Crusader

by Max Brand

  Round after round, he boxed like a master. Round after round, the man from the forest rushed like a tiger, and was met with an insoluble wall of gloves. Those punches of Lacoste, strong enough to have knocked out an ordinary man, were raising great purple welts on the body of Camden.

  Still he came on ceaselessly, striving for a second solid punch. Many a time he struck, but the blows were glancing ones. From the side of the head, from the cheekbones, the breast or the ribs of Lacoste, those man-killing blows caromed away, but, even as they glanced, there was power in them that often shook Lacoste from head to heel.

  In the eighth round he complained to the referee as he lay gasping in his corner:“This Camden has something in his gloves. No man could hit like that!”

  So the referee went to Harry Camden and thumbed his gloves thoroughly. There was nothing beneath the leather except the padding and the hard hand below. The ninth round was called, and the slaughter began again.

  “Knock him out! We’ve bet on you to win in ten rounds!” his chief second had said to Lacoste, and he went in willingly.

  To mix with this brown-skinned tiger was excessively dangerous, however. They had hardly closed in the first rally when a lifting uppercut plowed through the arms of Lacoste, glanced off his chest, and struck his chin. He staggered away the full length of the ring, and, bouncing off the ropes, he fell into a clinch.

  After that, there were no more chances to be taken. This was something like playing with a thunderbolt, and Pierre Lacoste had no liking for the work. He stayed away safely, from that point on. When he had to close, he was content to tie up the arms of his enemy. He preferred to dance away at arm’s length. The tenth round closed. The eleventh round dragged through.

  “You’ll last it out!” gasped out Sparrow.

  “I’ve got to win,” Camden panted, and his amber eyes, now looking forth through slits at the face of the other, measured Lacoste hungrily up and down.

  The referee leaned above him. “Kid,” he said with a rough sympathy, “you’ve done well. But there’s no use breakin’ your heart. You can’t catch Frenchy. He’s on wheels. That last round was good enough to end the fight. The crowd has had its money’s worth.”

  “Send him away,” Camden said to Sparrow, and rose from his chair at the sound of the gong.

  He rose slowly, however, for an idea had formed itself in his mind. What does a bird do when it wishes to lure the dog away from the rest? It flutters away with sagging wings, pretends to be lamed.

  So, at the first blow that collided with his chin, Camden allowed his knees to sag, and crumpled to the floor. The referee cast a sharp glance at Sparrow as though to say:“I told you what would happen.”Then he began the count.

  Camden, acting exactly as he remembered Pierre Lacoste had acted, gathered himself at the count of seven, swaying, and rose at nine, with arms half down. He looked up beneath his swollen brows and saw Lacoste, his face contorted with ferocity, plunge in for the finishing punch. It landed high on Camden’s cheek with a shock that cast a splintering of red across his vision.

  He reeled far back, letting his knees go limp, letting his head sag far to one side, as Lacoste had done in that wild first round. Yet all the while his heart was swelling with fury and with a sense of power as he saw the Frenchman rush in with a white glint of teeth behind his straining lips. In and in came Lacoste. His left glove was down—his right was swinging wildly.

  Then Camden straightened like a sapling released from a weight. He stood suddenly firm on both feet. It was in front of his left that the opening lay, and with his left he struck, the full length of his arm, the full sway of his body, with a chopping little hook at the end of the stroke.

  It was not accurately landed. At the last instant, Lacoste saw the trick and strove to cover himself. He was too late for that, but he managed to sway his head a little so that Camden’s glove landed on the forehead of his rival, instead of on the chin. Otherwise, so Sparrow swore afterward, the neck of Lacoste would have been broken.

  As it was, he fell loosely on the floor of the ring.

  No one needed to wait for the count.

  As for the referee, he waved Camden to his corner and, picking up the fallen king, began to drag him toward his seconds.

  Down on the press bench, reporters, agape, were scribbling as fast as pencils could make notes. The crowd opened its heart with joy, for it had seen the great Lacoste go down at last. It opened its heart, it opened its throat, and it yelled its joy in a key that made the sky ring.

  NO WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP FOR HIM

  Three weeks later the parting came between Camden and Sparrow. The wounds of Camden were healed, and the patience of Sparrow was finally exhausted.

  On a day he stood up in the tent that sheltered them and smote his hands together.

  “You’re the world’s champion, kid. Are you gonna tell me that you’ll give it up?”

  Camden took him out of the tent. On a long, flat shoulder of the hill a colony of prairie dogs was chattering.

  “Listen,” Camden declared, “that’s your world. Why should I want to be champion of it?”

  Sparrow could not utter a single word. Instead, he dug down into his coat and tugged out a thick sheaf of bills.

  “I’m done!” he cried, trembling with passion. “And when you’ve spent this wad, maybe you’ll get some sense. Go take that coin and blow it on the fool girl. When it’s gone, you’ll want to find more of the same stuff. Oh, I’ll hear from you again, right enough.” He cast the money at Camden. “Ten thousand!” he shouted. “That’s what you get for your little outing!”

  What he, as the most astute of managers, made out of the transaction was thus left undisclosed, and Sparrow stormed out of the camp and hurried away with a heart swelling with disgust. For here was a gold mine that refused to be mined, a man who refused to make himself great and famous.

  Camden went down from the mountains in his own way. That is to say, he covered more miles than a hard-ridden horse for five consecutive days, and so he came at last, into the country of Nan Pearson. He reached it at noon, slept on a bed of pine needles until the evening, and hurried down from the mountains into the lowlands through the dusk. He knew the country. The house, having been described, he went straight to it. It was barely dark. Inside the window of one room, he saw a cloud of smoke. Men must be there. Peering through another, he found himself staring into a small kitchen, and at the sink was Nan Pearson, laughing at her work and rattling the dishes as she washed them.

  The hand of Camden closed hard around the package of money, and a lump came in his throat. Then he stepped to the kitchen door and opened it. At that, she called over her shoulder:“Is that you, Lew?”

  When he did not answer, she turned, still laughing, and saw him. The laughter was struck from her face. She grew a little white and stood there, staring.

  For a moment she fumbled automatically, drying her hands on the apron, still staring at him and his burning amber eyes, and the flare of his nostrils, and the purple blotches that were the only marks of the fight remaining on his face. He saw her fear as clearly as he saw her beauty, and it sickened him.

  “Mister Roberts . . . he wrote and said that you was coming,” she said. “But . . . when I told him a long time ago . . . I didn’t mean. . . .” She began to tremble. “I’ll get Dad,” she whispered. “He’ll . . . he’ll know better how to talk to you.”

  He caught her shoulder and stopped her as she fled for the inner door. How soft was the touch of her flesh beneath his hard fingertips.

  “Wait,” he said. “Roberts told you that I was bringing down money?”

  “He said. . . .”

  “It’s a loan,” Camden said. “Someday, later on . . . maybe I’ll come to ask for it back.”

  He laid the packet of money on the table, without looking at it. Then he backed to the door. “You hate me, I guess,” he whispered.

  As he stood there with a great sorrow in those wild yellow eyes, and with a great grie
f making his breast swell, a great warm wave of relenting swept through the girl.

  She would have spoken and called him back, but she could not. Fear and this new emotion were too close to one another still. So, without a word spoken, she saw him fade away into the night. She ran to the door after him. But he was already gone.

  She hurried out into the night, with an ache of regret already forming in her heart, and then, over the ridge of the low hills, she saw a tall form, looking gigantic from that low angle, appear for an instant against the stars and then dip down behind the close horizon and disappear.

  She waited there so long and so still that the gray two-year-old filly came to the fence to stare at her through the darkness, and a great winged owl swooped over her head with whispering wings and passed on. After that, awakening, she went slowly back to the kitchen and found the money and began to count it mechanically, without knowing what she did.

  II

  CAMDEN IN TOWN

  Through the sun-brimmed world of yellow morning light, when the rose of dawn was as yet hardly out of the sky, rolled a great, deep voice:

  All day long on the prairies I ride,

  Not even a dog to trot by my side.

  My fire I kindle with chips gathered ’round,

  My coffee I boil without being ground.

  Camden wakened with the roar of the last note in his ears. He pitched his feet off the bed and swung into a sitting posture, his head in his palms, his fingers thrust into the deep, woolly tangle of his hair. Like hammer blows upon his brain, thickened with the tequila that he had drunk the night before, the words beat ceaselessly:

  All day long on the prairies I ride,

  Not even a dog. . . .

  Camden swayed to his feet and felt his way across the room. His legs were weak and uncertain. His knees sagged and wobbled. Of his feet he was only dimly aware that they were in his way, but his arms were as powerful as ever; liquor could not affect them or his mighty hands. So he steadied himself down the wall and along the foot of the bed until his grip was on the sill of the window and he looked out.

  The breath of the morning air was so unspeakably delicious to him that for the moment he forgot the malice that was surging in that dulled mind of his. He gulped that air; he drank it with a grin of fierce delight. He tore open his shirt until the wind could touch his hot breast. All the knotted muscles of his body, all the knotted muscles of his thought began to relax. He heard the wailing song more clearly, but more in the distance so far as volume was concerned.

  My fire I kindle with chips gath. . . .

  The grin of Camden was a wolfish lifting of his lip that exposed white teeth strong enough to have snapped at a bone and crushed it.

  “I’m more’n half drunk,” he said to himself. “I must have been on a beaut’last night.”

  He turned from the window. The warmth and the darkness of the room rolled oppressively against his face, and the fumes struck heavily upward to the seat of reason and of self-control.

  “I’m gonna get sober!” Camden announced.

  It was a stirring thing to see him use his will; as another man might wrestle against a physical enemy, so stood Camden, his legs well braced, half reeling, his big arms extended before him, his big hands half clenched so that the fingers were as rigid as stone. Thought was impossible to him, it seemed, without physical contortion.

  “I’m gonna get sober!” he said again aloud.

  All at once he stood erect easily on his legs; his eyes cleared; his brow smoothed; and his very breathing grew less rapid and harsh. In one in whose presence so much of the brute was visible, such an effort of the will seemed doubly amazing. Now that he had smoothed his face, it was possible to see him more clearly.

  His ugliness was extraordinary. He had a pugilist’s wide, short jaw, a cruelly arched nose, and big, cold amber eyes, like the eyes of a beast of prey. Listing his features one by one, they were not unattractive. It was his expression that made him repulsive.

  Now he crossed the room, bearing his two hundred pounds with a step of lightness. He lowered his head over the washbowl and inverted the pitcher above it. The rush of cold water cleared his brain like magic. Five minutes later he left his room and went down to the dining room of the hotel.

  He was early for breakfast. He had to sit beside a window and wait, staring out across the desert beyond the town to the brown, burned mountains whose distant summits turned blue and melted in the sky. The proprietor came in and greeted him with a nervous smile.

  “How you feelin’, Camden?” he asked.

  “Fine,” he replied with a growl.

  The proprietor rested his hands on the back of a chair so that it swayed slowly back and forth, and, pressing upon a nail in the floor, it gave forth a steady, subdued squeaking. That noise was the most exquisite torture to Harry Camden, but he took his tormented nerves in hand and checked them. He raised his head a little and forced a smile upon his lips. It was one of the great moments of his life. It was not to honor the proprietor or to conciliate his friendship. It was simply because he was getting a gruesome enjoyment out of this battle with his nerves that protested in a shuddering agony.

  “After last night,” said the proprietor, winking broadly, “I figgered that you’d be restin’ your head a little today.”

  “I ain’t one of them that need rest,” Camden replied. “But I . . . ,”—he paused. The loud singer wailed again.

  All day long the prairies I ride,

  Not even a dog to trot by my side.

  My fire I kindle with chips. . . .

  “Who might that be, that’s singin’?” Camden asked gently.

  “You’ve been noticin’ him, have you?” asked the proprietor.

  “I been noticin’ him,” answered Camden, more quietly than ever.

  “That’s Steve Arnot. Got a fine voice, I guess.”

  “A mighty good loud voice.”

  “Yep, they’s some say that he’d ought to be on the stage. I dunno but what he ought. He’s got talent, that gent.”

  “He’s got talents,” Camden agreed softly. “Maybe the cook’s got something in yonder for me to eat?”

  The proprietor hastened to find out. In the kitchen he said to the old one-eyed cook:“Hurry up with them flapjacks. We got Harry Camden in yonder, and doggone me if he ain’t plumb good-natured. Darned if he ain’t smilin’. The first I ever seen on his face!”

  How little can even the keenly observant tell what passes in the mind of a strong man. For in Camden there was only one strong desire, and that was to wreck the hotel, touch a match to its remains, strangle the singer who was “good enough to be on the stage,” and throw his body into the flames.

  These thoughts he turned slowly, deliberately in his brain. Then food was brought before him, a vast stack of hotcakes, ham, eggs, coffee impenetrably black, thick molasses, butter. Once more he took himself grimly in hand. Had he turned weakling that the very presence of food revolted him? He began to eat methodically, forcing down every mouthful with an individual effort. Perspiration stood on his forehead. A black mist of disgust swirled before his eyes. But he continued to eat. The proprietor came back and rocked the creaking chair once more, and Harry Camden forced himself to finish his meal and chat with the other pleasantly at the same time.

  What an effort every smile cost him, no one in the mountains could have calculated. But he persisted to the last. He listened to a long story; he finished the last bite of his food; then he sauntered forth onto the verandah and slumped into a chair. There he rolled a cigarette.

  My fire I kindle with chips gathered ’round,

  My coffee I boil without. . . .

  The cigarette tasted like the fume of metal filings, but he forced himself to finish it to the smallest sort of a butt. He smoked it so small that it singed his fingertips before he dropped it, and every breath he inhaled to the bottom of his lungs. Then he snapped the butt away. He was half sick, and he was in a cold frenzy. Still the song droned on, the sam
e stanza over and over again:

  All day long on the prairie. . . .

  The proprietor followed him onto the verandah. It was not often that one found terrible Harry Camden in such obviously good humor. Here was a chance for talk. Here was a chance to learn, perhaps, certain stories or hints of stories, which no one in the world knew, for the past of Camden was a dark abyss, hiding unknown things. So the proprietor came out, swinging a thick stick stout enough to have brained a wolf.

  “What was that yarn about you comin’down to Withero last year?” he asked frankly.

  “I dunno,” said Camden. “Lemme see that stick.” He took it in his mighty fingers. This was a weapon with which he could crush skulls. How he would like to use it for that very purpose!

  “There was some said . . . ,” began the proprietor, but then he was drowned by the huge, wailing voice of the singer on the farther side of the hotel.

  All day long on the prairie I ride,

  Not even a dog to trot. . . .

  The thick cudgel snapped between the hands of Camden and left two short butts ending in a brush of splinters. He stood up.

  “What’s the matter?” asked the owner of the hotel.

  “This here wood is rotten,” Camden declared, and gave the proprietor another smile. But a gate had opened, and the man of the hotel glimpsed a hell inside his guest. He remained behind to gape at this thing that he had half seen, half guessed at.

  Camden sprang down from the verandah and found the singer seated on a stump, repairing a broken bridle, his fingers busy, his eyes half closed with the ecstasy of his song.