Comanche

by Max Brand

  “There, there,” murmured Dunstan. “No one doubts your nerve. They all know that you’re an Apperley. And they all know the stuff that your brother is made of. Only . . . don’t you want to think over what I say?”

  “I can’t do it. I’d be ashamed . . .”

  “Better be a little bit ashamed than a great deal dead, Apperley.”

  “Perhaps, but not for me. Besides, I’m not afraid. I’m ready for them.”

  “Ah, man, well, you’re your own best judge. But I want you to keep up your good work in this town. Good night, then.”

  “Thank you for your kindness, Dunstan. Good night.”

  The buckboard rolled off through the night.

  Apperley looked after it for a moment, frowning in the greatest indecision. He glanced over his shoulder. He never had looked back in the other days, for he could always make sure that his back would be guarded. Now he was defenseless from the rear.

  The whole town knew that he had lost his guard, and it was plain what importance they attached to this change. However, he would not surrender himself to his imagination. He refused to let himself be daunted too greatly. He held his course toward the Grange cottage.

  Chapter Twenty

  In the meantime, the news flew by magic to the ears of the fat boss of Yeoville. And big Shodress could hardly believe in tidings so pleasant. But he wasted no time. In the back room of his hotel, busy with cards and bad whiskey, there were sure to be a few rough fellows at all hours of the day and most of the hours of the night. He went into that section of his domain, now, and glanced over the wreckage of the gambling room. Wreckage was the only word for it. Once a month, if not oftener, that room was the scene of a free-for-all fight in which chairs were tossed about promiscuously and guns blazed. This occurred when some member of the party had been caught in a manipulation of the cards, not altogether unquestionable. For some time Shodress had attempted to maintain the good condition of his game room in spite of these domestic wars, but the cost was too great. He started to repair the damage with bailing wire and rope. So the place was filled now with tied-together chairs and tables that leaned on rickety legs as though anxious to fall for the hundredth time to the floor.

  There were half a dozen men now in the room, three of them playing penny-ante poker, and three sitting gloomily looking on. The professional eye of Shodress told him instantly that the three who looked on were inactive merely because they were broke. He scanned them with inquiring eyes.

  He never forgot faces, and these were well-known to him. They were three weather-beaten wild ones who had made various parts of the globe too hot to hold them, so that at last, like wasps driven by hot smoke, they were forced into the one remaining haven of quiet, where their virtues would be appreciated more than anywhere else and where their vices would be instantly forgiven.

  In a word, they had come to Yeoville, and there instantly they had come into the service of its lord—the fat, and clever, and monstrously rich Alec Shodress. And since the work that was to be done for him was almost infinitely great, so also was his need of men.

  He employed them at once, in various ways. Dan McGruder, with his red face covered with blond bristles of unshaven beard, his blue eyes popping out, and his buckteeth pushing back his lips in a continual unconscious smile, had been dispatched forthwith upon the trail of a pair of Mexican ruffians who, a day or so before, had raided the place of a shepherd in the employ of the great Shodress. The dark, greasy fellow, Lefty Mandell, had the simpler task of hunting down a cardsharper who had just passed through Yeoville, collected some money by nefarious tricks, and ridden hastily out again. The third man was Hank Westover, a very long, thin man, with great joints and thin shanks. He had been added to a posse of cow hunters that was about to voyage away through the hills in search of cattle, preferably the cows of Andrew Apperley.

  All three had acquitted themselves admirably at the very first essay. When the posse of rustlers was surprised in the midst of its work by a yelling, charging, raging band of Apperley’s indignant cowpunchers, Hank Westover had dropped to the rear, seeking orders from no one but his own intelligence. Taking shelter behind some rocks that crowned the ragged top of a hill, he had sent a bullet through the shoulder of the leader of the cowpunchers, and thereafter he fought with such a clever and fast-shooting rear guard action that the cowpunchers were foiled and beaten off with the cost of another wounded man, while Westover leisurely rode away through the hills and rejoined his comrades.

  Lefty Mandell followed a twisting trail for five days and found the gambler at work in a valley town. Lefty watched the fellow clean the pockets of the crowd around his crooked faro layout. Then Lefty stuck him up in the quiet of a back alley and took away from him all his money, his guns, and his faro layout. Then, taking the crooked gambler’s horse for a full measure of revenge, he galloped away and carried his spoil to his new master, without attempting to steal a single penny of the sum that was in his possession.

  To Dan McGruder had been assigned the most terrible task of all. He went after the Mexicans, found a hot trail, and at the end of the second day, he rushed down and collared them both. But they showed fight. He killed one, but was himself twice wounded.

  He crawled away into the hills, nursed his own wounds back to health, and once more dauntlessly took up the long-cold trail. But he knew that he had crippled the Mexican almost as badly as he himself had been. For a month he wandered south, following idle hints in the place of real, tangible clues, until at length, following his own nose, he rode straight up to the man he wanted.

  The Mexican was seated in the door of a house, in the Mexican half of a little cow town. The guns spoke one word on either side. The Mexican leaned out from the doorsill and dropped full length and face down in the thick, velvety dust, and McGruder, having watched the smoke float off up to the heavens, turned back on the home trail, very worthily pleased with himself.

  These were the three chosen spirits who were watching the progress of the game of penny-ante when Shodress entered the game room. He called them away and talked to them in an empty corner of the barroom, over glasses of red, evil whiskey.

  “Boys,” he said, “I’ve got on hand an easy job. Single Jack has quit. You know that?”

  They nodded.

  “Then the track is cleared. You go and get that puppy, David Apperley.”

  Hank Westover and Lefty Mandell pushed back their chairs with grunts, tossed off the rest of their whiskey, and stood up at once. But Dan McGruder, his buckteeth bared and his lips grinning even a little more than usual, shook his head with vigor.

  “What’s the matter, Dan?” asked Westover. “You ain’t afraid of that tenderfoot, are you?”

  Dan had established his own repute for valor so very clearly that he did not even choose to deny this suggestion. But he said with emphasis: “Most jobs, I don’t mind, but I don’t want no newspaper work in mine.”

  “What do you mean by newspaper work?” asked Shodress.

  “I mean the sort of stuff that gets a man into the headlines. I don’t mind going after the scalp of a greaser or an Indian. You know that. And I’ll take after any card crook or gunfighter that has a white skin, too. But to hit the trail after a decent gent, and a fellow that stands for law and order, and that ain’t done nothing low-down and mean . . . why, that’s different. I may be a gunfighter, but I’m not any murderer.”

  This speech was made with such violent earnestness that the two companions of the gunfighter stared widely and admiringly at him. Then Westover’s Adam’s apple rose and fell in much agitation while a thought worked into his bullet head.

  “Now blame me if you ain’t right,” declaimed Hank. “When a gent gets mixed up with a killing that brings out the reporters as thick as bees after honey, then it’s about time for him to wear a loose collar, because it ain’t gonna be long before his neck will be stretched.”

  Shodress listened to this talk with a great deal more emotion than he cared to show, and his brig
ht, ratty eyes flicked back and forth from face to face. They were his superiors in downright honesty, but he felt that he would enslave them still by his superior cunning. He said: “Boys, you think that this David Apperley is a square-shooter?”

  “He is,” answered Dan McGruder without hesitation. “I’ve seen that gent. He’s got a clean eye. He looks right down to your backbone, and no mistake. He’s kind of up and lofty, but he means well. And he’s got a square-shooter for a brother, too.”

  If Andrew Apperley had been there to hear this tribute to his brother, he would have been a glad man, indeed.

  “I’ll ask you this,” snapped Shodress. “Do you know Steve Grange?”

  “Sure, I know Steve. Him and me have rode a good many trails together. He’s a fine lad, that Steve. Wild as a tiger, though.”

  “Yes,” said Shodress, “wild and mean and ornery and low-down is what they say Steve is.”

  “Do they?” exclaimed Dan McGruder, his dangerous smile increasing in width, while his prominent teeth glistened. “I’d like to catch hold of the rat that dared to pass remarks like that about my bunkie. There ain’t no more poison in Steve than there is in mush and milk. He’d give you the shirt off his back, and he’d fight till he died for any man that he liked.”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted Shodress. “You can’t mean what you say. You’re wrong about one of the two things. Because you say that both Apperley and Steve Grange is fine fellows. But they can’t be, because Apperley is trying to put your bunkie in prison. That ain’t all. In prison, Steve Grange is gonna go crazy. It’s all that they can do now to keep him from tearing his way through the walls of the jail, he hates being locked up so bad. And when they try to take him to a penitentiary, there’ll be the devil to pay. Is that right?”

  McGruder was silenced by this crossfire, whereat Shodress cleverly took him in reverse with the following remark: “And will Apperley ever rest until he’s put his man behind the bars? No, you don’t know him if you think that he will. He’s like a bulldog, when it comes to freezing to his hold, and he’s never going to stop until he’s got poor Steve in stripes. And that’s the same as shooting Steve through the head. You know that. He’ll fight his way clear, or he’ll die trying.”

  Dan McGruder acknowledged the truth of this by saying, as he rose to his feet: “Shodress, I never seen the truth of this until you explained it to us so clear, just now. And I’m obliged to you. I’ll go find Apperley myself.”

  “Boys,” cried Alec Shodress, delighted, “you ain’t going to be forgotten for this job! And if it makes talk, I’ll see that you’re taken care of. At least, there won’t be any Apperley to prosecute you in the court and buffalo that fool of a judge. I’ve got five hundred dollars ready for each of you the minute that you come back and tell me that the work is done.”

  Five hundred dollars—more than a year’s wages, for the sake of a moment’s exercise of the trigger finger? Mandell and Westover grinned with pleasure, but McGruder answered almost sadly: “I dunno that I’m in this game until I’ve talked with young Apperley. And if I am in it, it’s not for coin. If I took a penny, I’d be a murderer. But if I shoot Apperley, it’ll be because I’m the friend of Steve Grange.”

  “I’ll remember that,” said Shodress, with respect in his manner. “And I’ll see that Steve hears what you’ve said.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  No man can tell what would have happened had not the three been led by the singularly unerring instinct of Dan McGruder. It carried him straight across from the front of the hotel, and down the main street, and then dipped him through a narrow alley and so onto the crooked, winding lane that skirted the edge of Yeoville. And coming down that winding way, now a hundred feet from the edge of the Grange garden, the three suddenly encountered David Apperley.

  “It’s him!” croaked Hank Westover. “I’ve got him, boys.”

  But the lightning hand of Dan McGruder reached out and beat down the gun hand of his companion. “We’re gonna talk to him first,” he said. “This ain’t no murder party, Hank.”

  Hank Westover snarled. “There was never any good in talking first and shooting afterward,” he said.

  Perhaps there was a profound truth buried behind the words of Hank Westover, but McGruder did not pause to consider. David Apperley, having seen a flash of steel through the evening light—a flash that he rightly guessed to have been a drawn gun—had paused in his walk, and now he awaited developments, his right hand resting significantly upon his hip. To him went McGruder.

  “Apperley,” he said, “my name is Dan McGruder. I want to talk to you a minute about a bunkie of mine. I mean about Steve Grange.”

  “What have you to say?” asked David Apperley, casting a keen glance in the direction of the two who remained in the background.

  “Don’t you bother about them,” said Dan. “They ain’t gonna do you no harm. I’m here to talk things over with you peaceable, first.”

  There might have been a good deal of gloomy meaning attributed to this speech, and David felt that he saw through it at a glance. He also felt that his time to die had probably come to him. But though he turned very white, and though life at that moment —particularly so near to the fragrance of the Grange garden—seemed peculiarly sweet to him, still he never thought of retreating, or of changing his attitude to one of conciliation.

  “I can listen to you for a moment, McGruder,” he said. “I suppose that Shodress sent you?”

  “I’m talking for myself, and for nobody else.”

  “I’ll give you this warning first, McGruder. I know that you’ve come after me because Single Jack is no longer with me. You fellows think that I’m helpless with a gun. Well, I’m not. So much for that. Now what have you to say?”

  You will see that the speeches of David were far from gentle, but McGruder did not take them amiss. He knew that this was a very brave man whose back was against a wall, and, for his part, he was filled with nothing but admiration for the lawyer.

  He could not help saying: “This is a tight squeeze for you, old-timer. I like the way that you’re sassing us back. But I want to tell you that I ain’t thinking about Single Jack. If he was with you, it’d make no difference. I’d say exactly what I’m gonna say now. I like you, Apperley. I’m for you. You got nerve, and that’s what counts in this chunk of the country. But you’re hounding a bunkie of mine to death. I mean Steve Grange.”

  “Steve Grange,” echoed Apperley, and could not help glancing to the cottage. “Did she send you after me, too?”

  “You mean Hester?” asked the other with instant apprehension. “No. I ain’t any messenger for a girl. I’m telling you that I’ve rode trail and rode range with Steve Grange, and that he’s all right. I’m giving you that testimony outside of the court.”

  The mind of the lawyer could not help sifting this evidence and trying to find out what it was worth. “You tell me what you know about Grange. I tell you what I know . . . which is simply that a herd of cattle belonging to Andrew Apperley were cut out and driven away by this man when he was surprised by five men and surrounded. Even against odds like that, he started to fight back . . .”

  “Aye,” said the other in a ringing voice, “there ain’t any yellow in old Steve.”

  “Like a desperado, he fought with perfect recklessness, regardless of his own life and the lives of the other men. One of his bullets went through the hat of a ’puncher, and another clipped a hole through the side of a man’s coat, and no doubt the third bullet would have brought down a victim. But just then his shooting was interrupted by a slug that struck him a glancing blow on the head and knocked him to the ground. That is the only reason we have Steve Grange before he had committed a murder or two. For all of these reasons, and partly, also, because we know that he’s always been a proud, careless, free-swinging, gunfighting cowboy, ready for a fight, and never very ready for work . . .”

  “That’s wrong,” said the other, breaking in at once. “I’ve worked side-by
-side with Steve. Nobody at a camp could ever call him lazy. He’ll do his share of range riding in February, through the snow, and he never quit in August because it was hot. He ain’t a welsher, any way that you look at it. I’ve bunked beside him. I’ve rode trail beside him. There was never a squarer shooter in the world.”

  “In a way,” said David, “I think that you may be right. Heaven knows that I haven’t the slightest feeling of malice against him. He’s a brave fellow, and, in his own way, honest. But he steals cattle, and he tries to kill people who want to stop the stealing. There’s only one answer to that . . . the penitentiary!”

  There was a little pause. The wind, stealing softly up the street, rolled a small column of dust by, barely seen in the mingled starlight and dusk. It was like the form and the whisper of a passing ghost, and David knew that he was near to the end of his days.

  “I got this to say,” responded McGruder. “I ain’t a head for fancy arguing and thinking things over. But I got to say that a friend is a friend, and I wouldn’t give anything for a friend that wasn’t ready to stand by me forever. Take you, Apperley. I like you. You’re straight. You’re a man. Gimme half a chance, and I’d be willing to talk for you just the way that I’d talk for Steve. But Steve is my friend. I ask you, will you please let him off of this bad job that he’s got into? Because if you herd him into prison, he’ll go mad.”

  There was a great deal of moving emotion behind the voice of Dan McGruder, and his buckteeth glistened as his lips grinned back from them. So vast was his earnestness.

  “There’s nothing that I can do,” said David Apperley. “He deserves the bars, and he’s going behind them.”

  “Apperley, you must change your mind.”

  “I can’t, McGruder. That’s final.”

  A strong, full, high-pitched woman’s voice broke into song that swelled up through the dusk from the Grange cottage. It was Hester singing in her garden, and it struck David Apperley as a most strange thing that the woman he loved should be singing so gaily and so near to him when he was about to die.