Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US, page 356
Morgan Valentine stirred in his chair.
“She’s got the whole Norman clan worked up now. They’ll all be laying for Charlie. That’s the kind they are. Hunt like wolves in a pack. And they’ll pull down Charlie — and maybe Louis. And you’ll stand by and see it all — and do nothing!”
He expected her to break into tears at this point. But when her eyes remained dry, he moistened his lips and spoke.
“What d’you want me to do, Mother?”
“Send her away!”
“Send Mary away? Mother, she’s the last living thing that can remind me of John. I can’t turn her out. She ain’t fit to be sent away. She’s got to have them near her that love her, Mother.”
“Men? She’ll always have them.”
“Now you ain’t playing fair and square. You know what I mean.”
“You don’t have to send her away alone. Send her to her sister in Chicago. Lord knows she’s asked to have Mary often enough. She’ll let her study music, or something.”
She left her chair and slipped to her knees before Morgan Valentine.
“Don’t do that, Mother. Get up, won’t you?”
“Don’t you see what I want, Morgan? I want back all the things that Mary has stole from me — Charlie and Louis and Liz and — you!”
“Get up, Mother. It ain’t right you should kneel to me!”
“But here’s where I stay because I’m begging you for my happiness and for my boys and my girl, Morgan. Will you answer me?”
He looked down at her with a gray face, and she saw for the first time how deeply this cold man loved the girl. The pain of it made her cry out.
“In all the time we been married, it’s the first thing I’ve asked you, Morgan!”
“Stand up,” said Morgan Valentine. “I’ll send Mary away!”
CHAPTER 3
THE LAW OF compensation works in this manner: those who give their hearts to few things give in those cases wholly and without reserve. The life of Morgan Valentine had been a smooth-flowing river until the death of his brother; that blow aged him ten years. From that day until this it seemed to him that his life had been a blank, and now another blow was to fall. For if the girl left him, she left him forever. The city would swallow her — the city and her new life. He might see her again once or twice, but after the parting he would be dead to her and she would be dead to him. He set his teeth over the pain and smiled into the face of his wife. He raised her gently to her feet, and she put her hands timidly imploring upon his shoulders.
“Will you take it to heart a whole pile, Morgan?”
“It’s for the good of all of us, Mother. I’ve seen that for some time. You see, I been looking on Mary as a girl all these days, and here all at once she turns the corner on me, and I see that she’s a full-grown woman. It kind of beats me. But — I guess she’s got to go. This ain’t no sort of a country for her. Back where men don’t wear guns and where they don’t do more’n raise their eyebrows when they get real mad — that’s the place for Mary to do her campaigning. But she’ll be turning these parts around here into a regular battlefield if she stays.”
Mrs. Valentine caught her breath with joy.
“I hoped you’d be reasonable like this, Morg,” she murmured. “But then ag’in I was afraid you’d get all gray in the face, maybe, the way you did when—”
“Well?”
“When John died.”
“Mary ain’t dying.”
“Of course not. And it’s for the best. It ain’t the first time she’s started trouble, and you know it. There was the boys of old Jack White; they got into a fight because Mary smiled at Billy one week and at young Jack the next. Might have been a death if their father hadn’t found them, it’s said. Then there was ‘Bud’ Akin who?”
“Hush, Mother. You’re getting all excited. Besides, you ought to be asleep. Now you go back to bed and stop worrying.” He stopped. The rattle of galloping horses had topped the hill and was rushing down toward the house. The cavalcade swept near.
“Maybe more trouble!” cried the poor woman, clasping her hands.
But as the riders poured past the house, a chorus of voices and laughter rose.
“That’s Charlie and Louis and Liz,” cried the mother, recognizing all three voices in the chorus.
“And Mary,” said Valentine.
“Her, too,” she added shortly, and sent a glance at her husband.
The horses were put up; the voices grew out again; they were racing for the house; a shrill peal of laughter; a clatter on the steps — the door flew open and a girl sprang in. A flash of black hair and eyes and the flushed face, and then laughter.
“You tripped me, Mary!”
“But I got here first,” she was crying in triumph as a burly youth crowded through the doorway; and behind him his brother and sister were coming.
“Why, Mother — you up so late?” asked Charlie.
And the wonder of this strange event made the four faces of the young people grow sober.
“Now, Mother?” cautioned Morgan Valentine.
“Charlie!” she broke out. “What you been doing? What you been doing?”
He went to her and tried to take her in his big arms, but she fended him off and kept her head back to search his face.
“Some hound has been here talking,” he muttered.
“It was no worse’n he said?” she queried. “You only shot him in the arm?”
“It was only a scratch,” said Charlie. “He won’t know he was touched in a couple of days.”
“And, oh, Uncle Morgan!” cried Mary Valentine, taking his hand in one of hers and waving to big Charlie. “You’d have been proud if you’d seen him! I’m so proud of him. Joe Norman insulted me and Charlie — oh, Charlie, you’re a man!”
She turned full upon Charlie as she spoke, with such joy shining from her face that the boy crimsoned with happiness.
“It wasn’t nothing, Mary. Don’t make me feel foolish,” he stammered; and it was plain to be seen that he would venture a thousand times more for her sake. And in the background was his brother Louis, with a shadow on his face. As if he, too, would have been gladly a part of this ceremony of rejoicing and was determining to seize the first opportunity that came his way to strike a blow for the sake of Mary. But the voice of the mother cut in, cold and small, and withered all the happiness at the root.
“Mary Valentine,” she said, “it’s you that’s been drawing my boy into peril. It’s you!”
“Aunt Maude!” cried the girl, and ran to her; but she stopped in the act of taking her hands.
“Have I deserved it of you, Mary?” whispered the older woman. “Ain’t I tried to be kind to you and is this the way you pay me back — making murderers out of my sons?”
“Mother!” cried Charlie. “I won’t stand you talking like that! She didn’t.”
“You see?” said Mrs. Valentine sadly, turning to her husband.
“Charlie, you shut your mouth and keep still,” said Morgan Valentine sternly. “Ain’t you got manners with your own mother? Liz, take your mother up to bed.”
The girl was taller than Mary by an inch or more and strongly built — as blonde a beauty as Mary was dark — yet when she went to her mother, she turned a glance of appeal upon her cousin, as though asking for direction. Mary slipped between her aunt and the door to which Elizabeth was leading her.
“If ever you think hard of me, Aunt Maude,” she said, “I want you to tell me what it’s about. And if ever I’ve hurt you or done you wrong, I’ll go down on my knees and beg you to forgive me! Tell me now, while your heart’s hot with it!”
For a moment words trembled on the lips of Mrs. Valentine, but, looking past Mary, she saw the face of her husband, bowed her head, and hurried from the room.
“Go to bed,” said Morgan to his two sons. And they trooped out in silence, casting back frightened glances, not at their father, but at Mary.
She waved a smiling, careless good night to them, but the moment they were gone, her bravado vanished. She ran to her uncle and caught one of his burly hands in both of hers.
“What have I done?” she whispered. “Oh, what have I done?”
“Speaking personal,” he answered, “I’m hanged if I know. Sit down, and we’ll talk about it.”
They sat down; she was still holding his hand, and though he made a faint effort to draw it away, she kept it strongly in her own.
“Aunt Maude — looked — as though — she hated me!”
“Stuff!”
“But she looked straight into my eyes; and women have a way of understanding other women, Uncle Morgan!”
“Ah, girl, there’s the trouble; you’re a woman now.”
“Do you mean that I’ve changed?”
“I dunno how to put it, Mary.”
She cried out softly: “Do you think that I’ve changed?”
“I knew your father before you.”
A little silence fell between them in which both of them asked many questions and were answered. At length the rancher began speaking again, slowly.
“If you was a man, Mary, you’d be a fine man. But you ain’t a man.”
She waited.
“You’re about nine tenths woman, I guess, with just enough man in you for spice.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Instead of spice I might say deviltry.”
“Oh!”
“I’ve got worse things than this to say to you. When you were a girl, Mary, I took all your mischief for granted.”
“Yes, I’ve been very bad.”
“Not bad. But you were always hunting for action. Same’s a boy does. You got into lots of scrapes, but you come out ag’in just the way a boy does. But all at once you changed. You come pop out of a door one day, and you weren’t a girl any more; you were a woman. That was when things started to pop. You see, nobody understands a woman.”
“Except you, Uncle Morgan.”
“Kindly leave me out. I don’t know a thing about ’em.”
“But you know everything about me.”
“Not a thing, hardly. For instance, I don’t know whether you just can’t help making eyes at young gents, or whether you do it on purpose.”
“Is that the cause of all the trouble?”
She dropped his hand.
“You see it’s the way I told you. I don’t know a thing about you.”
“Do you believe what people say?”
“But tell me, aren’t they right?”
She gasped.
“I thought so. You’re turned into a maneater, Mary.”
“I think you’re making fun of me.”
“Me? Never!”
“It’s this way: I don’t mean any harm. But when I see some boy I’ve never known very well, I just can’t help beginning to wonder about him. What is he inside? Maybe he has a touch of the fire; I always keep hoping that!”
“What fire?”
“I — I don’t know.”
“Well, go on.”
“Maybe I’ve met him at a dance. The music is in my head. He dances well. He doesn’t talk much. My imagination begins to work on him. All at once he dawns on me — a new picture — he’s strong, brave, gentle, clever — and has the spark of fire. I begin to burn with it. I’m happy.” She dropped her chin upon her knuckles and stared gloomily into the distance. “And that’s all I can say about it.”
“But mostly you tell him that he’s making you happy?”
“Mostly.”
“And then what does the man do?”
“Mostly he says that I’ve made him happy, too. Sometimes they start being foolish. They want to sit in a corner and hold my hand. I don’t like that. Or if we walk out of the hall they?” She shuddered. “Why do men want to put their arms around a girl when they’re happy?”
“What do you expect them to do?”
“Why — talk — or be silent — and—”
“Well?”
“I don’t know. But mostly they do something that makes me despise them before the evening’s over. Or if they don’t, then I think about them until the next time we meet. And then — everything pops into thin air. They always seem different. You understand?”
“Maybe. It’s just what I thought.”
“Am I bad, Uncle Morgan?”
“No, but you need room, honey. I’m going to send you away to a big city.”
“You — send — I won’t go. It’s Aunt Maude! She’s never liked me!”
“Hush, girl!”
She saw suddenly that his hand was trembling, and the sight of his grief struck her cold with awe.
“In some city,” he went on slowly, “you’ll see crowds of clean young fellows. Maybe you’ll get over this; or maybe you’ll find a man that’s worthy of you. But there ain’t any round here. And I know them all. Why, rather than have you marry one of these unshaven, thickheaded fellows, I’d shoot the man, first! I want you — to marry — a gentleman.”
He spoke this last slowly, hunting for the words. She sat with her head bowed. Then she looked up to him.
“You’ll do what I want you to do, Mary—”
She made a little gesture. He could not tell whether it meant yes or no, and all the while there was a glimmer in her eyes like the changing colors of watered silk.
CHAPTER 4
BUT TWO DAYS later Morgan Valentine bought a ticket to Chicago and made his reservations; Mary had made up her mind apparently, though not half a dozen words had been spoken on the subject of her departure since that first night. But the next day she was talking of Chicago as though all her life had been spent there, and this experience in the mountain desert was only an excursion off her beaten trails.
“Between you and me, Uncle Morgan,” she said, “why not New York?”
This, for some reason, had rather staggered him. But now that the ticket was bought — dated ahead several days — and the step irremediably taken, he was easier. He made a short stay in Salt Springs that day. After he had the ticket in his wallet, he went to the bank and drew out the cash for his monthly payroll. His cowpunchers were numerous as befitted the keeping of his big range, but moreover there were the hired men who worked the cultivable ground, and in the northern part of his domain — the territory of his dead brother — there was a small logging outfit. Altogether, he had some thirty men to pay off each month, and the payroll ran around sixteen hundred dollars. He got it all in gold coin, and it made a heavy little canvas sack — fifteen pounds, or so. It was three in the afternoon before his buckskins jogged out of Salt Springs on the back trail of the twenty-five-mile trip, and though the going was fairly smooth most of the way, it would be dark before he arrived.
That, however, was a small worry to him. The two geldings were sure-footed as goats; and, given their own sweet way and a shambling trot, they could take the buckboard home in rain or shine, through the night and the rocks. They had done it before, so now Morgan Valentine bunched his duster around his shoulders with a shrug, settled back into the right-hand corner of the big seat, and let the reins hang idly.
An hour and seven miles dropped behind him, and still the buckskins were jolting steadily on. The suddenness of their stopping jerked him through a thousand miles of dreams back to the cold facts of earth. The buckskins had their heads high. And just before them was a horseman with a revolver pointing between the geldings and straight at the head of Valentine.
He put up his hands with the utmost unconcern.
“Thanks,” said the stranger. “If you’ve got any coin handy about you, you might throw it this way.”
There was deprecatory gentleness in this — the same tone of embarrassment which one uses when one asks a stranger for a match, and it made the rancher regard the holdup artist with more attention. The man sat a down-headed roan, an ugly brute which looked undersized in comparison with the bandit’s length of limb; for he was a tall man, with formidable shoulders. He had long arms, also, which appeared extremely capable; and the heavy Colt was poised lightly as a feather and firmly as a rock.
He seemed indiscriminately somewhere between thirty and forty and might have been at either end of this limit. What little hair appeared beneath his sombrero was sunburned and dusted to a pale-gray brown. He had one of those lean, long faces which are thin through the cheeks and wide through the cheekbones and the jaw. He was far from good-looking; and a very wide mouth and a highly arched nose which showed that he clearly belonged in the predatory type of mankind, made up a further debit on the side of beauty. To complete the impression, his eyes were an uninteresting but very intelligent gray. In fact, one might say that the color of this man was gray; for the rest, he keenly impressed Morgan Valentine as being about equal portions of sinew and sinew- hard muscle.
“I suppose,” said Morgan, “that you want my gun first?”
“I’m getting old, pardner,” admitted the other. “I’m forgetting my A B C’s. But?”
The last word was so explosive that Valentine paused with his hand on the way down to his weapon.
“But,” continued the stranger, “guns are things that I most generally like to take for myself. Thank you just the same.”
“As you please.”
He stood up and turned, his hands well above his shoulders, while the revolver was removed from his holster.
“Which I’m acting like a fool amachoor,” the bandit was saying apologetically, “and pretty soon you’ll begin to be ashamed of being robbed.”
He skidded the weapon into the back part of the buckboard.
“Now you can sit down ag’in, pardner.”
Valentine accepted the invitation. At close hand, he found that the stranger lived fully up to his first impression. He was, indeed, a grim-faced fellow. Only his voice, which was of the most exquisite and tender softness, counteracted the general effect.
“Now, if you’ll gimme your kind attention just a minute, sir,” went on the tall man, “I want to explain that holding a gun is plumb tiring to a gent of my nature that hates work. So I’m going to put it back in the leather. But here and there I’ve met curious gents that wanted to see just how quick that gun could come out of its house ag’in and say how’d you do. So they’ve let me take a gun off their hip, and then they’ve sprung a surprise by fetching out some little token of affection from under a coat or a shirt — say a knife, or a derringer. And them that have tried my gun have most generally found it right there on the job talking business.”
