Red Fire

by Max Brand

  He now covered Bobbie with a saddle blanket and moistened his lips with a dram of brandy from his pocket flask. Bobbie opened his eyes again, sighed, and looked with a faint smile upon his master. The white man took advantage of this glimmer of returning consciousness to make a desperate appeal.

  “You’re not nearly gone, partner,” he said. “Keep on fighting, Bobbie. Don’t let it get you. Here we are, shoulder to shoulder, fighting the same fight. Can it beat the two of us when we are making a hard fight, old man? Good old Bobbie. Don’t answer me with a word. Just lift the forefinger of your hand to let me know.”

  “Yes, sir,” whispered Bobbie, and his smile broadened to an ecstasy of happiness. Then his smile died, and his eyes closed once more, while his face wrinkled in a spasm of pain.

  “He’s dead!” gasped Tom Farnsworth. He looked wildly about him, but what was there he could do? He had felt, up to this point, that he had been fighting valiantly and successfully against death. He had felt that he was almost as strong as death itself in this great battle. But now there was no longer anything with which he could employ his hands. He could only sit and look about him at the greatness and the blackness of the night and up the brawny sides of the mountain, so utterly indifferent to this trifling human misery. There was nothing he could do except to throw more wood upon the fire. That light might prove a beacon that would bring in the hunters upon them both. But he desired nothing more. Let them come, and he might find among them a doctor who could be of direct help in this emergency.

  He started up and threw more fuel on the blaze. The pitchy needles cast towering masses of red fire high into the air. The wood itself caught and flared grandly. Then, troubled with a new thought, he turned and knelt beside Bobbie to shield his eyes from the play and shaking of the columns of light. Once the Negro opened his eyes and looked up calmly with no dimness of faded strength.

  “Bobbie,” whispered the master, “will you forgive me, my friend?”

  Before even an assent of expression could cross the face of Bobbie, the life had died in his eyes once more, and he passed into an utter faint. Farnsworth was furiously at work over him in a trice. There was another taste of brandy and water, then chafing of the Negro’s temples—not that he really expected that this would help, but because he must either do something, or else go mad with the suspense.

  As he worked, he felt barriers broken down, one by one, in his heart. He began to remember a thousand instances of cruelty on his part and of bitter neglect of Bobbie. He began to recall the gentle dignity of Bobbie in all the years of service that the Negro had poured out like a slave in service to the Farnsworth family. And then shame, grief, the deepest remorse for what he had done, and what he had been, swept over him. He looked upon the thing that he had been yesterday with a sort of horror, as though these had been the doings of strangers, and unworthy strangers at that. That he could have allowed this worthy fellow to ride away, carrying the burden and the danger of a charge of murder on his shoulders, was now incomprehensible, though then he had no more than shrugged his shoulders and called Bobbie a fool to himself.

  When the doors of self-knowledge are once opened, we are too apt to see far deeper into our souls than we had intended or ever guessed. He saw a great deal about himself in the first glance, and nearly everything was damning. His college career, of whose dissipations he had been rather proud, he now looked back upon as a wasted season of foolishness in which he had prided himself merely because of the difference that had existed between himself and other people. Such were some of the reflections of Tom Farnsworth. But worse than this and coming nearer to the present, he could now see that the reason Deborah Kinkaid had been so attractive to him was simply because she had refused to be awed by his presence. She had kept him at arm’s length, and for that reason she had at once seemed to him far pleasanter than any girl he had seen. He thought of this grimly, then with something of a shudder. Suppose that he had married her and awakened later on? Yet it was presumptuous to suppose that she would even have considered accepting him as a husband. But to learn all these things he had had to bring poor Bobbie to the gate of death. The second man within a few days. He sat up straight as the thought drove home in him. Was the very instinct of murder in him, then?

  That thought faded into a reality of forms that stood before him. One—two—three—sneaking up toward him, with guns in their hands. He turned his head another way. There were twenty men circling in upon him. He raised his hand.

  “Any one of you fellows a doctor?” he asked.

  Then they came hurrying in. They looked at him. They looked at Bobbie. Then they cursed softly, eyeing him as though he were a leper.

  “You did this, Farnsworth?” asked one gray-headed man with a young face. “I thought that Bobbie was your servant?”

  “Friends,” said Farnsworth, “I came here to meet Bobbie, and, while we were looking over a gun, it exploded.”

  He saw faint smiles of contempt and derision in their faces. In the old days—that is to say, an hour before that—he would have scoffed at such expressions from the boors of the cattle range. But now every man was a man, no matter what his breeding or his manners. And their opinions stung him like so many whips. A doctor was brought forward. He was a veterinary in practice, but much more a rancher. He had some knowledge of anatomy, and his hands had taken care of scores of wounded men in his day. Therefore, he was soon beside the unconscious figure of Bobbie. While he worked to give an opinion of the nature of the hurt, the others stood around and rolled their cigarettes. They made few comments, but those were to the point. One man, noting the long, rounded, smooth-muscled arm of the Negro, swore that he could now understand why Bobbie had handled grown cowpunchers as though they were children. Another, staring at the unconscious face of the wounded man, said that there was only one black thing about him, and that was his skin.

  “What’s more,” said the cowpuncher with the gray hair, “we’d never have taken him except for . . .” He turned with a gesture to Tom and an ugly look to complete his thought.

  The doctor now rose to his feet, dusting his hands together and frowning down at the victim. His eyes were keen. “He’s dead.”

  There was a mutter and a sharp exclamation of pain from Tom Farnsworth, so real, so ringing, that the cowpunchers, who had made up their minds about him, it seemed, now stared at him with a new interest.

  “Dead?” cried Tom.

  “I say he’s dead!” barked the doctor. “Anyways, he ought to be dead. That chunk of lead carved right straight through him. Why he ain’t foaming blood at the mouth I dunno . . . why he ain’t dead right now, I dunno. But here he is, living and calling me the same’s a liar. And if he ain’t dead or dying right this minute, maybe there’s a hope for him. He’s got to be treated plumb careful.”

  “He’ll have all the care in the world!” exclaimed Tom.

  The sheriff yawned. “We got to get him to jail,” he said.

  “For horse stealing?” asked Tom.

  “That’s part.”

  “I’ll pay every man’s claim.”

  “Will you pay the claim of poor young Pattison, dying over to Daggett?”

  “There’s no blame on Bobbie for that.”

  “Are you aiming to tell me my business, young man?” said the sheriff, who like most of the men on the range had heard of the eccentricities of young Farnsworth and greatly disliked all that he knew of the latter.

  “I’ll tell you what Bobbie did,” said Tom. “He took the blame of another man on his shoulders.”

  “That sounds likely. Run his head into a noose for the sake of somebody else, eh?”

  “I mean it, Sheriff.”

  “Look here, Mister Farnsworth”—and those the sheriff called by that formal title could be sure they rested under his disapproval—“your pa is a smart man. I’ve knowed him well and thought a lot of him. But even your pa couldn’t have me swallow such bunk as that. You been to college, Mister Farnsworth, which is an advantage that
I ain’t never had, but I thank my Maker that I can use the few brains He give me better than to believe any yarn like that.”

  “Sheriff,” said Tom, “I can name the man who shot Jack Pattison.”

  “So can everybody west of the Mississippi. It’s Bobbie.”

  “It is not.”

  “Let’s have your guess then, son.”

  The others waited, and the sheriff smiled wisely upon them, and they smiled wisely back upon the sheriff, for it would be pleasant to have this youth with his superior airs brought to time.

  “I did,” said Tom.

  The smiles wavered and then went out, like candles snuffed by a rudely unexpected wind.

  “Are you making a joke out of me, Farnsworth?”

  “It’s the truth, Sheriff. I shot Jack. He’s kept the secret for my sake.”

  “Look here,” muttered the sheriff, “you mean to say that you shot Pattison, and then let your man here ride off with the blame for the killing?”

  It was exquisite agony for Tom, but he swallowed the medicine and felt it burn home in him. “I did,” he answered.

  “I’m a tolerable reasonable man,” said the sheriff, “but I got to admit free and quick that this here plumb beats me. Which I aim to hear you talk some more about, Farnsworth. You let him go, but then you come after him?”

  “I did.”

  “Wanted to change places with him, maybe?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you let well enough alone?”

  “I wanted to get more out of him,” said Tom bitterly, and all at once, as he found in himself the strength to confess, he found the strength, also, to lift his head and look around on those grave, weather-chiseled faces.

  “More than what he’d done?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it, Tom?” asked the sheriff. His gentleness was amazing.

  He’s trying to draw me out, thought Tom. He said aloud: “There was still one more thing that Bobbie could do for me.”

  “And that?”

  “Die, as Pattison was doing, and take my secret away with him.”

  The sheriff gasped. “You admit then . . . ?”

  “Everything,” said Tom.

  “You’re under arrest, Tom!” cried the sheriff. “For the Lord’s sake, man, mind that everything you say now can be used against you.”

  “I mind it very well.”

  “You confess that you shot Jack Pattison?”

  “I do.”

  “That you let Bobbie take the blame of it?”

  “I do.”

  “That you come out here to get rid of the man that had risked his head for you?”

  “I confess it,” groaned Tom.

  “And that, when you met him, you shot him down?”

  “God have mercy on me,” replied Tom solemnly, “as I expect nothing but justice on earth . . . I confess this, too.”

  The silence of the men weighed upon him like lead. He turned desperate eyes upon the wide circle of their faces, and he saw with amazement that they were looking upon him rather with surprise than with horror or anger.

  “Tom,” said the sheriff slowly at last, “dog-gone me if I quite make you out. Being and talking like a white man this hour, how could you have played the skunk one hour back?”

  And that, on the whole, was the general opinion of the entire cattle range. It was freely expressed that day and the next, while Tom Farnsworth was being brought to Daggett to sleep in the jail.

  X

  The news came like a bomb to Daggett. It affected people with one emotion—astonishment. They could not believe that the son of Thomas Farnsworth was guilty of a shooting scrape. When they heard it confirmed, they could not understand how Tom Farnsworth had been induced to confess to his double crime. They heard of other things, also. On the way into town he was not moved to mention his own welfare once, but he was thinking and talking every moment of ways in which the comfort of Bobbie could be increased while he lay on the mountainside. In the first place, he had furnished an ample supply of cash to buy all sorts of provisions. They had secured enough tarpaulins from the cowpunchers to erect a little tent for the wounded Negro. Then the veterinary and two cowpunchers were hired to act as nurses until more aid could be sent out from the town, together with bandages and all manner of medical necessities, for it was beyond question that it would kill Bobbie to move him. So young Farnsworth planned to build a house over him, so to speak, and turn that spot on the mountainside into a little hospital.

  As for his own trial, he refused to speak except to say that he had confessed everything and would confess it again. He felt that he had downed Pattison in a fair fight, and, as for Bobbie, nothing could save Tom if the Negro perished. He wished to have the law executed to the letter upon his person.

  These were the strange sentiments that were expressed by Tom on his way back to Daggett. His father met him at the jail, throwing himself off a foaming horse and rushing into the building in spite of the sheriff.

  “You have disgraced your family and me forever!” he had cried to his son.

  “Farnsworth,” said the sheriff, “you’re wrong. He’s just proved that he’s a credit to you all. By the Lord, Farnsworth, I wish he were my boy.”

  This was much quoted around the streets the next day. Still more repeated was the interview between Bobbie’s grandfather and young Tom the next morning. The ancient Negro had hobbled into the jail, supporting himself on a cane with one hand and fumbling his way along the wall with the other. He had been straight as a string the day before. He was bent as a bow now. He had grown decrepit overnight. When he saw his master’s boy behind the bars, he fell on his knees and burst into pitiful sobbing.

  “Marse Tom! Marse Tom,” groaned the old fellow. “Lawdy, Lawdy! I knowed that Bobbie would be a trouble and a harm to you.”

  “Hush, uncle,” said the prisoner, coming to the bars of his cell. “Bobbie has done more for me than all the rest of the world together could ever have done. He’s taught me what men are.”

  “He’s brought you to ruin, Marse Tom.”

  “Let me tell you what he has done, uncle,” said the other. “He’s taught me that a man who thinks that he’s worthy of being a master is not fit to be even a slave. He taught me that he is a far better man than I am.”

  Tidings of this odd conversation were brought to Deborah Kinkaid, where she labored night and day at the bedside of Jack Pattison. She had made up her mind, at last. Jack was to be her husband, if she could win him back to life. She had told him so, and he was fighting with his whole strength to aid in the battle. The doctor said that it was being won from a reluctant enemy, step by step. She heard that report and turned straightway to the window and looked out at the morning sunlight, glistening on the roofs of Daggett.

  “I half guessed it before,” she murmured, “but only half. I didn’t know he had such a thing in him.”

  And she sighed, but, if it were with a regret, Jack Pattison was never to know. He began to recover rapidly. By that night he was out of danger.

  Still another week passed before word came from the Kiever Mountains that the big Negro was also recovering slowly. All of Daggett came down to give Tom Farnsworth a cheer in the jail. He listened to the noise with amazement, and the sheriff came in to explain.

  “When a man shows that he’s white,” said the sheriff, “all the black things that he’s ever done before are washed away and forgotten. That’s the way with you, Tom. I’m going to bust the law ten ways from Sunday. You’re free this minute. Go outside. Your father is waiting to take you home.”

  Outside, Tom walked into an ovation. He received it with his head bared and bowed, and he rode all the way out to the ranch at his father’s side without answering a word to that fine old gentleman’s exultation.

  “Now,” said Thomas Farnsworth, Sr., “when you have all the fool nonsense worked out of your head, you can settle right down on the ranch and get ready to take charge when I’m ready to step out, whi
ch will be plenty pronto.”

  It was not until the next morning that Tom, Jr. came to make his reply at the breakfast table. He was dressed not for the ranch, but for travel, and he explained this condition at once.

  “Father,” he said to the old man, “I’ve decided that I don’t want the ranch, and that the ranch doesn’t want me.”

  “What the devil sort of talk is this?” roared the rancher.

  “Straight talk.”

  “What do you intend to do, then?”

  “Start with these clothes on my back and fifty dollars in my pocket and see where it takes me. Then buck my own way with my own hands.”

  “You learned that out of some fool book.”

  The son smiled and said no more.

  “You mean,” shouted his father, “that you’re not coming back?”

  “I don’t mean that. I’ll come back when I can tell you something that I’ve done besides spend your money.”

  “The ranch is to go to pot, eh?”

  “You don’t need help, and you know it. If you do, I can give you a proved man to take my place and do better than I could ever have done.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Bobbie.”

  With that the talk was brought to a sudden close. That very day young Tom rode away from his home. He avoided Daggett, simply because he did not want to be run after and congratulated. He felt a warm shame and a weakness in his throat when he thought of the average goodness of human beings who could overlook and forget the harm he had done. He set the head of his horse toward the Kiever Mountains, far north and west, for one last talk with Bobbie. And he wondered, as he went on, what he would find in the big Negro, when he looked on him as a free man and not as a slave, and what would Bobbie find in him, now that he was no longer the master?

  A Lucky Dog

  “A Lucky Dog” first appeared in the October 22, 1927 issue of Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine. That year also saw the publication of eleven other short novels and eight serials, all but three appearing in Western Story Magazine. It is an unusual and charming story infused with Faust’s love for white bull terriers.