JERRY STRANN
The wrath of the Lord seems less terrible when it is localised, and the
world at large gave thanks daily that the range of Jerry Strann was
limited to the Three B's. As everyone in the mountain-desert knows, the
Three B's are Bender, Buckskin, and Brownsville; they make the points of
a loose triangle that is cut with canyons and tumbled with mountains,
and that triangle was the chosen stamping ground of Jerry Strann. Jerry
was not born in the region of the Three B's and why it should have been
chosen specially by him was matter which the inhabitants could not
puzzle out; but they felt that for their sins the Lord had probably put
his wrath among them in the form of Jerry Strann.
He was only twenty-four, this Jerry, but he was already grown into a
proverb. Men of the Three B's reckoned their conversational dates by the
visits of the youth; if a storm hung over the mountains someone might
remark: "It looks like Jerry Strann is coming," and such a remark was
always received in gloomy silence; mothers had been known to hush their
children by chanting: "Jerry Strann will get you if you don't watch
out." Yet he was not an ogre with a red knife between his teeth. He
stood at exactly the perfect romantic height; he was just six feet tall;
he was as graceful as a young cotton-wood in a windstorm and he was as
strong and tough as the roots of the mesquite. He was one of those rare
men who are beautiful without being unmanly. His face was modelled with
the care a Praxiteles would lavish on a Phoebus. His brown hair was
thick and dark and every touch of wind stirred it, and his hazel eyes
were brilliant with an enduring light--the inextinguishable joy of life.
Consider that there was no malice in Jerry Strann. But he loved strife
as the young Apollo loved strife--or a pure-blooded bull terrier. He
fought with distinction and grace and abandon and was perfectly willing
to use fists or knives or guns at the pleasure of the other contracting
party. In another age, with armour and a golden chain and spurs, Jerry
Strann would have been--but why think of that? Swords are not
forty-fives, and the Twentieth Century is not the Thirteenth. He was, in
fact, born just six hundred years too late. From his childhood he had
thirsted for battle as other children thirst for milk: and now he rode
anything on hoofs and threw a knife like a Mexican--with either
hand--and at short range he did snap shooting with two revolvers that
made rifle experts sick at heart.
However, the men of the Three B's, as everyone understands, are not
gentle or long-enduring, and you will wonder why this young destroyer
was allowed to range at large so long. There was a vital reason. Up in
the mountains lived Mac Strann, the hermit-trapper, who hated everything
in the wide world except his young brother, the beautiful, wild, and
sunny Jerry Strann. And Mac Strann loved his brother as much as he hated
everything else; it is impossible to state it more strongly. It was not
long before the men of the Three B's discovered how Mac Strann felt
about his brother. After Jerry's famous Hallowe'en party in Buckskin,
for instance, Williamson, McKenna, and Rath started out to rid the
country of the disturber. They went out to hunt him as men go out to
hunt a wild mustang. And they caught him and bent him down--those three
stark men--and he lay in bed for a month; but before the month was over
Mac Strann came down from his mountain and went to Buckskin and gathered
Williamson and McKenna and Rath in one public place. And when the
morning came Williamson and McKenna and Rath had left this vale of tears
and Mac Strann was back on his mountain. He was not even arrested. For
there was a devilish cunning about the fellow and he made his victims,
without exception, attack him first; then he destroyed them, suddenly
and surely, and retreated to his lair. Things like this happened once or
twice and then the men of the Three B's understood that it was not wise
to lay plots for Jerry Strann. They accepted him, as I have said before,
as men accept the wrath of God.
Let it not be thought that Jerry Strann was a solitary like his brother.
When he went out for a frolic the young men of the community gathered
around him, for Jerry paid all scores and the red-eye flowed in his path
like wine before the coming of Bacchus; where Jerry went there was never
a dull moment, and young men love action. So it happened that when he
rode into Brownsville this day he was the leader of a cavalcade. Rumour
rode before them, and doors were locked and windows were darkened, and
men sat in the darkness within with their guns across their knees. For
Brownsville lay at the extreme northern tip of the triangle and it was
rarely visited by Jerry; and it is well established that men fear the
unfamiliar more than the known.
As has been said, Jerry headed the train of revellers, partially because
it was most unwise to cut in ahead of Jerry and partially because there
was not a piece of horseflesh in the Three B's which could outfoot his
chestnut. It was a gelding out of the loins of the north wind and sired
by the devil himself, and its spirit was one with the spirit of Jerry
Strann; perhaps because they both served one master. The cavalcade came
with a crash of racing hoofs in a cloud of dust. But in the middle of
the street Jerry raised his right arm stiffly overhead with a whoop and
brought his chestnut to a sliding stop; the cloud of dust rolled lazily
on ahead. The young men gathered quickly around the leader, and there
was silence as they waited for him to speak--a silence broken only by
the wheezing of the horses, and the stench of sweating horseflesh was
in every man's nostrils.
"Who owns that hoss?" asked Jerry Strann, and pointed.
He had stopped just opposite O'Brien's hotel, store, blacksmith shop,
and saloon, and by the hitching rack was a black stallion. Now, there
are some men who carry tidings of their inward strength stamped on their
foreheads and written in their eyes. In times of crises crowds will turn
to such men and follow them as soldiers follow a captain; for it is
patent at a glance that this is a man of men. It is likewise true that
there are horses which stand out among their fellows, and this was such
a horse. He was such a creature that, if he had been led to a barrier,
the entire crowd at the race track would rise as one man and say: "What
is that horse?" There were points in which some critics would find
fault; most of the men of the mountain-desert, for instance, would have
said that the animal was too lightly and delicately limbed for long
endurance; but as the man of men bears the stamp of his greatness in his
forehead and his eyes, so it was with the black stallion. When the
thunder of the cavalcade had rushed upon him down the street he had
turned with catlike grace and raised his head to see; and his forehead
and his eyes arrested Jerry Strann like a levelled rifle. Looking at
that proud head one forgot the body of the horse, the symmetry of curves
exquisite beyond the sculptor's dream, the arching neck and the steel
muscles; one was only conscious of the great spirit. In Human beings we
refer to it as "personality."
After a little pause, seeing that no one offered a suggestion as to the
identity of the owner, Strann said, softly: "That hoss is mine."
It caused a stir in the crowd of his followers. In the mountain-desert
one may deal lightly with a man's wife and lift a random cow or two and
settle the score, at need, with a snug "forty-five" chunk of lead. But
with horses it is different. A horse in the mountain-desert lies outside
of all laws--and above all laws. It is greater than honour and dearer
than love, and when a man's horse is taken from him the men of the
desert gather together and hunt the thief whether it be a day or whether
it be a month, and when they have reached him they shoot him like a dog
and leave his flesh to the buzzards and his bones to the merciless
stars. For all of this there is a reason. But Jerry Strann swung from
his mount, tossed the reins over the head of the chestnut, and walked
towards the black with hungry eyes. He was careless, also, and venturing
too close--the black whirled with his sudden, catlike agility, and two
black hoofs lashed within a hair's breadth of the man's shoulder. There
was a shout from the crowd, but Jerry Strann stepped back and smiled so
that his teeth showed.
"Boys," he said, but he was really speaking to himself, "there's nothing
in the world I want as bad as I want that hoss. Nothing! I'm going to
buy him; where's the owner?"
"Don't look like a hoss a man would want to sell, Jerry," came a
suggestion from the cavalcade, who had dismounted and now pressed behind
their leader.
Jerry favoured the speaker with another of his enigmatic smiles: "Oh,"
he chuckled, "he'll sell, all right! Maybe he's inside. You gents stick
out here and watch for him; I'll step inside."
And he strode through the swinging doors of the saloon.
It was a dull time of day for O'Brien, so he sat with his feet on the
edge of the bar and sipped a tall glass of beer; he looked up at the
welcome click of the doors, however, and then was instantly on his feet.
The good red went out of his face and the freckles over his nose stood
out like ink marks.
"There's a black hoss outside," said Jerry, "that I'm going to buy.
Where's the owner?"
"Have a drink," said the bartender, and he forced an amiable smile.
"I got business on my hands, not drinking," said Jerry Strann.
"Lost your chestnut?" queried O'Brien in concern.
"The chestnut was all right until I seen the black. And now he ain't a
hoss at all. Where's the gent I want?"
The bartender had fenced for time as long as possible.
"Over there," he said, and pointed.
It was a slender fellow sitting at a table in a corner of the long
room, his sombrero pushed back on his head. He was playing solitaire and
his back was towards Jerry Strann, who now made a brief survey, hitched
his cartridge belt, and approached the stranger with a grin. The man did
not turn; he continued to lay down his cards with monotonous regularity,
and while he was doing it he said in the gentlest voice that had ever
reached the ear of Jerry Strann: "Better stay where you are, stranger.
My dog don't like you."
And Jerry Strann perceived, under the shadow of the table, a blacker
shadow, huge and formless in the gloom, and two spots of incandescent
green twinkling towards him. He stopped; he even made a step back; and
then he heard a stifled chuckle from the bartender.
If it had not been for that untimely mirth of O'Brien's probably nothing
of what followed would have passed into the history of the Three B's.