by Max Brand
“He’s coming right on over,” someone said.
“He knows there’s free drinks. And he feels a tickling in his ears, figuring we been talking about him so much. His ears is real hot so he’s coming to join the good time.”
Skeeter, who knew that this moment would be the most dreadful of her life, reached out desperately in her mind to find some way in which she could intervene, but a man who can be saved by a woman’s strength is not a man at all.
She had a strange way of phrasing this moment to herself. She was hoping, bitterly, that there would be enough power in Liddell for him to reach his destiny like a man—just enough strength for him to die as one hero beaten down by many hands.
Near her, she heard a man say, “Jimmy, get that rope over there. We’re gonna need a rope before we get through with Liddell.”
Then Liddell came in on the crowd along the bar. Faces half cold and half smiling received him. Everyone turned to watch, and even the orchestra felt the nervous strain that was tensing the air and stammered and began to die out in the midst of a piece. It was strange, but every person inside the enclosure and perhaps most of those outside it seemed to know exactly what was happening and the dangers that lay ahead of Liddell as he walked down the length of the bar.
He walked straight on toward Skeeter herself. Her heart cringed in her with pity and with shame and with love.
Then she saw him step past her and take Mark Heath by the right wrist.
She recognized the cleverness of that move. You take a man by one wrist and he’s helpless. If he tried to make a vital move, he draws you with him. All his physical efforts are muffled. Then she looked up at Liddell’s face and realized that it was not a trick. Some mist of ennui or indifference was blown away from him. She thought she was seeing him for the first time.
He was saying, “Where did you get the money, Mark? Where did you get the big money? You were flat broke a couple of days ago.”
Someone behind was saying quietly, “Give me the rope. I’ll handle it.”
But if Liddell heard that and knew what it meant, he gave no sign. He seemed unaware of the way the crowd was pooling around him, thick as lodgepole pines where one of the old forest giants has fallen and left an opening.
Mark Heath shouted out, “I got that money from roulette … and what made you a chum of mine all at once? Get your hand off me, you damned …!”
Liddell flicked his free hand across the face of Heath. The blow made a loud, popping sound. It struck the mind of Skeeter with a stunning force. It seemed to lift the hair on her head, and it knocked the closely thronging faces agape. It froze the lips of Mark Heath over the next few words he was about to utter. Everyone could hear Liddell, though he was not lifting his voice, when he said, “They don’t pay you off with hundred dollar bills at roulette. But you can get ’em from a bank. You can rob a bank and get ’em! If you reach for a gun, I’ll break your back, Mark.”
Mark Heath cried out, “Soapy … Pudge … are you gonna just stand there …?”
But Soapy and Pudge just stood there, and everybody else was just standing until an outcry from the side split that crowd apart as water splits under the forefoot of a boat, for the outcry said, “It’s Pollard … that tall guy … that’s Pollard or the ghost of him!”
He came slumping along with an awkward, shambling step and a foolish grin on his face, making gestures that might be construed as apologies. With him came Sheriff Chris Tolliver, tenderly licking his cracked lip with the tip of his tongue, with more of the sour wine in his face than ever before.
Mark Heath saw that tall figure coming and groaned half audibly.
Liddell said, “Frank, you’re all kinds of a fool to show your face. It’s too early.”
This dead man who had returned to life put his hand on the shoulder of Liddell and said, “And leave them string you up to a cypress tree, Slip?”
“Gimme that hundred dollar bill,” said the sheriff, and when it was brought to him from the register, he spread it out flat on the bar, and said, “There’s the ink mark, all right. That’s what the bank teller said that I’d find.”
He put the bill in his pocket and, drawing out a bright little pair of handcuffs, fitted them over the wrists of Mark Heath with a click. Pudge McArthur and Soapy Jones were pawing at Frank Pollard, vainly trying to get attention from him.
Liddell said, “Did you know right along, Chris? Did you know I was faking right along?”
“It was a slick trick of yours,” said the sheriff. “That bullet hole in the wallet, and the blood, and everything was pretty slick. But the fact was that the first word the bank gave out about the money it lost was wrong. They found a whole thousand bucks that the thief had overlooked. So when I counted twenty-seven hundred in the wallet, I knew that you put that money there. I knew Frank, here, never had a hand in the dirty deal. I knew you had his horse, but you hadn’t put bullets into him. I knew you two were framing it to lie low till we got the real crook. But who would’ve thought that a bank robber would be fool enough to stay right in the town and start spending what he’d stole?”
Liddell said to Heath, “When I met you outside the sheriff’s office and you looking at Pollard’s horse and kind of white and sick, you were afraid that he’d come in and given himself up. Wasn’t that it?”
But Heath could not answer. He kept moistening his lips and swallowing, for his brain was a cold blank, but the taste of the champagne was still in his mouth.
Skeeter, in the meantime, slid through that crowd, and got away from them. When she reached the river road, she ran through the darkness and the cool of the air. For she was burning with grief and with shame, and yet there was a triumphant joy in her, also. She ran down the road past the place where she had whistled the man out of the tulles. That man had been Frank Pollard, of course.
A horse at a swinging gallop came up behind her, so she drew over to the side of the road and reduced her run to a dogtrot. She was not far from the shack in which old Pop would be waiting. She was panting. It had been hard to run in the clinging fluff of that green dress.
The rider pulled up beside her.
“Hi, Skeeter,” said the voice of Liddell.
“Yeah. All right. Go on and guy me,” said Skeeter. “I thought you were scared, and you showed me up. You showed everybody up. I was a fool. Go on and yap at me, and then get out of my sight!”
Liddell dropped to the ground beside her. “Are you through talking?”
“Yeah, I’m through talking. Go on and say your piece.”
“What’s the good of talking?” asked Liddell. “You know me almost better than Sis does … so I suppose you know I love you, Skeeter?”
“Wait a minute,” said Skeeter. “What are you trying to put over on me, Slip? Are you trying to make me cry or something? Because I won’t.”
“Are you old enough to marry me?” asked Liddell. “How old are you, Skeeter?”
“None of your business,” said Skeeter.
“I told you it was no good talking,” remarked Liddell.
“Yeah, but I’m terribly old, really,” Skeeter said.
“Sure you are. Sure. You’re as old as the hills,” said Liddell.
They walked on down the road. He found her hand and drew it inside his arm. They passed the tulles. They did not speak. They could see the stars in the sky and in the flat of the river at the same time. Still they walked on, more and more slowly with Cicely following wearily behind.
The Power of Prayer
Only two years into his publishing relationship with Street & Smith, which was almost exclusive between 1921 and 1932, Faust was asked to contribute two Christmas stories to magazines the company published. The first was to Detective Story Magazine—“A Christmas Encounter” (12/23/22) under his Nicholas Silver pseudonym—and the other was the story that follows that he titled “The Power of Prayer.” It
appeared under the John Frederick byline in Western Story Magazine (12/23/22). In it Gerald Kern embodies many of those same qualities of a figure found in several of Faust’s Western stories, a gunman who is also a gentleman.
I
One could not say that it was love of one’s native country that brought Gerald home again. It would be more accurate to say that it was the only country where his presence did not create too much heat for comfort. In the past ten years, forty nations—no less—had been honored by the coming of Gerald and had felt themselves still more blessed, perhaps, by his departure unannounced. Into the history of forty nations he had written his name, and now he was come back to the land and the very region of his birth.
No matter if the police of Australia breathed deeply and ground their teeth at the thought of him; no matter if the sleuths of France spent spare hours poring over photographs of that lean and handsome face, swearing to themselves that under any disguise he would now be recognized; no matter if an Arab sheik animated his cavalry by recounting the deeds of Gerald; no matter if a South American republic held up its million hands in thanksgiving that the firebrand had fallen upon another land; no matter were all these things and more, now that the ragged tops of the Rocky Mountains had swept past the train that bore him westward.
When he dismounted at a nameless town and drew a deep breath of the thin, pure, mountain air, he who had seen forty nations swore to himself that the land that bore him was the best of all.
He had been fourteen when he left the West. But sixteen years could by no means dim the memories of his childhood. For was not this the very land where he had learned to ride and to shoot? A picture of what he had been rushed upon his memory—a fire-eyed youngster with flaming red hair, riding anything on four feet on the range, fighting with hard-knuckled fists, man or boy, delving deep into the mysteries of guns, baffling his very brother with lies, the cunning depth of which were like the bottomless sea.
He smiled as he remembered. No one would know him now. The fire-red had altered to dark auburn. The gleam was banished from his eyes, saving on occasion. And the ragged urchin could never be seen in this dapper figure clad in whipcord riding breeches and mounted—oh, hardy gods of the Far West behold him!—in a flat English saddle.
But, for the nonce, an English saddle pleased him. Time was when he had made himself at home in a wild Tartar’s saddle on a wild Tartar horse, emptying his carbine at the yelling pursuers—but that was another picture, and that was another day. For the present he was happier encased in a quiet and easy manner of soft-spoken gentility. It was the manner which this morning he had slipped into as another man slips into a coat. And for ten years, to do on the spur of the moment what the moment made him desire to do, had been religion with Gerald.
To be sure, when he came down to breakfast in that outfit and ate his bread and drank his coffee in the little dingy hotel dining room, people stared at him. But Gerald was not unaccustomed to being the cynosure of neighboring eyes.
Then he went forth to buy a horse, and the dealer, after a glance at those riding breeches, led forth a high-headed bay, with much profane commendation and a high price. But Gerald, in a voice as smooth as a hand running over silk, pointed out that the beast was bone-spavined and declined with thanks. And so he went on from horse to horse. But it seemed that his glance went through each beast like a sword of fire. One look, and he knew the worst that could be said of it. The horse dealer followed, sweating with discomfort, until Gerald pointed to a distant corral with a single dark-chestnut mare standing in it.
“That yonder,” he said, “that one yonder, my friend, looks as though it might be for me.”
The dealer glanced at the little English saddle that all this time Gerald carried over the crook of his arm.
“I’ll saddle her for you in a minute,” he said. “Yep. You picked the winner. I’d hate to see Sorrow go, but for a price I guess it could be fixed.”
“Why is she called Sorrow?” Gerald asked.
“Because she’s got sad eyes,” said the horse dealer, and looked Gerald calmly in the face.
So the little English pad was placed on Sorrow, and she was led out, gentle-mannered as a lamb, until the rider dropped into his place. That jarring weight transformed Sorrow into a vivid semblance of dynamite exploding.
“She busted herself in sixteen directions all at once,” said the horse dealer afterward. “And, when she went the sixteenth way, this fellow stopped follering. He sailed about a mile and landed on his head. I came over on the run. I sure thought his neck was broke. But he was on his feet before I got to him. And the light of fighting fire was in his eye. He up and jumped onto that mare in no time. Well, she sun-fished and she bucked and she reared, and did she shake him this time? Not a bit of it! He stuck like a cactus burr. And after she’d tried her last trick, she realized she had an unbeatable master, and she quieted down like a pet kitten. He rode her away as if she had been raised by him and ridden by him for years.”
Which was the truth. Sorrow stepped high and pretty, albeit obediently, back to the hotel. Here Gerald left her at the hitch rack while he threaded his way through the group of loungers on the porch and went in to freshen his appearance. In a few minutes he came downstairs, whistling. On the front veranda he spoke to the first comer, and the first comer was Harkey, the big blacksmith.
“What is there to see around here?” he asked of Harkey. “Can you tell me of any points of interest?”
Harkey stared at him, and all he could see was the whipcord riding trousers and the tailor-made cigarette that drawled from a corner of Gerald’s mouth.
“I dunno,” said Harkey. “There ain’t nothing that I’ve seen around here that would match up with you as a point of interest.”
And he laughed heartily at his good jest, and along the veranda the loungers took up the laughter in a long chorus.
“My friend,” said Gerald gently, “you seem to me to be a trifle impertinent.”
“The devil I do,” said Harkey.
“But no doubt,” said Gerald, “you can explain.”
“Me?” Harkey said, and he balled his sooty fists.
“Yes,” said Gerald, “you.”
“I’ll see you and ten of your kind in hell first,” said Harkey.
“My dear fellow,” said Gerald, “how terribly violent you are.”
And with that he stepped six inches forward with his left foot and struck with his left hand, swift as an arrow off the string, deadly as a barbed spear driven home. Vain were those thick muscles that cushioned the base of Harkey’s jaw. The knuckles bit through them to the bone, and the shock, hammer-like, jarred his brain. The great knees of Harkey bent under him, benumbed. He slipped inert to the ground, his back against a supporting pillar, and Gerald turned to the rest.
“I have been asking,” he said, “for the points of interest around the town. Can any of you tell me?”
They looked upon the fallen body of Harkey. They stared into the dead eyes of the giant. They regarded his sagging jaw, and they were inspired to speak. Yonder among the mountains, due north and a scant fifty miles away, where the Culver River had gouged for itself a trench, gold had been found, they said, not many months before. And in the town of Culver City there would be points of interest, they said. Yes, there would be many points of interest for one who wished to see the West.
When his back was turned, they smiled to one another. No doubt this fellow was a man of some mark. There lay the body of Harkey, now showing the first quivering signs of life. And yonder was he of the whipcord riding breeches mounted upon famous Sorrow, famous Sorrow now dancing down the road with her first-found master. But in spite of these things, what would happen when Gerald reached Culver City, where the great men of the West were gathered? He might ride a horse as well as the next man. He might crush the slow-handed blacksmith with one cunning blow. But what would be his ventures among those m
en of might, those deadly warriors who fairly thought a gun out of the holsters and smote an enemy with an inescapable lightning flash?
Such were the thoughts of the wise men as they shifted their quids and rolled fresh cigarettes, but among them all there was not one guessed the truth, that the West was meeting the West as Greek meets Greek.
Even wiser men than they might have been baffled, seeing those daintily tailored trousers, those shop-made cigarettes each neatly monogrammed, and the high-stirruped, slippery saddle in which he sat. For who could have told that the same West that had fathered them in overalls and chaps and bandannas had fathered this returned prodigal also?
II
But Gerald knew. Ah, yes, Gerald knew, and the knowledge was as sweet to him as is the sight of a marked card to an expert gambler. Why had he roamed so long away from them? This, after all, was his country, in which he was to carve his destiny. Let Paris keep her laughing boulevards and Monte Carlo the blueness of her sea—these raw-headed mountains, these hard-handed men, spelled home to Gerald. What mattered it if, in his wallet, there was a scant $50, his all of worldly wealth, so long as here was a gun at his hip, smoke in his nostrils, and beneath him a horse that went as sweetly as a song?
Up the valley he wound, and, topping the first range, he looked down on a pitching sea of peaks. Somewhere among them was gold. Yes, due north from him he would find gold, and wherever there was gold, there was electric excitement thrilling in the air. Wherever there was gold, there were sure to be lovely women with clever tongues and brave men with hands of iron and other men with wits as keen as the glimmering edge of a Damascus blade. That was no meaningless simile to one who had learned saber play—and used it!
It was the dull time of the evening when he came in view of Culver City. The double-jacks and the single-jacks were no longer ringing in the valley. But up the valley road the teamster was still cursing his twelve mules to a faster walk, and up the valley road other men were coming on horseback or in old caravan wagons, a steady stream typical of that which flowed into Culver City all day and every day and never flowed out again. What became of them, then, since the city never grew beyond a certain size? That was an easy riddle. Superfluous life was needed. It was needed to be ground away in the mines that pockmarked with pools of shadow the valley here and there. It was needed still more to feed into the mill that ground out pleasure in the gaming halls and the dance halls in Culver City.
