Brand Fortune's Christmas (Annotated)

Enriched Edition. A Western Tale of the Christmas Spirit
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-80-273-0146-1
Verlag: e-artnow
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 85 Seiten

Anthony Hazzard is a brute money lender with a dark secret. On Christmas Eve, he finds a young man half-frozen in the snow and recognizes him as escaped convict Harry Fortune. Hazzard rescues him and takes him home, intending to turn him in for the reward, but both Harry Fortune and Hazzard's warm-hearted niece mistake his action for one of kindness. As Hazzard cunningly maneuvers so as to realize how to make the largest profit possible for his planned betrayal, his selfish acts keep on being misinterpreted as more kindness and benevolence. Frederick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) was an American author known primarily for his thoughtful and literary Westerns under the pen name Max Brand. Prolific in many genres he wrote historical novels, detective mysteries, pulp fiction stories and many more.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brand, Max

E-Artnow

Weitere Mitwirkende

Kingsmere, Tobin

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2

Table of Contents

He stumbled off into the kitchen, noting that here, also, the fire had been kindled for some time and was burning hotly, so that the room was well warmed even to the farthest corner. Only between the foot-worn doorsill and the door the wind whirred through in a steady stream of ice. He held his hands above the rising heat. They trembled and wavered like hawks riding a storm wind. Sometimes he closed his eyes. When he did, faces peered in at him through the windows. Forms lurked in the hall. Out yonder the sea of darkness was a sea of danger.

A millionaire! Was that what men said of him? Was that really what had come to the ear of the girl?

He turned, shouting: "Anne! Anne! Come here!"

There was a little rush of footfalls; the door snapped open; there she stood, white-faced, before him.

"Uncle Anthony, what's happened? Are you sick?"

"You're talkin' like a fool," he told her sharply. "Now get your wits about you. Lemme know, Anne, who put that nonsense into your head. Who told you that I was a millionaire?"

"Why, Uncle Anthony, I guess most folks think that you must be pretty rich."

His smile was like the grin of a tortured beast. "Pretty rich, eh? Pretty rich? What might they think would be the reason for me livin' here in a poverty-stricken household, eh?"

"They think it's just your way, Uncle Anthony."

"They think that I got money buried on this here place, maybe? Is that it?"

"No, no! I never heard anything like that. But they say that you have a lot loaned out..."

"Not my money! Not my money! But friends of mine that got a trust in me. They gimme the money to loan out for 'em. D'you see, Anne?"

She nodded, but she looked down at the floor. Suddenly he ran to her and caught her, and drew her toward the light, and pushed her face with his hard, bony hand.

"D'you see, Anne?"

But all that looked back at him out of her eyes was abject fear.

"I see," she said.

She was lying. He knew that. She was deceiving him. Perhaps, at that moment, she was in league with cruel-handed robbers who would spill his blood for the sheer joy of slaughter—and afterward roll and revel in his money. She was lying, then. She did not believe. Perhaps everyday she was spreading abroad reports of his vast wealth. Every day she was gathering danger upon his head. What was to be done about it? He had looked upon her as an encumbrance before. He began to see in her, now, a most terrible and staring danger.

He went to his corner chair and picked up his last bit of work—the mending of a leather tug that had broken the winter before when he was driving a team over the muddy road to town. He began to carry on that work, forcing the stout needle through with all his might and drawing the waxed twine after. But he did not see his work. He saw only the new face of his life as his niece had made him see it in the past few moments. And what he saw made him ill at ease indeed.

In the meantime, she began to make preparations for the cooking of breakfast. She cracked one egg into a saucer; she reached out for another. This enormity shocked him out of his old troubles.

"Have you took to eatin' two eggs for your breakfast, Anne?" he rasped out at her.

"One for each of us, that's all," she explained.

"One for each of us? One for each of us? Who is us? Not me, Anne. I ain't wastin' them good eggs that got a price in the market. Not while there's other food in the pantry just as good or better... maybe better... maybe more lastin' in the stomach!" He went to the cupboard and brought out an earthen dish with a few spoonfuls of baked beans in the bottom of it.

So he sat in the corner chair, with his work laid aside. And he began to eat the beans with a pewter spoon that he had taken out of the drawer of the kitchen table. His good spirits rose in him when he thought of what his economy was saving him. Reckless young men in the town, at this very moment, were doubtless rising sluggishly out of their beds and contemplating a breakfast for which they would pay almost anything—250¢, 400¢, even 500¢ for the smallest meal of their day!

While he thought of this, the spoon sounded hollow against the bottom of the dish. He looked down and found that he had cleaned them up and still, in fact, he was hungry. He looked at the fresh bread on the table. A slice was newly cut, and exposed an inner flank as white as snow. How delicious would be the aroma when that slice was toasted. But the girl seemed in no haste to go on with the preparations for the breakfast. She idled over her work, and finally she sat, looking wistfully at the steam that whirred out of the muzzle of the kettle and rose until it curled like an opening lotus flower against the ceiling, then disappeared.

He felt that, if he remained too long within the kitchen, the pangs of his hunger would overcome him. He stood up, tightened his belt, and turned away. At the door he paused without looking back to her.

"Ain't you happy here, Anne?" he asked her.

There was no reply for a moment, and then a startled voice replied: "Happy? Me? Oh, I s'pose so. Of course, I s'pose I am."

He turned, now, and pointed a finger at her. "Rememberin' that if it hadn't been for me, girl, you might've been turned out to die in a snowdrift? Rememberin' that all the time, I hope?"

He had spoken in somewhat this fashion many times before, and always there had been some sort of shivering response, but now she merely sat in the chair with her head raised and her dulled eyes fixed upon him, silent, blank, immobile. It became impossible for him to look any longer into that weary young face. He hastily left the room and went into his office. It was hardly more than a great closet, but he sometimes felt that he would neither be able to live nor to think if he were separated from it.

Here he kept his office files. Here were his little cabinets filled with papers that were covered with notations in a cramped hand. But they did not contain the full record of his career. That record was in his brain only. These supplied only the notes, now and again, not to correct, but to verify his questions of himself. For he forgot nothing. All that had ever come into his life in the way of money remained in his thoughts.

In this closet he seated himself and folded his hands across his breast. It was still, for a half hour or so, too dark to start forth on the day's business. He devoted that time to meditating upon what lay before him. Not that he needed to refresh his memory, but because he loved to review his actions in the first place, like a general, overseeing the march of his men before battle. So it was with Anthony Hazzard.

When the picture of the day's work was completed, he got up, settled a battered felt hat on his head, and started out for the barn. There was already a streak of gray in the eastern sky, but in the barn all was so dark that he was forced to light the lantern that hung beside the sliding door. That illumination enabled him to see the old gray mare. She stood with hanging head, her lean withers and hips sticking up like three scalped mountains above her back. And Mr. Hazzard, regarding her, considered her not uninteresting history. She had been a wild mustang, in the beginning. Then some reckless cowpuncher had managed to tame her enough to sit in the saddle. She had become an expert cutting horse until she developed such a streak of vicious temper that her master sold her to a peddler who made the round of the mountain cow camps winter and summer. Lugging the heavy wagon behind her, she had lasted ten ghastly years at that work and, finally, even the peddler was ready to destroy her as one who has accomplished her share of work in life. At this moment, it was the good fortune of Anthony Hazzard to happen by.

He considered that she was only eighteen years old, that she was neither blind nor deaf, and that her hoofs were sound. He bought her for $2 and put her in his pasture. In two weeks she was able to move at a trot. At the end of the third week she even made a feeble attempt to buck the harness off her back. These things had happened five years before. Now, in her twenty-third year, her eyes were glazing, but she was still able to totter down the road at a shuffle that was fast enough to suit Anthony Hazzard. Speed, in fact, he did not like. Most of all, she performed her work on rations that would have starved a pony. In the summer, a slight chance to graze in the pasture was all that she needed. In the winter, however, he put her up in the barn and gave her a modicum of hay from time to time. Grain was a luxury she had quite forgotten.

He climbed into the mow, therefore, and worked loose a forkful of hay. This he weighed with care. He knew to an ounce how much nutriment she needed to keep body and soul together. When he had shaken off some of the fork load, he threw the rest into her manger, and at once she was greedily eating it. He looked down upon her, nodding his head with satisfaction. He felt a vague warmth of heart. Not because he was giving her happiness, but because the wrecked machine could still use fuel—which promised that it could still run. And, if she had to be destroyed in the next summer, he had a good chance of getting for her hide as much, at least, as he had originally paid for her.

This was a small thing. But out of such minutiae, in the beginning, he had built up his fortune. Still it was the little things that gave him his greatest...