Black Thunder

by Max Brand

  Then he forgot his troubles of the body.

  It was the glimmering verge of the day through which he rode; it was only the gray of the early dawn when he came down a gully toward the head of Skunk Creek. He thought, at first, that it was a wisp of morning mist that floated above the head of a cluster of aspens. But the mist kept rising, thin and small, always replenished.

  It was fire smoke!

  At the edge of the aspens he dismounted and leaned for an instant against the shoulder of the horse. His heart was rocketing in his body. His swollen feet were painful to stand on. His wrists were so thick that the rifle had a strange feeling in his grasp. His eyes felt heavy, too. He could find pouches beneath them by the touch of his fingertips.

  He looked for an instant about him. The rose of the morning had entered the gray dawn. The mountains shoved up black elbows against the brilliance of the sky. It was his country, and he loved it. But the beauty of it gave him no joy now. He could think of nothing except the horrible fluttering, the irregular pulsation of his heart, like a flock of birds beating their wings without a steady rhythm.

  Was he to be mastered again—if indeed that smoke rose from the campfire of the doctor—not in battle, but by the maudlin weakness of his own spirit? Not spirit, either. Matters of the spirit do not puff the eyes and make the limbs swell.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind he kept a sense of the old mountain tales of Indian witchcraft, and of evil spirits breathed into the bodies of condemned men by the ancient seers. It was like that—that was how he felt, exactly. He went on gingerly through the copse.

  Now, beyond the thinning of the trees, he could see the silhouette of a man saddling a horse. He drew closer. The veil of the trees thinned, and he found himself looking out on Dr. Parker Channing in person, in the act of drawing a bridle over the head of that lofty bay gelding. The gray flannels and the white shoes looked a good bit absurd in these mountain surroundings, however smart they had seemed in the town. But the air of the doctor had nothing absurd in it.

  That lofty head was carried like a conqueror’s. The pair of holstered revolvers at the hips was not there for show, and the Winchester worn in a saddle holster would keep its owner fed fat with the best game the mountains could offer.

  No matter what Channing had given up, he was not entirely depressed. It was the blue time of the day, of course, and yet he was singing a little to himself.

  Something crackled behind Traynor. That fool horse, Tramper, of course, had followed where he was not wanted. He saw a shadowy impression of the animal behind him, and then the doctor was whirling with a drawn revolver.

  “Hands up!” yelled Traynor.

  “Damn the hands!” said the doctor, and was firing into the trees at what must have been to him a very dim target. Traynor, gun at shoulder, aimed at the breast and fired. He wanted it not this way but another way, but he had to take the game as the doctor chose to play it.

  He was certain, as he drew the trigger that his forefinger was closing over the life of big Parker Channing. Then, as the rifle boomed, he heard the clang of the bullet against metal. The revolver, spinning out of the hands of the doctor, arched through the air and struck heavily against the side of the gelding, which went off like a shot down the side of the creek. And out of the woods, squealing like a happy fool, Tramper bolted after this good example of light heels and featherbrain. But Larry Traynor leaned a shoulder against a slender tree trunk and maintained his bead.

  “Don’t try for that second gun, Doctor,” he said.

  “Certainly not,” said Channing politely. “But can it be my old friend, Traynor? Well met, my lad. Oh, if I’d only had one candlepower more of sunshine to show where you were among those trees.”

  IV

  Fear ought not to choke a man when he had an enemy helpless under a leveled gun. Surely there was no fear in Traynor now, and yet his heart was still swelling in his throat and his breath would not come as he walked out of the woods toward the doctor.

  “Unbuckle that gun belt and drop it,” he commanded.

  The doctor obeyed. His glance was not on the gun, but on the face of the captor. “You’re going fast, eh?” he asked.

  “Going fast where?” demanded Traynor.

  “To hell, old fellow,” said the doctor. He kept shifting his glance across the face of Traynor as though he were reading large print. “No, you won’t last long,” added Channing, as if he were diagnosing a case for a patient.

  “Give me your hands,” said Traynor.

  Channing held them out, and, when he saw the handcuffs, he laughed: “Ah, a legal arrest, eh? No murder, Larry? Just a legal arrest leading up to a trial, and all that?”

  Traynor snapped the steel bracelets over the brown wrists of the other. And the doctor sneered openly: “You poor devil! You can hardly breathe, can you?”

  “Better than you’ll be breathing before many days,” said Traynor. “Step back now.”

  The doctor stepped back. But he kept nodding and smiling, as though he were entirely pleased by what he saw.

  Traynor stooped and picked up the fallen gun belt. He strapped it around his own hips.

  “I’m curious, Traynor,” said the doctor, “just how you managed to know that I’d come here?”

  “You’d travel as far as you could over ground that you knew. This is the biggest march you ever made from Little Snake.”

  The doctor stared. “Well,” he muttered, “I’ll be damned. Am I as simple as all this? Then I deserve anything that comes to me.” And he added, almost with a snarl: “I should have gone the entire way, on the Laymon verandah. I should have drifted lead into you before the other people could see that you weren’t able to fight. But here we are . . . what are you going to do?”

  “Follow those damned crazy horses, first of all. Face that way and march.”

  “How far, brother?” asked the doctor, looking down at Traynor’s feet, softly muffled in the socks.

  “Till I wear the flesh off to the bone!” said Traynor savagely.

  “Is that it?” asked Channing. “I’m to be paraded through the streets of Little Snake with the conqueror behind me? Is that it?”

  “Something like that,” said Traynor. “You’re still going to parade into the Little Snake jail. I don’t give a damn who sees you go.”

  “The fact is,” said the doctor, rather with an air of curiosity than of concern, “you never would have bothered about me, except that I seem to have shamed you in front of your townsmen?”

  “The man you shot off the stage was my best friend,” said Traynor. “You had to go down, Doctor. If I could manage to get a chance at you, I would have followed you the rest of my life.”

  “That wouldn’t have been long, old son.” The doctor chuckled. He looked again from the swollen feet to the puffed eyes of his captor. “No, that wouldn’t have been long.”

  “Stop bearing down on me,” commanded Traynor. “God knows that I’m holding myself hard. I don’t want to do you harm, Channing, but if you keep nagging me. . .”

  They followed the two horses a good ten miles. Five of those miles were backtracking completely away from the direction of Little Snake, and, at the end of that distance, from a hilltop Traynor bitterly watched the two animals careening miles and miles away from him down a gulch.

  There was little use in following. He could not make the doctor help him catch the horse that was to carry Channing to prison. And Traynor’s feet were now in a condition that made walking difficult and running impossible. Gloomily he turned in the direction of far-off Little Snake. “March!” he said huskily.

  The doctor laughed, and turned willingly in the appointed direction.

  No man thinks of shoes until there is long marching to be done. But Traynor began to yearn for anything that would effectively clothe his feet. He had to cut off slabs of bark and bind them to his feet with strips of clothes, which he sliced into bandages. Other bandages he used to wind around his ankles, and so constrict the swelling. But
the puffiness that did not appear in the ankles began higher up in the legs. To walk began to be like wading through mud. Yet through that entire day he kept heading on toward Little Snake.

  In the evening he built a fire and stewed some rabbit, which he had shot along the way. They ate that meat. Then the doctor sat with his back to the trunk of a tree and smoked cigarettes, and smiled derisively at his captor.

  There was reason and plenty of it for that mockery, as Traynor knew. He had covered a very short distance toward the town. Each day, it seemed, his feet were likely to grow worse and worse. If that were the case, before many days were out he would hardly be able to make perceptible headway.

  Presently he said: “Channing, this is a thing to die of, eh?” He pointed to his feet, to his wrists.

  “Die of? Why, you’re dying now, man,” said the doctor. He laughed again. “You were dying down there in Little Snake, and I saw what was the matter with you when I looked at you on the verandah. Dying? You’re as good as dead right now.”

  They were in the green bottom of a gulch, and the doctor looked around him with amused eyes. “And yet,” he said, “the medicine is here that will heal you. Make you fit and well again. Right here under your eyes, old son. I’ll make the bargain with you. I’ll take the swelling out of your legs and wrists . . . out of your whole dropsical body. And in exchange, I’m free to go where I please. What about that? What could be fairer?”

  “I’ll see you damned first,” answered Traynor softly.

  Where could the healing stuff be? In the bark of a tree? In roots of grass? In some mineral that the doctor had spotted in some small exposed vein?

  “Ignorance is the curse of your people,” said the doctor. “You ride your horses, raise your cattle, labor all your lives. Your amusements are drunkenness and gambling. Some of you marry and raise a batch of equally damned children to follow your own dark ways. In the end, men of more intelligence come, exploit the opportunities that you have opened to them, and elbow you out of your holdings. And that is fit and right, Traynor. In the eyes of a superior man, like myself, you and your friend of the driver’s seat were no more than wild hogs running loose in the forest.”

  Traynor gripped his rifle with an instinctive gesture. And then he lay the gun back as suddenly. “No,” he said. “That would be the easiest way for you, Channing. Dying wouldn’t bother you. But to be shamed in front of a lot of people . . . to have Rose pitying you and despising you . . . that would be the real hell. And by God, you’re going to taste plenty of it before I’m through.”

  He felt very faint, so he tied the doctor to a tree before he lay down for the night. Afterward, he slept brokenly, and in the earliest dawn he resumed the march, but not for Little Snake. He knew, too, that he could never make the town.

  There was a much nearer goal, however. By swinging to the south he would reach the most outlying ranch, the Laymon place, thirty good miles from Little Snake. Once there, his prisoner would be safely in the hands of the law. Old John Laymon, the fiercest of all the enemies of evil-doers, would see to it that Channing was handed over to the sheriff. And the sheriff would see to it that Parker Channing was hanged by the neck till he was dead.

  So to the south they marched. At noon, that day, Traynor told himself that he could go no farther. His ankles and wrists had become elephantine. His eyes were puffed until his vision was dim, and inside his breast there was continually that cursed beating as of wings, great and small, in hurried and irregular flight.

  If he lay down on his left side, during one of the many rest periods, it seemed to him that he was slipping down, being moved feet first—for the sound of his heart was like the rubbing of two bodies together—like the vibration of a wet finger against a pane of glass. There was constant pain. There was constant faintness.

  That night, the huge watery puffing of his flesh suggested something that might ease him. He cut shallow gashes with his knife. Not blood but water flowed out, in quantity. That was a relief, and when the morning came neither his wrists nor ankles seemed to have regained their swollen proportions of the evening before.

  Every night, thereafter, he made new incisions, or freshened the old ones so that the water would run out of his flesh. In the middle of the next day’s march, the cuts would begin to bleed, blood and water commingled.

  His eyes were growing bad, very bad. It was difficult for him to shoot game. Images wavered before him. But on the third day chance enabled him to shoot a deer. Afterward, he could load the prisoner with venison and make him carry the food for the party.

  “The worst diet in the world for you, Larry,” the doctor said cheerfully. “You’re dying, anyway, but you’ll die all the sooner under the effects of this diet. Do you want to know how really bad you are? Cut a reed there on the bank of the creek. Put one end to your ear and the other end to your heart. It will be a sort of stethoscope, old son. You can study your death more clearly, that way.”

  Traynor cut the reed. He was able to bend without breaking it, and with one end to his ear and the other pressed to his breast he listened to the queer, hurrying, faint vibration of his heart. It passed into flurries so rapid and dim that he could not begin to count the contractions. It seemed to him that legions of ghosts were flickering across his vision. And again there were breathless, frightful pauses in which he was sure the next stroke would never come, and at the end of those pauses would come one bell-like stroke that sent a thin shudder all through his being.

  He looked up at the sneering, smiling face of the doctor. “Yeah, Parker,” he said slowly. “I’m a dying man, all right.”

  “But why die, you fool?” asked the doctor lightly. “Life all around you . . . plenty to live for . . . and, with what remedies right before your eyes, you might have a long time to go.”

  Channing began to laugh, blowing out his cigarette smoke in ragged clouds of mirth. “Presently you’re going to fall into a coma. That will be the end, Traynor.”

  “It’s true,” said Larry Traynor. “I’m going to pass out. You’ll brain me with the handcuffs while I’m helpless. And that’s why . . . that’s why, after all, I have to do this.”

  “Do what?” asked the doctor cheerfully.

  To stand entailed too great an effort. That was why Larry Traynor only pushed himself up to one knee. He raised the rifle and leveled it.

  “You have to die, Channing,” he said. “I won’t be far behind you, I suppose . . . but you’ll have to go before me.”

  “Right,” said the doctor. “Either way . . . it makes little difference to me. But what a fool bulldog you are. Blind, stupid, with fat in your brain!”

  Down the barrel of the gun, Traynor sighted. He covered the breast. He covered the face. He drew his bead between the bright eyes, just where the bullet had knocked the life out of the buckskin leader.

  V

  There was no doubt that the doctor was a brave man, a very brave man. He sat steady enough; he held up his head high, but to look at death is not an easy thing, and, as the seconds ran on, the eyes of Channing began to enlarge and grow too bright.

  Suddenly he shouted: “Shoot, damn you!”

  Traynor lowered the gun. “I’ve been trying to. I’ve been wanting to,” he said slowly. “But I can’t. I don’t suppose I have the nerve to shoot even . . . a dog.”

  He cast the rifle from him and sat with his head between his hands.

  “The poorest fool”—the doctor laughed—”the weakest and the poorest fool that I’ve ever met.”

  There was a ridge between them and the valley in which the Laymon house stood. They climbed that ridge. It was only a few miles to go, but it took them four days. Sometimes the dying man walked. Sometimes he crawled. He would hear the doctor say: “Keep your drooling mouth shut, will you?” And then he would realize that he had been walking with his mouth open, babbling meaningless words.

  For the agony had ground out his brain. His wits were spinning; he knew that he carried death inside him, in his very heart.
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  It was on the second day of moiling up that slope that he reached a little pool of still water and looked at his face in the mirror. The thing he saw turned him sick. It could not be his. But when he opened his mouth, the bloated lips of the image also opened.

  The doctor said that day: “To do a thing like this for the sake of fame . . . there’s sense in that. But to do it for nothing . . . to do it for the sake of a little hand clapping in a village filled with muddy-brained yokels . . . by God, Traynor, I’ve never heard of such insanity. I’m going to take back some of the other things I’ve said to you. Whatever else you are, as a bulldog, you’re magnificent. You’re killing yourself for a crazy sense of justice. What good will the legal murder of me do to the soul of your dead friend? And if you’ll make the bargain with me, I’ll have you practically fit and well inside of three days. Will you listen to me?”

  Traynor did not answer. He was saving his breath because he seemed to need it all. The deadly tremor was entering him more deeply than ever.

  They got over the ridge the next day. Below them, Traynor could see the sprawling lines of the ranch house and the barns and the shining tangle of the wire fencing of the corrals. That was the goal, under his eyes, in his hand. It was not three miles away.

  It took him five days to cover the three miles, although almost every step of the way was downhill. He did not take so many steps. He was on his knees, waddling, most of the time. Although the knees grew bruised, the mere pain was nothing. The burning of the gashes in his legs helped to keep his wits awake.

  He had cut away most of his clothes for bandages, by this time. More than half naked, bloodstained, swollen to a frightful grossness, he could not look down on his body without loathing.

  The fourth evening found him still a full mile from the goal. He sat back against a tree, half blind, covering his prisoner constantly with the rifle, although he could only get the tip of a swollen finger inside the trigger guard. And lying there, with an aching throat and a groaning voice, he prayed aloud to God.