Читать книгу The Tenderfoot - Max Brand - Страница 6

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Allan went home and sat by the window, in his little room. He had not turned on the light, though the darkness was thick as ink in the chamber, for he wanted to look out on the night world. It was the first time in his life that he had such a desire. As a rule, there was supper to eat, and then a certain necessary chapter in a book to read, for he must not cease pushing his dull brain ahead. After the reading ended, he must undress and go to bed, according to that maxim of his dead father: "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise!" But his father used to add with a bitter significance: "Except fools--except fools!"

"Hush, father," Vincent's mother used to say, "how can you talk so--of your own boy--your own dear son!"

"Truth is like murder," his father would answer. "It will out!"

Neither of them had ever loved him. He had had an elder brother, graceful in body, quick in mind. On him all their hopes and their affections centered until scarlet fever carried him off. "If he had had Vincent's constitution, he would have laughed at the fever," the doctor had said. And from that moment they had rather held it against their younger son. They could not help letting him guess that, in their estimation, a whole gross of Vincents would not have been worth a single Ralph. So his home life had been a curse to him. Indeed, how little joy there had been in his life, either before or after the death of his parents. In fact, he could remember nothing so important as this day of days. He was revealed to himself as a new man. There was power tingling in his hands great enough to have struck down a professional pugilist so much larger than he. There was power in his heart, too, as untapped as the power in his hands had ever been. Romances of others had often appealed to him; suddenly he wakened to the belief that there might be romantic possibilities in himself, and the thought was stunning.

A block away the Third Avenue elevated roared and whined and rattled. It was hurrying throngs of men and women and children--alas!--back to their homes from the work of their day. To each of them the night had some meaning. There was a family to see for which they provided; there was a brother or a sister to greet; there was a table around which faces of dear ones smiled upon them. Oh, to Vincent Allan how dear was that picture! He had yearned to be a part of it all his life, but instead he had never been more than tolerated to his face and despised in secret.

On this magic day, however, a new avenue of escape was opened to him. Something might be done. There was strength in his hands--how much strength he himself could not so much as guess, but it haunted him. It was a domain which he would explore. Its distant borders he would examine and define. For what he had done against Bud was nothing. That final blow, he felt, could have been thrice as hard. Up his arm the muscles flexed and leaped at the thought, and fire came into his heart.

He could not stay in his room after that. Yonder m the street men were stirring, talking, laughing. He had a place among them now. They might supply the friction out of which he would be able to discover all the power that was in these hands of his. So he tugged his hat upon his head and went down the stairs to the street, now that his course was decided.

He began to wander idly, letting the streets lead him. He reached the Bowery where the congested traffic thickened from Fourth Avenue and Third and where the people swarmed like flies on the sidewalk. Three ruffians came before him, arms locked together, sweeping before them a wide swath. He braced himself--he dug for a foothold with gripping toes--the trio cracked open, and he was through. Vincent Allan stopped and turned and laughed. It was an invitation, but the three suddenly dropped their heads and hurried on.

He went on. --4 Out of all these hurrying thousands surely there was some one, or two, who would stand against him, and let him vent the newly found power of his arms, so long wasted. He turned a corner and wandered down a dim alley.

There came a chorus of shrill cries behind him; he turned and saw a child down and an automobile speeding on. Allan was off the curb in an instant. He raced at full speed in the direction of the speeding car. As it shot up beside him, he leaped onto the running board and caught at the wheel.

The driver crouched lower, barking at his companion. The companion whipped from a pocket a gleaming bit of steel, and Allan had no chance to see that it was a revolver. He struck as his eye caught the first flash, and the other crumpled in his seat. Then he seized the driver and the latter jammed on the brakes. They came to a halt bumping on the cobbles. He dragged the man from his seat onto the pavement. Behind them a hundred furious men and women were rushing, but they were still far away when the crisis came, for though the man whom he held twisted and writhed ineffectually in the grasp of Allan, like a child held by a man, his companion had now recovered and lurched from the automobile with the gun held stiffly before him. What was to be done? For the fastest hand could not outspeed a bullet. He thought of one thing only, and, lifting the man with whom he had grappled, he heaved the body around his head and flung it at the assailant. The flying mass struck home. Down they went in a heap, with the muffled roar of the gun booming at the ear of Allan.

Then the van of the approaching crowd swept up on them, engulfed them. He saw the two fallen men picked apart. The foremost of the crowd washed back. Some one gasped: "He's dead!" And Vincent Allan slipped back into the throng which had piled up even in this breathing space of interruption.

A man was dead; he had been the cause of that death; and for one killing the law exacted another. Such was the working of his mind as he hurried down the alley. He felt, vaguely, that he had been justified, and that he had only striven to bring punishment upon these brutes who had knocked down a child with their car and yet had driven recklessly on. But no matter what his intentions might have been, the fact remained that a man had died because of his intervention and because of that death he himself might be sent to the chair.

He thought of only one thing, and that was to flee as fast as he could. He had in his pocket all his cash which was not deposited to his bank account. That cash was woefully little, and yet it might carry him to a distance. He went straight to the Grand Central as fast as a taxicab would carry him. There he bought a ticket to Boston; in an hour the wheels were roaring under him upon the steel rails, and Manhattan had become a ghost of danger behind him.

The next morning he left Boston for New Orleans; and he reached New Orleans without a cent in his pocket. The tip to the porter had exhausted his exchequer. But still he had not placed a sufficient distance behind him. For it was in a New Orleans paper that he read the first account of the killing. It struck him like a blow--a headline on the third page.

"Man Used as Club" ran the headline. And beneath it: "Speeding Bandits Knock Down Child. Man Stops Pair Single-handed. Disappears."

The article beneath it ran:

"When Steve Martin, twenty-seven, of 92 West Charlesworth Street, New York City, and Mike Hanery, twenty-five, alias, 'Dan, the Mug,' of the same address, held up the paying teller of the Wheat Exchange Bank, Seventh Avenue Branch, Manhattan, they were given the cash which was on hand, amounting to seventeen hundred and forty-eight dollars. They did not stay to congratulate one another on their haul, but ran out of the bank before the alarm could be given and jumped into a stolen car which was waiting at the curb with the motor running.

"They sped down Seventh Avenue, soon eluding pursuit in the first traffic jam. Then they turned east, passed down Fourth Avenue to the Bowery, and left that famous street for a side alley running to Second Avenue. As they swung into the alley little Rose Kochansky, 192 Little Hanover Street, ran out on the cobble stones to escape a playmate who was attempting to tag her, and the machine struck her a glancing blow which knocked her down, inflicting severe bruises and perhaps dangerous internal injuries on account of which she now lies seriously ill in a hospital.

"The robbers, however, did not pause. They had other things to think about and gave their car the gas in spite of the shout of rage which arose from the pedestrians up and down the block. They would have escaped beyond doubt had not an unknown decided to take the affair into his own hands. He jumped on the running board of the automobile, stopped the car, and when the two attacked him, he picked up Martin and threw him at Hanery. The bullet from Hanery's gun passed through Martin's heart. The police are now searching for the man who used Martin as a club."

There was the significant sentence left to the very end like the snap and cut of the whiplash. The police were looking for him!

Let them reach far, then! That same day a freight train rattled West through the embowering green of Louisiana plantations and carried Vincent Allan on its rods. At the end of the first division, a brakeman discovered him, pulled him forth, and swung his heavy lantern to knock the hobo down the steep bank. So, before the lantern landed--weighted and reinforced with iron as it was--Vincent Allan stabbed his left fist into the shack's stomach and drove him into space. There was a roll down the lower bank, a half-stifled shout of fear and surprise, and then the splash as the green waters of the marsh received him.

Vincent Allan did not stay to observe further. He wandered on down the track, walking lightly and happily, for he knew that the magic had not yet left him--that it would never leave him and that he could make his way by the might of his hands wherever he might be. With this wealth of strength in his hands, however, how could he spend it? What could he do next?

He hardly knew. He hardly cared. Every day would take care of itself in its own turn, and he refused to worry over such non-essentials as clothes or food or a sleeping place. He had only to stretch out his hand and take what he would. He was in a farming district where strength had a value. He spent a week pitching hay. He broke the handles of three forks and blistered his hands raw until he mastered that peculiar little knack of getting under a large load of hay with the most ease. But Vincent Allan had learned to acquire information swiftly. All his life he had ever believed that there was a mystery behind everything, from the dexterous fashion in which a woman used a broom to bring the dust out of a thick carpet to the exquisite dexterity of a smith welding steel or tempering it; but he had always accepted his own stupidity so completely that he had not dared to attempt to imitate.

That bout with Bud had changed his mind. He had seen that his hands could do what other hands could do, and perhaps a little better than most of them! He kept on for a month. He learned, in that time, not only how to pitch hay but how to handle the bales, which is a very great mystery indeed! He learned how to ride a horse, how to drill fence holes with a hand auger, how to swing an ax, how to run a great cross-cut saw. Of course he did not become proficient in so many things at once, but he learned prodigiously every day. He learned with his body; he learned with his mind. He was in a new field, sinking roots into a new soil, and with the passage of every moment he felt his body coming into its own. The natural might with which he had been born was now being multiplied by exercise. For two weeks he went to bed with a thousand wearinesses in his flesh and wakened the next morning with a thousand aches. These pains began to disappear. By the end of the month his face was lean, this skin healthily flushed and tanned, and in his very fingertips the tingling certainty of his power.

What was in his spirit, however, hardly showed in his face. The mild, kindly blue eyes had not changed their light; his voice remained soft with a note of confiding and of appeal still in it. The habits of a life could not be changed so suddenly. He could not even ask for a direction without adopting the attitude of one who begged for bread. Such was Vincent Allan as he found himself in this new land, save that now he called himself Allan Vincent, feeling that even this small inversion might help to keep him from the knowledge of the police. For a few weeks of safety had not made him feel immune. An old saying rang in his brain day and night. Murder would out, and having been the cause of the killing of a man, his guilt must be eventually discovered.

So he pressed steadily West and West. At the end of the second week he considerably improved his position, for a farmer made a certain foolish wager concerning a three-hundred-pound bale of hay and the height to which it could be lifted, whereat Allan took the monster in his hands and heaved it to arm's length above his head. He could have put fifty dollars in his pocket, but instead the farmer offered a horse, a stoutly made and even rather beautifully finished animal with a strong Roman nose and long, mulish ears. That horse was offered in payment of the debt, together with an old saddle of which most of the leather had been worn from the wooden frame, and Allan, thinking that the farmer must have lost his mind, saddled and bridled the mare.

"What's her name?" he asked.

"Mustard!" said the farmer.

Allan had no sooner settled into the saddle than he was unsettled, sailed high into the air, and landed on his back. He sat up to find that Mustard was regarding him with a genial and whimsical eye while the laughter of the farmer and his men was a jovial thunder.

After that, when Allan journeyed West--a day of travel and then a day of work, here and there--he was accompanied by the roan mare. Not that he rode her, but that she strolled, contented, beside him. Every morning he attempted to stay in the saddle; every morning the battle was more and more desperate, more and more prolonged; but every morning Mustard pitched him upon his head and stood by panting to enjoy the picture of his fall. He was covered with bruises which were her handiwork, but he stuck by his guns. He was receiving a condensed, post-graduate course in the riding of a bucking horse. In the meantime, he passed from the district of farms. He came into open country. Bald, brown mountains lay before him in the day, and turned blue with the coming of evening, and it was now that he found a companion.