The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Seventh Man, by Max Brand

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Title: The Seventh Man

Author: Max Brand

Release Date: September, 1999 [Etext #1897]
Posting Date: November 18, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEVENTH MAN ***

Produced by Bill Brewer

THE SEVENTH MAN

By Max Brand

Chapter I. Spring

A man under thirty needs neighbors and to stop up the current of his
life with a long silence is like obstructing a river--eventually the
water either sweeps away the dam or rises over it, and the stronger the
dam the more destructive is that final rush to freedom. Vic Gregg was on
the danger side of thirty and he lived alone in the mountains all
that winter. He wanted to marry Betty Neal, but marriage means money,
therefore Vic contracted fifteen hundred dollars' worth of mining for
the Duncans, and instead of taking a partner he went after that stake
single handed. He is a very rare man who can turn out that amount of
labor in a single season, but Gregg furnished that exception which
establishes the rule: he did the assessment work on fourteen claims and
almost finished the fifteenth, yet he paid the price. Week after week
his set of drills was wife and child to him, and for conversation he had
only the clangor of the four-pound single-jack on the drill heads, with
the crashing of the "shots" now and then as periods to the chatter
of iron on iron. He kept at it, and in the end he almost finished the
allotted work, but for all of it he paid in full.

The acid loneliness ate into him. To be sure, from boyhood he knew the
mountain quiet, the still heights and the solemn echoes, but towards the
close of the long isolation the end of each day found him oppressed by
a weightier sense of burden; in a few days he would begin to talk to
himself.

From the first the evening pause after supper hurt him most, for a
man needs a talk as well as tobacco, and after a time he dreaded these
evenings so bitterly that he purposely spent himself every day, so as
to pass from supper into sleep at a stride. It needed a long day to
burn out his strength thoroughly, so he set his rusted alarm-