Max Brand

Werewolf

Warsaw 2019

Contents

I. THE NEW-COMER

II. THE LOCKED ROOM

III. DARK THOUGHTS

IV. NO ASSISTANCE

V. WORDS FOR THE WEAK

VI. A WOMAN OF STEEL

VII. FLIGHT

VIII. BITTER THOUGHTS

IX. THE PHANTOM

X. AN ANCIENT CREED

XI. WATCHED

XII. ONLY A MAN

XIII. READY

XIV. BEYOND FEAR

XV. BACK TO THE VALLEY

XVI. A QUEER DOG!

I. THE NEW-COMER

ALL day the storm had been gathering behind Chimney Mountain and peering around the edges of that giant with a scowling brow, now and again; and all day there had been strainings of the wind and sounds of dim confusion in the upper air, but not until the evening did the storm break. A broad, yellow-cheeked moon was sailing up the eastern sky when ten thousand wild horses of darkness rushed out from behind Mount Chimney and covered the sky with darkness. Dashes and scatterings of rain and hail began to clang on the tin roofs in the valley, and the wind kept up a continual insane whining, now and then leaping against window or door and shaking them in an impatient frenzy.

On such a night as this, few men got as far as Yates’s Saloon beyond the outskirts of the town of Royal, but nevertheless he was always glad to have this weather, for those who did come stayed long and opened their purses with as much freedom as though the morrow was to be doomsday, and as though their souls needed much warming with honest rye whiskey against that great event.

Mr. Yates had two rooms. The bar was in one, with a round iron stove at one end where the guests might warm themselves and a row of chairs against the walls, for one of the maxims of Yates had to do with the evils of drinking–while standing.

He was engaged in giving good advice at this moment to a youth who rested one elbow on the edge of the bar and poised the other fist upon his hip–a tall, strong, fierce young man who smiled down at the saloon keeper partly in contempt for the advice and partly in mild recognition of the privilege of white hairs.

“You give me another slug of the red-eye, old boy,” said the cowpuncher.

Mr. Yates filled the glass with an unwilling shake of the head. As he pushed it back across the bar and gathered in the fifty-cent piece he said gloomily: “You can’t hurry liquor, son. Whiskey is something that can’t be rushed. You got to go slow and easy, let it mellow you, treat it with caution... and then whiskey will stand your friend.”

“All right,” said the cowpuncher, tossing off the drink and shoving back the glass. “Never mind the change. Gimme another, will you... and then you can talk some more.”

Mr. Yates came to a pause.

“I dunno that I ought to let you drink another so quick,” he said.

“You dunno?” said the young man. “I know, though. Fill up that glass!”

There were five men in the barroom, their chairs tilted against the wall, and now five chairs swung softly forward, and five heads were raised.

“I tell you, lad,” explained the saloon keeper, “that the whiskey which will be a friend to the wise man can turn into a devil if it’s treated carelessly. You can’t crowd it into a corner. You can’t treat it like a slave!”

“What’ll it do?” asked the boy. And stretching out his arm with a movement of snaky speed, he wrenched the bottle from the hands of the saloon keeper, and filled his glass with such a careless violence that an extra quantity spilled upon the well-rubbed varnish of the bar.

“What’s this stuff going to do to me?”

Mr. Yates did not attempt to protest against the act of violence. But a dark flush spread over his face and he said solemnly: “It’ll take you by the throat and strangle you. It’ll send a bullet into your back. It’ll throw you under the feet of a mad horse. Or it’ll kill you with the horrors, if it feels like it!”

The youngster tossed off his liquor again, coughed, and then shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t understand what you’re driving at,” he said, “and I don’t know that I give a damn! Is there any writing paper in that other room?”

There was still more contention upon the tip of the tongue of Yates, but he controlled himself with an effort, for words flow more willingly from the lips of an old man than water from a rich spring. He merely said: “There’s always paper there, and welcome!”

There was no answer to this courtesy. The cowboy turned from the bar and kicked open the door. His chair screeched as he drew it up to a table, and after that there was silence from the second room, and silence at the bar, also. The five farmers and cow hands smoked their pipes or cigarettes and watched the thoughtful cloud upon the brow of their host.

“And who is he?” asked one at length.

“Him? Didn’t you have a fair look at him?”

“It’s Cliff Main,” said another. “I knew him over in the Ridoso Valley a few years back, and I’m sure it’s him.”

“Yes,” nodded Yates, “it’s the same man.”

But one of the others said suddenly: “Why, partner, that’s the name of Harry Main’s brother!”

Again the saloon keeper nodded.

“It’s him,” he confessed.

This was followed by a deeper and longer silence, and more than one apprehensive glance was cast at the door of the second room. A weather-beaten farm hand approached the bar and leaned against it.

“Tell me,” he murmured, “is he like Harry?” And he hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

“You can see for yourself,” said Yates solemnly. But he added, forced on by a keen sense of fairness: “No, he ain’t a killer, you might say. He’s gone straight enough. But still he ain’t any lamb!”

The farmer shuddered a little. “What’s his game here?” he asked.

“It’s that girl up the valley... her that young Royal is after.”

“Which Royal?”

“I mean Christopher.”

“It’s the Lassiter girl that Chris Royal goes with, ain’t it?”

“That’s the one. They say that Main seen her at a dance down in Phoenix last year, and it addled his head a good deal. So I guess that’s why he’s here.”

“That would be a thing!” said the farmer. “A Lassiter to look at a Main, eh?”

“Well, I’ve seen stranger things happen,” said Yates. “A pretty girl takes to a strong man, and a strong man takes to a pretty girl. Goodness and badness ain’t considered much, and neither is the poor old family tree. But that ain’t the point. Georgie Lassiter, she’s got one strong man already, and that had ought to be enough! I guess that no woman can ask for more than a Royal, eh?” He leaned on the edge of the bar. “I guess that no woman could ask for more than that,” he echoed himself, and he shook his head slowly from side to side and laughed softly.

The others nodded in understanding, as though they were all familiar with the qualities of the family which had given its name to the valley and to the town.

In the meantime the storm had been rising and quickening like the pulse of a sick man’s heart, and now the wind broke with hysterical wailing around the saloon. The windows and the doors rattled furiously. The very roofs seemed about to be unsettled, and a contrary gust came down the chimney and knocked a puff of smoke through every crack of the stove.

“What a night!” breathed Yates.

“I’ll take another whiskey!” said one.

“And me!” said another. “We’ll set ’em up all around. I say that I don’t mind a night like this when you can sit warm around a fire with something to keep your heart up. But I could tell you about a night that was a twin brother to this, except that it was in February with ice in the wind. I was back up in Montana, that winter, riding range for the...”

The door quivered and then jerked open, and the wind, like an entering flood of water, made every man cringe in his place. With that burst of the storm came a big young man who thrust the door shut behind him with a strong hand and then leaned against the bar, stamping the water out of his soaked riding boots and shaking the rain out of his hat. He was neither beaten nor even embittered by the force of the wind and the rain. It had merely brought a rosy glow into his face and dimmed the brightness of his eyes a bit with moisture.

“Well, Chris Royal,” said the bar keeper. “What’re you having?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m bound home, you see, and Mother doesn’t like me to have liquor on my breath. I stopped and put my mare in your shed for a feed and a bit of rest. She was fagged by bucking this wind all the way up the valley.”

He broke off to speak to the other men in the room and, as he completed that little ceremony and had asked after their welfare, you might have put him down as the son of a great landed proprietor on whose estates all of these men were living, so that their welfare in a way was his. However, that was not the case, even though the Royals had been so long in the valley, had given it its name, and had dominated all affairs in it that they were placed in a truly patriarchal position. There were no political parties in Royal County or in Royal Valley, for instance. There were only the Royal partisans and their opponents. And the opponents were sure to be merely a scattering and spiteful handful. In other ways, too, the family dominated the region.

“It’s a sort of queer name... Royal,” someone had said to a man from the valley, and the answer had been instant: “That’s because you ain’t seen them. They’re all fit to be kings!”

“But look here, Christopher,” said Yates. “D’you know that, if you don’t drink, you’re missing one of the best things in life?”

“I take a drink now and then,” said Christopher. “I like it as well as most, I suppose. But it bothers Mother to have me do it. So I don’t when I’m going toward her, you see.”

“Ah, well,” said Mr. Yates, holding up a bottle toward the light, “here’s something twenty-five years old that I was going to offer you a sip of, but heaven knows that I’d make trouble between no boy and his mother. She’s a grand lady, Christopher, and amazing how well she carries her years, ain’t it?”

“Years?” said Christopher. “Years?”

“Well, she’s getting on, ain’t she?”

Christopher Royal looked rather blankly at his host. “I never thought of that,” he said. “She isn’t really old, you know.”

“No, not old! Not old!” said Yates, smiling. “But when we have white hair...”

“Her silver hair,” said Christopher, “is beautiful. It’s always been silver, you know. As far as I can remember.”

“I can remember farther back than that, though,” smiled the saloon keeper. “I can remember when she first came to Royal Valley. It was a dark, mean day, and she come in a covered carriage, all made snug. But I had a glimpse of her through the carriage window and saw her face all pink and white and her yellow hair like a pool of sunshine in the shadows of the carriage.”

Christopher shook his head. “I can hardly think that my mother was ever like that,” he said, smiling in rather a bewildered way. “But you mustn’t call her old!”

“Why, Chris, at sixty you can’t exactly call her young, can you?”

“Sixty?” exclaimed Christopher. He began to think back. “I’m twenty-five. Duncan is twenty-eight. Peter is thirty. Edgerton is thirty-one. Samson is thirty-five. By heavens, you’re right, and she’s sixty years old. I should never have guessed that. One doesn’t connect years and time with her.” He added with a smile to Yates: “And you’re one of the unchangeables, too. You’ve never been any different, have you? Not in my lifetime!”

“Well, lad, well!” smiled Yates, “I do well enough. I just shrink and shrivel a bit as time goes on. I get a little whiter and a little drier, and there’s less hair for me to bother about combing, from year to year. But I don’t change much. Neither does the old place.”

“You’ve put a new wing on the shed, though.”

“You noticed that, eh?”

“Yes. Who did you have do the work?”

“I had the slaves of Adam,” said Mr. Yates, and he held out his two hands with a chuckle.

“You did it all yourself?” Christopher whistled. “You’re a rare old one. If there were more like you, there’d be no room for the youngsters in the world. You’d take our work away from us.”

A door crashed just behind him.

“Are you Chris Royal?” asked a voice, and he turned about and looked into the dark eyes of Cliff Main.

“I’m Christopher Royal,” he admitted.

The other stepped up and faced him at the bar.

“I started to find you today,” he said. “Then the rain dropped on me and I put in here. I want to have a talk with you, Royal.”

“A talk? Where?”

“Well, there’s an empty room back here. We might go there.”

II. THE LOCKED ROOM

CHRISTOPHER regarded the newcomer rather dubiously for a moment, but then he nodded and followed him into the other apartment. The door closed behind Main, and the lock grated as it was turned.

“Hello!” said the saloon keeper, starting around from behind the bar. “I don’t like that!”

“What’re you going to do, Yates?” asked one of the farm hands, catching his sleeve as he passed.

“I’m going to have that door open.”

“Now, don’t you do it. You know Main. Don’t take more’n a little thing like that to send Harry Main crazy. And his brother looks like the same kind of gunpowder.”

Yates paused, biting his lip with anxiety.

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