‘What about somebody else’s freedom? Say Bannerman’s?’
‘Let him protect his own.’
‘Haven’t you got any charity in you at all?’
‘No.’
McCracken watched him in quiet amazement. ‘Where the devil are your standards, then?’
‘Don’t you think I’ve got standards?’
McCracken just looked at him. ‘Scott, tell me something. What makes you so damn sure you’re right?’
‘How do I know I’ve got two hands to work with?’
At that moment McCracken felt sorry for the man. With a bleak look, he shouldered past him into the doorway, and paused on his way out. ‘There’s one thing you ought to think over.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re making your bed now,’ McCracken told him. ‘You’ll have to lie in it, Scott. When word of this gets around, you won’t have any friends left.’
‘I don’t need friends,’ Kramer said. There was something hollow in his tone, something unbending and at the same time terrifying in the proud lift of his head.
‘Scott,’ McCracken said with a shake of his head, ‘I wish I knew you.’
Kramer’s face showed a rigid smile. The wall he was building around himself was almost a visible rampart. McCracken, touched by reluctant pity for the man, added one more warning statement: ‘If you don’t pitch in with Bannerman, nobody will ever turn a hair to help you, Scott.’
‘Nobody should.’
‘That’s right.’
‘That’s the way it should be,’ Kramer said. ‘If everybody lived that way, it would be a better world.’
‘No. It would be a world full of animals. Scott, you’re breeding a hell of a lump on your nose. You’ll come to the end of the road. When you tumble into the ditch, nobody will be there to pull you out.’ McCracken rammed the hat on his head, swung down the porch steps and mounted up. Kramer came out onto the porch with a small lopsided grin and said, ‘Good luck on your witch hunt, anyway, Ben.’ And waved in idle signal. Giving the man a bleak glance, McCracken wheeled his horse out of the yard and drummed loping down the trail.
Forty minutes later, after a quick circuit through the timberlands and two brief stops at S-Bar and at Rafter-H, he cantered the horse into Bannerman’s Box B yard, and dismounted in a swirl of dust before the main house. He had just put his boot onto the top porch step when the door swung open and Florence Bannerman stepped out.
Something in McCracken’s expression must have warned her; she said, ‘What’s wrong, Ben?’
‘I’ve got to see Knox. Right away.’
‘Why,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, Ben, but I don’t know exactly where he is. He rode out this morning with the foreman—I didn’t notice which way they went.’
McCracken cursed under his breath, touched his hat brim absently and turned away, going down the steps and striding toward the horse. Florence Bannerman’s voice halted him, and when he turned, she said, ‘Something’s wrong, Ben.’
‘Yeah,’ he breathed. His voice sounded hoarse.
The woman came down the steps and gave him a peculiar anxious look that puzzled him. She said, ‘He drank a lot yesterday. When he got up this morning he was in a foul mood. He said he was tired of being laughed at—he said he was through pussyfooting around jumping at his own shadow. He took a bottle of whisky with him.’
‘Well,’ McCracken observed, ‘if he wants a chance to prove he can fight, he may get it sooner than he expects.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve got word that Chet Six intends to raid Box B tonight.’
Her hand rose to her mouth. He saw her eyes widen and then he heard hoof beats on gravel down by the creek, and when he turned he saw between the barn and smithy, two horsemen riding up across the meadow—Bannerman and his foreman. They came up through the grass and into the yard; Bannerman waved when he recognized McCracken, and when he stepped down the foreman led both horses toward the corrals. Bannerman walked forward, hand extended.
McCracken gave him a quick, firm handshake. Bannerman said, ‘Didn’t expect to see you so soon, Ben.’
‘Something’s up,’ McCracken said. ‘I’ve had a fairly reliable tip that Six plans to make a big raid against you tonight. Apparently he intends to sweep the outfit from one end to the other and drag along every head of beef he comes across.’
‘God,’ Bannerman said, and took a moment to digest it. He removed his hat and ran brown fingers through his graying hair, and turned the hat around in his hands, frowning at it.
McCracken said, ‘I’ve left word at Rafter-H and S-Bar. They’ll have three men apiece over here by nightfall, armed and ready. I’ll bring my own crew over as soon as I get back from town—I figure to get the sheriff up here where the action is, for a change. That way, including you and your crew, we ought to have fifteen men or more ready to give it right back to Six.’
The troubled look in Bannerman’s roving glance bothered him. Bannerman said, ‘Have you got a plan?’
‘I think so—unless you’ve got your own idea. After all, it’s your herd that’s in danger.’
‘I need time to think about it,’ Bannerman said.
‘Time,’ McCracken replied, ‘is exactly what you haven’t got, Knox.’
Bannerman, big and solid and weathered, pounded one fist into the other palm. The half-hidden, helpless look in his eyes made McCracken feel awkward. Abruptly, Bannerman swung with a snap of his broad shoulders and went up the porch steps into the house. His wife stood alone on a spot of earth and her glance pleaded silently with McCracken. Florence Bannerman said, ‘Help him, Ben.’
‘I can’t make him into something he’s not.’
‘You can give him something to lean on. He’s not used to this kind of thing.’
McCracken looked away, troubled, remembering what Scott Kramer had said, and listening to a small corner of his own mind that said quietly but insistently that perhaps Kramer had been right—perhaps if a man was not willing to stand and fight for his own, then he did not deserve to keep it. Kramer was a lonely, embittered man, but his voice was the voice of the frontier—rugged, self-reliant, giving no quarter.
These two men, Kramer and Bannerman, stood at opposite poles. Each was at an extreme and McCracken could not agree wholly with either of them. Yet, in spite of Kramer’s hard-bitten individualism and blatant selfishness, McCracken felt more in sympathy with it than he could ever feel with the kind of vacillating uncertainty that marked Knox Bannerman’s tracks through life. Where was Bannerman’s self-respect, his pride? If he owned his herd and his ranch, didn’t he have the responsibility to keep it and run it?
Meeting the woman’s pleading eyes, he shook his head slowly; but his long legs carried him up the steps and into the parlor, and he saw Bannerman standing astride the open-jawed head of the bear rug, working the cork out of a whisky bottle with his teeth. Bannerman spat out the cork and threw his head back, lifting the bottle to his lips.
‘That’s no good,’ McCracken said. ‘Put it away and let’s talk.’
‘Talk,’ Bannerman said, with a grimace and a bitter little laugh. ‘I’m good at that, Ben. I could talk all day. What do you want to talk about? The price of beef on the fall market? The prospects for a hard winter?’
McCracken walked across the distance between them and put his hand on the bottle. Meeting no resistance, he took it away from Bannerman’s grip and put it down on the table. ‘Sit down,’ he said.
Not meeting his glance, Bannerman turned aside and dropped loosely into a big chair. ‘My brother made this chair,’ he said abstractedly.
‘Your brother did a lot of things. That’s part of what’s eating you, isn’t it?’
Bannerman’s shoulders lifted, hung, and dropped; he turned his hands palms-up, Indian fashion. ‘Sure. I guess it is. Why not admit it? It’s hard for a fellow like me to fill another man’s tracks, Ben. Especially when they’re bigger tracks than I could ever make.’
McC
racken walked around the table and picked up a straight-back wooden chair. He carried it in front of Bannerman and sat down on it backwards, his legs around the chair-back and his arms folded on the top. Bannerman cocked his boot up against the rim of the table and idly spun the rowel of his spur with a finger. His eyes looked like deep sand without firm bottom.
McCracken felt the weight of a third presence in the room. When he looked over his shoulder, he saw Florence standing in the doorway. Giving both of them an unreadable look, she closed the door and went across the room into the bedroom. When that door clicked shut, McCracken said, ‘You’ve got a good wife.’
‘Better than I deserve,’ Bannerman answered moodily.
‘Only if you want to make it that way.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘A man decides what he wants. Then he goes out and does it.’
‘No,’ Bannerman said in a low tone. ‘A man’s cast in a mold, Ben. You grow up from being a kid, and the day comes when you crystallize into your final form. You can’t change it after that.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘Am I? I don’t think so.’
McCracken shook his head. ‘A long time ago you discovered you weren’t out in the sunshine where people could see you. There was a shadow that hid you—your brother’s shadow. You walked in that shadow a long time, Knox. But now the tree’s fallen down and it doesn’t make a shadow any more.’
‘Doesn’t it?’
‘No,’ McCracken said flatly. ‘Your brother made his mark. Now it’s your turn. There’s nothing standing in your way, Knox—not a damned thing but your own memory. Nobody’s asking you to fill your brother’s boots. You don’t have to follow his trail. Break your own trail. Be your own man. Hell, man, you’ve got a lot that’s worth fighting for.’
Bannerman stood up abruptly and paced a restless turn around the room, hands rammed into his pockets and head pushed down, looking at the floor. He said, ‘You think I’m scared, don’t you? Physically scared, I mean.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m not that afraid of getting hurt,’ Bannerman said. ‘That’s not the thing.’
‘Then what is the thing?’
Bannerman lifted his hands away from his sides, raising his shoulders. ‘I just find it harder than hell to convince myself that it’s worth it.’
‘That what’s worth it?’
‘Risking the lives of my men and your men for the sake ‘ of a few damned cows.’
‘You’d rather let Six run off with them?’
‘Maybe I would,’ Bannerman admitted, ‘if it would save lives.’
‘It won’t,’ McCracken told him bluntly. ‘It never does. If you back off from a man like Six, it just makes him bolder.’
‘You’re a fighting man, Ben. You’ve taken those risks before. I haven’t. I didn’t shoot my way through the Grant County War and have the good fortune to come out of it with a whole skin. Ben, you are—or at least you were—a gun-fighter. I’m not. Neither are the boys on my crew. Or on yours. They don’t get paid gun wages, and no matter how loyal they are, I don’t want to take the responsibility of putting them up in the line of fire.’
‘You don’t want to,’ McCracken said, ‘but you’ve got to. I know how you feel, Knox. I’ve seen good men die. But at least they died standing up for something—and sometimes that’s better than living for nothing.’
‘Maybe it is,’ Bannerman admitted. ‘I guess we each have to make up our own minds about that. Myself, I don’t agree with you. I never found a cause pure and important enough to be worthwhile dying for.’
McCracken rolled a cigarette, licked it, lighted it and drew smoke into his lungs. Squinting through the smoke at Bannerman, he said, ‘Put it this way, Knox: Suppose a man came along and held a knife at Florence’s throat. Would you be willing to fight that man to save her life?’
‘Yes,’ Bannerman said unhesitatingly. ‘But there’s a big difference between Florence’s life and the price of a few whiteface steers.’
‘Is there?’ McCracken said quietly. He drew on the cigarette and exhaled a ball of smoke toward the ceiling. ‘If you let Six walk off with your cattle, pretty soon you won’t have a ranch any more. You won’t have anything. You’ll find yourself one day down in the gutter without two pennies to rub together—and when you drop, you’ll be dragging Florence with you. You owe her more than that, Knox. You owe yourself more than that.’
‘Maybe,’ Bannerman said. ‘Maybe.’ He walked around the room again and came to a restless stand before McCracken, rocking back and forth on his feet. ‘Suppose it’s time,’ he said. ‘What can I do about it?’
‘Fight back,’ McCracken said immediately. ‘We’ll set up an ambush in the timber above the meadow at Seven Springs. If Six is going to raid Box B, he’ll have to come through there on his way across your land. We’ll let him pick off as many cattle as he wants. That way we’ll catch him with the goods in hand, and there won’t be any question of what he’s up to. Mossgrove will have all the evidence he could want—and we’ll have Six red-handed. We can surround him. And if he’s smart, he’ll surrender without a shot fired.’
‘I doubt that,’ Bannerman said. ‘Some of those boys are real hardcases, Ben. There’s nothing they’d sooner do than pull a trigger.’
‘If that’s the way it has to be—’ McCracken answered, and spread his hands to complete his reply.
Bannerman scrubbed a hand nervously over his jaw. He turned, looked down at the bottle on the table, licked his lips and turned resolutely away from it, both hands in his pockets. Finally he said, in a very low voice, ‘All right, Ben. We’ll do as you say.’
McCracken stood up, nodding. Putting his hand on the other’s arm, he said softly, ‘It may not feel right, Knox, but it’s the best way.’
‘I hope it is.’
‘I’ll see you tonight,’ McCracken said, and swung determinedly toward the door, his spurs dragging the floor. ‘Let me borrow a fresh horse, will you?’
. ‘Help yourself.’
‘Obliged,’ he said, and then he was out in the hard blast of the sun, a tall man tramping his own shadow into the ground.
Eight
Arroyo Seco town blended sleepily into the earth’s hard-weathered brown gray. Ripples of heat and a loose haze of dust hung close to the surface of the broad street. A scatter of horses stood around hipshot, half asleep at the hitch rails. The light stagecoach from Arrowhead and Spanish Flat rocked around a last bend of the coach road into the head of the street, came forward bucking and scratching up dust, and pitched to a stop at the depot, where a sleepy drummer waited on the shaded porch with his kit and sample bags. Coming out of the sheriff’s office, McCracken waited for the stage’s dust to settle down before he turned to cross over into Stewart’s store. Before he left the walk, Sheriff Mossgrove came out of the office behind him and said, ‘I’ll be there, Ben, but I don’t want any guns going off before they have a chance to put their hands up.’
‘I already told you I was agreeable to that,’ McCracken said. ‘What do you think I am, a blood-thirsty tough?’
Mossgrove smiled gently and shook his head. ‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you tonight, Ben.’ And went off down the street, tugging at the points of his gray mustache, a hard and weather-beaten old trail wolf.
The powdered street was a glaring broad stripe, smoky with heat and largely deserted. At Stewart’s mercantile, one horse stood waiting outside the place swishing away flies with its tail. Leading his own horse, McCracken tied it to a ringbolt in the porch post and went up, crossing the walk into the shaded coolness of the store. Stewart was there with his usual wink and sly grin, saying, ‘She’s upstairs, Ben, as usual.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Wait a minute.’
McCracken turned expectantly while the older man came around the end of his counter, wiping his palms against the soiled apron he always wore. Stacks of canned goods littered the shelves behind the c
ounter. Stewart pressed a palm against his forehead, squeezing away oil-sweat, and dragged fingers through his thinning white hair. The store’s only customer was across the length of the long room, trying hats on for size, and after a single glance in that direction Stewart said, ‘Will you have a talk with her, Ben?’
‘What about?’
‘She won’t listen to me,’ Stewart said, broodingly. ‘Ever since she came back from finishing school, she hasn’t had six words to say to me at any one time. Sometimes I think we inhabit different worlds, Ada and me.’
‘What do you want me to do about it?’
Once again, self-consciously, Stewart rubbed his hands on the apron. ‘She never goes out anywhere. She won’t visit folks. Hardly even says howdy to the lady customers that come in here. All she does is sit up in her room and brood. It ain’t good, Ben. There’s times I wish you lived in town, or she lived up in the mountains—anything to bring her out of that shell she’s built around her.’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ McCracken told him, and walked past the man. Stewart was nodding steadily and it came to McCracken that the man was getting old.
He climbed the stair and knocked as usual, and as usual Ada admitted him to a room darkened by drawn curtains. She looked pale in the bad light. Her tawny hair was carelessly tied back, as if she hadn’t had the patience to comb it out, and her expression seemed irritated and waspish. She greeted him with a quick word and turned back restively into the room, waving a hand jerkily.
Hat in hand, McCracken said, ‘Why don’t you open a curtain and get some light in here? Nobody was meant to spend all their time in a dark cage.’
‘That’s exactly what it is,’ she said, with an edge of bitterness in her tone that nobody could miss. ‘A cage.’
‘Why don’t you get out of it, then? The door’s open.’
‘Out of it—where to? Out into that dusty street? Into the saloon, perhaps, with the smell of unwashed bodies and stale liquor and dead tobacco smoke?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘why don’t you go out and visit folks? Angie Baird would likely enjoy visiting with you. So would Kate McQueen or Mrs. Mossgrove or a dozen others.’
The Outlaws 2 Page 5
