Blue Kingdom by Max Brand Page A

“I’m going to tell you something that you can write down as all true. It’s about me. I’ve never done a square day’s work in my life . . . nor a half day’s work . . . I’ve been a loafer, a hard drinker, a deadbeat, borrowin’ money and never payin’ it back . . . I’ve been a tramp, that’s all. So nomatter what happens to me on this trail, there’s no difference. You ain’t takin’ the bread out of no child’s mouth, and they’s no girl that’s gonna break her heart because I never come back.”
    She listened to him with an attempt at a smile that failed.
    Then he added: “But I will come back, after all. That’s my country . . . if I can’t get on in the horizon blue, I’ll never get on anywhere.”
    â€œDear Carrick. Bless you,” she said.
    He went past her into the road, then the mare stretched into a gallop as long and as easily rhythmical as the swing of a wave. He looked back only once and waved his hat to the figure that was dwindling at the gate. His glance could embrace all the place—the barn, the sheds, the land, the trees, the house white above them. Then a hilltop swelled behind him, and all was lost to him.
    He fell into an odd dream, and, rousing himself from that, it seemed to him as though he actually had passed into a new world. This sense, perhaps, came to him because already his mind was casting forward into mountains through which he never had ridden before. And it might also have been that he was now really feeling the impact of the shock that he had received that day, when he found that his face was the face of the first of the Dunmores.
    It took his breath, it gave him an odd sense of disaster impending, but it also gave him a prodigious feeling of liberty as though, in very fact, he were now the possessor of some feudal castle and of a hard-riding band of retainers who would follow him wherever adventureand loot seemed in sight. To that blue land of the mountains he turned his face with a strange assurance and rode the mare eagerly on, even leaning a bit in the saddle, as a child might do, hurrying home.
    Hoofs rang on the road beside him. Two hard-galloping riders pulled up beside the mare.
    â€œHey, Carrie! Is that Excuse Me? Did she turn out a square one, after all?” asked one of the riders.
    â€œShe’s turned out pretty square,” he told them.
    â€œI’d pay five hundred just for the looks of her!”
    â€œShe ain’t for sale.”
    â€œThat’s what you always say. I remember when you had the gray hoss that jumped so well. But when you’re broke and tight, you’ll sell, right enough, and not for five hundred.”
    The second man broke in: “Look here, Carrie. They want you over to the crossroads. You’ll have free drinks there. They still got the knives sticking in the wall just where you left ’em after drawin’ the silhouette of Pete Logan with ’em. Hey, Carrie, come on along. It won’t be no piker’s party. It’ll be just the kind that you want to sit in on.”
    â€œI can’t go,” said Dunmore. “Can’t even think of goin’. But who’s there?”
    â€œWho’s there? Why, everybody, I tell you. There’s Bill Clay, and the Guerneys, and Oliver Pike, and the Jensens, and Captain Patrick. . . .”
    â€œIs the captain there?”
    â€œWhy, sure, it was him that sent us over to get you, and Miss Furneaux, she said that you’d gone up the road this way for a little outing on Excuse Me.”
    â€œCaptain Patrick? How is he getting on?”
    â€œHe’s flush,” was the eager assurance. “And he says that he’d rather have you across the table from him than any other gent that ever tipped a glass in the world. He’s got a belt of gold dust that you could wrap around you twice, and it’s loaded, every inch of it. He’s so heavy with gold