The Max Brand Megapack

by Max Brand

  “That’s three mile, I guess.”

  “Oh, three miles—then it will take twice as long.”

  “More’n that His hoss would get pretty tired before it hit the last mile and a half at that clip.”

  “Well, that’s good! Willie, you know the Chalmers boy?”

  “Joe Chalmers? Sure, him and me fought every other week last year. I busted his face good for him. Sure I know Joe. Him and me are chums. We’re going shooting next month!”

  She was too serious to smile at this strange recital of the bases of friendship among the young.

  “Willie,” she said, “this is to be kept a dead secret, you see?”

  His eyes grew very wide.

  “Cross my heart to die!” whispered Willie in delight. “I sure won’t breathe a word of it to nobody!”

  “Then you come running to the hotel to-night at a quarter to eight—mind you, at seven-forty-five sharp! And you come shouting for the doctor!”

  “Why for the doctor?”

  “Because the Chalmers boy has been thrown from a horse and broken his leg.”

  “Thrown from a hoss? Why, there ain’t a hoss in the world that could throw—oh!”

  With this exclamation the light dawned upon Willie in a great and a blinding burst, so that he gasped, choked, and then was silent.

  “Will you do it?” she asked.

  “Will I do it?” exclaimed Willie. “Didn’t that damn doctor—excuse me for swearing, Elsie—pretty near raise me on castor oil?”

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  A FORMULA FOR HAPPINESS

  Perhaps the agreement at which Ronicky Doone arrived with the rancher was not large in words, but it was eloquent in substance.

  “How come you’ve lost so much coin?” asked Ronicky when he came to the gist of his argument in the growing twilight before the ranch house.

  “By bad luck,” said the other sadly. “Nobody in the world, hardly, has had such bad luck as I’ve had!”

  “At what?”

  “Cows—men—everything that I count on goes wrong.”

  “Chiefly cards, though,” said Ronicky.

  “Eh? The cards? I’ve had my ups and downs with ’em! Are you feeling up to a small game of stud?”

  But Ronicky was shaking his head and grinning scornfully.

  “I can see through you like glass, Bennett,” he said. “It’s the cards that have taken everything away from you. If you and me hit up for an agreement, we got to start right there!”

  “Right where?” asked the rancher, dismayed.

  “Right at the cards! Bennett, you’re through. You never lay a bet on the turn of a card again so long as you live. Understand?”

  Steve Bennett gasped a protest, but Ronicky raised his hand to silence the older man.

  “These boys I brung down here,” he said, “will be plumb happy to work for you and to clean up on Jenkins’ men. But the minute I give ’em the word they’ll be against you and for Jenkins. And the first time that I hear of you putting up some stakes I’m going to send word to the boys. Is that clear, and does that go?”

  Bennett swallowed and nodded sadly.

  “I was thinking of keeping ’em amused,” he began.

  “You keep ’em amused,” said Ronicky, “by starting your chink to cooking the best dinner that he ever turned out. That’s the best way to keep them amused. And don’t mind it if they make a mite of racket. They’re that kind.”

  Again Bennett could only mutely agree with the terms laid down by the dictator.

  “I’m going to slide off to Twin Springs,” said Ronicky. “But tell the boys that I’m coming back to-night. There ain’t going to be no trouble and no shooting scrapes come out of this little party. Everything is going to be plumb quiet, but to-morrow morning early I’m going to be back on the job, rounding up all the chances for a fight with Jenkins’ gang. But I think we’ve got ’em beat!”

  “We have!”, shouted Bennett savagely. “We’ve beat ’em, and when I see him again, the skunk, I’m going to tell him just what I—”

  But Ronicky had no desire to hear more of this meaningless boasting. He turned Lou with a twist of his body and, waving farewell to Bennett, galloped down the valley toward the little town.

  It was completely dark before he had covered more than half of the distance. In the shadows of the full night he swung down the street of Twin Springs, the bay mare rocking along as tirelessly as when he began the long run of that day’s journeying. And so he came to the hotel.

  But he did not choose to enter from the front. There might be too much talk, too much comment from the other men of the town. It seemed far better to Ronicky to send Lou between the two buildings next to the hotel and so around to the rear of the place. Here he dismounted and slipped up onto the veranda.

  There he paused, recalling the picture which he had last seen from that veranda, looking through the big window into the room where Blondy Loring lay. Now, stepping close to the outside edge, so that the boards would not creak under his weight, he stole softly on.

  As he went he heard a regular murmuring from the room—the low, low voice of the girl—the voices of two men—but all was kept so indistinct that he could not understand a syllable of it until he came opposite the window, and then a single glance was more eloquent with meaning than a thousand words.

  For there sat Elsie Bennett, wonderfully beautiful in an old yellow dress, with little flowers worked obscurely upon it in pastel shades, her blonde hair done low upon her forehead and upon her neck, her face quite pale with emotion that seemed to Ronicky to be fear. But with all her heart and soul she seemed to be driving herself forward.

  Beside her lay Blondy Loring, one hand stretched out from the bed and holding her hand. Over them stood a man reading from a book, a little man, with a high light thrown from the lamp on the back of his very bald head, and the light also shining in the aureole of misty hair which floated around the edge of the bald spot.

  And now the voice of Blondy, repeating the words of the minister, rose in a deep, heavy volume: “With this ring I thee wed!” And then the pale face of the girl was bowed over Blondy to kiss him.

  One step took Ronicky to the window, and another carried him over the low ledge and into the room. At the very shadow of his coming Elsie Bennett had started back. In vain Blondy strove to detain her with his big arm. She slipped out of his grasp and stood back against the farther wall, gasping, while the minister turned agape to face the intruder. Blondy was barely able to turn his head to view Ronicky.

  “You’re too late for the fun, son,” he sneered at Ronicky. “I’m sorry you didn’t come for the rest of the show!”

  “I’ve come to give it the last send-off, though,” said Ronicky grimly. “I’ve come to bring you good news.”

  “What news?”

  “A son has been born to your wife, and she’s sent for you—she needs you, Christopher!”

  He could not tell that this last name was already known to the girl. But it was not the name which struck her dumb; it was that first horrible message. Little Philip Walton reached her in time to lower her into a chair, where she sat nearly fainting and staring at Ronicky with uncomprehending eyes.

  Ronicky stepped to the bed and towered over the cringing, trembling outlaw. All the courage had gone out of the body of the bold Christopher, like the water out of a squeezed sponge.

  “I’m going to get you safe out of this,” said Ronicky Doone. “But when you’re safe and well, I’m going to run you down and kill you, you hound. At first I thought you were a sort of hero, and then I took you for a wolf of a man, Blondy, but finally I seen that all you were was just a miserable, sneaking coyote. And that’s the way I’m going to hound you, and I’m going to kill you in the end! But the time ain’t come yet. I’m not going to let the law finish you. I want to leave that for myself!”

  And to crown the horror, when the girl finally looked at her pseudo husband, she found him shaking and quivering and begging like a whipp
ed dog. She got up from the chair, cold and perfectly calm, and walked straight to Ronicky and took his hand in both of hers.

  “I’ve been a great fool,” she said, “and you’ve saved me from myself!”

  So she turned and left the room, as quietly as though she were slipping out to let the patient get his rest undisturbed.

  “Ah,” said the minister, “what a woman she is! And what a God’s blessing, young man, that you came when you did. Now let’s find the sheriff!”

  But from that resolution Ronicky carefully dissuaded him in a long argument which lasted until the light burned low and until Christopher was nearly dead with fear and shame on the bed. Then the minister gave in, and he took Ronicky home with him.

  At the gate they parted.

  “It’s made me young again.” said the minister, “listening to you talk. It’s made me young again. But what I continually wonder at, Ronicky Doone, is where you get your reward?”

  “Why,” said Ronicky, “I’ve been thinking about that myself. I figure a gent gets his reward when he sees other people happy. As long as I can help other people to their happiness, I don’t require no other reward. But I’m going to stay around here and wait.”

  He added this with a little emphasis, and the minister chuckled.

  “I see,” he said. “I see perfectly. Yes, I think that would be the best thing to do after all—just wait!”

  And he was still chuckling when he went into his house.

  But Ronicky went back down the street full of a sad happiness and with his brain full of Elsie Bennett. He could not guess—that night—that she was watching from an upper window of the hotel every step he took that night.

  BLACK JACK (1922)

  CHAPTER 1

  It was characteristic of the two that when the uproar broke out Vance Cornish raised his eyes, but went on lighting his pipe. Then his sister Elizabeth ran to the window with a swish of skirts around her long legs. After the first shot there was a lull. The little cattle town was as peaceful as ever with its storm-shaken houses staggering away down the street.

  A boy was stirring up the dust of the street, enjoying its heat with his bare toes, and the same old man was bunched in his chair in front of the store. During the two days Elizabeth had been in town on her cattle-buying trip, she had never see him alter his position. But she was accustomed to the West, and this advent of sleep in the town did not satisfy her. A drowsy town, like a drowsy-looking cow-puncher, might be capable of unexpected things.

  “Vance,” she said, “there’s trouble starting.”

  “Somebody shooting at a target,” he answered.

  As if to mock him, he had no sooner spoken than a dozen voices yelled down the street in a wailing chorus cut short by the rapid chattering of revolvers. Vance ran to the window. Just below the hotel the street made an elbow-turn for no particular reason except that the original cattle-trail had made exactly the same turn before Garrison City was built. Toward the corner ran the hubbub at the pace of a running horse. Shouts, shrill, trailing curses, and the muffled beat of hoofs in the dust. A rider plunged into view now, his horse leaning far in to take the sharp angle, and the dust skidding out and away from his sliding hoofs. The rider gave easily and gracefully to the wrench of his mount.

  And he seemed to have a perfect trust in his horse, for he rode with the reins hanging over the horns of his saddle. His hands were occupied by a pair of revolvers, and he was turned in the saddle.

  The head of the pursuing crowd lurched around the elbow-turn; fire spat twice from the mouth of each gun. Two men dropped, one rolling over and over in the dust, and the other sitting down and clasping his leg in a ludicrous fashion. But the crowd was checked and fell back.

  By this time the racing horse of the fugitive had carried him close to the hotel, and now he faced the front, a handsome fellow with long black hair blowing about his face. He wore a black silk shirt which accentuated the pallor of his face and the flaring crimson of his bandanna. And he laughed joyously, and the watchers from the hotel window heard him call: “Go it, Mary. Feed ’em dust, girl!”

  The pursuers had apparently realized that it was useless to chase. Another gust of revolver shots barked from the turning of the street, and among them a different and more sinister sound like the striking of two great hammers face on face, so that there was a cold ring of metal after the explosion—at least one man had brought a rifle to bear. Now, as the wild rider darted past the hotel, his hat was jerked from his head by an invisible hand. He whirled again in the saddle and his guns raised. As he turned, Elizabeth Cornish saw something glint across the street. It was the gleam of light on the barrel of a rifle that was thrust out through the window of the store.

  That long line of light wobbled, steadied, and fire jetted from the mouth of the gun. The black-haired rider spilled sidewise out of the saddle; his feet came clear of the stirrups, and his right leg caught on the cantle. He was flung rolling in the dust, his arms flying weirdly. The rifle disappeared from the window and a boy’s set face looked out. But before the limp body of the fugitive had stopped rolling, Elizabeth Cornish dropped into a chair, sick of face. Her brother turned his back on the mob that closed over the dead man and looked at Elizabeth in alarm.

  It was not the first time he had seen the result of a gunplay, and for that matter it was not the first time for Elizabeth. Her emotion upset him more than the roar of a hundred guns. He managed to bring her a glass of water, but she brushed it away so that half of the contents spilled on the red carpet of the room.

  “He isn’t dead, Vance. He isn’t dead!” she kept saying.

  “Dead before he left the saddle,” replied Vance, with his usual calm. “And if the bullet hadn’t finished him, the fall would have broken his neck. But—what in the world! Did you know the fellow?”

  He blinked at her, his amazement growing. The capable hands of Elizabeth were pressed to her breast, and out of the thirty-five years of spinsterhood which had starved her face he became aware of eyes young and dark, and full of spirit; by no means the keen, quiet eyes of Elizabeth Cornish.

  “Do something,” she cried. “Go down, and—if they’ve murdered him—”

  He literally fled from the room.

  All the time she was seeing nothing, but she would never forget what she had seen, no matter how long she lived. Subconsciously she was fighting to keep the street voices out of her mind. They were saying things she did not wish to hear, things she would not hear. Finally, she recovered enough to stand up and shut the window. That brought her a terrible temptation to look down into the mass of men in the street—and women, too!

  But she resisted and looked up. The forms of the street remained obscurely in the bottom of her vision, and made her think of something she had seen in the woods—a colony of ants around a dead beetle. Presently the door opened and Vance came back. He still seemed very worried, but she forced herself to smile at him, and at once his concern disappeared; it was plain that he had been troubled about her and not in the slightest by the fate of the strange rider. She kept on smiling, but for the first time in her life she really looked at Vance without sisterly prejudice in his favor. She saw a good-natured face, handsome, with the cheeks growing a bit blocky, though Vance was only twenty-five. He had a glorious forehead and fine eyes, but one would never look twice at Vance in a crowd. She knew suddenly that her brother was simply a well-mannered mediocrity.

  “Thank the Lord you’re yourself again, Elizabeth,” her brother said first of all. “I thought for a moment—I don’t know what!”

  “Just the shock, Vance,” she said. Ordinarily she was well-nigh brutally frank. Now she found it easy to lie and keep on smiling. “It was such a horrible thing to see!”

  “I suppose so. Caught you off balance. But I never knew you to lose your grip so easily. Well, do you know what you’ve seen?”

  “He’s dead, then?”

  He locked sharply at her. It seemed to him that a tremor of unevenness had come into h
er voice.

  “Oh, dead as a doornail, Elizabeth. Very neat shot. Youngster that dropped him; boy named Joe Minter. Six thousand dollars for Joe. Nice little nest egg to build a fortune on, eh?”

  “Six thousand dollars! What do you mean, Vance?”

  “The price on the head of Jack Hollis. That was Hollis, sis. The celebrated Black Jack.”

  “But—this is only a boy, Vance. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old.”

  “That’s all.”

  “But I’ve heard of him for ten years, very nearly. And always as a man-killer. It can’t be Black Jack.”

  “I said the same thing, but it’s Black Jack, well enough. He started out when he was sixteen, they say, and he’s been raising the devil ever since. You should have seen them pick him up—as if he were asleep, and not dead. What a body! Lithe as a panther. No larger than I am, but they say he was a giant with his hands.”

  He was lighting his cigarette as he said this, and consequently he did not see her eyes close tightly. A moment later she was able to make her expression as calm as ever.

  “Came into town to see his baby,” went on Vance through the smoke. “Little year-old beggar!”

  “Think of the mother,” murmured Elizabeth Cornish. “I want to do something for her.”

  “You can’t,” replied her brother, with unnecessary brutality. “Because she’s dead. A little after the youngster was born. I believe Black Jack broke her heart, and a very pleasant sort of girl she was, they tell me.”

  “What will become of the baby?”

  “It will live and grow up,” he said carelessly. “They always do, somehow. Make another like his father, I suppose. A few years of fame in the mountain saloons, and then a knife in the back.”

  The meager body of Elizabeth stiffened. She was finding it less easy to maintain her nonchalant smile.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Blood will out, like murder, sis.”

  “Nonsense! All a matter of environment.”

  “Have you ever read the story of the Jukes family?”

  “An accident. Take a son out of the best family in the world and raise him like a thief—he’ll be a thief. And the thief’s son can be raised to an honest manhood. I know it!”