by Max Brand
“Not very. But I’m trying to be,” he said. Could he tell her, also, that he was not a Pendleton? He wanted to say that, but he could not, for he felt that this new name he wore was giving him the right to a new existence, with a new soul, and this he could not surrender. If he left these mountains and never returned, it would be sweet to feel that he was remembered here as a man among men, a clean man, and a strong one. So he sighed and said no more as he grasped her hand.
“There’s one Pendleton in the world that I’ll remember, and that I’ll pray for, Al. Good bye,” she said. “But here’s the ring.”
“Will it hurt you to keep that?” he asked. “I’d like you to have it. You don’t need to wear it, but keep it, will you?”
“Why, Al, I’ll keep it forever and on my hand, too,” she said. Then she was gone, galloping her horse hard out of the mouth of the ravine.
Paradise Al did not look after her, but blindly he rode Sullivan up the valley. He was sad as he never had been sad before, but there was a sort of exultation behind his sorrow, a lifting of heart and soul. For the first time in his life, he felt the old life of streets and gutters and crime fading far away, as though he never had been a part of it. Paradise Al was dead and gone, it seemed, and Al Pendleton had taken his place. He smiled a little, as he thought of that. As for Molly Drayton, well, she would never have had anything to do with him. It was far better to let her go free without the weight of her promise yoking her to trouble.
As for the ache in his heart, perhaps the pure air of the mountain uplands would cleanse him of that, also. But all of life lay dim and vague before him. There was only one reality, and that was the bony, ugly head of Sullivan, nodding before him as he slowly climbed the trail.
Then a hot needle plunged through his thigh. The weight of the blow jerked him sidewise. Not until then did he hear the clang of the rifle shot down the ravine and, turning, saw three riders charging toward him.
XVI
His whole left leg was numb, from hip to foot, and the crimson was beginning to run rapidly down. He never could sit the saddle with such a wound, he knew. So he slumped out and lay flat on the ground, with Sullivan sniffing the hair of his head in inquiry.
There was no use in letting Sullivan be killed or ruined by a stray bullet aimed at his master. It was quite clear that he, Paradise Al, had come to his last day, and there was no reason why he should bring the stallion to his end, also. So he waved and shouted, and the stallion, taking alarm, fled at full speed down the ravine.
Past the three riders he ran, and they came on, fanning out as they galloped. They came closer, so that the tramp could recognize Winchell on the left, Tucker on the right, and in the center the black beard of Joe Drayton, divided by the wind of the gallop.
To be killed by such people as these? A sudden rage came over the tramp. He dragged himself up. There was a rock of convenient height, and against this he propped the knee of his wounded leg, and so he stood, revolver in hand, ready for any emergency.
They opened fire, flattening themselves along the backs of their horses as they charged in, but the bullets missed the target. He heard them, almost felt them, wasp-like in the air about him. But, with revolver poised, he waited until he could be reasonably sure.
He had a strange feeling that, if he were about to die, the Paradise after which he was nicknamed would be sure to permit him to lay his enemies low before the end.
Then, with his first shot, he smashed the left shoulder of Winchell and hurled him screaming with agony to the ground, where the shock of the fall blotted out the voice of pain.
Tucker, as he heard his companion shriek, involuntarily pulled on the reins of his horse and swung it a little sidewise. It was as though he had deliberately swung broadside to offer a better target. At the center of the body the marksman aimed, but knew, even as he fired, that he was shooting rather low. As his finger pressed the trigger, Tucker flung his head far back and clapped both hands to his hips.
Farther and farther back he leaned, as the horse galloped onward. Now his hat, caught by the breeze, whipped from his head, he was lying back almost on the hips of the mustang, and suddenly he rolled from the saddle. One foot caught in a stirrup, but, he was hardly dragged two jumps before he was disentangled and lay still.
At the same moment, a bullet ran a burning furrow down the cheek of Paradise Al. He had time to think, as he watched the black-bearded man rushing in on him, that now he was marked for life, and many of the easy old disguises would never be useful to him again. Scarface, they would call him, instead of Paradise.
Big Drayton, in the meantime, was covering himself almost perfectly with the body, head, and neck of the horse, as he charged on, firing now pointblank. But the outline of head and breast appeared through the flurry of the blowing mane, and at that dim target Paradise Al fired his third shot and his fourth.
The mustang rushed furiously past him; Joe Drayton lay in a senseless, broken heap at his feet.
“Are you dead, Joe?” he found himself saying as he sat beside the fallen man.
Joe Drayton groaned, twisted, sat up, putting a hand to his head. Other muffled groans were coming out of the distance from Winchell and Tucker.
“You nicked me. It was mighty pretty shooting, kid,” said the gunman. “Where’d you get it? There in the face. I see. Oh, and the left leg, too, eh? That’s nothing. Listen to those tramps groan and holler. They’re feelin’ sick. So’m I, a little. I felt a couple of ribs crack like kindling wood under your heel, when I hit the ground. That was a tolerable hard whack. Lemme give you a hand with your leg, kid. You’ll need to have a twist put on it to stop the bleedin’, and then we’ll take a look at the Winchell and Tucker gang. They were the skunks that persuaded me out on the trail after you, partner.”
Now, swiftly racing up the ravine, Paradise Al saw Sullivan returning, the girl in the saddle upon his back. Joe Drayton saw this, too, and groaned again, with a worse pain than his wounds.
“I’d rather be in hell than where Molly can talk to me about this job,” he said. “I’m going, and believe me, I’m going fast. Excuse me, kid.” Lurching to his feet, he made for the nearest of the unburdened mustangs, caught it, and, mounting, was soon gone up the ravine.
An odd, singing sound was buzzing in the ears of Paradise Al. His eyes were growing a little dim, as when an invalid too suddenly comes from a sick room and faces the blazing sunlight. He saw the girl only vaguely as she slid from the saddle and rushed to him. It was rather a blind sense of happiness that came over him.
And he heard her saying: “They’ve murdered you, Al. Oh, the cowards!”
“Look, Molly,” he said. “I’m going to live forever, if nothing worse than this ever happens to me. Tell me, did good old Sullivan bring you back?”
“I managed to catch him. I thought at first . . . and then I heard the guns and guessed the truth. Al, you don’t think it’s a trap I led you into?”
He shook his head. His dizziness was increasing. “Where are you, Molly?” he asked her.
“Are you fainting?” cried an anxious voice through the darkness that was suddenly welling up before his eyes.
“Of course not,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about Sullivan. He’s a grand stepper, isn’t he?”
“He’s a grand horse,” he heard her saying. “He’s almost worthy of the master that rides him. Al, I thought you were a gunman . . . but you could have killed them all, and you let them go, you let them go, and I . . . ”
She talked softly to him while her swift hands bandaged his wounds. It was music to him, and, listening, the mists lifted from his befuddled brain.
Paradise Al’s Confession
The follow-up story to “Paradise Al”, “Paradise Al’s Confession” appeared in the July 16th issue of Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine. In it, Paradise Al continues his charade as Al Pendleton, the son of artist, Rory Pendleton. He is planning on marrying Molly Drayton and is busy at work, starting up a ranch, when an unexpecte
d visitor arrives who could put an end to all of his plans for the future.
I
The road turned into a trail, the trail turned into a cow path, the cow path turned into a plain, open slope of pasture land, whose grasses swished around the wheels of the buckboard. Now those wheels began to bump and bounce over the many irregularities of surface that the grass masked. As rocks were struck, right and left, the pole of the wagon jumped to one side or the other, bumping against the shoulders of the mustangs.
However, they were accustomed to bad treatment, and they continued to moil and toil in their collars, to jolt the wagon forward until it arrived at its goal, which was at the bottom of a little, round-topped hill. Halfway up its side a spring leaped from the ground and hurried down with silver twistings to tumble into a brawling creek in the middle of the valley. That valley was a spacious one, largely covered with big pine forests that here and there gave back, revealing good, rich fields of grass, where a few cows grazed.
The particular goal of the driver in the buckboard stood beside the spring, a solidly built, one-story log cabin, not quite completed. At least half of the roofing had to be laid on. The furnishings, furthermore, were not all installed, and it was plain that a certain proportion of them were being made at home. Near the cabin there was a yellow-haired girl on her knees, planing smoother the well-laid surface of a big table.
The tall old man who was driving the buckboard stepped out of his rig, smoothed his long, white beard, and, having tethered the team with a long rope to a sapling, he went up the slope of the hill with a step surprisingly long and athletic. It was clear at once that his white beard was not in tune with his actual years, which could not possibly have been more than forty-five or fifty, at the most. But the silver beard, swung aside by the thrust of the wind, gave a touch of dignity and strangeness to his appearance that was already set off by his great height and the width of his shoulders.
Furthermore, as though consciously building up the picture still more, he wore a very wide-brimmed black felt hat whose curving outline made one think of old Spain. His coat, also, was so long that it almost gave the formal effect of tails.
When he came nearer, the girl jumped to her feet and gave the stranger the brightest of smiles. For in the lonelier parts of the West a stranger is always sure of his welcome by the very fact that he comes from another part of the world. He will bring news of far places and of other people, it is hoped. If he brings nothing else, he will at least introduce into the home circle a novel personality, and so enrich the time if he can be persuaded to stay a few days.
As she jumped up, smiling, the stranger took off his hat and bowed to her with an air of foreign grace; his brown eyes rested upon her with much kindness.
“You are Molly Drayton . . . I think?” he said.
“I’m Molly Drayton,” she answered, and came forward a little, holding out her hand and waiting to hear his name.
He took the hand and shook it with a gentle pressure, saying: “I want to keep my name for a surprise, if you don’t mind. The man of the house must have told you about me, I think.”
“Al?” she said. “No, he hasn’t told me. Not that I remember.”
“Tut-tut,” said the stranger, still with his fatherly smile. “Can Al have let such a friend drift out of his talk completely?”
“He almost never talks about the old days,” she said. “He’s become all Westerner, you see.”
“Has he? Good for him,” said the big man. “You don’t mind if I sit down here and wait for him, do you? The afternoon is still young, and I suppose that he’ll be back before long. Or is he letting you do all this house building?”
She shook her head; the sun glanced brilliantly on her hair.
“Al works like a tiger,” she said. “I’m only here part of the time. You see, it’s a ten-mile drive from my father’s place.”
“You drive over every day?” asked the big man.
“Yes, I come over every day from my father’s place.” After a pause she said: “Come inside. I’ll stir up a fire and cook something for you. I suppose you’ve driven out all the way from Jumping Creek?”
She led the way into the cabin. Like most log huts, it was surprisingly spacious inside, and it was built with a thorough soundness that promised to make it outlive centuries. The beams and great uprights were huge affairs.
“You must have had a crowd at the raising,” suggested the man of the white beard, looking around the room with apparent pleasure.
“Well, there were all the Draytons and all the Pendletons,” she said. “And that made quite a crowd. And there were some others, too, who came to help.”
“Yes, it’s a good thing for the whole range, I suppose,” he said as she began to lay the fire, “ . . . to have the Pendletons and the Draytons bury the hatchet.”
She lighted the fire in the stove, turned the draft, and stepped back for an instant, watching with pleasure as the flames began to roar up the chimney, while she answered: “You seem to know a great deal about what happens in this part of the mountains.”
“Why,” he said, “when I got to Jumping Creek and asked where I could find Paradise Al . . . ”
She started so violently that he hastened to add: “I see . . . he’s told you about some of his wild days when he was a youngster, has he?”
She looked steadily at the stranger, and for an answer merely sighed a little.
“That’s all right,” said the man of the beard. “I knew about some of his tricks, but I didn’t help him in them, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”
“I’m glad of that,” replied the girl. “Very glad indeed.” She began rapidly to slice bacon and cold boiled potatoes into a frying pan, having first put the coffee pot over the fire.
“As I was saying,” went on the stranger, “I asked about Paradise Al in Jumping Creek, and the minute that I mentioned his name the whole town turned out to give me all the information it could. When it found out that I was a friend of his, nothing was too good for me. I was offered at least a hundred drinks. And talk ran like water out of a tap.”
“Of course, they’d talk about Al,” she said, her eyes shining. “Everybody loves him.”
“Yes, it appears that you’re going to marry a famous man,” said the stranger. “I had no idea what he had been doing out here on the range, but I found plenty of people to tell me in Jumping Creek how he arrived, and how he was jailed, how it was discovered that he was a Pendleton, and how he rode the great red stallion, how he fought and downed three men, single-handed, when they tackled him in the ravine, and how, most of all, he became engaged to Molly Drayton. You’re a very important part of the hero’s story, you know.”
She rested her hands on the back of a deep-seated, strongly framed, homemade chair and smiled on the big man.
“But lately he’s been a little gloomy, it appears,” said the old man.
“Did you find that out, too?” asked the girl, surprised.
“I found that out, also,” said the big man. “And that’s what I’m here about.”
“Good,” she said. “If you can help him to get out of his despondency, you’ll prove a friend, indeed.”
“It can’t be done at a stroke,” said the other. “But little by little we’ll try to lift him out of the trouble, all working together.”
She smiled again. “He’ll be back here in a moment,” he informed him. “He’s gone down to see that the cows don’t drift too far north with this south wind blowing. You know how even an easy wind will make them drift a little.”
“I’ve heard that,” said the big man. “I dare say that he’s become a good cowpuncher by this time?”
She shook her head. “Not yet,” she admitted. “He can’t use a rope, and he doesn’t know cattle at all. But he’ll learn. And, oh, what a tigerish worker!”
“I suppose so,” said the man, and nodded his head sympathetically. “But tell me why you people are starting in such a small way? The Pendletons and the Drayt
ons are both rich enough and generous enough to give you a much bigger lift than this, I should think.”
“Al won’t have help,” said the girl with a lift of her head. “We could have almost anything that he’d take, but he won’t take a thing. He wants to start at the bottom and work up. I like that idea, too.”
“It may be hard on you,” said the stranger gently. He shook his head at her.
“You mean,” she interpreted, “that it will be callous places on the hands and a red nose from hanging over a stove. But I don’t care. The work’s the thing, and we’re going to make our place grow. See what a place it is, too. There’s no better grass land in the mountains than in this valley, but people never paid any attention to it because it’s tucked away among the trees. Al had the wits to see what could be made of it, and we’re getting this for a song.” She laughed happily, the brightness of an assured future in her eyes.
“Good for you!” exclaimed the stranger. “Is that Al coming along the road now?”
He stepped out from the door of the cabin. Along the slope of the hill a great, reddish chestnut stallion was galloping with a small, slender rider in the saddle.
“Yes, that’s Al,” replied the girl, following him outside.
The stranger started forward with long strides, waving his hand in greeting.
He was a little distance from the house when the rider drew rein before him, exclaiming: “Hello! Don’t happen to place your face, stranger.”
“You wouldn’t, Paradise,” said the stranger, “but I happen to be the man who’s supposed to be your father. I’m Rory Pendleton.”
II
Afighting dog obeys a first instinct by preparing to bite when in doubt, and so did slender Paradise Al show a glimmer of evil in his handsome face and in his brown eyes as he stared at the big man. To give point to his expression, there was the merest flicker of his right hand toward the inside of his coat, a gesture so rapid and fleeting that even the girl at the door of the cabin, watching with her heart in her eyes the man she loved, was unaware of it.
