The Big Rock Candy Mountain (56 page)

“I know what,” Chet said. “Here, Frankie, you take my .22. I'll use the horse pistol and Pete's got his air gun. Bill can yank the mattress up and jump back and we can all blaze at once.”

Bill said, “What if old Angus MacLeod came around here and caught you? He looks after this place for Tex.”

“Oh, Angus!” Chet said. “He's so tight every time he farts he whistles.”

They all laughed. He looked around and saw them laughing, and with a Dead-Eye Dick draw he yanked up the horse pistol and aimed it at the bed. “Come on, Bill,” he said.

“You'd shoot me,” Bill said. “I don't want to bust up Tex's shack anyway.”

“You helped bust the winda,” Chet said. “What are you such a sissy for?”

“I ain't a sissy.”

“You sure act like one,” Pete said.

“It ain't fair,” Bill said. “You'd all get to shoot and I wouldn't.”

“You can have second shot with my .22,” Chet said. “Frankie'll shoot, and then you can.”

Bill hesitated. “Well, all right,” he said. “But don't any of you shoot till I get out of the way.”

He walked over to the bunk, eyeing them. “Wait till I get clear out of the way, now.” He stooped, still watching them, yanked the mattress over the edge, and jumped clear. Two mice dropped out of a wide hole and darted for the corner. Another one dashed from under the bed. The air rifle went off, then the .22. The mice switched back toward the bed. Chet held the pistol with both hands and pulled the trigger.

There was a tremendous roar, the gun kicked clear up over his head and almost out of his hands. The four stared. The mice had vanished, but there was a great splintered gash in the floor..

“Holy cow!” Chet said.

For a moment the damage that that one slug had done to the boards shocked them silent. How would you like to get shot with a thing like that? It would make a hole through you you could put your hand into. Bill was staring with his eyes wide and scared. “Jiminy!” he said. He looked at Chet. “I'm gonna get out of here!” he said, and bolted.

Frankie reached out a toe and scuffed at the splinters the .44 bullet had ripped from the floor. They looked at each other, almost holding their breath. Then the impulse struck them almost simultaneously. They yelled. They fired their guns into the sodden mattress. They tipped over the table and spilled magazines and candle-ends onto the floor.

“Let's burn the damn place down,” Chet said. He shot the .44 into the bed again, and a mouse ran out. They cornered and killed it, ripped the mattress into the middle of the room, kicked at the mice that scattered frantically. Frankie wrenched, till he got a leg off the table, and with that for a club he beat down the shelves. From the doorway the scared face of Bill watched them.

“Burn ‘er down!” Chet said. “Break 'er all to pieces!” He smashed a chair against the wall and splintered one leg, threw the whole thing on the pile. Pete was bending down trying to light the mattress, soggy with winter damp. “I need some paper,” he said.

The air was immediately full of crumpled sheets of paper. Pete twisted a handful, lighted the feathered end, and stuck it under the pile of broken furniture and rubbish. The flame caught, grew. Chet looked at Frankie and wet his lips. He shifted the .44 to his other hand and moved over by the door.

“You guys are gonna catch it,” Bill said from outside.

“Aw bull,” Chet said. He wet his lips again and watched Frankie doing a wardance around the fire. The shack was beginning to get smoky, and the smoke was exciting. Chet leaped after Frankie, waving the gun. He struck a pose by the window and stood crouching, the gun in his belt, his hand like a claw. “I'm Buck Duane,” he said. “I'm the old Lone Star Ranger. Any-a you outlaws lookin' for me?”

He looked around the shack slowly, contemptuously, eyes narrowed and mouth a slit. The others were all watching. “I guess I'll just shoot your lights out anyway,” Chet said, “seeing you're all too yellow to come on.” He snatched for the gun in a lightning draw, but the front sight caught in a belt loop and he had to tug it loose. He fired twice into the ceiling, and Pete, by the door, pretended he was shot, clutching at his breast and staggering loosely around the floor. Frankie stuck out his foot and Pete almost fell in the fire. He arose full of wrath.

“Watch out who you go tripping.”

“Oh bushwah,” Frankie said.

Pete shouldered him sideways. “Bushwah nothing. You watch out who you go tripping around into fires.”

“Who'll make me?”

“I'll make you.”

“You and whose army?” Frankie said.

“I don't need any army.”

Their hands were up, they were sparring lightly, shuffling around in the corner where the table had been. Chet coughed in the smoke. “Come on outside and settle it,” he said. “We're gonna get our pants burned off in here.”

The quarrelers started out just as Bill, his eyes bugging out and his jaw so loose that he could hardly speak, stuck his head inside and shouted something. “What?” Chet said. He pushed past Bill, Frankie and Pete on his heels, shouldering each other angrily in the doorway. Bill yelled again and pointed. A wagon was coming up the hill, hardly more than two blocks away, and in the wagon was Angus MacLeod and his whole family. Even as they stared Angus was tossing the reins to his wife and jumping to the ground.

Bill and Frankie broke together around the smoking shack. Chet and Pete a step behind, hitting for the aspen coulee that came down close. After ten steps Frankie stopped, digging, and legged it back, to come after the other three in a moment pushing his bicycle on the dead run.

By the time Frankie reached the edge of the protecting brush Angus, tall, red-headed, and surprisingly fast, was around the house. He didn't even stop to look inside or put out the fire. Fists doubled, red hair blowing, he covered ground like a galloping horse, so that there never was a chance of getting the bike away. A block inside the brush Frankie wheeled it into a clump of bushes and came pounding after Chet, burdened down with his two guns. Bill and Pete were out of sight, maybe still running, maybe hiding.

The grade got steeper. Chet's mouth was dry, his eyes bulging, his chest on fire for air. Once, when the trees thinned, they heard Angus yell, and looked back to see him coming with that terrible unsuspected speed. They ducked up a side trail, raced across a stretch of level ground, slid off to the left through straggling brush, and huddled up under the bank of the watercourse, completely spent, trying to swallow the heaving of their breath. They waited, hoping that they had fooled Angus, and in a minute they heard him go thundering by. Even then they stuck where they were. Chet started to whisper to Frankie, but a sound above made him huddle close up against the bank, so close that little clods of dirt broke loose and rolled down past his cheek.

Angus was coming back. They heard his steps, heavy, not running now, and his hoarse breath. The steps went straight on down the path, and after three minutes Chet peeked through the roots on the lip of the bank and saw the farmer just disappearing into the trees. Keeping out of sight under the bank, they went back up the coulee, crossed through it onto the east side near the top, and came down through the other coulee to the sandhills. At the edge of the hills they found Bill and Pete, scared to go on any further till Angus left. They had run clear up onto the bench and then come down under the cover of the trees.

“Well, by Jeez,” Chet said, “he never caught any of us.”

In the low sumac between the aspen and the sandstone pillars they lay sprawling on their backs. Chet began to feel pretty good. They had got away slick as a whistle, and he still had the six-shooter, too. “Never laid a hand on a one of us,” he said.

“No,” Bill said, “but he's got Frankie's wheel.”

Frankie sat up, was pulled down instantly. He opened his mouth and squawked. “What?”

“I seen him,” Bill said. “I seen him come out of the brush pushing the bike. It's stood against the shanty now.”

They all stared at Frankie. His lip trembled, and a tear popped into each eye. “What'll Mr. Lipscomb do?” Chet said.

“He'll kill me,” Frankie said. He dashed his forearm across his eyes and bit his lower lip. “You don't know. When he gets mad he's just as likely to hit me with a stick of type.”

On hands and knees he crawled to the very edge of the sumac. The others wriggled up and they lay in a row looking across the green slope to the shack. The smoke wasn't going up any more, but there was a smoldering pile of stuff outside, where Mrs. MacLeod and the kids had thrown it. Mrs. MacLeod and the children were sitting by the wagon, Angus was hitching his horses to the plow he had brought along, and Frankie's wheel was leaning against the corner of the shack.

“Oh damn!” Frankie said. He lay down in the brush with his face on his arms.

Chet, looking over the six-shooter, rolling the empty cylinder, peering down the fouled barrel, thought darkly that they ought to go right down there and throw a gun on old MacLeod and take the bike and tell him to hit the grit. He would do just that, if he had any more bullets. He would throw his gun from low on his thigh, and it would come so fast Angus wouldn't even see it. “All right, MacLeod,” he'd say. “Give the kid back his bike, and don't take your time, either!”

He stole a look at Frankie. Once, on a hike, he had seen old man Lipscomb, who was the scoutmaster, get mad at Frankie and slap him so hard on the jaw that the red mark stayed there for an hour. Frankie would get hail columbia now.

Frankie raised up a little. “We got to get it back,” he said doggedly. “I wouldn't dast go home without it, and I ought to be there now.”

“Well, how?” Chet said.

“I ain't gonna help,” Bill said. “I didn't want to bust up Tex's shack in the first, place.”

“You're a coward,” Frankie said.

“I ain't either. I just don't want anything to do with it.”

“Me neither,” Pete said. “Any guy that'd shove you in the fire.”

“Oh, quit arguing,” Chet said. He was remembering an Indian story he had been reading in the
American Boy
where one hunter had drawn the Indians' fire while the other got away and went for help.

“Lookit,” he said. “Come on over here.” They all crawled to the edge again. “See? If you could get into the brush on this side, then the rest of us could go around on the other side and make a racket and get Angus chasing us and then you could dash out and get on your bike and beat it.”

“I'm game,” Frankie said. His face was smeared and his mouth tight. “Who's coming?”

“Not me,” Bill said.

“Me neither,” said Pete. “I'm not helping any guy that tries to push a guy in the fire.”

Frankie half raised up. “Oh for gosh sakes,” he said. “I'll smack you in the nose.”

“Try it,” Pete said. “I dare you. Go on and smack me.”

They lay on their elbows glowering, and Chet got mad at both of them. “You can fight any old time,” he said. “We got to get that wheel.”

So he and Frankie went alone, Chet feeling loyal and heroic and contemptuous of the two left behind. He left his two guns with Pete, so he could run faster if Angus took after him, and he and Frankie worked back down through the coulee until they could hear the cries of Angus' two little girls playing.

“Now I'll sneak on across,” Chet whispered. “You watch, and when you see the bushes jerk, get ready. Then I'll jump up and see if I can get him after me, and you grab the bike.”

Stealthily he snaked through the golden bright shadows of the aspen and into the fringe of sumac. Lifting his head carefully, he could see Angus plowing the potato patch he grew on Tex's land every year, and Mrs. Angus spreading out some lunch in the shade of the wagon. None of them was within a hundred feet of the bike. He jerked the bushes, and a bush across the opening, hardly fifty feet from the shack, twitched back.

Chet drew a long breath, trying to un-knot his stomach. He waited until Angus was plowing in his direction, as far from Frankie and the bicycle as he would get. Then he jumped to his feet, yelled, waved his arms, thumbed his nose.

Angus did not hesitate a second. He dropped the reins from around his neck, turned the plow on its side, and started like a footracer for Chet. Out of the corner of his eye, before his legs could answer his command to bolt, Chet saw Frankie run crouching to the corner of the shack, and then he himself turned tail and dug for the woods.

He had gone only a few steps when Mrs. Angus yelled. He threw a scared running look over his shoulder. Angus had turned, and was trying to cut Frankie off as he pushed the wheel desperately across the bumpy ground toward the road. Chet stopped and watched, hardly breathing.

Frankie had fifty yards to go before he hit the trail and ground smooth enough to ride on, and Angus, coming down at an angle, had a good chance to cut him off. Frankie sprinted, bouncing the wheel, his bare legs and fallen stockings twinkling, but Angus was coming like a thunderbolt. Chet's heart stopped for a full two seconds as Frankie hit the road and made a running leap onto the seat. It looked as if Angus could reach out in one more stride and grab him. He had looked terribly fast before, coming uphill. Now, going down, he was all legs. He opened up clear to the neck like a clothespin, he ate up twenty feet at a stride. Frankie's head was down, his feet on the pedals were a blur, his shirt was ballooning out behind, but he did not open up any daylight between himself and Angus. One bump, one spill, and Frankie was a goner.

But he didn't spill, and he didn't let up, and even at the tracks, where he had with providential carelessness left both gates open, he pedalled right on, bumped perilously over the planks of the crossing, and legged it out the other side and up the road to town. Angus stopped at the fence.