A Man's Measure

Front matter

A Man's Measure

A Novelette Proving One Mans Death May Be Another Man's Redemption

HE stood against the wall opposite Papa Pertwee's bar, alone in a room clamorous with the free mingling of many men. Rumpled clothes of a cut never originating or even sold in Chester's Dump or any other Michigan logging town hung from his broad shoulders and supple waist. His shirt was open, his head bare and on his face was a kindly, vacant smile, touched by wistfulness.

Chapter II

IT WAS Papa Pertwee's determination to keep all his transactions regular which sprouted the seed of trouble that Red Bart always sowed about him.

Papa looked into the face with its fringe of red beard stubble and mummed his chew with incredible speed.

“But you ain't a-paid for th' last un!” he protested.

Delaney quirked his thumb for the bottle. (He was leaning indolently against crossed fore arms.) “A drink, I said,” he growled.

“I never run no tick, Delaney, 'n you know it!” Pertwee whined. “Cash business, 'nd I ain't goin' to do no a-different fer anybody.”

By then other voices had been dampered to silence, for none had believed that Papa's avarice would ever carry him so far.

“I said, I want a drink,” Delaney repeated ominously. “That makes three times I've said it, which is too many.”

“But you ain't—”

One of Bart's great hands whipped out and stout fingers fastened in the shirt over Papa's skinny chest. Delaney's face was thrust forward as he drew the sputtering proprietor to him.

“If you ain't got change, this gen'man's been buyin' all night!” shrilled Pertwee with a wild wave toward McIver. “He offered you a drink like a gen'man 'nd you a-didn't take it 'nd now you want me to—”

“Who buys my whisky is my business.”

“Well somebody's got to pay for it a-when you git it!” Papa yelped.

Those men who had lived with Red Bart only by giving him a wide berth saw rage flood his face. He half lifted the little man with one hand and the other crushed the sorry beard against a wizened throat and Papa's breath retched in a falsetto gurgle.

“Aw, now, Bart—”

This was one of the Dump's bravest, opening a conciliatory protest, and it was Bob McIver who cut him short.

“Don't aw-now that scum!” he said sharply, yanking the peace-maker aside and glaring at him an instant. “He ain't no party to be got peaceable by aw-nowin' from t'night 'til hell freezes.” He flung a glance about the silent group. “What's wrong with this town, anyhow? Standin' here an' lettin' a Chiny-eyed Mick pinch daddy's wizen 'til he's clean uncomfortable?”

He nodded vehemently and hitched up his pants and spat and took the half-dozen steps which placed him at the bar's end. He leaned his elbow on the fixture and put his face close to Red Bart's.

“Chum,” said McIver and cleared his throat, “I wouldn't do that.”

He spoke almost casually and he looked at Papa, whose eyes bulged and whose hands, instead of waving in futile gestures of defense, now fluttered at his sides. Clearly McIver had only an academic sympathy for the mean little miser, but when he looked back at Red Bart and saw the mad light in that man's eyes, his mood was far from casual.

“Chum,” he repeated, rumblingly, “I wouldn't.”

The choking hand let Pertwee take a ragged, noisy breath; he began to cry as Red Bart still held him close by the grip on his clothing.

“Why not?” Delaney asked ominously. “Who wants me to stop?”

McIver's first move was deliberate but Delaney's was like lightning. He let Papa go as the stranger surged clear of the corner of the bar and the hand that had done the choking knotted to a fist and drove out to rock the tug-boat man's head. Just his head; his body, though it halted short, was not swayed, but his head snapped backward and blood burst from his mouth.

He looked about dully. “He hit me!” he said. “Hot dam'; he hiit me!”

He felt his mouth with finger tips and inspected them, saying again that he had been hit. And then, with no warning at all, he charged and went through the rain of blows until his great arms were about the other's body. He lifted Bart from his feet and swung him about as men stampeded away to make room and drove the small of Delaney's back against the edge of the bar with an impact which stirred the man's voice to a roar of pain and rage.

FOR an instant after that crash the rigidity went from Red Bart and he sagged sideways and McIver relaxed a trifle, just a trifle, enough to let one of Red Bart's hands slide across his stomach and the fingers slipped inside his shirt and when they came out men who had been still drunk a moment before swore sharp, sober oaths as the knife blade glittered.

It made one livid sweep and then remained still, glittering as McIver's hand bound Delaney's wrist and held it full length from his body.

“You pig-stickin' scum!” he cried hoarsely, his whole rage up, then.

Strength matched strength and their breathing sobbed in the silence. Then Red Bart gave. He went down to a knee and struck with his free hand. But McIver did not mind that; he twisted the wrist he held until it cracked and the knife spilled from flexed fingers into his waiting hand.

“You'd knife me, eh?” he panted.

Delaney stayed on his knee, a hand on the floor, tense, ready to pounce or elude. McIver backed to the bar, never taking his eyes from that evil face; his hand holding the knife rose high and as it drove downward the blade hit the pine plank to bury itself a third its length. Then the tug-boat captain wrenched and the steel snapped and he tossed the broken knife across the room.

Slowly he wiped his palms on his pants and said, quietly for so loud a man: “Now, red-head, we'll see!”

They did see. A mountain of a man, this McIver, a great hulk of lithe fury and he did terrible things to Red Bart Delaney, who had done so many terrible things to so many men and in the end he lifted Red in his arms, lumbered to the door and dropped his burden on the topmost of the three steps. The limp form thumped down the other two and its last unconscious movement was a smack of a palm as the arm described an arc and slapped it down on the damp, cool earth.

“Well, now,” queried McIver as he rolled back into the room, feeling his lip, “did anybody see that scum hit me? He did— An' le's resume.”

They all did and the drink was on Papa Pertwee and the only ones in the place who did not find emotional room for amazement at this unprecedented liberality were McIver, who had come to town only that day, and young Thad Chester who slept on the pool-table, a smoking oil-lamp casting a sodden glow over his good-natured face; a face that, about the mouth, now had an expression which spoke of many things, of disillusionment and heart-break and a fund of strength gone sour.

No one noticed it, but the cuckoo clock in Papa Pertwee's saloon had sounded the half after midnight just as Delaney's palm smacked down on the beaten path to the door; and it was tootoodeling its information that two o'clock was dead when the last of Papa's patrons lurched out, not counting, of course, the lad who smiled upward into the darkness from the pool-table.

The proprietor blew out the lamps that had not gone dry, stuffed the contents of the till into his shirt and climbed the stairs to his dusty room overhead. Mr. Chester slept on and after a time all the Dump slept—but one.

Red Bart, face bruised and cut, moving stiffly when he stooped, paddled canoe upstream and cached it under bushes around a point. Next, he stood for a time outside the store, looking and listening. Satisfied as to the repose of the town he went to the rear, raised a window and emerged with a new pack-sack suffed full. This he carried to his canoe, retraced his way, climbed to the hotel room where he had intended to sleep and came down again with a rifle under his arm.

The first birds were twittering then and out on the river a gull cried. The east was brightening and Bart moved slowly down toward the dock.

NOW, looking from his bedroom window above the store, bald-headed Osy Bartlett, the proprietor, observed two things that struck him as significant. The first was that the shadowy figure out there walked with his head thrust far forward from swaying shoulders, and only one man he knew walked in that particular posture. The second was that the man carried a rifle.

To see a resident of the Dump carrying a rifle at dawn was not odd. Deer browsed close to town and people took what they needed. But to see this particular man carrying a rifle made the lone observer pause.

He did not pause long, however, for his wife was up and demanding water and, shivering a bit in the chill dawn, Osy crossed the street to where a flowing well debouched into a hollowed bass-wood log. He filled his bucket as an early teamster drove his horses to the trough.

“Big time, eh?” the teamster asked.

“'At so? How's 'at?”

“Ain't you heard? Red Bart got th' hell beat outen him.”

Osy listened and shrugged and began putting two and two together to make a sum greater than four. Then he hurried home and what he had to tell checked his wife's bustle about the stove. Ten minutes later old man Tolman, the cruiser, sat up in bed and listened as closely as Mrs. Bartlett had while the storekeeper told what he had seen and heard.

IT WAS significant of Tolman's standing that the informer went to him rather than Haynes, the superintendent. Haynes was a good business man, but Tolman, the veteran of the bush, knew men and it was a man who knew men who would be needed today.

Tom Tolman was a good man, though old, but he had no fool's notion of his own capacities, nor did he have hope that law, order and perhaps life could be maintained by any unofficial vigilance the Dump could offer. His first destination was the store, to call the sheriff by telephone. He spoke tersely and his admonition was that grave trouble impended and that the officer had best come a-running. Then it was four o'clock and the town was stirring and breakfast was of little consequence because the story ran like word of fire:

Red Bart Delaney is skulking with a gun for the tug-boat man! Red Bart had met his master in a free fight and was about to become a killer!

Quietly old man Tolman went about. He looked into McIver's pilot house and decided he had a margin of time there because the man slept profoundly. He questioned others but none had seen Delaney nor could guess where he might be. Best, he thought, to delay search until the sheriff came.

But at seven the sheriff was not there; men went reluctantly to work. Tolman called the jail again and turned from the telephone with mouth set.

“Afeerd to come?” a bystander asked.

“That's what a country gets,” Tolman commented, “by listenin' to politicians instead of a man with bark on!”

HE WENT again to McIver's tug as the sun pushed over the Ontario hills across the broad river and shook the man and sat beside him on the pilot house locker and remarked gravely that Red Bart was likely hiding somewhere with a rifle, that the sheriff had been sent for and that his advice to Mr. McIver was that he stay under cover until either Delaney was definitely located or the law personally represented in the Dump.

McIver yawned and stretched and said he was darned if he'd hide for any Chiny-eyed Mick who went around chokin' old men for a drink of rot-gut. No, to hell with 'em; when he'd slept his sleep he was going about his business and dam' the man who tried to stop him, friend or otherwise. Women and kids? Sure, he had; a lot of both. He laughed sleepily. But he'd kept his skin whole a good while to take care of 'em and if this party had a crimp in Chester's Dump it was only a sign that they were a bunch of yellow-bellied corn-huskers instead of men and what scared them couldn't scare him a nickel's worth.

“An' it's early,” he concluded. “If you want to do me a favor, tell th' cook to fry the meat 'til it'll half-sole boots an' not to sing out until it's ready. It's th' late hours of this burg that's run yellow into your necks. If you'd sleep more an' talk less you wouldn't worry over no Chiny-eyed Mick!”

So Tolman gave that up and waited silently for the sheriff who, he felt in his heart, never had intended to hurry. The sheriff knew Delaney and the sheriff in hedging—if he were hedging—was doing no more, really, than the Dump and other towns had done for a decade. Still—he was the sheriff.

At eight-thirty-five McIver appeared on the dock, hitched his pants, stuffed a chew into his cheek and rolled up toward town to talk business with Haynes. His way, as he neared the shore, was flanked by the tops of alders which grew rank in the mushy soil along the river's edge. He was smiling as he walked, an arrogant, sparkling smile, and his gaze, caught by a movement in the bushes came to rest on a fleck of color.

It was a vivid yellow warbler, perking its head and eying the huge man. He grinned and started to speak a morning greeting to the midget songster as its throat swelled and sweet music poured out.

BUT McIver did not speak. A gun spoke instead; a flat, dull crash. The man on the dock put his foot down sharply without completing the step it had been about to take. He swayed a trifle and lifted a hand to his stomach. The hand fluttered there an instant and then slid down over his belly, over his thigh and, as he bent forward, the heel of it came to rest on his knee propping his torso half erect. He held that posture, a brief, brief moment and then went over on his face. He coughed once and lay very still, queerly flattened on the planks for so large a man.

A wisp of blue vapor floated over the top of a bush and the warbler, his music having been cut off so abruptly by the shot, shook himself, hopped to another twig and looked about. He sang again, the notes loud in the silence.

Up the street a woman screamed after that instant's pause and men started running. But they stopped in their tracks when Red Bart emerged from the alders.

His face was white, in strange contrast to the red beard stubble on his chin. He looked up the street and jerked the butt of the rifle to his hip, sweeping the town. He sidestepped across the shore end of the dock, never looking at the motionless figure behind him and when he was beyond the clump of alders on the far side he began running along the reedy bank of the river, running half sideways with his face turned over his shoulder to watch for pursuit.

They did not run after him. They ran to McIver and found him dead and consternation over the anticipated tragedy prevailed until some one discerned a canoe far out on the river. It had kept the screen of the long point for a time and its occupant had been able to put much water between him and the Dump before revealing his whereabouts. It must be Delaney, men thought, and hurried to McIver's tug to give chase but the engineer had been repacking his steam-pipe and the boiler was cold so that was hopeless. There was considerable talk of pursuing in other canoes but it came to nothing because the man they wanted was Red Bart Delaney, who had been bad enough to cow them before, but who now had became a killer.

It was noon when the sheriff drove into town with a deal of bluster. But he quieted oddly when he looked into Tom Tolman's face and when the cruiser told him that the next best move would be to telephone the provincial police of Ontario to head off his man he agreed. But he went on taking notes in a little book and did not telephone and Tolman went home in disgust.

Chapter III

McIVER was dead. Red Bart was gone. The first hysterical flush of excitement had subsided and Chester's Dump was mostly at dinner when young Thad stirred on the spotty pool-table and wrinkled his face and opened his mouth and moaned.

He sat up and with eyes squeezed shut clung to the edge of the table. After steadying himself he blinked and looked about. Four men were at the bar talking earnestly. Through the open double doors in the front streamed the splendid sunshine of June.

Thad swung his feet over the rail and was about to drop gingerly to the floor when a figure emerged from the store across the way.

It was the figure of a girl, lissom, small, clad in the faintest of blue frocks, dangling by its string a wide, floppy hat and the sun light fell on hair the color of spun gold. She came into the street with all the lightness of a bit of drifting down and walked away with the grace of a sprite. He watched her go out of his range of vision. Then he opened his mouth as though to speak, dropped to the floor and took a half-dozen quick strides forward.

For the moment he was all determination but as he neared the doorway his decisiveness ebbed sharply. He stopped and put out a hand to the bar and the other rested over his eyes as though to shield them from a blinding light. When he lowered it he saw himself in the dusty, bubbly mirror on the wall and his smile was dark. He made a wry, hopeless grimace at that reflection because he was seeing, in a dulled, foggy manner, the contrast between its dark visage and the fine lightness of the figure he had watched across the street.

Papa Pertwee was on his knees under the bar, filling a demijohn from a spigot.

The men spoke to Thad more elaborately than they would have greeted one another, with deference and something that smacked of patronage, and went on with their earnest talk. For an interval none of it registered on the consciousness of Thad Chester and then words came:

“2 undertaker ought to be here by now.”

Undertaker, that connoted death.

“Who's dead?”

The faces turned to him again; even Papa Pertwee's, popping up above the level of the bar and disappearing with a rattling sound from his throat.

“Dead? Who? My 2, ain't you heerd?”

“No I've been—” He felt a sweep of self-consciousness as he started to explain why he was not abreast of the Dump's news but that faded out.

“McIver— Th' tug-boat—”

“Red Bart's fin'ly done it,” another broke in and then all four talked at once, contributing concurrently some thrilling morsel of the striking event and young Chester stood frowning, trying to realize that his was not the only tragedy enacted in the town. They edged closer and their interruptions became more frequent as memories brought up new detail, but somehow the boy was not much impressed.

What they related did affect him, in a way. The atmosphere of another tragedy darkened the sun, added to young Mr. Chester's giddiness—either that or the liquor of yesterday and the day before and the weeks before that— Death! He shuddered.

Papa Pertwee corked the demijohn, wiped his hands on his stained shirt front, set a glass before Thad and thumped the bottle on the bar.

The young man stood staring into the street, brows drawn into a deep frown. He had ceased listening— A man shot dead, yonder in that sunshine.

Papa spoke. “Here's your mornin's mornin'.”

Thad drew his great, lax shoulders up slowly but did not look at him.

One of the others took the bottle and poured a drink and the rest did likewise, leaving it at the far end of the line. Pertwee collected their change, shuffled along the bar, retrieved the bottle, slid it out to where it would touch the back of Thad's hand and wheezed again:

“Here's your mornin's mornin', sonny.”

Thad looked at him, and Papa smiled a toothless running smile. He always smiled at Thad Chester because Thad Chester's allowance was by far the largest single item that passed across his bar. But now instead of bowing with grave courtliness as he usually did, instead of smiling his weak, habitual smile, his best customer looked right through Mr. Pertwee and when the cuckoo popped out of its cote and tootoodelooed the half after twelve as it had an even dozen hours ago when Red Bart came to ignominious rest outside, Thad started as if struck.

“No thank you,” he said and moved away.

Papa was startled.

“What's th' matter?” he squawked.

Thad shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, frowning at the bottle and wiping his hot, parched lips. “Nothing, Mr. Pertwee; nothing at all.”

BUT, of course, much was the matter. He was confused, but for months, now, he had been confused on waking; he was depressed today, conflicting emotions were surging within him; he had been shocked by the the tale of McIver's death. But confusion, depression, shock—none of these mattered much, because he had had a vision of lovely life, swinging a straw hat, and he knew that he had failed in another thing he had started out to do; he had sought to drown despair over one failure in Papa's liquor and had not only failed to achieve forgetfulness but had made matters worse—much worse.

His lips, his throat, his raw nerves, screamed for whisky, but he would not let them have whisky. The self deep in him revolted from it and chastized the body by saying that no whisky was to be its portion that day—not until he had tried once again!

He started out and Papa Pertwee, beard sagging at this disaster of his commerce, bent forward. As Thad reached the doorway the old man croaked:

“Ain't you going to a-settle, young man?”

The boy stopped and turned unsteadily.

“What's that, Mr. Pertwee?”

“Ain't yon a-goin' to settle?” be repeated in his craved whine.

“Do I owe you something? I—I didn't recall ”

He fished in his pocket and Papa's eyes guttered with avarice.

“I don't aim to take lodgers,” he said. “No more do I aim to keep pool players waitin'. You be'n sleepin' twelve hours on my table an' that's worth a-suthin'.”

No amazement showed in Thad's face; no humor or resentment, either. He was preoccupied as he walked back to the bar, fumbling in his pocket.

“I'd a-ought to charge city,” Papa wheezed. “'N Detroit they gits fifty cents a hour for pool-tables, but I don't a-want to be called niggardly.”

Thad found a crumpled bill and tossed it to the bar.

“And have a drink,” he said abstractedly as he turned away.

Chapter IV

SO BILLIE COMPTON was back! That amazing fact was the one thing which clung clearly in his mind, resting against a jumbled background of subordinate thoughts, of failure, and dismay and death, a confused, fuzzy background.

It was there in his mind, a burning burden, when he left the saloon. It was there when he came up from his long dive in the biting waters of the river. It was there, and reflected in his eyes, as he bent to the broken mirror and shaved with trembling hands. It goaded him as he dressed and impelled him later up the one street of the town, clean, shaven, hatless, walking slowly and heedlessly past the group of men clustered about ±e sheriff and about old Tom Tolman.

Billie Compton was back, back in the house of her uncle, Haynes, and that fact relegated murder to a secondary place in the boy's fogged mind.

He had believed, up to that moment of waking on Pertwee's pool-table, that he had forgotten, thought he had drowned memory of her, desire for her in Papa's poison; but she had come back and demonstrated to him that the frittering of his strength and his self-respect had been only waste. And he was going to her, a moth again to the flame; a singed moth, after two years up here in the North, where his roaring old father had sent him to learn to be a man.

He grimaced at that. He knew what his father's idea amounted to. He knew what his father had been striving at, for the elder Chester was of that school of rich men who had had nothing but vision and vitality with which to fashion beginnings. He wanted his son to have the experience of that same hard school. Perhaps doing what was called a man's work for a wage proved something, but young Thad had doubted it from the beginning.

Still, he tolerantly put himself into the process and did what any employee was expected to do. But would that make a man? He had no lack of woolens; he had no broken rubbers, no ragged mittens; no wife and children dependent on his meager wage, no indefinite future of such toil, even. He had youth and strength, agility and a zest for action and behind him was his father, beyond him the Chester millions. Tolman, he knew, had written to his father that the man was emerging from the youth. He had gone up the Zhing-wauk with the cruiser to look over that Ontario pulp stuff and had acquitted himself well and his guide had smiled and said that he was coming along.

But what makes a man? Hardships? Physical courage? He had tried what these men called hardships and found it play; he had a reputation for being unafraid in woods and on river, but when Billie Compton came, what had these mattered?

Billie Compton, with her blue eyes and gentle voice! She had snared his heart as easily as he, on the boom, sent logs to their berths with his pike pole. She had taken his assurance, his balance; she had made him plead when he wanted to be masterly; she had made him feel like weeping when he knew that strategy demanded laughter. She had made a fool of him in his own eyes and he had not the manhood to help himself.

It was memory of her teasing laughter that would not let him sleep sober; memory of her slim arms slipping through his hands that drove him to Papa Pertwee's. It was Billie Compton, the flirt, who had made him quit trying to be a man and sell his soul on the assumption that he could have peace.

And he had not achieved the forgetfulness which meant peace! He had tried since Fall to drink himself to indifference and had renounced drink today only that he might be fit to go to her again. Failing now, though, what would be left? He not now. He had come up here to learn to be a man and was going to her again, like a singed moth to the flame.

“Billie!”

His voice crackled strangely as she emerged from the cool shadows of the wide living-room in response to his ring.

“Dear old Thad!”

He wanted to be reserved. He wanted to come this afternoon with an air of casualness and yet he had called her name in a voice that broke like a small boy's and when she spoke he felt his knees tremble!

“Dear, dear old Thad!”

She was in knickers, now, and a low-necked blouse. She was offering her hand, the cool, slender, pink-and-white hand, and he was telling himself that he must appear indifferent and yet with that hand in his he lurched forward with a moan and she was back in the room, with those devils of triumph dancing in her eyes and breaking his heart.

AFTER that he sat down and talked a a bit. Billie prattled on, about her winter in the East, about this prom, that dinner; about Tom and Dick and Harry, and her words were like fine blades in his heart and she watched him and knew this and gorged herself with his suffering.

Then she came about. She was prim, grave.

“But they've told me, dear Thad,” she said just above a whisper. “They've told me about you. Why; why must you throw yourself away?”

He laughed bitterly and for once she was startled and in doubt, but he did not see that. Failure danced before him and he paced the room while she watched with something like alarm. Things were clear, now, blindingly clear to his singing nerves. It was as though he had finally shaken off that fog.

Adroitly, the girl nipped the talk and led it off.

“That terrible Delaney!” she murmured. “And uncle says they'll never get him, now!”

He was glad of respite, of letting her talk of another tragedy than his and listened while she told.

The crew of a tug-boat which had been across the river at dawn and had docked at the Dump at high noon reported seeing Red Bart driving his canoe straight for the mouth of Zhing-wauk. The sheriff was afraid to follow, had made only the feeblest pretense of searching the river. No other would go, if the sheriff would not, and who could blame them? It was a man's job, her uncle had said; a man would take his life in his hands by following Red Bart. Besides, what good would it do, now, with the start he had and the sort of man he was known to be on trail and river?