The Steel Box

by Max Brand

  “For me? There’s nothing that I need. There’s nothing that I want,” answered Sherry. “I’m going back to the range right away. That’s the place for me . . . I never was meant for a life in a town, you see.”

  She looked at him with a sort of despair. “I think it’s hardly fair and kind to me,” she said. “You go away and leave me in terrible debt to you.”

  “I don’t want to bother you. You see, there’s nothing that I need.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No.”

  She looked down at the floor, and then forced her eyes to meet his “There’s nothing you could ask of me that I wouldn’t give,” she said.

  “Nothing?” he cried.

  “No,” she said.

  Suddenly he was standing over her with twitching hands. “I pray to heaven that I don’t misunderstand,” he said.

  “I pray that you don’t,” she said.

  So, a long time later—it seemed only an instant—the sheriff returned and tapped discreetly on the door. “It’s taken me an hour to get that drink,” he announced. “May I come in?”

  “An hour!” cried the girl.

  The door was unlocked. The sheriff stood, with his faint smile, in the doorway.

  “A whole hour since he went away?” exclaimed Sherry, and stared at the girl.

  But suddenly she smiled, and touched his arm. “It isn’t so very long,” she said. “One hour out of a whole life.”

  THE END

  About the Author

  Max Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, Destry, and many other fictional characters popular with readers and viewers worldwide. Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres. His enormous output, totaling approximately thirty million words or the equivalent of five hundred thirty ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, and fashionable society, big business and big medicine. Eighty motion pictures have been based on his work along with many radio and television programs. For good measure he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in more different ways.

  Born in Seattle in 1892, orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At Berkeley he became a student rebel and one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. Denied a degree because of unconventional conduct, he embarked on a series of adventures culminating in New York City where, after a period of near starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful author of fiction. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, and finally in Los Angeles.

  Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world. A great deal more about this author and his work can be found in The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood Press, 1997) edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski. His website is http://www.maxbrandonline.com/.