by Max Brand
He said: “But what a man he is, Tom! To do the things that he’s done, and yet to keep so quiet that not one man in ten thousand ever heard of his name. Why, when I think of him, I have to take off my hat. I have to do it!”
And he did! He took off his hat and stood there with his head back, and the long, shining black hair curling almost down to his shoulders. He was like something out of a storybook. A fairytale, not a fact!
No, I could see that the wonder might be growing in him, but there was no doubt as yet. And if I started in cold blood to tell about the lie we had worked on him, he simply wouldn’t believe me. The time hadn’t come when I could do that part of my duty for him.
So I had to try the other string in my bow. I had to fall back on Maybelle Crofter.
“Well, old-timer,” I said, “I’ll tell you what’s making me blue. And it’s a thing where I need help.”
“Ah, Tom,” he said, “if I could do a good turn for you, it would be the happiest day in my life!”
Chapter Twenty
He meant it, too. He was as deceiving and mysterious as a good pane of polished glass. He was as subtle as a bull buffalo and as hard to outguess as a hen in a chicken yard. He stood up there with his face shining at me and his eyes snapping. He wanted me to tell him to fight ten men, or find a gold mine, or hold up an express train single-handed, or do something else man-sized like that. But it would’ve made you laugh to see his face fall when I said to him that my trouble had to do with the affairs of a woman!
He lost interest right away and began to smile down at me in a very superior sort of way, as though I was to be pitied and wondered at for wasting my time on anything as lowdown and useless as a woman.
He said in an easy way: “You’re fallen in love with some girl, I suppose, Tom.”
“Yes,” I said, “I have.”
“Just lately, then?” the kid asked.
I thought about that. “No,” I said, “it’s been about four years since I first fell in love with her.”
That was not a complete lie. In a way I had been half in love with pretty Maybelle Crofter from the time that she got out of childhood. She had such looks and such ways about her.
Anyway, this speech made a terrible hit with the kid.
He stepped back.
“Tom,” he said under his breath, “you don’t mean that you have loved a woman for years … not saying a word about it ever … My God, Tom, but you’re a wonderful man!”
Yes, sir, the raving young idiot was going to start in worshipping me again. I never saw a boy like that. He was positively miserable unless he found somebody to make a hero out of.
“You see, old-timer,” I had to put in, “it’s this way … she was only a kid when I first knew her.”
“Don’t explain to me,” said the kid. “It’s like something out of an old romance … like the way the knights used to love their ladies in the old times. Here you are, and me knowing you so long and so well, but I never guessed it. Never dreamed that you ever so much as thought of a woman!”
There he was at it. He was always reading some sort of rot in books that he picked up, and then trying to apply what he read about knights in armor to real cowpunchers in chaps and bandannas.
I only shook my head. I didn’t know exactly what to say next.
“But tell me,” the kid said, very excited, “why you’re so sad, Tom? Won’t she have you?”
“She won’t,” I confirmed. “And she can’t. She’s married!”
“Heavens!” the kid blurts out. “Heavens, old man!”
He goes over and leans at the window with tears in his eyes. Yes, I mean what I say! There was tears in his eyes! He was actually standing there and suffering for me. There was a frown on his face, he was working so hard to keep from showing his emotion.
He says, deep and quiet: “I always knew that there was a secret sorrow in your life, chief. I always guessed it when I sat and watched you when you were silent.”
That was typical. Seeing me when I was too tired to talk, he turned my ache in the shoulders into an ache of the heart.
“Never mind that,” I said. “What matters now is …”
“I’ve got to mind that!” the kid sings out, so excited that I was afraid that somebody close by my room might hear him through the tissue-paper walls of that crazy old shack of a hotel. “I’ve got to mind,” he says, “how you’ve swallowed your troubles and never winced! Why, chief, when I look at you and think what kind of a man you are, it makes me feel like … like a fool and a baby. I tell you, chief, that it makes me put you up there with … with Louis Dalfieri himself!”
He got rid of the tears that were in his eyes—tears of sympathy for my grief. He got a new set. Tears of joy because I was so wonderful and so great and so grand, and because he could have the pleasure of looking at me with his own eyes. And he could stand there in the same room with me and breathe the same air.
Oh, damn such a boy as he was!
“Jigger,” I said, “is this a time to think about me or about Louis Dalfieri, even? It’s a time to talk about that poor girl!”
“Ah,” the kid said, “I thought that your trouble was just because you never could marry her, chief. But I see, now, you wouldn’t trouble yourself about such things. You wouldn’t ask help for yourself. It’s because you want to help her out of some sort of trouble.”
He was busy putting some more gilding on my wings.
“Son,” I said, “I can’t tell you what it would mean to me if I could help this poor girl.”
“Tom, Tom!” he said. “Could you use me? Could you please let me try to be of help to you or to her?”
“It’s no good, Jigger,” I told him. “It ain’t any good. You ain’t the sort of a man who could help a woman like her.”
He was humble enough, but he had his pride, and now he bit his lip. And then he sings out: “I want to do what I can, partner, if you’ll only tell me what it is that I can do!”
“Nothing, Jigger,” I tell him, very sad. “I see that there’s nothing that you can do. You could never settle down and live quietly, keeping out of the sight of folks.”
“Why couldn’t I?” Jigger asked, getting excited. “Would you please tell me why I couldn’t be quiet?”
“Oh, I know you, Jigger,” I replied. “Pretty near as well as I know myself. Yes, maybe better, even. What you want to do is to be out there in the hills, galloping along and living wild and free and fine, the same way as Dalfieri himself and the rest of them great wild men have lived. It would be poison to you to settle down and be quiet …”
“You don’t know me, chief,” he said, fairly stuttering with eagerness. “Doggone it, I tell you that you don’t know me. Gallop around over the hills? Live wild and free? Why, chief, do you think that it’s any pleasure to me to be herded around the mountains like a wolf? No, only it’s my fate to be an outcast hounded by enemies, surrounded by hate …”
He stopped for a minute. There were such tears of self-pity in his eyes that he couldn’t go on for a while. He had kidded himself into a great state of mind. He was all worked up. When he got that way, sometimes he would open up and talk like sixty. He would talk as good as you could find in a book. And mostly his speeches used to come out of some of the yarns that he used to read, I think.
I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing in his face, and I said: “You don’t really mean it, Jigger. You don’t really mean that it’s distasteful to you, living high and free and wild, the way that you do?”
“No,” the kid admitted. “Living doomed and desolate though I do, my secret yearning is for some quiet corner of the world … a house of peace, and a little garden where I could work with hoe and spade …”
Here he got so choked with sorrow for himself that he had to stop again and let off steam. The idea of him ever turning his hand to a cottage and a hoe made
me smile inside—but, after all, anything was possible for that kid, if the right sort of suggestion was used on him.
“I see how it is,” I said, keeping my face fairly straight. “And it gives me a lot more hope that maybe you could help her. Except that it would be terribly hard. Mind you, I would try the job myself, but she wouldn’t let me. She wouldn’t let me sacrifice myself for her. She’s that fine, Jigger. She would do some terrible wild thing if she thought that she was messing up my life!”
Jigger blinked and swallowed the idea on the wing, so to speak.
“I see,” he said, “that she must be a wonderful woman.”
“She is,” I agreed, “different from any woman that I ever met or that I ever heard of.”
Which was exactly the truth, as you’ll agree with me before you’ve heard the finish about Maybelle.
“But,” I said, “to take care of her, you would have to actually take the terrible danger of finding a way of living right here in the middle of this here town. The idea of a horrible risk like that … why it makes me sick to think of it even. It would mean living, say, in the barn behind her house, and keeping yourself out of the sight of everybody as long as the sun was shining and only sneaking out at night … like a wild tiger right in the middle of the town …”
Terrible? I could see that Jigger Bunts was almost swooning with happiness to think of tackling such a job.
“Chief,” he said, “even if it’s dangerous, I would like to give it a try.”
I raised my hand.
“Don’t tell me about it,” I warned. “Because the more that I think about it, the more I see that it would be sort of suicide for you to attempt it. Too many men are out gunning for you. And if they saw you … well, you might get away, but that would be an end of the protection that poor … I can’t tell her name, though.”
“Chief,” gasped the kid, “I beg you to tell me.”
“No, no,” I told him. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Why, youngster, this here is a harder thing than I’ve ever heard of before. Not you nor any man could ever do it.”
He was foaming, now, with despair and enthusiasm.
He said: “Tom, I want to beg a little favor of you.”
“Jigger,” I said, pretending not to understand, “of course I would do anything that I could for you.”
He said: “Tell me the name of the girl.”
“It’s not fair, trapping me like that,” I told him. “But I suppose that I’ve got to live up to my promise to you. Her name is Maybelle Wayne.”
“Chief,” he said, “if you won’t send me to her, I’ll go myself and offer myself to guard her.”
I swallowed a smile again.
“Jigger,” I told him, “I like your nerve, I got to admit. But before you ring into this game, you’ve got to know what you’re to guard her from.”
“Aye,” he agrees. “That’s it.”
“I … you’ll have to ask her yourself,” I let him know. “And let her tell you in her own words … what the danger is, because I can’t do it half so well. And here, Jigger, is a picture of her.”
I had held back that photograph for the last minute, and now I passed it across to Jigger Bunts.
Well, he wasn’t of age, and until a man gets along toward thirty, he has a weakness for girlishness, and again after he’s fifty. The only period when he’s fairly safe is between thirty and fifty. Jigger had never paid much attention to girls. He’d been much too busy finding himself heroes, of one kind and another, and getting himself ready to imitate them. The amount of hours he had sunk in studying in the dress of Louis Dalfieri for instance would’ve made him a pretty good actor on the stage. And as for the time that he had invested in fancy shooting—why, I would hate to guess at it, but I know from what he told me that he spent five hours a day for six weeks in practicing a quick whirl around and a shot from the hip.
So you can see how it was that Maybelle could step in his mind without any competition to give her a run for her money. I sized the situation up for a while, watching poor young Jigger simply turn groggy with wonder as he stared at that snapshot.
Then I said: “I’m going to keep you right here in this room until tomorrow night. And then I’m going to take you to see Maybelle.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Keeping Jigger inside four walls was like keeping a royal Bengal tiger in a henhouse. He was wanting to rip loose every minute. He was always pretending humility and gentleness. But the fighting devil that had always been pretty strong in that youngster had been given a pretty thorough cultivating during the past months when he was free to roam up and down the range as he would.
I had to watch him like a hawk all the time that he was with me, and in the middle of the next afternoon, I made him swear not to budge out of the room while I was gone—then I started for Maybelle.
She had a house on the edge of town that her husband had fixed up for her after he decided that he couldn’t leave her with his folks on their ranch. And when l sauntered up to her door, the piano was rattling, and Maybelle’s voice was chirping out a rag tune.
When she came to the door and found me there, she brought me right in and introduced me to a tall young chap with a brown face that was never got except prospecting or punching cows. He’d come into money lately. And the coin was busting out like a rash all over him. He had an emerald stickpin that looked like a big green eye in the middle of his red necktie. And he had a wallet that looked like a football in the throat of an ostrich. I forget what his name was.
She sashayed into the room and said: “Here’s my lawyer come to talk business to me, dearie. You run along, and don’t stand on the corner with your hat off, because there’s sunstroke in the air. So long!”
The big guy backed out the door and gave me a dangerous look while he was passing out.
“You’re kind of rough on that gent,” I said to Maybelle. “He knows that I’m no lawyer.”
“What difference does it make, foolish?” Maybelle said. “He’s the kind that likes to be handled rough. Anything to get him out of his trance. He’s had a rush of dollars to the head, and he can’t think straight. Now sit down and tell me about Jigger Bunts. I’ve been dreaming about him in the middle of the day.”
“That’s because he’s coming to see you tonight,” I told her.
She was a good deal surprised by that, and so I went ahead and told her when Jigger had showed up, and how.
“Just crazy!” said Maybelle. “But what’ll I tell him is the danger, when you bring him around tonight? I’m in no danger from anything.”
“You work that up yourself,” I said. “If this is a partnership job, Maybelle, I’ve done more than fifty percent already. Now you do your part. The thing for you to do is to look young and get a pair of wings. He says he can see already that you’re one of the most wonderful women in the world. He won’t see much of you. Just his idea of you.”
“I’ve to prune down the slang,” Maybelle commented. “Talking English is a terrible strain. Does the poor fish have to live in my barn while he protects me from things that ain’t?”
“It’s the only way,” I explained to her. “I’ve got him all heated up about the idea. Now, Maybelle, when you get that young man out there in the barn, the thing for you to do is to imagine that you got a wild hawk in your hand. You got to teach him to come when you whistle. You got to get him tamed. And when it comes to working out the saving of him, we’ll do that together. Main thing for you is to keep him put safe. If he keeps on rampaging around, sticking up stages and whatnot, he’ll be ripening himself for the gallows in no time.”
She agreed that that was the thing to do.
I had a couple of other people to see, and it was already the warm evening of the day, and the town was settling down—as much as New Nineveh ever settled down—when I started back for the hotel. The sprinklers were whizzing and swis
hing on the front lawns of the houses that I passed, and the householders were out in their shirt-sleeves, hollering their opinions about weather and politics to each other. Everything was peaceful until I got pretty close to the hotel, and then there was a sudden yipping of men, half scared and half mad, and the barking of Colts, deep and hoarse.
When I come around the corner, keeping close to the building, I saw half a dozen gents in the vacant lot next to the hotel, ripping around and shooting at shadows.
“Where did he go?” they were yelling.
“He went behind that tree.”
“No, he started straight back for the hotel.”
“You lie! He ducked out on the street.”
“He headed for behind the blacksmith shop.”
I hung around until they had quieted down a mite, and then I found out what had been happening. The deputy sheriff, Hendon, had been just standing there talking to some of the boys. Telling them that they had got to quiet down, because he was gonna bring law and order into that town of New Nineveh if he had to kill himself doing it. And the boys agreed that it was time for the old town to turn over a new page, but they suggested that the first thing for him to do was to get out on the trail and run down Jigger Bunts.
The deputy sheriff agreed that that was a fine idea, but he said that he had already worked himself ragged on the trail of Jigger Bunts after the stage holdup, but that all he could figure out was that Bunts had headed right straight back for New Nineveh itself, and when he came to that point, he decided to give up the search altogether, for the time being. Because, as he pointed out, it was madness to imagine that even Jigger Bunts would dare to try to hide himself in New Nineveh.
He said that he would get Jigger before long, though, and he said that the chief trouble with the other folks who had ridden out to get him was that they were licked and ready to be bluffed out before they ever got within shooting distance of the kid. But he, Hendon, wasn’t going to be bluffed.
