Holding out my hand to Bob, I said, "So long, Bob. Easy riding."
"Adios, compadre."
Longley got up. He looked awkward and embarrassed. "See you out West sometime. You watch for me."
"I'll do that."
Throwing the rest of my coffee into the dead leaves I looked into the empty cup, then I turned and dropped the cup and stepped into the saddle. For a long moment I sat my saddle unmoving, my back turned to them, for we all knew it was the last time, and the sickness of leaving was on me. Then I rode away.
"He should have waited to eat," Longley said.
Kirby glanced up. "A doom's on him, can't you see it? My old grandma told me when the doom's on a man and he knows he's going to die, he's like that."
"That's fool talk." Bob Lee dropped his cup. "I'm not waiting. I'm riding to Fannin County. Coming Bill?"
When they were gone the tall young man
rubbed his eyes and looked sheepishly at Kirby. "You sleepy? I'm raht tard."
Only a few yards away I'd stopped again, almost afraid to go on, yet feeling like Bob Lee that there was something about this place that gave me a bad feeling. I'd sat there, listening to them talk, hearing the retreating sounds of the horses of Lee and Longley, and then I heard Kirby say, "Sleep, I'll wake you to take watch when I'm sleepy."
So I rode away under the trees, sitting easy in the saddle and shaped up for a long ride West.
At daybreak I was still riding, but the mare was dead tired and we both needed rest. There was plenty of time to get to Willow Bluff-but that was the trouble. A man always thought there was plenty of time, and there never was.
When I awakened and pulled on my boots I checked my guns and then scouted around. By the sun I judged I'd slept a couple of hours, and after a scout around I put together a small fire in a hollow place near a tree where the rising smoke could lose itself in the branches, and made coffee. Broiling a chunk of beef, I took a couple of swallows of coffee and then with the beef in my left
hand, taking occasional bites, I strolled over to where the trail went through the trees.
There was no evidence that the trail had been used by anyone else, although I saw where an inquisitive deer had been checking my tracks. This was an old Caddo trail, and kept to high ground under the trees, dipping only occasionally to lonely springs or to the river. The days of Caddo wandering were almost a thing of the past, so the trail was unused. It was the same trail I'd taken out of the country once before. My camp was south of the Sulphur near Whiteoak Creek.
Both Barlow and the soldiers would be hunting me now. I'd escaped from prison now, and for that alone they'd be4after me. But I was out of Cass County, and pretty much beyond Barlow's zone of action.
There was a mockingbird doing tricks in a treetop some distance away, but no other sound. At the fire I finished eating, finished my coffee and put out the fire with great care. I'd seen too much damage done by carelessly put out fires, or those left burning by some damn' fool.
It was a lazy, sunlit morning, and I was about three miles from Willow Bluff. In the silent woods a sound can be heard from quite
a distance, so when I heard a sound I straightened up and listened.
It could have been a branch breaking, but animals do not break branches, and if broken deliberately it must be for a cooking fire. If otherwise, then somebody was sneaking around and I wasn't ready for that.
Moving easy-like, I saddled up and put my stuff together. Mounting up I walked the horse off under the trees, keeping away from my lonely litde trail until some distance from the night camp. The mail trail, such as it was, was several miles away, but there was another used occasionally that would touch at Willow Bluff. There was not a chance in a million anyone would guess my trail was here. Fact is, it would take a sharp man, just stumbling on it, to judge it a trail at all.
At no time had I failed to practice the technique of drawing a gun fast. Each day except when in jail I'd spent some time working at it, and I knew I'd become a sight faster than when I killed Dud Buder in Fort Worth. Accuracy had never been a problem. From boyhood I'd been skillful witn all sorts of weapons.
At intervals I drew up to judge the silence of the woods, to sort out the sounds, and the closer I was to final escape the more jumpy I
became. The very fact that I was getting out made every move more careful because I wanted nothing to go wrong at the last minute.
About noontime I rode down to the bank of the Sulphur. It was a dangerous river, many ways. Under the surface there was an entangling mass of roots, old snags, and masses of dead and long-submerged water lilies, sudden shallows or depths. The old ferry was several miles downstream, and the place where I now sat my saddle was an old Caddo crossing almost two miles upstream from Willow Bluff.
Approaching the bluff from the north seemed a likely idea, and I'd circled around, cutting for sign, and checking the country. Right about then I'd an uneasy feeling the woods weren't at all empty. Could be I was jumpy, but the feeling was on me.
Katy might come at any time, and she might not be alone, so I'd want to check whoever was with her before I showed up in plain sight. Also, there was always the chance she'd been followed. A man on the dodge can't rule out anything as unlikely. Walking the dapple into the water I waded her and swam her across the Sulphur.
The old trail divided here and a branch went northwest toward a couple of shacks called White Cotton. The other branch went northeast to intersect with a very poor trail running north to Dalby Springs and southeast toward the ferry. Turning off the trail before it reached the road, I worked a cautious way through the forest toward Willow Bluff.
Willow Bluff was one of several bluffs that were actually litde more than high banks covered with willows as was much of this bottom in 1869. On the edge of a thicket near some pines I got down from the saddle. There was no reason I could think of for feeling like I did, but there was panic in me. The silence of the forest was suddenly oppressive and I had to fight back the urge to climb into the saddle and light out of there and run like I had never in my life until I was far from here, far from Texas, and far from anything I ever knew.
Easing the girth on the dapple I squatted on my heels and lighted my pipe, and then I stayed right there, listening, making myself easy. The earth smelled of decayed leaves and rotting timber. Along a fallen log walked a big red ant, and a bumblebee bumbled lazily among the wild flowers-no other sound came through the trees.
Below me and to the right was Willow Bluff. There was a tumbled-down log cabin lurched half over like a sorry old drunk. There was a well, the remains of a pole corral and some unfinished fence, and not far off was the north bank of the Sulphur. I could hear the water running through the branches of a huge old tree that had fallen off the bank into the stream.
There was some open meadow down there, and from where I squatted on the slope I could see it all without being seen. A fly buzzed in the sunshine, my horse cropped grass, down on the river a fish jumped. Easing my pistols in my belt I knocked out the pipe on the palm of my hand.
Nothing moved anywhere, yet my stomach felt empty and I felt touchy as a boar with a sore snout. There was no sense to feeling this way: Katy would be here soon.
When they came it wasn't like I expected. Katy was there, but with her was Lacy Petraine and John Tower, and they were leading a pack horse. Tower got down from the horse and helped the two girls down, but I sat right still and didn't move.
Impatient as I was, I sat right still, just waiting and listening. If they had been followed, I wanted to know it. When ten minutes had passed I could wait no longer, so cinching up the gray, I walked down the slope.
"Cullen!" Katy ran toward me. "We heard you were dead! Warren said he'd killed you!"
It made no kind of sense. Not at first. Seems when they were well on their way they had spotted a rider coming toward them, and when he pulled up it was Warren and he was wild, and he was yelling, "/ killed him! I killed him!"
"Killed who?" To
wer had demanded.
"I killed that oudaw!" Warren was excited and his eyes had a glassy shine. killed Cullen Baker!"
"You killed Cullen Baker?" Tower had asked. "A sneaking litde pipsqueak like you?"
"Don't you dare talk to me like that!" Warren's voice was shrill. "Don't you dare! I killed Cullen Baker!"
"I don't believe you," Tower had said. "You're out of your mind."
Warren had laughed, and Katy said she was shocked by his manner. He acted as if he were intoxicated. There was a queerness about him, an almost sadistic excitement that revolted them.
"Oh, I killed him all right! He thought he
was so much! He was there in the brush with another fellow. I shot them both. Cullen was laying there in the checkered shirt he always wore and he never knew what happened. That other man, the one called Kirby, he started to get up, and-"
"You shot him when he was asleep?" Tower's face was white with fury, Katy said. "Why you litde-5"
"He didn't kill him, Mr. Tower," Katy said. "I just know he didn't."
Warren had turned on her, almost white with anger. "You fool! Can't you see now? He's dead! He's dead now, and nothing but a clod of empty flesh! And / killed him! I! There's no sense you mooning around over him. It will be me they talk about now. I'll be the man who killed Cullen BakerI"
"I think," Tower had said, "I think I'll kill him."
"No," Katy stopped him, "he doesn't understand. Down here," she said, looking at Warren, "a man is admired for daring to face another armed man with a pistol and for settling his quarrels bravely. It isn't a killing that is admired, it is the courage to fight for what you believe. You won't be admired as the man who killed Cullen Baker, you will be despised as someone who murdered a sleeping man."
They had turned then and ridden away as he stared after them. And the last thing they heard was a contemptuous laugh, but it was a hollow sound.
"I won't believe it," Katy had said, "I'm going on to Willow Bluff."
And in the end they had all come on along.
So there we stood in the warm sunshine of the meadow, with the grass around our feet and a blue sky overhead with a few white puffballs of fleecy cloud drifting. We heard the gurgle of the water around that fallen tree, and I looked at Katy and she looked at me and I knew my home was going to be wherever she was, that I didn't need the land Pa had owned, that I didn't need anything, anywhere as long as I had her.
Tower, he turned to Lacy, and he said, "Something I've got to say. Lacy, I love you. I'm in Texas because I came hunting you, because I had to find you. I think I've loved you ever since you were Terry's wife, but Lacy, I didn't want to kill him, I didn't want to at all."
Right then Katy was in my arms and I
wasn't thinking about anything else but I heard Lacy say, "John, I think we should go West, too."
And Katy was saying to me that she'd brought Sandoval for me, and then I looked up and threw Katy away from me.
Chance Thorne and Sam Barlow were at the edge of the woods, just beyond the old well. And there were two others with them.
Four men standing in a scattered line, and they had us covered.
Fifteen feet away from me John Tower was facing them also.
"John," I said quiedy, "it looks like we're going to do some shooting."
We both knew what could happen to the girls if we were killed without killing them.
"I'll take Barlow and Thorne, John," I told him, speaking low. "You get those others."
"All right, but you're getting all the best of it."
Sam Barlow was grinning. "Wish we were closer to that grave you dug for me. I figured you to fill it."
"John"-they were walking nearer-"I've been working on something. Getting my gun out fast, shooting from where it is, it worked against Buder in Fort Worth."
"I saw it."
"Takes them a moment to think, you know."
"AH right."
They had come up within thirty feet of us now, and Chance was looking at Katy, and there was nothing nice in the way he looked. "You always despised me," Chance said, "and whatever happens here, nobody knows. Nobody will ever know."
"I'd like to take time to set fire to you, Cullen," Barlow was saying, "but we don't want to keep them girls a-waitin'. They be impatient for some real men, seems like, so we're goin' to kill you."
"Sam." I was cold inside. I felt like ice. I could feel the sun and hear a mockingbird in the trees and I could see the wasps hovering about the well. "Sam," I said, "there's one thing I've got to tell you."
"Yeah? What's th-"
The brief lightning of my shot coming against men who believed themselves securely in command stabbed across the afternoon.
The months of hard practice, speeded now by the knowledge of waiting death. With complete coolness I fired a second shot into Barlow, then swung the gun muzzle and as a bullet blasted past me, a shot touched off by
panic, I shot Chance Thorne through the body. My fourth bullet went through Chance's neck under his ear and drenched the falling man with his own blood.
I stepped around the well toward Barlow. Tower had to do what he must, these two were mine.
Barlow was trying to get up. He knew he had bought it. He knew what a bullet through the stomach could do and he had two of them right where he lived. He was dying and he wanted only one thing, to hurt me and to take me with him.
"They got Bob Lee," he gasped at me. "He was ridin' from his home to Mexico when the Peacocks ambushed him." He gasped hoarsely, sweat standing out on his forehead. "They got Bickerstaff over in Alvarado. Now I'm gettin' you."
He turned the gun muzzle on me and I kicked it from his hand, then I glanced over at Chance.
Thorne was twisting on the bloody grass, dying in the sunlight of a warm afternoon in Texas. "I wish ... I wish ..." Whatever he wished none of us knew, for he died there on the grass looking up at the empty sky through the leaves of the oak that stood by the well.
"It worked, Cullen," Tower said. "I'd never have believed it."
Lacy was ripping his shirt sleeve where a bullet had cut through the deltoid muscle of his shoulder.
"Warren said he had killed you," Katy said, "and if you don't appear again, it will be believed, so let Cullen Baker die. Take another name, in another place."
We switched saddles so I could ride Sandoval and Katy the dappled mare. This much of the dream remained, that we had a stallion and a mare, and it was a beginning for any man, and most of all, I'd come up out of it with Katy Thorne.
So we mounted up and rode away in the sunlight, four of the living who left four of the dead behind.
And that was the way of it, although down along the Sulphur and the bayous around Lake Caddo some will say that Cullen Baker was an unreconstructed rebel who carried on a lone fight, and those who read a book written by Thomas Warren will tell you that Cullen was a drunken murderer and a thief. Only that was not the end. . . .
A man can breed horses and catde and still find time to read, even to study law of an evening when he has a wife to help and encourage him, and for a man with an education the world is a wide place and the opportunities are many, but the old habits and ways are not forgotten and on my desk today there lies a Dragoon Colt, polished, cleaned and loaded to remind me of the days along the bayous when I invented the first fast draw.
Tonight John Tower will drive out from town and we will walk down to the corrals together to watch the horses, two tall old men who long ago stood side by side in a green sunlit meadow on the banks of the Sulphur River, but that was long, long ago, and in another world than this, another time.
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the First Fast Draw (1959) Page 14
