L'Amour, Louis - Novel 06

by To Tame a Land

  What would Liza think of me now?

  When I put down my glass and turned toward the door, Smoky Hill was there. He looked sort of strange, and right then I knew I was in for it.

  ‘Choc,” he said, “Ash Milo wants to see you up o n the hill.”

  Chapter 18

  WHEN I WALKED OUT on that porch I knew I was in trouble. If Mustang Roberts had guessed right and Ash Milo knew me, I was going to have to kill another man.

  And I would have the problem of getting out with Liza if she would still go with me after what she had seen.

  Standing there on the porch in front of the saloon, I rolled a smoke. Inside I felt empty. I could feel the slow, heavy beating of my heart, and I had a hard time moistening my cigarette, my mouth was that dry.

  That walk up the hill, only a hundred and fifty yards or so, was the longest walk I’ll ever take.

  I felt the sun on my back. I could smell the grass, and off over a distant ridge there was a fluff of white cloud that left a shadow on the salmon cliffs. It might be the last time I’d see that sky or the cliffs.

  Gray was down there in the stable. I suddenly wished he was saddled. I was going to need a home if I came out of this alive.

  In my thoughts were the things I had heard. Milo was said to be utterly ruthless, without compassion. He had killed suddenly and without warning. He could be dangerous as a striking rattler, with no need to rattle before he struck.

  Liza opened the door. But it was a taller, more lovely Liza.

  She would be eighteen now, but there was a quiet maturity in her face that made her look older. There was a great sadness, too.

  For a long moment our eyes held, and she searched mine as if she expected to find something there, feared to find it.

  “Rye,” she said, “I wanted to spare you this. I wanted to.” And then she stepped aside and I stepped into the door and I was looking at Ash Milo.

  Only I knew him … I knew him well. He was the man I had admired most in the world. He was the man I had looked up to and respected. The man who had been my friend when I had no other. He was Logan Pollard.

  He was slimmer, older. His hair was mixed with gray, his face was drawn tighter and harder, and his lips had thinned down. Above all, there was in him a tension I did not recall. Always, he had seemed so thoroughly calm, so relaxed, so much in command of himself and all around him.

  As though it were yesterday, I remembered the day he interceded for me and stopped McGarry from giving me a whipping. I remembered the day he saved me from the horse thieves when I had walked into a gun battle with them. I remembered the advice he had given me.

  He walked toward me, smiling that tight smile, and he held out his hand.

  “Rye!” he said. “Rye, it’s really you! After all this time!”

  There was no hesitation in me. I grabbed his hand and held it hard, and he looked into my eyes and smiled.

  “You’ve made a name for yourself, Rye. And you’ve stayed on the right side of the law. I’m glad.”

  “So that’s why you kept your outfit away from my town,” I said. “You were protecting me.”

  He smiled, still that tight, quick smile. Only this time there was a hint of cynicism in it, and a little mockery.

  “No, Rye. I’ve always known you. I knew if we ever crossed you, we were in real trouble.

  “You see, Rye,” his voice was almost gentle, “a boy who will fight back when his father is killed is a natural boy. He does what anyone would do, given a chance.

  “But you were different. You followed those Indians, and you killed at least one. Moreover, I saw you face McGarry. You weren’t afraid. There was iron in you… .”

  He turned and walked across the room. Liza was looking at me strangely, watching me for something. Me, I was confused, but now I was settling down. I was beginning to think.

  “What became of Mary?” I asked.

  His back was toward me and for a long time he did not reply, nor did he move. Then he said quietly, “She died in childbirth, Rye. If she’d lived I would probably have stayed right there.

  “Remember old Sheriff Balcher? He tried to get me to stay, but I wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t stay there with those memories, so I left.”

  Logan Pollard came back to the center of the room.

  “Sit down, Rye. Please sit down.”

  It wasn’t in me to quibble or to beat around the brush.

  “Logan,” I said, “you know why I’m here?”

  The smile left his eyes. He looked at me, taut and watchful. I knew then that all they said of the gunman known as Ash Milo was true. He was a dangerous man … and a not entirely sane man.

  I’d looked many times into the eyes of dangerous men, and I knew how they looked. But in his eyes there was something else … something extra.

  “Of course. You’ve come for Liza. On that score I must disappoint you.”

  So here it was. Here was the line we drew, the line along which neither of us would yield. Yet I had to try.

  “It isn’t like you, Logan. You’re holding her against her will. That’s not your sort of man.”

  He shrugged, a little irritable frown gathering around his eyes. “Don’t be a fool, Rye! She may not wish to stay now, but she’ll change. I’m not forcing her into anything, just giving her time to change.”

  “If she were to change at all, Logan, it wouldn’t be in this place. No decent woman could live in such a place.”

  He stood with his feet a little apart, facing me. He was wearing gray-striped trousers and a white shirt with a black string tie. He looked good. He was, I expect, a mighty handsome man. He also wore a gun.

  “Rye, you’re the man I’ve needed here. Stay with me. Together we can live like feudal barons. We can have all this!” He waved a hand at the hills. “We can have it t o ourselves!”

  All this … an empire of rock and sand. Someday it would be more, but that was a long way off, and no bunch of outlaws would make it more. Yet this man had helped me. He had been my best friend, and for a long time my only friend. But now I knew I was going to have to leave, and that our friendship was at an end. And I was going to take Liza with me. And it wasn’t going to be easy.

  “No. I said it flatly. “No, Logan, I’m leaving. And I’m taking Liza with me if she wants to go.”

  Then I told him about the place back in Maryland. Only I was telling Liza, too. “I’m going to do what you advised, Logan. I’m going to get away from the need for killing before I kill the wrong man, or before I lose all sense of balance and kill too many.”

  He was very quiet. He rolled a smoke, and then he looked up at me. This was Logan, but it was also the man who had called himself T. J. Farris the man who had sent for John Lang. The man behind Ben Billings. It was hard to believe how a man could change.

  “You can go. Liza stays with me.”

  “You had Mary,” I said quietly. “She was your tie, the person who stood by you, helped you. Liza is the same for me. Liza can be everything to me. We’ve both known it since we were kids.”

  “No.” He said it as if he didn’t want to believe. “No. She stays.”

  I glanced at Liza. “Will you go with me?”

  “Yes, Rye. I will go with you.”

  “See?” My eyes swung back. “I “

  Logan Pollard was smiling at me. That tight, strange smile, so unlike the warm smile he used to have. He was smiling at me over a gun.

  “Rye, I thought I taught you better. Never take your eyes off a man.”

  “But you’re my friend,” I said.

  His face did not change. He looked a little bored, I thought. Only I’m not always a good judge.

  “There are no friends. In this life you take what you want or it’s taken from you. You can go now, Rye. You can ride out of the badlands and stay out. I’ve told the boys to let you go. I told Smoky Hill you were to go after I’d talked with you.”

  So there it was. He looked at me across a gun the way he had once looked at McGar
ry, only with that odd difference. He looked at me down the barrel of a gun and I knew he was, with that gun, one of the most dangerous men in the West.

  He had taught me other things. Never to draw unless to shoot, never to shoot unless to kill.

  The man standing behind that gun was a man who had never drawn but to kill. Rarely in the old days, but now I could see that with the death of Mary, something had happened. The old Logan Pollard was gone.

  And here before me in this tight, icy man with the thin-drawn mouth was what I might become. This man who killed wantonly now, who could take a decent girl and hold her until she was finally broken by his will.

  And suddenly I knew. I knew that when I turned to go he would kill me.

  He would kill me because if I left I would return with armed men to wipe out the Roost. He had admitted I’d been left alone because he’d known how I would react.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go. But I wish you’d think it over. We’ve been friends, and-”

  “Stop it!” His tension was mounting. He would have to kill. I knew. “Consider yourself lucky. You did me a favor by killing Chance Vader. Now get out of here. I’m returning the favor by letting you go.”

  Liza’s eyes were wide and frightened. She was trying to warn me, trying to tell me.

  I turned, needing the one trick, the thing that would throw him off the one instant I needed, for there is a thing called reaction time, the space of delay between the will and the action.

  I started to turn, then suddenly looked back. “Logan,” I said, “I’ve only read Plutarch four times.”

  “Plutarch?”

  He had been set to kill, and the remark threw him off.

  It took an instant for his mind to react and in that instant I threw myself aside and drew.

  It was an action I had practiced when alone, dropping aside and to one knee, the other leg outstretched. And I made the fastest draw of my life. I made it because I had to.

  The Smith & Wesson .44 kicked hard against my palm.

  In the instant I fired I saw his eyes white and ugly and his gun blossom with fire. I was smashed back to the floor, heard the hammer of another bullet drive into the wall back of me, and I fired twice.

  Yet even as I fired, I saw the red on his shirt front, and I saw him knocked back and twisted by my shots, so that his third shot went into the ceiling.

  Rolling over, I came up fast. He swung his gun and we both shot. He hit me. I felt the numbing shock of the bullet. And then I fired and he fell, tumbling face down, the gun slipping from his hand.

  For an instant I stared down at him, holding my gun ready. He turned over and stared up at me, smiling faintly.

  “Rye,” he said. “Good old Rye. You learned, didn’t you?”

  His body tightened and twisted, held hard against pain, and then his muscles relaxed.

  “Liza,” I said, “get a rifle. Stand by the window. We’re still in trouble.”

  He was lying there looking at me. “Think I always knew it, Rye. Think I always knew it would be you. Fate … somehow.”

  He was dying, and he knew it, yet there was still danger in the man, and I could not trust-him. He saw it in me, and smiled. “Good boy,” he said. “Good boy.”

  We could hear them coming up the hill. We could hear them all coming. Thirty or more of them, armed and dangerous men.

  “I’m going East, Logan. You’re the last. I’m going to put my guns away.”

  My guns were loaded again. He had taught me that.

  Reload as soon as you stop shooting.

  They had stopped outside. I stepped to the door. “Smoky Hill,” I said. “You and Bronc. Come on in.”

  With Liza holding a rifle on the others, they entered one by one.

  Logan Pollard looked up at them. He stared at them for a minute, and then looked back at me. “Told you Plutarch would be good reading,” he said. “I-”

  And he died, just like that. He died there on the floor, and inside I felt sick and empty and lost.

  Across his body I looked at them. “His real name was Logan Pollard,” I said. “He was my best friend.”

  Nobody said anything. “I’m going out of here,” I said.

  “She’s going with me. I came after her.”

  Smoky Hill rubbed his hands down his pants. Bronc rolled his quid in his jaws.

  “Any argument?” I asked.

  “Not any,” Bronc said. “You go ahead.”

  They turned and walked outside and I took Liza by the arm. She held back, just a minute. “You’re wounded, Rye!”

  “Get what we’ll need,” I said. “We can’t give them time to change their minds.”

  My side was stiff and sore. I could feel the wetness of blood inside my shirt. But I felt all right. I could make out.

  I’d have to.

  “Rye … he was all right to me. He really was.”

  “I knew him,” I said. “He was a good man.”

  Nobody said anything as we walked out and went down to the stables. Nobody made any argument. Maybe they didn’t want to face my guns. Maybe they were too stunned to think about doing anything. Maybe there wasn’t anything they wanted to do.

  At a seep a dozen miles down the back trail, Liza looked me over. One bullet had cut through the muscle at the top of my shoulder. The second had hit a rib, breaking it and cutting through the flesh and out the back. I’d lost blood.

  We met Mustang Roberts and a posse of twenty men coming down Nine Mile. Valley, trying to work out the trail. We were riding along together when they saw us, and they just turned around and fell in behind.

  And that was the way it was in the old days before the country grew up and men put their guns away.

  Someday, and I hope it never comes, there may be a time when the Western hills are empty again and the land will go back to wilderness and the old, hard ways.

  Enemies may come into our country and times will have changed, but then the boys will come down from the old high hills and belt on their guns again.

  They can do it if they have to. The guns are hung up, the cows roam fat and lazy, but the old spirit is still there, just as it was when the longhorns came up the trail from Texas, and the boys washed the creeks for gold.