When I handed Gates that note, he looked from them to me. He was scared, but he dearly hated to sell.
“It’s better than nothing,” I said, “and that’s what he’ll leave you.” I handed him the pencil. “Just sign it.”
“What’s going on here?” the sheriff demanded.
“What’s that paper?”
“All right, all right,” Gates whispered hoarsely to me. “They’re yours.” He glanced at the others with him. “You agree?”
They nodded, and he signed. Deliberately I took the paper, turned my back on them, and walked to my horse. Tied to the saddle by a slipknot was my Colt revolving shotgun. Taking the shotgun, I stepped back into the light.
“What’s goin’ on here?” the sheriff said again. “What d’you think you’re doin’?”
“I just bought title to those cattle you say you’re going to cut from the herd. You ain’t getting hide nor hair of them. Now, you boys just turn yourselves around and ride back to town.”
He looked to be a mighty mean man, and I knew he wasn’t going to back down. At the beginning, before he started to run his bluff, they might have kept him off; but once he’d gotten a toe hold it meant a fight.
“Now, see here, boy!” He started to turn his horse to bring his rifle to bear, and I let him turn until the muzzle started to lift, then I shot him out of the saddle.
That Colt shotgun was loaded with buckshot, and it cut loose with a tremendous roar. That so-called sheriff left his saddle as if he’d been pole-axed.
The rest of them sat almighty still, afraid to blink for fear I’d shoot again. There was no arguing with that shotgun, and I held the drop. My next step took me nearer, but also deeper into the shadows near a wagon.
“Pick him up,” I said, “and ride out of here. I’ll kill the next man on sight that I see.”
Well, sir, they done it. They got down mighty meek and hung him over the saddle and then they rode out of there, and they seemed pleased to be going.
On the ground where the body lay was a six-shooter that had fallen from his belt. I went over and picked it up. It was a finely made gun with an oddly carved ivory butt. Holding it up, I called after them, but they were gone, and they were not about to come back, so I thrust that gun back of my belt, and with that move I bought a ticket to hell with a dead man’s gun.
Gates’s men just sat there, too surprised and shocked to speak. “They’ve gone,” Gates said finally; “you ran them off.”
Me, I walked to the fire and picked up my cup. I was shaking a mite, and I didn’t want them to see it. Boy though I was, I’d had a spell of time to know something of men, and knew my troubles had only begun.
“You killed him,” one of the men said, as if he couldn’t believe it.
“He came yearning for it.”
“But you killed him!”
I drank my coffee. Sitting there by the fire, I could see the idea was beginning to reach them. The danger was over—it was gone. But now there was something else. I owned half their herd.
And I had killed a man, something I’d never done before, and hoped not to do again. It left me feeling sickish in the stomach, but I knew I daren’t let them know it.
There by the wagon wheel, that redhead girl was looking at me. She wasn’t smiling, and she wasn’t offering any friendliness. She was just looking.
“Seems to me,” I said, “We’d better move this herd. We’d best put some distance behind us.”
They stared at me. The youngest of the men could have been my grandpa.
“Did you have to shoot that man?” one of them said. “Did you have to kill him?”
“What would you have done?”
Nobody answered that question, so I finished my coffee and, taking up my fixings, walked back to my horse. We had to get moving, but the men had already started to think. They hadn’t come to any decision yet, but they would. Just give them time.
Chapter 2
We moved the cattle west a good eight miles, then bedded down, and all night long a soft rain fell. In the morning I rode out to make tally of my cattle.
The night guard came to me. He was Harvey Bowers, a lean, bitter old man with a skimpy face and thin hair stretched hard over his skull. “What you huntin’ for?” he asked.
“Studyin’ my cattle. Makin’ a tally, if you want to know.”
“Ain’t yours yet. Not until you pay that note.” He rolled his quid in his lean jaws. “You got a long way to go, boy.”
“I’ve been there before. I been over the trail.”
“You come by them cattle mighty easy. It taken us months of hard work to make the gather.”
“And you could have lost them in one minute. If you figured it was easy to keep them, you could have tried. I risked my hide for them, don’t forget that.”
The cattle were in fair shape, better than I had expected. They had come up the Shawnee Trail, the roughest of the lot, with deep rivers to swim, and lots of broken country and brush, but the grass had been good, and with the rains and all, they’d had a-plenty to drink.
But now trouble was shaping up for me. A big share of the herd was mine if I made good on that note, and the thought of it was beginning to rankle with those men. Boy I might be, but I was wise enough to know that, given time, every man jack of them would come to hate me.
The rain was a mesh of steel against an iron sky. We pointed the herd west down a valley of grass where a small stream wound among the willows and redbud. This was Indian country, but the Indians were friendly … it was said. The Cherokees were friendly, I knew, and good people, but they had their renegades, too, and a herd of strange cattle would be a temptation to them.
Westward, the Indians we would meet would be wild Indians, out for scalps and horses, and I had an idea this rawhide outfit would be glad they had me along. But I knew that folks can sometimes come to hate a man they owe; and as time went on, they would find reasons for liking me less and less.
When I came in to the fire at noontime they had been talking about it. There was no friendship for each other among these men, only a kind of cold toleration.
Taking hold of the pot, I used my left hand. Gates looked up at me from his seat on the ground. “Young, ain’t you?”
“Nineteen,” I said, “nineteen by two months, but don’t let the years fool you. I’ve covered country.”
“You killed that man mighty easy. You killed men before?”
“I’ve been shot at, and shot back. I never took to counting scalps.”
“That was a lawman you killed.”
“He lied when he told you that. This is Indian Territory, and the law is the United States Marshal and his deputies.”
The coffee was good, I’ll say that for them. “You got off easy,” I said. “Once that outfit got away with the cattle they claimed, they’d have come back for the rest.” I glanced over their heads at that redhead girl. “And that wouldn’t have been all they’d have taken.” After that they talked among themselves, leaving me out, so when I’d finished eating I saddled up and returned to the drive.
Now, I’d never asked anything of anybody, nor expected anything from folks. Nobody could be held to account for what his people did or didn’t do, but I’d had to answer for pa.
Pa was hung for a horse thief when I was a tall thirteen. After a lifetime of hard work and self-denial, in which pa had few of the things he set store by, he had made one foolish mistake and got hung for it.
It was never in me to judge a man, because each of us does his share of sinning, one way or another. Other folks prospered and pa didn’t, but it was no fault of his that I could see, although that cut no ice with the folks down on the flatlands. They called him shiftless and no-account because he was poor, but pa had never been either of those things. But they hung him by the neck and made me stand to watch. To teach me a lesson, they said.
“You stand and watch, boy. This is what comes to thieves.”
You’d think there’d have been some Christian kindness in them, but there wasn’t an ounce. It was Martin Brimstead whose horse was stolen, and there was no sympathy in the man, nor any understanding, and some say he even wore a name he’d no right to. He was there to see the job was done, but the man who led the mob was Stud Pelly. And it was Stud Pelly who grabbed me and twisted my head, forcing me to look at pa, hanging there.