The Gun is my Brother

by Matt Chisholm

  The marshal gestured towards Spur.

  ‘Nothing for me,’ he said. ‘I’m what you might call an impartial witness. Your business is with Sam here.’

  So they were at the Christian name stage!

  ‘And what might your business be, Mr. Spur?’ He called Spur mister before he knew what he was doing.

  Spur pushed his new grey hat on to the back of his head and said, ‘I’m bringing formal charges against certain citizens of this town. The names I know are Smelling, Wragg, Thurminger. There’re plenty more. I’d appreciate it if you’d gather them for me.’

  ‘Just what are these charges?’

  ‘I don’t know the fancy words, but don’t you think I have a small hunk of justice due to me when I get shot a couple of times, when I get a whole God-damned pack of bloody-minded men after me. When the time comes I’ll have me a lawyer in here - best that money can buy - and he’ll dress it up so good you’ll even like the sound of it yourself.’

  The sheriff gave that a little thought before he came back with, ‘I only hope you know what you’re doing.’

  Spur stood up, towering over the sheriff.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Do you?’ He turned for the door and Foggart followed him. ‘We’ll be staying at the Golden Glory. Good name that.’ He smiled and the sheriff thought he’d never hated a smile more in all his life.

  Then they were gone, stepping out on to the street as large as life; maybe even a bit larger in the sheriff’s eyes. He reached into the right-hand drawer of his desk, produced a bottle and drank. He felt a little better after that. Good enough to yank open the door to the cells and yell at Ely, ‘Come on out of there.’

  Ely came and stood staring at the sheriff wide-eyed. He seemed surprised the office wasn’t a shambles and the sheriff dead.

  ‘They gone?’

  ‘No,’ Carlson snarled, ‘they’re hidin’ in the bottle there.’

  Ely switched his gaze to the bottle and had the grace to look foolish.

  ‘That Spur—’ he began. Then, ‘What you gonna do?’

  ‘Do? I’ll tell you what you do. You get out of here and rope in all the deputies you can. I don’t want none of the boys that tried to tree Spur. Not a one. Hear? Steady men like … like … Judas priest, don’t we have any steady men in town?’

  ‘Cain’t say? Who was the other jasper?’

  It was the sheriff’s turn to look foolish.

  ‘Deputy United States marshal.’

  ‘You don’t say?’

  The sheriff shouted, ‘I do God-damn well say, you gapin’ fool. Forget about the deputies. Where’s Henry Wragg … Thurminger, that great ox Smelling?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Go find ’em. They’ve got to know who Spur’s got with him and they’ve got to know fast before they make a play. You got that?’

  ‘I reckon.’

  When he’d gone, the sheriff gave the bottle a chance to show its paces again. By the time he got around to reviewing the situation he felt a better and the bottle felt considerably lighter.

  When they had reached their horses Spur said, ‘Ly, go on over to the saloon and book our rooms, will you? I have some business to attend to.’

  Foggart put his left foot in the stirrup iron and watched Spur swing up. The lawman was frowning.

  ‘Now, Sam—’ he said and hesitated, knowing Spur wasn’t the kind you dictated to.

  Spur laughed.

  ‘Quit worrying, man,’ he said. ‘I’m a legitimate citizen now.’

  ‘Just watch out for yourself. You don’t have any friends in this town. I can’t stop a bullet from out of the dark.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Spur said. ‘I’ve got the best friends in this town a man ever had.’

  He turned the black and put it down the street at a canter, heading for the ford and swinging left into the timber.

  As he came across the flat under the bluff, pushing through the light mist coming up from the creek, the animal whinnied and received a reply from the barn. Glancing towards the house, Spur saw a small figure silhouetted against the light in the open door. Janey.

  He slowed the black to a walk and gave his hallo to the house, saw another figure join the little girl’s and felt his heart turn over just as if he were a young boy.

  In the yard, he halted and lifted his hat.

  ‘It’s Sam Spur, ma’am,’ he said and the child gave a small scream.

  ‘It’s the outlaw, Ma.’

  Janey broke from the restraining hand and ran to him, clutching at his boot.

  ‘You ain’t daid, then,’ she yelled up at him and the black danced off sideways till he stopped it.

  ‘Still in one piece,’’ he affirmed.

  The woman in the doorway said, ‘ Light and welcome, Mr. Spur.’

  He stepped out of the saddle, left a rein dragging and walked towards her with Janey hanging on his arm. Lucy Overell was black against the lamplight behind her and he couldn’t see the face that he had seen in the eye of his mind for a month now.

  Above the child’s gabble, the woman said, ‘Hush, Janey, where’re your manners?’

  He said, ‘I don’t mind, ma’am,’ and then they were in the house, the door was closed behind them and they faced each other.

  He had somehow pictured her smiling at him when they met, but she wasn’t smiling now. Her expression was a shock to him.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ she told him.

  She was pale and her hands were clenched into small fists till the knuckles showed white.

  ‘You knew I would.’

  ‘I was afraid you would.’

  He moved around the room, so she would have to turn and face him in the lamplight and show her face more clearly. He saw that anxiety had lined her face, taken its full grip of her.

  ‘I reckon something’s happened,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. The worst thing possible.’

  His lean face lit with a smile.

  ‘I’ve been thinking I’d get me a piece of that apple-pie of yourn, ma’am. I’ll allow you’ve done burned it.’

  She didn’t answer his smile, but said, ‘It’s the money.’

  ‘What money?’ Janey demanded.

  ‘Time you were in bed, Janey,’ Spur told her.

  ‘Aw, shucks, it ain’t … you on’y just come.’

  ‘Janey, go to bed.’

  She knew that tone when her mother used it. She stuck her lower lip out and walked slowly from the room. The man and the woman didn’t speak till the door was closed.

  Spur said, ‘Sit down, take it easy and tell me all about it.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t sit. It all sounds so easy, so untrue. You give me more money than I’ve had in all my life and I tell you I’ve lost it.’

  He sat on the edge of the table and she took note of the change of his clothing for the first time, noting how it altered him, gave him a gentlemanly air. She liked it.

  ‘Don’t fret about how it sounds,’ he told her. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘It was the same day you gave it to me. I couldn’t have been a mile from the Rock when he came after me ... he must have been watching the Rock.’

  He jerked his head up and said, ‘Smelling.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘He come back. Wragg was with him, hid down by the creek. They tried to get me.’ He smacked a fist into a hand-palm.

  ‘My Gawd, I should’ve known. I shot his horse and he run back for his bed-roll. He had the belt hidden there.’ He got up and walked up and down a couple of times. ‘It’s my fault. I was a fool. I could’ve caught him down by the creek only I let him go—thought it risky in the dusk.’

  ‘I haven’t known what to do,’ she said. ‘I’ve been weak. He threatened ... he said he’d seen me go into the cave with you ... I know I’ve been a coward.’

  He crossed to her and took hold of her by the tops of her arms and looked down into her upturned face. This woman wasn’t afraid of much.
She wasn’t scared of him now because of the money. She was scared of the fact that she had failed, been found wanting in some standard she had set herself.

  ‘It wasn’t a coward,’ he said, ‘that rode out of town and brought the gun and supplies to me at the Rock. Don’t mind the money. That makes just one more debt they owe us … you and me.’

  She moved out of his grip. Stood with her back to him and said softly, ‘All that money … you believe me without a question. You could be making a mistake.’

  ‘No,’ he told her. ‘I couldn’t. Now … about that apple pie? While I’m eating it, you can tell me some of the things I have to know and I can tell you how far this business has gone.’

  She found a smile and gave it to him over her shoulder.

  ‘You must have smelled my baking today ‘way back down the trail. Not only the old apple—blueberry too.’

  He laughed and she had to laugh too because the sound was so good to her.

  ‘We’d best leave the talk till later. Blueberry pie is liable to take a man’s whole attention.’

  They went into the kitchen where she served him sweet coffee with his pie, finding it pleasant to sit watching a man consuming her cooking with gusto after so long alone here with the child. She was a woman made for a man and knew it.

  When he was done eating, he rolled a smoke with her permission and told what had happened to him in the last month, his hunting out the marshal in Chisholm, gleaning him the news of the lawlessness outside the town here, his own determination to do this thing the legal way. If it could be and he wasn’t so sure even now. She told him all she knew about the men involved in the attempt to catch and hang him, ending with the question he awaited about his being wanted by the law.

  ‘No,’ he answered. ‘The law doesn’t want me. Nor never should have. I reckon once it was kind of jealous.’ She could see that he was sitting there mocking himself and she liked him for being able to laugh at himself. She had scarcely guessed at this light-hearted skepticism before. ‘You see, it was down in the brasada beyond the Nueces. There wasn’t any law there, so I took along my own. A notable man got himself shot and there was hell to pay. So they made me an outlaw. No matter, when the Yankees took off with their carpet-bags, my own folk give me a pardon. The folks up this way had heard of my trouble and the way I used a gun, but the bit about me being regenerated hadn’t gotten around to this neck of the woods.’

  She told him in detail of her meeting with Smelling and she saw the capacity for quiet anger in him then and again she was scared for him. When he got up to go, she came to the door with him, laid a hand on his arm and said, ‘Watch out for yourself, Mr. Spur … Sam.’

  ‘No call to say that, girl. I’ve got reasons to stay alive now.’

  ‘And Sam?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’m sorry I made a hash and Smelling got that money. I know it means everything to you.’

  ‘Not everything.’

  She watched him walk away to the black and felt a surge of pleasure that he had kept the horse and said nothing about giving it back to her. The strength of him was plain to her and she felt a premonition of danger for him that his lean strength might soon be blasted out of the living world in gunfire.

  He stepped easily into the saddle, the black whirled, and he lifted a hand in salute. She watched him ride slowly across the flat into the dark maw of the cottonwoods and her heart seemed to be heavy in her breast. She said a small wordless prayer to herself and went back into the house.

  In the stillness of the kitchen, picking up his cleaned plate from the table she said out loud, ‘He’ll do it, Will. Pray God he comes back to me alive.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Fifteen miles out of town across the rolling plain of buffalo grass that whispered softly under the caress of the southerly breeze, on for another thirty miles clear up to the dark ridges of the foothills, was the Smelling headquarters—two shacks and a barn no horse should have been seen alive in. No matter, Smelling stood for power and influence in his world and, standing in his yard in the moonlight listening, he held himself like a man who stood astraddle of the country. A rich man—in reputation because no one had ever thought to count his cows. If they had, they might have wondered where his spending money came from.

  The riders standing with him didn’t have any doubts about that. They helped him earn it. Here they brought the stolen horses, the rustled cattle and the loot from the ore-trains and stage-coaches. Here they rested up after their hard and dangerous trips.

  Smelling said, ‘I can’t hear a goddam thing. Who in hell said he could hear a hoss?’

  ‘Me,’ one of them said. ‘Boss, you clean the dust out of your ears and you’ll hear it.’

  ‘Gold dust,’ another said and they all gave him a laugh.

  Smelling liked that, standing here laughing with his men, knowing he only had to change his tone and the laugh would come off their faces like he’d pulled a string. And all of them hard cases.

  He cocked his great head and told them triumphantly, ‘I heerd him.’

  They waited and within fifteen minutes a horse that heaved after the hard run out from town brought its rider into the yard, threw dust in their faces as it halted.

  ‘Smelling!’

  ‘Here.’

  The rider jerking around, whirling the horse.

  ‘Spur! Spur’s in town!’

  Smelling thrust two men violently aside and bawled, ‘Keep that damned horse still. Whata ya sayin’?’

  ‘Spur.’

  The rancher grabbed the bridle and wrenched the horse still so the animal tried to rear up in its fright.

  Henry Wragg climbed out of the saddle and walked away from the animal stiff-legged, aching from the pace he had hit.

  ‘Spur’s in town, I’m tellin’ you. Brought a sidey with him. Rid down the street cool as you like and went straight into Carlson’s office. What do you think of that? Straight off he heads for the sheriff.’

  The little man was fidgeting this way and that. Smelling caught him by the coat and wrenched him around to face him holding him still with a great iron hand.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘How in hell do I know what happened?’ Wragg thundered. ‘I rid out. I come to tell you.’

  Smelling let the little man go and howled, ‘You rid out! My Gawd, you rid out! Where was you?’

  ‘Across the street.’

  ‘Was the range too far for you to make a hit or some thin’?’

  Wragg shook himself angrily, working himself into a rage, but not letting it get too strong a hold on him. He’d brace Smelling any day of the week and not give it a thought, but that was when his men weren’t around.

  ‘You think I’m crazy? Cut him down right under Carlson’s nose?’

  ‘Carlson!’ Smelling put his poor opinion of the sheriff into the name as if he were spitting a bad taste off his tongue. ‘Waal, I’d best do the chore you didn’t have the guts to do.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Henry came back at him with, ‘you do that ... an’ make sure you have plenty of guns to back you.’

  Smelling took a long look at him.

  ‘All right,’ he ordered, ‘saddle up.’

  His straw-boss, a tall gangling man carrying his head thrust forward asked, ‘Who’d you want, boss?’

  ‘Every damn one of you.’ Which showed what the big man felt about Sam Spur, told every man there the whole story and Smelling knew that, didn’t like it.

  ‘Loan me a fresh mount, Smelling,’ Wragg said.

  ‘Ride your own goddam crowbait,’ Smelling snarled and thereupon sealed his own fate in Henry Wragg’s mind.

  Within minutes they were crowding away from the place down the lane between the corrals, following hard on the heels of Smelling’s impetuous rush for the town. Wragg brought up the rear, making no attempt to keep up, not wanting to kill a good horse because they were hard to come by and cash was notably absent just now. When he thought of the lifted stock in Smelling’s p
ens he choked on the thought.

  He rode at a steady lope, listening to the sounds of the hurrying horses drawing away from him, tasting with some pleasure the fear that drove Smelling. There was no parson now to cover him, no deadly gun to hide behind. Smelling was passable, but he didn’t travel in the same class as Sam Spur—and himself. The one man who could reveal Smelling now that he had talked with the Overell woman, the one man who had every reason to see both Smelling—and Wragg—dead was going to get his comeuppance tonight.

  One thought worried Wragg: that it would not be his gun that cut Spur down. Or if it was his gun—that no one would witness it. He wanted grandstand play. He wanted a glow of terrible glory built on violence and the blood of a defeated enemy. Smelling he would be willing to kill unseen. Spur was different.

  When Sam Spur returned to the Golden Glory he found that Foggart had booked a shared room for him. The marshal was there now, standing trim and spruced up on the bare boards, feeling clean for the first time in five days.

  He greeted Spur with a grin, saying, ‘So you’re in one piece still. The news hasn’t got around yet.’

  ‘It’s got around, but I reckon Carlson hasn’t forgotten to mention you’re along.’

  ‘What’s your program?’

  ‘A bath, a shave, a drink and a good meal.’

  ‘Suits my book. I’ll go ahead and sample the rotgut while you clean up.’

  He left Spur and descended to the bar, propped it and called for whiskey, bought his next-door neighbor one according to custom and found he was the center of attention. They didn’t make it too obvious, but the talk dimmed a little and the card players didn’t give their full attention to the pasteboards. The man he bought the drink for didn’t linger. The marshal found himself standing in a little island of emptiness. Not even the barkeep showed inclination for talk and they were a notably garrulous tribe.

  After a while, about a half-dozen men with the dust of the trail on them, filed in and took their places at the bar Foggart couldn’t miss the fact that the men already there gladly gave up their places to them, that the barkeep jumped to serve them Their leader he couldn’t miss either—a big man with the head and shoulders of a bull. This, he guessed from Spur’s description, was Smelling.