by Max Brand
“Give me a name? Oh, Aunt Elizabeth, I know what a great honor and kindness you’re doing to me . . . but, even if I should change my name to Cornish my blood would still be Colby through and through. That would be the name I’d respond to like an anthem. Change my name? Why, I’ve gone all my life thanking God that I come of a race of gentlemen, clean-handed, and praying to God to make me worthy of it. That name is like a whip over me. It drives me on and makes me want to do some fine big thing one of these days. Think of it . . . I’m the last of a race. I’m the end of it. The last of the Colbys! Why, when you think of it, you see how I can’t possibly change, don’t you? If I lost that, I’d lose the best half of myself and my self-respect. You understand, don’t you? Not that I slight the name of Cornish for an instant. But even if names can be changed, blood can’t be changed.”
She turned her head. She met the gleaming eyes of Vance, and then let her glance probe the fire and shadow of the hearth.
“It’s all right, my dear,” she said faintly. “Stand up.”
“I’ve hurt you,” he said contritely, leaning over her. “I feel . . . like a dog. Have I hurt you?”
“Not the least in the world. I only offered it for your happiness, Terry. And if you don’t need it, there’s no more to be said.”
He bent and kissed her forehead.
“Now run back to your greasy guns and forget about this.”
The moment he had disappeared through the tall doorway, Vance, past control, exploded. “Of all the damnable exhibitions of pride in a young upstart, this . . . !”
“Hush, hush,” said Elizabeth faintly. “It’s the finest thing I’ve ever heard Terry say. But it frightens me, Vance. It frightens me to know that I’ve formed the character and the pride and the self-respect of that boy on . . . a lie. Pray God that he never learns the truth.”
Chapter Six
There were not many guests. Elizabeth had chosen them carefully from families that had known her father, Henry Cornish, when, in his reckless, adventurous way, he had been laying the basis of the Cornish fortune in the Rockies. Indeed, she was a little angry when she heard of the indiscriminate way in which Vance had scattered the invitations, particularly in Craterville.
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” Terence smiled. “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 not 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.” Terence smiled. “In the meantime she has freckles and a vocabulary without growing pains.”
Aunt Elizabeth was speechless. She glared at Terence. Her own vocabulary was not impeccable; she had done too much work with and among men.
“What in thunder are you going to try to find in women?” she asked. “Do you think you can cut a slip on Fifth Avenue and ask it to strike root and blossom out here?”
“Why not?” answered Terence serenely. “You did that very thing, you know.”
Aunt Elizabeth was silenced. She rubbed her long nose. “Are you going to hunt for a woman like me . . . an iron woman?” she asked with attempted sarcasm.
“It’s the mind that counts,” asserted Terence.
“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?” Terence sighed.
“Good heavens,” groaned Aunt Elizabeth. “Terry, you’re impossible. Where are you going now?”
“Out to see El Sangre.”
“To ride him?”
“Of course. Or talk to him.”
“Talk to a horse?”
“Lots of ways of doing that. El Sangre has a vocabulary . . . fully as large as Nelly’s, I give you my word. And what he says means more.”
He went whistling out 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. Indeed, she thought there was something strangely similar in the wild horse and the untamed youth—the same strength unconscious of its power for evil or for good.
“I wish to heaven, Terry,” she murmured, “that you could find a master as El Sangre has done. You need teaching.”
Which was, of course, entirely true. But it was a decided reflection on the upbringing she had given him. Often she had a feeling that he escaped her. That there was too much of him for her to grasp with one effort of eye and mind and heart. And in moments of bitterness she knew that it was because she was not his mother in blood. She had not paid the great price of pain and doubt and hope, and therefore she could not reap the great reward. 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 that 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. It was the one conversational thrust for which she had no parry. 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.”
She felt like saying that this was a rather qualified compliment. But she knew the nature of Vance made him mix the good and the bad together. If he lifted a man up one moment, he wanted to knock him down the next. She listened while he expanded his theme.
“You see, what Terence needs is some sort of intellectual interest. He’s only educated on the surface. Give him a lot of horses, and trails to ride ’em on, and he never thinks about books and the inside of his mind. Give him enough open country and he’ll never do anything but see and hear things without listening to what wise heads have to say.”
“I think you’d like to be Terry’s adviser,” she said.
“I wouldn’t aspire to the job”—Vance yawned—“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,” Vance sneered. He had been drawn further 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 dénouement came, those seeds might blossom overnight into poisonous flowers.
In the late afternoon he took up his position in an easy chair on the big verandah. The mail was delivered, as a rule, just before dusk, one of the cowpunchers 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 Seven
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 seen 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. But something very important had happened. For she knew perfectly well that it takes a great deal to make a youngster of twenty-five forget food.
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? She had been as close to his secrets as a mother. Closer, perhaps, for she was as much a friend as an adopted mother. And now the locking of that door shut her out definitely. It put a period to one part of their relations.
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 it.”
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 that 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 foo
d had not been touched. The napkin was still draped across it, fresh and crisp and sharp of fold as only Wu Chi could arrange it. There was a little bunch of wildflowers on one corner of the tray, already wilting, and their heads leaning over the edge—that was Wu’s idea of an appetizer. But Terry had not eaten!
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, with ragged edges where the knife had carelessly gashed it out. 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?
