The Fugitive

by Max Brand

  The passing of the train, in fact, was accomplished at not more than twenty or thirty miles an hour, because of a grade, scarcely noticeable, but a factor to be reckoned with in hauling forty loaded cars. Swaying and snorting, casting out fire at its feet and a mist of blowing steam from its head, the engine went roaring by finally, and their eyes still followed the caboose as it hitched along at the end of the train. It grew smaller. Its flag dwindled out of sight; the whole train was enveloped and lost within the thin cloud of dust that whirled up behind it. Then it appeared again, as a small black spot. Finally it was gone.

  The three had watched the passing of the train with their eyes squinted, their ears assailed by the roar of the monster. Now they began to look at one another and shake their heads, so that it was hard to say whether they wished they were on that train, pursuing their way, or thanking heaven that they remained behind where peace and quiet reigned.

  It was about this time that the girl, whose eye was quicker than the others, saw an odd fellow come out of the bush on the farther side of the track. He vaulted lightly over the two fences that railed in the track. He was enough to set people staring in any community, because he was dressed in a long robe of silk, striped with red and yellow, and he had on his head a red and yellow turban-shaped cap of the same material, and there were red and yellow slippers on his feet. This attire gave him the appearance of an Oriental. His face, too, and his eyes were dark. One immediately placed him among more ancient races. Furthermore, his face was so delicately cut it looked less like flesh and blood than a statue chiseled out of marble. Yet, with all this, it was a face not lacking in decision.

  This fellow, as he came up to the station platform, saluted the others by crossing both hands on his breast and bowing low, so that the tassel of his silken cap fell forward. The manner of the others in answering the greeting was characteristic. Young John Wilson started to part his lips, started to raise his hand, but, instead of doing either, simply nodded curtly without uttering a sound. The other man, Benjamin Thomas, was so surprised at the bow that he actually put his hand up to the brim of his hat to lift it, but recovered himself in time to turn the gesture into a salute. The girl looked at the dark-faced stranger with a smile and gave him a pleasant good afternoon.

  He straightened from his bow and went on through the door of the station house. He had the look of one who does not wish or dare to look on the faces of strangers; although he went with his head erect, his eyes were so lowered that it seemed impossible that he could see beyond the tasseled toes of his slippers. The lids were so far down that the black lashes made a semicircle of shadows under each eye, like a painted line.

  After he had gone into the station house, the other three looked at one another. Mr. Thomas shrugged his shoulders and winked one eye expressively, as though this were a question that he knew all about, although he was holding his tongue. John Wilson had a faint glimmer in his eyes, but immediately afterward relapsed into his high-headed, supercilious attitude. But the girl said: “That’s a wonderful face. Let’s go look at him, if we can manage it without being too rude.”

  She was first through the door of the station house, followed by the others. They found that the stranger was seated, cross-legged, on a bench on the opposite side of the room, his feet being drawn up under him like a Turk. The light came in over each of his shoulders and showed him engaged in an occupation that was even stranger than his appearance. He had a small crystal, about two inches across, spinning on the upright tip of the forefinger of his left hand, and, while it spun, the finger never wavered to one side or the other, yet the crystal kept its balance as though it were fastened by a rod through the center of the finger bone.

  The length of time that the ball continued to spin was one of the most remarkable points of the matter. If it were resting upon flesh, no matter how smooth, the friction would presently cause it to slow down and stop, but it whirled and whirled until one felt that the very breathing of the stranger must be the cause of its rotation. Perhaps it was balanced, with really marvelous exactness, upon the very tip of the fingernail. At any rate, it continued to spin almost as though it were revolving in a vacuum.

  While it whirled and flashed, the stranger kept his downward look upon it with the look of a Hindu devotee—that is to say, with an expression of stony but breathless absorption. One might have said that this odd ceremony was some sort of religious pantomime.

  Ben Thomas crinkled his eyes, critically, as though he were looking straight through the performance. Then he shrugged his thick, athletic shoulders, and leaned back in his place.

  John Wilson stared, lost his supercilious look, resumed it again, and also leaned back.

  But the girl crossed the room and stood before the stranger. “We’re terribly curious about that spinning crystal,” she said. “I wonder if you don’t expect us to be?”

  Chapter 2

  The beauty of a cat lies half in its movements. Your dog is full of effort, tug, and strain when it is jumping about. But a cat will get up out of a sound sleep, slope from the branch of a tree to the ground, and nail a squirrel as it comes out of its hole all in a half second. The cat always seems to be folded up in utter repose, but it unfolds with wonderful ease. It is always loaded for trouble; it sleeps no more than a gun does. There is always a trigger finger ready to exert pressure.

  As a cat slides from sleep into waking, so the man in red and yellow rose from the bench and the crystal ball disappeared in a flash from the tip of his finger. He was gravely attentive to the girl before him. “That is my business,” he said. “I am a crystal-gazer, and I make my living by looking into glass.”

  “Oh, you’re a fortune-teller?” she said.

  “Fortune-teller?” he said in a voice whose silken gentleness matched the beauty of his face. “Well, I am rather a reader of the past than of the future, but I see something of the future, also. But shadows of light are harder to decipher than shadows of darkness.”

  “I don’t understand that,” said Ben Thomas. “That kind of beats me, Jessica,” he added, drawing nearer.

  John Wilson also drifted toward them, maintaining his aloof air, as though his feet were bearing him forward without the intervention of his will.

  “Why,” said the girl, “I suppose he means that he looks at the future as that part which has the light, and the past is the part which throws the shadow.”

  “Eh? Maybe, maybe,” said Ben Thomas. “What’s your country, stranger?”

  “I come from the country of Kush,” said the other, “from above the Fifth Cataract and the Oasis of El Badir.”

  “Kush? Cataract? El Badir? That’s the dog-gonedest address I ever heard,” said Benjamin Thomas.

  “Cataract . . . that refers to the Nile, I suppose?” said the girl.

  “It does,” said the solemn crystal-gazer.

  He had been standing with lowered eyes all this time, eyes so extremely downcast that his face had the blind look that one sees in the head of a Grecian statue. Now he suddenly looked straight at the girl. She straightened a little, astonished at the sight of those remarkable eyes.

  “Then you’re an Egyptian. Is that it?” asked Ben Thomas.

  “I am an Ethiopian,” said the other.

  “Negro?” exclaimed Thomas.

  “The Ethiopians of the pure blood are not Negroes,” said the stranger.

  “Well, this crystal-gazing,” said Ben Thomas, who was a practical man. “How d’you go about it?”

  “I look for you into the crystal as it turns,” said the youth.

  “And what’s the price?” asked the practical man. His companion glanced at him with a sudden shadow of distaste in her eyes.

  “Whatever you wish to give me, so long as it is silver,” said the man from Ethiopia.

  “Well, a dime’s silver,” said hard-minded Ben Thomas.

  “That, also, is enough,” said the stranger.

  “All right, start in crystal-gazing, then,” said Ben Thomas. “And here�
��s the dime.” He chuckled as he drew a fistful of silver from his pocket and produced a dime between thumb and forefinger.

  The youth shook his head. “Afterward,” he said. “There will be time to pay, after I have finished looking in the crystal. Sometimes I see nothing but whirling lights and whirling shadows without form. And sometimes I am able to see a little truth. It is not I, but the crystal that speaks . . . sometimes I am too dull to understand it. In the end, if you have found some truth in what I say, you may pay me as you will, or not.” He finished, and waited.

  “That’s a good dodge, too,” said Ben Thomas. “Nobody’ll refuse a coin to a fellow with a game like that. Go on, then, and start the ball spinning, if that’s the way you go about it. Then you can tell me what you see. I’m gonna learn,” he continued, looking toward the girl and John Wilson, “that I’m a man with two legs and two hands, a heart and a pair of lungs. I’ll find out that there’s been a woman in my past and there’s gonna be a woman in my future. Oh, I know the kind of tripe that the fortune-tellers give out. But we gotta have some way to waste the time.”

  “It may not be a waste in spite of that,” said the girl, but her voice was so soft a murmur that no ear caught the words except the man of Ethiopia. And he heard because the furry ear of a cat was not more acute than his.

  “Are you prepared?” he asked. He was looking at Ben Thomas.

  “Prepared? Sure I’m prepared,” said Thomas, shrugging his thick, powerful shoulders. “You go right ahead, sonny.” And he laughed.

  Suddenly in the hand of the man from Ethiopia there again appeared the crystal ball, and he raised it until it stood on the tip of his delicately tapering forefinger at such a height that it was between his eyes and those of Ben Thomas.

  “You are ready,” he said. “And therefore . . .” He flicked the ball with his right hand, and it began to whirl rapidly about with a flicker of reflected sunshine trembling in its depths. The face of the Ethiopian turned to stone; all life died out of his eyes as they stared.

  He spoke, and his voice was a dead, wooden thing. “In the past there is a red shadow, and in the future there is a red light.”

  “What kind of red? Paint? Or whiskey?” asked Ben Thomas. The heavy lines of his face wreathed in a smile once more and his mustache bristled with pleasure.

  “Blood,” said the boy.

  “Hello, there!” exclaimed Thomas. “Blood? I’ve been a butcher, eh?”

  “Of men,” said the boy.

  “What say?” exclaimed Thomas. “What’s the idea in this here? Trying to get more coin out of me by . . . by pretending that you. . . . Look here, young fellow.” He reached out to grasp the arm of the Ethiopian, the arm that was supporting the whirling crystal ball.

  The arm disappeared smoothly, but not abruptly. The crystal ball was gone at the same instant, and the Ethiopian stood before Ben Thomas with his eyes on the floor, his hands thrust into opposite sleeves, very like a Chinaman.

  “What sort of bunk is this, young fellow?” asked Thomas.

  “Uncle Ben,” protested the girl, “you asked him to play his game. You mustn’t be angry with him for the way he plays it.”

  “I’m gonna find out something!” cried Thomas. His voice rose to an angry roar. “Look me in the eye!”

  The Ethiopian looked up, but the dark blankness of his stare was utterly impenetrable to the other.

  “Now tell me where you get that stuff about blood in my past?”

  “From the crystal, sir,” said the mild-voiced youth.

  “Hey? Oh, rot!” exclaimed Ben Thomas. He was an angry man, indeed; in the swelling of his rage, it seemed as though he were about to lay violent hands upon the smaller man. But the Ethiopian, slender, erect, immobile, kept a blank but fearless stare fixed upon the face of the rancher.

  “Suppose that the crystal should have told him something about the days when . . . ?” began the girl.

  “Bosh,” said Ben Thomas. “You know me, do you?”

  “The crystal knows you, perhaps,” said the youth. “I never have seen you before today.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Ben Thomas. “You know me, and you’ve heard yarns about the vigilante days. That’s it.”

  “No, sir,” said the crystal-gazer. “I heard nothing about you. I give you my word that I never have seen you before today.”

  “I don’t believe it,” muttered Ben Thomas. “But . . .”

  “He talked about the past, but he talked about the future, too,” remembered John Wilson, aloud.

  Ben Thomas jerked his head toward the big young man. “Yeah, and that’s true, too,” he said. “Whacha mean about the future?” he added, whirling back on the Ethiopian.

  “Sir,” said the youth, “the crystal sees not only the deed but the mind. It sees the red of blood in your mind.”

  “Well, now, I’ll be . . . ,” began the rancher. He checked himself. “I’ve half a mind,” he declared, losing control of himself, “to teach you to. . . .” The hand of the girl on his arm quieted him. He shrugged his shoulders and turned away. “Never heard such bosh in all my life,” he declared.

  “There is the silver, then,” said the Ethiopian. “You pay, but only if you are satisfied.”

  “I’ve got ten cents’ worth of heat out of your lying,” said Thomas. “Take it.” He threw the dime on the floor.

  The Ethiopian leaned with an unhurried movement that was swifter and surer than the dropping of a bird’s head to pick up a seed. The coin that had rolled in a flash across the floor disappeared under the shadow of his hand. He straightened again, unperturbed.

  John Wilson said: “I’d like you to try with me, if you please?” He flushed a little as he said it, and strode up before the smaller man.

  “Thank you,” said the crystal-gazer. “I hope that there will be something to reward your faith, sir. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, quite ready,” said John Wilson. He turned a deprecating smile and shrug toward the girl, as though to assure her that he took no stock, of course, in this sort of thing, but was merely trying to make up for the atrociously bad manners of the other man. He was met by a glow of approval in her eyes that made him glance hastily away again, flushing.

  The blank, sightless eyes of the gazer were now again considering the winking lights inside the ball of crystal. “There is a coldness, sir,” said the dull voice of the Ethiopian. “There is a coldness that fills my mind from the crystal.”

  “What coldness?” asked John Wilson.

  “It is fear,” said the gazer.

  “Fear?” said Wilson. “Fear of what?”

  “That I cannot see. But there has been much fear about you, and fear in you . . . fear for its own sake, I should say.”

  The color rushed out of the face of the big young man. He said nothing, but stared, and the girl looked up at him with an expression of much pain.

  “In the past there is more strength than was needed,” said the youth who watched the crystal. “In the future there will be enough strength, at least.”

  A shudder ran uncontrollably through the body of John Wilson. “In the future, there will be strength?” he said haltingly.

  The girl drew back a little, as though she were troubled by being within earshot of this speech, as though she felt that she were playing the part of an eavesdropper.

  “There will be strength. There will be sufficient strength and sufficient trouble, also.”

  “Danger?” asked the big young man.

  “Danger that you can avoid.”

  The breast of John Wilson rose. “And suppose that I do not avoid it?”

  The crystal-gazer remained silent for such a long moment that the turning of the crystal grew perceptibly slower and slower. “If you do not avoid it, you still have strength enough,” said the crystal-gazer.

  An exclamation burst from the lips of John Wilson, beyond his power to control. “Thanks for that,” he gasped.

  Chapter 3

  The voice of John Wilson
was not loud, but there was a fervor in it that changed the whole atmosphere, and gave it significance. He stepped hastily back, and, turning to the girl in a way that showed that she had been constantly on his mind, he murmured: “I’ve made a fool of myself. I’m sorry. I’ve been an ass.”

  She shook her head, regarding him, however, with a little constraint as she answered: “I know how it is. It gets on the nerves . . . it’s like hypnotism, I dare say. One goes to pieces. I’ve been at a séance and had the thing happen to me.” She smiled reassuringly at him, out of the largeness of her heart, but he knew that inwardly she was despising his lack of control.

  He was deeply flushed when he pulled a dollar from his pocket and dropped it into the hand of the crystal-gazer.

  The latter murmured his thanks, his face as expressionless as ever, and he seemed about to sit down when the girl said: “It’s my turn. Let the crystal talk for me, too, if you please.”

  She stood before the Ethiopian, smiling a little, very steady of eye and assured of manner. He, without a word, made the crystal spin again. There was only one important distinction this time—being shorter by several vital inches than the crystal-gazer, she could look more fully into his eyes, and it seemed to her that she could see lights forming and dissolving in the large, dark pupil. It was like the light of energy, rather than the light of thought. The smile vanished from her face.

  “In the past there are only small shadows,” said the crystal-gazer in that silken voice that fell like an enchantment upon her. “Except one near shadow out of which you have hardly stepped. A shadow of grief, a shadow of sorrow.”

  She caught her breath.

  John Wilson, lingering, shamefaced, nearby, watched her hungrily. As he saw the words strike in, his own expression of protective concern spoke quiet volumes.

  “You are still in the shadow, but it is not so deep. You are searching, and you are full of hope. You are searching now. You are walking forward into a bright light of questing. And there I see . . .” He paused. The blankness left his eyes. A troubled frown appeared on that delicately modeled forehead.