Novel 1959 - The First Fast Draw (v5.0) (4 page)

“Chance?”

“He’s in Boston, or wherever, and he does not often come to call, anyway. Chance likes the towns of Texas, not the plantations and ranches.”

It would not be the first time I had been to the house of Will Thorne, for even as I made enemies that day at the mill, I had also made a friend.

Will Thorne, in my estimation, was a man worth the lot of them, perhaps less the sportsman than the others, and much less the talker, but a man of some attainments in his own way. He studied nature a good bit, and I who had lived in the swamps found much to learn from him, as he, I suppose, learned from me.

He did a sort of writing. I never knew much about that as I was a man who had learned to read but poorly, scarcely more than my name, which I could write, and no more. But he wrote some things for periodicals in London and in Paris, one was about a heron we have in the swamps, and another was on the beaver. I believe he wrote about butterflies and trap-door spiders, and a variety of things. It made no sense to me at first; I’d known about those things from a child, and he told me once that I’d knowledge in my head a naturalist would give years of his life to own.

We had walked in the swamps. The trails were known to none but the Caddos and me, though later I showed a few of them to Will, and sometimes we’d hunt for plants together, or for strange birds or insects. Usually I knew where to find what he wanted, for a man who is much in the woods acquires a gift for observation.

In Will I had a friend, and I never forgot his one question after I’d told him of some fight—there were others after the one at the mill, like the one at Fort Belknap when I killed a man—all he would say was to ask me, “Do you think you did the right thing?”

A question like that sticks in a man’s mind, and after awhile I judged everything by it, deciding whether it was the right thing, and often if there was no other way. I expect it was a good lesson to learn, but a man in his life may have many teachers, some most unexpected. The question lies with the man himself: Will he learn from them?

For a man to be at peace with himself was important, Will said, not what people say. People are often wrong, and public opinion can change, and the hatreds of people are rarely reasonable things. I can hear him yet. He used to say there was no use a man wearing himself out with hatred and ill-feeling, and time proved it out.

“Will used to tell me about you when I was a little girl,” Katy said. “He said you were a fine boy. That you’d the makings of a fine man if they would just let you alone. But he said you’d the makings of a great clansman in the old days among the Highlands of Scotland. He said you’d dark blood in you, dangerous blood. But he always came back to saying you were the best of them around here, thoughtful, he used to say, and a gentleman at heart.”

Despite myself, I was embarrassed at that. It has been rare that anyone has given me a word of praise in my life, and the last thing I’d thought of myself was a good man. But it worried me some, for Will Thorne was a man of few mistakes, and his saying that put a burden on me, his saying I was a good man almost put it up to me to be one. The idea was uncomfortable, for I’d been busy being Cullen Baker, and what he’d said about the black angers I could grasp, for it was proved too often in my life.

We sat in the kitchen to talk, and I liked the rustle of her skirts as she moved about, making friendly sounds with glass and crockery, and tinkling a bit of silver now and again. The fire made a good homely sound, too, and the water boiling in the pot. I was a man unused to such sounds, knowing the crackling of a fire from my own lonely camps and not from a hearth.

Aunt Flo was napping somewhere in the house while Katy got supper, and it was a rare surprise to me to see how sure she was about it, with no finagling and nonsense, but with deft hands and of one mind about what to do. I’d never thought to see a Thorne preparing her own meal, least of all a meal for me.

She put the dishes on a small table in a corner of a room, a friendly sort of table, and not like the long one in the dining room, which scared me to look at, it was so far from end to end. There she lighted the candles, and a soft glow they made, which was as well, for I’d had no chance to shave the day, and my clothes were shabby and worn from riding in all kinds of weather. I was shy about them, the big hulking fool that I was, and no man to be eating supper with such a girl.

Yet she was easy to be with, easier than any girl I’d met, and here and there I’d known a few, although not always of the nicest. The sort you tumble in the hay with, or take a walk with out in the grass away from the wagons. Yes, I’d known them, but some of them were good girls, too. Maybe it was wrong of me to walk out with them that way, but when the urge is on a man his conscience is often forgot.

“Tell me about the West,” Katy asked me over coffee. “It has always fascinated me. If I had been a man, I should have gone West.”

Tell her of the West? Where could a man begin? Where could he find words to put the pictures before her that he saw when she asked about the West? How could he tell her of fifty-mile drives without water and the cattle dying and looking wild-eyed into the sun? How could he tell her about the sweat, the dust, the alkali? Or the hard camps of hard men where a word was a gun and a gun was a death? And plugging the wound with a dirty handkerchief and hoping it didn’t poison? What could a man tell a woman of the West? How could he find words for the swift-running streams, chuckling over rocks, for the mountains that reached to heaven and the clouds that choked the valleys among the high peaks? What words did he have to talk of that?

“There’s a wonder of land out there, Mrs. Thorne,” I said, “a wide wonder of it, with distances that reached out beyond your seeing where a man can ride six days and get nowhere at all. There are canyons where no white man has walked, canyons among the unfleshed bones of the mountains, with the soil long gone if ever there was any, like old buffalo bones where the buzzards and coyotes had been at them. There’s campfires, ma’am, where you sit over a tiny fire with a million tiny fires in the sky above you like the fires of a million lonely men. You hover over your fire and hear the coyotes speaking their plaintive words at the moon, and you smell the acrid smoke and you wonder where you are and if there’s Comanches out there, and your horse comes close to the fire for company and looks out into the dark with pricked-up ears. Chances are the night is empty, of living things, anyway, for who can say what ghosts may haunt a country the like of that?

“Sometimes I’d be lazy in the morning and lie in my blankets after sunup, and I’d see deer coming down to the waterhole to drink. Those days a man didn’t often camp right up against a waterhole. It wasn’t safe, but that wasn’t the reason. There’s other creatures need water besides a man, and they won’t come nigh it if a man is close by, so it’s best to get your water and then sleep back so the deer, the quail, and maybe a cougar can come for water, too.

“Times like that a man sees some strange sights. One morning I watched seven bighorn sheep come down to the water. No creature alive, man or animal, has the stately dignity of a bighorn. They came down to water there and stood around, taking another drink now and again. Tall as a burro most of them, and hair as soft as a fawn’s belly. A man who travels alone misses a lot, ma’am, but he sees a lot the busy, talky folks never get a chance to see.

“Why, I’ve stood ten feet from a grizzly bear stuffing himself with blackberries and all he did was look at me now and again. He was so busy at those berries he’d no time for me. So I just sat down and watched him and ate my own fixin’s right there, for company. He paid me no mind, and I paid him little more. When I’d eaten what I had, I went back to my horse and when I left I called out to him and said, ‘Goodbye, Old Timer,’ and lifted a hand, and would you believe it, ma’am, he turned and looked after me like he missed my company.”

I was silent, suddenly embarrassed at having talked so all-fired much. It wasn’t like me to go to talking like that. Shows what candelight and a pretty woman can do to a man’s judgment of the fitness of things.

Aunt Flo had not come down, although I heard some stirring about upstairs. For me it was just as well. I’m no hand at getting acquainted with people in bunches. I’d rather cut one out of the herd and get acquainted slow-like so I can really know what the person is like. Never much of a talker I’d little business with women. It’s been my observation that the men with fluent tongues are the ones who get the womenfolks, and a slick tongue will get them even faster than money.

“If you loved it so much out there, Cullen, why did you come back?”

Well…there was that question I’d been asking myself, and of which I didn’t rightly know the answer. There were answers I’d given myself, however.

“It’s all the home I ever had,” I told her, trying to make the words answer my own problem. “My folks are buried out there back of the orchard where Ma used to walk. The land is mine, and it is good land. Pa would work from daylight to dark out there, trying to make it pay. I don’t know, maybe it was a feeling I had for him or just wanting to be some place familiar, and there was nothing out West that belonged to me. Maybe, rightly speaking, I’m no wanderer at all, but just a homebody who would rather be unhappy among familiar surroundings and faces than happy anywhere else.”

“I don’t believe that.” Katy got up to clear the dishes. “And don’t call me Mrs. Thorne. We’re old friends, Cullen. You must call me Katy.”

Standing up I seemed most too high for the little room where we’d been eating, so I fetched dishes to the kitchen and got my hat to go.

“Come again, Cullen, when you’ve a wish to talk or want a meal cooked by other than your own hands.”

At the door I paused. “Katy…ma’am, the light must be out when I go out the door. There’s folks about would just as soon have a shot at me if the chance was there.”

Outside in the dark I stepped to the side of the door and let my shadow lose itself in the shadow of the house. Caution becomes a man in strange country, and this country would be strange to me for a few days until the feel was in me again.

At night all places have a feeling of their own, and a man must be in tune with the night if he is to move safely. The sounds were different, and a man’s subconscious has to get used to them again, so standing there against the outer wall of Will’s house, I listened into the night, my mind far ranging out over the great lawns of Blackthorne, which were off to my left, and the orchard to my right, and beyond that to the swamps the river was bringing closer to Blackthorne by the year.

The frogs were loud in the darkness, a cricket chirped nearby. No coyote sounds in here, although there were wolves enough in the thickets to the south and west. Somewhere an owl hooted, and something splashed out in the swamp. The night was quiet so I walked to where the mule had been left and tightened the girth, then adjusted the bridle. It was quiet enough, but the mule was alert and I was uneasy.

Maybe it was the strangeness after so many desert and prairie nights, but turning from the path to the lane, I took a way that led back through the orchard and so across the fields. It made no kind of practical sense, going back the way I’d come—a man in Indian country learns things like that because it is back along the return trail they may be waiting for you.

The night had a different smell, a familiar smell. The clean dryness of the desert air, touched by the smell of sage or cedar was gone. Here there was a heaviness of the greater humidity, and heavier smells of decaying vegetation, of stagnant water, and of dew-wet grass. The leaves of the peach trees brushed my hat as I rode through the orchard, taking my way from old experience toward a place where the fence was down. Sure enough, it had never been fixed.

When I walked the mule across the soft grass coming up back of my own house I knew there was someone else around, and drew up, careful not to shift my weight so the saddle would creak, and then I listened. Then an owl hooted and I had a feeling it was no true owl but one speaking for me.

Searching a minute in my mind I tried to recall what Bob Lee knew of our place and where, if it was him, he would wait, and was sure and certain it would not be the house itself.

There was a big old stump Pa had never been able to grub out, gigantic roots, big as small trees themselves, curled deep into the rich earth and without powder, which we could not afford then, it would be a long task to get it out. So we left it there, and it was a known place, used for a meeting on coonhunting nights. Bob Lee would remember. One of the few times he’d been on the place was to coon hunt, so I swung in a wide circle toward the stump, and when I was backed by the trees I hooted like an owl, but low down, so I’d sound farther off than I was…in the night a knowing man can do many things with sound.

The answer was plain, so with the Spencer in shooting position I walked that mule over the weed-grown field toward the stump. Two men arose from its shadow as I pulled up.

“Cullen?” it was Bob Lee.

“You’ve the name. What’s the message?”

“Chance Thorne has learned you’re here. He’s sworn to drive you from the country. You were seen by someone in the lanes today, and then you’ve talked to Joel Reese.”

“If he comes for me, he’ll find me here. I’ve work to do.”

“If the time comes you’ve a need of friends,” Bob Lee said, “you’ll know where to find us. We’ve means of learning things, Cullen, and friends about who’ll feed us and hide us as well.”

Crouched by that big old stump we talked an hour away, and they brought me up to date on much that had taken place, and things they’d just got wind of. Bob Lee was a man with friends as well as a big family, and such can be a sight of comfort to a man, times like this.

Bill Longley had little to say. He was stern for his age, a tall, quiet young man that took getting used to, but I liked him.

“You know what I think,” Bob Lee said, standing. “I think we’ll all be lucky if we add five years to our ages. I think they’ve marked us down for dying.”

“Five years?” Longley’s tone was almost wistful. “Bob, I’d settle for the certain knowledge of one year.”