Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US, page 616
Poor Ross Hale suddenly recalled the past three years. He remembered how the brilliant young athlete from Huntley School had mysteriously dropped from the football ranks. He remembered certain passages in the letter from the famous coach, Crossley. Well, that was enough.
Slowly he went toward Peter, and, as he walked, it seemed to him that he was making eleven steps, and each step meant a year of torture that he had undergone for the sake of this moment. And each year was now blazing with an incredible brilliance of torture in his soul.
He had failed — he had failed — he had failed! Here was his hero, his breaker of the ranks of men, his demigod, his Peter — a mere shattered wreckage crawling home from a ruined life!
Ross felt no pity for Peter; he felt no pity for himself. Muttering something — he hardly knew what — he calmly stooped and picked up the bags that Peter had brought with him. Then he strode away through the crowd, and that crowd melted away on either side.
The very first man to retreat was Sheriff Will Nast, who was soon to be called upon to make the decision upon the value of each of these two young men. Others went in haste. Voices were raised with a sham cheerfulness. People recalled a thousand-odd bits of business, anything that might furnish them with a decent pretext for turning and hurrying away.
Yet they did not go unnoticed. Here and there a deep, quiet voice spoke, as Peter Hale noticed and recognized one face and then another. He paused to speak with each and to shake hands with each. He had a clever way of shifting all his weight and his right crutch onto the left arm and the iron-braced left leg. Then, balanced a little precariously in this fashion, he had his whole right hand and arm free for shaking hands.
People thought that he looked very white and sick. His eyes were quite hollowed and shadowed. But his voice was perfectly cheerful. He had something to say to each one who he knew, and so he came with a surprising ease through their midst and out to the steps at the back of the platform. By this time, there were few people left. Everyone had started off at full speed. Consequently there were not so many eyes to see the little calamity that followed.
Peter, fumbling for the steps with his crutches, hardly noticed that one of the concrete steps had crumbled away. There was a grunt, the crutches plunged down through thin air, and the heavy body of Peter lurched to the ground and rolled in the dust.
Two or three ran to help him up. But he managed himself with a surprising adroitness. He had not lost the crutches, and now one had a chance to estimate the immense strength that must have belonged to him once. One could believe those old tales of how Peter had crushed through opposing football lines and come at the ball carriers with an incredible, cruel force, merely from seeing the lightness with which his long, powerful arms heaved him up out of the dust and the cinders and balanced him erect upon the crutches again.
His father, looking back, saw the commotion and its cause but did not hurry to the rescue. He felt an insane desire to throw back his head and burst into laughter, and he felt that if he ran to Peter, he would run with laughter that must not be heard.
Besides, there were plenty of others to brush the dirt from Peter’s clothes. He thanked them gravely and calmly. It seemed to Ross Hale that his son had no shame and accepted the ministrations of the others with a pleasant smile, like one accustomed to the pity of the world. Ah, well, after this day the world might just as well end.
Only one thing was amazing — that the blow could have fallen so suddenly. One instant, he was like a king, above the rest of the people of Sumnertown and of Sumner Country. The next instant, there was the cause of his elevation reduced to a horrible mockery of manhood.
When the hulk of a man reached the buckboard, his father stood by. He would not offer help until it was asked, although he wondered how Peter would go about getting into the vehicle. But the moment was not so clumsy as it might have been, for Peter, balancing himself on the iron-braced left leg, put his crutches away in the back of the buckboard. Then he grasped the upper rim of the front wheel tire with one hand and the side of the seat with the other. He gave himself a swing and a lurch, and there he was, sitting in the seat, breathing a little hard with quivering nostrils.
It did not seem like a very great thing, except to one who knew something about the limitations of human strength. But Ross Hale knew. He had been crippled once for nearly eighteen months by the kick of a refractory mule that he was harnessing by the semilight of a lantern, before dawn. And he knew what it means to take the drag of a heavy body upon the arms alone. As Ross gathered up the reins and climbed into the buckboard, he rebuilt for himself the picture of Peter Hale as he might have been — as he once had been.
Once strength of foot had matched the strength of hand. Then he had been a veritable giant, indeed. Oh, to have had him only once come back here that the people of Sumnertown might have seen him in his glory — merely that they might contrast this glory with the wreck that it had come to now. But even that small mercy had not been granted to him, and he had read the disgust in the faces of the people who turned away from that station platform — disgust and pity commingled — than which there are no lower passions.
They would not forget; they had heard the lies for three years by which they were promised stories of the giant’s prowess. This, they now felt, had been merely an artful deception practiced upon them by the father and the son — a stupid piece of artifice to keep from them the irrevocable fact — that the life and the body of Peter Hale were ruined things.
Ross put the whip to the ragged, down-headed team of mustangs and drove them out of the town in a whirl. But they passed over the first mile before he could look at Peter, and then it was only a side glance, which showed him his son sitting with a high head and a glance fixed calmly on the road before them.
Presently Peter said: “This goes even harder with you than I had feared, Father.”
“Harder?” repeated the rancher. “Harder?” And then he laughed, but the sound was choked off and died in the pit of his throat.
“You see,” said the level voice of Peter, “when I saw that you were so dead set on having me do something on the football field... why, after the accident, I talked it over with the coach and the doctor. They agreed that it might be a good thing if I didn’t give you the great disappointment. They agreed, at that time, that there was one chance in ten that my legs might be untangled from the knots that they were in. So I took that chance... like a coward. And having started with fear, in that manner, I’ve never had the nerve to speak to you about it since. I’ve written those misleading letters to you. I’ve even let poor Crossley write lies to you. Bless him Tony for it, though. He meant the best in the world.”
It was an echo from a far and glorified world — in which the son of Ross Hale called the great Crossley — whose picture had appeared in papers a thousand times — by his first name. Ross Hale sat quietly, without answering, and digested the bitter sweetness of this fact through the remainder of the miles that brought them to the ranch house.
CHAPTER VI
AS THEY DROVE alone, with the wheels sagging now and again into a deeper rut and tossing up a whirl of gray dust and a film of white mist, it seemed to the rancher that something else might follow. Something else must follow. There were other explanations owing to him, and Peter would at once attempt to make them. It did not matter that they might be hard to make; Peter would surely make them.
But Peter did not speak. He seemed only to be waiting for his father to open up the conversation again. For his own part, Peter was merely contented to sit there and let the time streak idly on, and the miles jog away toward the home ranch.
The early burst of speed had left the broncos down-headed. Their feet trailed, for the toes of their hind hoofs had been chipped away by constant trailing through the dust of this same road. For how many years had Ross Hale seen them pause to walk up the rises and lurch wearily into a trot again, on the farther slope? How many times had he seen them reel at the same places, and stumble at the same places, and lift their heads with a sudden interest, when they smelled the black mud and freshness of water that always blew to the road from Murphy’s windmill and overflowing water tank.
Peter Hale sat like a young Indian, and his father decided, in bitterness, that perhaps he had not lost so very much, after all. For instance, his Peter was not the handsome youth that he had promised to become. Or was this, too, an after-effect of the sickness? It seemed to the broken heart of Ross Hale that the accident that had wrecked the powers of his son had marred his comeliness, also. His square, powerful jaw, for instance, might not look so brutally cruel and stern, if it had been fleshed over a little. And one would not have noticed the forbidding depth to which the eyes were sunk, if it had not been that beneath the brows they were blackened so tremendously by suffering and long years of gloom.
Yes, Peter had suffered. There was no doubt of that. But it did not lighten the load on the soul of Ross Hale to know this. Certainly it would have been a sad thing if his son had turned out too great a fool even to understand how much he had lost, how much had been taken away from him by the fatal accident.
“Tell me how it happened?” asked the father.
“I was up in the mountains with young Bassiter... Dick Bassiter. That was the summer after my freshman year. Bassiter was in my class, and I’d seen a good deal of him at Huntley School. We were what you might call chums.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“No?”
“No, you never wasted much time writing to me, you know, while you was away all of those years at school.”
He felt the glance of Peter twitch aside toward his face, but, knowing that the eyes of his son were upon him, he looked steadily down the sunwhitened road before him. And he knew that his jaw was iron, and the rim of his face was iron, also, as Peter looked at it.
“Well,” said Peter in his deep, quiet voice, “Dick and I had always been great friends. He had taken me home with him a good many times, you see? I knew his family. They knew me. We were all pretty fond of each other. One day we were all swimming in the river... a little river that runs across the Bassiter estate, you know. There’s a huge lake... with the falls tumbling in above the farther end. Dick’s little sister, Molly, was there. She said that she wanted to go in swimming above the falls, so we climbed up there with her. But we saw at once that it was no good. The current was smooth on top... smooth but very fast. It whipped things right in and under and it tore for the falls full speed. However, we hardly had time to warn Molly. She had fixed her mind on diving in and the smoothness of the surface deceived her. She plunged in and began swimming, but she’d hardly started when the current took her spinning around and drove her down the stream. Dick leaped in after her with a yell. But the current mastered him, too. I saw that there wasn’t much chance, because Dick was a better swimmer than I, by a long shot. However, I couldn’t stand there on the bank and do nothing. Anything was better than that. So I dived in.”
“And the water, it got its grip on you, too?” asked the father darkly.
“I was helpless in it. I couldn’t make any headway. I saw the girl shoot down toward the lip of the falls and then catch at a rock and hold herself there. I saw Dick reach for her and she managed to pull him in to her. They were safe... the two of them. I saw that I couldn’t make it out to them. So I swung back for the shore that I had just left and tried to make the shallows. It was no good. I couldn’t handle that current for an instant. It was as strong as a team of hard-pulling mules.”
He paused, and Ross Hale found his son looking quietly, sternly at a cloud that floated low in the sky, burning with the fire of the sunshine.
“And then?” asked the father.
“Why, the water snatched me down over the edge of the fall, and, when they managed to fish me out, my legs were badly done up, as you see for yourself.”
That was all. Ross Hale, setting his teeth, waited for the harrowing details. It is an invalid’s privilege to take a bitter glory in the troubles that had stretched him in the sickbed. But to the astonishment of the rancher, his son seemed to have reached the end of his tale with this stroke. He had gone over the edge of the waterfall, and now he cared to talk about it no more.
Ross Hale, breathing a little more deeply, turned his horses in at the gate and handed the reins to his boy. He saw the eyes of Peter flick over the yard and toward the house and he steeled himself to hear the remark that must surely be forthcoming.
But it did not come. One would have said that Peter did not even see that the yard had been denuded of trees. They had all gone the winter before. There had been nothing else to sell, and they had brought in a good, fat price, together with a stiff winter task for him. That money had seen Peter through one crisis of the college career.
However, here was the team going on toward the barn. And there was Peter sitting in the front seat — his son, his treasure, the reward of all of his labors. Ross tipped back his big head, and his laughter was good neither to see nor to hear.
The horses were soon unharnessed, and he noticed that Peter, for his part, managed with a singular adroitness to handle his wrecked body, standing about and working so fast with his hands that he was able to do a full half of the unharnessing and of the tending to the horses afterward.
It gave the father a cruelly sad pleasure to see it. He had not thought to bring back his boy to such labors as these. But now he saw before him the complete wreckage of all his hopes. They came out from the barn. One would have thought that big Peter’s eyes had been ruined no less than his legs. One would have thought that he had seen nothing of the poverty that appeared in the mow of that barn, where not two hundredweight of moldy hay littered the floor; that he had been unable to discover the sagging state of the roof, or the loft door hanging from a single broken hinge.
What the barn was, the entire estate had become; it was a burned cinder of a ranch. All that had once been prosperous had gone to the nurturing of Peter. And what return would he make? Well, that was yet to be learned, for there were ways in which money could be made, and it was true that many a man had been able to pile up a fortune despite worse handicaps than the crippled body of Peter. Yet there was little hope in the soul of Peter’s father.
When they stood in the welcome brightness of the sun outside the shadowy interior of the barn, a crow lighted on the watering trough and cried at them. And the despair and the rage that had been growing greater and greater in the heart of Ross Hale now burst out in a childish spite. He snatched out his Colt and blazed away. Both shots went wide — one that startled the crow up into the air, and the other as he rose into the wind.
But as Hale lowered his weapon, the strong hand of Peter reached for it and took it. The crow had risen well into the wind and now was flying for the safety beyond the roof of the barn. Peter fired at that black streak.
The crow sagged sidewise and dropped half a dozen yards, shrieking a bitter protest. Then it drove onward once more, but before it reached the barn, the gun spoke again. The black fellow tumbled in silence out of the sky and bumped heavily upon the ground.
Ross Hale observed, and, although he said nothing as he took back his gun, he was keenly conscious of the matter-of-fact expression on the face of Peter.
“That gat of mine bears to the right,” said Ross Hale as they went toward the house, across the corral.
“It bears to the right,” said Peter. “That’s why I winged him on the right side, I suppose.”
“You’ve been trying your hand at shooting, then?” asked the rancher.
“A man has to do something for amusement, you know. And I had no chance at the other sports,” said Peter. “So I got me some medals in the rifle and revolver teams.” And he smiled, without bitterness, and straight into the eyes of Ross Hale.
CHAPTER VII
SOMETIMES IT REQUIRES only a small thing to make us revise our mental estimates of men and events. It seemed to the rancher, now, that there might be cause in this mere bit of target work to alter his first judgment. But he decided that he would make himself more cheerful. He would talk to his boy of all that he could. Since there were blank and dreadful days, he thought that nothing could be better than to talk of the great moments that Peter had enjoyed on the gridiron.
“Of all the days that you ever had on the football field,” Ross Hale said, “what was the biggest and the best for you, Peter?”
“Every day at football was a pretty good day for me,” said Peter. “I was big. I was fast. I loved the game. And I had the instinct for it.”
Ross Hale glanced askance. He felt a prickling sensation and he was glad that there had been no other person at hand to hear this remark. It would have passed for a reasonably immodest utterance in the village of Sumnertown or on the ranges around that village. But Peter did not seem to he boasting. He was stating a fact.
“However,” said Peter, “there was one day which was bigger and better than all of the rest put together. That was the day that Huntley School played its alumni in a practice game... just before the big game of that fall. My last year in the school, you understand.”
“Go on,” said Mr. Hale, sharpening his taste for the tale of the deeds of glory.
“You see,” said Peter, “I had developed fast. I was eighteen. And I was my full height, nearly my full weight, very tough and hard, muscles very nearly as tough as they ever became. I’d been in athletics all my life, as you might say. And so I was never more fit than I was for that game. I was the star of that Huntley School team. That’s not saying a great deal, because it wasn’t a very good team. But I was their star. I was their one scoring threat. And I was able to take care of everything that went toward my end or tried to cut around me or inside of me. The teams we had played used to take good care not to bother me. It was the far half of the line that they used to tackle, and so I got into the habit of scooting back behind the line as soon as the other fellows snapped their ball.
