Max Brand

Way of the Lawless Max Brand

Beside the rear window of the blacksmith shop Jasper Lanning held his withered arms folded againsthis chest. With the dispassionate eye and the aching heart of an artist he said to himself that his life workwas a failure. That life work was the young fellow who swung the sledge at the forge, and truly it was astrange product for this seventy-year-old veteran with his slant Oriental eyes and his narrow beard ofwhite. Andrew Lanning was not even his son, but it came about in this way that Andrew became the lifework of Jasper. Fifteen years before, the father of Andy died, and Jasper rode out of the mountain desert like a hawkdropping out of the pale-blue sky. He buried his brother without a tear, and then sat down and looked atthe slender child who bore his name. Andy was a beautiful boy. He had the black hair and eyes, the wellmade jaw, and the bone of the Lannings, and if his mouth was rather soft and girlish he laid the failing tothe weakness of childhood. Jasper had no sympathy for tenderness in men. His own life was as litteredwith hard deeds as the side of a mountain with boulders. But the black, bright eyes and the well-madejaw of little Andy laid hold on him, and he said to himself: "I'm fifty-five. I'm about through with mysaddle days. I'll settle down and turn out one piece of work that'll last after I'm gone, and last with mysignature on it!"That was fifteen years ago. And for fifteen years he had labored to make Andy a man according to agrim pattern which was known in the Lanning clan, and elsewhere in the mountain desert. His programwas as simple as the curriculum of a Persian youth. On the whole, it was even simpler, for Jasperconcentrated on teaching the boy how to ride and shoot, and was not at all particular that he shouldlearn to speak the truth. But on the first two and greatest articles of his creed, how Jasper labored!For fifteen years he poured his heart without stint into his work! He taught Andy to know a horsefrom hock to teeth, and to ride anything that wore hair. He taught him to know a gun as if it were asentient thing. He taught him all the draws of old and new pattern, and labored to give him bothprecision and speed. That was the work of fifteen years, and now at the end of this time the old manknew that his life work was a failure, for he had made the hand of Andrew Lanning cunning, had givenhis muscles strength, but the heart beneath was wrong.