The Winged Horse

by Max Brand

  The proceeding seemed most unheroic. He had gone out like a hired murderer, and tried to take life at the bidding of his employer. He looked deep into his own soul, at that moment, and what he saw made his heart fail.

  He was indifferent to the praise that he met all around him. There was Milligan, looking more like a fox than ever as he grinned and nodded.

  “That maverick had to take the brand, after all,” Milligan said to him.

  And old Monty Montague stuck close to his side, and struck his champion on the shoulder with the flat of his hand.

  “That’s the last chance that they had, and they’ve used it up for nothin’,” he said. “Their boys were pretty downhearted before. They’ll be a sick lot of critters now. The time has come to shake the fruit off of the branch, kid, and you’re the sun that’s ripened it and got it ready to fall.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  They went straight back to the house and the procession grew on the way. It became a sort of flaunting triumph—there were a dozen men in that group—and then Louise Patten joined them, with His Lordship skipping over the snow crust, through which the horses broke.

  She steered through the group and came up beside the Lamb, smiling. “That was a mighty fine thing,” she said to the Lamb. “I don’t think any other man could have done just that.”

  Jimmy Montague said without enthusiasm, “I didn’t know that you liked the knock down and drag out as much as this, Lou.”

  “Shut up, Jimmy!” commanded his grandfather. He laughed, and his laughter was like his speaking voice, indescribably harsh and grating. “This here is the way to multiply a hero by two … giving him a chance to see a pretty girl smile.”

  But Louise answered the young Montague gravely, “It wasn’t the beating of Fargo, Jimmy. But he could have shot that man and he didn’t.”

  “Shot him?” growled Jimmy. “His gun jammed on him, I suppose. So he beaned him with the barrel of it.”

  “He changed his mind,” the girl said firmly. “I saw!”

  Jimmy was silent, looking with a curious interest from the girl to the Lamb, and back at her again, as though he were drawing a most potent deduction.

  “Could you tell at that distance?” the Lamb asked.

  “I thought I could,” she said.

  Old Montague threw a clenched fist above his head. He laughed again. “When you think how that flat face, that Loring, is gonna feel!” he broke out. “That’s what’s milk and honey to me. Boys, it’s the damn end of this here trouble. Inside of a week we’ll have ’em swept off the range. We’ll have elbow room. They’ve lost their Lamb … they’ve lost their Lefty Fargo that cost ’em so much money. And old Loring has his back ag’in’ the wall. He’s got no more money. He’s flat. Jimmy, this is where we start our war council.”

  But the Lamb looked aside in spite of this flattery and met the eyes of the girl, and she smiled back frankly at him. It seemed to him that he was enlarged and ennobled by that glance of hers. He looked at her no more, but inward on his own soul, and upon his own life, where he began to be aware of blemishes that never had troubled him before. All the scars, the brutality, a certain shiftiness at cards, a certain cruel cunning, he was aware of now, and he knew that others were aware, also. What things the world could tell this girl about him, if it chose to gossip.

  Blind to the ground before him, he let the stallion carry him on, and all the time he registered and named, one by one, the list of his ill doings. It seemed to him that his crimes were a sort of Tower of Babel, broad-based, and tapering to the top. For he could remember the beginning, when simply to be known as a very dangerous boy had been a delight to him, and when he had rejoiced in the whisper that ever trailed behind him when he walked among his fellows. He had grown up to a more narrow worship of violence. His creed had improved a little; it had lost some of its brutal scope, but growing smaller in field, it had been more burning, it had cut deeper.

  These things would come to her ears about him—and she would never know that in this last adventure, at least, there had been a great purpose driving him on, something more than the mere blood lust. So it would be reported to her, and so it would appear—merely the passion for fight, which had drawn him away from his home and brought him into the midst of this feud.

  Suddenly they were at the house. He unsaddled the black horse in the stable, and found Jimmy Montague waiting for him outside. The sky was a solid gray again. Thin snow was flying down, blown almost horizontal with the ground. It was far colder than the air through which it fell. It was so cold that it stung the skin like little flakes of fire where it touched. Jimmy walked beside him to the house, silent, head lowered a little in gloomy thought.

  Only when he came to the rear door of the house, he paused, and words came out of his bull throat. “Look here, kid.”

  “Well?” said the Lamb.

  “You got your start here, now. You’ve done pretty fine. The old man is for you. So am I. You gotta chance to have everything that you want. We’ll fix you up. You can have what you want out of us. Land. Cows to stock it. Hard cash to start on the side. I don’t mean by that, that you can have the whole world with a fence around it.”

  “What are you ruling out?” asked the Lamb. He looked up into the dark face and the contorted brows of the big fellow and for almost the first time in his life, fear colder than the snow passed into the heart of the Lamb. Not that he doubted his ability to meet this man with weapons, but he felt in Jimmy a dark sea of malevolence that would be capable of producing many marvels of sinister form.

  “You can guess what I mean,” Jimmy said. “She don’t like me none too much. If I win the game with her, it’ll only be because I keep the other aces out of the pack. You’re an ace with her. I saw that today. So did you.” He paused.

  The Lamb, strive as he would, could not keep the color from mounting in his face. He wanted to turn his eyes away, but the grim regard of Montague held him.

  “Mind you,” Jimmy said. “You’ve done fine so far. You’ve had the horse out of me. You’ve got yourself talked about pretty famous. And that’s all right. I don’t mind that. Only, she’s out, y’understand?”

  He waited a little. And they stared at one another. It was to the Lamb as though he were facing drawn guns.

  “Now,” said Montague, “I’m gonna give you some time to think it over. It won’t be worthwhile. Turn it back and forth and you’ll see that I’m right.”

  They went up the stairs together, in silence, through the big, dark house, with the stale smell of cookery in the air. In Monty’s room they found the head of the clan in person, seated alone, filling his pipe and tamping down the tobacco extra hard.

  He smiled at them. His toothless grin was like a horrible scar across his face. His eyes were absent, plotting mischief. He seemed to have the impish spirit of a child, united with the ancient experience of a long and evil life. He finished his task as the two younger men sat down. He dusted the tobacco crumbs from his hands and lit the pipe with care, saying in gasps, through the smoke, “You two young fools. You look like poison at each other. You got woman on the brain. Like dogs that are dreamin’ about a bone. Well, a dog can crack a bone and get at the marrow. There ain’t any marrow in a woman. And there ain’t anything to her. She’s a face. And faces get old and wrinkled. But you take a young girl, there’s a freshness about her, and a milky look to the eyes, and a sweet breath like a cow. And the young gents, they figger that she’s a saint. I talk to you … I know. It ain’t the woman that a man loves … it’s his idea of her. Marriage is the noose with which a woman snags a man, and ties him, and puts her brand on him. And here are you two wantin’ to cut each other’s throat about that girl. Why, if there’s gonna be trouble about her, I’ll send her out of here. I’ll give her a ticket to Chicago.”

  “You leave your hands off of her,” Jimmy said.

  His grandfather glanced
aside at him. There was a little pause, and then the old man said, “We want some ideas about how we’re gonna handle this here job with Loring. You got any, Jimmy?”

  And the Lamb wondered. His esteem for the formidable nature of Jimmy rose, for he saw that the grandfather respected this giant as a physical force, and also as a brain.

  “You got the first speech,” Jimmy said. “Lemme hear what you got to say. You’re the oldest head here. Does he sit in on this deal?” He turned a keen eye upon the Lamb, and the latter could see that jealousy was, for the moment, banished from the mind of the young Montague. He was simply a crafty fox, striving to work out a hard problem.

  “What do you think … after today?” asked the patriarch. “If he’s straight … sure … we need his head as bad as we need his guns. Go on. He’s a part of us, now. He’s burned his bridges behind him, today.” And he rubbed his hands together. Those hands were eternally blue with cold. Even the summer sun could not warm them. After that, the old man continued, “It seems to me like a pretty easy thing. Any night, now, we can start up the hills and put a net around the house. In a couple of days we’ll have it.”

  Jimmy grunted, “Is that your idea?”

  “It’s simple,” said the grandfather. “But that don’t mean that it’s bad.”

  “It is bad,” Jimmy said.

  “You young gents,” said Montague, “are always after something fancy.”

  “You’re gettin’ old,” Jimmy said brutally. “I never seen how old, before this minute.”

  “You gotta prove that,” Montague said angrily.

  “Easy,” answered the grandson.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  All other things young Al Lamb forgot in his intense interest in this struggle of two generations. They looked at each other, old and young, with the penetrating, cruel eyes of duelists. The Lamb almost forgot that he had at last a priceless opportunity to learn what he had come to this house for—information about the plans of the enemy.

  “You think that your idea is worth something,” sneered Jimmy. “I’m gonna show you what it’s worth.”

  “You got a fancy idea,” repeated the veteran. “You think that you’ll play Napoleon. Lemme tell you … if you knew the facts, you’d find out that Napoleon was simple, too.”

  “But not a fool, I guess.”

  “Am I a fool, young man?”

  “You’re old,” Jimmy said. “You’re too darn old!” Then he went on, “Suppose we scatter out around the house of Loring, what’ll happen the next day?”

  “Why, most of the yellow-hearted dogs would come right over to us,” said old Montague.

  “Half of ’em would. But the other half would be enough for us,” countered Jimmy.

  “We’d range rifle bullets through them log walls, and through and through ’em!”

  “Would you? They got them walls sandbagged,” Jimmy said brusquely.

  “Ha!” grunted the old man, and was gloomily silent, admitting this point against his plan.

  “Behind them sandbags, they could lie snug and blow the life out of us if we tried to rush ’em.”

  “We’d have the Loring cows!”

  “You can’t get the Loring cows that way,” said Jimmy. “You got an idea that there still ain’t any law in this here country. There is.”

  “A lot of law,” sneered Montague. “Law is on the side of the gent with the most cows.”

  “Law ain’t on the side of the gent that’s got all the cows,” Jimmy said. “Right now we got a lot of Loring stuff run into our herd. We got weaners, and all. It wouldn’t take no expert to see where a lot of those brands have been changed.”

  “I had experts run the irons on them calves,” said the old man.

  “A fine hand can put the irons one by one on a hundred calves, maybe,” Jimmy said, “and no court of law could swear to what it had used to be. But a thousand is different … and two thousand is a lot more different. There’s pretty sure to be a mistake, and one mistake would show up big.”

  The old man nodded. “You got brains in that big ugly head of yours,” he said.

  “Leave the ugliness of my head alone, will you?”

  “Aw, she wouldn’t be stopped by that,” said old Montague. “It ain’t your homely phiz that would stop the girl, Jimmy.”

  “Leave her out, too!” boomed the young giant. “I’m talkin’ business, now.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  “We gotta be pretty smart. We gotta be foxes. You make a murder party out of this, and it’s one thing. You make a cow raid out of it, and they’ll have us in prison.”

  Monty Montague grinned broadly and without much mirth. “This here law … it prizes murder more’n cattle lifting?”

  “Sure,” Jimmy said. “It always has when you take it on a big scale. I mean … you shoot one man and you get tried for murder. You take a gang and meet a gang … that’s a cattle war … that’s a battle. There ain’t any murder about it … unless there’s a lot of cow liftin’ alongside of it. Raid the house, and it’s murder. Raid the range, and it’s just another cattle war. Then the newspapers gotta chance to talk a lot. Everybody is a hero that ain’t dead. Everybody says that something has gotta be done to put down this here sort of business. And there you are. Nothing is done at all.”

  “You’ve been free and large, criticizin’,” Monty Montague said. “Now lemme hear you step out and talk for yourself some. You can blame me, maybe, but that don’t put you in heaven, nor halfway there, even.”

  Big Jimmy knelt by the hearth. He took a stick, one end of which was burned, and began to make a sketch upon the floor. The paint fumed and boiled under the burning wood, and the stick point itself crumbled away, but old Montague made no protest. He leaned to the side in his chair and studied the map with a frown, and nursed the big bowl of his pipe in both his ancient hands.

  “This here is the Loring house,” Jimmy explained. “Now, you look down here. This here is where the three hill ranges branch out. Is that right?”

  “Sure. That’s right.”

  “Where they meet makes two valleys.”

  “Of course. You don’t have to tell me what that country is like. Loring has hogged the best part of the range and with no right to have it.”

  “A man has a right to what he can get … and keep,” Jimmy advised his grandfather, with the superiority of a more brutal attitude. “Look here. This is the Black Hills, nearest to you. There’s the valley head between the end of ’em and the Capper Hills.”

  “I remember old Capper like yesterday,” said the old man. “Him and me used to trout fish, over in them same hills. He loved ’em. He swore that someday he’d strike gold rich in there. There was an old strike of porphyry that stuck its head up above the rest of the rock, and old Capper, he used to say that …”

  “What has that got to do with what I’m talkin’ about?” Jimmy demanded.

  The old man rambled on, nevertheless, “He used to swear that that streak of hills would make him rich. Well, he got rich there, well enough, if dyin’ and gettin’ to the golden Kingdom Come is to get rich. Go on, Jimmy. You talk like you got some sense, today. Woman is all that’s the matter with you. Get that girl pried out of your head, and you’d be fair-to-middlin’ intelligent.”

  Jimmy straightened up on his knee and looked with a dark forbearance upon his grandfather. Then he went on slowly. “If you’ve finished your chatter, this is what comes next. Between the Capper Hills and the line of Mount Solomon, there’s another valley head, ain’t there?”

  “There is, boy.”

  “Where does the Loring range lie?” persisted Jimmy.

  “Why, he claims …”

  “Damn what he claims. What has he got? Where does he run his cows?”

  “Why, between the Capper Hills and the Black Hills on the one side, and Solomon Mountain on t
he other side.”

  “He won’t run ’em much longer if I have my way,” the boy assured him.

  “Aye? That’s good. I like to hear you talk that way, Jimmy. I like the whole way that you talk. I sort of like the attitude that you got about this here thing!” exclaimed old Montague with feeling.

  Big Jimmy laughed fiercely and softly. “I know what you like. Fightin’! You could live by it. Well, you’re gonna have that, too. You’re gonna have everything that you want, out of this here job. What’ve you been doin’ all this time that you and Loring’s been growlin’ and snappin’?”

  “Runnin’ cattle off from each other, most of the time,” said old Montague.

  “What good was that?”

  “No good. That’s why I wanted to hit right from the heart of the business. Go after his house. And why not? No more trimmings. Bite the meat nearest to the heart. That’s what I want to do.”

  “I’ve showed where that was foolish. Drop that right out of your head, if you got any sense.”

  “Well?” the old man asked patiently, submissively.

  “Here’s what we do. We wait for the crack of dawn. Then we ride down across the hills and we plant our boys straddlin’ the throats of them two valleys. We plant ’em where there’s easy hidin’. I take one half of the boys. And the Lamb, here, he takes the other half.” His eyes kindled as he looked across at the Lamb.

  The old man nodded and struck his hand upon his knee. “I see it,” he said.

  “Of course you do,” grunted Jimmy. “It’s pretty clear now.”

  “You’re between the house and the range,” Monty said slowly.

  “That’s it,” broke in the Lamb. “And when the boys come drifting in from the range, they’re swallowed one by one. And if there should have to be a shot or two fired, here and there, it wouldn’t amount to nothing. The wind would blow the noise away from the Loring house, mostly, and if it didn’t, why then they would only think that one of the boys was coming in and was taking a crack at a coyote or a wolf, maybe.”