by Max Brand
I got down and shot my horse and used him for an earthwork and opened fire on them. And while they were charging in and charging back again, I fired about fifty bullets at them. The dark came on, and after I had waited there until I was about frozen, I dared to start off, and I got to the ranch the next morning and found that the story had got there ahead of me. It was one of those jokes that are too good to be true, and what those boys told about the straightness of my shooting and the way I lay behind my horse was enough to make a whole county hold its sides laughing. So you can guess that my best friends never mentioned the word Indian without looking me in the eye.
This kid went straight on, though, and his face was as serious as a book.
He said: “I’ve heard how you held off forty Sioux and killed seven of them! And I want to say that I don’t see any reason why that shouldn’t be written down and published all over the world. People ought to know about that wonderful thing that you’ve done, Tom Reynard!”
He said it with a lot of emotion wobbling back in his throat. The same sort of a voice that the hero has in the play, when he says to the father of the heroine: “I will stick by you to the end, until death do us part, Mr. Smith.”
Or maybe you don’t go to that sort of a play?
Of course, when he said that to me, I figured that the young rascal had a sense of humor, which is a pretty rare equipment for a boy of that age to have, except in the line of horseplay. And still, it’s a hard thing for a man to appreciate the laugh on his own expense, and I was about to out with something nasty, when I saw Sam Mitchell at the other end of the hotel porch looking pretty innocent.
I shifted part of the blame onto Mitchell the minute I saw that look on his face. I said to the boy: “What’s your name?”
He said: “Bunts is my name, sir.”
“Leave off the sir,” I says. “Mostly I am called Reynard … or plain Tom. What is your front name?”
“Jeremy,” he said. “But at home I am called Jigger a good deal of the time.”
I said: “Jigger, if you want to work for me, report to me tomorrow morning, and we start out. I’ll be glad to have you.”
He got a red, happy look on his face, as if I had presented him with a chunk of gold and a title. Then I got away from him and went to Sam Mitchell. I asked him what the devil he meant by talking to a tenderfoot that way.
“Tom,” said Mitchell, “there is some that are born foolish and that study most of their lives to improve on what nature made them, and this boy is one of the lot. He came out here with a lot of book talk in his head about Indians, and such. Also, he wanted a hero, and I didn’t see anything wrong about making you fit the part. All I did was kill seven Sioux for you.”
There was nothing I could do except to tell Mitchell what I thought of his sense of humor, and then I went on my way. And the next morning, when I gathered up my men for the trip out to the ranch, there was the boy, nickname and all, looking as happy as a lark. So we started out.
Chapter Four
I had to prepare the boys for the foolishness of this fellow. And on the way out, I got a chance to drop a word in their ears.
I said to Jigger Bunts: “Jigger, we got to watch ourselves in this part of the country. And you might ride ahead and keep a lookout, and if you see any sign of Indians, you come pelting back to us.”
Jigger turned pale with happiness. It was as though I had knighted him or something foolish like that.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “I’ll do my best.” And he galloped away.
Of course, there was no danger of any trouble with Indians just then. They had been pretty well flogged by the United States cavalry in the past two years, and all they wanted to do then was to rest up for a year or two and get ready for more mischief. So, when Jigger rode on ahead, the boys all looked a little queer at me, as though they thought that I was drunk.
I told them right away just why I had done it. I gave them about as much idea of Jigger as I had gathered from him and from Mitchell the day before. Jigger had come from some place in upper New York state, I think it was. And he had been raised well, and he was pretty well educated. But times were too dull for him back there, and he had come along to this part of the world where he could have a chance to do something that might interest a man.
I told them, too, about the famous Indian fight in which I had stood off forty Sioux and how I had killed seven of them. That brought a pretty big laugh from the boys, and no wonder. Now and then you hear wonderful things about what a white man, particularly one of the scouts, used to do to the Indians. Most of all when they were alone.
And it is mighty queer that they usually were alone when they did their most heroic and wonderful fighting. There was never a witness to tell about it. According to some of those scouts—who were a lot of them just tramps that were too lazy to be regular cowhands or hunters—one white man could clean up no end of redskins. But observing is all on the other side. One red man was all that any one of the boys I knew wanted to have on his hands, and yet I knew some pretty tough characters. Maybe the Indian wasn’t much account when it came to a pitched battle, though even there you’ll find if you read the accounts that he gave Uncle Sam’s best cavalry some tough times of it, but when it came to small parties, they were certainly poison for the whites that came in their way. And as for me or any other man holding off forty Sioux and killing seven of them during the game—why, it’s the straightest sort of nonsense, of course!
So the boys had their laugh, but I warned them that they had better not laugh at me when Jigger was around, because the first thing that he would want to do would be to fight on my account!
And Jigger was not the sort of a boy that you would want a fight with. He had black eyes just about as bright as polished steel, and he had a fine, supple pair of shoulders with a crease down between them in the back that made a wrinkle in his coat all the time. And he walked on his toes, and he had nice, long arms, and the cords of his wrists were as big as hamstrings. The boys had noticed these things, too. And of course they didn’t want any hand-to-hand trouble with Jigger, any more than I would have wanted it.
But they had started a game as soon as they got to the ranch, and they kept it up all the time. The game was to make me out a wonderful sort of hero and tell all sorts of exaggerated stories about the things that I had done. These stories were always told when Jigger was around, of course.
It didn’t make any difference what they said; Jigger was willing to believe anything. And while some wild, stupid yarn was being told, he would turn those big black eyes of his over to me and worship me and admire me in a style that used to make me feel pretty hot.
Of course, that was simply raw meat to those wolves that worked for me. Their joy was in listening to one of those crazy stories and watching Jigger’s face and mine, and then to swallow all of their laughter. They used to sit around with stony faces and let out little exclamations and shake their heads as if they were full of wonder. And every one of them would be curling up inside and fairly dying with laughter.
You’ll wonder that they could have kept it up all winter long without any break. But I assure you that they would have done it without a break. It was the bright spot in their lives. And they used to come in with a hungry look in their eyes every night, ready to sit around and swallow up some more mirth.
And the result was that they were bubbling all the time. It was nothing to see one of my men, in those days, riding through the snow or the mud and fairly rolling around in his saddle and busting with laughter. And nobody around to sympathize with what he was laughing about.
And every one of those men went around with a sort of wise look that was mighty irritating to me. And there was always a laugh to be seen around the corners of their eyes.
However, I stood for it for a long time, because the work was being done on that ranch in a style that it had never been done before, and the cows we
re getting the finest care you could imagine, and there were no glum, silent places in the evenings.
Silent evenings are the worst poison that you can feed to working men. Give the fellows a chance to stretch and laugh—or just talk—after the day’s work is over, and they’ll forget all about sore muscles, and bad chuck, and blistered hands, and monotony, and everything. But when they begin to sit around in the evening in silence, then you know that you have trouble ahead of you, and pretty soon there is going to be fighting or sulking or grouching. And then the complaining starts. And for my part, I would rather be on a starvation party than on a party where there are a lot of grouches along.
However, there was a time when I couldn’t stand the gaff any longer. They worked me up beyond what you might call a saturation point. And I was beginning to worry, too. Because every evening it seemed impossible that that young fool could sit there and swallow the lies that that gang made up. Not polished lies. Just rough, raw lies. The rawer and the cruder they could make them, they liked it all the better. Because the fun was to see the tenderfoot swallow them.
Of course, that fun wouldn’t have amounted to anything if the boy had been as stupid in every way as he was in this one way. But take him all in all, he was a mighty exceptional youngster.
I’ve told you what I thought about boys of eighteen and how they have a natural talent for doing things in the wrong way. But that Jigger Bunts was an exception. There was hardly a way in which he showed up as a tenderfoot after he had been on the ranch for a month.
In the first place, before he came out West, he knew a lot about horses. He had ridden them ever since he was a little youngster. And there was no fear of them in him, and of course that was a great thing. He rode as well as any old hand in the party, and more than that, he liked to try the bad horses. Inside of a week, he had all the worst outlaws in the outfit on his string, and every morning it was a sight to see one of those devils performing, with the kid sitting up straight in the saddle and laughing and enjoying it, and beating the bronco with his hat and slamming his spurs into him, and quirting him plenty. Half a dozen ridings took the gimp out of most of them and they began to act pretty reasonable, but a few of his string were mean and stayed mean all the time.
He was a handy boy with a rope, too. He had been dreaming about the West and the Western ways for years, and for years he had been working with a rope back there in his own home. I don’t mean to say that he was a roping expert, but after he got the hang of a rope, he could do his day’s work alongside of any one of us.
Well, a man who can ride and who can rope has a pretty fair start as a handyman on a ranch. But he needs to know a lot more, and that boy was ideally suited for picking up knowledge. He had his eyes open all the time, and he had his ears open, too. And no matter what drivel the boys talked to him in the evenings, when they had him out on the range during the day, they saw to it that he heard nothing but sense, because they knew perfectly well that clumsy work on his part could simply put more on their own shoulders.
The results were fine. That kid with his bright eyes that were never still had seen nearly everything on the range in the first month, and by the time the snows began heavy and bad, he was a good deal more use than anybody else, because he was never tired, and he was never proud. I mean he was always ready and willing to do anything that he could for any of us. Most kids of that age, as I’ve said already, hate to have anybody take advantage of them, but Bunts was not that way at all.
Take him in the bunkhouse. He would sit over in a corner mending a bridle, maybe, and you could be sure that it would be somebody else’s bridle and not his. There he would sit with his bright black eyes snapping as he took in everything that was said and never a word would come out of him except just an exclamation, now and then.
And all the time it was: “Hey, Jigger, reach me that Bull Durham, will you?”
Or: “Kid, rouse up your stumps and grab that paper for me, will you?”
Or: “Looks like the woodbox is getting sort of low.”
You never had to ask twice. He would bounce up and get what you wanted, and he would do it with a smile, and when the woodbox was empty, he would always slide out through the door and come back with his face and hands red and blue with the cold outdoors and his arms full of wood.
Any of you who have been in camp can guess what a mighty lot of comfort it was to have a boy like that around.
But all the time I sat back and said to myself that this was too good to be true, and that no matter how well the kid was acting now, sooner or later he was sure to bust out and in one wallop do enough harm to put him in the class where all the eighteen-year-olds belong.
I only wish that I hadn’t been such a surefire prophet.
Chapter Five
Well, it was my own fault.
If I had let things go along as they were, we never would have had any really bad trouble. But things got to such a point that I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I want to tell you how it happened that I kicked over the traces. I want to tell you the whole scene, so that you’ll have an idea of just what I was going through.
To give you an idea, too, of how everything was hitched onto me and my wonderful actions, I can say that it started like this.
One of the boys said: “Was any of you ever in Boston?”
“Sure,” said Charlie, who was one of the square-rigger sailors. “I went all the way from Belfast to Boston that time when I saw Reynard fight forty-eight rounds with that Englishman in the ring.”
He makes a pause here. And I see that I am in for another grilling. They have made me almost everything else. They have made me a great prospector, and Indian fighter, and lumberman, and hunter, and everything else, except the skipper of a ship. And now they are going to make me a great prize fighter, when I’ve never had more than two fistfights in my life.
I’ll admit that that was roughing me a bit. But I set my teeth and endured it all.
“Who was that Englishman, now?” says somebody to me.
I answered that I didn’t know.
The kid had been holding onto himself all this time, and now he broke out: “Jiminy, chief, have you been a prize fighter, too?”
I said nothing.
There was a sort of unwritten law that no matter how the game went, I should not have to affirm any of the crazy things that the boys invented about me. They had to carry along for themselves. And while I sat there, frowning down at my cigarette, Charlie, the sailor, chipped in and shouted: “Has he been a fighter? Has he been a fighter? Why, good Lord, boys, the kid don’t know that Tom has been a fighter!”
And he put back his head and began to laugh. And all the other boys were very glad, of course, to have a chance to laugh too, and they fairly raised the roof laughing at me, and at the kid, and at the wonderful joke, and at the good time they were having. While I naturally got a little hotter than usual.
There was something about that—I don’t know what—that made me mad.
I said: “Look here, Charlie, and the rest of you, quit it! I’m tired of being made the …” I stopped there, just in the nick of time.
And the kid jumped up and said: “Why, chief, it’s only because they admire you so much! You don’t think it’s anything else, do you? Of course, there isn’t a man here, I guess, that would dare to make a joke out of you.”
He stood up there with his black eyes blazing and his jaw sticking out like a rock. And not a soul let out a whisper. And I didn’t blame them, either. I would as soon have invited a wildcat to drop down my back as get into trouble with that boy.
No, they all sat around as solemn as owls. Because, of course, what he said simply played into their hands more than ever.
“Make a joke of him,” said someone. “I guess not. Back in the days of my youth, when I first come sashaying out this way, maybe I would’ve been that foolish. But I’ve learned since not to ta
ke no liberties with a two-gun man. Not me.”
And they all sat about and shook their heads, very solemn.
Now, it didn’t need anyone with the intelligence of a child to know that I wasn’t a two-gun man. In the first place because I was never better than a fair average with a revolver—that is to say, I could hit a good target about once in five times in practice and once in ten times in earnest. But the main reason that anybody could tell was that I didn’t wear two guns, and never had, and never would. Because one was all that I wanted to have to manage.
Maybe you would think that a bright, sharp-eyed boy like that young Jigger Bunts would have seen a thing like that right off. And if it had been anybody else, he would have seen it. But where I stepped into the picture, there was no use. He was blind. He was blind on purpose. And he had been blind ever since the day that he had heard Sam Mitchell first tell those whopping lies about me.
Poor Jigger! He could have looked at me right in the middle of the day, and if I said that a spade was white, he would have sworn that I was right, and he would have fought with anybody that hinted that maybe I might be wrong under some conditions. Jigger had found a hero, and he made that hero, with the help of those lying cowpunchers, fit in with everything that he could expect a hero to be.
I was faultless. I had to be faultless, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been any thrill in me from Jigger Bunts’ point of view.
I suppose by this time that you’re beginning to see just what sort of a queer one he was. And yet not so queer, either, but just young. And anybody that’s a man and young is bound to be sort of crazy in one direction or another.
He was satisfied with what he heard about nobody daring to make a joke on a two-gun man, and the blithering idiot grinned and looked happy, as though somebody had paid him a compliment.
