Dashiell Hammett: Afraid Of A Gun and Other Stories

So he had fled from the Maryland city to avoid the possibility of another meeting with the cockney sailor and his bull-dog pistol.

And that was only the first time.

No matter where he had gone, he had sooner or later found himself looking into the muzzle of a threatening gun. It was as if his very fear attracted the thing he feared. A dog, he had been told as a boy, would bite you if he thought you were afraid of him. It had been that way with guns.

Each repetition had left him in worse case than before; until now the sight of a menacing firearm paralyzed him, and even the thought of one blurred his mind with terror.

In those earlier days he hadn't been a coward, except where guns were concerned; but he had run too often; and that fear, growing, had spread like the seepage from some cancerous growth, until, little by little, he had changed from a man of reasonable courage with one morbid fear to a man of no courage at all with fears that included most forms of physical violence.

But, in the beginning, his fear hadn't been too great to have been outfaced. He could have overcome it that time in Baltimore. It would have required an enormous effort, but he could have overcome it. He could have overcome it the next time, in New South Wales, when, instead, he had gone riding madly to Bourke, across a hundred-mile paddock, away from a gun in the hands of a quarrelsome boundary rider—a desperate flight along a road whose ruts stood perversely up out of the ground like railway tracks, with frightened rabbits and paddy-mellons darting out of the infrequent patches of white-bearded spear grass along his way.

Nor would it have been too late three months after that, in north Queensland. But he had run away again. Hurrying down to Cairns and the Cooktown boat, this time, away from the menace of a rusty revolver in the giant black hand of a Negro beside whom he had toiled thigh-deep in the lime-white river of the Muldiva silver fields.

After that, however, he was beyond recovery. He could not then by any effort have conquered his fear. He was beaten and he knew it. Henceforth, he had run without even decent shame in his cowardice, and he had begun to flee from other things than guns.

He had, for instance, let a jealous half-caste garimpeiro drive him out of Morro Velho, drive him away from his job with the British Sao Joao del Rey Mining Company and Tita. Tita's red mouth had gone from smiling allure to derision, but neither the one nor the other was strong enough to keep Owen Sack from retreating before the flourish of a knife in the hand of a man he could have tied in knots, knife and all. Out of the Bakersfield oil fields he had been driven by the bare fists of an undersized rigger. And now from here...

The other times hadn't, in a way, been so bad as this. He was younger then, and there was always some other place to attract him—one place was as good as another. But now it was different.

He was no longer young, and here in the Cabinet Mountains he had meant to stop for good. He had come to look upon his cabin as his home. He wanted but two things now: a living and tranquillity, and until now he had found them here. In the year 1923 it was still possible to wash out of the Kootenai enough dust to make wages—good wages. Not wealth, certainly, but he didn't want wealth; he wanted a quiet home, and for six months he had had it here.

And then he had stumbled upon the Yusts' cache. He had known, as all Dime knew, that the Kootenai River—winding down from British Columbia to spend most of its four hundred miles in Montana and Idaho before returning to the province of its birth to join the great Columbia—was the moving road along which came much liquor, to be relayed to Spokane, not far away. That was a matter of common knowledge, and Owen Sack of all men had no desire for more particular knowledge of the river traffic.

Why, then, had his luck sent him blundering upon the place where that liquor was concealed until ready for its overland journey? And at a time when the Yusts were there to witness his discovery? And then, as if that were not enough in itself, the Prohibition enforcement officers had swooped down on that hiding-place within a week.

Now the Yusts suspected him of having informed; it was but a matter of time before their stupid brains would be convinced of that fact; then they would strike—with a gun. A pellet of metal would drive through Owen Sack's tissues as one had driven through Cardwell's...

He got up from the chair and set about packing such of his belongings as he intended taking with him—to where? It didn't matter. One place was like another—a little of peace and comfort, and then the threat of another gun, to send him elsewhere. Baltimore, New South Wales, north Queensland, Brazil, California, here—thirty years of it! He was old now and his legs were stiff for flight, but running had become an integral part of him.

He packed a little breathlessly, his fingers fumbling clumsily in their haste.

Dusk was thickening in the valley of the Kootenai when Owen Sack, bent beneath the blanketed pack across his shoulders, tramped over the bridge into Dime. He had remained in his cabin until the last minute, so that he might catch the stage which would carry him to the railroad just before it left, avoiding farewells or embarrassing meetings. He hurried now.

But, again, luck ran against him.

As he turned the corner of the New Dime Hotel toward the stage terminus—two doors beyond Henny Upshaw's soft-drink parlour and poolroom—he spied Rip Yust coming down the street toward him. Yust's face, he could see, was red and swollen, and Yust's walk was a swagger. Yust was drunk.

Owen Sack halted in the middle of the sidewalk, and realised immediately that that was precisely the wrong thing to do. Safety lay—if safety lay anywhere now—in going on as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

He crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, cursing himself for this open display of his desire to avoid the other, but nevertheless unable to keep his legs from hurrying him across the dusty roadway. Perhaps, he thought, Rip Yust's whisky-clouded eyes would not see him hurrying toward the stage depot with a pack on his back. But even while the hope rose in him he knew it for a futile, childish one.

Rip Yust did see him, and came to the curb on his own side of the street, to bellow:

"Hey, you! Where you going?"

Owen Sack became motionless, a frightened statue. Fear froze his mind—fear and thoughts of Cardwell.

Yust grinned stupidly across the street, and repeated:

"Where you going?"

Owen Sack tried to answer, to say something—safety seemed to lie in words—but, though he did achieve a sound, it was inarticulate, and would have told the other nothing, even if it had travelled more than ten feet from the little man's throat.

Yust laughed boomingly. He was apparently in high good humour.

"Now, you mind what I told you this afternoon," he roared, wagging a thick forefinger at Owen Sack. "If I find that you done it—"

The thick forefinger flashed back to tap the left breast of his coat.

Owen Sack screamed at the suddenness of the gesture—a thin, shrill scream of terror, which struck amusingly upon the big man's drunken fancy.

Laughter boomed out of his throat again, and his gun came into his hand. His brother's arrest and Owen Sack's supposed part in that arrest were, for the time, forgotten in his enjoyment of the little man's ridiculous fright.

With the sight of the gun, Owen Sack's last shred of sanity departed. Terror had him fast. He tried to plead, but his mouth could not frame the words. He tried to raise both his hands high above his head in the universal posture of submission, a posture that had saved him many times before. But the strap holding his pack hampered him. He tried to loosen the strap, to fling it off.