Max Brand - The White Cheyenne (Max Brand) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

When I looked into the wise eye of Sir Thomas, I felt better. I patted his neck and leaned for a moment against his shoulder.

That steadied me. There is nothing that brings assurance back to a man so quickly as the feeling that he has really gained the mastery over some twelve hundred and odd pounds of high-spirited horse. I patched up my bruised face, brushed the dust from my clothes, and shoved into my holsters my second pair of guns to take the place of the ones which the big man had taken from me so shamefully. After that, I saddled Sir Thomas and went back into Zander City, sitting in that saddle with a devil raging in my heart.

I got back quickly enough to the place where I had been made a double jackass for the first time in my life—once by a common teamster and once by the most extraordinary fists of that tall man.

When I arrived on the spot, I looked around hungrily. I was not long in finding a few faces of men who had seen me there before. They felt that they knew me well enough, by this time, and they not only smiled openly at me, but they went so far as to shrug their shoulders and sneer.

I picked the biggest of the lot and rode up to him.

“Were you here ten minutes ago?” I asked him.

He looked me over with his contempt like poison on his face.

“What if I was, son?” said he.

“If you were,” said I, “the first thing I have to do is to teach you manners.”

“Why, darn my heart,” said this fellow, rearing himself up from the old, crazy apple barrel on which he had been sitting, “either the kid has a little spunk or else he’s just crazy! How will you teach me manners, youngster?”

“With a whip,” said I, and I gave him the lash squarely across his face.

There are ways and ways of using a quirt. You can simply sting a horse or, if you are an expert and keep the right sort of a heavy, supple lash, you can cut the skin. I had the right sort of a lash, and I was an expert. A crimson stain followed that savage cut of mine.

He screamed with pain and surprise and shame, all mingled. With one hand thrown up before his face to ward off another of those terrible blows, he reached for his revolver.

I could have killed him three times while he was dragging out that gun, and in my left hand I kept the gun ready to open fire the moment that a gun should be necessary. I did not see any necessity for it as yet. I knew how to handle that long-lashed quirt, and I fell to work with it now. The second slash wound the thin tentacle of oiled leather around the gun wrist of that man. The backward drag of my arm drew the lash off again with a force and a speed that ripped the skin from his arm and yanked the gun fifty feet away.

That would have finished most men, but he was a fighting machine, that big fellow was. Only, he was not the same sort of fighting stuff that had mastered me on that same spot not many minutes before. He came in blindly to tear me from my horse and rip me to bits in his big hands. I literally cut him to ribbons with that dreadful quirt as he came storming in, recoiling, and plunging again. I hate to speak of that scene now. At the time, every stroke gave me infinite pleasure. Finally, he had enough and turned and fled with a scream.

I sat there and watched him go, with the devil sinking back in my heart a little appeased.

When he had disappeared I looked around me with care. I found that no one was sitting down. Nor was any one smiling.

I selected my nearest neighbor, and I rode up to him, saying: “A little while ago I was beaten here by a tall fellow. If you saw that fight, I want you to tell me the name of that man and where he can be found.”

The other was a fellow of middle age. And I suppose that he was past his fighting prime, or perhaps he had never had one. He merely nodded.

“You mean The Doctor, stranger,” said he.

“Is he a physician in this town?” I asked.

“I dunno that he ever spent much of his time curing,” said the other, and he smiled faintly, with much meaning.

“Well,” said I, “I want you to tell me where I can find him.”

He shook his head.

“Be glad to oblige you, stranger. But I dunno that I can say that. The Doctor comes, and The Doctor goes, pretty much as he doggone pleases.”

“What got him that name?”

“Why, I suppose that it was the sort of scientific way that he had of cutting up gents.”

“I follow the idea. Now I want you to tell The Doctor, if you see him, that I am going to be back in this same place at three o’clock in the afternoon of this day, and that I expect to find him here. When I find him, I am going to shoot him through the head if I can!”

I reined back Sir Thomas, and he gave way, prancing, because that was the only direction in which he didn’t like to travel. And I said to that choice cross section of Zander City’s finest ruffians and cutthroats:

“And if there are any friends of The Doctor in hearing, who want to tell me that he is anything else than a scoundrelly blackguard, I would like to have them step out and speak, because just now I happen to be in a listening humor. Do you hear? Do you all hear me?”

They heard me, but that was not all that they were to hear. For I rode up and down that place on Sir Thomas, cursing Zander City and the men thereof to their faces, telling of the regions from which they had come, and of the place to which they were all inevitably bound.

They listened to me seriously, never smiling, but with their heads cocked a little to one side as though they were preparing to pass critically upon the quality and quantity of the cursing which I was doing at that moment.

Not a one of them answered me. So I left them and retired to a distant saloon. There I stretched myself out in the shadows of a back room which was filled with reminiscent stenches of stale cigars and lager beer and terrible whisky. I gave a dollar to a loafer to watch the door, to warn me if any one tried to come in, and, in the meantime, call me at ten minutes before three o’clock, unless I was disturbed before that time.

At ten minutes to three I had to be shaken by the shoulder before I could waken. My nerves are not now what they were then. At the time it had seemed to me a perfectly natural and normal thing to be doing—to take a restful little nap before swinging into action. For two hours I snored in that back room; then I got up and shook myself together.

When I started out, after paying the loafer, the bartender significantly pushed a black bottle toward me. I put a dollar on the bar and asked for a glass of water and a towel. I used the water to pour over the back of my neck and head, and the towel to rub myself dry again. There is nothing better than a dose of this sort to pull the wits together and brush the cobwebs out of the brain.

I was ready for my work when I stepped out of that saloon, and untethered Sir Thomas. Then I walked down the street with that good horse following me like a big dog. I wanted to have an even steadier base than Sir Thomas himself when I unlimbered and went into action against The Doctor.

As I went along, I rather regretted that I had not made inquiries about The Doctor at the saloon. On the whole, it was perhaps as well that I had not learned all of the details of his heroic reputation before I started against him.

At the same place where I had first encountered the big Doctor, I slowed up, going along at a casual gait. I had an audience, now, and it was the sort of a scene in which I liked to figure. I suppose that most young men are the same. If they are going to be virtuous, they want to be virtuous to the playing of a drum, and if they are going to be wicked, they want to be wicked on a broad stage, with plenty of audience standing about. I couldn’t have been half so savage if there had not been a crowd on hand.