by Max Brand
In a corner of the room sat his evil genius, the high priest of the demon, Culture. He was a little, white-headed man with the round, rosy face of a boy. His voice, also, was as light and high a tenor as it had been in his tenth year. His eyes had never dimmed in the poring over books, which had made up his life. No glasses had as yet been proved necessary to him. But with unfaltering hand he turned page on page. And he would twitter on with a joyous nonchalance about profundities. Arabic and Hebrew were his playthings, and in his careless moments—his after-dinner hours of relaxation, so to speak—he indulged himself by mining in the treasures of Sanskrit. But in his real moments—then there was nothing but abstruse mathematics worthy of occupying his brain.
Sometimes poor Jerry Swain looked upon his mentor as a giant encased in the body of a pygmy. Sometimes, he revolted against the hideous labor of following print until his eyes blurred, until his head swam. But always with a fine sense of duty he brought himself back to his task. He would not die until he became a cultured man.
“What is a man without history?” a traveling United States senator had said in a speech that Swain once heard. “And what is a man who does not know the masterpieces of literature? Nothing! A hollow shell!”
To Jerry Swain this fierce assertion was of the utmost importance. He was at that period beginning a new life in which the chief purpose of his energies was the accumulation of an atmosphere that would separate him forever from his past. That past was of a nature that made Jerry sometimes shrug his shoulders and glance quickly around, almost as though he feared that someone might peer in upon the memories that he was calling up to mind. To be sure, he had built his fortune upon a broad basis of hard work, but he had helped himself along from time to time by methods of a rather grim nature. No one suspected. But, staring up into the face of the senator, Swain listened with a believing spirit.
And poor Jerry Swain took that announcement to his heart. He was only a hollow shell if the senator were to be believed. And he must be believed. Jerry had voted for him. He was never to know to the moment of his death that the sentences that changed the course of his life were never written by the senator, though they were spoken by him. They were not even written by the senator’s secretary. They were composed by the senator’s assistant secretary, who was a girl freshly out from college with an ignorant world before her to be uplifted.
But the result was that Jerry Swain Sr. sat now deep in the third volume of Gibbon, his mind reeling as monotonously sonorous sentences rolled on and on like waves in the sea—ground swells in the middle of the vast Pacific.
Yesterday, for recreation, the white-headed, young-faced demon in the corner of the room had given him Tristram Shandy. And the rancher had waded industriously through some fifty pages of that whimsical masterpiece before, having found some dozen themes announced and abandoned in that time, and struggling desperately and in vain to find a theme of the story that was announced to him as a novel, the poor man closed the book and leaned in his chair as far as the stiff back would allow him and whispered softly, “Swain, are you going mad? Are you losing your brain?” So he had left Tristram Shandy and reverted to the more soporific style of Gibbon.
Sometimes, the little man in the corner talked to him about his reading. Of course he never talked about anything so simple as Gibbon. But he would talk about the sources of Gibbon. Personally he had not much use for English.
“If Shakespeare had only walked in the shoes of a Roman, how great his plays would have been,” he was accustomed to saying. “Don’t you agree with me, Swain?”
That little tag-end question about an agreement, he rarely left off, even if he had just been quoting raw Arabic. And Swain never failed to mumble an assent.
It was at one of these moments, in time to save him from an answer, that his son entered.
Chapter Twelve
To say that Jerry Swain was only glad to see his boy because he made a timely interruption, would be no doubt too much. Yet certainly it may be said that never had he laid a book aside with greater satisfaction than he did now as he turned toward Jerry Jr.
He looked Jerry over with an eye of approbation. He always saw the face of his dead wife in the handsome features of his boy, and for that reason he loved him and forgave him a thousand sins. He never was able to see that there was as much feminine weakness as there was feminine beauty in the features of young Jerry.
But this night, coming into the library flushed with the wind and evidences of riding, the son was as dear to the father as well-nigh any human being can be to another. He did not even weaken and change his attitude to suspicion when the boy began with the time-honored formula: “I’d like to talk to you a minute alone.”
“D’you mind letting us have the room for a while?” asked the rancher. “We won’t be long, Tomkins.”
“Tush!” chirped the octogenarian, rising as straight as a sapling and clasping in his fleshless arms the burden of a sixteenth-century first edition. “Be as long as you please, Mister Swain. I’m trotting up to my room for the night.” And he went with a sprightly step through the door.
Some of the rage that was burning in the youth overflowed in the direction of this absentee. “The little grafter,” he snarled. “I should think you’d get tired of paying for his board and room. What the devil good is he?”
“He directs my reading,” the rancher said with dignity. “He’s rounding up culture for me, Son, and doing everything but putting on the brand for me so that I can call a few facts my own. But look here, Jerry, it seems to me that you have nothing but knocks to give everyone around you. I wish you’d get over that habit. It’s not good. A man without friends is like a cripple without crutches.”
“I, for one,” Jerry said viciously, “will get on without ’em, just the same.”
“You will?”
“Yes, I need no help.”
“You don’t? And where would you be without what I’m going to leave you one of these days?”
“That’s true,” Jerry said, immediately backing down, as usual, the instant his father showed the slightest sign of heat. “And, as a matter of fact, Dad, I’ve come to you tonight needing help bad.”
“Ah?” said the father. It was all he could do to keep from saying, “Good.” So wholeheartedly was he a man of action, and so greatly did he yearn to put his shoulder to the wheel if his son needed him. But he continued, “Well, boy, tell me what’s gone wrong with you.”
“It’s money,” Jerry said. “I’ve got to have five hundred. Because …”
“Nevermind,” said the rancher. “Don’t bother with explanations. Good Lord, Jerry, aren’t you my boy? And is five hundred anything to me? No, I thank heaven, I can write my check for a hundred times five hundred and never miss it. Never miss it!”
How he rejoiced in this chance to boast a little. How it warmed the very cockles of his heart to talk to his son of his power, without having the freezing eye of Tomkins watching from the corner ready with a question.
“Things are looking up all over,” went on the father, taking checkbook and pen from his pockets. “Money is going into the bank account steady and sure. We got our drift fences out, lad, and we catch every stray dollar and herd it the right way.” He laughed at his own fantastic metaphor. Then he pulled his glasses down lower on his nose and prepared to write. Heaven opened for his son. He was past the gate of danger. If the old man asked for an explanation later on—well, he would have time to think up one.
“But,” Jerry Sr. said suddenly, “what do you want this for? How come you to …?” He pulled the glasses off his nose. Glasses were all very well for looking at print, but he still preferred to trust the lenses that nature had given him rather than peer into a human face through glass. He saw that his son was grown pale as cloth. It sickened him. Fearless himself, the sight of fear in his son maddened him. All at once he roared, “You’ve written another IOU! You young blathe
rskite, have you done that? If you ain’t …!”
Bad grammar flooded his tongue in moments of emotion. He was stopped not by the protestations of his son but by the latter’s horrified silence and what he could see with the naked eye.
“Jerry, why did you do it? Will you tell me?”
“Dad, it was a queer turn in luck … and … things have got to break for me someday.”
“You lie!” thundered the rancher. “You can’t force luck to come your way. Luck goes where it isn’t asked. Why, you blockhead, you …” He stifled again with his rage. “Not a cent!” he bellowed. “Not a cent! I’d see ’em dead first.”
“Good Lord,” groaned the son. “My honor, Dad!”
“A snap for your honor! Honor doesn’t sit in at a card table, you idiot. If you lost money there, go pay it out of your own pocket. You’ll get nothing out of mine.”
“But … Dad …”
“Get out!”
Before that raised face, Jerry Jr. shrank back to the door. But for the first time in his life he dared to delay in the presence of the terrible old man.
“Dad, I think it means murder if I haven’t the five hundred. They … they’ll kill me.”
“Kill you?” the rancher thundered. “Are your hands tied? Haven’t you got a gun? Kill you? Good Lord, are you afraid? Didn’t I teach you to shoot myself? Get out of the room, and if you ever ask me again for gambling money, I’ll skin you … myself!”
And the very roar and heave of his voice carried Jerry Jr. through the door and into the hall. There he leaned against the wall, sick at heart. What could he do? He decided that his best luck might be found in an attempt at lightheartedness. Straight out of the house he proceeded and down the steps and confronted the two on horseback, where he had left them.
“Boys,” he said glibly, “I’ll tell you how it is. The old man is a little hard pressed for cash just now. Some big deals he’s pushing through have really tied up about every cent he has, and he …” He was interrupted by derisive laughter.
“D’you think we’re as thick in the head as that, kid? Nope. We’ll let you in on a few facts. We laid in close to the windows, and we heard what the old man had to say when you gave him the rise for the coin. And what it looks like to me is that we’ll never get the stuff. And if that’s the way of it, Swain, we’ll have it out of your skin.”
They were suddenly advancing on him, two grim, savage-faced men.
“On my honor!” poor Jerry cried. “On my honor, I’ll get it for you if you give me time and …”
“How’ll time help you?”
“My allowance …”
“Ain’t five hundred a month … we know that flat enough.”
“I’ll get it some way. I’ll get more than five hundred. I’ll pay you interest.”
“We ain’t money-lenders,” they said coldly. “We want the five.”
“It’ll grow to seven-fifty in a month, boys. I swear it will!”
Suddenly they desisted. The promise seemed to have lulled their angry suspicions. “Look here,” they cautioned him. “Inside of a month and a day, we’ll come back. If the coin ain’t waiting for us at Jackson’s in two envelopes, all sealed up and addressed, half to each of us, first thing we’ll do will be to spread the word around that you’ve double-crossed us, and that your IOU ain’t worth a hoot. Then we’ll come out and get you, Jerry, and when we finish with you, the cat can have what’s left if she can find it. So long!”
Their hoof beats drummed away. Jerry Swain grasped for the nearest tree, and leaned against it until his head cleared of the swimming thoughts and the dark fear. But in the end he knew one blissful fact before all else. He was free for a month—thirty days of sunshine.
Before the end of that time something would turn up. It was a perfect eternity. He turned back to the house with an almost jaunty footstep and ran up the steps to the big room that was reserved for him in the corner of the house. From the window he looked out along the line of the poplars. And then, to one side and the other, he glanced down at the jutting wings of the big, red-roofed barns. What a huge estate was his, and what a power would be in his hands when it came to his turn.
What would he do? First he would find the two gamblers and smash them. Secondly? Secondly he would find the big man with the black beard, big Tom Keene, and make him burn for what he had said and for what he knew. Such a man’s knowledge was not safe.
Chapter Thirteen
The load that black Major carried out of Porterville that night was not the bulk of Tom Keene alone. Bags and bundles and parcels of a dozen descriptions bulged around the saddle and jounced softly against the sides and back of the great stallion as he went on down the road after the interruption of Jerry Swain. And when they reached the shadow of the great house, it required some time for Tom to take off the bundles and so arrange them that he could make one immense armful of them. Then he went to the kitchen door and tapped loudly.
In answer, he heard a chair squeak as it was pushed back. Then footfalls went slowly down the hall, and the light of a carried lamp wavered through the door and approached him. Mrs. Carver opened the door to him and jumped back with a cry of surprise and alarm at the sight of the giant with the shapeless, shadowy heap in his arms. The flame leaped in the chimney of the lamp as she sprang back, and by that light she saw the face of Tom.
She stood by in silence, then, while he put down his load. Her quick eye recognized the contents of every parcel by its shape—the bread, the flour, the sugar, the butter, the side of bacon, the ham—for she had grown to know the shape in which Mr. Tucker did up his articles from the general merchandise and grocery store of Porterville. And when all was done and Tom rose, dusting the flour from his hands, he looked up and saw that tears were streaming down her face.
“Lord, Lord,” Tom soothed gently, and his voice at its softest went booming and humming through the room. “What’s wrong now? Have I hurt your feelings, Missus Carver, by bringing out these things?”
She turned away from him to put the lamp on the table, but she remained with her back to him for a moment, and by the quiver of her shoulders he knew how she struggled to regain control of herself. At length she could face him, but only by looking down at his feet. She was crimson to the hair with shame.
“I know,” she said, “that I’ve got no right to refuse it while Mary is lying in there sick. I’ve got no right to tell you that I can’t take it. But … what will John do when he finds out? He’s a proud man … he’s a terrible proud man, and he’ll near die with shame when he learns about how …” Her voice trailed away and choked to silence.
“Look here,” Tom Keene insisted, “there’s no need that he should ever know.” And he thought grimly to himself that he would like to wring the neck of this proud man who wandered about the country as he pleased and left a starving family behind him. But he went on to make the acceptance easy for poor Mrs. John Carver. He took her arm; he smiled down into her face.
“Lemme tell you something, lady,” he said. “Them that are too proud to take help are most generally the ones that are too quick to give help. They want to give and give and give. But the minute that they can’t give, and when they have to be plumb uncomfortable for the lack of things they need, they still won’t let anybody give ’em a helping hand. Now, you and your husband, I’ll bet, have done a sight of good for folks.”
She caught eagerly at that straw of comfort. “Yes, yes,” she said. “In the old days, I’ve heard John tell how his father used to stake the boys when they were down and out, and then he would never take a penny back for it. He could have half of the good gold mines in the mountains if he had let the boys go out with grubstakes, but the stake that he gave them were always just gifts that they could pay back when they pleased. Yes, Porterville owes a lot to the Carver family.”
To the Carver family. The heart of Tom Keene shrank as he saw the p
oor woman taking refuge behind the good deeds of her husband’s ancestors.
“I suppose,” she went on, “that I could even take such things as this as our right.” Then she added with a changed voice, “But you ain’t from Porterville. We got no claim upon you.”
He placed his great kind hand upon her shoulder. “You start fixing up a snack for the little girl. I’m going to go in and talk to her. Don’t you worry about having no claim upon me. Lord, Lord, I ain’t giving anything myself. I just collect … and then I give the collection where I think it might help the most. Claim upon me? Why, Missus Carver, every woman in the world has a claim upon me.”
“Why is that?”
“It was a woman that brought me into the world,” he answered. “For her sake I got to do what I can for the rest. And that includes you and the little girl in yonder room. Now you get busy with the stove and stop worrying.”
He was gone before she could protest again, and, once he was gone, she started to work with a feverish speed. A fire soon smoked and then roared in the stove; in a few minutes bacon was hissing in the pan, and a fragrant mist spread over the kitchen.
It spread farther still and pried with a stealthy finger into the front bedroom where the injured girl lay. But, half famished as she was, even the smell of food did not entirely distract her from the big man who had saved her from the well, and who was now sitting beside her bed. Mrs. Carver, carrying a tray loaded down with food, paused outside the door and listened intently to them.
The big voice of Tom Keene was sounding steadily, and he was telling her about the black stallion that he rode. He had made up his mind, he was saying, that he would raise a colt for himself and make it know him so well that it could almost read his mind.
