Mistakes Can Kill You

by Louis L'Amour

  The three horses started walking toward the draw, and Johnny pointed out what he meant. “A feller’ over to Mobeetie did that one time,” he said, “and it washed his dam out twice, but the third time she held, and he had him a little lake, all the year around.”

  “That’s a good idea, Johnny.” Redlin studied the setup, then nodded. “A right good idea.”

  “Sam and me could do it,” Johnny suggested, avoiding Pa Redlin’s eyes.

  Pa Redlin said nothing, but both Johnny and Else knew that Sam was not exactly ambitious about extra work. He was a good hand, Sam was, strong and capable, but he was big-headed about things and was little inclined to sticking with a job.

  “Reminds me,” Pa said, glancing at the sun, “Sam should be back soon.”

  “He might stop in town,” Else suggested, and was immediately sorry she had said it for she could see the instant worry on Redlin’s face. The idea of Sam Redlin stopping at the Four Star with seven thousand dollars on him was scarcely a pleasant one. Murder had been done there for much, much less. And then Sam was overconfident. He was even cocky.

  “I reckon I’d better ride in and meet him,” Redlin said, genuinely worried now. “Sam’s a good boy, but he sets too much store by himself. He figures he can take care of himself anywhere, but that pack of wolves …” His voice trailed off to silence.

  Johnny turned in his saddle. “Why, I could just as well ride in, Pa,” he said casually, “I ain’t been to town for a spell, and if anything happened, I could lend a hand.”

  Pa Redlin was about to refuse, but Else spoke up quickly. “Let him go, Pa. He could do some things for me, too, and Johnny’s got a way with folks. Chances are he could get Sam back without trouble.”

  That’s right! Johnny’s thoughts were grim. Send me along to save your boy. You don’t care if I get shot, just so’s he’s been saved. Well, all right, I’ll go. When I come back I’ll climb my gelding and light out. Up to Oregon. I never been to Oregon.

  Flitch was in town. His mouth tightened a little, but at that, it would be better than Pa going. Pa always said the wrong thing, being outspokenlike. He was a man who spoke his mind, and to speak one’s mind to Flitch or Loss Degner would mean a shooting. It might be he could get Sam out of town all right. If he was drinking it would be hard. Especially if that redhead had her hands on him.

  “You reckon you could handle it?” Pa asked doubtfully.

  “Sure,” Johnny said, his voice a shade hard, “I can handle it. I doubt if Sam’s in any trouble. Later, maybe. All he’d need is somebody to side him.”

  “Well,” Pa was reluctant,” better take your Winchester. My six-gun, too.”

  “You hang onto it. I’ll make out.”

  Johnny turned the gelding and started back toward the ranch, his eyes cold. Seventeen he might be, but four years on the frontier on your own make pretty much of a man out of you. He didn’t want any more shooting, but he had six men dead on his back trail now, not counting Comanches and Kiowas. Six, and he was seventeen. Next thing they would be comparing him to the Kid and to Wes Hardin.

  He wanted no gunfighter’s name, only a little spread of his own where he could run a few cows and raise horses, good stock, like some he had seen in East Texas. No range ponies for him, but good blood. That Sprague place now … but that was Sam’s place, or as good as his. Well, why not? Sam was getting Else, and it was little enough he could do for Pa and Ma, to bring Sam home safe.

  He left the gelding at the water trough and walked into the barn. In his room he dug some saddle gear away from a corner and out of a hiding place in the corner he took his guns. After a moment’s thought, he took but one of them, leaving the .44 Russian behind. He didn’t want to go parading into town with two guns on him, looking like a sure enough shooter. Besides, with only one gun and the change in him, Flitch might not spot him at all.

  Johnny was at the gate riding out when Else and Pa rode up. Else looked at him, her eyes falling to the gun on his hip. Her face was pale and her eyes large. “Be careful, Johnny. I had to say that because you know how hot-headed Pa is. He’d get killed, and he might get Sam killed.”

  That was true enough, but Johnny was aggrieved. He looked her in the eyes. “Sure, that’s true, but you didn’t think of Sam, now, did you? You were just thinking of Pa.”

  Her lips parted to protest, then her face seemed to stiffen. “No, Johnny, it wasn’t only Pa I thought of. I did think of Sam. Why shouldn’t I?”

  That was plain enough. Why shouldn’t she? Wasn’t she going to marry him? Wasn’t Sam getting the Sprague place when they got that money back safe?

  He touched his horse lightly with a spur and moved on past her. All right, he would send Sam back to her, if he could. It was time he was moving on, anyway.

  The gelding liked the feel of the trail and moved out fast. Ten miles was all, and he could do that easy enough, and so he did it, and Johnny turned the black horse into the street and stopped before the livery stable, swinging down. Sam’s horse was tied at the Four Star’s hitchrail. The saddlebags were gone.

  Johnny studied the street, then crossed it and walked down along the buildings on the same side as the Four Star. He turned quickly into the door.

  Sam Redlin was sitting at a table with the redhead, the saddlebags on the table before him, and he was drunk. He was very drunk. Johnny’s eyes swept the room. The bartender and Loss Degner standing together, talking. Neither of them paid any attention to Johnny, for neither knew him. But Flitch did.

  Flitch was standing down the bar with Albie Bower, but none of the old Gila River outfit. Both of them looked up, and Flitch kept looking, never taking his eyes from Johnny. Something bothered him, and maybe it was the one gun.

  Johnny moved over to Sam’s table. They had to get out of here fast, before Flitch remembered. “Hi, Sam,” he said, “just happened to be in town, and Pa said if I saw you, to side you on the way home.”

  Sam stared at his sullenly. “Side me? You?” He snorted his contempt. “I need no man to side me. You can tell Pa I’ll be home later tonight.” He glanced at the redhead. “Much later.”

  “Want I should carry this stuff home for you?” Johnny put his hand on the saddlebags.

  “Leave him be!” Hazel protested angrily. “Can’t you see he don’t want to be bothered? He’s capable of takin’ care of himself, an’ he don’t need no kid for gardeen!”

  “Beat it,” Sam said. “You go on home. I’ll come along later.”

  “Better come now, Sam.” Johnny was getting worried, for Loss Degner had started for the table.

  “Here, you!” Degner was sharp. “Leave that man alone! He’s a friend of mine, and I’ll have no saddle tramp annoying my customers!”

  Johnny turned on him. “I’m no saddle tramp. I ride for his Pa. He asked me to ride home with him—now. That’s what I aim to do.”

  As he spoke he was not thinking of Degner, but of Flitch. The gunman was behind him now, and neither Flitch, fast as he was, nor Albie Bower were above shooting a man in the back.

  “I said to beat it.” Sam stared at him drunkenly. “Saddle tramp’s what you are. Folks never should have took you in.”

  “That’s it,” Degner said. “Now get out! He don’t want you nor your company.”

  There was a movement behind him, and he heard Flitch say, “Loss, let me have him. I know this hombre. This is that kid gunfighter, Johnny O’Day, from the Gila.”

  Johnny turned slowly, his green eyes flat and cold. “Hello, Flitch. I heard you were around.” Carefully, he moved away from the table, aware of the startled look on Hazel’s face, the suddenly tight awareness on the face of Loss Degner. “You lookin’ for me, Flitch?” It was a chance he had to take. His best chance now. If shooting started, he might grab the saddlebags and break for the door, and then the ranch. They would be through with Sam Redlin once the money was gone.

  “Yeah,” Flitch stared at him, his unshaven face hard with the lines of evil, and shadowed by the intent tha
t rode him hard, “I’m lookin’ for you. Always figured you got off easy, made you a fast rep gunnin’ down your betters.”

  Bower had moved up beside him, but Loss Degner had drawn back to one side. Johnny’s eyes never left Flitch. “You in this, Loss?”

  Degner shrugged. “Why should I be? I was no Gila River gunman. This is your quarrel, finish it between you.”

  “All right, Flitch,” Johnny said, “you want it. I’m givin’ you your chance to start the play.”

  The stillness of a hot midafternoon lay on the Four Star. A fly buzzed against the dusty, cobwebbed back window. Somewhere in the street a horse stamped restlessly, and a distant pump creaked. Flitch stared at him, his little eyes hard and bright. His sweat-stained shirt was torn at the shoulder, and there was dust ingrained in the pores of his face.

  His hands dropped in a flashing draw, but he had only cleared leather when Johnny’s first bullet hit him, puncturing the Bull Durham tag that hung from his shirt pocket. The second shot cut the edge of it, and the third, fourth and fifth slammed Albie Bower back, knocking him back step by step, but Albie’s gun was hammering, and it took the sixth shot to put him down.

  Johnny stood over them, staring down at their bodies, and then he turned to face Loss Degner.

  Degner was smiling, and he held a gun in his hand from which a thin tendril of smoke lifted. Startled, Johnny’s eyes flickered to Sam Redlin.

  Sam lay across the saddlebags, blood trickling from the temples. He had been shot through the head by Degner under cover of the gun battle, murdered without a chance!

  Johnny O’Day’s eyes lifted to Loss Degner’s. The saloon keeper was still smiling. “Yes, he’s dead, and I’ve killed him. He had it coming, the fool! Thinking we cared to listen to his bragging! All we wanted was that money, and now we’ve got it. Me, Hazel and I! We’ve got it.”

  “Not yet,” Johnny’s lips were stiff and his heart was cold. He was thinking of Pa, Ma, and Else. “I’m still here.”

  “You?” Degner laughed. “With an empty gun? I counted your shots, boy. Even Johnny O’Day is cold turkey with an empty gun. Six shots, two for Flitch, and beautiful shooting, too, but for four shots for Albie who was moving and shooting, not so easy a target. But now I’ve got you. With you dead, I’ll just say Sam came here without any money, that he got shot during the fight. Sound good to you?”

  Johnny still faced him, his gun in his hand. “Not bad,” he said, “but you still have me here, Loss. And this gun ain’t empty!”

  Degner’s face tightened, then relaxed. “Not empty? I counted the shots, kid, so don’t try bluffing me, Now, I’m killing you.” He tilted his gun toward Johnny O’Day, and Johnny fired, once, twice … a third time. As each bullet hit him, Loss Degner jerked and twisted, but the shock of the wounds, and death wounds they were, was nothing to the shock of bullets from that empty gun.

  He sagged against the bar, then slipped floorward. Johnny moved in on him. “You can hear me, Loss?” The killer’s eyes lifted to his. “This ain’t a six shooter. It’s a Walch twelve-shot Navy gun, thirty-six caliber. She’s right handy, Loss, and it only goes to show you shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

  Hazel sat at the table, staring at the dying Degner. “You better go to him, Red,” Johnny said quietly. “He’s only got a minute.”

  She stared at him as he picked up the saddlebags and backed to the door.

  Russell, the storekeeper, was on the steps with a half dozen others, none of whom he knew. “Degner killed Sam Redlin,” he said. “Take care of Sam, will you?”

  At Russell’s nod, Johnny swung to the saddle and turned the gelding toward home.

  He wouldn’t leave now. He couldn’t leave now. They would be all alone there, without Sam. Besides, Pa was going to need help on that dam. “Boy,” he touched the gelding’s neck, “I reckon we got to stick around for awhile.”

  FOUR CARD DRAW

  When a man drew four cards he could expect something like this to happen. Ben Taylor had probably been right when he told him his luck had run out. Despite that, he had a place of his own, and come what may, he was going to keep it.

  Nor was there any fault to find with the place. From the moment Allen Ring rode his claybank into the valley he knew he was coming home. This was it, this was the place. Here he would stop. He’d been tumbleweeding all over the West now for ten years, and it was time he stopped if he ever did, and this looked like his fence corner.

  Even the cabin looked good, although Taylor told him the place had been empty for three years. It looked solid and fit, and while the grass was waist high all over the valley, and up around the house, he could see trails through it, some of them made by unshod ponies, which mean wild horses, and some by deer. Then there were the tracks of a single shod horse, always the same one.

  Those tracks always led right up to the door, and they stopped there, yet he could see that somebody with mighty small feet had been walking up to peer into the windows. Why would a person want to look into a window more than once? The window of an empty cabin? He had gone up and looked in himself, and all he saw was a dusty, dark interior with a ray of light from the opposite window, a table, a couple of chairs, and a fine old fireplace that had been built by skilled hands.

  “You never built that fireplace, Ben Taylor,” Ring had muttered, “you who never could handle anything but a running iron or a deck of cards. You never built anything in your life as fine and useful as that.”

  The cabin sat on a low ledge of grass backed up against the towering cliff of red rock, and the spring was not more than fifty feet away, a stream that came out of the rock and trickled pleasantly into a small basin before spilling out and winding throughtfully down the valley to join a larger stream, a quarter of a mile away.

  There were some tall spruces around the cabin, a couple of sycamores and a cottonwood near the spring. Some gooseberry bushes, too, and a couple of apple trees. The trees had been pruned.

  “And you never did that, either, Ben Taylor!” Allen Ring said soberly. “I wish I knew more about this place.”

  Time had fled like a scared antelope, and with the scythe he found in the pole barn, he cut off the tall grass around the house, patched up the holes in the cabin where the pack rats had got in, and even thinned out the bushes—it had been several years since they had been touched—and repaired the pole barn.

  The day he picked to clean out the spring was the day Gail Truman rode up to the house. He had been putting the finishing touches on a chair bottom he was making when he heard a horse’s hoof strike stone, and he straightened up to see the girl sitting on the red pony. She was staring open mouthed at the stacked hay from the grass he had cut, and the washed windows of the house. He saw her swing down and run up to the window, and dropping his tools he strolled up.

  “Huntin’ somebody, Ma’am?”

  She wheeled and stared at him, her wide blue eyes accusing. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “What do you mean by moving in like this?”

  He smiled, but he was puzzled, too. Ben Taylor had said nothing about a girl, especially a girl like this. “Why, I own the place!” he said. “I’m fixin’ it up so’s I can live here.”

  “You own it?” Her voice was incredulous, agonized. “You couldn’t own it! You couldn’t. The man who owns this place is gone, and he would never sell it! Never!”

  “He didn’t exactly sell it, Ma’am,” Ring said gently, “he lost it to me in a poker game. That was down Texas way.”

  She was horrified. “In a poker game? Whit Bayly in a poker game? I don’t believe it!”

  “The man I won it from was called Ben Taylor, Ma’am.” Ring took the deed from his pocket and opened it. “Come to think of it, Ben did say that if anybody asked about Whit Bayly to say that he died down in the Guadaloupes—of lead poisoning.”

  “Whit Bayly is dead?” The girl looked stunned. “You’re sure? Oh!”

  Her face went white and still and something in it seemed to die. She turned wi
th a little gesture of despair and stared out across the valley, and his eyes followed hers. It was strange, Allen Ring told himself, that it was the first time he had looked just that way, and he stood there, caught up by something nameless, some haunting sense of the familiar.

  Before him lay the tall grass of the valley, turning slightly now with the brown of autumn, and to his right a dark stand of spruce, standing stiffly, like soldiers on parade, and beyond them the swell of the hill, and further to the right the hill rolled up and stopped, and beyond lay a wider valley fading away into the vast purple and mauve of distance, and here and there spotted with the golden candles of cottonwoods, their leaves bright yellow with nearing cold.

  There was no word for this, it was a picture, yet a picture of which a man could only dream and never reproduce.

  “It—it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said.

  She turned on him, and for the first time she seemed really to look at him, a tall young man with a shock of rust brown hair and sombre gray eyes, having about him the look of a rider and a look of a lonely man.

  “Yes, it is beautiful. Oh, I’ve come here so many times to see it, the cabin, too. I think this is the most lovely place I have ever seen. I used to dream about—” She stopped, suddenly confused. “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk so.”

  She looked at him soberly “I’d better go. I guess this is yours now.”

  He hesitated. “Ma’am,” he said sincerely, “the place is mine, and sure enough, I love it. I wouldn’t swap this place for anything. But that view, that belongs to no man. It belongs to whoever looks at it with eyes to see it, so you come any time you like, and look all you please.”

  Ring grinned. “Fact is,” he said, “I’m aimin’ to fix the place up inside, an’ I’m sure no hand at such things. Maybe you could sort of help me. I’d like it kind of homey like.” He flushed. “You see, I sort of lived in bunkhouses all my life, an’ never had no such place.”