When the next day came, two wagons rolled out of town.
With Kate riding beside me, D’Artaguette, Meharry, Nugent, and I rode down to cut them off. Only one thing we wanted to know – was anybody riding in those wagons who had been among those who killed Tom Lundy.
The man in the first wagon who held the lines did not move to pick up a weapon, for he was a wise man, and he knew that the tempers of men at such a time are on hair triggers.
“You’ve played hell,” he said, looking up at Kate, and then at me.
“My brother was killed.”
“Yes, and I don’t hold with that.” There was genuine sympathy in his eyes. “You’ve my regrets, for whatever they are worth. I knew Tom Lundy … he traded in my store, and was a gentleman, but I said my say back there, and no thanks did I receive for it.”
“Drive to Hackamore,” Kate said, “and tell Priest I said to show you a site for your store.”
“Thank you.” He made no move to drive on. And then he said hesitatingly, “I guess we’ll be going on.”
His wife thrust her head from the wagon. “You tell them!” she said. “You tell them or I will! They’ve got a lot of men coming in on the train,” she went on, “and they’re going to wipe you out.”
“Who’s paying for them?” I asked.
“McDonald and Shalett,” the driver answered. “They’re putting up most of the money.”
“Shalett? I don’t believe I know him.”
“He knows you. He ran the Prairie Dog – that saloon next to the bank.” The man was curious. “I’d say he knew you mighty well, sometime or other. It was his idea to bring in fighters, and he backed McDonald in everything he did.”
“Shalett?”
“Frank Shalett. A big, dark man … talks mighty little. Funny thing, him and McDonald getting together now. McDonald was all for running him out of town before he’d been there three months. Shalett had killed a man in a gun battle. He killed Port Rader.”
The wagons rolled on, and we let them go.
But Harvey Nugent spoke up. “I knew Port,” he said, “and he was a good man with a gun. Whoever this Frank Shalett is, he’s no tenderfoot.”
Port Rader, like Nugent, had been a man for hire, a professional fighting man, brought in to fight rustlers, Indians, or nesters, and a tough man.
But I could remember no Frank Shalett.
No doubt I had forgotten much during the years I was away, traveling in Europe. When a man leaves behind all he knows and remembers, he tends to forget it, and there for a time I had left it all behind.
The year I killed Morgan Rich was the year I was sixteen. It was 1855.
When a boy is foot-loose and drifting, there’s no telling where he’s apt to end up, and about that time I was walking along the street in Santa Fe one day when I ran into Captain Edwards, the man to whom I had taken Jim Sotherton’s possessions after he was murdered.
He caught my arm. “Dury, isn’t it? Conn Dury?”
“Yes, sir. And you’ll be Captain Edwards.”
“You know, Dury, I’ve a letter for you. I wrote to Sotherton’s family, and told them about you, and about the education you had been getting from their son. They want you to write to them.”
We walked along to his quarters to get the letter. After he had given it to me, he asked, “You said something about hunting those other men. Did you find them?”
“I found Morgan Rich. He’s buried over at Las Vegas.”
“And the other one?”
“Hastings … he dropped out of sight – probably some Indian killed him. There’s a lot of ways a man can die out here. Many such men nobody will ever know about.”
“Dury,” Edwards said suddenly, “stay and have dinner with me. I am in command here, and the food is good. It will be a pleasure to have you.”
He was full of questions at first about the means I’d used to hunt down Rich. Finally we got around to talking about Sir Walter Scott and some of the other writers whose works I’d read, but it seemed to me there was something else on his mind.
After a time, while we were sitting over coffee, he said, “You know, Conn, I don’t know all that is in that letter to you, but I do know part of it. They want you to come to England.”
At first I was not sure I’d heard him correctly, but then he explained. They had written him that they had the idea they should give me a chance to continue the education their son had begun, and they would, if I wished, send me to school over there, providing tutors to bring me up to date, and whatever was necessary to enter.
“I think,” Edwards said, “it is in good part because they want to hear about Jim Sotherton. The things he said, the way he looked, all you can tell them about him. They would pay your way over and back, and your expenses.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “It is a rare opportunity, Conn.” So I went to England.
At the last, Edwards warned me. “Be careful, Conn, about what you say. Remember they are no longer young, and they live in a country that has been civilized for hundreds of years. They are like the people who will come after us here, and when they hear of the West as it really is, they will not believe it.
“They are used to curbstones, and to officers that one can simply call on to take care of malefactors. There is no place in their thinking for a land where a man carries the law in his holster. What I mean is, I wouldn’t tell them about Flange and Rich.”
In England, they met me at the station, a tall, fine-looking old man with white hair and the erect carriage of a military past, and a girl perhaps a year younger than I.
What they expected I do not know. Possibly they believed I would step down from the train in buckskins and a sombrero, but whatever it was, I do not believe it was what they saw.
Although I was only sixteen, I was more than six feet tall, slim but strong. A friend of Captain Edwards had come down from West Point to help me choose the proper outfit, so there was nothing strange in my appearance, and the only way they could have known me was by my age and the darkness of my skin, browned by Texas sun and wind.
The girl knew me at once, and came to me, her hand outstretched. “You must be Conn Dury. I am Felicia Kirkstone – James Sotherton was my uncle.”
She was pretty, and pretty in a way I vaguely remembered from the years before my folks moved west.
“How do you do?” I said. “Mr. Sotherton told me about you.”
“Conn … Mr. Dury … my grandfather, Sir Richard Sotherton.”
We talked a little of my crossing, which had been a wild one, due to the terrible storms of that year, and we walked to the open carriage that waited for us.
Sir Richard drove, and we rode the short distance to Sotherton Manor behind a handsome pair of blacks. When the trip had been planned I was uneasy about it, for all I knew had been taught me by Jim Sotherton, aside from my earlier training at home; and I had never traveled.
Sotherton Manor was a large, rambling old house of gray stone, half covered with vines. There was a wide stretch of lawn in front and a winding gravel drive that led to the door. It was far more grand than any place I had ever seen before.
They asked me about my own country, the country where I had worked for Jim; and looking around me, I wondered how I could make them understand. Everything around me indicated that this was a long settled land – the spreading lawns, the carefully planted trees, the green well-kept beauty of it all. Even the woodlands had definite borders, for this was a land where everything had been decided long, long ago.
Here there was custom, tradition, and a common law built upon hundreds of years of living on the same ground, in somewhat the same way. And my land in the Big Bend of the Rio Grande was still wild, untamed. Nothing there was ordered and arranged, nor were there customs or traditions. Everything was raw and new, and the laws were the laws of the sun and the water holes, the wind and the sparse grazing.
But that evening, after dinner, I tried to tell them.
“When Jim Sotherton rode into the Big Bend,” I said, “there weren’t twenty men in the whole area, and most of them gathered at the old Presidio, a place they called Fort Leaton, down on the Rio Grande.”