The Lawless West (6 page)

“I…I don’t know about you or those terrible cowboys,” replied Jane dubiously. “How did
they
happen on the name Frank Owens?”

“Sure, that’s a stumper. I reckon they put a job up on me.”

“Frank…tell me…did
you
write the…the love letters?” she asked appealingly. “There were two kinds of letters. That’s what I could never understand.”

“Jane, I reckon I did,” he confessed. “Somethin’ about your little notes just won me. Does that make it all right?”

“Yes, Frank, I reckon it does,” she returned, leaning down to kiss him.

“Let’s ride back home an’ tell the boys,” said Springer gaily. “The joke’s sure on them. I’ve corralled the little schoolmarm from Missouri.”

Fredrick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) was born in Seattle, Washington. He wrote over 500 average-length books (300 of them Westerns) under nineteen different pseudonyms, but Max Brand—“the Jewish cowboy,” as he once dubbed it—has become the most familiar and is now his trademark. Faust was convinced very early that to die in battle was the most heroic of deaths, and so, when the Great War began, he tried to get overseas. All of his efforts came to nothing, and in 1917, working at manual labor in New York City, he wrote a letter that was carried in
The New York Times
protesting this social injustice. Mark Twain’s sister came to his rescue by arranging for Faust to meet Robert H. Davis, an editor at The Frank A. Munsey Company.

Faust wanted to write—poetry. What happened instead was that Davis provided Faust with a brief plot idea, told him to go down the hall to a room where there was a typewriter, only to have Faust return some six hours later with a story suitable for publication. That was “Convalescence,” a short story that appeared in
All-Story Weekly
(3/31/17) and that launched Faust’s career as an author of fiction.
Zane Grey had recently abandoned the Mun-sey publications,
All-Story Weekly
and
The Argosy,
as a market for his Western serials, selling them instead to the slick-paper
Country Gentleman.
The more fiction Faust wrote for Davis, the more convinced this editor became that Faust could equal Zane Grey in writing a Western story.

The one element that is the same in Zane Grey’s early Western stories and Faust’s from beginning to end is that they are psycho-dramas. What impact events have on the soul, the inner spiritual changes wrought by ordeal and adversity, the power of love as an emotion and a bond between a man and a woman, and above all the meaning of life and one’s experiences in the world conspire to transfigure these stories and elevate them to a plane that shimmers with nuances both symbolic and mythical. In 1920 Faust expanded the market for his fiction to include Street & Smith’s
Western Story Magazine
for which throughout the next decade he would contribute regularly a million and a half words a year at a rate of five cents a word. It was not unusual for him to have two serial installments and a short novel in a single issue under three different names or to earn from just this one source $2,500 a week.

In 1921 Faust made the tragic discovery that he had an incurable heart condition from which he might die at any moment. This condition may have been in part emotional. At any rate, Faust became depressed about his work, and in England in 1925 he consulted H. G. Baynes, a Jungian analyst, and finally even met with C. G. Jung himself who was visiting England at the time on his way to Africa. They had good talks, although Jung did not take Faust as a patient. Jung did advise Faust that his
best hope was to live a simple life. This advice Faust rejected. He went to Italy where he rented a villa in Florence, lived extravagantly, and was perpetually in debt. Faust needed his speed at writing merely to remain solvent. Yet what is most amazing about him is not that he wrote so much, but that he wrote so much so well!

By the early 1930s Faust was spending more and more time in the United States. Carl Brandt, his agent, persuaded him to write for the slick magazines since the pay was better and, toward the end of the decade, Faust moved his family to Hollywood where he found work as a screenwriter. He had missed one war; he refused to miss the Second World War. He pulled strings to become a war correspondent for
Harper’s Magazine
and sailed to Europe and the Italian front. Faust hoped from this experience to write fiction about men at war, and he lived in foxholes with American soldiers involved in some of the bloodiest fighting on any front. These men, including the machine-gunner beside whom Faust died, had grown up reading his stories with their fabulous heroes and their grand deeds, and that is where on a dark night in 1944, hit by shrapnel, Faust expired, having asked the medics to attend first to the younger men who had been wounded.

Faust’s Western fiction has nothing intrinsically to do with the American West, although he had voluminous notes and research materials on virtually every aspect of the frontier.
The Untamed
(Putnam, 1919) was his first Western novel and in Dan Barry, its protagonist, Faust created a man who is beyond morality in a Nietzschean sense, who is closer to the primitive and the wild in Nature than other human
beings, who is both frightening and sympathetic. His story continues, and his personality gains added depth, in the two sequels that complete his story,
The Night Horseman
(Putnam, 1920) and
The Seventh Man
(Putnam, 1921).

Those who worked with Faust in Hollywood were amazed at his fecundity, his ability to plot stories. However, for all of his incessant talk about plot and plotting, Faust’s Western fiction is uniformly character-driven. His plots emerge from the characters as they are confronted with conflicts and frustrations. Above all, there is his humor—the hilarity of the opening chapters of
The Return of the Rancher
(Dodd, Mead, 1933), to give only one instance, is sustained by the humorous contrast between irony and naïveté. So many of Faust’s characters are truly unforgettable, from the most familiar, like Dan Barry and Harry Destry, to such marvelous creations as José Ridal in
Blackie and Red
(Chelsea House, 1926) or Gaspar Sental in
The Return of the Rancher.

Too often, it may appear, Faust’s plots are pursuit stories and his protagonists in quest of an illustrious father or victims of an Achilles’ heel, but these are premises and conventions that are ultimately of little consequence. His characters are in essence psychic forces. In Faust’s fiction, as Robert Sampson concluded in the first volume of
Yesterday’s Faces
(Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983), “every action is motivated. Every character makes decisions and each must endure the consequences of his decisions. Each character is gnawed by the conflict between his wishes and the necessities of his experience. The story advances from the first interactions of the first characters. It continues,
a fugue for full orchestra, ever more complex, modified by decisions of increasing desperation, to a climax whose savagery may involve no bloodshed at all. But there will be psychological tension screaming in harmonics almost beyond the ear’s capacity.”

Faust’s finest fiction can be enjoyed on the level of adventure, or on the deeper level of psychic meaning. He knew in his heart that he had not resolved the psychic conflicts he projected into his fiction, but he held out hope to the last that the resolutions he had failed to find in life and in his stories might somehow, miraculously, be achieved on the higher plane of the poetry that he continued to write. Yet Faust is not the first writer, and will not be the last, who treasured least what others have come to treasure most. It may even be possible that a later generation, having read his many works as he wrote them (and they are now being restored after decades of inept abridgments and rewriting), will find Frederick Faust to have been, truly, one of the most significant American literary artists of the 20
^th
century. Much more about Faust’s life, his work, and critical essays on various aspects of his fiction of all kinds can be found in
The Max Brand Companion
(Greenwood Press, 1996).

“It ain’t hard at all,” said the sheriff. “Most likely he thinks that nobody seen him because of the dark. And he’s right when he thinks that nobody could make out his face. But the point is that there’s lots of ways of identifying a gent, and one of the ways is by the hoss that he rides. And old Jeffreys is willing to swear that he made out the gray gelding of Bill Vance, the high-headed fool of a hoss that young Vance has been riding around lately. So all I’m going to do, boys, is to wait till the moon comes up and then slip out to the Vance place. The reason that I want you fellows to come along is because I never can tell when the Vance people will put up a fight. They got the spirit of a load of dynamite, and any old spark is lightning enough to set them off and blow the tar out of everything within reach.”

“Till the moon comes up?” queried one of his men. “Well, that won’t be more’n half an hour, I guess, at the most and…”

But Jack Trainor, sitting in the next room of the
hotel and hearing every syllable that was spoken because the wall between was of a thickness hardly rivaling cardboard, waited to hear no more. He had made out, from what passed before in their talk, that the sheriff had gathered the half dozen men in the next room to conduct an inquiry into the stage robbery that had occurred the night before. And now he had been struck rigid with horror by the mention of the name of Bill Vance, his brother-in-law.

Trainor had left Bill’s house the previous evening after a visit of a fortnight. It seemed impossible that young Vance should have committed the robbery, but on second thought Jack remembered that his host had been absent during the entire first half of the night, pleading a business call across the hills. Moreover, he knew that Vance was desperately hard pressed for money. He had made considerable loans to Bill in the past, but all that he could raise on a cowpuncher’s pay had been little enough, considering the needs of a growing family. However that might be, he had no time to argue about possibilities. The important thing for him to do was to rush back to Bill’s house and learn the truth from him and deliver the warning about the coming of the sheriff.

That was what he did. Five minutes later he was out of the hotel and on his horse galloping hard along the road. As he swung out of the saddle before the door, he saw the white rim of the moon slide up above the eastern hills. The house was black. The family slept. And yet, at the first rap at the door, there was an answering stir.

Did a guilty conscience make the sleep of Bill Vance light?

“It’s me, Bill,” he called softly, and a moment later
the door was opened to him by his brother-in-law, the moonlight shining fully on his face and making him seem old and pale.

“What’s wrong?” gasped out Vance.

“How d’you know that there’s anything wrong?” demanded Jack Trainor sternly. “Who said that there was anything wrong?”

“I don’t know…only…”

“Bill,” commanded Jack, “you got to tell me the whole truth. Did you stick up the Norberry stage?”

There was another gasp from the wretched Bill. Confession of his guilt, and his despair for the consequences of his act that now confronted him, showed at once in his face.

“It was only because I…” He stopped short. “Who says I did it?” he asked.

“You’re guilty, Bill,” said Trainor. “And they know it. They know that the gent that stuck up the stage rode a gray horse. They recognized that high-headed young gray of yours, that Mike horse that you been riding lately.”

“They co-couldn’t,” stammered Bill. “It was dark and…”

“You did it, then?”

“Lord help me,” groaned Bill.

“Better start by helping yourself. Bill, they’ll be here in twenty minutes. They were to start by moonrise and then…”

“I’ll stay here.”

“You’re crazy, Bill. That’ll be ruin. They’ll get you sure. You ain’t got the face to stand up before a jury. They’ll see through you as clear as day.”

“I don’t care what they do to me. It would be ruin if I ran for it. What would become of Mary and the kids if I ran for it?”

The heavy truth of that statement bore in upon the mind of Jack Trainor. He regarded his sister’s husband bitterly.

“Does Mary know that I’ve come back?” he asked.

“No. She’s sound asleep, I guess.”

“Then I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll take the gray horse and make a getaway. You stay here where you are and, if they ask, tell them that I was out last night, you don’t know where, and that I’ve gone out again tonight, and that both times I took the gray horse. Understand?”

“Good Lord, Jack, you don’t mean that you’ll take the crime on your own head? Man…”

“Shut up that talk. We ain’t got the time for it. You got a family, and it’s the needs of the family that made you do it…but you’ll never try it again, I guess.”

“Never, so help me…”

“Help yourself, Bill,” said the other sternly. “You been looking around to the Lord and other folks for help long enough.”

“But I can’t let you…I’m not a low-enough hound to let you step in and take the blame for this.”

“You got to let me. You got three people depending on you. I got none.”

“But Mary knows that you didn’t leave the house…”

“She’ll let it go as I want her to do…she knows that the family mustn’t be ruined.”

“But this may wreck your life, Jack.”

“My life is young. If it’s wrecked now, I got time to make a new life over again. Stop arguing and help me get the gray and throw a saddle over him.”

Ten minutes later, on the back of gray Mike, he wrung the hand of his brother-in-law.

“They’ll think that I started back for town and registered for a room at the hotel just as a bluff. Meantime, I’m going to ride for Jerneyville and show myself, and, when I get through at Jerneyville, there won’t be any doubts about me being the man that done the stick-up of the stage last night. Good bye, Bill. Go straight. And put every cent of that money you got by the hold-up in such a place that it will be found and returned to them that lost it. A gent can’t get on by taking things that he don’t own by rights. So long!”

And, as he gave the gray his head, they could hear the drumming of many hoofs far down the road coming out from town. But Jack Trainor regarded them not. He had under him a fresh horse with a fine turn of speed, and, by the time the posse had finished making its examination of Bill Vance, he would be so far away that they could never hope to head him off without a change of horses.

So he swung toward Jerneyville, keeping the gray well in hand, and at an easy pace cantered down the main street of the village at midnight. There he picked out the bank, which was well guarded, he knew, dismounted, broke in the back door, making noise enough to attract the attention of an army, and, of course, he was promptly encountered by the watchman.

He knew that worthy, a fat and harmless fellow with a smile as bland as a summer sky. He had often thought that thieves who could not handle such a watchman as he must be stupid villains, indeed. Now Trainor tested his theory and found that it was perfectly workable. He stopped the first yell of the fat watchman with a blow of his fist and then knocked the gun out of the hand of the other.

It exploded as it struck the floor, while the half-strangled shriek of the fat man echoed through the village: “Murder! Robbery! Jack Trainor is robbing the bank!”

With that hubbub behind him, and the grim knowledge that he had certainly established his reputation as a criminal and been identified as such, Trainor hurried outdoors, sprang into his saddle, and let the eager gray show some of the speed that had been going into the steady pull at the bit earlier in the night.