The Fugitive

by Max Brand

  He went immediately to the shop, and there found Hank lying on the floor in the coolest corner, with his head upon a small sack of shavings, sleeping off the effects of his liquor. A smile of bliss was on his lips. His thin face was flushed by the happy vision that visited his sleep. One old hand lay, palm upward, on the floor of hard-compacted earth. Its palm was calloused like the heel of an athlete. The fingers were shriveled and wasted by age. They were curled almost as far shut as though the familiar handle of the sledge were in their grip. It was a noble and weary old face. Seen apart from his garb, those features would have served a sculptor for the type of a great statesman, wearied with the cares of his nation, and sinking under the burden of public service. The nose was long and finely formed. The forehead was a towering magnificence, with the blue tracery of veins showing distinctly at the temples. The eyes were very large, and sunk deeply, as with long mental labors beneath the overhanging brow. The chin was long, square, and beautifully formed.

  Even Chris Martin, who was as devoid of sentiment as stone, was touched with emotion and awe as he looked down upon the sleeper. But awe and emotion could not rule him long. He presently extended his foot and ground the toe of his cowhide boot into the ribs of the old smith. Hank Ballon groaned, clapped his hand to his bruised side, then opened his eyes and saw the face of his visitor. He pushed himself into a sitting posture with his long, thin arms.

  “Howdy, Chris,” he said pleasantly, and he smiled upon Martin. It was a beautiful smile. In sickness it made him seem whole. In age it made him seem young again.

  “Stand up,” ordered Chris Martin.

  The smith caught hold upon the old anvil that stood near him and heaved himself up. He yawned widely, stretched himself, and was suddenly quite sober and steady. The imminence of the danger that confronted him was sufficient to make him rally all his faculties.

  “I come here to wait for you, like you told me to do, Mister Martin,” he said ingratiatingly.

  Old Chris looked steadily upon him, and a savage satisfaction in his power filled him when he saw the glance of the other waver and fall away. “You been drunk again, Hank.”

  “Drunk? Me?” began Hank with honest indignation.

  “Ain’t no good to lie. Not to me.”

  Poor Hank passed a hand slowly across his forehead, bewildered, as though unable to remember accurately what he had been and what he had done even no earlier than this same day. “Maybe I had a mite too much,” he admitted.

  “You’ve been drunk again,” said the tyrant. “How much did you borrow from me last month?”

  “Ten dollars,” said Hank in a dying voice.

  “What’d you promise me then?”

  “That I’d stop drinking, Mister Martin. I aimed to do it, too, but seemed like this morning . . .”

  “Damn what it seemed to you. Looked to me like you’d lied.”

  At the insult, Hank flushed to the roots of his gray hair. But he looked steadfastly down upon the floor. He was more enchained than any galley slave. He could not strike back.

  “How much d’you owe me altogether?”

  “A hundred and thirty-five dollars,” murmured Hank, almost inaudible now.

  “A hundred and thirty-five dollars!” cried Chris, with honest indignation. “A hundred and thirty-five dollars is a lot to be owed . . . by an old gent with one foot in the grave. A damned lot of money.”

  Hank shifted his weight from his left foot to the right. He sighed, but could not speak, and still he looked steadily down at the floor.

  “You been going from bad to worse,” said Chris. “You used to have some sense. Damned if you ain’t losing even that. You get worse all the time. I’m tired . . . I’m through.”

  Hank shuddered as the blow struck. He looked up now, indeed, bewildered, incredulous. But the face of old Chris was the face of a demon. He kept his voice low, but the effort made him white.

  “I’m through,” he continued. “You can move out your things. You can go wherever you please. You can pay me back that money you owe me when you’ve made any . . . which’ll be never, I guess. But I want this shop and the house you been living in. I’ve charged you low rent on ’em both. I’ll put ’em where they’ll pay me better, now. Good-bye.”

  He went out, not too hastily, for he wanted to enjoy what was sure to follow. And, just as he reached the doorway, a step came up behind him, and a hand touched his shoulder. He turned halfway around.

  “You ain’t serious, Mister Martin?”

  “Ain’t I? You old loggerhead, d’you think I been talking just for lung exercise? Aim to make a fool out of me?”

  He was not even answered. Hank clasped his long hands nervously together and looked up and down the street. “I been pretty much tied up to this here town,” he commented thoughtfully.

  “What good have you ever done for it?” queried the master.

  “Outside this town, there ain’t nobody I know. I’m considerable too old a man to start out and make a new place for myself in the world.”

  “It ain’t my choosing,” announced Martin. “I’ve given you chances and chances. But you ain’t done your part. Now I’m through.”

  He turned away again. He had not the slightest thought that he would be allowed to go. He expected that frightened figure to follow him. His first steps, therefore, were followed by shorter, halting ones. But nothing came behind him. There was nothing saving a most eloquent silence; Hank would not beg.

  Now it had never been in the mind of Chris, for a moment, to drive the old blacksmith out of his shop and home. He had, to be sure, done things as cruel as this, but on this day he only wished to be repaid for a recent annoyance by enjoying the spectacle of the humiliation of Hank. He wanted to be entreated. He wanted to whip the tears of despair into the eyes of Hank. But he had failed lamentably. The grief of the old man had been terrible and calm rather than ridiculous and weak. And old Chris cursed steadily and softly to himself as he went up the street. However, the matter would have another termination than this beginning. Ballon would not move until he was thrown out, bag and baggage. This, the rich man of the town, cruel and tyrannical though he was, dared not attempt. For he knew that the old smith had wound himself around the hearts of every man and woman and child in the village.

  He decided, however, to allow Hank to suffer through the night, but on the morrow he would hunt him out and let him know that judgment was suspended—on a promise of future good behavior. With this resolution, he drove out to the ranch house and ate his supper alone; Jennie was not to be seen, and the cook announced her message to her uncle—that she was troubled with a headache and was lying down.

  Heartache, said the veteran to himself. That’s her trouble. Them kind of aches take a time to get over, but they heal up after a while. Besides, Jennie has some sense. In a month she’ll be thanking me for keeping her out of the hands of a cowpuncher squatter.

  This consideration so warmed his heart toward her that he could not keep from going to her, after a time. He found her in her darkened room, lying on her bed with her face buried in the pillow. He sat down beside her and removed his after-dinner cigar from his mouth.

  “Look here, Jen,” he said, “I’m sorry you’re all cut up with this here headache. Come out and try the fresh air. It’s turning tolerable cooler.”

  She shook her head.

  He pondered upon her for a little while. The tan of her neck was as brown as when, in her childhood, she ran about under the sun with a bared head. The wisps of hair that half curled and half floated at the nape seemed to him strangely childish, too. Indeed, he told himself, she was still only a little girl. The consideration of her weakness of body and of mind and of character brought pity into his mind. He took one of her hands. It was hot and wet; the skin was as soft as a baby’s.

  “I’ll tell you, honey, I’m going to send you out of this darned hot climate where you can draw a cool breath. I’m going to send you up into the mountains. Understand?”

  “Dear Unc
le Chris,” she whispered, and then no more except to shake her head.

  “You won’t go?”

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re not to be married . . . not for a whole year, Uncle Chris.” “Why not?”

  “Willie wants to make more money. And while he stays here and slaves, I can’t be gadding about on vacations, can I?”

  It was a side of the picture that Chris Martin had not considered.

  “Will it make him happier to have you miserable?”

  “But I’ve got to be a partner, you know. Then, in another year . . .”

  “Bah!” cried Martin.

  She sprang from the bed and to her feet in an instant, bright-eyed with suspicion. She was not so young and tender after all, he decided. He put on a manner of calm masterfulness. She must do what he told her to do. It would be much better for her peace and her comfort of mind. Stop thinking; he would do that for her. But oil had no effect on the stormy sea of her suspicion. Why had he cried out in scorn at the mention of Will Merchant’s name? There was something strange and hidden about this whole affair.

  “Because he ain’t worthy of you!” cried Chris, losing his temper for the second time that day. “He’s yaller. That’s what he is. He’s plumb yaller, Jen!”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Don’t tell me, girl. I’ve seen.”

  “Seen what?”

  “Seen him crumple up like a dog when I threatened him.”

  “When you . . . Uncle Chris, what does it mean?”

  He saw that he had blundered on much too far. He decided to brave it out. “Means that I told the pup that, if he married you, I’d shut his cattle away from the water. He didn’t have nothing to say. That’s why he come out and talked to you. Puts his cattle above you. A devil of a fine kind of love that is. Love? He loves my money. That’s all. That’s why he wanted to marry you, Jen. Nothing else. He’s a crook, and he’s yaller besides.”

  Thrice she had been about to make a fierce retort, and thrice she had controlled herself. “And that’s all true?” she said huskily at last.

  “What else made him change his mind?”

  “Then,” she said, “thank God that I’ve found him out in time.”

  She spoke so gravely that Chris Martin was touched with a slight misgiving. He began to feel that he had meddled in something more than an affair of calf love, perhaps.

  “I guessed that he was no good,” he said. “I wanted to give you time to find it out for yourself.”

  “I’d like to be alone,” said Jennie.

  He left her to walk, as he did every evening, up and down under the mulberry tree, smoking his long, black Havana. He made it last a long time, as he did every one of those costly cigars. It endured with him until bedtime. But during the whole space he thought not once of the cigar between his teeth; what was in his mind was that he was in a grave crisis. He was beginning to understand that, if he lost the affection of the girl, he did not care what calamity followed. She was more to him than he had dreamed, far more. She was more, even, than a child of his own could have been. Realizing this, he was more pleased than ever that he had broken that engagement with young Merchant. If only everything turned out well.

  Chapter 4

  He went to bed and dreamed troubled dreams. He wakened with a headache, and no Jennie to sit opposite him and pour his coffee and smile at him while he growled at the world in general. Once, as he looked at her empty chair while the Chinaman awkwardly hovered about and tried to take the place of the young mistress of the house in making the rancher comfortable, a panic came over old Chris.

  Martin said to himself that, if love and sorrow had crushed the girl to such an extent—for to miss a meal was not in the comprehension of Chris—perhaps it would be better, after all, to let her marry the youngster. However, he felt that he had taken a step from which he could not recede. He had poisoned the mind of the girl against Willie Merchant, and on that point he was entirely comfortable, for he had only told her what was, to a great degree, the truth. Like all truly masterful liars, indeed, he never based a falsehood upon thin air. His conscience would never trouble him for what he had done, if only Jennie could be made happy again. To help him to that end, he trusted deeply to time, as all wise men do.

  Having had a debauch of sternness and cruelty the day before, when he arrived in town the next morning, he opened the three letters that lay upon his desk, read them, answered them with his swift, illegible scrawl, and then finished smoking his cigar. By this time the effect of a night’s bad sleep had well worn off; his natural vigor was beginning to assert itself, and he left his office and walked down the street, banging his heavy heels against the boardwalk that was his only needless extravagance in the construction and the maintenance of the village. He reached the house of Hank Ballon and kicked the gate open.

  “Oh, Hank!” he called. His voice struck like a blast through the open front door and echoed faintly back to him from the rear wall of the house.

  “Hank’s got up early, the dog.” Old Chris grinned. “Done him good to get a talking-to, and he’s got up and started in work the same’s younger men do. Well, he won’t keep it up long. Not him. It ain’t in his bones.”

  He was so convinced of this that he went on down the street toward his office again, but at the door of the hotel he turned sharply about, driven by something that he could not explain. He went hastily around the corner of the street, and there he saw a semicircle of youngsters standing at the entrance to the blacksmith shop, and gaping in the most intent interest.

  That was most usual. Wherever Hank appeared, the children were sure to show their faces before long. While pressing jobs awaited his hand, he would sit down on the old barley bin in the corner of his shop and hold forth to all who cared to listen, but particularly to the children. Rocked far back into the shadow, with his long and bony fingers hooked in front of one knee, his head deeply sunk, his eyes either closed or else looking out with startling glimpses of light, he would tell his stories. They were better than fairy stories. They started not with “Once upon a time,” or “In a distant land across the seas,” but out of the very stuff of which their lives were made, he built his romances. His heavens were no bluer than the skies above their heads, and he, by the mere naming, made the old swimming pools, the twisting white roads across the hills, and the smoky colors of spring upon the desert enchanting.

  He was about to turn on his heel again and go to the office, but he decided that he would steal up and listen to the old loafer’s voice for a minute or two. So up he crept, all unheeded by the enrapt children. When he arrived, he found that he had apparently come into one of the pauses in the narrative. There was no voice speaking. It was a pause of terror and fear and grief in which the cunning talker allowed their own emotions to work in the minds of his audience. All of those emotions were in the faces of the children who stood so silently around the door of the shop. Old Chris looked around the corner of the shop to take a peek at this eminent faker. But to his amazement, he found that the shop was empty of a single human form. But upon the flooring, near the forge, there had been written with the point of a red-hot iron:

  Dear Chris:

  Here are all my tools, and I guess that they pretty near pay for the money I got from you. I find it’s hard to go, but I’ll never come back.

  Hank Ballon

  This, then, was the meaning of the movement upon the fascinated lips of the children. They were repeating that terrible sentence over and over again: Hank was gone, and he would never come back again.

  Then, suddenly, some one of them caught sight of old Chris. There was a white flashing of faces as they turned upon him. Not a word was spoken. Old Chris turned and fled. There was no other word for it. He ran away. As he went, he wondered what under heaven had happened. If the shouting of children was a mere noise and annoyance, why should their silence be worse than a thunderbolt fallen upon him?

  When he was at last i
n the shelter of his office, he did not even light a cigar, but walked up and down for a long time, trying to put his thoughts in order, and failing lamentably in the effort. Hank had left town. Hank had actually taken him at his word and gone. If a dog, that had barked at him a hundred times and then run when he snapped his fingers, had actually run out and put teeth in him, he could not have been more appalled.

  He finally decided that he must go down to hear what people were saying of him. He had not far to go. He found half a dozen black brows bent upon him. The very clerk behind his grocery counter would barely bid him good morrow. These were signs, these were portents, indeed.

  Then he went out into the street and saw Sam Patrick, and gave him a “good morning.”

  “Adarn’ poor morning to poor old Hank,” blurted out Sam Patrick, and went on past him without another word.

  In short, it meant revolution. But Chris Martin thrust out his lower jaw and decided to meet the brunt of the opposition right there on the spot. He called back Sam Patrick with a voice of thunder. Then he told him why he had driven Hank away. “The blacksmith was a lazy old drunken ruffian,” stated Chris Martin. For years he had not been worth his keep. For years he had been running deeper and deeper into debt. Now the time had come for him to leave. He was incurable.

  “He’ll he a big loss to the kids,” was all that Patrick would say, and so he left Chris.

  In the meantime, as they talked, windows had gone softly up, and heads had looked out and even many ears, unseen, had listened carefully to every word from the street. When the tale was ended, each window was closed again all as softly. Not a word was said; not a voice was raised. But old Chris knew well enough all that would follow, and how they would gather together to converse about the thing that had been done. They would have harsh things and hard things to say about him, beyond a doubt. But he resolutely damned them and went on his way. Yet something was stinging him to the heart. What would become of old Hank? Where had the old rascal gone?