Stagecoach

by Max Brand

  There we leave him, not calmly submitting, but swallowing his despair. For the one thing he wanted was Anne Cosden, and, were she East or West, he felt that she was beyond his dreams. There was only one bitter satisfaction, that through his engineering he had put her beyond the dreams of handsome Chester Furness as well.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  To understand the extent to which the mountains were shocked, one must consider what Hobo Durfee was, before the tragedy happened to him. His nickname of Hobo had been honestly earned. He had been nothing but a tramp, a lazy, good-for-nothing scamp who wandered about the country inventing new methods for avoiding labor in any form.

  This continued more than halfway through his life, but, when he was forty years old, Hobo Durfee suddenly contracted what might be called the industry fever. Some said it was due to the fact that he had loaned a friend $1 and that the man paid him back $2 the next month. At any rate, Hobo Durfee never forgot. He laid the thought of that dollar of interest away in his memory, embalmed in myrrh and spikenard. And that started his interest in accumulating money.

  He began to put away every bit of it that he could lay his hands on. But he did not really have the courage to be a stirring thief. So presently he learned that his love of money was greater than hatred of work, and he began to work steadily, earnestly. He accumulated more and more money. In five years he had a shade over $1,000 in a bank, and then the bank failed. Durfee got his money out, because he was one of the first to call with a check when an evil rumor got abroad. But he never forgot how close he came to losing his money on that day, and thereafter nothing in the world could persuade him to trust his money in hands other than his own. It was known that all his wages were turned into gold, and that all of that gold was hidden away in some secluded place on his own land. For he had a little shack of his own and a patch of ground down in the river bottom. It was just as much as he was able to cultivate by himself. And on it he raised, during a part of the year, vegetables for the market in Munson, which was fairly near his place. No one else, in that region of timber and mines, had ever so much as thought of raising vegetables, and therefore his labor brought him quite a rich reward.

  Besides, he was working on his land only a part of the year, and the rest of the time—even now that he was fifty-five years old—he approved himself a good cowhand in every sense of the term by his work on the cattle ranches. It was estimated that Hobo Durfee, in the last years of his life, must have laid up between $5,000 and $10,000 in gold, all hidden some place on his little estate.

  Of course that brought the crooks in a swarm, and for years they almost literally plowed the ground of the Durfee Ranch to get at his treasure every time he left his house. They never found it. Old Durfee was too foxy to leave his precious money without having it so securely tucked away that not even an eagle’s eye could have located it. So, after a time, the crooks left off trying and Durfee was in peace. A pretty well-deserved peace, too, as everyone agreed.

  The old man liked to talk to people about the money he had saved and about the good old foolish, happy, sunny days in trampdom. He liked to talk so well that he kept open house and would entertain anyone who came by with food and chatter.

  Well, in the West they appreciate hospitality. In a country where men know desert travel and the heart-stopping joy of coming in sight of a human habitation with smoke curling out of it, they put a high rating upon sincerely hospitable folks. And such a value was placed upon Hobo Durfee.

  He grew a lot of strawberries in the spring of the year, and, as they came ripe, he used to gather them and stew them into a delicious jam. That Durfee jam became famous for more than a hundred miles around. And literally hundreds and hundreds had taken a trip scores of miles out of their way in order to come at Hobo Durfee, sit by his stove, eat his pone and delicious strawberry jam, drink his coffee, and then go their way.

  He was very happy when he was talking about the good old days when he never used to turn a hand at work. He had never stopped hating work. He had simply come to love money more. And when he began to turn to the subject of how he learned to labor and to save, the boys used to sit around and laugh at him a good deal. But he was willing to be laughed at. It was part of the game, and he liked company so well and liked an audience so well, that he was very willing to have them laugh at him.

  It would have done you good to see the red-brown face of that old chap with a grizzled fringe of whiskers more or less long, for he was not like most misers. The point was, some said, that the knowledge that he had a quantity of gold hidden away kept him bubbling over with so much happiness that he just wanted others to hear about it. And so the door of his shack was never closed.

  You must know all this to understand how old Hobo Durfee jumped up, one night, and laughed and nodded to some horsemen who had stopped outside of his shack and then had crowded into the doorway. There had been no other callers there on this day, and Hobo Durfee was warmed clear down to his boots when he saw so many forms of men outside his door.

  He called out: “Come on in, boys! I’ve just finished up making some of the most sizzling good jam that you ever seen. And I’m just after finished mixing up some pone and shoving the pans in the oven. And outside of that, I’ve got about five minutes to start the coffee. Which there ain’t never been no better coffee than I make, and there ain’t gonna never be none better never made.”

  Then a voice outside the door said: “Tell the old fool that we ain’t come to eat his chuck tonight. And tell him it’s something else we want.”

  Then the leading two men crowded in through the doorway and old Hobo Durfee saw that there was a mask on the face of each. A real hundred percent mask made of black coat lining turned into a sack and pulled down over the head with just a couple of big holes left for the eyes to look through and for air to come in. I suppose it was right then that Hobo guessed what was coming.

  He saw that he didn’t have a chance. His gun was clear across on the far side of the room. And I suppose there was no particular desire in Hobo to get the gun, at that. All he wanted to do was to make people happy. And besides, what could they get in his house except jam and pone and coffee—which he offered them just as freely without any sign of a mask or a gun?

  “Well, boys,” he said, “you’re mighty welcome to anything that you can see around here. Just look around and help yourselves. But I guess that you ain’t gonna see nothing much worth carrying away . . . unless it’s some of my cans of jam . . . or maybe the new saddle blanket.”

  “Leave off the guff, will you, Hobo, you old fool?” one of the men barked. “We ain’t gonna do any of the looking tonight. You can do the looking for us.”

  You can wager that poor old Hobo Durfee was hard hit by that. But he blinked at them for a time and tried to smile around the well-chewed stem of his corncob pipe. “All right, boys,” he said, “I guess that I know how to take a joke.”

  “Joke?” another fellow said, squeezing his way into the house. “You chuck out the coin, old bo, or you’re gonna find that this here is the hottest joke that you ever laid hold of in your life. And don’t you forget it.”

  It took the smile from the lips of Hobo Durfee and he stood rather weakly, looking from one black mask to another.

  “Show him what we mean,” one said tersely.

  It was done in an instant. They seized upon Durfee, who made no resistance to such numbers, and they stripped off his boots. They then opened the firebox of the stove and carried him up to it until the heat burned his socks and he uttered a yell of pain and terror. They took him away from the fire at once.

  “All right, Durfee,” they told him. “You show us where the money is or you see what you get.”

  When poor old Durfee saw that they actually meant what they said, he was silent and stared at them. He simply could not believe. No matter what the first part of his life had been, the past fifteen years had been so flooded by kindliness that I suppose it was impossible for the ex-hobo to understand that this brutal
ity was really intended—or that there were creatures in the world capable of it.

  At any rate, he maintained that silence until they caught hold of him and actually thrust him up to the firebox so close that his socks caught fire. He screamed in earnest this time and they brought him away and demanded with a snarl if he were ready to give them what they wanted. But he was not ready. And they pushed him up to the blazing wood until his feet . . .

  But Munson saw those feet afterward, and it is better to leave that part until later.

  According to the approved story, Durfee fainted after one of the applications of the torture. But they threw a half bucket of cold water in his face and waited for him to come to. Then they began again, and he stood the fiendish cruelty until the fire had actually . . . But this is unspeakable.

  All that one can say is that when he finally surrendered he was too far gone to walk. He was too far gone to creep. He had to be stimulated with whiskey, and after he had half a pint of that under his belt, he was able to whisper to them and they carried him with them out of the house and they brought him to the old shed where he kept his horse.

  It had once been a house. The shed was built up around the last standing parts of the chimney and a portion of the north wall. Inside that chimney, which no one knew about, by reaching down half an arm’s length and removing a few loose bricks, they found an aperture, and inside that aperture they found the treasure of Durfee.

  There were nothing but $20 gold pieces. And there were three hundred and eighty-seven of these, which made exactly $7,740 that they looted from him.

  There were six of them altogether.

  No, just at the end a big man came galloping up, and when he found what they had been doing, he cursed them and said that he was through with them forever. But they pointed out that the business was done and that he might as well share in the profits and forget about it.

  Which he did.

  So that the total was only just a shade above $1,100 per thief, and for that small sum they sold their souls, certainly, into the deepest part of purgatory.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  They left old Durfee lying in the horse shed, and that was what saved his life and brought danger to the gang. Because he managed to drag himself onto the bare back of his horse and he rode on into Munson. Or, rather, the horse took him there, for when Jack Lorrain found him in the night, Durfee had slid unconscious from the back of the old gelding and lay in the street before his hoofs, and the horse stood above his master with his head dropped wearily, looking uncannily as though he were grieving for the thing that had been done.

  Jack Lorrain, as he said afterward, thought that it was some drunk who had taken too much liquor and he was about to go on past, when something about the patience of the old horse standing there over its master and waiting for him to rise touched the heart of Jack. And he decided that a man who was worth the trouble of a horse, in this fashion, must be worth the trouble of another man, also.

  So he went to the quiet form that lay in the dust and seized him by the shoulder, and the body was just as limp as drunkenness to his touch. Jack Lorrain was again on the verge of passing on, but he decided to take a look at the drunk so that the boys could laugh about the thing the next day. He scratched a match, accordingly, but what the light of that match showed him kept him speechless until the flame pricked the tips of his fingers sharply. And then a roar broke from the lips of Jack—a roar that rang and reechoed through Munson and brought men tumbling out of houses all around. And when Lorrain had gathered quite a crowd, he lit another match and showed them what he had found.

  They picked up Hobo Durfee with a womanish tenderness and they carried him into what had once been Mortimer’s saloon, famous for iniquity until big Chester Furness, the first day he came to town, shot Mortimer and treated the boys over the bar, leaving gold on the bar to pay for the drinks. Gold for a dead man.

  The saloon was somewhat less celebrated now, but truly it was hardly less wicked, and what transpired inside of its walls would have filled many a chapter in a wild history every day. It was filled with carousal even at that moment, but the procession silenced them suddenly and completely.

  They gathered with drawn faces and looked at the frightful thing before them. And all at once everyone became as busy as they were silent. Some dozen mounted horses and rushed away in varying directions to find Dr. Stanley Morgan. And some heated water and brought it. And one youngster, newly in from the East, offered a flask of fine old brandy, such as had not been seen in rough Munson town for many a day.

  Others cut the clothes from the body of Hobo Durfee. Others washed him. Others prepared his bed in the back room of the saloon—piling it thick and soft with blankets, and clearing all the rubbish from the chamber and all the dirt from the floor.

  Here the doctor arrived, just as Durfee began to groan his way back to consciousness, and by the doctor’s care the feet were thoroughly dressed before consciousness fully returned to Hobo. All agreed that it was a mercy that his sleep had lasted until that dressing was completed.

  The boys of Munson wanted to know what would become of Durfee, and they were assured that he would never walk again without the aid of a pair of crutches. It was a sentence almost worse than death, and they quietly interchanged glances. Morgan was not much of a doctor. He would hardly have dared to set up for anything more than a veterinary in any other part of the world. But his opinion about such a matter as those feet was not to be doubted.

  In the meantime Durfee had regained consciousness completely. But the doctor had put enough opiates on his feet to keep him from torment. He was merely weakly drowsy, and kept turning his head slowly from side to side and staring at the faces around him in terror and in horror that would gradually melt away as Jack Lorrain or some other, sitting by his bed, patted his hand and would say: “Buck up, old-timer. You’re all right now. We’re gonna take care of you. Steady along, old buck. There ain’t nothin’ to be skeered of, Hobo. Nobody but your friends here.”

  So Durfee would manage a faint, incredulous smile, and then shake his head and frown while he closed his eyes and seemed to be trying to think back to the confusion of troubles that had closed around him.

  After a time they tried to press him for a little information. But he could only say: “Seems like I had a sort of a falling out with some of the boys . . . I dunno about what. I disremember exactly what the argument was all about. They was het up considerable, though.”

  That was all he could say, and the doctor decided that it would be wise not to press him too much that evening.

  Half a dozen volunteers decided to sit up and take turns watching Durfee through the night and another half dozen mounted horses and rushed furiously out to the little Durfee shack in the bottom land.

  They descended into the damp, cool air of the river side. They came to the cabin and found all neat and orderly there, with the lamp burning steadily on the table. Only there was a faint cloud of bluish smoke hanging in the corners of the room, and, when they opened the doors of the oven, they found four big pans of pone burned to a crisp.

  Then, with lanterns, they went over the ground outside and very quickly they decided that someone had been there before them. A party totally indifferent to the condition of Hobo’s garden. For his choicest patches of ground had been trodden and torn by random tramplings of hoofs. Being experts at this business, they very readily decided that seven horses had been there.

  “What were seven riders doing here,” they asked one another, “interrupting old Durfee while he was baking his pone?”

  Jack Lorrain, who was one of the party, said solemnly: “Boys, I hate to think it . . . I ain’t gonna really think it till I’m cornered . . . but I got a hateful sort of a lingering suspicion that them burned feet of poor old Hobo’s ain’t no accident. It was done to him on purpose by them gents that rode in here over his garden.”

  No one answered Jack, because it was a little too horrible for them to speak about. For though ther
e has always been plenty of brutality in the West, following the frontier, yet it has been brutality of the man-to-man type. The Indians were never able to establish any precedents with all of their efforts. However, the searchers did not discover the plundered cavity in the chimney in the horse shed.

  They returned to spread a vague rumor of horror through the town of Munson. In the morning, people had come from a distance to learn the facts as soon as old Durfee was able to relate them, and, among others, there were some celebrities recently come down from Crumbock. They came with the others to the saloon, and with whispers in the front room they were told about the condition of the sufferer in the back room. They were Hubert Cosden and little Sammy Gregg, who had pushed through the celebrated stage line from Munson to Crumbock, nearly a year before. People said that Sammy was himself worth more than a quarter of a million, now, what with the stage line and little investments here and there among the mines, made at the advice of his friend, Cosden.

  With them came big Anne Cosden riding a strapping black horse on which she had kept pace from Crumbock with the stage, doing the hundred miles in a day and a half—a hundred miles of terrible ups and downs in thirty-six hours. One might have thought that she was tired out, after such a performance, but she was not. Or at least, she seemed to forget about it when she saw a sick man.

  In ten seconds she was in charge of the room and Hobo Durfee in it. And before the first minute had elapsed, she had a bucket of hot soap suds and was giving that floor the first scrubbing of its short but eventful life. She washed it until it dried white. And then she washed the walls. And when she was ended with that, she sent little Sammy Gregg forth to get wildflowers, and these she distributed around the room in any receptacles that she could get out of the saloon.

  About half an hour after these changes had been made—with the windows of the room opened, and the doors opened, also, so that a refreshing wind could pass through—old Durfee opened his eyes and said in a tremulous voice: “Dog-gone me if spring ain’t come ag’in.” And then he saw the girl and flushed. He was not used to be tended upon by ladies.