Iron Dust

by Max Brand

  “Listen to me,” he was saying, in that tense whisper that was oddly like the tremor of his hand. “I’ve been hungry for that voice all these weeks… and months… and thousands of years. Go on and talk.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” said the girl, very grave. “I’m going to break up this cowardly conspiracy against you. I’ve written to my father to get the finest lawyer in the land and send him out here to make you… legal… again. Oh, I wrote a letter that’ll make Dad’s blood boil. You’ll have to meet Dad, Andrew Lanning.”

  He began to smile and shook his head. “It’s no use,” he said. “Perhaps your lawyer could help me on account of Bill’s death, but he couldn’t help me with Hal.”

  “Are you… do you mean you’re going to fight the other man, too?”

  “He killed his horse chasing me,” said Andrew. “I couldn’t stop to fight him, because I was comin’ down here to see you. But when I go away, I’ve got to find him and give him a chance back at me. It’s only fair.”

  “Because he killed a horse trying to get you… you’re going to give him a chance to shoot you?” Her voice had become shrill. She lowered it instinctively toward the end and cast a glance of apprehension toward the door. “You are quite mad,” said the girl.

  “You don’t understand,” said Andrew. “His horse was Gray Peter… the stallion.”

  The simple sentence seemed to mark the vast gulf of difference between them. She only stared at Andrew, and for the first time she grew aware of the fact that he was dripping on her carpet and that his clothes were tattered—remarkably ragged, in fact—and that he was by no means clean.

  “I’ve ridden Gray Peter myself,” went on Andrew. “And I would rather have killed a man than have seen Gray Peter die. Hal had Peter’s head in his arms,” he added softly. “And he’ll never give up the trail until he’s had it out with me. He wouldn’t be half a man if he let things drop now.”

  And she forgot the dripping, the ragged clothes, the dirt. In some manner she saw the whole picture of the death of Gray Peter in the saddened face of Andrew. If she had felt above him the moment before, she now felt infinitely beneath him.

  “So you have to fight Hal Dozier?”

  “Yes.”

  “But when that’s done…?”

  “When that’s done one of us will be dead. If it’s me, of course, there’s no use worryin’… if it’s Hal, of course, I’m done in the eyes of the law. Two… murders.”

  His eyes glinted, and his fingers quivered. It sent a cold thrill through the girl.

  “But they say he’s a terrible man, Andrew. You wouldn’t let him catch you?”

  “I won’t stand and wait for him,” said Andrew gravely. “But if we fight, I think I’ll kill him.”

  It was said with perfect lack of braggadocio.

  “What makes you think that?” She was more curious than shocked.

  “It’s just a sort of feeling that you get when you look at a man… either you’re his master or you aren’t. You see it in a flash.”

  “Have you ever seen your master?” asked the girl slowly.

  “I’ll want to die when I see that,” he said simply.

  Suddenly she clenched her hands and sat straight up. “It’s got to be stopped,” she said hotly. “It’s all nonsense, and I’m going to see that you’re both stopped.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  She was not angry, but very curious. It was, in fact, difficult to be angry with a man who kept his eyes upon her with a look of mortal hunger, mortal stillness.

  “Of course,” she said, without smiling, “I’m not a fighting man.”

  It was as though, when words failed him, he relied upon a gesture to take their place. She followed the glint of his eyes and the movement of his hand, and was sorry she had made that last remark. Too late she knew she had precipitated the trouble. She would have stopped him, but it was like raising a hand to halt an avalanche. She felt lost, as though a horse had taken the bit in his teeth and was whirling her on into danger, out of control. The emotion that had been in the quivering gesture of his hand and in the glint of his eyes was stamped freely on his whole face now. It was in his pallor, in the deep lines beside the mouth, in his very breathing, and above all, it flowed into the quality of his voice, which did not rise in pitch or in volume, but which took on a peculiar edge—something that went to her heart.

  “Four days ago,” he said, “you could have taken me in the hollow of your hand. I would have come to you and gone from you at a nod. That time is about to end.”

  He paused a little and looked at her in such a manner that she was frightened, but it was a pleasant fear. It made her interlace her fingers with nervous anxiety, but it set a fire in her eyes.

  “That time is ending,” said Andrew. “You are about to be married.”

  “And after that you will never look at me again, never think of me again?”

  “I hope not,” he answered. “I strongly hope not. I shall make myself busy with that purpose.”

  “But why? Is a marriage a blot or a stain?”

  “It is a barrier,” he answered.

  “Even to thoughts? Even to friendship?”

  “Yes.”

  A very strange thing happened in the excited mind of Anne Withero. It seemed to her that Charles Merchant sat, a filmy ghost, beside this tattered fugitive. He was speaking the same words that Andrew spoke, but his voice and his manner were to Andrew Lanning what moonshine is to sunlight. She had looked upon marriage simply as an acquisition, a gain, an inevitable event toward which all woman must move. And now a new point of view was opened to her, and she saw marriage as a bitter loss, a great gain, and a great sacrifice, a chance for joy, and a certainty for aching sorrow, inevitable trial by fire to which all womankind moves. She had been thinking of Charles Merchant as a social asset; she began to think of him now as a possessing force. Anne Withero possessed by Charlie Merchant. A faded smile came and went on her lips.

  “What you have told me,” she said, “means more than you may think to me. Have you come all this distance to tell me?”

  “All this distance to talk?” he said. He seemed to sit back and wonder. “Have I traveled for four days?” he went on. “Has Gray Peter died, and have I been under Hal Dozier’s rifle only to speak to you?” He suddenly recalled himself. “No, no. I have come to give you a wedding present.”

  He watched her color change. “Are you angry? Is it wrong to give you a present?”

  “No,” she answered in a singular, stifled voice.

  “It is this watch.” It was a large, gold watch and a chain of very old make that he put into her hand. “It is for your son,” said Andrew.

  She stood up; he rose instinctively. “When I look at it, I’m to remember that you are forgetting me?”

  A little hush fell upon them.

  “Are you laughing at me, Anne?”

  He had never called her by her name before, and yet it came as naturally upon his lips as a child’s name, say, comes upon the tongue of its playmate.

  She stood, indeed, with the same smile upon her lips, but her eyes were fixed and looked straight past him. They were dim and obscured by moisture. And presently he saw a tear pass slowly down her face. Her hand remained without moving, with the watch in it exactly as he had placed it there. A great awe came upon Andrew. All before he had felt that he was the master with the upper hand while they talked together.

  But now she wept, and his heart was humbled. It shocked him and crushed him with a feeling that in her were motives so deeply drawn, flowing from sources so remote that he could never have understood her even if she were to speak. All that mysterious power that is womanhood came upon him and about him like still and holy things—the whisper of rain in the evening when it is easiest to die, the pure and melancholy cold of autumn, the fragrance of a garden passed unknown in the night.

  It became impossible for him to bear the sight of her eyes. If he remained she might spe
ak, and he feared to hear her. A sense of a third presence, of another soul in the room overwhelmed him; he could not give it a name, and therefore he called it God.

  She had not stirred when he slipped without a noise through the window and was instantly swallowed in the rushing of the wind and rain.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  There was, as Andrew had understood for a long time, a sort of underground world of criminals-, even here on the mountain desert. Otherwise the criminals could not have existed for even a moment in the face of the organized strength of lawful society. Several times in the course of his wanderings Andrew had come in contact with links of the underground chain, and he learned what every fugitive learns—the safe stopping points in the great circuit of his flight.

  Three elements went into the making of that hidden society. There was first of all the circulating and active part, and this was composed of men actually known to be under the ban of the law and openly defying it. It was the smallest component part of the whole, and yet it was the part with which law-abiding society occupied itself mostly. Beneath this active group lay a stratum much larger that served as a base for the operating criminals. This stratum was built entirely of men who had at one time been incriminated in shady dealings of one sort and another. It included lawbreakers from every part of the world, men who had fled first of all to the shelter of the mountain desert and who had lived there until their past was even forgotten in the lands from which they came. But they had never lost the inevitable sympathy for their more active fellows, and in this class there was included a meaner element—men who had in the past committed crimes in the mountain desert itself and who, from time to time, when they saw an absolutely safe opportunity, were perfectly ready and willing to sin again.

  The third and largest of all the elements in the criminal world of the desert was a shifting-and-changing class of men who might be called the paid adherents of the active order. The longriders, acting in groups or singly, fled after the commission of a crime and were forced to find places of rest and concealment along their journey. Under this grave necessity, they quickly learned what people on their way could be hired as hosts and whose silence and passive aid could be bought. Such men were secured in the first place by handsome bribes. And very often they joined the ranks unwillingly. But when some peaceful householder was confronted by a desperate man, armed, on a weary horse—perhaps stained from a wound—the householder was by no means ready to challenge the man’s right to hospitality. He never knew when the stranger would take by force what was refused to him freely, and if the lawbreaker took by force, he was apt to cover his trail by a fresh killing.

  Of course such killings took place only when the longrider was a desperate brute rather than a man, but enough of them had occurred to call up vivid examples to every householder who was accosted. As a rule he submitted to receive the unwelcome guest. Also, as a rule, he was weak enough to accept a gift when the stranger parted. Once such a gift was taken, he was lost. His name was instantly passed on by the fugitive to his fellows as a safe man; other longriders were sure to come to his door quietly and ask shelter or food or some trifle in equipment. They always paid handsomely for what they received, and if they had to take on credit, they were certain to pay doubly when they were again in funds. It was a point of honor. And so the innocent householder, drawn into the underground circle by force and retained there by bribes, was kept in the new world. Once fairly in, he could not withdraw. Before long he became, against or with his will, a depository of secrets—banned faces became known to him. And if he suddenly decided to withdraw from that criminal world, his case was most precarious.

  The longriders admitted no neutrals. If a man had once been with them, he could only leave them to become an enemy. He became open prey. His name was published abroad. Then his cattle were apt to disappear. His stacks of hay might catch fire unexpectedly at night. His house itself might be plundered, and in not-infrequent cases, the man himself was brutally murdered. It was part of a code, no less binding because it was unwritten.

  All of this Andrew was more or less aware of, and scores of names had been mentioned to him by chance acquaintances of the road. Such names he stored away, for he had always felt that time impending of which Henry Allister had warned him, the time when he must openly forget his scruples and take to a career of crime. That time, he now knew, was come upon him.

  It would be misrepresenting Andrew to say that he shrank from the future. Rather he accepted it with a fierce joy. It offered him a swift life of action, an all-absorbing career, a chance for forgetfulness of the one thing that, before this, had held him back with a meager leash. He accepted everything that lay before him wholeheartedly, and with the laying aside of his scruples, there was an instant lightening of the heart, a fierce keenness of mind, a contempt for society, a disregard for life beginning with his own. One could have noted it in the recklessness with which he sent Sally up the slope away from the ranch house this night.

  He had made up his mind immediately to hunt out a safe man, recently mentioned to him by that unconscionable scapegrace Harry Woods, crooked gambler, thief of small and large, and whilom murderer. The man’s name was Garry Baldwin, a small rancher, some half day’s ride above Sullivan’s place in the valley. He was recommended as a man of silence. In that direction Andrew took his way, but coming in the hills to a dished-out place on a hillside, where there was a natural shelter from both wind and rain, he stopped there for the rest of the night, cooked a meal, rolled himself in his blankets, and slept into the gray of the morning.

  No sooner was the first light streaking the horizon to the east than Andrew wakened, and wakened in instant possession of all his faculties; he had gained a Napoleonic power to take his sleep whenever and wherever he chose, and wake refreshed and ready for a new start. He could sleep as a camel eats. If opportunity offered, he could spend a dozen hours wrapped in oblivion and then go freshly forty-eight hours without a new rest. Of all the rare qualities of hand and eye and mind that equipped Andrew Lanning for his hard life, there was nothing half so valuable as this command over sleep. The heartbreaking ride from Los Toros, which would have reduced another man to a tangle of nerves and weariness, left him as fresh as a bird. One sleep was all he needed to wipe his mind clean of the past.

  He saddled Sally this morning, and after a leisurely breakfast, started at a jog trot through the hills, taking the upslope with the utmost care. For nothing so ruins a horse as hard work uphill at the very beginning of the day. He gave Sally her head, and she went along in her own capricious manner, walking at a snail’s pace here, trotting there, breaking into a wild gallop now and again to stretch her muscles, and on the whole behaving like some irresponsible boy turned loose for the first time on the road. But by letting her go as she pleased, she topped the divide, breathing as easily as if she had been walking on the flat; she gave one toss of her head as she saw the long, smooth slope ahead of her, breaking into a tumble of rolling ground beyond, and then, without a word from Andrew or a touch of her heels, she gave herself up to the long, rocking canter that she could maintain so tirelessly for hour on hour.

  A clear, cold morning came on; the wind, changing from southwest to north, whipped the sky clear in a few moments; a rout of clouds piled away in storage to the south, and the sun came over the tips of the eastern mountains, dazzling bright and without a particle of warmth. Indeed, it was rarely chill for the mountain desert, with a feel of coming snow in the wind. Sally pricked one ear as she looked into the north, and Andrew knew that was a sign of trouble coming.

  He came in the middle of the morning to the house of Garry Baldwin. It was a wretched shack. The roof sagged in the middle, and the building had been held from literally falling apart by bolting an iron rod through the length of it.

  A woman who fitted well into such a background kicked open the door and looked up to Andrew with the dishwater still dripping from her red hands. He asked for her husband. He was gone from the house. Where,
she did not know. Somewhere yonder, and her gesture included half the width of the horizon to the west. There was his trail, if Andrew wished to follow it. For her part, she was busy and could not spare time to gossip. At that she stepped back and kicked the door shut with a slam that set the whole side of the shack shivering.

  At that moment Andrew wondered what he would have done those few months—those few lifetimes—when he lived in Martindale if he had been treated in such a manner. He would have crimsoned to the eyes, no doubt, and fled from the virago. But now he felt neither embarrassment nor fear or anger. He drew his revolver, and with the heavy butt banged loudly on the door. It left three deep dents in the wood, and the door was kicked open again. But this time he saw only the foot of the woman clad in a man’s boot. The door remained open, but the hostess kept out of view.

  “You be ridin’ on, friend!” she called in her harsh voice. “Bud, keep outen the kitchen. Stranger, you be ridin’ on. I don’t know you, and I don’t want to know you… a man that beats on doors with his gun!”

  Andrew laughed, and the sound brought her into view, a furious face, but a curious face as well. She carried a long rifle slung easily under her stout arm. There was the strength of a man in her shoulders and the readiness of a man about her hands.

  “What d’you want with Garry?” she asked.

  And he replied with a voice equally hard: “I want direction for finding Scar-Faced Allister.” He watched that shot shake her.

  “You do? You got a hell of a nerve askin’ around here for Allister. Slope, kid, slope. You’re on a cold trail.”

  “Wait a minute,” protested Andrew. “You need another look at me.”

  “I can see all there is to you the first glance,” said the woman calmly. “Why should I look again?”