Texas

by James A. Michener

  The judge was dead, of that there could not be the slightest doubt, because four quick bullets had ripped his abdomen apart and he lay bleeding in the middle of the street. Lawyer Parmenteer walked steadily and without emotion to the sheriffs office, where he turned in his gun with the words ‘A good deed done on a good day,’ a verdict in which the town concurred.

  Most towns in Texas had known such incidents, but this particular crime posed extraordinary problems for the editor of the Larkin County Defender.

  ‘Jackson,’ the young man said to his assistant as they discussed how to handle this case, ‘we have a problem.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Let me talk with the two dozen people who saw the shooting.’

  ‘The facts? We have no problem with them. The question is, how do we deal with them?’

  ‘We just say “Lawyer Daniel Parmenteer—” ’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Killed Judge Bates.’

  ‘We dare not say boldly “Lawyer Parmenteer killed Judge Bates.” Sounds too blunt, too accusatory.’

  ‘The truth is: “Lawyer Parmenteer, brother of the noted outlaw—” ’ ‘Stop. No mention of the brother. We’d have both of them gunning for us.’

  ‘You may be right. So it’s “Lawyer Parmenteer murders—” ’

  ‘Impossible to say that, Jackson. Murder implies guilt.’

  ‘How about “Lawyer Parmenteer shoots—” ’

  ‘I’m afraid of that on two counts. If we stress that he was a lawyer, it might be interpreted as our prejudicing the case. And we cannot use the word shoot. Sounds as if he intended to do it.’

  ‘My God! He walked up to him, if what I hear is true, spoke to him once, and pumped him full of lead. If that isn’t shooting …’

  ‘You don’t understand, Jackson. We must not print a single word that in any way impugns either the motives or the actions of two of our leading citizens.’

  So Fordson and Jackson agonized over how to handle the biggest story of the year, and they decided that there was almost nothing they could say which would not infuriate either Lawyer Parmenteer on the one hand, or the relatives of Judge Bates on the other. They could not point out that the lawyer had acted because a court case had gone against him, nor could they state what everybody in two counties knew, that Judge Bates was a drunken reprobate who took bribes on the side, as he had flagrantly done in the case which Parmenteer had lost.

  In fact, there was almost nothing that the Defender could say about this case except that it had happened, and even that simple statement posed the most delicate problems, and when it came time to draft the headline, young Fordson found himself right back at the beginning, REGRETTABLE KILLING ON MAIN STREET had to be discarded for three reasons: to stress Main Street would imply that the sheriff had been delinquent; to use the word killing was simply too harsh, for as the governor himself had argued in his now-famous letter ‘Texans do not go around killing people,’ and regrettable might prove most troublesome of all, because it implied that the killing was unjustified, and to say this could well bring Lawyer Parmenteer storming into the editorial offices bent on another killing that would be justified.

  One by one the two newspapermen discarded the traditional headline words: deplorable, brutal, savage. They all had to go, until young Jackson wailed: ‘What can we say?’ and Fordson remembered: ‘There was this case in East Texas last year. They got away with calling it a fuss.’

  ‘You mean that Copperthwaite case? Three men dead on Main Street, within five feet of one another? They called that a fuss?’

  ‘In Texas you do,’ Fordson said, and then in a stroke of genius he dashed off a headline that might work: UNFORTUNATE RENCONTRE IN FORT GARNER.

  ‘What in hell is a rencontre?’ Jackson asked, pronouncing the word in three syllables.

  ‘It’s a polite French way of saying that someone got shot in the gut. But I’m not too happy about the word unfortunate. The Parmenteer people might take unkindly to that. We don’t want to launch a feud.’ Fordson sighed, then said resignedly: ‘No big headlines at all. No talks with any of the witnesses. Just something that happened on Main Street?’ And when that week’s edition of the Defender appeared, readers scanned the front page in vain for any big handling of the story; on page three, buried among notices of meetings and offerings of new goods in the store, appeared the inconspicuous story: RENCONTRE IN FORT GARNER, with no adjectives, no gory details, and certainly no aspersions cast on either side.

  The editor was applauded for his good taste and Daniel Parmenteer actually bowed to him as they passed. The lawyer was not apprehended for the killing because no one could be found in Fort Garner who had seen it, and the incoming judge, pleased to have had worthless Judge Bates removed from the bench so he could occupy it, held that because the killing occurred before he assumed jurisdiction, he could ignore it.

  Indeed, the Parmenteer-Bates affair would have subsided like a hundred other murders in these frontier areas had not the younger Parmenteer, Cletus the outlaw, suddenly roared back into town, shot the place up, and stolen a horse. The gunfire could be forgiven as an act of high spirits, but the stealing of a horse went so against the grain of Texas morality that a posse had to be organized immediately: ‘Men, we can’t stand horse theft in this county!’ and sixteen amateur lawmen were sworn in prior to setting out to run down the criminal.

  By a stroke of poor luck, the leader of the posse—not designated by law but by noisy acclaim—turned out to be the younger brother of dead Judge Bates, and he prosecuted the chase with such a vengeance that by nightfall they had come upon the renegade struggling along with the stolen horse, which had gone lame. It was quite clear from the stories which circulated afterward that Cletus Parmenteer had remained astride his incapable horse and had tried to surrender, thinking no doubt that his brother could somehow defend him against the charge of theft, but Anson Bates as leader of the posse would have none of that.

  ‘What Anson done,’ one of the posse members explained to Daniel Parmenteer later, ‘was, he rode up to your brother and said “We don’t want none of your kind in jail,” and he blasted him six times, right through the chest, him standin’ no further away than I am from you.’

  When Lawyer Parmenteer heard this, he knew there was no possible response but for him to go shoot Anson Bates, which he did as the latter came out of the barbershop. ‘Unarmed, without a call so he could defend hisse’f,’ a Bates man explained to his clan, ‘this proud son-of-a-bitch kilt our second brother,’ and with that a general warfare erupted.

  The Bates gang killed four Parmenteers, but were never able to get Lawyer Daniel, who moved quietly about the county always armed. His people, fatal phrase, gunned down five Bates partisans, and before long the feud had spread, as such feuds always did, to the surrounding counties. For a while Bateses and Parmenteers fell like leaves, but most of the dead did not bear these names; the typical victim was some unimportant man like an Ashton farming in Jack County or a Lawson in Young who happened for some obscure reason to side with one party or the other. By the close of 1881 seventeen people were dead in the Bates-Parmenteer feud, and the former side vowed that the fighting would never stop ‘until that sinful bastard Daniel Parmenteer lies punctured from head to toe eatin’ dust.’

  In December 1881 word of the Larkin County feud reached the Eastern newspapers, one of which pointed out that more white men had already died than had been lost in most of the Indian attacks in the area during the preceding decade. At that point even the governor conceded that he must do something, and what he did was so alien to what an Eastern governor might do that it, too, attracted considerable national attention.

  He summoned to his office in Austin a short, wiry sixty-one-year-old man and told him: ‘Otto, this could well be the last assignment I’ll ever ask you to take. You’ve earned retirement, but you’re the best lawman we have. Go up there and slow those damned fools down.’

  So Ranger Otto Macnab returned to his ranch at Fredericksbu
rg, saddled up his best horse, loaded his mule with a tent, rations of food and one small case of ammunition, and prepared to head north toward Larkin County. His wife, Franziska, now fifty-four years old, had often watched him make such preparations, always with apprehension, for she and Otto had attended many funerals of Rangers who had lost their lives on similar lone-wolf missions, but she did not try to dissuade him. ‘Take care, Otto, do take care.’ He accepted the white linen duster she handed him, the fifth she had made during his years as a Ranger, then kissed her goodbye: ‘Take care of the ranch. Be sure the boys watch things.’

  He did not follow main roads, but used back trails through the lonely wastes of Llano, San Saba, Comanche and Palo Pinto counties into Jack County, where he made quiet inquiries as to developments in the Larkin County feud. In an eating house where he was not known, a farmer said at table: ‘Gonna get worse over there,’ but another contradicted him: ‘It’ll probably settle down. Friend told me the governor’s sendin’ in some Ranger to stop the killin’,’ and the first man replied: ‘Well, the Bateses is callin’ in some reinforcements of their own.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ the optimistic man asked, and the farmer explained: ‘I’m told that one of the Bates cousins, Vidal, went to New Mexico to hire Rattlesnake Peavine to come east and get Lawyer Parmenteer.’

  This ominous news was greeted with silence, and then the second farmer said, professionally: ‘That’s gonna produce a flock of new killin’s,’ to which the first man agreed: ‘Sure is.’

  They turned to Macnab: ‘You ever run across Peavine? Crippled left arm. But he only needs his right.’

  ‘Haven’t heard of him, but if he’s a New Mexico gunman …’

  ‘He’s a Texas gunman. Ran across the border to escape hangin’.’

  ‘Bad?’

  ‘The worst. The Bateses ain’t doin’ Texas any favor by bringin’ him back. And they ain’t doin’ Parmenteer any good a-tall.’

  In the morning Otto headed due west for Larkin County, knowing that Rattlesnake Peavine was approaching it headed east. Had someone from a superior vantage point been tracking the movements of Macnab on his western heading and Peavine on his eastern, he could have predicted that these two must collide somewhere near the town of Fort Garner, and he would have known that this would produce considerable wreckage, for Macnab was a man who never turned back or shied away from a difficult confrontation, while Peavine had acquired such mastery of guile and unexpected movement that after twenty years of continuous peril he was still known as one of the two or three most dangerous men in the West.

  Otto rode into town late one Thursday afternoon, a small, lone man leading a carefully laden mule that never looked up. He entered by the dusty road from Jacksborough, came slowly, quietly down Main Street, and tied up at the rack in front of the saloon. Watchers noticed that he did not tie the mule, a sign that he had used this beast many times before. No one guessed that he was a Ranger, for he bore not a single sign to indicate that.

  Inside the saloon he occasioned little comment, and when he asked in a quiet voice: ‘Any place a man could stay?’ they willingly told him of a farmer’s widow who took in boarders.

  ‘Food any good?’

  ‘Best in town,’ the men assured him, but with a shrug which indicated that even that wasn’t going to be too palatable. He ordered a beer but drank little of it, then headed out the door, untying his horse, leading it by the bridle, his mule following behind.

  He ensconced himself in the home of Widow Holley, where he said his name was Jallow, which caused some discussion among his fellow boarders: ‘What kind of name is that?’

  ‘I’ve often wondered. Mother said it was German, but she was Irish.’

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Galveston.’

  ‘Where you headin’?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Lookin’ for land?’ He nodded, and the men offered advice, to which he listened carefully.

  He spent the next five days visiting land that might be for sale and listening to accounts of the region. He was much impressed by the Quaker Rusk, and especially by stories of how he had found his bride, but Rusk said firmly: ‘No land of mine for sale.’

  As he went about, returning regularly to Mrs. Holley’s for his noon and evening meals so as to catch the gossip, he reached two conclusions: the Bateses were a mean and ugly lot who had indeed sent to New Mexico to import a notorious killer, and Lawyer Parmenteer was one of the most unpleasant men he had encountered in a long time. One night, after a stormy meeting with the man regarding a farm west of town, he muttered to himself: ‘If I ever saw a man who invites being killed, Daniel Parmenteer’s the one.’

  The lawyer was sanctimonious, vengeful, hateful in his personal relations, and mortally afraid of being shot. He apparently felt that his only protection lay in eliminating the Bateses and those associated with them, and to accomplish this he had instituted the worst kind of vigilante community, in which men went in fear of their brothers.

  On the sixth day Otto rose as usual, shaved, donned his usual dress, breakfasted with the boarders, then went to the stables, where he mounted his horse, adjusted the two pistols at his waist, and rode to where the Bates brothers lived at the eastern end of town. Dismounting in one quick swing of his leg, he walked quietly but quickly into the Bates house with pistols drawn, and announced: ‘Sam and Ed, you’re under arrest. Otto Macnab, Texas Ranger.’

  Before the startled men could respond in any way, even to the lifting of a cup to throw it, he had shackles about their wrists and a rope uniting them. He walked them quickly to a stout tree at the edge of town, to which he bound them, warning that he would shoot them dead if they tried to escape.

  He then rode back into town, where he stalked into the law offices of Daniel Parmenteer, arresting and securing him in the same way. Leading the lawyer into the street, he banged on the door of the sheriffs office and told him to fetch his deputy and follow immediately. When the sheriff started to ask questions, he snapped: ‘Otto Macnab, Texas Ranger,’ and on foot he led Parmenteer to the east edge of town, where he lashed him also to the big tree.

  When the sheriff arrived, Macnab told the prisoners, and the crowd that had gathered: ‘Bateses, Parmenteers, people of Larkin County. The feud is over. The killing has ended. My name is Otto Macnab, Texas Ranger, and I am telling you that this town is at rest.’ Some cheers greeted this welcome promise.

  He then went to stand before the Bates brothers: ‘You’ve had grievances, I know. And you’ve responded to them. But enough’s enough. We will stand for no more.’ Taking a long, sharp knife from his belt, he reached out and cut the two men free.

  Moving to Parmenteer, he said: ‘Daniel, you felt you had to vindicate your brother Cletus, and you have. We all understand, but we can tolerate no more. The feud is over.’ And he cut his cords too.

  But then Parmenteer asked a sensible question: ‘What about Peavine? They’ve sent to New Mexico to bring him in to kill me and my folks.’

  ‘I’ve been told that,’ Macnab said, never raising his voice, ‘and I shall go out now to warn Peavine not to enter this town. He is forbidden.’

  With that, he turned to the sheriff: ‘Now the job’s yours. Watch these men. Keep the peace.’ And he walked back to the center of town, where he recovered his horse, packed his mule once again, jammed his felt hat down upon his forehead, and rode out of town to intercept the Rattlesnake.

  He rode three days toward the New Mexico border, and toward dusk on the last day, saw figures on the horizon. Neither hurrying nor slowing down, he rode toward them.

  They turned out to be three soldiers on patrol from Fort Elliott, and as they camped under the stars, with the soldiers providing much better food than Otto could supply, they told him that they had crossed paths with two men named Bates and Peavine.

  ‘You say Bates and Peavine are still at Fort Elliott?’

  ‘They helped the captain hunt for deer … for the mess.’

 
In the morning the soldiers continued their patrol. Macnab headed for the distant fort, and at about noon he was rewarded by seeing two men coming eastward, each with two horses. Making sure that they must see him, he rode resolutely right at them, and at hailing distance he called out: ‘Peavine! Bates! This is Otto Macnab, Texas Ranger.’

  With no guns showing, he went directly up to them and said: ‘I’ve been sent to Larkin County to stop the killing. Four days ago I arrested your two nephews, Sam and Ed, and also Lawyer Parmenteer.’

  ‘He’s a killer!’ Bates growled.

  ‘I know he is, but so were your people, Bates. And now it’s ended.’

  Neither of the men responded to this, so Macnab said: ‘Rattlesnake, you’re not to come into Larkin County. You’re to turn around and head back for New Mexico. Bates, you can do as you wish.’

  ‘He’s comin’ with me,’ Bates said, and the one-armed man nodded.

  ‘If he steps foot in town, I shall arrest him. And if he resists, I’ll shoot him.’

  It was a moment of the most intense anxiety. The two men, watching Macnab’s hands, realized that if they made an aggressive move, he could whip out his guns and kill one of them, but they also knew that the survivor could surely kill Macnab. Since it was likely that the Ranger would aim at Peavine, Rattlesnake was careful not to make even the slightest false move.

  Showing no emotion, Macnab said: ‘You can kill me, but you know the entire force of Rangers will be on your neck tomorrow, and they’ll never stop. They’ll chase you to California, Peavine, but they’ll get you.’

  There was a very long silence, after which Macnab said gently: ‘Now, why don’t you two fellows split up? Rattlesnake, go home. Bates, ride back with me to a new kind of town where you can live in peace.’

  He edged his horse away, to give the men a chance to talk between themselves, and for nearly half an hour they did while he waited patiently, not dismounting and never taking his hands far from his guns, but moving close to his mule, whose load he kicked once or twice as if adjusting it.