Blue Kingdom

by Max Brand

  It was stiff work. The big bundles weighed a hundred pounds and more apiece, and, as he toiled up the ladder, the hot sun made the moisture pour down his face, down his breast and back. Wood dust, too, fell down his neck and began to set up an itching, and, before he had brought up two burdens, his fingers were filled with splinters. However, he set his teeth, paused only to swear at the extraordinary heat of the roof, which had been well baked in the sun, and then set about laying the shakes.

  He put on half a dozen. It was not a simple task, no matter how it looked. He knew that Elizabeth Furneaux would have done the thing ten times as quickly and ten times as well as he. The craft that enabled him to juggle five knives at once seemed utterly useless for the purpose of handling a hammer. He barked his own fingers twice, and the nails bent under his strokes as though they were made of wax. He began to swear slowly, softly, but with intense viciousness.

  He went down the ladder, after a time, for a drink, and walked to get it fresh and cold from the windmill. The water was like ice, with a delicious taste, and he drank deeply of it. Then he sat down on an old bench, and took off his hat. It was very pleasant here. The coolness soaked into him. Water was dripping, and the wheel high above him whirred and hummed, while the pump rod heaved busily up and down. The water it raised poured with hollow-sounding bursts into the almost emptied tank, and to this music he listened with wonderful content, thinking how delightful it was for the very wind that blows to be harnessed to the works of man. There might even be machines invented, one day, for the covering of roofs with shakes and shingles. He busied his mind for a moment with a rather formless conceiving of such an affair. His idea grew gradually dimmer—and presently he wakened to find Elizabeth Furneaux standing before him, saying: “It’s lunchtime, Carrick.”

  EIGHT

  Carrick started up with a spinning brain. “Why . . . I just sort of dropped off . . . ,” he began.

  “You shouldn’t have tried work today,” said Elizabeth. “You’re not fit yet. It’s much too soon after your accident.” She turned toward the house. “Come along,” she said.

  “Wait a minute, Elizabeth,” he begged. “Turn about and look at me, will you?”

  She obeyed, and he looked searchingly into her face to try to discover scorn, and contempt, and disappointment in it. There was no shadow, however. She was as bright and as cheerful as ever.

  “Elizabeth,” he said, “is it possible that you really aren’t disgusted with me?”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For starting to do so much. I was going to cover the roof of the barn . . . all sorts of things . . . and I’ve sat down here and gone to sleep.”

  “You’re tired.”

  “I’m mighty near always tired,” he answered, “when there’s any work to do. Nothing like the idea of work to keep me in bed of a morning, for instance.”

  She smiled at him and nodded, then she shook a warning finger. “Don’t try to grow a conscience,” she said, “because it’s the one crop that a Carrick Dunmore never could raise, I’m sure.”

  “No,” he admitted, “I’ve got on without being bothered much by it until now. . . .” He paused.

  “Have you forgotten what I told you about Carrick Dunmore the First?” asked Elizabeth.

  “I’m remembering. He was a man.”

  “Who never worked. Do you remember, Carrick? When the earl first saw him, he was juggling in the street of the village. . . .”

  He started.

  “Don’t tell me that you’re a juggler, too!” Elizabeth exclaimed.

  He wiped his forehead. “Don’t matter,” he said. “But . . . Elizabeth, tell me one thing. Is there anything I can do to help you . . . that’s not work? It makes me pretty sick to have to admit that, but I’m not a worker. I’ve got no strength for it . . . no strength in the brain, I mean.” He was taken by an impulse that made him stand close to her and catch both her hands. “D’you think I’m talkin’ like a fool?” he asked. “Or . . . ?”

  She was serious at once. “You’ve no obligation to this house, Carrick,” she said.

  “Then why’s my picture hanging inside it?”

  Her eyes wandered, and then they came back to his face with a snap. “The fact is that you might walk into a lion’s den for me, Carrick,” she said, without smiling in the least.

  “Give me the street and number of the lions,” he stated, “and tell me what was in the purse you dropped there?”

  “I’ll tell you,” she said. “There’s a twenty-one-year-old boy now herding with Jim Tankerton’s gang. Go get him and bring him safe home before he has a chance to commit more crimes . . . hanging crimes, Carrick.” Suddenly she was trembling. “Don’t answer quickly, Carrick. But think . . . think a moment.”

  “Tankerton?” he repeated slowly.

  “Yes, Tankerton. Jim Tankerton. You couldn’t find a harder man to deal with.”

  Instinctively he turned toward the mountains. The brown foothills rolled away into smoky blue, which was spotted here and there with streaks of white that might be the gleam of a cloud or of the snow on a distant peak.

  Carrick Dunmore laughed softly. “That’s my road, Elizabeth,” he said. “That’s Tankerton’s hang-out, isn’t it?”

  She looked white and sick, and her mouth twisted a little to one side as she watched him. “Yes,” she said faintly. “Heaven forgive me for letting the idea come into your mind. Oh, you know of Tankerton, but you can’t know all that we do in this part of the world. There is no other evil, no other supreme, overmastering, and exquisitely complete evil except Tankerton.”

  “I’ve heard a bit about him, here and there,” he admitted, “but you see how it is? What right has he got over there on my ground?”

  “What ground, Carrick? What do you mean?”

  “Why, Elizabeth, I mean the blue, yonder, and all the roads that climb out of sight into the horizon blue. That’s the land of the first Carrick Dunmore, and I’d say that I ought to have the same right, eh? Don’t you think no more about it. I’m off.”

  “Not before lunch, Carrick.”

  “I wouldn’t trust myself,” he said bitterly. “I might start to thinking about the long, hot trail that’s lyin’ ahead of me, and the first thing you know, you’d have to wake me up for supper. No, no, Elizabeth, I’m startin’ now. As quick as I can make up my pack and slap it onto the back of Excuse Me.”

  She did not speak another word in dissuasion but went meekly about working on the pack. She put up a quantity of food for him, since, as she pointed out, he would be following a road that rarely touched houses, and he would probably have to sleep out in the open that night. So the pack was made up, wrapped securely in a tarpaulin, and lashed behind the saddle upon the back of Excuse Me. She accepted this new burden with an angry stamping and rattling of her bridle, but she did not attempt to buck it off. Then Elizabeth Furneaux opened the corral gate for her champion to get out onto the road. She stood beside the open panel with the same troubled look and white face that he had seen before, so he checked the mare close beside her, as he came out, and leaned above her.

  “Look here, Elizabeth,” he said, “I’m going to tell you something that you can write down as all true. It’s about me. I’ve never done a square day’s work in my life . . . nor a half day’s work . . . I’ve been a loafer, a hard drinker, a deadbeat, borrowin’ money and never payin’ it back . . . I’ve been a tramp, that’s all. So no matter what happens to me on this trail, there’s no difference. You ain’t takin’ the bread out of no child’s mouth, and they’s no girl that’s gonna break her heart because I never come back.”

  She listened to him with an attempt at a smile that failed.

  Then he added: “But I will come back, after all. That’s my country . . . if I can’t get on in the horizon blue, I’ll never get on anywhere.”

  “Dear Carrick. Bless you,” she said.

  He went past her into the road, then the mare stretched into a gallop as long and as easily rhy
thmical as the swing of a wave. He looked back only once and waved his hat to the figure that was dwindling at the gate. His glance could embrace all the place—the barn, the sheds, the land, the trees, the house white above them. Then a hilltop swelled behind him, and all was lost to him.

  He fell into an odd dream, and, rousing himself from that, it seemed to him as though he actually had passed into a new world. This sense, perhaps, came to him because already his mind was casting forward into mountains through which he never had ridden before. And it might also have been that he was now really feeling the impact of the shock that he had received that day, when he found that his face was the face of the first of the Dunmores.

  It took his breath, it gave him an odd sense of disaster impending, but it also gave him a prodigious feeling of liberty as though, in very fact, he were now the possessor of some feudal castle and of a hard-riding band of retainers who would follow him wherever adventure and loot seemed in sight. To that blue land of the mountains he turned his face with a strange assurance and rode the mare eagerly on, even leaning a bit in the saddle, as a child might do, hurrying home.

  Hoofs rang on the road beside him. Two hard-galloping riders pulled up beside the mare.

  “Hey, Carrie! Is that Excuse Me? Did she turn out a square one, after all?” asked one of the riders.

  “She’s turned out pretty square,” he told them.

  “I’d pay five hundred just for the looks of her!”

  “She ain’t for sale.”

  “That’s what you always say. I remember when you had the gray hoss that jumped so well. But when you’re broke and tight, you’ll sell, right enough, and not for five hundred.”

  The second man broke in: “Look here, Carrie. They want you over to the crossroads. You’ll have free drinks there. They still got the knives sticking in the wall just where you left ’em after drawin’ the silhouette of Pete Logan with ’em. Hey, Carrie, come on along. It won’t be no piker’s party. It’ll be just the kind that you want to sit in on.”

  “I can’t go,” said Dunmore. “Can’t even think of goin’. But who’s there?”

  “Who’s there? Why, everybody, I tell you. There’s Bill Clay, and the Guerneys, and Oliver Pike, and the Jensens, and Captain Patrick. . . .”

  “Is the captain there?”

  “Why, sure, it was him that sent us over to get you, and Miss Furneaux, she said that you’d gone up the road this way for a little outing on Excuse Me.”

  “Captain Patrick? How is he getting on?”

  “He’s flush,” was the eager assurance. “And he says that he’d rather have you across the table from him than any other gent that ever tipped a glass in the world. He’s got a belt of gold dust that you could wrap around you twice, and it’s loaded, every inch of it. He’s so heavy with gold that his heels hit hard when he walks. He goes upstairs like he was carryin’ a hod. Come on along, Carrie. You might as well get in on some of it as the next gent, eh?”

  A whirl of wind raised the dust on the road before them and whirled it into the face of Carrick Dunmore. It was very hot, and the way dipped up and down interminably, and, after all, a man about to undertake such an important enterprise ought to relax a little. . . .

  “There’s snow on old Digger Mountain, ain’t there?” asked one of the pair who had overhauled him.

  He looked in that direction and saw the gleam of the snow strike through the horizon blue of his new-found land, his own country. Suddenly he touched the mare with his heels, and she bounded away like a deer. That was his answer. A very rude one, and one that allowed no answer, for the pair could not match strides for one minute with the gallop of Excuse Me.

  NINE

  It had just rained in Harpersville, and Chuck Harper, builder, proprietor, and manager of the town hotel, author, also, of its name and principal reason for its existence, came out from his hostelry and sat in a chair that he gripped with his knees, as though it were a horse. In this position, with his hat on the back of his head, he set to work whittling a stick of sugar pine, and to this he gave his utmost attention. He was not trying to reduce the stick to any definite design; he was working with such pains merely to see how thin a slice he could remove with the knife, which was sharp as a razor. The long, translucent whittlings were so light that they almost floated in the wind, and they fell one by one about his feet.

  Every ten minutes, punctually, he raised his head and showed a massive, sullen face. He cast a gloomy look up and down the roads that here wound about the mountainside and entered the village, and, bending his thick neck, he returned to his whittling.

  There was a rattling of rain among the trees every time the wind slapped them, but the clouds had long ago melted, and the sun was raising steam from the pools and the silver streaks of water that lay in the ruts along the road. Chuck Harper gave no heed to the face and form of nature. He watched the road and communed with his own dark mind.

  Presently the door of the hotel banged. His wife, a raw-boned half-breed of his own age—which was less than forty—sang out in a nasal voice: “Hey, Paw!”

  He did not answer.

  “Paw!” she shouted.

  A touch of contentment appeared upon the savage face of Chuck Harper.

  “Paw!” she screamed. “Are you gonna hear me?”

  “I hear you,” said the giant, without turning.

  “You hear me, do you? Then I wanna know, are you gonna cut that wood for me?”

  He squinted down the stick and removed a shaving as thin as a feather.

  “Paw, I’m askin’ ye, are you gonna cut that wood for me?”

  He raised his head but did not answer.

  “Paw, confound you, are you gonna cut that wood?” she shrieked.

  “Naw,” he said, and resumed his whittling.

  This brief answer brought the woman to the verge of a veritable insanity of rage. For a time she lingered at the door, her clenched hands raised above her head, speechless with the imprecations that crowded up into her throat. Then the door crashed heavily as she went inside.

  Her husband raised his head again, and there was almost a smile of contentment upon his face.

  At this moment, a rider came about the bend of the road on a dark, dappled chestnut mare, a thing of such deer-like beauty that even the brutal eyes of Chuck Harper glimmered a little as he watched the animal come closer. She trotted with a movement so sweeping and soft that the rider hardly stirred in the saddle, and Chuck Harper turned his attention to the face of that rider for a single moment and saw a man who smiled as he came.

  Down dropped the head of Chuck again, and once more he whittled.

  “Whoa, girl,” said the stranger, drawing rein. “Is this Harpersville?”

  Chuck did not hear.

  “I’d like to know,” said the other, “if this is Harpersville?”

  Chuck did not speak. But his heart was eased by this new opportunity to annoy another. The daily torture of his wife was monotonous and would have been hopelessly so if it had not been that he knew that, sooner or later, she would try to slip a knife between his ribs while he slept. But strangers were a fair game, sweet to the tooth of Chuck.

  His silence, however, was presently matched by the silence of the newcomer. Chuck, interested, saw the man dismount at the watering trough and watch his mare drink. Then he turned, and stretched himself.

  He was not a giant like Chuck, but he was big, and there was a peculiar sleekness about his neck and shoulders that suggested useless bulk and softness. This in turn was more or less denied by the extraordinary lightness of his step. Chuck observed these details not because he was greatly intrigued, but because he could not help noting every physical detail, any more than a hungry wolf can help being alert. There was one deathless craving in the soul of the hotel-keeper, and that was for trouble.

  “Steady, Excuse Me,” said the stranger to his horse. He turned from her, and, at that, she followed him like a dog at the heel.

  Chuck regarded the pair with
disgust, because he looked upon horses as stupid means of travel and had no more affection for them than he would have had for a machine.

  The stranger, however, spoke gently to the mare as he went toward the end of the water trough where there was a massive stone, one that had rolled down the mountainside the year before and luckily lodged here. It was of enormous weight and, if it had come faster, would have plunged straight through the hotel, from front to back. The stranger, going to it, leaned, patted it, and bent over. Then Chuck was aware that the man was straightening, there was a sound of suction, and the burden came free. Next, the fellow was bearing it, straight toward him, walking slowly, but without bulging eyes, or a convulsed face, or any sign that this was a crushing burden. He advanced. Wonder and awe leaped into the soul of Chuck, and he started up from his chair. The other came straight on and dropped the rock beside the chair.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Now we’re fixed comfortable for a chat.”

  Chuck Harper sat down.

  Amazement still flooded his soul, but he was enraged because he had been so startled by this exhibition of uncanny power that he had not been able to control his emotion. It was the first time since he could remember that he had been so unmanned, and fury gathered in his heart. So as he sat down, he resumed his whittling, and said nothing.

  “This is a pretty good sort of a hang-out,” said the other. “I’ll introduce myself. I’m Carrick Dunmore.”

  He waited. Chuck said no word.

  Side by side, they sat silently.

  “I’m Carrick Dunmore,” repeated the newcomer.

  Still Chuck was silent. He felt that this would be the beginning of a fight, and that was what he yearned for. The lust of battle was as hot as fire in his brutal heart, and already his lips were twitching at the corners, like the lips of a bulldog when it sees an enemy.