by Max Brand
“Munson is her stop, too.”
“But, dog-gone it, you said that she was a lady.”
“I did.”
“But there ain’t no ladies in Munson. There ain’t no young ones to speak of, and there ain’t no old ones at all.” He stared almost bitterly at the conductor, adding: “Why, an old lady in that town would be a plumb calamity. What would the boys do with her?”
“How should I tell,” the conductor answered, grinning. “I told her that there was a fellow townsman aboard and she’s all set to see you. You better come back there with me right now.”
Barclay groaned. “Look here, old son,” he said, “now what would I be talking to a blooming woman about, will you please tell me?”
“Aw,” the conductor said sympathetically, “I know what you mean, but this one is different. She’s a regular lady.”
What this mysterious difference meant, Barclay was very shortly to discover. He accompanied the conductor to a rear car and there he found that there was a little old white-haired lady seated at the end of the car with a white fluff of knitting in her lap. The conductor introduced him to Mrs. Fountain. She was the most dainty and delicate creature that Barclay had ever seen. And she made room beside her with such a smile that Barclay was actually glad to sit down there. A moment later she was telling him that she was going West to see her son, and to take him by surprise.
“Of course you know my boy, Chester Fountain?” she said.
Barclay admitted that he did not, and the little lady seemed enormously surprised.
“But,” she said, “you haven’t been there very long, I suppose. Perhaps you’re just going there now for the first time?”
Barclay grinned. “I was in Munson,” he said, “when there was no more houses there than nothing at all. I was in Munson when the trail was first called a street. And I was there when the boys dedicated the first saloon. That was Mortimer’s Place. Oh, yes, I’ve seen about all of Munson there is to see.”
“But,” Mrs. Fountain said, “then you surely know my boy.” He shook his head. “Not know my boy, Chester Fountain?” she cried. “Why, he must be almost as well known as the town, he and his farm.”
At that last word, the ears of Mr. Barclay pricked a good deal. “Is his place near the town?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, very near,” Mrs. Fountain answered. “You can see it from the train.”
“Oh,” said Barclay, for suddenly he understood. Of course there had never been more than two places that could be called farms. One was the little patch of cultivated ground around the shack occupied by old Hobo Durfee. And the other was that strange hodge-podge in the mountains that poor Cumnor called a farm and was trying to make into one—if the rocks and a thousand other hindrances would let him. But a place in sight of the train that could be called a farm? This precious boy of the old lady’s had been lying in great style to her, on the chance that she would never, at her age, risk the long and wearisome train ride to the West. But here she was, coming gaily along.
Barclay could not tell in which way to be most moved—with pleasure that this gigantic liar should be exposed, or with sorrow when she learned what a hoax she had been made the victim of. But chiefly he was immensely sorry for the poor old lady. However, she was not the first to be bled by the devices of some rascal son who had gone West for the purpose of living on his annuity—which he found too small to keep him in liquor and pay his gambling debts. And here was some brilliant scoundrel who had created an illusory farm for the building of which he had no doubt drawn huge sums of money from his mother.
For there were signs of wealth about the woman. She was dressed simply. But it might have cost a small fortune to duplicate that gold pin at her breast—if the green gem in it were an emerald and not simply a bit of colored glass. And then, too, the daintiness of her hands, the tapered delicacy of her fingers, all spoke of a life in which there had at least been no labor. Barclay regarded these details with a critical eye.
“I suppose,” she said, “that you begin to recall now?”
“Matter of fact,” Barclay said, “you see how it is. Chester . . . of course I know him.” He added: “But the last names . . . well, they aren’t used very much. You know how it is out there . . . can’t bother about remembering two names for every man . . . so it’s just Al, Bill, Harry, Chester . . . everybody is in too much of a hurry to waste much time on two names.”
“But suppose there are two men with the same name in town?” Mrs. Fountain queried. “The same first name, I mean. What do you do then?”
“Why, in a case like that, it’s pretty easy fixed. Suppose there is two by the name of Bill. Then we’d call one Boston Bill, if he come from Boston, and we’d call the other just plain Bill. You see how it works? But mostly the boys don’t stay long enough in town to be called by any name.”
“How can they be remembered, then?”
“Mostly they ain’t remembered. But if you’re thinking back to somebody that had been in town, you speak about the gent that rode the Roman-nosed sorrel, or the gent on the cock-eyed gray horse . . . or him that had killed somebody some place or other. You see, people out there have a pretty good memory for the things that they’ve seen, but they haven’t got any memory at all for the things that they’ve just heard.”
She nodded, her head canted a little to one side as she drank in this information about the wild land in which her son was living.
Barclay went on systematically to draw what information he could from her. “Farming,” he said, “is a great gamble, you know.”
“Oh, is it generally considered so out West?” Mrs. Fountain asked.
“It sure is,” he replied. “What with changes of weather and changes of prices, and such like things . . .”
“How lucky my dear boy has been, then,” Mrs. Fountain said. “But I suppose you know about his prosperity as well as I do.”
“Humph,” Barclay said, feeling that this was a tune that he could not follow so readily. “You see how it is with us. The boys are all pretty busy and they haven’t got much time to talk about what they’re making, and such like things.”
“I suppose not,” said Mrs. Fountain, “but then there are ways of telling even if a man doesn’t talk about his own affairs all the time.”
“I suppose that there are . . .”
“And in Munson and the neighborhood I don’t suppose that you have very many fifteen-room houses?”
Barclay blinked. A fifteen-room house in Munson was a thing to dream of, but not to tell. He could not even make an answer until finally he managed to gasp out that that was a pretty big house for any part of the country.
“And I suppose,” Mrs. Fountain continued, “that a good many of the other men . . . the ranchers and the miners and the rest . . . will be wanting to follow my boy’s example?”
“I suppose that people follow the leader pretty easily out there,” Barclay agreed. But his mind was in a whirl.
“Ah, well,” Mrs. Fountain said. “Money is made more easily now than it used to be. My husband and I waited a long time and he worked very hard, you may be sure, before he could get, even in years, what Chester earns often in a single deal.”
“Is that so?” Barclay said huskily. And he wished with all his heart that he could get this monumental liar in a place where he could pommel him thoroughly and make him yell.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Fountain said. “I don’t suppose that Chester has even let the boys know that he has a mother. Nor that he has a mother who must look to him for everything. But, oh, I wish that the whole world could know what a genteel, thoughtful son he has been to me.” And she shook her head. “And how he has showered me with far more than any woman in the world could really use.”
Barclay was fairly downed by this last remark. This consummate liar who had told his lies while he was supporting his mother like a queen—and not drawing upon her bank account. It impressed him as being against all the rules.
And then little Mrs. Fountain
, in her burst of fondness, snapped open a little locket that was suspended from a gold chain around her neck, and inside the locket Barclay found himself staring at a neatly painted miniature of none other than the handsome face of Chester Ormonde Furness.
Chapter Forty-Two
Chester Ormonde Furness! gasped Barclay to his innermost soul of souls. Chester Ormonde Furness! And then he cursed his stupidity for not having put the two together long before this. The same initials—the same first name. It was only wonderful that Fountain-Furness had dared to keep two of his first names the same as his true ones.
Moreover, Barclay told himself that he should have identified the wonderful son in another manner, because there was no one in Munson or its vicinity who could have pretended to a mother such as this fine old lady saving Chester Ormonde Furness.
“I think,” said Mrs. Fountain, “that you have only placed him accurately in your mind since you saw this picture of him.”
“Oh, no,” Barclay said. “There’s only one fifteen-room house at Munson.” For he had become desperate, and he had sworn to himself that, no matter how profoundly he had to perjure himself, he would never take upon himself the painful duty of telling this poor little woman the facts.
Her son was in jail. Munson was congratulating itself upon the splendid performance of her citizens that had resulted in the seizure of the celebrated bandit. And he, Barclay himself, was now speeding West for the sole purpose of furnishing additional evidence to hang this very man.
Altogether, it was a nasty mess. He wished himself well out of it, of course, but since he could not be out of it, unless he left the train, he decided that he would go in for the wretched business with all his might.
And in the days that followed, he was gradually ripening into an old friend of Mrs. Fountain’s. He was one of the boys who knew him best, in fact. And doubly delighted, therefore, to have had the pleasure of coming in contact with the mother of that gentleman. He could even recall pleasant little anecdotes that had to do with various exploits of her son. But, oh, what a check was put upon his imagination. How far he had to roam for the truth.
“Of course, my dear Chester has always loved the West,” Mrs. Fountain declared one day.
“Sure,” said Barclay. “It’s rough, but sort of friendly.”
“Rough?” Mrs. Fountain said. “Have you really found it so very rough after all?”
“Why, sort of,” declared Barclay.
“That is odd,” Mrs. Fountain said, “because do you know that my boy writes to me that the Western roughness is almost entirely the result of too much writing by Easterners who rush through the mining camps and similar places, and then have to write back to their papers to tell them about the wild sights and scenes that have come their way . . . turning old dogs into grizzly bears and sleeping Indians into drunken scalping parties.”
“Humph,” Barclay murmured. “Has he found it a pretty quiet place, speaking for himself?”
And through his mind in a long, shadowy procession, rushed the images of all the stories he had heard about Chester Furness, robber and warrior extraordinary—and it was like thinking back to a whole battlefield, in which every form was simply another silhouetted outline of the same man—Chester Furness. Oh, if the story of his doings were ever written out in full, what a tale it would make—what a history. But mere words could never tell it.
“Oh, yes, he has found it very quiet, of course,” Mrs. Fountain averred. “And he has written to me saying that he thanked heaven that he had never had to have a single gunfight since he entered the country and that he was sure he never would.”
“Oh,” Barclay said faintly. “Is he sure of that?”
“Because,” Mrs. Fountain said, “he says that the trouble is nearly always with the people who drink too much and then hunt for excitement and find more than is good for them. Of course, my boy never drinks to excess, and he is so quiet and gentle that I suppose it is hard to imagine anyone desiring to do any harm to him even in that wild country.”
“I imagine that it is.” Barclay sighed. But he felt that his eyes were increasing in size with the passage of every moment and presently he escaped and stood on the observation platform of the train, wondering why this thing had to be, and why he should have been selected as the victim.
However, there was a sort of fascination about his torture, and he found himself wandering back to face it again, and receive long, rippling narratives about Chester in his infancy—how brave, how gentle, and how manly he had always been. And then there were stories about Chester in school. Oh, yes, there had been occasional storms. And Chester had been thrashed, on a time, by a large boy.
“After that, he learned to box,” Mrs. Fountain said, “and a few months later he whipped the boy who had pummeled him. But as a matter of fact, the boxing went a little to the head of our Chester, and we began to get reports about Chester picking fights with other boys in the schoolyard . . . larger boys, or two boys at a time. It seemed hardly to matter to him. He had such a passion for fighting. I had to have the minister have a long talk with him. And after that, everything was all right . . . and there was never again the slightest trouble with my Chester. And as he grew larger, he would never take advantage of his size.”
Perhaps not, but Barclay could see the inward story of young Chester, with all the tyrant in himself repressed until the day when he found himself in the West, and at liberty to use his strength. And then the devil in him had come out, of course.
The train was approaching the town steadily. He was glad that they were arriving after dark. Therefore there would be no necessity to make explanations about the nonappearance of the fifteen-room house. Once the train got to the town, he decided that for his part he would bolt for the rear country and stay there until the poor old lady had left the place.
But how like a sneak he felt when the train pulled up at Munson and he helped Mrs. Fountain from the lowest step to the ground beneath and gathered up her suitcases.
“If Chester should see me . . . walking along the street like this,” Mrs. Fountain said, laughing.
But Chester would not see. Several Colts were doing their duty and preventing that, of course. And Barclay thanked heaven for it. He escorted Mrs. Fountain to the hotel, where a dozen loungers stood up at attention, like soldiers when an officer enters. Some of them knew Barclay, but none of them spoke. One could never tell what to do when a friend showed up with a woman in tow, old or young. So they took no chances and did not speak at all—which was of course the surest way of being right in the matter.
Mrs. Fountain, therefore, found herself smiling cheerfully at brown, blank countenances, and there was a great flurry of cigarette rolling. And suddenly the hotel proprietor’s face was a bright crimson, for this was the second time in the history of Munson that a woman had come to sleep in the hotel. The only other time was when Anne Cosden arrived. And she did not count, she was so big, and so hearty, and so like a man.
Mrs. Fountain was shown to an upper front room. It was the cleanest room in the hotel and always was reserved, if possible, for distinguished guests, such as mine owners. But still it could not be called in all respects a flawless room. One had to note, for instance, where a random pair of spurs had been raked a few times across the varnish of the door by way of demonstrating how a certain cowpuncher had handled a bucking horse. And then there was need of taking heed of the black spots along the window sill—some of them with little furry rags of brown paper still adhering to them, in token of the last cigarette butts that had been put down there and allowed to burn away, unheeded.
There were other slight tokens of wear about the chamber, such as the patch upon the matting that had been scrubbed through by the drumming of impatient spurred heels. And there was also a little board nailed across a spot in the center of the floor. The end of that little board was loose, and, if one turned it around, one could look down into the chamber below through a little hole just the size that a .45-caliber bullet is supposed
to drill through planking.
But Mrs. Fountain overlooked these trifling imperfections with the blandest of smiles.
“You might say that this here is more or less of a man’s hotel,” the proprietor stated, redder than ever as he looked at his room and then at the lady who was to occupy it. “And out here in this part of the world, there ain’t many accommodations for the womenfolk, you know.”
Mrs. Fountain simply laughed. “Don’t you suppose I know?” she said. “My son has written to me and told me what to expect, and if he has been able to live here and like the place, I’m sure that it is amply good enough for me.”
So young Barclay and the proprietor found themselves outside of the door of her room. A sudden change passed over the face of the proprietor.
“You pie-faced yap!” he said savagely. “Ain’t you got better sense than to take your mother into a town like this?”
“You wall-eyed snake-eater,” Barclay said no more amiably, “will you tell me what put it inside of your thick skull she was my mother?”
“Then why in the devil have you got her in tow?”
“Would you have me leave her to break her shins falling over the roughneck ways of Munson, young feller, without no assistance from nobody? Yes, I guess you would. You’re that sort of a gent.”
“Barclay,” the proprietor said more gently, “leastwise you might have wired on to me from the train to let me know that a woman was comin’, so’s I might’ve swabbed down the room and got it fixed up a mite for her.”
“If I didn’t have nothing to think about but the sort of a room that she was to sleep in when she came to Munson, write me down for a four-year old unbroke bronco that never got no sense.”
“What was you thinkin’ about, Barclay?”
“Come along with me, son, and prop your ears open, because you are gonna hear some talk like there was never any talked before in this here town.”