by Max Brand
It was only a matter of seconds, then. The muscles in the neck of Almayer was like great pillars of India rubber. But the fingers of Clarges could crush rock, almost. I’ve seen him take two stones and crumble one against the other with his grip!
I guess that desperation made Soapy a giant for an instant. He gave a heave and a twist like a bucking horse. He couldn’t have thrown Jimmy clear of him, but he did start them both rolling head over heels, and they went through the doorway and crashed down the steps of the cook house and so out onto the ground. And there luck gave Almayer a chance, for the head of Jimmy hit the knuckle of an exposed root that stuck above the surface of the earth, and Clarges was stunned for a few seconds.
It was long enough for Almayer to get away and stand up, and his knees was buckling under him, and his face was purple, and his mouth was wide open, with the tongue hanging out. Another second, and he would have been a finished man in that grip of Clarges.
Almayer, he went staggering around fumbling at the air, still full of fight, but blind and almost done for. And in the meantime, Clarges was getting back his senses, and, swearing terrible, he began to get back onto his feet. His face was like the face of a bulldog, they told me, as he started for Almayer again.
I got to give the big boss the credit that, when he seen them ready to murder each other, he was the only man there that had the grit to rush in between them. And he was hollering to the rest of the boys to help him stop the fight while he dived at Clarges.
Clarges simply swung out with the back of his left hand, and the sweep of it knocked the big boss clean away from him and rolled him head over heels in the moss and mud and sawdust.
The next minute, with a roar, Clarges was at Soapy.
If he had got Soapy in the first rush, that would have been the end, but there was just enough sense in Almayer to get him away from that lunge, and, in the meantime, every second was clearing his head terribly fast. After all, he hadn’t been stunned, and a man will have a clear head from choking as soon as his lungs get properly filled with air.
When Jimmy Clarges, snarling and foaming, whirled around and rushed again, Almayer was enough himself to do a beautiful side-step, and cuff Jimmy in the face with his fist. It wasn’t more than enough to knock out an ordinary man, and, therefore, it didn’t have any effect at all upon Clarges. He rushed on in for more—and he got it!
You see, fighting in that little, narrow cook house, Jimmy had had all the natural advantages that he could get out of his gorilla strength. But now they was in the open, with snow to make the ground slippery, and the long legs and the faster action of Soapy gave him almost as much of an edge as though he had wings to carry him around.
He simply floated away from Jimmy, and, when Clarges reached for him, a fist like an iron-shod battering ram hit Jimmy between the eyes and knocked him back against the trunk of a tree.
That one punch just drenched his face with blood. Every one of Almayer’s knuckles, like a knob of steel, had bit through skin and flesh to the bone.
On came Clarges, covered up like a prize fighter, and trying his best to close in on Soapy, and around and around that clearing they had it out, the most awful fight that any two men ever had in this here world, by the accounts of it.
Twice Clarges got Almayer for a fingerhold, and twice Soapy twisted away like a flash—because he’d come to dread that grip worse than fire.
But, in the meantime, with Jimmy all doubled over, and his long, thick arms wrapped around his head, Almayer couldn’t get in a finishing punch, though he was hitting hard enough to kill a man with every stroke.
And then it was that I come into the scene—just too late. I heard the shouting in the distance, and I whipped that tired pony I was riding and raised a gallop out of it, but, as I come through the trees, I seen them at it, and I knew that I’d just missed my time.
I threw myself out of the saddle with a screech and started toward them. That instant Clarges got in close again and laid a wrestler’s hold on Soapy. But reaching out that way, he left his head unguarded, and Almayer, swaying his whole weight forward and up on his toes, smashed an uppercut that grazed the chest of Clarges and hit him flush on the button.
He walked backward, his huge arms flopping at his sides, and his head swinging on his neck like a pivot.
And Almayer leaped after him to give the finishing touch. If that punch landed, it would kill Jimmy, and I knew it. I managed to get in between and tackled Almayer around the knees. It stopped him a fraction of a second. He reached down and plucked me away by the nape of the neck, like a grown man picking up a baby. But, while I dangled in the air, I managed to yell at him: “It’s all right! I got the truth! She’s been making a fool out of you and him, too.”
He let me drop, but he didn’t go on after Jimmy. He didn’t need to, for Jimmy had stumbled over a little ridge of snow and fallen flat. He didn’t try to pick himself up. Matter of fact, he’d been knocked clean senseless by that punch and only by luck had managed to stay balanced on his feet.
I had Almayer by the hand in a minute, and I tugged him away, talking a blue streak to him, all of the time. And the big boss, he understood what he was to do, too. He didn’t need no telling. I’ll say that for him. He come with a rush, and him and some of the rest of the boys was working away over Jimmy to bring him back to life.
I had Soapy against a tree.
“It was Shorty. It was that skunk Shorty that planned the whole thing,” I explained.
Soapy raised a hand to his throat. The skin and the flesh was all tore where the fingers of Clarges had gripped him, and the blood was running down onto his breast.
“Shorty?” he said. “Shorty?” And his eyes was glazed like a man full of dope.
“Shorty!” I repeated to him. “The gent that wanted to fight you, up here. The gent that was with Rosita Alvarado that night. He hated the pair of you and wanted to get even. So he went to the girl. He got her to be sweet to both of you, so’s he could get the pair of you into trouble with each other.”
Soapy took hold of me. He sat down on a stone, and he held me in front of him. “Now tell it to me over again,” he said. He looked as though he would break me open like an orange, if he thought that I wasn’t telling him the truth.
So I said the same thing over, and then over again, and I told him how I had rode down and had met the girl, and had talked to her, and had bluffed her into giving me a complete confession of what Shorty had tried to work through her. And gradually, as Soapy’s wits cleared after the let-down from the fight, he seemed to understand, and his eye cleared, and suddenly he said: “Then I’ll get Shorty.”
“Shorty is tracking it out of this here county. He’ll never be seen here again,” I told the big chap.
“But then it wasn’t the fault of Jimmy,” said Almayer. “It wasn’t his fault at all.”
“No,” I said, “nor yours.”
“Then I wish to God,” Soapy announced, “that I’d never knocked him down, because he ain’t gonna ever forgive me.”
“You done him no harm after you floored him,” I said.
He patted my shoulder. “No, kid, thanks to you, I didn’t. But don’t you suppose that he would rather be dead than have been beaten, even by a pal like me? No, no, kid, the harm that’s done today, there ain’t no undoing of it, and I’ve lost a gent that was more than a brother to me.”
XV
That idea seemed to bother Almayer a tremendous lot. And the first thing that he did was to jump up and go to find Jimmy Clarges. I went along, of course, but we found that Clarges was gone.
“He wouldn’t even wait to have a bandage put over his face,” said the big boss. “He just went stumbling along through the snow and away off among the trees.”
“He’ll come back,” snapped the cook. “He’ll come back when his belly gets empty enough. I know these big men. They’re all babies. They’re all babies.”
I looked up to the face of Soapy, and it was very dark.
He s
aid to me: “Kid, I ain’t any good at this woodcraft stuff. Are you?”
“What do you mean, Soapy?”
“Can you follow a trail?”
“Why, nothing extra. What trail do you mean?”
“I mean the trail of Clarges.”
“Ain’t you done him enough harm for today?”
“Aye,” he said, “and I have, and now I want to do him some good. Harm? Aye, I’ve done him enough harm now and enough to last me forever.” His big hand fumbled at his throat, and he shuddered a little. “Will you go with me on the trail, kid?”
While he was talking, the snow was falling faster. The air was streaked and clouded with it, and the ground was growing deep with it.
“I’ll do my best for you, old-timer,” I stated. “But we’d better start pretty pronto, if we want to catch him … even with the snow falling like this.”
“We’ll start,” he said. “Are you ready now?”
“Aye, I’m ready.”
He lunged off ahead of me in the direction that some of the boys pointed out to us. And, as he went, he passed by one of his own huge axes leaning against a tree at the side of the clearing. He snatched that up, automatic, and strode along ahead.
Ordinarily it would have been hard to follow that trail. I mean, if it had hit out along any of the frequented paths out of the main diggings, but it didn’t go that way. It was like the trail of a blind man, full of reels and staggers, and pushing straight ahead, until he seemed to have almost run into a tree or something, and then veering off to the side, but on the whole keeping to one pretty straight line away from the camp.
Big Almayer interpreted the things as he went along, and he would say: “He’s blind with the punch that cut his forehead and swelled up his eyes. Those eyes must be pretty near closed by this time. And besides that, he’s more blinded with shame than with pain. He don’t care much whether he lives or dies, except that he’s prayin’ and hopin’ against hope that heaven will give him a chance to get even with us, some way. Oh, ain’t he hopin’ that he will have me by the throat once more. And then nothing in the world will ever let me get away from him.”
Well, I suppose that was a pretty fair picture of what might be going on through the brain of Jimmy Clarges, and it didn’t encourage me to go none too cheerful along that trail, I may as well confess. No, I was pretty well scared out, as a matter of fact, and ready to quit at any time, but there was no quit about big Almayer. The idea of being afraid of anything, I suppose, never come into his head. But me, I would’ve a lot rather’ve hunted a panther bare-handed than to try to hunt a devil like Jimmy Clarges in his present humor. But I had to go along.
It wasn’t so hard to follow the trail, in spite of the fall of snow, because where Jimmy’s feet had fallen, they had beat down the whole surface and made a great hole that half a day’s snowing could hardly be expected to fill.
So we headed down that trail, with big Almayer following behind me, and breaking out into lively talk, now and then.
“Did he near have you, Soapy?” I asked him.
“Near?” Soapy said. “It was the nearest thing that you ever heard of, kid. The very nearest thing that you ever heard of! I was within about a second of dying. And then by the grace of heaven his head hit against something. What was it that we hit when we rolled down the steps out of the cook house?”
“It was a root that stuck up out of the ground like a rock.”
“Ah-ah-ah” groaned Soapy. “I’ve stumbled over that same root a dozen times, and cursed it. And how was I to guess that I would ever owe my life to it?” And he added: “What’s next from here?”
For we’d followed the path of Jimmy’s big feet out of the trees, and into a broad trail where there was a jumble of tracks of men and horses and wheels that had churned up the snow here and beaten it down there. Several eight-horse teams had just been along that way, and it was pretty hard to make anything out of the jumble of signs. I was leaning over to study things out as well as I could.
But Soapy didn’t hesitate. He struck right out ahead.
“Jimmy would head right on across this trail,” he said. “He wouldn’t be hankering to meet anybody on a road. Not the way that he’s feeling just now. Not him. And the way that he’s looking, too. No, he’s gone on through the timber.” And, with that, he headed away into the brush, and me picking up to hold after him.
But we didn’t find the trail right away.
I figured that Almayer might be right, but that the snow over here might have been covering up the tracks, because now the trees were heaped with it, and the branches were bent and sagging and groaning with the weight.
We cut in a circle for a sign, and, finding none, we circled again. All at once, I grabbed the arm of Soapy. He stopped.
“What’s that behind us?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“I tell you I think that I heard something walking along behind us.”
“What could be trailing us?”
“It ain’t the first time that the hunters have been hunted.”
“By a mountain lion, maybe?” Almayer said, grinning, and swinging his axe.
Why, sir, you could see that that big devil wouldn’t have cared at all if a mountain lion had jumped him. With a blow of that axe he would have sunk the steel blade clean through a lion. I had to laugh, too, looking at him.
Just then, the wind freshened to a strong gale, for an instant. There was a crashing of snow all around us, and a groaning of trees already loaded with snow and now loaded twice more with the weight of the wind. A whole avalanche of snow hit the two of us, and left us gasping and blinded and laughing and cursing. And then, through the mist of flying snow ahead of me, I seen a great shadow falling, and a noise of branches whistling through the air, and the ground quivered with the shock.
I hardly sensed what had happened, at first, as I jumped backward. But then I guessed that it was the fall of a tree. And sure enough, there she lay full length—a real giant! The lightning had bit the trunk almost clean through the summer before, and the wind and the weight of the snow had done the rest just at that critical, unlucky moment.
There lay the tree, and where was Almayer?
I stared around, and then I heard a groaning, and I made him out, lying stretched on the ground, pinned down by a big branch. I shouted to him to get a cleat, and I grabbed his leg and pulled him.
Did you ever try to pull a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man that was lodged in the snow, and caught in branches?
And just then the whole of that great branch sagged some more, and buried Almayer deeper in the snow.
He said, as clear as a bell: “I’m gone, kid. So long. It’s gonna flatten me out. You better turn your back and….” He stopped with a gasp of pain.
He was spread out helpless, and one leg was broke and bent back in under him, most awful to see.
Well, sir, I dunno what came over me—but the idea of that wonderful giant of a man being killed like that—well, it maddened me. I screamed like a hysterical woman.
And there was an answering roar right in my ear. It was Jimmy Clarges, charging out from the brush with the blackening blood still on his face, and his eyes purpled and closed. And I thought that he was just gonna kill me first so’s there would be no witness, and then finish off big Soapy.
I was too paralyzed and scared to move an inch. And then he leaped past me and caught at the end of the branch that pinned Almayer down.
“I’ll lift this,” he said. “And you pull him out.”
XVI
He heaved up on the branch. There was a shout of joy from Soapy, as he felt the weight taken from him, and he began to twist over and push himself clear with his arms, but, as he did so, some of the smaller branches of the tree that had been keeping the trunk from grinding clear down to the ground gave way, and the body of the tree settled with a shudder and a groan.
Almayer was pressed back into the snow and pinned harder than before!
It lo
oked like the finish, you would say. And I stared across at Jimmy Clarges where he was holding up the bough. A weight that must have been tons had been throwed on him by the shifting of the weight of the tree. No, I suppose that I shouldn’t say tons. But, anyway, I would bet that no one man ever held such a weight before, and no one will ever hold such a weight again.
He was drove down through the mud and the snow near knee-deep, to where his feet bit into the firm ground beneath. And then he could be sunk no farther. There he stuck, and he gritted his teeth, and his horrible-looking face swelled with the effort, and his lips curled back like a wolfs that’s going to bite.
I watched him, like a man in a daze, and I heard him roar in a choked voice: “Get the axe, you fool, and chop off that branch!”
You see how complete my brain had stopped functioning.
I jumped for that axe and with it I ran at that bough. I had weighed and balanced the big axes of Jimmy and Soapy Almayer before that day, and I had wondered how any human being could manage to swing them. Well, sir, I was so excited and desperate, now, that that axe turned into a feather in my hands, and I flushed it almost to the wood with the very first stroke. I tugged it out, and then I began to hew away, and the chips flew out of that bough, just where it narrowed after leaving the trunk.
But, as I worked, though I was swinging that axe like lightning, it seemed to me that hours was passing, instead of seconds. And, though the chips ripped out of the heart of that bough faster than you could count, still it seemed to me that I was working in iron and not in wood—or just gnawing at that branch like a rat.
Because I could see two men dying before my eyes. What I mean is that Almayer was now crushed right against the earth, and the trunk of the tree was still settling. It was working its way down and down and biting deeper and deeper through the soft upper snow and soft mud, and eventually it would settle a whole foot or so lower than it was here. It was slipping gradually down, and, since Almayer couldn’t be pushed any more in front of the branch, it stood to reason that the branch would push through him. Y’understand what I mean? And there he lay with his face turned up and going black.
