Texas

by James A. Michener

  Finally Peavine rode up to Macnab: ‘I’m headin’ back.’

  Otto nodded approvingly as the notorious killer turned and started west, but before the man had gone even a few paces, he called: ‘If you try to come back, I’ll kill you.’ Rattlesnake said nothing.

  By the end of December 1883, Ranger Otto Macnab had every reason to believe that he had quelled the feud, as he had been directed to do, but in the back of his mind he still suspected that the Rattlesnake might slither back into Fort Garner to complete the killing for which he had been hired, so Macnab had the prudent thought of reporting in writing to the governor:

  Fort Garner

  Larkin County

  27 December 1883

  Excellency:

  Obedient to your orders I came to this town, arrested the leaders of both parties to the Larkin County feud and pacified them. They proved to be sensible men and tractable, and I expect no more trouble from them.

  However, there is a possibility that the hired killer Rattlesnake Peavine who is hiding in New Mexico might sneak back to resume the killing, as he was at one time hired by the Bates to do this. I do not know whether to stay here or return to my family and shall await your instructions.

  Otto Macnab

  The governor thought it safe to bring the Ranger back, but ten days after Otto rode out of Fort Garner, Peavine rode in. He headed straight for Lawyer Parmenteer’s office, where he kicked open a rear door and shot Parmenteer in the back before the latter could reach for his gun.

  Macnab was on his way home, well south of Palo Pinto County, riding quietly along his preferred back roads, when he stopped at the growing village of Lampasas and sought lodging with a farmer he had assisted years before when bandits threatened the area. ‘They could of used you up north,’ the farmer said.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Them Larkin County maniacs.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Rattlesnake Peavine come into town and shot Daniel Parmenteer in the back. All hell broke loose and there must be a dozen dead.’

  Macnab said nothing. He ate his evening meal of hard-fried steak and brown gravy, accepted the bed the farmer provided out of gratitude for past favors, and left early next morning. He rode mournfully south, lost in defeat, heading not for home but for Austin, where he told the governor: ‘I’ve got to go get him.’ The governor, who had already accepted full blame for ordering Macnab home, said: ‘Shoot that son-of-a-bitch if you have to trail him to Alaska,’ and Macnab replied: ‘You can depend on it.’

  Now he rode west to explain things to his wife, and when she expressed her disappointment about his heading back to trouble, and at his age, he said simply: ‘The world is a muddy place, and if good men don’t try to clean it up, bad men will make it a swamp.’

  Emma Rusk often suspected that she was having so much trouble with her white son, Floyd, because she had rejected her Indian son, Blue Cloud, for although she lavished unwavering love upon Floyd, he refused to reciprocate. At the beginning he had been a normal child, robust and lively, but from the age of six, when he began to realize who his parents were and in what ways they differed from other fathers and mothers, he began to draw away from them, and it pained her to watch the bitterness with which he reacted to life. He was not difficult, he was downright objectionable, and she sometimes thought that it would be better if he moved in with the rough-and-ready Yeagers, who might knock some sense into him.

  His principal dislike was his mother, for he saw her as unlike other women, and on those painful occasions when he came upon her without her nose, he would blanch and turn away in horror, but it was when he became vaguely aware of how babies were born that he suffered his greatest revulsion, for he had learned from other children in the stone houses about his mother’s long captivity with the Indians and of what they had done to her. He was not sure what rape involved, but he had been told by eager informants who knew no more than he that many Indian men had raped his mother, and from the manner in which this was reported, he knew that something bad had happened.

  He thus had two reasons for his antipathy, his mother’s physical difference and the fact that she had been abused by Indians, and it became impossible for him to accept her love. Whatever she did or attempted to do he interpreted as compensation for some massive wrong in which she had participated, and in time he grew to hate the sight of her, as if she reminded him of some terrible flaw in himself.

  He grew equally harsh toward his father, for he had learned from the same cruel children, who, like others their age, were eager to believe the worst and report upon it immediately, that his father was a Quaker, ‘not like other people.’ They said that he was so cowardly he refused to fight: ‘At the tank, which he and Mr. Yeager had fenced in, this man Poteet forced him to back down. He was scared yellow.’ In an area where a gun was the mark of the man, the fact that Earnshaw refused to carry one proved this charge.

  There had also been an ugly incident in which a wandering badman of no great fame had stumbled into Fort Garner and tried to hold up the place. He had chosen the Rusk residence for his first strike, and finding Earnshaw with no gun, had terrorized the place for some time before Floyd escaped and ran screaming to the Yeagers: ‘Pop’s being shot at by a robber!’

  Within the minute Frank Yeager had dashed across the open space of the parade ground, burst into the Rusk home, and shot the befuddled gunman dead. As they stood over the corpse, Yeager repeated something he had said before: ‘Earnshaw, a Texan without a gun is like a Longhorn without horns. It just ain’t natural.’

  So now, if Floyd saw his mother as stained because of her experiences with the Indians, he saw his father as emasculated because Frank Yeager had been forced to protect the Rusk household. He was therefore a bewildered, unhappy lad as he approached his teens, and it occurred to him that he must do something about the deficiencies in which he was enmeshed. Concerning his mother, he could do nothing except continue to repel the love she tried to bestow upon him, but the glaring faults in his father’s character could be corrected. For one thing, he could behave in a manner totally unlike his rather pathetic father, and he began in a calculated way to make this adjustment.

  He went to Jaxifer: ‘If I can get the money, will you help me?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘How much must I give you for a pistol?’

  ‘Now what do you need a pistol for?’

  ‘Like when that man came to our house.’

  ‘Yep. Man oughta have a pistol, time like that.’

  It was agreed that Jaxifer would provide Floyd with a revolver in fairly good working order, and some shells, for six dollars, and now the problem became how to accumulate so much money.

  In these troubled days the United States government did not provide enough currency to enable men to conduct their businesses. This did not mean that there wasn’t enough to provide charity to feckless idlers who refused to work; it meant there wasn’t enough to pay the men and women who did work. The cause of the trouble was avarice; those fortunate few who already had money, or who worked at jobs whose salaries enabled them to acquire some, saw that it was to their advantage to keep the national supply meager, for then those who lacked funds would have to work doubly hard to earn a portion of what the well-to-do already controlled.

  On the Texas frontier cash was in such short supply, thanks to policy decisions formulated by the money-masters in New York and Boston, that hard-working cowboys like the two black cavalrymen rarely saw actual cash, and when they did, it was apt to be Mexican, French or English coins dating from the 1700s, with Spanish coins circulating at a premium. It was a great system for the rich, who could command excessive rates for the money they had acquired, a miserable system for people endeavoring to accumulate enough funds to start a business or keep one going.

  Earnshaw Rusk, a man of uncommon insight, saw early the great damage being done by the monetary policy of his nation, for although he and Emma had gained their start through the large lan
d grants obtained by her family and from the free horses and cattle that roamed the prairie in those earlier days, he was aware that others who followed were having a desperate time. Out of regard for them, he wrote frequent letters to the Defender explaining his interpretation of the money problem. By imperceptible steps, none consciously taken at the time, he progressed from being merely aware of the problem, to a Free Silver man who argued that silver should be cast into coins at a much greater rate and at a higher value than was now being done, to an avowed Greenbacker who pleaded for the printing and circulation of more paper money, to an incipient radical Populist who believed that the government ought to protect and not harass its citizens. Long before a much greater orator and thinker than he took up the subject, Earnshaw was warning the people of Larkin County that ‘we are slaves to gold,’ and people in the growing town began accusing Rusk of being a radical, a socialist and an atheist, giving his son reason for being an opponent of his father’s social beliefs, a loud adherent of religion as practiced by Mrs. Yeager, and a strong advocate of guns. In one of his letters to the editor, Earnshaw had said:

  I do believe the same family income buys less and less each week, even though the total supply of money diminishes. This is self-contradictory, and I cannot explain it.

  The cause was simple. Floyd Rusk was systematically stealing as much as he could from both his mother and his rather, and after he had paid the cavalryman more than two and a half dollars for the promised gun, his father caught him taking two Mexican coins.

  ‘What in the world is thee doing in that jar, Floyd?’

  ‘I was looking at the different coins.’

  ‘Thee knows thee is not to touch that jar. Nobody is except thy mother. Not even me.’

  ‘She told me I could.’

  It was obvious to Earnshaw that his son was lying, because Emma so treasured the few coins she was able to hoard that she allowed no one to approach them. Rusk knew he ought to have a showdown with his son here and now, but he evaded it because to do so would necessitate involving Emma; he knew that she was already in difficult straits with her headstrong boy and he did not want to exacerbate this. So the moment of significant challenge passed, and Earnshaw said weakly: ‘Don’t touch that jar. Thy mother wouldn’t like it.’

  He did not report the affair to his wife, nor could he guess that his son had stolen from his savings too. It would have appalled him to know that the combined thefts totaled nearly six dollars, a considerable amount, and he would have been even more distressed had he known that these thefts had been planned and conducted over an extended period of time. His son was in training to be an accomplished thief, and before the year was out he was a thief with a very good army revolver hidden in an unsuspected corner of the Rusk house.

  Fort Garner buzzed with rumors when Ranger Macnab rode back into town. He knocked on the Holley door to ask if he could stay there for a few days, during which it became apparent that he had come to deal with Rattlesnake Peavine if he could flush out that murderous fugitive. Floyd Rusk, possessor of his own gun, was at Macnab’s side constantly, asking for pointers on how real gunfighters handled their weapons, and Otto told him a secret the boy chose to ignore: ‘Only one, son. Know you’re right and keep coming.’

  When Floyd asked if it was true that he was after Peavine, Otto said: ‘Rangers are always after whoever’s done wrong,’ and then he disappeared, heading south. But Floyd, a student of shootings, told Molly Yeager, a brash child with her own interest in such matters: ‘When a Ranger heads south, you can be sure he’s really going in some other direction. Macnab is heading west to see if he can track down the Rattlesnake.’

  Floyd’s guess was correct, for after a long detour to the south Macnab made easy adjustments in his heading, winding up in the general direction of Palo Duro Canyon. As he approached the deep depression he saw signs which tempted him to turn sharply southwest to where a tiny settlement lay across the New Mexico border.

  As he rode into town it was like a hundred other episodes on the long frontier: a Ranger comes cautiously into a village, looking this way and that, asking a few questions, nodding and passing on. But this time as Macnab headed toward the western exit, a small, wiry man in his late sixties watched him ride past, waited till he was a few feet down the road, then slipped out, positioned his left arm to serve as a platform, and pumped four quick bullets into the Ranger’s back.

  With supreme effort Macnab held himself in the saddle, aware that he had been most savagely hit but hoping that the shots might not be fatal. With what strength remained, he turned to face his assailant, who now blasted Otto square in the face and chest. Without a sound, the little Ranger slid from his saddle and fell awkwardly into the New Mexico dust.

  Five Texas Rangers set out to kill Amos Peavine, and they tracked him for many weeks, coming upon him one morning at seven in a dirty eating house near Phoenix, Arizona Territory. When the coroner examined the body he found that it had been shot seven times in the back, twice more from the left side and twice more from the right side well to the back. Considering the Rattlesnake’s long reign of terror and the relief at his justified death, the coroner saw no reason to publish the fact that the Rangers had killed him with eleven bullets from the rear.

  When Floyd Rusk, back in Fort Garner, heard the news, he told Molly Yeager: ‘I’ll bet he died like a man. I’ll bet all five of the Rangers was terrified when they came onto the Rattlesnake.’

  Floyd, the would-be gunman, had learned the value of money through stealing enough to purchase a revolver; his father would now learn in an equally perilous game. Although he had scrimped on his family’s expenditures and paid his savings into the bank to reduce his loan, 1885 found him with $135 still outstanding, and cautious though he was, he could not seem to get ahead by that amount.

  Of course, he paid the interest regularly because he knew that if he didn’t, Mr. Weatherby could declare him in default and take his ranch away from him; the terms of the mortgage were quite clear on this, and the possibility so terrified Rusk that he was usually a day or two early in paying the interest.

  But now, when money was tightest, he saw that the banker had another stranglehold on him, for on two occasions recently Mr. Weatherby had suddenly and arbitrarily called mortgages on unsuspecting ranchers and farmers; that is, he had demanded full payment at a time when he knew the rancher had no chance of paying it. In each case, according to Texas law, the rancher was judged to have been in default, which meant that if the bank let the man keep his homestead—house and small acreage attached—it could claim title to the rest of the ranch, and thus accumulate valuable land.

  ‘That was so unfair!’ Earnshaw cried when he heard of the second foreclosing. ‘A man spends two thousand dollars for his land. He spends another two thousand improving it. For seven years he meets every mortgage payment, and then because he can’t come up with a hundred and seventy-five dollars, he loses everything.’

  Rusk often misunderstood business details, and this time he had the situation only partly right, for in the case cited, when the bank foreclosed, it was merely to obtain its outstanding debt, $175. When the ranch was sold at a sheriff’s sale, any income beyond that belonged to the former owner, but now the trick was to rig the sale so that either the bank or someone associated with it bought the ranch for a pittance, which meant that there was little or nothing to be returned to the original owner.

  When Rusk found that the courts, the newspapers, the churches and the customs of the countryside all supported such moral thievery, he became so enraged that he felt compelled to protest in the Defender:

  Surely, the Grange and the Farmer’s Alliance are right when they argue that the laws of a nation ought to support the homeowner, the small businessman, the young family trying to get started. No law should allow a bank to deprive a man of his residence and his means of earning a living. If the United States had arranged its affairs so that money was more reasonably available, then the paying off of a mortgage could be do
ne, and people who refused to pay should be punished. But the nation keeps the money supply so constricted that even a prudent man cannot accumulate enough cash to pay his debts, much as he would like to. Something in our society is badly wrong when a good rancher like Nils Bergstrom loses his ranch because he cannot get his hands on a little cash.

  No one read Earnshaw’s letter with more anger than Banker Weatherby, and when the economy was at its depth, he informed the Rusks that he must demand the balance of his loan, $135, payable as the contract stipulated within thirty days. ‘But thee promised me thee’d never do this,’ Rusk protested, and Weatherby said: ‘Conditions have changed. The bank must have its money, now.’

  Then began the month of hell, because in all of Fort Garner, or Larkin County too, there was no one from whom the Rusks could borrow that missing $135. There were ranches worth $6,000 or $7,000, counting land and cattle, which had less than $30 in cash, and these meager funds were so necessary to keep the place operating that to lend them out would have been impossible.

  The Rusks themselves, with a ranch now worth nearly $9,000, considering its fencing and cattle, could assemble less than $50, and Mr. Weatherby would not consider any partial payment; he was entitled by law to his full amount and he intended to collect it, or take over the ranch.

  In despair, Earnshaw laid the prospects before his family: ‘Through no fault of our own, we stand to lose our ranch. Emma, thy cattle were never better, but we can’t sell them to anyone here. Floyd, we pay only a little for thy schooling, but it can’t be continued. We must all try till the last legal day to find this money, and if we fail, well, others better than we have failed before us.’

  As he said these words the awfulness of his family’s position overwhelmed him, and he wept, an act which sickened his son, who said boldly: ‘Someone ought to shoot that Mr. Weatherby.’