Max Brand

Sleeper Turns Horse-Thief

Warsaw 2019

Contents

I. BEHOLDEN TO A PEDDLER

II. UNBROKEN STALLION

III. FOUR MEN'S FORTUNES

IV. RACE OF THOROUGHBREDS

V. BATTLE OF THE STALLIONS

VI. THE STALLION'S STORY

VII. BOTTLED WITH DEATH

VIII. ANOTHER DEBT PAID

I. BEHOLDEN TO A PEDDLER

SLEEPER was hungry. There was plenty of game to be shot in the mountains around him, but he had neither rifle nor revolver. He had not even a fishing line or a fishhook. He might build traps to catch rabbits or the stupid mountain grouse. But that would require a day or more of work and waiting, and he was too hungry for that.

So he found a shallow stream where the sun struck through the rapid of water and turned the sands to gold. There, on a flat ledge of rock just above the edge of the stream, he stretched himself and waited. Only a thin sliver of his shadow projected into the tremor of the water, and his blue eyes grew fierce with hunger when he saw the trout nose their way upstream leisurely in spite of the swift tumbling of the little brook. They moved in their element with perfect ease, like birds in the sky. One that looked sluggish with bigness and fat disappeared in a twinkling and a flash, when Sleeper’s lightning hand darted down to make the catch.

But his patience was perfect. If a bear can lie on a bank and knock salmon out of a creek, Sleeper could lie in the same manner and flick out a trout now and then. He not only supposed so but he knew it, because he had done the thing many times before in the famine days of his boyhood.

His deceptively slender body remained motionless. Nothing about him stirred except the blue glinting of his eyes. And in them was the sign of the gathered nervous tension, the piling up of electric force ready to work with the speed of a leaping spark when the moment came to make a contact.

Another speckled beauty drifted up the stream at lordly ease. The fish started to dissolve in a flash, but the darting hand of Sleeper flicked through the water, and from his fingertips the trout was sent hurtling high into the air, to land in the grass well up the bank.

At the lower verge of the trees that descended the mountainside and stopped a little distance above the creek, Pop Lowry halted his three pack mules and looked out on the scene below. He began to smooth his bald head and laugh, silently as a grinning wolf, when he saw this fishing going on. Yet he remained there, screened by the trees and brush, while Sleeper stood up from his rock and started to make a small fire. Expertly Sleeper cleaned the fish and broiled them over the handful of flame. He was still busy when he called out: “Why don’t you show your ugly mug, Pop? I’m used to it. It won’t hurt my feelings.”

Pop Lowry, with a start, came suddenly out from among the trees, hauling at the lead rope of the first mule, to which the other pair were tethered. Two big panniers wobbled at the sides of this mule; heaping packs swelled above the backs of the others. Pop Lowry, shambling down the slope in his clumsy boots, waved a greeting to Sleeper, and, as he came up, he said: “How come, Sleeper? What you done with thirty thousand dollars in three days, boy? Or was it a whole week?”

A dreaming look came into Sleeper’s blue eyes. Then he smiled. “If that red horse had won Saturday,” he said, “I’d be worth a quarter of a million!”

“What horse?” asked Pop. His long, pockmarked face kept grinning at Sleeper, but his eyes narrowed and brightened as they strove to pierce into the nature of the youth.

“He’s a thoroughbred, Pop,” said Sleeper. “And he should have won. I put my money on him over at the rodeo and watched it go up in smoke.”

“You mean that you bet all that on one horse... on one race?” demanded Pop.

“You know how it is,” said Sleeper. “It’s better to stay dirty poor than be dirt rich. I mean... what’s thirty thousand?”

“It’s fifteen hundred a year income, if you place it right,” declared Pop Lowry.

“If I’m going to have money, I want real money,” answered Sleeper. “He was only beaten by a head, so I don’t mind.”

He began to eat the broiled fish, while Pop looked on in a peculiar combination of horror and delight.

Sleeper was succeeding in that task very well while the peddler filled a pipe, lighted it, then sat down on a stump to smoke.

“Supposin’ that you got that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Sleeper, what would you do with it?” Pop asked.

“I’d get married,” said Sleeper. “But I don’t know who I’d marry.”

“You’d get married... and you don’t know to what girl?” shouted Lowry. “Dog-gone me, if you ain’t a crazy one!”

“I don’t know which one,” said Sleeper. “There’s Kate Williams... I get pretty dizzy every time I think about her. But then there’s Maisry Telford. Her eyes have a way of smiling that I can’t forget.”

“Maisry Telford... why, she ain’t nothin’ but a little tramp. She ain’t got a penny to her name,” said the peddler. “You mean that Kate Williams would take you, Sleeper?”

“Perhaps she wouldn’t,” said Sleeper. “But there have been times when we seemed to understand each other pretty well.”

“My God, she’s worth a coupla millions,” said the peddler. “At least, when her father dies, she is. Marry her, kid, if you got any sense at all. Maisry Telford, what’s she got?”

“A good pair of hands on reins or a rifle, and a nice way with a horse or a man. She could ride all day and dance all night. She doesn’t need a big house. She’s at home in the whole range of the mountains. She could find you a rabbit stew in the middle of the desert, and she could find firewood above timberline in a thirty below blizzard. That’s some of the things that she could do.”

“Take her, then,” said the peddler. “It ain’t in you to have sense and marry money. It ain’t in you to keep anything. What you got on you now?”

“A comb, a toothbrush, and a razor,” said Sleeper. “A bridle and saddle and a horse to wear them... clothes to cover me... and a knife so that I can carve my name right up on the forehead of this little old world, Pop.”

Pop began to laugh. “If I was a magician and could give you any wish, what would you ask for first?”

“A sack of bull and some wheat-straw papers,” said Sleeper.

Pop Lowry, laughing still, opened one of the hampers of his first mule and produced the required articles. Sleeper accepted them with thanks, and soon was smoking.

“Why did you want me to meet you up here?” asked Sleeper. “I’ve been waiting a whole day.”

“I was held up,” said the peddler.

“What sort of crookedness held you up?” demanded Sleeper. “Were you planning a bank robbery, or just to stick up a stage? Or were you bribing a jury to get one of your crooks out of jail?”

“Sleeper,” said the peddler, “it’s a kind of a sad thing the way you ain’t got no faith in me. But the thing that I want you to do now is right up your street. It’s just the breakin’ of a hoss to ride.”

“What kind of a horse?”

“Just a nervous sort of a high-headed fool of a stallion,” said the peddler. “And four of my boys have tried their hands with him and gone bust.”

“Where’d you steal the horse?” Sleeper asked.

“There you go ag’in,” sighed Pop Lowry, “as though I never bought and paid for nothin’ in my life. But lemme tell you where the place is. You know Mount Kimbal? Well, down on the western side there’s a valley, small and snug with Kimbal Creek running through it. And back in the brush there’s a cabin...”

“Where the Indian lived that Tim Leary killed?” Sleeper queried.

“Right. Go there, Sleeper. You’ll find the hoss there. You’ll find Dan Tolan there, too, and Joe Peek and Harry Paley and Slats Lewis. Know them?”

“No.”

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