The Max Brand Megapack

by Max Brand

  But, as he said, he had acted so as to show her that he had entered fully into the spirit of the thing, and that his heart was in the right place as far as this birthday party was concerned, and she could not do otherwise than accept his explanation.

  Some of the bidden guests, however, came from a great distance, and as a matter of course a few of them arrived the day before the celebration and filled the quiet rooms of the old house with noise. Elizabeth accepted them with resignation, and even pleasure, because they all had pleasant things to say about her father and good wishes to express for the destined heir, Terence Colby. It was carefully explained that this selection of an heir had been made by both Elizabeth and Vance, which removed all cause for remark. Vance himself regarded the guests with distinct amusement. But Terence was disgusted.

  “What these true Westerners need,” he said to Elizabeth later in the day, “is a touch of blood. No feeling of family or the dignity of family precedents out here.”

  It touched her shrewdly. More than once she had felt that Terry was on the verge of becoming a complacent prig. So she countered with a sharp thrust.

  “You have to remember that you’re a Westerner born and bred, my dear. A very Westerner yourself!”

  “Birth is an accident—birthplaces, I mean,” smiled Terence. “It’s the blood that tells.”

  “Terry, you’re a snob!” exclaimed Aunt Elizabeth.

  “I hope not,” he answered. “But look yonder, now!”

  Old George Armstrong’s daughter, Nelly, had gone up a tree like a squirrel and was laughing down through the branches at a raw-boned cousin on the ground beneath her.

  “And what of it?” said Elizabeth. “That girl is pretty enough to please any man; and she’s the type that makes a wife.”

  Terry rubbed his chin with his knuckles thoughtfully. It was the one family habit that he had contracted from Vance, much to the irritation of the latter.

  “After all,” said Terry, with complacency, “what are good looks with bad grammar?”

  Elizabeth snorted literally and most unfemininely.

  “Terence,” she said, lessoning him with her bony, long forefinger, “you’re just young enough to be wise about women. When you’re a little older, you’ll get sense. If you want white hands and good grammar, how do you expect to find a wife in the mountains?”

  Terry answered with unshaken, lordly calm. “I haven’t thought about the details. They don’t matter. But a man must have standards of criticism.”

  “Standards your foot!” cried Aunt Elizabeth. “You insufferable young prig. That very girl laughing down through the branches—I’ll wager she could set your head spinning in ten seconds if she thought it worth her while to try.”

  “Perhaps,” smiled Terence. “In the meantime she has freckles and a vocabulary without growing pains.”

  “All men are fools,” declared Aunt Elizabeth; “but boys are idiots, bless ’em! Terence, before you grow up you’ll have sore toes from stumbling, take my word for it! Do you know what a wise man would do?”

  “Well?”

  “Go out and start a terrific flirtation with Nelly.”

  “For the sake of experience?” sighed Terence.

  “Good heavens!” groaned Aunt Elizabeth. “Terry, you’re impossible! Where are you going now?”

  “Out to see El Sangre.”

  He went whistling out of the door, and she followed him with confused feelings of anger, pride, joy, and fear. She went to a side window and saw him go fearlessly into the corral where the man-destroying El Sangre was kept. And the big stallion, red fire in the sunshine, went straight to him and nosed at a hip pocket. They had already struck up a perfect understanding. Deeply she wondered at it.

  She had never loved the mountains and their people and their ways. It had been a battle to fight. She had fought the battle, won, and gained a hollow victory. And watching Terry caress the great, beautiful horse, she knew vaguely that his heart, at least, was in tune with the wilderness.

  “I wish to heaven, Terry,” she murmured, “that you could find a master as El Sangre has done. You need teaching.”

  When she turned from the window, she found Vance watching her. He had a habit of obscurely melting into a background and looking out at her unexpectedly. All at once she knew that he had been there listening during all of her talk with Terence. Not that the talk had been of a peculiarly private nature, but it angered her. There was just a semblance of eavesdropping about the presence of Vance. For she knew that Terence unbosomed himself to her as he would do in the hearing of no other human being. However, she mastered her anger and smiled at her brother. He had taken all these recent changes which were so much to his disadvantage with a good spirit that astonished and touched her.

  “Do you know what I’m going to give Terry for his birthday?” he said, sauntering toward her.

  “Well?” A mention of Terence and his welfare always disarmed her completely. She opened her eyes and her heart and smiled at her brother.

  “There’s no set of Scott in the house. I’m going to give Terry one.”

  “Do you think he’ll ever read the novels? I never could. That antiquated style, Vance, keeps me at arm’s length.”

  “A stiff style because he wrote so rapidly. But there’s the greatest body and bone of character. Except for his heroes. Terry reminds me of them, in a way. No thought, not very much feeling, but a great capacity for physical action.”

  “I think you’d like to be Terry’s adviser,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t aspire to the job,” yawned Vance, “unless I could ride well and shoot well. If a man can’t do that, he ceases to be a man in Terry’s eyes. And if a woman can’t talk pure English, she isn’t a woman.”

  “That’s because he’s young,” said Elizabeth.

  “It’s because he’s a prig,” sneered Vance. He had been drawn farther into the conversation than he planned; now he retreated carefully. “But another year or so may help him.”

  He retreated before she could answer, but he left her thoughtful, as he hoped to do. He had a standing theory that the only way to make a woman meditate is to keep her from talking. And he wanted very much to make Elizabeth meditate the evil in the son of Black Jack. Otherwise all his plans might be useless and his seeds of destruction fall on barren soil. He was intensely afraid of that, anyway. His hope was to draw the boy and the sheriff together on the birthday and guide the two explosives until they met on the subject of the death of Black Jack. Either Terry would kill the sheriff, or the sheriff would kill Terry. Vance hoped for the latter, but rather expected the former to be the outcome, and if it were, he was inclined to think that Elizabeth would sooner or later make excuses for Terry and take him back into the fold of her affections. Accordingly, his work was, in the few days that intervened, to plant all the seeds of suspicion that he could. Then, when the denouement came, those seeds might blossom overnight into poison flowers.

  In the late afternoon he took up his position in an easy chair on the big veranda. The mail was delivered, as a rule, just before dusk, one of the cow-punchers riding down for it. Grave fears about the loss of that all-important missive to Terry haunted him, for the postmaster was a doddering old fellow who was quite apt to forget his head. Consequently he was vastly relieved when the mail arrived and Elizabeth brought the familiar big envelope out to him, with its typewritten address.

  “Looks like a business letter, doesn’t it?” she asked Vance.

  “More or less,” said Vance, covering a yawn of excitement.

  “But how on earth could any business—it’s postmarked from Craterville.”

  “Somebody may have heard about his prospects; they’re starting early to separate him from his money.”

  “Vance, how much talking did you do in Craterville?”

  It was hard to meet her keen old eyes.

  “Too much, I’m afraid,” he said frankly. “You see, I’ve felt rather touchy about the thing. I want people to know that you
and I have agreed on making Terry the heir to the ranch. I don’t want anyone to suspect that we differed. I suppose I talked too much about the birthday plans.”

  She sighed with vexation and weighed the letter in her hand.

  “I’ve half a mind to open it.”

  His heartbeat fluttered and paused.

  “Go ahead,” he urged, with well-assured carelessness.

  She shook down the contents of the envelope preparatory to opening it.

  “It’s nothing but printed stuff, Vance. I can see that, through the envelope.”

  “But wait a minute, Elizabeth. It might anger Terry to have even his business mail opened. He’s touchy, you know.”

  She hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders.

  “I suppose you’re right. Let it go.” She laughed at her own concern over the matter. “Do you know, Vance, that sometimes I feel as if the whole world were conspiring to get a hand on Terry?”

  CHAPTER 8

  Terry did not come down for dinner. It was more or less of a calamity, for the board was quite full of early guests for the next day’s festivities. Aunt Elizabeth shifted the burden of the entertainment onto the capable shoulders of Vance, who could please these Westerners when he chose. Tonight he decidedly chose. Elizabeth had never see him in such high spirits. He could flirt good-humoredly and openly across the table at Nelly, or else turn and draw an anecdote from Nelly’s father. He kept the reins in his hands and drove the talk along so smoothly that Elizabeth could sit in gloomy silence, unnoticed, at the farther end of the table. Her mind was up yonder in the room of Terry.

  Something had happened, and it had come through that long business envelope with the typewritten address that seemed so harmless. One reading of the contents had brought Terry out of his chair with an exclamation. Then, without explanation of any sort, he had gone to his room and stayed there. She would have followed to find out what was the matter, but the requirements of dinner and her guests kept her downstairs.

  Immediately after dinner Vance, at a signal from her, dexterously herded everyone into the living room and distributed them in comfort around the big fireplace; Elizabeth Cornish bolted straight for the room of Terence. She knocked and tried the door. To her astonishment, the knob turned, but the door did not open. She heard the click and felt the jar of the bolt. Terry had locked his door!

  A little thing to make her heart fall, one would say, but little things about Terry were great things to Elizabeth. In twenty-four years he had never locked his door. What could it mean?

  It was a moment before she could call, and she waited breathlessly. She was reassured by a quiet voice that answered her: “Just a moment. I’ll open.”

  The tone was so matter-of-fact that her heart, with one leap, came back to normal and tears of relief misted her eyes for an instant. Perhaps he was up here working out a surprise for the next day—he was full of tricks and surprises. That was unquestionably it. And he took so long in coming to the door because he was hiding the thing he had been working on. As for food, Wu Chi was his slave and would have smuggled a tray up to him. Presently the lock turned and the door opened.

  She could not see his face distinctly at first, the light was so strong behind him. Besides, she was more occupied in looking for the tray of food which would assure her that Terry was not suffering from some mental crisis that had made him forget even dinner. She found the tray, sure enough, but the food had not been touched.

  She turned on him with a new rush of alarm. And all her fears were realized. Terry had been fighting a hard battle and he was still fighting. About his eyes there was the look, half-dull and half-hard, that comes in the eyes of young people unused to pain. A worried, tense, hungry face. He took her arm and led her to the table. On it lay an article clipped out of a magazine. She looked down at it with unseeing eyes. The sheets were already much crumbled. Terry turned them to a full-page picture, and Elizabeth found herself looking down into the face of Black Jack, proud, handsome, defiant.

  Had Vance been there, he might have recognized her actions. As she had done one day twenty-four years ago, now she turned and dropped heavily into a chair, her bony hands pressed to her shallow bosom. A moment later she was on her feet again, ready to fight, ready to tell a thousand lies. But it was too late. The revelation had been complete and she could tell by his face that Terence knew everything.

  “Terry,” she said faintly, “what on earth have you to do with that—”

  “Listen, Aunt Elizabeth,” he said, “you aren’t going to fib about it, are you?”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “Why were you so shocked?”

  She knew it was a futile battle. He was prying at her inner mind with short questions and a hard, dry voice.

  “It was the face of that terrible man. I saw him once before, you know. On the day—”

  “On the day he was murdered!”

  That word told her everything. “Murdered!” It lighted all the mental processes through which he had been going. Who in all the reaches of the mountain desert had ever before dreamed of terming the killing of the notorious Black Jack a “murder”?

  “What are you saying, Terence? That fellow—”

  “Hush! Look at us!”

  He picked up the photograph and stood back so that the light fell sharply on his face and on the photograph which he held beside his head. He caught up a sombrero and jammed it jauntily on his head. He tilted his face high, with resolute chin. And all at once there were two Black Jacks, not one. He evidently saw all the admission that he cared for in her face. He took off the hat with a dragging motion and replaced the photograph on the table.

  “I tried it in the mirror,” he said quietly. “I wasn’t quite sure until I tried it in the mirror. Then I knew, of course.”

  She felt him slipping out of her life.

  “What shall I say to you, Terence?”

  “Is that my real name?”

  She winced. “Yes. Your real name.”

  “Good. Do you remember our talk of today?”

  “What talk?”

  He drew his breath with something of a groan.

  “I said that what these people lacked was the influence of family—of old blood!”

  He made himself smile at her, and Elizabeth trembled. “If I could explain—” she began.

  “Ah, what is there to explain, Aunt Elizabeth? Except that you have been a thousand times kinder to me than I dreamed before. Why, I—I actually thought that you were rather honored by having a Colby under your roof. I really felt that I was bestowing something of a favor on you!”

  “Terry, sit down!”

  He sank into a chair slowly. And she sat on the arm of it with her mournful eyes on his face.

  “Whatever your name may be, that doesn’t change the man who wears the name.”

  He laughed softly. “And you’ve been teaching me steadily for twenty-four years that blood will tell? You can’t change like this. Oh, I understand it perfectly. You determined to make me over. You determined to destroy my heritage and put the name of the fine old Colbys in its place. It was a brave thing to try, and all these years how you must have waited, and waited to see how I would turn out, dreading every day some outbreak of the bad blood! Ah, you have a nerve of steel, Aunt Elizabeth! How have you endured the suspense?”

  She felt that he was mocking her subtly under this flow of compliment. But it was the bitterness of pain, not of reproach, she knew.

  She said: “Why didn’t you let me come up with you? Why didn’t you send for me?”

  “I’ve been busy doing a thing that no one could help me with. I’ve been burning my dreams.” He pointed to a smoldering heap of ashes on the hearth.

  “Terry!”

  “Yes, all the Colby pictures that I’ve been collecting for the past fifteen years. I burned ’em. They don’t mean anything to anyone else, and certainly they have ceased to mean anything to me. But when I came to Anthony Colby—the eighteen-
twelve man, you know, the one who has always been my hero—it went pretty hard. I felt as if—I were burning my own personality. As a matter of fact, in the last couple of hours I’ve been born over again.”

  Terry paused. “And births are painful, Aunt Elizabeth!”

  At that she cried out and caught his hand. “Terry dear! Terry dear! You break my heart!”

  “I don’t mean to. You mustn’t think that I’m pitying myself. But I want to know the real name of my father. He must have had some name other than Black Jack. What was it?”

  “Are you going to gather his memory to your heart, Terry?”

  “I am going to find something about him that I can be proud of. Blood will tell. I know that I’m not all bad, and there must have been good in Black Jack. I want to know all about him. I want to know about—his crimes.”

  He labored through a fierce moment of silent struggle while her heart went helplessly out to him.

  “Because—I had a hand in every one of those crimes! Everything that he did is something that I might have done under the same temptation.”

  “But you’re not all your father’s son. You had a mother. A dear, sweet-faced girl—”

  “Don’t!” whispered Terry. “I suppose he broke—her heart?”

  “She was a very delicate girl,” she said after a moment.

  “And now my father’s name, please?”

  “Not that just now. Give me until tomorrow night, Terry. Will you do that? Will you wait till tomorrow night, Terry? I’m going to have a long talk with you then, about many things. And I want you to keep this in mind always. No matter how long you live, the influence of the Colbys will never go out of your life. And neither will my influence, I hope. If there is anything good in me, it has gone into you. I have seen to that. Terry, you are not your father’s son alone. All these other things have entered into your make-up. They’re just as much a part of you as his blood.”