Burnt Creek Stories – Complete Collection. Ernest Haycox

Dan, trapped by his half-donned Mackinaw, backed against the wall of the place and poured out a wealth of curses. Reilly put his arms behind him.

      "Stay fast, both of you," ordered Budd. A gust of anger set his words on harsh edge, and then the pent-up feeling of the long night's vigil spilled over, like water rushing from a dam's floodgates, like lava erupting from a crater. "You dog!" he cried, leveling the gun at his son. "Thought you'd get away, eh? Kill a man in cold blood and then use me fer shelter! Bearin' my name an' actin' like a rattlesnake! You're no son of mine, an' I'll not have you runnin' loose to bring sorrow on me! Stand up, you cussed murderer, an' take what I'm goin' to give you!"

      He leveled the gun directly at his son's breast.

      So this was the result of the bitter night's travail of spirit. Old man Budd had meant to do the world's justice by his own hand—to show people that the skulking cur who bore his name held no bonds of affection from him. The pistol's muzzle slid toward the earth, following the young man who collapsed, inch by inch, from sheer terror. And at last the gun was aimed at the base of the shanty. Budd's face turned the color of dead ashes as he watched his son grovel and gibber for mercy, issuing words that could not, for charity's sake, be repeated. The words were so panic stricken that they carried no meaning, nothing but abject fear. The storekeeper's mouth quivered in disgust. Many years had he endured, but this last spectacle was the sharpest, most cruel experience of all his life.

      "Get up!" he bellowed, breathing fast. "Get up, you yaller cur! Ain't there a mite of spunk in you? Get up, I say!"

      Reilly had backed a little aside and was now on the storekeeper's left, nearly out of vision's range. Budd had no eyes for him, being bent on infusing a little of his own dogged fatalism into the corrupt clay that was his son. Dan crawled to his knees and thence upright, a sense of shame at last giving him ballast to face his father's wrath. The gun's muzzle came up. Budd's trigger finger crooked, drew back the hammer. Then, quite slowly, quite impotently the hammer slid back, and the gun wavered. Strength seemed to leave the big arm. It dropped.

      He could not do this thing! Murder was murder, and he had meant that Danny Budd should fully expiate so terrible, so unmanly a crime. But at that last moment when the front sight of the gun stood against the white flesh of Dan's forehead in startling clearness, and Budd's eye met it evenly through the rear sight notch, the weakness of the blood was too great. It seemed to him that the crisp air was filled with the sweet resonance of church bells.

      Was there a chance to save the soul of Dan? Even yet a chance? Something choked him, and a film covered his eyes.

      "I can't do it!" he muttered. "I jest can't do it!"

      Dan's cry ran across the clearing, and Budd jerked up his head in time to see Mike Reilly's hand streak for a gun. He had paid no attention to Mike. Now he swung a bit and waited a full breath. There was a double explosion which seemed to break the clear air into a million bits and send a great fury to the sky. His shoulder was punched back, the gun slid from his fingers, and he found himself sagging to the cold snow. Mike Reilly had strangely disappeared and, when he looked closer, he saw the man had fallen face downward.

      Dan scurried up and stooped over his father. There was, in his ratty face, a most curious look, an expression that might come to one who had seen and felt an unusual thing and labored mightily to understand it. Mechanically he kicked the pistol behind his father's reach. "Well," he grunted, almost dispassionately, "I never thought you was a gunfighter. Got him plumb center through the heart. Guess it was an accident. But you was goin' to kill me, wasn't you? And changed your mind. What for?"

      Budd supported himself on one hand. "Go on," he said thickly. "Get away. I can't stop you, nor wouldn't. Go on now. Some day, mebbe, you'll have spunk to be a man...jest fer a minute or so before you die...a whole, grown man just fer a minute. Git out now."

      There was a sound of a body crashing through the brush on the right. It might be the deputy or Toots Billmire. On the left, too, was a sound, fainter but coming up hurriedly. Dan moved uneasily, seeming unable to shake off the lethargy.

      "It's mighty funny," he said. "Sure is funny."

      "Get out!" roared Budd, and turned away. He no longer wished to see his son. After he had struggled to his feet, Dan had gone. The shanty door stood open, and the horse still was tethered behind. Tracks led across the fresh snow and disappeared in the pines. Budd groped for the pistol and got it just as the deputy ran into the clearing, with a smear of crimson running down one side of his face and a pistol swinging loosely in one hand.

      "Where'd they go?" he shouted. "I got Billmire! Where's the others?"

      Budd nodded to the east, and the deputy turned off. He hadn't reached the fringe of the pines before another blast of gunfire was flung in his face. Two shots that stung the eardrums, disturbing the balance of the forest, singing sharply for an interval in echo then dying to a sinister silence. Budd charged after the deputy, regardless of wounded shoulder, regardless of whipping branches and shrubs that plucked at his legs. Fifty yards brought him to the left-hand road, and here he saw Dan crumpled in a heap with the sheriff bending over him. Budd ran on and, pushing the sheriff back, knelt beside Dan and raised him up with the one good arm. And there came from him at that moment the oldest, saddest cry in the human tongue.

      "My son...Dan...sonny!"

      Dan snuffled like a broken-spirited child and opened his eyes. A rack and a rumble welled in his throat, significant of the advancing tide of death. But the same surprised expression he had carried from his father was still on his face and a brief, weak phrase explained it. "Why, it ain't a bit hard to die, is it?"

      "I guess not, son," muttered Budd. "I guess it ain't...fer a man."

      "I'm a man," whispered Dan. "It's funny what come over me when Mike winged you. It's funny...I dunno...but I faced the sheriff fair an' square...dunno what made me do that...you ask him...Dad..." And with that last inarticulate, futile cry, he died.

      The sheriff bent down. "That's so, Dave. He come bustin' through the pines just as I ran up the road. He saw me and figgered he was cornered. I called fer him to give in, but he said he guessed not. Queer, too, the way he said it, straightenin' and facin' me like he aimed to make a good target. He sort of drew a hand across his face like he was dizzy. Then he says: 'I'll count three an' draw.' Danged if he didn't. I beat him to it."

      Budd's face turned to stone. "He fought fair, then? He stood an' faced it?"

      "He sure did, Dave. Like I told you. Never flinched."

      "Thank heaven," said Budd very softly, and laid an arm affectionately across the boy's grimed forehead. A single tragic tear sparkled in his eye and fell. Peace had come to Danny Budd, and he had given his father, in departing, the greatest of gifts. He had died in a man's way. The erratic heart might never have had the same fair impulse again, but some inexplicable emotion carried him to the high limit of his courage, and at that moment fate had chosen to fashion a crisis. And Danny Budd had faced it like a man.

      "Thank heaven," said Budd. It seemed to him that the bells were filling the air with a resonant beauty, a swelling glory. There was a great sorrow in those sweet chimes, but greater than sorrow was the promise of enduring peace.