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Title: The other half
Author: Edwin L. Sabin
Release date: May 6, 2024 [eBook #73550]
Language: English
Original publication: Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1926
Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OTHER HALF ***
[Illustration: “Skull and skeleton lay eery and mysterious, whitely
gleaming, bleached by many weathers.”]
THE OTHER HALF
By Edwin L. Sabin
I had advertised that a passenger would be taken (for a price) on my
return trip by air from Omaha to the coast, and awaited the responses
with no little curiosity. A flying companion should be chosen
carefully.
The very first applicant, therefore, startled me. He appeared almost as
soon as the papers were off the presses--a spare, intense, elderly man,
with gray mustache and imperial, and bushy brows shadowing singularly
bright, restless eyes. His years, of course, were against him; his
weathered, lean face and active step bespoke energy, nevertheless I
judged him to be rising sixty.
“But, my dear sir!” I protested.
He proved insistent.
“Heart perfect,” he snapped. “I’ll leave that to any doctor you
appoint. Heart, arteries and lungs, they’re as sound as yours.”
“Just why do you wish to make the trip, may I ask?” said I. “Business
or pleasure?”
“Business.” He eyed me sharply. “There’ll be no woman aboard?”
“Scarcely,” I assured.
“All right. No woman. I’ve been across time and again, by train--and
there were women; by auto--drove my own car, alone, but there were the
women, before, behind, and no way to avoid them.” He grumbled almost,
savagely. “I’ll go by air,” he resumed. “I want to get to San Francisco
at once. I want to look around. Do you stop at Denver? Salt Lake?
Cheyenne?”
“Straight to San Francisco,” said I. “We may have to land en route,
perhaps Cheyenne, perhaps Reno; but not for long and I make no
promises.”
“All right. I’ll look around San Francisco. I may have missed
something. Then I can work back. I’m not through. You’ll have to take
me. I’ll pay you double. I’m sounder than most of the younger men; I
have no family----”
“You’re not married, sir?” I queried.
“No, no! Thank God, no! You accept me?”
He noted me hesitate. Perhaps he sensed that I deemed him a trifle off
center.
“I’ll give you references,” he proffered with dignity. “I’m not
crazy--not quite. Look me up, for I mean to go. San Francisco, again:
then I can work back. There’s always the chance,” he muttered. “Yes,
there’s always the chance.” And he challenged: “If you find me sane and
sound, it’s a bargain, is it?”
“Possibly so, in case----”
“And we start at once?”
“Tomorrow.”
He paused.
“You’re a Westerner?”
“Born and raised in Leadville, Colorado,” I assured.
He seized upon the fact.
“Ah! Leadville! We couldn’t stop there?”
“Hardly.”
“But it was a busy camp, once, wasn’t it? A typical camp; a rendezvous,
with dance halls, gambling dens, and men and women of all kinds
gathered?”
“A boom camp, and wide open,” I said. “That was before my day,
however.”
“Yes,” he pursued. “So it was. I’ve been there. I must look into it
again. It’s one more place. You were born and raised there, you say?
Lived there some time? Wait! Did you ever happen to see the mate to
this, in curiosity shops, say, or among relics of the old-timers?”
Thereupon he unsnapped a small protective leather case and passed me
the half of a silver coin, pierced as if it once had been strung.
“An old half dollar?” I hazarded.
“Yes. If you’ve aviator’s eyes you can read the lettering around the
rim, young man.”
So I could. “God Be With You----” was the legend, unfinished as if cut
short. He was gazing anxiously at me, his lips a-tremble. I turned the
piece over and passed it back.
“No,” said I; “I never happened to see the other half. A keepsake?”
His face set sternly. He restored the half coin to its case.
“A keepsake. You are married, young man?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t,” he barked. “Don’t. Pray God you may be spared that.”
A woman-hater, he; odd in a man who should be mellowing. But upon
looking him up I found that this was his only apparent defection. A
strange, restless man, however, with few friends; antecedents unknown;
personal history taboo with him; and wanderlust possessing him today as
yesterday and the day before.
“Again?” his banker blurted. “Bound across again? He only just got back
from San Francisco, by automobile, via Salt Lake, Cheyenne and Denver.
Drove alone. So he’s going through with you? That’ll be his fifth or
sixth trip this year. He’s a regular Wandering Jew.”
“And his business?” I invited.
“Business? None.”
“On the trips, I mean.”
“My dear man, nobody knows. He goes and comes, goes and comes. You’d
think he was hunting a lost mine; or a lost child, only he says he
isn’t married. I believe he has covered the West from end to end and
border to border. Did he show you his pocketpiece?”
“A half coin? Yes. And asked me if I’d ever seen the other half.”
“That’s it. He asks everybody the same, especially if they’re Western
people. What he wants of the other half, no one knows. A fad, maybe; an
excuse to keep moving. He’ll not find it in the air, that’s certain.”
“Not in the air,” I agreed. “He must have other reasons for going by
that route. To avoid women, he intimated.”
“And to get there quickly. He never comes home satisfied. No sooner
gets here than something seems to call him; you’d think he had an S. O.
S. wireless by the way he hustles out again, maybe over the very same
trail. Always searching, always searching; that’s the life of old John.
And never finding.”
“He’s past sixty?” I asked.
“Past sixty! He’s past seventy, but nobody’d guess it.”
And I accepted John Brown as passenger. No one else offered as likely.
I notified him to be ready. We hopped off in the morning.
* * * * *
The iron rails crushed the romance of plains travel. With the airplane
also the crossing of the West, like the crossing of the East, is
business. In the long overland stretches the aviator pays scant
attention to the dead epics that he violates with the drumming blast of
his propeller when he bores through the atmosphere above those plains
where the spirits still dance in little dust whirls that pivot and
career with no breath of wind. But I’ve often wandered what imploring
shades we dislocate when we ride in that half-world ether which is
neither heaven nor earth.
My passenger and I made our first leg without event. Out of Cheyenne
the motor began to buck, and a rudder control jammed annoyingly. There
was only one thing to do. Spiraling and slanting like a wing-tipped
bird we sought a landing place.
The country below, as revealed, was rugged, inhospitable desert--a
bad-lands desert with deeply graven face upturned immutable. Plunging
from high covert as we did, and bursting into full earth-view, we
should have appeared like a prodigy from the nethermost. But no buffalo
rocked in flight, no antelope scoured flashily, no red warriors
hammered their ponies for refuge. I saw, however, far, far away toward
the horizon, the smoke thread of a train, and I read in the signal a
message of derision.
We skimmed above a flattish uplift. Fissures and canyons yawned for us.
My passenger’s voice dinned hollowly into my ear, through our ’phone.
“A country God forgot. And there’s nothing here. Useless, useless! We
must go on.”
But I had to do it. Passing with a great rush we turned into the wind,
and breasting, fluttering, managed to strike just at the edge of a
flat-top butte or mesa. We bounded, rolled, checked, halted, and there
we were.
My passenger was out first, divested of his safety harness. He acted
like one distraught. Our brief stop near Cheyenne had vexed him--he had
wished to spend either more time there, or less time. Now this
impromptu stop enraged him.
“What a place, what a place!” he stormed. “There’s nothing here; there
_can_ be nothing here. We must get on. I’m wasting time. I paid to get
on, to San Francisco; even Salt Lake. Then I can work back. But what am
I to do here? And I’m growing old. How long will you be?”
“Not long. And meanwhile,” I retorted, “you’ll not be bothered with
women. You can be thankful for that.”
He snorted.
“Women! No women here; yes. A spot without woman: man and God. We’ve
got to get on. I’ll pay you well to get me on. Do you hear? To San
Francisco--to Salt Lake; some center where I can look, look, and then
work back. I must look again.”
He strode frenziedly. A glance about as I stripped myself of
incumbrances showed me that we were isolated. The mesa dropped abruptly
on all sides; by a running start we might soar from an edge like a
seaplane from the platform of a battleship. And I noted also that
without doubt we should have to depend upon our own resources, for if
this was a country God forgot it moreover seemed to be a country by man
forgotten, granted that man ever before had known it. All furrowed and
washed and castlemented, it was a region where we might remain pancaked
and unremarked, as insignificant as a beetle.
* * * * *
I was hunting our engine trouble, when on a sudden he called, and
beckoned.
“Here, you! What’s this?”
I went over. Something quickened me, electric and prickling as when
one’s flesh crawls in contact with a presence unseen. Skull and
skeleton lay eery and mysterious, whitely gleaming, bleached by many
weathers. He stooped----
“Great God!” he stammered.
“You’ve found it?” I asked: and I knew that he had, even while he was
polishing it against his sleeve.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Look at it. Tell me. I can’t see. What is
it?”
His hand shook as with palsy as he extended it to me; then the half of
a silver coin, plucked from the loosened grip of skeleton fingers; the
date----
“Give it to me,” he cried, and snatched at it.
The date, 1866; and the legend, upon the side less tarnished, “--Till
We Meet Again.” He fumbled in his pocket. The two halves matched
sufficiently--“God Be With You Till We Meet Again.”
“What you’ve been looking for?” I prompted.
He stared dazedly at me.
“Looking for! A thousand times. A thousand years. No, no; not that
long, but more than fifty years. Denver, Cheyenne, Salt Lake, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Helena, Laramie, Creede, Deadwood, Leadville,
Dodge City--wherever men and women of her kind gathered in her day and
his I’ve searched again and again. Not for her! She must be dead, and
long dead. But for word of this; for this, or trace of this. It was
mine. I gave it. And now, here! How came it here? Those bones won’t
speak.” He angrily kicked them. “Speak! What were you doing with this
half coin? Where was she? Were you man or woman?”
“Woman, Mr. Brown,” said I.
His jaw tautened as he faced me full.
“You say woman? How do you know? What woman?”
“I know,” said I. “And what woman? A young woman, a girl, somebody’s
wife who was supposed to have run away with a breed on the Overland
Trail fifty odd years ago--but didn’t.”
He recoiled a step, tottering, countenance blanched.
“What? Supposed! Supposing I say there was such a woman--my own wife,
sir--my bar sinister--my cross that has ruined my life and made me
doubt God and man and woman for half a century. And this half coin! I
vowed I’d have it back. When at old Fort Bridger I got word that _she_
had deserted me--deserted me for a scoundrelly half-breed--I swore that
I’d trail her down till I got back the only bond between us. It’s been
my passion; it’s been something to live for. That was 1867; this is
1920. I am seventy-four years of age. I have covered the West, and
cursed women while cursing her. And to what end? This forsaken spot, a
mess of bones, and no word! Oh, God! I thought I didn’t care--she
deserved the worst that could happen to her. This is the keepsake
token. Yes. But where is she? I loved her. I want to know.”
He shut his face in his quivering hands.
I put my hand upon his shoulder.
“Come, come,” said I. “The half of the coin and the half of the story
have been yours. Shall I tell you the other half of the story, to match
this other half of the coin? It says ‘Till We Meet Again’, remember.”
Then he faced me once more.
“We halved the coin when we parted in the States, I for Fort Bridger as
a government clerk there, she to wait till I should send for her. Yes,
yes. Fifty and more years ago. ‘Till We Meet Again’! And mine: ‘God Be
With You’! Ah! What do you know? How can you stand and tell me of
_her_? Did you ever see her--did you ever see her?” He clutched me by
the arm. “Did you ever see her, that hussy, that scarlet woman,
that--that--yes, and my own wife who made me lose faith in woman, man,
and God; took my youth from me, sent me wandering about without home
and without charity? Curse her! The end of the trail, and what do I
find? Dry bones. Whose bones?” He faltered, and he implored, simply:
“You guessed? You’re too young to have been on the plains in those
days. Did you know _him_?”
“Pierre Lavelle?”
“Ah!” he quavered. He dashed down the half coin. “Are you going to tell
me these bones are his? No, no! Such men as he live long. And this
keepsake! Tell me she died miserably; that will be something. You did
know him? You did? Or do you dare to allege you can rebuild a past,
from this dungheap? What?”
“You wrong her, Mr. Brown,” I answered. “I never knew Lavelle, never
saw him, I never knew her--I do not even know her name, except by
yours. But----”
“Catherine,” he murmured. “Kitty. A beautiful girl, and false as hell.”
“You wrong her,” I repeated. “You wrong these poor bones. Will you
listen?”
“Go on.” He steadied himself. “They won’t speak. Can you?”
“I’ll speak for them,” I continued. “In 1867 a government wagon train
was en route from Leavenworth for old Fort Bridger of Utah.”
“Very likely,” he sneered.
“There was a young wife with it, to join her husband at the post. And
there was a train attaché named Pierre Lavelle, half Spanish and half
Indian--a handsome scoundrel.”
“I’ll take your word for that.”
“He coveted the girl. She was innocent--she had no notion. One evening
after supper he and she rode up into a narrow draw, here in western
Wyoming, to seek flowers. He roped her and gagged her and left her
while he returned to the camp, on one pretext or another. He succeeded
in fastening a note inside her tent: ‘Tell my husband I’ve gone with a
better man.’”
“I got the note,” nodded the old man grimly. “Well?”
“The note was a forgery and a lie,” said I.
He sneered again.
“How do you know?”?
“I know. This first night he rode with the woman tied to her saddle;
the second night he freed her. He didn’t fear pursuit, and the trail
and the train were fifty miles behind. It was a lowering evening, and a
wild land. He advanced upon her, she smiled as if she had yielded, but
when he reached for her she struck him across the mouth and snatched
his knife from his belt and defied him.”
“Indeed? And how do you happen to know that, sir?”
“Wait. This stopped him for a moment. She fell upon her knees and
prayed to God for help. He wiped his lips and laughed. Can you imagine
that little scene, Mr. Brown? She in white, as she was----”
“She always loved white. There you are right,” conceded the old man.
“And disheveled and at bay; he in his buckskins and greasy black Indian
hair, his lips bloody and his teeth glistening; and all the country
around promising no succor for her?”
“My imagination is dead,” he said. “Yours seems much alive. Well, go
on, go on.”
“Lavelle wiped his lips and laughed. ‘There’s no God in this region, my
lady,’ he mocked. ‘There’s only you and me.’”
“God-forsaken, God-forsaken,” the old man muttered. “A land
God-forsaken it is, as I have been.”
“Is it?” I challenged. “Wait. She prayed, and these are her very words:
‘God, lift me from this fiend’s hands, or give me strength to lift
myself.’ Lavelle taunted: ‘Why not call upon your husband? He’ll be hot
to know. I left him just enough word to make him curious.’ And he told
her of the note. She cried: ‘Oh! How I hate you! Some day he shall
know, and know the truth. I hope he kills you.’ ‘Not for you, he
won’t,’ Lavelle answered. ‘He won’t want you after you’ve lived in my
Sioux lodge for a while.’”
The old man’s hands had clenched. He gazed fixedly as if witnessing the
scene.
“At this,” I proceeded, “she saw something in the fellow’s eyes that
alarmed her. When he rushed her she dodged and lunged, and snapped the
knife blade close to the hilt, upon his belt buckle. Then she ran,
leaving a strip of her dress in his fingers. She ran for higher
ground--ran like a hunted rabbit; sprang across a fissure, and gained
the top of a butte--a flat butte or mesa. And he made after, jeering,
for he knew that she had trapped herself. The mesa top ended abruptly.
Further flight was barred. He came on slowly, enjoying her plight.”
The old man rasped:
“You say all this. How do you know? Answer me that.”
“Wait,” I bade. “Then she again fell on her knees, panting like a nun
of old Panama facing a buccaneer. But suddenly she called out, this
time gladly, and flung up her two arms, to the sky. And Lavelle saw
that which frightened even him. The north was strangely black and
jagged; out of the black there issued a roaring, and a gigantic
spectacle speeding very swiftly. It might have been the thunder bird of
the Sioux, said Lavelle, or a winged canoe, or monstrous devouring
demon--and it might have been an avalanching cloud of wind and rain.
But to her it was as if God were riding in upon a thunderbolt chariot,
and she had reached up her two arms to be taken into that driving
shelter.”
“And this happened, you say; did it?” smiled my old man, sarcastically.
“And you happen to know!”
“It happened, and I happen to know,” said I. “Lavelle was stopped short
again. The Indian in him recoiled. Then his ruffian courage surged back
within him. Whether god or spirit, it should not have her. So he threw
his rifle to his shoulder, and just as the blackness swooped roaring
and whistling to envelop her he touched trigger. Then he ran headlong,
in retreat out of the way. The cloud descended, it passed, the rush of
air in its wake knocked him flat, the terror and the rain and the hail
and the thunder and lightning plastered him, face to the ground, at the
foot of the mesa.”
* * * * *
“The morning the sun rose clear. But Lavelle could not get atop that
mesa again. The cloudburst had sheered away the approaches, like a
hydraulic stream, and washed them down as mud and gravel. The mesa rose
rimrocked and precipitous, like a biscuit to an ant. He hallooed and
got no answer. One horse had broken its tether; he rode the other to a
near-by ridge and gazed across. He could see the girl lying white and
motionless. His hawk eyes told him that she was dead. So, being a
coward in heart, he made off at speed. He quit the country altogether,
changed his name, drifted down into border Arizona, and was shot at a
gambling table in Tombstone some forty years ago. The girl, you see,”
said I, “has been lying here ever since, the half coin--that half coin
of promise in her fingers, waiting for you and your understanding.”
“But,” he cried fiercely, “you say so. You weave a story. How am I to
know? Where is your proof? Why should I believe? How does it
happen----?”
“Because,” I answered, “these bones and this half coin ‘happen’ to be
here; and you ‘happen’ to be my passenger; and we ‘happen’ to land
together upon this ‘God-forsaken’ spot. And my middle name,” said I,
“‘happens’ to be Lavelle, from the line of my grandfather who in his
private memoirs confessed to a great wrong.”
My old man plumped to his knees; he groped for the half coin. I left
him pressing it to his lips and babbling a name, and I went back to the
plane.
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the February 1926 issue of
Weird Tales magazine.]
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