The Seventh Man
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Max Brand >> The Seventh Man
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17 This Etext has been prepared by Bill Brewer, billbrewer@ttu.edu
THE SEVENTH MAN
By Max Brand
Chapter I. Spring
A man under thirty needs neighbors and to stop up the current of his life
with a long silence is like obstructing a river--eventually the water
either sweeps away the dam or rises over it, and the stronger the dam the
more destructive is that final rush to freedom. Vic Gregg was on the danger
side of thirty and he lived alone in the mountains all that winter. He
wanted to marry Betty Neal, but marriage means money, therefore Vic
contracted fifteen hundred dollars' worth of mining for the Duncans, and
instead of taking a partner he went after that stake single handed. He is a
very rare man who can turn out that amount of labor in a single season, but
Gregg furnished that exception which establishes the rule: he did the
assessment work on fourteen claims and almost finished the fifteenth, yet
he paid the price. Week after week his set of drills was wife and child to
him, and for conversation he had only the clangor of the four-pound
single-jack on the drill heads, with the crashing of the "shots" now and
then as periods to the chatter of iron on iron. He kept at it, and in the
end he almost finished the allotted work, but for all of it he paid in
full.
The acid loneliness ate into him. To be sure, from boyhood he knew the
mountain quiet, the still heights and the solemn echoes, but towards the
close of the long isolation the end of each day found him oppressed by a
weightier sense of burden; in a few days he would begin to talk to himself.
From the first the evening pause after supper hurt him most, for a man
needs a talk as well as tobacco, and after a time he dreaded these evenings
so bitterly that he purposely spent himself every day, so as to pass from
supper into sleep at a stride. It needed a long day to burn out his
strength thoroughly, so he set his rusted alarm-clock, and before dawn it
brought him groaning out of the blankets to cook a hasty breakfast and go
slowly up to the tunnel. In short, he wedded himself to his work; he
stepped into a routine which took the place of thought, and the change in
him was so gradual that he did not see the danger.
A mirror might have shown it to him as he stood this morning at the door of
his lean-to, for the wind fluttered the shirt around his labor-dried body,
and his forehead puckered in a frown, grown habitual. It was a narrow face,
with rather close-set eyes and a slanted forehead which gave token of a
single-track mind, a single-purposed nature with one hundred and eighty
pounds of strong sinews and iron-hard muscle to give it significance. Such
was Vic Gregg as he stood at the door waiting for the coffee he had drunk
to brush away the cobwebs of sleep, and then he heard the eagle scream.
A great many people have never heard the scream of an eagle. The only voice
they connect with the kind of the air is a ludicrously feeble squawk, dim
with distance, but in his great moments the eagle has a war-cry like that
of the hawk, but harsher, hoarser, tenfold in volume. This sound cut into
the night in the gulch, and Vic Gregg started and glanced about for echoes
made the sound stand at his side; then he looked up, and saw two eagles
fighting in the light of the morning. He knew what it meant--the beginning
of the mating season, and these two battling for a prize. They darted away.
They flashed together with reaching talons and gaping beaks, and dropped in
a tumult of wings, then soared and clashed once more until one of them
folded his wings and dropped bulletlike out of the morning into the night.
Close over Gregg's head, the wings flirted out--ten feet from tip to
tip--beat down with a great washing sound, and the bird shot across the
valley in a level flight. The conqueror screamed a long insult down the
hollow. For a while he balanced, craning his bald head as if he sought
applause, then, without visible movement of his wings, sailed away over the
peaks. A feather fluttered slowly down past Vic Gregg.
He looked down to it, and rubbed the ache out of the back of his neck. All
about him the fresh morning was falling; yonder shone a green-mottled face
of granite, and there a red iron blow-out streaked with veins of glittering
silicate, and in this corner, still misted with the last delicate shades of
night, glimmered rhyolite, lavender-pink. The single-jack dropped from the
hand of Gregg, and his frown relaxed.
When he stretched his arms, the cramps of labor unkinked and let the warm
blood flow, swiftly, and in the pleasure of it he closed his eyes and drew
a luxurious breath. He stepped from the door with his, head high and his
heart lighter, and when his hobnailed shoe clinked on the fallen hammer he
kicked it spinning from his path. That act brought a smile into his eyes,
and he sauntered to the edge of the little plateau and looked down into the
wide chasm of the Asper Valley.
Blue shadows washed across it, though morning shone around Gregg on the
height, and his glance dropped in a two-thousand-foot plunge to a single
yellow eye that winked through the darkness, a light in the trapper's
cabin. But the dawn was falling swiftly now, and while Gregg lingered the
blue grew thin, purple-tinted, and then dark, slender points pricked up,
which he knew to be the pines. Last of all, he caught the sheen of grass.
Around him pressed a perfect silence, the quiet of night holding over into
the day, yet he cast a glance behind him as he heard a voice. Indeed, he
felt that some one approached him, some one for whom he had been waiting,
yet it was a sad expectancy, and more like homesickness than anything he
knew.
"Aw, hell," said Vic Gregg, "it's spring."
A deep-throated echo boomed back at him, and the sound went down the gulch,
three times repeated.
"Spring," repeated Gregg more softly, as if he feared to rouse that echo,
"damned if it ain't!"
He shrugged his shoulders and turned resolutely towards the lean-to,
picking up the discarded hammer on the way. By instinct he caught it at
exactly the right balance for his strength and arm, and the handle, polished
by his grip, played with an oiled, frictionless movement against the
callouses of his palm. From the many hours of drilling, fingers crooked, he
could only straighten them by a painful effort. A bad hand for cards, he
decided gloomily, and still frowning over this he reached the door. There
he paused in instant repugnance, for the place was strange to him.
In thought and wish he was even now galloping Grey Molly over the grass
along the Asper, and he had to wrench himself into the mood of the patient
miner. There lay his blankets, rumpled, brown with dirt, and he shivered at
sight of them; the night had been cold. Before he fell asleep, he had flung
the magazine into the corner and now the wind rustled its torn, yellowed
pages in a whisper that spoke to Gregg of the ten-times repeated stories,
tales of adventure, drifts of tobacco smoke in gaming halls, the chant of
the croupier behind the wheel, deep voices of men, laughter of pretty
girls, tatoo of running horses, shouts which only redeye can inspire. He
sniffed the air; odor of burned bacon and coffee permeated the cabin. He
turned to the right and saw his discarded overalls with ragged holes at the
knees; he turned to the left and looked into the face of the rusted alarm
clock. Its quick, soft ticking sent an ache of weariness through him.
"What's wrong with me," muttered Gregg. Even that voice seemed ghostly loud
in the cabin, and he shivered again. "I must be going nutty."
As if to escape from his own thoughts, he stepped out into the sun again,
and it was so grateful to him after the chill shadow in the lean-to, that
he looked up, smiling, into the sky. A west wind urged a scattered herd of
clouds over the peaks, tumbled masses of white which puffed into
transparent silver at the edges, and behind, long wraiths of vapor marked
the path down which they had traveled. Such an old cowhand as Vic Gregg
could not fail to see the forms of cows and heavy-necked bulls and running
calves in that drift of clouds. About this season the boys would be
watching the range for signs of screw worms in the cattle, and the
bog-riders must have their hands full dragging out cows which had fled into
the mud to escape the heel flies. With a new lonesomeness he drew his eyes
down to the mountains.
Ordinarily, strange fancies never entered the hard head of Gregg, but today
it seemed to him that the mountains found a solemn companionship in each
other.
Out of the horizon, where the snowy forms glimmered in the blue, they
marched in loose order down to the valley of the Asper, where some of them
halted in place, huge cliffs, and others stumbled out into foothills, but
the main range swerved to the east beside the valley, eastward out of his
vision, though he knew that they went on to the town of Alder.
Alder was Vic Gregg's Athens and Rome in one, its schoolhouse his
Acropolis, and Captain Lorrimer's saloon his Forum. Other people talked of
larger cities, but Alder satisfied the imagination of Vic; besides, Grey
Molly was even now in the blacksmith's pasture, and Betty Neal was teaching
in the school. Following the march of the mountains and the drift of the
clouds, he turned towards Alder. The piled water shook the dam, topped it,
burst it into fragments, and rushed into freedom; he must go to Alder, have
a drink, shake hands with a friend, kiss Betty Neal, and come back again.
Two days going, two days coming, three days for the frolic; a week would
cover it all. And two hours later Vic Gregg had cached his heavier equipment,
packed his necessaries on the burro, and was on the way.
By noon he had dropped below the snowline and into the foothills, and with
every step his heart grew lighter. Behind him the mountains slid up into
the heart of the sky with cold, white winter upon them, but here below it
was spring indubitably. There was hardly enough fresh grass to temper the
winter brown into shining bronze, but a busy, awakening insect life
thronged through the roots. Surer sign than this, the flowers were coming.
A slope of buttercups flashed suddenly when the wind struck it and wild
morning glory spotted a stretch of daisies with purple and dainty lavender.
To be sure, the blossoms never grew thickly enough to make strong dashes of
color, but they tinted and stained the hillsides. He began to cross noisy
little watercourses, empty most of the year, but now the melting snow fed
them. From eddies and quiet pools the bright watercress streamed out into
the currents, and now and then in moist ground under a sheltering bank he
found rich patches of violets.
His eyes went happily among these tokens of the glad time of the year, but
while he noted them and the bursting buds of the aspen, reddish-brown, his
mind was open to all that middle register of calls which the human ear may
notice in wild places. Far above his scale were shrilling murmurs of birds
and insects, and beneath it ran those ground noises that the rabbit, for
instance, understands so well; but between these overtones and undertones
he heard the scream of the hawk, spiraling down in huge circles, and the
rapid call of a grouse, far off, and the drone of insects about his feet,
or darting suddenly upon his brain and away again. He heard these things by
the grace of the wind, which sometimes blew them about him in a chorus, and
again shut off all except that lonely calling of the grouse, and often
whisked away every murmur and left Gregg, in the center of a wide hush with
only the creak of the pack-saddle and the click of the burro's accurate
feet among the rocks.
At such times he gave his full attention to the trail, and he read it as
one might turn the pages of a book. He saw how a rabbit had scurried,
running hard, for the prints of the hind feet planted far ahead of those on
the forepaws. There was reason in her haste, for here the pads of a racing
coyote had dug deeply into a bit of soft ground. The sign of both rabbit
and coyote veered suddenly, and again the trail told the reason clearly--
the big print of a lobo's paw, that gray ghost which haunts the ranges with
the wisest brain and the swiftest feet in the West. Vic Gregg grinned with
excitement; fifty dollars' bounty if that scalp were his! But the story of
the trail called him back with the sign of some small animal which must
have traveled very slowly, for in spite of the tiny size of the prints,
each was distinct. The man sniffed with instinctive aversion and distrust
for this was the trail of the skunk, and if the last of the seven sleepers
was out, it was spring indeed. He raised his cudgel and thwacked the burro
joyously.
"Get on, Marne," he cried. "We're overdue in Alder."
Marne switched her tail impatiently and canted back a long ear to listen,
but she did not increase her pace; for Marne had only one gait, and if Vic
occasionally thumped her, it was rather by way of conversation than in any
hope of hurrying their journey.
Chapter II. Grey Molly
If her soul had been capable of enthusiasm, Marne could have made the trip
on schedule time, but she was a burro good for nothing except to carry a
pack well nigh half her own weight, live on forage that might have starved
a goat, and smell water fifteen miles in time of drought. Speed was not in
her vocabulary, and accordingly it was late afternoon rather than morning
when Gregg, pointing his course between the ears of Marne, steered her
through Murphy's Pass and came out over Alder. There they paused by mutual
consent, and the burro flicked one long ear forward to listen to the
rushing of the Doane River. It filled the valley with continual murmur, and
just below them, where the brown, white-flecked current twisted around an
elbow bend, lay Alder tossed down without plan, here a boulder and there a
house. They seemed marvelously flimsy structures, and one felt surprise
that the weight the winter snow had not crushed them, or that the Doane River
had not sent a strong current licking over bank and tossed the whole village
crashing down the ravine. One building was very much like other, but Gregg's
familiar eye pierced through the roofs and into Widow Sullivan's staggering
shack, into Hezekiah Whittleby's hushed sitting-room, down to the moist, dark
floor of the Captain's saloon into that amazing junkshop, the General
Merchandise store; but first and last he looked to the little flag which
gleamed and snapped above the schoolhouse, and it spelled "my country" to Vic.
Marne consented to break into a neat-footed jog-trot going down the last
slope, and so she went up the single winding street of Alder, grunting at
every step, with Gregg's whistle behind her. In town, he lived with his
friend, Dug Pym, who kept their attic room reserved for his occupancy, so
he headed straight for that place. What human face would he see first?
It was Mrs. Sweeney's little boy, Jack, who raced into the street whooping,
and Vic caught him under the armpits and swung him dizzily into the air.
"By God," muttered Vic, as he strode on, "that's a good kid, that Jack."
And he straightway forgot all about that knife which Jackie had purloined
from him the summer before. "Me and Betty," he thought, "we'll have kids,
like Jack; tougher'n leather."
Old Garrigan saw him next and cackled from his truck garden in the
backyard, but Vic went on with a wave of his arm, and on past Gertie
Vincent's inviting shout (Gertie had been his particular girl before Betty
Neal came to town), and on with the determination of a soldier even past
the veranda of Captain Lorrimier's saloon, though Lorrimer himself bellowed
a greeting and "Chick" Stewart crooked a significant thumb over his
shoulder towards the open door. He only paused at the blacksmith shop and
looked in at Dug, who was struggling to make the print of a hot shoe on a
hind foot of Simpson's sorrel Glencoe.
"Hey, Dug!"
Pym raised a grimy, sweating forehead.
"You, boy; easy, damn you! Hello, Vic!" and he propped that restless hind
foot on his inner thigh and extended a hand.
"Go an workin', Dug, because I can't stop; I just want a rope to catch Grey
Molly."
"You red devil--take that rope over there, Vic. You won't have no work
catchin' Molly. Which she's plumb tame. Stand still, damn you. I never seen
a Glencoe with any sense!--Where you goin', Vic? Up to the school?"
And his sweaty grin followed Vic as the latter went out with the coil of
rope over his shoulder. When Gregg reached the house, Nelly Pym hugged him,
which is the privilege of fat and forty, and then she sat at the foot of
the stairs and shouted up gossip while he shaved with frantic haste and
jumped into his best clothes. He answered her with monosyllables and only
half his mind.
"Finish up your work, Vic?"
"Nope."
"You sure worked yourself all thin. I hope somebody appreciates it." She
chuckled. "Ain't been sick, have you?"
"Say, who d'you think's in town? Sheriff Glass!"
This information sank in on him while he tugged at a boot at least a size
and half too small.
"Pete Glass!" he echoed. Then: "Who's he after?"
"I dunno. Vic, he don't look like such a bad one."
"He's plenty bad enough," Gregg assured her. "Ah-h-h!"
His foot ground into place, torturing his toes.
'"Well," considered Mrs. Pym, in a philosophic rumble, "I s'pose them quiet
gents is the dangerous ones, mostly; but looking at Glass you wouldn't
think he'd ever killed all those men. Know about the dance?"
"Nope."
"Down to Singer's place. Betty goin' with you?"
He jerked open the door and barked down at her: "Who else would she be
goin' with?"
"Don't start pullin' leather before the horse bucks," said Mrs. Pym. "I
don't know who else she'd be goin' with. You sure look fine in that red
shirt, Vic!"
He grinned, half mollified, half shame-faced, and ducked back into the
room, but a moment later he clumped stiffly down the stairs, frowning. He
wondered if he could dance in those boots.
"Feel kind of strange in these clothes. How do I look, Nelly?" And he
turned in review at the foot of the stairs.
"Slick as a whistle, I'll tell a man." She raised her voice to a shout as
he disappeared through the outer door. "Kiss her once for me, Vic."
In the center of the little pasture he stood shaking out the noose, and the
three horses raced in a sweeping gallop around the fence, looking for a
place of escape, with Grey Molly in the lead. Nothing up the Doane River,
or even down the Asper, for that matter, could head Molly when she was full
of running, and the eyes of Gregg gleamed as he watched her. She was not a
picture horse, for her color was rather a dirty white than a dapple, and
besides, there were some who accused her of "tucked up belly." But she had
the legs for speed in spite of the sloping croup, and plenty of chest at
the girth, and a small, bony head that rejoiced the heart of a horseman. He
swung the noose, and while the others darted ahead, stupidly straight into
the range of danger, Grey Molly whirled like a doubling coyote and leaped
away.
"Good girl!" cried Vic, in involuntary approbation. He ran a few steps. The
noose slid up and out, opened in a shaky loop, and swooped down. Too late
the gray saw the flying danger, for even as she swerved the riata fell over
her head, and she came to a snorting halt with all fours planted, skidding
through the grass. The first thing a range horse learns is never to pull
against a rope.
A few minutes later she was getting the "pitch" out of her system, as any
self-respecting cattle horse must do after a session of pasture and no
work. She bucked with enthusiasm and intelligence, as she did all things.
Sun-fishing, sun-fishing is the most deadly form of bucking, for it
consists of a series of leaps apparently aimed at the sun, and the horse
comes down with a sickening jar on stiff front legs. Educated "pitchers"
land on only one foot, so that the shock is accompanied by a terrible
sidewise, downward wrench that breaks the hearts of the best riders in the
world. Grey Molly was educated, and Mrs. Pym stood in the doorway with a
broad grin of appreciation on her red face, she knew riding when she saw
it. Then, out of the full frenzy, the mare lapsed into high-headed,
quivering attention, and Gregg cursed her softly, with deep affection. He
understood her from her fetlocks to her teeth. She bucked like a fiend of
revolt one instant and cantered like an angel of grace the next; in fact
she was more or less of an equine counterpart of her rider.
But now he heard shrill voices passing down the street and he knew that
school was out and that he must hurry if he wanted to ride home with Betty,
so he waved to Mrs. Pym and cantered away. For over two days he had been
rushing towards this meeting; all winter he had hungered for it, but now
that the moment loomed before him he weakened; he usually did when he came
close to the girl. Not that her beauty overwhelmed him, for though she had
a portion of energetic good-health and freckled prettiness, he had chosen
her as an Indian chooses flint for his steel; one could strike fire from
Betty Neal. When he was far away he loved her without doubt or question and
his trust ran towards her like a river setting towards the ocean because he
knew that her heart was as big and as true as the heart of Grey Molly
herself. Only her ways were fickle, and when she came near, she filled him
with uneasiness, suspicion.
Chapter III. Battle
On the road he passed Miss Brewster--for the Alder school boasted two
teachers!--and under her kindly, rather faded smile he felt a great desire
to stop and take her into his confidence; ask her what Betty Neal had been
doing all these months. Instead, he touched Grey Molly with the spurs, and
she answered like a watch-spring uncurling beneath him. The rush of wind
against his face raised his spirits to a singing pitch, and when he flung
from the saddle before the school he shouted: "Oh, Betty!"
Up the sharply angling steps in a bound, and at the door: "Oh, Betty!"
His voice filled the room with a thick, dull echo, and there was Betty
behind her desk looking up at him agape; and beside her stood Blondy
Hansen, big, good looking, and equally startled. Fear made the glance of
Vic Gregg swerve--to where little Tommy Aiken scribbled an arithmetic
problem on the blackboard--afterschool work for whispering in class, or
some equally heinous crime. The tingling voices of the other children on
their way home, floated in to Tommy, and the corners of his mouth drooped.
To regain his poise, Vic tugged at his belt and felt the weight of the holster
slipping into a more convenient place, then he sauntered up the aisle,
sweeping off his sombrero. Every feeling in his body, every nerve, disappeared
in a crystalline hardness, for it seemed to him that the air was surcharged by
a secret something between Betty and young Hansen. Betty was out from behind
her desk and she ran to meet him and took his hand in both of hers. The
rush of her coming took his breath, and at her touch something melted in
her.
"Oh, Vic, are you all through?"
Gregg stiffened for the benefit of Hansen and Tommy Aiken.
"Pretty near through," he said carelessly. "Thought I'd drop down to Alder
for a day or two and get the kinks out. Hello, Blondy. Hey, Tommy!"
Tommy Aiken flashed a grin at him, but Tommy was not quite sure that the
rules permitted speaking, even under such provocation as the return of Vic
Gregg, so he maintained a desperate silence. Blondy had picked up his hat
as he returned the greeting.
"I guess I'll be going," he said, and coughed to show that he was perfectly
at ease, but it seemed to Vic that it was hard for Blondy to meet his eye
when they shook hands. "See you later, Betty."
"All right." She smiled at Vic--a flash--and then gathered dignity of both
voice and manner. "You may go now, Tommy."
She lapsed into complete unconsciousness of manner as Tommy swooped on his
desk, included hat and book in one grab, and darted towards the door
through which Hansen had just disappeared. Here he paused, tilting, and his
smile twinkled at them with understanding. "Good-night, Miss Neal. Hope you
have a good time, Vic." His heel clicked twice on the steps outside, and
then the patter of his racing feet across the field.
"The little mischief!" said Betty, delightfully flushed. "It beats
everything, Vic, how Alder takes things for granted."
He should have taken her in his arms and kissed her, now that she had
cleared the room, he very well knew, but the obvious thing was always last
to come in Gregg's repertoire.
"Why not take it for granted? It ain't going to be many days, now."
He watched her eyes sparkle, but the pleasure of seeing him drowned the
gleam almost at once.
"Are you really almost through? Oh, Vic, you've been away so long, and I--"
She checked herself. There was no overflow of sentiment in Betty.
"Maybe I was a fool for laying off work this way," he admitted, "but I sure
got terrible lonesome up there."
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