# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 32/Number 4/The Feud

Extracted from The Red Book Magazine, 1919 Feb pp. 29–32, 91–92. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
By ROY NORTON
Illustrated by HAWTHORNE HOWLAND
Bill got reluctantly to his feet.... walked deliberately out with no weapon in hand.
OVER that long strip of country where men mine for gold, bounded on the north by the Arctic Circle and on the south by the Equator, with the Pacific Ocean ever in proximity to the westward, the partnership of “Cajon Bill” Weidner and “Yavapai Jim” Williams was known. Established for more than twenty years, it had become traditional that the partners must be accounted for as one, be it in frolic or fray, hardship or prosperity. If they purchased, they purchased together; and if they sold, they sold together. Dangerous men to trifle with, secure men to depend upon; well rarely seeking trouble, never shirking it. And in time men came to smile at the actual absurdity of their affection and exchanged admiration.
“My pardner Jim can do as much work and can sing better than any man on earth,” Bill would assert, as if proclaiming twin and paramount virtues.
My pardner Bill is as good a miner as walks, and isn't afraid of anything, dead or alive!” Jim would frequently explain when talking to friends, acquaintances or strangers.
And perhaps through reiteration of these statements, men of the mining fields from Klondike to Peru began to believe them. For Jim could do the work of two men with tireless energy, and had a splendid voice when raised in song; and Bill Weidner seemed born with a sixth sense for the gold that lay secreted in mother earth, and his courage was beyond challenge. Doubtless it was the very stubbornness and fixedness of their characters that made the pitiful feud between them notorious when it broke out. The actual beginning could be traced to Sarajevo and the date June 28, 1914.
One of the most peculiar and distressing thoughts, to the contemplative mind, is that a war was begun in such an obscure corner of Europe that but few men could tell where Sarajevo was, before seeking it on a map, and that the assassination of a grand duke and duchess should break friendships between two such humble far-away men as the partners. Doubtless neither Cajon Bill nor on Jim ever even heard of either the royal victims or of Sarajevo.
On the night the partners arrived at a tavern on the American River they learned that Germany had gone to war. The conflict had been in progress for some weeks without knowledge on their part, for they had returned from a prospecting trip high up on the divide of the Sierra Nevadas. Also they, being humble citizens of the United States of America, had not been consulted regarding it. Jim was not highly interested. He said: “Well, if them fellers want to fight, let em go to it! I don't give a cuss which side wins, although I've got a sneakin' hope the Frenchies do, because as far as I can figure out, they're the littlest fellers.”
And with perfect good nature Bill took the opposite side.
“As far as I'm concerned,” he said, “I'm for Germany. My father came from there when he was young. Used to tell me about it a lot. Only aunt I ever had was from there too. Mighty good to me, she was, after my mother died. Sort of brought me up. Looks to me, from what I can read about it in this old newspaper, as if Germany'd been jumped on.”
“It don't read that way in this one I've got,” said Jim. “Looks like it was the other way about. As if this Kayser, or whatever you call him, had started out lookin' for trouble and blamed well got it!”
“Humph! Hello! Here's somethin' in this paper that says anyone who sends his name to the German Club in San Francisco can get a nice book tellin' all about the truth of the war sent to him for nothin', Jim. Guess I'll drop 'em a card.”
“Well, readin' you can get for nothin' is sure cheap enough. Besides. old books make mighty fine spills for lights,” Jim agreed. And thus ended their first conversation regarding the war.
Others came in to greet them with boisterous hilarity, as befitting welcome to wanderers returned to their long unoccupied cabin in the gulch. There was much local news: “The Yellow Jacket has a new lead,” and “That ground of old Tom's begins to look as if he had a patch of the ancient channel—seven dollars to a pan, he got!” There was friendly libation, and some one produced a guitar and insisted on Jim's singing.
Jim tuned its strings with an attentive ear, threw his handsome, graying head back, softly strummed time with his booted foot and sang—songs: songs of everywhere—of the sea, of the mines, and at last, with a look of affection at the enraptured Bill: “And this for my old pardner—the best man who ever walked in shoe-leather! 'The Love of the Matador!'” And he sang a love-song in the Spanish tongue, learned somewhere south of the Rio Grande in their days of wandering, a song rendered so plaintively in that great voice of his that it seemed as if there could be nothing in this world of ours but love and tenderness.
BUT Sarajevo, the unknown and unconsidered, had injected its poison. Bill got the free booklet, and a letter which, had he been more accustomed to that sort of thing, he might have recognized as only imitation typewriting save for his name and address. It stated that the society was glad to know that his forefathers were German, and that his name would be placed on a mailing-list, that in such grievous times when the “Fatherland” was being unjustly attacked, it looked to its children to support it by contributions, speech and deeds; that he was a man of influence in his community, and the society was confident would exercise that influence in the cause of justice.
Bill was immensely flattered. He had given but scant thought to the land of his forefathers since the death of his father and aunt. It seemed a long way off. Moreover he was American; but now, on the nightly visit to the road-house where the stage relay was made, and which was the sole gathering place for those in that vicinity, he rather gloried in a new championship. He became discursive and argumentative, having most surprising “facts” with which to confound his opponents.
The “facts” came regularly now by mail. He was bombarded with them. He who had usually received perhaps one letter a year, was inundated with missives. There was a pleasing sense of importance conferred upon him, as if he had suddenly become a man of affairs and an authority on the subject of war. If the discussions waxed warm, Jim always acted as mediator until that day when the first news was published concerning certain doings of the advancing German army through Belgium.
“I'm not so sure about the Germans,” he said with a shake of his head. “If this is true, Bill, they must have changed a whole lot since your father was there. Most of 'em I've met have always been decent enough; but—if this newfangled kind of German is doin' what this here paper says, I—”
He looked thoroughly miserable. Bill rose to the defense. For the first time in his life, he refused to believe the truth of something he had read in a newspaper. And on the following day he got more imitation typewritten papers saying that all things published derogatory to the conduct of German soldiers must be accepted as malicious lies. He shook the circular under Jim's nose.
“Why—why, Bill! You aint gettin' hot under the collar at me, are you, old man?” Jim asked with a hurt stare, and Bill subsided to angry silence. But other men arrived, and each night the discussions became more heated until active intervention became frequently necessary to stop fists. Gradually the singing stopped, and the open friendliness of intercourse gave way to nothing but heated arguments, punctuated by sneers and vehement exclamations, or lapsing to silence. The thing that happened at Sarajevo was slowly working in that mountainous depth of California.
No one knows when it penetrated to the homely log cabin the partners had built with their own hands some years before; but men observed that now they frequently traveled separately to the stage-station, sometimes one, then the other, arriving first, and that sometimes they departed separately. All the love and laughter was slipping from the Big Divide.
On the North Fork of the river lived Otto Bergé, who worked his ground alone, and was largely unenvied and unmolested because its pay was poor. Old, bent, twisted, reticent and yet friendly, he held the full respect due veracity and industry. It was after the partners had each hardened into differing and sorrowful convictions that Jim arrived at the stage-station alone one night to find the ancient Belgian leaning across the bar with his head resting on his arms, and his scant gray hair clutched in his calloused, toil-hardened hands, while his shoulders twitched in suppressed sobs.
“Good Lord! Otto—” Jim began solicitously, and then lifted his eyes inquiringly to the man behind the bar.
“I gave him a letter. Had a furrin stamp on it. Then he busted down like that, and—” He burst into a storm of raving profanity and objurgations. “Here's the letter! Read it, Jim!”
JIM took the letter and slowly read it through. It was from an American who had been in Louvain, but was mailed from Holland and began with the statement that he was writing on behalf of Otto's sister, who was in a hospital, whither she had been taken by the writer after he had rescued her from Louvain,
“You are her brother and may as well know the whole truth,” it read after its explanatory opening. “You are a man, and will want to know the facts. When the advance guard of German troops arrived, they were orderly; but this was not the case after they were tacitly given permission to turn themselves loose—for I cannot doubt that such permission was granted, or at least that looting and worse things were condoned by the apostles of frightfulness. A number of Prussian infantrymen demanded admission to your brother-in-law's house, and on discovering your niece be young and attractive, became bestial. Your brother-in-law fought to protect his daughter, and was thrust through with bayonets. Your sister was booted into the street, and when she heard her daughter's screams, battered on the door with her fists. It was opened from within, and a soldier struck her over the head with his rifle-barrel. When she recovered consciousness, she crawled into the house. Your niece was on the floor—dead.
“I passed the house in my car, bound for the frontier (having gained a permit with much difficulty), and saw your sister crouched on the doorstep and almost demented. I could do nothing for the dead, and time was against me. All I could do was to pick up the terribly maltreated body of that beautiful child,—for she was but little more than that,—place it on a bed, cover it, and take your sister in my car. Your sister has only a chance of recovery; but if she survives, a letter addressed to the Hôtel Dieu will reach her, Of my personal sorrow and sympathy for you it is needless speak, nor of the horrible but absolute truth that scores, perhaps hundreds, of similar outrages have been perpetrated by some of the barbarians who are in the ranks of the invading army.”
Jim's lean, weather-tanned face, with its square jaw, was set and hard when he threw the letter onto the bar. For a moment he clutched the rail in front of him, tried to speak, choked, and then stood scowling absently at something very distant, a horrible mental picture conjured up by imagination. Slowly his hand crept out until it clutched the letter. He thrust it into his pocket, stammered—and made the last appeal for his partner.
“Hank,” he said to the man behind, “I'd like—I'd like it if you'd say nothin' about this letter to anyone until—until I have a chance to show it to Bill. Sabe?”
Hank gravely nodded his head, and said soberly: “Yes, Jim, sabe. You look—you look— Good Lord, I've got to bust a rule and take a drink! Here, you need one too!”
They did not look at each other as they gulped the stimulant Jim walked over and put his arm around Bergé's shoulder with that rare compassion he gave to anything in distress.
“Otto, there aint much I can say; but I've got enough money to send you across, and—it looks to me like you ought to go. I sort of reckon from what I've heard that about all the money you've taken out has been sent over to help this brother-in-law, and—Otto, you're mighty welcome to all I got, and—and I think you'd better go by the morning stage. Let's walk up to your shack and talk it over.”
He assisted the heartbroken old man to his feet, uttering stammering words of sympathy, and they passed out into the night.
SOMETIME later Jim returned, to find a number of men in the roadhouse; none seemed aware of the blow to Bergé. Hank was exceedingly grave, and pretended to be polishing glasses, with his back turned on Bill, who was vehemently championing Germany. Jim was unaware that already discussion had passed to extremely heated argument, and he was too distressed to observe that his partner was exceedingly angry. With an air of cold determination he took the letter from his pocket, smoothed it out, walked directly to Bill and said: “Bill, before there's any more talk, I'd like to have you read that.”
He stood with his eyes fixed on his partner's face as Bill read. The discussion in the room went on. Bill, as if angered by unexpected epistolary proof that outrages had been comm in Belgium, suddenly threw the letter onto the bar and roared: “Well, what about it?”
The room fell to silence.
“What about it? Do you mean to say that after readin' that you'll ever stick up for a lot of beasts like the Germans again? An army of murderers, dogs that—”
Jim sang songs of everywhere, and at last: “And this is for my old pardner—the best man who ever walked in shoe-leather. 'The Love of the Matador'.
“I mean that if that did happen it's no sign the whole German army is in on it; and besides, who in blazes are you talkin' to, anyhow?”
He made an infuriated grab at the letter as if to vent his anger by any sort of physical action; but Jim's hand clutched over his, intent on seizing the sorry missive—and the unexpected happened: Bill struck his partner a smashing blow on the jaw. Almost blindly Jim reached for his gun, which for years had been carried only through habit. Before any man could intervene, Bill had accepted the challenge; the two shots sounded as one, and both partners had fallen to the floor. Sarajevo had come to the Big Divide.
They were taken to the nearest hospital in the same wagon, but put into different wards. Jim's wound proved slight, and he was the first to return to the cabin in the gulch, where, with scrupulous care and a sore heart, he divided the partners' personal belongings and made a quit-claim deed giving Bill his interest in the claim. He rebuffed anyone who mentioned the affray. He was ashamed of his temper, of his partner, and was thoroughly miserable, but nursed his belief that the fault was entirely Bill's. He traveled a long distance—hundreds of miles—alone for the first time in more than twenty years, and sought a country near Needles which with his former partner he had considered promising when they had visited it before.
Bill came out of the hospital to learn that he no longer had a partner. He resented the gift of half the claim. The very stillness of the cabin oppressed him and added to his melancholy. A passenger-ship had been sunk without warning on the Atlantic Ocean, which neither Bill nor Jim had ever seen; but when Bill went to the roadhouse, after vaguely pondering what he should do, there was none to argue with him. There was a dead silence when he entered. No man offered to buy him a drink. As if he had leprosy, man after man made an excuse to leave the place.
“What's the meanin' of this?” he demanded of Hank.
“It means, Bill, if you want it straight, that the sign's up in this part of the hills which says: 'No Germans wanted.' Hold on! You and me wont fight! Bill, you're lucky to be alive. You know it's about the first time Jim ever shot high. Now, you take my tip. Cut the German talk out, and keep on the other side of the State from Jim—because, if I know him at all, the next time you two meet, you'll need a hearse. Now, that's all I've got to say about it.”
“And the first time we meet, it'll be him that needs the ride! So that's the way the land lays, eh? Well, you can any of you get trouble that's lookin' for it!”
Still weak and unstrung, he lost his temper. It was the first time in his life that he had been given the cold shoulder by men who knew him. Not wanted! He banged the door shut, went to his cabin, tramped up and down for an hour and then packed his things. When he came to a pile of circulars, pamphlets and imitation letters sent out by the German propaganda society, he tore them to shreds, threw them to the floor, cursed them and stamped the fragments under his heel as if killing a rattlesnake that had bitten him. He would not work the claim. If Jim Williams thought to make his former partner look like a beggar, he was a fool. He bade no one farewell when he took the stage.
In due time, when Jim wrote to Hank, the road-house keeper, he received a reply in which Hank thought it wise to warn Jim to go heeled, and repeated Bill's threat. Jim, whose anger had died to a smolder, received the news and hardened. Also he grimly oiled his gun. He had made no threats, but if Bill wanted a finish when next they met— Jim was sorry and lonely, and he brooded.
A prospector who had witnessed the beginning of the feud wandered to Needles and spread the story, together with such additional details as his imagination could provide; he cursed Bill for being a German at heart, and continued on his way; and while none mentioned the subject to Jim when at intervals he came to the town, everyone knew of the feud.
Guns are not popular, or customary, in Needles, which prides itself on being law-abiding; but when Cajon Bill Weidner, morose, silent, seeking to forget his miserable heartache by adventuring to new fields, arrived in Needles after many months of unrest, he wore one in a holster. Craving something liquid to wash the dust of the desert from his throat, he entered a salon where in former years he had been welcomed; but to his surprise the proprietor gave a startled stare and promptly shouted: “See here, Cajon Bill! You can't come into my place with a gun! Get it off—or take it somewhere else.”
Bill, not knowing whether to take this as a jocular greeting or an insult, laughed and threw his gun onto the bar and he demanded a drink. There was an abrupt stir in the darker end of the place. Bill looked and saw that two men were trying to restrain a third, and the third was Jim. Bill's gun had been speedily removed beyond his reach. He now realized why.
“If he wants anything, turn him loose. I can kill him with my fists,” he shouted, springing toward Jim, and the two came together like a pair of infuriated grizzly bears, striking and smashing, overturning chairs, stools and tables, and finding time to hit or kick anyone who tried to interfere. They were overpowered by sheer weight of numbers and arrested.
The magistrate who sentenced them was admirably candid: “There was a time when you two men were welcome in Needles: but for some reason this court does not understand, you have both deteriorated. The day of the gunman, as far as this community is concerned, has long since passed. This camp will not permit itself to be made the dueling-ground for such a feud as it is well understood has been declared between you two; but because there was a time when you two men were reputable, the court is inclined to be lenient. You are therefore sentenced to six months imprisonment in jail.”
Bill and Jim, who, bruised and disheveled, had not so much as looked at each other since their arrest, gasped at the severity of the judgment.
“However,” the court added, “the sentence is suspended on these conditions: that you, William Weidner, take the first train east to some point no nearer than Tombstone, Arizona, and that you, James Williams, take the first train westward-bound to some point no closer than Los Angeles.”
For so long had Bill and Jim been regarded as clean, respectable men, that not only the arrest but the banishment inflicted terrible wounds to their self-esteem. But the sheer obstinacy and resolution of their natures, coupled with anger, made of each a more dangerous man.
When Bill arrived in Tombstone, his first act was to buy a new gun to replace the one that had been confiscated by the police-force of Needles, his next to bathe; after that he nursed his blackened eyes in morose silence in the seclusion of his room. He had not been in Tombstone for many years. He was forgotten. The town itself had become a fine, peaceful, modern little city. He felt like a stray wolf coming back to what he remembered as a friendly wilderness, and finding instead a highly cultivated farmyard. He read in the newspapers that more unoffending ships had been sunk by the Germans, and that the Kaiser was curt, insolent or contemptuous in his replies to protests. He recalled now that while his father had loved the Fatherland from which he came and many of its people, he had at times cursed the houses of Hohenzollern, Bismarck, and their arrogant, lying and merciless military caste.
The mandolin stopped “The Love of the Matador.”... A woman screamed.
It is doubtful if the father could have cursed them as fluently and fervently as did his son, brooding there in a hotel room. He did something he should have done in the beginning—sat down and wrote a letter to the San Francisco German propagandists in which he declared that his name must be canceled from any list of theirs, because one William Weidner was all American, through and through, when it came to any question involving Germany and the United States of America. He had considerable satisfaction in this literary effort. It was the longest letter he had ever written; and in it he used language that might have cost him years in a Federal prison for disgracing the mails, for he wrote as he would have talked in a fight, and to him oaths were as adjectives.
JIM got off the train in Los Angeles, bought a new gun and resolved that his only chance of self-respect lay in bringing the feud to a definite end. It had never been his principle to let the other man seek him in a deadly quarrel. He always sought the other man first. So after a day's rest he bought a ticket to Tombstone, confident that Bill would expect him, and would wait, and would shoot on sight.
When Jim arrived at Tombstone, he too was shocked at the change in the town. As he walked toward the hotel, he looked in vain for anyone he knew, and then he came to a halt and set his jaws. Bill, his night's literary work having told upon him, was asleep in a tilted chair in front of the hostelry.
“Here, boy!” Jim called a neatly uniformed messenger-lad. “Do you see that man sitting there asleep in front of the hotel? Here is a two-bit piece. Go and wake him up, and tell him that in just ten minutes from now Jim Williams said he would come walking down the middle of the road, heeled! Get that? Heeled, tell him.”
The boy pocketed the silver piece, grinned as if participating in a great joke, and did as he had been instructed. Bill snarled when disturbed, but on receiving the boy's message looked black as a thundercloud, drew his gun and ran out into the middle of the street. Jim's offer of ten minutes' grace had been intended to give Bill ample time to arm and get thoroughly awake; but it proved to have been a mistake, for at the sight of a huge man jumping into the center of the main street with a drawn gun, a deputy sheriff who was a relic of ancient days and knew the premonitory signs of a battle, dodged hastily from shelter to shelter behind the waiting duelist, gained a cigar-store sign, a lamp-post, a letter-box, and just as Jim appeared up the street a block distant, leaped from behind upon Bill and seized his gun-arm with the deftness and certitude of long experience.
At the same time a mere farmhand—not a cow-puncher—who had learned to throw a rope, dropped a noose around Jim, set his pony to its heels and dragged Jim to earth while his gun discharged itself aimlessly into the air.
The street suddenly swarmed with men who had no respect at all for feudists or gun-performers. They fell upon Bill and Jim as ruthlessly as if they had been mere highwaymen, knocked them into submission, which meant insensibility, and under the instructions of the chief of police, dumped them into a grocer's delivery wagon and hauled them unceremoniously
They were given separate trials two days apart. Jim was fined to the utmost and advised to make himself scarce, with the suggestion that Arizona was not quite large enough to hold him as a citizen, and unfeeling officers of the law saw to it that he was driven across the Mexican border. Bill was likewise fined and told that he had better move into some district where a man with a gun was welcome—where that place was, the court could not advise.
AGAIN disgraced, humiliated and feeling more than ever disreputable, the ex-partners were once more divided perforce. Gone now all the good fame in which they had secretly gloried; gone the confidence that wherever they were known men spoke well of them; and gone was their prosperity. For many years neither of them had known what it was to be actually at the end of funds, so that financial distress was now added to their misery. Each was heartily sick of the feud, but each was convinced that nothing but death could end it. Each thought of the other as relentless where enmity was aroused, and was saddened thereby.
Bill had seen Jim led past the window of the jail, handcuffed and going to-trial, and had suffered a stab of the heart that made him shut his teeth in anguish. It seemed to him that Jim's broad shoulders had lost something of their squareness and litheness of swing. His feet moved heavily, as if the spring had departed from his legs. Bill had time, in the loneliness of his cell, to reflect. He resolved that he would take precautions never again to meet Jim. And had he but known it, Jim had come to the same final resolution.
And so intent was Jim on carrying out his resolve that when he was told he had best leave Arizona, the court was unaware that nothing in Tombstone could have tempted him to remain there. He made up his mind to travel far, and to where he was unknown. He went to Chihuahua, where he got employment as shift-boss in a mine, thinking to himself that there would be the last place on earth where Bill would find him.
Bill, when released, took the train to a near-by camp, where he put more than half his remaining money into an outfit and planned a prospecting-trip; but the county sheriff heard of the feud and visited him with the gruff assertion that he had best get clear of the country. Bill sold his outfit at a sacrifice, and after an hour's deliberation, while waiting for a train, resolved to cut clean loose from places where he might meet Jim and—bought a ticket to Chihuahua!
Bill was there but two days before he learned, accidentally, of Jim's presence. Shocked, disappointed and perturbed, he walked out into the hot solitudes behind the town to consider what he should do. He had not sufficient money to buy a ticket to any distance. His original anger had melted away, even as his original folly regarding Germany. He would have sacrificed anything to be able to rush to Jim, and implore him to forget the feud and its cause, and to start the broken partnership where it had left off.
But Bill was still convinced that Jim would scorn any overture. And what would Jim think in case he, Bill, did leave the camp? For of his arrival and sojourn Jim was certain to learn. No, there was but one course open, to play the part of a man to the last; and that part, as he conceived it to be, was to show no weakness or regret. He returned to the miserable posada where he stopped, and from there sent a curt note to Jim, merely announcing his arrival in town.
Bill awaited the reply, clutching vaguely at the hope that it might contain some word warranting him in going to Jim with an extended hand; but Jim saw in the note nothing save an indication that Bill had relentlessly followed him. He pondered Bill's note, hoping to find one sign that some spark of the old flame of affection remained—but found nothing that was other than inexorable. It was decent of Bill to give warning, thought he. But the pride which builds false barriers around the souls of men left him no recourse but to accept what he regarded as a challenge.
“I shall be at the Casa de Oro at exactly ten o'clock to-night,” he wrote; then he hesitated for a long time with his stub of a pencil poised, wet it against his tongue, striving dumbly to think of words which might indicate that the continuance of the feud was not of his own seeking. But he could think of nothing suitable, and 'in desperation signed: “James Williams.”
BILL received the note. He had been in suspense, building on the hope that Jim might relent, that he might give some sign; and he was resolved that the slightest pretext would be sufficient for a friendly overture. A deliberate blow in the face could have hurt him no more deeply than Jim's reply. He knew they were now in a land where bloodshed was an incident, rather than a crime, that they were to meet on ground where none would interfere. It had come to a finish.
Bill walked into the Casa de Oro just as its brazen clock struck nine-thirty, threw a casual scowl of contempt upon those who clustered around the gaming-tables, started toward the ornate bar, checked himself when he recalled that tonight of all nights he must retain all his faculties, and sought a chair.
The sleek, oily manager of the House of Gold was anything but an inexperienced fool. His very business had made him a competent observer. He thoughtfully eyed the tall, lean, sinewy, red-mustached and blue-eyed man in the corner, who bought not so much as one drink or one stack of white chips, and decided it wise to watch him. No peon, this, eager to slip a knife under the armpit of a rival Lothario, but a cool-headed man bent on big game. A similar event had happened before in the Casa de Oro, and there had been a devil of a fuss raised thereby. As the tragic hour of ten approached, the manager noted that the lean and unprofitable visitor's eyes frequently sought the clock above the central bar.
“That gringo, curse him, expects to fight a man at ten,” he said to himself, conjecturing that men about to engage in mortal combat would select an even hour for rendezvous. So at ten o'clock he stood in the doorway scanning casual arrivals and watching for another Americano. The other came, and was similarly lean and set-jawed. “That is my man,” thought the manager, and barred the way.
“You come to fight,” he declared in border English. “Very well! The man you wish to meet ees eenside. He has wait. Eet ees nice moonlight, si? I shell heem call. Thee street ees not so crowd', eh? Better as my house for the shoot.”
Jim's hope for at least a parley was gone. To him it seemed that Bill had fallen so low as to boast of his purpose to this grinning, unspeakable greaser. All right! Bill craved a finish; he could have it!
“Call him out,” Jim said. “Tell him we meet in the road, back to back, take thirty steps, then turn, pull and let go!”
“Está bien!” the managerial diplomat approved, and returned inside to impart the terms to the other lean gringo. Bill got reluctantly to his feet, and the manager watched, expecting him to draw his gun, rush to the swinging doors and from behind the screen, or through a crack, perforate his enemy. That is exactly what the manager would have done; but to his utter amazement and scorn Bill did nothing of the kind. Instead he walked deliberately out with no weapon in hand. The Mexican hastily stepped behind a door-casing, now confident that the man in the road would take advantage of the light and shoot; but evidently he also was a fool. Peering around the edge of the door-casing, the Mexican saw the adversaries meet in the exact middle of the street.
“Thirty steps, Jim?”
“Thirty it is, Bill.”
That was all they said; then they stood back to back and began taking thirty fateful paces. Their steps were deliberate and timed. Neither was flurried. Neither looked back. The arms of each dangled at his sides. The white, hot moonlight flooded the deserted, somnolent roadway, bordered by adobe houses.
WHEN the two men had met in the road, a curious hush of expectancy pervaded the languid idlers who lounged in the shadows; but observing that the men were unarmed and stepping away from each other, sounds resumed. A mandolin that had abruptly stopped in the midst of a merry air gave a soft strumming of strings and broke into a tune of melancholy longing, subdued, plaintive, regretful, “The Love of the Matador!” Jim's feet faltered, and he muttered: “God—not that tune!” The embers of a thousand lonely campfires gleamed before his eyes; the smell of their friendly smoke was in his nostrils. How he had loved Bill in those far-off days!
And poor Bill, wearily trudging and counting paces, faltered, although believing that his very life depended upon the accuracy and steadiness of each portentous stride. He found it difficult to count.
“Twelve—thirteen—fourteen— He was my pardner then—the best that ever lived!” He paused. “Did I take fourteen or fifteen?”
Veteran of conflict that he was, participant in a score of desperate situations where nothing but quickness, steadiness and courage had saved his life, he subconsciously fought his hesitation in this hour of need and concentrated his mind.
“Twenty-three — twenty-four— Better take thirty-one to be certain of the count. Jim's brought it on himself, but I'd rather get it myself than to— Jim was always fair! Any song but that! He used to—” And again the uncontrollable wandering stabs of his mind accused him of having lost count.
Jim continued his slow, deliberate walk, despite the harassment of the Spanish song. Bill would not falter, he thought. “Strange that Bill should be so relentless! Is there no other way? No—none! Bill followed me here after the feud, as far as I am concerned, is done and—”
Again he was mastered by exasperation.
The Mexican behind the door of the Casa de Oro gasped with surprise when he saw that the big gringo at the near end of the course had taken thirty-three steps and was still pacing forward. To have taken but twenty-five, then turned and shot, could be understood; but to take thirty-three! He suddenly leaned outward with a gasp.
Jim had whirled and with the incredible quickness of trained hand and mind had whipped his gun from its holster, lifted the muzzle above his head for the frontiersman adept's shot, and arrested its fall in mid-air. Bill was still walking. His back was turned, and the moon smote his broad shoulders. Jim bent forward and peered, an immovable, statuesque figure in the middle of the silver road.
AS if the drawing of a weapon had alarmed the musician to a sense of tragedy, the mandolin stopped “The Love of the Matador” with a single discordant crash of strings. It fell, rattling hollowly to the flags of the portico, as if forever mute; and a woman screamed. She flashed, a panic-stricken figure in white, across the street, as if intent on reaching the opposite side before the battle began. And at that instant Bill had taken his thirty-fourth step, whirled like an automaton, but saw the woman and because he could not stay his finger, fired—toward the watching stars.
There were two shots, for Jim, startled as by an intervening apparition, had unconsciously twitched his finger on the hair-spring trigger. The stab of yellow flame ranged true. Bill wavered an instant; his great arms flew wide; he bent forward like a runner exhausted and falling toward the tape—dropped into the dust and lay there motionless and prone.
“He saw her! That's why he shot upward! And I—” Jim groaned.
He threw the gun into the road as if it burned his hand and ran toward Bill, each heavy footfall stirring up a tiny whirl of dust; for heavily he ran, as if in one irrevocable instant the old buoyancy of spring had been torn from his muscles. He ran not in victory but in despair. He did not hear the disturbed cries and screams in the borders of the street, the opening of screens and blinds. He did not see those who surged outward; all he saw was the blotched figure in the dust toward which he raced with a breaking heart; for there lay Bill—his partner, for whose succor he had always fought in the old, fair days.
He reached his goal, fell to his knees on the road, put his lean, strong arms under Bill, turned him over and lifted the listless head into his lap. Blood trickled from Bill's forehead and began making gruesome rivulets through the dust on his face. Jim dug distractedly for his handkerchief and tenderly wiped it away.
“Bill! Bill!” he called. “I didn't mean to shoot! I didn't, Bill!” Then, when the closed eyes did not open, and the relaxed lips did not frame to speech, he cried more anxiously: “Bill! Can you hear me”
Very gently he rested Bill's head on the handkerchief which he spread over the dust, got stiffly to his feet, ran a bewildered, trembling hand over his eyes.
“Help me! Get water! Get something! Get a doctor. Don't you see—this is Bill—my pardner Bill! Don't let him lie there in the road like a dead dog! I got to get him to some place where—”
His appeal died inanely in his throat as if he had lost vocal control. A man thrust his way through a narrow lane and said crisply: “What does this mean? I am a surgeon.” And then he added to the crowd in harsh Spanish: “Make room there! Do you wish to smother the man?”
To the amazement of the crowd Jim, like a man distraught, rushed upon then with flail-like arms and hard fists, shoving and striking. They discreetly fled, although reluctant to lose the sight of a gringo in the final pangs of death. When he had cleared the street, Jim returned to the surgeon, who was calmly wiping a pair of scissors with burnished blades that caught the shimmer of the moon.
“Curious!” said the surgeon. “If that bullet had gone a sixteenth of an inch deeper, it would probably have been all off. Nasty crease—nothing worse. Hello! He's coming back.”
JIM knelt and stared solicitously into the fluttering eyelids of his former partner. Bill's eyes opened, lost their dazed expression, and he shoved a hand upward. It was caught between two hard, clutching palms.
“Jim, old man! I'm tired—awfully tired!” Bill muttered. “But I'm glad, Jim—very glad—it was me.”
While Jim gulped and tried to get the lump out of his throat to make some response befitting all that surged up in his heart, they heard the strings of the mandolin struck again, tentatively, as if to test the extent it had been damaged by its reckless fall; and then the player again began the broken song. Jim lifted his chin and threatened to blubber like a baby unhardened by life. Bill didn't know what to do or say in this phenomenal exigency; so he twisted his head and looked away.
“Bill, I've thought it over a heap, I didn't have no business to say what I did about all Germans. I take it back They aint all bad—I—I reckon; because you said your father was—”
It was as far as he could get. He had done so little throughout his years in which he felt called upon to apologize that he felt dumb for want of words, and awkward. But he was spared further distress; for Bill suddenly sat up, shook his fist with physical weakness, but mental decision and said: “It was my fault! Let's forget it, Jim. I'm American—all American, anyhow! To hell with Germany!
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1942, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 81 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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