Author: Max Brand
Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9903] [Yes,
we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This
file was first posted on October 29, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of the project gutenberg
EBOOK way of the Lawless ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Dave Morgan, Tom Allen
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Max Brand
1921
Previous ed. published under title: Free Range
Beside the rear window of the blacksmith shop Jasper
Lanning held his withered arms folded against his
chest. With the dispassionate eye and the aching
heart of an artist he said to himself that his life
work was a failure. That life work was the young
fellow who swung the sledge at the forge, and truly
it was a strange product for this seventy-year-old
veteran with his slant Oriental eyes and his narrow
beard of white. Andrew Lanning was not even his
son, but it came about in this way that Andrew became
the life work of Jasper.
Fifteen years before, the father of Andy died, and
Jasper rode out of the mountain desert like a hawk
dropping out of the pale-blue sky. He buried
his brother without a tear, and then sat down and looked
at the slender child who bore his name. Andy
was a beautiful boy. He had the black hair and
eyes, the well-made jaw, and the bone of the Lannings,
and if his mouth was rather soft and girlish he laid
the failing to the weakness of childhood. Jasper
had no sympathy for tenderness in men. His own
life was as littered with hard deeds as the side of
a mountain with boulders. But the black, bright
eyes and the well-made jaw of little Andy laid hold
on him, and he said to himself: “I’m
fifty-five. I’m about through with my saddle
days. I’ll settle down and turn out one
piece of work that’ll last after I’m gone,
and last with my signature on it!”
That was fifteen years ago. And for fifteen years
he had labored to make Andy a man according to a grim
pattern which was known in the Lanning clan, and elsewhere
in the mountain desert. His program was as simple
as the curriculum of a Persian youth. On the
whole, it was even simpler, for Jasper concentrated
on teaching the boy how to ride and shoot, and was
not at all particular that he should learn to speak
the truth. But on the first two and greatest
articles of his creed, how Jasper labored!
For fifteen years he poured his heart without stint
into his work! He taught Andy to know a horse
from hock to teeth, and to ride anything that wore
hair. He taught him to know a gun as if it were
a sentient thing. He taught him all the draws
of old and new pattern, and labored to give him both
precision and speed. That was the work of fifteen
years, and now at the end of this time the old man
knew that his life work was a failure, for he had
made the hand of Andrew Lanning cunning, had given
his muscles strength, but the heart beneath was wrong.
