Jigger Bunts by Max Brand

Author:Max Brand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2018-12-27T21:17:20+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

“Well,” I said, when I got through laughing, “you’re after alimony now, I suppose?”

“Sure,” Maybelle said. “By reason of not causing hubby any bother about this reason, I get a pretty good slice off the estate. When the dough arrives, I get myself a vacation.”

“Vacation!” I said. “Why, honey, you’ve had nothing but vacations since they tried to keep you in school back in home!”

“Don’t make me think back that far,” Maybelle replied. “It gives me a headache. I never remember anything before the time when I crowded a few extra letters into my name. But it hasn’t been all a vacation. Ask any married woman if it’s easy. And I’ve been married five times … six, I mean. When I get my money, I’m going to get me a shack in the mountains where there’s nothing nearer to men than grizzly bears and mountain lions. That’s the way that I feel.”

“You’ve got enough scalps to retire on,” I admitted. “So long, Maybelle.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Take off your pack and rest a while. What’s gone wrong on the ranch?”

“Damn the cows and the ranch,” I say. “This is about a man, old-timer, and you can’t help.”

“Can’t I?” she said. “Why, young fellow, I’m a professor in just that line of work. Tell Aunt Maybelle what’s on your mind. You look like a Methodist Sunday.”

I gave her another look. It wasn’t that I really expected any solution from her. But I needed help so bad that I was willing to tell everybody how low I felt.

We were standing in front of a house with a ‘For Rent’ sign pasted inside the window. We sat down on the front steps.

“You haven’t been here long,” I said, “but you’ve heard about Jigger Bunts?”

She showed life right away.

“The bandit? I know about him, of course.”

“But you don’t know much, and nobody does except me and a few of the boys out at my ranch. If that bandit showed out there, do you know what way we’d act?”

“Like the rest of the poor fish around here every time they hear his name mentioned,” said Maybelle. “You’d dive through the window or anywhere to get clear of him.”

“You’re wrong, kid,” I said. “We’d shake hands all around, get out our best moonshine whiskey, and pull up an easy chair in front of the fire.”

She blinked at me. “Since when have they had easy chairs on a ranch?” she asked.

“Don’t get too literal,” I said. “I say that Jigger Bunts is the best-liked kid that was ever on that ranch.”

“Did you say ‘kid?’” she said.

“He’s about twenty,” I tell her.

She put up her head and whistled.

“Let me tell you the story all in a nutshell,” I went on.

“I was drumming up a crew last fall for riding range on that ranch … which is the meanest bit of range in the world … and I picked up this Jigger Bunts. Old Sam Mitchell … the hound … had filled this tenderfoot Bunts full of talk about me.

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