by Max Brand
He sank slowly upon his bunk and glanced down the page.
Chapter Three
There were three priceless things that, from of old, were the apples of the eye of John Keene. One of them was this little Bible, timeworn, yellow of edge, and frayed. This he had by indirect words commended to his son as a gift.
But the other two treasures had not been mentioned. Tom took them from the wall where they had hung, side-by-side, symbols of the honest heart of the dead man. One was a medal for heroic service in the army of the Confederate States, and the other was a faded picture of Lincoln. When the grave was dug, Tom placed the two relics on the breast of the trapper and so lowered him into the pit.
It was the first gray of dawn, that coldest and most cheerless time, when the last sod was heaped above the grave. But it was the rose of morning when Tom finished chipping in the inscription on the flat stone that he had dragged to the spot. He stood back with the cold chisel in one hand and the single jack in the other hand, and scanned the ragged letters that he had made.
Here lies John Keene.
He lived square, and he died with clean hands.
Then he swung into the saddle, and made off down the familiar trail that was unchanged in the slightest degree by the ten years. He was very hungry, very tired, and he would willingly have pushed the black stallion hard to hurry on to the next village, had it not been that the horse was quite as weary with fasting as he. And he would not abuse Major. Three years ago he had had the foresight to invest in the crippled, high-blooded yearling, and his reward was the king of horses now under the saddle.
So, letting the honest Major take his own time—which was a steady gait on the rough, mountain trail—Tom tightened his belt to the last notch and then amused himself with watching the progress of the dawning morning over the peaks, how the shadows melted away in the hollows like pools drying up with magic speed, and how the air grew momentarily warmer as the sun climbed higher and the trail dropped lower.
But this was a poor way of killing time for a man with the spirit of Tom. He leaned, drew from the saddlebag the Bible, and opened it again at random. He had found in it, the evening before, words both stern and beautiful, but now what his eyes discovered started him frowning. Half a dozen times his hands twitched to hurl the book into the neighboring ravine, but each time he managed to look back into the text until the list of the Ten Commandments was finished. After which his comment was a single word repeated once or twice with peculiar variations in the tone. Then he dropped the Bible back into the saddlebag.
But a moment later he was impelled to lean and make sure that none of the pages had been doubled back by this rough treatment, and, when he sat back in the saddle once more, he found that he did not require the printed page in order to recall those commands to his mind, one by one. Of the ten, there were few that he had not violated at one time or another. He reviewed those violations carefully. They were all excusable, he declared to himself. For instance, though he had thrice killed his man, he had been cleared of any blame by a jury of his peers. Nay, he had even been thrice thanked by good and law-abiding citizens because he had rid the community of evildoers.
But, in spite of that flattering reflection, the printed words jolted across his memory and took on a voice and sang against his ear in rhythm with the steadily padding feet of Major: Thou … shalt … not … kill.
Tom Keene swore again. But his throat was dry, and there had come into his mind a second self, most unfamiliar and infernally disagreeable, which sat in judgment upon all that his other self did and said and thought. That new self, on the inside, had an irritating way of agreeing with the printed words. Indeed, it was almost like an echo.
Shawker might be alive to this day, intoned that small, inward murmur, if you’d given him a chance. You might have been able to tear the gun out of his hand and then …
His throat had grown drier. He gritted his teeth, flung back his big shoulders, dragged down a deep breath, jerked his hat lower over his eyes, scowled like a villain into the shadows of the wood—but, do what he could, he was unable to summon up the old, carefree, hearty soul that had been his. His past began to hang on his mind.
Is this the treasure that my father has left me … this devil of remorse? thought poor Tom. Then, unable to resist an odd impulse, he jerked his Colt .45 out of the holster and hurled it into the cañon as far as the strength of his long arm would carry. The moment it had swished from his fingertips, his heart leaped into his throat in dismay. Down it sped in a swift, bright arc and clanged into a wreck on a stone far, far below.
It was a shock that brought Tom up short. “Have I gone batty?” he asked himself. “What’s wrong inside of me?”
It was the book, he decided a moment later, that had made him ruin the best old gun that ever punched a way into a gent’s hand.
But book and gun were presently forgotten as his mind harked back to his father. In his sullen, restless youth he had often been irritated by the calm of the trapper. He had wondered how a man could cling so contentedly to a single spot for half of a long lifetime. He had rebelled against the smiling, quiet ways of John Keene. Those were not his natural ways. Soul and body, he had taken the mold of the dark-eyed, beautiful girl who had married the trapper and died of a broken heart in the loneliness of the mountains.
But that could not be charged against his father, he decided. Nothing could be charged against that blameless life, and to the very end the old trapper had been able to pour out a strangely effective influence upon all who came near him—all save his own wife and his own son. They alone had been too near, it seemed, to see him as he was. But on all others, to a greater or a lesser degree, fell the influence of that—what should he call it?—loving kindness was certainly the expression.
It came to the big man with a start, and a little chill of awe ran through him. He was glad to see, above the trees of a nearby hollow, the windings of a pale blue twist of smoke. He swung Major to the side and made for the house or campfire, whichever it should prove to be, at a round gallop.
Chapter Four
It was a cabin upon which he broke from the trees, a cabin surrounded by a spacious clearing of several acres. Many of the stumps had been dug out. All around the cabin itself there was a fine stretch of loamy ground, the nucleus and core of what would one day be a rich little farm, no doubt. Toward the edges of the clearing there were increasing numbers of stumps, around which the plow had been driven so close to the trunk as to show that all side roots had been removed. The work of clearing was still going on, for yonder was a new-felled tree as yet untrimmed, and on the trunk of another pine the ax man was working with a will, swinging the heavy ax with a long, loose stroke that did the heart of Tom Keene good. He loved to see sturdy muscle at play; it made his own muscles flex and relax in sympathy with the labor.
In answer to his hail, the fellow turned a tanned, happy face toward him—a man of thirty, perhaps, arrow-straight, hardened, but as yet unbent by the labor of hewing out his home. He sank his ax in the tree and came at once with an eager step that told that he was glad to see a stranger.
“How’s chances for breakfast?” asked Tom. “I’m plumb starved.”
“Your chances are riding on the top of the world,” said the woodcutter. “My brother ain’t hardly through finishing up the breakfast dishes. You come along in with me, and I’ll see what we can do for you. What’s the news with you, partner?”
Tom Keene glanced inward upon his mind. The greatest events of his life had happened this past twenty-four hours, and yet nothing would be news he could tell to another man. He wondered at this greatly. How many other men talked only of things that little concerned them, and buried in silence their real feelings and all that was really vital to them?
“News?” he said. “I been out from any town for quite a spell. I guess I ain’t got any news.”
He saw the lithe-limbed homesteader pi
cking out the important points about Tom’s make-up with a keen eye, dwelling on three things chiefly—the unusual, thick black beard that gave so many years of dignity and importance to Tom, the bulk of shoulders and length of arm, and above all the empty holster in which his cherished Colt had hung. Such a man as Tom was not apt to be seen without a revolver, and if he were without one, there must be a significant reason.
All of these were the comments that, Tom knew, went on inside the brain of the other, but Tom could have laughed aloud. How trifling a thing was a beard or a gun or length of arm, to be used as an index of the mind and soul?
He put the black Major in the shed while his host admired the magnificent body from which Tom stripped the saddle. Then they went to the house. The breakfast dishes, indeed, had not been cleaned. They were still jammed in a heap at one end of the roughly made table. The larger portion of the length was occupied by ponderous books, over which leaned a young fellow as like Tom’s first acquaintance as one pea is like another. He had the same lean, sinewy contour of body, the same eagle-thinness of feature, the same birdlike quickness of eye. The main difference was that the face that he turned toward Tom was somewhat pale, the brows separated by a heavy, perpendicular wrinkle, and his glance, for the very first instant, was a little suffused with thought. His thoughtful frown blackened at once to a scowl as he started up with as much guilt as indignation, Tom thought.
“That’s the way the dishes are getting done, is it?” sneeringly inquired the woodcutter. “I might’ve knowed if I’d listened close. I didn’t hear no racket.”
“There’s plenty of time,” said the other, who appeared many years the junior of the pair. “We ain’t so close to dinner time as all that, are we? Howdy, stranger!”
He looked to Tom with a smile of welcome that, beyond doubt, was as much assumed to turn the wrath of his brother as to greet Keene. The latter was seated in due form at the table, and the elder brother turned to the stove where, by lifting the lid, he found that the fire was out.
At once, he whirled on his younger brother with a flush of rage. “The fire’s out!” he exclaimed. “Blowed if you ain’t sat right there in arm’s reach of it, almost, and let the fire go out!” He ground his teeth as this incredible fact worked its way home into his mind.
“I had something to do besides feed a fire,” said the younger of the two. “I had something to do that was more important than that, Hal. You know it, too, if you’d stop and give yourself a chance to think.” He indicated the ponderous tomes on the table with a gesture that was not altogether without a tinge of self-conscious satisfaction.
“To the devil with the books and to the devil with the law,” Hal said. “You got no business making a bargain with me if you ain’t going to keep it, Jack. You come here agreeing that, if I do the chopping and all the work except a few of the little chores, you’ll have everything shipshape inside the house, and that you’ll still have time for your studying. I ain’t aiming to cut off on your studying. I’m proud to have you aiming to be a lawyer. But I say I’m blowed if I’m going to get the short end of the bargain all the time.”
They faced each other with clenched fists.
Jack ground his teeth in turn. “Are you going to expose all of our family history?” he asked with biting sarcasm. “You might begin further back and tell the conditions under which Father left you the money to start up on this place with me. Why don’t you tell that, too, as long as you’re in a humor to communicate the details of our family arrangements to every stranger who happens by?”
“You can’t bulldoze me with none of your big words,” Hal said, hotter than before. “We was to have beans for dinner, and you know it, and them beans ain’t been put on. Didn’t I pick them beans over last night … which was your work? Didn’t I put ’em to soak last night … which was your work … just so’s you could have a straight shot at your law reading, which you’re always howling for?”
“I can’t help putting the study of law a trifle above the importance of wood chopping,” Jack observed with a glance at Tom Keene that invited the latter’s approbation.
“You can’t, eh?” roared Hal. “Well, it’s about time you did start putting wood chopping above your rotten books! I ain’t seen you do anything but read most of your life, and yet you ain’t got anywhere …”
“I can do anything you can do with an ax or a horse or a rope,” Jack said fiercely, “or with my fists!”
“Eh?” grunted Hal. “D’you mean that?”
“I don’t have to repeat a thing in order to mean it,” Jack said with a sneer, and he fell back a little and dropped his hand on his hip in what Tom could not help feeling was a rather oratorical attitude.
“Jack,” cried his brother, “if it wasn’t for a stranger being here, I’d teach you a thing or two that maybe ain’t in books! You been just aching for …”
“For a what?” asked Jack.
“A licking,” Hal said.
“You ain’t man enough.”
“I’m twice man enough.”
“Lemme see you do something besides talk.”
“Then …”
They leaped together with muffled shouts of rage and crashed against each other with a shock of their big bodies that made the cabin quake. So confused were they by their anger that they were unable to strike directed blows, and, before one fell, Tom Keene tore them apart with such violence that they staggered away to opposite walls of the cabin.
“Gents,” Tom said, “I sure hate to step in between when folks is having a little argument, private-like. But right now I got to say that it sure ain’t nacheral …”
“Curse your hide!” Hal thundered, swelling with redoubled anger as soon as he saw that he could turn it toward some more legitimate object than his brother. “What call have you got coming in here and breaking things up?”
“And tearing my shirt!” cried Jack. “Your advice wasn’t asked, was it? No one appointed you judge, so far as I know.”
“Friends,” Tom Keene said, recalling with all his might the dying and beatified face of his father, and striving hard to banish the temptation to war from his mind, “I’m a peaceable man, and I don’t want no trouble. All I’m trying to do is ask you if you ain’t acting like a pair of young fools … ?”
“Fools?” cried Jack. “Call me a fool, and I’ll smash your dirty beard into your face, stranger!”
It was an involuntary act. No forethought lay in it. No malice was behind the hand. No plan made him double the fist. And yet the big left fist of Tom Keene was doubled, and, before he knew what he was about, his long left arm had twisted back and then struck out with the speed of a rattler trying to strike two gophers before they can both escape. That bony mass of fist was avoided by the blocking arm of Jack so that it did not shoot through to his face, but it was deflected to his chest and landed on that target with sufficient force literally to lift Jack from his feet and fling him with a crash against the wall of the little house.
Then, knowing instinctively what was coming from the other side, Tom pivoted on toe and heel and started to punch with his right fist which landed on Hal’s abdomen as that bronzed athlete came hurtling through the air to the rescue of his brother.
The blow deposited him in a gasping heap on the floor, but at the same moment Jack, rebounding from the wall, landed solidly on the side of Tom’s jaw and staggered him. By the time he had recovered his footing, both Hal and Jack were tearing in at him like two fighting terriers.
Well for Tom Keene then that his precarious mode of making a living had forced him to study with utmost care all methods of self-defense—so-called. He met Hal with a long stabbing left to the face that converted his nose to a red blotch and stopped him as though he had run into a wall in the dark. And then he twitched across a right hook, short and nasty, that landed cleanly on the point of Jack’s chin and dropped him on the floor on his face, a limp and qu
ivering mass. The next second, heaved into the air in the grip of those long, iron-hard arms, Hal was sent crashing down upon the body of his brother, and both lay inert, slowly regaining their scattered, stunned senses.
As for Tom, he retreated, dismayed by what he had done, and sat upon the edge of the table, staring down at them. It had been a wonderful treat, this moment of exercise. And he was assured that the promptings of it had come from the wicked spirit that had in the first place driven him out from his father’s honest cabin and made him exchange the peaceful life of a trapper for the wild and turbulent life of a gambler.
Out of the bottom of his heart came the words with which he greeted the stunned brothers as they staggered to their feet. “Gents, I’m plumb sorry. If I could make it up to you, I would. But I got this to say … it seemed pretty hard to me that two brothers should stand up like that and light into each other. It sure did seem hard. I ain’t any sky pilot to do preaching, understand? But I wasn’t one of them that had a brother born in his house. I’ve had to get along without one. Maybe you think that’s easy? Well, it ain’t. A gent that has a brother born in his house is plumb lucky. Why? Because he’s got a sure enough friend made to order and guaranteed. He …”
“You’ve talked enough … enough!” Jack snarled. “Get out or …”
“Take your hand off that gun,” Tom Keene said, rising from the table. “Take your hand off that gun, friend, or I’ll sure enough pulverize you.” He attempted to justify the old fierce impulse that rose in him according to the new lights that were dawning in his nature. “I ain’t going to stand by and see you do murder. Not me, Jack. And, if you don’t let go of that gun, I’ll take it away from you and jam it down your throat!”
The last words came in a roar, with a flash of teeth through the beard, and Jack, appalled by that voice of thunder, hastily dropped his fingers from the gun and stood like one about to be stricken by a blast of lightening. The stain from his face dripped down to his shirt while he listened as Tom continued.
