by Max Brand
“There’s something in that,” Marian Lane agreed, “but it’s the talk that I want to hear. I want to have you unloose your imagination, because I’d bet high on the results. Just for a little jewel robbery, you’ve had my heels dangling eleven stories above the street, put a bullet through my arm, made me thirsty with loss of blood, and given me champagne...that went to my head, too. But for the sake of love...how I should like to hear you talk then, David.”
“I have quite another way for that,” he said.
“Of course you have, and it must be wonderful to hear. What is your other way? I don’t presume to guess.”
“Oh, very few words. Something manly, direct, and simple...the cards all upon the table...here I am...a poor thing, but your own. You see?”
“H-m-m,” she said. “I can see how well that might do, especially with horsey people such as you’ve known a lot. They’re free and easy and love bluntness, and talking to the point.”
“They like to be casual,” said Duval. “One says to the girl of one’s choice...‘Mary, why not step off?’ ‘Where?’ says she. ‘Give me a cigarette, will you?’ ‘To a church,’ one answers, lighting the cigarette for her. ‘How can we find a church?’ says she. ‘By asking for the minister,’ one answers. She yawns, and then wakes up a little. ‘Are you proposing, David?’ ‘Some girls take it that way,’ one answers. ‘Jolly old David,’ says she, ‘he will make conversation. Let’s go out and see the new filly. Jimmy says she’s up to my weight.’ That’s the way proposals go in the hunting crowd.”
“But suppose she accepts you?”
“That’s just as simple. ‘Good idea,’ she says. ‘Wait till I get my hat.’ It’s like that.”
“It wouldn’t do out here,” Marian advised. “We’re romantic. We have long evenings without cards, and that lets us read stories, and that makes us want speeches made. If you’ll make speeches for me, David, I don’t think I can resist.”
“I’d need to work them up a bit.”
“You could tell me the themes, though.”
“You mean eyes and hair, and lips and throat, and all that sort of thing?”
“Well, for a background that would do.”
“But I couldn’t shine at that, because you know a lot more about your face than I do. I haven’t had time to give it the study that you have.”
She gave his arm a slight tug that stopped him.
“I like you better and better, David,” she said. “If you leave out the face, what would you find to want about me?”
“The intriguing imp that makes you torment me, Marian.”
“We’d better walk on,” she said. “You’re growing bad-natured. Is there an imp in me?”
They went on together.
“A mysterious imp, Marian. A cruel, wicked, pain-loving, cunning, prying, eavesdropping imp, that has not let poor young Duval alone, who took burning glass and focused it on him, and ever since has kept him writhing and dancing and twisting in the fire until at last he came to you and fell on his knees, as it were, and begged for mercy.”
“And heard a long, pretty story,” she said.
“If it had been a kind-hearted imp,” Duval said, “it would have recognized the worth of labor even in a lie. Such a long lie. Such thousands of words put together, such detail, such embroidery, such passion, such a veritable sun of near truth shining upon it, warming it, making it more like the truth than a mirage on the desert. But this cruel spirit in you, my dear, only skewered me with a sharp accusation and left me in more pain than ever before.”
“We’d better turn back,” suggested Marian Lane, “because I’m growing uncomfortable.”
They swung slowly about and started back. But despite her protest, she still walked with him, arm in arm, swinging along in step in the most companionable fashion.
“Besides,” she said, “it really isn’t true. I’ve only shown a perfectly natural, human curiosity.”
“Ah, I’m not talking about myself, alone,” said Duval. “But there’s the rest of the world. All the good fellows about here whose hearts fairly quake when they see Marian Lane, when they speak of Marian Lane, when they so much as think of her gentleness, her industry, her child-like face, her child-like soul. What a wife for any man, and particularly for a cowpuncher, a farmer, a rancher. What a girl to be cherished, to be held in the arms, and her eyes covered from the biting, brutal truths about the world. An Iago would melt in the presence of such a girl.”
“But not a Duval,” she said.
“Why not? He can see that she has spent her days learning to play this neat rôle, this pretty, guileless part of baby face that looks up to the big strong men, and never changes expression, and never lets her mockery get up as far as her eyes, to say nothing of her tongue.”
“But why should I play such a part?” she asked.
“Because if you were yourself, my dear, the acid of your criticism would eat away the sham gold leaf that covers men and let the eye of the world see their true composition of brass and lead. They would hate you for that. Even if you were more beautiful than you are...though I shouldn’t like to try to improve you...men would hate you for knowing the truth about them. For no matter what exquisite care God shows in forming a woman, if He puts a brain in the completed picture, men will not endure it. The first thing and the last that we positively demand of every good woman is that she shall not think.”
“But what about the other kind?”
“Well, they’re different. And because they’re burning themselves up like candles before an altar...man being the god in the case, do you see...we’ll permit them to have brains, poor things, and enjoy reasonable conversation with them. But not from you, good people. No, if your logic goes one scruple deeper than ‘because’, we’re frightened away, and that’s why many a lovely girl has mysteriously grown into a charming spinster while her snub-nosed sister marries three times and always picks from a crowd. You knew it, Marian, and you planned your life accordingly. And nothing can save you except one odd chance.”
“What’s that?”
“Some hundred percent fellow who will sweep you off your feet, make you as dizzy as you’ve made others, rattle you away to a church, and marry you before your head clears, thereby bringing you in touch with the eternal verity.”
“Which is?”
“That we’re all such children that none of us need to pretend simplicity.”
They went on in silence, after this, until at last she withdrew her hand from his arm.
“Here’s the end of our walk,” she said. “I see the sun through the trees, and I’d better go out alone onto the road.”
“I suppose you had, and this is the one friendly time we’ll have together. This is the last time, eh?”
“David, David,” she said, “I only wanted....”
“Do you have to roll up your eyes like that?” he asked.
“I can’t help it,” she said. “I’ve practiced so long that it’s deeper than second nature. But I’ve never wanted to harm you, and I’ll never again ask anyone to help me find out who Duval is.”
“That’s a promise, but I’m afraid you won’t keep it.”
“So am I,” she said.
“Then good bye, Marian. After this, swords out once more...but now I’m going to say good bye to everything that’s delightful in you.” He took her deliberately in his arms. “Do you mind?” he asked.
“Not at all. I’m delighted,” she said, and she turned up her face to him, smiling, and with half-closed eyes.
Duval, however, leaped suddenly back from her. A gun flashed in his hand, and then, with a murmur, he made it disappear.
“We’ve been watched,” he told her. “Jude, the sour-faced cur, has trailed us, and I had a glimpse of his eyes as he faded out of sight in the bushes, there!”
“That’s not the end of the world,” s
he answered.
“That he’s seen you in my arms?” Duval cried, strangely excited. “Don’t you see? Kinkaid hates me enough without hearing that. And Charlie Nash, when he learns of it...what will Charlie feel about me? Others, too. It’ll be spread through the town in no time. I’m the lucky man, and twenty of them will want to murder me for my good fortune....”
He began to laugh heartily but silently. He even leaned a hand against the trunk of a tree, and the girl, watching him, suddenly yearned to be out of the shadows and in the warm, bright, honest sun. She hesitated, then yielded to a quick panic and fled from the woods out onto the open road.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Into Pete’s Place went Larry Jude.
Even his sullen and vicious heart could have made no greater effort than to face the sneers of the men who had seen him, not so long before, thrust ignominiously out of that place. But he came armed with patience and with savagery. That downfall of his spirit that had allowed even a puny bystander to strike him with impunity he now had recovered from to some degree. To face Duval, he dared not at any price, but the very fact that he made the one exception made him despise himself and all other men profoundly.
So he stood in Pete’s Place in the late afternoon, when the blacksmith had ended his day of hot labor and stood with elbows on the bar, his red, soot-marked face bowed above a tall glass of beer whose thick and creamy collar he had not yet disturbed. Two cowpunchers had just come in, and Tom Main from his ranch, with a buckboard loaded with broken harness that needed repair — for Tom that morning had tried the unique experiment of hitching twelve mustangs to a gang plow, and when the mêlée ended, the plow was a battered wreck — one mustang had been kicked and trampled to death, and their leather harness was a tangled mass.
When they saw big Larry Jude come in, these men swung half around toward him in dismayed surprise, in disgust, and then, instead of speaking, fell back to their drinks and looked at one another with faint sneers.
Only Pete himself rose to the occasion. For Pete was a gentleman to the core of his heart, and he allowed no malice to overcome him. It made no difference to him that Jude had acted the part of a boor and a brute. The man had had his lesson, and now he was too thirsty to resist the smell of liquor in the air, the feel of soft sawdust underfoot. He asked with a certain amount of solicitude what the big man would have.
“Whiskey!”
It was poured; it disappeared.
“Another!”
It went the way of the first. The third drink stood glimmering on the bar before Larry Jude, a ray of westering sunlight shining in the red heart of the liquor.
Tom Main offered the first general conversation.
“Chimney Creek is in flood,” he said. “They tell me that Will Mason’s house has got water up to the top of the verandah steps. His chicken coops have gone down the current, and he’s lost half a dozen calves. Chimney Creek is a heck of a stream, I always said.”
Larry Jude cleared his throat. The others looked down, bit their lips, and waited for the outcast to speak.
“I was crossin’ Chimney Creek one fall,” said Larry Jude. “Got in the middle of the dry bed. Warn’t more’n a trickle of water that twisted along between the rocks. Give my horse a drink and went on. It was too muddy water for a human. I hear a roar. It’s one of them water walls that come crashin’ around the curve above me. Five foot of water, leapin’ and dancin’. I put the pony to a run. There was a wall of rock each side of the creekbed. I had to sprint him nigh half a mile before we made the bank, and as he climbed up, the crest of the wave hit his hind legs and rolled him and me over and over. But we’d got away. Chimney Creek is a right treacherous bit of water.”
This broke the ice, and the others were all willing to chime in with remarks, and similar anecdotes. No matter what they privately thought of Larry Jude, they respected the effort he was making to step back into human society once more. It was not all mere good will, moreover, for they saw in the fixed and glaring eye of Jude, now beginning to relax, that he meant trouble, if trouble were necessary to rehabilitate himself.
“You come from up Montana way, Jude?” asked Pete.
“Naw. But I had a wife up there, once.”
“Died?”
“Run away with a half-breed.”
He swallowed his third glass of whiskey, but refused a fourth.
“The half-breed died sudden,” Jude said. He smiled his crooked, evil smile. “I dunno what come of her.”
The others could not help a quiet glance at one another. They could guess what had happened to her.
“Lot of women are that way. You never know what way they’ll jump,” Pete said, the smoother-over of difficulties. “You see ’em all the time, but you can’t tell what they’ll do. The younger and the prettier they are, the worse trouble maybe they’ll make, the more they’ll fool everybody. Ain’t I right?”
There seems to be professional agreement among men that the opposite sex is not to be defended. His own wife, his own daughter, may be the exception — but as for all others....
So there was a general murmur of assent to Pete’s proposition.
“I remember,” Tom Main began, “a brown-eyed girl in Tucson, with enough Mexican in her to give her spice. She was one day out with a fellow by name of....”
“You don’t have to go to Tucson to be fooled,” Larry Jude inserted. “What about right here in Moose Creek?”
“Aye, wherever there’s women, ain’t I right?” Pete suggested philosophically.
“You couldn’t be no righter,” declared Larry Jude, and the evil in him ripened and flowered in his speech. “Take this afternoon...I was out walkin’ in the woods, and there I seen the blonde kid from across the street....” He paused and shook his head with a smile.
An electric shock passed through the barroom.
“Might you be meanin’,” Pete said slowly, picking his words with care and changing color, “might you be meanin’ Miss Marian Lane?”
Larry Jude grinned down at his empty glass, turning it methodically between thumb and forefinger. “What else would I mean?” he burst out suddenly. “She’s the girl that nobody can touch, nobody can lay a finger on. She ain’t got no steadies. Am I wrong?”
“No, you’re right,” Pete agreed. “There ain’t a man that’s so much as held her hand, and I’m here to say so. There ain’t been a word ag’in’ her, and there ain’t gonna be.”
“Ain’t there?” Jude muttered somewhat sourly.
“No, there ain’t,” Pete insisted, and gripped both his fists as he answered the ominous stare of Jude.
“Lemme tell you what I seen,” Jude said slowly. “I was out strollin’ through the woods, and there I seen this same Marian Lane that makes the boys so dizzy...there I seen her out walkin’ with a gent....”
Growing hot and white in spots, Pete interrupted, saying: “I seen her start out. I seen her go up the street, and there wasn’t no man with her.”
“Sure there wasn’t,” Jude said. “Why should there be? Wouldn’t it discourage the rest of the boys a lot if they seen her goin’ out with one man, day after day? They’d feel a good deal out of place with her, wouldn’t they?”
He paused for an answer, but none came from the troubled company. They looked neither at one another nor at him, but considered in their own minds what protest they should make against this attack on the favorite of Moose Creek.
“Why should she show herself with a man,” continued Jude, “when she can walk up through the woods and find a gent waitin’ for her?”
Honest Pete gathered his courage and his strength to burst out: “Jude, mind what you’re sayin’! You’re talkin’ about a lady, now, man!”
Larry Jude regarded the bartender with a deadly eye. “Oh, I mind what I’m sayin’,” he declared. “I got the facts and the figures, the names and the faces. Would you k
now what man she’d picked out?”
They did not answer, each feeling that he should speak some disclaimer, and each unable to do so, for the man was fairly trembling now with malice, and with rage.
“What man,” went on Jude, “is sort of outstandin’ from the rest of the herd, here in Moose Creek? What’s the man that’s made himself taller than the rest of you? Will you tell me that? You know him well enough. Some of you seen him hypnotize me here in this barroom. You seen him make me take water....” Despite his rush of words, he had to stop here and swallow hard. “Because if it wasn’t hypnotism, what was it? Who else ever seen Larry Jude take a back step from any man, and who’s ever gonna see it happen again, for one Duval, or for twenty of ’em!”
He waited, and, waiting, he struck the bar heavily with his balled fist.
Then Pete spoke again. “I got no better friend in Moose Creek than Duval,” he said. “There ain’t a girl in the world that we all think more of than Marian Lane.”
“Don’t I know it?” Jude said fiercely. “Ain’t that why I’m here? To tell you what fools you all been about her, and about him. Him that hadn’t no time for women, eh? Him that couldn’t be bothered with ’em, because he was too busy workin’! Why, Duval, I see him holdin’ out his arms to her, and her steppin’ into them like a horse trained to step into its collar. Like a fire horse trained to jump into its place!”
He broke off with loud laughter, and, standing back a little from the bar, he glared fiercely around him. Vainly they strove to meet his eye.
“Why don’t they come out into the open?” Larry Jude asked. “Why sneak into the woods and make love? What’s on her conscience? Because she still wants the whole town to trail around after her, I reckon. What better idea have you got?”
Pete strove to answer, here, but he found the words sticking in his throat.
At this point, old Henry himself walked into the saloon for his afternoon glass of beer. It was his one drink of each day, and now, as he saw Larry Jude, he hesitated for a tenth of a second, mid-step, then went on to his corner place.
