The Winged Horse

by Max Brand

  “Not with such pretty notches on ’em.”

  “Ah,” the colonel said, and his yellowish eyes opened and gleamed with light. He asked bluntly, “How many?”

  “Just five on one and six on the other.”

  “Eleven!” exclaimed the colonel.

  “Exactly that.”

  The colonel sighed. “I’d like to see that young feller, Sheriff, if you got no objections.”

  “I got no objections at all … as long as you want to see him in the jail.”

  “I’ll go up there and sit in the dark with you.”

  So they went back to the jail, and there they lit two lanterns, which could be closely shuttered.

  “Put yours on the floor at your feet, and keep one foot on the catch. If anything stirs, open up wide with that light. I’ll open up with mine, too, and here’s a sawed-off shotgun that we can use on him. One for you and one for me.”

  “You don’t want to blow him right to glory,” Colonel Loring said pleadingly.

  “Not naturally, I won’t, if he’ll play fair and square with me.”

  “Give him a chance, give him a chance.”

  “Is he a friend of yours, Colonel?”

  “No, but I got hopes that he will be. Look here, Bud. You know that I need good men. If you could see your way to turning that gent loose, there’s five hundred in my wallet that ain’t working very hard, just now.”

  The sheriff smiled, and his saber-like mustache fanned stiffly out to the side. He had the look of a walrus, suddenly.

  “Look here, Colonel Pete,” he said, “I like you fine. You’re my friend. But I never took coin, and I never will.”

  “No harm meant,” the colonel said hastily.

  “Sure not,” answered the good-natured sheriff. “I don’t mind you getting this gent, if he busts loose, and if I don’t have to kill him. Only … I won’t have money for him.”

  They closed their lanterns, and they sat for a long hour in utter darkness, their shotguns across their knees. The window was closed. It was very hot and breathless. But the sheriff remained fixed in his place. There was no noise in the jail. From the town they heard merely high-pitched notes, now and again—a shrill cry of anger, or a pulse of laughter, foolishly thin and high.

  Then the door opened from the cell room. It could not be seen. It could only be sensed, by the soft, quiet wave of air. Then, by the movement of another wave of air, the sheriff knew that it had been shut again.

  Chapter Three

  He still waited for a moment, and then from across the room came a flash of light. He snapped on his own torrent at the same instant and he saw his prisoner, Alfred Percy Lamb, as active as a Punch and Judy show. Without a sound, with wonderful surety and swiftness, the man had crossed the floor in that utter darkness and reached his guns. He whirled with them in his hands, and fell toward the floor, with a double click of the weapons.

  The sheriff leveled the shotgun and the shaft of light at the fallen man.

  “It’s no good, Kid,” he said. “It’s no good at all, Medium. You can’t ride dummy horses, even with the longest spurs in the range.”

  “You pulled the teeth of these dogs,” the Medium Kid said, rising alertly to his feet, “and nobody can bite without guns. Am I talking straight?”

  “Why, straighter than a string, by a whole lot. Set down and rest your feet, Kid.”

  The Kid sat down.

  “You might introduce me,” said the colonel. “When I saw those guns wing, I pretty near introduced myself with both barrels.”

  “Colonel Pete Loring,” the sheriff said. “And this here is Alfred Percy Lamb.”

  “I didn’t quite follow that recitation,” said the colonel.

  “You ain’t been to church for a long time,” the sheriff said dryly. “Which your mind is out of practice on texts, and suchlike things. But you might know him as the Kid, or the Lonesome Kid, or the Doctor, or Montana, or the Medium Kid, or Kid Medium, if any of those names sort of sounded to you, Colonel.”

  The colonel smiled his capacious smile and showed a wide range of broad, white teeth. He seemed full of the content of good living. “Glad to know you,” he said.

  “Glad to know you,” said Kid Medium, alias Alfred Lamb. He turned to the sheriff. “It was the way that cook done the frijoles,” he said, “that got me all restless. You know how it is when beans is cooked with only one kind of pepper?”

  “I know,” said the sheriff.

  “They ain’t satisfying.”

  “No,” agreed the sheriff, “they sure ain’t.”

  “But I’ll try ’em again,” said the youngster, “and see if I can get used to ’em.”

  “Do you think you can?”

  “I’m kind of afraid not. Frijoles I’m special particular about, having spent some time in Mexico.”

  “I don’t want to be prying,” said the sheriff. “But I’d like to know who you talked into opening the door for you and unlocking your irons.”

  “I talked to the irons first,” said the prisoner, “and then I talked to the lock on the door.”

  “What kind of talk?”

  “Sign language.”

  “How old are you?” the colonel, interrupting, asked suddenly.

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Like fun you are!”

  “Sorry you don’t think so.”

  “Ain’t you on the far side of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, maybe?”

  “Thanks,” he said. “But I grew up fast.”

  “Now,” said the colonel, “I want to talk business with you.”

  “Sure,” answered the boy. “I love to talk business. The sheriff will tell you that.”

  “I’m serious. The sheriff, here, is a pretty doggone good-hearted gent.”

  “He is,” said the boy, “or otherwise he would have plastered me a minute back, just as I was about to plaster him.” He added gravely, “I was shooting for your legs, Sheriff. Y’understand?”

  The sheriff nodded with the utmost cheerfulness. “You just wanted me out of the way. I never had a better thought in my life than taking the salt and pepper out of those lunch boxes. But listen to what the colonel has to say.”

  “You ever hear of me, son?”

  “I don’t know. Lemme think. Colonel Pete Loring? Are you him that has a Montague every Sunday for breakfast?”

  “Perhaps I might have run into the Montagues, now and then. But it was them that first run into me.”

  “I’ve heard something about it,” said the boy. “I don’t know what.”

  “Trouble!” exclaimed the colonel. “There’s been nothing but trouble since I ran into the Montagues. You take my record. Clean as a whistle. But when I come onto this range, where there was room for everybody, the Montagues started to make trouble. Dogs in the manger. They couldn’t use all the range … but they didn’t want anybody else to use it. You’d despise to know how mean those gents can be, those Montagues.”

  The boy nodded, watchful and intent. He glanced aside at the sheriff.

  “Yes, ask the sheriff,” Colonel Pete Loring said.

  The sheriff shook his head, however, and grinned, his mustache furring out in the peculiar way it did, which always made him look like a walrus.

  “I don’t take sides,” he said. “Colonel Pete has been a pretty good friend to me, and so he has to most of the boys in this here town. But I don’t take sides. There’s some that say that the Montagues are all right, and I don’t take sides. Thank heaven that the fighting ain’t been in my county, or I’d’ve tried to round up the whole gang, all around.”

  “If it had been in your county,” said the colonel, “the trouble would never have got fairly started, but being where it is, with the sheriff bought up by the Montagues …”

  “They say that he’s bought up by you!”


  “Sure they do. Why, it’d made a man tired, the way those low-down skunks will lie about a man. Bought up by me. Bribery! Why, rather than bribe …”

  The colonel caught himself. The sheriff was looking straight at him with a quizzical but not unfriendly smile.

  Then he said, “But I’ll get right down to business. You guess what I want with you?” he asked the boy.

  “I dunno. I could guess.”

  “Well, then, I want you to help me to protect the range to which I’ve got a good right.”

  “That sounds reasonable. You got a pretty good outfit?”

  “The best gents in the world. Some of ’em are kind of rough, but a mighty good set, take ’em all the way through.”

  “Some of ’em get pretty sick, all of a sudden?”

  “Why … some do, and no mistake.”

  “Too quick for the doctor to get to them?”

  “There ain’t any denying of that, either.”

  “What sort of a price?”

  “Sixty bucks, and a bonus for trouble.”

  “Why, I dunno. I might think it over.”

  “In jail?”

  “This jail is kind to me,” said the boy. “It wouldn’t ever hold me, to tell you the truth.”

  “Talk up,” said the sheriff. “Do you want this job?”

  The youngster hesitated. “No,” he said. “Not at sixty.”

  “Well, what’s your figure?” the colonel asked.

  “I’m worth a hundred. I’ll take ninety. That’s only three dollars a day.”

  “It’s a lot,” growled the colonel. “If I paid you that, you’d have to keep your face shut about the money that you get.”

  “Talking after hours,” said the boy, “is what I chiefly hate, Colonel.”

  “Done, then,” said the rancher. “What about it, Sheriff?”

  “It’s kind of a funny business,” said the sheriff, “that a gent that gets jailed for a street fight in my town should be promoted to a good fat job over on your side of the fence, Colonel. But I got nothing ag’in’ him. He didn’t punch my nose, and he couldn’t get loose from my jail. So I call it an even break. Take him away if you want him.”

  “Pronto,” said the colonel. “Are you ready, Kid?”

  “Ready now to step.”

  “Have you got a horse in town? If you ain’t, I brought in an extra one. They’s no sense in going fishing if you don’t take a basket.”

  “I’ve got a horse already, but I’ll take a look at yours.”

  “This’ll make you some trouble, likely?” said the boy to the sheriff as they parted.

  “No, it won’t. The judge don’t mind me settling cases outside the court. He knows that I never make a penny out of these here deliveries, and so long as I keep turning the right kind out and keeping the wrong kind in, what’s to complain of?”

  This free and somewhat extra-legal viewpoint was heartily applauded by the colonel, and he took his protégé down the front steps of the jail, a free man.

  They crossed to a side street to the stable attached to the jail from which, at a message from the sheriff, the horse of Alfred Lamb was being led.

  The colonel walked about it with a keenly critical eye. “This horse set you back something,” he said at last.

  “It did.”

  “Money or trouble?”

  “Both,” the youngster said noncommittally.

  “Has she got enough under the cinches?”

  “She won’t say no if you ride her all day.”

  “She’ll do, then. I’ve got a good thing for you, but it’s five hundred dollars cheaper than that nag.”

  They passed up the street, leading the mare behind them, and as they turned a corner, the colonel laid a sudden hand upon the shoulder of his protégé.

  “Young fellow,” he said, “I want to put the cards on the table. If you’re what I want, I’ll make you rich enough to buy a whole stable of horses better than that one behind you.”

  “Try me first,” said the boy, “and see if I can take any tricks.”

  Chapter Four

  On the colonel’s place they were rounding up weanlings. They were in the last camp before they made the ranch house. Therefore, good cheer should have been strong among the cowboys, but good cheer hardly fitted in with such weather as they were having. The fall was ending and winter was beginning to show its teeth. The wind came straight across the mountains, well chilled from the upper snows, and at all things it struck with a fierce lunge, and drove its spear point of cold far home. Many days of riding in wet clothes, on wet saddles, with water squelching in their boots, had worn out the cowpunchers, and their tempers had gone before their strength. But above all they were tired of the wind; its weight leaned continually against them, cutting their faces red and raw, and making balloons of their mouths when they attempted to speak.

  It was good food that the cook gave them. The Dutch ovens were filled with excellent beef and roasted potatoes, richly browned and covered with juicy gravy. There was a sort of stew in which tomatoes were the chief ingredient. All these delicacies steamed and gave forth their fragrance when the cook shouted, “Come and get it!” and the hungry cowhands swarmed in and lifted the lids. But with all this, and the supreme charm of the perfume of the coffee streaming through the air, still the men went stolidly, grimly about their supper. The cook himself scowled; he was disheartened by such lack of appreciation and swore silently to himself that he would make these cowboys rue their glumness the following morning at breakfast time.

  The attack upon the food had barely started when through the wet and the wind a horseman rode in and dismounted on the verge of the firelight, where it gleamed vaguely on him, and more brightly on his horse.

  “This is the colonel’s outfit, is it?” he asked.

  Heads turned toward him. They nodded.

  “Where’s the cavvy?”

  They pointed to the rope corral that made its location known, at the instant, by a sudden outbreak of squeals and whinnies. In that direction the stranger disappeared and returned with considerable speed, carrying his saddle and a small pack. He went through the circle of feeding men, produced his own plate, cup, knife, and fork, and helped himself generously to everything. This was not at all unusual, of course, upon the range. But there was something about the assured air of this youth and the size of the portions to which he helped himself that irritated the wagon boss.

  He said, “Who might you be, stranger?”

  “I’m a new hand,” said the other hurriedly.

  “What’s your best hand?” asked the boss.

  “A left hook,” the stranger answered as he settled himself in a strategic position where the wind snarled and snapped a little less than in other places.

  The wagon boss felt that he was set back. Also, he saw the men lifting their heads a little. They looked upon the stranger with anger because, though strange, he was not abashed, and yet they smiled a little—faint, semisecret smiles, for it soothed their very souls to have the wagon boss put down even with words.

  For the wagon boss was a bold, bad man, and though every one of these handpicked warriors of the range would have qualified in the same category, yet they acknowledged him as their master. He was made of iron. There were two hundred and twenty pounds of that metal in him, and he had been heated with liquor and hammered with bullets and tempered in gore, so to speak. He rarely had occasion to lift his voice or his hand, once he was known.

  Now he raised his head stiffly and stared at the newcomer. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “What’s yours?” asked the stranger.

  “I’m Muldoon.”

  “Muldoon what? Or, what Muldoon?” asked the cheerful stranger.

  At this, a deep, grim chuckle passed around the crew. They knew that destruction was rushing down upon
this glib youth, but they could not help enjoying the badgering that he was giving to their man of might.

  “Muldoon,” rumbled the wagon boss, “of the street of Muldoon, in the town of Muldoon, in the county of Muldoon, in the state of the same name, and Muldoon is the name of the country, too. Have you heard of it?”

  He had suspended his eating operations—which were conducted upon a vast scale—and he let his eyes wander a little over the group. He was proud of his speech. It was not the first time he had made it, as a matter of fact, but it was pronounced for the first time here.

  “I’ve heard of it,” the stranger said, continuing to eat with an unabated appetite. “I’ve heard a lot about the country of Muldoon.”

  “You read about it in your geography, maybe?” Muldoon said. “Then maybe you know that the kids are born with teeth, in that part of the world, and suckers starve to death, and four-flushers have their heads beat off.”

  This last he said with a good deal of scowling point, for he was working himself into a rage. He enjoyed being in a rage. He reveled in the deeps and darknesses of fury. He began to pant, and to make his chest heave, and to clench his hands, and to roll his eyes like the eyes of a maddened bull, for he knew that if he went through all the appropriate gestures, it would not be long before he was actually in the state that he simulated.

  The wind, at this point, took control. It leaped off the nearest mountain and flattened the flames of the fire to flickering, blue-rimmed tatters. The light was nearly extinguished, so that every man became for an instant a stranger to his nearest neighbor, and the pencilings of rain were visible, and the face of the night and the storm pressed down and breathed upon that little human company.

  Having stamped upon this spot, the storm wind leaped away again. The first voice to be audible was that of the stranger, remarking, as he drained his coffee cup, that he had heard these things before, and he had also heard that all the winds that blew in the country of Muldoon were composed of blasts of hot air. He stated, also, that he had learned in school how to bound the country of Muldoon, and that he had been taught that it was bounded on the north by a heavy frost, on the east by a flood, on the west by the big rain, and on the south by the Fourth of July.