L'Amour, Louis - Novel 06

by To Tame a Land

Bowers laughed. He had a laugh with no smile in it.

  “We’ll cut it,” he said.

  When they came up I’d been standing over the coffee pot with a fresh-filled cup. Now I stepped a little away from the fire, still holding the cup. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Bowers turned to look at me. He turned his head straight around and looked at me out of both eyes, the way a snake does. He had his gun tied down, and it was a Bisley Colt. I remember there was a patch on his vest, sewn with lighter material. The patch was below the heart.

  “We’ve got twenty-five fighting men,” he said, and he was measuring me. “We’ll cut it, all right.”

  “You don’t need twenty-five,” I said, stepping out a bit more from the fire. “You only need one if he’s good enough. Otherwise twenty-five couldn’t do it, nor fifty. The boys here,” I added, “like a fight. Ain’t had much fun this trip.”

  He kept looking at me. Mustang Roberts was off on my right. He had his leg bandaged but there was nothing wrong with his gun hand. Kid Beaton was a little farther over.

  “Who’re you?” he asked softly.

  “My name is Ryan Tyler,” I said, “and I own some of these cows.”

  Leet Bowers’s eyes glinted and his tongue touched his lips. He was laughing a little now. “Rye Tyler,” he said , “who killed Rice Wheeler and then let Burdette run him out of Colorado.”

  It was poor shooting light, with only the fire flickering, and the shadows uncertain and strange.

  “Burdette never ran me out of anywhere,” I said, “but that’s no matter. You ain’t cutting this herd.”

  “Burdette ran you out of Colorado,” he repeated, a taunt in his tone. “You’re yellow!”

  My first bullet cut the top of that white patch on his vest, my second notched the bottom of the hole made by the first.

  Leet Bowers fell with his head in the fire but he didn’t feel it. He was dead.

  It happened so fast that nobody had a chance to do anything, but no sooner had the sound of the shots died than Kid Beaton threw down on them with his Sharps. “You boys drag it,” he said, and gesturing toward the body , “Take that with you.”

  “Now,” said the cook. He was holding one of those old Colt revolving shotguns. “Or we can bury all of you here.”

  They dragged Leet Bowers out of the fire and slung him over his saddle. None of them looked so very spry and I’d say they’d lost some wind.

  Bennett walked toward them. “Don’t come near my herd. If so much as one cow is missing, we’ll hunt down every man jack of you and hang you to the highest tree. And if there isn’t a tree, we’ll drag you.”

  They rode off, drifting mighty quiet.

  Mustang Roberts looked around at me, drinking coffee.

  “See that? With his left hand, yet. And never spilled his coffee!”

  Bennett turned around to me. “Nice work, Tyler. I’ve heard of this man. He killed a rider two months ago and since then has had everything his own way.”

  For once I didn’t feel bad about a shooting. In Leet Bowers’s eyes there had been something vicious. The flat, mean look of a man who kills and wants to kill.

  Outside of Wichita, bunching the herd, Roberts rode over to me. “Goin’ back to Colorado?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Who’s this Burdette? Heard something of him?”

  “Gunman. Mighty salty, they say.”

  “Have trouble?”

  “Words.” I headed a steer back into the herd. “He had his chance.”

  “Seems he’s talkin’.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m not hunting trouble. But I am agoing back.”

  “Maybe I’ll ride along.”

  “Welcome.”

  In Wichita Bennett decided to hold his herd for a better price, and advised me to do the same. “It’s down from what it’s been, but there’s only a few cows around and no herd within miles. The price will go up.”

  “I’m selling,” I told him. “I want to go to Colorado.”

  He nodded, chewing on an unlighted cigar. Then he took the cigar from his lips and looked at it. “You stay with me,” he said. “We’ll make a good thing of this, then bring another herd from Texas. A few years and you’ll be a rich man.”

  “Maybe… . I don’t want to kill a man for every herd , though.”

  “Won’t have to.” He gestured south. “By now every herd cutter on the trail knows what happened to Leet Bowers. There’ll be no more trouble.”

  It was there for me. And I liked cattle drives. It was hard, brutal work, but it was strong work, good work, an d a man was doing things. There was talk of taking cattle to Wyoming and Montana, and there was open country up there. New country, fresh country.

  But there was a girl in Colorado I kept thinking about.

  She had been only a youngster then, but by now . .

  “No,” I told him. “Thanks anyway. I’m going back.”

  “Burdette?”

  “No. I hope I never see him. It’s . . well, there’s somebody there I want to see. And there’s that ranch I want.”

  Two days later I sold for a nice price and left there with more than seven thousand dollars. Some I carried in gold, some in a draft on a St. Louis bank. Mustang Roberts rode along with me.

  It was late fall, the air turning crisp and sharp. I liked the feel of it because it reminded me of the high country.

  We rode west, heading for Dodge.

  The new town was at the end of the tracks, and crowded with hide hunters, the buffalo men of the plains country. We crowded up to the bar for a drink, something I rarely did, but I wanted to see how things went in this wild town.

  The first person I saw was Billy Dixon, whom I’d known in Kansas City.

  “Come with me,” he argued. “I’m going out west of here and shoot in the big herd. We can make a fortune in a few months.”

  “Not me. I don’t like to kill.”

  Dixon glanced at me. I guess Mustang Roberts did, too.

  My face started getting red, and I told them, “I mean that. I kill for food or if somebody pushes me. Not otherwise.”

  “Reminds me,” Dixon said. “Billy Ogg told me that gambler we knew, that Charley Woods, Billy said he was killed.”

  “That so?”

  “Must have happened when you were in New Orleans. Chris Lillie was telling the story around that Woods tried to murder some Western man.”

  “Probably deserved what he got.”

  I wasn’t telling anybody anything. Four men I’d killed now, not counting Indians. It was nothing to be proud of. Nobody but a tinhorn ever scratched notches on his gun, and I never would.

  Nor was I wanting to be known as a killer. So far nobody knew about Jack McGarry. That is, it was known in California, but there wasn’t too much traffic between the cow and mining camps. The bad men of one group weren’t much known to the other.

  So far as the public was concerned, I had killed but two men, Rice Wheeler and Leet Bowers. So far, not so many knew about me, although the reputation of the two I’d killed had been such as to make folks believe me a dangerous man.

  No man in his right mind wanted such a reputation, which immediately made a man a target for half the would-be gun slingers in the country. And if I were to be known for something, I wanted it to be something of which I could be proud.

  “Thinking about you the other day,” Dixon continued. “Didn’t you tell me you worked for a man named Hetrick? Out in Mason Crossing, Colorado?”

  “Uh-huh. Fine man.”

  “Then you’ll be sorry to hear this, but you’d better know it now. He’s dead. Ollie Burdette killed him.”

  Chapter 10

  IT TOOK A WHILE for it to sink in. Hetrick almost never carried a gun, and he was a man who never got angry with anybody. He did not believe in killing. He was a stern but gentle man. Yet he was also a man who would not compromise his principles.

  Even so, there seemed no way he could have come to trouble with Burdette. He w
as rarely in town, and he did not loaf when he was there, or drink. He did what business brought him there and left. He was a man who preferred his own family, his own home.

  Then I began to think. Hetrick had stood beside me when I made Burdette take water.

  To Burdette it would be a galling thing to know that even one man lived who had seen him back down, who had seen him refuse an issue.

  That most have been it. Burdette could not rest easy as long as one man knew. And it might even be that Hetrick had heard Burdette’s story of running me out of the state and had told the true version of what happened that day on the street.

  A thing like that would ride Burdette. His reputation as a dangerous man was all he had. He was an empty man. But he was a killer.

  “When did it happen?”

  “Four, five months ago.”

  “I see.”

  The glass in my fingers still held whisky. I had never cared for it, and suddenly I cared less for it now. Right now I had only one idea: I was going back to Mason Crossing.

  Yet it was not Ollie Burdette that I thought of, it was Liza. What about Liza? Where would that leave her?

  “You like this town?” I asked Mustang.

  “I lost nothing here.”

  “All right. We’re riding.”

  Billy Dixon went out on the walk and watched us get in the saddle. “You take care of yourself,” he warned. “That Burdette’s a bad man.”

  Me, I just waved a hand.

  Country slid away behind us. Big, open, grassy, wonderful country. Two days out we saw the big herd, black sea of shifting buffalo as far as the eye could reach. Never saw anything like it. Made my gray plumb skittish, but we circled and come sundown we followed a stream bed through the herd and away.

  Country began to get rougher, all cut up with ravine s and some high mesas. I was getting so I liked the smell of buffalo-chip fires, although it brought back memories of Pap and the wagon train.

  Someday I wanted to go back and find his grave and put a stone marker on it. He would have liked that. But I wouldn’t move him. He was always one to say. “Let the chips fall where they may.” He had fallen there, and he would like to lie there, right in the middle of the West.

  He could have built himself a good life, Pap could. Sometimes I wondered what would have become of me if he had lived. Probably I’d never have used a gun. I’d have gone to school to be a lawyer or something. A man never knows.

  Bennett had tried to tell me one night before I left Wichita that men like me were needed, that the country had to grow up, and it had growing pains, and that all the guns must not be on the bad side. There had to be guns for the right, too.

  That I knew. Yet it was a hard thing to be sure one was always on the right, and sometimes there wasn’t a chance for figuring out the right and wrong of it when guns started smoking.

  We rode on, into rougher, wilder country. One time we had a brush with Comanches. Nobody killed. Mustang downed one of their homes a quarter of a mile away with his Sharps. They didn’t figure to like that sort of shootin’ and they went to hellin’ across the country.

  “Never forget you saved my bacon that time,” Mustang said, shoving a shell into the breech.

  “What time?”

  “Them Kiowas. They had me, cold turkey. Horse dead, bullet in my leg, and just three rounds of ammunition left. Then you come arunnin’. Mighty fine sight you made.”

  “You was late for supper.”

  Mite of snow came time and again. The country was high now, the weather crisp, the nights cold. There was more brown than green in the grass now, and the cottonwoods looked like tall feathers of gold with their yellow leaves. In the morning there was fog in the low ground, and sometimes it was noon before a man rightly began to feel warmth in the air.

  The gray was growing his winter coat. He didn’t look so pretty any more, but mighty ragged and tough. He was all horse, that one.

  This was a man’s country-wide open, big as all creation, and as far as you could look, nothing but rolling miles. Antelope bounded up and away, giving queer jumps. Sometimes a rabbit scurried out of the way, and at night there were coyotes calling the moon.

  Once we sighted an Army patrol and went out of our way to get some tobacco and talk a bit. It was a routine patrol. Somebody had seen some Cheyennes, but they turned out to be Shawnees, peaceful, hunting buffalo from the fringe of a small herd.

  “We goin’ to Denver?” Mustang wanted to know.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I want, to get me a sheep coat. This here wind cuts a man.”

  All I could think of was Burdette, shooting Hetrick.

  Time a man like that was sent packing.

  I wasn’t going to kill him. I was going to do worse. I was going to break him. I was going to bust him right in front of people. I was going to ruin him as a gunman.

  The one thing a gunman can’t stand is to lose face.

  Too many men hunting them. Too many men wanting to make a cheap kill. Once they get shown up, it’s only a matter of time until they are killed … unless they leave the country.

  We reached Denver in late September with snow sifting out of a lead-gray sky. We reached Denver and headed for a hotel. I had money, so we went to the best.

  That night I lay in bed thinking, staring wide awake at the ceiling. What did a man come to? Where could a man get, drifting like this? I had a little stake now, and the thing to do was to go someplace and light. Get some roots down. Maybe I should marry.

  That thought stopped me a bit. I didn’t like to think of being tied down. Not when I might have to ride on at any time. But Logan Pollard had stopped. Good old Logan! I’d sure like to see him. I told myself that and it was true. By now they probably had a family. No time at all since I’d seen them, but it seemed a long while. I was going to be twenty soon, and I’d been through the mill.

  Getting up, I went to the washbowl and poured some water and bathed my face. I picked up a towel and dried it and looked at myself in the mirror.

  Ryan Tyler, I told myself, there you are. What looked at me was a smooth brown face without any mustache , curly hair brushed back from the forehead, but always inclined to fall over it. A brown face that had strong cheekbones, and a strong jaw, but the eyes were sort of green and there wasn’t any smile around the mouth.

  That wasn’t good. A man should smile. And there was something a little cold around the eyes. Was I cold? I didn’t feel cold inside. Not a bit.

  Never had many friends, but then, I’d drifted too much, and the few friends I’d had were good ones. Logan Pollard, Hetrick, and now Mustang Roberts. Yes, and Billy Dixon, Ogg, and Bennett. Good men they were, all of them.

  But where did that leave me? The one thing I could do better than most men was the one thing I did not want to do. Maybe, as Bennett had said, the West needed its gun fighters. Maybe in a land where there was no law, some restraint was needed for the lawless. But I didn’t want t o be one of them.

  What did it get a man, twenty years old and no smile?

  Twenty years, and four dead men behind him, and eyes that were always a little cool, a little remote, a little watchful. I wanted no more of it. I wanted to get away, to make an end of it.

  But a man does what he has to do. That’s why a man is a man.

  I walked back and got into bed and tried to sleep. When it was daybreak I did sleep for an hour or so.

  Outside the ground was two feet deep in snow. In the streets men were shoveling walks, their breath smoky in the cold air. It was no time to travel, but it was no time to stop, either.

  “Hetrick’s been dead a few months,” Roberts argued. “Take your time. Burdette ain’t going nowhere. If he does, maybe so much the better.”

  That made sense, and crossing those mountains in the winter would be no picnic. Even if a man made it, and the old-timers were smart enough not to try.

  Denver was booming those days and gambling was booming right along with it. Maybe I’d played poker a mite,
but I was no gambling man. Just the same, those places were wide open and mighty exciting. Maybe, too, it was because I was still just a boy, although I’d been caring for myself for a long time now.

  So Mustang and me, we made them all. The Morgue, the Bucket of Blood, the Palace, the Chicken Coop, an d Murphy’s Exchange. All of them wide open. Crowded, too.

  Soapy Smith was there, a fellow we were to hear a lot about later. Young Bat Masterson was in town, and Doc Halliday drifted through, bound for Texas. Kit Carson was there for some time, and one of the Bents from down New Mexico way.

  One night after we got back to the hotel Mustang and me were having supper when he nudged me.

  “Rye, there’s a dude got his eye on you. He’s been studying you for some time now. You ain’t been in no trouble back East, have you?”

  Mustang, he was a blond fellow with a lean, tough face. No gun slinger, but a mean man to face in a fight, and game as they come. He was also a man very sharp t o notice things, so when I could, I glanced around.

  This tenderfoot sat across the room. He was a tall man with black hair, gray at the temples, and mighty handsome.

  Maybe he was fifty years old, but dressed real fine. When I looked around he saw me and our eyes held for a moment, and then he got up and started across the room.

  I wasn’t duded up as I had been in New Orleans. My fancy clothes were all packed away. Nonetheless, I didn’t look so bad, I guess. I had on those black calfskin boots, a gray wool shirt with a black string tie, and a black , braided short coat that I’d picked up in Texas. It was cut Mexican style. And I had on my gray pants, tucked into my boots.

  Without looking again, I tried to place the stranger. He might be a gambler, but somehow that didn’t fit, either.

  And at a quick glance my guess was that he wasn’t packing a gun.

  He paused alongside the table. “I beg your pardon. My name is Denison Mead.”

  I got up. “I’m Ryan Tyler,” I said, “and this here’s Mustang Roberts. Will you sit down?”

  “Thank you.” He sat down and motioned for his bottle of wine to be brought to our table. “I’m a lawyer,” he said, “representing a mining company. I’ve been looking over some gold properties.”