She stepped in close and got her arm about my waist and helped me walk toward the chair, as I refused the bed. I sat while she brought hot water and stripped my shirt from me and looked down at the place where the bullet had come through, and a frightening mess it was, with blood caked to my hide and the wound an ugly sight.
She bathed the wound and she probed for the bullet and somehow she got it out. This was something she had done before, that I could see. She treated my side with something, or maybe it was only her lovely hands and their gentle touch, and as I watched her I knew that here was my woman, if such there was in the world, the woman to walk beside a man, and not behind him. Not one of those who try always to be pushing ahead and who are worth nothing at all as a woman and little as anything else.
She started coffee then and put broth on the fire to warm, and over her shoulder she looked at me. “Who are you, then? And where is it you come from?”
Who was I? Nobody. What was I? Less than nothing. “I’m a drifting man,” I said simply enough, “and one too handy with a gun for the good of himself or anyone. I’m riding through. I’ve always been riding through.”
“There’s been a killing?”
“Of a man who deserved it. So now I’m running, for though he was a bad lot, there’s good men in his line and they’ll be after me.”
She looked at me coolly, and she said, “You’ve run out of one fight and into another, unless you move quickly.”
“Here?”
“Yes. We have moved in and planted crops and now a cattleman would be driving us out. There are eleven of us-eleven that can fight, and fourteen women, who can help.
Some have been killed, my father for one. There are more than thirty tough hands riding with the cattleman, and one of them is Sad Priest.”
There was no good in Priest. Him I knew well and nothing about him I liked. “Who is the cattleman?”
“Yanel Webb. It’s a big outfit.”
“I know them.” By now I was eating the broth and drinking coffee and the chill was leaving my bones, but my lids were heavy and there was a weight of sleep on my eyes.
She showed me to the bed where her father had slept and helped me off with my boots and guns, and then what happened I never knew, for sleep folded me away into soft darkness.
Though I remembered but fragments, there was a fever that took me and I tossed and turned on the bed for hours. A drink of water from a cup in her gentle hand exhausted me and the medicine in the dressings for my wound stained the sheets. At last I faded off into a dreamless sleep that seemed to go on forever. When next my eyes opened to awareness, there was daylight at the window and a clear sky beyond it and the girl was standing in the door. I had a vague memory of someone knocking on the door, voices, and the pound of hooves receding into the distance.
“You’d best get up. They’re coming.”
“The Gleasons?”
“Webb and Priest, and his lot. And we’re not ready for them. We’re all scattered.”
She dried her palms on her apron. “You’d best slip out. I’ve saddled your horse.”
“And run?”
“It’s no fight of yours.”
“I’m not a running sort of man. And as to whether it’s a fight of mine or not, time will be saying, for you’ve done me a turn and I pay my debts when I can … have you coffee on?”
“My father said there must always be hot coffee in a house.”
“Your father was a knowing man.”
When I had my boots on and my guns I felt better, favoring my side a bit. When they rode into the yard I was standing in the door with a cup of hot, black coffee in my left hand.
There were at least twenty of them, and armed for business. Tough men, these. Tough men and hard in the belly and eyes. The first of them was Webb, of whom I’d heard talk, and on his left, that lean rail of poison, Sad Priest.
“Morning,” I said. “You’re riding early.”
“We’ve no talk with you, whoever you are. Where’s Maggie Ryan?”
“This morning I’m speaking for her. Is it trouble you’re after? If it is”-I smiled at them, feeling good inside and liking the look of them-“you’ve called at the right door. However, I’ll be forgivin’.
“If you turn about now and ride off, I’ll be letting you go without risk.”
“Let ms go?” Yanel Webb stared at me as if I was fair daft, and not a bad guess he’d made, for daft I am and always have been, for when there’s a fight in the offing, something starts rolling around in me, something that’s full of gladness and eagerness that will not go down until there’s fists or clubs or guns and somebody’s won or lost or got themselves a broken skull. “You’ll let us go? Get out of here, man! Get out while we see fit to let you!”
That made me laugh. “Leave a scrap when the Priest is in it? That I’d never do, Webb.”
I stepped out onto the porch, moving toward them, knowing there’s something about closeness to a gun that turns men’s insides to water and weakness. “How are you, Sad? Forgotten me?”
He opened his scar of a mouth and said, “I’ve never seen you before-” His voice broke off and he stopped. “Race Mallin…”
That made me chuckle. There’d been a change in his eyes then, for he knew me, and I knew myself what was said about me, how I was a gun-crazy fool who had no brains or coolness or anything, a man who wouldn’t scare and wouldn’t bluff and who would walk down the avenues of hell with dynamite in his pockets and tinder in his hair.
Now, no man wants to tackle a man like that, for you know when the chips are down and you’ve got to fight, he’ll die hard and not alone.
Sad Priest was a fast hand with a gun, maybe faster than me, but there’d been other fast men who had died as easily as anyone.
“Right you are. And it looks like some of these boys here will be able to tell it around the bunkhouses next year, the story of how Sad Priest and Yanel Webb died with Race Mallin in an all-out gun battle! What a story that will make for those who yarn around the fires!
“Yanel Webb, all his cattle wasted, his ranch in other hands, his wife a widow, and his baby son an orphan, and Sad Priest, the fastest of them all, facedown in the dirt of a nester’s yard with his belly shot full of lead bullets!”
Beyond them were the others and I grinned at them. “Oh, don’t you lads worry. Some of you favored ones will go along. How many is a guess, but you’d best remember I’ve ten good bullets here, and while I’ve gone down three times in gunfights, it was every time with empty guns!
“Tell them, Sad! You were on the Neuces that time when the four Chambers boys jumped me. They put me down and filled me full of holes and I was six weeks before I could walk, but they buried three of the Chambers and the other one left the country when I left my bed.”
“You talk a lot,” Webb said sourly.
“It’s a weakness of the Irish,” I said.
They did not like it. None of them liked it. At such a time no man feels secure and each one is sure you’re looking right at him. “What are you doin’ here?” Webb demanded.
“This is no fight of yours.” “Why, any one-sided fight is my fight, Yanel,” I explained.
“I’ve a weakness for them. I could not stay out of it, and me with the Gleasons behind me.”
That I said for the smartness of it. I’m not so crazy as I sound, and wild as I get in a scrap, I knew they’d salt me down if the guns opened here. But my deal was to bluff them, for no man wishes to die, and once the bluff started, to offer them an easy out, a reason for delay.
The Gleasons made a reason. I knew they would figure that if the Gleasons were after me, all they had to do was sit back and let the Gleasons kill me-and any gain in time was a gain for us.
Webb hesitated, soaking it up. He didn’t like it, but it was smart, and Priest said something to him under his breath, and probably a warning to let the Gleasons come.
Then Webb said, “Why are the Gleasons after you?”
“Korry,” I
explained, “shot down an old friend of mine when I was down Del Rio way.
I hightailed it back and met him last night and he was a bit slow. He died back there and the Gleasons will be after me.”
“That,” Webb said, “I’d like to see. We’ll camp out and see what happens.”
Now, that I’d not expected. I’d believed they would ride out and leave us alone, but with them here … Maggie Ryan spoke beside me. “What will we do, Race? The others will be here soon, and they are not fighting men, they are quiet, sincere men with families and homes. If there is a fight here, some of them or all of them will die. Webb won’t stop killing once he starts.”
“It isn’t Webb,” I said. “It’s that cold image of a buzzard beside him, it’s Priest that worries me.”
Strange is the world that men are born to, and strange the ways of men when trouble comes. Yanel Webb was not a bad man, only a hard man who thought cattle were the only way of life and would stop all others who came into the country. And those with him-they were hard, reckless men, but cowhands, not killers. Fight they would, if they must, but with a decent way out… and the Gleasons who were coming. Korry had been the only bad apple in that lot. They knew it as well as I, but they were honor bound to hunt me down, but I’d no stomach for killing honest men.
Across the hard-caked earth of the yard on that morning after the rain I looked at Sad Priest.
“Maggie,” I said, “there’s a chance that we can work it out, but only one chance.
What stake has Priest in this?”
“Webb’s given him land and a job. He’s the worst of them, I think.”
“How was Webb before he came?”
“Angry, and ordering us off, but he wasn’t so strong for killing.”
“Maybe,” I said, “if Priest were out of it, we could talk.”
Then we heard the rattle of hooves on the bridge and the sound of riders and I looked around over my shoulder and saw the Gleasons come into the yard.
There was the weakness from my wound, but no time for weakness now. There they were, the three of them, and they were looking around at what they had ridden into. And then I took my gamble as a man sometimes must. I’m not a talking man when the chips are down and the love of battle is strong within me, but there was more at stake now than me or my desires, for there was a handful of kindly folks and their farms and wishes.
There comes a time to every man when he must drop the old ways and look ahead, so here was I, a man who had ridden and roistered and rustled a few head, who had shot up the wrong side of town on a Saturday night. I’d killed a few hardcases and lived the life of a wild land growing, and now suddenly I could see a chance for my own life: a wife, my own home, my own green and growing land, my own children about the door-maybe all of it lay out there beyond that hot, sunbaking yard where my enemies stood. Twenty-odd men with reasons for killing me, and not one for helping me stay alive.
“Maggie,” I said, “I’m a changed man. I’m going out there and talk. Pray if you can, for you’re certain to have more of a voice with the Lord than I, for it’s got to be blarney rather than bullets if we come out alive from this.”
So I walked out there and faced the Gleasons, three hard, tough, honest men. Three men who had ridden here to kill me.
“Pat,”
I said, “we rode a roundup together. Mickey, you pulled me out from under a steer one time, down Sonora way, an’ you, Dave, I’ve bought you drinks and you’ve bought them for me. That’s why I ran after I’d shot Korry. He had it comin’, an’ deep in the heart of you, you all know it.
“Korry got what he asked for, and had it not been me, it would have been another, but I ran, for I’d no desire to kill any of you.”
“Or to be killed, maybe.”
Then I shrugged. “That’s a gamble always, but the Chambers boys went down and a fool knows no lack of confidence. Surely, I’m a fool, and a great one.”
“Why the palaver?” Pat demanded. “What trick is this?”
“No trick,” I said. “Only I’ve no wish to kill any one of you, nor to kill anyone anymore but one man.
“These”-I gestured at the gathered riders-“are fine upstanding men who’ve come to rob a girl of her home! To take the roof from a girl who’s but recently lost her father!
“They want to run out a lot of fine, homemaking men who are irrigating land and building the country. And they’ve brought a killer to do their dirty work, a buzzard named Sad Priest!
“I don’t want to fight you. I’ve this fight to think of now. Never yet have I shot an honest man, and I’ve no wish to begin.
“Only one thing I want now,” and when I spoke my eyes went to Sad Priest across the yard. “I want to kill the man who’d run a girl with no family from her house!”
Oh, I didn’t wait for him! Nobody waits for Sad Priest! So when I spoke, I reached, but he drew so fast his gun was up and shooting before I’d more than cleared leather.
But I’d known he’d shoot too fast and he did. His bullet tugged at my shirt and I triggered my six-gun, two quick, hammering shots, and then ran!
Right for him, his gun spitting lead and the blood of my bullets showing on his neck and shirtfront, but my running made him miss and only one of the bullets hit me, taking me through the thigh, and I went down and felt another bullet whip past my skull, and then I fired up at him and the bullet split his brisket and his knees let go and he started down just as I rolled on my side and fired into him again at eight feet of distance.
He hit ground then and lay there all sprawled out, and one of the Webb hands started for me and Pat Gleason levered a shell into the barrel of his Winchester. “Hold it, mister!” he said. “That was a fair fight!”
They stood there, all of them, nobody quite knowing what to do, and then Maggie Ryan ran to me and with her hands under my arms I got to my feet. I stepped away from her and pushed her back toward the house. This was not yet over. Blood was running from my side where the other wound had started to bleed.
“Got you twice,” Dave Gleason said.
“No,” I told him, “the one in my side was Kerry’s. Only he was a few inches too low.”
“Korry got a bullet into you?” Mickey said. “If he did that he had a fair shake.
He wasn’t fast enough otherwise.”
“It’s his,” I said. “You can see the wound’s not fresh.”
Yanel Webb stood there with his hands at his sides, not sure of what to say. And his hands waited for him, for he was their boss and they rode for the brand, but knowing their kind I knew their hearts weren’t in it.
“Yanel,” I said, “Priest was long overdue. Ride home. You’ve land enough, and when you want eggs and fresh vegetables, come down on the creek and trade with these people.
“You and me,” I said, “we’ve got to grow with the times. The day of the gun and the free range is past. We’ve got to accept that or go like the buffalo went.”
He was reluctant to leave, and he stood there, knowing the truth of what I’d said, and knowing that nothing now stood between him and my first bullet.
“He’s calling them fair,” Pat Gleason said. “I stand with him on that.”
Webb turned to his hands. “Well, boys,” he said, “we’d best take Sad along and plant him. I reckon we’ve played out our hand. These farmers best keep their crops fenced, though.” It was his final chance to bluster. “If their fields are eaten or trampled, it’s not my lookout!”
They went then, and we watched them ride, and then I faced around and looked at the Gleasons and they looked at me. Maggie Ryan had her arm around me and then she spoke up and said to them, “There’s coffee on. Will you come in?”
So we went in and the coffee was hot and black, and there by the table there was warm and pleasant talk of cattle and grass and what a man could do in a green growing valley, with time on his hands.
*
LAST DAY IN TOWN
The riders moved forward in a body, then halted. “
Strike a match, Reb!” Nathan Embree’s voice trembled with triumph. “We finally got one, I heard him fall.”
Reb Farrell slid from the saddle. “I see him! He’s right over here!” A match whispered on his jeans and the light flared.
All necks craned forward. The man on the ground had a bullet through his head, but the face of the man was placid. It was a quiet face, seamed with care and years that had not been kind. The face of a man tired of the endless struggle of living. It was the face of Reb Farrell’s father.
Numb with horror, Reb stared down at the man they had killed, the man who had fought to give him some little education and a sense of honor, who had fought so hard and lost, and who now was dead, killed, possibly by a bullet from the gun of the son he loved.
“My God!” Dave Barbot’s exclamation was low. “Not Jim Farrell! It can’t be!”
Nathan Embree’s own shock changed to sudden, bitter fury. “So that was it? That was why you couldn’t find any rustlers for me, Reb? Maybe this explains how they always knew when an’ where to strike! Maybe this explains why they were always one jump ahead of us!”
Reb Farrell stared unbelievingly at the body of his father, shocked as much by his father’s presence here as by the feeling that he had himself shot him. He did not hear the words of Nathan Embree. He did not hear Dave Barbot’s refusal to agree.
“You don’t believe that, Nathan!” Dave’s voice was sharp. “Reb’s fought them harder than anybody! He’s recovered two herds for you!”
“Uh-huh.” There was cold certainty in Nathan Embree’s voice. “Why did he find ‘em when nobody else could? Maybe it was because he was the only one who knew where to look? When did this rustling start? Right after I made him foreman, wasn’t it?”
Reb Farrell looked up. “What was that? What did you say, Nathan?”
Nathan Embree was a wealthy man and he was a driver. He was also a just man, but hard and merciless. The moon had emerged from under a cloud and showed him the face of his young foreman.
“You’re fired, Reb! Get your gear an’ get off the place! I can’t prove anything against you, but if you’re still in the country within twenty-four hours, we’ll hunt you down an’ you’ll hang!”
Monument Rock (Ss) (1998) Page 6
