by Max Brand
After a while, he said that he was going to sleep on board her that night, and he said to me: “What are you doing now?”
“Eating and sleeping,” I said.
“Want a job?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Water job?”
“That suits me to the ground.”
“Then I’ll hire you. You’re captain, crew, and skipper, pilot, and engineer, and all the other names. You’re the crew of the Thomas Drayton.”
I laughed.
“I mean it,” he said. “You get a hundred dollars a month till I find something else to do with the boat. When I find a way of using her, I’ll pay you more.”
“When you find a way of using her?” I questioned. “You’ll never find a way, brother. Don’t you go and waste a hundred dollars a month on me for nothing. You don’t even need a night watchman out here. Nobody’s going to try to steal your boat . . . nobody but you wants her.”
“You let me run it my own way,” he said. “Only, Joe, you promise that you’ll stick with the boat, no matter what happens, for a month, eh?”
“Of course,” I said. “But what can happen? If a storm blows up, I might run another line ashore. But there’d be nothing else to do.”
“Well, whatever I want to do with her, you’ll stick with her for the month?” he asked again.
I laughed again. “I’ll do that,” I said. “I don’t mind a vacation on a hundred a month of anybody’s money. I’ll even shine brass for that, but there’s no brass ’board the Thomas Drayton.”
We hoisted his kit aboard the boat, and stowed it in the captain’s cabin, which was big and fine, a real bedroom, with a real double bed in it, such as a man could twist around in, and still have leg and head room.
Larry liked that cabin fine, too.
Then we crossed the deck, and, with the dog behind us, we ran a plank out to the dock and stepped ashore.
Old Steve Mannock was sitting on a pile of rain-stained wood, chewing tobacco, with his arms folded on his chest, his beard working up and down as he chewed.
He was looking at us rather glassy-eyed, the way a man does when he’s chewing at tobacco and thinking of nothing at all.
I said: “Here’s the new owner of the Thomas Drayton, Steve. This is Lawrence Decatur. Larry, this is Steve Mannock, the best engineer that ever tied down a safety valve and blew steam in the face of a gale.”
Steve got up and shook hands with Larry. He didn’t seem much impressed about his owning the boat, but he looked him up and down and said: “So they tell me that you licked Big Ed Graem in a fair fight.”
“I say nothing about fighting. I don’t like fights,” said Larry Decatur.
“You don’t, eh?” said Steve Mannock, fingering his beard and looking very thoughtful.
“No, I don’t,” said Larry.
“Well,” said Steve, “nobody ever brought a bull terrier this far north without liking to see a fight. That dog’ll freeze when the winter comes on.”
“Run your thumb down his back against the grain,” said Larry.
Steve did it, although Larry had to hold the dog’s head while he was being thumbed.
Well, that coat was as thick and soft as a seal’s fur. You couldn’t even see the pink of the skin.
“I’m blowed,” said Steve. “Is this a bull terrier cross on a white seal?”
“What are you doing now, Steve?” said Larry.
“I’m aiming at a long mush and a dry mush,” said Steve. “And I hate dry land!”
“You stay here and be the engineer of the Thomas Drayton for a month, at a hundred dollars for the term,” Larry proposed.
“And what will the Thomas Drayton be doing all that month?” asked Steve.
“Thinking it over and resting your feet,” suggested Larry. “But if you want the job, you’ve got to shake hands to stay with her, no matter what I do with her.”
Steve looked up and down the lake. Then he laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “I don’t mind resting my feet for a month. I don’t mind, either, shaking the hand that knocked Big Ed cock-eyed. He had it coming to him.”
IX
Jeff Worth came down the dock, just then, with a light in his eye. I knew by that that somebody else was burning up; Jeff never had a light of his own.
He came up to Larry and said: “Decatur, I’ve got some news for you.”
“Good or bad?” Larry said.
“Why, good news, I guess it is,” replied Jeff. “Big Ed is over in the Bridgeman saloon with five thousand dollars in dust to pay you.”
“Waiting for me . . . to pay it . . . is he?” said Larry.
“Yes, that’s it,” said Jeff. “Coming over now?”
“All right. You can tell him that I’m coming,” said Larry.
“I was gonna tell you the same thing,” said Steve Mannock. “But Jeff always gets his fingers in the other fellow’s pie.”
“He means trouble,” I told Larry. “If Big Ed is back in that saloon, he’s got poison in him.”
“I could tell that if he were on the other side of the earth,” said Larry. “I didn’t think that he was in there to tell me how much he loved me.”
Straight off, he starts walking down the dock toward the saloon. Steve and I followed.
“Did he lick Big Ed fair and square?” Steve asked in a murmuring voice.
I thought back to the fight. Well, it had been a fair fight, all right. It was a fair fight when Young Corbett fought terrible Terry McGovern and drove him insane with banter, so that he fought blindly and was knocked out. It was a fair fight. And using the same weapons, Larry might meet and beat the great Graem again, that mountain of a man. Still, it was hardly a fair test, according to what I knew of the way a real fight ought to be carried out.
“It was a pretty fair fight. He talked Big Ed out of a couple of points, maybe,” I said. “But it was a pretty fair fight.”
“If a man can use his tongue along with his fists,” said Steve, “it’s just a sign that he has brains, and brains are more important than hands in winning any kind of a fight, I reckon.”
There was something in that. It was about what Larry had said before the battle ever had a start.
We walked into the saloon behind Larry, and there at the far end of the counter was Big Ed, looking like thunder—purple thunder, at that. I never saw such a jaw on any man. It was puffed out on both sides of the chin, where those raps of Larry had cracked home. There was no other mark on his face. Larry was such a marksman that, when he played for the face, he had hit nothing but the button.
Graem said: “I’ve come to pay you your bet.” He pointed to a canvas sausage that lay on the bar. There would be about fifteen to seventeen pounds of gold in that sausage to pay a $5,000 debt. You remember that he had made the bet at ten to one.
I looked at the back of Larry’s head, and wondered what he would say and do. I was glad that Nelly Bridgeman was out of the room and that her father, apparently recovered from his attack of hysterics, was there in place to serve drinks. He looked with his mild, rather dim eyes from face to face, not understanding anything.
But the rest of the room was pretty well filled. Everybody within reach was there to see what happened the second time Big Ed met up with the cheechako.
I think there was a good deal of sympathy for Graem, now. After he had been licked, people felt better about him. They were more willing to remember the bigness of his heart and the good things that he had done from the White Horse to Nome.
I had some of those feelings, I know, as I looked at his bruised and swollen jaw.
“There’s five thousand dollars in dust in that poke,” said Graem. “Come and take it.”
There was a challenge in his way of saying this, as though he dared the other fellow to take it at his own risk.
I saw the risk well enough. Anybody who reached for the money would be within the grip of one of those huge hands, and, although Larry might be able to beat Graem in a fair fist fight, he would be c
rumpled like a bunch of dead leaves in the grip of that giant.
I suppose Larry saw it, too. I saw him halt, one elbow leaning against the bar. Nobody else was there at the bar. The rest were backed up around the room, looking on. They were the audience, and they were expecting some action. They got what they were not looking for.
“That money is not mine because I never make a bet on myself except at evens,” Larry said. “That money is not yours because you were fool enough to take on the fight at those odds. Give it to Bridgeman, to dole out to the boys when they come by and need a grubstake or a free drink or a hand-out of some kind.”
You see, it kept him out of the reach of the hand of Graem. Also, it made Graem give over the money to another man, a man from whom he couldn’t afford to keep it. In the third place, it put Larry more in the right than ever, and it put Graem more in the wrong, in some way, as if he should have had impulses as generous as that without being forced to it. Finally it wound up the whole argument, and there was nothing to do, you would have said, except for Ed to pay over the money, and then walk out of the saloon.
It was a facer and it was a silencer.
Larry turned around toward the bar and he took out some money. Over his shoulder he called to the crowd: “Come on, boys, and liquor on me! I haven’t had a real drink today!”
I suppose that everybody in the place wanted to hold back still in order to see what might happen between Graem and Larry, but the speech that Larry had made in the first place and his way of throwing Graem out of the picture in the second put everything at an end, as it seemed, and the whole gang came shouldering in toward the bar.
But nobody, I noticed, came very close to big Graem. He stood there like a frozen thundercloud at the end of the bar, emitting rays of darkness and icy cold.
Altogether, it was a great play that Larry had made. It had cost him $5,000, to be sure. It had cost him so much that I had to replan and resketch all of my ideas of him on the spot, and the job sprained my brain.
It was also a complete flabbergasting for Graem.
I heard Steve Mannock murmuring at my ear: “That fellow is something worth having in Alaska. He’ll find something worthwhile, or else he’ll wreck the territory hunting for it.”
I was inclined to think that this might be the truth.
Then I heard old Bridgeman speaking. He was a gentleman, even if his grammar was not perfect. Neither is mine, for that matter, and neither is yours, perhaps, if you dig down to the bottom. I never could see what difference the words made, so long as the meaning was clear.
White-Water Sam said: “Boys, this is a pretty big thing for a cheechako to do. This drink ain’t on him. A man like him can’t buy the first drink in my place, because just now I’m thinking of a lot of the boys that come through here, dead beat and all down and out. They’ve had bad luck coming in or they’ve had bad luck going out. They get here with their hearts sick. It’s a bad thing when the sickness gets as deep down as the heart, I wanna tell you. I been sick at the heart myself. I once heard a story about a boat called the Denver Belle.”
“Say, Sam,” I yelled out, “get back to the point! If Decatur doesn’t pay for the drink, who does?”
I was sweating when I said it, but it had the right effect. It switched him from the bad point and got him across the bridge to a new idea.
He looked down the bar and smiled at me. “Hello, Uncle Joe,” he said. He called me that from hearing Nelly so often. “I didn’t see you before, son. I’ll tell you who pays for the drink. I do! It’s on the house. Fill ’em up, boys, and all to the brim!”
He spun the bottles down the bar, and everybody filled. Everybody except Ed Graem.
Everybody filled to the brim, too.
“Here’s to Larry Decatur!” called old Sam.
And we put up a roar and put down the drink.
Only Graem did not drink. And then I saw him striding straight toward Larry, through the crowd.
X
I gave Larry a nudge in the ribs hard enough to break a couple of them, but he paid no attention until the hand of Big Ed was stretched out and about to fall on his shoulder. Then Decatur wheeled around like a spinning top, and shoved a gun straight into the stomach of Ed Graem.
Guns were unfamiliar things in northern Alaska, you know. That is to say, revolvers were. A rifle might be worth its weight for hunting game, but a revolver was just a dead burden that hardly ever repaid its keeping. Men who were used to counting not only the pounds by the ounces that they loaded onto their dog sleds were not likely to carry any extras.
So it gave a shock to Graem when that gun was pulled on him. You could see the shock hit him between the eyes, as it were, and the hand that he had stretched toward the shoulder of Larry jumped back again as though it had been burned.
“What d’you mean?” demanded the big man, snarling.
“I’ll tell you what I mean,” said Larry. “I won’t have any more trouble with you. I’ve thrashed you once,” he said, with a slow and deliberate contempt, “and I’m not going to break up my hands hammering you on the jaw again. If you try to lay a hand on me once more, I’ll shoot your wishbone in two. Understand?
Graem stood back and dropped his hands into the deep pockets of his coat, his face working spasmodically.
At last he said: “It’s guns that you want, is it?”
“It’s peace that I want,” said Larry Decatur, “and it’s peace that I’m going to have. You’ve been a Juggernaut, and rolled over people long enough. Now you’re going to learn to back up and keep in your place, or I’ll fit you into a grave before your time comes.”
It was pretty mean talk, any way that you looked at it. But by the stern quiet that came over that room, and the hard way the people all looked at Graem, I could see that Larry had uttered their own thoughts for them. They were tired of Graem’s overbearing ways, and they were glad to have a spokesman to utter their opinion.
Graem, with a flash across the faces of the crowd, must have seen just where he stood, and what he saw sickened him more even than the beating he had received not so long before on this same day. I suppose that he had always excused himself, admitting to his conscience that he had a bad temper, and all that, but reasonably sure that his good deeds performed in the north country far more than overbalanced the evil of his wild passions.
Now he saw the truth, and it was as though half of his lifetime of work had been thrown away.
He went right out from the saloon without lifting his hand or his voice. He simply walked out of the picture.
Well, when we had seen Graem budge from where he had been standing, I don’t think that any of us could believe our eyes and ears.
No one spoke, as Larry put up his gun, but finally Denny Lawson, a red-headed, no-account, lazy loafer that carried a bad name in the States with him, this red-headed Lawson, standing in a corner of the saloon, broke out into bawling laughter, and a traveling mate of his, a blinking, down-headed rat called Lefty, he laughed, too.
“That’s the finish of the great Graem,” said Lawson. “Curse him. He’s had his foot on our necks long enough, I say.”
“He’s had it a lot too long,” said Lefty, the echo.
And they walked out of the room together, laughing together, and that laughing sounded like the snarling of two dogs, which was what they were.
“If they fool about with Ed Graem,” said Larry Decatur, as calm as could be, “they’ll get themselves broken up, I tell you. He’s not broken, as they think. He’s only holding himself, and piling up strength inside of himself, like water piling behind a dam that’s sure to break.”
I felt the same way about it, and I really hoped, if those two hounds bothered him, Big Ed would put his hands on them.
Old White-Water Sam was troubled. He didn’t know what it was all about. He’d missed, as usual, a good many links in the chain of happenings, and he began to ask questions now, but we soon soothed him and told him that everything was all right. He was as easy to han
dle, most of the time, as a well-raised child. And he was soon smiling at us, with his very kind and half-vacant eyes.
He liked to have the boys about him. The saloon business was nothing to him, except a chance to keep company around. And I’ve never known him to ask for the price of a drink. Any bum could go in there and drink all day and never pay a cent, except that, when the other boys found out about it, they skinned the tramp alive. No, White-Water generally got his money, but never by collecting it.
Pretty soon, Larry Decatur left the saloon, with me and Steve Mannock going along.
Outside, Larry said: “I want you fellows to know that I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve had with Graem. I don’t want to shame him and I don’t want to break him. I hate to pull a gun. But one fight a day with a grizzly bear is about enough for me.”
Steve Mannock said that nobody could possibly blame him, that everything he had done was all right, and that he had admired the way that Larry had handled the ticklish job. But I didn’t say a word. Because it seemed to me that Larry was a little too deep for me to appreciate him altogether. So I said nothing, and then felt the quizzical eyes of Larry resting on me.
He said, if we wanted to, we could put our blankets aboard the old Thomas Drayton; he had something else on hand. So he went one way, and we got our duds and blanket rolls and went out to the boat.
It was good to step back on board of her, and Steve Mannock said: “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with life on shore. There ain’t any run to it. There ain’t any get-up and get to it. A dog team is all right, but a dog team has to stop at night. But a river, it don’t stop at night. It keeps on going, and it snakes you along the right way, smooth as silk, or else it comes smash ag’in’ the bows, all night long. There ain’t any finer thing in the world, from my way of thinking, than to hear an engine growl low and growl high, working all oily and shiny, never letting up, never getting tired, grinding up ag’in’ a current. That’s the life for me.”
I couldn’t help agreeing with him, except that for me engines were interesting because they were what kept the ship trembling and the paddle wheel crashing around; it was the way of the ship itself that I wanted to follow.
