The Hair-Trigger Kid, Max Brand [best classic literature TXT] 📗
- Author: Max Brand
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The girl flushed and bit her lip. “Do go on,” said she.
“We moved off the old land—there was nothing but a small shack on
it—and then we started across the hills for a sort of promised land
about which we’d heard a lot. We plugged along at a good rate. There was
no hurry. We wanted to have our cattle in good condition when we came to
the badlands, where we’d heard that the grass had been burned out, and
that it was very hard to push through. So we slogged along very slowly,
and enjoyed being on the road. Our first bad luck was a real smasher.
Half a dozen rustlers came down on us one evening, and scooped up
everything that we had in the way livestock, except for the two milk
cows. They took the horses, the mule, the burro, even; and the steers.”
“The scoundrels!” said the girl. “The contemptible scoundrels! Did you
ever learn who they were?”
“There were five of them,” said the Kid dreamily, as though he were
looking across the years and seeing that evening closely again. “Yes, I
learned all of their names. A tough bunch. Very tough. I learned all of
their names, however.”
“How? But go on! What did you do, then?”
“My father was a hard man,” said the Kid. “He’d lived a hard life. He had
the pain of work in his eyes, if you know what I mean,”
“Yes,” she answered. “Of course I know.”
“He’d been a farmer. And a scholar! But a farmer—frosty mornings,
chilblains at nights, freezing behind the plow, roasting in the hayfield.
He worked like a dog.
“Well, when we lost our stock, we were on the edge of the desert. My
mother begged him to turn back, but he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t go
back to the old life. He lightened the wagon of everything that we didn’t
absolutely need, and then he yoked up those two milk cows—and we went
ahead!”
“Great heavens!” said the girl. “Across the desert? With cows!”
He paused. His face, losing its characteristic smile, became like iron.
“My mother was a very young woman to have had a boy of six. She was a
jolly sort. She was straight, and had a good, sun-browned skin and her
eyes were always laughing. Like a dog that loves all the people all
around him. You know?”
She nodded She felt a breathless interest.
“She was rather tall,” said the Kid, looking straight and hard at the
girl. “She had blue eyes. They sparkled like sea water under the sun.”
The straightness of his glance took her breath. She herself was tall, her
skin was brown, and she knew she had dark-blue eyes. Her mirror told her
that there was life in them!
“Well,” said the Kid, “after a couple of days, I got sick. Very sick. My
mother began to worry. There was hell in the air!”
He looked up, as one suddenly struck to the heart by an irresistible
pain.
“Yes,” said the girl, barely whispering. “Yes?”
“The cows kept plugging along. I was sick, but my brain was all right. I
mean, I knew everything that was happening around me. I watched those
cows get thinner and thinner The flesh melted off them like the tallow
off candles. They turned into skeletons. It was a terrible thing to sit
there on the wagon seat and watch them dying on their feet. It was a
terrible thing to sit and watch it.”
“Go on!” breathed the girl. “What happened?”
“One of them died. I remember her. She was big Spot, we used to call her.
She was hard milking, and she was mean with her horns. But we got to love
her on that march through the desert. She pulled two thirds of the load.
Then she didn’t get up one morning. She was dead.
“There we were, stuck in the sands. There wasn’t very far to go, now, to
get to the grasslands, and one night I heard my father begging my mother
to go ahead and get to safety. He would wangle me through—me and the
wagon.
“Well, after Spot died, there was no chance of that. Mother wouldn’t
leave. They made a pack of everything that they dared to carry along.
They left the old wagon. They loaded me onto the back of the other cow.
She was old Red. One horn had been broken off. The other one curled in
and touched her between the eyes. She had eyes like a deer and a shape
like a coal barge. You know the way cows are.”
“Yes,” said the girl.
“They loaded me and part of the pack on top of old Red. Well, she was
pretty far gone. Her backbone stuck up like a ridge of rocks. I was
pretty weak. They had to hold me on her. They didn’t dare to tie me,
because every minute they thought that she might drop. And I could feel
her weaving under me. Staggering, and then going on. She was used to
pain, I suppose. It never occurred to her to lie down and give up.
“We went on for two days. At night, I used to stand in front of her and
rub her face, and she would curl out her long, dry tongue, and it felt
like a rasp on my hand.
“The third day, she went down with a bump and a slump. She was stone
dead.
“But she had done her part.
“Over to the north, we could see a green mist, and we knew that that was
the grass country. The edge of it.
“My father took me in his arms. I was too weak to walk. We went across
the rest of the desert and got to the grasslands, all right. My father
and I did, I mean.”
“Your mother—” said the girl, in horror.
“Oh, she came through, also,” said the Kid. “But a good deal of her was
left behind on that trail. She lasted through to the winter. I could see
her dying from day to day. So could my father. After a while she stayed
in her bed, and then died. The trail took too much out of her. She never
could get rested again.”
The girl placed her hands over her eyes.
At last she said: “And the men who did it? The cowards—the devils who
stole your stock?”
“Well,” said the Kid, “that’s a funny thing. You know that a mule lasts a
long time. Nine years later, when I was fifteen, I saw the mule that had
been stolen, and naturally I was a little curious. I started following
its back trail, and I looked up the five men, one by one.”
“They were all alive?” she asked.
“Only one is alive now,” said the Kid, and, lifting his head, he looked
at her in such a way that the blood turned to ice water in her veins.
To think of this matter calmly and from a distance, there was nothing
strange in the fact that the Kid had just implied that he had killed four
men, one after another. He had a reputation that attributed stranger and
more terrible deeds than this to him. But to be there in the quiet of the
woods alone with him was another matter. The friendliness in his blue
eyes upset her. And then he seemed amazingly young. There was not a trace
of a wrinkle about his eyes, and the only line in his face was a single
incision at the side of his mouth which appeared, now and then, when the
rest of his features were gravely composed, and gave him a look of
smiling cynically to himself. Whatever cruelties and desperate actions he
was guilty of, it seemed also manifest that he was as generous as cruel,
as manly as fierce.
Then, suddenly, she asked him: “Did you kill all of those men?”
“I?” said the Kid.
He smiled at her.
“You don’t think that I ought to ask you that,” she agreed, “and I don’t
suppose that I should. You’ve never told a soul, I suppose?”
“No, I’ve never told a soul, and I never intend to.”
She took her place on the log, she turned about on it to face him, and,
resting an elbow on her knee and her chin in the cool, slender palm of
her hand, she studied the Kid as he never had been studied before. He
looked straight back at her, but it was not easy.
“Well,” said she, “I don’t lose anything by asking, I suppose.”
“Are you asking me to tell you?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m asking.”
He still had in his hand the knife with which he had been whittling. That
whittling, she now saw, was no real use of the edge of the steel, but a
mere testing of it, while the whittler produced long, translucent
shavings which fel! as light as strips of paper to the ground, and slowly
dried, and warped, and curled. Now he flicked the knife into the air. It
whirled over and over in a solid wheel of silver that disappeared with a
thud. The blade had driven down into the earth its full length, and the
hilt had thumped heavily home.
“That’s a weighted knife,” said the girl.
“Yes. It’s weighted.”
He pulled it out and looked down the steel, which was hardly tarnished by
the moisture of the ground. He began to wipe and polish the blade slowly
and carefully.
“I asked about the four killings,” said the girl. “You won’t talk about
it, Kid?”
At this, he laughed a little.
“Do you expect that I’ll answer?”
“I sort of do expect you to,” said she.
“Well, tell me why.”
“Because I want to get to know you, and I hope that you’ll want to get to
know me.”
The Kid started a little. He looked at her in amazement, and in
bewilderment, and suddenly he seemed to her younger than ever before.
There was actually a slight tinge of red in his cheeks, and at the sight
of this color, she could have laughed, outright. But she swallowed her
triumph with a fierce satisfaction.
In fact, he was taken quite off balance.
“That’s fair enough,” said the Kid. “Friends as much as you like. Do you
have to know my story, first?”
“I’d like to, of course.”
“Would you have to?” asked the Kid.
He smiled in the way he had, secretly, to himself, as though he were
criticizing both himself and her, and wondering at the way he allowed
himself to be drawn out.
“Yes,” said the girl, calmly and firmly.
“Well,” said he, “the newspapers have written me up a good deal, and what
they leave out, you’ll find almost anybody willing to fill in—on a good
long winter evening when the fire’s burning well and the pipes are
drawing.”
She nodded.
“I know that sort of talk,” said she. “But I’m after facts.”
“You’d make an exchange, I suppose?” said the Kid.
“Of course I will. I have some dark spots of my own to show.”
He balanced the knife on the tip of a forefinger. It stood up as straight
and steady as a candle flame upon a windless night. “Well,” she said.
“I’m waiting to make the bargain. You ought to have me for a friend.”
“Yes?” said he, in query, but very
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