Over on the Dry Side (4 page)

“You figurin' on trouble?” I asked him once.

He threw me a hard look. “Boy,” he said, “when a man comes at me shooting I figure he wants a fight. I surely wouldn't want him to go away disappointed.

“I don't want trouble or expect trouble, but I don't want to be found dead because I was optimistic. I'll wear the gun, use my own good judgment, be careful of what I say, and perhaps there won't be trouble.”

He still didn't tell us why he'd come to start with, and it was a question you didn't ask. He was more than welcome. In them days you could ride a hundred miles in any direction and not see a soul.

Once Chantry got started he was a natural-born storyteller. Of a nighttime, when the fire burned down on the hearth and the shadows made witches on the walls. He'd been a sight of places and he'd read the stories of ancient times, the old stories of Ireland, of the sea and some folks called the Trojans who lived somewheres beyond the mountains and did a lot of fighting with the Greeks over a woman. And stories of Richard the Lion-Hearted, who was a great fighter but a poor king.

An' stories of Jean Ango, whose ships had been to America before Columbus. And of Ben Jonson, a poet, who could lift a cask of canary wine over his head and drink from the bunghole. He told of Gessar Khan, stories that happened in the black tents of nomads in haunted deserts on the flanks of a land called Tibet.

An' so our world became a bigger place. He had him a way with words, did Owen Chantry, but he was a hard man, and dangerous.

We found that out on the cold, still morning when the strangers come down the hills.

I'd gone to put hay down the chutes to the mangers for the stock, an' I was in the loft with a hayfork when they come.

Pa was in the yard, puttin' a harness on the mules for the plowing.

They come ridin' up the trail, five rough men ridin' in one tight bunch, astride better horses than we could afford, and carryin' their guns.

They drew up at the gate. And one of the men outs with his rope, tosses a noose over the gatepost, and starts to pull it down.

“Hey!” Pa yelled. “What d'you think you're doin'? Leave that be!”

“We're tearin' it down so you'll have less to leave behind. When you go.” The speaker was a big brawny man with a gray hat.

“We're not goin' nowhere,” Pa said quietly. He dropped the harness where he stood and faced them. “We come to stay.”

The two men I'd met on the trail were in the bunch, but my rifle was inside the house. Pa's was too.

We might just as well have had no weapons for the good they could do us now.

“You're goin',” the brawny man said. “You're ridin' out of here before sundown, and we'll burn this here place so nobody else will come back.”

“Burn it? This fine house, built by a man with skill? You'd burn it?”

“We'll burn any house and you in it if you don't leave. We didn't invite you here.”

“This here is open land,” Pa said. “I'm only the first. There'll be many more along this way 'for long.”

“There'll be nobody. Now I'm through talkin'. I want you out of here.” He looked around. “Where's that loud-mouthed boy of yours? One of my men wants to give him a whippin'.”

I'd dropped from the loft and stood just inside the barn. “I'm here, and your man ain't goin' to give me any kind of a whippin'…not if it's a fair fight.”

“It'll be a fair fight.”

The words come from the steps, and we all looked. Owen Chantry stood there in his black pants, his polished boots, a white shirt, and a black string tie.

“Who in hell are you?” The brawny man was angry some, but not too worried.

“The name is Owen Chantry,” he replied quietly.

The stocky man I'd met on the trail got down from his horse and come forward. He stood there, a-waitin' the outcome.

“Means nothing to me,” the brawny man said.

“It will,” Chantry said. “Now take your rope off that post.”

“Like hell I will!” It was the man with the rope who shouted at him.

In the year of 1866, the fast draw was an unheard of thing out west of the Rockies. In Texas (so Chantry told me later), Cullen Baker and Bill Longley had been usin' it, but that was about the extent of it 'til that moment.

Nobody saw him move, but we all heard the gun. And we seen that man with the rope drop it like something burned him, and something had.

The rope lay on the ground and that man was shy two fingers.

I don't know whether Chantry aimed for two fingers, one finger, or his whole hand, but two fingers was what he got.

Then Owen Chantry come one foot down the steps and then the other. He stood there, his polished boots a-shinin' and that gun in his hand. First time I'd ever seen that gun out'n the scabbard.

“The name,” he said, “is Owen Chantry. My brother lived on this place. He was killed. These folks are living here now, and they're going to stay.

“I, too, am going to stay, and if you have among you the men who killed my brother, your only chance to live is to hang them. You have two weeks in which to find and hang those men.…Two weeks.”

“You're slick with that gun,” the brawny man said, “but we'll be back.”

Owen Chantry come down another step, and then another. A stir of wind caught the hair on his brow and ruffled it a mite and flattened the fine material of his white shirt against the muscles of his arms and shoulders.

“Why come back, Mr. Fenelon?” Chantry said pleasantly. “You're here now.”

“You know my name?”

“Of course. And a good deal more about you, none of it good. You may have run away from your sins, Mr. Fenelon, but you can't escape the memory of them.…Others have the same memories.”

Chantry walked out a step toward him, still with that gun in his hand. “You're here already, Mr. Fenelon. Would you like to choose your weapon?”

“I can wait,” Fenelon said. He was staring at Chantry, hard-eyed, but wary. He didn't like nothin' he saw.

“And you?” Chantry looked at the stocky man who was settin' to whip me. “Can you wait too?”

“No, by the Lord, I can't! I come to slap some sense into that young'un, and I aim to do it!”

Chantry never moved his eyes from them. “Doby, do you want to take care of this chore right now, or would you rather wait?”

“I'll take him right now,” I said, and I walked out there and he come for me, low an' hard.

My Pa come from the old country as a boy and settled in Boston, where there was a lot of Irish and some good fightin' men amongst 'em. He learned fightin' there, and when I was growing up he taught me a thing or two. Pa was no great fightin' man, but he was a good teacher. He taught me something about fighting and something about Cornish-style wrestling. There were a lot of Cousin Jacks in the mines, then as ever, and Pa was quick to see and learn. But he was a teacher, not a fighter.

Me, I started scrappin' the minute they took off my diapers. Most of us did, them days.

Here I was sixteen, with plenty of years already spent on an ax handle, a plow, and a pick and shovel. So when he come at me, low and hard like that, I just braced myself, dropped both hands to the back of his head, and shoved down hard with them.

I was thoughtful to jerk my knee up hard at the same time.

There's something about them two motions together that's right bad for the complexion and the shape of a nose.

He staggered back, almost went down on his knees, and then come up. And when he did his nose was a bloody smear. He had grit, I'll give him that. He come for me again and I fetched him a swing and my fist clobbered him right on the smashed-up nose.

He come in, flailing away at me with both fists, and he could hit almighty hard. He slammed me first with one fist and then with the other, but I stood in there and taken 'em and clobbered him again, this time in the belly.

He stood flatfooted then, fightin' for wind, so I just sort of set myself and swung a couple from the hip. One of them missed as he pulled back, but the other taken him on his ear and his hands come up so I belted him again in the belly.

He taken a step back and my next swing turned him halfway round and he went down to his knees.

“That's enough, Doby,” Chantry said. “Let him go.”

So I stepped back, but watchin' him. Fact is, I was scared. I might have got my ears pinned back, tacklin' him thataway…Only he made me mad, there by the road.

“Now, gentlemen,” Chantry said, “I believe you understand the situation. We are not looking for trouble here. These good people only wish to live, to work the ranch, to live quietly.

“As for myself, I've told you what I expect. I know either you or someone you know killed my brother. I'll leave it to you. Hang them, or I shall hang you.…One by one.

“Now you may go. Quietly, if you please.”

And they rode away, the stocky one lagging behind, dabbing at his nose and mouth with a sleeve. First one, then the other.

Pa looked at me in astonishment. “Doby, I didn't know you could fight like that!”

I looked back at him, kind of embarrassed. “I didn't either, Pa. He just gimme it to do.”

Suppertime, watching the clouds hanging around the highup mountains, I thought of that girl and wondered what she was to them and would anything happen when they rode home.

“You don't really b'lieve they'll hang their own men, do you?” Pa asked.

“Not right away,” Chantry said quietly. “Not right away.”

We looked at him, but if he knew it he gave no sign, and I wondered just how much he believed what he said.

“You'd really hang 'em?” Pa asked him then.

Owen Chantry didn't reply for a minute, and when he did he spoke low. “This is new country, and there are few white men here. If there is to be civilization, if people are to live and make their homes here, there must be law.

“People often think of the law as restrictions, but it needn't be, unless it's carried to extremes. Laws can give us freedom, because they offer security from the cruel, the brutal, and the thieves of property.

“In every community—even in the wildest gangs and bands of outlaws—there is some kind of law, if only the fear of the leader. There has to be law, or there can be no growth, no security.

“Here there is no established law yet. We have no marshal, no sheriff, no judge. And until such things exist, the evil must be restrained. A man has been murdered, you have been warned to leave.

“This country needs men like you. You may not think of yourselves as such, but you are the forerunners of a civilization. Where you are, others will come.”

“And how about you, Mr. Chantry?” I asked.

He smiled, with genuine warmth. “Doby, you've asked the key question. How about me? I am a man who's good with a gun. I'll be needed until there are enough people, and when there are enough, I shall be outmoded.

“I do not recall any other time in history when men like me existed. Usually it was a baron or a chief who brought peace to an area, but in this country it is often just a man with a gun.”

“I don't put no stock in guns,” Pa said suddenly. “I figger there should be a better way.”

“So do I,” Chantry replied. “But had there been no gun today, your son would have been beaten by not just one man but several. Your fence pulled down, your house burned.

“Civilization is a recent thing, sir. With many, it's still no more than skin deep. If you live in a busy community, you must live with the knowledge that maybe two out of every ten people are only wearing the outer skin of civilization. And if there was no law, or if there was not the restraint of public opinion, they would be utterly savage.…Even some people you might know well.

“Many men and women now act with restraint cause they know it is the right thing to do. They know that if we are to live together we must respect the rights of those around us. Our friends in the mountains do not feel that way. They've come to this remote place because they wish to be free of restraint, to be as cruel, as harsh, as brutal as they wish.”

“You talk like a schoolteacher, Mr. Chantry,” I said.

He glanced at me. “I wish I was a schoolteacher. It is the most honorable profession, done well.” He smiled at me. “Maybe, in a sense, that's what I am.”

“You say when there're enough people you won't be needed anymore,” I said boldly. “How long're you givin' yourself?”

“Ten years. Maybe twenty. Surely not more than thirty. Men become civilized by degrees. By adapting, compromising.”

“A man like you, with your education, I reckon you could do anything,” Pa said.

Chantry's smile was grim. “No,” he said. “I've had a fine education, good opportunities, but I was trained for nothing.…To be a gentleman, to oversee land, to direct the work of others. To do all that one must have a business, or money to employ.…I have nothing.

“I have read…and riding long distances alone has given me time to think.”

“What about that woman up yonder?” Pa asked.

“She's to be considered. Most definitely, she's to be considered.”

Somethin' in the way he said it made me uneasy. I liked him…figured he was quite some man, but he worried me, and he knew it. Suddenly I knew. That was his trouble. He
knew
the kind of man he was. Whatever he done, one part of him stood off and watched.

He walked outside to the steps and lit one of them slim cigars he smoked. He stood there, away from the light, and after helping Pa with the dishes, I followed him.

“Have you seen her, Doby? I mean that girl up there? Have you seen her?”

“No. I ain't.”

He was silent awhile. His cigar glowed in the dark. At last he said, “I'm going up there, Doby. Can you tell me how to get to that cabin?”