A bullet whiffed past Taggart’s face and he began to thumb shells into his gun, and then he got to his knees and started to rise. His leg buckled under him and he fell again, feeling a bullet pass him as he went down. And then he shot upward from a prone position, rolled over and got up, all the way this time.
There was blood on his face and he could taste blood in his mouth, and he felt a strange weakness in his body. He held his gun ready as he looked around slowly, trying to place Shoyer, but he could not find him. Miriam was grasping his arm and crying, and he was trying to shake her off, sure she would be killed.
Then he saw Pete Shoyer. The gunman was sprawled on the adobe soil near the corner of the stage station. Taggart lifted his gun.
“It’s all right,” Stark was saying. “He’s dead.”
“Who killed him then?” Taggart demanded. “This was my fight. I—
He felt himself slipping; he tried to lift his gun. But as he fell he heard Adam Stark say, “Why, you killed him, man, and a good job it was, too.”
There was an arm under his head and he heard someone sobbing. He felt his shift torn open, and someone else was tearing his pants leg. He wished they would go away. Besides, this was the last pair of pants he had.
He heard himself speaking. “Adam,” he said, “I would like to ask the hand of your sister in marriage.”
There was a moment then when he was aware of nothing, and when he opened his eyes later they were all around him and he was on a table in the stage station.
“I asked a question,” he said.
“And I answered,” Miriam said, “I give myself to you.” “This is between men,” Taggart replied. “It was your brother I asked.”
“Why, yes,” Adam said, “she could go far and not find so much of a man. I’ll give her to you on condition you join us on the ranch we’ll find somewhere near Tucson.
We will need a man who knows cows.”
Taggart turned his head stiffly. His skull throbbed heavily and he knew he must have been hit there, too, but he felt very much alive. “All right then,” he said to Miriam, “I accept your acceptance. We will be married then, and if there is any beauty after this that I can bring to you, it shall be yours.”
He was delirious, he decided, but it was not a bad way to be. He was delirious or he was happy, or he was both, and he put his head back on the table.
“Here’s his gun,” somebody said. “I’ve put his horse in the stable.”
His horse and his gun, he thought. It was all he had when he rode up to the canyon of the chapel, and now he still had his horse and his gun, but he also had a woman and a friend.
Taggart (1959) Page 14
