Draw Straight

by Louis L'Amour

  Gelvin’s store was closed, unusual for this time of day. Abel glanced at Rip, and his brow furrowed. Rip was wearing two tied-down guns this morning, unusual for him.

  Abel finished polishing a glass and put it down, glancing nervously at Packer. Suddenly Packer downed the drink and got to his feet. Walking to the door, he glanced up and down the street. All was quiet, yet the big man was worried. A man left the post office and walked along the boardwalk to the barbershop and entered. The sound of the closing door was the only sound. A hen pecked at something in the mouth of the alley near Gelvin’s store. As he watched, he saw Pete Dodson stop his horse behind Gelvin’s. Pete was carrying a rifle. Packer glanced over at Rip, noting the guns.

  Packer turned suddenly, glaring at Abel. “Give me that scatter-gun you got under the bar!”

  “Huh?” Abel was frightened. “I ain’t got …”

  “Don’t give me that! I want that gun!”

  There was an instant when Abel considered covering Packer or even shooting him, but the big man frightened him, and he put the shotgun on the bar. Packer picked it up and tiptoed to the window and put the gun down beside it. Careful to make no sound, he eased the window up a few inches. His position now covered Rip’s side and back.

  Abel cringed at what he had done. He liked Rip. The lean, easygoing, friendly young man might now be killed because of him. He’d been a coward. He should have refused, covered Packer, and called Rip inside. And he could have done that, if he wasn’t such a coward. Now, because of him, a good man might be murdered, shot in the back. What was going on, anyway? This had been such a quiet little town.

  Jim Yount rode up the street with Ruth beside him. Her face was pale and strained, and her eyes seemed unnaturally large.

  Red Lund trailed a few yards behind. He drew up and tied his horse across the street.

  From the saloon Abel could see it all. Jim Yount and Ruth Kermitt were approaching Rip from the west. North and west was Red Lund. Due north and in the shadow of Gelvin’s was Pete Dodson. In the saloon was Packer. Rip was very neatly boxed, signed, and sealed. All but delivered.

  Jim Keane, Logan’s much older brother, was the express agent. He saw Jim Yount come, saw Red Lund across the street.

  Rip got up lazily, smiling at Ruth.

  “Come for your package, Miss Kermitt?” he asked politely. “While you’re here, would you mind answering some questions.”

  “By whose authority?” Yount demanded sharply.

  Ward McQueen, crouched behind the saloon, heard the reply clearly.

  “The state of Texas, Yount,” Rip replied. “I’m a Texas Ranger.”

  Jim Yount’s short laugh held no humor. “This ain’t Texas, and she answers no questions.”

  Ward McQueen opened the back door of the saloon and stepped inside.

  Packer, intent on the scene before him, heard the door open. Startled and angry, he whirled around. Ward McQueen, who he had buried, was standing just inside the door. The shotgun was resting on the windowsill behind Rip. Packer went for his six-gun, but even as he reached, he knew it was hopeless. He saw the stab of flame, felt the solid blow of the bullet, and felt his knees turn to butter under him. He pitched forward on his face.

  Outside, all hell broke loose. Ruth Kermitt, seeing Rip’s situation, spurred her horse to bump Yount’s, throwing him out of position. Instantly, she slid from the saddle and threw herself to the ground near the edge of the walk.

  All seemed to have begun firing at once. Yount, cursing bitterly, fired at Rip. He in turn was firing at Red Lund. Ward stepped suddenly from the saloon and saw himself facing Yount, who had brought his mount under control. He fired at Yount, and a bullet from Dodson’s rifle knocked splinters from the post in front of his face.

  Yount’s gun was coming into line, and McQueen fired an instant sooner. Yount fired, and they both missed. Ward’s second shot hit Yount, who grabbed for the pommel. Ward walked a step forward, but something hit him, and he went to his knee. Red Lund loomed from somewhere, and Ward got off another shot. Lund’s face was covered with blood.

  There was firing from the stage station and from Gelvin’s store. There was a thunder of hoofs, and a bloodred horse came charging down the street, its rider hung low like an Indian, shooting under the horse’s neck.

  Yount was down, crawling on his belly in the dust. He had lost hold of his six-shooter, but his right hand held a knife, and he was crawling toward Ruth. McQueen’s six-shooter clicked on an empty chamber. How many shots were left in his other gun? He lifted it with his left hand. Something was suddenly wrong with his right. He rarely shot with his left hand, but now …

  Yount was closer. Ruth was staring across the street, unaware. McQueen shot past Ruth, squeezing off the shot with his left hand. He saw Yount contract sharply as the bullet struck. McQueen fired again, and the gambler rolled over on his side, and the knife slipped from his fingers.

  Abel ran from the saloon with a shotgun, and Gelvin from his store with a rifle. Then Ruth was running toward him, and he saw Kim Sartain coming back up the street, walking the red horse. Ward tried to rise to meet Ruth, but his knees gave way, and he went over on his face, thinking how weak she must think him. He started to rise again and blacked out.

  * * * * *

  When he could see again, Ruth was beside him. Kim was squatting on his heels. “Come on, Ward!” he said. “You’ve only been hit twice and neither of ’em bad. Can’t you handle lead anymore?”

  “What happened?”

  “Clean sweep, looks like. Charlie Quayle got to us, and we hightailed it to the ranch. Hollier wanted to give us trouble, but we smoked him out. I believe there were others around, but if there were, they skipped the country. Whilst they were cleanin’ up, I took it on the run for town. Halfway here, I thought I heard a shot, and when I hit the street, everybody in town was shootin’, or that’s what it looked like. Reg’lar Fourth of July celebration! Pete Dodson is dead, and Red Lund’s dying with four bullets in him. Yount’s alive, but he won’t make it, either. Packer’s dead.”

  Ward’s head was aching, and he felt weak and sick, but he did not want to move, even to get out of the street. He just wanted to sit, to forget all that had taken place. With fumbling fingers, from long habit, he started to reload his pistols. Oddly, he found one of them contained three live shells. Somehow he must have reloaded, but he had no memory of it.

  Rip came over. “My name’s Coker, Ward. I couldn’t figure any way to bust up Yount’s operation without getting Ruth Kermitt away from him first, so I faked that package to get them into town, hoping I could get her away from them. I didn’t figure they’d gang up on me like they did.”

  They helped Ward up and into the saloon. Gelvin brought the doctor in. “Yount just died,” Gelvin said, “cussing you and everybody concerned.”

  He sat back in a chair while the doctor patched him up. Again he had lost blood. “I’ve got to find a bed,” he said to Kim. “There must be a hotel in town.”

  “You’re coming back to the ranch,” Ruth said. “We need you there. They told me you left me, Ward. Jim Yount said you pulled out and Kim with you. I hadn’t seen him, and Yount said he’d manage the ranch until I found someone. Then he brought his own men in and fired Kim, who I hadn’t seen, and I was surrounded and scared. If you had been there, or if I’d even known you were around, I …”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Ward leaned his head back. All he wanted was rest.

  Baldy Jackson helped him into a buckboard, Bud Fox driving. “You know that old brindle longhorn who turned up missin’? Well, I found him. He’s got about thirty head with him, holed up in the prettiest little valley you ever did see. Looks like he’s there to stay.”

  “He’s like me,” Ward commented, “so used to his range, he wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.”

  “Then why think of anywhere else?” Ruth said. “I wan
t you to stay.”

  Four Card Draw

  When a man drew four cards, he could expect something like this to happen. Ben Taylor had probably been right when he told him his luck had run out. Despite that, he had a place of his own, and, come what may, he was going to keep it.

  Nor was there any fault to find with the place. From the moment Allen Ring rode his claybank into the valley, he knew he was coming home. This was it; this was the place. Here he would stop. He’d been tumbleweeding all over the West now for ten years, and it was time he stopped, if he ever did, and this looked like his fence corner.

  Even the cabin looked good, although Taylor told him the place had been empty for three years. It looked solid and fit, and while the grass was waist high all over the valley and up around the house, he could see trails through it, some of them made by unshod ponies —that meant wild horses—and some by deer. Then there were the tracks of a single shod horse, always the same one.

  Those tracks always led right up to the door, and they stopped there; yet he could see that somebody with mighty small feet had been walking up to peer into the windows. Why would a person want to look into a window more than once? The window of an empty cabin? He had gone up and looked in himself, and all he saw was a dusty, dark interior with a ray of light from the opposite window, a table, a couple of chairs, and a fine old fireplace that had been built by skilled hands.

  “You never built that fireplace, Ben Taylor,” Ring had muttered, “you who never could handle anything but a running iron or a deck of cards. You never built anything in your life as fine and useful as that.”

  The cabin sat on a low ledge of grass backed up against the towering cliff of red rock, and the spring was not more than fifty feet away, a stream that came out of the rock and trickled pleasantly into a small basin before spilling out and winding thoughtfully down the valley to join a larger stream, a quarter of a mile away.

  There were some tall spruces around the cabin and a couple of sycamores and a cottonwood near the spring. Some gooseberry bushes, too, and a couple of apple trees. The trees had been pruned.

  “And you never did that, either, Ben Taylor,” Allen Ring had said soberly. “I wish I knew more about this place.”

  Time had fled like a scared antelope, and with the scythe he found in the pole barn, he cut off the tall grass around the house, patched up the holes in the cabin where the pack rats had got in, and even thinned out the bushes—it had been several years since they had been touched—and repaired the pole barn.

  The day he picked to clean out the spring was the day Gail Truman rode up to the house. He had been putting the finishing touches on a chair bottom he was making when he heard a horse’s hoof strike stone, and he straightened up to see the girl sitting on the red pony. She was staring, open-mouthed, at the stacked hay from the grass he had cut and the washed windows of the house. He saw her swing down and run up to the window, and, dropping his tools, he strolled up.

  “Hunting somebody, ma’am?”

  She wheeled and stared at him, her wide blue eyes accusing. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “What do you mean by moving in like this?”

  He smiled, but he was puzzled, too. Ben Taylor had said nothing about a girl, especially a girl like this. “Why, I own the place?” he said. “I’m fixing it up so’s I can live here.”

  “You own it?” Her voice was incredulous, agonized. “You couldn’t own it! You couldn’t. The man who owns this place is gone, and he would never sell it. Never!”

  “He didn’t exactly sell it, ma’am,” Ring said gently. “He lost it to me in a poker game. That was down Texas way.”

  She was horrified. “In a poker game? Whit Bayly in a poker game? I don’t believe it!”

  “The man I won it from was called Ben Taylor, ma’am.” Ring took the deed from his pocket and opened it. “Come to think of it, Ben did say that, if anybody asked about Whit Bayly, to say that he died down in the Guadeloupes … of lead poisoning.”

  “Whit Bayly is dead?” The girl looked stunned. “You’re sure? Oh …”

  Her face went white and still, and something in it seemed to die. She turned with a little gesture of despair and stared out across the valley, and his eyes followed hers. It was strange, Allen Ring told himself, but it was the first time he had looked just that way, and he stood there, caught up by something nameless, some haunting sense of the familiar.

  Before him lay the tall grass of the valley, turning slightly now with the brown of autumn, and to his right a dark stand of spruce, standing stiffly, like soldiers on parade, and beyond them the swell of the hill, and farther to the right, the hill rolled up and stopped, and beyond lay a wider valley fading away into the vast purple and mauve of distance and here and there spotted with the golden candles of cottonwoods, their leaves bright yellow with nearing cold.

  There was no word for this; it was a picture, yet a picture of which a man could only dream and never reproduce.

  “It … it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said.

  She turned on him, and for the first time, she seemed really to look at him, a tall young man with a shock of rust-brown hair and somber gray eyes, having about him the look of a rider and the look of a lonely man.

  “Yes, it is beautiful. Oh, I’ve come here so many times to see it … the cabin, too. I think this is the loveliest place I have ever seen. I used to dream about …” She stopped, suddenly confused. “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk so.” She looked at him soberly. “I’d better go. I guess this is yours now.”

  He hesitated. “Ma’am,” he said sincerely, “the place is mine, and, sure enough, I love it. I wouldn’t swap this place for anything. But that view, that belongs to no man. It belongs to whoever looks at it with eyes to see it, so you come any time you like, and look all you please.” Ring grinned. “Fact is,” he said, “I’m aiming to fix the place up inside, and I’m sure no hand at such things. Maybe you could sort of help me. I’d like it kind of homey-like.” He flushed. “You see, I sort of lived in bunkhouses all my life and never had no such place.”

  She smiled with a quick understanding and sympathy. “Of course! I’d love to, only …” Her face sobered. “… You won’t be able to stay here. You haven’t seen Ross Bilton yet, have you?”

  “Who’s he?” Ring asked curiously. He nodded toward the horsemen he saw approaching. “Is this the one?”

  She turned quickly and nodded. “Be careful. He’s the town marshal. The men with him are Ben Hagen and Stan Brule.”

  Brule he remembered—but would Brule remember him?

  “By the way, my name is Allen Ring,” he said, low-voiced.

  “I’m Gail Truman. My father owns the Tall T brand.”

  Bilton was a big man with a white hat. Ring decided he didn’t like him and that the feeling was going to be mutual. Brule he knew, so the stocky man was Ben Hagen. Brule had changed but little, some thinner, maybe, but his hatchet face as lean and poisonous as always.

  “How are you, Gail?” Bilton said briefly. “Is this a friend of yours?”

  Allen Ring liked to get his cards on the table. “Yes, a friend of hers, but also the owner of this place.”

  “You own Red Rock?” Bilton was incredulous. “That will be very hard to prove, my friend. Also, this place is under the custody of the law.”

  “Whose law?” Ring wanted to know. He was aware that Brule was watching him, wary but uncertain as yet.

  “Mine. I’m the town marshal. There was a murder committed here, and until that murder is solved and the killer brought to justice, this place will not be touched. You have already seen fit to make changes, but perhaps the court will be lenient.”

  “You’re the town marshal?” Allen Ring shoved his hat back on his head and reached for his tobacco. “That’s mighty interesting. Howsoever, let me remind you that you’re out of town right now.”

  “
That makes no difference.” Bilton’s voice was sharp. Ring could see that he was not accustomed to being told off, that his orders were usually obeyed. “You will get off this place before nightfall.”

  “It makes a sight of difference to me,” Allen replied calmly. “I bought this place by staking everything I had against it in a poker game. I drew four cards to win, a nine to match one I had and three aces. It was a fool play that paid off. I registered the deed. She’s mine, legal. I know of no law that allows a place to be kept idle because there was a murder committed on it. If, after all this time, it hasn’t been solved, I suggest the town get a new marshal.”

  Ross Bilton was angry, but he kept himself under control. “I’ve warned you, and you’ve been told to leave. If you do not leave, I’ll use my authority to move you.”

  Ring smiled. “Now, listen, Bilton. You might pull that stuff on some folks that don’t like trouble. You might bluff somebody into believing you had the authority to do this. You don’t bluff me, and I simply don’t scare … do I, Brule?”

  He turned on Brule so sharply that the man stiffened in his saddle, his hand poised as though to grab for a gun. The half-breed’s face stiffened with irritation, and then recognition came to him. “Allen Ring,” he said. “You again.”

  “That’s right, Brule. Only this time I’m not taking cattle through the Indian Nation. Not pushing them by that ratty bunch of rustlers and highbinders you rode with.” Ring turned his eyes toward Bilton. “You’re the law? And you ride with him? Why, the man’s wanted in every county in Texas for everything from murder to horse thieving.”

  Ross Bilton stared at Ring for a long minute. “You’ve been warned,” he said.

  “And I’m staying,” Ring replied sharply. “And keep your coyotes away if you come again. I don’t like ’em.”