Free Blue Kingdom by Max Brand

the spur to a runaway horse. He bounded to his feet again with a groan of intolerable anguish. It seemed to Chuck that he was entering a dark mist, a fog of sooty smoke, so did his emotion master him. With a bound, he came to the front door and wrenched at it. The heavy bolt answered him with a jangle and crash. That was all.
    He recoiled for a step. “My own house, too,” said Chuck.
    It was one of his favorite diversions to work himself into a towering rage about trifles, about nothing at all. It was the one constant cup of joy for him to see others cringe and cower, not knowing why he was so maddened.But now he found an excuse for every violence. For the first time in his life, murder itself would be justifiable, nay, praiseworthy. For what court can reprove a citizen for defending his hearth and home from the aggression of a stranger? He would be applauded, men would shake him by the hand, his own wife would smile upon the deed of valor. . . . Chuck Harper threw his arms above his head and cried out in a stifled voice of joy.
    Then he rushed for the first window. He jerked it up a few inches, but there it stuck, for the sash was warped and would not run in the groove. “By grab,” said Harper, “the whole world’s gone crazy.”
    He, at that moment, heard the stranger pass with a light step and a whistle into the front room, the big room, the room that the great Tankerton himself honored with his presence when he deigned to come here for the night, and, at this, the brain of Chuck Harper was somewhat befogged again. He leaped for the next window, jerked it wide, and sprang in. His Colt was in his hand as he crashed up the stairs. He was so drunk with fury that, at the landing, he lurched into the wall and careened back against the railing, but he paid no heed to this. He felt in himself power enough to rip the house apart like a matchbox to get at the insulting man who called himself Dunmore.
    So he came to the upper hall, and the boarding groaned and creaked beneath his weight as he plunged down the corridor to the corner room, the chosen room, the room from which he and his wife so gladly had removed themselves and their belongings in order to make way for the great James Tankerton. The doorwas wide open. He drove in, gun in hand, with a bellow like the roar of a bull as it closes in battle with a peer.
    But suddenly he saw that the room was empty. He whirled about. There beside the door stood the stranger, still whistling softly, and carelessly, hip-high, he held a revolver that pointed straight at his host.
    â€œGosh!” ejaculated Chuck Harper, and remembered suddenly that life was sweet. The gun slipped from his unnerved fingers and dropped upon the very pack that Dunmore had flung upon the floor.
    â€œYou’re pretty modest about your place,” said Dunmore gently. “I guess I figger out how it is. You’d like to have a bang-up, fashionable hotel, with hot and cold runnin’ water in every room, and all that, but for an ordinary cowpuncher like me I don’t see anything wrong with this little old room. It just about fits me, take it all in all.”
    He made a gesture, and Chuck Harper saw that the gesturing hand was empty of any gun. He thought for an instant that he had imagined the sight of the leveled weapon of the moment before, but then he knew that he could not have dreamed the thing. But by some mysterious sleight of hand the other had conjured the gun out of view. Perhaps it was merely shaken up his sleeve, and ready instantly to drop again into his fingers.
    â€œThis here room,” panted Harper in a hoarse and shaken voice, “is already took.” Suddenly he realized that what he said would make no difference. This genial, pleasant-mannered fellow would simply help himself to what he chose, and smile in answer to every argument.
    â€œYou’ve got other rooms for him,” said Dunmore.“But I’ll tell you how it is . . . I need