Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US, page 665
“You wonder why the Westerner doesn’t like the tenderfoot? Because he is the chap who makes the trouble! He doesn’t know one end of a gun from another. But because he has bought a Colt, he thinks that he will have to use it.
“As for you, Leon, I think that you will not be a fool. I think that this practice will give you better common sense than you ever had before. It will make you respect the possibilities of weapons — in the other fellow’s hand as well as in your own!”
This was the philosophy of Father McGuire. I think that the event would have justified the thought of that good man. But I ask you to remember that I was only eighteen; and I think I can show you that the temptation was very great indeed!
At any rate, I take you with me to a certain evening when we sat sleepily over our books in the library of Father McGuire, and I heard a tap at the front door.
I got up to answer it. I remember stumbling over the little rug in front of the library door, and how Father McGuire said testily:
“Your feet, Leon! Your feet! Will you watch your way, my boy?”
I closed the door behind me, went down the hall, and opened the front door. It let in a rush of warm spring wind, and there was Harry Chase standing before me!
IX. STIGMA
“PORFILO,” SAID HE, “I’m very late, but I’m here at last.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said I, nevertheless, understanding very well.
“Think it over a moment,” said Harry Chase. “You have disgraced me and beaten me twice. I’ve come back to fight you in another way.”
It seemed incredible. In spite of all that Andrew Chase had told me, still I could not believe the thing!
I said: “Chase, I never struck you unfairly except that in the first fight I took advantage of what I had learned about boxing. But that’s not really so very unfair. I apologized for that; I would apologize for it again, if that would make you feel any better!”
He merely sneered at me. “Do you wear a gun?” said he.
“Good heavens,” I cried, “do you mean it?”
“Not so loud,” said he, glancing sharply over his shoulder. “Not so loud, Porfilo. The priest might hear. I don’t want his noise and his chatter. Have you a gun, I asked you?”
“Are you drunk?” I groaned.
“Drunk?” said he, with that same sneering smile which he and his brother understood so well how to use. “I’ve slipped away from my school on a good excuse and come five thousand miles to see you. I’m supposed to be in Scotland shooting. Instead, I’m here in Arizona — but I intend to have my shooting, all the same. If you’re not armed, I have a gun for you. Come outside!”
“I’ll have nothing to do with you!” said I, in a real panic, and I started to close the door.
He put his foot against it and caught my arm at the same time.
“Now listen to me,” said he. “If you won’t fight, I’ll make the entire range laugh at you for a coward. I’ll publish it everywhere. I’ll make the children point their fingers at you! Do you believe me?”
I stepped through the door and stood with him in the night. I was half minded to try the weight of my fists on him now. It would have been an excellent thing if I had. But he had stirred up my pride, and pride in a young man is a tiger.
“Very well,” said he. “I’m glad to see that you are reasonable. Have you a gun?”
“No.”
“Here is a new Colt. It’s loaded in all six chambers. Does it satisfy you?”
I broke it open. I even extracted a shell to see that they were honest stuff. Then I looked up to Chase.
He was smiling his contempt at my open suspicions.
“Very well,” said I. “I’m ready.”
“Good!” said he.
“How do you want to go about it?”
“I’ve thought of a way. Come back with me so that we can’t be seen from the street.”
He led the way to the rear of the house. He took his place at one side of the vegetable patch and I at the other side. I think there were about twenty paces between us, though the distance seemed greater, because we had only starlight.
He said: “It is nearly nine o’clock, and when the first bell strikes, we fire.”
“Very well,” said I, and freshened my grip on the gun butt.
I can hardly believe this, as I write it down. It seems entirely too blunt and matter of fact to have been the truth. But I am putting down exactly what Harry said and what I answered. If you wish to know what I felt, as I faced him in the dimness, I can only say that I had pushed fear behind me and kept a tight grip on my courage.
I felt, every instant, that terror was about to leap on me and make a trembling woman of me; but still I kept around the corner from such a disaster.
He went on, after a moment: “I am going to kill you, Porfilo, I think. If you have any messages to leave behind you, tell me what they are.”
I said: “If I die, there is only one message: Tell Father McGuire that it was a fair fight. Tell him that I’m sorry he didn’t guess better. He’ll understand what I mean.”
“That’s fair enough,” said Harry Chase.
“I’ll offer you the same thing,” said I.
He laughed softly. “There’s no danger that I’ll need a messenger. I’ll do my own talking after this affair, Porfilo. When my character has been cleaned up by putting you away, I’ll do my own talking. I think it’s nearly nine o’clock, Porfilo. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready,” said I.
At that instant I heard the old town clock beginning to buzz; a moment later the first note of the bell struck sharply against our ears, and Harry twitched up his gun and fired from the hip. The bullet was well intended. It shaved past my head and clipped away a bit of my red hair at the temple.
My own shot was delayed until I had stretched out my arm, for I knew nothing of these snap shots from the hip. His second shot and my first one rang out at the same instant. His whisked under the pit of my arm, barely grazing my coat on the left side of my body. Mine dropped him in his tracks.
I ran to him while the scream of old Mimsy came shrilling out from her open window. The poor woman had been sitting there in the dark of her room looking out on the night, and she had seen the whole thing, but what our standing opposite one another meant, she had not been able to guess. I suppose her dim eyes did not see the guns in our hands.
I found Harry Chase swearing fluently.
“I’ve spoiled everything,” said he. “That infernal bullet of yours went right through my left thigh. There’s nothing to it except a long stay in bed; and a lot of talk at home and in the town. You’ve won again, Porfilo. But how in Heaven’s name I could have missed you — when I’ve smashed a target an inch square at the same distance — I can’t tell! It looks like fate!”
Harry Chase had told the exact truth about his wound. When Father McGuire came running out to us and we had carried Harry into the house, we found by cutting away the trousers that the bullet had pierced the thigh and clipped cleanly through it, leaving a small puncture in front and not an over-large one in the rear of the leg. It was bleeding freely.
Harry Chase caught my arm and said to me in a tensed expression: “Did you shoot low on purpose, Leon?”
“I shot to kill!” I admitted, “because I knew you were shooting to kill me!”
“I was,” said he. “You can be the witness, Father McGuire, that I started all this trouble! Leon is not to blame!”
Father McGuire said nothing. He had sent Mimsy away for the doctor. In the meantime, he stopped the flow of blood.
Andrew Chase came in response to our message to him. He came in a matter- of-fact way, shook hands with Father McGuire and with me, and made a remark on the weather. Then something to the effect that Harry would learn, sooner or later, that Porfilo was not meant by Providence to be his meat! It was a very cool speech, and Father McGuire was thoroughly angered. But he said nothing.
“After all,” said Andrew calmly to me, “I see that you were wise in not clearing out of the town on account of Harry. It seems that he isn’t able to accomplish a great deal — even with a gun!”
I saw that beneath the surface, Andrew was fairly writhing with shame and with contempt for Harry; I saw, too, that he was hating me with all his heart. It was not so much that he wished Harry to win as that he wished him not to lose. A stigma was thrown upon the entire Chase family, it seemed. Or at least, that was his way of looking at it.
They took Harry away in a stretcher and put him in a buckboard because he insisted on being moved. He said cheerfully to Father McGuire:
“I know you’d take care of me, but your food would choke me, after I’ve tried to punch a bullet through Leon Porfilo like this!”
In this very casual manner, the whole thing ended, for the moment. There were other moments to come. But what astonishes me as I look back on that evening, is the almost humdrum manner in which everything passed off. Even Father McGuire had nothing to say in the way of reproof or advice for the future.
He merely said in his gentle way: “This is the third time with Harry Chase. I think he may have his lesson, now!”
I thought so, too. By this time I was pretty thoroughly convinced that Harry Chase could never put me down, by hand, knife, or gun.
Most naturally, from that moment, I kept my eye upon the house of Chase, because I expected, and Father McGuire expected, that the next move must come from them. They had played all the leading cards so far, and though I had managed to take all the tricks, it was reasonable to suppose that the next disturbance would have a member of the Chase family in it.
I was wrong. The next trouble arose, apparently, from the entrance into Mendez of the most distinguished liar and rascal who ever rode a horse or wore a gun.
I refer to none other than “Turk” Niginski.
No one had so much as heard of Turk Niginski until the day of his arrival. He looked like a Turk, I must confess. He had a pair of bristling mustaches — not many hairs, but long stiff ones that curved down around the corners of his mouth like so many dark scimitars. He had rather slant eyes, very black, with yellow-stained whites. He had a sallow, greasy, shiny skin. His appearance was finished and set off, at once, by a line of ragged-edged, yellow teeth which showed when he grinned. He was always grinning.
This undecorative devil appeared in Mendez and in my life on the same day. I was working in the vegetable garden, preparing a bed for new soil, but excavating it a foot and a half deep, to make room for fresh dirt and dressing.
A voice sang out: “That’s him!”
I looked up into the face of the sheriff, who sat his horse beside the fence. With him was Turk Niginski.
I said: “What’s wrong?”
The sheriff replied: “Something a good deal worse than anything I’ve ever had against you before, Lee!”
That alarmed me. Because I knew that I was not liked by the sheriff. He had an inborn, natural suspicion of fighting men, and I had fought and fought and fought through my entire life, as far back as he could remember me. Only with my fists, to be sure, until very lately. But the sheriff had always expected me to really run amuck some day, and the affair with Harry Chase had simply convinced him that his forebodings about me were bound to be accomplished.
He who fights must eventually do a murder! Such was the reasoning of the sheriff. But he was such a wonderfully fair man, such an able and careful sifter of evidence, that I never had a doubt of good treatment at his hands.
“I’ll tell you what I’ve heard,” said the sheriff, looking me grimly in the eye. “I’ve heard that Niginski tried to bum a dollar from you an hour ago. I hear that you kicked him off the place, and when he tried to fight back, you shoved a gun in his face and told him to get off the place.”
I was so amazed that I suppose I turned color. Let no one believe the old gag that innocence has a voice of its own. The mere suspicion of guilt, the mere accusation, is enough to throw most men off their feed, as the saying goes. I was thoroughly thrown off by what the sheriff had to say, you may be sure! Consider that I had never so much as seen this Turk before that moment.
The sheriff went on: “He says that you went on and told him that you didn’t like the look of him. That the best thing for him to do was to keep right on moving until he was clear out of the town. Because if you seen him again, you was apt to salt him away with a morsel or two of lead. Well, kid, what about it?”
“Sheriff,” said I, “I dunno what to say!”
There was innocence for you; but it made such an impression on the sheriff, this innocence of mine, that he scowled blackly upon me.
“Now look me in the eye, kid, and get me right,” said he. “I ain’t takin’ nothin’ for granted. It may be that Niginski faked all of this, and that there ain’t a word of truth in what he says, though it would be a considerable bit of brain work for a bird with a mug like his.”
Truly the face of Niginski seemed one to which a real thought could never come.
“That’s exactly what’s happened!” I declared with much heat.
“All right,” drawled the sheriff. “It may be that you ain’t puffed up because you knocked over the Chase kid a few weeks back. It may be that you ain’t always been a trouble hunter ever since you was a little kid. It may be that you’re all right, and Turk Niginski is all wrong. But I’ll tell you pronto, and I’ll tell you plain that it looks bad to me. In case you get any wrong ideas to start with, I want you to know that I’m runnin’ this here town. When it comes to orderin’ gents to move along, I’m gonna do all the talkin’ that’s talked!”
I broke in: “Sheriff, you’re not fair!”
He raised his hand and shut me off. “All right, all right!” said he. “You’re a saint, maybe. You never done nothin’ wrong in all your life. But I tell you that I ain’t gonna have this poor saphead scared of his life while he’s in Mendez, and if anything happens to him while he’s here, I’m gonna come right to you and ask you how come! That’s all I got to say!”
He rode away at the side of Turk Niginski, who was grinning in perfect content. I went on blindly with my work, wishing the mysterious liar, Niginski, in the lowest part of the nether regions, to say nothing of the unhappy future which I desired for the sheriff.
But, after a time, I could think of nothing except what might be behind the lie of Niginski. I had never seen this man before. I could never have wronged him. What could be his ultimate intention? My brain came into such a tangle with the idea, that at last I decided to saddle my horse and take a ride in the hope that the wind of a good gallop would blow away the cobwebs.
So I saddled and mounted and whirled out of Mendez on the road north in the direction of the great, cool, cloudy blue mountains which tumbled above the horizon there. My great wish at that moment was that I could break away from Mendez and all of the people in it, and keep straight on with a tireless horse until I was in the upper slopes of those piled summits.
In the midst of these reflections, I looked over my shoulder at the sound of hoofs and saw none other than Turk Niginski rushing up behind me with the ragged mane of his horse wagging high in the wind of his gallop.
I knew there was trouble coming now, in very fact. Turk Niginski had out a gun as he spurred along, and now he raised it and knocked my hat from my head with his first shot — a very capable performance for a man riding at high speed. He was much closer when I put in my bullet in answer. It passed directly through his head, and Niginski lunging from the saddle a limp hulk, struck the knees of my horse and then, rebounding, rolled limp in the dust of the road.
I did not waste time. I knew that the man was dead, and I spurred back to town as hard as I could ride. I went straight to the sheriff, and he seemed to read my story in my excited face.
“Has bad luck come the way of Niginski?” he asked.
“I was riding down the road, harming no one, God be my witness — when I heard the sound of a horse”
The sheriff finished for me, in a dry voice: “It was Niginski, riding you down with a drawn gun, I suppose. And you had to turn and drop him?”
“Exactly,” said I, rather weakly.
“A fine story,” said the sheriff, more crisp than ever.
“I can show you my proof. Here is my hat,” said I, having scooped it up as I started back for town.
I showed him the bullet hole through it, from front to back.
“Let me see your gun,” said the sheriff.
I showed it to him. “Two empty chambers,” said he. “Did you have to shoot at him twice?”
I was covered with a very convincing pallor, I have no doubt, for I can remember the cold feel of my face. I could remember now, that after my target practice of the day before, having cleaned my gun thoroughly and reloaded, I had tried a flying shot at a darting jack rabbit that crossed my trail — and missed, of course. Nothing but luck can hit a jack rabbit when it is making its first burst of speed.
“I fired that shot yesterday,” said I.
“At what?” snapped out the sheriff.
“A rabbit,” said I, more faintly than ever.
The sheriff spat in his disgust. “You come with me,” said he, and led me straight to a cell.
There I stayed unheeded for three hours. My first visitor was Father McGuire, who came with a weary face. His voice trembled as he said: “What could have made you do it, Leon? How could that poor man have wronged you in any way?”
That showed me more clearly than anything else could have done how black my situation was. I did not try to explain to Father McGuire. I knew that I would only be able to stumble and halt through my story. So I kept my silence. Thereby I damned myself in the eyes of my only friend.
Everything turned out worse than I could have suspected. Niginski had been found by the road; but his gun, with the emptied chamber, had not been found.
The gun was gone, and thereby the case against me was automatically made perfect. As for my motive in the crime, the townsmen were willing to consider that killing as the natural outcome of a life of violence. It was a natural following-up of the shooting of Harry Chase, no matter how much Harry might have been to blame. The general opinion of everyone was that I should be put away for a good long term.
