whose brain was a vital second or two faster than the brains of the men, who heard and understood at once. And he uttered a yell to Harrison and tried to break out to get at the fighters. It was too late. He could only paw and strain to break away through the jam at the doorway, while, before his eyes, happened one of the oddest things he had ever witnessed in the length of a very full and active life.

  As Harrison leaped in again—warily, now, as a trained fighter who realizes that he has an enemy worthy of his steel—Major went to meet him. You could not say that Major exactly leaped as Harrison did. But he slithered low over the ground, and one was simply conscious that he had left one place and had appeared again at another.

  Somehow, he managed to straighten up just under and inside the arms of big Harrison, and the result was worth traveling long miles to see. For truly it was as though a shell had exploded in front of big Harrison. He made a clumsy effort to strike at his smaller foeman with both hands, but the fists of Major had sunk into the midsection of Harrison’s anatomy. He tried to stagger in and close with this elusive fellow. But his efforts were only too successful. Major met him in mid-air. They swirled into a tangle of twisting, writhing bodies, and then Harrison collapsed.

  It was all so quick that no one could see exactly what had happened. Only the results were visible. And the most important result was the picture of Harrison lying prostrate upon the ground with his eyes wide and staring, as the eyes of a dead man, and his face swollen—either with effort or from being nearly throttled.

  It wasn’t a pleasant thing to see. They went to pick him up, and it was odd to see them go in to him like children advancing toward the edge of a fire, so carefully did they keep their eyes fixed upon the form of Major in the background.

  He made no effort to persecute his fallen enemy, however. He seemed to be shrinking away into the distance, as though ashamed of what he had done.

  They raised Harrison. He himself half recovered from his swoon at the same instant and put out a hand to help himself up, but the arm that he extended crumbled under the strain and he uttered a wild scream of pain. And everyone nearby could hear the gritting of the broken ends of the arm bone. At some time in that brief and terrible struggle, Jeremy Major had snapped the arm of his enemy like a pipe stem.

  I suppose everyone there had seen a good deal of rough-and-tumble fighting. Even the girl had seen her share, for Anne Cosden loved boxing almost well enough to try her own turn at the gloves. However, there was no jubilant shout from the spectators, no shout such as usually goes up when the smaller man of a pair wins a fight. And the reason was that this was different from ordinary fighting.

  There were not many outward signs of a fist fight on the body of big Harrison. His face, as has been said, was swollen and discolored a little and his jaw was marked with a purple patch near the point. But, on the whole, he looked rather like one who has collapsed from a great shock rather than one who has been beaten with fists to insensibility.

  And the same touch of horror that was in his eyes was in the eyes of the others as they raised him to his feet. He saw Major, then, and utte
red a groan. Then he was led, staggering, into the house.

  The men were busy with him. Only Anne Cosden remained behind in the yard of the house with Major, and now she turned and looked at him with a frown.

  “Well,” she said at last, “I see that you’ve been playing a part, all day long. I suppose you’ve simply been hungry for the trouble to start so that you could show us what you could do.”

  And he replied quietly: “Do you think I really wanted that fight?”

  When she looked back on the affair, she had to admit that he certainly had not pushed himself forward in the fray. And yet she could not help a feeling that his lazy, shrinking indolence had been all an assumed mask. No one, with this devilish, compacted energy within, could have been utterly nonchalant at a moment when battle was in the offing. And then, too, there had been a destructiveness about his fight. It was not like a mere encounter of fists. Usually in those struggles there is a vast deal of swinging and smashing and puffing and heaving. But here there had been hardly more than a brush—one tangle—one thrust—and there lay Harrison, swollen of face, crushed, perhaps broken in spirit forever, and here was this slender youth untouched.

  In the older days, no doubt, this matter would have been put down to a little use of black magic, and though there were few girls more level-headed than Anne Cosden, yet even Anne had a slight sense of weird awe.

  “Well,” Anne said, “and what do you want to do now?”

  “Stay here, ma’am, and go right on working,” Major replied.

  “Working?” echoed Anne. “We’ll keep you, though. Out of curiosity, if nothing else. But will you please tell me where you learned to fight like that?”

  “Why, yes,” Major said. “I used a lot of patience, you know. I had to admit, when I was younger, that I was a good deal weaker than most boys of my age. And so I had to make a good deal of myself if I were going to hold up my end with the other boys. I had to do everything in the best way, or else I couldn’t do it at all.”

  “Humph!” Anne Cosden said. “All very probable, I’m sure. And the same sort of patience, I presume, taught you how to work so fast, with so little effort. Young man, are you trying to make a fool out of me?”

  “No,” Major answered blandly.

  And he and the young lady stared at each other—she with a bright-eyed challenge in her eyes, and he calmly defying her and smiling inwardly, so it seemed.

  In the meantime, Hubert Cosden had busied himself with Dick Harrison, and that stout young man gradually came back toward consciousness with a brain still reeling. He wanted to know where he was, and if the fight was over. And when he was assured that it was, he shamelessly thanked the Lord for it. After they had poured a dram or two of hot brandy down his throat, he recovered a bit more and gave them his own impressions of the battle.

  “It was like hitting a bunch of feathers and . . . finding that they were carved out of rock,” he explained. “I thought my fist could hardly be kept from going clean through him. But when he got his hands on me . . . I thought I’d fallen under the feet of a thousand buffaloes stampeding.”

  And so young Harrison talked on, without shame, not as one who details a defeat, but as one interested in the portrayal of some inhuman phenomenon.

  Hubert Cosden felt that there was a heavy moral responsibility on his hands for what young Major had done. And he gave his men a little talk in which he told them that it was possible that Jeremy Major would be on hand for some time, and, in that case, he hoped that they would make it a point not to indulge in any more quarrels with him. Cosden discovered that he need not have troubled himself about this matter. His young men were not at all inclined to experiment after Harrison had opened their eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Early the next morning in the canvas-walled, floorless place that was known as The Hotel, young Sammy Gregg was wakened by the capable hand of Hubert Cosden upon his shoulder.

  “Gregg,” said the miner, “tell me at once just what you know about this fellow Major . . . this Jeremy Major.”

  It took Sammy hardly ten minutes to tell how he had first seen an unsuccessful young beggar blowing improvised music with a flute in Munson, and how he had dropped $10 into the hat of the stranger, or how he had seen the same figure grown brilliant and playing with huge sums in a gambling den in Texas not very many days later, or how he had encountered him later in a tramp jungle, and how Jeremy Major and his horse had driven a herd of wild mustangs through the mountains to Crumbock.

  Cosden listened to these details with a hungry interest, but still he continued to shake his head, as though he did not find in what he heard the sort of answers that were satisfying to him.

  “It seems to be out of the frying pan and into the fire, Gregg,” said Cosden. “There is something about this Western air that affects the head of my girl. I’ve never known her to pay any attention to men, except to laugh at them. But now . . . confound it, Gregg, she seems to be fascinated by young Jeremy Major. She watches him . . . the way a bird is said to watch a snake.”

  “He’s done something, then?” Sammy said.

  “Oh, curse him, yes. A most uncanny, grisly thing . . . smashed up the strongest, most athletic man I have. A trained boxer, too. Broke him up in the most amazingly easy style. A weird style, too.”

  Sammy Gregg, nodding and with wide eyes, did not interrupt. For he knew that a man in this frame of mind could not keep from talking.

  “And the young scoundrel seems to be enchanting my daughter,” Cosden went on. “So that I don’t know which to dread the most . . . the influence of big, handsome Furness, who may be a rascal, but who seems to be a gentleman . . . or the influence of young Jeremy Major, who seems to be a wild, lazy, mysterious good-for-nothing. And, between you and me, what I really wish is that I could get my girl safely out of these mountains and away to the farther side of the world.

  “Do you understand? It’s a dangerous business, using fire to fight fire, or poison to fight poison. My one hope is that the business will be over soon, and if they don’t mutually brain one another, I shall be disappointed. Jeremy Major is coming to see you. He has told me that he is willing to do whatever he can to handle Furness for me. And he thinks that he needs you and me both to arrange the matter. His idea is an odd one. And yet there is something a little attractive about it, too. What he wants to do is to throw out a sort of general challenge to big Furness. He says that Furness is not holding up stages merely to get the money out of them, but also because he is rather amused by the exciting work. Confound his heart.

  “Now, then, what this fellow Major wants to do is to have me entrust a good fat shipment of gold to the stage. You yourself, Gregg, will go along to deliver the shipment and to check up on all that happens. There will be a driver, and there will be young Major. Or, if a driver doesn’t want to handle the risky job, Major himself says he will drive the coach and fight it, also.

  “You understand the scheme? Everything is to be published far and wide. Jeremy Major is going to attempt to push a stage, carrying a good many thousands in gold, straight through the mountains to Munson. And the hope is that Furness will take it into his head to meet Major and dispute the way with him . . . partly for the sake of the money and partly for the sake of maintaining himself as ruler of the roost.”

  This was the origin of that odd plan that Jeremy Major had conceived, and that he also desired to execute. And Sammy, listening to the scheme, found a good deal that he could object to. But he also saw two great advantages for himself for which he would willingly have sacrificed himself a thousand times over. One advantage was that he would, in this fashion, be rid of Furness. Another was that if Major traveled on that stage line to defend it, it would discourage not only Furness, but perhaps all other prospective thieves who had sundry villainous intents in mind.

  He announced on the spot his willingness to direct the whole affair and travel in the danger stage himself for that purpose. Also, he would provide, if he could, a driver and a
good team to make the first relay run.

  There would be no trouble about the provision of horses. For the Texas mustangs, which had lost so much flesh during the first few days of the operation of the line, were now waxing fat again. And their spirits were rising with their flesh. For poor Sammy had been forced to reduce the number of stages until now only one was making the trip. It came from Munson to Crumbock. And at Crumbock it was relieved by another vehicle that started back under the same driver.

  But the patronage of the line had fallen off so hugely that even the running of one coach was not worthwhile. It was never a third filled. And that third consisted of penniless adventurers. For the coach from Munson to Crumbock and back had become known throughout the range as the danger line, or the danger stage—a name to which it had lived up only too well.

  But now, with the mines booming more strongly than ever, with the pressure of business coming closer and closer to the boiling point, the one rapid and effective means of communication between Munson and Crumbock was practically abandoned by miners and travelers.

  Sammy had to admit that they were right. All he objected to was that they made a joke of his line. Yes, even the men who were on his payroll were inclined to smile at the prospects of the stage. All of them were looking forward to a necessary change of work before long, and all of them were loafing on a job that no longer required their industry. And Sammy, remarking the fact that the rats were leaving the sinking ship, felt every day more convinced that his doom was surely creeping upon him.

  Furness, of course, was the main rock upon which he was splitting. All the other ruffians who had infested the highway across the mountains had not been as dangerous to life and property as that single man. And now there was a last hope, that Jeremy Major might meet and crush the famous rider of the gray horse.

  Sammy himself saw the stage looked to, and every nut in her tightened and the wheels greased. He saw the six best horses he had prepared for the work. Then he set about finding a driver for the team.