The Max Brand Megapack (56 page)
Read The Max Brand Megapack Online
Authors: Max Brand,Frederick Faust
Tags: #old west, #outlaw, #gunslinger, #Western, #cowboy
“You’ve got to listen to me, Anthony—”
“I’ll listen to nothing, for there he is and—”
She said with a sharp, rising ring in her voice: “If you shoot at him while he carries that white flag I’ll—I’ll send a bullet through your head—that’s straight! We got only one law in the mountains, and that’s the law of honour. If you bust that, I’m done with you, Anthony.”
“Take my gun—take it quickly, Sally, I can’t trust myself; looking at him, I can see the place where the bullet should strike home.”
He forced the butt of his revolver into her hands, rose, and stepped to the door, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Tell me what he does.”
“He’s comin’ straight toward us as if he didn’t fear nothin’—grey William Drew! He’s not packin’ a gun; he trusts us.”
“The better way,” answered Bard. “Bare hands—the better way!”
“He has killed men with those bare hands of his. I can see ’em clear—great, blunt-fingered hands, Anthony. He’s coming around the side of the house. I’ll go into the front room.”
She ran past Anthony and paused in the habitable room, spying through a crack in the wall. And Anthony stood with his eyes tightly closed, his head bowed. The image of the leashed hound came more vividly to her when she glanced back at him.
“He’s walkin’ right up the path. There he stops.”
“Where?”
“Right beside the old grave.”
“Anthony!” called a deep voice. “Anthony, come out to me!”
He started, and then groaned and stopped himself.
“Is the sign of the truce still over his head, Sally?”
“Yes.”
“I daren’t go out to him—I’d jump at his throat.”
She came beside him.
“It means something besides war. I can see it in his face. Pain—sorrow, Anthony, but not a wish for fightin’.”
From the left side of his cartridge belt a stout-handled, long-bladed hunting-knife was suspended. He disengaged the belt and tossed it to the floor. Still he paused.
“If I go, I’ll break the truce, Sally.”
“You won’t; you’re a man, Anthony; and remember that you’re on the range, and the law of the range holds you.”
“Anthony!” called the deep voice without.
He shuddered violently.
“What is it?”
“It sounds—like the voice of my father calling me! I must go!”
She clung to him.
“Not till you’re calmer.”
“My father died in my arms,” he answered; “let me go.”
He thrust her aside and strode out through the door.
On the farther side of the grave stood Drew, his grey head bare, and looking past him Anthony saw the snow-clad tops of the Little Brother, grey also in the light of the evening. And the trees whose branches interwove above the grave—grey also with moss. The trees, the mountain, the old headstone, the man—they blended into a whole.
“Anthony!” said the man, “I have waited half my life for this!”
“And I,” said Bard, “have waited a few weeks that seem longer than all my life, for this!”
His own eager panting stopped him, but he stumbled on: “I have you here in reach at last, Drew, and I’m going to tear your heart out, as you tore the heart out of John Bard.”
“Ah, Anthony,” said the other, “my heart was torn out when you were born; it was torn out and buried here.”
And to the wild eyes of Anthony it seemed as if the great body of Drew, so feared through the mountain-desert, was now enveloped with weakness, humbled by some incredible burden.
After that a mist obscured his eyes; he could not see more than an outline of the great shape before him; his throat contracted as if a hand gripped him there, and an odd tingling came at the tips of his fingers. He moved forward.
“It is more than I dreamed,” he said hoarsely, as his foot planted firmly on the top of the grave, and he poised himself an instant before flinging himself on the grey giant. “It is more than I dreamed for—to face you—alone!”
And a solemn, even voice answered him, “We are not alone.”
“Not alone, but the others are too far off to stop me.”
“Not alone, Anthony, for your mother is here between us.”
Like a fog under a wind, the mist swept from the eyes of Anthony; he looked out and saw that the face of the grey man was infinitely sad, and there was a hungry tenderness that reached out, enveloped, weakened him. He glanced down, saw that his heel was on the mount of the grave; saw again the headstone and the time-blurred inscription: “Here sleeps Joan, the wife of William Drew. She chose this place for rest.”
A mortal weakness and trembling seized him. The wind puffed against his face, and he went staggering back, his hand caught up to his eyes.
He closed his mind against the words which he had heard.
But the deep organ voice spoke again: “Oh, boy, your mother!”
In the stupor which came over him he saw two faces: the stern eyes of John Bard, and the dark, mocking beauty of the face which had looked down to him in John Bard’s secret room. He lowered his hand from his eyes; he stared at William Drew, and it seemed to him that it was John Bard he looked upon. Their names differed, but long pain had touched them with a common greyness. And it seemed to Anthony that it was only a moment ago that the key turned in the lock of John Bard’s secret room, the hidden chamber which he kept like Bluebeard for himself, where he went like Bluebeard to see his past; only an instant before he had turned the key in that lock, the door opened, and this was the scene which met his eyes—the grave, the blurred tombstone, and the stern figure beyond.
“Joan,” he repeated; “your wife—my mother?”
He heard a sob, not of pain, but of happiness, and knew that the blue eyes of Sally Fortune looked out to him from the doorway of the house.
The low voice, hurried now, broke in on him.
“When I married Joan, John Bard fled from the range; he could not bear to look on our happiness. You see, I had won her by chance, and he hated me for it. If you had ever seen her, Anthony, you would understand. I crossed the mountains and came here and built this house, for your mother was like a wild bird, Anthony, and I did not dare to let men near her; then a son was born, and she died giving him birth. Afterward I lived on here, close to the place which she had chosen herself for rest. And I was happy because the boy grew every day into a more perfect picture of his dead mother.
“One day when he was almost three I rode off through the hills, and when I came back the boy was gone. I rode with a posse everywhere, hunting him; aye, Anthony, the trail which I started then I have kept at ever since, year after year, and here it ends where it began—at the grave of Joan!
“Finally I came on news that a man much like John Bard in appearance had been seen near my house that day. Then I knew it was Bard in fact. He had seen the image of the woman we both loved in the boy. He was all that was left of her on earth. After these years I can read his heart clearly; I know why he took the boy.
“Then I left this place. I could not bear the sight of the grave; for she slept in peace, and I lived in hell waiting for the return of my son.
“At last I went east; I was at Madison Square Garden and saw you ride. It was the face of Joan that looked back at me; and I knew that I was close to the end of the trail.
“The next night I called out John Bard. He had been in hell all those years, like me, for he had waited for my coming. He begged me to let him have you; said you loved him as a father; I only laughed. So we fought, and he fell; and then I saw you running over the lawn toward us.
“I remembered Joan, her pride and her fierceness, and I knew that if I waited a son would kill his father that night. So I turned and fled through the trees. Anthony, do you believe me; do you forgive me?”
The memory of the clumsy, hungered tenderness of John Bard swept about Anthony.
He cried: “How can I believe? My father has killed my father; what is left?”
The solemn voice replied: “Anthony, my son!”
He saw the great, blunt-fingered hands which had killed men, which were feared through the length and breadth of the mountain-desert, stretched out to him.
“Anthony Drew!” said the voice.
His hand went out, feebly, by slow degrees, and was caught in a mighty double clasp. Warmth flowed through him from that grasp, and a great emotion troubled him, and a voice from deep to deep echoed within him—the call of blood to blood. He knew the truth, for the hate burned out in him and left only an infinite sadness.
He said: “What of the man who loved me? Whom I love?”
“I have done penance for that death,” answered William Drew, “and I shall do more penance before I die. For I am only your father in name, but he is the father in your thoughts and in your love. Is it true?”
“It is true,” said Anthony.
And the other, bitterly: “In his life he was as strong as I; in his death he is still stronger. It is his victory; his shadow falls between us.”
But Anthony answered: “Let us go together and bring his body and bury it at the left side of—my mother.”
“Lad, it is the one thing we can do together, and after that?”
A plaintive sound came to the ear of Anthony, and he looked down to see Sally Fortune weeping at the grave of Joan. Better than both the men she understood, perhaps. In the deep tenderness which swelled through him he caught a sense of the drift of life through many generations of the past and projecting into the future, men and women strong and fair and each with a high and passionate love.
The men died and the women changed, but the love persisted with the will to live. It came from a thousand springs, but it rolled in one river to one sea. The past stood there in the form of William Drew; he and Sally made the present, and through his love of her sprang the hope of the future.
It was all very clear to him. The love of Bard and Drew for Joan Piotto had not died, but passed through the flame and the torment of the three ruined lives and returned again with gathering power as the force which swept him and Sally Fortune out into that river and toward that far-off sea. The last mist was brushed from his eyes. He saw with a piercing vision the world, himself, life. He looked to William Drew and saw that he was gazing on an old and broken man.
He said to the old man: “Father, she is wiser than us both.”
And he pointed to Sally Fortune, still weeping softly on the grave of Joan.
But William Drew had no eye for her; he was fallen into a deep muse over the blurred inscription on the headstone. He did not even raise his head when Anthony touched Sally Fortune on the shoulder. She rose, and they stole back together toward the house. There, as they stood close together, Sally murmured: “It is cruel to leave him alone. He needs us now, close to him.”
His hand wandered slowly across her hair, and he said: “Sally, how close can we ever be to him?”
“We can only watch and wait and try to understand,” murmured Sally Fortune.
They were so close to the door of the ruined house, now, that a taint of burnt powder crept out to them, a small, keen odour, and with a sudden desire to protect her, he drew her close to him. There was no tensing of her body when his arm went around her and he knew with a rush of tenderness how completely, how perfectly she accepted him. Over the hand which held her he felt soft fingers settle to keep it in its place, and when he looked down he found that her face was raised, and the eyes which brooded on him were misty bright, like the eyes of a child when joy overflows in it, but awe keeps it quiet.
THE UNTAMED (1920)
CHAPTER I
PAN OF THE DESERT
Even to a high-flying bird this was a country to be passed over quickly. It was burned and brown, littered with fragments of rock, whether vast or small, as if the refuse were tossed here after the making of the world. A passing shower drenched the bald knobs of a range of granite hills and the slant morning sun set the wet rocks aflame with light. In a short time the hills lost their halo and resumed their brown. The moisture evaporated. The sun rose higher and looked sternly across the desert as if he searched for any remaining life which still struggled for existence under his burning course.
And he found life. Hardy cattle moved singly or in small groups and browsed on the withered bunch grass. Summer scorched them, winter humped their backs with cold and arched up their bellies with famine, but they were a breed schooled through generations for this fight against nature. In this junk-shop of the world, rattlesnakes were rulers of the soil. Overhead the buzzards, ominous black specks pendant against the white-hot sky, ruled the air.
It seemed impossible that human beings could live in this rock-wilderness. If so, they must be to other men what the lean, hardy cattle of the hills are to the corn-fed stabled beeves of the States.
Over the shoulder of a hill came a whistling which might have been attributed to the wind, had not this day been deathly calm. It was fit music for such a scene, for it seemed neither of heaven nor earth, but the soul of the great god Pan come back to earth to charm those nameless rocks with his wild, sweet piping. It changed to harmonious phrases loosely connected. Such might be the exultant improvisations of a master violinist.
A great wolf, or a dog as tall and rough coated as a wolf, trotted around the hillside. He paused with one foot lifted and lolling, crimson tongue, as he scanned the distance and then turned to look back in the direction from which he had come. The weird music changed to whistled notes as liquid as a flute. The sound drew closer. A horseman rode out on the shoulder and checked his mount. One could not choose him at first glance as a type of those who fight nature in a region where the thermometer moves through a scale of a hundred and sixty degrees in the year to an accompaniment of cold-stabbing winds and sweltering suns. A thin, handsome face with large brown eyes and black hair, a body tall but rather slenderly made—he might have been a descendant of some ancient family of Norman nobility; but could such proud gentry be found riding the desert in a tall-crowned sombrero with chaps on his legs and a red bandana handkerchief knotted around his throat? That first glance made the rider seem strangely out of place in such surroundings. One might even smile at the contrast, but at the second glance the smile would fade, and at the third, it would be replaced with a stare of interest. It was impossible to tell why one respected this man, but after a time there grew a suspicion of unknown strength in this lone rider, strength like that of a machine which is stopped but only needs a spark of fire to plunge it into irresistible action. Strangely enough, the youthful figure seemed in tune with that region of mighty distances, with that white, cruel sun, with that bird of prey hovering high, high in the air.
It required some study to guess at these qualities of the rider, for they were such things as a child feels more readily than a grown man; but it needed no expert to admire the horse he bestrode. It was a statue in black marble, a steed fit for a Shah of Persia! The stallion stood barely fifteen hands, but to see him was to forget his size. His flanks shimmered like satin in the sun. What promise of power in the smooth, broad hips! Only an Arab poet could run his hand over that shoulder and then speak properly of the matchless curve. Only an Arab could appreciate legs like thin and carefully drawn steel below the knees; or that flow of tail and windy mane; that generous breast with promise of the mighty heart within; that arched neck; that proud head with the pricking ears, wide forehead, and muzzle, as the Sheik said, which might drink from a pint-pot.
A rustling like dried leaves came from among the rocks and the hair rose bristling around the neck of the wolflike dog. With outstretched head he approached the rocks, sniffing, then stopped and turned shining eyes upon his master, who nodded and swung from the saddle. It was a little uncanny, this silent interchange of glances between the beast and the man. The cause of the dog’s anxiety was a long rattler which now slid out from beneath a boulder, and giving its harsh warning, coiled, ready to strike. The dog backed away, but instead of growling he looked to the man.
Cowboys frequently practise with their revolvers at snakes, but one of the peculiarities of this rider was that he carried no gun, neither six-shooter nor rifle. He drew out a short knife which might be used to skin a beef or carve meat, though certainly no human being had ever used such a weapon against a five-foot rattler. He stooped and rested both hands on his thighs. His feet were not two paces from the poised head of the snake. As if marvelling at this temerity, the big rattler tucked back his head and sounded the alarm again. In response the cowboy flashed his knife in the sun. Instantly the snake struck but the deadly fangs fell a few inches short of the riding boots. At the same second the man moved. No eye could follow the leap of his hand as it darted down and fastened around the snake just behind the head. The long brown body writhed about his wrist, with rattles clashing. He severed the head deftly and tossed the twisting mass back on the rocks.
Then, as if he had performed the most ordinary act, he rubbed his gloves in the sand, cleansed his knife in a similar manner, and stepped back to his horse. Contrary to the rules of horse-nature, the stallion had not flinched at sight of the snake, but actually advanced a high-headed pace or two with his short ears laid flat on his neck, and a sudden red fury in his eyes. He seemed to watch for an opportunity to help his master. As the man approached after killing the snake the stallion let his ears go forward again and touched his nose against his master’s shoulder. When the latter swung into the saddle, the wolf-dog came to his side, reared, and resting his forefeet on the stirrup stared up into the rider’s face. The man nodded to him, whereat, as if he understood a spoken word, the dog dropped back and trotted ahead. The rider touched the reins and galloped down the easy slope. The little episode had given the effect of a three-cornered conversation. Yet the man had been as silent as the animals.
In a moment he was lost among the hills, but still his whistling came back, fainter and fainter, until it was merely a thrilling whisper that dwelt in the air but came from no certain direction.
His course lay towards a road which looped whitely across the hills. The road twisted over a low ridge where a house stood among a grove of cottonwoods dense enough and tall enough to break the main force of any wind. On the same road, a thousand yards closer to the rider of the black stallion, was Morgan’s place.
CHAPTER II
THE PANTHER
In the ranch house old Joseph Cumberland frowned on the floor as he heard his daughter say: “It isn’t right, Dad. I never noticed it before I went away to school, but since I’ve come back I begin to feel that it’s shameful to treat Dan in this way.”
Her eyes brightened and she shook her golden head for emphasis. Her father watched her with a faintly quizzical smile and made no reply. The dignity of ownership of many thousand cattle kept the old rancher’s shoulders square, and there was an antique gentility about his thin face with its white goatee. He was more like a quaint figure of the seventeenth century than a successful cattleman of the twentieth.
“It
is
shameful, Dad,” she went on, encouraged by his silence, “or you could tell me some reason.”
“Some reason for not letting him have a gun?” asked the rancher, still with the quizzical smile.
“Yes, yes!” she said eagerly, “and some reason for treating him in a thousand ways as if he were an irresponsible boy.”
“Why, Kate, gal, you have tears in your eyes!”
He drew her onto a stool beside him, holding both her hands, and searched her face with eyes as blue and almost as bright as her own. “How does it come that you’re so interested in Dan?”
“Why, Dad, dear,” and she avoided his gaze, “I’ve always been interested in him. Haven’t we grown up together?”
“Part ways you have.”
“And haven’t we been always just like brother and sister?”
“You’re talkin’ a little more’n sisterly, Kate.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ay, ay! What do I mean! And now you’re all red. Kate, I got an idea it’s nigh onto time to let Dan start on his way.”
He could not have found a surer way to drive the crimson from her face and turn it white to the lips.
“Dad!”
“Well, Kate?”
“You wouldn’t send Dan away!”
Before he could answer she dropped her head against his shoulder and broke into great sobs. He stroked her head with his calloused, sunburned hand and his eyes filmed with a distant gaze.
“I might have knowed it!” he said over and over again; “I might have knowed it! Hush, my silly gal.”
Her sobbing ceased with magic suddenness.
“Then you won’t send him away?”
“Listen to me while I talk to you straight,” said Joe Cumberland, “and accordin’ to the way you take it will depend whether Dan goes or stays. Will you listen?”
“Dear Dad, with all my heart!”
“Humph!” he grunted, “that’s just what I don’t want. This what I’m goin’ to tell you is a queer thing—a mighty lot like a fairy tale, maybe. I’ve kept it back from you years an’ years thinkin’ you’d find out the truth about Dan for yourself. But bein’ so close to him has made you sort of blind, maybe! No man will criticize his own hoss.”
“Go on, tell me what you mean. I won’t interrupt.”
He was silent for a moment, frowning to gather his thoughts.
“Have you ever seen a mule, Kate?”
“Of course!”
“Maybe you’ve noticed that a mule is just as strong as a horse—”
“Yes.”
“—but their muscles ain’t a third as big?”
“Yes, but what on earth—”
“Well, Kate, Dan is built light an’ yet he’s stronger than the biggest men around here.”
“Are you going to send him away simply because he’s strong?”
“It doesn’t show nothin’,” said the old man gently, “savin’ that he’s different from the regular run of men—an’ I’ve seen a considerable pile of men, honey. There’s other funny things about Dan maybe you ain’t noticed. Take the way he has with hosses an’ other animals. The wildest man-killin’, spur-hatin’ bronchos don’t put up no fight when them long legs of Dan settle round ’em.”
“Because they know fighting won’t help them!”
“Maybe so, maybe so,” he said quietly, “but it’s kind of queer, Kate, that after most a hundred men on the best hosses in these parts had ridden in relays after Satan an’ couldn’t lay a rope on him, Dan could jest go out on foot with a halter an’ come back in ten days leadin’ the wildest devil of a mustang that ever hated men.”
“It was a glorious thing to do!” she said.
Old Cumberland sighed and then shook his head.
“It shows more’n that, honey. There ain’t any man but Dan that can sit the saddle on Satan. If Dan should die, Satan wouldn’t be no more use to other men than a piece of haltered lightnin’. An’ then tell me how Dan got hold of that wolf, Black Bart, as he calls him.”
“It isn’t a wolf, Dad,” said Kate, “it’s a dog. Dan says so himself.”
“Sure he says so,” answered her father, “but there was a lone wolf prowlin’ round these parts for a considerable time an’ raisin’ Cain with the calves an’ the colts. An’ Black Bart comes pretty close to a description of the lone wolf. Maybe you remember Dan found his ‘dog’ lyin’ in a gully with a bullet through his shoulder. If he was a dog how’d he come to be shot—”
“Some brute of a sheep herder may have done it. What could it prove?”
“It only proves that Dan is queer—powerful queer! Satan an’ Black Bart are still as wild as they ever was, except that they got one master. An’ they ain’t got a thing to do with other people. Black Bart’d tear the heart out of a man that so much as patted his head.”
“Why,” she cried, “he’ll let me do anything with him!”
“Humph!” said Cumberland, a little baffled; “maybe that’s because Dan is kind of fond of you, gal, an’ he has sort of introduced you to his pets, damn ’em! That’s just the pint! How is he able to make his man-killers act sweet with you an’ play the devil with everybody else.”
“It wasn’t Dan at all!” she said stoutly, “and he
isn’t
queer. Satan and Black Bart let me do what I want with them because they know I love them for their beauty and their strength.”
“Let it go at that,” growled her father. “Kate, you’re jest like your mother when it comes to arguin’. If you wasn’t my little gal I’d say you was plain pig-headed. But look here, ain’t you ever felt that Dan is what I call him—different? Ain’t you ever seen him get mad—jest for a minute—an’ watched them big brown eyes of his get all packed full of yellow light that chases a chill up and down your back like a wrigglin’ snake?”
She considered this statement in a little silence.
“I saw him kill a rattler once,” she said in a low voice. “Dan caught him behind the head after he had struck. He did it with his bare hand! I almost fainted. When I looked again he had cut off the head of the snake. It was—it was terrible!”
She turned to her father and caught him firmly by the shoulders.
“Look me straight in the eye, Dad, and tell me just what you mean.”
“Why, Kate,” said the wise old man, “you’re beginnin’ to see for yourself what I’m drivin’ at! Haven’t you got somethin’ else right on the tip of your tongue?”
“There was one day that I’ve never told you about,” she said in a low voice, looking away, “because I was afraid that if I told you, you’d shoot Black Bart. He was gnawing a big beef bone and just for fun I tried to take it away from him. He’d been out on a long trail with Dan and he was very hungry. When I put my hand on the bone he snapped. Luckily I had a thick glove on and he merely pinched my wrist. Also I think he realized what he was doing for otherwise he’d have cut through the glove as if it had been paper. He snarled fearfully and I sprang back with a cry. Dan hadn’t seen what happened, but he heard the snarl and saw Black Bart’s bared teeth. Then—oh, it was terrible!”
