Stagecoach

by Max Brand

  This, however, was a different matter. The news had purposely been sent far abroad that the stage, on the 14th of the month, was to start out for Munson with $15,000 in raw gold aboard her. And it was perfectly well understood why that information had been cast out. It was that a hook might be baited for Chester Ormonde Furness. And there was a very generally expressed opinion that Furness would not only be snagged by the hook, but that he would straightway swim off with hook, line, sinker, and fishers, also.

  Nobody, in short, wished to take the job. Old Alec, with his crippled arm, wrote in to sympathize with his old boss upon the cowardice of his successors on the driver’s seat. But Alec himself had been rendered not available by the very enemy who now they had specially singled out.

  If there were any doubt as to what might become of the news that had been sent out in the general direction of the mountains that sheltered Furness, it was removed when a neatly written and quite surprising letter was received by Sammy in the following language:

  Dear Mr. Gregg: It is so long since I have seen anything but frightened tramps in your stages that I am delighted to hear that you have changed your policy and that you have now made yourself responsible for a shipment of gold.

  I am so interested that I must convey to you my intention of taking special charge of the gold at the earliest opportunity.

  Believe me to be most faithfully yours, and in gratitude for many favors consigned by you in the past,

  Chester Ormonde Furness

  Over this letter young Sammy Gregg pondered with a gray face. He was fairly well convinced that, no matter how formidably slender Major might be, Furness was unbeatable. And therefore he carried the letter to Cosden with a gloomy silence.

  However, Cosden was indomitable. “I have seen this man handle his hands. If he can use a gun half as well, he will be fairly invincible. Don’t talk to me about failure. He cannot fail. The gold goes by that stage, and, if you cannot persuade another man or young Major himself to drive, I’ll drive the infernal wagon myself.”

  There was no need of that. Jeremy Major willingly took upon himself to manage the team, and upon the appointed morning, with the June sun just turning the sky to rose and gold, Major stepped into the street and passed through the dense crowd that had gathered to see the danger coach start. Six men held the dancing, furious horses, all high strung from their long stay in the pasture. But when Major mounted the seat where Sammy was already waiting for him and picked up the reins, it was noted that under his hand and voice the team became suddenly quiet. A moment more and the brake was eased with a screech, and the big wagon lurched away down the street.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  There was a final thrill for the crowd of spectators after the coach had rolled down the street and while they were still standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the pair on the high-pitched seat rock with every inequality of the road.

  Someone called out: “Look here! Look at this stray! Hey, boys, who owns that horse?”

  There was such a note of wild excitement in this call that every head jerked around and presently they were aware of a tall, black stallion hoofing it down the street in strange guise. For he was fully saddled—most beautifully saddled, in fact. And upon the horn of the saddle there was tied a bridle that was one mass of burnished metalwork. But the head itself of the horse was free, and, as he trotted along, he tossed his crest high and glanced disdainfully from side to side upon the people in the street. For he was of a royal dignity, this king of kings among horses.

  There was not a white hair on him. He was as black as tar from head to foot. Yes, and the hoofs themselves were as black as though they had been newly stained. And he shone, too, as though he had been newly burnished, so that one could speak of the brightness of his glimmering flanks, but hardly of their color. Yes, the very hoofs flashed as though they had just been waxed and polished. And yet one knew after an instant of attention, that Nature was the groom in this case.

  Again, another sang out in quick warning: “Mind yourselves, boys! I know that horse. It’s Jeremy Major’s horse. And he’s a nacheral killer. Mind yourselves!”

  They minded themselves quickly enough. They scattered to either side, and, through the lane thus formed, the big fellow skipped with a wonderful lightness. There is a gait that exceeds in beauty either the racing step or the swinging canter or the high or daisy-cutting trot, and that is the walking pace of a truly fine horse. For, as he walks, his actions are not too swift for the human eye to follow the play of light upon his shoulders and the exquisite cushioning flexibility of the supple fetlock joints. And what these knowers of horseflesh saw as the big black walked past stirred their hearts. One did not need to know horses. A child would have understood that here was the speed of the wind.

  Presently he broke into a gallop, swept out from the town, and away after the stage and up the hill, following his master.

  “Look,” Anne Cosden said to her father. “He can let his horse run free behind him. What in the world does he do to animals?”

  So thought the rest of Crumbock, and a deep-throated murmur ran up and down the street.

  But the black was away in his stride, which did not alter until he had put himself ahead of the swinging trot of the stagecoach that Jeremy Major was driving over the mountain way. And, still in the lead, he idled along, keeping himself just beyond the leaders, pausing now and again to crop a tempting bunch of grass, and then brushing on.

  “If Furness should get away . . . ,” Major said, and finished by pointing to the stallion.

  Out from Crumbock there was a three-mile slope to climb, and after that for a distance the trail wound along the crest of a ridge. They had covered a good mile of this easier going when Major called softly and suddenly to the horses and at the same time shot the long handle of the brake forward. There was a screech of the brake pads against the heavy iron tires. The coach slowed to a walking pace, with the traces of the team slack, and then for the first time Sammy Gregg saw a reason for the halt.

  Through the trees at the next bend appeared the body of a great dappled gray horse with a tall rider in the saddle—Furness, with his rifle at the ready—Furness with the rifle butt against his shoulder.

  It cracked. A sound as of a whirring hornet darted into the ears of Sammy, and Major was out of the seat and lunging down—with a bullet through body or head.

  No, for he had landed astride of the near-wheeler, and then flicked off again onto the ground, and while he was still in the air a bit of steel gleamed in his hand. It spoke as the feet of the owner touched the deep dust. Sammy saw the rifle slip from the grip of Furness—saw it hang from the fingers of one hand—and then the Winchester dropped while Furness clutched at one arm with his other hand.

  At the same time, he swung the gray about with a sway of his body and a twist of his knees—and the forest closed instantly behind him. Through the silence that fell with a sudden weight as the jangling noise of the coach stopped, Sammy could hear the horse of the fugitive crashing through the underbrush.

  Was this the end of the battle toward which he and the other people of the mountains had looked forward with so much eagerness and dread? No, for here was Major catching the black stallion, Clancy, and leaping with a cat-like lightness into the saddle. Another instant and the black was sweeping down the road, his head a little turned and his mouth opened to receive the bit of the bridle that his master leaned forward along his neck to fit between his teeth. In an instant the bridle was in place, and Major had twitched the stallion from the road into the brush.

  There was one more glimpse for Sammy. He could look from his high seat far down the hillside to a clearing among the trees, and an instant later he saw the gray horse dart across the opening, dodge through a thick hedge of bushes, and pass on out of sight.

  An instant later the black flashed into view, with Major pitched forward like a jockey on the neck of the stallion. There was no dodging for Clancy. He rose like a steeplechaser at the hedge and cle
ared it with an arrow-like leap. Then he, too, was lost in the forest beyond.

  There was no doubt in his mind about which horse would win the race. The gray was a grand runner and a good mountain horse, used to this work. But he might as well have been matched against a hawk as against the black. But as for the battle that would ensue when the two met—that was a different matter. For it was the left arm of big Chester Furness that had been wounded and his right—his revolver hand—would be as accurate as ever. It seemed to Sammy that the power of Furness and the terrible speed of Major would make a resistless force and an immovable object meeting somewhere yonder in the wilds.

  But he still had many thousands of dollars’ worth of gold in the stage. There was no guard to help him. A gun was useless in his hands. And the management of the coach team was a very sufficient mystery to him. At the first open space he turned the stage and its six horses laboriously around and started back for Crumbock.

  What difference did it make whether or not the stage was pushed through to its destination? He and everyone else understood perfectly that what was of importance was not the traveling of the stage, but the defeat of Chester Furness, if that could be arranged.

  But when his team was seen cresting the slope above Crumbock, that busy town suspended all work and flocked in a noisy mass to learn the news.

  Was the gold gone?

  Had they seen Furness?

  Where was Jeremy Major? Dead on the road and his horse stolen by the outlaw?

  All they got for an answer was that the great pair had clashed, and that the first round of the battle had been a victory for Major, and that the last seen of the outlaw, he was riding away for life, with the black stallion in swift pursuit.

  That was the story he told over again to Hubert Cosden, when the miner came to ask hasty questions—and receive back the gold that had been for the baiting of the trap.

  “And Miss Cosden?” asked Sammy timidly.

  “She has set her teeth and will not show a thing,” Cosden replied. “But . . . come up to the house tonight. I want to talk to you and get all the details over again. Now I’m busy. But I want to hear everything, and you can wager that Anne wants to hear it, too.”

  So that eventful morning ended, and the roar of the mining town began again, and the mere thought of what had happened seemed to be lost.

  Not lost to Sammy, however, as he sat in his office, which had once been so thronged with business, and which was now so empty of all interest. Only the sign was outside the window: [Set in small caps] Munson-Crumbock, through stages. The only fast, regular, and safe means of transport. [End small caps]

  Some wit had underlined in red chalk the word, safe, and Sammy had not the heart to erase the line.

  All was a jumble of confusion, now, in the mind of Sammy—Anne Cosden, big, sunny, cheerful, strong of hand and mind, and wild Jeremy Major, and handsome Chester Furness with his record of dead men behind him, and the dying stage line. Out of all those wrecks, what could be salvaged by Sammy?

  Chapter Thirty

  At least he had the night to wait for, the talk with Cosden, and perhaps a glimpse of Anne. But, oh, how slowly the day waned, and how many hundreds of times he looked wistfully and vainly toward the dark forests of the southern hills, hoping against hope, still, that the rider of the black horse might emerge, unscathed and triumphant. Or perhaps was Cosden right? Would it be better for everyone if both of those warriors fought until the two lay dead in the woods, with only the owls to watch them fight and die?

  The evening came at last. Sammy saw the men from the mine come for supper to the Cosden house. He waited nervously until they left, and then he climbed the slope and presented himself at the door. Cosden took him in. The rattle of pans in the kitchen died away, and big Anne Cosden came swinging in and sat down on the arm of a chair improvised from a packing case and some supple bent boughs.

  “I’m mostly interested in just one thing,” Anne Cosden said. “When they fought . . . is the story true that Chester Furness turned and rode away?”

  “With a bullet through his left arm,” Sammy said honestly. “I saw the red stain.”

  “Then,” Anne Cosden said with a firm conviction, “they are both dead.”

  There was a sharp exclamation from her father. “What makes you think that, Anne?”

  “If Furness couldn’t beat him in the first fight, he could never beat him after once turning his back. And he could never escape. Nothing that lives could escape from that black horse, with a cat like Jeremy Major in the saddle. And . . . I’m going back to work. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  She was as good as her word. She returned to the kitchen and left her father staring gloomily back at the door.

  “I don’t know,” he said to Sammy Gregg. “I can’t tell. Sometimes I think that she doesn’t care a whack about either of them. But I’m not sure. She beats me.” The last was whispered, and his eyes fixed upon the outer door of the cabin and grew wide with staring.

  Sammy turned with a start, and he saw over his shoulder the slender form of Jeremy Major standing in the doorway. Beyond, there was the stamp of an impatient horse. Clancy—standing dimly in the night. Then Major came in and slumped into a chair.

  “It was mighty hot this afternoon, wasn’t it?” Major said. “I lay up on the edge of the woods for a long time waiting for it to cool off. There was a pair of gray squirrels that couldn’t agree which owned the tree I was lying under. They kept paying visits to each other. And finally they clinched. They made the fur fly, I can tell you. Finally they tumbled off their branch. I thought they’d drop eighty feet to the ground and break themselves to a pulp. But they didn’t. Did you ever see a squirrel dive for the ground? The fellows hadn’t fallen twenty feet when they shook themselves apart, and spread out their tails and flattened their bodies, and fluffed out their tails behind them. Those big tails were like balloons, holding them back when they fell. Oh, they dropped with a clunk, of course, but they weren’t hurt. They scampered up the trunk of the same . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” Cosden broke in.

  “Well?” Major said blandly.

  “Do you think we give a continental damn about the pair of gray squirrels in their infernal pine tree?”

  “Ah,” Major said a little sadly, “I suppose you don’t.”

  “Then tell us what we want to know, in the name of heaven. What happened between you and big Furness?”

  “Why,” Major said, “we met each other, after a while, and we had quite a talk. We came to a sort of an agreement.”

  “Go on, Major!”

  “And he gave me a note to take back to you here. Let me see. I hope I haven’t got it all rumpled up. Here you are.”

  It was a single sheet of paper, folded twice, and pinned with a sliver of wood. And it was addressed to Anne Cosden. Her father took it with a scowl and carried it silently out to the kitchen. And by the sudden whitening of her face, he knew that she recognized the handwriting.

  She opened it eagerly, swept through it with a glance, and then ripped it across and threw it on the floor.

  “What in the world,” asked Cosden, “has Furness got to say to you?”

  “The man is a coward!” she cried in bitterest scorn. “What do I care what he has to say? Read it, if you wish.”

  He picked up the pieces of torn paper humbly enough and read it over slowly, to himself. “Does he call you by your first name, girl?”

  The letter read:

  Dear Anne: I have just finished a long talk with Jeremy Major. I have to admit to you that he is a most convincing talker. And, after listening to him, I have decided that I must give up this foolish amusement of keeping the stage from running.

  Also, I think it is rather dangerous for me to linger near Crumbock. So I suppose this little letter must serve to say good bye to you.

  A thousand regrets that we have not had an opportunity to come to know each other better.

  Chester Ormonde Furness

/>   “And there we are,” murmured Cosden to Sammy and Major. “The end of that chapter. What the devil will the next chapter turn up? But I think you understand, Mister Major, that I am eternally grateful to you . . . because it was Gregg’s stage, but it was my money.”

  But that was not the end of the stage.

  The next morning there was a change at the Crumbock office of the Crumbock-Munson stage line. Men were waiting. And the gold shipment of Cosden, doubled in size, was joined by two other shipments, hardly smaller. It was a jammed, packed stage that finally crawled up the slope, and dipped into the woods beyond.

  And three days later word came whirling back to Crumbock that the trip had been made in perfect safety and in excellent time. And business thrived, and rates climbed. And Sammy Gregg saw the swift hundreds pouring into his hands every day and mounting to thousands each week.

  “If you’ll stay on as regular guard,” he said to Jeremy Major, “I’ll pay you a hundred a week . . . with nothing to do except to trail the crooks, if they ever try to hold-up the stages again.”

  “It’s sort of a hard life,” Major sighed, “cooking chuck for oneself . . .”

  “I’ll hire you a cook,” Sammy said, “above your wages. And a servant, if you want, to take care of your horse and your guns for you.”

  Jeremy Major sighed and stared up at the pale blue sky, where the sun was burning. “Matter of fact,” he said, “I’ve made up my mind that I’d better be traveling south. You see, I have a touch of rheumatism up in these northern countries.”

  So Sammy attempted no longer to persuade.

  Major was gone. And after his departure, Anne Cosden had suddenly taken the stage for Munson, bound East. And suddenly all that was left for Sammy was to sit quietly wherever he pleased and watch the gold flood flow steadily into his coffers. He had won, but the glory was small in his eyes. For Sammy had been growing since he first left Brooklyn, and now he had reached a certain pitch of mind where money alone could not satisfy him.