Riders of the Silences

by Max Brand

In that case he becomes immortal. It is not that lies are told about him or impossible feats ascribed to him, but every detail about him is seized upon and passed on with a most scrupulous and loving care.

In due time he will become a tradition. That is, he will be known familiarly at widely separated parts of the range, places which he has never visited. It has happened to a few of the famous characters of the mountain desert that they became traditions before their deaths. It happened to McGurk, of course. It also happened to Red Pierre.

Oddly enough, the tradition of Red Pierre did not begin with his ride from the school of Father Victor to Morgantown, distant many days of difficult and dangerous travel. Neither did tradition seize on the gun fight that crippled Hurley and "put out" wizard Diaz. These things were unquestionably known to many, but they did not strike the popular imagination. What set men first on fire was the way Pierre le Rouge buried his father "at the point of the gun" in Morgantown.

That day Boone's men galloped out of the higher mountains down the trail toward Morgantown. They stole a wagon out of a ranch stable on the way and tied two lariats to the tongue. So they towed it, bounding and rattling, over the rough trail to the house where Martin Ryder lay dead.

His body was placed in state in the body of the wagon, pillowed with everything in the line of cloth which the house could furnish. Thus equipped they went on at a more moderate pace toward Morgantown.

What followed it is useless to repeat here. Tradition rehearsed every detail of that day's work, and the purpose of this narrative is only to give the details of some of the events which tradition does not know, at least in their entirety.

They started at one end of Morgantown's street. Pierre guarded the wagon in the center of the street and kept the people under cover of his rifle. The rest of Boone's men cleaned out the houses as they went and sent the occupants piling out to swell the crowd.

And so they rolled the crowd out of town and to the cemetery, where "volunteers" dug the grave of Martin Ryder wide and deep, and Pierre paid for the corner plot three times over in gold.

Then a coffin—improvised hastily for the occasion out of a packing-box—was lowered reverently, also by "volunteer" mourners, and before the first sod fell on the dead, Pierre borrowed a long black cloak from one of the women and wrapped himself in it, in lieu of the robe of the priest, and raised over his head the crucifix of Father Victor that brought good luck, and intoned a service in the purest Ciceronian Latin, surely, that ever regaled the ears of Morgantown's elect.

The moment he raised that cross the bull throat of Jim Boone bellowed a command, the poised guns of the gang enforced it, and all the crowd dropped to their knees, leaving the six outlaws scattered about the edges of the mob like sheep dogs around a folding flock, while in the center stood Pierre with white, upturned face and the raised cross.