The Max Brand Megapack

by Max Brand

  The Kid nodded.

  He made himself a cigarette, and smoked it with thoughtful care.

  “Look here, Champ,” he said.

  “Aye? What is it?”

  “Well, it’s this way,” the Kid continued. “You liked your life back there on the ranch?”

  “That was life, Kid. Making things grow, and—”

  “And round-up was a great time?”

  “The best times that I ever saw!”

  “Champ, I don’t think that you mean it. I’d like to make you remember the time that you blew the safe of the First National in Carnedas, according to the story that Bill Jackson told me of that night.”

  “I remember that night.”

  Soft laughter brooded upon the lips and the throat of Dixon.

  “That was a night, old son!”

  “Did you ever have such a good night on the old ranch?” Champ started to speak, changed his mind, and stared fixedly in front of him.

  “Did you ever have so much fun in any twenty days and nights on your ranch,” persisted the Kid.

  Still Champ did not answer, and the Kid, apparently taking this silence as a confession, went on:

  “There was no cruel sheriff that drove me out on the road, Champ. Nobody ever cheated or gypped or short-changed, robbed or beat me in any way.”

  “Hard times can rub through men’s patience,” declared poor Champ.

  “Hard times didn’t bother me, either,” said the Kid. “I had enough money. My family is a good family. I could walk on Persian rugs and drink tea at four thirty every afternoon and sun myself with the pearls and paste of the opera boxes at night. But that stuff didn’t appeal to me. There’s too much dressing up and not enough places to go.”

  Champ regarded his friend with tightened lips and tightened eyes.

  “Where can you go out here except from sunstroke into chilblains? What have you got here except a raw neck and an aching back, and dirt, dirt and more dirt? By heck, sometimes I almost think, Kid, that I’d chuck it all for the sake of living next door to a tin bathtub and a good supply of hot water all the time. This is a hard life.”

  “Yeah,” said the Kid. “It’s a hard life for those who don’t like it. But let them have their soft rugs and deep beds and smart talk. I prefer to shoot my meat, cook it, and eat it. They get the pleasure of being together. I get the pleasure of being alone. They learn how other people live and imitate them. I learn how horses and wild cats live, and imitate them. They’re inside the laws. I’m outside the laws. I’m above the laws, Champ. I kick the law in the face, because it doesn’t walk on my level.”

  He yawned and stretched his arms.

  “That sounds pretty fat-headed,” said he. “Well, I don’t mean it that way. I only mean to tell you that I’ve never gone home since the day I left, and I’ll never go home if I live to be a thousand. I’ve cut myself away from ’em. I’ve buried my old name. And I’m free as a lark, old son!”

  He laughed as he said that, the purest joy in life welling and bubbling in his throat, so that Champ grinned and nodded in return.

  “You’re all out by yourself, Kid,” he remarked. “I’ve heard it before, and I believe it, now. You haven’t even thrown in the sunsets, and the mountain air, and such stuff. I was afraid that you were going to be poetic.”

  “I knew you were,” said the Kid, “and so I went soft on that pedal.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “I’ve been down south with Juan Gil, the Portuguese in Yucatan. Very hot. Even gold melts down there.”

  He yawned again.

  “You got some, I hope?”

  “Yeah, I got some. I loaded a pack mule with what I got.”

  “Of gold?”

  “Yeah. It was everything that Juan Gil had taken out of an old mine down there. Good, patient sort of boy, Juan is!”

  “You caught him out?”

  “One night he tried to knife me. You see, he thought I wouldn’t be needed any more.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Well, I pulled down the heads of two saplings and tied him to them. When they jumped up into the air again, they didn’t pull him in two but they stretched him a good deal. I left him up there close to the sky, and took away his mules and the gold. Juan cried a good deal to see me go. But he was taken down that day with nothing worse than a few bones broken.”

  “You don’t seem to be traveling very heavy now.”

  “It’s a long way from Yucatan,” said the Kid. “You wouldn’t have me go all the way without stopping?”

  “No. I bet you even threw roses on the desert, eh?”

  “I threw a few,” said the Kid, complacently. “Even Old Mexico City blushed a couple of times on account of me. And that’s a habit that I thought the old town had forgotten a couple of hundred years ago. What have you been doing?”

  “I’ve been selling some mining stock,” said Champ Dixon. “It goes pretty well, too, if I can get far enough east. But lately the blamed sheriffs and their deputies have been pretty thick. So I’ve started in on a new game.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Jumping water rights.”

  “That’s nothing new.”

  “Not new. All the better for that. It’s a game that’s been tried out and practiced until a fellow can learn all of its dodges.”

  “Like it?”

  “Why not? It’s exciting.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Look around through the ranches, and find out the ones that have shaky titles. Why, most of them have, for that matter. They’ve got their land from the Indians, first of all, or from some old Spanish grant, perhaps, or a Mexican under a law that never was a law, or from some old-timer who never had any claim to the ground in the first place. We look around, Shay and me, and we pick out the likely ranches, and then jump in and claim and start to homestead on the best water on the ranch. Take most of those places hack there where the big Milman ranch is, there’s not more than one good stream to the ranch. You grab that creek, and they’ve gotta buy water rights from neighbors, if they can, and drive the cows a darn long march to get a drink; or else they cannot wait to go to the law, but they can shoot it out with you. Maybe they drop you, and then they have a chance to be hung for murder. Maybe they’re dropped. And then it’s a case of the poor homesteader defending his rights.”

  As the beauty of this business came home to Champ Dixon, he chuckled through his teeth again, and drew in a long breath.

  “If they go to the law. Shay has got one of the slickest lawyers that you ever seen, and a lot of crooks that knows how to make evidence. Shay has got men that could remember the length of Noah’s whiskers. They’ll swear to anything. So if the trial comes off one chance in two, we win anyway. And the poor sucker of a rancher has to pay through the nose, and we live on the fat. Why, old son, it’s the very kind of a life for you!”

  Suddenly he stopped, and grew red. For he saw that the Kid was watching him intently, and without a smile.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Suggestion

  “A good kind of a life,” said the Kid, “if a fellow takes to it.”

  “Why,” said the other, more enthusiastically than ever, “it’s the best kind of a life that I know about.”

  “And Shay is your boss?”

  “Yeah, Shay is my boss.”

  “What sort of a fellow d’you find Shay?”

  “The best kind. He’s been around in the world, and knows something that you don’t learn out of books.”

  “Square?”

  “He pays up.”

  “The right sort, eh?”

  “The right sort for me. He’s no time waster. But he keeps you busy and he pays you for your time.”

  The Kid nodded.

  “You like him pretty well for a boss, then?”

  “I like him? I’ll tell a man that I like him. I’ve drawn down thousands from Shay, Kid.”

  “Well,” said the Kid, “there’s only one thing
I ever had against him.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Once he pulled out of Los Angeles bound for Arizona—packing out with a pair of horses, a pair of mules and an old-timer by name of Pete Coleman along with him. They had a bad time of it, I suppose. Anyway, on the other side of the desert, there was no more than one mule and your friend Shay. Old Coleman, two horses, and a mule, had disappeared on the trip. Well, I want to know what happened to Coleman, and I want to hear it from Shay’s own lip.”

  “Come in to Dry Creek with me and ask him. They probably met up with a stack of trouble on the way. There’s nothing that Shay wouldn’t do to get you with him, Kid. He knows a man, and a man’s worth!”

  “Does he?” said the Kid. “Well, I’ve already stopped off at Dry Creek, and Shay wasn’t interested in seeing me. He left his house. In fact, he climbed out of a top-story window and turned himself into a cat to get to the ground.”

  The other stared fixedly. His eyes gradually turned from surprise to a hard understanding.

  “Did you go gunning for Shay?” he asked suddenly.

  “Gunning?” said the Kid. “I never go gunning for anybody. But I wanted to ask Shay that question. He had business outside the house, though, it appeared.”

  “You hate Shay?”

  “Not a bit. I only want to ask him a question.”

  “Why didn’t you stay in Dry Creek?”

  “Would you like to go to sleep inside the den of a wild cat?”

  The other nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ve missed a fine chance, Kid. If I was you, I’d go back to Dry Creek and see Shay under a white flag and make friends. Nobody is gunna get on in this part of the world unless he’s a friend of Shay’s.”

  “There’s only that question,” said the Kid. “When you see him, you ask him, will you? I’d give a lot to find out.”

  “You think that Shay double-crossed him?”

  “Double-crossed him?” said the Kid, gently. “Why, man, Coleman was sixty years old. Who would double-cross a man that old?”

  The other watched his face cautiously, and seemed to perceive a tone of iron in that last remark.

  “I dunno anything about it,” he said shortly. “Was Coleman a great friend of yours?”

  “Coleman? Oh, not particularly. I just barely knew him. He took me in when I was hungry, once, and again he showed me the way out when I was in a tight hole, and another time he saved my life when I was cornered by a gang. Outside of that, he didn’t have any claim on me.”

  Dixon frowned, and then stood up.

  “I guess I know what you mean,” said he. “If I should find out about Coleman—I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks,” said the Kid, showing his teeth as he smiled. “I take that kindly from you, Champ.”

  “I’ll tell you one other thing, Kid,” burst out Dixon. “If you want to wear your scalp long, don’t stay in this country unless you’ve made it up with Shay.”

  “He has everything under his thumb, has he?”

  “He has everything under his thumb, and that’s a fact.”

  “I’m glad to know that,” said the Kid, “and I hope that we’ll be friendly. You tell him something from me, will you?”

  “Of course I will, when I see him.”

  The Kid looked up at him with the same smile.

  “Tell him that unless I hear from him soon I’m going to have to drop in on him in a hurry and open him up to learn the truth about Coleman.”

  “Open him up?” asked Dixon, starting.

  “Yes,” said the Kid. “If I can’t hear it from his mouth, I might find it in his heart, or his liver. And if I fail—he’ll make good dog food, anyway. That’s all I’d like to have you tell him from me, old-timer.”

  Dixon, during the last part of this speech, had been backing away from the Kid, frowning. Now, without a word, he turned to his horses, saddled one, and was about to climb into the saddle, when he paused, fumbling at the saddle straps.

  The Kid was watching closely, though from the corner of his eye, while he saddled the mare. Then, glancing in the direction in which his companion was looking, he saw from the top of a distant hill the flicker of a light, as though the sun were glittering upon the face of a moving glass. Suddenly he found that Dixon was staring at him closely, critically.

  “Yes,” said the Kid, still smiling, “it looks as though your friend Shay had the country by the throat. There he is, winking at you across all those miles, old-timer. Wink back, when you get a chance, and tell him that I’m waiting for my answer.”

  Dixon, without answering, flung himself on the back of his horse. He seemed about to ride straight off, but changing his mind at the last moment, he returned to the Kid and leaned a little from the saddle.

  “I’ll tell you something,” said he, “and it don’t cost you nothin’ to hear it. You’re gunna be marked down in a pretty short while. Get out of this neck of the woods. I ain’t got nothin’ agin’ you. I like you fine. But—I tell you to start movin’, Kid!”

  The latter watched him carefully.

  “I believe you, old son,” said he. “I’d better get moving, before you have to start on my trail. Is that it?”

  “Put it any way you want to. You think that you know a lot, Kid. You don’t know nothin’. You give Shay the run today and think you’re the top dog. Why, that don’t mean nothin’. He don’t fight because he’s proud. He fights because he wants your blood. And he’d sooner use hired hands than his own. Kid, watch yourself. So long. I’ve said a pile too much, already!”

  He jerked his horse around and made off at once along the trail toward Dry Creek, while the Kid looked after him with a certain combination of pity, contempt and kindness. Then he mounted and went in the opposite direction, riding slowly, with a thoughtful cant to his head.

  CHAPTER 10

  Handmade Shoe

  For not more than a half mile did the Kid keep along the trail, and then, so seriously did he take the friendly warning of Champ Dixon, that he turned aside and cut through the open country, winding up and down through the ravines and over the hills patiently. There was a great deal to occupy his mind during this ride, and chiefly the figure of Champ Dixon.

  That man had been famous in story and legend and fact for many a day. But now, like many another legend of the Far West, the Kid had met it, mastered it, put it behind him. It did not seem to him a thing entirely of rags and tatters. It was merely the boiling down of a great, great giant into a quite ordinary man.

  And yet he could see the other side of the chance, as well.

  As, for instance, if the mare had not spotted the approach of Dixon in the distance, and that red Indian of a man had found the Kid before the Kid found him. Then, there was a little doubt. Dixon would have increased his fame endlessly by a good, well-aimed bull’s-eye, the center of the target being the forehead of the Kid. That was the sort of a man Dixon was. He lived for glory. And, beyond question, he had needed nothing but an audience, this day, to force him to take the most hopeless chances and fight out the battle against the Kid and all the odds of circumstance.

  A comfortable warmth was in the heart of the Kid, as he thought of this.

  The next instant the mare limped, and he dropped down from the saddle instantly to see what was wrong.

  He found the trouble in a moment. She had cast a shoe.

  This made him shake his head. For the terrain over which they were traveling was very bad, constant outcroppings of rock making the way dangerous for a shoeless horse. Even the regular trail was bad enough, but the cross-country work much worse.

  From his saddlebag, with a buckskin string and a flat, thick piece of leather, he improvised rapidly, a sort of moccasin, and mounting again, he rode on through the broken sea of hills.

  He went more carefully now, however, and studying the landmarks before him, he presently turned down a ravine that pointed to the left of his way. He wound the bend of this in the dusk of the day, while the sun was st
ill rosy on the upper mountains, but here in the heart of the narrow valley the twilight was already so deep that he could see the faint shining of a light before him, dull as the evening star just after the sun is down.

  Toward this he went, the mare picking her way adroitly. She seemed to realize as well as her master that that naked foot might be a cause of trouble in the future.

  As he came near the house, he heard a clattering of hoofbeats, and looking up the hill, he saw a couple of riders coming over the crest, horses and men outlined like black, strangely moving cardboard figures against the red of the western sky.

  This made him rein up, but, as he studied the horsemen, he made out that only one was a man. The other form was certainly no more than a small boy.

  The Kid went on, more at ease, and now he could see the flat shine of the pool beside the cabin, the dim image of the tree at its verge, the straggling march of the shrubbery up the slope, and the little squat cabin itself, looking too small for human habitation.

  It grew a little on nearer approach. He saw the woodshed, and the little corral. But the whole place had an air not of habitation so much as an accidental touch of human life in the midst of the wilderness. Men who lived here remained not for what they won from the soil, but for the freedom which they breathed in from the ground. They might be either thoroughly fine fellows, beyond price, or rascals not worth their salt.

  When the Kid was close he called out: “Trainor! Trainor!”

  A loud voice whooped instantly in answer: “Who’s there?”

  “A friend!”

  “Come on in, friend!”

  The swinging light of a lantern appeared outside of the door of the shack, and into the uncertain circle of this light rode the Kid.

  He found that the lantern was held by a big bearded fellow with shoulders wide enough to have lifted the whole house behind him, it seemed. He was not more than thirty, but he looked older. Frost in winter and burning sun in summer put their mark on the skin of a man, and all the beards in the world cannot mask the pain of labor which appears in the eyes.