by Jory Sherman
Dan’s father found a live oak that was near some scrapes and rubs. He made a ladder out of tree limbs he sawed with a piece of wire cable wrapped around two wooden handles. He had nails and a hammer in his saddlebags. He nailed chunks of wood to the oak’s trunk and the three of them climbed into the tree and sat on separate limbs like squirrels or monkeys.
“Now,” Virgil said, “we sit and wait. But, we don’t just sit and wait.”
“What do we do, Daddy?” Dan asked.
“We sit so still that we become part of this tree—part of the woods. We breathe very quiet and we listen. And we think we are part of the forest.”
“We think we are part of the forest?” Dan asked, squinting his eyes in puzzlement.
“Yes, Son. We think so that we become part of the forest. You’ll see. After about twenty minutes or so, you’ll hear the woods come to life. You’ll hear the squirrels a-chitterin’ and animals walking through the dried leaves. You’ll hear a twig snap and your skin will jump, but you won’t make a move. You are part of this tree and this tree is a part of you.”
“I don’t understand, Daddy,” Jason said.
“You’ll understand in due time. Just do what I say, Jason, and you too, Dan. All the critters here will forget we ever walked into their woods. They’ll think we’re just like them, like we took up our home here. They won’t pay no attention to us.”
And, it was true.
Dan remembered that he sat there on the limb of that oak tree, with his .40 caliber rifle lying easy across his leg, a percussion cap on the nipple, and his thumb on the hammer, ready to draw it back to full cock. His daddy had showed him how to squeeze the trigger just a little bit when he hammered back so that it wouldn’t make so much of a clicking noise.
He waited and he thought of becoming a part of the oak tree and he felt himself grow into the limb until he was just another limb of it himself. And he looked over at Jason, who was sitting still and quiet and staring down at the deer paths like someone in a trance. His father seemed natural and at ease, his blue eyes the only thing moving. His head never moved, and it seemed his ears stood out and were picking up every sound.
A half hour went by, maybe less, and Dan began to hear the squirrels coming down the trees where they had been hiding. He could hear their little claws scratching the bark. Then he heard them in the leaves and his heart jumped. He heard insects buzzing, and little far-off rustlings sounded like animals walking among the crackling dry leaves. Suddenly, all of the sounds seemed amplified, but he was able to put them into perspective, so that he knew which sounds were close, which were far away.
It was an exhilarating experience for Dan. He felt as if he had been transported into another world, a world where all of his perceptions were heightened and yet he was gripped with a strange calm, as if he belonged there. As if he had always belonged there.
And then, a deer, a doe, had walked beneath their tree, its ears twisting first one way, then another. It stopped and lifted its nose to sniff the air. Dan felt his flesh tingle. His heart pounded so loudly he could hear it. He looked at his father out of the corner of his eye.
Virgil slowly lifted one hand from his rifle and pointed downward. Then he nodded. Dan knew that his father was telling him to shoot, that he was being given the first shot.
The white-tailed doe stepped forward as Dan raised his rifle to his shoulder, cocking the way his father had shown him. He lined up the sights on the doe’s side, just behind her left foreleg, where the heart and lungs were lying underneath her hide. The doe stopped and turned its head. Dan drew a breath, held it, then squeezed the trigger. The rifle cracked like a bullwhip and recoiled against Dan’s shoulder. A jet of flame erupted from the barrel, followed by a billowing cloud of white smoke. He heard the thunk of the lead ball, then hoofbeats. The doe ran twenty yards, then fell down hard. Blood spurted from a tiny hole in its side and then it looked back up at Dan with glassy eyes and died, its head dropping gently to the earth. The smoke wafted away and Dan sat there, trembling all over. He looked over at his father who nodded his approval.
Later, when they were heading home with four deer killed and dressed out, Dan asked his father about being in the woods, being a part of everything there.
“After I shot that deer, Daddy, it seemed like I ruined everything. I mean, I was really in the woods and felt like I belonged, but when my rifle went off, I knew I had broken the spell. Do you know what I mean?”
“Danny, boy, all you did was let the deer, the squirrels, the turkeys, and the quail know that you belonged there. You took food to eat. You’re a meat eater. The animals understand that.”
“They do?”
“Why, sure. You don’t never back down about who you are. The animals respect you for that. People will, too.”
He thought about those words a lot over the years, and now that they had come back to him, he felt better about himself. He could ride the owlhoot trail, but he didn’t have to change who he was. He would let his beard grow so that he didn’t look like the drawing on the wanted poster, but inside, he would be the same Dan Cord as he always had been.
Wasn’t that what his father meant?
His father had told him many other things, and Dan found himself missing him. He wondered, of course, why his father had left his family, but his mother said he must have had a good reason.
“Your daddy never did nothing without a good reason,” she always said.
“But, aren’t you mad at him for leavin’ us like that, so sudden and all?”
“No, I’m not mad at him, Dan. Virgil would have told me he was a-leavin’ if he could have. I think he just got took away and someday he’s a-goin’ to come back and explain it to me and you and Jason.”
Dan wondered. Since he had found out that his father had been in the Army, the Union Army at that, he wasn’t so sure that his father gave a damn about his mother or him or Jason. He never wrote a letter and he never told them why he left and why he didn’t come back after the war.
Dan could not think about his father any more that day. It was just getting too painful. He had to think about how to find out when the Texas Rangers were going to ride Jerico Jones down to San Antonio, and he had to do it pretty fast.
He got up and looked out the window at the street. “Well, I sure as hell ain’t gonna get any information sittin’ in this hotel room.”
He squared his hat and left the room. He wanted to walk over to the fort and see if he could learn anything about the Rangers’ plans. It was better than doing nothing.
As Dan was walking through the lobby, a man entered, carrying saddlebags, a bedroll, rifle and scabbard. His hat brim shielded his face, but there was something familiar about him. The man didn’t look at Dan, but walked up to the counter and rapped on it for the clerk.
Outside, Dan started toward the Ranger fort. He passed some saloons, a bail bond office, a lawyer’s office, and a notary public’s office. All the buildings looked decrepit, run down. The people on the street looked like idlers, loafers, the dregs of human society. He began to feel depressed again, so he crossed the street to a side road. As soon as he turned the corner, he stopped. It was as if someone had struck a match and lit a lamp in his brain.
That man he had seen coming into the Double Eagle. Now, he knew who it was.
He couldn’t think of the man’s name right off, but he worked for Jake Krebs. Of that, Dan was dead sure.
He stood there, then looked over his shoulder as if expecting to see the man turn the corner.
He stared at the empty corner for a long stretch of moments, his mouth twisted in a dark frown.
Then someone tapped him on the shoulder. Dan felt as if he had jumped a foot inside his skin.
He went into a crouch, whirled, drawing his pistol. By the time the Colt cleared the holster, it was cocked and level. All his blood raced at high speed through his veins, hot as fiery lava running down a mountain.
Chapter Thirteen
Sometimes a man’s l
ife hangs by the thinnest of threads.
Death was no more than a heartbeat away from the young man standing at the wrong end of Dan’s Colt. Dan’s finger was just that close to squeezing the trigger when he looked into the wide eyes of a man still wet behind the ears. There was peach fuzz growing on the man’s face, which was as white as cuttle bone, every ounce of blood drained from it, as if his throat had been cut.
“Don’t shoot me, mister. I was just lookin’ for a handout. Honest.” The young man’s lips quivered in fear.
Dan eased his finger off the trigger ever so slightly. He was beginning to shake himself with the thought of what he might have done a split second before that one stark moment.
“I almost blew you to kingdom come,” Dan said. “You ought not to walk up behind a man like that.”
“I’m awful sorry, sir. I’m just hungry and you looked like a good touch.”
The street was deserted except for the stranger and Dan. The falling sun had left most of it in shadow. It was a strange place for a panhandler to work. The young man was wearing a pistol and gunbelt. He had curly red hair and pale blue eyes. His clothes were unkempt and dirty. He wore scuffed boots that hadn’t seen a shine in months. His shirt hung on him and his pants were loose around his waist. In his cheap, worn-out holster, the kid carried an old Colt Navy revolver that had been converted from percussion to centerfire. The butt was dark cherry-wood and Dan saw that some of the bluing was worn down to the dull silver color of iron.
Color gradually returned to the young man’s cheeks, but Dan saw fear in his eyes, the fear he knew only too well. The fear of a hunted man.
“Where in hell did you come from so all of a sudden?” Dan asked.
The young man pointed to a passageway between two old buildings.
“Back of that old store there,” he said.
“Show me.”
“I sure wish you’d put that Colt away, Mister. I’m about to piss my pants as it is.”
“You just keep walking. And put your hands down. But don’t go for that pistol or you’ll get a hole in your back.”
They passed into the walkway between the two buildings. The building on the left had once been a feed store. The letters were faded on the front, but they read: FEED, followed by the name K. Newcomb, Prop. The building on the right had once housed a woman’s clothing store and was now empty, except for an old dress form that stood like some disembodied mechanical human in the window. The form was covered with dust and cobwebs dangled from its armature. The painted sign above the windows read: MADAME GENA’S DRESS SHOPPE, followed by the name P. & G. Brandvold.
They reached the alley where the young man stopped and pointed to a loading dock behind the feed store. The alley had become a garbage dump for cast off items. It was strewn with broken pots, empty and torn feed bags, broken dress forms, scraps of cloth, tin cans, crates, boxes, broken barrels.
“Under there,” the young man said. “That’s where I been sleepin’.”
To Dan, it looked like a pigsty. It was dark and he could see where boxes had been stacked and moved when he left his bed on an old stained mattress that looked as if it had once been on a cot in a flophouse.
Dan swore under his breath. “All right,” he said. “I’m going to holster my Colt. You’ve been livin’ hard. How come?”
“I got no place to live. I got no job.”
“You’re young. You look healthy. What kind of trouble are you packin’? Are you runnin’ from somethin’ worse than this?”
The man turned around and Dan saw that his eyes were filling with tears. Dan felt sorry for him at that moment.
As Dan watched, the young man broke down, the tears coming fast, the sobs shaking his body. He put his hands over his face and doubled over as if he had been slammed in the stomach with a fist. Dan had never seen a man cry like that in front of another man and it was unnerving. He reached out and touched the man on the shoulder. He didn’t know what else to do.
“Maybe you better spell it out,” Dan said. “You can’t carry a load like that all by yourself.”
The young man straightened up and began wiping away his tears with the backs of his hands. He was too overwrought to speak, but he was trying to bring himself under control. After a few seconds, he looked at Dan, tears still brimming in his eyes.
“I got the law after me,” the man said.
“What’s your name, first off?”
“Pete. Pete Raskin.”
“Where you from?”
“Down near Austin. I live in Marble Falls. Yeah, I’m runnin’ and I’m plumb scared to get caught. So I took to the owlhoot trail.”
“You’d better tell me all of it,” Dan said. “Maybe I can help you.”
“All I want is a handout. I ain’t et in three days.”
“What happened? Did you kill somebody?”
Raskin shook his head. “Just as bad, maybe. Me’n some boys got drunk over in Austin one night and they stole this horse. I was with ’em. We got caught, but I run away. They hanged those boys right on the spot and I seen it all. I wanted to go home, but those boys told ’em where I lived and even my name and my wife’s name. So I lit a shuck and came north.”
“Maybe you should have gone to the law,” Dan said.
“Those men were the law. One of ’em wore a deputy badge.”
Dan whistled. “Do you know any of them that done the hangin’?”
“They were all drinkin’ in the same saloon as we was, and they follered us out to this place where we stole the horse.”
“Looks to me like you got caught up in somethin’,” Dan said.
“Mister, are you going to help me, or turn me in?”
“I’m not going to turn you in, Raskin. Let me think a minute.” Dan looked at the squalor beneath the loading dock and shuddered inwardly. It seemed to him that Raskin had fallen in with bad companions and wasn’t a born horse thief. He wasn’t exactly innocent, probably, but he wasn’t real guilty, either.
While Dan was pondering Raskin’s story, Pete was studying Dan’s face with intense scrutiny. He took a deep breath and wiped the last of the tears from his face.
“I know who you are,” Raskin said. “I seen your face on a flyer yesterday. You’re Dan Cord and you’re wanted for murder up in Kansas.”
Dan reared up and stood straighter. “Maybe,” he said.
“No maybe about it. You’re Dan Cord and there’s a reward out for you.”
“Being wanted and guilty are two different things. But, yeah, I’m Dan Cord. Are you figurin’ to collect that reward?”
“No, sir. Not me.”
“Good. Look, Raskin, I believe your story. Maybe, like me, you’re not really guilty of stealing that horse. But, like me, you’re a wanted man. Maybe we can do better if we hook up.”
“You mean like being partners or something?”
“Two heads are better than one.”
“Can you stake me to a meal?”
“Come on. I’ll buy you some eats and we can talk about some things, maybe.”
Together, the two men found a little nondescript Mexican café on one of the side streets. Dan bought two plates of beef steak, refried beans, tortillas, and eggs. Raskin wolfed his food down and the two men talked in low tones between bites of food.
Dan told Pete about the murders of the drovers who rode for the 2 Bar 7 Ranch and that the Texas Rangers were holding an eyewitness who could testify against Jake Krebs.
“He’s the man who framed me for murder,” Dan said.
“And he’s in Waco now, you say?”
“I think he’s here to murder Jerico Jones, that eyewitness.”
“How could he do that?”
“The Rangers are going to take Jones down to San Antonio to testify before a grand jury. I think Krebs will try to kill Jones somewhere between Waco and San Antonio.”
“What do you aim to do?” Raskin asked.
“Follow those rangers down there to make sure Krebs doesn’t kill Jones. Je
rico Jones is my only chance to clear my name. Krebs framed me for murder. When the grand jury hands down an indictment, Krebs can be arrested and brought to trial. The prosecutors can confront him with those murders up in Kansas and I could testify against Krebs.”
“It sounds real complicated.”
“It is. But so is living on the owlhoot trail.”
They finished their meal and Dan paid for it.
“Do you have a horse, Pete?”
“Yeah. I got him hobbled on a patch of grass downriver a ways.”
“If I put your horse up and give you a place to sleep, stake you to some duds, will you help me?”
“Why, sure, Dan. You’ve been right nice to me. What do you want me to do?”
“I need to know when the rangers head out with Jones. I’ve got my picture on a wanted flyer and can’t show my face around town. But there are no flyers out for you. Here in Waco, you’re just another citizen.”
“I don’t know how long that’s going to be,” Raskin said.
“They might never put a flyer out on you.”
“I hope to God.”
The two walked along the Brazos to an empty field where a sorrel gelding grazed. It was lying down in the shade of a clump of trees and stood up when the two men approached. The horse whinnied in recognition of Pete.
“That’s my best horse, Socks,” Raskin said. “He’s a three-year-old I raised from a colt.
The horse had four white stockings and a small star blaze on its face. His sleek hide hadn’t seen a curry comb in a while and there were blood streaks where the flies had gotten to him.
“We’ll get Socks some grain and put a curry comb to him, Pete. Where’s your saddle?”
“Up in that tree yonder.” Raskin pointed to a gum tree.”
“You’re pretty smart, Pete. Can’t no critters get to that saddle. Or thieves, neither, less’n they know right where to look.”
“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, Dan. But I did make that one dumb mistake.”
