Читать книгу Sixteen in Nome - Max Brand - Страница 5

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Looking after them, with my eyes fairly popping, and the reeling dizziness only gradually working out of my head, I kept reaching down and patting Alec the Great, for as the huskies jogged away, I could think again about Alec.

Rewards were not in my mind, however. You don't think of rewards from any creature that has been through the fear of death with you. It was reasonably true that I had saved him from being mobbed—as I thought then — but it seemed equally true that he had saved me from a pretty pickle.

I made another pat for the head of Alec and found that he was not there. He had run off a little way down the street and was fawning around a man who was in the act of putting away a revolver inside his coat.

You can imagine that I stared at him. For suddenly I realized that I had not been alone and helpless during this fracas. That fellow must have been there a good part of it. He had pulled out a revolver to intervene if necessary. But he had not fired.

The cold-bloodedness of this staggered me. I had been a twentieth part of a second from having my throat ripped wide open, when the leader started to spring; and still the man had not fired, or rushed in with so much as a shout, but in a calm silence he had stood off there and watched the wrangle.

There was still a smile on his face, so that I knew he had been enjoying the little battle as if it had been staged for fun.

His face was pretty well muffled in fur cheek flaps, but I could see that he was young, and that he had a pair of eyes as hard and cold as the light that gleams on a steadied rifle barrel. He was not the sort of a man that one would reproach about anything, not unless one wanted either a fight or chilly contempt. I have seen that look in the faces of a few other men, and always they are the fellows who have been at danger's door and had a good chance to admire the interior.

He came up to me while I was still agape. "Who are you?" he said.

I started to answer, but the cold, the relief from terrible danger, and the sense of uncanny awe that was in me made my lips too stiff for words.

It was only after a second effort that I managed to say: "I'm Joe May."

"You'd better go home and put on something warm!" said this fellow. "Got no more sense than to come out in that sort of rig?"

There was so grimly commanding an air about him that I muttered something and turned on my heel and did as he had told me to do. I was too numbed in the brain not to do as he commanded, for I realized that this was no other than the great Massey himself. That being so, it explained why he ventured to stand by and reserve his fire until the last split part of a second, for they said that he was one of those men who cannot miss.

It no longer seemed strange to me that he had not offered any reward for the care I had taken of Alec. As a matter of fact, Alec had taken just about as much care of me! However, Massey had the reputation of being a fellow who cared for only two things in the world — Alec the Great and fighting. He was not the one, I supposed, to bother about sentimental payments such as charity to a ragged kid he had run into on the street.

I went back to the lodging house, therefore, simply because I saw that there was nothing else for me to do. I was paid up until that night, and at least I could keep the gnawing, painful, bitter spark of life alive in my breast until that time, lying crouched under my blankets.

So I went down the dark, cold dampness of the hallway and came again to the room where I had spent the night. Despair came over me as I entered that room, and the rank foulness of the air struck me in the face. Let them tell of the good, brave days of Alaska, but ah, the horrible pain I have known there.

I got to the bunk, but did not lie down at once. Instead, I sat on the edge of it with my face in my hands and my closed eyes looking at death, which I hoped would not be far away. Out of the naked earth of the floor, I felt the cold pass up into my feet, and higher, until my ankles ached. And I calmly wondered if it would not be better, really, to get to the outer margin of the town and simply lie down in the snow.

Of all deaths, it is the sweetest. I had heard it described. The pangs of the cold soon pass. There comes a delicious, an enormous wave of drowsiness. Pleasant thoughts move warmly through the soul. And that is the end. It is exactly like dropping off to sleep in a warm bed.

At this moment, a stone was dropped into the stagnant pool of my life. The harsh voice of a man spoke to me from the doorway.

"Going to lie down and die like a sick puppy?" asked that voice.

I looked vaguely, without resentment, toward the form in the doorway. There was no pride in me to bruise. I was only sixteen, and I had been pretty well rubbed down to the core.

A wet nose touched my hand. It was Alec the Great, and I saw that Massey had followed me home.

"Have you paid your room rent?" he asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"Are those your blankets?"

"No."

"Get up, then, and follow me out of this pig-sty."

I got up without a word and walked at his heels down the hallway and, when we came out into the street, I still floundered at his heels, blindly, like a dog behind a master. In some manner, the question of the future had been slipped onto his shoulders. He would have to solve it, and numbly I rejoiced at getting rid of the weight. This is not a heroic admission, but it is the truth. An empty stomach, I have found, is a famous corrupter of both pride and virtue.

We went down the street through the snow for a way, then he stopped, took me by the shoulder, and gave me a hard shake. I was loose in his grasp, which was like iron.

"Stand up beside me and walk out like a man!" said he. "Don't trail at my heels like a beaten cur!"

That was a little too much. The words, you might say, tilted back my head and threw up my chin like a straight left to the button.

"I'm not asking your advice about how I walk!" I said.

His gleaming, steady eyes looked through me like a glancing knife blade. A sneer formed on his lips, and disappeared slowly.

"Then hold up your head and walk beside me," he said.

I did as I was told. But anger was beginning to warm me inwardly. I set my teeth hard and strode along. I wondered if I should challenge him to a fight. At least, my pride was now not quite dead.

A little farther along, we were met by a man who was running at full speed, head down. When he saw Massey, he halted with a jerk.

"Massey!" he said. "Did you see my string of dogs?"

Massey answered not a word. He walked straight on and, when I would have blundered out an answer, Massey took me by the arm and dragged me forward.

I saw that the other fellow was gaping angrily after us, on the verge of shouting an insult which he controlled. Men did not shout insults at Massey. Not in Nome, where they had cause to know him. Half a dozen gunmen had started to make a reputation at his expense at one time or another, and they had all become mere footnotes in the story of his life.

But this little incident started me wondering what was wrong with the master of Alec. I could see that he was wearing a grim little smile, as though he actually had had a touch of enjoyment out of keeping back information from that dog-puncher.

I wonder if it were mere justice—punishment for a man who had allowed his team to get loose and thereby had endangered the life of the great Alec, who was more valuable than five times the entire lot? But it seemed to me that it was no mere matter of justice. Something more was involved. There was the question of that cruel, cold little smile.

I had heard, as every one in Nome had, the terrible tale of how Massey and Calmont had lived together until they hated one another because of Alec. They had been old, tried, proven friends. They had gone through everything together. Life and honor and everything they had owed to one another repeatedly. I could not help wondering, as I slipped and skidded on the icy snow crust beside Massey, if something had gone out of this man's life because of that breach between him and his old friend. Stranger things than that have happened. However, certainly I never met a man who, at first glance, appeared to be so entirely devoid of the ordinary gentler human emotions.

I was to know him much better and, the longer I knew him, the stranger the picture of him became. There was enough here to look at from a thousand angles, but never enough to show me the entire man. You would have said that he possessed some great secret on which he had locked his lips and which the world could never get at. For my own part, I am convinced that it was the wound made when he found his old partner and bunkie untrue to him. Enough to make even a saint put on a bit of a shell, I should say.

All these thoughts were struggling through my brain as I marched up the street beside him.

We turned a corner. A gust of icy wind struck strongly at me. I staggered. My feet went out from under me, and I fell flat. There was a solid whack about that fall, and I lay limp for a moment until I heard the harsh voice of Massey calling out:

"Pick yourself up! If you're not able to do that, you're not able to live, anyway, and I'll be hanged if you're worth wasting time over!"

I got to my feet, somehow, though now between cold and hunger and utter weakness I was pretty far spent. But the anger swallowed my other sensations. That fellow Massey had deliberately walked on ahead of me after his last remark, and I hated him with a power that gave me strength.

I ran after him. I shouted.

He pretended not to hear, or else the whistling of the wind may have drowned my words.

At last I stumbled up to him at the door of a sod house and touched his shoulder.

"I want to tell you," I shouted at him, "that I don't want your help! You and your help can both be hanged!" I yelled at him and shook a blue hand in his face.

He kicked open the door. He took me by the shoulder, and I still can see the sneer on his face as he hurled me before him into the room.