Bull Hunter, Max Brand [top novels to read .TXT] 📗

to mean life or death! That's all! I'm not the only man that's faster'n you are. They's others. I've never been beat to the draw, but they's some that's shot so close to me that it sounded like one gun going off—with a sort of a stammer. And any one of those men would of shot you dead, Bull, if you'd fought 'em. Now, knowing that, tell me, are you going to keep practicing?"

"I'll keep tryin', Pete. But I'll never get much faster. You see, my arm—it's too big, too heavy. It gets in my way, handling a little thing like a revolver!"

Pete spun the big Colt and shoved it back into the holster so incredibly fast that the steel hissed against the leather.

"There you go running yourself down," he muttered.

He began to pace the room again, biting his nether lip, and now and then shooting side glances at Bull, glances partly guilty and partly scornful. Presently he came to a halt. He had also come to a new resolution, one that cost him so much that beads of perspiration came out on his forehead.

"Bull," he said gravely, "I'm going to tell you the secret."

"You've told me a dozen already," Bull sighed. "You've taught me how to swing the muzzle up, and not too far up, and how to lean back instead of forward, and how to harden the arm muscles just as I pull the trigger, and how to squeeze with the whole hand and keep my wrist stiff, and how—"

"None of them things counts," said Pete gravely, almost sadly, "compared to what I'm going to tell you. Stand up!"

It was plain that he was going to give something from the depths of his mind. The cost and importance of it made his eyes like steel and drew his mouth to a thin, straight line.

Bull Hunter arose; and as the great body unfolded and the legs straightened, it seemed that he would never reach his full height. At length he stood, enormous, wide, towering. He was not a freak, but simply a perfectly proportioned man increased to a huge scale.

Pete Reeve canted his head back and looked into the face of the giant. There was a momentary affectionate appreciation in his eye. Then he hardened his expression.

"Let your arm hang loose."

Bull Hunter obeyed. The hand came just above the holster that was strapped on his thigh. All these weeks Pete Reeve had kept him from going an instant without that gun except when he slept. And even when he slept the gun had to be under his pillow.

"Because it helps to have it near all the time," Pete had explained. "It sort of soaks into your dreams. It's never out of your mind. It haunts you, like the face of the girl you love. You see!"

Bull Hunter did not see, but he had nodded humbly, after his fashion, and obeyed. Now, with his arm fallen loose at his side he peered studiously into the face of his master gunman and waited for the next order.

"Draw!"

The command was snapped out; Bull's gun whipped from the holster; and
Pete Reeve drew in the same instant, carelessly, his eyes watching the
movement of Bull instead of paying heed and put his gun up again, but
Bull followed the example almost reluctantly.

"Nearly beat you that time, Pete," he exclaimed happily. "But maybe you weren't half trying?"

"Beat me?" sneered Pete. "I wasn't half trying, but you didn't beat me. I shot you twice before you had your muzzle in line. I shot you in the throat and through the teeth before your gun was ready."

Bull, with a shrug of the massive shoulders, touched the mentioned places and looked with awe at the little man.

"Now, listen!"

Bull grew tense.

"Watch my draw!"

Pete did not put his hand near the butt of his weapon. He held his arm out before him, dangling in the air. There was a convulsive moment. One could see the imaginary weapon shoot from the holster and become level and rigid, pointed at its mark.

"I've seen before—fast as my eye could go," Bull sighed.

"Look again," said Pete, gritting his teeth with impatience. "This time I'm going so slow a cow could see and beat me."

He made the same motion, but to an ordinary eye it was still as fast as light. Bull shook his head.

"Idiot!" cried Pete, his voice jumping up the scale, flat and harsh and piercing. "It's the wrist! Not the arm, but the—"

He stopped with an expression of dismay. Even now he regretted revealing the mystery, it seemed. But then he went on.

"I found out quick that I couldn't beat a good gunman if I used the old methods. Practice makes perfect; they practiced as much as I did. So I studied the methods and the great idea come to me. They all use the whole arm. Look at you! Your shoulder bulges up when you make the draw, and you raise the whole arm. Matter of fact, you'd ought only to use your fingers. Not stir a muscle above the wrist. Now try!"

Bull tried—the gun did come clear of the holster.

"No good," he said gravely. "It's magic when you do it, Pete. It just makes a fool of me."

"Shut up and listen!" Pete said sharply. "I'm telling you a thing that'll save your life some day!"

He drew a little closer. His emotion made him swell to a greater stature, and he rose a little on tiptoe as if partly to make up for the differences between their bulks.

Bull obeyed.

"Now start thinking. Start concentrating on that right hand. There's nothing else to your body. You see? You forget you got a muscle. There's three things in the world. You see? Just three things and no more. There's your gun with a bullet in it; there's your hand that's going to get the gun out; and there's your target—that doorknob, say! Keep on thinking. They ain't any more to your body. You're just a hand and an eye. All your nerves are down there in that hand. They're all piled down there. That hand is full of electricity. Don't let your eyes wander. Keep on concentrating. You're stocking the electricity in that hand. When your hand moves, it'll be as fast as the jump of a spark! And when that hand moves, the gun is going to come out clean in it. It's got to come out with it! You hear? It's got to! Your fingertips catch under the butt; they flick up. They don't draw the gun; they throw it out of the holster; they pitch the muzzle up, and the butt comes smack back against the palm of your hand. And in the same part of a second you pull the trigger. You hear?"

He leaned forward, trembling from head to foot. The eyes of the big man were beginning to narrow.

"I hear; I understand!" he said through his teeth.

"You don't pull the gun. You think it out of the leather. And then the bullet hits the doorknob. You don't move your arm. Your arm doesn't exist. You're just a hand and a brain—thinking! And that thought sends a bullet at the mark!" He leaped back. "Draw!"

There was a wink of light at the hip of Bull Hunter, and the gun roared.

Instantly he cried out, alarmed, confused, ashamed.

"I didn't mean to shoot, Pete. I'm a fool! I didn't mean to! It—I sort of couldn't help it. The—the trigger was just pulled without my wanting it to! Lord, what'll people think!"

But Pete Reeve had flung his arms around the big man as far as they would go, and he hugged him in a hysteria of joy. Then he leaped back, dancing, throwing up his hands.

"You done it!" he cried, his voice squeaking, hysterical.

"I made a fool of myself, all right," said Bull, bewildered by this exhibition of joy where he had expected anger.

"Fool nothing! Look at that knob!"

The doorknob was a smashed wreck, driven into the thick wood of the door by the heavy slug of the revolver. Footsteps were running up the stairs of the hotel. Pete Reeve ran to the door and flung it open.

"It's all right, boys," he called. "Cleaning a gun and it went off. No harm done!"

CHAPTER 12

"And now," said Pete Reeve, looking almost ruefully at his pupil, "with a little practice on that, they ain't a man in the world that could safely take a chance with you. I couldn't myself."

"Pete!"

"I mean it, son. Not a man in the world. I was afraid all the time. I was afraid you didn't have that there electricity in you or whatever they call it. I was afraid you had too much beef and not enough nerves. But you haven't. And now that you have the knack, keep practicing every day—thinking the gun out of the leather—that's the trick!"

Bull Hunter looked down to the gun with great, staring eyes, as though it was the first time in his life that he had seen the weapon. Pete Reeve noted his expression and abruptly became silent, grinning happily, for there was the dawn of a great discovery in the eyes of the big man.

The gun was no longer a gun. It was a part of him. It was flesh of his flesh. He had literally thought it out of the holster, and the report of the weapon had startled him more than it had frightened anyone else in the building. He looked in amazement down to the broad expanse of his right hand. It was trembling a little, as though, in fact, that hand were filled with electric currents. He closed his fingers about the butt of the gun. At once the hand became steady as a rock. He toyed with the weapon in loosely opened fingers again, and it slid deftly. It seemed impossible for it to fall into an awkward position.

The voice of Pete Reeve came from a great distance. "And they's only one thing lacking to make you perfect—and that's to have to fight once for your life and drop the other gent. After that happens—well, Pete Reeve will have a successor!"

How much that meant Bull Hunter very well knew. The terrible fame of Pete Reeve ran the length and the breadth of the mountains. Of course Bull did not for a moment dream that Pete meant what he said. It was all figurative. It was said to fill him with self-confidence, but part of it was true. He was no longer the clumsy-handed Bull Hunter of the moment before.

A great change had taken place. From that moment his very ways of thinking would be different. He would be capable of less misty movements of the mind. He would be capable of using his brain as fast as his hand acted. A tingle of new life, new possibilities were opening before him. He had always accepted himself as a stupidly hopeless burden in the world, a burden on his friends, useless, cloddish. Now he found that he had hopes. His own mind and body was an undiscovered country which he was just beginning to enter. What might be therein was worth a dream or two, and Bull Hunter straightway began to dream, happily. That was a talent which he had always possessed in superabundance.

The brief remainder of the day passed quickly; and then just before supper time a stranger came to call on Pete Reeve. He was a tall, bony fellow with straight-looking eyes and an imperious lift of his head when he addressed anyone. Manners was his name—Hugh Manners. When he was introduced he ran his eyes unabashedly over the great bulk of Bull Hunter, and then promptly he turned his back on the big man and excluded him from the heart of the conversation. It irritated Bull unwontedly. He discovered that he had changed a great deal from the old days at his uncle's shack when he was used to the scorn and the indifference of all men as a worthless and stupid hulk of flesh, with no mind worth considering, but he said nothing. Another great talent of Bull's was his ability to keep silent.

Shortly after this they went down to the supper table. All through the meal Hugh Manners engaged Pete Reeve in soft, rapid-voiced conversation which was so nicely gauged as to range that Bull Hunter heard no more than murmurs. He seemed to have a great many important things to say to Pete, and he