Beyond the Outposts
Max Brand
Author’s Comment
Books are queer things, mostly written by people who want to show how many ways they can tell a lie. Scratch a writer and you’ll find a liar every time. As old Chief Standing Bear used to say: “A man cannot work in two ways. He must live by his hands or by his tongue. Talk is for squaws, my son.”
But every white man, including me, is half squaw, and that’s why I’m writing this book. Partly, too, because a good many things I’ve done have been misunderstood. Everything that I put down here is fact, and I hope the doubters will come to me for the proofs. That includes you, Chuck Morris. All that I write is the truth and only half the truth, at that, because how can Indians and the prairie be packed into words?
Now that I’ve said this, I suppose that I’d better start in the usual way.
WILL DORSET’S RETURN
When a man writes of his own life, he generally begins with the house in which he was born and goes back to the list of his ancestors - modestly, of course, and by a sort of inference. For instance, in furnishing the hall he cannot help mentioning that the clock was given to the family by his father’s dear friend, the Duke of Abercrombie, or that the basket-hiked sword that hangs from the wall was won by his great-grandfather, Sir Ernest, at Colloden. He goes on in this way until the reader, unless he is a born fool, has to guess that there is the blue blood of an old nobility in the veins of the writer. I confess at once that my family never had a coat of arms. If it had, my grandfather, Tom Dorset, would have traded it for one dram of whiskey, and, for another dram, he would have thrown in the whole family tree. As for the house in which I was born, I cannot remember it, because to celebrate my birth there was such carrying on that the house caught fire and burned to a cinder. They carried me, squalling, I suppose, out of the room where I lay just as the ceiling began to smoke, and so I had my first sight of the open sky that I have loved so much from that day to this. My poor mother was taken out next, and she died the following day of the shock.
My father decided the house must have been set on fire by our old enemies, the Connells. He was a silent man who did most of his talking with his hands, after the way of Standing Bear, the Sioux chief I would come to know. This time he simply took down the rifle from the wall and went out with his dog to find a Connell or two, just as another man might have started out to hunt coons. He was too lucky, you might say, because, when he found one, he found six, and all fighting men. He gave them warning and got behind a tree. Take it all in all, that was about as sizable a little battle as a man would care to mix into on a summer day. My father, Will Dorset, killed Jerry Connell first - then Peter and Jasper. After that the other three shot him to pieces and left him there for dead. The sheriff came along a little later and gathered him up.
Of course, it was taken for granted that he would die, but he had a way of disappointing people. He got well, and then nobody knew what to do with him. He had killed three men, but, when the odds are six to one, you can’t call it murder - at least not in Virginia. Everyone was puzzled by the case and, when the case was tried, the judge was no exception.
It was hard to catch a Connell for testimony at that trial because they had three good reasons for wanting to see Will Dorset set free. And those three reasons were their three dead men. They didn’t want Virginia law at all. They wanted to use Connell law on him, just as he had used Dorset law on their dead men. Besides, if he were set free, it would open up the entire feud and keep everyone amused for a long time. They could go after Uncle Abner. They could even go after me, because in a real hundred-per-cent feud age doesn’t count. I was pretty small, but a life is a life. The Indians feel the same way about scalps, so I suppose that it’s human nature. If Father were hanged or put in prison, that ended things.
No one wanted to see Will Dorset hanged, and no jury would have called him guilty if it hadn’t been for the judge. He said something had to be done, and he promised the jury that, if they would find Father guilty, he would see that Will Dorset didn’t hang. They all said guilty after that, and the judge turned right around and sentenced him to life imprisonment! It was a mighty poor decision, as anybody can see, and that judge was so unpopular in Virginia afterward that he couldn’t have been elected dog catcher in our county. However, that didn’t prevent Father from going to prison, and it didn’t help me, because it gave Uncle Abner Dorset a sort of whip hold over me. He could always tell me that I was bad by nature and bad by inheritance from my father who was rotting in jail. My Uncle Abner could do more harm with his tongue than any other man could do with a blacksnake whip.
Not that I can claim that he was wrong, and that I was good. But I’ve noticed that there’s usually something to be said on both sides of every question - even for Indians, in spite of the bloodthirsty fools who say that the only good Indians are the dead ones. Since I’m limited to the facts, I have to admit that I loved trouble from the time I could walk. I have an idea that most good boys are weaklings. I was strong. I had to be strong or else die young from the life that Uncle Abner made me live, because he started me in at a man’s work when the plow handles were as high as my chin. It was rough work and hard work. Perhaps it made me a little smaller than I might have grown, but it kept me compact and tough and limber. From as early as I can remember, I have had more strength in my arms and hands than other boys, or other men.
Let me say right here that strength has nothing to do with bulk. I’ve never stood more than five feet and ten inches, and I’ve never weighed more than a hundred and sixty-five pounds, but I’ve never found a man who could put me down, not even Chuck Morris, of whom I guess you all have heard. I hope this doesn’t sound like boasting, but you have to start with this understanding of me in order to appreciate all of the things that happened. And I attribute my strength entirely to the tremendous work that my uncle made me do. It would have killed most boys or wrecked them. But I was too mean to die. In addition to strength I had to have a quick eye and a quick foot because, when anything went wrong, Uncle Abner never asked questions. He simply came to me and threw the first thing that he put his hands on. Once it was an axe that cut a gash across my head. Once it was a big hunting knife that just missed me and clipped a little notch out of my right ear.
Every time I touched that nick in my ear, I couldn’t help remembering I led the life of the hunted around my home, and, therefore, it was my right to hunt others just as I was hunted. That was boy logic, even if it was bad logic. I started after the white boys in the neighborhood, naturally. Sometimes they won, and sometimes I won, until I was about fifteen and had my full weight together with a good deal of my settled strength. After that, things always went my way, and finally the fathers of the white boys called on Uncle Abner and told him that their sons would carry guns from that time on.
I had to turn my attention to the Negroes. This was away back before the war, and perhaps some of you who live in the North and never understood Negroes and never will, might wonder that slaves would stand up to a white boy. They wouldn’t, if the white boy was the son of some rich plantation owner. But I was out of blood, only a step or two above white trash. Those slave boys had to work almost as hard as I did, and they were as tough as leather. However, fire will bum through almost anything, and I was fire in those days. Eventually they never went out to play or hunt except in bands of five or six, and I found ways of plaguing even groups like that.