Frontier Feud

by Max Brand

  Out of the distance they heard the dim shouting of men who saw, at last, the prey they had toiled for so long.

  “Take him easily,” said Rusty. “Speak to him a great deal. He will serve you now, and carry you. Start now, brother.”

  He held up his hand, and Bill Tenney seized it with a frantic grasp.

  “I’m wrong,” said Tenney. “I shouldn’t do it. But—my God! What’d they do to me if they got me a second time?—Rusty—so long!—Good-bye.—God bless you!”

  He turned the stallion. The White Horse made a few steps; then he halted, looking back toward his master. But a shout that came cheerfully out of Rusty’s throat made the big animal break into a gallop. Rusty watched him going like a streak that diminished in size; then the wavering surface of the prairie covered him from view.

  From the other direction, the beating hoofs of the many horses thundered down upon him; and before them the dogs strained forward in full cry. He looked down at the mustang, which still lay as if dead on the ground.

  Bill Tenney had intended to use that living breastwork and fight from behind it, forgetting that he could be surrounded and picked off from the rear. But Rusty had no intention even of making resistance. He was not good with a rifle; he never had been good. Indians are not famous marksmen with firearms, although among the Cheyennes there were always plenty of warriors who could surpass Rusty with firearms of all sorts. And so the White Indian simply faced the advancing charge; and with his eyes he selected the form of Major Marston, riding first of all.

  Far to the rear there appeared other horses—undoubtedly the reserve herd out of which the major would have remounted his men, if the goal had not been reached. But what would he do now? To follow the White Horse would be an act of perfect folly. The two Cheyennes were gone far away, and were beyond pursuit. And out of four men there remained only one for the major’s wrath to consume. Then the dogs came in, leaping furiously at Rusty. He shouted and raised his hand, and they shrank to either side of the human quarry. And there was the major, towering above him on horseback; glaring down at the calm face of Rusty.

  The soldiers, too, were sweeping up. A voice from a young lieutenant called:

  “Shall we go on, sir?”

  “Go on after what?” snarled the major. “After a streak of lightning?—Don’t be a damned fool, Wells.”

  Lieutenant Wells strained his eyes at the point, far away, where a dissolving point of white could still be seen. He made no answer, for it was plain that they might as well try to catch birds out of the sky with their bare hands as to hunt for the White Horse.

  “You weren’t man enough to keep your horse, eh?” said the major to Rusty. “You let him take your horse away from you, eh?—That’s what he is, eh? The fellow whose hide you saved?”

  But a sergeant broke in to say, “There wasn’t no fight, sir. I seen it all. He just give Tenney his horse. He give him the stallion. I watched, and I seen him standin’ at the head of the hoss. I never seen nothin’ like it!”

  “Keep still!” commanded the major, angrily.

  It would have been better the other way. It would have been a great deal better to take Rusty Sabin back to the fort and spread word that, like a coward, he had permitted his companion to take away the horse by force. But this thing of voluntarily giving up so famous a stallion, would it not make Rusty even more of a hero than ever, in the mind of Maisry Lester?

  Aye, and in the minds of all the other men in Fort Marston, too. That was why the major glowered as he sat the saddle and stared down at Rusty Sabin. Quick and keen as his mind was, he did not know at once how he would be able to handle Rusty to the best advantage. But in his very soul there was an iron determination to wring out of Rusty enough wretchedness to make up for the shame which the major had endured the night before.

  He could not see his way clear. There were legal methods, of course; but his own methods would be more to his personal taste. He had the desire to raise his quirt and slash Rusty across the face with it, right now. He wanted to flog this blacksmith all the way back to the fort.

  Instead, he merely forced himself to smile, and commanded that for the return march the captive be mounted between two of the troopers.

  CHAPTER 12

  That bitter quandary kept the major’s mind employed all during the long, slow march back to the fort. It was the position in which Rusty stood that baffled him.

  The major, it is necessary to make clear, was a man who never gave up an objective, once he had settled upon it. And as a goal the winning of Maisry Lester was more firmly established in his mind than anything else ever had been. It was so deeply rooted in him that her name moved in his very blood. All that was simple and gentle and beautiful in the world was represented to the major by the girl. It seemed as though the very evil in him craved her because she was his opposite.

  Now he had Rusty Sabin in his hands, but if he wreaked his wrath on Rusty, the girl would never forgive him, no matter how he cloaked his proceedings in the name of justice.

  He heard one of the soldiers behind him saying to Rusty, at one moment:

  “That was a damned fine, crazy thing you done to-day, Sabin!”

  Every man on the frontier would say the same thing. Rusty faced years of imprisonment, for the crimes of entering a Federal building by force, for an assault upon a United States officer, and for forcibly interfering with the course of Federal justice. Any one of three crimes would be enough to lodge him in prison for a long term. The three combined were enough to put him in darkness for almost all the rest of his days.

  But if this were done, the girl would never be able to look upon Major Marston without pain. And therefore the thing had to be managed in another way. Obscurely, the major’s good brains worked on the problem. In some way, he was sure, he ought to be able to arrange the affair so that he could seem to give Rusty the advantage; so that the major himself might appear really as a benefactor to the young man. By so doing, his reputation would be sweetened in the eyes of the girl, and a vast step forward in that direction would be made.

  For a long time the plan was nebulous before Marston’s searching brain; but little by little, during the long march, it gained in clarity.

  It was toward the evening when they drew near Fort Marston and saw the big, square shoulders of the building rising. The major never saw that outline lift without feeling that it spoke the name “Marston” in a voice whose vibrations could be sensed around the world—“Marston,” a word that meant big and powerful and enduring.

  Fort Marston would become a city one day, the major hoped and believed. The railroads would come out here, bringing wealth and noise and soot, and people would pool around Fort Marston and make the name of its founder immortal. No matter how occupied his mind might be, there was a smile on his lips as he saw the gross, formidable outlines of the fort growing up out of the plain.

  He sent riders on fresh horses ahead of him. He sent a special messenger to inform the Lester family that Rusty Sabin was “safe in the hands of Major Marston.” If Maisry had half a brain—and she had a whole one—she would be able to interpret that as a message from a friend; one who would intercede between justice and her lover.

  The whole maneuver that followed would be complicated; difficult in the extreme. But he would manage it.

  Some of the difficulties began to appear when the cortege entered the town, for the entire population of Fort Marston, as a matter of course, had heard about the return from the advance riders. They knew the entire story of what had happened by now, and they thronged the way. There were no cheers for the soldiery; there were simply multitudes of shouts for Rusty Sabin.

  “Good lad!” screeched an old woman as she ran out from the others and followed along at the side of Rusty for a few steps. “A better or a finer thing wasn’t never done. You’ll be teachin’ brutes how to make themselves into men!—More power to you, Rusty Sabin!”

  And all who heard this shouted and cheered Rusty.

  The maj
or wanted to curse, but he made himself smile. He was pale with rage, but he kept that smile enduring like one cut in rock. He hated these townsmen.

  Then he saw the Lesters in front of their house, the father and the daughter close together, the mother at a little distance from them. It would have pleased Mrs. Lester well enough, the major knew, if Rusty had been thrown into jail for life. Anything to prevent the marriage of her daughter with a half-wild man. But the anxious, tense faces of Richard Lester and his daughter told the major how keenly they were suffering.

  Well, if all went as he planned, he would have her for his own, one day. And more than once she would stand like that, with just that face of suffering, waiting for his return. Good women, the major felt, always love where they should love. If only a man can wangle the marriage, everything else follows as a matter of course. And a girl like Maisry Lester—why, she would as soon deny her God as her husband!

  These were Major Marston’s thoughts as he got Rusty Sabin inside the fort and had him placed in the guard room. When he looked at Rusty’s manacled hands, he wanted to hang the man by them from the high walls of the fort, but he made his tone gentler as he said:

  “I must pursue certain courses, in order to fill out my duty to the law, but I intend well by you, Sabin. You’ll be surprised before the end, by what I intend to do for you.”

  * * * *

  After that, he went straight as a homing pigeon to the Lester house. Maisry, standing straight and still in a corner of the room, turned a white face toward him and could not speak. Richard Lester had his face bowed in his hands. Only Mrs. Lester was at ease, and almost florid in her talk.

  “It’s a good day for this town when you took charge of things, major!” she told Marston. “There’ll be an end of the scalawags and the wild men. The decent people are going to have a chance to call their souls their own, and to lead their own lives.”

  But the major got to Maisry at once, saying, “I want to speak to you in the next room, Maisry. I have something important to tell you.”

  She showed him into the next room. It was a storage place, with sacks of flour on the floor, hams and bacons hanging up from the low ceiling, and various barrels and boxes of dried meat and fruit. They sat down close together on a pair of boxes. The girl had a look of one in church, during a funeral service for a dead friend.

  The major said, “This is a serious business, in a way; and yet it’s a business to laugh about also. To begin with, I’ve grown mighty fond of Rusty, during the trip in from the place where we caught him.”

  “Fond of him?” breathed Maisry, looking up suddenly, a shadow of disbelief in her clear eyes.

  “Well, he was pretty scared when we came sweeping up,” said the major. “Seemed to think that we were going to eat him. And as we came back toward the fort, I talked to him a lot. The fact is, he’s a simple fellow. There’s no real harm in him. I like him. I like him so much that I’ve told him I want to do what I can to help him out. And what do you think he asked me to do?”

  She shook her head. She seemed dazed when the major talked of the kindly feeling he had for Rusty.

  “Why,” went on Marston, laughing a little and touching his mustache with the tips of his fingers, as though to make sure that it was there, “why, he’s a bit superstitious, you know. He feels he’s had all this bad luck—lost the White Horse and put himself in prison, so to speak—all because he gave up his luck. And do you know where he thinks his luck centers? In that green beetle that he gave you!”

  The major laughed again, but the girl, startled, drew the little scarab from the bosom of her dress and fingered it anxiously.

  “He asked me to beg you to send it back,” said the major, casually.

  “But he couldn’t have done that!” exclaimed Maisry. “Of course he couldn’t have done that. You were in the room, Arthur, when he gave it to me. You heard him tell me never to send it to him unless I wanted to be rid of him.”

  “Well, that’s true; I remember the scene perfectly well,” answered Marston. “I wonder if that’s really in his mind? I never thought of that. I wonder if he really wants to be free from you again?”

  “Free—from me?” said Maisry, turning white again.

  She looked away from the major, envisaging disaster. The major went on in a tone of gentle sympathy:

  “I don’t know. But I suppose it’s the wild life calling him back again. Towns are too small to hold red Indians; too small for white Indians, either, I suppose.”

  She was rigid. Her lips were purple-gray.

  “And then, I dare say, he feels his luck is wrapped up in the green beetle,” went on the major. “You know, the Indians have their medicine bags, and they think their souls are sewed up inside the leather. And—”

  “Don’t!” breathed Maisry.

  She took the green beetle from around her neck and made a gesture to give it to the major; but catching her hands back again, she pressed the little scarab between them, close to her breast.

  “If he’s asked for it, it means that he doesn’t want to see me again,” said Maisry miserably. “Or else it’s because he expects to spend all his life in prison—”

  “Not that,” answered Marston. “I’ve told him that after all I’m going to take the law into my own hands and set him free.”

  “You are?—To set him free?” said the girl, eagerly.

  “I’ve got to,” said the major. “The fact is, Maisry, it makes me sick at heart to see you like this. When I rode past you with Sabin, this evening—and when I saw your white face—I knew that I would have to turn him loose.”

  “Ah,” she said, “how good and how kind you are! How really good and kind! Then, if I send him the green beetle, he’ll have a chance to come to me?”

  “Aye, if he wants to. Of course he’ll have the chance,” said Marston.

  She put the scarab suddenly into the major’s hands.

  “It seems like giving away life and breath!” she told him, trying to smile.

  “But take it to him at once. Tell him that I love him, and that I am waiting for him.—Will you do that for me, major?”

  He stood up. There was nothing but blackness in his heart. “Tell him? Of course I’ll tell him,” he lied.

  He crushed the scarab with the grip of his fingers, and felt as if he were squeezing Rusty Sabin’s very heart.

  CHAPTER 13

  A light heart makes a brisk step, and the major’s step was like that of a colt on a spring day. He went back to the fort with his head in the air. He had the appearance of one who moves with a great heart toward the accomplishment of some magnanimous purpose.

  When he got to the guardroom, he took the prisoner by the arm and marched him off to his own quarters, unescorted. There, in the same room where he had confronted Rusty Sabin the night before, he unlocked the manacles and set Rusty free. Then he stepped back to take stock of what he had done.

  Rusty, stunned, looked up from his freed hands into Marston’s face and waited for the explanation. The major took the long knife that had been removed from Rusty when he was captured and gripped the handle of it hard. There was such passion in the man that he was half tempted to drive the long blue steel straight into Rusty’s body; but he merely smiled and presented the weapon to its owner. The major took a fierce and quiet joy in mastering his hatred and covering it with his smile; in keeping his eye as gentle as though there was arising in his heart an intense affection for this man.

  Rusty took the knife as though it had been a sword of honor. Now he was waiting, with wide eyes.

  “You are free,” said Marston. “The fact is, I’ve been fighting myself all the time since you were taken. The law commands me to punish you. But when a man has sacrificed himself for the sake of a friend, as you have, why then I have to listen to a law higher than that of men. I’ve made up my mind, and you’re going free.”

  Rusty, like one trying to clear his brain after receiving a heavy blow, shook his head a trifle. The thing seemed impossible.
More than once, he had seen in other days the sudden malice come darkly into Major Marston’s face. But there was a fundamental simplicity in Rusty Sabin’s soul that prevented him from searching other men too deeply. There was such a well of trust in him that it was apt to be invested in any man. So he puzzled only a short time over this matter of the change in Major Marston, and then he said, simply:

  “What shall I say? I have done you harm; and now you befriend me!” He took a breath, adding: “A kind act can be a weight on the heart. My heart is heavy because I have not known what a good man you are.”

  The major did not laugh aloud; but inwardly he was merry enough over the success of his deception.

  “I have to be two men in one,” he explained. “I have to be the head of the military and the law; but besides that, I hope that I can be a man, now and then. And that is why you’re going free. You understand, though, that after you’ve left the fort—after you’ve escaped from it—you mustn’t be seen in the town again?”

  “That is true,” agreed Rusty, thoughtfully. “Then I shall have to write a letter to Maisry, before I go—”

  “There’s bad news from her,” answered Marston, shaking his head. “By the Lord, I think what she told me made me pity you, you poor fellow!”

  “Bad news?—From Maisry?” echoed Rusty Sabin, incredulous.

  The major took Rusty by the arm and walked up and down the room with him, slowly. He said:

  “You know how girls are, my friend. They change their minds quickly.”

  “Once a year!” exclaimed Rusty, as his father’s words struck up the memory in his heart. “Once a year, a girl will change her mind—”

  “Who would think that it began with the blacksmith business?” remarked the major, making a sweeping gesture with his hand.

  “That? That disgusted her?” asked Rusty, finding it difficult to comprehend.

  “And yet what can a man do that is more honest?” asked Marston.

  “The smoke and grime and the soot!” said Rusty.