“What does he think he’s doing?” Tyree said. He seemed to have forgotten the indignity of being dumped from his saddle and outdrawn.
Shrugging, Fred went with the cowboy. After a short hesitation, so did Tyree. McCarthy had stayed on his horse, but he was curious too, and clambering down, he joined them.
Aces Connor stood in plain view of the approaching warriors. By now they weren’t more than a couple of hundred yards out. At the sight of him, they stopped. One brandished a lance over his head and yelled in the Arapaho tongue.
“They’ll charge us any moment,” Fred said.
“Not if Sassy can help it,” Aces said, and patted his Winchester.
“You gave your rifle a name?”
“If it was good enough for Davy Crockett to do, it’s good enough for me.” Aces raised the target sight, adjusted it, and pressed the Winchester to his shoulder.
“Kill them,” Tyree said gleefully. “Shoot every one of the savages.”
“What would I want to do that for?” Aces said. “Now hush, infant. If I’m off by a whisker, I’ll splatter his brains.”
Out on the prairie, the warrior with the lance appeared to be working the others into a frenzy. He pumped his lance and was shouting and pointing.
Aces Connor took a deep breath and held himself still. His trigger finger slowly curled.
The Winchester Browning boomed like thunder.
Fred saw an incredible thing. The warrior who was working the others up had an eagle feather in his hair, and at the shot, the feather flipped into the air, then fluttered to earth. It awed him as much as it did the Arapahos. They looked at the feather and then at Aces as he worked the lever and prepared to shoot again.
“Damnation!” Tyree exclaimed.
Aces raised his cheek from the rifle and shouted something, but not in English. He took aim once more and said, to himself apparently, “I hope they don’t push it.”
To Fred’s astonishment, the warriors reined around, jabbed their heels, and departed at a gallop, several twisting their heads as if they feared being shot in the back.
“Drop some of them!” Tyree urged.
“No.”
The Arapahos didn’t slow until they were a quarter of a mile away. Soon only the dust they raised was visible.
“I’ll be switched,” Fred said. “You drove them off as slick as anything.”
Aces had lowered his Winchester. “No one wants to die.” Turning, he started back down.
“What did you say to them?” Fred wanted to know.
“Run or die.”
“In their own tongue?” Fred marveled. “Where in creation did you pick up Arapaho?”
“Mr. Horrell used to give the tame ones some cows now and then,” Aces said. “Mostly to help them get through the winter. He’s a fine Christian gent, and always doing good by folks.”
“That doesn’t explain you speakin’ their tongue.”
“I only knew a handful of words,” Aces said. “Some of the warriors like to gamble, and we’d throw dice or play cards.”
“That was some shootin’,” Tyree said. “If it had been me, I’d have gunned every last one of the red vermin.”
“They’re people, boy, like you and me.”
“The hell you say.”
On reaching his saddle, Aces shoved the Winchester into the scabbard and squatted to roll up his blankets. “Where are you gents headed, if you don’t mind my askin’?”
“Cheyenne,” Fred said.
“Hmm,” Aces said, and went on rolling.
Intensely curious, Fred asked, only partly in jest, “Are you sure you’re a cowboy and not a gun hand? I never saw anyone draw as fast as you, and you’re no slouch with that Winchester.”
“Everyone was somethin’ else before he became what he is,” Aces replied.
“Huh?” Tyree said.
“I’ve been nursemaidin’ cows going on ten years now,” Aces informed them. “I was with Mr. Horrell for the last five, but he had to fire me a couple of months ago and I’ve been lookin’ for work since.”
“Why did he have to, if you don’t mind my askin’?” Fred said.
“I shot somebody,” Aces said, “and Mr. Horrell has a rule about not havin’ shootists on his payroll.”
“Who did you shoot?”
Aces looked at him. “You ask a lot of questions.”
“It’s the badge,” Fred said.
“Sure it is.” Aces picked up his saddle blanket in both hands and shook it. “I was in a card game over to Casper and the tinhorn who was dealin’ slipped a card from the bottom of the deck. I told him to reshuffle and deal again, but he went for a hideout and I shot him dead.”
“So you shot in self-defense,” Fred said. “It doesn’t seem fair that your boss fired you over that one killin’.”
“There were three.”
“You shot the other cardplayers?”
“No. About six months before that I’d shot a rustler. Caught him in the act of using a runnin’ iron to change the Circle H brand and told him to throw up his hands. He did, but he had his six-shooter in one and I had to perforate his brainpan.”
“What about the third?”
Aces was moving to his palomino. “A year or so before that I shot a drummer who’d stopped at the ranch to sell ladies’ corsets to Horrell’s missus. While all the hands were stuffin’ their faces with chuck at the cookhouse, the drummer snuck into the bunkhouse and was helpin’ himself to our plunder. I told him to throw up his hands and he drew a belly gun. I shot him in the arm, thinkin’ to spare him, but the arm became infected and he died anyway.”
“You don’t have much luck with people throwin’ up their hands,” Fred observed wryly.
“I surely don’t.” Aces draped the saddle blanket over the palomino and smoothed it. “As soon as I’m saddled we can head for Cheyenne like you want.”
“We?” Fred said.
“I’m going with you.”
Chapter 12
Ohio was a good place to grow up.
The land was fertile, crops thrived, and Donald Connor did well by his wife, Martha, and their four sons and two daughters. He did so well that he got it into his head that he’d do even better if they moved west of the Mississippi River, where the land was a lot cheaper. Instead of the two hundred acres he had, they could have thousands.
Don had a plan. He’d homestead, add more land as his finances allowed, and in a few years he and his wife would be sitting pretty. He worked it all out on paper and showed it to her.
Martha didn’t want to leave the home she loved, but she was willing to give the West a try. If her husband said they could do it, they could. He was the brains of the family. After all, he’d had schooling up to the sixth grade and she had only gone as far as the fourth.
They sold their farm, loaded their possessions onto a Conestoga, and set out.
Martha fretted about the dangers, but everyone assured her that the Indians were mostly peaceable and outlaws were few and they’d do fine. It wasn’t like in the old days when half the tribes were on the warpath and banks and trains were being robbed right and left.
The days of the famous gangs like the James brothers and the Youngers were long over.
Don picked Kansas for their new home. He’d heard that the earth was as rich as Ohio earth and crops would grow with a minimum of tending. He’d been told the land was flat as a plate and easy to plow. That the summers were mild and the winters saw less snow than most Eastern states.
As it turned out, everything he’d been told by people who had never been there was wrong.
For starters, the land was a lot drier. Where Ohio received over thirty inches of rainfall a year, most parts of Kansas were lucky to see fifteen to twenty, and most of that came in the form of afternoon thunderstorms that didn’t do crop
s a lot of good. Considerable irrigating was called for to make a large farm prosper.
As for the claim that the ground was easy to plow, Don found that it was so hard-packed and hid so many rocks that plowing was a Herculean effort.
And then there were the winters. Bitterly cold winds howled out of the arctic north, and the temperature plummeted to ten degrees. That same wind made it seem like fifty below. As for the snow, two to three feet wasn’t uncommon, with drifts of six to eight.
Within a year of their move the family was barely getting by. They were so destitute that Don did something Martha resented for the rest of her days. He sold their oldest son as an indentured servant to a man who ran a freighting outfit.
The custom was well established. In the early days of the Colonies and for a long while after, a lot of immigrants came to America as indentures. It was popular with the poor because it enabled them to come to the land of opportunity, and after working as an indenture for a set number of years, they were given their freedom and could do as they pleased.
In recent years the practice had been on the decline, but it was still done now and then.
Don met the freighter in Salina. Over drinks at a saloon, Don shared his tale of woe. It was the freighter who suggested he’d be willing to take on the oldest boy as an indentured servant for, say, a hundred dollars. The boy would have to work for ten years to pay the debt off and then would be set free.
So it was that young James Connor, who had just turned twelve, found himself doing a man’s work under the always critical eye of a taskmaster who seemed to delight in taking a switch to him for any excuse whatsoever.
Young Jim had been in shock. That his own pa had done this to him crushed him. He cried a lot those first weeks, and if the freighter caught him, he was switched until he bled. After a few times of that, Jim made sure not to be caught.
He grew to hate being indentured, and to hate the freighter even more. The man worked him to the bone from dawn until well past dusk, seven days a week, month in and month out.
The only real rest Jim had was when the freighter let him handle a team. He was a top driver by the time he turned fifteen.
They freighted all over. His master, as the freighter called himself, liked to boast that they’d haul freight anywhere, and that they did: from Missouri to New Mexico, from Texas to Montana.
By his sixteenth year Jim had put on weight and muscle. So much so his boss stopped using the switch. But the freighter still treated him as if he were less than the mud that clung to their boots when it rained.
One day Jim made bold to ask if there was anything he could do to get out of being indentured early. Sure, the freighter laughed, give him the hundred dollars, plus interest. How much interest? Jim asked. Another hundred should do, was the freighter’s reply.
Two hundred dollars. To Jim it was a fortune. He had no money of his own, and no need for any. His clothes and his food were provided by the freighter.
Acquiring the two hundred became Jim’s dream. His obsession. He would somehow get his hands on it and be free to live his life as he pleased. The mere notion was a tonic for his spirit.
The “how” eluded him.
Then one day they were in Kansas City. The freighter had gone off to see a man about a job. Jim was left to watch the wagons and happened to notice several black men rolling dice in an alley. He drifted over to watch, and the oldest of the men asked him if he wanted to sit in. Jim said thanks, but he didn’t have anything to bet with. The black man asked why not and Jim told him about being indentured.
Jim would never forget the look that came over that man, or what he said.
“They even do it to their own.”
To Jim’s astonishment, the black man peeled a bill from his hand and held it out. “What’s this?” he’d said.
“Your first step on the road to freedom,” the man said, and wagged the bill. “Five dollars. Take it. It’s yours.”
Jim had protested, saying it wouldn’t be right, but the black man pressed the bill into his hand and made him take it. Even more astonishing, the man then prevailed on his two friends to contribute.
That night Jim lay under a wagon, where he usually slept, and fingered the godsend he’d been given. Each of the others had given him three, for a total of eleven. He felt rich, as if all the money in the world had been dropped in his lap. It intensified his yearning to be free.
All he needed was another one hundred and eighty-nine dollars.
Obtaining it became all he thought about.
It was why he took the risk he did.
Jim sat in on a card game.
They were in Denver. The freighter had gone to visit a sporting house, informing Jim he’d be gone all night and to stay with the wagons, which were parked in a freight yard. Other freighters were there, and their loud voices and laughter drew Jim to a poker game. He watched for over an hour, torn between fear of losing all he had and his desire to add to his Freedom Purse, as he called it. When one of the players left, the others asked if anyone wanted to take his place.
Jim offered to.
It was a friendly game and they were playing for small stakes. Nickels and dimes and quarters. The most a player could raise was a dollar.
Jim lost fifteen cents and then twenty more and was tempted to quit, but his next hand was three of a kind and he won twenty-five. Lady Luck liked him and he ended up winning more hands than he lost so that by midnight, when the game broke up, he was six dollars and forty cents richer.
Jim had found a new passion. From then on, he played poker every chance he got. He had to do it behind the freighter’s back, but that just added spice to his pleasure.
He grew better fast. He learned to read the other players, to tell when they had a good hand and when they were bluffing. He learned to bluff himself, to turn his expression to stone and not give his hand away.
In Kansas City he was first called Aces. During a late-night game he won three big hands in a row, all with three aces. The odds against that happening were astronomical. One of the other players started calling him Aces as a friendly joke, and the rest took it up. He liked the nickname.
From then on he called himself Aces Connor.
By the end of his seventeenth year Aces had one hundred and eighty-seven dollars and sixteen cents in his Freedom Purse. All he needed was twelve dollars and eighty-four cents.
He won it in Wichita. The moment he had the full two hundred, he bowed out and made for the saloon where he knew the freighter to be.
His master was at the bar, a bottle of whiskey half-gone. He glowered when Aces strode up and growled, “What in hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be with the wagons.”
“Two hundred dollars, you said.”
“What?”
Aces pulled the Freedom Purse from his pocket and smacked it down in front of the freighter. “Two hundred dollars it is.”
“What?” the freighter repeated himself.
“For my freedom. There’s your money. I want out of the contract you talked my father into signing.”
The freighter had struggled to collect his wits. He blinked in confusion and opened the purse. All that money cleared his head right quick. Mumbling, he counted the bills and coins. “I don’t believe it.”
“So, are we square?” Aces had said.
“Not so fast,” the freighter said. “Where did you get this? I don’t pay you a cent. Did you steal it?”
Aces told him about the poker games.
“So you’ve been sneaking away when you were supposed to be working?” the freighter said. “I should take a switch to you for that.”
“Try,” Aces said.
The freighter was bigger, although not by much. He gauged the width of Aces’s shoulders and the breadth of Aces’s chest, and frowned. “You’re past that age. But I can punish you in other ways.�
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Aces jabbed the purse angrily. “You have the two hundred. What more do you want?”
“You’re supposed to be mine for another five years yet,” the freighter said. “This ain’t hardly enough.”
“It’s how much you told me.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” the freighter said. “I didn’t take you seriously. I said whatever popped into my head.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” the freighter warned. “You’re still mine to do with as I damn well please, and it pleases me to let you know that it will take four hundred to buy out your contract.” He shook the purse. “Twice as much as you have here.”
“You greedy bastard.”
“Keep this up and I’ll have you thrown behind bars. I’m within my rights. I can’t help it if you were stupid enough to think two hundred would do.”
Aces hit him. He’d never struck another human being, but he unleashed an uppercut to the jaw with all his rage-driven strength behind it and knocked the freighter down. Cursing, the freighter stood and Aces punched him again, full in the face. It sent the freighter crashing onto a table, and the table upended, landing on top of him. Aces moved in, set to pound the freighter into the floor.
Only the freighter wasn’t moving. Blood flowed from a deep gash on his forehead, and he didn’t appear to be breathing.
In a sudden panic, Aces fled. He was sure he’d killed him. Sure that the law would be after him and he’d be put on trial and thrown behind bars.
Aces would be damned if he’d let that happen. He didn’t have any money and he didn’t have a horse, but he knew of another freighter who was leaving for Texas in the morning, and he asked the man if he could go along. The man was a driver short and happy to have him.
Only later did Aces learn he needn’t have run off. His “master” wasn’t dead. The bartender splashed water on his face and the freighter got up, grabbed the purse, and staggered out. He never pressed charges. Never sent anyone to bring Aces back.
Texas was a lot to Aces’s liking. The folks there kept to themselves and didn’t badger others with a lot of questions. He worked as a store clerk in Dallas long enough to buy new clothes and save twenty dollars so he could sit in on a poker game.
Ralph Compton the Evil Men Do Page 9
