Brand, Max - 1925 Read online

  I managed to writhe loose and, bending over, as Dan Donnelly had taught me to do, I jerked both my hands upward with all my might into his body. I had used that trick twenty times before and felt each hand sink sickeningly deep into the stomach of another youngster, gasping, choking. But striking the body of Chuck Morris was like hammering at a log cushioned with wrapped sacks. The force of those punches made my wrists ache, but they did not daunt Chuck Morris. He whipped a long overhand blow into my face. I was not stunned, but the sheer weight of it smashed me to the earth. Before I could stir, he was on me.

  "Fair play!" I shouted.

  "I'll give you fair play," he said and sprang up again.

  I rose, lurching low along the ground as Dan Donnelly had taught me to do, so that his ponderous first swing missed me, but the second, as I stood up, caught me fairly under the jaw and knocked me head over heels. That was the end of the fight. I do not mean that the battle stopped at this point, but after that stunning blow my mind was half wrapped in darkness, which lifted long enough now and again to show me my foe and let me get at him with driving fists, a darkness rent with red splashes of lightning and thunderstrokes in my brain as his heavy fists thudded home on me. I was either down on the ground and dragging myself up, or else I was leaning in against his powerful hands like one leaning into a hurricane.

  Vaguely I knew that other people had come - all the men in the circle of the wagons, as well as others from the outside. My consciousness was awash with a roar of voices, like the beating of the sea against great rocks.

  Friendly hands caught at me, at last. I made out the voice of Chris Hudson shouting: "He's had enough, Chuck.. .and so have you, by the looks of you."

  "You lie," I managed to groan. "Lemme at him."

  "All right, young tiger," said Chris. "But this goes by the ring rules from now on...half a minute between knockdowns ...and the first man that fails to come to the scratch at the end of that time ...he's beat. Gregory, you get out your watch...."

  His hands pushed me to my feet. I went at the shadowy form of big Chuck Morris. My brain cleared a little. I found myself standing toe to toe with Chuck, exchanging crashing blows. As my senses cleared, I was bewildered by my own skill which, out of the fighting instinct, had kept me weaving my body and head from side to side to dull the snap of his punches, while I drove my own in with more telling effect. He went back. I followed him in the midst of a sudden silence. Then he was down - lost in the blackness at my feet.

  The hands of Chris Hudson caught me, and I was dragged down upon his knee. It was the last bright moment of the fight for me. Dull and distant, I saw the swarms of faces, I heard their shouts, I even heard the calling of bets as they laid wagers. Then the voice of Chris was at my ear: "You've done enough, Lew. You can stop now, before he smashes you to pieces. There's no disgrace. He's older. He weighs forty or fifty pounds more. There's not a man in the camp would stand up to him with either fists or guns."

  What I answered, I do not know, but I know that the thought of surrender turned me sick and then turned me wild. Time was called. Chris Hudson pushed me to my feet, and Chuck Morris and I lurched together. I felt my hard fists literally splash twice against the running blood on his face. Then before me loomed the huge fist of Morris, striking over and down. It landed, and my knees turned to water.

  Still it was not the end, though that blow is absolutely the last that I can recall of the fight. During the rest of the time I must have struggled on through perfectly instinctive motions, but my conscious brain was covered with darkness. Chris Hudson told me later how the struggle went on, with Chuck Morris literally cut to pieces, his feet braced to keep his body from falling, his eyes almost blinded, his face dripping crimson, but still hammering away at my lurching, swaying body until finally, after I had fallen upon my face for the fiftieth time at the end of the half minute, I was a mass of inert flesh in Hudson's hands.

  You will say, as others have said to whom I told this story, that it was a brutal thing for those men to allow the battle to go on between two youngsters, and one so totally overmatched. But those hardy traders knew what they were about. Up to that moment both Chuck Morris and I had been ceaseless bullies. They knew about Chuck and perhaps they guessed about me, as older men usually see through boys with a glance or two. All my life I had gone about hunting for trouble. But after that fight with Morris, though I loved battle as much as ever, I had had my lesson, and I never again hunted trouble. To my knowledge, neither did he, until the combination of events - and something, perhaps, of a predetermined fate - forced him to hunt for me, and find me, and fight with me the most dreadful battle of our lives - except the final fight that is still to come for me and that all men must eventually face.

  I wakened into blackness at last. Across my face was a mass of wet cloth, and there was a pungency of some healing salve in my nostrils. I hardly could draw a breath, I was in such agony. Every inch of my body had been battered, strained, crushed. My mouth was swollen, my eyes were closed, and the pain was so dreadful that I prayed for unconsciousness again. I groaned, and Chris Hudson's voice said rather softly: "He's coming 'round. I thought he never would. I thought that we had a dead boy on our hands. Friends, we've let this go too far."

  "Bah!" exclaimed Gregory. "It'll be good for both of 'em."

  CHUCK FINDS A PAL

  The final reason, then, that I left Boonville with that trading caravan was simply because I was unable to help myself. I could not walk; I could not stand. And so I was carted away by those abolitionists. For all of my life - let me confess it - that word has reddened my face with anger, and for a long time it would be my regret that I was unable to come out of the Far West to fight on the side of the Confederacy. I had not yet come to realize that we are a nation subject to passionate fevers, that it is in our very nature always to want to abolish something. After all the killing of the Civil War, the abolitionists declared to the slaves that they were free, and then proceeded to turn their backs on them. Abolition itself is the thing, and about all that ever really matters to the true abolitionist is what he wants to abolish, and damn the human consequences.

  It was a whole week before I could sit on a horse, let alone walk or run. On the same day I staggered out of the wagon with a patched and purple face, I saw a huge grotesque at the same moment reel out of another wagon on the opposite side of the caravan - for they had not yet broken up their morning circle for the day's trek. I did not recognize, at first, the awful face I saw. Then I knew that it was none other than big Chuck Morris.

  The men were finishing the cooking of breakfast at the central fire, and yet even breakfast stopped to watch the encounter between Chuck and myself. We went straight toward one another to the center of the circle, and there we paused and looked at one another out of our blackened eyes. I still hated him, but the change from the handsome face was so great that I could not help breaking into laughter.

  "Chuck," I said, "you're a sight."

  He roared with laughter at the same moment. "Lew," he said, "you little game chicken... you're a sight, too."

  He clapped me by the shoulder. I caught him by the hand. In that instant was cemented a friendship which was to last through many years, a strange and beautiful friendship. Would to heaven that it had never been broken, Morris, and that you and I had never come to hate one another as we do now.

  The men, when they saw that there was to be no more righting, gave us a shout and a cheer and called us over to the breakfast fire. We sat down there side by side. I'll never forget how the men laughed at our smashed and purple faces. I'll never forget how the youngsters did their best to swallow their grins for fear of us. But we would not have cared if the whole world had laughed, we were each so happy to have found a friend worthy of the other. So perfect was our friendship that we even talked of the cause of the fight and of the fight itself.

  "You see," I said to Chuck, "we're from different sides of the fence. You know what grows in your own back yard. I know what grows i
n mine. Things look different when you have only a knothole to peek through. But let that go. You can think what you want, Chuck, and I can think what I want. Leastways, there's no slaves out here to quarrel about."

  He chuckled and nodded over that.

  "If you'd had ten pounds' more weight, or another year of seasoning behind you, you'd have licked me, Lew," he commented so frankly I turned red at the mere thought of it. "Every time I closed with you, it was like closing with a wildcat. I had those knuckles of yours slashing me across the face. Besides, I was down and done for with the first punch... if the boys hadn't given me a hand."

  This sort of talk made me dizzy with wonder. I had such a shame of defeat that merely to mention it made me a little sick. But he was so open and free I felt like a small-souled coward. That was a characteristic of Chuck's. He was always willing to admit when he was beaten. Yet, there is a sort of savage bulldog in me that shames me from seeing such truths. After that, we rolled our blankets down beside one another every night of the passage.

  There is no voyage at sea that takes as long as the crossing of the plains did with a traders' outfit. Even with steers, in the earlier days, the outfits of the 'Forty-Niners bound for California traveled faster, because they had a definite destination, and every day they tried to put more miles behind them and press farther toward their goal. But the trader had no such goal. He was simply embarked for the prairies and for Indians in general. He never knew exactly where he could find them, and, when he found them, he never knew whether they would feel more like trading or taking scalps - and the whole train of goods.

  That was why we traveled in such a large band. We had, altogether, fifty-five men in that troop, and every man was familiar with the use of a rifle. Every night, or whenever the scouts brought back word of danger, the wagons were drawn into a compact circle, and the bales of forage were piled against the wagons, making a very good sort of fort. At night the horses were tethered inside, close to the wagons. If there were trouble, they were taken to the center of the corral, and their heads were pointed in, because what a horse doesn't see is not so apt to bother it. Those fifty-five rifles handled by steady fighters could turn back the rush of any wandering bands of young Indians, hunting for game and scalps and fun. If there were a gathered tribe, there was also apt to be more good sense from the old men among the Indians - wise old chaps who pointed out that wars with the white men rarely ended well, and that one massacre, no matter on how small a scale, was enough to start trouble.

  For trading we had quantities of butcher knives, et cetera, and mostly made of cheapest steel. We had hundreds of pounds of beads, all of the biggest size and of the brightest colors. We had flashy cloths, usually cotton printed with staring dyes. We had some old rifles and pistols, usually guaranteed to explode after two or three discharges. We had a hundred kinds of foolish trinkets, to say nothing of extra flour and molasses and tea - for the Indians had the strangest love of the white man's food. But, first and last, we had firewater. Not whiskey. Make no mistake about that. The thing that ruined the Indians was not whiskey, no matter how new, how poorly made, how raw. It was alcohol - raw grain alcohol of the cheapest sort, full of impurities. It was mixed with water and with coloring matter of any kind, often sweetened a little with molasses. The effect of it was simply a terrible thing to watch. A tumbler of it could actually make a white man drunk - and I have never seen a white man who could not endure alcohol better than the poor Indians with their hair-trigger nerves and lack of centuries of drunkenness. It was a dastardly thing to trade among the Indians with such poison. But the traders who did not carry it could do no business, and money, from the beginning of time, has always weighed heavier than ethics. I did not understand, then, what the whiskey accomplished in the natures of the red men. But after I learned, I am honestly glad to say that I never used whiskey to delude any Indian - not even a Cheyenne, confound their rascally, horse-stealing hearts.

  All the ways of the prairie men were made short-handed for me by Chuck Morris, and I could not have found a better teacher. He had been born to this life, and, having been in it from infancy, he knew more by instinct than most of the oldest scouts ever learned through experience. In the first place, he gave me a horse. Chris Hudson had offered to sell me one of the worst of his string. Not because he was ungenerous, but because giving things away was not in his nature. He had surrendered the Colt to me out of purest chagrin when he saw how much more master of it I was than he could ever hope to be. But Chuck Morris showed me his string. He had four horses, and all of them were fine animals. They were of fine Kentucky blood crossed with the best sort of Indian mares. The result was that they were larger than almost any Indian pony, and they had borrowed some of the toughness of their mothers. One meets hard weather on the prairies, and your real Thoroughbred is apt to be made of tender stuff. When Chuck showed me those four beauties, he pointed out a gray mare.

  "You can have your choice of any of the lot," he said, "except that gray. She's my special saddle horse. And between you and me, I figgered out that she must have some of the same blood that's in White Smoke. Anyway, her mother was gray... almost white... and that mare came from the same district where White Smoke has been raising the devil the last year or two."

  I asked him what White Smoke was, and he seemed a little surprised to learn I hadn't heard the name. He said that he thought nearly everyone in the world must have heard about White Smoke at one time or another. At least, everyone west of the Mississippi.

  I was often surprised in this way by the talk of the prairie men. They had lived out there so long that they had forgotten the ways of the rest of the world, and they had forgotten the size of it, too. They finally came to have the viewpoint of the Indians who never could really understand that there were more white people in existence than there were Indians. It made no difference how one talked of cities and nations. I have seen a great chief wave his hand at a village of five hundred teepees and speak as though there were no greater city in existence. And so, in a way, it was with the prairie men.

  Chuck explained about White Smoke in detail. He was a great white stallion with four black-stockinged legs. The horse had first appeared about three years before - that is, it had grown up to maturity at about that time. Since then it had done all sorts of damage by running off the horses of Indians and the stock of caravans. No one could be safe unless his horses were hobbled, and that was an immense nuisance. Over a district a thousand miles wide men watched their horses every night for fear of White Smoke. For he would steal down a gully with the cunning of a wolf, leap in among the horses, and startle them away with his great clarion neigh. Once off at his heels, he knew how to lead them where they could not be easily pursued. He kept with him a band composed of a hundred or more of the finest mares that were anywhere to be found, for they were the weeded-out result of a thousand chases. They had enough food to keep away from the relayed chasing of the Indians and the whites as well. It had come to such a point that, when a man wanted a specially fine mount, he tried to get one of White Smoke's mares, and Chuck Morris told me that some men had traveled hundreds of miles trying to run down one of the stallion's band.

  This mare of Chuck's, whether she was of that famous strain or not, was a pure beauty with the strength of a tiger and the eye of a lamb. When I looked at her, horseflesh for the first time entered my soul. And those who taste the lotus are no more condemned to dreams and yearning than are those who have lost their hearts to horses, waiting for the perfect horse to jog over the horizon into their lives. I knew, however, that I could not ride her. I told Chuck that I was no good in the saddle, that I didn't know a horse well enough to attempt to select one, but, if he chose to give me the gentlest animal of his quartet, I'd pay him my fifty dollars as a first installment and more money later. He wouldn't take a cent of money, though it must have been like parting from his own flesh and sinews to give up a horse to me. Every one of that quartet was worth more than two hundred dollars - in a day when a doll
ar meant many times over what it means in this reign of millionaires. And Chuck Morris was only eighteen. However, he did give me a horse, and it was the second best of his lot. It was a brown gelding with a white left forefoot and a big, wakeful eye. I felt that horse had brains I could trust, and I was delighted with the choice. Chuck gave me an old bridle, too, and Chris Hudson gave me a saddle that was rather in tatters. Gregory himself, who was the captain of the caravan, gave me some blankets and some good advice, every word of which I forgot.

  In short, the entire caravan, young and old, treated me like a king simply because I had shown some spunk in standing up to big Chuck Morris. But after my boy's life spent like a hunted beast half the time and like a beast of burden the rest, God alone can understand what that warmth of human kindness meant to me or how my whole heart responded to it and opened up. I loved the men, and I loved the country they came from. The very word West has always brought joy to me from that first happy time.

  In the meantime we drudged forward. No one can appreciate the incalculable slowness of a caravan. In a pinch the whole progress could have been multiplied. Most of the horses were in good condition, and most of the wagons were sound. We could have rustled away across the prairies at an excellent clip, but the leaders wished to keep a good deal of strength in reserve to be mustered in case of need. Besides, at the slightest cause of alarm or the very hint of Indians, the crawling snail drew in its horns, stopped, curled up, and prepared for an attack. Once we lay for an entire day and a half, scouting the country busily in search of Indians, and all because one boy, riding alone, thought that he had seen one creeping through the grass.