Red Fire

by Max Brand

  “You treacherous, sneaking rat and woman-stealer!” bellowed Dick Brett. “Have you come to fight like a man, or to get down in the mud and crawl?”

  “I’ve come to kill you,” said Torridon pleasantly, and drew the pistol. Light, light was the metal in his fingers. He could not miss. It was as though a silken thread drew the muzzle straight to the forehead of big Dick. He, with an exclamation, snatched the rifle butt once more to the hollow of his shoulder. How slow and blundering seemed the motion to Torridon.

  There was almost time to pause and smile at it—then he fired, and Brett fell, the gun discharging as he went down, face foremost. And smiling indeed was Torridon as he went on, the pistol hanging at his side. The second brother had disappeared.

  There was a whirl and eddy in the crowd where he had been standing, and then red fury took Torridon, and red drunken joy in killing. He ran like a greyhound for a hare. He rushed through the crowd—they gave back suddenly before him, split away as by a vast hand of fear. He hurried into the store. He peered under draped counters and tables. He ran out into the back yard.

  Slowly, his teeth gritting, he came back to the street and looked up and down. Another day, then, for the second brother. Then he saw men carrying a prostrate form, a sagging body, toward the door of the store—Dick Brett, who lifted his head a little, despite the red wound in his forehead. That head was turning, and Torridon saw a crimson gash down the side of it. Then he understood—the bullet had slipped off the bone, and glanced around the scalp. He stepped to the wounded man and touched his shoulder.

  Fear made the eyes of Dick Brett bulge in his head.

  “There will be another day for you and me,” said Torridon.

  Then he turned back down the street, past white, icy faces, and eyes that looked at him as though he were a column of fire. A great voice called. And there was Roger Lincoln beside him, walking with him toward the house of Samuel Brett.

  “Paul,” said the frontiersman, “before you go into the house, ask yourself if you’re a safe man to be her husband. I warned you about yourself before. Was I right, or was I wrong?”

  Torridon paused. And as he paused darkness ran over his brain. He found himself repeating: “What have I done, Roger?”

  “Nearly killed one man . . . tried to kill two. And now you’re going to marry Nancy Brett to a gunfighter with not three years of slaughter before him, perhaps.”

  Torridon caught at the arm of Lincoln. “Oh! Oh!” he groaned. “What’s happened to me? I don’t know myself. Roger, what shall I do? What shall I do? Shall I turn back? Shall I leave Nan?”

  Roger Lincoln held him off at arm’s length. “You’re past the help of any man,” he said. “But maybe . . . wait here.”

  They were in front of the house of Samuel Brett, and Roger Lincoln went into it, leaving Torridon stunned, feeble, in front of the place. The wind was shaking the rain clouds to bits. Long rifts and streaks of blue appeared in the sky. And the poplars around the Brett house began to shine like silver—like silver mist was the smoke that rose languidly from the chimney top.

  It was to Torridon like a dissolution of the world, and his own self had dissolved before it. He was a new man; what manner of man he hardly could tell, but those words of Roger Lincoln in the prairie came hauntingly through his mind—he saw the train of his life behind him, the super delicacy, the hypersensitiveness of his body, of his very soul. And brutal chance had taken him in hand and hammered and hardened him until, at last, he had been changed from flesh to metal.

  Aye, at that very moment, half his heart was back up the street, yearning to hunt down that other who had fled, savagely yearning.

  Something came down slowly toward him. It was a shape of mist to him, in his rush of thoughts. But those thoughts cleared, and like a light through a storm he saw Nancy coming to him. And a wild torrent of emotion made Torridon fall on his knees before her, and take both her hands.

  They trembled under his touch.

  “Nan,” he cried wildly, “tell me, for heaven’s sake, that you have no fear of me!”

  She drew him up to her, her slender arms about him. “Don’t you see, Paul?” she said to him. “I’ve always been afraid of you from that first day in the schoolhouse. I always knew that this day would come. I always feared you, and I always loved you, too.”

  THE END

  About the Author

  Max Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, Destry, and many other fictional characters popular with readers and viewers worldwide. Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres. His enormous output, totaling approximately thirty million words—the equivalent of five hundred thirty ordinary books—covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, fashionable society, big business, and big medicine. Eighty motion pictures have been based on his work along with many radio and television programs. For good measure he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in more different ways.

  Born in Seattle in 1892, orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At Berkeley he became a student rebel and one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. Denied a degree because of unconventional conduct, he embarked on a series of adventures culminating in New York City where, after a period of near starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful author of fiction. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, and finally in Los Angeles.

  Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world. A great deal more about this author and his work can be found in The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood Press, 1997) edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski. His website is www.MaxBrandOnline.com.