by Max Brand
The tirade burst out with incredible emphasis, the words driven through drawn lips. And the whole of Happy Jack’s big body trembled from head to foot with his passion. He had been a handsome boy a moment before. He was suddenly a madman.
With a great effort Sandy Crisp retained his smile, for he had known men to go blind with rage in the face of that taunting sarcasm.
“You’re tolerable sure you’ll finish me, eh?”
“Sure of it? Aye. A thousand times sure. I’m waiting, Sandy. I’m waiting for you to start.”
Still, making no move to rise from his chair, partly paralyzed by the chill of fear which was now more and more stiffening his limbs, Sandy Crisp looked up at his antagonist, and always his forehead was creased by the puzzled frown that it had worn from time to time since he first saw the big man from the south.
When would that chill of terror depart from him? When would he be able to rise to his feet?
Suddenly he knew that he was beaten. Another five minutes of delay, and he would be incapable of action. The terrible certainty of Happy Jack, the certainty to which Shorty had paid such a tribute not long before, was unnerving him. If he fought, he must fight now.
“Once more!” shouted Happy Jack. “Will you stand up, or do I have to come for you bare-handed?”
And as he spoke, he laughed suddenly, wildly, as though the thought of that conflict, man to man and hand to hand, was inexpressibly preferable to the sudden fight of guns. But while he laughed, stealing a long stride nearer to Crisp, the latter thrust out his hand.
“Wait! Happy! Wait!” he called. “I been trying to think. Now I got it. I got the name of the gent you’re like in the face. Your laugh showed me.”
And he himself fell back into his chair and burst into long-drawn, hysterical laughter, until the tears came into his eyes.
The other stood frowning in wonder and glaring down at Crisp, until the outlaw straightened again with a sudden gesture of friendliness, as if inviting Happy Jack to step into a secret.
“Here you come on a killing trail,” he said, the laughter not quite gone from his voice, “and here I sit up to this minute just choosing the place where I was to plant a bullet in you. But as a matter of fact, Happy, we ain’t going to fight. Not a bit of it.”
“What?” exclaimed the younger man.
“Listen,” said the other, growing more grave. “Do you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to be partners, son. We’re going to be partners!”
He laughed again, overflowing with joy.
“Me?” Happy Jack sneered. “I’d rather be partners with a coyote. That’s what I say.”
“Sure you would, if a coyote could make you rich. But it can’t, and I can.”
“Crisp,” said Happy Jack ominously, “I dunno what the play is that you figure on making. But I wouldn’t trust you a split part of a second. If you think you’re going to talk me off my guard, you’re wild in the head. You can lay to that.”
“What would you say,” broke in Crisp, “to being the heir to a ranch worth about a million, more or less? What would you say to shaking hands with me and coming into an estate like that?”
“What,” said Happy Jack solemnly, “would Jackson say if he seen me shake hands with you?”
The other seized upon this thread of argument.
“Why, he’d be happy, because he’d know, then, that you’d be able to take care of his widow and his kids. Wouldn’t that make him happy?”
Jack rubbed his bony knuckles across his chin. “Go on, Crisp,” he said coldly, “I’ll wait till you get through talking. If I could make sure of taking care of them four lives … well, here it’s Christmas time, and it’s sure the right season for making gifts, eh?”
He smiled sourly, as though he had no real hope that through Sandy Crisp he might attain this charitable power.
“Sure,” Sandy Crisp chuckled, still studying with keener and ever keener interest the face of the man from the south. “And what’s more, you’re going to be a gift yourself … and you’re going to be a gift this same night. Come to think of it, this is Christmas Eve, ain’t it? The time the old women and the young fools get soft-hearted?”
Happy Jack stared closely at him.
“Yes,” he said softly, “the time they get that way.” And while he spoke his eyes were as cold as steel.
“Listen,” ran on Crisp with a growing enthusiasm, “when you threw back your head and laughed a while back, I seen young Johnny Neilan again, standing on top of the logs in the jam and going down the river. A minute later, while he was laughing and waving his hand at the rest of us boys and knowing well enough that he had about thirty seconds to live, the log turned, he went under, and that was the last ever seen of Johnny.”
Happy Jack listened quietly, waiting until the other came to the point of all this talk.
“Well,” went on Sandy Crisp, “I’ll go back a little ways further. Yonder, over in the hills, where the good range country begins on the far side of the valley, lives old John Neilan and Missus John Neilan, his wife. They’re the hardest, closest-fisted, meanest pair in the mountains, and they got enough money to choke a herd of elephants. They got no charity locked up inside of ’em. They pay their hired men less, they feed ’em worse, than folks around here that ain’t got half so much coin.
“Twelve years ago they were a pile different, but pretty hard even then. They were so hard, in fact, that they made life miserable for their only child, and that was young Johnny Neilan Junior. Johnny was going on fourteen, a straight-standing, wild-eyed kid. One day he ups and runs off because the old man had been giving him a tongue-lashing for something. He disappears, anyways, and he never was found, and it plumb busted the hearts of the two old folks. If they was hard before, they got like pure flint afterward.
“Well, nobody got trace of Johnny, till one time I come up to a logging camp in Canada, and among the gents I seen a husky youngster about eighteen that looked pretty much like Johnny Neilan. I couldn’t be sure, because kids change so darned much between fourteen and twenty that you could hardly tell your own brother if you was away from him five or six years. Anyway, I laid a trap for the kid and made him confess, after a while, that he was Johnny Neilan. That was the morning of a big jam in the log drive. About ten seconds later, after he’d told me who he was, Johnny had run out onto the jam and was working away. All at once the jam busted. The rest of the boys got off safe. But Johnny was stuck out there by himself. He seen they was no chance to get safe to shore. So he just stood up and waved good-bye, laughing. And the next minute he went under and never come up … just the way I told you a while back. Twenty logs must’ve smashed him to bits the minute he went under the surface of the water.
“I come back to these parts, and I dropped in on old Neilan and told him what I seen. Can you believe that the old fool just cussed me out and swore it wasn’t true? He and his wife had gone on, all those years, wishing to have the boy back, so that he couldn’t stop his wishing even when I told him the out-and-out truth. He took it serious enough to go up north, though, and find that logging camp.
“There he found out that none of the boys had knowed Johnny by his right name. And they gave old Neilan a picture of the boy the way he was just before the logs got him. Well, Happy, you know how pictures are. Johnny had sure changed a pile in the four years. He was man-sized. And that picture showed him with a face all covered with four days’ growth of hair. Old Neilan took one long look and then took a great big breath of relief. He’d just nacherally made up his mind that that wasn’t Johnny. His boy was still alive and would come riding back home someday, and everything would be hunky-dory on to the end of the story. You know the way old folks get? Plumb stubborn and foolish? That’s the way he got. Wouldn’t listen to no sense. And him and his wife are still sure that young John Neilan will come back. And they’re right! They’re going to see him come back!”
He jumped out of his chair, laughing joyously, and pointed at Happy. “You’re the man!”
“Me?” gasped Happy.
“You!” shouted the outlaw. “In about ten minutes after you get there the old man will remember what the kid and him had the argument about the time his kid left. It was because young Johnny got the key to his old man’s safe … the old fool keeps a pile of cash in his house … and got to tinkering with the lock. Old Neilan caught him and raised the devil. Well, he’ll be so plumb tickled to have you back that he’ll make you a present of the key. All you got to do, then, is to sneak down late tonight, grab the boodle, and then come out to me. I’ll have horses ready. Man, we’ll clean up a good forty thousand if we clean up a cent.”
His ecstasy of greed was sharply checked by the shake of Happy’s head.
“You think I’m fool enough to try that?”
“Why not? You’re sure like Johnny. Maybe not if he was alive and standing beside you now. But he was a big kid, and you’re a big man. You got the same color of hair, the same color of eyes, and the same funny way of throwing your head on one side when you laugh. You can step right into his shoes.”
“But suppose they get to talking about old times …”
“Mostly you’ll be able to say that you’ve forgotten a good deal inside of twelve years. And you’ve only got to stall them off for one evening, or maybe two. Then you can grab the money and kiss ’em all good-bye. One minute they have a Christmas present, the next minute they have it not.”
He fell again into hearty laughter but stopped short at the shudder of Happy Jack.
“Sandy,” said Happy Jack, “do you think I’m skunk enough to fool that poor old man and his wife?”
“Poor old nothing,” snorted Sandy. “They’re the meanest …”
“I’ve done tolerable bad things in my day,” said Happy slowly, “but I wouldn’t make money that way.”
“Then don’t keep the money for yourself,” said the elastic-minded Crisp. “Don’t keep it at all. Just turn over what you get to Jackson’s widow. Ain’t you been a lot cut up because her and the three kids didn’t have nothing to live on? Well, Happy, you take the coin from them two old skinflints and give it to the widow. That’d sure be a good deed, if you want to fall in with the Christmas idea. Does it sound good to you?”
Happy Jack sighed. For that single instant he was off his guard, staring through the window. Sandy’s hand made a furtive motion toward the butt of his gun, but it came away again at once. There was too rich a game in sight to imperil such chances in order to make a kill.
“It don’t seem like no good can come out of dirty work like that,” muttered Happy Jack at last. “But the last I seen of the widow and the three kids they was sure a mournful lot. Suppose they’re hungry tonight, with this cold …” He stopped short. “Blast your soul, Sandy,” he growled out, “I s’pose I’ll try it. But you’re going to pay some time for the murder of Jackson. I’ll see to that. Now tell me what you know about the Neilan place and the folks on it. Or do you know nothing at all?”
“I know every inch of it,” answered Sandy, ignoring the threat. “Ain’t I scouted around that place twenty times getting the lay of the land? I’ve had my eye on Neilan’s safe for ten years, more or less. Now listen hard.”
And, sitting down again in his chair, he began to talk swiftly. Happy Jack listened in gloomy silence.
III
The dinner table was a shrine of silence in the big dining room at the John Neilan house. It was a silence which Mary Thomas dreaded, always, but on this Christmas Eve it seemed to her that the silence was an accusation leveled at her head. Again and again she stole furtive glances at the stony faces of the old people. But they had no glance or word for her. Neither had they a glance or a word for each other. Their attention was fixed upon their own thoughts, and these were deadly, frozen things.
She was out of place here. Even from the first she had felt that she was out of place, since the very day when the two old folks, a dozen years before, had taken in the newly orphaned child in the hope of filling, to some extent, the vacancy formed by the loss of their son. But she had not filled it. She had only served to make the loss more visible. To be sure, they would not send her again into the world to find her own way, but, on the other hand, they could not prevent letting her see that she was ever a thorn in their sides.
And she, with the keen perception that comes to those who know grief early in life, had understood from the first and shuddered at her understanding. They never spoke cruel words. But with such silences as these they crushed her spirit time and again. When she first came, and after she learned what was wanting, she had longed many a bitter hour to change her form and face. And if wishes could change flesh, she would certainly have become like the picture of that handsome impudent-eyed boy who ever since his disappearance had remained sacred to the memory. But wishes, alas, can change neither features nor minds.
She remained the same rather pale, pretty, large-eyed girl. If she could only have had some touch of Johnny’s manner. If she could at least have been a tomboy. If she could have ridden horses bareback and run and whooped about the house, she might have partly filled the niche.
In this respect she strove to change also. But she could not. She loved horses. But a bucking horse chilled her with fear. And for the rest, she was feminine of the feminine, and rather more demure than the average. The more she fought against herself, the more she became like herself. And she knew that, as she grew older, the rancher and his wife were more and more tormented by her presence.
They insisted on giving her a good education. Sometimes she thought it was because they wished to get her out of the way in this manner. But during vacation times she had to return home. And those vacations were such things of dread that they gave her nights of tearful, wakeful anticipation.
But of all vacation times Christmas was the worst, and of all the Christmas vacation there was nothing to match the horror of Christmas Eve. For on that night, whenever the eyes of the old folks fell on her, they twitched away sharply, as though in pain. She was too gentle of heart to blame them for it. She knew that, since the boy left, their lives had been passed in a long winter of despair.
Even John Neilan’s own wealth was a torment to the rancher. He was still saving, but it was merely the effect of habit. Why build a fortune to which no one could fall heir except a girl—a girl who would probably marry and thereby bring the Neilan fortune into the hands of a stranger? There was no other heir. And sometimes Mary Thomas felt that Neilan actually hated her because she could receive the wealth he had created. And yet he still saved his pennies, scrupulously pretending, as he drove a hard bargain or made a niggardly purchase, that it was not for his own sake, but for the sake of Johnny … “when the boy comes home.”
How often she had heard that! “When the boy comes home.” She had dreamed of it. She had seen him coming in a thousand guises, repentant, defiant, sneaking, heroic.
Chung, the sole servant in that vast house, barnlike in its silences, padded around the room, serving the plates of chicken as John Neilan carved it. And whenever his misty old eyes fell on the face of the girl they lighted a little, as though he understood and wished to give her the warmth of kindliness which she never received from the old people. But in return she dared not so much as smile with her eyes, for mirth and happiness were sins in the house of the Neilans. What smile was worth seeing save the smile of their lost boy?
Yet, when she looked down to her plate, a faint smile did come about the corners of her mouth. It was always chicken at Christmas time at the ranch. Turkey would be too much like the real festival, and there must be no reality to Christmas until that blessed day when the boy came home. Really, they were a little absurd about it. But when she looked from one to the other of those white heads, those iron-hard faces, all sense of their absurdity left her. Twelve years of cons
tant practice had made them, so to speak, specialists in pain.
“You haven’t told us much about the school this time,” said Mrs. Neilan at last, by way of breaking in on that solemn quiet. She assumed a faint smile of interest while asking the question, but her eyes looked far off.
Mary sighed. “The same courses and the same teachers as last year,” she said. “There isn’t much new to tell about them.”
“Just as many parties as ever, I guess?” John Neilan asked suddenly. “Young Harkins still calling on you?”
“Quite often.”
A glance of satisfaction passed between Mr. and Mrs. Neilan, and Mary noted it shrewdly. How well she understood them, and how gross they were not to see that she understood. Their chief interest was merely to see her well married and off their hands. Young Harkins was acceptably well off, and therefore they considered him eligible. She thought back to him with a shrinking of the heart. Perhaps, someday, driven by the constant unhappiness of her life in this home, she would accept the suit of Harkins. But seeing, in vision, the meager form and the dapper ways of that brilliant youth, she could not help sighing again.
“Why don’t you ask him out home some vacation time?” asked Mr. Neilan. “Why don’t you do that, Mary? You got to make some return, him spending so much time and money toting you around places. Eh?”
How could she tell them that Harkins would be alternately bored and amused by this ranch life and the people of the ranch? She obviously could not say that. But doubtless Jerry Harkins would go to the ends of the earth with her if she so much as hinted that she desired his company.
“I suppose he wants to spend his vacations with his own folks. Besides, he wouldn’t be at home with us. He doesn’t know ranch life and ranch ways.”
