The Hair-Trigger Kid, Max Brand [best classic literature TXT] 📗

>because they wanted to go wrong.”

 

“I’ve heard a lot about that,” said the Kid. “I don’t believe much in

it.”

 

“I’ll tell you my own case,” said the other. “I was doin’ fine. I had as

slick a little ranch as you ever seen. I was follerin’ the letter of the

law. It was down on the Pecos—it was away off down there. It was a good

little old ranch, I’m telling you.”

 

His hard, bright, overwise eyes softened. He dreamed about the happier

past for an instant.

 

“I get me a wife, and the cows are running fine and fat, and everything

is what I want it to be, and then along comes Pi Jefford and wants my

land, and I won’t sell it, and so he gets hold of that long-drawn-out

skunk, that Dick Origen, and paid him a reward too for rustling every

head of stock that I had on my place. I go bust, the bank gets my ground.

Pi Jefford gets the place from the bank, and my wife, she figures that

it’s a dead waste of time for her to stick with a fellow as down and out

as me. All inside of a week I was flat on my face. Why? Because I’d done

something wrong? No, but because there was a great crook that pretended

to go straight, and that lived inside of the law, and he wanted me out of

the way. Well, the world owed me something after that, by my way of

figuring, so I’ve gone and taken it.”

 

The Kid nodded.

 

He made himself a cigarette, and smoked it with thoughtful care.

 

“Look here, Champ,” he said.

 

“Aye? What is it?”

 

“Well, it’s this way,” the Kid continued. “You liked your life back there

on the ranch?”

 

“That was life, Kid. Making things grow, and—”

 

“And round-up was a great time?”

 

“The best times that I ever saw!”

 

“Champ, I don’t think that you mean it. I’d like to make you remember the

time that you blew the safe of the First National in Carnedas, according

to the story that Bill Jackson told me of that night.”

 

“I remember that night.”

 

Soft laughter brooded upon the lips and the throat of Dixon.

 

“That was a night, old son!”

 

“Did you ever have such a good night on the old ranch?” Champ started to

speak, changed his mind, and stared fixedly in front of him.

 

“Did you ever have so much fun in any twenty days and nights on your

ranch,” persisted the Kid.

 

Still Champ did not answer, and the Kid, apparently taking this silence

as a confession, went on:

 

“There was no cruel sheriff that drove me out on the road, Champ. Nobody

ever cheated or gypped or short-changed, robbed or beat me in any way.”

 

“Hard times can rub through men’s patience,” declared poor Champ.

 

“Hard times didn’t bother me, either,” said the Kid. “I had enough money.

My family is a good family. I could walk on Persian rugs and drink tea at

four thirty every afternoon and sun myself with the pearls and paste of

the opera boxes at night. But that stuff didn’t appeal to me. There’s too

much dressing up and not enough places to go.”

 

Champ regarded his friend with tightened lips and tightened eyes.

 

“Where can you go out here except from sunstroke into chilblains? What

have you got here except a raw neck and an aching back, and dirt, dirt

and more dirt? By heck, sometimes I almost think, Kid, that I’d chuck it

all for the sake of living next door to a tin bathtub and a good supply

of hot water all the time. This is a hard life.”

 

“Yeah,” said the Kid. “It’s a hard life for those who don’t like it. But

let them have their soft rugs and deep beds and smart talk. I prefer to

shoot my meat, cook it, and eat it. They get the pleasure of being

together. I get the pleasure of being alone. They learn how other people

live and imitate them. I learn how horses and wild cats live, and imitate

them. They’re inside the laws. I’m outside the laws. I’m above the laws,

Champ. I kick the law in the face, because it doesn’t walk on my level.”

 

He yawned and stretched his arms.

 

“That sounds pretty fat-headed,” said he. “Well, I don’t mean it that

way. I only mean to tell you that I’ve never gone home since the day I

left, and I’ll never go home if I live to be a thousand. I’ve cut myself

away from ‘em. I’ve buried my old name. And I’m free as a lark, old son!”

 

He laughed as he said that, the purest joy in life welling and bubbling

in his throat, so that Champ grinned and nodded in return.

 

“You’re all out by yourself, Kid,” he remarked. “I’ve heard it before,

and I believe it, now. You haven’t even thrown in the sunsets, and the

mountain air, and such stuff. I was afraid that you were going to be

poetic.”

 

“I knew you were,” said the Kid, “and so I went soft on that pedal.”

 

“Where’ve you been?”

 

“I’ve been down south with Juan Gil, the Portuguese in Yucatan. Very hot.

Even gold melts down there.”

 

He yawned again.

 

“You got some, I hope?”

 

“Yeah, I got some. I loaded a pack mule with what I got.”

 

“Of gold?”

 

“Yeah. It was everything that Juan Gil had taken out of an old mine down

there. Good, patient sort of boy, Juan is!”

 

“You caught him out?”

 

“One night he tried to knife me. You see, he thought I wouldn’t be needed

any more.”

 

“What did you do to him?”

 

“Well, I pulled down the heads of two saplings and tied him to them. When

they jumped up into the air again, they didn’t pull him in two but they

stretched him a good deal. I left him up there close to the sky, and took

away his mules and the gold. Juan cried a good deal to see me go. But he

was taken down that day with nothing worse than a few bones broken.”

 

“You don’t seem to be traveling very heavy now.”

 

“It’s a long way from Yucatan,” said the Kid. “You wouldn’t have me go

all the way without stopping?”

 

“No. I bet you even threw roses on the desert, eh?”

 

“I threw a few,” said the Kid, complacently. “Even Old Mexico City

blushed a couple of times on account of me. And that’s a habit that I

thought the old town had forgotten a couple of hundred years ago. What

have you been doing?”

 

“I’ve been selling some mining stock,” said Champ Dixon. “It goes pretty

well, too, if I can get far enough east. But lately the blamed sheriffs

and their deputies have been pretty thick. So I’ve started in on a new

game.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Jumping water rights.”

 

“That’s nothing new.”

 

“Not new. All the better for that. It’s a game that’s been tried out and

practiced until a fellow can learn all of its dodges.”

 

“Like it?”

 

“Why not? It’s exciting.”

 

“What do you do?”

 

“Look around through the ranches, and find out the ones that have shaky

titles. Why, most of them have, for that matter. They’ve got their land

from the Indians, first of all, or from some old Spanish grant, perhaps,

or a Mexican under a law that never was a law, or from some old-timer who

never had any claim to the ground in the first place. We look around,

Shay and me, and we pick out the likely ranches, and then jump in and

claim and start to homestead on the best water on the ranch. Take most of

those places hack there where the big Milman ranch is, there’s not more

than one good stream to the ranch. You grab that creek, and they’ve gotta

buy water rights from neighbors, if they can, and drive the cows a darn

long march to get a drink; or else they cannot wait to go to the law, but

they can shoot it out with you. Maybe they drop you, and then they have a

chance to be hung for murder. Maybe they’re dropped. And then it’s a case

of the poor homesteader defending his rights.”

 

As the beauty of this business came home to Champ Dixon, he chuckled

through his teeth again, and drew in a long breath.

 

“If they go to the law. Shay has got one of the slickest lawyers that you

ever seen, and a lot of crooks that knows how to make evidence. Shay has

got men that could remember the length of Noah’s whiskers. They’ll swear

to anything. So if the trial comes off one chance in two, we win anyway.

And the poor sucker of a rancher has to pay through the nose, and we live

on the fat. Why, old son, it’s the very kind of a life for you!”

 

Suddenly he stopped, and grew red. For he saw that the Kid was watching

him intently, and without a smile.