Sylvia stood up. “And now I’ll go. I’ve been noble enough for one day. What I really want to do is scratch that damned girl’s eyes out.”
“I’m not worth that.”
“Don’t be too sure, Sloan. Don’t be too sure.”
He started to get up, but she put a hand on his shoulder and held him down. She bent and kissed him softly on the mouth. She would be hurt again, he thought. Life would hurt her until she died. Because there was a rarely found softness in her, and a generosity that was just as rare. Now she was alone, or would be soon. But Sylvia would not be alone for long. Sloan realized that to think such a thing about any other woman would be a condemnation, but with Sylvia it was not. Sylvia’s relations with the men in her life would never be cheap or sordid. Her motives were too unselfish for that. He watched her hurry up the street. She did not look back, and he had the uneasy feeling that the reason she didn’t was because she was crying and didn’t want him to see. She turned the corner and disappeared.
Sloan stared thoughtfully at nothing for a long, long time. He was remembering the war years, his brief leaves. He was remembering Sylvia and wondering if he were not a fool. Then he thought of Merline Morris and remembered the clear, straightforward eyes that could be so soft. There was fire in Merline as well as in Sylvia, but it would never spill over to include more than a single man.
He became aware that the activity in the street was not normal, and pulled his thoughts reluctantly from Sylvia and Merline to concentrate on the undercurrents flowing along the street. The saloonkeepers no longer stood before their saloons. The storekeepers, closing, did not walk past him toward their homes at the upper end of town, but rather turned downstreet to disappear into the Cowman’s Pride.
Sloan’s face was touched with a wry smile. A meeting was shaping up. The respectable and the disreputable were joining forces down there with a common purpose—that of ousting the marshal from their town. Each group had tried, in its own way, to rid itself of him. Burle and the saloonkeepers had tried ridicule, ambush, a smear. Dryden and his group had asked Sloan to resign and in their own conservative way had tried to buy him off. He wondered what they’d come up with next. A deal with the cowmen, perhaps, and this approach was certainly going to strain the consciences of the so-called respectable group. Because a deal with the cowmen’s group could only be consent to murder, the price on that consent being the cowmen’s agreement not to harm the town. Sloan was very close, in this instant, to getting up and walking down there to burst in on their meeting. He was close to giving them his resignation before they shucked their consciences and bought his death. A strain of growing stubbornness prevented it. The reasons he had taken this job were still valid ones. If anything, they were stronger than before. Sylvia had strengthened his resolve, whether she had realized it or not. And there had always been something about pressure that made Sloan stand like a rock in the face of it.
Dusk deepened into night, and stars winked out in the limitless black void overhead. The breeze died, leaving the town even more still than it had been before. Sid came out and sat down on the bench again. In the utter quiet lying along the street, Sloan could hear raised voices drifting from the batwing doors of the Cowman’s Pride. Grinning, he said, “Argument. That’s healthy.” Then he thought, It makes me nervous. It’s not flattering when the whole town wants you dead.
Down at the Cowman’s Pride, the meeting broke up. First the town’s businessmen filed out, to separate almost furtively before the door and go their separate ways, avoiding looking directly toward Sloan, detouring so that they would not have to pass close to him in the street. This, more than anything else, told him the things he wanted to know, and with the knowledge that the town’s respectable citizens had made a deal with the lawless element came an intangible feeling of dread, a menace that flowed along the street like water. He couldn’t fight them all, saloonkeepers and hangers-on, the respectable element, the cowmen, too. And if they didn’t want him, then why cram himself down their unwilling throats?
He got up and walked slowly and carefully past the bank, then down Fourth toward the Morris house. And, walking, he saw still another segment of the town that he had not considered a few moments before. The women, who might not approve of his methods but who would certainly approve of the result. The children, whose lives would be safe if he succeeded in taming the lawless town. They yelled in the early darkness, and played along the dusty streets and through the grassy yards. They played the games that Sloan himself had played as a boy back home, and he smiled faintly to himself as he heard the old, familiar arguments between them. A wild prairie town, but one that would be here long after cattle, drovers, saloon men, and gamblers had gone. If he was lucky and lived through the next few days, he would be here, too, watching his own kids play in the soft summer night.
He reached Merline’s house, limping more noticeably from his walk and sweating faintly from pain. She was sitting on the porch steps, her feet on the step below, her arms around her knees. She called softly, “Watch that broken board in the walk.”
He avoided the broken board and stopped just short of the steps.
Her voice was a trifle nervous, as though she sensed what he had come to say. “The town’s awfully quiet tonight.”
“No drovers in town.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve not got much to offer a woman. But I want to marry you. I think I’ve wanted that since I first set eyes on you.”
Merline stood up, and doing so put herself only inches away from him. She said simply, “And I’ve wanted you to ask me almost that long.”
“Is that yes or no?”
He could see her smile, even though the light was poor. “It’s yes, you fool. What else could it be?”
He had been nervous and scared all the way here. Now he relaxed. He wanted to laugh with pure relief. He put out his arms and caught her to him with a hunger that flared like a fire but that was also strong and solid and good. It had been so long since he’d held a woman in his arms. He had never held a woman quite like this one before. She was less composed than he had ever seen her. She was like a girl, confused, eager, uncertain. He bent his head and kissed her on the mouth.
Now he had something to fight them for that he hadn’t had before. He could feel strength flowing through his body, resoluteness through his mind. He had almost quit this afternoon, but there would be no thought of quitting again. This town was his, and before he was through it would be a decent place in which to live.
XIII
After Sloan had left, Sid Wessell went out and sat on the bench before the marshal’s office, frowning thoughtfully into the warm summer night. There was a lamp burning in the office behind him, which softly bathed the boardwalk and street before him with light. A young couple in a buggy turned off Fourth, rounded the corner past the bank, and drove toward the upper end of town and the prairie beyond. From the darkness inside the buggy, Sid heard a delighted giggle and grinned to himself. The reins, he noticed, were slack.
Sloan had said nothing about his destination when he left, but Sid had a pretty good idea where he’d gone. There was a difference between them, he thought. Sloan liked a town and liked people around him even though he wasn’t exactly the social type. Sloan had reached a point in his development where he wanted roots—a woman, a family of his own. Sid hadn’t reached that point and maybe never would. He liked the open prairie, liked being alone with the vast and awesome stillness around him at night. He had a normal man’s appetite for women, but an occasional visit to town took care of this need without cluttering his life with permanence and strings to tie him down. Sloan, if he lived long enough, would marry that Morris girl. He’d settle here and raise half a dozen kids and grow stocky and slow and get that quiet, thoughtful look in his eyes that married men developed. And it would be good for Sloan. Sloan, unlike himself, was deviled continuously with loneliness. Sloan needed to belong, and he would belong. Right here.
>
Sid would stay until the town was tamed, and then he’d go. Maybe he’d find another partner and hunt buffalo until the beasts were gone. Maybe by then he’d have enough to start some cattle of his own on a homestead grant of prairie sod. Or maybe he’d just drift. There was a lot of country to the west of here—where savages still roamed, where the land was new. Man ought to see all he could before it was too late. Someday there would be fences and roads and towns and schools out here just the same as there were in the East. Yes, sir. A man ought to see it all before it was too late.
He settled back, fished a plug of tobacco from his pocket, and worried off a chew. He stowed it comfortably in his cheek and let the warm stillness of the night flow through and over him. The showdown here was due in a day or two. At the prospect, the nerves in his body tingled expectantly. It never occurred to him that he might die and Sloan die with him. Whatever the odds, however uneven they were, he had unswerving confidence in Sloan and in himself.
The street was quiet. Those who had attended the meeting at the Cowman’s Pride had disappeared from the street. The saloons were quiet, too, although they were still lit up as though expecting a flood of customers from the plain at any time. Sid remembered suddenly the way he’d met Sloan. Pure coincidence. He hadn’t wanted to go home after the war because there was nothing particular to return for. He had no folks or family—only the granger for whom he’d worked when the war broke out. He’d been camped in the woods, roasting a weaner pig that he’d stolen from a farm. Sloan had walked into the circle of firelight, and Sid had invited him to stay and eat.
The brooding loneliness had been plain in Sloan’s eyes then, he remembered, but not until much later had he learned its cause. Nor had he cared. They just seemed to get along well and so had stayed together. Sloan had a little money, and so had Sid. They both were pretty good shots. The buffalo-hunting venture had seemed natural and right. This was something else, and Sid still had moments of doubt about it. Seemed like a man was crowding his luck, taking on a job like this. It was like the war, only it was worse. You fought alone, and you fought craftiness and guile and murder from ambush. It was like fighting an enemy in his own camp because you fought hatred, too. That hurt Sloan much more than it did Sid because of Sloan’s thirst for roots and a place to belong.
Impatient with his own thoughts, which he knew could scare him if he gave them a decent chance, he got up and went inside again. He wandered aimlessly through the office and the cells behind it, sometimes changing a piece of furniture and vaguely depressed for no particular reason he could name. The door stood open upon the street, and the man materialized there without sound. One moment the doorway was empty, and the next he was standing there.
Sid started, and his hand touched the grips of his gun. But the man didn’t move. He was slightly drunk, whiskered, ordinary. The town-drunk type, Sid decided. He said unsteadily, “The marshal says for you to get a horse and make a couple of patrols.”
“Where is he?”
“He ’n’ Miss Morris took a buggy ride. I was down to the stable, so he sent me. He said you’d give me fifty cents.”
Sid fished in his pocket and came up with a half dollar. He tossed it to the man, who caught it expertly as though used to having money tossed to him instead of handed to him.
Sid said, “All right,” and watched the man turn and slouch away downstreet. He blew out the office lamp, went out, and closed the door. He didn’t see why patrols were necessary tonight, but if Sloan wanted them, it was all right with him. He walked downstreet to the stable, went in, and got a horse. He swung to the saddle and rode down Texas Street, staying in the center the way Sloan did. There was a reason for that, he thought. You were out in the open, and could plainly see both sides of the street. You had freedom of movement in case you were attacked. It also had a good effect on the town. Out there in the open you were the man on horseback, flinging a challenge into the faces of those who would like to cut you down. Whether you were or not, you seemed to be unafraid, contemptuous of danger and death.
Grinning, Sid held his horse in the exact center of the street. The doorways of the saloons were empty now; the town was like a tomb. No pianos tinkled from inside their batwing doors. No quarrelsome shouts were raised. Down past the depot he rode, on beyond to the cattle pens. The alleys between the pens were inky black, and cattle inside the pens spooked nervously away as he approached, to crowd together on the far side against the fence.
Vague uneasiness touched Sid, but he couldn’t place its source. He quieted it by telling himself that no one wanted him. It was Sloan they wanted dead. He saw the shadowy movement at the end of the alleyway—saw it but didn’t slack his pace. He thought it was a steer, loose from one of the pens. Too late, he saw that it was not. Flame, narrow, bluish orange, spat at him from beside the fence. He felt the bullet’s impact and knew suddenly why they wanted him. Without him, Sloan would be wholly alone, without backing, without support, either moral or tangible.
He felt himself tumbling backward out of the saddle, felt his back and shoulders strike the ground. There were more bullets now, a veritable fusillade of them. From all sides they came at him, kicking dust and powdered manure over him, striking him, whining overhead. He never got out his gun. An angry curtain of red descended over his eyes. His last thought was, That drunk! That goddamn dirty drunk … and then he knew no more.
Sloan heard the shots from the porch of Merline’s house, and was moving long before the last of them had died away. He forgot his wounded leg, and ran down the boardwalk toward the gate. Merline screamed at him, “Wait! I’ll get my mare! She’s …” She never finished. Sloan put his foot on the broken board, went through, and sprawled face down on the splintery walk.
She ran toward him, but he yelled, “No! I’m all right! Get the mare!”
He wasn’t all right. He’d twisted the leg, and pain from it was a blinding white sheet of flame before his eyes. He rolled and sat up, keeping the leg stiff and straight before him. Carefully he eased himself to his feet. His head reeled, and he could feel the warmth of fresh blood soaking the bandage over the wound. Damn!
Now he tried to place the direction of the shots, and decided they had come from the direction of the depot. He felt immeasurably relieved and wondered why he had instantly thought of Sid as he heard those shots. Sid was in the marshal’s office. He’d left him there less than half an hour ago.
Merline came running, dragging the mare behind her. Sloan took the reins from her, separated them, and swung to the mare’s back. He thundered away down the street without glancing back.
God! They couldn’t even let a man propose to his future wife without kicking up some damned fuss. Probably a pair of drunk cowhands shooting at … His thoughts stopped cold. There weren’t any cowhands or trail hands in town. There was a boycott on. That realization started him thinking of Sid again. And suddenly he was scared. His spine was cold as ice, and the flesh on the back of his neck prickled. He wore no spurs, but his heels dug savagely into the mare’s sides. Unused to this kind of treatment, she jumped as though she had been shot.
He took the corner at Fourth and Texas Street, heeled over, and swung wide to the opposite side of the street. He glanced behind him involuntarily and saw with increasing dread that the marshal’s office was dark. Sid was down there … maybe hurt … maybe even dead. How he’d got there and why, Sloan didn’t know, but now he understood why his thoughts had leaped to Sid the instant he heard the shots. Close as they were, there was something of their thoughts that leaped to each other across distances that voice or sight could never reach. Damn it! He’d thought the town was quiet for tonight. He’d let down his guard.
He passed the saloons at a hard run and rounded the turn into the depot, the mare’s hoofs setting up a veritable thunder as they crossed the plank platform. The station agent, sitting at his telegraph key, jumped and yanked his head around. Sloan yelled, “The shots! Wher
e …?”
“Cattle pens …”
Sloan didn’t wait to hear the rest. Down across the tracks to the cattle pens he thundered, and down the main alleyway between them, contemptuous of caution that would have slowed him down. His gun was in his hand, half raised and ready for anything that moved. But nothing did—not until he reached a cross alley—and then he caught a glimpse of something large and dark that might have been a steer. He reined over hard, and the shadow spooked away from him. He recognized it now as a horse.
“One of theirs,” was his thought, and he left his mount in a single easy movement as he spotted something dark and lumped upon the dusty ground.
He hit the ground running, cursing under his breath because once more he had forgotten his wounded leg. It gave, and made him lurch, but he caught himself and went on. Even before recognition touched him, he felt a stab of the same dread he had earlier felt, and something that was close to terror. Then he was close, and kneeling, and he knew that the man on the ground was Sid.
Gently he touched the man. He held his own breath while he listened for Sid’s. Hearing nothing, he put his head down against Sid’s chest and heard a faint, erratic heartbeat. Sid was still alive, at least. He started to slide his arms under Sid’s body, but stopped as Sid stirred and tried to speak. Motionless Sloan said, “I’ll get you uptown to Doc …”
“Uhn-uh. Too damn late for that.”
“Who was it? How’d they get you down here?”
“Never saw ’em. They sent the town drunk to tell me you wanted me to get a horse and patrol the town.”
Sid’s voice was weak and growing weaker fast. Sloan knew he should let Sid remain quiet while he rode for Doc, but something held him here, immovable, and something made him ask urgently, “The town drunk, you say. What’d he look like?”
“Whiskers. Slouch. Red eyes. Made me give him fifty cents. I tossed it to him, and he caught it like he was used to catching coins.”
Lawless Town Page 16
