The Champion by Max Brand

Author:Max Brand [Brand, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories
Publisher: Roy Glashan's Library
Published: 2017-10-22T22:00:00+00:00

BUT Jumbo got up and left the cook-wagon, carrying Sammy’s unfinished plate with him. His own stomach was clamoring for more food but he turned his back on thoughts of himself and went down to where Sammy Pleasant lay under the wagon with his face in his hat, groaning a little with every breath he drew.

Jumbo turned him on his back. The two hundred pounds of him was as loose as water.

“I’m fine. I wasn’t hungry. I’m fine,” said Sammy.

Jumbo fanned his face with his hat. “Take it easy … I ain’t gunna see you killed. Take it easy .. . Let the record go. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

“I’m going to last it out,” said Sammy. “Did you see Frenchie laughing? .. . I’m going to last it out, all right.”

“Not unless’n you eat,” said Jumbo. “Leave your head rest on my knee, like that. …”

“I won’t be a baby. I’m not sick.”

“You just leave go all holts and take it easy,” ordered Jumbo. “There’s nobody can see us.”

“I’m no man. I haven’t any guts,” Sammy said, when the steak was finished, “like you got, Jumbo. There’s nobody like you.”

“I guess there ain’t anybody like me, at that. I’ll tell you what. I never was tired in my life. You lay there and rest while I go and throw up those bales.”

He went off and spent the rest of the lunch hour completing the stack, throwing the bales up lightly, not with the craft of a bale-roller but with sheer, clumsy excess of power.

The whole audience from beneath the oak-tree, except Frenchie, came out to watch him. Frenchie, of course, had gone back to spend the heat of the day lolling on the Pinzone porch.

Jim Coffey’s boy touched his leg and said: “Jumbo, is it true? Are you the strongest man in the world?” And nobody laughed.

But just at the end of the lunch hour, as he hoisted the last third-rank bale into place, old Tom Walters came and confronted him. “You’re going to make yourself sick, Jumbo Cafferty,” he said. “The bigger you are, the more there is for the sun to fry. A man isn’t meant to work straight through a day as hot as this. A man is meant to take an hour off for lunch. God means him to!”

Heat was raging through Cafferty’s brain so that the trees in the distance seemed to lift and fall on the waves of it. Those bales had turned to lead.

And then he was back on the platform with the sun focused as with a burning glass on the back of his head, and the dust cloud suspiring upward around the press. Straight up the dust lifted for there was not a breath of wind, not a touch of mercy in that terrible afternoon.

Yet Sammy Pleasant was carrying on very well. He looked sicker than ever but he was rolling and piling the bales steadily.

“How you making it?”

“That steak’s working,” yelled Sammy, white-faced but laughing.

Cafferty’s heart opened.

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