by Max Brand
“Never mentioned my name?” murmured Pendleton. After that, he rode on for a considerable distance without saying a word, but with his face set in bitter lines.
At length, he sighed. “Well, I suppose that he’s right to keep his pride. How are his business affairs?”
“There aren’t any,” said Paradise Al.
“Hold on. What . . . all the money gone?”
“You know that it’s hard to paint even bad pictures and have any time left over for looking after the money affairs?”
Pendleton nodded his head. “I know that,” he said. “I thought at first that he was getting much the best of the deal, when he got his half of the property in hard cash, and I got nothing but land and cows weighed down with mortgages. After that there were the bad years, when the whole country seemed to be going broke.”
“My father’s talked to me about that time,” said the young man.
“I was sure that I’d have to sell off everything for a song,” said Pendleton. “But I weathered through the hard times, and then affairs grew better and better.”
He sighed. Perhaps he was glad to get his mind off the nephew who had just disgraced the family name before the whole town of Jumping Creek. At any rate, he went on with his own history in brief.
“Your aunt was a tremendous help,” he said. “She worked in the kitchen while I rode the range. She lived in calico. In her small body there’s the greatest heart in the world.”
“But then everything went better, I understand,” said Paradise Al.
“Yes, your father would have heard about that,” Pendleton replied, nodding his head. “The bad times ended. There was a jump in prices. We had a number of good grass years. And the mortgages were paid off by magic. I managed to put money behind us, and, when the next hard times came, we were able to buy land and cattle cheap. That was the end of trouble for us. Things have gone on very well. My family will be provided for, I trust. And you, Alfred?”
Paradise Al shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve got four hundred dollars and something over. It’s in my wallet now. I never expect to get a penny more from my father.”
Nothing could be truer than this, of course. Pendleton shook his head and sighed again.
“The place for our whole family is out here on the range,” he declared. “We’re Westerners. Look at you, Alfred, a grown man . . . and not able to sit on the back of a horse that . . . ”
He bit his lip with shame, but Paradise Al merely smiled.
“I could learn the trick, maybe,” he said.
“Yes”—Pendleton sighed—“but already . . . ”
He did not finish the sentence and he did not need to do so, for the young fellow could understand. Already, he, the tramp, had sufficiently disgraced the family name. The fact that a man made noise when he was on the back of a murderous beast of a horse seemed to be a lasting disgrace.
Paradise Al shrugged his shoulders. He was not shamed, himself. He was merely amused. These people had a different code of manners and different standards of manhood. It would be interesting to delve into them.
They came in view of the ranch house. It was a prepossessing view. The building stood halfway up an easy slope that sheltered it against the north wind, and the irregular roof line lifted, here and there, above the tops of the grove of trees that surrounded it. It looked like a house where happiness and great domestic content might be gathered; it looked, in short, like a home. His glance, running from the house over the sweep of rolling ground that extended about it, young Paradise Al was struck, first of all, by the small number of fences that ran gleaming over the hills.
“How far does your land go, Uncle Tom?” he asked.
“My land?” said Pendleton. “Oh, it runs as far as your eye reaches from this spot. On the other side of that range of hills it goes down to the land of Jim Pendleton, in part, and in part it joins onto the land of your cousin, Hal Smythe. Over there to the south is Harry Pendleton’s place, and Samuel Pendleton has a ranch to the north of us. Sam is getting old now. But I suppose that your father used to tell you what a wild fellow he was as a boy.”
“My father,” said Paradise Al truthfully again, “used the name Pendleton just as seldom as he could.”
This produced another conversational silence that lasted until they had ridden through the grove of trees and had come to the house itself and the wide pasture that was fenced in behind it.
There they dismounted, unsaddled, and turned the mustangs loose. Then they went toward the back of the house. They were on the rear porch when they heard a door slam in the front of the house, and the powerful voice of a man shouting: “Mother, Mother! Where are you?”
“Here, Dick,” said a woman’s voice. “What’s the matter, dear?”
“Uncle Rory’s boy, Al, has turned up, in jail!” cried the voice of Dick. “Father got him out, and then he made a holy show of himself trying to ride Ginger. He was thrown, and he screamed like a woman! The whole Drayton tribe is laughing. The whole range will be laughing at us tomorrow. We’re disgraced, Mother! We’re shamed forever! He screeched and yelled for help!”
VII
That was the introduction of Paradise Al to the Pendletons—at least, to the head of the clan. But much followed the mere introduction. There were, in that household, besides big Thomas J. Pendleton, and his little, sharp-faced, gentle wife, a single daughter, Sally, tall and brown, as imposing in her directness of speech as she was imposing in thews and sinews. Above all there was a crown of growing manhood in the form of three huge sons. There were Dick, Jerry, and Ray, each one taller than the other, ranging from Dick, the eldest, to Ray, the youngest, tallest, handsomest, most promising young berserker in the entire clan Pendleton.
He was one of those men who bear about them all of the signs of eminence from childhood to the grave. He was not only inches taller than most men, but he possessed size without awkwardness, and without the rough finish and lack of perfect proportion that is the drawback of most large men. One thoroughbred in a million or more stands seventeen hands high and is compactly and powerfully built from the nose to the heels. And Ray Pendleton was one of these rare creatures among men.
He was only twenty-one or twenty-two, but already his opinion was as much listened to in the household as that of his own father. Yet, such was his natural modesty and proper sense of the fitness of things, that he rarely advanced his opinions except when asked.
It was he who delivered the final touch in the discussion of the new member of the family the very night of Paradise Al’s arrival. Paradise had withdrawn very early, pleading fatigue. Then, sliding through the window of his room, he had faded down the side of the house with the adroitness of a climbing monkey and the silence of a stalking leopard, until he was back under the open window of the living room in which the rest of the family was informally gathered.
He was in time to hear Thomas Pendleton say: “If he’d been trying to ride Sullivan, well, there might have been some excuse for it. But old Ginger, who does nothing but put up a bluff, to raise such yells because Ginger danced a little, I never was so disgusted in my life. A contemptible performance, that’s my opinion.”
“Dear, dear,” said little Mrs. Pendleton over her sewing.
“We’ve gotta get rid of him, Dad,” said Jerry Pendleton. “Maybe buy him a ticket somewhere, and turn him out with our regards.”
“He’ll ruin the family name all over the range,” declared Dick Pendleton.
“I’ll never dare to face Molly Drayton again, the spiteful thing,” said tall Sally Pendleton.
Then the youngest son said: “You can’t turn him out. You’ve got to make the best of him. And there may be something in him. There’s something in every Pendleton, so the saying goes.” Any other member of the tribe would have given that quotation in solemn seriousness, but Ray Pendleton laughed as he said it. Then he added: “You know how it is . . . maybe he has a dread of horses. People are that way, sometimes . . . they have a special fear of particular
things, but they’re regular lions with everything else.”
“Bah!” exclaimed Sally. “You make me tired, Ray. Always trying to stand up for the underdog . . . and this time it’s just plain dog.”
“Sally! Sally!” exclaimed her mother.
“Well, she’s right,” said Dick. “There’s a sneaking look about him. You’ve got to admit that.”
Thomas laid his head on his hand and groaned. “In front of the whole town!” he exclaimed. “If it had been Sullivan that he was riding, but it wasn’t Sullivan. It was just plain old Ginger. Thunder, he screamed like a frightened child.”
Outside in the darkness, the tramp looked up at the stars and shook his head. What if he had made a little noise on the back of the pitching horse? And what sort of people were these, to refer to the gymnastics of the mustang as mere dancing?
“Let him alone for a while,” said Ray Pendleton. “I’m going to make it my business to try to draw him out. There’s something in him, mind you. He’s got the right sort of an eye. It’s just as steady as can be.”
“He’s got the eye of a hunting snake, is what he has!” cried Sally Pendleton.
Paradise Al went back to bed, climbing cautiously. They would have been interested, all of them, if they could have seen the rapid progress with which he mounted with bare toes and bare fingers to the upper story of the house, and faded through the window again. They would have been chiefly amused and amazed to see him finally hanging by one hand from the window sill, then drawing himself up with the single arm before he brought the other hand into action.
Back in bed, Paradise Al stared at the ceiling. Sullivan was apparently some horse famous in the neighborhood for its meanness. Well, since it appeared that he was disgraced because he had put up such a bad performance on the back of Ginger, he would redeem himself, in their eyes, by his performance on the back of this Sullivan of evil name.
For difficulties never impressed Paradise Al greatly. He had a certain set of mottos that were deeply embedded in his mind and to which he was constantly referring. A few of them were:
“It’s not the weight of the punch, but where you place it.”
“A fast foot is better than a strong leg.”
“What you can’t meet, you had better dodge.”
“The other fellow is as badly hurt as you are.”
“Patience and a good pair of hands will open any lock.”
“If the first lie doesn’t work, lie, lie again.”
“The bigger the man, the smaller the brain.”
Such were the maxims with which the young man was equipped. He was young, indeed, but he had poured into his short years enough events to have filled a dozen ordinary lives.
As he consulted his preestablished ideas, he vowed to himself that he would certainly not give up this easy home in a hurry, not until the real Rory Pendleton or his real son appeared on the scene. It was not any sense of disgrace that troubled Paradise Al. He was not in the slightest interested in the opinions of other people; he was merely perturbed because the disgust that the rest of the household felt might react in such a way that they would discard him, and set him on the out trail.
Lying in bed, he turned his head right and left, became aware of the big, airy spaces of the room, saw the dull glimmer of the top of the mahogany desk even in the starlight, and again nodded his head a little.
He knew nothing about riding, but he would win himself a place in the esteem of all by mastering the celebrated Sullivan, whatever that might be. He would learn, or else he would establish some system of hypnotism. According to his maxims, if there is not a way through the front door, there is a way through a window.
Having made up his mind, he fell promptly asleep, slumbering as peacefully as a child, until a hand fell heavily upon the door of his room, and a great voice summoned him for breakfast.
He was up, sponge-bathed, dressed, and down the stairs with a clean-shaven face within ten minutes, and this without hurrying, for he had learned, before almost any other thing in life, to make every move of his hands count for the best.
Downstairs, he found the family already eating, and a place reserved for him at the right of Mrs. Pendleton, who explained with her gentle, rather tired smile, that they had a punctual hour for breakfast, which was never postponed.
The others greeted him with nods and mutterings, all except the harsh, mechanical voice of the father of the family, inquiring how he had slept.
There was a better exception than that. It was Ray Pendleton, talking about hunting and wondering if he, Alfred or Albert, cared to make a day’s trip to get a deer?
To get a deer? He would be delighted.
But before he had finished his porridge, he had recklessly turned the argument upon the subject of bucking horses and how they can be managed.
“Every horse can be ridden, and every rider can be thrown,” said Thomas Pendleton.
“Sullivan has never been ridden!” exclaimed the girl.
“He will be, one day,” said Thomas Pendleton.
“Who’s Sullivan?” asked Paradise.
“Not the prizefighter. Sullivan is the stallion that belongs to the Draytons.
“Is he a fighter?”
“That’s what he is. He’s the finest piece of horseflesh that I ever saw,” said Dick Pendleton, sighing and shaking his head. “And Tim Drayton will give him away to the first man that can stick on his back for ten minutes running.”
“For only ten minutes?” asked the tramp carelessly.
“Only ten minutes? Only ten minutes of hell is enough!” exclaimed Dick.
“Well, ten minutes doesn’t sound very long,” said the tramp. “I’d like to try him.”
“You?” shouted every voice, except the voice of Ray Pendleton.
“Well,” said Paradise Al, “I don’t know how to ride, and I might as well learn. The harder the teacher, the better the lesson will be.”
“Sullivan will make a hard teacher,” agreed Thomas with a sneer. “He’ll eat you before the lesson’s over, though. He’s a man-killer.”
“I’ve seen man-killers before,” said the tramp softly, but with a certain meaning.
“Where, in the circus?” asked Sally Pendleton.
He looked straight at her, his brown eyes very soft and gentle. “Yes,” he said, “it was a circus.”
“You won’t have a circus tent over you,” exclaimed Sally, “if you try Sullivan! You won’t try him, though.”
“Hush, Sally,” said the mother.
“You know, Mother,” said the girl, “that Sullivan doesn’t look like a horse, but more like a beautiful four-legged devil.”
“I know, my dear,” said the older woman, “but you mustn’t try to tell Albert what’s in his mind. Every Pendleton does his own thinking.”
VIII
As a matter of fact, Paradise Al was doing his own thinking, and with a vengeance. He felt, on the whole, that he would have chucked the whole business had it not been for the way the face of Molly Drayton stuck in his mind. But she was there in the picture as a commanding figure. Therefore, after breakfast, he said to Ray Pendleton: “Mind if I borrow a horse for a while today? I’ve got to put off that deer hunt. There’s that Sullivan horse, you know.”
Ray Pendleton put a big, efficient hand on his shoulder and said: “Are you dead set on trying to ride Sullivan?”
“Yes, I’m set on it,” said the tramp.
Ray Pendleton shook his head. He replied: “Let me tell you something, Cousin Al. I know that you’re dead game. Most of the breed are. But there’s no good in trying to prove it on Sullivan. You know his history?”
“No,” said Paradise Al, yawning a little. For he looked upon the task that he had undertaken as one might look upon the blowing of the safe of a great bank, a difficult and a dangerous job, but one that had been done before and one that might be done again.
“I’ll tell you about Sullivan,” said Ray Pendleton. “There was a pair of Irishmen by the name of Rourke a
nd Sullivan. They were prospectors, and they’d worked together all over the Rockies, but one day, away up in the desert in Nevada, they looked down from the shaft they were sinking in the side of a mountain and saw a herd of wild horses going by. In the front of that herd was a big, long-legged, red son of a wide-stepping chunk of a hurricane. When they saw that horse go down the valley, leading the rest, his mane up in the air like a flag, and his tail pouring out behind him like it was floating on a fast river, they forgot all about the gold they were after in the rock of the mountainside, and they packed up their stuff and hit the grit after the stallion.
“Matter of fact, along comes a pie-faced Dutch bartender, after them, and finds their hole in the ground. He sinks a drill into it, lays in a shot, and blows off the face of a couple of million dollars. But that doesn’t matter to Sullivan and Rourke. They’re after the horse and they keep after him for six months.”
“That’s a long time,” said the tramp, shaking his head.
“Yeah, but they were long men,” answered Ray Pendleton. “There was nothing weak or short about ’em. They walked all through the winter. They walked that horse right out of his herd, and they kept on walking, and they kept on starving and driving themselves, until Sullivan lies down, one night, and wakes up dead the next morning, so to speak, if you know what I mean.”
“Heart trouble, maybe?”
“Quick pneumonia on top of a bad heart, and no food in his hide,” said Ray. “It fetched him off like a poison. Rourke woke up in the middle of the night and heard his partner raving. At daybreak Sullivan was dying, and Rourke says to him . . . ‘It’s all right, partner. I’ll catch that son of a he-wind and a lightning flash, and I’ll saddle your name on him.’ That was what happened.
“Of course, the pair of ’em had worn themselves out, but they’d rubbed the stallion down to a stack of bones. When Rourke started out the next day, he cinched up his belt and cut a new hole in it to keep his trousers from sliding down over his hips. That same day he got his rope on the horse. Once on the back of the big brute, he was bucked off, but, ten miles farther on, he caught the end of the lariat again. And so Rourke worried the horse down in two days from the mountains to the Drayton Ranch, and Tim Drayton himself met him on the range. With his ’punchers he herded and dragged and beat the red devil into a corral, and in that corral Sullivan has been ever since.
