Brand, Max - 1925

by Beyond the Outposts (v2. 1)

  Now, after all this talk, I must come back to the point at which Chris Hudson, standing there in the street in Boonville, said to me: "Can you shoot straight?"

  He might as well have asked me if I could speak English or eat food. I was not vain about my skill. It was so much a part of me and of my life that I had hardly had a chance to contrast my marksmanship with that of other people. I simply answered: "I usually hit the spot."

  He gave me one of those side-ripping glances of his. Then he handed me the Colt and said: "There's a bit of a broken bottle over by the fence. Don't let that hold you back. You've got six chances in that gun."

  As I have said, the balance of that Colt, conceived by an inventor who was a genius, was like a miracle to me. It was not one of those Colts everyone else has seen so often. It was not one of those double-action bits of magic that answer the finger as thought answers the eye. It was an old single-action gun, but, after all, it was a Colt, and from the first that was a wonderful gun. A glow went over me as I looked down at it. I glanced for a moment at the mechanism. I saw how the cylinder worked. I tried the weight of it in my hand. Then I tipped up the muzzle and fired.

  That was a stunning blow to me. Even Uncle Abner Dorset's hickory had never inspired in me the desire to shoot straight so much as had the wish presently to impress Chris Hudson. I felt the hot blood pumping in my temples. Chris Hudson simply called out: "Look out, youngster! Don't handle that gun so careless. It's got a mighty light trigger. But dog-gone me if that wasn't a lucky accident. The bullet mighty near hit the glass."

  I saw that he thought the Colt had exploded by accident, and I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling. Shooting from the hip had not yet been invented in the West.

  "I won't miss this time," I said.

  I called into my mind, in place of that bit of glass, the head of a squirrel darting about behind the leaves of a tree with just a glint of the sun in its bright eye. Then I tipped the muzzle of the revolver again and fired a second time. The glass crashed into nothing.

  "That's a beauty, that gun," I said, as I handed the Colt back to Chris Hudson.

  He brushed straight past me without any attention to the butt of the gun as I offered it. He hurried over to the post and leaned down at the base of it. He stayed there for a long moment, fumbling in the dust and staring at the hole which the bullet had clipped through the post. Then he came back to me with his hat pushed back, scratching his head.

  "What's wrong?" I asked him, very much worried.

  "The devil," he said, and kicked at a little stone that was in his way.

  I felt that I had done something terribly wrong, and I searched my mind to find out what it might be.

  "Well," he said at last, "you better come along with me."

  I was sick, I was so worried by his frown. I said: "If it's the cost of that post, I'll be glad to pay for it. I've got money. I've got thirty-two.. .1 mean fifty-two dollars."

  I was pretty proud of having such a lot of coin, but he only turned his head a bit and glinted at me out of those long-distance eyes of his.

  "Post be damned," he said. "By the way... you better keep that gun."

  It stopped me in my stride like a blow. It was as if he had offered me a palace in fairyland. I ran after him and touched his arm.

  "Look here, Mister Hudson, of course, you're joking. You don't mean that I can have this?"

  "Don't I? You can, though."

  "Why, it must be worth a mighty lot of money. I'd be glad to buy it. I got this fifty-two dollars for a part...."

  "Humph," said Chris Hudson. "I don't suppose that you ever seen a gun like that before?"

  "Never. Except on the boat coming up the river."

  "Maybe you hit that glass by accident, then?" he asked. He began to laugh. "Before you tell a lie like that, Lew, you want to think first. But that gun is yours. It ain't any good to me no more."

  "Have I spoiled it?"

  "You've spoiled it for me," he answered. "I don't know enough to handle a gun like that. I'm gonna stick to a rifle from now on, you can bet your last dollar right on that."

  I went on holding that gun in both hands. It was bright, well polished, and also bright with its newness.

  CHUCK MORRIS

  The place to which Chris Hudson led me was on the edge of Boonville. It was a great circle of huge covered wagons. There must have been twenty-five or thirty of them. All around them were horses past counting, tied to the wheels.

  "Have you ever seen anything like this?" he asked.

  I told him that I hadn't, and he said that it was a trappers' caravan, and they were bound due west for the prairies the very next day. While he was telling me this, we entered the circle of the wagons. All that inner circle was tossing and swaying with light and life from a big fire in the center of the enclosure. On the edges of that fire two or three men had raked out coals and were cooking. One was frying meat, and another was making coffee, for it was the dusk of the day, and they were getting ready for supper. There seemed quite a crowd of other men - at least thirty were in sight at that moment, and I felt this caravan was like a whole village ready to roll away on wheels. Except that there were no women and no children, although I did notice a number of youngsters who could not have been much older than I was.

  Hudson took me up to a big wagon on the far side of the circle and called out: "Gregory!"

  A big-shouldered man came, lumbering out of the wagon with a pipe in his mouth and some playing cards in his hand.

  "I'll be back in a minute, boys," he was saying, as he jumped down to us.

  "Gregory," said Chris Hudson, "this is Lew Dorset. He has fifty-two dollars and a new Colt. He wants to join our crowd."

  "A Colt," said Gregory, "is mostly good for making trouble in camp, and fifty-two dollars ain't enough to turn around with. What can he do?"

  "Ask him," said Hudson.

  "Can you use a lariat?" asked Gregory.

  "No," I said. I hardly knew what a lariat was.

  "Can you ride a horse?"

  I thought of the bony nags my uncle kept. They could hardly be called horses. "Not very well," I replied.

  "Have you got a rifle?"

  "No."

  "Can you talk Sioux?"

  "No," I said, never having heard that word before.

  "What the devil can you do?" asked Gregory.

  I was stumped. "I don't know. But I'm tough, and I'm willing to work."

  "Humph! We've already got all the kids in camp we need for the odds and ends."

  "Wait a minute," said Hudson, and took Gregory aside.

  He began to talk quietly to him, and after a time Gregory grunted and looked back at me. I can understand now what Hudson must have been saying, but at the time it seemed very mysterious to me.

  After a moment Gregory turned and walked up to me, looking me up and down. "I understand," he said, "that you're looking for your father out here." He waved his hand to the darkening western skies. "And if you come across sign of him, you're due to quit the party at any time." He grinned a little as he said this.

  "I'd have to leave if I got track of him," I affirmed.

  "Well, maybe you can do enough hunting for the party to be worth your keep. Do you think you can?"

  "I have hunted a little," I admitted. "But it's rather hard to shoot far with a pistol."

  He looked at me a minute. "Maybe we can fix you up with a rifle. As for a horse, Hudson has more than anybody else in the camp. Might be that he has one worth less than fifty dollars. I dunno."

  He hurried back into the wagon without saying good bye. I asked Hudson what it meant, and he declared I was now a member of the party if I cared to join. He took me to his wagon, showed me some blankets I could use, and declared that he would sell me a horse for twenty dollars the very next morning when the caravan started. As for the rest of my money I could turn it into ammunition, or do what I pleased with it. But he advised me to get a hunting knife and a hatchet together with plenty of matches and a c
ouple of pots for cooking.

  I thanked him with all my heart. "Mister Hudson," I said, finishing up, "the Dorsets never forget good turns or bad ones."

  "The devil," he said. "I've heard folks talk like that before, but words don't mean nothing... not out on the prairie. Now you cut loose from all this gratitude and mix around among the boys and try to pick yourself out a friend or two. Lemme tell you this.. .a friend on the prairie is worth more than his statue done in gold and set off with diamonds."

  This was a manner of talk that made me very much at home. It was so much like Uncle Abner. So I went off to stir about among the other young people. I could see at a glance that they were not like the boys, black or white, that I had known in Virginia. These fellows were as brown as paint. They were all quite straight, and they seemed to be whittled down rather lean - dried out, I might better call it. They were drawn out altogether longer and finer than the people of the Eastern coast. I could see that they were tough and lasting rather than strong. When they stepped, they stepped like young horses - ready to jump out of their skins for fun or fighting at any minute. They didn't have eyes like boys I had known - that is, they didn't have a dull, tired look - but they stared around as the men did, except that they were wilder. I knew before I had seen them so much as lift a hand that they were as fast as lightning. But it seemed to me they lacked the shoulder bulk and the width of back which is only put on a youngster by hard work or a great deal of athletics. Here were boys who could ride all day on a tough mustang or run all day over the prairie, but on the whole their legs were more exercised than their arms.

  Of course, there were exceptions, and it was into the hands of the greatest of all, and one of the most remarkable men who ever carried a rifle or spurred a horse that I was to fall. I marked him the instant that I came on the outskirts of the group. He was a tall fellow with blond hair worn very long and a fine blue eye, the handsomest man I have ever seen in all my travels. He looked twenty - as a matter of fact, he was just eighteen - but he had his full height even then, which was two or three inches over six feet. He had filled out not to the great bulk that was eventually his, but to some hundred and ninety pounds of leathery muscle and iron bone. Indeed, he was fit company rather for the men than the boys, and it was only by accident that I found him among the younger crew on this occasion. He was one of those men of whom I have spoken before, who are naturally strong and who know their strength. He had a bold, high carriage of the head, the very look of a hero, a throat like a brown pillar, and a breast arched with muscle - and with pride.

  I studied him with delight and terror commingled. It was a time before I paid any attention to what he was saying, for he was delivering his opinion on a subject that for years had been the most important question in the country and that was eventually to bring on the saddest and the bitterest war that was ever fought. But after a moment I began to follow the thread of his talk.

  "Suppose I had a black skin," he said. "Would that make me any different? I aim to say that I'd be just the same underneath. I'd need the same sort of eating and the same sort of sleeping. The same sort of things would make me happy, and the same sort of things would make me sad. But suppose you come along and you say... `Look here, Chuck Morris, your dad was mine and belonged to me, and therefore I own you.' Suppose that you was to say that, how would I feel and what would I do? I'd bust loose, that's all. I tell you gentlemen, we must abolish slavery."

  There was a little muttering of assent, but I began to sit up stiff and straight. I had heard of abolitionists in my life, of course, because like every boy south of the Mason-Dixon line I knew that everyone north of that line was a designing scoundrel. But for some reason I felt that in going into mis for land of the West I would be where politics did not exist, and where all men were noble and free of thought. It sickened me to find myself in such a crew, and I decided on the spot that, if the others were of the same temper, I had rather die than go on with them.

  The young orator was continuing. He was growing so excited that he stood up to his full height, a very splendid young god with a golden head and flashing eyes, with his big, supple body clothed in tightly-fitted deerskin all aflash with colored beads.

  "It ain't a right thing, of course," he said, "but what're we gonna do about it? They got those men with the black skins, and they call them slaves. I say those black men are just as good as the white ones. I say again, slavery is wrong!"

  This I could stand no longer. This was open heresy of the most damnable stamp, and I lifted my head and said: "That's not so!"

  There was a dead silence. I saw Chuck Morris start and glare swiftly around the circle as though he were trying to pick out the voice that had challenged him, but, since he couldn't seem to find the man, he said: "Who said that?"

  I didn't answer. I was plainly too frightened to speak, for I felt that, if I did, my head would be in the lion's mouth. He went on again, talking very slowly, his glance fixed vaguely in my direction, while he said: "Down yonder they tie a man up to a post ...a man like you or me, except that his skin is black... and they whip him and his blood runs down, and I tell you folks that treat other folks like that are worse than devils! They're cowards, and one man that never owned slaves could lick any two mat do own slaves."

  I wanted, with all my might, to let all of these challenges slip away unnoticed. I knew that there was a great deal too much danger for me if I dared to speak out what I thought, and yet to save my soul I could not keep my rage from rushing up into words. They came tumbling out of my lips before I could check them. I found myself jumping to my feet and standing up in clear view of them all.

  "That's a lie!" I shouted at him. "And an abolitionist like you isn't fit to sit with a gentleman."

  A BATTLE OF FISTS

  Looking back now through what I know of Chuck Morris, I can understand why the other boys in that circle were too appalled and too astonished so much as to turn their heads toward me. But most of my courage returned the moment I leaped up, and most of my old self-confidence. I had seen how big and how lion-like this fellow was, but all my life I had been fighting - fighting with my hands, and, though I had often come against youngsters almost half as big as I was, I usually found that the bigger they were, the softer they were. Indeed, with one exception, I have never seen a man over six feet in height who was really built in good proportion, well knit, well balanced. That great exception was Chuck Morris, not as he was when I first saw him, but as he afterward developed into a glorious Hercules.

  At that time I had fought so many times - so many times I had beaten two and even three boys at once by the ferocity and the weight of my attack - that I looked upon the handsome blond giant as just one victim more. The bigger he was, the more satisfaction I would take in leveling him with the grass. He walked across the little circle with his hands clenched into fists, but, when he stood close and I saw how he towered a head above me, he smiled a little and stepped back.

  "If you was a mite bigger and a mite older," he said, "I'd teach you how to talk to your betters. Are you a slave-keeper, maybe?"

  He had spurred a willing horse with those insults. I could not speak for a moment, so great was my passion. Then I said: "Chuck Morris, lemme tell you why it's right for a Virginia gentleman to keep slaves while it isn't right for a damned Yankee. In Virginia a man with black skin knows his place when he's around a white gentleman. But when that black man goes North, he feels like bossing around the bad blood he finds there."

  Chuck Morris lifted his hand, but he controlled himself, though he ground his teeth. "Boy," he said, "send your pa around to me, and I'll teach him to learn you better manners."

  "Why," I said, picking my words one by one and rejoicing when I saw the sting of them madden him, "you Yankees never would have been free if it hadn't been for a general from Virginia who came up and fought your battles for you. That was General Washington. And he owned slaves, Chuck Morns.

  "You lie," he said, and then, seeing that this point would not
bear debating, he struck me across the mouth.

  That open hand was as heavy a clenched fist wielded by any boyish arms that I had ever encountered. It gave me the first taste of what was coming, but I was not a whit dismayed. With all the skill which a thousand free fights had given me in the science of hitting, with all the power which ten years of moiling and toiling had given to my young back and shoulders, I flung my fist into his face and landed it squarely on the point of the chin where the long leverage of the jaw bone throws the shock against the base of the brain. Chuck Morris dropped upon his face.

  I was astonished in spite of all my fighting. It was like felling a huge oak tree with a single blow of an axe. But my astonishment was nothing compared with the bewilderment and the rage of the other youngsters who were there. Hardly a one of them had but felt the arm of Chuck Morris in anger or in play until they had come to look upon him as an invincible hero. They shouldered past me in a wave. They picked him up. They threw water in his face. They called on him to stand up.

  "You better leave him lay," I said. "Because, if he stands up, he'll get the same thing again. I tell you, no abolitionist can stand in front of a Virginia gentleman."

  I blush a little as I write down these words, chiefly when I think what a real Virginia gentleman would have thought if he had heard the son of Will Dorset rank himself with them. But at that moment I felt strong enough to face Dan Donnelly himself, the big Irish blacksmith who had been a pugilist in England and who had taught me something of the art of the prize ring and filled my ears with tales of its heroes, from the matchless Jem Belcher down.

  Then I heard a groan and a shout. The circle of Chuck's friends was torn apart, and Chuck Morris himself, his long golden hair floating behind his head, rushed out at me. There could not have been a better mark for me. I gave him my right again with such force that my arm turned numb to the shoulder, and a slash of crimson opened under his eye. Though that blow stopped and staggered him, the next minute he fell in on me and gripped me in his long arms. It was as though Uncle Abner had laid his giant hands on me. That bear hug crushed the wind from my body and the confidence out of my mind.