Brand, Max - 1924

by Clung (v1. 1)

  "For a human being!” she would respond angrily.

  "Half human, maybe,” John Sampson would answer.

  "You mean, because he’s half-white? As a matter of fact, Dad, it isn't the white in him that interests me, but the yellow blood. He’s the most unusual mind I’ve ever met.”

  "Now, to be frank, Winifred, the whole point is that you want another person to take care of, just as you've been taking care of poor Billy Kirk. As soon as Bill was well you sent him away and you don't care if you ever lay eyes on him again. It'll be the same with this Clung -— if you ever find him., which you won't."

  "Won't I?" she would respond with that little touch of mystery upon which a woman always falls back when she is thoroughly baffled. "I have some tricks left with which I'll catch him."

  "But no trick as good as the one I have for scaring him away."

  "Would you do that?"

  "For heaven's sake, my dear, are we to throw away our lives simply because Billy Kirk called down the law on the head of an outlaw?"

  "On the head of a man who saved his life,” she would answer bitterly, and this, as a rule, ended the argument for the time being, until John Sampson recovered his wind and his bad temper. For he was a little plump man with short legs, and men of this build are not meant to withstand the heat of the Southwest.

  So John Sampson, as a rule, persisted in following Winifred through the morning, but when the afternoon came his will power became a less vital factor than his irritation, and he retired in dudgeon to his room.

  However, this routine could not go on forever. It was manifestly impossible that he should fry himself on the griddle of benevolence in the Southwest until doomsday. He decided to put an end to the tiresome quest; he would unearth a thorough history of the wild exploits of Clung, some of which he had already heard, and armed with this tale he would go to Winifred and relate it to her with some embellishments of his own. If this tale of violence did not revolt her, nothing would.

  To do him justice, John Sampson was a thoroughly kindly man, and if he showed malevolence on this occasion, the shortness of his wind and of his legs must be remembered, and the tireless insistence of a woman bent on doing a good deed. A charitable woman, undoubtedly, is an angel to the evildoers, but she is designed by God to try the patience of respectable men who possess a surplus of everything except time.

  It was something of this madness which possessed John Sampson on this day. He had trudged from one dusty end of Mortimer to the other pursued by a haunting mirage — a cool room in his club far, far to the north. Having made up his mind to unearth the whole gruesome story of the killings of the outlaw, he decided to start at the beginning and wheedle something from the mouth of Li Clung, the reputed father of the man-killer. And he went, accordingly, as fast as his pudgy legs would carry him, straight to the laundry of Li Clung.

  Now, the smell of a laundry in any land and in any city and clime is not that of a garden, and the odor of a Chinese laundry on a hot day in the Southwest, with the scent of sweaty laborers and the sharp taint of desert sand all mingling, is thrilling, indeed, but not poetic. John Sampson stood at the door and stared down the row of bobbing heads that wagged steadily from side to side above the ironing-boards.

  "Haloo!" called John Sampson, but not a head stirred. While he waited he observed a little table at his right hand, full in the glare of the sun. Interesting things might have been told him about that table, and at least one story that would have made the face of Winifred Sampson turn pale. Presently a little Chinese in white, loose trousers and a black cotton coat, the forward part of his head completely shaven, hobbled from the back of the room.

  "Li Clung?" asked John Sampson.

  "Li Clung,” nodded the Chinese, and removed the long stem of his pipe from his mouth. John Sampson saw a death's head of leanness, the skin pulled so tightly across the forehead that it shone, and the cheeks sucked into little holes at the center. The head was supported by a marvelously lean neck on which the skin hung in withered folds. Yet there was about this old, tottering wreck of a Chinese a suggestion of strength and further capacity for labor that moved a sense of dim respect in John Sampson. He began to see that it was possible for this old grotesque to be the father of slender, handsome Clung, the killer of men.

  He said: "You have a son?"

  Instantly the countenance of the Chinaman lightened, and his hand made a little movement almost as if he were about to reach out and touch the white man. The expression changed almost at once, however, to one of suspicious grief.

  "I have a son," he answered simply, and his moist old eyes fastened earnestly on John Sampson.

  "And he is in trouble," went on the financier easily. "Of course we all know about that. Now, Li Clung, I am a friend of a man whose life Clung saved. Understand?"

  He raised his forefinger to emphasize and point his question, careful lest his vocabulary should be too large for the brain of Li Clung, but the Chinese returned at once: "It is true:

  Clung saved many men; he saved even more men than he killed."

  John Sampson could not refrain from a little frown of irritation. It was not an auspicious beginning.

  "I don't doubt it,” he went on, "but I saw him save the life of my friend Kirk, and I'm grateful to him for it. I want to do something to show that gratitude, understand? Now, of course I can't do anything for him down here where the law is hunting him, but if I could send word to him to go north and meet me somewhere, there is a good deal that I might do. Can you tell me where he is, Li Clung?"

  It was only the shadow of a smile that touched the lips of Li Clung, but John Sampson knew at once that the old man would rather die a thousand times than give the location of his son.

  "How should I know?" asked Li Clung, and he raised his calloused hands, palms out. "My son has gone. Can I follow the wind?"

  John Sampson smiled — and there was a great deal of kindness in his smile. He could not help admiring the old man's faithfulness and liking him for it. Now, kindness is the one human light which all men recognize independent of color and breeding; this time it shone from the face of John Sampson and reflected dimly on the face of Li Clung.

  "You are a good man, maybe,” said the Chinese dubiously. "Li Clung knows in your house Clung was taken.”

  "But you also know it was not my fault.”

  "That is true,” admitted Li Clung.

  "Now, Li, I'm going to be straightforward with you. If I can get hold of Clung, I can do a great deal for him. You want your son to be a wise man, don't you? Well, I can see that he goes to the finest schools; I can see that he has clothes as good as any white man; in a word, I can set him up in life.”

  His first note was the key that unlocked the heart of Li Clung; for in China, old and new, the thing most highly prized is education. Now Li Clung laid his pipe by on the table and drew a little closer to John Sampson.

  "Li Clung,” he repeated, "thinks you are a good man, and perhaps he can tell you — “

  "But first,” said John Sampson, for the last thing he wished to know at that moment was the location of the outlaw, "first I must ask you some other questions.”

  "Come,” said Li Clung readily enough, and led the way back to his own little rooms behind the laundry.

  Chapter 16

  "In the first place,” went on John Sampson when they were settled in privacy, "I want to know something about the — er — parentage of Clung. You see, it isn't always easy to place a boy of — er — foreign birth in the best schools —"

  But Li Clung broke in with a smile and a wave of his hand.

  "Clung is the son of a white mother —"

  "Yes,” nodded Sampson, "his skin shows that much."

  "And a white father," added Li Clung.

  "A what?" roared John Sampson, and bolted out of his chair.

  "He is not of my blood," said the old Chinese sadly, "but he has lived in my house and eaten my food and learned my lessons."

  The white man stared at
him, transfixed with wonder and a touch of horror. For his daughter Winifred had seemed strangely interested in the outlaw, and had persisted even when she thought him to be a half-breed Chinese. If she learned that he was all white, John Sampson shuddered for the results. There flashed across his mind a picture of his fortune descending through his daughter to the hands of an unlettered whelp of the desert, a man hunted by the law.

  "It's a lie," he groaned.

  "Li Clung," frowned the Chinaman, drawing up to the full of his withered height, "does not lie."

  And the white man knew it was the truth; his own anguish of spirit confirmed it. A grim resolve came to him to save his girl from the possible horror of the future through the hand of the law. He shrank from it, but he had done harder things than this in his day, and for lesser reasons.

  "Where is Clung?" he asked at length.

  Li Clung observed him with steady eyes.

  "Swear to Li Clung," he said, "that John Sampson means only good to Clung, that he means to give him schooling and make him a man among men."

  The other set his teeth and swallowed before he could reply: "I swear."

  But Li Clung hobbled at his burden-bearer's gait to a corner of the room and took down a dusty book from the shelf.

  "The yellow man has his gods and the white man has other gods," said Li Clung, and returning he placed an open Bible before John Sampson. "Swear again on this book that you mean only good to Clung."

  John Sampson laid his hand on the crinkling page of the open book and scowled at the Chinese. The word came up in his throat, up to his very teeth; and there it stuck. His tongue was so dry that he could not have spoken if he wished, and it seemed as if the heat which dried his tongue rose from the book he touched and ran along his arm and up to his heart.

  "It is a little thing to do,” urged Li Clung gently. "Swear on the book of the white god. My son is hunted; I must know if you are one of the hunters."

  But John Sampson suddenly raised the book and hurled it across the room. It crashed against the wall and dropped to the floor again with a rush and rattle of the leaves; then he turned on his heel and strode heavily and quickly from the room and out past the swaying line of ironers on to the white-hot street.

  Suppose a man buys a lead mine and finds that it produces gold; and suppose this gold threatens, like the touch of Midas, to divide the purchaser from all that he holds dear in the world. From these suppositions one might strike fairly close to the heart of John Sampson's mood. He loved his daughter as a vigorous, worldly man can love an only child; he loved her energy — so like his own — her beauty, her frankness; the charm and grace of spirit which illumined her to his eyes. Her charity, doubtless, went hand in hand with her other virtues, but it was the quality which he admired least and the force which now threatened to debase her to the level of an unlettered man-killer. For the same instinct which enabled him to read the purposes of speculators in the stock market gave him insight into the impulses of the girl. She followed the trail of Clung partly because he had received bad for good in a single instance, but mostly because of the very fact that he was an outlaw, hopeless, beleaguered by the hostility of thousands. To her he held the charm of a lost cause, something to be saved and therefore something to be cherished. Only his Chinese blood had kept her from regarding him as a young girl might regard a desirable man; now this single barrier was removed and John Sampson sweated with fear as he guessed at consequences. He went straight back to the little house they had rented, to rest and to think; he had a grave need of thought and planning.

  But as he set foot on the lowest of the steps leading to the front porch there rose from the depths of the house a voice of thrilling sweetness; to John Sampson it was like the bugle call which announces the charge of the enemy's horse. He drew in a great breath and puffed it out noisily as a diver snorts when he comes up for air; and the singing of Winifred rose and rang in the slow cadence of the old song:

  What made the ball so fine?

  Robin Adair. What made the assembly shine?

  Robin Adair.

  The favorite song of Winifred, and he knew that she only sang it when her heart was at rest; he leaped up the steps with the agility of a youth and stamped into the house. At the banging of the front door she came running to him, caught both his hands.

  "Dad!” she cried gaily. "Can you guess the good news?”

  His heart stood still; perhaps from some other source she had learned the true identity of Clung.

  "Clung?” he managed to articulate in spite of his dry throat.

  "Yes, yes — of course. And Fve found him!”

  "You!”

  "Why, Dad, you look sick!”

  "The damned heat,” he muttered. "Enough to kill a horse. Where's Clung?"

  "In Kirby Creek. We start for it tomorrow."

  He ejaculated: "We start? For Kirby Creek?”

  "We do.”

  "Winifred, d’ you know that's the hardest, roughest mining camp in the Southwest? D'you know that that's the haunt of Dave Spenser and a hundred other scoundrels who'd as soon kill you as ask you for a match? What fool suggested that you go to Kirby Creek?"

  She sighed, and then fixed her eyes gravely on him like one prepared for a long debate.

  "No one suggested it, but it was Marshal Clauson who told me that Clung might be in Kirby Creek."

  "Might?" cried John Sampson, seizing on the straw.

  But it would not bear his weight.

  "The marshal is almost sure that Clung is there, but he made me promise not to spread the news about. There's something quite mysterious about it, Dad. You see, he would say nothing to me about Clung and seemed furious when I mentioned the name of Clung. In fact, he called him a blankety blank Chink."

  "Quite right," growled John Sampson.

  "But,” went on the girl, "when I convinced him that I meant nothing but good by Clung and told him my reasons he seemed a bit shaken and listened to me pretty closely. At last he told me, in his gruff way, that if I was really anxious to find Clung the best way would be to go to the worst bit of hell in the Southwest — Kirby Creek. I asked him how he knew that Clung was there. He answered, of course, that he knew nothing, and that if he were sure he'd go to the Creek and take Clung in the name of the law. Then I wanted to know why he gave me the hint, but he only winked and then refused to say another word. It was very queer, but I'm sure that he had some grounds for giving me the advice, and I'm also sure that he doesn't wish any real harm to befall Clung. Isn't this enough reason why we should go to Kirby Creek and at least make the trial to find Clung there?"

  John Sampson frowned, thinking hard.

  He said at last: "Give me until next Monday before we start. In the meantime we'll hunt for more clues in Mortimer."

  "But if we don't find 'em you will go, Dad?"

  He looked at her in whimsical despair.

  "Don't I understand perfectly, my dear," he answered, "that if I didn't go with you, you'd go alone?"

  "Poor Dad!" she smiled.

  "Poor Winifred/' he responded, and his seriousness silenced her and set her thinking.

  Chapter 17

  Sampson went to his room at once and sat for a time with his hot face buried in his hands, then he took pen and paper and wrote to William Kirk, far in the north. No pleasant task, for his wet hand stuck to the surface of the paper; and his thoughts came haltingly.

  Dear Billy, (he wrote),

  Hell has broke loose at last.

  I wrote you that we were still on the trail of the scoundrel Clung; and here in this miserable little oven of Mortimer we have stayed all these days, walking these infernal, dusty streets; you know this alkali dust that stings your nose and throat like pepper. Here we've remained, but today the devil, as if he were tired of my rest, rose up and, in the language of the streets, hit me where I live. He hit me twice.

  And both punches, Billy, are as hard on you as they are on me.

  First I went to see Li Clung, reputed father of our
outlaw. I found a withered mummy of an Oriental, and began to pump him, but after the first draw I wanted to seal the well. For I learned right off the bat, Billy, that Clung is pure white.

  It stunned me. Then I thought of trying to find out where Clung is hiding and warn the officers of the law — such law as they have in the sand-wilderness. But the old Chinaman grew suspicious. He wouldn't tell me another word.

  So I went back to the house and the first thing that greeted me was the voice of Winifred singing "Robin Adair.” You know how she sings that little song when she's happy?

  And she told me that she had received a hint that Clung is in Kirby Creek. She wanted to start for the place at once. If she follows the trail of a half-breed Chinaman with this enthusiasm, what will she do when she learns that the man is white? God knows!

  And what am I to do? I can't keep up with that long-legged girl of mine, and she's as tireless as a little devil — or angel. An angel when she does what I wish and a devil when she crosses me. Take a little of the coolest blue of heaven and salt it with some of the fire of hell and you have an idea of Winifred's stubbornness. What will happen if that fire touches the powder of Clung, the white man? But does Clung know that he's white? Isn't it possible that his father has never told him? Does anyone besides old Li Clung know that the outlaw is white? I think not; pray God that no one does.

  For I tell you, Billy, in all seriousness, if Winifred learns that Clung is white she's going to do something that will make the rest of her life one long torment. She must not know. And I must have help to keep the knowledge from her. Billy, you must come down here and work with me.

  Winifred has recovered from her first anger against you because you turned Clung over to the law; now I'm sure she'd accept you on the basis of a friend, at least. And as for you, if I can believe the letters you write, two fevers possess you: one is for Winifred and the other is for another sight of the desert. In fact, there is a thing they commonly refer to down here as desert-fever. The Lord knows it will never get me, but I'm afraid you're a victim. Perhaps you can't forget that you recovered your health down here in the wilderness.