The Black Rider
Authors: Max Brand
MAX BRAND
®
THE
BLACK
RIDER
LEISURE BOOKS 
NEW YORK CITY
“Now God be praised. Senor, the Black Rider,” he said, “I see that I have to do with a gentleman and not with a cutthroat.”
“Be assured, friend,” said the Indian dryly, “that if I were a throat cutter, yours would have been slashed at our first meeting. This is to be a fair fight with equal weapons.”
“However, you still carry a pistol at your belt.”
The Indian tossed that weapon behind him and into the shrubbery.
“We are now even forces.”
There was a ring of joy in the throat of Guadalmo.
“Fool,” he said, “you are no better than a dead man!”
Chapter I - “Beginning The Journey”
Chapter II - “The Flute Player”
Chapter IV - “A Wager that Taki Wins”
Chapter V - “Beginning a Fortnight of Service”
Chapter VI - “Lucia’s Servant Interviewed”
Chapter VIII - “The Black Rider”
Chapter IX - “Flashing Blades”
Chapter XII - “Lucia Faces the Master”
Chapter XIII - “The Seventh Encounter!”
Part II - The Dream of Macdonald
Chapter V - “In Quest of Trouble”
Chapter VII - “Between the Eyes”
Chapter VIII - “A Very Pleasant Party”
Chapter X - “The Banquet of the Dead”
Chapter I - “When West Meets East”
Chapter II - “Gerald Goes to Culver City”
Chapter IV - “Vance Makes a Bet”
Chapter V - “The Campaign Begins”
Chapter VI - “Gerald Meets Cheyenne Curly”
Chapter VII - “Kate Rolls a Boulder”
Chapter VIII - “Gerald’s Blindness”
Chapter IX - “A Chance for a Kingdom”
Chapter X - “The Gathering of the Storm”
Chapter XI - “Tom Writes a Letter”
Chapter XII - “What Women Hate Most”
M
ax Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, Destry, and [many other fictional characters popular with readers and viewers worldwide. Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres under numerous pseudonyms. His enormous output, totaling approximately thirty million words or the equivalent of 530 ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, and fashionable society, big business and big medicine. Eighty motion pictures have been based on his work along with many radio and television programs. For good measure he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in more different ways. Born in Seattle in 1892, orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquín Valley of California. At Berkeley he became a student rebel and one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. Denied a degree because of unconventional conduct, he embarked on a series of adventures culminating in New York City where, after a period of near starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful popular-prose writer. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, and finally in Los Angeles.
Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. In the United States alone nine publishers now issue his work. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world. Yet, only recently have the full dimensions of this extraordinarily versatile and prolific writer come to be recognized and his stature as a protean literary figure in the 20th Century acknowledged. His popularity continues to grow throughout the world.
The stories I have collected for this book do not appear in chronological order. The organizing principle, instead, is the expansiveness of Faust’s imagination when it comes to the Western story as a form of literary art and the fecundity with which he would vary his themes, examining problems and dilemmas of the human condition from numerous disparate viewpoints. In another sense these stories fit together as episodes in a great saga, very much after the fashion of Homer in the Books of
Odyssey.
No matter how much editors or his agent might tell Faust that he was writing stories that were too character-driven, he could never really change the way he wrote. In order to write, he was fond of saying, I must be able to dream. As early as 1921, writing as George Owen Baxter, Faust had commented about Free Range Lanning in “Iron Dust” that Lanning “had at least picked up that dangerous equipment of
fiction which enables a man to dodge reality and live in his dreams.”
Brave words! Yet, beyond this, and maybe precisely because of the truth in them, much that happens in a Western story by Frederick Faust depends upon an interplay between dream and reality. There will come a time, probably well into the next century, when a reévaluation will become necessary of those who contributed most to the eternal relevance of the Western story in this century. In this reévaluation unquestionably Zane Grey and Frederick Faust will be elevated while popular icons of this century such as Owen Wister, judged solely in terms of their actual artistic contributions to the wealth and treasure of world literature, may find their reputations diminished. In such a reévaluation Faust, in common with Jack London, may be seen as a purveyor of visceral fiction of great emotional power and profound impact that does not recede with time.
The stories collected here, early or late, have all been restored where necessary by comparing the author’s manuscripts with the published versions. They are set in that land Faust called the mountain desert, a place for him as timeless and magical as the plains of Troy in the hexameters of his beloved Homer and as vivid as the worlds Shakespeare’s vibrant imagery projected outward from the bare stages of the Globe. Faust was not so much mapping a geographical region in his Western stories as he was exploring the dark and bright corridors of the human soul—that expanse which is without measure, as Heraclitus said. For Faust, as for his reader, this experience is much as he described it in 1926 for Oliver Tay in what became
The Border Bandit
(Harper, 1947):…He was seeing himself for the very first time; and, just as his eye could wander through the unfathomed leagues of the stars which were strewn across the
universe at night, so he could turn his glance inward and probe the vastness of new-found self. All new!” In these explorations of the inner world Faust’s fiction can be seen to embody a basic principle of the Western story that quality which makes the Western story so vitally rewarding in world literature, the experience of personal renewal, an affirmation of hope through courage, the potential that exists in each human being for redemption.
T
he Black Rider” was Faust’s original title for this short novel. It first appeared in
Western Story Magazine
(1/3/25) under the Max Brand byline. Although until now it has never been reprinted, it did serve as the basis for
The Cavalier
(Tiffany-Stahl Productions, 1928), a motion picture directed by Irvin Willat starring Richard Talmadge and Barbara Bedford. This black and white film was made utilizing the early Photophone process that included on the track sound effects and a musical score composed by Hugo Riesenfeld. The theme song was “My Cavalier,” with the music by Riesenfeld and lyrics by R. Meredith Willson, perhaps best known for his 1957 Broadway musical, “The Music Man.” For some reason that only Hollywood screenwriters could ever hope to explain, Taki’s ethnic heritage was changed in the film from Navajo to Aztec.
“The Black Rider” is an excellent example of a Western story by Faust in which most of the conversations between various characters intimate a subtext that is deeper and far more meaningful than what they would seem to be saying. The setting here is Spanish California at the time when the eastern colonies of this country were still ruled by Great Britain. Lucia d’Arquista is a splendid heroine and, notwithstanding the title, this is very much her story and her confrontation with her
own soul. Indeed, the Black Rider in a way is only a metaphor for that divine force Vergil once sought to capture within an image both awesome and sinister:
numina magna deum.
I
f
Señor
Francisco Torreño had been a poor man, the bride of his son would have been put on a swift, horse and carried the fifty miles to the ranch in a single day, a day of a little fatigue, perhaps, but of much merriment, much light-hearted joyousness. However,
Señor
Torreño was not poor. The beasts which he slaughtered every year for their hides and their tallow would have fed whole cities. Sometimes he sold those hides to English ships which had rounded the Horn and sailed far and far north up the western coast of the Americas. But he preferred to sell to the Spaniards. They did not come so often. They offered lower prices. But Torreño was a patriot. Moreover, he was above counting his pence, or even his pesos. He counted his cattle by the square league. He counted his sheep by the flocks.
To such a man it would have been impossible, it would have been ludicrous to mount the betrothed of his only son and gallop her heedlessly over the hills and through the valleys to the great house. Instead, there were preparations to be made.
The same ambassador who negotiated the marriage with the noble and rich d’Arquista family in Toledo had instructions. If the affair terminated favorably, to post to Paris out of Spain with all the speed of which horseflesh was capable, and from the same coach builder who
supplied the equipages of Madame Pompadour to order a splendid carriage. About the carriage
Señor
Torreño mentioned every detail, except the price.
Chiefly he insisted that the exterior of the wagon should be gilded with plenty of gold leaf and that in particular the arms of the Torreño family—that is to say an armored knight with sword in hand stamping upon a dying dragon—should appear on either side of the vehicle.
All of this was done. The sailing of the
Señorita
Lucia d’Arquista was postponed until the carriage was completed and had been shipped on a fleet-winged merchantman for the New World. And, when the lady herself arrived, she was ensconced in that enormous vehicle as in a portable house. For it was hardly less in size!