The Black Rider

by Max Brand

  No matter if she were already engaged to another man. One curt note, and then ten days of silence could do much. Oh, it could do very much. Wounded pride was an excellent sedative for the most vital pangs of love. And silence and the leaden passing of time would help. Ten days to a lover were the ten eternities of another person.

  Would it be very odd if she came to pay some attention to a stranger who was not altogether ungracious, whose manners were easy, whose voice was gentle, who could tell her many tales of many lands, and the story of whose manhood was even now ringing through Culver Valley—if such a man as this were near while Kate Maddern struggled with grief and pride and angry pique, would there not be a chance to win a thousand dollars from Tom Vance—and something more?

  V “The Campaign Begins”

  He went lazily on up the slope of the mountain. Behind him the town was wakening to a wilder life. And, staring back, he could see a thickening stream which poured in under the great light in front of Canton Douglas’s place.

  Yes, it would be very pleasant to sit at one of those tables and mine the gold out of the pockets of the men who were there with their wealth. But a game even more exciting was ahead of him. He turned up the hill again, walking lightly and swiftly now. Yonder was the cabin, with the door open and a spurt of yellow lamplight over the threshold and dripping down half a dozen stone steps.

  He arrived at the path and turned up it, and in a moment she came whipping through the door and down the steps with a cloak flying behind her shoulders.

  “Tommy, Tommy dear!” she was calling as she came dancing to him. Her arms flashed around his neck. She had kissed him twice before she realized her mistake. And then horror made her too numb to flee. She merely gasped and shrank away from him.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Gerald. “This is the second time I’ve been mistaken for ‘Tommy dear.’ Do I look so much like him in the darkness?”

  “What have I done!” breathed poor Kate.

  She went up the steps backward, keeping her face to him as though she feared that he would spring in pursuit the moment she turned her back. But at the top step, near the door of the cabin, she paused.

  “Who are you?” she queried from this post of vantage.

  “My name is Gerald Kern,” he said.

  “Have you come to see Dad?”

  “No.”

  “Are you one of the men from the next cabin?”

  “No.”

  “Well?” inquired Kate tentatively.

  “I came to see you,” said Gerald.

  “You came to see me? I don’t remember.…”

  “Ever meeting me?”

  “Have I?”

  “Never! So here I am, if you don’t mind.”

  She hesitated. It was plain that she was interested. It was also plain that she was a little alarmed.

  “I came down the hill this afternoon,” he went on. “Rather, it was in the dark of the twilight, and some one called from the door of the cabin to ‘Tommy dear.’”

  “I’m so ashamed!” said Kate Maddern.

  “You needn’t be. It was very pleasant. It brought me back up this mortal hill in the hope that you might let me talk to you for five minutes. To you and your father, you know.”

  “Oh, to me and to Dad.”

  There was a hint of laughter in her voice which told him that she understood well enough.

  “I didn’t know anyone who’d introduce me, you see.”

  “I think you manage very nicely all by yourself,” said Kate Maddern.

  “Thank you.”

  “You are just new to Culver City?”

  “Yes. All new this evening.”

  “But you haven’t come to dig gold…in such clothes as those.”

  “I’m only looking at the country, you know.”

  “And you don’t know a single man here?”

  “Only one I met at Canton Douglas’s place.”

  “That terrible place! Who was it?”

  “His name was Vance.”

  “Why, that’s Tommy!”

  “Your Tommy?”

  “Of course!”

  “Lord bless us!” said Gerald. “If I had known that it was he, I should never have let him go.”

  “Go where?”

  “He’s off to find a mine…or prospect a new ledge, I think.”

  “He left tonight?”

  There was bewilderment and grief in her voice.

  “Yes. I’m so sorry that I bring bad news. Shall I go back to find him?”

  “Will you?”

  “Of course. If I had guessed that he was your Tommy I should have tried to dissuade him.”

  He turned away.

  “Come back!” she called.

  He faced her again.

  “Don’t go another step! I…I mustn’t pursue him, you know.”

  “Just as you wish,” he answered.

  “But what a strange thing for Tommy Vance to do!”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “And to start prospecting in the middle of night….”

  “Very odd, of course. But all prospectors are apt to do queer things, aren’t they?”

  “Without saying a word to me about it!” And she stamped her foot.

  “Hello?” called a voice beyond the cabin, and then a man turned the corner of the shack.

  “Dad!”

  “Well, honey?”

  “What do you think of Tommy?”

  “The same as ever. What do you think?”

  “I think he’s queer…very queer!”

  “Trouble with him?”

  “Dad, he was to come to see me tonight. It was extra specially important.”

  “And he didn’t come?”

  “He left town!”

  “Terrible!” murmured her father and laughed.

  “Dad, he’s gone prospecting. Without a word to me.”

  “Leave Tom alone. He’s a good boy. Hello, there!”

  He had come gradually forward, and now he caught sight of Gerald, a dim form among the shadows.

  “That’s the man who has just told me about Tom.”

  “H’m!” growled Maddern. “Did Tommy ask you to bring us the news?” he asked of Gerald.

  “No, Mr. Maddern.”

  “You know me, do you?”

  “I know your name.”

  “Well, sir, you might have let Tom talk for himself.”

  “It was quite by accident that I told your daughter,” he said.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Maddern. “A pretty girl hears more bad news about young men from other young men than an editor of a paper. Oh, I was young, and I know how it goes. It was by accident you told her, eh?”

  “Dad, you mustn’t talk like that!”

  “You don’t need to steer me, honey. I’ll talk my own way along. I’ve got along unhelped for fifty years. It was accident, eh?”

  “It was,” said Gerald.

  “And that’s a lie, young man.”

  “You are fifty, are you not?”

  “And what of it?”

  “You are old enough to know better than to talk to a stranger as you talk to me.”

  Maddern came swooping down the steps. There was no shadow of doubt that he was of a fighting stock and full of blood royal which hungered for battle.

  “Dad!” cried the girl from above.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” said Gerald. “Nothing will happen.”

  “What makes you so infernally sure of that?”

  “A still small voice is speaking to me from inside,” said Gerald.

  And suddenly rage mastered him. It was the one defect in his nature that from time to time these overmastering impulses of fury would sweep across him. He lowered his voice to a whisper which could not reach the girl, but what he said to Maddern was: “You overbearing fool, step down the hill with me away from the girl, and I’ll tell you some more about yourself.”

  To his amazement, Maddern chuckled.

  “This lad has spirit,
” he said cheerfully. “Ain’t you going to introduce me, Kate?”

  “This is my father?” said Kate.

  “I have gathered that,” said Gerald.

  “And, Dad, this is Gerald Kern, who was just.…”

  “Gerald Kern?” shouted Maddern, leaping back a full yard. “Are you the one that…come up here!”

  He caught Gerald by the arm and literally dragged him up the stairs and into the shaft of light which streamed through the open door.

  “It’s him!” he thundered to the girl as he stood back from Gerald, a rosy-cheeked, white-haired man with an eye as bright as a blue lake among mountains of snow. “It’s the one that kicked Red Charlie out of town. Oh, lad, that was a good job. Another day, and I’d’ve got myself killed trying to fight the hound. When he talked to me, it was like a spur digging me in the ribs. But Charlie’s gone, and you’re the man that started him running! Gimme your hand!” And he wrung the fingers of Gerald Kern with all his force.

  This was pleasant enough, but in the background what was the girl doing? She was regarding the stranger with wonder which went from his odd riding boots to his riding trousers, thence up to his face. But anon her glance wandered toward the trail outside the house again, and the heart of Gerald sank. Truly, she was even more deeply smitten than he had dreaded to find her.

  But William Maddern was taking him into his house and heart like a veritable lost brother.

  “Come inside and sit down, man,” went on Maddern. “Sit down and let me hear you talk. By Heaven, it did me good to hear the story. I’d have given a month of life to see Red Charlie when the lanterns and the other truck landed on him. Kate, you can stand watch for Tommy.”

  Gerald was dragged inside the house.

  “Why should I watch?” said Kate.

  “Make yourself busy,” said Maddern. “We’re going to have a talk.”

  “Am I too young to hear man-talk?” asked Kate angrily, standing at the door.

  “Now there’s the woman of it,” said her father with a grin. “Lock a door, and she’s sure to break her heart unless she can open it, even if she has all the rest of the house to play in. But if you’re inside, you’ll be sure to wish you were out to wait for Tommy Vance.”

  She tossed her head.

  “Let him stay away,” she said. “But not to have sent a single word, Dad!”

  And Gerald bit his lip to keep from smiling. It was all working out as though charmed.

  “When I was a youngster in Montana,” began Maddern, “I remember a fellow in the logging camp as like Red Charlie as two peas in a pod. And when….”

  With one tenth of his mind, Gerald listened. With all the rest he dwelt on Kate. And she was all that he had hoped. The glimpse had been a true promise. Now for a season of careful diplomacy and unending effort.

  Were not ten days long enough for a great campaign?

  VI “Gerald Meets Cheyenne Curly”

  But ten days were not enough! Not a day that he left unimproved. Not a day that he did not manage to see Kate Maddern. But still all was not as it should be. He felt the shadowy thought of big, handsome Tom Vance ever in her mind. It fell between them in every silence during their conversation.

  Not that he himself was unwelcome, for she liked him at once and showed her liking with the most unaffected directness. But sometimes he felt that friendship is farther from love than the bitterest hate, even.

  In the meantime, he had become a great man in Culver City. The sinews of war he provided by a short session every evening in Canton Douglas’s place—a very short session, for it must never come to the ear of the girl that he was a professional gambler who drew his living from the cards. To her, and to the rest of Culver City he was the ideal of the careless gentleman, rich, idle, with nothing to do except spend every day more happily than the days before it.

  Neither was there any need for more battle to establish his prowess. It was taken for granted on all hands that he was invincible. Men made way for him. They turned to him with deference. He was considered as one apart from the ordinary follies of lesser men. He was an umpire in case of dispute; he was a final authority. And the sheriff freely admitted that this stranger had lessened his labors by half. For quarrels and gun play did not flourish under the regime of Gerald Kern.

  There was the case of Cheyenne Curly, for instance. Cheyenne had built him a repute which had endured upon a solid foundation for ten years. He was not one of these showy braggarts. He was a man who loved battle for its own sake. He had fought here and there and everywhere. If he could not lure men into an engagement with guns, he was willing to fall back upon knife play, in which he was an expert after the Mexican school; and if knives were too strong for the stomach of his companion, he would agree to a set-to with bare fists. Such was Cheyenne Curly. Men avoided him as they avoided a plague.

  And in due time, stories of the strange dandy who was “running” Culver City drifted across the hills and came to the ear of the formidable Curly. It made him prick his ears like a grizzly scenting a worthy rival.

  Before dawn he had made his pack and was on the trail of the new battle.

  None who saw it could forget the evening on which Cheyenne arrived in Culver City. He strode into Canton Douglas’s place and held forth at the bar, bracing his back against a corner of the wall. There he waited until the enemy should arrive.

  Canton Douglas himself left his establishment and went to give Gerald warning. He found that hero reading quietly in his room, reading the Bible and.…

  But that story should be told in the words of Canton himself.

  “I come up the hall wheezing and panting, and I bang on Gerald’s door,” he narrated. “Gerald sings out for me to come in. I jerk open the door, and there he sits done up as usual like he was just out of a bandbox.

  “‘Hello,’ says he, standing up and putting down the big book he was reading. ‘I’m very glad to see you, Mr. Douglas. Sit down with me.’

  “‘Mr. Kern,’ says I, ‘there’s hell popping.’

  “‘Let it pop,’ says he. I love noise of kinds’

  “‘Cheyenne Curly’s here looking for you,’ says I.

  “‘Indeed?’says he. I don’t remember the gentleman?’

  “I leaned ag’in the wall.

  “‘He’s a nacheral-born hell-cat,’ says I. ‘He don’t live on nothing less’n fire. He’s clawed up more gents than would fill this room. He’d walk ten miles and swim a river for the sake of a fight.’

  “‘And he has come here hunting trouble with me?’ says Gerald.

  “‘He sure has,’ says I.

  “‘But I’m a peaceable man and an upholder of the law, am I not?’, says Gerald.

  “‘Which you sure are, Mr. Kern,’ says I. ‘When you play in my house, I know that there ain’t going to be no gun fights or no loud talk. And that’s the straight of it, too.’

  “‘Very well,’ says he. ‘Then, if you won’t stay with me and try a few of these walnuts and some of this excellent home-made wine…if you insist on going back immediately…you may tell Mr. Cheyenne Curly that I am most pacifically disposed, and that I am more interested in my book than in the thought of his company’

  “I let the words come through my head slow and sure. Didn’t seem like I could really be hearing the man that had cleaned up Red Charlie. I backed up to the door, and then I got a sight of the book that he was reading. And…by the Lord, boys, it was the Bible! Wow! It near dropped me. I was slugged that hard by the sight of that book! Yep, it was an honest Injun Bible all roughed up along the edges with the gilt half tore off, it had been carried around so much and used so much.

  “Well, sir, it didn’t fit in with Gerald the way we knew him, so quick with a gun and so handy with a pack of cards. But, after all, it did fit in with him, because he always looked as cool and as easy as a preacher even when he was in a fight. It give me another look into the insides of him, and everything that I seen plumb puzzled me. Here he was reading a Bible, and the rest of
us down yonder wondering whether he’d be alive five seconds after he’d met Cheyenne Curly! He seen me hanging there in the doorway, and he started to make talk with me. Always free and easy, Gerald is. He sure tries to make a gent comfortable all the time.

  “He says to me: I get a good deal of enjoyment out of this old book. Do you read it much, Mr. Douglas?’

  “‘Mr. Kern,’ says I, ‘I ain’t much of a hand with religion. I try to treat every man as square as I can and as square as he treats me. That’s about as much religion as I got time for.’

  “‘Religion?’ says he. ‘Why man, the Bible is simply a wonderful story book.’

  “Yes, sir, them was his words. And think of a man that could read the Bible because of the stories in it! Speaking personal, there’s too many ‘ands’ in it. They always stop me!

  “‘Well,’ says I to Gerald, ‘I’ll go down and tell Cheyenne that you’re too busy to see him tonight. He’ll have to call later.’

  “‘Exactly’ says he. ‘One can’t be at the beck and call of every haphazard stranger, Mr. Douglas.’

  “‘No, sir,’ says I. ‘But the trouble with Cheyenne is that he ain’t got no politeness, and that when I tell him that, he’s mighty liable to come a-tearing up here and knock down your door to get at you.’

  “At that, Gerald lays down his book and shuts it over his finger to keep the place. He looks at me with a funny twinkle in his eye.

  “‘Dear, dear,’ says he, ‘is this Cheyenne such a bad man as all that? Would he actually break down my door?’

  “‘He would,’ says I, ‘and think nothing of it.’

  “‘In that case,’ says he, ‘you might tell him that I am reading the story of Saul, and that when I have finished I may feel inclined to take the air. I may even come into your place, Mr. Douglas. Will you be good enough to tell him that?’

  “‘Mr. Kern,’ says I, ‘I sure wish you luck. And if he gets you, there ain’t a chance for him to get out of this town alive.’

  “At that he jumps up, mad as can be.

  “‘Sir,’ says he, I hope I have misunderstood you. If there should be an altercation between me and another man, I know that the victor would never be touched by the mob.’