Brand, Max - 1925 Read online

  "Well, pay down sixty hundredweight of diamonds, and you get my horse, but not before."

  It was his turn to grow hot then. He glared at me and surveyed my rough deerskins. I have said before that I never was famous even among the Indians for a good appearance. I wore now the same ragged suit that had been on me when I finished the hunt for White Smoke. It was a mass of tatters, held together with rough patching.

  "I am not a professional jester," said Kearney stiffly. "Now, Dorset, I shall pay real money. That is a fine animal. I'll give you four hundred dollars."

  He reached for his purse. It was as big as a provision bag, and it clinked with the gold in it. It was too good an opening for me to miss. I hit back as straight as I could.

  "If your own horse was gold, and the saddle on its back was gold, and the man in the saddle was gold, you could not trade yourself and your horse for White Smoke."

  I had not meant to bring out that famous name - it simply slipped out of my lips naturally, and I could have cursed, afterward, because I knew that if men wanted to buy that horse before, they would want to murder me for the stallion now. At least that name did one good thing - it covered up the insulting manner of my remark to Kearney and brought a gasp from him and from the crowd while Mary was simply turned speechless. Kearney jerked back his horse to get a better view of the big animal.

  "Great heavens, man," he said, "is that the horse of the fable? Is that White Smoke?"

  "It is.,,

  Here a big voice from a big man sounded. "That's a lie and a loud lie! I've hunted White Smoke for a month and seen him a dozen times. Why, this here hoss ain't white at all...he's gray."

  What kept me from putting a bullet through his head I have never understood. My good angel must have laid a hand on my arm. I merely turned on him while he was still blustering.

  "Among the people where I have been living," I said, "the rule is to kill a fool while he's still talking. But white men give fools a second chance and a warning. I give you that warning and that second chance now. But if I put eyes on you again, I'll skin you alive, you sneaking coyote. Get out of my sight!"

  The greatest miracle was that there was not a killing on the spot. The fellow hesitated half an instant, but then he saw certain death in my eyes, and he turned and waded through the crowd.

  I was in the true killing humor now, and, from the way men shrank from me, they must have seen the humor in my face. I looked around at them and said: "As for you, Kearney, and any of the rest of you abolitionists, all I want from you is news of where I can find Chuck Morris."

  I heard an oath from Kearney and saw him move a hand to his gun, as I watched him from the corner of my eye. I was not too far gone with madness. I only intended to put a bullet through his shoulder. But Mary caught his hand. "Dad, Dad," she gasped out. "Are you thinking of fighting with a common ruffian?"

  "Oh Lord," groaned Kearney, "to put up with such a speech from even such a man."

  He let his daughter take him through the crowd. And that was my introduction to Mary Kearney.

  LEW PLEADS FOR THE INDIAN GIRL

  I suppose that a dozen hands were working at a dozen gunbutts during that moment. I might have killed one or two, but the third or the fourth would surely have nailed me when someone sang out: "Here's Chuck Morris himself. Maybe he has first call on this man."

  At that I saw Chuck moving down the street, and at the same instant he saw me. He threw up both hands with a shout like the roar of a buffalo bull, and then he came for me. He was at me before I could get out of the saddle, and he lifted me down as though I were a child. What a giant's power was in those hands of his. There he held me in one great bear arm and brandished the other in the air.

  "Lew! Lew!" he cried. "Have you come back from the dead, boy? Have you come back from the dead?"

  "Back from the Pawnees," I said, "which to some is the same thing."

  "And here.. .dear Lord, it's White Smoke."

  That name from Morris settled any doubts about the identity of the stallion that might have been in the minds of the crowd. And, seeing Morris greet me like more than a brother, most of the sting of my last speech was rubbed out of their minds. They stood about with good-natured grins, watching Morris lead me up the street, stopping every now and then to wring my hand, or I to wring his, laughing, shouting, and - on my part at least - weeping like a child. He got me into his own cabin at last.

  "The Pawnee villains told the truth, then," he said. "I caught one of the red demons, and he swore that Bald Eagle had sent you hunting White Smoke as a ransom for yourself and Sitting Wolf. I thought that was another way of saying that he had sent you to heaven. I strangled the poor dog. But you're here, Lew... you're here past my hopes. Ah, man, when I thought you were gone, it wrung my heart. I hated every redskin. I hated the damned prairies. They were haunted for me. I couldn't stand it.. .and so I came in here."

  So I, after all, was the first cause of the tragedy. If it had not been that loneliness for me had driven him away from the tribe, he would have stayed with Zintcallasappa until she and their child held him with a greater strength than steel. But my loss was the knife that cut the bond, just as she, poor, wise girl, had prophesied. Hearing him say it sent something like ice to my heart. I was dumb. I could only stare miserably at him. Then most of the brightness left his face.

  He muttered: "You saw Zintcallasappa, of course?"

  "The boy has your hair, Chuck," I said, fumbling for the surest means of wounding him and rinding it well enough. "Yellow hair like yours, Chuck. When I saw it, the firelight was shining through it and turning it into gold."

  He blanched as the words struck him. But I was brutal for the sake of Zintcallasappa. I thought I might as well let him know that I knew everything.

  I said: "I've seen the other woman, too."

  At this, he put up his great hand, and it was trembling. "Don't, Lew. Not any more for a minute."

  He got up and went to the door where he stood a moment, and the noise of his breathing filled the room. Then he turned about and came slowly back to me.

  I looked about the room. There was such a strain in the shack that I couldn't go on tormenting him for a time - and this in the first moments of our meeting. It was a big place, heaped in every comer to the very ceiling with all manner of stuffs from flour to beads.

  "Who owns all this?" I asked him.

  He nodded at it vaguely. "I do."

  "Why, Chuck, have you gone into partnership with some rich man?"

  "It's all mine," he answered, as though it were so much dirt. "I'm doing a new kind of trading."

  "What's that?"

  "Most of these fellows are risking their necks, trading straight with the Indians. That takes oceans of time. Of course, they make huge profits, but every third time they get wiped out by accidents or Indians. Well, they need partners, too, to share the danger and the profits with them, but I had a new idea. I cleaned up five thousand in less than a week when I first came to the fort. It's a lucky place ...a lucky place for me, Lew."

  How his face lighted as he said it and gave me a glimpse again of Rising Sun.

  "I chartered an old river steamer for that.. .too crazy to run, people said, but I got an old Scotchman who can make a steam engine talk Sioux, if he wants to. He took it down the river and mortgaged the ship together with the rest of my cash. He sank it all in the sort of goods I'd named to him, and he brought it back to the highest point on the Missouri that his old tub would take it. Then I pulled it up here on canal boats ...horses on the banks, you see? Well, I turned five thousand into fifteen thousand on the first trip, simply by selling the cargo directly to the traders. I'm a wholesaler, you might say. I went right back at the job myself. We patched up the ship, shot her down to New Orleans, and brought her back again with my entire capital turned into flour, rifles, beads, and...."

  He paused quickly and glanced askance at me.

  "Firewater?" I asked him.

  He knew my opinion about that traffi
c, and he said: "Well, that's what they want. If they didn't get it from me, they'd get it from someone else. Why not from me? I really don't like the business any more than you do."

  I looked down at the floor. I was afraid to face him.

  "I finished that second trip with close to forty-five thousand dollars. Another man up here caught my idea and offered me a ridiculously high price for my charter on the steamer. Well, he offered more than the old tub was worth. I took my Scotchman, dropped down to New Orleans, and bought another ship outright, twice as big and twice as fast as the one I had chartered. I poured the rest of my money and all I could raise with a mortgage into a cargo that jammed her to the gunwales, as my Scotchman says."

  He lowered his voice a little and looked at me with shining eyes.

  "Lew, I cleared a hundred thousand dollars on that voyage! I cleared a hundred thousand, and besides that I have the new steamer. I mean she's new in this trade. This stuff in the house is all that is left of the cargo, and I could sell it all today... but I'm waiting for a little rise in prices. In a word, Lew, I'm a rich man." He brought it out with a ring. "A rich man in eight months of work, Lew."

  It was like a miracle. I found myself changing my mind about him again. I had always been changing my mind about him, off and on. My last estimate of him had been as a careless lounger who would smile his way through life in easy fashion and do no good for himself or anyone else except to spread a sort of festival spirit around him. Yet, I found it as easy to understand why he had been able to take these huge business ventures and succeed in them. The mere thought of investing one's total profits after each trip in a crazy old river boat that was overdue in Davy Jones's locker made my blood run cold, but, whereas I was the poorest gambler in the world, Morris was one of the best. In eight months he had piled up a huge fortune. In these days of billions one may think a hundred thousand is a very small sum, but, before the war, a hundred thousand was a tidy fortune. Besides, it was only the beginning for Morris. Already he seemed to be drawing away from me. He was becoming a figure, I felt, of national importance. I digested all of this news in a moment of quiet.

  "You are going to be a rich man, Chuck," I said. "I thank God for it. Because you're the sort of a fellow who will use money in the right way. No poor devil will ever be brokenhearted by your business ways. But what became of the man who bought the charter from you?"

  "Of him? The ship sank on the way down... rammed a submerged wreck of a scow, I think. The poor devil who had invested in it blew his brains out... after he'd swum ashore. A fool, you see, with no nerve at all. Should have been in a foundling's asylum. I gave his wife and his youngster money enough to take them home."

  Once more I had to look down to the floor. Yet, I could not accuse Morris of sharp practice. It was simply business, I suppose. The next moment his heart was running over again.

  "And now, boy," he said to me, "you're coming in with me, and we're going to be partners. I have it worked out. The whole scheme jumped out of my brain alive and running the minute I saw you. I'm going to New Orleans to handle that end. I have some ideas about shipping in stuff cheap, directly from England and France and Boston. I can cut our costs in two, now that I'm able to handle things on a larger scale. I'll work down there. You'll handle this end of it. I've only had one outlet, and that's here. I want others. I need others. I have growing pains with this business, old man. I want twenty forts and posts to be fed directly from me at a rate that will break the hearts of the little fellows that cart their stuff three thousand miles overland and have to ask ridiculous prices. Waterway transportation... nothing but waterway transportation is my motto. It beats dry land ten ways. I have a scheme for getting a couple of big depots up these little side rivers to the forts. Very well.. .this will be the firing line, and on it I need a fighter. I need you, Lew! You know Indians better than anyone in the world. It was always play with me, but some of their stuff got into your blood. You are an Indian, you tiger, you. Very well, you know what the red devils want better than they do. I. ..I.. .why, I'd almost cut out the firewater trade, if you'd come in with me, Lew."

  He was striding about the room as he said this, and I watched his magnificent enthusiasm in a sort of dream. Finally he stopped and frowned at me.

  "Well?" he snapped out. "Well?"

  "What?" I asked him blankly.

  "Damnation, man. I'm asking you if you want to be a partner in a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar business. Isn't that enough to keep you awake?"

  I roused myself at that. "You're too generous," I told him, "but I have something to work at for a while. There's something else on my mind that I have to clear away first."

  "What's that?" he barked out in this new fashion he had picked up since he became a businessman. "What's more important than your own good, man?"

  "Zintcallasappa and your son."

  He turned crimson to the eyes, and a great purple vein stood out on his forehead, jagged as a lightning flash that rips across the sky. It was the danger sign in him, but in an instant he banished that mood. He stood there, looking sadly down at me.

  "I thought I could talk you out of it," he sighed, "but I might as well try to talk the Rocky Mountains off their feet. Go on, Lew, say whatever you please. I'll listen."

  I packed a pipe, turning the words over in my mind and making a dozen different beginnings. After I had begun to smoke, I saw the truth as the drifts of blue-brown shadows went up and flattened against the ceiling.

  Words would do no good. If he had left the girl once, he would leave her again. He laid his hand on my shoulder.

  "Say something, Lew," he begged. "I don't care how you damn me, it will be better than this silence. If you want to call me a dog, a heartless dog...a traitor, a hypocrite, I'll admit that I'm all that. I've made a mistake... a horrible mistake, and I want to pay for it. I want to suffer for it. Poor girl, I'll give her more than any Indian ever had since the beginning of time. I'll fix her up on a ranch in the south and see that her interests are cared for. The...the boy...I'll see that he's educated, and that he gets everything the world can give him."

  "Except a father?" I said.

  Whip your gentlest dog long enough in a corner and it will show its teeth at last. Morris gave me an ugly glance, but almost at once he sighed and then leaned back against the wall.

  "Don't you see, Lew?" he asked. "The whole thing is impossible. I can't bring an Indian... not even Zintcallasappa ...into my life. It... it would wreck me."

  "I don't quite see," I answered. "When I'm married, I expect my home to be nine tenths of the world to me. As long as I can keep that home happy, I won't care how the other tenth of the world shrugs its shoulders or smiles."

  He looked before him fixedly, seeing the vision of such a state of things and growing red. "That would drive me mad!" he burst out at last.

  I went on smoking.

  Then he shouted with a new alarm in his voice: "Lew, Lew, do you mean that it will make any difference between you and me? D'you mean that it will put an end to our friendship? Lord, Lew, rather than that, I'll get her...I'll bring her here

  I went on smoking, watching him through the thin drifts, but, oh, how sad my heart was. His voice trailed away. He made a feeble little gesture with both hands.

  "Well," he concluded, "you've seen Mary Kearney. Can you blame me? Can you blame any man for going mad about her? Heaven put such women on earth for the special purpose of depriving men of their wits. And I have none about her. I'd despise the man who could stand in front of her for ten seconds without losing his heart." He added with a faint laugh: "Except you, old man. You have nothing but horses and rifles.. .and honor, confound you."

  "Are you to be married?" I asked him, with a hand gripping me by the throat.

  "I hope so. She likes me. Sometimes I think that she more than likes me. But her mind changes like a wind vane. It's all right with Mister Kearney. He's mighty rich, but he knows that I'm firmly settled as far as that goes. He approves. She doesn't hate me
at least. Between you and me, I'd take heavy odds that I marry her within a year."

  I could not tell why it was that the hand relaxed its grip upon my throat, but what I said made Morris gape.

  "I'd like to lay that bet with you," I said.

  "Damn it, Lew, what do you mean?" he cried.

  "I don't know, except that the words slipped out. A man has his own ideas about some things.. .queer ideas, you may say. But I have a pretty strong conviction that you'll never be her husband."

  He could only stare at me. "Lew," he said at last, frowning, "has she hit you, too?"

  I broke out into laughter. "Me? A low ruffian like me? I'm not a fool, old-timer."

  I told him everything that had happened. He seemed a little amused, a little serious. But at last he said: "I don't think there'll be any trouble. I know the men in this town, and they know me. They also know that you're my friend by this time. Now, Lew, it's time to think over how we're going to celebrate."

  I told him that a bed was all I wanted, and, when he was convinced that I meant what I said, he made me take his own bed. I stretched out between cool sheets on a mattress for the first time in more than five years. It seemed wonderfully comfortable, and I went to sleep only to awaken in five minutes out of a dream that I was being buried alive. I took a roll of blankets outdoors and lay down under the stars. And so I slept like a stunned man until the sun shone in my face again.

  ASSEMBLING AN ARMY

  Everything that had been whirling through my brain when I went to sleep - whirling in confusion - was fixed and clear when I wakened. I could see the simple truth of everything. First of all, I could see that Chuck Morris would never return to Zintcallasappa. I could see, too, that it was dangerous for me to remain at the fort. Dangerous not to Morris, but dangerous to myself. When I stood up and drew a few breaths of the purity of the morning air, I felt if I saw the blue eyes and the smiling mouth of Mary Kearney once again, I should be madly, madly in love with her. So, honestly as I thought and for the sake of everyone, it seemed to me the proper thing to get back to the Sioux as fast as I could.