The Winged Horse

by Max Brand

  “Of course you do. But what nails me to the mast more than anything else is why nobody pays any attention to you, here.”

  “Who?”

  “The young gents. Even these here Comanches want squaws. But they don’t seem to bother you none.”

  She seemed a little angered, at first, by this excessive frankness, but suddenly she laughed. And the Lamb smiled in his turn.

  “Well, that clears the air,” she said. “They don’t pay any attention to me because they don’t want me, of course.”

  “Does a trout rise to flies?” asked the Lamb. “Sure, except when the shadow of the rod is floating on the surface. Does a horse try to stand on his nose in his feed box? Sure, except when he smells a snake in the oats. But why don’t these gents make a rush for you? I dunno. They walk by like they were blind in the eye that was next to you.”

  She looked earnestly at the Lamb. “There’s no way to answer you,” she said. “Of course, you see that.”

  “Isn’t there? I don’t see,” the Lamb said. “Here I am, miles outside of you and clean different. I’m a hired man. I’m just a pair of hired guns, as you might say. Couldn’t you talk to a pair of guns?”

  She smiled a little. “You’re talking yourself down,” she said. “But I may as well tell you that it isn’t pleasant for people who pay attention to me here. I should warn you … unless you’ve already heard … Jimmy doesn’t like to have me noticed.”

  “He’s the shadow of the rod on the water, and the snake in the feed box, eh?” murmured the Lamb. “I should’ve guessed that. But why do you stay here to be bullied by them? You were raised pretty good, or else you’ve had a lot of attention showed to you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “By the language you daub,” he said. “You can tell a cowboy by his boots and a girl by the way she talks. Besides, you’ve got an emerald there that wasn’t picked up at any counter sale.”

  The jewel was at her breast; it was the ornament in a golden pin, dark sea-green, with the sea’s shadow of blue in it. She covered it hastily with her hand and stared at the Lamb. His keen, bright eyes searched her very soul, and in between them pressed the terrier with a growl, as though he guessed at a crisis of some sort.

  The girl quieted the dog with a word.

  “What’s his name?” asked the Lamb.

  “His Lordship.”

  “Sure,” said the Lamb. “By the way of his walking and talking, a man could guess that. Here, old son. Here’s my hand.”

  The dog bared his teeth.

  “Be careful!” cried the girl. “His Lordship is an ugly noble when his temper comes up.”

  “I never knew a dog to refuse my hand, ma’am,” the Lamb said. “Look at His Lordship, now. He doesn’t see anything wrong in my hand.”

  The dog growled, presently sniffed the hand, and now came a little closer to the stranger, his tail wagging in a small circle, as though it worked upon a spring.

  “I’ve never seen him act that way before,” admitted the girl.

  “He’ll act that way again, though,” the Lamb smiled. “He’s made friends with me. You take a fighting dog and he doesn’t change. It’s the same with a fighting man, ma’am. When he’s made up his mind to be a friend, it’s worth having him. Would you say no?”

  She hesitated, filled with an odd anxiety, and the Lamb went on, “Look at you! I speak about an emerald that you’re wearing, and you begin to get red and white in turns. Look here. That’s a fighting dog, and he’s our friend. I’m a fighting man, and I’m your friend. You live here like a wolf among dogs, or a dog among wolves. Why not talk out, ma’am?”

  “Did you ever see this pin before?” she asked him suddenly.

  “Jewels don’t wear faces, for me, ma’am,” he answered.

  She watched him with a sudden hunger of curiosity. “Did you ever know Will Dunstan?” she asked.

  The wind leaped across the valley and smote them, so that the Lamb bowed his head against it and clutched his hat. And yet the wind appeared to have caught him so much off balance that he staggered into it a little. It released him.

  “That was a puff enough to sink a ship,” he said. “I didn’t catch what name you said.”

  “Will Dunstan,” she said. “Did you know him?”

  “Dunstan? Dunstan?” he repeated. “I knew a gent by name of Dunbar. He was a half-breed and …”

  “No, no! There never was a trace of Indian blood in this man!”

  “Dunstan?” murmured the Lamb. “I don’t seem to quite place any name like that. But what did he look like, because gents have a way of changing their names, when they go wandering around the range from place to place. That’s because a name that might fit in pretty good in one place wouldn’t be so very good in another, y’understand?”

  She raised her head a little, and said in her quiet voice, “Will Dunstan was not that sort of man. Wherever he went, he couldn’t have carried more than one name. His own name was the right name for him. He had no other, ever.”

  “Ah, yes,” the Lamb said. “He was a gent that you knew pretty well, eh? When you’ve seen a horse all the way from foal to saddle, you can pretty well know what he’s like.”

  “I knew him less than a month,” she told him.

  “Hello!” said the Lamb cheerfully. “Less than a month? I dunno that even a teacher can learn a man that quick.”

  “I must go on,” she said hastily.

  “The emerald had something to do with this here Dunstan, did it?”

  “He gave it to me.”

  The Lamb watched her with his keen eyes. “Excuse me,” he said, “if I’ve been making myself too much at home. This Dunstan is sort of on your mind, it seems.”

  “He gave me this,” she said. “He was working here for the Montagues and …”

  “Ah, then he was one of ’em, was he?”

  “Will Dunstan?” She paused to let the emotion pass from her. “He was no Montague,” she said. “He gave me this. And the next day, he fell from the trail around the mountain, there, and they picked him up, dead.”

  “It’s a long time since?” asked the Lamb gently.

  “It was last fall. The leaves were dropping, and it was just before the first snow fell,” she answered. Then hastily, “I have to finish my walk. I’ll talk to you some other time, whenever you wish.” She brushed past him and hurried down the path, swinging immediately out of sight.

  The Lamb made as if to follow her, but changed his mind and sat down abruptly upon a stump of a felled tree. There he remained for a long time, looking before him with a blank face, as though he were struggling with a thought too great for utterance, too great for conception. At last his lips stirred to a faint muttering. He got up, then, and looked around with a glance both dark and guilty, as though he feared that other eyes might have looked upon him.

  Then he turned down the path that rimmed the plateau, walking in a direction opposite to that which the girl had taken. He was, in fact, watched from the brush, for he hardly had started away before the brush parted and the dark face of Jack McGuire looked out, with the soiled bandage drawn about his head.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Five minutes later, McGuire stepped before him and glowered.

  “Old son,” said the Lamb, “you always look at me like I’d stole your calf. What’s the matter?”

  McGuire merely hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “The chief wants you inside.”

  “Thanks,” the Lamb said, and started on back to the house beside the other, shortening his step when McGuire showed signs of purposely falling behind.

  “If you were a cook,” the Lamb said, “the boys would sure turn out pronto when they heard you holler in the morning, and them that come late would look for poison in their beans the next time they fed. What’s on your mind, handsome? Because I nicked you w
ith that slug? Why, I was just shooting at Montagues in general. I didn’t pick out your face. I’d never had the fun of seeing it.”

  McGuire, with an ugly twitch of his lip, said, “You and me don’t come of the same breed and we don’t run on the same trails. Leave me be. You’d best.”

  To this the Lamb replied with a shrug of the shoulders, and then walked lightly on, with Jack McGuire bringing up the rear. In that position they appeared in the room of Monty Montague, and found Jimmy with his grandfather.

  “Here I come,” the Lamb said, “with the sheep dog behind me.” He sat down uninvited upon the arm of a chair and looked cheerfully upon the others.

  “All right, Jack,” said the younger Montague, and McGuire withdrew reluctantly, as though he expected dour proceedings and wished to be present at them.

  “He’s going to bite, one of these days,” the Lamb declared. “He’s been getting his teeth ready for a long time to eat me up.”

  Monty Montague dismissed that subject with a gesture. Then he passed his fingers smoothly through his fluff of a beard, and he nodded knowingly at the Lamb. “You ain’t had a bad time here, son?” he began.

  “I been resting,” said the Lamb, “and waiting for the trouble to start.”

  “It’s started now,” Jimmy said.

  The Lamb waited.

  “You ain’t camped on one homestead all your days?” suggested old Montague.

  “No, I’ve sashayed up and down the range a good deal.”

  “You’ve met up with a few rough ones?”

  “Sure. I’ve met some that wore the leather side out.”

  “And what was the roughest?”

  “One that shot my horse, and rode her and me down afterward,” the Lamb stated. He did not look at Jimmy, but his smile was most unpleasant.

  Jimmy smiled, also, openly, and with great satisfaction.

  Of these two smiles, Monty Montague was aware, though he appeared to be looking at the floor as he declared, “That’s forgot! You two are friends now, and going to stay put that way. Outside of my boy here, you’ve met up with other rough ones?”

  “There was Dutch Binderloss in El Paso. He was as good with his left hand as he was with his right. I shot him through the right shoulder, and with his left hand he caught his gun while it was falling and put me in the hospital for a month.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Just that slug through the shoulder. I missed him with my second and my third.”

  “Bad luck,” Jimmy hissed with an evil sneer.

  At this, the Lamb shrugged his shoulders. “I ain’t a fellow who’s always won. I ain’t that kind of a fairy tale.”

  “You’ve had your ups and downs, eh?”

  The Lamb laughed, and, in laughing, his boyishness appeared in the backward tilt of his head as he sat like a boy on the arm of the chair, carelessly, his back humped, his attitude most ungraceful. “I’ve had my ups and downs. I’ve just batted over five hundred, that’s all. They ain’t put me on the bench yet. But outside of the books, where are the pitchers that always win by shut outs?”

  Jimmy Montague’s nostrils flared and his eyes glittered. But the grandfather smiled with a genial understanding.

  “You gotta hammer iron before it makes good steel,” he said. “You’ve had the hammering, son, is that it?”

  “I’ve had it, plenty,” said the boy. He closed his eyes and groaned softly. “Ran into an Irish lad when I was a kid at school. He was smaller than me … and I wasn’t as big as I thought. He pretty near tore me in two. I wore the marks of that licking for years.”

  “Ever fight him again?”

  “No, I never had the chance. He moved out of town while both my eyes were still closed. Fargo got him finally, from what I heard.”

  “Fargo?”

  “Sure. The great Fargo … him that they talk about so much. Lefty Fargo.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” said Jimmy. “He’s got a record behind him.”

  “Nobody has a longer one. But it’s part talk, of course.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Aw,” the Lamb said with a shrug of his eloquent shoulders, “all of these yarns about the dead-eye Dicks are part made up. This here Fargo … they tell how he takes a gun in each hand and smashes a couple of dimes at twenty yards with snap shots, one from each hand … bang, bang.” He laughed.

  “You don’t believe it?” asked the old man.

  “Sure I don’t. I’ve been in too many gunfights, and I’ve seen too many. I was on hand when Harry Corson, Jack Peters, Lew Marquis, and Jemmy Bone all met up in Tombstone and shot it out.”

  “Aye, that was a great fight.”

  “Was it? Corson got killed and Bone got shot through the hip. That was all. And those four dead-eye Dicks were all in one room together for pretty near ten minutes. They must’ve planted a hundred pounds of lead in the walls, and the ceilings, and the floors. They busted all the windows. The floor was flooded and smelled like a big mixed drink, because they’d potted most of the bottles behind the bar. After they got through, it looked like a bunch of Comanches had gone for that barroom with hatchets … but they hadn’t. It was only four dead shots, so called, that had been firing off their guns. One killed … one wounded. The lead they fired off, they could’ve embalmed Corson in it.”

  “Folks exaggerate. There ain’t any doubt of that,” said the elder Montague. “But Fargo is a pretty fair man, I’d say.”

  “Why, sure he is.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “Two years back.”

  “Friends?”

  “Pretty fair. He put me under the table, that time.”

  “Drink?”

  “A half-inch chunk of lead straight through the middle of me,” the Lamb said. “Fargo, he ducked his head under the table and grinned at me. ‘I’ll see you later, kid,’ he said. Meaning in Hades, someday, you understand? But I lived through it.” He laid his hand on his breast and made a wry face, as though the agony of the wound, and the long hospital weeks of weariness, were rushing back upon his mind at that instant. Then he said, “But what’s up?”

  “We’ve got a letter from a gent that Colonel Loring has hired. Professional gunfighter.”

  “Does he tell you to hop right off of the range?” asked the Lamb.

  “He wants to meet Jimmy, here, in the middle of the floor of Beacon Creek.”

  “If you went there, he’d never show his face, most likely,” the Lamb said. “Unless he’s a kid.”

  “What you mean by that?” put in the heavy bass of Jimmy.

  “You take ’em young … fifteen up to eighteen or nineteen … and a kid’ll do any fool thing to get himself famous. He likes to fight. He ain’t got any sore places to start aching on him. You take me,” continued this veteran of one-and-twenty, “and when a cold wind hits me, it goes right through fifty channels. I feel like the side of an old barn … full of holes and cracks, where bullets and knives have punched through me. I feel like a transfer ticket that’s been punched ten times, and folded and punched over again.”

  “This is no crazy kid,” Montague insisted. “But he’s the kind that will live up to his word. What’s the matter up there at the colonel’s shack, sendin’ out challenges, this way? Do they think that the old storybook days of knights have come back, where gents fight for the sake of fighting? There was you, before.”

  “I wanted to get Jimmy,” the Lamb said. “I wanted him bad.” He laughed with perfect good nature. “You going down to clean up this gent?” he asked.

  “I’m not,” said Jimmy. “I’m gonna accept. I’ve sent back my acceptance already. He’s gonna be in the creek bed in an hour or so. But I don’t expect to do the shooting for my side.”

  “Who will, then?”

  “Why not you, kid?”

  The
Lamb rose from the arm of the chair. “I’ve got all kinds of fondness for you, Jimmy,” he said. “I’ve got reason for having it. But you want me to go down there and play dummy for you? Thanks!”

  Jimmy said, “You lie around here and sleep soft and eat fat. What d’you do for yourself and us? Have you lifted your hand? For all we know, you might be a spy for Loring, right now, snoopin’ around into our affairs.”

  “Shut up!” commanded old Montague. “You gotta talk like a bull. You always gotta roar and paw around and raise such a dust that nobody can see what we’re talkin’ about. But listen to me, Al Lamb. You got a personal interest in that other man, because his name ain’t nothing but Fargo.”

  “Lefty Fargo!” exclaimed the boy.

  “It’s Lefty, right enough. Loring has got so low that he has started in hirin’ professional gunfighters to drive me off the range. He’s got that killer, Fargo.”

  The Lamb drew in his breath with a hiss.

  “I’m gonna chuck a saddle on the black,” he said, and left the room in haste.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Lamb went to his own room first, and there he looked to his guns with the most loving care. He saw to it that his rifle was in perfect condition, that the cylinders of his revolvers spun like tops at a flick of the finger, and that the weight of the hammer was exactly right, so that it could be flipped back by the thumb easily, and yet retain sufficient force to explode the cap of the cartridge when it fell. For this purpose, hardly a day went by that he did not adjust the spring a little and perhaps sharpen the point. The fingering of the pianist is a delicate matter, for it deals with the souls of many notes to make them strong or small, but the fingering of a pair of Colts is infinitely more delicate, and it had to do with the preservation or the perishing of the life of men.

  For an entire half hour, the Lamb worked intently. It was cold in his room, and into the damp chill of the apartment a finger or two of icy wind penetrated from without. Yet he was dripping wet with the intensity of his application. This was only the first of his preparations.

  The slightest tremor might upset his aim. Therefore, he set about arming himself against the cold. He stripped to the waist and redressed, putting on two flannel shirts, then a closely knit sweater, and over this apparel he donned a coat lined with rabbit skin, loose and warm and last of all he wore a slicker. His hands were sheathed in two pairs of bulky woolen mittens, and he looked like a fat man when he left his room and went down to the stable.