by Max Brand
“That’s all right,” I said, “Miss Gulliver has one.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“You will before the dance is over,” I said, pulling her up out of her chair by both hands.
She was the owner of a plumb-crooked smile that knocked a dimple right into the middle of one cheek. Amazing! She turned that grin loose on me, and my knees sagged.
“Besides …,” she began.
But just then that blessed drummer, he hit an inspired place in his system, and uncorked a lot of whistles and bangs and whangs and bumps that just tickled a man’s feet right into moving. That girl, she couldn’t help letting me take her in my arms and whirl her away.
“You was about to say something,” I asked.
“I dunno what.”
“It begun with ‘besides,’” I told her.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I was about to say that I couldn’t dance this one with you because I had it already with another man.”
“Hey,” I said, weakening a little, “why didn’t you say that before?”
It ain’t an easy thing, when you cut out a cowpuncher from his dance. Most usually he wants to break you in two because of it. But then I took another look at her.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll fix it with him.”
“He’s a very mean man.”
“Oh, that’s all right.”
She looked up at me and puckered her brows. And then the dimple sunk into one cheek. It wouldn’t’ve pleased her to see a couple of gents fighting about her. Oh, no. Not at all, it wouldn’t.
“But,” she said, “you belong to Thunder and Lightning, don’t you?”
“Lady, what might your name be?”
“Jessica Long,” she answered.
“Jessica, don’t you make no mistake. Thunder and Lightning belong to me!”
“Oh,” she asked, “are you one of the bosses?”
“I am.”
Well, she settled down into my arms and gave me a happy look as much as to say: “Let the world rip. I got what I want out of it.”
Women is that way; maybe you happen to know. I mean, they’re sold out to gents that have got a position, or something. They like a gent that has got power. Even a straw boss in a lumber camp is something. That was me!
V
You would think that I had forgotten about Thunder and Lightning. But I haven’t forgotten about them at all. I just wanted only to take things pretty slow and easy for a while. I wanted to show you about that girl, Jessica. I mean to say, she was a humdinger. She is a humdinger. I never have met anybody like her. She deserved a little space all to herself. But now I’ll get back to Thunder and Lightning and to something else.
While I was circling around the room with Jessica, hitting it up high and lively, over in a corner I saw a gent about average size, with wide shoulders and a mighty graceful way of dancing. He was got up modestly in dark clothes, with no smart dashes of color about him, but his easy way of dancing and something else about him made him quick to notice. I seen his back first and the face of the girl that was dancing with him. She was something extra. She was a cut above me.
What I mean to say is, Jessica was pretty, dressed up fine, and a bang-up dancer. But this other girl, she was a queen. She had a pair of eyes that picked you up and set you down again. She had a sort of a pale face, kind of Mexican olive, when you looked at it close, and very black hair—tons of it. But nothing that I could say about her would tell you what she was.
Maybe you have seen a good deal of horses. Standing together, they look pretty much the same, and you look over the lot and place your bets, but when they come out and the race starts, you suddenly see one of them that has the action and the way of going and the looks all tied together, and you know that that’s the winner. That was the way with this girl. She was the winner, no matter what sort of company she was placed in. And just as I got over the shock of seeing her, her partner whirled her around, and I seen his face, and that was another shock because it was Shorty.
Shorty there in the same dance hall with Thunder and Lightning! And Shorty, of course, had a gun or two stowed on his person. You just couldn’t imagine that little fire-eater without a Colt or two packed away on him.
Jessica seen that I was rather worked up, and in one glance she seen why.
“She’s awfully pretty,” Jessica said. “There isn’t anybody else like her, is there?”
She said it without being spiteful, or without sort of asking you to praise her and run down the other girl. You see, that was the kind that the other one was.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Rosita Alvarado.”
“And what is the name of the gent that’s dancing with her?” I asked.
“That’s Jack Thomas.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
“No. He just hit town a few days ago.”
“And what’s he doing?”
“Working on the Alvarado place, riding range.”
“You mean that’s the daughter of his boss?”
“Yes.”
“He seems to get along with her pretty well.”
“He’s a grand dancer, ain’t he?” Jessica asked, looking him over. “I guess he’s quite a man, maybe.”
Women have got an instinct to pick a horse. They’ve got an instinct to pick a man, too. And I knew that she was right, and that Shorty was quite a man. But, just the same, I was pretty sure that there was going to be trouble between this Shorty and Thunder and Lightning. I could feel it in my bones. In the meantime, there was something else to think about. That was Thunder and Lightning themselves. They had got themselves partners, and they had stepped out to dance.
It was a funny thing to watch Jimmy Clarges; he had picked out the tallest girl in the room, bar none. She stood just as high as he did, and her hair was worn piled up and made her look a good deal taller. And along with big Soapy Almayer there was one of the smallest girls in the room. I don’t think that she was an inch more than five feet, but she was mighty pretty and neat. Soapy, you could see, was crazy about her. She was so small, and he was so big that he had to bend over a lot to take hold of her. She had to tilt back and look almost straight up to the ceiling to talk to him. It made you laugh to look at them. But as she was dancing with a gent that everybody knew the name of, you could see that she didn’t much care what sort of a picture she made with him. She was happy, and Soapy Almayer … he was just blind happy with her.
“Ain’t he a fine, big, simple fellow?” Jessica said to me, laughing.
“He sure is,” I replied.
You could tell that everybody in the room had taken a liking to Thunder and Lightning.
But after that dance was over, I put Jessica into a corner. And I said to her: “Jessica, how are you staked out for this evening? Will you tell me?”
“I have got a pretty crowded program,” she admitted, and she looked up to me with a pucker in her forehead.
I said: “Lemme see your program.”
She gave it to me, and there it was, all lines and filled with names. There wasn’t a single vacant space. And almost every other place was taken by “Charley.”
“Who’s Charley?” I asked.
“Charley is an old friend,” Jessica said, a little red.
It sort of stopped my heart. Charley—well, blast Charley. Then I tore that program up and dropped it into my pocket.
“Good gracious!” she exclaimed, her eyes popping. “What have you done?”
“I’ll tell you,” I explained. “While you was leaning at the window, over there, dog-gone me if a puff of wind didn’t come along and snatch that program right out of your hand, and so you’re all mixed up about your partners.”
“I don’t know what you mean!”
“Maybe you’ll understand later on,” I said. “Meantime, you just save every other dance for me. The ones in between you can scatter out among the rest of the boys to please yourself.”
“Than
k you,” she said.
“Oh, that’s all right.”
“And what might your name be?” she asked.
“Jim Rankin.”
“Jim,” she told me, “of all the gents in the range, you’re the sassiest that I ever did meet.”
“The dance after next is the first one that I come back for,” I stated, and I went off and left her.
Before I’d taken three steps a big chap comes up to me and glowers down on me, and he said: “Who might you be?”
Well, I didn’t have to ask him who he was. It was Charley. And he was turned clean batty, he was so mad. I looked him over, and then I remembered Jessica’s dimple, and I decided that she was worth trouble.
“Partner,” I said, “I take it that you’re her man?”
“I dunno about that,” he said. “But what I’d like to know is….”
“Hold on,” I said. “We can arrange this here thing two ways. We can cut aces to see who leaves this hall tonight, or else we can step outside and shoot it out. Now, you take your choice.”
He looked me in the eye. “You’re a crusty little hound,” he said.
“I ain’t so small. I look to myself big enough to handle you.”
He just laughed down at me. “All right, kid,” he said. “I don’t pull shooting irons for Jessica nor no other woman unless I have to. But if we can get a pack of cards, I’ll cut with you.”
No, he wasn’t taking water. By the cut of him, I knew that he was a hundred percent fighting man, and a good man, too. But he had a sense of humor, you understand? And that was what made him let me have my way.
We stepped back to a corner, and I pulled out a pack of cards. He turned up the first one, and it was a jack of clubs. I turned the next one. No, I didn’t really turn it. I had learned a few little tricks with cards, and I’d fixed up this one on the way to the corner. I shook down an ace of spades out of my sleeve, and I seemed to Charlie to be turning it over honest from the top of the deck.
He stared down at it for a minute. “Well …,” he said, and then he turned on his heel and left the hall.
Crooked? Sure it was a crooked trick that I pulled on him. If you blame me a lot for it, that’s because you haven’t yet had a chance to see the dimple and the smile of Jessica. I breathed a little easier when that job was finished, and when I knew that I was going to have that girl pretty much to myself during the rest of the evening. But I had other work on hand, and the first thing was to find Soapy. It wasn’t hard to find him. Where the densest part of the crowd was, there was Soapy, looming a head above the tallest of them. His shoulders looked like the shoulders of a plow horse. I walked over to him, gave him a signal, and he waded through the crowd to me and bent down.
“Soapy,” I said, “you’re knocking them dead with that get-up of yours.”
“The boots … they ain’t so bad, kid, what?” he said. And he looked down and grinned at them, very admiringly.
“They’re wonderful,” I agreed, “and everybody is talking about them. But I got to tell you something else, old-timer.”
“Cut loose, kid.”
“There’s some trouble here … trouble for you.”
“Where?” He looked around the room like a bull.
“Trouble that I want to steer you through. Will you let me?”
“Kid,” he said, “you be the boss, and I’ll follow.”
VI
He had a kind of confidence in me, the big boy had, and now, as he looked down at me, I wondered if I really could keep him in hand and take him through this mess. I said to him: “Soapy, I suppose that you ain’t seen anything but friends up here?”
“Not a soul,” he said. “Why?”
“Because,” I explained, “there’s a fellow here that I think has got it in for you. How would you act if you was to see him face to face?”
“How would I act?” he asked. “Why, I wouldn’t act no ways. I would just bust him on the jaw.”
I couldn’t help feeling a mite sick. The idea of getting busted in the jaw by the fist of big Soapy Almayer was a good deal like being smashed with an iron club. They said that he had killed a four-year-old maverick by hitting it in the head. I believed it. And what would have happened if he had slugged a mere man as hard as he could hit? Well, I thought that over as I looked down to the big, balled-up fist of his.
“Old-timer,” I said, “is this the sort of a place to have a fight in?”
“Why, I dunno that I’ve thought about that.”
“I have, though,” I stated. “But maybe you’re one of the kind that likes to raise the devil and shoot out the lights and scare all the women?”
“It’s a lie, and a long-bearded lie at that,” said Soapy. “There ain’t any truth in that at all.”
“You don’t like to scare the girls?”
“Not a bit. Matter of fact, I’m real fond of the girls, kid.”
“All right,” I said, looking him in the eye, “I’m gonna try to believe you, but I got to confess that you scare me when you say that you’d hit a man if you met him up here in this hall, all filled with nice girls.”
“I was wrong, kid,” he admitted quick as a flash. “I was wrong, and I take it back. I’m having one fine, large time right now, and I wouldn’t let nothing interfere with it.”
“All right,” I said, taking him at his word. “Over there is Shorty, that you had the trouble with in camp.”
He walled his eyes in that direction, and, when he seen Shorty, his nostrils flared out, but then he grinned. “What have I got ag’in’ Shorty?” he asked. “Shorty is all right. Shorty is absolutely OK, as far as I’m concerned. We played a mean trick on him, by his way of thinking, and he stood up and sassed us for it. Well, that’s all right.”
“He punched you in the face, Soapy,” I said, looking at the purple spots where those hard punches had landed.
“Love pats,” Soapy said. “What did they amount to for me? Nothing at all! That’s a game kid, and I sort of like him. Funny thing, though, about Jimmy Clarges.”
“Hold on … what’s he got so bad against Shorty?” I asked. Because I hadn’t thought that Jimmy would make any trouble about Shorty at all—him having had the easy end of the fight.
“Well, sir,” Soapy said, “Jimmy says that Shorty would have murdered me with his Colt, if he’d had a chance, and Jimmy takes that kind of hard. I dunno that he could keep himself from reaching out and tying the runt into a couple of knots if he was to see him up here tonight.”
“You get to Jimmy right away,” I suggested to Soapy, “and you explain what a terrible disgrace it would be for a gent to do anything like fighting up here, will you?”
He nodded and grinned and started away to find Clarges. I hadn’t explained the most important thing of all to Soapy. Which was that if either him or Jimmy tried to put a hand on Shorty, they would probably get a couple of .45-caliber slugs of lead crashing through their midsection. I hadn’t said anything like that, because if I had, the game might have looked sort of attractive to the pair of them. As it was, Shorty was just a foolish kid, game, but wrong, and they could afford to sort of overlook him. You understand my drift, maybe?
I watched Soapy go up to Clarges and hold him back from a dance and talk to him. It made a wonderful picture, the pair of them togged out so gaudy, and with big Soapy draping his hand over the huge, wide shoulder of Jimmy, and Jimmy Clarges looking up to the face of Soapy like an ordinary man, listening to a hero’s voice. Other people noticed that picture, and there was a chuckle and a shaking of heads all around the room. There was five hundred weight of muscle and bone standing together in that spot, with enough power to break open heads of men like walnuts, and it was sort of touching to see how plumb fond of each other they was, and how brotherly, and all that, you understand?
It was plain that Soapy was having a hard job of it, because Jimmy kept shaking his head and frowning terrible black, but finally he began to nod, and the pair of them set sail across the room, Soapy leading. I
seen that they was heading straight for Shorty, and I tagged along with my heart in my mouth.
I was up close enough to hear what was said. Shorty got up and left the beautiful Rosita, and he stepped out and met them. Soapy said: “Kid, are you here with hard feelings ag’in’ us, or ain’t you?”
Shorty looked them over and up and down, as cool as you please, and he said to them: “Soapy, I’ll never rest till I’m squared up with you. And the same goes for you, Clarges. Someday, I’ll be even with you.”
With that, he turned his back on ‘em and walked back to Rosita Alvarado.
Soapy and his pal were dumbfounded. I suppose that little speech that they had made was the nearest to making a first step toward peace that either of them had ever made in their lives. They couldn’t understand how any man could be so plumb hostile and mean as to back-talk them after that fashion. Well, it took the wind out of my sails, too.
“I’m gonna go back and smash him,” said Jimmy Clarges.
“Hold on, Jimmy. He ain’t big enough for you to hit,” said Soapy.
“No,” Jimmy said. “He ain’t a man. He’s an insect.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Soapy stated. “I’ll get at him in another way. I see the way that I can hurt him most. Lemme talk it over with the kid.”
He stepped aside with me.
“Kid,” he said, “I’ve got the great idea for fixing that ornery Shorty.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m gonna sashay in and cut him out with the girl,” he explained. “What do you say to that?”
Well, I swallered a laugh. Anybody that watched Rosita talking and smiling and blushing, would have figgered that she was pretty strong for Shorty. But it didn’t seem to have sunk into the heart of big Soapy that way. He’d got a lot of attention that night, and I suppose he felt that he was pretty near invincible.
So I just said: “You go ahead, Soapy. But don’t you get downhearted and mad if she don’t pay no attention to you, because maybe Shorty has poisoned her mind against you.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I dunno how a girl like her can waste time on a runt like him. I ask you personal and special, kid. Do you see how it could be?”
