A Century of Great Western Stories

by A Century of Great Western Stories (retail) (epub)

  “Son,” he said, “my job is to enforce the law and maybe make a small profit on the side, not to play games with fair and unfair.” He looked at me for a moment longer. “Well, maybe we’ll meet again. It depends.”

  “On what?” I asked.

  “On the price,” he said. “The price on your head.”

  “But I haven’t got—”

  “Not now,” he said. “But you will, wearing those guns. I know the signs. I’ve seen them before, too many times. Don’t count on having me under obligation to you, when your time comes. I never let personal feelings interfere with business … Easy, now,” he said to a couple of fellows who were lifting LeBaron, bound hand and foot, into the wagon that somebody had driven up. “Easy. Don’t damage the merchandise. I take pride in delivering them in good shape for standing trial, whenever possible.”

  I decided I needed a drink, and then I changed my mind in favor of a cup of coffee. As I walked down the street, leaving my pony at the rail back there, the wagon rolled past and went out of town ahead of me. I was still watching it, for no special reason, when Waco stepped from the alley behind me.

  “Jim!” he said. “Turn around, Jim!”

  I turned slowly. He was a little unsteady on his feet, standing there, maybe from my hitting him, maybe from drinking. I thought it was drinking. I hadn’t hit him very hard. He’d had time for a couple of quick ones, and liquor always got to him fast.

  “You sold us out, you damn traitor!” he cried. “You took sides with the law!”

  “I never was against it,” I said. “Not really.”

  “After everything I’ve done for you!” he said thickly. “I was going to make you a great man, Jim, greater than Longley or Hardin or Hickok or any of them. With my brains and your size and speed, nothing could have stopped us! But you turned on me! Do you think you can do it alone? Is that what you’re figuring, to leave me behind now that I’ve built you up to be somebody?”

  “Waco,” I said, “I never had any ambitions to be—”

  “You and your medicine guns!” he sneered. “Let me tell you something. Those old guns are just something I picked up in a pawnshop. I spun a good yarn about them to give you confidence. You were on the edge, you needed a push in the right direction, and I knew once you started wearing a flashy rig like that, with one killing under your belt already, somebody’d be bound to try you again, and we’d be on our way to fame. But as for their being Bill Longley’s guns, don’t make me laugh!”

  I said, “Waco—”

  “They’s just metal and wood like any other guns!” he said. “And I’m going to prove it to you right now! I don’t need you, Jim! I’m as good a man as you, even if you laugh at me and make jokes at my expense… . Are you ready, Jim?”

  He was crouching, and I looked at him, Waco Smith, with whom I’d ridden up the trail and back. I saw that he was no good and I saw that he was dead. It didn’t matter whose guns I was wearing, and all he’d really said was that he didn’t know whose guns they were. But it didn’t matter, they were my guns now, and he was just a little runt who never could shoot for shucks, anyway. He was dead, and so were the others, the ones who’d come after him, because they’d come, I knew that.

  I saw them come to try me, one after the other, and I saw them go down before the big black guns, all except the last, the one I couldn’t quite make out. Maybe it was Fenn and maybe it wasn’t …

  I said, “To hell with you, Waco. I’ve got nothing against you, and I’m not going to fight you. Tonight or any other time.”

  I turned and walked away. I heard the sound of his gun behind me an instant before the bullet hit me. Then I wasn’t hearing anything for a while. When I came to, I was in bed, and Martha Butcher was there.

  “Jim!” she breathed. “Oh, Jim …!”

  She looked real worried, and kind of pretty, I thought, but of course I was half out of my head. She looked even prettier the day I asked her to marry me, some months later, but maybe I was a little out of my head that day, too. Old Man Butcher didn’t like it a bit. It seems his fight with Martha had been about her cleaning up my place, and his ordering her to quit and stay away from that young troublemaker, as he’d called me after getting word of all the hell we’d raised up north after delivering his cattle.

  He didn’t like it, but he offered me a job, I suppose for Martha’s sake. I thanked him and told him I was much obliged but I’d just accepted an appointment as Deputy U.S. Marshal. Seems like somebody had recommended me for the job, maybe Old Joe Fenn, maybe not. I got my old gun out of my bedroll and wore it tucked inside my belt when I thought I might need it. It was a funny thing how seldom I had any use for it, even wearing a badge. With that job, I was the first in the neighborhood to hear about Waco Smith. The news came from New Mexico Territory. Waco and a bunch had pulled a job over there, and a posse had trapped them in a box canyon and shot them to pieces.

  I never wore the other guns again. After we moved into the old place, I hung them on the wall. It was right after I’d run against Billy Bates for sheriff and won that I came home to find them gone. Martha looked surprised when I asked about them.

  “Why,” she said, “I gave them to your friend, Mr. Williams. He said you’d sold them to him. Here’s the money.”

  I counted the money, and it was a fair enough price for a pair of secondhand guns and holsters, but I hadn’t met any Mr. Williams.

  I started to say so, but Martha was still talking. She said, “He certainly had an odd first name, didn’t he? Who’d christen anybody Long Williams? Not that he wasn’t big enough. I guess he’d be as tall as you, wouldn’t he, if he didn’t have that trouble with his neck?”

  “His neck?” I said.

  “Why, yes,” she said. “Didn’t you notice when you talked to him, the way he kept his head cocked to the side? Like this.”

  She showed me how Long Williams had kept his head cocked to the side. She looked real pretty doing it, and I couldn’t figure how I’d ever thought her plain, but maybe she’d changed. Or maybe I had. I kissed her and gave her back the gun money to buy something for herself, and went outside to think. Long Williams, William Longley. A man with a wry neck and man who was hanged twice. It was kind of strange, to be sure, but after a time I decided it was just a coincidence. Some drifter riding by just saw the guns through the window and took a fancy to them.

  I mean, if it had really been Bill Longley, if he was alive and had his guns back, we’d surely have heard of him by now down at the sheriff’s office, and we never have.

  Max Brand was one of many pseudonyms used by Frederick Faust (1892–1944), one of the most amazing giants of the pulp fiction field. Faust produced about one hundred twenty-five novels and more than three hundred thirty stories in many fields (among other things, he was the creator of “Dr. Kildare”), but it was as a Western writer that he achieved his greatest fame. His stories were well-plotted, reasonably true to historical fact, and always fast-moving and involving for the reader. He was so prolific that he often had three or four stories in the same magazine issue, each under a different name. He died in action as a war correspondent for Harper’s during World War II.

  Wine on the Desert

  Max Brand

  There was no hurry, except for the thirst, like clotted salt, in the back of his throat, and Durante rode on slowly, rather enjoying the last moments of dryness before he reached the cold water in Tony’s house. There was really no hurry at all. He had almost twenty-four hours’ head start, for they would not find his dead man until this morning. After that, there would be perhaps several hours of delay before the sheriff gathered a sufficient posse and started on his trail. Or perhaps the sheriff would be fool enough to come alone.

  Durante had been able to see the wheel and fan of Tony’s windmill for more than an hour, but he could not make out the ten acres of the vineyard until he had topped the last rise, for the vines had been planted in a hollow. The lowness of the ground, Tony used to say, accounted for the wat
er that gathered in the well during the wet season. The rains sank through the desert sand, through the gravels beneath, and gathered in a bowl of clay hardpan far below.

  In the middle of the rainless season the well ran dry but, long before that, Tony had every drop of the water pumped up into a score of tanks made of cheap corrugated iron. Slender pipe lines carried the water from the tanks to the vines and from time to time let them sip enough life to keep them until the winter darkened overhead suddenly, one November day, and the rain came down, and all the earth made a great hushing sound as it drank. Durante had heard that whisper of drinking when he was here before; but he never had seen the place in the middle of the long drought.

  The windmill looked like a sacred emblem to Durante, and the twenty stodgy, tar-painted tanks blessed his eyes; but a heavy sweat broke out at once from his body. For the air of the hollow, unstirred by wind, was hot and still as a bowl of soup. A reddish soup. The vines were powdered with thin red dust, also. They were wretched, dying things to look at, for the grapes had been gathered, the new wine had been made, and now the leaves hung in ragged tatters.

  Durante rode up to the squat adobe house and right through the entrance into the patio. A flowering vine clothed three sides of the little court. Durante did not know the name of the plant, but it had large white blossoms with golden hearts that poured sweetness on the air. Durante hated the sweetness. It made him more thirsty.

  He threw the reins off his mule and strode into the house. The water cooler stood in the hall outside the kitchen. There were two jars made of a porous stone, very ancient things, and the liquid which distilled through the pores kept the contents cool. The jar on the left held water; that on the right contained wine. There was a big tin dipper hanging on a peg beside each jar. Durante tossed off the cover of the vase on the left and plunged it in until the delicious coolness closed well above his wrist.

  “Hey, Tony,” he called. Out of his dusty throat the cry was, “Throw some water into that mule of mine, would you, Tony?”

  A voice pealed from the distance.

  Durante, pouring down the second dipper of water, smelled the alkali dust which had shaken off his own clothes. It seemed to him that heat was radiating like light from his clothes, from his body, and the cool dimness of the house was soaking it up. He heard the wooden leg of Tony bumping on the ground, and Durante grinned; then Tony came in with that hitch and sideswing with which he accommodated the stiffness of his artificial leg. His brown face shone with sweat as though a special ray of light were focused on it.

  “Ah, Dick!” he said. “Good old Dick! … How long since you came last! … Wouldn’t Julia be glad! Wouldn’t she be glad!”

  “Ain’t she here?” asked Durante, jerking his head suddenly away from the dripping dipper.

  “She’s away at Nogalez,” said Tony. “It gets so hot. I said, ‘You go up to Nogalez, Julia, where the wind don’t forget to blow.’ She cried, but I made her go.”

  “Did she cry?” asked Durante.

  “Julia … that’s a good girl,” said Tony.

  “Yeah. You bet she’s good,” said Durante. He put the dipper quickly to his lips but did not swallow for a moment; he was grinning too widely. Afterward he said, “You wouldn’t throw some water into that mule of mine, would you, Tony?”

  Tony went out with his wooden leg clumping loud on the wooden floor, softly in the patio dust. Durante found the hammock in the corner of the patio. He lay down in it and watched the color of sunset flush the mists of desert dust that rose to the zenith. The water was soaking through his body; hunger began, and then the rattling of pans in the kitchen and the cheerful cry of Tony’s voice, “What you want, Dick? I got some pork. You don’t want pork. I’ll make you some good Mexican beans. Hot. Ah ha, I know that old Dick. I have plenty of good wine for you, Dick. Tortillas. Even Julia can’t make tortillas like me… . And what about a nice young rabbit?”

  “All blowed full of buckshot?” growled Durante.

  “No, no. I kill them with the rifle.”

  “You kill rabbits with a rifle?” repeated Durante, with a quick interest.

  “It’s the only gun I have,” said Tony. “If I catch them in the sights, they are dead… . A wooden leg cannot walk very far… . I must kill them quick. You see? They come close to the house about sunrise and flop their ears. I shoot through the head.

  “Yeah? Yeah?” muttered Durante. “Through the head?” He relaxed, scowling. He passed his hand over his face, over his head.

  Then Tony began to bring the food out into the patio and lay it on a small wooden table; a lantern hanging against the wall of the house included the table in a dim half circle of light. They sat there and ate. Tony had scrubbed himself for the meal. His hair was soaked in water and sleeked back over his round skull. A man in the desert might be willing to pay five dollars for as much water as went to the soaking of that hair.

  Everything was good. Tony knew how to cook, and he knew how to keep the glasses filled with his wine.

  “This is old wine. This is my father’s wine. Eleven years old,” said Tony. “You look at the light through it. You see that brown in the red? That’s the soft that time puts in good wine, my father always said.”

  “What killed your father?” asked Durante.

  Tony lifted his hand as though he were listening or as though he were pointing out a thought.

  “The desert killed him. I found his mule. It was dead, too. There was a leak in the canteen. My father was only five miles away when the buzzards showed him to me.”

  “Five miles? Just an hour … Good Lord!” said Durante. He stared with big eyes. “Just dropped down and died?” he asked.

  “No,” said Tony. “When you die of thirst, you always die just one way… . First you tear off your shirt, then your undershirt. That’s to be cooler… . And the sun comes and cooks your bare skin … And then you think … there is water everywhere, if you dig down far enough. You begin to dig. The dust comes up your nose. You start screaming. You break your nails in the sand. You wear the flesh off the tips of your fingers, to the bone.” He took a quick swallow of wine.

  “Without you seen a man die of thirst, how d’you know they start to screaming?” asked Durante.

  “They got a screaming look when you find them,” said Tony. “Take some more wine. The desert never can get to you here. My father showed me the way to keep the desert away from the hollow. We live pretty good here? No?”

  “Yeah,” said Durante, loosening his shirt collar. “Yeah, pretty good.”

  AFTERWARD HE SLEPT well in the hammock until the report of a rifle waked him and he saw the color of dawn in the sky. It was such a great, round bowl that for a moment he felt as though he were above, looking down at it.

  He got up and saw Tony coming in holding a rabbit by the ears, the rifle in his other hand.

  “You see?” said Tony. “Breakfast came and called on us!” He laughed.

  Durante examined the rabbit with care. It was nice and fat and it had been shot through the head. Through the middle of the head. Such a shudder went down the back of Durante that he washed gingerly before breakfast; he felt that his blood was cooled for the entire day.

  It was a good breakfast, too, with flapjacks and stewed rabbit with green peppers, and a quart of strong coffee. Before they had finished, the sun struck through the east window and started them sweating.

  “Gimme a look at that rifle of yours, Tony, will you?” Durante asked.

  “You take a look at my rifle, but don’t you steal the luck that’s in it,” laughed Tony. He brought the fifteen-shot Winchester.

  “Loaded right to the brim?” asked Durante.

  “I always load it full the minute I get back home,” said Tony.

  “Tony, come outside with me,” commanded Durante.

  They went out from the house. The sun turned the sweat of Durante to hot water and then dried his skin so that his clothes felt transparent.

  “Tony, I gotta be damn m
ean,” said Durante. “Stand right there where I can see you. Don’t try to get close… . Now listen… . The sheriff’s gunna be along this trail some time today, looking for me. He’ll load up himself and all his gang with water out of your tanks. Then he’ll follow my sign across the desert. Get me? He’ll follow if he finds water on the place. But he’s not gunna find water.”

  “What you done, poor Dick?” said Tony. “Now look… . I could hide you in the old wine cellar where nobody …”

  “The sheriff’s not gunna find any water,” said Durante. “It’s gunna be like this.”

  He put the rifle to his shoulder, aimed, fired. The shot struck the base of the nearest tank, ranging down through the bottom. A semicircle of darkness began to stain the soil near the edge of the iron wall.

  Tony fell on his knees. “No, no, Dick! Good Dick!” he said. “Look! All the vineyard. It will die. It will turn into old, dead wood, Dick… .”

  “Shut your face,” said Durante. “Now I’ve started, I kinda like the job.”

  Tony fell on his face and put his hands over his ears. Durante drilled a bullet hole through the tanks, one after another. Afterward, he leaned on the rifle.

  “Take my canteen and go in and fill it with water out of the cooling jar,” he said. “Snap into it, Tony!”

  Tony got up. He raised the canteen, and looked around him, not at the tanks from which the water was pouring so that the noise of the earth drinking was audible, but at the rows of his vineyard. Then he went into the house.

  Durante mounted his mule. He shifted the rifle to his left hand and drew out the heavy Colt from its holster. Tony came dragging back to him, his head down. Durante watched Tony with a careful revolver but he gave up the canteen without lifting his eyes.

  “The trouble with you, Tony,” said Durante, “is you’re yellow. I’d of fought a tribe of wildcats with my bare hands, before I’d let ’em do what I’m doin’ to you. But you sit back and take it.”

  Tony did not seem to hear. He stretched out his hands to the vines.