Laurie merely nodded, saying, “I guess he wanted a change.”
Cody was wearing a pair of faded blue jeans with a chambray shirt that matched and his oldest pair of boots. He had been practicing roping the buffalo and was pretty well covered with dust from head to foot. Wiping his forehead with his arm, he gave her an odd look. “You’re not telling all of it, are you, Laurie?”
“Why—I don’t know what you mean,” said Laurie defensively.
“You don’t lie too well, Laurie.” Cody allowed his eyes to rest on her, then added, “Almost everyone knows how Con’s been asking you to marry him. He hasn’t made any secret of it. I figure you turned him down.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Why? He ought to make a pretty good husband.”
“I suppose so. But not my husband.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t love him.” Laurie lifted her eyes and her lips trembled slightly. “You can understand that. A girl would never marry a man she didn’t love, or shouldn’t.”
“Laurie, I don’t know much about love. What makes you so sure about it? You’ve read too many books, I think sometimes, too many romances.”
Laurie at once said, shaking her head, “Oh, Cody, there are all kinds of love. I love my father in one way, and I love my mother in another. They’re two different people. Then, of course, I love Mac. Not like I love my father, that’s something very special, just for him. Love is tied up with a person, and you can’t get away from it.”
“What about Sam? What kind of love have you got for him? He says you’re kissing cousins.”
“That’s exactly right, we’re cousins. His mother and my father—and your stepfather—are brothers and sister. And Sam is what he is, and I’m what I am, and together, we have a relationship.”
Cody stared at her, then his shoulders seemed to sag. “I guess that’s right for you, Laurie.”
Suddenly, he turned and walked away, leaving her standing helplessly. She wanted to go after him, but she could not think of another thing to say. Oh, why didn’t he ask me how I felt about him, she thought, but could I have told him? She knew that she could not have done it, for she believed that if Cody had any feelings for her, he would have to speak the first word.
****
Sam Novak finished herding the buffalo into the pen, and as the huge, ungainly beasts moved inside in response to his urgings, he shouted, “If I wasn’t a preacher, I could cuss! I never saw such contrary critters in all my life! Get on, there!”
“What’s the matter, preacher? They botherin’ you, them sweet, little woollies?” Buck Bronson had moved in beside him. Towering over Sam, he grinned and said, “Just be glad you don’t have to put ’em to bed and tuck ’em in.”
Sam glared at him and shook his head. “I won’t be sorry to see the last of them,” he muttered, then added, “Have you seen Jim?”
“He took off right after the show was over,” Buck said. “I think he was going to town. He had a pretty urgent look about him, I’d say.” Then a smile broke out on Buck’s big face. “You don’t reckon he’s got a gal stashed away there, do you?”
“I don’t think so,” Sam murmured. He continued helping with the animals, keeping his eye out for Cody, but he never saw him.
It was after ten that night when Johnny Baker came into the tent that they shared. He looked a little the worse for wear; his hair was messed up, and there was a bruise under his right eye.
“What happened to you, Johnny?” Sam demanded.
“Oh, I had a little disagreement with a feller,” he said. He plopped down on the cot and pulled off one boot, explaining, “I went into this saloon, you see, and there was this pretty little red-haired girl over there, so I went over and introduced myself.”
He pulled off the other boot, holding it, and grinned at Sam. “But this feller that was with her, he took exception, so he pulled out his gun and pointed it at me. Pulled the trigger, too, but she snapped on empty.” He tossed the boots down and started pulling off his shirt. “Well, sir, I tried to reason with him, but he picked up a chair and hit me over the head with it—and that’s when the trouble started.”
“I hope you learned something from it,” Sam Novak said morosely.
“Sure did,” Johnny Baker said. He leveled his pale blue eyes on Novak and grinned. “I learned not to ever let a man get the bulge on me. From now on, I’ll go in swingin’!” He pulled his pants off, rolled under the blanket, then raised up on one elbow and said, “Hey, did you know Jim was in town having a toot?”
Instantly Novak was all attention. “You saw Logan?”
“See him? Why we hit half the saloons in town together. I tried to get him to come home with me, but he wouldn’t hear nothing of it. Says he’s gonna bust the town wide open, but I reckon that sheriff there’ll stop that. I heard he was a pretty mean one. Lets a fellow get all drunk, then sneaks up and hits him over the head with that special blackjack of his and hauls him off to jail.” He closed his eyes wearily, adding, “Then he slaps a big fine on him. Shore hate to see Logan get in a mess like that.”
Instantly, Sam leaped to his feet, grabbed his hat, and ran out of the tent. Without hesitation, he saddled a horse he had bought for himself and took off at a gallop. What could he be thinking! he thought as he drove the animal hard toward the lights of the town half a mile away. If he gets picked up, they might find out who he is.
He had some trouble finding Cody, for there were a dozen saloons in the wide streets. It was in the sixth one that he found him loudly arguing with the bartender.
“Give me another drink, or I’ll punch your ugly face in,” Cody threatened.
The bartender, a burly man with a shock of black hair, reached under the counter, pulled a club out, and said, “I told you, cowboy, you’ve had enough. Now you walk out or get carried out.”
“Carried out? We’ll see who gets carried out,” Cody yelled. He would have gone over the bar toward the saloonkeeper, but Sam managed to get to him and jerk him around. Cody’s eyes were blurred from the effect of all the whiskey he had consumed. Not recognizing who had spun him around, he took a wild swing that caught Sam high on the forehead. It sent stars flashing in front of his eyes, and Novak was driven backward, flat on his back. He struggled to his feet and grabbed Cody’s arm. “Come on, Jim. Let’s get out of this place.”
Cody blinked his eyes and licked his lips. He was so drunk he had to focus carefully, then he mumbled, “Oh, Sam, I didn’t know it was you.”
Pushing Cody toward the door he muttered, “Come on,” and muscled him out of the saloon.
When they were outside, Cody asked, “What are you doing here, Sam? Did you come into town to get drunk, too?”
“I came to take you back.”
“Not going back,” Cody said stubbornly, stumbling toward his horse. He also had bought an animal for his own use, and Novak saw that the saddle blanket was tied up into a roll. “I’m leavin’—gettin’ out of here,” Cody mumbled.
Sam stared at him and shook his head. “Why, you can’t do that,” argued Novak.
“Why can’t I? What good am I doing here?” Cody’s mouth was tightly drawn with a bitter line, and his eyes, though glazed, were heavy with anger and doubt. “All I’m doing is messin’ up lives, so I’m gettin’ out.”
Sam tried to reason with him, using every argument he could think of, but Cody simply stood there shaking his head, insisting that he was leaving the show and moving on.
“All right,” said Sam finally. “If you’re leaving, I’m going with you. Just give me time to go back and get my stuff.”
Cody shook his head. “I’m headin’ down that road. We’ll pass right by the show. You can get your stuff on the way, but, Sam, don’t tell anybody.”
“I’ll have to tell,” Sam insisted. “It wouldn’t be fair to Colonel Cody just to pull out.”
Cody made several attempts to get his foot in the stirrup, then awkwardly pulled himself into the saddle. “All ri
ght, tell him anything you want to. Just say I’m gone to the devil.” Without another word, he turned his horse around and began moving down the street at a trot. Sam leaped on his own horse, rode up to Cody, and all the way back tried to persuade him to change his mind. When he saw it was hopeless, he said, “Don’t go so fast. I’ll catch up with you.”
“Better hurry it up, then. I want to get out of here.”
Sam galloped his horse into the arena and went at once to Nate Salsbury. He told him what had happened, and Salsbury shook his head sadly. “That’s too bad. You go with him, Sam, and bring him back. After he gets over his drunk, he’ll feel differently.”
“I’ll do the best I can—but I can’t promise anything,” Sam answered. He turned and mounted again and caught up with Cody a quarter of a mile down the road.
“Well, I got my stuff,” he said. He determined to be cheerful about the whole thing and began talking about some places they might go, but he received nothing but a stony silence for his efforts. Finally, after riding for several hours, Cody became so sick that he could hardly sit on his horse. Sam gathered the reins of both animals, pulled them over to a grove of trees where he tied them, and then made camp.
Cody spent the next two hours throwing up. He was unaccustomed to liquor in such large quantities, and finally he fell into a fitful sleep. Sam sat there staring into the fire, poking it and watching the sparks fly upward. “Well,” he said softly, “the Good Book says man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, and I guess that’s what Cody’s in.” He sat there thinking about his friend and praying for a long time.
****
Sam had figured that one drunk might be enough to purge Cody, and that when he sobered up, he’d be willing to go back. But for five days the pair rode along, and every day Cody would stop at a town and buy whiskey, then proceed to drink himself unconscious. Every night he would fall into his blanket in oblivion, leaving Sam to do all the work. He ate almost nothing, and on the fifth day, Sam found a place to camp just outside of a small town. Cody was already bleary-eyed and half-sick. “We’ve run out of grub,” Sam said. “You go on to bed, and I’ll go find us something to eat.”
“Don’t want anything to eat,” Cody murmured. But Sam ignored him and rode away from the camp. He was back in half an hour, but discovered Cody was already asleep, tossing fitfully, his legs jerking.
“Don’t know how long this can go on,” Sam said to himself. “He’s gonna kill himself drinking.” After cooking a meager supper and eating it, Sam sat there staring at the fire and praying hard for his young friend. Finally, he spread out his bedroll and went to bed.
The next morning, the sunlight fell on Sam’s face, awakening him. He blinked like an owl in the sunlight and sat up. He looked across to Cody, and his eyes flew open when he saw Cody was gone. “Cody,” he called out, jumping out of his blanket and looking around. Then he saw Cody’s horse was gone.
He started scrambling into his boots, when all of a sudden he saw a white sheet of paper weighted down by a rock almost at his feet. Snatching it up, he read the brief note:
Sam, I'm going to the devil, but there's not any sense your going along with me. Don't try to follow me. You've been a good friend, but there’s nothing you or anybody else can do for me. Think of me sometimes. Cody.
Sam immediately threw his gear together, strapped it on his horse, and rode down the highway at a fast clip. Though he searched all day, he could not find a trace of a trail to follow, and he knew that Cody must have cut off the main road. “He could be anywhere,” he groaned in despair, and though he asked around at several places at the small towns, no one had seen anyone that fit Cody’s description.
Reluctantly, he started back to the town where the Wild West Show was, not knowing anything else to do. It was a long trip back, for his horse grew lame, and Sam became more morose as he went along.
On the third night, he had made camp, telling himself, “I’ll have to trade this dumb horse off. The show’ll leave before I get back.” He was sitting in front of the fire frying bacon in a pan, when suddenly he heard the sound of a horse approaching out of the darkness. He was still a little wary of company and pulled the .44 out of his blankets and held it loosely. Then he called out, “Who’s there?”
“Me—Cody.”
At once, Sam’s heart leaped, and he tossed the gun down and stepped forward eagerly to where the horseman came out of the darkness. “Cody!” he said, grabbing at him as he slid out of the saddle. “Man, am I glad to see you! I thought, for sure, I’d seen the last of you.”
Cody looked even more lean and drawn than he had when he left. But by the flickering light of the fire, Sam saw that something was different. Cody’s eyes were clear now, and there was a slight smile on his face. “I thought you’d be back to the show by this time, Sam.”
“My horse is lame,” he said. “Come on, sit down and eat. You look starved.”
“Reckon I could take a little nourishment,” Cody agreed. He sat by the fire and devoured the plate of food Sam had handed him. Setting it down, he picked up a mug of coffee and sat back and sighed with pleasure. “That’s the best supper I ever had in my life, Sam.”
“Where have you been, Cody?” Sam asked eagerly. “Are you going back to the show?”
“Well, one thing at a time,” Cody said as he gazed across the fire at his friend. He took off his hat and put it down to one side, and his hair fell down over his forehead. “Where have I been? Well, in one sense, I’ve been twenty miles down that road there.” He gave Sam a curious glance, and the corners of his lips turned up. “But I guess I’ve been at a place you know about.”
“Where’s that?” asked Sam, trying to figure out why Cody was so different. Only three days before, he was so drunk he could hardly see to ride. Now, Cody sat there with a curious humor flickering in his eyes.
Cody looked down into the fire, picked up a stick, and began poking at it, watching the sparks and listening to the crackle. He paused so long that Sam thought he hadn’t heard the question, but finally Cody looked up and said, in a strange, rather tense voice, “I guess you’d have to say I’ve been with God.”
Sam Novak could not have been more shocked if Cody had said he’d been on the planet Venus! Hope leaped up into his eyes, and he demanded excitedly, “Tell me about it. What do you mean you’ve been with God?”
Cody related how that for hours he had ridden along and still continued to get drunk, but finally he had run out of whiskey. “I woke up one morning,” he said quietly, “sick and ready to die—and hoping I would. There was a creek there, and all I could do was crawl over and get a drink of water, trying to wash my face. Well, I sat there for a long time and was real quiet, and I thought about what a mess my life had become. And I thought about you, and Laurie, and my mother and stepfather, and about all the people that have been praying for me. I remembered Reverend Moody’s words and his prayer.” His voice grew mild as he continued to speak, staring into the fire, “I don’t know what brought it on, all I knew was I suddenly was so sick of living, I couldn’t go on. I called out to God and asked Him to kill me—and I meant it, too! I think I told God if he didn’t do the job, I’d take care of it.” He grinned ruefully over at Sam, shaking his head. “I don’t know whether I would have done it or not, but as it turned out, I didn’t have to.”
Sam had been intrigued by the story, and he whispered, “Tell me about it, what did you do?”
“Well, I was in such a hole that I didn’t know what to do. Finally, after about two hours of wrestling with it, I just kind of gave up, I guess. I’d heard the Gospel enough to know that all you have to do is call on God and ask for His forgiveness. That always seemed odd to me—but that was all I had left, Sam, so that’s what I done. I just said, ‘Jesus, I’ve been wrong all my life, but I ask you to come into my life, and if there’s anything there you can use, just take it, cause I want to know you.’ Sam,” he said, “I never would have believed it! But right then, all the doubt, and all
the fear, all the anger and bitterness—why they just blew away. And I knew that that couldn’t be anybody but God!”
Sam Novak had seen other people come to God in his day, but there was something real special sitting there listening to Cody explain how he had given his life to Jesus. “That’s wonderful, Cody.” Sam reached over and clapped Cody on the back. “And you turned right around and came back?”
“I figure I needed to tell you and Laurie about it. And Mac, too.” He looked over and smiled. “You know, I thought it’d be gone the next morning, but that sense of peace is still there.”
“That’s the peace of God, Cody. The world doesn’t give it, doesn’t have it to give, and can never take it away.”
The two sat there for hours, and never had Sam been so glad to see anyone come out of the darkness and into the light as his friend.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“I Can’t Do It!”
“I’m so happy for you, Cody!”
Cody had ridden back with Sam, and the pair caught up with the show. At once Cody had gone to Laurie’s tent. Instantly she had seen the change in him, but before she could speak, he said, “Well, you can believe in your prayers, Laurie.”
That was when Laurie had exclaimed her gladness and joy, and she insisted that he tell her the whole story. He sat down on Leona’s cot across from Laurie. She leaned forward expectantly, her eyes bright, her hands clenched tightly together.
“I don’t have to tell you how low I’ve been, Laurie. And to tell the truth, I don’t think a man could get much lower. So, when I rode out of here, I was about as drunk as a man could be, and if Sam hadn’t come after me, I expect I’d be sitting in a jail right now.” He related the story and ended by saying, “ . . . so out there, I just called on God and asked Him to forgive me and change me, and it’s all been different ever since.”
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