Crusader

by Max Brand

  THE BAREFOOTED GENT

  The yell of startled Sparrow Roberts brought two burly sparring partners with a rush down the slope. They caught up poor Ed Morgan and carried him hastily to the half shack, half house where they lived. There they doused him with a bucket of water. But even the water brought him only slowly to his senses, and, as he wakened and groaned, they felt him muscle by muscle and bone by bone but could find no injury. There was not a spot or a mark on him, except a long blue welt along the side of his jaw.

  “He tripped and fell and hit the rocks,” said Sparrow at last. “I was some scared at first. Hey, Ed, how d’you feel? What’s wrong? Shake yourself together.”

  Ed sat up with a sudden ferocity. “Where is he?” he snarled out.

  “Who?”

  “The bird that soaked me.”

  “What? Did somebody knock you out, Ed?”

  “Knock me out? Not with his hands. He hit me with a club! Or he had a friend that sneaked up behind me and swatted me.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was comin’ up from town. I was walkin’ slow and easy. I wanted to tell you, Sparrow, that me bein’ married didn’t make no difference about me trainin’ for the fight. . . .”

  “Sure it don’t,” groaned Sparrow. “Take on all the worries of a married man . . . try to box so’s your face don’t get spoiled for the sake of your wife . . . act up like that . . . and a devil of a mess you’ll be when Pierre Lacoste gets ready to tap you on the bean. But lemme hear about this bird that slugged you.”

  “With a club!” shouted Ed Morgan. “You know that I ain’t ever been lifted off’n my feet with a punch. Don’t you, Sparrow, old boy?”

  There was such a wail of appeal in this voice, that Sparrow blinked and regarded his champion again. This time more closely.“What happened?” he snapped out.

  “I was comin’up the path. Had a stone in my hand, and I slung it onto the brush along beside the path. Dog-gone if I didn’t hear that stone spat on flesh. There was a snarl that made my hair stand up on end, but what jumped out wasn’t no wild animal. It was a gent that was mostly bare, brown like an Indian . . . maybe he was an Indian . . . and a wild pair of eyes, darned if I ever seen amber-lookin’ eyes like them, before! He didn’t say nothin’. I was too paralyzed to do nothin’.”

  “And he knocked you flat?”

  “Him? His punch wasn’t more than a tap. But just as he tapped me, I felt something slug me in the back of the head like. . . .”

  Sparrow Roberts fumbled at the back of the head of his fighter with expert fingers. “It feels like that, sometimes,” he said to those who were standing around, listening and wondering. “You get rapped on the point and you feel like somebody had soaked you in the back of the head with a club. A doctor, he tried to tell me what made that. I dunno. It’s something where the nerves . . . well, Ed, your luck started on your weddin’ day. You got knocked out the same. . . .”

  Cyclone Ed leaped to his feet and threatened to destroy all who cast such aspersions upon him. He had never been knocked out. He would annihilate everyone who pretended that such a lie was the truth.

  To this raving, Sparrow Roberts listened with an impassive face. “This is all pretty smooth, kid,” he declared gravely. “But they ain’t any lump on the back of your head, and we all can see where you was slugged on the jaw. There’s a welt as big as a hen’s egg.”

  “By the heavens . . . !” began Ed Morgan, shouting with wrath.

  “Lay low,” snarled out Sparrow. “I ain’t claimin’ that this here was handed you on the level. All the baby had that socked you on the jaw was a pair of brass knuckles, I guess. No bare fist ever done that. I’ve seen ’em all soak. And nobody ever done that! Not with his fist!”

  “Brass knuckles, eh?” said Bert Kenny, who did duty as one of the sparring partners. “Then maybe it’s the same dirty dog that swiped the punching bag and the punching bag platform. Maybe it’s the same sneak thief that swiped the gloves, too, and the weights. . . .”

  “There’s gettin’ to be something wrong about this here camp,” said the second sparring partner, Vince Munroe, whose speed had left him, but whose tricks and ring wisdom still made him a dangerous teacher. “The way I figger it. . . .”

  “You figger too much,” snapped out Sparrow. “Too much thinkin’around this here camp. I’m tired of it. I’ll do a little bit more. You all hear me talk? I’ll do the thinkin’ from now on. To hear you birds chatter, you’d think that there was a jinx on this camp!”

  He stamped on into the outer evening, and then came hurrying back again. “Look here, Cyclone,” he said, “what was the looks of this crook with the brass knuckles?”

  “Sort of young-lookin’. I didn’t get a fair look at him. He came so fast! Like a cat that jumps and sinks its teeth into you and then gets away. You know how it is. But it seemed to me that he had a patch of fur around his hips. Outside of that, clothes didn’t bother him none. Y’understand? Didn’t have a thing on. Maybe he’d been down havin’a swim in the pool.”

  “How did he hit?” asked Sparrow.

  “A straight right with a. . . .”

  “A straight right, eh? Brass knuckles or not, that baby can cock, believe me.”

  “When I get him . . . ,” began Cyclone. “Well, that’s all that I’m askin’ for, another chance to have a whirl with him. I’ll do the swatting next time, and he’ll do the sleepin’.”

  “Sure,” said Sparrow a little absently. “Sure. They ain’t nobody in the world, heavy nor light that can really take you off your feet, kid. I guess you know that.”

  “I’ve tried the stuff they sent for six years,” answered Cyclone sneeringly. “None of it’s fazed me yet.”

  Thereafter he bade them good night and went forth toward Juniper and his bride of yesterday.

  “He’s sure a fathead about that iron jaw,” said Vince Munroe. “Damned if I ain’t sort of glad that somebody crooked him.”

  “It’ll take him down about where he ought to be,” suggested Bert Kenny. “Still, he’s got a mighty hard jaw to crack. You got to hand him that.”

  “Do I hand him that?”Vince Munroe scoffed. “Don’t I know him, boob? Ain’t I hung ’em on the button with him twenty times? Ain’t I bust my hand on that chin of his, and never rung the bell? I know all about his jaw, old son. It’s padded. That’s all.”

  “Where’s the padding?” asked Sparrow.

  “I dunno. He’s made that way. That’s all.”

  “It’s inside of his head. He don’t think that nobody can hurt him. And so they can’t. He’s a fathead, sure. If you was a fathead, Kenny, you’d be a champion inside of a month.”

  Kenny sighed and shook his head.

  “Now listen to me,” said Sparrow. “You’ve heard the kid chatter. You know what he thinks. But I’ll tell you the facts. I was just kiddin’him along when I said brass knuckles. Brass knuckles never raised a welt like that. It was just a plain fist, but, if the kid gets it into his head that he’s been knocked out, he won’t be able to lick even a Chinaman.”

  “Who could have done it?” they asked.

  “I’ll show you a part of him,” said Sparrow. “I’ve saved it ever since the day that the punchin’ bag was copped.”

  He led them back through the house to his own small room. There he removed a piece of paper and exhibited to them a strip of shingle upon which was a quantity of mud, and in the mud, deeply printed, was the print of a man’s foot.

  The others gathered and stared at it.

  “What of that?” asked Kenny.

  “Take off your shoe,” snapped out Sparrow.

  Kenny obeyed. He stood up in his bare feet.

  “Look at the length of Bert’s toes. Then look at the toes of this barefooted gent. He could almost hang onto a stick with ’em!”

  The others, more and more interested, gathered closer and began to note different points. Nearly all of the print was of the toes, and the mud had been jammed up into points between
them, a certain sign that the heel received almost nothing of the weight of this traveler.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Under the tree down near the spring. There were other footmarks, but they’d been wiped out pretty careful. This here one was still there. I sliced it off of the face on the ground. And here it is. We’ve got the length of his foot, here, down to a pretty small fraction. I guess that’ll help when we get him cornered.”

  “But what sort of a gent is he that goes around barefooted without much clothes except patches?”

  “I dunno,” said Sparrow. “But when I see him next, I’m gonna try to play tag with him with this here.” He drew from his pocket the shining bulk of a new automatic pistol.

  SPARROW TAKES A DETOUR

  Such was the attitude of Sparrow to the stranger. It was copied instantly by the other men around the camp. But although they got their guns ready and although they were prepared to shoot on sight of a stranger, half naked, with brown skin like an Indian, Sparrow had secret thoughts of his own that he by no means was prepared to divulge to his companions, and among those secret thoughts there was a very definite objection to the destruction of the unknown.

  The reason of Sparrow was very definite and on logical grounds, for he said to himself that the hand that had knocked the invincible jaw of Cyclone Ed Morgan into the proverbial cocked hat was also the hand that could floor many another famous name in the American ring. The strong jaw of Ed Morgan had withstood the shocks of some of the strongest men of his weight. But here he had gone down sick and groggy—no, rather smitten by a thunderbolt.

  Over this, Sparrow brooded for some time. He tried to get a description of the stranger from Cyclone, and Ed responded as well as he could. But the whole thing had been so swift and strange and it had taken such a violent hold upon the imagination of Morgan that his details of the encounter grew like any green thing in the spring of the year, from day to day. His imaginings put forth leaf and became more and more gorgeous.

  He finally arrived at a point where he declared that the stranger who had leaped upon him was a giant of two hundred and fifty or sixty pounds, wild as a demon turned loose in the forest, who had charged at him, snarling like a beast and gnashing his teeth.

  This was a little too like a Jack-The-Giant-Killer story, and out of it the manager evolved a story somewhat in the following fashion: The man who had attacked Cyclone had done so simply because the thrown stone had struck him in a tender place as he lurked behind the shrubbery, waiting for the man to pass. Furthermore, he was of great size. This was proven by the very strong evidence of the footprint that he had found in the mud, and allowing for the fact that the foot, if it had slipped a little in the mud, might not be nearly so huge as it appeared in the print, still it was the toe-spread of a very big man. Besides, although Cyclone had undoubtedly exaggerated, yet it must have taken a man little short of a veritable giant to strike tough Ed Morgan so completely senseless. Never in all of Morgan’s long career in connection with the ring had Mr. Sparrow Roberts seen a man so completely knocked out. A mighty arm, indeed, must have struck that blow, a big man, with speed, no mere mauler, for a heavy-hitting mauler does not produce unconsciousness with his strokes. He crushes and pains and bruises his antagonists; he beats them gradually to weakness, then he strikes them down and they are unable to rise. But mere size and bulk of brawn could never have produced the complete coma into which Ed Morgan had fallen.

  Such a state is induced by a clean-clipping blow, a punch struck with the speed and the sharp decision and the accuracy with which the snapping end of a whip cuts the hide of a horse. That one punch, Sparrow was afraid, reduced his near champion to the ranks of the ham-and fighters. But perhaps, through the effects of that punch, he would be able to attach himself to a still more brilliant warrior who would go on to greater heights of glory than Ed Morgan could ever aspire toward. Perhaps this would result in that dream of dreams—a real heavyweight, perhaps the world’s champion of champions—under the management of Sparrow Roberts, the distinguished impresario.

  So ran on the mind of Sparrow in his dreams. He confided his thoughts to no one, but he began to make secret inquiry, first of all to find out the name of the man who, in that section near and about Juniper, was considered the finest hunter, the surest hand to unravel a trail. Wherever he went, he was met with only one answer: there were hunters and hunters. There were good men at the trail and good men at the rifle. But the man who was useless on the back of a horse, stupid with revolver or rifle, helpless with a rope, was nevertheless a concentrated genius with traps and in trailing, and this man, they said, was called Knut Rasmussen. He had come in from the North Country, and little was known of him except that, in the spring, he brought in the finest furs that were ever taken out of the mountains. As to his past history and as to his nature, no man could say a word. He had no friends. He communed with no man. The reason was that, when he came down from the North Country, he bore upon his face the ragged, horrible scar of the gun brand.

  At this story, when he first heard it, Sparrow innocently asked what the gun brand might be, and he shuddered when he was informed that it was done by dragging the sight of a gun first across the forehead and then down the victim’s face over the bridge of the nose, tearing lips and chin down to the throat.

  Thus prepared for what he might find, Sparrow went into the hills and found Knut Rasmussen, a big, dark man whose face was crossed by the great, ragged scar. As one talked with Knut, at every pause his fingers absently caressed that mark of torture and shame.

  What Sparrow wanted, he said, was someone who could go on the trail of a most dangerous animal—a man. He then told Knut Rasmussen all that he knew of the stranger near the Cyclone Ed Morgan camp. Knut Rasmussen considered the matter for some moments, and then asked what remuneration would be his. As to this, having in mind what trappers made in good season, Sparrow very reasonably offered two hundred dollars for this single bit of work, but Knut Rasmussen merely smiled at him.

  “If I get twelve inches of knife rammed through my back while I’m sleepin’,” he said, “it won’t be so doggone much use havin’ any money,” and he added: “About a thousand will suit me, Mister Roberts.”

  Sparrow cursed and raged, but he could not avoid the bargain, for an instinct told him that this was the man, and that this was the only man who could avail him ought in the hunt for the hard-hitting stranger. So he met all the terms of Knut. That is to say, he paid ten percent, or a hundred dollars, upon the spot, and he agreed in writing to pay nine hundred dollars more when the stranger of the large footprint was delivered into his hands, bound and helpless.

  This contract having been drawn up, Mr. Sparrow Roberts started back through the woods for the camp, and on the way he made a deep detour through the woods, for he had newly purchased a fine pump gun with which he felt that he was the true king of the forest. Thus equipped he hunted eagerly here, there, until, losing his way entirely, he found himself at length in a long, deep ravine, of which the sides were composed of rough boulders, made still more difficult to scale or descend by a dense growth of shrubs and vines. He was passing through the bottom of this ravine when he heard a peculiar rapid sound, echoing out of the mouth of a subterranean tunnel, and he paused to listen and make out the strange disturbance if he could. What it sounded like, he thought, was a number of horses running in the distance over a hard pavement, the sounds blended and confused by the depth of the cave.

  He tried in vain to persuade himself that the sounds were probably the effect of water splashing in an underground torrent. There was a perfect steadiness and rhythm about the noise that assured him that it could not be the effect of anything so simple. What else could it be? Something in the back of his mind suggested one very definite explanation, but, being a very reasonable man, he forgot this matter at once and turned his back upon it, so to speak, and absolutely refused to consider it.

  Sparrow Roberts ventured into the mouth of the cave. Here the noise w
as far clearer, and now the character of the rapid and yet regularly irregular pattering was such that the trainer blinked. Certainly it sounded most amazingly like one thing and one thing only—a thing with which he was most familiar.

  He hurried down the gloomy tunnel, holding the shotgun at the ready before him, ready, indeed, to let any wild beast have both barrels at the first sign of danger. So he turned a corner of the underground passage and came in full view of the very thing that he had so strongly in mind, but which he dared not believe the sound to issue from. It was a punching bag hanging from the very platform that had been stolen from the camp a week or so before. It was the same bag that had been stolen, too, and it was still swinging on the end of the string in rapid vibrations back and forth. There is nothing, after all, that will develop certain qualities of speed of hand and eye like exercise with a punching bag. But why should it have been brought out to this strange place?

  He looked around him and found that he was in a sort of rude room, partly the effect of the natural wideness of the tunnel, and partly increased by an industrious removal of the rocks that had been taken away from the walls wherever they were loose.

  But where was the owner of the place? The punching bag still swung. Certainly the last blow that was dealt it must have been a snapping one. It recalled to Sparrow, very vividly, a certain broad purple welt along the side of the jaw of Cyclone Morgan. Yes, this must be the same hand. This was he who had stolen the punching bag and the platform. This was he who had helped himself most liberally to the provisions in the camp, time and again. This was he who had felled Cyclone. This was the giant of the woods!

  Instantly Sparrow built a story around the idea. Here was a fellow who had committed some crime, been exiled to the safety of the mountains and a hermit’s life, and who had been so passionately fond of boxing in the old days that he could not resist an opportunity to take away even such a cheap and cumbersome prize as this.