Max Brand (2 page)

"I have heard you," said the priest; "but you will see. He is coming
now."

There was a knock at the door; then it opened and showed a modest
novice in a simple gown of black serge girt at the waist with the flat
encircling band. His head was downward; it was not till the blue eyes
flashed inquisitively up that Father Anthony recognized Pierre.

The hard voice of Jean Paul Victor pronounced: "This is that Father
Anthony of whom I have spoken."

The novice slipped to his knees and folded his hands, while the plump
fingers of Father Anthony poised over that dark red hair, pressed
smooth on top where the skullcap rested. The blessing which he spoke
was Latin, and Father Victor looked somewhat anxiously toward his
protege till the latter answered in a diction so pure that Cicero
himself would have smiled to hear it.

"Stand up!" cried Father Anthony. "By heavens, Jean Paul, it is the
purest Latin I have heard this twelvemonth."

And the lad answered: "It must be pure Latin; Father Victor has taught
me."

Gabrielle Anthony stared, and to save him from too obvious confusion
the other priest interrupted: "I have a letter for you, my son."

And he passed the envelope to Pierre. The latter examined it with
interest. "This comes from the south. It is marked from the
United States."

"So far!" exclaimed the tall priest. "Give me the letter, lad."

But here he caught the whimsical eyes of Father Anthony, and he
allowed his outstretched hand to fall. Yet he scowled as he said: "No;
keep it and read it, Pierre."

"I have no great wish to keep it," answered Pierre, studying anxiously
the dark brow of the priest.

"It is yours. Open it and read."

The lad obeyed instantly. He shook out the folded paper and moved a
little nearer the light. Then he read aloud, as if it had never
entered his mind that what was addressed to him might be meant for his
eyes alone.

"Morgantown,

"R.F.D. No. 4.

"SON PIERRE:

"Here I lie with a chunk of lead from the gun of Bob McGurk resting
somewheres in the insides of me, and there ain't no way of doubting
that I'm about to go out. Now, I ain't complaining none. I've had my
fling. I've eat my meat to order, well done and rare—mostly rare.
Maybe some folks will be saying that I've got what I've been asking
for, and I know that Bob McGurk got me fair and square, shooting from
the hip. That don't help me none, lying here with a through ticket to
some place that's farther south than Texas.

"Hell ain't none too bad for me, I know. I ain't whining none. I just
lie here and watch the world getting dimmer until I begin to be seeing
things out of my past. That shows the devil ain't losing no time with
me. But the thing that comes back oftenest and hits me the hardest is
the sight of your mother, lying with you in the hollow of her arm and
looking up at me and whispering, 'Dad,' just before she went out."

The hand of the boy fell, and his eyes sought the face of Father
Victor. The latter was standing.

"You told me I had no father—"

An imperious arm stretched toward him.

"Give me the letter."

He moved to obey, and then checked himself.

"This is my father's writing, is it not?"

"No, no! It's a lie, Pierre!"

But Pierre stood with the letter held behind his back, and the first
doubt in his life stood up darkly in his eyes. Father Victor sank
slowly back into his chair, his gaunt frame trembling.

"Read on," he commanded.

And Pierre, white of face, read on:

"So I got a idea that I had to write to you, Pierre. There ain't
nothing I can make up to you, but knowing the truth may help some.
Poor kid, you ain't got no father in the eyes of the law, and neither
did you have no mother, and there ain't no name that belongs to you
by rights.

"I was a man in them days, and your mother was a woman that brought
your heart into your throat and set it singing. She and me, we were
too busy being just plain happy to care much about what was right or
wrong; so you just sort of happened along, Pierre. Me being so close
to hell, I remember her eyes that was bluer than heaven looking up
to me, and her hair, that was copper with gold lights in it.

"I buried Irene on the side of the mountain under a big, rough rock,
and I didn't carve nothing on the rock. Then I took you, Pierre, and I
knew I wasn't no sort of a man to raise up the son of Irene; so I
brought you to Father Victor on a winter night and left you in his
arms. That was after I'd done my best to raise you and you was just
about old enough to chatter a bit. There wasn't nothing else to do. My
wife, she went pretty near crazy when I brought you home. And she'd of
killed you, Pierre, if I hadn't took you away.

"You see, I was married before I met Irene. So there ain't no alibi
for me. But me being so close to hell now, I look back to that time,
and somehow I see no wrong in it still.

"And if I done wrong then, I've got my share of hell-fire for it. Here
I lie, with my boys, Bill and Bert, sitting around in the corner of
the room waiting for me to go out. They ain't men, Pierre. They're
wolves in the skins of men. They're the right sons of their mother.
When I go out they'll grab the coin I've saved up, and leave me to lie
here and rot, maybe.

"Lad, it's a fearful thing to die without having no one around that
cares, and to know that even after I've gone out I'm going to lie here
and have my dead eyes looking up at the ceiling. So I'm writing to
you, Pierre, part to tell you what you ought to know; part because I
got a sort of crazy idea that maybe you could get down here to me
before I go out.

"You don't owe me nothing but hard words, Pierre; but if you don't try
to come to me, the ghost of your mother will follow you all your life,
lad, and you'll be seeing her blue eyes and the red-gold of her hair
in the dark of the night as I see it now. Me, I'm a hard man, but it
breaks my heart, that ghost of Irene. So here I'll lie, waiting for
you, Pierre, and lingering out the days with whisky, and fighting the
wolf eyes of them there sons of mine. If I weaken—If they find they
can look me square in the eye—they'll finish me quick and make off
with the coin. Pierre, come quick.

"MARTIN RYDER."

The hand of Pierre dropped slowly to his side, and the letter
fluttered with a crisp rustling to the floor.

Then came a voice that startled the two priests, for it seemed that a
fourth man had entered the room, so changed was it from the musical
voice of Pierre.

"Father Victor, the roan is a strong horse. May I take him?"

"Pierre!" and the priest reached out his bony hands.

But the boy did not seem to notice or to understand.

"It is a long journey, and I will need a strong horse. It must be
eight hundred miles to that town."

"Pierre, what claim has he upon you? What debt have you to repay?"

And Pierre le Rouge answered: "He loved my mother."

"You are going?"

The boy asked in astonishment: "Would you not have me go, Father?"

And Jean Paul Victor could not meet the sorrowful blue eyes.

He bowed his head and answered: "My child, I would have you go. But
promise with your hand in mine that you will come back to me when your
father is buried."

The lean fingers caught the extended hand of Pierre and froze about
it.

"But first I have a second duty in the southland."

"A second?"

"You taught me to shoot and to use a knife. Once you said: 'An eye for
an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' Father Victor, my father was killed
by another man."

"Pierre, dear lad, swear to me here on this cross that you will not
raise your hands against the murderer. 'Vengeance is mine, saith
the Lord.'"

"He must have an instrument for his wrath. He shall work through me in
this."

"Pierre, you blaspheme."

"'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.'"

"It was a demon in me that quoted that in your hearing, and not
myself."

"The horse, Father Victor—may I have the roan?"

"Pierre, I command you—"

The light in the blue eyes was as cold and steady as that in the
starved eyes of Jean Paul Victor.

"Hush!" he said calmly. "For the sake of the love that I bear for you,
do not command me."

The stern priest dropped his head. He said at last: "I have nothing
saving one great and terrible treasure which I see was predestined to
you. It is the cross of Father Meilan. You have worn it before. You
shall wear it hereafter as your own."

He took from his own neck a silver cross suspended by a slender silver
chain, and the boy, with startled eyes, dropped to his knees and
received the gift.

"It has brought good to all who possessed it, but for every good thing
that it works for you it will work evil on some other. Great is its
blessing and great is its burden. I, alas, know; but you also have
heard of its history. Do you accept it, Pierre?"

"Dear Father, with all my heart."

The colorless hands touched the dark-red hair.

"God pardon the sins you shall commit."

Pierre crushed the hand of Jean Paul Victor against his lips and
rushed from the room, while the tall priest, staring down at the
fingers which had been kissed, pronounced: "I have forged a
thunderbolt, Father Gabrielle. It is too great for my hand. Listen!"
And they heard clearly the sharp clang of a horse's hoofs on the
hard-packed snow, loud at first, but fading rapidly away. The wind,
increasing suddenly, shook the house furiously about them.

It was a north wind, and traveled south before the rider of the strong
roan. Over a thousand miles of plain and hills it passed, and down
into the cattle country of the mountain-desert which the Rockies hem
on one side and the tall Sierras on the other.

It was a trail to try even the endurance of Pierre and the strong
roan, but the boy clung to it doggedly. On a trail that led down from
the edges of the northern mountain the roan crashed to the ground in a
plunging fall, hitting heavily on his knees. He was dead before the
boy had freed his feet from the stirrups.

Pierre threw the saddle over his shoulder and walked eight miles to
the nearest ranch house, where he spent practically the last cent of
his money on another horse, and drove on south once more.

There was little hope in him as day after day slipped past. Only the
ghost of a chance remained that Martin Ryder could fight away death
for another fortnight; yet Pierre had seen many a man from the
mountain-desert stave off the end through weeks and weeks of the
bitterest suffering. His father must be a man of the same hard durable
metal, and upon that Pierre staked all his hopes.

And always he carried the picture of the dying man alone with his two
wolf-eyed sons who waited for his eyes to weaken. Whenever he thought
of that he touched his horse with the spurs and rode fiercely for a
time. They were his flesh and blood, the man, and even the two
wolf-eyed sons.

So he came at last to a gap in the hills and looked down on Morgantown
in the hollow, twoscore unpainted houses sprawling along a single
street. The snow was everywhere white and pure, and the town was
like a stain on the landscape with wisps of smoke rising and trailing
across the hilltops.

Down to the edge of the town he rode, left his cow-pony standing with
hanging head outside a saloon, strode through the swinging doors, and
asked of the bartender the way to the house of Martin Ryder.

The bartender stopped in his labor of rubbing down the surface of his
bar and stared at the black-serge robe of the stranger, with curiosity
rather than criticism, for women, madmen, and clergymen have the
right-of-way in the mountain-desert.

He said: "Well, I'll be damned!—askin' your pardon. So old Mart Ryder
has come down to this, eh? Partner, you're sure going to have a rough
ride getting Mart to heaven. Better send a posse along with him,
because some first-class angels are going to get considerable riled
when they sight him coming. Ha, ha, ha! Sure I'll show you the way.
Take the northwest road out of town and go five miles till you see a
broken-backed shack lyin' over to the right. That's Mart
Ryder's place."

Out to the broken-backed shack rode Pierre le Rouge, Pierre the Red,
as everyone in the north country knew him. His second horse, staunch
cow-pony that it was, stumbled on with sagging knees and hanging head,
but Pierre rode upright, at ease, for his mind was untired.

Broken-backed indeed was the house before which he dismounted. The
roof sagged from end to end, and the stove pipe chimney leaned at a
drunken angle. Nature itself was withered beside that house; before
the door stood a great cottonwood, gashed and scarred by lightning,
with the limbs almost entirely stripped away from one side. Under this
broken monster Pierre stepped and through the door. Two growls like
the snarls of watch-dogs greeted him, and two tall, unshaven men
barred his way. Behind them, from the bed in the corner, a feeble
voice called: "Who's there?"

"In the name of God," said the boy gravely, for he saw a hollow-eyed
specter staring toward him from the bed in the corner, "let me pass! I
am his son!"

It was not that which made them give back, but a shrill, faint cry of
triumph from the sick man toward which they turned. Pierre slipped
past them and stood above Martin Ryder. He was wasted beyond
belief—only the monster hand showed what he had been.

"Son?" he queried with yearning and uncertainty.

"Pierre, your son."

And he slipped to his knees beside the bed. The heavy hand fell upon
his hair and stroked it.

"There ain't no ways of doubting it. It's red silk, like the hair of
Irene. Seein' you, boy, it ain't so hard to die. Look up! So! Pierre,
my son! Are you scared of me, boy?"