The Cowboy Way

by Elmer Kelton

  The hotel man’s shaky voice broke the stillness. “That was better than I expected of you, Fladness. But you’d best move on. You can get a far piece in an hour.”

  Woodenly Dick picked up Mrs. Matson’s pistol from the freshly swept floor. He handed it to the hotel man. “Take it to her. She’s liable to need it.”

  Dick stood on the hotel porch, steadying himself against a post. The heat of late afternoon rushed against him, stifling him, crushing his lungs. The street seemed stretched out of shape. It swayed back and forth, and it looked a mile long. He knew it was his nerves. They tingled like telegraph wires.

  Two men stood in front of the nearby saloon. The words of one came to Dick like the slap of a swinging rope. “Bet you the drinks he lights off of that porch in a high lope.”

  Dick swallowed hard. Deliberately he stepped down into the street. He started back toward Lavender’s barn, his steps measured and slow. He was so scared he was sick at his stomach. But they weren’t going to see him run.

  It seemed an hour before he gained the door of the barn. Mike Lavender’s chair was empty. Dick sagged into it. Lavender hobbled up, braced his long arm against the door and leaned on it, looking out across the town and saying nothing.

  “You’ve heard about it?” Dick asked him finally.

  Mike nodded gravely. “Collin means it, Dick. I told you a while ago that you ought to stay. I’ve changed my mind. You better go, son. I got you a horse in the pen back yonder.”

  Dick stared at the ground. A thousand things hummed through his mind, memories of people he had known and ridden with and liked. He had especially liked Lindy Matson. Maybe Lindy’s death was Dick’s fault, and maybe it wasn’t.

  “You goin’, or ain’t you?” Mike queried anxiously.

  Dick shook his head. “Give me time to study.”

  For a long time he sat there staring vacantly across the town. He watched a lazy cur dog make its leisurely way down the street, checking under high porches, sniffing at every corner. He watched a brown hen out back of a washerwoman’s house, scratching around in the thin shade of a mesquite, seeking a cool place to settle herself.

  Most of all he watched the saloon where Collin and the Hornby crew were. Occasionally he would see one or two of them come out, look around and go back in. He could feel speculative eyes appraising him from a distance, and he wondered how poor the betting odds were that he might not run.

  Mike Lavender tromped back and forth in the barn like a stallion in a small corral. Now and then he would stop in the door and look up the street with Dick. Once he drew an old stem-winding watch from his pocket. “Been half an hour, Dick.”

  Dick nodded dully.

  Mike said, “Son, I know that on a thing like this a man has got to make up his own mind. But anybody would know you ain’t got much chance against a man like Branch Collin. Supposin’ you leave now, there ain’t much people can say that they ain’t said already.”

  Dick never answered. He sat in the doorway, watching.

  He saw the flare of a long skirt on the gallery of the hotel. The girl stood looking down the street toward the barn. Her shoulders squared as she saw Dick sitting in the doorway. Quickly she lifted the hem and rushed down the steps onto the street. In a few moments Nora Matson stood in front of him, her young face pale.

  “Dick,” she said huskily, “are you a fool? I thought you’d be gone by now.”

  Bitterness coiled in him. “Like last night?”

  She flushed. “Dick, it won’t help anything for you to stay here and get killed. It’s too late to bring Lindy back.”

  He searched her eyes for some sign of the love he had seen there before. “Does it still matter to you, Nora?”

  “It matters. Last night changed a lot of things, but I can’t forget what there was between us. I beg you. Go!”

  Dick watched her walk hurriedly back toward the hotel, drawing upon her stout pride to keep her shoulders straight and her head high. Dick looked down, staring fixedly at the ground in front of his brush-scarred boots. He heard Mike Lavender stomping around behind him.

  “Mike,” he said, “is that horse still out there?”

  A sigh of relief passed the old cowhand’s lips. “He is, and it’s high time you used him.”

  Stiffly Dick stood up. He glanced at the saloon long enough to know he was being watched. Then he moved back into the barn and picked up his saddle and bridle. He flipped a loop over the horse’s head, pulled him in, bridled and saddled him. The pen had an outside gate opening west. Going out through it, a man could leave town without using the street. But it wouldn’t keep him from being seen.

  Mike strode out of the barn with Dick’s war bag. “Here’s your gear. Good luck to you.”

  “Thanks, Mike,” Dick replied. “But it’s not me that’s goin’. It’s you!”

  Lavender’s jaw sagged. “Me? What in the—”

  Dick said, “Look, Mike, you know I couldn’t beat Collin if he came lookin’ for me. But I’m a fair enough shot. If I had surprise on my side, I might beat him.

  “You’re about my size, Mike. You’re goin’ to spur out of this gate and head west in a lope. They’ll think it’s me. When Collin comes, he won’t expect me. Maybe that’ll be enough to give me an edge.”

  The old man’s face was sharp with anxiety. “And maybe it won’t.”

  Dick shrugged. “If it doesn’t, I sure appreciate the way you’ve stuck by me.”

  Lavender placed his knotty hand on Dick’s shoulder. “Son, I know why you ran last night. I knew all along you wasn’t no coward. Good luck to you.”

  Dick opened the gate for him. The old man spurred out and swung westward, the dust rising beneath the horse’s hoofs.

  Dick watched him a minute. Then he latched the gate and hurried once again through the back door of the barn. In the shadowed interior he picked his spot, about twenty feet inside the barn door, where he would not readily be seen from outside. He pulled up a chair and sat down to wait. Holding the gun, he sat back, his hands cold with sweat, nervousness playing through him like lightning in a stormy sky. His eyes set on the open door, he waited.…

  He heard the voices before he saw the men. They were laughing voices, lifted high by the warmth of liquor. Dick heard the easy jingling of spurs. Branch Collin and Ansel Hornby swung into view, their men trailing. Collin was laughing, and even Hornby’s normally somber face showed a little humor. The sight of the horseman spurring out the back way had been a joke even Hornby could enjoy.

  Still in the sunlight, Collin threw back his head and roared, “Hey, Lavender, I see we flushed your quail.”

  Collin and Hornby walked in through the door and passed into the shadow. Collin blinked away the momentary blindness and sought out Dick Fladness’s form in the dark of the barn. Dick stood up and took one step forward from the chair.

  Collin’s jaw dropped as recognition hit him like the lash of a whip. His hand dipped.

  But the surprise had delayed him a moment. In that moment Dick brought his pistol up into line. It exploded twice. Collin’s weapon cracked once, raising a puff of dust at the man’s toes just before he pitched forward onto his face.

  Paralyzed, Ansel Hornby stared foolishly at Collin’s sprawled form. He grabbed at his own pistol, then realized belatedly how foolish that was. He stopped with it half out of the holster. He stared into the smoking muzzle of Dick’s six-shooter, and horror slowly crawled into his eyes as he felt death brush him.

  He stammered, his voice failing as panic gripped him. “For God’s sake,” he managed, finally. “My God, man, don’t kill me!”

  Dick held his pistol steady. He had every intention of squeezing the trigger, and Hornby must have seen it in his eyes. Hornby let his pistol drop to the dust. “Fladness, for the love of God…” His knees gave way, and he sank to the dust, crying.

  Dick looked past Hornby at Hornby’s men. Muddled with drink, they had sobered quickly at the roar of guns. They stared in disbelief upon the man who had
led them, now groveling in the dust, begging for his life.

  Other men gathered, and they too, stared, and they knew who was the coward.

  * * *

  Dusk gathered heavily. Dick sat on the broad gallery of the hotel, the cool evening breeze bringing him relief from the heat and ordeal of the day. From inside the lobby Mike Lavender’s voice drifted out to him.

  “You see, Mrs. Matson,” Mike was saying, “it was the fire that chased Dick away last night. It was several years back that me and Dick was workin’ for the same outfit. One night one of the hands got careless with a cigarette. We woke up with the bunkhouse burnin’ down around us. Smoke had already knocked out a couple of boys in their sleep.

  “Wasn’t time for us to do anything except run. Dick tried to drag one of the boys out, but part of the roof fell in on him. Dick was pinned under a burnin’ timber that broke his leg. He laid there and seen that other boy burn to death. We finally got Dick loose just before the whole place caved in. That’s where his limp come from, and his fear of fire. Most anything else he could’ve stood. But when the fire got to burnin’ him last night, he couldn’t hold out.”

  Presently Mrs. Matson came out onto the gallery. Nora was with her. “Dick,” Mrs. Matson said, “I wish there was some way to tell you…”

  Hat crushed in his hands, Dick nodded. “I know.”

  Mrs. Matson gripped his arm. “I wish you would go hitch the team to the buckboard. I want you to take us home.”

  Dick shook his head. “There’s not much home left out there.”

  Her shoulders braced. “No house, perhaps, but a house can be rebuilt. It takes more than fire to destroy a home.”

  Dick stepped down from the porch and started toward the livery barn.

  “Wait for me,” Nora said, and hurried after him. “I’d like to go with you.”

  THE BLACK SHEEP

  Will Clayton crawled stiffly out from under the blankets into the chill of the dark room, as tired now as when he had gone to bed. Pulling on his khaki clothes and his high-heeled boots, he caught the familiar aroma of Maude’s coffee and bacon. But he felt no appetite.

  He cupped his hands and splashed icy cold water on his wind-toughened face. Glancing up into the mirror, he felt the sudden surprise that hit him so often lately, as if he were looking not at himself but at the face of some troubled stranger. His gray eyes were weary, and the carved lines were deepening day by day.

  He hobbled toward the kitchen, through the hall whose walls were covered by pictures of 4-H Club boys with prize-winning steers and lambs. His legs were slow and sore. He had put in a heap of miles yesterday, checking an ailing milk cow for Jeff Alley, helping Buster Cook mark up his early lamb crop, running terrace lines in old Max Pfeiffer’s fallow cotton field. It seemed like the older a county agent got, the more there was to do.

  Maude turned away from the stove and glanced at him, her blue eyes soft with concern. She turned his frying egg to harden the yolk the way he used to like it. Lately, nothing seemed to have much taste for him.

  “You didn’t sleep much last night,” she said. He shook his head. “You’ve got to start sleeping, Will. You’ll kill yourself this way.”

  He didn’t much care. “All I need is work.” Work to keep me busy, he thought, too busy to remember.

  His tired gaze touched upon two layers of fresh-baked cake cooling on the cabinet, and he knew Maude had been up a while. Lately, she hadn’t slept much either.

  “For the Stevens family,” she said. “Mrs. Stevens is sick.” The fact that the Stevens family lived clear across town wouldn’t mean a thing to Maude. It was a small town, and she knew everyone in it.

  Will poured himself a cup of coffee and sipped, immune to the scalding heat. He stared up at the West Texas Feed and Supply calendar, with its bright print of a Charlie Russell cowboy painting. “Real estate man’ll be over this morning,” he said. “Maybe you ought to stay around.”

  Lips tight, she set his egg in front of him. “We don’t have to go, Will.”

  “But we do have to. And you know why.” He picked up the knife and fork, then laid them down again, seeing the glistening in her eyes before she blinked it away.

  “Look, Maude, you know the Prairie Land and Cattle Company has been after me a long time to take that manager job. It’s a good job, the chance of a lifetime.”

  “This is your kind of job, Will. That isn’t. You won’t be happy there. And neither will I.” She looked straight at him then, her blue eyes firm. “Why don’t we be honest about it? You’re trying to run away, Will.”

  He flinched and looked down. “You know why I haven’t slept, Maude?” he asked huskily. “I lie there and fight it for hours. I know that when I sleep I’ll dream. And there it’ll be, all over again, just the way it was. I’ve dreamed it twenty times.”

  “It was an accident, Will. Nobody blames you for it, nobody except yourself.”

  “And John McKenna?”

  “You don’t know how he feels. You won’t go to see him. Look, Will, he’s been your best friend for twenty years. Why don’t you go talk to him?”

  Will stood up and shoved back his chair, leaving his breakfast uneaten. “What do you say to a man when you’ve killed the only son he had?” he asked miserably.

  At the 4-H feeding barn, he slowly stepped out of his pickup truck and turned up the collar of his faded plaid Mackinaw against the chill of the January wind. He stopped in the open barn door and heard the bleating of hungry lambs. He listened to the rattle of buckets and the noisy clamor of happy young voices.

  The brisk cold weather was a stimulant to the boys. They ran and jumped and cut up as they swept out troughs and poured fresh feed for eager lambs to push their noses into.

  “Morning, Mister Clayton.”

  “Hi, Will.”

  He answered quietly as each boy spoke to him, stepping past him with buckets of grain or chips of hay. He knew each kid by his first name, knew the parents of every one. This was the community barn he had worked to get for so many years, so the kids in town could feed livestock and get to know how to handle them, like the boys on the farms and ranches. He and Maude had never had sons of their own.

  That new L off the south end of the barn had been built just last year because of overcrowding. The boys themselves had raised the money for it, selling soft drinks and barbecue at the rodeo and the stock show. And there had been that big 4-H amateur show, with Johnny McKenna as master of ceremonies.

  Johnny McKenna. Will Clayton closed his eyes, his fist tightening in the pocket of the Mackinaw. A blowout on a sharp curve … the helpless skid and the crash through the guardrail that had thrown Will out of the pickup truck before it pitched off the embankment and smashed onto the rocks below. Johnny McKenna never had a chance.

  * * *

  Will watched six lambs in a little pen run over each other to get to the feed which a red-haired boy was pouring out. They were Johnny’s lambs.

  Will swung his body around and savagely punched his fist against the yielding bulk of a grain sack. Why wasn’t it me? Why wasn’t it me?

  Slowly, then, he became conscious of a commotion around the corner, down at the end of the L. He hobbled down the alley between the sheep pens. He found three club boys angrily confronting a fourth youngster in one of the pens.

  “I wasn’t gonna hurt nothin’,” the dirty-faced kid protested. “I just come to look at the lambs.”

  “You come here to steal somethin’,” one of the boys declared hotly. “That’s all you know how to do, is steal stuff.”

  Will studied the boy. He was 12, maybe 13, dressed in patched, faded blue jeans and a thin woolen coat that had been worn out before it was passed on to him. His grimy fists were doubled, tough as mesquite knots. Defiance shone in his brown eyes.

  “I can’t place you, son,” Will said. “Who are you?”

  “I ain’t done nothin’. I just wanted to see the sheep.”

  Patiently Will shook his head. “I didn’t s
ay you’d done anything. Just asked who you are. Where do you live?”

  “I’m Bo Magee. I live down yonder by the stockpens.”

  An older club boy named Chester Willis said, “His old man runs Blackie’s pool hall. A boozer. His old lady takes in washing to feed them. This Bo’s strictly a foul ball.”

  “That’s enough of that kind of talk,” Will said firmly. “Turn him loose.”

  “We better search him first,” Chester said.

  “Turn him loose!”

  Free, Bo Magee stepped back with eyes flashing.

  Chester said, “Plays hooky half the time, hangs around them tough guys down on the arroyo. I’d search him, if it was me.”

  Will frowned. “You kids better get on to school.”

  * * *

  The other boys gone, Bo Magee stood facing Will, nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “You fixin’ to call the law?”

  Will shook his head. “Why? You haven’t done anything wrong. You wanted to look at the sheep. You can look at them with me.”

  Will slowly started up the alley that divided the L. He stooped down. “Boys left some of their buckets lying around,” he said, picking up one. “Mind helping me gather them?”

  Bo Magee didn’t answer, but he pitched in and helped. His eyes were on the lambs, some just beginning to take on that final bloom that meant they were nearly ready for the stock shows.

  “You like sheep, Bo?”

  The boy was silent a moment. “Yeah, I reckon.” His brown eyes came alive as he watched the lambs eat, and his dirty face seemed to warm.

  “Why haven’t you ever joined the 4-H Club, fed some lambs or a calf?”

  “I got no money. You can’t buy nothin’ without you got money.”

  “The bank lends money to 4-H Club boys, Bo. You could get a loan.”

  The boy pondered that a while, then shrugged hopelessly. “Paw wouldn’t let me. I brought home a puppy once. Paw said it costs too much to feed a family, much less an animal. He took it out and killed it.”