Acres of Unrest
of
Unrest
Max Brand®
LEISURE BOOKS 
NEW YORK CITY
“You have a gun at your hip, I think?”
“I have. Are you ready?”
“Oh, I’m ready. Though I hate this business, Charlie.”
“Curse you and your snaky ways! I’m gonna do a good thing for the world when I rid it of you. Here’s at you, Pete.” He reached for his gun…
This was the day of Ross Hale. The whole county knew it. When he got up that morning—and he had slept very little the night before. you may be sure—he looked at himself in the mirror and decided that he would now take ten years off his age and grow young once more.
He put on his best suit. scowling when he saw how shiny it was at the elbows. Then he went out and hitched his only team to the buckboard. It was a sorry pair, incurably thin, incurably down-headed, hardly fit to drag their feet along the road with the old buckboard trailing them, although Ross Hale forced them to carry him across the hills when he had to ride range.
Ross was desperately ashamed to go in for the great occasion in such a guise as this; nevertheless, he was mildly comforted by the knowledge that everyone understood. The whole county knew the wager that had been made between Ross and Andy Hale eleven years before, and the whole county was burning with excitement now that the decision was about to be made.
Eleven years before—to tell all briefly—the wives of Ross and Andy Hale were caught in a fire that broke out in the house of Andy. They were burned to death in spite of the great effort made to save them, The two brothers were left in exactly the same
condition. They were of the same age, for they were twins, they were widowers, and they had each a boy of the same age.
In the winter that followed, when they talked over what the world might hold for each of them and for their boys, they laid their schemes, in their own ways, for the development of the young lives. To Andy Hale there was only one existence under the stars that was worthwhile. His argument ran something like this:
“Nobody but a fool would want to live in the city, if he could get away from it. No, everybody with good sense prefers to live in the country. Why? Because he ain’t so crowded, in the country. He’s got elbow room and breathing space. And that’s the reason that he goes out from the cities. Well, if he goes to the country for that reason, where in the world will he find more elbow room than right here in this county? Where will he find better mountains or more of them? Where will he find better grass for his horses and his cows? Tell me, partner?”
Andy Hale, who was so exactly suited by this world that he found around him, decided that he would raise his son to follow in his footsteps and do exactly as he had done. He took pains that young Charlie Hale should attend the same tumble-down shack of a school where he himself had learned his letters. He also took care that Charlie did not remain in the school a minute longer than his father had remained before him.
“What made a man of me is going to make a man of my boy,” he announced to the world at large—and particularly to his brother, for there was a great contest on between them.
The views of Ross Hale’s differed materially from
those of his twin brother’s. Ross could not tell just what was wrong with the range. He did not mind riding range; he was a cowboy of sorts—so good with a gun that he could have made a living as a professional hunter, if nothing better had come to his hand. On the whole, although he thought that this life might be well enough, he dimly recognized the faint horizon of another universe, a sort of Milky Way that streaked thinly across his sky. And that other universe was the world of mind and soul.
In just what fashion the human brain might expand and flower, Ross Hale did not know. But he knew that he was extremely eager that his son should wander through the unknown spaces where his own feet had never trod. So he came to the great decision that young Peter Hale should he sent to a school where he could be prepared for a great Eastern university.
He consulted the rich rancher, Crowell, on the subject, and Crowell, in his usual positive manner, said: “There is only one place in the world where an American boy may be properly prepared to enter a great American university. That place is Huntley School. Furthermore, there is only one great American university. But that I need not tell you, because, if your boy attends the Huntley School, he will be sure to know the name of the only real university before he gets out of the doors.”
The matter was thus settled for the rancher, but when he began to look into the matter, he found that this was a staggering thing. Education was not a gift in the Eastern states; it was something that had to be paid for, and often paid for through the nose. However, Anthony Crowell had spoken. And upon such matters no man on the range would
dare to question his opinion, however little Crowell apparently knew about cows, poor fellow. Thus, it never came into Ross’s mind that he might be able to provide for his son more reasonably.
He had to clean up his savings in cash at the bank in order to provide for the very first year at Huntley School. But he made the provision, and, after that, he could not resist the desire to redeem the money he had already spent by completing the work that he had begun. And each succeeding year was more expensive than the one before.
Since he could not afford to spend $200 on a trip East to see his boy, he could not afford to spend the same amount of money in bringing his boy West to see him. Therefore the years slid along, one after the other, with more and more money departing from the packet of Ross Hale, and never a glimpse of his boy, Peter, in the flesh.
Peter himself, even when he was only fourteen, realized that he must be a heavy drain, and he wrote home to say that there were various ways of picking up quite a bit of pocket money and arranging matters so that, when he got to the college age, he would be able to provide his own board and lodging—if his father could only manage the tuition fee. This letter gave a ray of hope to the rancher. He carried it to his educational oracle, Mr. Anthony Crowell.
The latter said instantly: “Education serves two purposes, Hale. In the first place, it gives a youngster mental discipline and it pours a certain quantity of facts into his mind, together with the knowledge of how to go about collecting new facts about new subjects, even after he has left school. But on the other hand, education gives a boy a prolonged childhood. It gives him a longer season
during which the burden of the weary world is removed from his shoulders, Hale. He plays out in the sun without a bit of thought for the shadows that are to come. His body grows straight and his muscles grow strong. And his mind opens its gates and gathers in impressions. But if you make a poor lad work his way through school, the weight of the world is introduced, and it crushes flat that play existence that should fill the school from wall to wall. School is not for work only. It is primarily a social experience and a place where the boy can remain a child until he is actually forced to take on the duties of a man…until he yearns to take them on, Hale. That’s the great thing.”
Ross Hale did not understand a great part of this speech, and what was clear to him was really hardly more than that Anthony Crowell did not advise allowing a boy to work his way through a school. This was enough. Of these matters, Ross Hale knew nothing, and he was such a frank and honest man that he never dreamed of pretending an opinion in matters where he was not learned by experience.
He went back home and wrote to his boy in the very spirit of the lecture that had just been read to him. He wrote, in effect:
Spread your elbows at the board, and do not regard any reasonable expense. The ranch is doing very well. I want you to have a good time, along with your studies!
Then he went down to see his brother Andy and sold him the southeast forty-acre field that Andy had been yearning for all these many, many years.
The resolution, which Andy and Ross had taken,
of developing their boys according to their own views, had put Andy on his honor. He had changed his old way of living, ceased being a happy-go-lucky, free-swinging individual, without that understrain of seriousness that had always been a shadow in the life of his twin brother. But when he saw Ross settling down and making great sacrifices for his boy, Andy changed his own way of life, little by little. A certain number of years hence—so the agreement between Ross and Andy went—they were to produce their sons to Will Nast, the sheriff. And they would then accept the verdict that the sheriff might pronounce as to which was the finer man and the more valuable citizen.
This was a contest upon which a great deal depended. There was no doubt but that Peter Hale would come from his education a fine lad, and Charlie Hale would need a great deal to compete against him and keep from being disgraced. So Andy Hale did two things. In the first place, he seriously impressed on his boy the necessity of doing all things well that are expected from a cowpuncher and a range rider. In the second place, he set about building up a respectable property, for his dream was that, at the end of the probation period, Charlie might appear as the prospective proprietor of a fine bit of land and cows. That would give point and emphasis to all the qualifications that Charlie might possess as a cowpuncher.
So Andy, from being a free spender, became a most thrifty and saving soul, and, as the years went on, his place began to show all the effects that industry and care and forethought could present. He had good fortune, also, and what he turned his hand to prospered exceedingly. His cattle were free
from sickness and plagues. When he tried his hand at crop raising, he got bumper returns of wheat and barley. And he always managed to sell at the top of the market and buy everything at the bottom.
“I dunno how it is,” said Andy Hale, marveling at himself.
“Everything seems to turn out well.”
There was one touch of learning in Ross Hale. He used it now: “You’ve sold yourself for the touch of Midas,” he said.
Andy did not know what the touch of Midas might be. But he gathered from the sneering tone of his brother that it was something rather disgraceful, and he returned a hot answer. Humility was not the chief virtue of Ross Hale, and so one word led to another until they parted from each other in passion and never again returned to the former kindly footing.
No doubt, Ross Hale should have been big enough of soul to look upon the waxing prosperity of Andrew without jealousy, but he could not control himself. About this time, too, Andrew took a second wife, and for some reason Ross felt that this was an indubitable token of the other’s prosperity, for, after all, wives cost money. Ross Hale felt that his brother was getting money to burn. Moreover, on his way to and from town, the road passed close to the house of Andrew, and Ross could see, with almost every trip, some new token of the comfort of his brother.
There was either a new bit of fencing, or else a new brand of cattle among those in the fields—for Andrew had taken to buying up the run—down and starveling stock of the neighborhood. Perhaps there was a new coat of paint on house or barn—fancy wasting paint on barns!—or the roof of some brand-new shed piercing the horizon. Andrew’s ranch was beginning to extend itself, too. Andrew needed
more land, and yet more land. He was renting great acres of alfalfa among the irrigated little valleys among the foothills and he was carting the produce of alfalfa to his ranch. Then he bought up, in the dreary winter of the year, half-starved stock from far ranges, where the winter offered wretched pittance to the grazing cows. Yet these cattle, almost too thin to be driven to his ranch, soon grew plump. They were wretched poor strains, most of them, but they sold at so much a pound, once they were fattened, and Andrew always knew just when to take his stock to market to get the top prices.
His fields were expanding, therefore, to meet his requirements. He did not buy rashly, but a little here and a corner there, when one of his neighbors was in a desperate need of hard cash. Clever Andrew was so well established by now that the banks in town were fighting to get his business, and they were more than willing to lend him money, all the money that he could use, at six percent.
“Someday it’ll be the ruin of him,” said Ross Hale darkly and bitterly, “usin’ money like this, because the money sharks’ll swaller him. It ain’t gonna be for the lack of my advice to keep him from it!”
He dressed himself in his best clothes—that he might pass the inspection of the wife of Andrew—and rode over to offer that advice and, incidentally, to see if it were true that Andy was laying out the foundations for a barn that would hold 300 tons of hay. It was true; he found Andy assisting the workers to sink the foundations. Part of those foundations had been dug already and laid, and the building was to be built upon—concrete piles!
Ross Hale stared with wonder and sharp envy gnawing at his heart. Standing there, he spoke out
his heart to his brother and gave his warning against the money sharks, as he had conceived it. Andrew listened with an intent frown, at first, then shaking his head and smiling. At last he laid his hand upon Ross’s shoulder.
“You mean me the best in the world, I hope,” he said. “I wouldn’t think that it was just envy of me that brung you over here, Ross. You mean me good, and that’s why you warn me. And lemme tell you that sometimes you’re right, and there’s more than one man that’s working for a bank and not for himself. But not me, Ross. No, not me. I’ve learned something, and I tell you that, so long as I got my wits about me, I’m gonna keep right on borrowing from the banks. Why? Because I need capital that I ain’t got. I want to go out and buy when the season is right. When I hear that there’s a bunch of a hundred worn-down, dying cows some place, I want to be able to ride right out and pay down the cash and snatch up that band. I can’t do it with my own money. I could only bargain for a corner of that whole herd. Well, the bank lends me that money at six percent interest, but maybe I make hundreds of percent in the meantime. I give you an example…last November I heard of a batch of eighty dogies down in the Sawtrell Valley dying of hunger…no way to save them. Well, I borrowed money from the bank to buy them. Now look at what happened. Ten months later I sold off that batch. Eight of them had died. Too far gone for me to save them from starving to death. But seventy-two of them pulled through. The result was I cleaned up near twenty-five hundred dollars, old son! I paid back the bank a few days ago. Besides, I sank the twenty-five hundred in the vault, but not for long. I’m going to
have that coin out again. It’ll rot in the bank at a miserable rate of interest. I’ll soon want that money out and working in my hands.”
This was all a little bit beyond the ken of Ross Hale. He knew, however, that transactions that looked simply gigantic to him were as nothing in the capable hands of his brother, and he felt that time had transformed Andrew into a new and formidable force. To dare to gamble on such a scale—to clear $2,500 in cash in a single, simple transaction, and clearly to regard that transaction as a mere nothing. This was like handing fire to Ross Hale. He stared at Andrew with awe, and the spite of malice could not be kept a little from his eyes.
“Well, Andrew,” he said, “I dunno that I understand all of these ways of doing business. But I wish you all kinds of luck.”
“Thanks,” said Andy, “and lemme give you a mite of advice…which is that, if you want to make money out of Durhams, you had ought to…”
“Curse the Durhams!” said Ross Hale. And well he might curse them, for disease was wasting his herd strangely and swiftly.
“Well,” Andy said kindly, “you take care of your own business. How’s things with Peter, though?”
A broad grin of triumph twisted the mouth of Ross Hale, and his eyes shone with triumph. He tried to make his voice casual and unimpressive. “I just heard from him, sort of indirect. Someone that knows him sent me along this clipping, but Peter himself, he wouldn’t say nothing about it.”
He took out a newspaper clipping, already well worn in the creases and the seams, telling the tale of how Huntley School, in its great annual football contest with Winraven School, had triumphed
gloriously with two touchdowns to one, through the heroic work of young sixteen-year-old Peter Hale. His burly shoulders had burst through the line from his place at tackle, blocked a punt, and carried the ball to a touchdown. Again he had broken through and tackled a back, so hard that the fumbled ball was picked up by a fellow Huntley man, and so the second touchdown was achieved. There was not so very much about the game, but there was a great deal about Peter Hale. His name was in the big, flaring headline. And there was a whole long paragraph, at the beginning of the story, telling about the manner in which stars are born and made.
This missive was read through twice, from beginning to end, by Andy Hale, and his lips pinched a little as he handed it back.
“Curse it, Ross,” he said frankly. “I really dunno whether to be proud of having that boy for a nephew, or to envy you for having such a son. Still, I ain’t ashamed of my Charlie, only I don’t think that he’s any such headliner as all of this.”
He turned his head to mark Charlie in person, big and bronzed, healthy and laughing and handsome, as he galloped his big, fast cow pony around the corner of the barn.
“He’s sixteen, but he does a man’s work,” said Andy Hale. “Maybe he don’t speak trimmed-up garden English, like your boy most likely does, but he can tell which side his bread is buttered on, and he knows how to ask for more. I ain’t ashamed of my Charlie, even if he ain’t made any touchdowns.”
However, Ross Hale felt, when he rode back home that night, that he had scored a great triumph. True he had sold the corner lot to Andrew. But he had been able to sit in the sun of Peter’s glory and lord it
over the others. That was enough. In the meantime, if he had to ride back to a cheerless house and to a cold kitchen, he felt that it was worth the agony. And that night he entered his damp bedroom and went to sleep well acclimated to his fate.