Blue Kingdom

by Max Brand

  The colonel grew absent of eye and mind. Suddenly he said: “Pete, take Charlie and Joe. Take an extra set of hosses along, too. Ride like fury. It’s only two mile’ to Chaffey’s place, and, if you can’t get there in five minutes, you lose your jobs with me. Get that worthless, no-account, set-in-the-sun Carrie Dunmore, and bring him here.”

  The foreman looked anxious. “That’s only three of us, sir,” he said.

  “Suppose there are only three?” roared the colonel. “Is he a grizzly bear or a mountain lion? Besides, ain’t he drunk, by the report of that wo’thless Sam Parker? Go get that man. Rope him, tie him up, and bring him here. I’ll make him ride, confound him!”

  Pete Logan departed at once. Along the fence, he picked up Charlie and Joe—seasoned cowhands—and told them what was wanted. They listened with long faces.

  “Why don’t you ask me to go on an’ pull the teeth of a live buzz saw?” asked Charlie plaintively.

  “It ain’t a question of wantin’ or askin’,” said the foreman. “It’s a question of gettin’ and doin’. The old man is nutty, he’s so mad. He wants Carrie Dunmore.”

  “For a watch charm, maybe,” Joe said with delicate sarcasm.

  But they rounded up an extra horse and started at once on a dead run. In the specified five minutes their puffing, dripping horses halted at the roadside place of Chaffey.

  Sounds of mirth issued from within, and the foreman risked a spy glance through the window before entering. He returned, cursing: “There’s four of the best damn’ cowpunchers in Texas in there, and they’re all hangin’ around watchin’ Carrie juggle knives. It depends on how lubricated those gents are, what luck we have. Joe, you’re a neat hand with a rope. I’ll go in and get his attention . . . if I can. When I get in, you daub a rope onto him. Charlie, you stand by to help in any direction you might be needed.”

  So, determined, grim-faced, they advanced through the door into the place, and there they found five cowboys stamping on the floor and singing a thundering herd song, while Chaffey himself, behind the bar, smote the varnished surface with the flat of his pudgy white hand in time with the music.

  All this accompaniment was for the benefit of a large young man who was dancing a jig with uncertain and fumbling feet, laughing at his own clumsiness, but while he danced his hands were seriously occupied. On the bar were laid nine or ten knives—hunting knives and big Bowie knives. Of these he had taken three and was juggling them into the air as he danced. As the newcomers entered, he greeted them with an Indian yell and added a fourth knife to the three that were in the air. This complicated his performance. What with the stumbling feet and the flight of four knives, it seemed that at any moment he might blunder under the heavy, descending point of one of the weapons. Indeed, he seemed to be drawing his head from side to side to escape their fall.

  “We’d better stop this,” said Charlie. “He’ll be carving with one of these Bowies, before long.”

  “They’re gonna stop you, Carrie!” yelled one of the audience.

  Carrie answered with wild laughter, and actually turned his handsome head for a fraction of an instant toward the trio. Yet he managed to keep the knives flowing upward without an interruption, yelling: “You there, Pete Logan . . . you line up ag’in’ the wall, ol’ hoss, line up there with your hands over your head, or I’ll split you right in two!”

  Pete Logan hesitated, but he did not hesitate long. The wild light in the juggler’s eye convinced him that there was a real danger, and back he went to the wall and stretched his arms above his head, only growling as he did so: “I knew that we’d land in the mud, Joe.”

  The chorus of five liquor-ridden cowpunchers grew louder, until it thundered, while Carrick Dunmore, still laughing, still reeling, flung a knife that stuck, humming, in the wood half an inch from Logan’s right ear.

  “Hey!” yelled Logan. “Look out, you’ll murder me!”

  “If you budge ag’in, old hoss, I will!” shouted Carrick Dunmore, and suddenly the knives flowed brightly from the flat of his hands—the four he had in the air and the others from the edge of the bar behind him. With them, he outlined the head of the foreman, who remained rigid with horror as, with shock after shock, the murderous steel flew home into the wall and hedged his head about in a close circle.

  All the time the song of the cowpunchers thundered, and the knives flowed in beat with the song. When the last knife was thrown, however, enormous laughter swallowed all other sound.

  Then: “Step out, Pete, and look at your picture drawed on the wall, there,” ordered Dunmore.

  Pete stepped out and nodded to Charlie, and that worthy instantly had his rope over the shoulders of Carrick Dunmore. It happened with wonderful speed and unison of effort. While the five inebriated ’punchers were still helpless with excess of mirth, three pairs of hands were applied to the neck of the lariat, and Carrick Dunmore was yanked from his feet, dragged over the floor, and out the door, which was slammed and locked behind them.

  “Hey!” shouted Dunmore. “You poor, pudding-headed. . . .” Then laughter seized him again and shook him helpless.

  Similar roars still bellowed from the saloon to tell of the hysterically weak men within. The trio, still grim enough and frightened enough, grappled Dunmore. His body was utterly relaxed, but it was not soft. It was loose, with the looseness of supple steel cables as they heaved him into a saddle, and then lashed his feet together beneath the belly of the horse.

  Still he laughed as they started down the road. He reeled heavily from side to side. Only the lashings that gripped his feet seemed able to keep him in place, but still with inexhaustible laughter he roared and wept for joy at his own jest, as they thundered along, four men now, and three of them as proud of this exploit as though they had seized a robber chief from the midst of his band and carried him off to the power of the law.

  So it was that they galloped onto the field of the rodeo, where the bucking contest still was in progress, although drawing toward a close, for the sun was sloping far to the west, and the dust that whirled up from the riding field floated, golden in the air. As they came, they could hear the bawling of an angry cow pony, and the whooping of an exultant and equally fierce rider.

  “One of them center-fire Californians ag’in,” said the foreman, “but maybe we can do something ag’in’ ’em now. Where’s something to sober up this here Carrie Dunmore?”

  They found a bucket of water and dashed it over him, and, as he emerged from it, spluttering, but still laughing with inextinguishable good nature, they led him to the judges and demanded his right to ride.

  The judges regarded the unsteady newcomer with interest. “They’s only two horses left to ride,” they said. “One of them is for Tom Bizbee. The other is the colonel’s mare. Would you like to try her, Dunmore?”

  “I al’ays loved the ladies,” said Carrick Dunmore. “Lemme see this pretty girl?”

  They led him eagerly across the field to visit Excuse Me for the first time.

  THREE

  Miss Furneaux went straight to the judges. There she looked them calmly in the eye and said: “That big young man is going to try to ride the colonel’s pet roan, and she’ll kill him. Do you realize that?”

  “He’s a mighty good rider, ma’am,” was the first answer.

  “Good? He’s a drunken rider, just now.”

  “Miss Furneaux, a man with too much liquor in him is rarely hurt, except with a bullet! Let him alone. Carrie will come out all right. There goes Bizbee, by the way, and he’s caught a hummer!”

  Tom Bizbee was a serious young man who would not have been afraid of climbing the side of a thunderbolt and sitting on its back, stirrups or no stirrups. He rode the gray mustang that had fallen to his lot bravely and well to the very center of the bucking grounds, but there the gray rose, as it were, and dissolved like a skyrocket into a tangle of head, tail, legs, and Tom Bizbee.

  From this explosion the mustang dropped lightly down, and Tom Bizbee fell in another
place, and fell not to rise again. He stretched flat on his back, with his arms thrown wide. Spinning like a top, the gray horse whirled to savage him!

  It was too sudden for thought, too horrible for expectation. The time for succor was some fifth part of a second before those steel-clad hoofs would smash in the breastbone, or shatter the face and skull of poor Bizbee. But with the yell of distress that arose mingled the sharp, hoarse bark of a revolver.

  The gray mustang lurched up on his hind legs, wavered in the air, as though about to drop on the fallen man, and then crashed backward, dead.

  “What a wonderful shot!” said Elizabeth Furneaux.

  “Him that fired it was the same drunk cowpuncher!” said a judge.

  She stared. The crowd was flooding onto the field and examining the wound—a bullet hole through the head of the gray! But Carrick Dunmore was gripping the bars and looking through them at the mare within.

  “Who is he? What’s his name?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Him? That’s Carrick Dunmore, that. . . .”

  “Carrick Dunmore? Great heavens!” she exclaimed, and changed color. Her horse moved off, and she seemed too stunned to handle the reins and check him in place.

  “What’s the matter with her? What’s Carrick Dunmore in her life?” muttered one of the judges.

  “Why, I never thought of it before now. But wasn’t her ma’s name Dunmore?”

  “Hey! Then maybe they’re related in some way?”

  “Why, maybe! What’ll Carrie do? Ride the dappled chestnut?”

  “Oh, he might try. But no man’s son’s gonna ride that mare, my boy.”

  Carrick Dunmore was still at the bars, considering Excuse Me. “What’s the breeding of this here mare, Colonel?” he asked.

  “Well, what’d you guess, Carrie?”

  “I’d guess she was sired by a streak of lightnin’ out of a black nor’west blizzard, Colonel.”

  The colonel laughed.

  “Don’t look like a man would be none at home with her,” remarked the thoughtful Carrick Dunmore.

  “Who’d you expect to be easy with her, Carrie?” went on the colonel, enjoying this conversation.

  “Why, a couple of well-growed grizzly bears might handle her . . . or a pack of mountain lions might have some chance, if she didn’t kick out their hind sights.”

  “Dunmore,” said one of the judges, coming up, “she’s the last horse that hasn’t been ridden, or tried. Do you want her, or do you stay out of this?”

  “If they was fifty hosses here in these here pens,” said Carrick Dunmore, “and, if I was to have the first choice, I wouldn’t pick nothin’ but her. Where’s all these cowboys? Ain’t they got an eye in their heads? Payin’ all that attention to common mutts when they’s a thoroughbred queen of Spain standin’ here to take ’em in one jump all the way to glory? Lead out beautiful. I wanna be interduced.”

  Six men, busily, cautiously laboring, snubbed her head short against a post, then worked the blanket and saddle onto her velvet back. She did not struggle greatly. Now and again there would be a ripple through the shoulder muscles, or a bending of the back upward. But like one that knows that the time has not yet come to strike, she waited.

  “She’s pretty quiet, ain’t she?” said the colonel.

  “Aw, she’s quiet,” said Dunmore. “She’s about as quiet, it seems to me, as a blast of powder before the fire gets to it. I bet that she’s got wings.”

  They led her out, blindfolded, and Carrick Dunmore mounted. He was still far from recovered from the fumes of drink. His foot twice missed the stirrup, and he seemed to need the help of many hands to heave into the saddle. But once he was fitted into it, he squeezed the mare with his knees, and she grunted at the enormous pressure.

  Elizabeth Furneaux, lingering near, watched this performance with a pale face and with eyes that burned with a peculiar interest. Then she turned her horse and deliberately rode away from the grounds, only stopping to speak for a moment to the colonel. Behind her arose a wild whoop from the crowd, and, looking back, she could see Excuse Me black against the sun, with the hat of her rider batting her ears, and the swinging legs of him scratching her fore and aft. She waited to see no more, but with a shudder put her horse into a canter and hastened home.

  In the meantime, Excuse Me showed her worth. Her exhibitions had been limited affairs in every sense before this. It was like putting a heavyweight champion against an amateur feather, to see her entertaining the best of cowpunchers who had come her way, but now she had met a master of the craft, and she did all that a horse could do. She fished for the sun and, landing, strove to jam her forehoofs to the heart of the earth. But the earth was furnished with springs, as it were, and cast her up again into the air. She was like a hawk that, missing its prey as it stoops, leaps with the bracing of its wings almost to the same vantage point and so shoots down again and again as rook or dove hurries for the shelter of the woods.

  So Excuse Me went across the field. Her rider lost his right stirrup at the second jump—got it at the third—lost both stirrups at the fourth—found them again at the next. He circled the field, sometimes with the sun showing between him and the saddle, but still in his place. It was dreadful work. For Excuse Me threw in sudden variations, here and there, sometimes spinning in a circle with wonderful speed, the most deadly of all the tricks of a bucking horse. Sometimes she fenced-rowed for a bit, her hoofs flickering in a jigsaw frame upon the ground.

  As that first slow circle was completed, men saw that blood was streaming from the nose of Carrick Dunmore.

  “But he’s got her licked,” they told one another.

  Fiercely they said it, whispering, gripping the rails of the barrier, while they set their teeth hard, and hoped.

  The six strangers, who had done so well, were gathered in one group, watching very thoughtfully, not with malicious eyes, but with a profound appreciation, such as one consummate artist yields to the work of another, even when it’s entered in competition with his own.

  Twice around the pair worked. Then, as the mare was covered with flecks and streaks of foam and markings of blood where the cruel spurs had rasped her skin, men could see, also, that the face of Dunmore was deadly pale, his mouth opened, his eyes empty.

  “By gravy,” cried the colonel, “has she got him?”

  “Nobody ever rode better,” said Pete Logan, at his side. “Good ol’ Carrie. Ride her, boy! Bust her! Hey, there. . . .”

  Excuse Me had flicked over backward to the earth, her rider swerving sideways from the saddle. She rolled and pitched her hoofs, reaching her head about violently to tear the leg of Dunmore. But a fist of leaden weight smote Excuse Me upon the muzzle, and, as Dunmore settled into the saddle, she skyrocketed, twisting over in mid-air, and so went crashing down upon her back.

  Dunmore, cast from the saddle, slowly crawled to his knees, and the mare lay for an instant still, also, then twisted over and pawed her way up to stand. Dunmore would have risen, but he could not. His legs seemed paralyzed, but he was seen to draw himself upon his strong hands toward the mare, and, as she lurched up, he reached for a stirrup leather and raised himself by a grappled saddle horn, and so, as she lurched to stand, she swayed him up with her. Men saw him reach back with his right hand and drag his right leg over the cantle. It flopped down helplessly and dangled, regardless of the stirrup, and a groan of sympathy and disappointment came from the watching crowd.

  The very next fling of the mare would surely throw him. But Excuse Me flung no more. She stood for a while, with hanging head and with legs spread far apart. The reins hung idly down.

  “Beat,” said all that crowd in a single voice. Although so many sounds were in it, it was not a loud voice, but as though each man and woman were announcing to himself a miracle.

  Then Dunmore slipped still farther forward. His arms hung over the neck of the mare, and, with him in that position, loosely sagging toward the ground, Excuse Me walked quietly back to her pen and entered it veritabl
y like one returned after an arduous and trying journey.

  They took Dunmore from her and stretched him along the ground. A doctor kneeled by him, and listened to his heart, to his breathing. Then he touched him here and there with a needle and watched the reactions of the nerves and the muscles. Then he stood up.

  “I’m very glad to say that there’s nothing serious,” he said. “Only a temporary paralysis of the legs after the fall. And one other remarkable fact, my friends. This man is unconscious now from the fall. And . . . he must have been unconscious when he crawled back to the mare and mounted her with his hands alone.”

  The doctor went away. He said to his wife as they climbed into their buggy: “Rather a pity that he wasn’t killed. It would have been a fine ending for a perfectly worthless life.”

  FOUR

  From his long trance Carrick Dunmore wakened in a large, sunny room. His stunned brain had slipped into a deep sleep, and so he had spent a round of the clock and more. It was the prime of the day, and the sun flowed brilliantly through the lofty windows. It was an old-fashioned house. By the big, square room and the time-thinned carpet on the floor, he could guess the face of the house on the outside. It would be of wood, with a romantic wooden lantern built up from the center, and a good deal of gingerbread work about the eaves. It was one of those places made to look like a castle on the outside and a little like a palace within.

  Nevertheless, Carrick was impressed and wondered how he had gotten here. But his brain refused to work hard on any subject. He lay back on his pillow and contentedly, lazily, watched the quiver of the shadows of the lace curtain falling upon the opposite wall. He noticed that the wallpaper was ragged, and there were water stains that proved that the roof had not been kept in very good repair. But chiefly he occupied himself with a painting that was on the wall facing his bed. It showed a town of twisted streets and red-tiled roofs swarming up the side of a hill; terraced olive orchards lay on either side like puffs of dissolving smoke, and in the sky was eternal sunshine and eternal peace.