Destry Rides Again

by Max Brand

  “Then why for are you sorrowin’ so much?” he asked.

  “Because I’ve lost my man,” she said, “and only his ghost come back.”

  “You’ll get yourself fixed up with another right now,” said he. “You ain’t never had no trouble collectin’ young nuisances around you. That tribe of young boys has et up a drove of hogs for me, and a herd of cattle, and a trainload of apples and such; they’ve drunk enough of my whiskey to irrigate a thousand acres of corn; and all because you’re close onto half as good lookin’ as your mother used to be, Charlie.”

  “Thanks,” said she. “You wanta see me tied up in one of these love-me-little-love-me-long marriages. But the fact is that I ain’t gunna marry, never.”

  “If you ain’t gunna get yourself a husband,” said he, “you might get yourself some grammar; which a man would think that you never been to school, to listen at you talk!”

  “I only dress up my talk once a week,” said she, “and the rest of the time I’d rather go around comfortable and let the pronunciation take care of itself. What difference does it make to an adjective if it’s used for an adverb? It don’t give the word no pain; it’s easier for me; the niggers understand me better, and everybody’s happy all around.”

  “I’ve seen young Chester Bent look kind of odd at some of your language, though,” observed Dangerfield.

  “Young Chester Bent,” she mocked, “wouldn’t mind the language of a red Comanche if she had the Dangerfield money.”

  “There you go,” said he, “puttin’ low motives into high minds! That boy is all right!”

  “Yeah?” she queried. “Who’s that comin’ across the field?”

  “I don’t care who it is,” said her father. “What I want to say is that Chester Bent is about the best——”

  “It’s somebody tryin’ to catch something or tryin’ to keep from bein’ caught,’ said Charlotte.

  Her father leaned to look through a gap in the trees that surrounded the ranchhouse, and he saw across the hill a rider flogging forward a horse so tired that its head bobbed like a cork in rough water.

  “He’s lookin’ back,” remarked the girl, “and the fact is that he’s scared pretty bad. He’s comin’ here like a gopher scootin’ for a hole in the ground.”

  “Who is it?” asked Dangerfield.

  “Some boy from town,” she replied, “because no puncher that’s worth his salt ever rode so slantin’ as that.”

  “Which Harrison Destry sure could fork a boss,” remarked her father.

  The rider disappeared behind the trees, but almost immediately afterward an excited negress appeared at the kitchen door saying: “They’s a young gent here that wants powerful to see you, Colonel Dangerfield!”

  It was the family title for him; it was a title that was spreading abroad, now that he was able to lend money instead of “borrowing” it.

  He had no chance to invite the stranger to enter and share the hospitality of his house, for the man that instant appeared, shouldering past the fat cook. He was very dusty. Dust was thick in the wrinkles of his sleeve and on his shoulders. His hat was off, and his hair blown into a rat’s nest; he walked with a stagger of exhaustion; his face was drawn, and his eyes sunken. Yet it was a handsome face; some said he was the finest looking fellow on the entire range, for it was Jerry Wendell.

  He fell into a chair, gasping: “Lock the doors, Colonel! He’s not three jumps behind me! He means murder! He’s killed two men already, this night. He’s hounded me across the hills. I’ve gone a complete circle around Wham, and he’s been after me every minute!”

  “Lock the doors and the windows, Charlie,” said the Colonel with composure. “Hand me that riot gun, too. I loaded it fresh with buckshot yesterday. How many of them is there, Jerry, and who are they, and what the devil do they mean by chasing you right onto my ranch? There ain’t anything to be afraid of. My niggers will fight for me. How many are there, though? Charlie, give the alarm—”

  “There’s only one,” said Jerry Wendell. “Only one, but he’s the devil. I’m not ashamed of running! You know who it is! You must have heard!”

  “Nothing!”

  “It’s Harry Destry running amok!”

  The riot gun crashed to the floor from the hands of the girl.

  Jerry Wendell, his eyes rolling wildly at the windows, was crowding himself back into the most obscure corner of the room, as he continued, his voice shaking as violently as his body:

  “It was all a sham! You see? Pretending to be afraid! Oh, what fools we were to think that Destry ever could be afraid of anything! He wanted to trap us all—every man that sat on that jury—oh God, how I wish I never had seen that courtroom or listened to that judge! He’ll kill the judge. I hope he kills the judge.”

  “Straighten up,” said Dangerfield slowly. “I’ve seen Destry actin’ like a yellow hound dog with his sneakin’ tail between its legs, and you tell me that he’s runnin’ wild?”

  “That’s it! He waited till all of us were back in town. Then he trapped the Ogdens in the Last Chance. He—he—killed them both. He killed them both!”

  Dangerfield stepped closer to him.

  “Murder?” he asked.

  “Murder? What else? What else?” screamed Jerry Wendell. “What else is it when a killer like him starts after an ordinary man, like me? Murder, murder, I tell you! And he’ll never stop till he’s got me here and slaughtered me under your eyes in your own house!”

  Chapter Ten

  Shame, after all, is a human invention; the animals know no touch of it. The elephant feels no shame when it flees from the mouse, and the lion runs from the rhinoceros without a twinge of conscience, for shame was unknown until man created it out of the whole cloth of his desire to be godlike, though the gods themselves were divorced from such small scruples on sunny Olympus. Poor Jerry Wendell in his paroxysm quite forgot the thing that he should be; fifty thousand years of inherited dignity were shaken out of him and he acted as a caveman might have done if a bear were tearing down the barricade at the mouth of the dwelling, and the points of all the spears inside were broken.

  Every moment he was starting, his pupils distending as he looked at the doors or the windows. He was oblivious of the scorn of the Dangerfields, which they were covering as well as they could under an air of kind concern.

  “Have you got a man at that door?” asked Jerry. “And that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that?”

  “That leads down into the cellar. He won’t try to come that way.”

  “No matter what you do, he’ll be here!” said Wendell, wringing his hands. “I thought I could stop him, too. I had the message from the saloon in time; I had three good men posted; I was telephoning across the way for more help, and then I heard a step on the stairs—a step on the stairs——”

  The memory strangled him.

  “I ran for the back steps and jumped down ’em. I locked the kitchen door as I went out. I tore across the garden and vaulted the street fence, and as I jumped, I looked back and saw a shadow slide through the kitchen window.

  “Then I found a horse on the street. I didn’t stop to ask whose it was. I jumped into the saddle, thanking God, and started for the lights in the middle of the town.

  “But he gained on me. I had to cut down a side alley. He was hard after me on a runt of a mustang.

  “I got out of the town. Luckily my horse would jump. I put it over fences and got into fields. There was no sight of him behind me then, and at last I decided to circle back into Wham.

  “Then I saw him again, coming over a hill—just a glance of the outline of him against the stars—and he’s been on my heels ever since—ever since! He’ll——”

  “Sit down to breakfast,” urged Dangerfield. “The corn bread’s still warm. You look—hungry!”

  “Breakfast?” said the other. And he laughed hysterically. “Breakfast!” he repeated. “At a time like this! Well, why not?”

  He allowed himsel
f to be put into a chair, but his hands shook horribly when he tried to eat. His soul and nerves were in as great disarray as his clothes; his hair stood wildly on end; his necktie was jerked about beneath one ear; in a word, no one would have taken him for that Handsome Jerry who had broken hearts in Wham for many a day.

  He spilled half his coffee on his coat and on the tablecloth, but the rest he managed to get down his throat, and his eye became a little less wild. Instantly the buried conscience came to life again. He clutched at his tie and straightened it; he made a pass at his hair, and then noticed for the first time the downward glance of the girl.

  He could read in that many a thing which had been scourged out of his frightened brain all during his flight. Ostracism, ridicule would follow him to the ends of his days, unless he actually met Harrison Destry, gun in hand. And that he knew that he dared not do. The cruel cowpunchers and the wags of the town would never be at the end of this tale; they would tell of the mad ride of Jerry Wendell to the end of time!

  He said, faltering as he spoke: “I would have stopped and faced him, but what chance would I have against that jailbird? And why should a law-abiding man dirty his hands with such a fellow? It’s the sheriff’s duty to take charge of such people. Ought to keep an eye on them. I said at the time, I always said that Destry was only shamming. He drew us all back, and then he clicked the trap! He clicked the trap! And——”

  Here he was interrupted by another voice inside the room, saying: “Hullo, Colonel! Morning, Charlie. I was afraid that I’d be too late for breakfast, but I’m glad to see that they’s still some steam comin’ out of that corn bread. Can I sit down with you-all?”

  It was Destry, coming towards them with a smile from the cellar door, which he had opened and shut behind him silently before saying a word.

  The three reacted very differently to this entrance. The Colonel caught up the sawed-off shotgun that had been brought to him; his daughter started up from her chair, and then instantly steadied herself; while Jerry Wendell was frozen in his place. He could not even face about toward the danger behind him, but remained fixed shivering violently.

  Charlotte Dangerfield was the first to find her voice, saying with a good deal of calmness:

  “Sit down over here. I’ll get in some eggs and some hot ham. I guess the coffee’s still warm enough.”

  “Thanks,” said Destry. “Don’t you go puttin’ yourself out. I been trying to get up with Jerry, here, and give him a watch that he dropped along the road. But he’s been schoolin’ his hoss across country so mighty fast that I couldn’t catch him. How are you, Jerry?”

  He laid the watch on the table in front of the other, and Jerry accepted it with a stir of lips which brought forth no sound. Destry sat down opposite him. The host and hostess were likewise in place in a cold silence, which Destry presently filled by saying: “You remember how the water used to flood in the cellar when a rainy winter come along? I had an idea about fixin’ of that, Colonel, so I stopped in and looked at the cellar on the way in, but they wasn’t quite enough light this early in the day to see anything. You didn’t mind me comin’ up from the cellar door that way?”

  Dangerfield swore softly, beneath his breath.

  “You’re gunna come to a bad end, boy,” he said. “You leave your talkin’ be, and eat your breakfast. Why you been gallivantin’ around the hills all night?”

  “Why,” said Destry, “you take a mighty fine gold watch like that, and I guess a man wouldn’t like to think that he’d lost it, but the harder I tried to catch up with Jerry, there, the harder he rode away from me. He must of thought that he was havin’ a race with big stakes up, but I’m mighty sure that I didn’t have money on my mind!”

  His smile faded a little as he spoke, and there was a glint in his eyes which turned Jerry Wendell from the crimson of sudden shame, to blanched white.

  “What you-all been doin’ this while I been away?” Destry asked politely of Wendell.

  “Me?” said Wendell. “Why, nothing much. The same things.”

  “Ah?” said Destry. “You alluz found Wham a pretty interestin’ sort of a town. I was kind of surprised when I heard that you was gunna leave it.”

  “Leave it?” asked Wendell, blank with surprise. “Leave Wham? What would I do, leaving Wham?”

  “That’s what I said to myself, when I heard it,” said Destry gently. “Here you are, with a house, and a business, and money in the mines and in lumber. Jiminy! How could Jerry leave Wham where everybody knows him, and he knows everybody? But him that told me said he reckoned you got tired of a lot of things in Wham, like all the dances that you gotta go to, and the dust from the street in summer blowin’ plumb into your office, and all such!”

  Wendell, confident that something was hidden behind this casual conversation, said not a word, but moistened his purplish lips and never budged his eyes from the terrible right hand of the gunman.

  “Him that told me,” went on Destry, “said that you’d got so you preferred a quiet life. Here where everybody knows you, you’re always bein’ called upon for something or other. They work you even on juries, he says, and that’s enough to make any man hot.”

  Wendell shrank lower in his chair, but Destry, buttering a large slice of corn bread, did not appear to see. He put away at least half the slice and talked with some difficulty around the edge of the mouthful.

  “Because them that work on a jury,” he explained to his own satisfaction, “they gotta decide a case on the up and up and not let any of their own feelin’ take control. Take a gent like you, you’d have an opinion about pretty nigh everybody in town even before the trial come off. And you might make a mistake!”

  “There’s twelve men on a jury!” said Jerry Wendell hoarsely.

  “Sure there is,” nodded Destry. “You seem to know all about juries—numbers and everything! There’s twelve men, but any single one of ’em is able to hang the rest! One man could stop a decision from comin’ through!”

  Wendell pushed back his chair a little. He was incapable, at the moment, of retorting to the subtle tortures of Destry.

  At last he said:

  “I’d better be goin’ back.”

  “To Wham?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well,” said Destry, “that’s up to you. Go ahead. I think they might be somebody waiting for you along the road, though. But a gent of your kind, old feller, he wouldn’t pay no attention to such things.”

  Wendell stood up.

  “I’m leaving now,” he replied, with a question and an appeal in his voice that made the girl look up at him as at a new man.

  “Good trip to you,” said Destry.

  “But first I’d like to see you alone, for a minute.”

  “Don’t you do it,” said Destry. “I know just what it must be like to cut loose from an old home, the way that Wham has been to you. Well, good luck to you!”

  “I’ll never come back,” said the other, unnerved at the prospect.

  “Likely you won’t—till the talk dies down a mite.”

  “Destry!” shouted the tormented man suddenly. “Will you tell me why you’ve grounds to hate me the way that you do?”

  “No hate, old fellow. No hate at all. Don’t mix that up in the job. But suppose that we let it drop there? You have your watch back, I have a cigarette in this hand and a forkful of ham in that and a lot of information that I would like to use, one day.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Wendell left that room like a man entranced, and behind him he would have left a silence, if it had not been for the cheerful talk of Destry.

  “I come by the Minniver place, last night, lyin’ snug under its trees, with the moon standin’ like a half face just over the gully, where it splits the hills behind, and doggone me if it wasn’t strange to see the old house all lit up, and, off of the veranda, I could hear the whangin’ of the banjos, soft and easy, and the tinkle of a girl laughin’, like moonshine fingerin’ its way across a lake. But we h
ad to go on past that, though it looked like Jerry would of wanted me to stay there, he seemed so bent on turnin’ in. But I edged him away from it. Only, when we went by, I recalled that that was the first time that I see you, Charlie. You was fifteen, and your dad, he’d let you go out to that dance. D’you recollect?”

  She looked at him, her lips twisting a little with pain and with pleasure.

  “I remember, perfectly,” said she.

  “You can remember the party,” said Destry, “but you can’t remember——”

  “Harry!” she cried at him. “Will you talk on like this about just nothing, when there’s poor Jerry Wendell being driven out from Wham and cut away from everything that he ever was? Wouldn’t it be more merciful to murder him, than to do that?”

  “Why, look at you, Charlie!” said Destry, pleased and surprised. “How you talk up right out of a school book, when you ain’t thinkin’!”

  “Sure,” said Dangerfield. “If Charlie wasn’t always watchin’ herself, the boys would think that she was tryin’ to have a good influence on ’em, and educate ’em, or something. Now and then I pick up a little grammar from her myself!”

  “You can both make light of it,” said the girl, too troubled to smile at their words, “but I really think that killing would be more merciful to Jerry!”

  “So do I,” answered Destry.

  It shocked the others to a full pause, but Destry went on: “There ain’t much pain in a forty-five calibre bullet tappin’ on your forehead and askin’ your life to come outdoors and play. I used often to figger how easy dyin’ was, when I was in prison. Ten years is a long time!”

  They listened to him, grimly enchanted.

  “It was only six,” said the Colonel.

  “Time has a taste to it,” said Destry. “Like the ozone that comes from electricity, sometimes, and sometimes like the ozone that the pine trees make. But time has a taste, and it was flavored with iron for me. What good was the six years? I thought it’d be ten, of course. I’ve seen seconds, Charlie, that didn’t tick on a watch, but that was counted off by pickin’ at my nerves—thrum, thrum!—like a banjo, d’you see?”