by Max Brand
“Are we free to go on?” she asked him.
“Yes, and quickly in the name of heaven. I want to turn my back on that valley and my conscience.”
She loosed the reins, but drew them tightly again before the gray could take a step. A strange pain was wringing her heart. “Stephen,” she said, “if you go on with me, you have left your honor behind you forever.”
“Yes.”
“But what if your honor should become my honor,also?”
Christy seemed to whirl back of her own accord, and here was Stephen Macdona sitting his saddle, facing her.
“Tell me quickly, Constancia. My brain whirls. I cannot think my way through this thing. What do you mean?”
“I mean that I am a foolish, weak girl. I thought that I wanted to match strength with you and conquer you, Stephen. But now . . . I see that I am breaking my own heart.”
“Constancia, Constancia, by all that’s wonderful and beautiful and dear in the world . . . you are crying.”
“I am a great fool, Stephen. But I cannot . . . help it.”
“Does it mean that you care for me, then?”
She made an impulsive gesture with both hands. “If you had half an eye, Stephen, you would have seen from the very first instant that I loved you. Take me back to the valley. I would rather die than have you break your faith with Don Guido.”
They went slowly, slowly down the slope again, with many pauses. Just as they reached the valley floor a swirl of horsemen came rushing toward them. There was a chorus of shouts. To left and right the wild riders sheered away and left them facing Guido de los Pazos.
“It was too fine a night, Guido,” said Stephen Macdona. “We went out to watch the valley in the moon.”
Chapter 16
On the balcony before his library sat Señor Don Rudolfo Alvarez. His guest, who was none other than that same Diego Catalon who had recently resigned from the presidency because his mines were more important to him than political glory, smoked one of Don Rudolfo’s best Havanas and looked with him across the softness of the night. It was not complete darkness. There was just a stain of color in the west, and only the brightest stars and planets were visible.
“When I look back upon your life, Don Rudolfo,” said the politic guest, “I see one clever stroke after another. Until, at last, you have completed the picture of a successful man. That much is entirely clear. But let us go a little further. There is often a flaw in the finest diamond. And it seems to me that there is one weakness in your career.”
Don Rudolfo lifted his brows in the dimness of the evening. “So?” he said.
“May I speak outright, like an old friend?”
“By all means.”
“Very well. Since ancient days, wise men have always realized that one of the surest ways of founding their fortunes was in making wise marriages for their children. Is not that really quite true?”
“Most undoubtedly true, my friend. Continue.”
“Very well. You could look about you in Venduras and select whatever family you chose and then make the marriage proposal for an alliance between your daughter and the heir of the other house. Is not that true?”
“I hope that it is true. Continue. I shall have something to say when you have ended.”
“Very well. You might have selected the son of some great owner of a ranch like your own, and, uniting your interests, you could have dominated the plains. Or you could have allied yourself with some of the mine owners . . . I do not mention myself. But others, still richer and stronger, perhaps. Or again, you could have selected the son of a powerful political family, such as the Vegas. Could you not?”
“All of those things were possibilities, of course.”
“But, instead of all that, you select this man from a foreign nation . . . a wild American . . . a daredevil and a hero, I grant you, but a fellow who came to you without anything much greater by way of reputation than the number of times that he had flirted with death. Now, Don Rudolfo, tell me in what way you have strengthened your position by this alliance?”
Don Rudolfo considered for a moment, eying the dark of the night. “All of these things, to be sure, I have thought of,” he said. “But I had to consider other things, also. I had to have in mind that, if I married my daughter to the son of some other rich man, people might begin to be envious, because this is an envious country of ours, Diego.”
“That is true.”
“And it might have looked as though I were trying to fasten too strong a grip on the wealth of the country. However, there is something lost in one way and gained in another. Consider this, Don Diego, that in the past year there have been waves of revolution passing here and there. Haciendas are burned to the ground, and men are murdered in their houses. All around me there have been calamities, but my lands remain unharmed. There has not been a single sheep driven away. Every cow remains to me. My horses have not been stolen, and what is the explanation, then?”
“It is true.” Don Diego sighed. “We suffer from these bandits. I cannot tell what sort of a lightning conductor you use. But it is notorious over the entire country that you are no longer harmed by them . . . not since your daughter was carried away . . . and returned to you.”
“Very true. Now I shall tell you the reason, amigo. I keep with me a young tiger, and the robbers fear him more than the devil. Because if they dare to offend him, he follows them not like an ordinary man but like one of their own kind. He runs them to the ground and slaughters them without mercy. Besides, the greatest robber of them all . . . that great de los Pazos . . . is like a father to Stephen Macdona. And I have nothing to fear. By this marriage of my daughter to the adventurer, I have made my property safe. It is better to keep a little in safety than to build a great house that may one day be burned to the ground.”
“But when this property comes into the hands of Macdona . . . will he not be a waster?”
“A conqueror is not a waster, my friend. Besides, he follows a master.”
“Is his wife his controller, then?”
“His wife? There is no such thing between them. They are like one. No, but they are the two proudest people in the world and they have both given up their pride to another thing.”
“Very well. But tell me what that thing may be.”
“Listen, and you will hear the voice of the master of them both . . . there, it begins again.”
Don Diego canted his head. And out of the distance he heard the thin, far, high-pitched crying of a child.
Uncle Chris Turns North
The year 1923 saw sixteen short novels and ten serials published by Faust under various pseudonyms, mostly in Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, his primary market between 1922 and 1934. This story, “Uncle Chris Turns North,” appeared under the Max Brand pseudonym in the December 8, 1923 issue of Western Story. It is an unusual story about power and tyranny, in which Chris Martin, the czar of the local village, tests the extent of his reach when he takes on Willie Merchant, the hardworking young man who has fallen in love with his niece, Jennie.
Chapter 1
What Willie Merchant decided, when he had finished dressing and looked at himself in the glass, was that his face was not so bad—it was his name that damned him. There was nothing spectacular even in his appearance, to be sure. That is to say, he was of about average height; his hair was between sandy and brown; his eyes were between gray and blue and looked a little green in some lights; his features were simply as average as the rest of him, except that his mouth was a little wider. He stretched that mouth with a grin, and the effect startled him.
“But, after all,” he decided, “old Chris Martin won’t give a hang about my looks. It’s my bank account that he’ll inquire after.”
He stepped to the door, and the hot wind rolled heavily against him. It burned up his perspiration in an instant; it scorched his body even through his clothes. But it was better than the stifling closeness of the atmosphere inside. He scowled, so that a steep shadow
fell across his eyes, and, thus sheltered, he was able to look forth upon the landscape.
“Mostly flat,” he said to himself.
In truth, it was not a very attractive picture. There was just enough roll to the ground to spoil the grand effect of an absolute level plain standing away to the horizon, but there was not roll enough to give the comforting variety of hills. The surface was simply thrown into little waves one hundred yards apart—that was all. It looked to Willie Merchant as though that landscape had been turned out with a gigantic rolling pin. The only bit of mountain sculpture was the Diablo range to the south and west. They were a huge distance for riding, but the eye went to them so easily through the dry air that no tint of the horizon blue was on them in the midday.
They were simply big, brown, naked ugly masses, a poor monument to the Creator of this wretched country. Yet Willie Merchant surveyed the scene with much complacence—if in some respects it were ugly, in others it was delightful. For instance, that sunburned bunchgrass, withering still more in this hot wind, had the most astonishing nutritious properties. It fattened certain scores of wide-horned, redeyed cattle that roamed the desert, branded with a peculiar scrawl and cross. A most delightful hieroglyphic, in the eyes of Willie, because it meant that they were his property.
No wonder, then, that he looked fondly at that brown grass, and then away to a single form of a cow that strolled into the skyline across the top of a knoll and then disappeared. Only a fleeting glimpse. But he knew the creature. It was the four-year-old brindled mongrel among the half dozen he had bought for a song from Peterson last winter, when they were half starved. He had nursed them through the bad season almost by hand. Today five of the six were living and prospering. They were money in his pocket. By such shifts as these he had built up his little herd in the amazingly short time of two years. After all, he had not received the weight of a single hand to help him. It was all his own work. The only previous preparation had been the year he spent accumulating his pay. That saved cash, and then infinite labor to eke out his capital, had given him these returns.
So great were the returns that Willie Merchant lifted his brown face and smiled toward the white-hot sky; his ideas concerning a divinity were very vague, very less real than the wisps of cloud forms here and there that the sun had not yet been able to burn up. But to whatever God there were, he rendered up his thanks.
The house in which he lived was small, but it was his own. His own money had bought the remnants of old Sam Chandler’s shack in the draw. How few dollars had been needed to persuade the whiskey-loving old scamp. His own labor had brought that lumber across the hills; his own uninstructed hands had, somehow, contrived to erect the shack. For two years he had struggled on, propping it, refitting it, making it finally ugly enough, but sound and strong. He rejoiced in the possession of three rooms. There was a kitchen-dining room. There was a bedroom. And there was another room more splendid than the others. He himself hardly knew what to call it. Surely it would be presumption to name it a parlor.
At the thought, he turned from the door and went to the front of the house and gingerly pulled open the door of the sealed chamber. The window was kept tightly shut lest sand and dust blow in. Accordingly the room was furnace hot, and the stinging smell of new varnish, half melted, came to the nostrils of Willie Merchant. But that he did not mind. What he looked at was the grass rug on the floor, embroidered with a brilliant Indian design, and two pictures on the wall that had been cut from magazines, but which looked well enough in neat frames, and, most of all, he regarded three great bundles wrapped in coarse cord and paper. The biggest was the rocking chair. The other two were straight. Willie regarded them with a leaping heart. Her hand was to cut the strings, remove the paper, and bring those chairs to use and the light of day.
She was pretty Jennie Martin, so gay and so happy that the only blot on her life was the freckles across the bridge of her nose. But Willie was blind to such small defects; to him she had seemed an angel, on a day, three years before. The sight of Jennie had made him begin his savings. The sight of her had made him toil and slave for two more years. Now, at the last, he was ready to marry her.
There was a single last hurdle to be jumped. Jennie herself was willing; she had told him so two months before. She had ridden to the ranch. She had inspected everything with cries of delight. She had nodded with a flushed, uncomprehending face of joy as he explained with magnificent gesture, how his little ranch would expand west and west toward the Diablo range, and how the cows would multiply. She had been escorted through two of the rooms of the house and had declared it was more than good enough to start housekeeping in. And to think that he himself had planned and executed this dwelling. How big and wise and strong he was. The heart of Willie ached to think of her words. And how she had teased and pleaded to be allowed to peek—one single glance, no more—into the sealed chamber. But he had been adamant. He had wondered at his own strength. In the end, when he took her home, she had cried for pure happiness into the hollow of his shoulder, and all the stars in heaven had seemed to look down upon Willie Merchant to bless their union.
Yet still there was one hurdle to cross, and that was to gain the consent of Chris Martin, her uncle. He had raised her. Therefore he had a right to speak as to her destiny in her years to come. What answer he would give was the great question now, and, although Willie Merchant could not imagine why he might be refused, yet no one could be sure of what old Chris would do. All the old-timers declared that his mind was as unreadable and whimsical as the mind of the Sphinx. Yet to Willie himself he had always seemed a kind and simple man, singular only from the fewness of his words.
There was no time to ponder now, however. So Willie picked rope and saddle from the wall and went out to the corral. The four horses began to swirl about when they saw him coming. It did not confuse Willie. He opened the gate, stepped inside, dropped the saddle upon the top rail of the fence, and with a single wrist movement shook out the noose of his rope. Then he advanced. It was the roan he wanted, the fiery, ugly-headed roan. He wanted to feel the strength of that indomitable little mustang under him on the way to town for the momentous interview. It would give his very mind greater power. So he sifted through the others, and let the three fly to the far corners of the corral. But the roan he cornered and advanced on tiptoe toward him, prepared to spring to either side. For the roan was rope-wise to a degree. And it could dodge like a house cat. In one hand Willie held the rope end, noosed. In the other hand he carried the real noose. When the roan plunged to one side, he feinted with the nearest hand, and the horse finally was backed into the corner, watching him with glittering little eyes of hate.
At length, desperate, the roan made a blind charge for freedom, neither to the right nor the left, but straight at Willie. Willie dodged like a bullfighter, just before those gaping teeth were in reach of him. The rope slithered out of his hand. The noose floated out, formed in a perfect circle above the roan, and then dropped around his neck. The roan stood still. He had been rope burned too many times not to surrender the instant that prickling coil had hold on him. He stood like a lamb while the master saddled him, and like the most well-trained saddle horse he cantered off when Willie Merchant had mounted him. Only his ears were flattened along his neck, and his little bloodshot eyes watched the rider from their corners. Someday that horse would make him trouble, but Willie never worried about the future.
He was in the presence of Martin before he even saw the old Tartar, for, when he entered the town, he was upon Martin’s land. All the town and all the houses upon it belonged to the little czar of the district. There were twenty houses or shacks. They were all Martin’s. There was a combination hotel and general merchandise store. It was Martin’s. There was a blacksmith shop. It was Martin’s. So were broad stretches of land outside the town and the cattle that grazed on them. All belonged to Martin. Perhaps he was not worth, actually, many hundreds of thousands of dollars. But he seemed to be richer than a millionaire, for
, what he owned, he owned with an absolute right. The families that were his tenants were almost his slaves. They owed him money, and they were powerless in his grasp. But he never pressed his tenant debtors for the money they owed him. He gave them freely his keen, practical wisdom. There was not a man in his village who did not live in comfort. Yet they feared him, rather than loved him, for they knew that to differ with him was to be ruined. Rebellion he would not tolerate. In short, he was a tyrant. He was a kindly tyrant usually, but, when his fur was rubbed the wrong way, his claws were instantly out.
Willie Merchant could not help thinking of these things as he entered the town, and for every step his horse advanced, his heart sank lower. If the czar refused him, what would he do? What could he do?
Chapter 2
His courage returned when he actually faced the great man. Old Chris kept a room in a corner of the hotel as his office. It was a most unpretentious place. It was up two flights of stairs, in the little corner room that was all that the third story consisted of. The stairs were unpainted, rickety, with the center of the boards hollowed out by the treading of many rough boots. The door of the office sagged upon one hinge. For three years old Chris had let it hang like that, lifting it carefully open, and shutting it again with equal caution. He used to say that he could read the character of a man by the fashion in which he opened and shut that door. The office itself was a heap of scraps and a little of odds and ends. Whatever old Chris found, he picked up; whatever he picked up, he saved.
Martin was dressed, when Willie Merchant found him, in a soft white shirt with a double stripe of blue and red lines running through the cloth. It had shrunk so that the collar and the sleeves were much too small for him. But he made short work of those hindrances. He cut off the sleeves at his fat elbows, and he left the collar unfastened. Such was the shirt of the great man; the rest of his costume consisted of a pair of old brown trousers, faded to a tan across the knees and the seat, and bagging beyond conception at the knees. They were held up by a single suspender, which was used out of preference and not carelessness. It crossed the left shoulder, and Chris used to say that this gave him a little more freedom in his right shoulder and arm. What he needed that slightly greater freedom for, need not be said. His boots, to complete his costume, were heavy, unpolished, shapeless things, and, most of all offensive to the eye of a cowpuncher like Willie Merchant, who would not have donned other than shop-made boots had he starved to buy them.
