Valley Thieves

by Max Brand

  We went a good mile down the creek before he called out to me to stop.

  "There's a right good ford here," he said, "and we'll cross over to the other side of the creek."

  That spoiled my plans. It was on the south side of the creek that I expected to meet my three friends.

  "What's the matter with riding along here?" I asked him.

  "I dunno," he said, "except that you come in on this trail, and maybe it'll be a pile better if we hit across on the other side and take my trail."

  I was amazed as well as disappointed. The boy had the suspicions of a wild beast, and in this case they were justified.

  I crossed the ford and he came along after me. The water got up as high as the knees of my horse, and once I figured on turning suddenly back at Chuck. But a glimpse of the bright black eyes and the lean, stern young face, and the way the rifle was constantly at the ready changed my mind for me.

  I crossed that ford, and a moment later we were heading off on a trail among the trees, and leaving the little ravine of that creek far behind us.

  I knew then that I was not destined to see Silver and the rest before I saw the inside of the Cary house. Thank Heaven, that was all I did know of what was lying ahead of me.

  CHAPTER X

  The Head of the Clan

  WE left the trees and entered the big central plain of the Cary Valley until we hit a maze of old and new trails that had been worn by cattle and horses, and then we came in sight of the Cary house, spilling out right and left behind its screen of trees.

  I could see cattle dotting the plain, here and there, little single points, or whole smudges of red. They were feeding on the finest grama-grass, the best fodder in the world for horse or cow, I believe. The cows we passed were sleek as butter and filled right up round between the short ribs and the hip bones.

  We got up along another creek that came white with speed down the farther slope of the valley, close to the Cary house, and around a bend we came upon a lot of women washing clothes. They were standing in the water or crouching like Indians along the rocks, soaking, and rubbing, and beating the clothes, and using mighty little soap. That, in the days of good washing machines and scrubbing boards, and when even half-wits ought to know that clothes need boiling before they are really clean at all.

  But I didn't wonder very much at the primitive methods of that laundry, because what staggered me was the look of the women themselves. I had seen a Cary woman here and there, but never a group of them, and what a set they were! They were all handsome, in a way, but built on heroic lines, with plenty of bone in body and face. Some of the young girls who were down there helping with the work were quite beautiful; time had not yet filled them out to the full Cary measure.

  Every solitary one of those women had black hair and eyes. It was said that one of Old Man Cary's mandates was that he would have no blondes in his valley.

  These big women all turned around and stared at us as wild creatures and brutal savages do, gaping, some of them, and never shifting their eyes, and laughing, and pointing me out. To be frank, they frightened me more than any group of men could have done. I mean, there was such cruelty in their eyes and such strength in their hands that they looked capable of anything.

  The trail took us up to the home grove and through the trees to the front of the house. It was the sort of thing you would expect, just a bare flat of beaten ground with a hitching rack here and another one there, and a stone-paved run of water that went close to the front door, where the horses could be conveniently given drink. A dozen small youngsters were rolling around, playing. They got up and looked at us. They stared, and pointed me out silently.

  "Hey! Hey, somebody!" yelled Chuck.

  A woman came to the nearest door and screened her eyes against the slanting rays of the sun. She was a huge woman, swarthy, sun-darkened.

  "What you want, Chuck?" she asked. "Who you gone and got there?"

  "Shut your mouth and go and tell the old man I wanta see him," said Chuck.

  "Yeah? All right," said she, taking no offense at this rough talk.

  I could gather from the specimen that the men occupied a position of dignity in the valley, perhaps from the moment when they could daub a rope on a cow or go out and shoot venison. Anyway, the woman left the door, and I heard her begin to bawl out:

  "Hey, there, Grandpa! Hey, Grandpa!"

  Her voice passed into the distance, but I could still hear it shrilling, several rooms away.

  The children came up and stood close about us, staring, silent. Their eyes were as old as the eyes of any of the grown people—just as bright and just as cruel. I had a feeling that if their parents were all killed, the children would be able to live in the woods and forage well enough with tooth and nail.

  My apprehension grew all the time I waited out there. And when I thought of Silver and Taxi and Clonmel, it was small comfort. They would never miss me. They would simply think that I had lost my heart and preferred, at the last moment, to remember Silver's invitation to go home and leave the rest of the business to better hands than mine. Even if the three of them wanted to help me, what could they do? What could anyone do? Three? It would need thirty to break into this fort where man and woman and child were capable of hard battle.

  And if Silver was a superman, still the Carys were close to being supermen, also.

  Suddenly I saw that this den of wild beasts ought to be broken up and the inhabitants scattered. The law had never taken a single step past the flat, stone faces of that circle of cliffs which fenced in the round of the plateau. It was time for it to appear.

  I tried to talk to the boy. I said: "Chuck, do you fellows aim to bring in every stranger who happens to ride into the valley?"

  "What would strangers be doin' up here?" he asked me brutally. "Nobody but a Cary has got no rights in this valley, I guess."

  "So you put a gun on them and bring them in?"

  He looked me slap in the eye, while his mouth twisted into a grin.

  "Some of 'em won't be brung," he said. "Some of 'em would have to be left, I reckon."

  Left dead, was what he meant. I needed no interpreter to tell me that much.

  The big woman appeared in the doorway again.

  "Take him around to the old man's room," she said. "He'll see him. Who is he, Chuck?"

  "Calls himself Bill Avon and says he wants to buy cows. I dunno who he is," said Chuck.

  To me he added: "Get off that hoss."

  I dismounted, with the hollow eye of the rifle watching me with special care in case I should try any quick moves.

  "Now march ahead of me," said Chuck.

  He sent me around the side of the house and marched behind, and the silent, black-eyed children ran out ahead of me, turning and staring up at me over their shoulders, as children will when they march ahead of a band. There was no dignity of noise to this moment, but there was plenty of danger, and they wanted to see how I would take it. I was suddenly glad—gladder than I had ever been before in my life—that I was middle-aged, not at all imposing, and with a good record of long and honest work behind me.

  When we turned the farther corner of the house, I saw a big vegetable garden stretching away to the next trees. Another runlet of water ran through it, and there were little mud embankments to contain the flood when it was poured on one patch or another. New green tops were pricking the black of the earth, here and there. I saw the dirty yellow of ripe onions, ready to be dug up; tomato vines were growing up on frames, and off in the distance there was a woman bending over a broad-bladed hoe. The flash of it seemed to strike right into me.

  The back of the house was more irregular than the front of it, because here big cabins or little ones had been added to the long structure and the rear showed the differences in size. Finally, we came to a door, where Chuck halted me. He kept his rifle in both hands and kicked the door.

  "Who's there?" called a voice that was so husky and deep that it seemed one could count the number of vibrations
per second that went to the make-up of the sound.

  "Chuck. I got something to show you," said the youngster.

  "Open the door and come in."

  Chuck opened the door with his left hand, keeping the rifle carefully under his right elbow. But I had no intention of trying to escape. I felt as though I were in the center of a hostile kingdom—as though a great continent had swallowed me up.

  I stepped through that doorway and found myself before Old Man Cary.

  It was a naked sort of a room with nothing much to it except a broad open hearth and an iron crane hanging in it, with a black pot that hung from the crane, over the low welter of the fire. The smell of the cooking broth was stale through the room. Everything seemed to be soaked with the greasy odor, as though that same pot had been boiling there for years. Mutton was the smell, and if you know mutton, you know what I mean when I speak of the greasy rankness. The air was filled with it. Not this day's cooking only, but a stale offense that rose out of the ground and seeped out from the dark walls.

  I say it came out of the ground because there was no wooden flooring. There was just beaten earth. Some of that earth was so footworn that it seemed to have a sheen about it, to my eyes.

  Old Man Cary sat in a corner near the fire, with a rug pulled over his legs—an old, tattered, time-worn rug that was once the pelt of some sort of animal. Now, half the fur had been worn away. He had a broad bench beside him, and that bench was littered with revolvers and rifles which he was cleaning. I could imagine that he cleaned the guns for the entire clan and during that cleaning took heed of the way the different weapons had been used.

  Now I hope you have some idea of what the place was like, but when it comes to Old Man Cary himself, it's hard to make a picture of him. He still had the great Cary frame which his descendants had inherited from him; he still sat as high as many a man stands. But there was no flesh on him. He was eaten away. Death had been at him for a long time and death was still at work. If it could not strike the old giant to the heart or the brain, it could at least worry him down little by little. His face had shrunk so that it seemed very small, unmatched to the size of his head, like a boy's face under a mature skull.

  And his eyes were bright, sharp, young, under the wrinkling folds of the lids. He lifted those eyes to Chuck as he said:

  "Who knocked at my door?"

  "I did, Grandpa," said Chuck.

  "You lie," said the old man. "You didn't knock. You kicked that door."

  "Look," said Chuck. "I had my hands full of the gun, like this here, and I had to kind of rap the door with my foot."

  "If you ever kick my door again," said that husky voice; which seemed to be tearing the fiber of the throat, "I'll nail you to a tree and take your hide off. Now, what you brought here to me?"

  He turned his glance on me.

  Chuck was so scared that he had to draw breath a couple of times before he could stammer out that I said my name was Bill Avon, that he had found me up the creek, and that I said I was coming to try to buy cattle, and that everybody ought to know that Cary cattle were not for sale at this time of year.

  "They ought to know, ought they?" said the old man. "You know it, do you?"

  "Yes, sir," said Chuck, more breathless than before.

  "Cary cows are for sale when I say they're for sale. The time of the year don't make no difference," said the old man.

  "Yes, sir," said Chuck. "I'm sorry."

  "Sorry for what?"

  "Sorry I didn't know."

  "What didn't you know?"

  "That the cattle—I mean—I dunno."

  "You don't know what you don't know, eh? Are you a fool or ain't you a fool?"

  "No, sir," said poor Chuck. "I mean—yes, sir."

  "You got too much of your mother in you, and she's a fool woman. You hear me?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "You tell her that. Go back and tell her: 'Ma, you're a fool woman.' If she don't like that, send her to me, and I'll tell her some more."

  "Yes, sir," said Chuck. "Pa would knock hell out of me if I told her that."

  "You send your pa to me, too, then," said the old man. He looked at me. "You say you're Bill Avon, do you?"

  "Yes," said I.

  "You come to buy cattle?"

  "Yes."

  "How much money you got with you?"

  "Fourteen, fifteen dollars."

  "How many Cary cows would that buy?"

  "I was going to dicker for a sale," said I.

  "You're lyin'," said the old man. "Chuck, you was right to bring him in. You're a good boy. But what you mean by leavin' a gun on him? Take it away and fan him. We'll see what his linin' looks like!"

  CHAPTER XI

  Worse Trouble

  THERE was nothing much to be done with that old devil. It was like talking to a man with an eye that could read the brain. I wondered what even the great Jim Silver would do if he ran up against a power like that of Grandpa Cary.

  Grandpa went on cleaning a rifle and paying no attention until Chuck had heaped on an end of the bench everything from my pockets, plus the gun from my holster. There were some silver and a five-dollar greenback. There were my old pocket knife and wallet and some bits of string and a couple of nails. I always seem to have some nails around in my pockets, because you never can tell when nails will come in handy.

  I stood there like a fool, in a sort of emptiness, waiting.

  After Chuck had put my stuff on the bench, he stepped back and eyed me savagely. The rough things the old man had said to him were a grudge that the youngster passed along to me. That's the way with people bred to a certain level. As long as they can feel a good hate, they don't care in what direction it goes.

  Before he paid any attention to me, the old man growled:

  "M'ria!"

  Maria popped a door open and stood on the threshold. She gave one flash at me, and then looked to the head of the clan for orders. She was not much older than Chuck and had not yet begun to bulge with the Cary brawn. She had big bare feet, and she would grow to the bigness of them, one day, but the rest of her was slim and round and smooth enough to stand in stone forever.

  "M'ria, gimme somethin' to eat," said the old man.

  She ducked back into the other room and came again with speed enough to make her calico dress snap and flutter about her brown legs. She had a big pewter spoon, and a big earthenware bowl, and a lot of stale bread crusts dropped into the bowl. She took the cover off the pot above the fire and stirred the contents, and then dipped out enough of the broth, swimming with shreds of meat, to cover the crusts of bread.

  She gave the old man the bowl, and he held it between his knees and began to eat. He was careless about his feeding, and he made a lot of noise at it. Sometimes the soup drizzled out of the corners of his mouth, and then the girl was quick as a wink to wipe the drops away before they had a chance to fall off his lean chin. He had no teeth, of course, and that compression of his lips was one thing that helped to make his face so small, and oddly boyish. Sometimes, too, he was so casual about the way he raised the spoon that some of the soup ran down over his hand and onto his hairy arm, and the girl was always there with an edge of her apron to keep him tidy.

  When he had had all he wanted, he gave the bowl a shove. She took it at once. He put his bald old head back on the edge of the chair.

  "You ain't a bad girl, M'ria," he said. "Gimme a kiss."

  She leaned over him and kissed him on the lips. It must have been a little hard for her to do, but most youngsters are accomplished hypocrites if hypocrisy will give them advantage in the family.

  "You make that soup pretty good, too," said the old man. "You make it better than that Alice ever done. I'm glad she gone and got married. Get out of here, now."

  Maria got out. She had just time to pass one glance at Chuck, and the glint in her eyes said that she and Chuck knew each other fairly well. She was receiving sparks as well as passing them out, I should have said.

  When the do
or was closed after her, I was glad of the interruption. I was glad that the old man had some food to comfort his stomach while he talked to me. He got out a pipe and loaded it, and put it in his toothless mouth. He had a wad of blackened string wound around the stem of the pipe so that he could hold it better between his gums. He went on examining me.

  "You bring up thirteen dollars and forty cents, and you're goin' to buy Cary cattle, are you?" he said.

  "I brought along no money to buy. I wanted to see the cows and find out what the prices might be."

  "How long you been around these parts?"

  "I've had a ranch for about eight years."

  "And you don't know that strangers ain't welcome in Cary Valley?"

  "I don't know," said I. "Of course, I've heard that people don't come up here very much. Not most people. But I've seen some of the Cary cattle, and I wanted to buy some of them."

  "You're a bright man. You got an education. A gent that's got an education is sure to be bright," said the old man, "and you stand there and try to tell me that you didn't know that you wasn't wanted up here?"

  "I thought it was worth a chance," said I. "I didn't know, I can tell you, that you had gunmen out watching for strangers. But I'd seen the Cary cattle, and I wanted to buy some of them."

  "Why did you want to buy 'em? Because they're so good?"

  "No. They're not good. There's no size to them," I said.

  "No? No size to my cows?" shouted the old man, suddenly enraged. And Chuck took a little hitch step toward me as though he were going to bash me in the face with his fist.

  "There's no size to them. They're all legs," said I, "but they fat up well in a short season. If I could cross them on the short-legged breed I've got, I might manage to turn out a herd with size and one that fats up early in the season."

  "You're a fool. He talks like a poor fool, Grandpa," said Chuck.

  "Does he?" said that terrible old man. "If you was to listen to some fool talk like this, you might learn somethin', though. He's right. And doggone me if it ain't a pleasure to hear sense talked once in a while, instead of the blatherin' blither I get up here, most of the time."