Curry

by Max Brand

  Brooding on this perpetual and inescapable trouble, she went into the dining room with Henry Mark, and they sat down near the window. It was rather early for the noon meal, and hence the room was scantily occupied, saving for a tall lean man who sat in one corner eating his breakfast. He was distinguished by the sling in which he carried his right arm, and the clumsiness of his efforts to manage his fork with this left hand. Henry Mark at once forgot his own woes to talk about the other.

  Leaning across the table toward his daughter, he whispered, “That’s Lang.”

  “Really? The man the Red Devil held up?”

  “That’s the one. And he had the nerve to up and blaze away at the scoundrel. He didn’t quite succeed in nailing his man, but Jake, the stage driver, says that it was the closest call a gent ever come to.”

  “But why didn’t the Red Devil kill him, if he’s such a terrible man?”

  “Nobody can work out the ways of the Red Devil,” said her father. “Some say that he’s a pretty decent sort of a gent in some ways … others say that he’s a murderer by nature, but just holds himself in for reasons of policy. I dunno. They tell a lot of hard things about him, and, if one half of them are true, he’s a bad one, the worst that ever lived.”

  She listened negligently, for her mind had left the victim of the stage robber and gone back to her own affairs. They ordered their meal, and by the time the food appeared, the dining room was rapidly filling, for the hour of noon had come. And men in the West eat punctually, growing hungry by the clock, as it were.

  Henry Mark reverted to the trouble with Charles Mark, and in talk of the dreariest nature they spent half of their dinner time. An interruption came violently and without warning.

  There was a loud scraping of a chair pushed back. The tall form of Lang sprang to his feet, and, in a voice shaken crazily by rage, he called, “D’you folks in Hampton stand for this sort of thing?” As he spoke, he pointed with a long left arm to a man who was at that moment giving his order to the waiter. All eyes were turned at once in that direction. “D’you let ’em hold up stages on the road, and then come in and sit down and eat with you?”

  “What’s biting you?” asked the man who was being pointed out, and he was no other than Jim Curry.

  “It’s his voice,” said Lang. “I’d know him in a million. I know him by his way and his build, and what he does with his hands, but mostly by that voice and them eyes. When you’ve seen an eye behind a gun, you ain’t apt to forget soon what it looks like, and I tell you, even if he ain’t got red hair … can’t wigs be put on and put off? … that’s the Red Devil!”

  The name burst like a bomb on the dining room.

  “Get him,” said Lang. “Don’t let him get away. He’s got twenty-one thousand dollars that he lifted off of me. He’s got that money, and I’ll give a thousand of it to the gent that drops him for me.”

  “You fool,” began Jim Curry, turning carelessly in his chair.

  “Hands up,” shouted Lang, “or I’ll drill you clean!”

  As he spoke, a lone revolver was conjured into his left hand, and with it he covered Curry.

  “Gents,” said Jim Curry rising, “is this gent crazy, or is he …?”

  “Hands up,” said Lang.

  “Is he crazy?” asked Curry, turning calmly to the amazed, nervous crowd.

  “Look out!” cried half a dozen voices. “He’s going to shoot!”

  And, as they spoke, the gun spurted fire from the hand of Lang.

  Jim Curry clapped his hands to his thigh, spun halfway around, and then, with admirable coolness, caught the back of a chair and lowered himself into it.

  “Somebody get some cloth for bandages,” Curry directed steadily. “And somebody else grab that infernal idiot … or I’ll kill him, even if he only has one hand.”

  His coolness abashed Lang, and it did something more important, it won two-thirds of the way to his side the crowd of spectators. In a moment they were around him. None too gently Lang was thrust away, and Jim was carried tenderly out of the room and deposited on a leather-seated divan in the room that served as a lobby and office for the hotel.

  There the leg was bared, washed, and bandaged, the whole work being completed before the doctor arrived, accompanied by the sheriff.

  “What’s this about shooting?” asked the sheriff. He made his way to the side of Curry and looked down at him. “Who did this?”

  “A gent that says I’m the Red Devil,” answered Jim. “That long fellow over there.”

  The sheriff whirled on his heel. “Who says that? What fool says that?” he asked. “Why, you idiot, don’t you know the wire over to the telegraph office has been humming for the last ten minutes with a story about how the Red Devil dropped down into Peterville this morning, early, got away with a bunch of swag, and killed Joe Thomas and Hank McGuire, while he was getting away?

  “It can’t be right,” declared Lang, positively staggering with astonishment.

  There was a groan from Jim Curry.

  “It’s the leg,” he answered, when someone inquired what had hurt him. And he asked, “Two men, Sheriff? Did the Red Devil kill two men?”

  “Two men,” said the sheriff, “and it was the Red Devil, all right. He was riding Meg, and he had the same crop of red hair sticking out under the brim of his hat. Lang, you can trot along to the lockup with me and think this over. Partner, what’s your name?”

  “Jim,” said Curry, “is the name I go by.”

  “Well, Jim,” said the sheriff kindly, “we’ll see that you’re taken care of. Got any money?”

  Jim Curry fumbled at a package in his pocket that contained twenty-one thousand and some odd dollars. But all of that must go to another man. “No,” he said truthfully enough, “I haven’t any money but some small change.”

  “All right,” began the sheriff.

  But here the tall, white-headed form of Henry Mark broke through the circle around the wounded man.

  “Sheriff,” he said, “I got lots of room out to my house. If he’s well enough, I’ll take him out today. I been talking to my girl about him, and, she and me agree that he’s played the coolest game we’ve ever seen. Suppose he’d been the Red Devil … don’t you think he would have filled Lang full of lead? But what he really is, is a square gent who wouldn’t fight back against a crippled man like Lang. Sheriff, let me take him along.”

  “Have your own way,” said the sheriff, glad that the public burden had been assumed by one capable pair of shoulders. “Have your own way, Mark.”

  Jim Curry had been lying still, with his eyes half closed and his face puckered up. Now his eyes widened suddenly.

  “What name?” he asked.

  “Henry Mark,” said that kindly rancher. “You look to me, son. I’ll take care of you. You sure played man in not diving for your guns.”

  But here Jim Curry fell back on the seat.

  “He rides down and kills two men … and here I am going into his own home. They’s some kind of fate behind this exchange.”

  The bystanders looked blankly at one another.

  “Hush,” said Ruth Mark very softly, raising her hand and cutting short the volley of astonished comment that began. “Don’t speak. There mustn’t be much noise. Poor fellow, the fever has begun already, and he’s delirious. Let me take charge of him.”

  And the wretched Jim Curry opened his eyes, and stared up at her with a strange, burning glance.

  “I ain’t worthy of a touch of your hand,” he said.

  Jim Curry’s Test

  I

  Even before Little Billy would fight with hard, freckled fists, he was called by that half-affectionate, half-contemptuous diminutive. He had not yet reached the emerging age, but he was not more than a year short of it. In fact, Billy was eleven, which, as everyone knows, is the last year of the real childhood of a boy who l
ives between the Rockies and the Sierras. At twelve he enters his time of apprenticeship. This is largely because the work of the cowpuncher requires more skill than strength, no matter how contrary to this the general opinion may be. It requires endurance to stick on the back of a horse, to be sure, but endurance and muscle are not the same. And as for throwing a rope and a steer, everyone who has done it will agree that the knack is of greater value than the brawn of a Hercules impressed for the job.

  In the last year of childhood, then, was Little Billy, straight as a wand and of proportions not much more sturdy, brown of skin save where the brown was relieved with bright-red freckles, and with a head of windy hair sun-faded to a nondescript hue. The one colorful thing about his face, indeed, was the pair of intensely blue, intensely alive eyes.

  He was laughing and dancing from foot to foot in his excitement as Ruth Mark looked out from the window and noted him. She remembered how he had first been brought from the town to the ranch by her great-hearted father. There was no explanation about his parenthood. And that was sufficient to assure Ruth that Henry Mark had found a forlorn orphan and had determined to give the boy a home. He had grown into a strange, impish little chap, undersize—and overbright, she had always thought. He saw through grown-ups as a ray of sunshine looks through clear ice. He saw through her and made her uneasy before him. He saw through Henry Mark with such ease that the rancher hesitated, and never quite had made up his mind to adopt the waif as he had adopted Charlie, that other waif of an older day, ungrateful wanderer now.

  Indeed, there was something terrible about the child. All persons felt his impish cleverness and insight. In the bunkhouse the cowpunchers dreaded him like a blight. He was a cross between a child and a man. He had the size of a child and a few of a child’s ways. For the rest, he could ride like a man, handle his own pet .32-caliber revolver far better than most experts could handle a .45, and throw a knife with the uncanny skill of an Italian master. In general his list of warlike accomplishments read like those of some hero of the frontier, where a man learned to fight well nigh before he learned to walk.

  No wonder, then, that Ruth Mark, for all her kindness of heart, eyed the child with a mixture of admiration, wonder, and fear, while Little Billy danced from one bare foot to the other in the dust, and poised the rubber ball lightly in his raised right hand.

  She knew by the first glance who he was aiming that ball at. As clearly as in a mirror, the face of Jim was imagined. For no one else would Little Billy have exhibited a tithe of this interest, this fear, as though he at whom he was about to cast the ball might dart in inescapable pursuit and work a great revenge. The expression of the impish little chap was the expression of a monkey tormenting a lion, and from a distance that he was not quite certain was secure.

  She ran her glance to the left, by dint of pressing her face close to the glass of the window, and there, with his back against an angle of the house, stood Jim himself. And as always when she glanced at him, her heart jumped a little. It had jumped when she first saw him in the hotel not so very many days before—that time when the tall man, Lang, had jumped up, accused Jim of being the Red Devil, and shot him through the thigh. And ever since Henry Mark brought the stranger home to be healed, his daughter had felt that strange, breathless, painful interest in the man who announced no name except Jim. Plain Jim he was, and had been ever since he arrived, and as to his past his lips were locked. Now he stood with his back to the wall of the house, and his brown hands dropped carelessly into his trouser pockets. With bored indifference he regarded the sparkling face of the boy opposite him.

  The hard rubber ball was raised, the poising arm of the boy quivered—suddenly it was hurled with all his might, dissolving into a streak of light that flashed straight at the head of Jim. The latter waited until he thought the ball had well nigh struck him and then, with a movement of such catlike speed and grace combined that Ruth could hardly follow it, he was out of the way. There was not the slightest bit of extra and unneeded effort in his side-step. He moved only far enough to allow the ball to whir past his very cheek, and it rebounded with a thud from the solid wall and back to the hands of the child.

  “Pretty slow,” Jim said quietly. “Darnation slow, son, I’d call that. If you can’t learn to do a pile better, you’ll never be no account with your gun work. I’d give up that gun work if I was you.”

  Ruth saw the boy flush to the roots of his hair. He fairly trembled with shame and indignation. From the first moment he laid eyes on Jim, he had made the stranger his hero. Hours and hours he had been content to sit by the bedside of the tall man and fix half-frightened, half-idolatrous eyes upon him.

  “I would have hit you easy,” he declared now, “if it hadn’t been that the damned …”

  “Hush up,” cautioned Jim, working his shoulders into a more comfortable position against the board behind him. “You ain’t big enough to start cussing like that.”

  “Don’t I hear you cuss every day?”

  “Sure you do. But I’m studying your ways mighty careful, Billy, and before long I expect I’ll be out of the habit. Cussing don’t do no good. It don’t help you none, and it don’t hurt the thing you cuss at none. I want you to lay off that habit.”

  “Hmm,” murmured the child thoughtfully. “Maybe I’d better. But you think I’m pretty slow, Jim?”

  “Terrible. Never saw worse. If …”—here the ball flashed again from the hand of Little Billy, but the speaker, without hesitating over a single word, drifted out of the path with another of those incredibly rapid and smooth side-steps—“you was to take time and practice doing things, you might get pretty fair.”

  “Practice? Don’t I practice a pile?”

  “Practice?” The tall man chuckled. “Why, son, you don’t know what it means. There ain’t nothing worth doing that you don’t have to practice at. Look at the way you come running along with that ball, all ready to soak somebody with it, and jest nacherally expecting that I’d stand still and let myself get soaked.” He shook his head, smiling. “What’s nine-tenths of winning a fight, Little Billy? It’s keeping from getting hit. You’re young. You got time to learn. But you got to practice hard. The way to win a fight is not to get hit by the other gent.”

  The boy listened with eyes and mouth agape. “You practice dodging a lot, Jim, I guess.”

  “Fair to middling lot. Boxing is the best practice. You got to get your hands and your feet moving all the time in that game. I ain’t got the build or the weight for it. But I got the speed out of practice. I ain’t got the shoulder drive to knock the ribs out of the other gent … but, if I ain’t hurting him much, you can lay to it that he most likely ain’t hitting me at all.”

  There was an exclamation of delighted amazement from the boy. “Can anybody lick you, Jim?” he asked. “Can anybody beat you at anything?”

  “Sure,” responded Jim instantly. “A pile of gents can beat me all hollow. The worst fool in the world can beat the best man in it, if he gets the break. Suppose I was to get into a fight and try to pull my gun, and suppose that gun was to stick a little. Well, Billy, any halfway decent gunfighter ain’t more than a little part of a second slower than the fastest at getting out his gun and pulling the trigger … and no matter if I was the king of ’em all, the worst fool could beat me, if I was to have a bit of bad luck and the gun was to bind against the leather.”

  “What good is it, then?” exclaimed the boy, who had listened to the gospel of “practice makes perfect” with the utmost devout attention. “What good is it to practice all the time? Luck might beat you.”

  “I’ll tell you why it’s good to practice. The best reason is … so’s you won’t have to fight.”

  “What?”

  The girl at the window smiled and pressed her face closer to the glass until her nose was a white smudge behind it. She was beginning to see the reason behind this lesson in gunfighting.

 
“Sure,” went on Jim complacently. “A gent that knows how to handle his gun fine never has to lay a hand on it. Why? Because what he can do will be knowed pretty quick without him saying a word about it. And then folks let him alone, you can bet.”

  “But …” protested Little Billy gloomily.

  “What you want to do,” said Jim, chuckling, “is to get good with a gun, and then go out and shoot somebody up when you’re a mite older. Eh?”

  “Well,” said the freckle-faced youngster, “I sure don’t aim to take water from nobody.”

  “Nope, you want to get lightning fast, and then go up ag’in’ a gent that ain’t wasted a couple of hours a day on gunplay. Then you wouldn’t be in a fight. You’d be doing a murder. Just the same’s I’d be doing a murder, now, if I was to go after you. Understand?”

  The point in ethics slowly penetrated to the savage mind of the child. He looked at Jim with a mixture of awe and disappointment.

  “And now,” said Jim, “you’ve had two cracks at me with a ball that would sting like sixty if it ever landed. What am I going to do to get back at you?”

  “I dunno,” said the boy. “I didn’t think about that.”

  “Well,” said Jim, “I guess you don’t need nothing more done to you … because somebody’s been looking and seen how you couldn’t hit me.”

  Ruth Mark exclaimed in shame and surprise. He must have seen her from the back of his head, it seemed. She stepped out of view behind the wall and stood there, wondering why her face was so hot, and why her nerves tingled so, and why she was smiling so foolishly—all because she had been espied playing the part of a most innocent eavesdropper. She decided for the twentieth time that there was a certain something about this Jim.