A Century of Great Western Stories

by A Century of Great Western Stories (retail) (epub)

  Not a whisper of wildness in Reed Cable, meanwhile. Quiet and steady—that was what everyone said about him. Quiet and steady and honest. He took a position as night clerk at the Boxelder Hotel. Not because he wanted the job; saddlemaking and leather work were what he craved to do with his life. But there were two saddlemakers in town already, and neither was interested in hiring an apprentice. He’d have moved to another town except that his ma, who’d supported them since his father’s death, had taken sick and was no longer able to work as a seamstress. All up to him then. And the only decent job he could find was the night clerk’s.

  Ma’d died in March of that year. One month after Tarbeaux’s aunt—the last of his relatives—passed away. And on a day in late April Bob Kendall and Lee Tarbeaux and the rest of the K-Bar crew drove their roundup beeves in to the railroad loading pens. Old Man Kendall wasn’t with them: he’d been laid up with gout. Bob Kendall was in charge, but he was a hammerhead as well as half wild: liquor and women and stud poker were all he cared about. Tarbeaux was with him when the cattle buyer from Billings finished his tally and paid off in cash. Seventy-four hundred dollars, all in greenbacks.

  It was after bank closing hours by the time the deal was done. Bob Kendall hadn’t cared to go hunting Banker Weems to take charge of the money. He wanted a running start on his night’s fun, so he turned the chore over to Lee. Tarbeaux made a halfhearted attempt to find the banker, and then his own itch got the best of him. He went to the hotel, where his old friend Reed had just come on shift, where the lobby was otherwise deserted, and laid the saddlebags full of money on the counter.

  “Reed,” he said without explanation, “do me a favor and put these bags in the hotel safe for tonight. I or Bob Kendall’ll be back to fetch ’em first thing in the morning.”

  It was curiosity that made him open the bags after Tarbeaux left. The sight of all that cash weakened his knees, dried his mouth. He put the saddlebags away in the safe, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the money. So many things he could do with it, so many ambitions he could make a reality. A boldness and a recklessness built in him for the first time. The money grew from a lure into a consuming obsession as the hours passed. He might’ve been able to overcome it if his mother had still been alive, but he was all alone—with no prospects for the future and no one to answer to but himself.

  He took the saddlebags from the safe an hour past midnight. Took them out back of the hotel stables and hid them in a clump of buck brush. Afterward he barely remembered doing it, as if it had all happened in a dream.

  Bob Kendall came in alone at eight in the morning, hung over and in mean spirits, just as the day clerk arrived to serve as a witness. There was a storm inside Reed Cable, but outwardly he was calm. Saddlebags? He didn’t know anything about saddlebags full of money. Tarbeaux hadn’t been in last evening, no matter what he claimed. He hadn’t seen Lee in more than two weeks.

  In a fury Bob Kendall ran straight to the sheriff, and the sheriff arrested Tarbeaux. The hardest part of the whole thing was facing Lee, repeating the lies, and watching the outraged disbelief in Tarbeaux’s eyes turn to blind hate. But the money was all he let himself think about. The money, the money, the money… .

  It was his word against Tarbeaux’s, his reputation against Tarbeaux’s. The sheriff believed him, the Kendalls believed him, the townspeople believed him—and the judge and jury believed him. The verdict was guilty, the sentence a minimum of eight years at hard labor.

  Tarbeaux had made his vow of vengeance as he was being led from the courtroom. “You won’t get away with this, Reed!” he yelled. “You’ll pay and pay dear. As soon as I get out I’ll come back and make sure you pay!”

  The threat had shaken Cable at the time. But neither it nor his conscience had bothered him for long. Tarbeaux’s release from Deer Lodge was in the far future; why worry about it? He had the money, he had his plans—and when one of the town’s two saddlemakers died suddenly of a stroke, he soon realized the first of his ambitions.

  CABLE SHIFTED POSITION on the hard stool. That was then and this was now, he thought bitterly. The far future had become the present. Pain moved through his belly and chest; a dry cough racked him. He sleeved sweat from his eyes, peered again through the front window. A few pedestrians hurried by on the west sidewalk; none was Lee Tarbeaux.

  “Come on,” he said aloud. “Come on, damn you, and get it over with!”

  TARBEAUX FINISHED HIS meal, took out the makings, and rolled a smoke to savor with a final cup of coffee. Food, coffee, tobacco—it all tasted good again, now that he was free. He’d rushed through the first twenty years of his life, taking everything for granted. And he’d struggled and pained his way through the last eight, taking nothing for granted. He’d promised himself that when he got out he’d make his remaining years pass as slowly as he could, that he’d take the time to look and feel and learn, and that he’d cherish every minute of every new day.

  He paid his bill, crossed the street to Adams Mercantile—another new business run by a stranger—and replenished his supplies of food and tobacco. That left him with just three dollars of his prison savings. He’d have to settle someplace soon, at least long enough to take a job and build himself a stake. After that … no hurry, wherever he went and whatever he did. No hurry at all.

  First things first, though. The time had come to face Reed Cable.

  He felt nothing as he walked upstreet to where the chain-hung sign rattled and danced. It had all been worked out in his mind long ago. All that was left was the settlement.

  Lamplight still burned behind the saddlery’s window. Without looking through the glass, without hesitation, Tarbeaux opened the door and went in under a tinkling bell.

  Cable sat on a stool at the back wall, an old double-barreled shotgun across his knees. He didn’t move as Tarbeaux shut the door behind him. In the pale lamp glow Cable seemed small and shrunken. His sweat-stained skin was sallow, pinched, and his hands trembled. He’d aged twenty years in the past eight—an old man before his thirtieth birthday.

  The shotgun surprised Tarbeaux a little. He hadn’t figured on a willingness in Cable to put up a fight. He said as he took off his rain hat, “Expecting me, I see.”

  “I knew you’d come. You haven’t changed much, Lee.”

  “Sure I have. On the inside. Just the opposite with you.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. You fixing to shoot me with that scattergun?”

  “If you try anything I will.”

  “I’m not armed.”

  “Expect me to believe that?”

  Tarbeaux shrugged and glanced slowly around the shadowed room. “Pretty fair leather work,” he said. “Seems you were cut out to be a saddlemaker, like you always claimed.”

  “Man’s got to do something.”

  “That’s a fact. Only thing is, he ought to do it with honest money.”

  “All right,” Cable said.

  “You admitting you stole the K-Bar money, Reed? No more lies?”

  “Not much point in lying to you.”

  “How about the sheriff and Bob Kendall? Ready to tell them the truth, too—get it all off your chest?”

  Cable shook his head. “It’s too late for that.”

  “Why?”

  “I couldn’t face prison, that’s why. I couldn’t stand it.”

  “I stood it for eight years,” Tarbeaux said. “It’s not so bad, once you get used to it.”

  “No. I couldn’t, not even for a year.”

  “Man can be in prison even when there’s no bars on his windows.”

  Cable made no reply.

  “What I mean, it’s been a hard eight years for you, too. Harder, I’ll warrant, than the ones I lived through. Isn’t that so?”

  Still no reply.

  “It’s so,” Tarbeaux said. “You got yourself this shop and you learned to be a saddlemaker. But then it all slid downhill from there. Starting with Clara Weems. You always talked about marrying he
r someday, having three or four kids—your other big ambition. But she turned you down when you asked for her hand. Married that storekeeper in Billings, instead.”

  The words made Cable’s hands twitch on the shotgun. “How’d you know that?”

  “I know plenty about you, Reed. You proposed to two other women: they wouldn’t have you, either. Then you lost four thousand dollars on bad mining stock. Then one of your horses kicked over a lantern and burned down your barn and half your house. Then you caught consumption and were laid up six months during the winter of ’90 and ’91—”

  “That’s enough,” Cable said, but there was no heat in his voice. Only a kind of desperate weariness.

  “No, it’s not. Your health’s been poor ever since, worsening steadily, and there’s nothing much the sawbones can do about it. How much more time do they give you—four years? Five?”

  “Addled, whoever told you that. I’m healthy enough. I’ve got a long life ahead of me.”

  “Four years—five, at the most. I’m the one with the long life ahead. And I aim to make it a good life. You remember how I could barely read and write? Well, I learned in prison and now I can do both better than most. I learned a trade, too. Blacksmithing. One of these days I’ll have my own shop, same as you, with my name on a sign out front bigger than yours.”

  “But first you had to stop here and settle with me.”

  “That’s right. First I have to settle with you.”

  “Kill me, like you swore in court you’d do. Shoot me dead.”

  “I never swore that.”

  “Same as.”

  “You think I still hate you that much?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No,” Tarbeaux said. “Not anymore.”

  “I don’t believe that. You’re lying.”

  “You’re the liar, Reed, not me.”

  “You want me dead. Admit it—you want me dead.”

  “You’ll be dead in four or five years.”

  “You can’t stand to wait that long. You want me dead here and now.”

  “No. All I ever wanted was to make sure you paid for what you did to me. Well, you’re paying and paying dear. I came here to tell you to your face that I know you are. That’s the only reason I came, the only settlement I’m after.”

  “You bastard, don’t fool with me. Draw your gun and get it over with.”

  “I told you, I’m not armed.”

  Cable jerked the scattergun off his knees, a gesture that was meant to be provoking. But the muzzle wobbled at a point halfway between them, held there. “Make your play!”

  Tarbeaux understood then. There was no fight in Cable; there never had been. There was only fear. He said, “You’re trying to make me kill you. That’s it, isn’t it? You want me to put you out of your misery.”

  It was as if he’d slapped Cable across the face. Cable’s head jerked; he lurched to his feet, swinging the Remington until its twin muzzles were like eyes centered on Tarbeaux’s face.

  Tarbeaux stood motionless. “You can’t stand the thought of living another five sick, hurting years, but you don’t have the guts to kill yourself. You figured you could goad me into doing it for you.”

  “No. Make your play or I’ll blow your goddamn head off!”

  “Not with that scattergun. It’s not loaded, Reed. We both know that now.”

  Cable tried to stare him down. The effort lasted no more than a few seconds; his gaze slid down to the useless shotgun. Then, as if the weight of the weapon was too much for his shaking hands, he let it fall to the floor, kicked it clattering under one of the workbenches.

  “Why?” he said in a thin, hollow whisper. “Why couldn’t you do what you vowed you’d do? Why couldn’t you finish it?”

  “It is finished,” Tarbeaux said.

  And it was, in every way. Now he really was free—of Cable and the last of his hate, of the past. Now he could start living again.

  He turned and went out into the cold, sweet rain.

  CABLE SLUMPED AGAIN onto his stool. Tarbeaux’s last words seemed to hang like a frozen echo in the empty room.

  It is finished.

  For Tarbeaux, maybe it was. Not for Reed Cable. It wouldn’t be finished for him for a long, long time.

  “Damn you,” he said, and then shouted the words. “Damn you!” But they weren’t meant for Lee Tarbeaux this time. They were meant for himself.

  He kept on sitting there with his back to the wall.

  Waiting.

  Peggy S. Curry (1911–1987) wrote the kind of quiet Western stories that escaped the attention of all but a few practiced eyes. It seems that every generation produces a number of excellent writers who are never quite given their proper due or recognition. Her slight body of work, most of which appeared in such slick magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, fell somewhere between traditional Western fiction and mainstream literature. Her literary influences seemed to run more to Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter that to any Western writers. Curry was born in Ayshire, Scotland, and this influence can also be felt in her work. Readers are encouraged to read any of her fourteen or so other stories, especially “In the Silence,” which is one of the true masterpieces of American literature.

  Geranium House

  Peggy Simson Curry

  We heard about them long before we saw them. News traveled fast in those days even though we didn’t have telephones in the valley. Old Gus, the mailman, gave us the full report. “They come in from Laramie in a two-wheeled cart,” he said, “him ridin’ and her walking’ beside the cart and the old sway-bellied horse pullin’ it. That cart was mostly filled with plants, and she was carrying one in her arms, just like most women carry a baby.”

  “Where they going to live?” my uncle Rolfe asked.

  “They moved into that old homestead shack on the flats,” Gus said. “Been there since the Indians fired the west range, that shack. Used to belong to a man named Matt but he died a spell ago, and I guess they’re welcome to it.” He sucked on the end of his drooping brown mustache and added, “Him now, he don’t look like he’d be much—his pants hangin’ slack and his shoulders humped worsen my granddad’s. But her! You’d have to see her, Rolfe. What she’s got ain’t anything a man could put words to.”

  As soon as Gus finished his coffee and started back to town in his buggy, my mother mixed a batch of bread. “We’ll take over a couple of loaves and a cake,” she said. “A woman deserves better than that dirt-roofed cabin on the flats.”

  My uncle Rolfe stood looking out the kitchen window. He was big and handsome in a wild, blackheaded way. He was always splitting his shirts and popping off buttons, and he never cared what he had on or how it fitted. Uncle Rolfe came to live with us and take over part of the ranch when my father died, and you’d never have thought he was my mother’s brother, for she was small and neat and had pale brown hair.

  “Anne,” Uncle Rolfe said, “I wouldn’t be in a hurry to rush over and welcome a couple of squatters. We don’t know anything about them and they don’t come from much when they have to put up in a dead man’s shack on the flats. What’s more, they won’t stay long.”

  The color flew high in my mother’s cheeks. “You don’t understand about a woman,” she said. “You don’t know how much it helps to have a friend of her own kind in this big lonesome country. You’ve been a bachelor too long to see a woman’s side of things, Rolfe Annister.”

  “Well,” he said, “I aim to leave them alone.”

  But the next morning when we were ready to go, Uncle Rolfe got in the buggy. “Won’t hurt me to meet them, I guess.” Then he turned to me and smiled. “Billy, you want to drive this morning?”

  I was thirteen that spring morning in the mountain country, and nothing ever sounded better than the clop-clop of the horses’ hooves and the singing sound of the buggy wheels turning along the dirt road. The meadowlarks were whistling and Uncle Rolfe began humming under his breath, the way he did sometimes when the sky wa
s soft and the grass coming green.

  It was six miles to the homesteader’s cabin and we were almost there before we saw it, for it sat low on the flat land among the sagebrush and was the same silver-gray color. The river ran past it but there weren’t any trees along the water, only a few scrubby willows still purple from the fall, for they hadn’t leafed out yet.

  First thing we noticed was the color in the windows of the old cabin, big blossoms of red and pink and white. My mother stepped out of the buggy and stared. “Geraniums!” she exclaimed. “I never saw anything so beautiful!”

  The two-wheeled cart was beside the door and so old and bleached it might have been part of the land. And we saw the horse picketed in the sagebrush. Like Gus had said, he was a pack of bones with a belly slung down like a hammock.

  My mother carefully carried her box with the cake and bread to the front door and knocked. She was wearing her new gloves, the ones Uncle Rolfe had bought her in Denver when he shipped the cattle.

  The door opened slowly and all I saw that first moment was the woman’s eyes, big and dark and shining. She was young and her hair was so blond it looked almost white and was drawn back tight until it made her eye seem larger and blacker. She was brown-skinned and tall and she looked strong. Her dress was clean but so worn my mother would have used it for a rag.

  “I’m Anne Studer,” My mother said. “We’re your neighbors. This is my brother, Rolfe, and my son, Billy.”

  The woman seemed to forget my mother and Uncle Rolfe. She bent over and put her hand on my head and smiled down into my face. “Billy,” she said, and her hand stroked my head and I could feel she loved me, for the warmth came right out of her hand.

  She asked us to come in and then I saw the bed on the floor near the stove and the man there in the blankets. His face was thin and gray and he sat up coughing. “Sam,” she said, “we’ve got company—our neighbors.”