Sour Creek Valley

by Max Brand

  I hate knives; I hate them worse than I hate poison. You can stand up and fight fair with fists or clubs or guns, but, somehow, to run a knife like a long tooth into the flesh of another human being—why, it always makes me feel sick and dizzy, and that’s a fact.

  I just said, “They like knives, and I’d kill a man that pulled a knife on me.”

  “Did you ever kill a man for a thing like that?” asked Harry Randal, not loud enough to disturb me much.

  “I killed five for it,” I said, “and maybe I’ll kill some more before I …”

  I stopped myself after I realized that I had already said too much. I got up and glared at Randal, but he was very pleased with himself. He leaned back and rubbed his hands together, most contented.

  “All right,” said Randal. “I’ve got a closed mouth. I won’t talk about you. But it seems that there were parts of your history that the judge didn’t know anything about, eh? What you did in the city was really just a little vacation party, while you were away from work. Don’t mention it, Big Boy. Only, I see that you have reason for hating Mexicans. I suppose that some of them don’t love you, either.”

  I had to admit: “They hate me all the way to Mexico City. I’m proud of it, but I got to admit that I lose a little sleep over it. But what about this Valentin Mauricio and Pablo Almadares?”

  “Valentin,” said Harry Randal, “is a cool fellow with a sharp head on his shoulders. He knows how to take care of himself, but he isn’t aggressive unless he has somebody else to do the fighting for him. His brother, Gaspar, for instance, was a regular bulldog, and he executed the plans that Valentin made for him.

  “Pablo Almadares is a different matter. He is a gentleman who turned crook for the pleasure that it brought to him. They say that he has a very honorable name and a still more honorable estate somewhere down in Old Mexico, as well as a lot of the pure Castilian in his veins … you know what I mean. But this Almadares was born to love trouble for its own sake. He likes a fight. He likes it better than you and this Rusty McArdle rolled into one. He finds his fights, too. They have a price on his head, and in half a dozen states the governors will pay out a fat bonus on top of the federal reward. There’s nothing particularly vicious about this Pablo Almadares. But dangerous? Oh, man, it was when I heard about Pablo Almadares that I started in to give the boys their own way on my ranch. Better for them to take liberties than for Almadares to take the whole place and the cows that are on it!”

  Now, it has always seemed to me that you can make a difference between reality and imitation. Out of two imitations, one may look bad and the other seem more real. When the important reality itself comes along, you don’t have to use your reason none. A gong rings inside of you, and you know that this is the hundred percent fact that you got your hands on.

  It was that way when I listened to Randal. He was a faker, but when he talked about Almadares, he sure had the golden ring in his voice. Yes, sir, I knew that if I had to mingle with that Pablo, it would be an awful mess all around.

  Chapter Sixteen

  You will notice in all of this that Randal had controlled his joy pretty well on the subject of how I had handled Rusty McArdle and the rest. I didn’t hold that against him. You can’t expect a pint measure to hold a bushel, and there simply wasn’t room in Randal for anything generous—like praise. What he aimed at was to show me that I had simply managed to finish off the first bit of my job, with a lot worse stuff coming along behind it.

  I forgot about him the minute that I left the room. I had stayed away a lot longer than I intended. Right then, I would rather have lost my hopes of that ranch than to have given up that kid. He meant so much to me.

  I tried my door and found it locked, just the same as it had been before. There was no lamplight leaking out through the crack beneath the door. That looked bad. I went out around the house, and when I came opposite my window, my toe stubbed on a bit of metal. I scooped it up, and it was the key to my room.

  That made me feel worse than ever, because it was easy to figure that the kid had climbed down the draining pipe—which would be plumb easy for an active little monkey like him, and then he had dropped my key and started away.

  I climbed up the pipe, simply because it was a good deal quicker than going clear around to go up the stairs and open the door from the outside. When I shoved my head through the window, I got a happy surprise. There wasn’t much of a moon out—just a thin half circle a quarter of the distance up the sky, but it gave enough light to show me Pepillo, lying on his face on the bed.

  He jumped up right away when he saw me, and he hollered out with great fury, “I desire to leave this room, señor! I … I have lost the key … and … and I dared not venture down the outside from the window, otherwise … you should never have seen me again, gringo devil!”

  The darkness covered up my grin, and I was glad of that. If he had suspected that I saw through him, it would certainly have been the end between me and the kid. However, it was easy to tell what had happened. He had lost his nerve about leaving the house and me, and so he had thought of this dodge to keep himself there—throwing the key out of the window, first, so that it would be lost, and then pretending that he was afraid to climb down to the ground.

  All of this flashed on me. What I saw most clearly was that the best way for me to get rid of the kid forever would be to let him see how I could look through him. You can believe that I didn’t want to get rid of him.

  I just said, “All right, old son, but where did you think that you might’ve left the key?”

  “If I could tell that, señor,” said Pepillo, “should I not have found it at once and let myself escape from this house and from you and from all the other gringos whom I hate, forever?”

  “That’s pretty mean talk, Pepillo, but I wish that you would forget what I said a while back. I tell you, Pepillo,” I said, sitting down on a chair as close to him as I dared, “that everybody has a different way of looking at folks. You take a high-class, educated gent that has traveled a lot, and he is always pretty easy on foreigners. It doesn’t make any difference to him if a man talks in a queer way or wears funny clothes or eats with the handle of his fork. You understand? But you take a low-down, common sort of a gent that ain’t traveled much, he doesn’t take to strange things … not at all, he doesn’t. What he wants is his own kind of pork and beans, or else he pretty near starves to death. You take him when he meets up with a fellow that wears clothes different to him, and talks a different language, and walks in a different way, why, he just about hates that gent. If he doesn’t laugh at him, he wants to about kill him. Well, Pepillo, I’m just one of them low-down, ignorant folks that ain’t had no education, you see. I suppose that I ain’t got much against the greasers … I mean the Mexicans. But they got a tricky way with their knives, you got to admit, and after a fellow has been carved up a few times, you understand …”

  “Ah, ah,” said Pepillo, “have you been stabbed by one of my countrymen?”

  “Have I been stabbed by one of your countrymen? I’ll tell a man that I been stabbed by one of your countrymen. Lemme show you!”

  I lighted the lamp and, when it was going good, I turned around to Pepillo. He kept back in the shadow, which told me he didn’t want to come too close to me. That made me wonder a good deal. I showed him a place on the inside of my left hand, first, where there was a big white scar, caused by taking hold of the knife of a Mexican that was kneeling on my chest.

  “Well,” said Pepillo, very edgy, “do you go about taking the knives of fighting men in your hands?”

  “This gent,” I said, “was sitting on my chest, just then, and one of his pals had a hold of my two feet, and a cousin of his was trying to find a gun that had dropped on the floor, so’s he could come over and make sure of killing me.”

  Pepillo gasped, and came out into the light to stare at me and the cut in my hand. When the lamplight hi
t him fair, I could see why Pepillo had wanted to keep in the shadow. His eyes were all rimmed with red, and I could see that he must’ve been lying up there bawling, most of the time that I was away, until maybe he cried himself to sleep. It softened me down a good deal to see that, just as it would’ve softened you down, maybe. He was a good kid, you understand, and I could tell that he was fond of me, just as I was of him, only not so much, of course. Him and me had been through a lot together, this same day.

  “But how did you escape?” cried Pepillo. “You had other friends in that place, and they came to you with help?”

  “The four of us were alone,” I said, “excepting for a fifth man that didn’t count, because I’d hit him in the right place when his pals were putting me down.”

  “But with three men … and you on the floor … and the knife flashing above you … Señor Kitchin!” sang out the lad. Doggone me if he didn’t put his hands together and begin to wring them like the knife was in danger of driving through him! He was a funny one, was that Blue Jay, not like any other man or boy.

  “I grabbed at the knife as it came down,” I told him, “and turned it away from my throat, which he was aiming at. Then I kicked the other Mexican off of my feet and into the wall. That gave me a chance to tear into the boy that was on my chest. I rolled him into the wall, too, and slammed Mexican number three in the face. After that I was able to dive through the window and get away. I tied a half of my shirt around my hand, but I was some weak before I could get to the doctor, five miles away. There you are for one reason why I don’t love Mexicans, Pepillo.”

  His eyes were closed, and he was shuddering. “Ah, ah!” said the Blue Jay. “I begin to understand.”

  “And here’s another to show you,” I said, and I opened up my shirt and showed him a place across my chest and the right side of my ribs where a Bowie knife had gone slithering.

  Pepillo’s eyes was as big as saucers. “That was your life!” he cried. “And how many lives have you, amigo?”

  “That was one of the nine,” I admitted. “I’ll tell you about that. I had got it in for the gentleman greasers by that time, but the ladies still looked pretty good to me. There was a little beauty by the name of María something or other, living over in San Sebastian. I used to wade my horse across the river and go to see her.” I could see a pretty cold look in the face of the kid, and I wondered at it. Then I went on, “If there was only a light in the living room window, then I knew that I could go on up to the house. But if there was a light in the kitchen, too, then I could know that her suitor was there. Because her family had it fixed how they was to splice her to a rich young don from down the country. Mateo was his name, I think … I forget what else. But I got tired of seeing the lights in both windows, and so I laid for this here Mateo one night, and pulled him off his horse and took him down to the edge of the river.

  “‘Mateo,’ I said, ‘you’re a pretty fine-looking chap, and I would sure hate to have you found drowned by accident in the river. But I would like to know how did you ever get that bad habit of coming to visit María? She’s plumb unhealthy for you.’

  “This Mateo, he wasn’t any fool. He said … ‘I tell you, señor, that I have already been feeling the damp of this air in the lowlands. The house is too close to the river, and the marshes are full of a deadly malaria and other fevers, are they not?’

  “I admitted that that climate was pretty near sure to be fatal to him, and he agreed with me and thanked me for showing him the facts. So I let him up and put him back on his horse. And he rode off.”

  “Ah, the coward!” cried Pepillo.

  “He stopped at a little distance and turned loose some lead at me,” I said, “but nothing hit me. Because, you know, your countrymen, they ain’t as handy with guns as they are with knives. But my María, when the don stopped paying attention to her, she located the trouble and found out that I had scared him away. She took very kind to that idea, although it made her pa and ma pretty cross. But one evening while we were sitting under the big cypresses down by the edge of the river, holding hands and the rest of it …”

  “And the rest of what?” interrupted Pepillo, very sharp.

  “Why, making love, of course, you young sap! Did you think that I was taking those long rides for the sake of a glass of wine and some talk about the weather? Because if you did, think again. It’s your turn.”

  “I see,” said Pepillo. “You were what you call … spooning, no?”

  “All night,” I said. “You may call it that, if you want to. I had just been telling María that I loved her more than any other woman was even able to imagine being loved …”

  “Was not that false?”

  “Oh, sure, but you know how it is … or you will know when you get about two or three years older. You got to talk sort of foolish to a girl, or she don’t understand.”

  “Faugh!” exclaimed Pepillo. “It fills me with a great disgust! Are all men like you?”

  “Sure,” I said, “only worse. That is, most of them are, and them that ain’t would be, if they could. I ain’t done much harm to the ladies, because God didn’t give me the face for it. However, I was telling you that I was finished with telling María how she came like an angel into my life … and all that sort of bunk, you understand. María came back with … ‘Alas, my dear, but I fear that my father and mother will never give their consent to let me marry you.’

  “It sort of staggered me, and I popped out … ‘Marriage!’

  “‘Do you not intend to marry me?’ asked María.

  “‘But of course, I do,’ I said.

  “‘Then,’ María said, ‘there is only one way. You must come and carry me away, my love, some night. You must come with two fleet horses. And I shall bring down enough of my father’s money to make a dowry.’

  “It flabbergasted me. ‘Sure.’ I said. ‘Tomorrow night I’ll be here … at midnight, María.’

  “But, of course, when tomorrow night came, I was not at her father’s house.”

  “It was because you would not have her steal her father’s money, was it not?” Pepillo asked, very eager.

  “Say, kid,” I said, “why would I be saddled with a greaser for a wife?”

  Pepillo jumped up and stamped his foot. “Gringo dog!” he yelled. “They are far, far above you!”

  “Sure,” I said, very quick. “Sure, they are above me … but that’s the reason that I wouldn’t marry one of them. I want somebody that is down on my own level, Blue Jay.”

  “Ah, well,” Blue Jay said, “you are nothing but great lies, one on top of the other. But what has all of this to do with the knife wound?”

  “I’m coming to it,” I said. “You see, that next night I thought that I would try to fill the gap that was left in my heart by the losing of María …”

  “Bah! You have no heart!” cried, Pepillo.

  “All right,” I said. “Anyway, I was looking for amusement, and then I remembered a blue-eyed little Irish girl living up in the hills. A great card she was, and a hand at jigging such as you never seen or guessed about, old-timer. So I went up to see the Irish kid, and when I came back it was pretty late. When I came to my quarters it was close to dawn, and against the gray of the morning light I saw a shadow that came jumping at me. I fetched up an arm to guard myself, but I was too late. A knife blade sank into my breast, the hilt thumping home. If it hadn’t been that the point of the knife turned along my ribs instead of slipping between them, I would’ve been a tolerable dead Blondy Kitchin before the sun came up.”

  “It was María?”

  “It was her, all right.”

  “She was right,” said Pepillo. “If a man jilts a woman, it is her duty to kill him.”

  “You’re like all kids,” I said to him, “all wild about your ideas of women. All wild and wrong, old man. Anyway, that was María, right enough. I barely had time to get her ou
t of the room, because she’d turned hysterical and was swearing that she would kill herself because she had killed me. I took the knife away from her and told her that it wasn’t more than a scratch, and that she had only made herself mighty ridiculous. That turned her mad again, because there ain’t nothing that a woman likes more than to be grand and heroic and passionate and mean, you understand.”

  “Stuff!” said Pepillo. “It is plain that you have never known ladies, señor.”

  “No … maybe they’re different,” I said, “but it always looks to me that they been all painted with the same kind of tar. Anyway, that María put me in bed for three weeks, and darned if there wasn’t a funny thing, Pepillo. She sent me flowers every day, and used to come and sit by the window, looking very pretty.”

  “Did that seem strange to you?” asked Pepillo, sneering.

  “Sure it did … pretty near crazy,” I said.

  “And yet you say that you understand women! Bah!”

  “Anyway,” I said, “when I got well, I had to skin out of that part of the country, because I began to suspect that if I didn’t look out, that María would marry me, whether I wanted to or not. However, that cured me of Mexican girls, same as I had been cured of the Mexican men before. However, I want to show you where a bunch of Mexican gamblers went after me, down in a dive on the river. I beat them off with a chair till I got a little clearance. But when I tried to jump through the window, one of them dived in quicker than a snake strikes, and he sank his knife right into my hip. Lemme show you that scar, because it’s a beauty. Twists clear around to the back of my leg!”

  Pepillo held up both his hands, closed his eyes, and shook his head.

  “No more, señor!” he cried. “All of this talk, it sickens me a little. I do not like scars. No, but I dread and I hate it. I do not wish to see any more of your wounds. Alas, Señor Kitchin, many times you have been at the very edge of dying, have you not?”