Draw Straight

by Louis L'Amour

  “That’s good for me,” I agreed, “I’m not hunting trouble. I’ll do all I can to find that killer, and if you want, I’ll try to trail those men for you. I’ve ridden trails before,” I added, and I pointed this one right at Lynch, “and found out right where they ended.”

  Lynch didn’t like it, but no more than any other man did he have a stomach for gunplay in that close quarters. The presence of Win Dolliver was a big help and allowed him a chance to back out and save face.

  The same questions kept coming into my mind. How had they learned Wat Bell was headed this way? Why had Hugh Taylor told me to ask for Bill Keys on the Tin Cup when it was owned by Ludlow? Who had killed the old man, and why?

  Bill Keys was another puzzle. Taylor had said the man could be trusted, but he didn’t size up right to me. How good a description did he have of me? Or did he have one at all? Hugh might not have known him so well and could have been mistaken in trusting him. For one, I was doing no talking until I understood the lay of the land.

  Something else had come into my mind that somehow I’d never thought of before. When Hugh Taylor had met me that night and told me of my uncle’s murder, and that I was wanted for it, I had thought of little else. True, I had left town rather suddenly after a quarrel with old Tom Bell, but that he had been murdered on the night I left for Mexico, I’d had no idea until then. Hugh had showed me the “reward” poster but had assured me that he didn’t believe me guilty. He had investigators working on the crime and advised me to go away and stay in hiding until he sent for me.

  My mind was full of questions. Had my uncle left a will? And to whom had he left two hundred thousand acres of his ranch? And who had killed him?

  Bill Keys got up and turned toward the door, and my eyes dropped to his gun, absently noting that a chip had been broken from the bone handle and the break looked recent. Sheriff Ross Lynch and Bates followed him out, and then Dolliver and I. When he rode around the corner of the house, Keys was saddling a horse with which to carry the body into town.

  Once around the house, I slid from the saddle and scrambled into the rocks. A hasty look showed me only one thing: the gun was gone!

  Win Dolliver looked at me curiously but said nothing until we were well along the trail to the Tumbling T. It was just six miles, and Dolliver talked pleasantly and easily of the country, the cattle, and the rain. Ludlow had been running only about six hundred head, while he had four times that many. Keys and Bates, holding a ranch in partnership, ran a few head over west.

  When we were in sight of his own ranch, Win turned. “Did you get a good look at those riders? Enough to know them again?”

  “No,” I admitted, realizing this was the first pointed question he had asked and wondering what was behind it, “but one of them lost a gun back there. When I looked … it was gone.”

  “Maybe you just didn’t find it?”

  “No, I saw where it had been. There was a boot track near it.”

  We didn’t say anything more right then, because the door opened and a girl stepped out on the porch, and I forgot everything I had been thinking and all that had happened.

  There is no description for a girl like that. It was simply that this was the girl I had been looking for all my life. It wasn’t a matter of eyes nor hair, although hers were beautiful, it was simply that here she was, the girl that was meant for me. She was trimly shaped and neat, and there was quick laughter in her eyes, and there was interest and appraisal, too.

  “Mag,” Dolliver said, swinging down, “meet the Papago Kid. He’s riding through the country and has had a little trouble with Ross Lynch.”

  “That’s nothing against him on the T!” Maggie Dolliver replied with spirit. “You know what I think of Ross.”

  Win chuckled. “Everybody should after the way you told him off at the last Latigo dance. But what about Howie Taber?”

  She flushed, and I didn’t miss that. The name struck me, too.

  “Who did you say?” I asked.

  “Taber. He is a partner of Lynch’s in a ranch they have out here. At least, Taber owns the ranch, and Lynch runs the cows when he’s not working at being sheriff. Pretty well off, Taber is. And he made quite a play for Maggie when he was out here last.”

  * * * * *

  Maggie made better coffee than Win, I found, and her cookies were wonderful. I listened, mostly, and answered a few random questions about Mexico. Then I started in and asked my first question.

  “What about Keys? Who is he?”

  “Keys?” The question puzzled Dolliver. “Frankly, I don’t like the man. He ranches some with Bates, as I said, and he and Lynch are thicker than thieves. There’s a story around that he ran with that horse-stealing outfit down in the Bradshaws, but I wouldn’t know how true it is. He’s also supposed to be something of a gun hawk. He has killed one man I know of … a drifter in Latigo.”

  Maggie looked at me curiously, then a thought seemed to occur to her, and she turned to Win. “What I can’t understand is why anyone would want to kill a nice old man like Simon Ludlow.”

  “It was a mistake,” I said, repeating what I had overheard when I rode up on the killers. “I think they were looking for someone else.”

  “But who?” Win puzzled. “And why?”

  “I think,” I said deliberately, “they were looking for me. I think they saw a rider at the expected place and shot him, then finished him off to prevent him talking when they found their mistake.”

  “But who was it they were after?” Maggie demanded.

  “Me,” I repeated dryly. “I think they wanted me.”

  Moreover, I told myself, if they had wished to kill me and had failed, they would surely try again. Had they been sure that I was Wat Bell rather than the Papago Kid, they would have insisted I go to town with them and shot me, “trying to escape” on the way in. As it was, probably Win Dolliver’s presence had saved me at first sight.

  “Don’t take what I said about working too seriously,” Win volunteered, after a moment. “My main idea was to get you away from Lynch without a fight. He’s tough, and he didn’t like you. I could see that. Dangerous as he is, I think you’ve more to fear from Bill Keys.”

  Neither of them asked me any questions, nor why I believed it had been me the killers wanted. Whatever their reason for inviting me here, and I was convinced there was a reason, they asked no questions and offered no information.

  III

  Nevertheless, I was up at daybreak with the hands, ate breakfast with them and with Win, and rode out to work with them. Later in the morning, when Maggie came out to join us, I overheard him tell her: “Whatever else he may be, Mag, he’s a hand. He’s done more work than any two of the regular boys.”

  Maybe it was because these cedar brakes were easy after brush-popping down in the Big Bend, where I had worked two years, but I did get a lot done. And maybe because it was good to have a rope in my hands and a cow by the tail instead of only a gun. Yet all the time I worked, my mind was busy, and it didn’t like what seemed to be the truth.

  A lot of loose ends were beginning to find their way to a common point, and I had begun to see that in skipping out of Texas, I had made a big mistake. Hugh Taylor, aside from being my cousin was also my friend, or so I had believed. From anyone but him, I would never have taken the advice he had given.

  Hugh Taylor had run off from the ranch where we were growing up when he was sixteen, and returned again after four years. After being around a year, he took off again, and returned some months later with money and a silver-mounted saddle. He was bigger than I and rugged. He was also two years older. A top hand at anything he did, he stood high in my uncle’s favor.

  Yet I’d worked on at the ranch, never leaving, punching cows, mending fence, riding herd. I had taken two herds north over the trail, and I’d had a gunfight in Abilene and killed my man. I wasn’t proud of that, and as only
a few of the trail hands returned, and they promised not to talk, nobody around the XY knew. Later, when I was down in the Big Bend with a bunch of cattle, we had trouble with Mexican bandits, and I went into their camp, brought back some stolen horses, and did it without firing a shot.

  Finally, when I was twenty-four, Uncle Tom and I had a big argument, and I got mad and lit out for Mexico. Crossing the border, I didn’t want to be known as Uncle Tom Bell’s nephew, so I called myself the Papago Kid. Riding through Coahuila to Durango, I had several fights, and then moving up into Sonora, I tied up with old Valverdes and protected his ranch against bandits. While there I had two more gunfights, one with a Mexican gunman, the other with an American.

  Then, after being away two years, I had returned across the border, and the first person I’d met was Hugh. At the time it seemed a stroke of luck, and I remember how startled he was to see me.

  “You here, Wat?” he had exclaimed. “Don’t you know you’re wanted for murder?”

  That got me, and in reply to my heated questions, he told me that the night after our quarrel, Uncle Tom had been shot and killed, that I was sought as the killer, but a story had returned to the XY that I had been killed by bandits in Mexico.

  “Your best bet is to get out of here,” he told me. “Ride west to Arizona. I’ve some friends out there, and in the meantime I’ll do what I can to straighten this up.”

  So my uncle was dead, and they believed I had killed him. I hadn’t, but somebody else had, and who was that somebody? Also, what kind of a deal had Hugh sent me into at the Tin Cup? I arrive to find a man murdered, and the sheriff hunting a Texas outlaw known as Wat Bell—and knowing exactly where to find him and when.

  That last didn’t make sense until I began to remember my last stop before getting there. It had been in Lincoln, New Mexico, and I had stopped there with a friend of Hugh Taylor’s. Now if that friend had wired Sheriff Lynch, and Lynch had done a little figuring as to miles a day, it would not be too hard to arrive at the day of my arrival at the Tin Cup —a sufficiently secluded spot for murder.

  Uncle Tom Bell had no relatives anyone knew of but Hugh and myself, so he would naturally leave his two hundred thousand acres to us, and if one of us died, then the other would inherit everything. I didn’t like to think that of Hugh, but he had been a little greedy, I remembered, even as a youngster.

  A few discreet inquiries around proved that nobody had ever heard of Hugh Taylor, yet Taylor knew people here, and they knew him. I was still studying about that when Mag loped her pony over to where I sat my horse watching the herd we’d bunched.

  “Win tells me you’re a hand,” she said, smiling at me. “I hope you decide to stay. He likes you, and it will be lonesome for him after I leave.”

  That hit me hard. I turned in my saddle. “After you leave? Then you’re going away?”

  She must have seen something in my face, because hers suddenly changed, and the smile went out of it. “I … I’m going to be married,” she said quietly.

  That was all. Neither of us had another thing to say right then. For me, she had said it all. If in all the world there was a girl for me, this was the one. I wanted her as I never had wanted anything. But I was just the Papago Kid and a fugitive from the law.

  What she was thinking, I have no idea, but she didn’t look happy. We just sat there watching the herd until it started to move. There were enough men to handle it, and I made no move to follow.

  “You’re quiet,” she said finally, “you don’t say anything.”

  “What can I say?” I asked her honestly enough. “You’ve just said it all.”

  She didn’t act mystified and want an explanation, for she knew as well as I what I meant and how I felt. She did finally say something, and it was so much what a lot of girls would have said that it enabled me to get my feet on the ground again.

  She said: “You’ve only known me a few hours.”

  “How long does it take? Is there a special time, or something? A special set of rules that says flatly a man has to know a girl three weeks, seventeen hours, and nine minutes before he can fall in love with her? And another set that says she must know him six months, four hours, and five minutes before she can admit she likes him?

  “There isn’t any time limit and there never has been,” I told her. “To some people it comes quick, to others slow. With me it was the minute you walked out on the porch back there, and I rode into the yard. That’s exactly when it was. The rest doesn’t matter.”

  My voice wasn’t a lover’s voice. It was pretty sharp and hard, because I felt just that way. Then it hit me all of a sudden, and I could see it plain as day.

  “Well, at least he didn’t steal you!”

  She looked up quickly, her eyes going wide with surprise. “Steal me? Who?”

  “Hugh Taylor,” I said.

  “Who?” she looked puzzled and a little frightened. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Howie Taber … the one who was a friend of Lynch’s, only his name is Hugh Taylor, and he’s my cousin.”

  “Your cousin?” She was staring at me now, but there was not so much surprise in her eyes as I had expected. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about a big, blond, and handsome man with broad shoulders and deep-set blue eyes, a man with a small scar on the point of his chin, who rides good horses and wears flashy clothes and handles a gun well. That’s who I mean. A man who is my cousin but who could easily have called himself Howie Taber.”

  Her face was white now, but she was staring right through me. “And what is your name?” she demanded.

  “I’m Wat Bell,” I told her. “I am the man Lynch was looking for at the Tin Cup, and how did he know I’d be there? Only one man in all the world knew it, and that man was Hugh … who I thought was my best friend.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said, “I don’t believe any of it. You may know him, but you’re an outlaw, masquerading under a false name. You’ve made all this up.”

  “All right,” I said, “I made it up.” With that I reined my horse around and started back for the T. If I had been riding Rowdy, I’d never have gone back at all, but this was a cow horse I’d borrowed, wanting to save the big black after his long trek across country.

  There was only one thing in my mind then, to get Rowdy and hit the trail out of there, but fast. And where to? Back to Texas! To prove that I hadn’t killed my uncle. To prove that I was no outlaw.

  The cow horse I was on was a good horse, and he took me over the hill to the T at a fast lope, and I came up from behind the corrals and hit the dirt and then stopped. Right there across the yard from me was Ross Lynch, and beside him was Gene Bates. Win Dolliver was on the step, and his face looked dark as death and just as solemn.

  Lynch stepped out toward me and stopped. “Wat Bell!” he said. “I arrest you for murder!”

  “Whose murder?” I demanded.

  “The murder of Simon Ludlow!” he said. Then he smiled. “There is a charge against you in Texas, but we’ll hang you for this one!”

  I was mad all the way through. My hands swinging at my sides, I looked at him. “Ross Lynch, I did not murder Ludlow, and you damned well know it. You know it because you know who did. And I know. It was …”

  Gene Bates’s hand swept down for a gun, as did the hand of Lynch. My own guns were coming up, and I took a quick step forward and right and fired quickly—too quickly. My first bullet knocked the gun from the sheriff ’s hand, and I hadn’t intended it that way. I wanted to kill him. The second one took Gene Bates right over the belt buckle.

  Win Dolliver hadn’t moved. He stood there on the steps, his eyes wide. But what he thought, he wasn’t saying. I don’t know where Maggie was. On the bunkhouse steps were two of the boys, and another one stood at the corral. He turned to his saddle pockets and dug out a box of .44s.

  “C
atch!” he said simply, and tossed it.

  “Thanks!” I caught the box in my left hand and backed toward the corral.

  Lynch was holding his numbed hand and staring at me.

  “I’ll kill you for this!” he said. “I’ll kill you if it’s the last thing I do!”

  “If you do, it will be,” I told him.

  Astride the cow pony, I looked at Win. “Thanks, Dolliver. You’ve been mighty square. Simon Ludlow was killed by Gene Bates and Bill Keys. That chip on the bone handle of Keys’s gun was broken off when it fell into the rocks, you know where.”

  Then I reined my horse around and hit the trail at a fast run.

  * * * * *

  That pony had worked hard, but he was game. He stayed with that run until he hit timber, and then I slowed him down to a canter and then to a walk. After that, I began to Injun my trail. I took so many twists and turns, I was dizzy, and I rode up and down several streams, across several shelves of rock, and through some sand. And then I doubled back and headed for the Tin Cup.

  My horse wouldn’t go far, and he needed rest. I needed food. There was food in the cabin, and every chance they wouldn’t think of it right away. Also, it was within striking distance of the T, and I had no idea of leaving Rowdy. That big black horse meant a lot to me, and ever since old Valverdes gave him to me, I’d treated him like a child.

  Now I was an outlaw, having resisted arrest, the first crime I’d committed. But if I could prove that Bates and Keys had killed Ludlow, and with the sheriff ’s knowledge, I’d be in the clear even on that. And it was something I intended to prove.

  From the expression on Lynch’s face, I knew that shooting of mine had been a distinct shock. Hugh hadn’t warned them about that simply because he didn’t know. Hugh had always beaten me in shooting matches. That was before I went to Mexico. He had probably told Lynch I was only a fair shot. Well, the shooting that knocked the gun from his hand and drilled Bates had been good shooting, the kind he wouldn’t be too anxious to tackle again.