Blue Kingdom

by Max Brand

  The doctor drew a long breath. He began to wish that he were far away from that kitchen. And yet he was held here by a great curiosity, also.

  “If you’re Doctor Legges,” went on Dunmore, “you’re the best friend of Tankerton. Is that right?”

  The doctor was silent, for it was a forbidden name.

  “And that bein’ the case,” said Dunmore, “I’d be mighty happy to have you take a message to him for me.”

  “What message?” asked Legges.

  “Why, you tell Tankerton that I’m mighty surprised that he ain’t come to see me. You tell him that it was a real pleasure to see his friend, Lynn Tucker, down here. And it was a sure great pleasure to meet Doctor Legges, too. But I’d like to talk to Tankerton himself. Will you go and tell him that, partner?”

  Malice suddenly mastered the doctor. “Young man,” he said, “are you sure that you want to see James Tankerton?”

  “Nothin’ that I want to see so bad,” said Dunmore.

  “Very well,” said Legges. “I think that can be arranged. Tankerton himself will call on you, Carrick Dunmore.”

  “Thanks,” said Dunmore. He raised the frying pan from the stove and carried it, contents and all, toward the door. There he turned. “You won’t forget that the dead dog is still in my room, Doctor Legges, eh?”

  Then he passed out and left three silent people staring at one another. But all had been differently affected. Mrs. Harper was convulsed with the most savage anger, so that she trembled with it. Her husband was loose and white, like a man about to faint. The eminent doctor was mopping his forehead with an automatic motion.

  Then Mrs. Harper spoke. “And here’s what we get,” she said, “after the years that we’ve slaved and fought and starved, and gone through suffering for Jim Tankerton! Here’s what we get in the way of help when we need to get out of a. . . .”

  Her husband grasped her by the shoulder and shook her most violently. “Shut up, you!” he gasped at her. “Ain’t he apt to be behind that door now listenin’?”

  “Listenin’ and laughin’,” said the wife, undaunted, because now fury completely mastered her. “Listenin’ and laughin’ is what he’s doin’. Laughin’ at a great, fat-faced noodle that ain’t man enough to be the master in his own home, but that lets a low, sneakin’ deadbeat come in and trim him to the bone, and take the food off of his table. . . .”

  “Will you quit it?” asked the gentle Chuck, lifting up his massive fist.

  “Be quiet, both of you,” said Legges, with an air of authority and impatience. “I can console you both by giving you my personal assurance that young Carrick Dunmore will be dead before the week’s out.”

  FOURTEEN

  James Hamble Tankerton came over the mountains to Harpersville. He had his saddle on Gunfire, on this day, and, therefore, he came fast, for that was the only way that Gunfire knew how to travel. He had his name from the sound of his flying hoofs upon the road—like rolling gunfire, a certain sheriff had said, as he and his posse spurred hopelessly up the dark of a road in pursuit of the brigand.

  Now, on Gunfire, he flashed down the slope, and trotted up the rises, and swung away in a long gallop down the easier going that brought him to Harpersville. On the hill that stood above it, he halted his stallion and surveyed the surrounding country, with hand on hip, like a king looking over his kingdom. And this, in fact, was what that countryside was to James Tankerton. In this wilderness of heaped mountain ranges, split across with great cañons and darkened with trees of the most enormous size, he was the undisputed prince.

  It was not a rich domain. Those who lived here were as a rule the poorest trappers and hunters, or else they worked patches of farmland in the bottoms. But this was all the better for Tankerton. For the poorer his people the more easily he could exercise his power over them. In fact, he drew no revenue from his kingdom, but rather it was a source of expense to him continually. What it returned to him was constant support and protection. All who did not love him, feared him, and both the one class and the other needed him. What little money many of these families received from their farms, their few cattle, the sale of pelts, was in many cases almost doubled by the handsome gifts that Tankerton made right and left. He gave with apparent recklessness but with real care, and, although he adopted a magnificent and paternal manner, yet his hand could fall heavily when he chose. More than one mountaineer received a sudden message advising him to flee to the plains beyond, and always that warning was heeded. If not, the body of the obdurate would be found before many days lying in the woods with a bullet through brain or heart.

  “Accident while hunting,” the coroner would give as verdict. But everyone understood and took the lesson darkly home. Those who were true to Tankerton had his support and money at their command in a strong measure. For a friend in need, he was known to have organized a band of raiders and ridden two hundred miles to break open a jail in the secure heart of a town. With that rescued man he returned, and the mountains rang with the deed.

  Such acts gave him the right to rule as a king; the people accepted him, and if he was a robber by profession, none of his plunderings occurred in the mountains where he lived. Now and again, a band gathered somewhere in the valleys, and a dozen or a score of beautifully mounted men rode out into the foothills or the level, rich lands beyond. There they struck at a bank, a jeweler’s stock, a train, a stagecoach richly laden, and whirled back into the mountains to squander their loot. That squandering poured out more money into the laps of the mountaineers. So it worked for them in an eternal circle.

  The rule was by this time established. No sheriff or marshal, riding on the trail of Tankerton, could penetrate into the mountains with any success. The lips of all men were sealed, the ears of all men were deaf, there was no hospitality, no help, for the men of the law, but a screen of scouts and spies rose up before the posse and continually spread around them like waves from a dropped pebble in a pond. In a few days, the whole region of the mountains understood the nature of the posse, knew descriptions of the individuals, and well comprehended that, if any of these men should suddenly be missed from the ranks and found dead among the rocks or the trees, Tankerton would not be offended. In fact, the people of the mountains were his militia, and they had served him so extraordinarily well that the arm of the law no longer reached after him. It meant long and hard riding, bitter weather, hard trails, and in the end nothing but broken-down men and horses and an emptied pocketbook.

  These thoughts drifted through the mind of Tankerton as he rested his horse upon the summit of the hill and looked over his domain. He felt assured and fixed upon his throne, and he would not have traded his place for any scepter in the world. This was his own realm, the place he knew, the air with which he was familiar, where every road was traced in his memory and where hardly a sapling could fall without his knowledge. He had all that a sovereign could wish for in the fear, the obedience, and the love of his subjects. He had the additional joy of the gambler who plays a winning game against great odds.

  It was wearing toward the latter half of the afternoon, and, therefore, the light already was growing stained with blue in the bottoms of the valley—the cañon seemed deeper—the snow upon the mountains in the distance looked through the mist with a gleam like the glitter of swords. All was slowly being overcast with blue. The vapors ascended from the gorges, from the forests, and blew down with the melting of the snows, and, wherever the mountain mist appeared, it was blue of the sky, faintly breathed among the trees, or deeply pooled in the hollows, and the kingdom of Tankerton was the kingdom of the blue horizon.

  He filled his eye with the noble picture, and then he gave Gunfire his head again, and the black stallion swept down from the slope.

  Tankerton came to the rear of the hotel and saw a small boy coming up the trail beneath him. There he paused, with Gunfire turned into a black statue among the bushes and the poplars, until the youngster had come close enough to him to see the child’s face. It was a brown li
ttle mountaineer of twelve or fourteen years, wearing his father’s trousers, worn to shreds that hung halfway down the scratched calf of his leg, and with a single strap passing over his shoulder by way of suspenders. He lugged a heavy shotgun of ancient make, and his face was dark with disappointment.

  However, as he came closer, it seemed to Tankerton that he could recognize the features. He could not be expected to know every man, woman, and child in his dominions, but he followed the example of Caesar as nearly as he could. He did not think he had seen this boy before, but he ventured that he knew his father. So he waited until the lad, coming within five or six steps, suddenly halted and looked with bright, suspicious eyes about him. He had not seen anything, but, like a wild young animal, he seemed to suspect that eyes were fixed upon him from the covert. Tankerton rejoiced in the sight of him. He was as ragged, as rough, as unkempt as a bear cub, but he had a bear’s keen senses, a bear’s courage, and one day he would have almost equal strength. Such boys as this would grow into the men who would assure him a long reign, for Tankerton knew very well that the permanence of his power did not depend upon the crew of lock breakers, yeggs, thieves, confidence men, and plain gunfighters and murderers who brought him in his immediate revenue. It was the mountain militia that enabled him to keep his standing army from being broken up by the arm of the law.

  “I’m here,” he said suddenly.

  The boy whirled and jumped the butt of his shotgun into the hollow of his shoulder, before he saw who it was that sat the horse half shrouded among the brush. “Hey!” he said then, and the gun almost dropped from his hands. “Jiminy! Look what I nearly done.”

  Tankerton rode out into the trail. “Do you know me?” he asked.

  “Sure I do,” said the boy.

  “Who am I, then?”

  “You’re Jack Timberline,” said the boy.

  “I’m Jack Timberline?”

  “Yep.”

  “And what else do you know beside my name?”

  “You got a bad pair of lungs,” said the boy. “That’s one of the things I know about you.”

  “What makes you think that I have a bad pair of lungs?”

  “If you wasn’t a lunger,” argued the boy, “why would you be hangin’ around here in the mountains, except it was for your health. Maybe you’re one of these here scientists that studies bugs, though, or flowers. I dunno. But I’d say that Jack Timberline was something special.”

  Tankerton could not help smiling. “I know your father,” he said.

  “No, you don’t,” said the boy.

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s been dead for ten years. You might know Cousin Bill, though.”

  “Do you look like him?”

  “Do I look like a dog that’s run wild?” said the boy. He sneered with disgust. “I’d tell a man that I hope I don’t look like him,” he said.

  “How old are you, sonny?”

  “I’m old enough to shoot a buck,” said the boy.

  “And skin him?” asked Tankerton.

  “Aye, and skin him, and cut him up. No butcher could do it better!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Ain’t Bill the butcher at Harpersville?”

  Suddenly Tankerton remembered the humped shoulders and the long, bestial face of Bill, the butcher at Harpersville.

  “That’s Bill Ogden. He taught me how to cut meat. He always sets in the sun and swaps lies with Chuck Harper.”

  “Your name is Ogden, then?”

  “Me? I hope it ain’t! My name is James McVey Alderwood Larren.”

  “It’s a good long name.”

  “My pop was a good man, and he figgered it that the Larrens oughta have at least one name for every couple of foot of ’em!”

  “And Bill Ogden was related and took you in. . . .”

  “He took me in proper, he did! He ain’t hardly done a stroke since I arrived.”

  A big mountain partridge, hiding beneath a bush, thought that it had crawled far enough from the sound of the voices and now rose on whirring wings. Instantly James McVey Alderwood Larren wheeled and discharged his shotgun. It was a quick shot, but it went home, for the partridge staggered in its flight, thumped against a tree trunk, and then fell to the ground.

  The boy marked the spot and then let the bird lie. He turned back to Tankerton again, and assumed a careless air.

  “That was a bully good shot,” said Tankerton. “You’d better pick it up.”

  “I guess I’d better,” said the boy. “A good thing for me that I slammed that feller on the nose,” he resumed, as he came back with his burden. “I’d’ve got a whanging from Cousin Bill, otherwise.”

  “Does he whang you when you come in without any game?”

  “Sure he does. He knows how, too. He’s been a tanner.” The boy laughed carelessly. “It don’t do me no harm,” he said. “Along about last year I learned not to holler, and that takes a lot of the pleasure away from Bill, when he don’t hear me yap.”

  “It toughens you up, I suppose,” said Tankerton, rather wonder-stricken by the philosophy of this lad.

  “Don’t it, though?” said James Larren brightly. “When I get into a fight with some of the other kids, don’t seem like I can feel it when they punch me. They can wear ’emselves out punchin’ me, but I knock their teeth down their throats in the finish, darn ’em.” He grinned, and his white teeth flashed.

  “Bill isn’t your uncle, then?” said Tankerton.

  “Him? He ain’t much more related to me than a swaller is to a bald eagle, though both of them is birds. There was never but one Ogden that went out and got himself famous by bustin’ in and marryin’ with a Larren. And there ain’t never gonna be another. But girls is funny, Mister Tan . . . Timberline, as maybe you’ve noticed once or twice yourself. They go a lot more by faces than by fun.”

  “Ah, but I’ll wager that you have your share of ’em, Jimmy? They know a man, even in the making.”

  “Thanks,” said Jimmy, flushing with pleasure. “But I don’t have nothin’ to do with ’em. A lot o’ gabbin’, gabberin’, squealin’, wo’thless things that keep a boy mindin’ that his shoes is wore out at the toes, and keep a man from readin’ his paper peaceful of an evenin’.” He looked down and wiggled his toes thoughtfully as he said this. They were visible through great ragged gaps at the end of each shoe.

  Tankerton laughed again. “You don’t have much fun in Harpersville, I take it,” he said.

  “Aw, things is all right, because you can get shut of the town so quick and have this for your main street,” said the boy. He waved to the great chasm of the cañon, and smiled at it with an air of possession. “But lately,” he said, “things has been lookin’ up, since the new man come.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Carrick Dunmore. He is a man,” said the boy, his voice softening with awed admiration. “You’d oughta see the stone he lifted. He’s got Chuck Harper lookin’ like he’d just been licked. And by Missus Harper’s face, you’d think that she was just from seein’ a ghost.”

  “A hard sort of a fellow, is he?” asked Tankerton with interest.

  “Him? He ain’t hard at all. He’s soft. He’s so soft you can’t break him with a hammer, and he’s so hard you can’t cut him with a knife. That’s him.”

  Tankerton drew out a dollar, and tossed it. It winged high in the air, but was caught by the unerring hand of the boy. “Will you do something for me?”

  “I’ll do a dollar’s worth, and that’d be about five years’ pay, according to the lights of what Bill Ogden pays me.”

  “Go to Harper. Tell him that I’ll meet him on this trail. No one else needs to hear what you have to say.”

  The keen eyes of the boy flashed. He nodded, and was instantly off up the path at a run. Tankerton watched the sturdy legs flying, and thanked the providence that had furnished his kingdom with such man material as this.

  FIFTEEN

  Tankerton dismounted now, but, even so, he did not
relax his precautions, but rather redoubled them. He left the horse in the center of the thicket, where the perfectly trained animal stood without attempting to crop grass, or the succulent ends of the twigs about him; he hardly so much as swung his tail at the flies, or shook his bridled head. Tankerton, for his part, went two trees back from the trail and sat down to smoke. At this distance from the path, the smoke would not be seen, and yet he could view the way through gaps between the trunks. He did not need to use these precautions. He was able to ride where he pleased among the mountains, and he knew it. On occasion he enjoyed showing himself boldly, but his instinct was that of a hunted man, and in time of peace he constantly prepared for war.

  The noises of the forest closed around him—the drip and murmur of a small stream nearby, and the whisper or rush of wind that carried with it bird noises, the squeak of squirrels, the deep voice of the waterfall in the cañon, and these sounds delicately intermingled with the fragrance of wildflowers, and the pure, sweet smell of the pines. In the distance, all the mountains had turned blue.

  Presently he saw big Chuck Harper coming down the trail in huge lumbering strides, and he stepped out under the shadow of the first tree. Harper halted at sight of him, and then came on, half eagerly and half diffidently.

  All the nature of Tankerton revolted at this man. He was himself fastidiously, beautifully made, lightly and slenderly, and the gross and shapeless bulk of Chuck Harper repulsed him. However, he was not one to allow such qualms to affect his attitude toward one of his most valuable tools. The hotel of Chuck Harper was of peculiar value. There were few like it, and no other hostelries within a full day’s ride. Therefore, it was sure to be used by people of every kind who traveled light, and for that reason he had to have Chuck Harper heartily in his service.

  He went straight to the big fellow, and gripped his hand. “I’m glad to see you, Chuck,” he said. “I’m sorry that Lynn and the doctor were not able to take care of this business for you . . . so you see I’ve come myself. He’s a remarkable fellow, from all that I hear . . . too soft to break and too hard to cut, eh?”