She brought the bacon to the table, then sat down opposite me. “We have no eggs but Mrs. Hollyrood plans to raise chickens. We will have some soon.”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s been almost a year since I had eggs. That was out in Pioche, Nevada.”
“Pioche? I’ve heard of it. A rough town, they say.”
“Sort of. There was shootin’, time to time. They say they buried seventy-five men before one died of sickness. They seemed fight proud of that fact. I’ve heard of places where the climate was so healthy they had to shoot somebody so’s they could start a graveyard, but those folks in Pioche sort of overdid it.”
“Are you a miner, Mr. Passin’?”
“I’m anything it takes to get the coon. When there’s mines, I work at minin’, and when there’s cows, that’s my game. A man has to adjust.”
“And if there’s shooting?”
“That’s part of the adjustin’. I was brought up to respect the rights of others and to protect my own self and my rights. Out in this rough country when it’s new, there isn’t any law standin’ around to protect folks. You got to do it yourself and the law expects it of you. There’d be mighty few marshals or sheriffs around if they had to do all the shootin’ themselves. Some of us folks have to sort of trim around the edges, like.”
“I understand.” She looked like she did, too. And she’d shot that man chargin’ the house with a torch. This here was a woman a man would have to treat gentle. Not that I’d treat one any other way, if I had one. And that was unlikely, me bein’ a driftin’ man with no fixed abode and mighty little silver showin’. She puzzled me some.
The fire crackled, and she got up, lifted a lid on the stove, and added a chunk of pine. I finished the oatmeal and moved closer to the bacon. She filled my cup.
“Where I come from,” I said, “we weren’t Sunday shooters. I mean we weren’t folks who went out of a Sunday to shoot at targets. We boys had to hunt meat for the table or we didn’t eat. My pa, he was away workin’. He’d no time to hunt so it fell to me. He’d give me six balls and the powder for them, and come evenin’ I had to have six pieces of game, the unfired balls, or a da - a mighty good explanation as to why I missed. I didn’t miss much.”
“I know,” Matty said quietly, “it was the same with us.”
“Your brothers?”
“With me. I did the hunting until I was twelve, then my mother died and my father took me away from all that. He went back to riding the boats.”
Well, I looked at her. “The riverboats?”
“My father was a gambling man. He’d quit when he married my mother, but when she died he went back to it and took me along.”
Those riverboat gamblers were a smooth lot. They were gentlemen, mostly, men who had been southern planters who lost it all during the War. Or there were some who posed as southern gentlemen but were not. Gambling on the riverboats needed a smooth hand.
“He was a wonderful man,” Matty said, “and I loved him very much. He sent me away to school and I did well but never liked it. I liked being on the boats with him, and in the summer, I was.”
“What happened?”
“He made a big winning one night, very big. I was sixteen then, and he had always told me that when he made his stake we would go back to Boston, that was where he came from, and live there.
“There were some gamblers on board who worked together. My father outwitted them and won and they came after him. He never got back to our stateroom.”
“Murdered?”
“Yes.” She was quiet for a moment and then she said, “He was stabbed as he was passing the stacks of firewood when he was coming back to our cabin. They robbed him and threw his body overboard. I heard the splash.”
Her face was pale, her eyes large in the lamplight. “Tough,” I said, “sixteen and alone on a riverboat. Did you have any money at all?”
She looked at me, her face very still, very cool. “I had it all,” she said. “I had everything he’d won.”
“But -!”
“I was up, waiting for him to come in.
I heard him fall, a moment of scuffling, and then the splash. They went to their cabin, and when I opened the door one of them was wiping off a bloody knife. If the blow had not killed him the knife would.”
“You followed them?”
“I did. And I told them I wanted my money. They laughed at me and I shot one of them through the ear. There were three of them in the room and my father’s money was on the table. I told them to put it into the pillowcase and give it to me. ‘Next time,’ I said, ‘it won’t be just an ear.’ “
Well, I just looked at her, and you know something? I believed her. She could have done it.
“That was rough going for sixteen years old,” I commented.
“Where I come from sixteen years is grown-up, and my father had taught me that someday I’d be on my own. I’d no choice. A sixteen-year-old girl left alone on a steamboat with almost no money?”
She looked at me over her cup. “That was four years ago. I took some of the money and went back to school. I needed the education but I also needed time to think, to decide what to do.
“It was a fashionable school, and the girls lived well, so I did, too. Then some of us slipped out one night to see Mrs. Hollyrood’s company perform. Traveling shows were not considered very nice. They were not ‘respectable,’ so they were forbidden. But we went, I saw the show and thought it was fun. I went to Mrs. Hollyrood and asked for a job. They needed a girl, so I left school and went with them.”
Mrs. Hollyrood appeared in her bedroom door. She was wearing a Japanese kimono. “Some men are coming. I am afraid we are in trouble!
“There are five of them,” she added, “and they look rough.”
Chapter Four
Standing well back from the window, I watched them ride down the lane and up to the house. One face looked familiar and as I watched I remembered. He was the one who put the noose around my neck.
Mrs. Hollyrood went to the door. “How do you do? Is there something I can do for you gentlemen?”
“You can move out,” one of them said. He was slim, wiry, and wore his gun butt forward on the left side. A man wearing a gun in that position can draw with either hand. At least two of the riders with him had been drinking. “I don’t know what kind of trick you used on my uncle, but this here ranch belongs to me.”
“I am afraid you are mistaken.” She had dignity and she was cool. “The arrangement was all perfectly legal, and Mr. Phillips had the papers drawn up and witnessed.”
“That’s no account. This here place is mine. I’m his legal heir and I want you off of it. I want you off now.”
She smiled. I could see that from where I stood. “I am sorry, gentlemen, I like it here and have no intention of leaving. The ranch is mine. If necessary I can call the sheriff.”
“To do that you got to ride into town. Do you think you’ll make it?”
She smiled again, very sweetly. “It has been my understanding,” she said, “that western men treated ladies with consideration. Am I to understand that you are threatening me?”
One of the other riders, an older man with a beard, muttered something, but the wiry one shook his head. “Threatenin’? No, it’s just a warnin’. This here’s a rough time, lots of Injuns ridin’ who don’t care who they shoot.”
Suddenly one of the riders noticed the blue roan.
“Lew? What’s that roan doin’ here?”
The wiry one addressed as Lew turned irritably, then saw the horse. He turned back to Mrs. Hollyrood. “Where’d that roan come from? How’d he get here?”
“This is his home. If you are related to Mr. Phillips you should know that. He belongs here.”
“That’s a bad-luck horse, Lew. I don’t want nothin’ to do with it.”
“He won’t be bad luck anymore,” Lew said suddenly. “I’ll shoot him.”
Stepping past Mrs. Hollyrood, I said, “Leave that horse alone. I like him.”
They were shocked. They had no idea there was anyone else about, although they might have known of Matty.
“Who the hell -?”
“Hey!” The man who put the noose around my neck recognized me. “Ain’t you -?”
“I am. I’m the man you hung. It didn’t seem to take, somehow.”
Nobody said anything. They simply stared, and the man who put the noose around my neck swallowed a couple of times and looked like he would like to be somewhere else, anywhere else. It is one thing to put a rope around a man’s neck when you’re backed by a crowd and he’s alone. It is quite something else when you are facing that man, just thirty feet away, and he is armed.
The man called Lew slowly moved his hand away from his gun. “You the one who killed Houston Burrows? He was a good man with a gun.”
“Not where I come from.”
Again there was silence. One of the men who showed signs of drinking now looked cold sober. He backed his horse a few steps. “It’s gettin’ late,” he suggested.
Lew didn’t like the situation. He looked like he wanted to do something or say something to save face, but everything that came to mind was provocative.
He wanted to get off the hook and I just didn’t give a damn. He’d come to drive two women off a ranch that rightfully belonged to one of them, and I just didn’t care what he did, but if he did the wrong thing he’d be bedded down in Boot Hill tomorrow.
There were four of them and one of me but I knew what I could do and what I had to do. Two of them were ready to run at the first move and the third hadn’t made up his mind.
The one I was going to kill first wasn’t the one who put the noose around my neck. It was a square-built gent with a bullet head who sat a bay horse just to the right of Lew. I didn’t know his name but he was the tough one.
I gave them a minute to worry themselves and then said, “Why don’t you boys just ride out of here? The gate’s open, but be damned sure you close it when you leave.”
Two of them already had their horses moving before I stopped talking.
Lew, he sat there a minute. He was stubborn and thought well of himself. When he told about this in town, he wanted the story to make him look good.
“I’m goin’, but we’ll be seein’ you again.”
“Why wait?” I went down the stone steps to the road. “I’m here right now, and maybe Houston Burrows is wantin’ comp’ny.”
Lew didn’t like it. He backed off and turned his horse. “A man talkin’ like that can get hisself killed.”
“Maybe, but I won’t go alone. I’ll have a couple of dogs to lay at my feet.”
They walked their horses away and did not look back. I stood in the center of the road watching them go, but I wasn’t even thinking of them. I was thinking of my two horses in that faraway town and my outfit. If I figured on prospecting I was going to need what I had, if somebody hadn’t already gone south with it.
When I went back in the house they had filled my cup again so I sat down. Mrs. Hollyrood looked across her cup at me. “Mr. Passin’, you’re a brave man.”
“No, ma’am. Just a man. A man who’s spent his life ridin’ rough country, an’ I just don’t know no better.”
“Thank you. I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Yes, you do.” I looked across the table at her. “You’d have done what I did, only maybe different.” I looked over at Matty standing beside the kitchen range. “And she knew what she would do.”
Matty didn’t say anything nor turn her head to look at me. That woman … well, there was something about her.
Anyplace like that where there hasn’t been a man around keepin’ things up will slip into decline. This one had just gotten started, so I went around repairin’ a fence rail here, cleanin’ stalls there, just generally keepin’ myself busy. Also, I kept an eye on the road and on the low hill back of the house.
There was some fine meadows that would grow a good stand of grass, and I could see where cattle had been feeding under the scrub-oak trees, and bedding down there, too. Later that day I took a ride along the edge of one of the meadows. There were deer tracks, and near a small pool I saw a bear track.
The country I was riding was higher than the house, and both the house and the road leading past it were clearly visible. The dim game trail I followed led through the scrub oak and along the slope below the ridge. I rode east, constantly looking off toward the La Platas, bulking against the sky to the north. There was a good deal of down timber, as there nearly always is in wild country. A man could made a few trips with a wagon and bring back wood enough for the coming winter. Dipping down, the trail led into the aspen below the highest peak.
It was very still, there was no sound but the hoof falls of the blue roan. The horse walked, ears pricked, into the stillness of the forest. Finally, we reached the edge where I could see along the trail toward the east. To the north, up La Plata Canyon, lay Parrott City, a town that had come into being a few years back to supply miners working silver deposits in the La Platas. Further west there were a couple of other towns.
The place where my horses and gear had been left was off to the northwest and a good long ride away. Somewhere east there was a place called Animas City, but I’d never been there. This was new country for me.
Here and there I saw cattle, and when I figure to judge the worth of land for grazing I just look at the stock. These cattle were fat and lazy, so they were getting plenty to eat without rustling too much for it. Again I saw bear tracks and some droppings.
Looking across the country toward the La Platas, I could see where a creek came down, cutting diagonally across the mountainside. That would be Starvation Creek, named by some men who came into the country with John Moss, who founded Parrott City.
Turning the roan, I walked him back through the woods to the other side where I could see back along the trail toward the house. Nothing moved back there.
My eyes followed the ridge to the rocky promontory that stood out over the green valley to the west of it. I’d have to ride that ridge and see what lay on the other side. Meanwhile I was doing some serious thinking.
What would Lew and his outfit do now? That he wanted the ranch was obvious, but as things stood he had no clear claim to it. Still, if he could run Mrs. Hollyrood off he might be able to establish a claim on the abandoned place as next of kin. Most of us knew a little about the law from setting in on trials and such-like, but that was an area of which I knew nothing.
In the smaller towns throughout the country, trial lawyers were like stars in the theater. When court was setting, folks would drive or ride in from miles around just to see the show, and the trial lawyers played to us in the gallery as much as to the jury, and some of the more flamboyant lawyers had followings who bragged them up and told story after story about what they said or who they quoted.
Most of the lawyers had read from the Bible and the classics and they could quote freely, and did. Some of them had a story for every occasion, and a story would often make a point when nothing else would.
Folks would come in from miles around like to a revival meeting and they would bring picnic lunches. Wagons, buckboards, surreys, and horses would be tied around the court house whilst the owners were inside listening to the trials. Some lawyers drew packed houses, and often the cases were decided on common sense rather than any point of law.
A man quoting the Bible had to be almighty sure of himself because most folks read the Bible and heard it quoted every Sunday and considerable on weekdays. Church wasn’t a place where folks went only for religious reasons. It was a social occasion, a chance to meet the people who lived around the country, and if a man expected to do business, that was where he would meet the outstanding men of the community. All the young sprouts went because that was also a place to meet girls, and many a wedding developed from flirtations begun at church or one of the church socials they were always having.
Many a man who had small interest in religion
as such could quote from the Bible because of what he had heard in church.
Mine was a churchgoing family, and to get to church from where I was raised we had to get up before daylight, and ride in an old spring wagon over ten miles of rough road, or at least a trail we called a road but which nobody from anywhere else would have recognized as such.
My thoughts turned back to Matty. I’d heard no other name for her, and folks in our country just didn’t ask for names. You took what was handed to you or you started callin’ somebody “Shorty” or “Slim” or “Red” or whatever. Sometimes a man would give you his handle and you’d use it, calling him whatever he said.
Matty was a strange woman. My guess was that she was about twenty years old. Most were married by that time. She was a downright beautiful woman but she didn’t act like she wanted you to notice. Her face was still, with only her eyes busy. Come to think of it, had I ever seen her smile? I could not remember.
Mrs. Hollyrood, on the other hand, was one who smiled a lot. She was a pleasant, attractive woman.
When I got back to the ranch I stripped the gear from the roan and turned him into the corral, pitching some hay to him. Then I went to the granary, which doubled as a bunkhouse, and I washed up. There was a shelf outside the door and a towel hung there, with a washbasin and soap. The water was cold, but I could remember only a few times in my life when I’d washed up in warm water.
Drying my hands, I stood close to the log wall and studied the country back of the house, then down the valley where the road went, getting to know the trees and clumps of brush so any change would show up right away. It was second nature for a man like me to be careful.
A lot of what a man sees is sort of instinct, I guess. You notice how the shadows fall, and if there’s a thicker shadow than should be, or a shadow where none had been before, you take care.
Sooner or later, scouting around like I’d been doing, I would locate all the good spots which a hidden marksman might use for cover. Then I could keep an eye on them. It was not difficult to select the danger spots. Anybody figurin’ on dry-gulching somebody picks a spot where he can be hidden and which offers some shelter from return fire, as well as an easy escape route. He will try to choose a place where he just naturally fits into the scenery.
Passin' Through (1985) Page 3
