by Max Brand
Afterward, I saw them all, and you could tell that they were really relations of Crandall. They had the same yellow skin that came from too much coffee and tobacco and too little work. Because work sweats the poison out of a man’s system pretty regularly. They had the same sort of a greasy handsome face, too.
All these men had been raised with guns in their hands, just the way Crandall had. All of them packed Colts stuck away in their clothes but ready to come out as slick as a whistle at the first call on them. And the four of them slouched up to young Jigger Bunts and stood around his table.
There was an old Negro working as cook at that hotel, and he was the one who had cooked up some ham and coffee for Jigger. Through the kitchen door, which he pushed open a peg or two, he saw the whole affair, afraid to keep on watching, because he knew what was going to happen, and a lot too curious to go away. He said that Jigger sat there as calmly as you please and went on eating his supper and looking the four of them up and down.
Of course, I could believe that, and it amused me to think of anyone really trying to stare the kid down. Because he wasn’t that kind. His black eyes weren’t made to droop away under anyone’s stare.
Finally, the four got tired of waiting for him to begin to wilt and one of them leaned over and said: “I think your name is Bunts?”
The kid looked up to him and said: “I’m afraid that you have the advantage of me, sir.”
Right there I broke out laughing, and that nearly wrecked the rest of the story.
Chapter Thirteen
Those New Nineveh men stood around and gaped at me, and the chap with the whiskers asked me if I doubted the story, but I told him no, that I didn’t.
Matter of fact, I had laughed just because I was hysterical, I suppose, and not because it didn’t seem true. Oh, I could understand the thing easy enough. That was the sort of a slicked-up remark that Dalfieri would have made in a place like that. So I knew that it was real. But back to the story.
“I am afraid that you have the advantage of me, sir,” the kid had said to four thugs standing around waiting for the time to come when they could tear him open and see what made him run!
I laughed, but I could just as easy have groaned.
“It ain’t half of the advantage that I’m gonna have,” said the other fellow. “Unless you’ll stand up and come along with us to a place down the street where you can rest behind some bars and where you’ll be watched, so’s it can be seen that you have a nice, quiet night’s sleep.”
The kid nodded and smiled at him. It was Harry Askew that had said that. And when it looked as though Jigger was simply going to give up and go along without a fight—on account of him looking so pleasant—one of the Harper boys (I think it was Steve Harper) had to break in and say that there was one thing before the kid started, and that was for him to hand back the sixty-five dollars that he had stolen from Bud Crandall.
The kid was finishing his coffee. And while the cup was emptying, he chatted with those fellows, and then he said that he didn’t mind considering what they had to say to him, but, first off, he would have another cup of hot coffee. He reached for the pot and filled himself a piping hot dose of it in one of those big tin cups that hold nearly a pint.
This was a little too much for the boys. Jud Harper said that they had waited long enough and told the kid to stand up and come with them—and put his hands up over his head while he was standing up out of the chair.
This to Dalfieri! That was all I could think about when I listened to that. Not what the kid would probably do, but what he would think that Dalfieri had ought to do in the same pinch. Something wild and crazy, I had no doubt at all.
He said: “Gentlemen, I want to oblige you, but the fact is that the money which I took from Bud Crandall was taken by him from some friends of mine, and was taken by him through dirty card tricks. Whereas, what I used to take the money back again was a perfectly clean gun.”
“Cover him … he means trouble, boys!” said the Askew brother named Sim, and fetched out a pair of Colts.
And the rest of that bunch started for their guns at the same minute, and the cook blinked, getting ready for the roar of guns. When he opened his eyes again, he saw the kid throw that cup of hot coffee—boiling hot—right into the faces of the gang.
Sim Askew let off both his guns—and blew two little holes in the ceiling—and sent one of those slugs through the boot of a fellow who was sleeping over the dining room.
Sim was the only one who had had time to get his guns out, and he was so burned with coffee that all he could do after that was to hop around, and yell for help, and say that he was blinded. Matter of fact, he was badly burned, and when I saw his face, it looked as though it had been rubbed on an emery wheel. It was a sight, I can tell you.
His brother Harry was scalded, too, and so was Jud Harper, though not so bad. The only one that wasn’t pretty much hurt was Steve Harper, and before he got his guns to working, the kid had come out of his chair with a leap and smashed a fist into Steve’s face.
I didn’t have to ask whether Steve did much fighting after that. I just had to remember those big, thick, flexible shoulders of the kid, and the way the cords stood out on his wrists like hamstrings. I knew that Steve Harper must have gone down with a whack. And that was exactly what he did. He slammed his head on the floor so hard that he couldn’t get up without help five minutes later, when the old cook came out and dragged him up to his feet.
In the meantime, the kid had gone out of that dining room in about two jumps and slammed the door behind him. The whole hotel was buzzing like a nest of wasps right away. The town always slept with one ear open for gunplays. And when the guns started, it got up pronto, because there is no fun in being shot while you’re lying in bed.
Well, between you and me, that was about the size of most of the gunfights out West when it was wild and wooly, as they say. Revolvers were the fashion, and revolvers, by my way of thinking, were always a mighty silly weapon. Exceptions, of course. Here and there you’d meet somebody like Billy the Kid. But the exceptions just proved the rule that in a revolver fight, those that got hurt were usually the bystanders.
Here was a good case in point. Four men, all handy with their guns, come in and stand right around the table where the kid was eating his supper. They tell him to hold up his hands, and one of the four gets out two guns and covers him—and yet he gets away without so much as firing a shot!
You may say that the coffee was an extra card in the pack. But where you’re talking about a brave man, you’ll find that he usually can find a joker in the pack. I used to know a brakeman who worked in the West for years, and he never packed a gun in all his life and yet he was being hunted all the time by hobos that he had kicked off the trains, here and there. Nothing mysterious about how he handled them. He used to walk up to the yeggs and take their guns away from them and stick them down their throats. He had a pair of hard fists and he kept the knuckles all calloused with knocking down “killers.” The point was that he never took them serious, and I suppose that nobody could do much in the way of being bad if he had an audience that was laughing at him.
Anyway, there was the kid out of the dining room without a scratch on him.
The people in the hotel spilled out into the street as fast as they could run, waving their guns, because the four cousins were raising a terrible yell and saying that there was a murderer and a crook that had just got away. And the boys swarmed out, and some of them grabbed horses, and the rest of them started tearing off on foot, because as a rule the boys in New Nineveh never overlooked a chance to blaze away at a living target.
And here came the joke. This was the thing that the old fellow with the whiskers couldn’t repeat without nearly choking to death, it made him so mad. This was the thing that made New Nineveh blush for years afterward, just thinking about it. Because they prided themselves on their hardness, that town did. And they had
all rushed out, waving their guns, to get this fresh eighteen-year-old kid.
And while they were still rushing, guns were booming on the edge of the town, where they were shooting at every shadow that looked like a man. In fact a calf was killed. While all that was going on, down the stairs of the hotel walks Jigger Bunts!
Yes, sir, though it is hard to believe that any real man would do such a thing, it was exactly the sort of a thing that Dalfieri would have done, of course.
He wouldn’t allow a crowd of gunfighters to disturb him any. He wouldn’t get flustered and put ill at ease. Not Dalfieri! He would go right along his own sweet way. Because he was a gentleman, and a gentleman doesn’t let himself get flustered by a lot of ruffians like the New Ninevites.
No, when he went out of that dining room, he simply had walked upstairs and went into his room, and he didn’t run out of the hotel at all!
Up in his room, you see, he had left a lot of his things, including his hat. And could you imagine Dalfieri running away from a fight without his hat?
No, you couldn’t. Not if you had sat in at the birth and the making of Dalfieri the way I had done.
Up there in his room, the kid took plenty of time and rolled up some blankets which he thought he might need, and left a little note written out to the proprietor, promising to pay for those blankets the first time that he got a chance.
When he was good and ready, he took his roll of blankets and his hat and went downstairs, and walked out of the hotel, right past two or three dozen blockheads that were running around raving for him. But they swore afterward that they were looking for a poor scared critter that would be running and ducking from one cover to another, and they never even so much as looked twice at a man that was walking—with a blanket roll under his arm!
He went right out into the stable. He led out his horse—doesn’t it seem too plain idiotic that nobody had thought of looking for his horse?—and after he had saddled that horse, he jogged it out into the main street of New Nineveh!
I suppose that New Nineveh would have paid thousands of dollars if it didn’t have to admit that he was able to do that and get away with it. But that wasn’t all that he did. It was not half!
When he got about two-thirds of the way down the street, three men ran up to him with their guns and hollered out to know who he was.
And he stopped his horse and said: “I am Jeremy Bunts. Do you want me?”
There is no doubt about it. That was exactly what he did. And those three men stood there as if they were paralyzed, and finally, he spoke to his horse and rode right on through the three of them!
That’s another thing that may be hard to believe. But it was done. Those three were as brave as lions until they heard the voice of Jigger, and then there was something in that voice that made them curl up inside and froze up their talking muscles.
It has happened to me, for that matter.
But oh, if they had only kept paralyzed! But they didn’t!
Chapter Fourteen
I suppose that Jigger’s voice and the size of his shoulders and the way he had of sitting in the saddle, as if it was a throne, was too much for them. But the minute that they saw his back, they was stimulated a lot and remembered how brave they was—and that they were looking for this very man. And I suppose they remembered, too, that there were three of them and that there was only one of him. It must have been a comforting thought, too!
They didn’t run after him. They got their guns up, and then they yapped at him to turn around and come back, or they would drill him, just as sure as the devil!
You or me or anybody else would have dropped down low in the saddle and seen how quick our spurs could have turned the walk of that horse into a gallop. But you gotta remember that there wasn’t any real human being in that saddle. There was Dalfieri—the man that never was!
And the kid—or rather Dalfieri—did exactly what they told him to do. That is, he turned that horse of his clear around and started toward the three.
“Stick up your hands!” they yelled at him.
And he stuck up his hands, but he stuck them up with a gun in each of them. Also, when he came, he came at a hard gallop, with his horse just fair legging it along. And he blazed away at them.
They had a man on horseback to shoot at, and he only had a group of men on foot. But their nerves were a little upset and his were—well, the nerves of Dalfieri.
There is no use making a long story out of it. He simply shot down every one of those three men.
I have a paper here beside me now, with the account of that shooting. Here is the list that it gives.
Richard Hughes, of Belfast, Ireland, 31 years old.
Frederick Ginsing, Hamburg, Germany, 22 years old.
Bartholomew Lewis, of Boston, Mass., 24 years old.
Hughes was shot through the hip, and the ball traveled around inside the hip bone and came up in the small of the back, where it lodged under the skin and could be seen with the naked eye—a little bluish lump there. The doctor just cut the skin, and the slug fell out in his hands. Hughes had a lot the worst wound. He was in bed for weeks before he could sit up, and it was thought for a while that he was going to die. But men took a lot of killing in those days.
Frederick Ginsing, the German with a little withered arm, was one of these fellows who look prematurely born and never stop looking that way as long as they live. He had a collarbone broken, and the bullet went right on, glancing up through the thick flesh at the base of the neck. But the top of the lung was missed, and there were no big arteries severed. So he was all right in a short time.
Bart Lewis, of Boston, got it through the thigh, a nice clean hole that didn’t even scrape the thigh bone. He said that all he felt was a numbness, at first. He didn’t know where he was hit, until he tried to take a step, and then he fell flat on his face.
What was plain was that they had not hurt the kid. They had sent enough lead in his general direction, but they had scored no hits. He rode right on!
Yes, anybody else, of course, would have snapped his horse around and rode for dear life, but Dalfieri, having been turned in his course, kept right on in the same direction.
People heard the shooting and came tearing down the street, and a dozen of them, meeting the kid, said: “What’s happened?”
What do you think he said?
Why, he told them the truth, of course! That was Dalfieri’s way.
He said: “Bunts has just shot three men, down there. They tried to stop him.”
The crowd spilled down that way, by horse and foot. And when they got there, they found Ginsing sitting up, yelling and cursing at them for a lot of fools and cowards, and telling them to go back and take the man that had just rode through them, because that was Jigger Bunts, or the devil in that shape!
They were a good deal bewildered at this, and somebody said that Ginsing was raving, and that it couldn’t have been Jigger Bunts, because he was just jogging his horse along, slow and easy—and heading right through the town.
Ginsing began to scream at them, but I suppose they never would have paid any attention to him, he was so excited, but here Bart Lewis broke in and told them that it was Bunts that had just passed through the lot of them.
By that time, he was out of sight down the street, and they grabbed their horses and went down the street like mad.
They didn’t find him. He had turned off the main street right in the middle of town. A woman whose husband was away working in the mines had heard the racket in the town and had got up and dressed hurriedly, and while she was looking out the window, she saw a fellow who answered the description of Jigger Bunts and his horse. He was still just jogging his horse along, slow and easy. She could see him pretty clear, because although there was a film of clouds across the sky, there was a big moon behind them, and so against the white of the snow, you could make out things pretty
good. The snowstorm hadn’t hit over by New Nineveh yet.
She said afterward that when she saw him trotting along so cool and comfortable, she told herself that there was at least one calm, sensible man who wanted to keep out of the way of trouble in New Nineveh.
That’s the way things go in real life.
There was no reason why Jigger should have got away that night if he had acted like any normal human being. But he didn’t act like any human being for the pretty simple reason that what he was modeling himself after was a man that never was. Jigger Bunts would have wanted to run like anybody else, when the time came, but he had to be Dalfieri.
While the men and the horses were washing up and down the main street of New Nineveh, the kid was tracking off through the snow as easy as you please, until they got to work and began to organize a little and search the houses, thinking that in some way he must have tried to hide himself in one of the sheds, or even in one of the houses.
It was when they began to search the houses that they came across the miner’s wife. When she told them about the man she had seen, and when she gave them all the particulars of just how he looked and just how his horse looked, they realized who it was that she had seen, and they went after him pelting, you had better believe.
However, by this time he had a cool hour’s lead on them, and even if he hadn’t rushed his horse, he was sure to be at least five miles away from the town, which makes for a long and a hard chase. Besides, the kid was not taking any chances.
* * * * *
The New Nineveh men got a couple of hours away from town, and they came across a house with a light in it. There they found a man who was up and dressed and cleaning his rifle and very hot about a thing that had happened to him a while before.
His name was Wilbur Green, and he was squatting on a nice piece of land with plenty of water and pretty good grass, where he was trying to raise cows and a few horses and doing pretty good at it. He said that a knock had come at his door, and when he called out, a man asked to talk to him. He said what about, and the man said that he wanted to make a horse swap with him. Green got up and went to the door and didn’t forget to take a gun along with him, because a gun was apt to be handy in a little midnight chat like this.
