Black Thunder

by Max Brand

  He wanted the girl. Perhaps he could get her, too, and who was I, and what power had I to prevent him from having her? It was a gloomy walk for me. I remember, however, that it was on this occasion that I said to him: “Look here, old-timer, how did you keep the terrier from jumping at big Graem in the middle of the fight.”

  “Why,” he said, “didn’t you see me wave him off, three or four times?”

  “No,” I said, “and yet I was watching every move you made, all through the fight.”

  He seemed surprised, and then he shook his head.

  “After all,” he said, “the hand is faster than the eye. I’ve noticed that a good many times in my life before this.”

  He laughed a little, when he had finished this trite remark, but I didn’t like either the remark or the laughter. He seemed to be a fox, and I couldn’t help hoping that fox would not get its teeth into poor Nelly Bridgeman, not that I imagined she would be an easy prey of the first clever-tongued man who came her way. No, I had a lot of respect for Nelly and her powers of mind and judgment. Nevertheless, I began to look at the future rather gloomily.

  VII

  How am I going to give you an idea about this fellow, Larry Decatur? Well, I’ll tell you this. When we came out of the woods and crossed the dock, there were half a dozen people in sight, all hunched up, with their hands in their pockets, and they looked at us with a good deal of interest.

  “You’ve made yourself known pretty fast around here, partner,” I said to Larry.

  He sighed and shook his head.

  “That’s a bad thing, too,” he said. “There’s always an advantage in having a card or two up your sleeve. I hate it because I’ve had to show so much on the first day. Suppose that something takes an important turn, why, I won’t have very much ammunition in reserve.”

  “You mean,” I said, “that playing the lazy, worthless bum, you’re able to take in a good many people?”

  “Brother,” he said, “I am.”

  And he smiled at me in a cheerful and a gentle manner. I noted the smile, but I only nodded at it.

  “You know, Larry,” I said, “there’s such a thing as bein’ a ringer.”

  He cocked his head and smiled at me again. “That’s a cheap way of making money,” he told me. “I know what you mean, too. But I’ve never won any big stakes. You can’t call me a stake horse.”

  “A lotta stake horses are never used except for the little money,” I said. “The returns are small, but they’re sure.”

  “You’re hard on me, Joe,” he said.

  We stepped into the canoe. There was only one paddle, and there was the weight of the two of us and the dog to handle, besides his pack, which had not yet been taken out of the little craft. But I give you my word that seemed to make no great difference to him. Neither did the wind that was blowing in our teeth. He headed straight out against it to go around to the other side of the dock, and the big, towering stacks of the Thomas Drayton. I could feel the fluid, regular, pulsing strokes of the paddle as he drove us along. The man was a machine—a mighty, powerful machine.

  Now I get down to what I wanted to tell you in particular.

  “Where’d you learn to use a paddle and handle a canoe like this, Larry?” I asked.

  I was sitting facing him, watching the dip of his shoulder as he put his weight behind the paddle. The bull terrier, just in front of him, was sitting with its nose in the air and its eyes closed, smelling at the wind.

  Larry gave me his smile, which I admired so much and distrusted so much, too.

  “Did you ever have the Northwest Mounted Police after you, brother?” he asked.

  “What’s that got to do with paddling?” I asked. “No, I never had the Northwest Mounted after me.”

  “If you ever did, you’d know what it has to do with paddling,” he said. “Did you ever have the Texas Rangers after you?”

  “Yes,” I admitted with a shudder. “I had ’em once, and I never wanna have ’em again. I hit the Río Grande and just stepped across it. That’s how fast I was traveling south with the Rangers behind me. When they mean business, they sure put a wind in the sail.”

  “What had you done?” he asked.

  “Murder,” I answered, “according to what they were told. I had to sit and wait for a while away down in Mexico, until the real crook was caught, and the way was clear for me to come back. I didn’t want to see Texas again, so long as the Texas Rangers were after my scalp.”

  “Well,” he said, “I know that the Rangers were a bad lot to mix with, but, at their best, the Rangers were never such a hand-picked lot as the Northwest Mounted. There’s something about those people,” Larry said, running on, “that puts a chill into your blood. The Rangers are like cowpunchers without a uniform. The Northwest Mounted are like cowpunchers in uniform. It’s just as though with the uniform they put on a single character and single qualities. They’re all alike. They never get tired riding a horse, walking, or paddling a canoe. They’re as much at home in the forest as Indians. They’re as much at home in the snow as Eskimos. They all shoot straight and fast. They don’t know what it is to be afraid. They all have fast-thinking brains in their heads. And they’re all willing to die in the line of duty.”

  “True,” I said. “And the less I have to do with ’em in the line of duty, the better pleased I am.”

  “You’re so right about that, Joe,” he said, “that all I can say to you is . . . yes. Now, I happened to run foul of ’em in their line of duty, because I met up with a red-headed scut of a no-good gunman who wore two guns and liked to prove that he was ambidextrous.”

  “So you ambidextered him into a grave, eh?” I said.

  “It was self-defense,” said the big fellow, with a little yawn, and another one of his smiles for me, which I was liking less and less. “He was mean in the camp. That’s what he was. I’m a fellow, as you know, who always takes a lot, but I was tired from the trail, and I was hunting for peace. I put up with all I could stomach, and finally I told him a few things about the places he could go and the places that he’d probably come from. He was so angry that he made a great mistake. He tried to pull both guns at once, because I’d just been telling him that he was a fake and that all men that pretend they can shoot with both hands were fakes. So he wanted to prove how good he was, and out came both his guns at once.”

  I remembered how, by talk plus hard punches, this same man had just beaten the great Ed Graem. I said nothing, but did some

  “As a matter of fact, that fellow was ambidextrous,” went on Larry Decatur, “and he was fast and straight with both his guns, too. A lot faster than I, but not quite so straight. His right-hand gun knocked the hat off my head, and his left-hand gun shaved off the right side of a pair of mustaches that I was wearing. Though I was a lot slower, and might have been killed by either of those first two shots, except that he was a little hasty and nervous with anger, when I did fire, I split his wishbone right in two. He keeled over and started coughing red, and a little later he was dead.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  “There were a lot of men in that camp that could have said that I fired last, and that I fired in self-defense,” said Larry, “but from the foreman to the cook, they were all Canucks, and my observation is that Canucks are an ornery lot.”

  “You said something,” I broke in.

  “Thanks,” said Larry, with that smile of his again. “Well, then, the Canucks, when the Northwest Mounted came inquiring, showed them the dead man and said who’d killed him. But they said nothing else. And those boys in uniform came for me. I had made a short start on them, but they soon were hot after me. I worked day and night like a beaver. But they had a big advantage. They could all read forest trails and do forest work like Trojans. In addition, they were all white-water men, and I was a green hand with a paddle. For ten days, I had guns and death right behind me all the while. Then I ran into an Indian who was a trapper and who saw by the way that I was cutting across country that
I was trying to get away from somebody, so he took up my trail. The long and the short of it was that I had to shoot him, too.”

  “That makes two dead men so far, Larry,” I commented. “Two in one little story.”

  “The Indian wasn’t killed,” he said, “just winged in the left arm. When I saw that, and that he couldn’t handle his long, old-fashioned rifle, I had an idea. I got hold of that Indian and I gave him first aid, tied up the wound, and treated him kindly.

  “Indians are a queer lot. I know that they’re cursed out by a lot of the old-timers, but I’ve always noticed in my treatment of ’em, that if you do a favor for a red man, he always tries to pay you back double, at the least.

  “That was what happened this time. He had tried to hunt me down like a moose or a bear. And I’d winged him, and then given him good for evil. He couldn’t tell that I’d done it with malice aforethought. He simply felt that I was a great, big, good man. And he bowed down in front of me, so to speak. He showed me the way to his canoe, and, since he couldn’t paddle, I had to. I did some funny tricks with that paddle, and nearly upset the canoe in rough water, two or three times, but he sat there and taught me, partly by gestures, partly by words. Mostly by a way he had about him as he crouched in the bottom of the canoe and looked things over. I paddled him five miles, and I learned a whole world of things in that distance about how to handle a canoe and a paddle.

  “After that, I lived with the Indian for a month. No, it was two months, but that time passed so happily that it seemed like nothing at all.”

  “The Northwest Mounted didn’t find you, then?”

  “They found the cabin, all right,” he said, “but I slid up into the attic of the cabin, and the Indian, he stayed down below and lied the way only great artists and Indians can lie. They went away without me, and, though they beat all around that district for about six weeks, they never found me. During that time, I was working the trapline for my friend the Indian, and paddling with him in the canoe, every day, and learning the names of the trees, the birds, and the animals . . . but always paddling. The canoe was our horse and saddle, and we were constantly in it. Well, learning to paddle a canoe is like learning to milk a cow. You may get rusty in the practice, but you’ll never quite lose the hang of it, you know.”

  I nodded my head. “And what came of you and the Northwest Mounted Police, in the end?” I asked.

  “Why,” he said, “one of the Canucks got to talking over his liquor one day and told the truth about what had happened, and it got to the ears of the Northwest Mounted Police, as everything comes to their ears, sooner or later. So they wiped me off their blacklist, and that’s why I’m safe and sound here today. But here we are alongside the Thomas Drayton. Do we go up this ladder?”

  VIII

  We tied up the canoe, and he threw the bull terrier on the deck; after the blood had been washed from his back, you never would have known that he had been in a fight with a Husky, bigger and stronger than any wolf. Then we climbed up to the deck.

  It was a pleasant and a sad thing to walk the familiar deck of the old boat. It was pleasant because I could remember so many good runs that we’d had aboard of her. And it was melancholy because every step we made on the deck, the hollow, empty sound from the hull reminded me that she was used up and done for. There was nothing left except to lie here in the lake and rot.

  I said so to Larry, and he nodded, smiled at me again, and slapped me on the shoulder.

  “I know she’s a rotten hulk,” he said. “As far as most of the chances go, she’s no good at all, I’m sure. But, just the same, a man never knows his luck until it comes up and shouts at his ear. And this thing is so big and cost so little, that I couldn’t help picking it up. Let’s give it a good look, anyway, and see what it says for itself.”

  We looked it over from top to bottom. It was as strong and as tight as a clipper ship. There never was a better made river boat in Alaska up to that time. And Larry was delighted.

  “She’s so fine and big and roomy,” he said, “that a fellow could live the rest of his life aboard her, very comfortably . . . and what’s so good as a house when you can catch your fish from the roof of it? A thousand dollars for a house like this? It’s worth ten thousand for that purpose alone. Joe, I’ve made an excellent investment.”

  I only grinned at him and felt sourer than ever.

  Then we went into the engine room. When he saw the big engines, he asked more questions than any child. I could explain a lot of things to him, but, of course, I didn’t know the scientific details very well. He listened to me more happily than if I had been telling fairy tales.

  “You like the Thomas Drayton, Joe, don’t you?” he said at the last.

  “I do,” I replied.

  “And so do I,” he said.

  We looked over the accommodations for the passengers and the pilot house, and he fingered the wheel.

  “I suppose the touch of a wheel like that would mean a great deal to poor old White-Water Sam, wouldn’t it?” he said.

  “Him?” I said. “Why, it would start him talking about the Denver Belle and throw him into another fit. I guess that’s about all.”

  “I wonder,” he said, dreaming the thing over in his mind.

  “Maybe you’d like to invite him out here to inspect the ship, eh?” I said, very dry.

  “Well, I remember a fellow who was bitten by a rattlesnake and nearly died of it,” he said, “and he was half crazy because the country he lived in was full of snakes. He couldn’t think of anything else. Life was torment for him for ten years, and he made it torment for his whole family around him. He tried to sell out for a song, but times were so bad that he couldn’t sell. His hair turned gray. His years were a misery to him. He got so that he never talked.

  “Then, by thunder, another rattler bit him. The instant that the fangs were in him, he forgot all about being afraid of that snake. He reached down and grabbed it by the neck. It bit him a couple more times, but he just bashed its head out on a rock. He didn’t die of the poison, either. He was hardly even sick. Perhaps the first dose of poisoning had made him immune. Or perhaps it was a sick snake with withered-up poison glands. I think they come that way, now and then. At any rate, he got over his scare about snakes that way. The next day, he was laughing and joking and telling stories. And the stories that he most liked to tell were all about snakes!”

  “And how do you hook up this snake man with old White-Water Sam?” I asked.

  “I don’t hook him up,” said Larry. “I only wanted to show you that you can’t tell what will cure and what will kill. But I like this boat, old son, I like it a lot, and I’m glad that I spent a thousand bucks on it. But they must make money with these boats now and then. It cost a penny or two to build this one, and Drayton isn’t the man to build a thing just for the fun of it, either.”

  “Oh, she’s made him a hundred thousand net, easy,” I said. “And there’s some of these things that turn into money faster than that even.”

  “Are there?” he said, opening his eyes at me.

  I remembered, then, and told him the story about a fellow I knew who got wind of a big strike up a river that could be reached from the Yukon by water all the way. When he heard this yarn, he was in Dawson. He knew that he had about an hour before the news would get around all over the place, and he went to the owner of a dirty old scow of a single stacker and bought the boat from him. That tin can of a boat was never worth $5,000, but he had to pay $15,000, and he was glad to do it. Well, she was booked to hold a hundred people, but when the news of the gold strike hit Dawson, everybody wanted to go, and he packed ’em in like sardines. He got two hundred aboard of her for that passage, and he charged ’em $100 a throw. He cleared the whole price of the boat, and more, that first trip. And he came back and did the same thing over and over again, at the same price. Then he sold the hulk for $30,000 and she piled up on a rock the next trip.

  When I told Larry these things, it was pretty amusing to see
how hard it hit him. There was something childish about him, for all of his foxy cunning, you see.

  “Why, in a case like that, with a boat like this, I could pack in four hundred, I suppose,” he said. “There must be space for ’em if they’re packed in like sardines.”

  I couldn’t help saying: “Well, in a case like that, you’d not be able to pack in any at all, because nobody would have any use for the boat. There’s a strike on right now,” I said, “and a lot of the boys are running like the mischief to get there. This old boat would be worth her weight in gold, if you could get her through Miles Cañon and what lies below. But you can’t get her through, and that’s that. She’s just . . . well, she’s just a houseboat here on Lake Bennett, and I hope you’ll enjoy the fishing.”

  He was not angry. He just shrugged his shoulders.

  Finally he said: “You know the only way to do anything in the world, Joe?”

  “Work like the mischief and never spend a cent. Is that what you mean?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders again. “You won’t listen to me,” he said, “but I could tell you something that’s worth knowing about.”

  “Go on and tell me, partner,” I said, “because I’m anxious to know.”

  “You’re not anxious,” he said, “but I’ll tell you anyway. I’ll give this away free. The only way to get along is to read fairy stories, and then try like a demon to make ’em come true.”

  “And how do you try to make ’em come true?” I asked, grinning at him.

  “By believing in ’em when you hear ’em,” he replied.

  I laughed a good deal at that.

  He walked around the Thomas Drayton for a while longer. Everything he saw, he admired—the strength of the planking along the decks, for instance, the size of the anchors, and the thickness of the tarred ropes that were coiled under tarpaulins. I must say for Tom Drayton that his ship was trim, fore and aft, and ready to go. I liked Larry better and better, just because he admired the old craft so much.