“Yes, sir.”
“The headmaster said you attacked him savagely.”
“He struck me, sir, and I whipped him.”
“But did you have to do it so brutally?”
“I know of no other way to fight, sir. One fights to win. I would not know how to fight any other way. It was he who began the fight, and I had tried to avoid it – so much so they were saying I was afraid.”
“Well,” he said ironically, “they do not think so now.” He studied me for a moment, and then asked, “What do you plan to do now?”
“Return home, sir. To Texas.”
“We would like to have you stay. My wife and I, we would like it very much if you stayed.”
“Thank you, sir. You’ve given me every opportunity, but I keep thinking of it back there. Whatever there is in life for me is back there. I – I am not cut out for this.”
“This morning I was speaking to George Travers. He is an old friend of mine, you know. He told me you had a revolver.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Aren’t you rather young to be carrying a weapon of that kind?”
“No, sir. In Texas I carried one from the time I was twelve. When one lives in Apache country one must go armed.”
“May I see it?”
We went up to my room and I opened my luggage and took out my worn but well-oiled belt and holster. The walnut butt of the revolver was badly scarred and the gun showed wear, but it was clean and ready for action.
He took the gun in his hands and turned it carefully. “Now, there’s no nonsense about that, is there?”
“It has a hair trigger, sir.”
“Yes, I suspected as much.” He handed the gun back to me. “Is it true they shoot as well as they say? One hears much talk of the gunfighters out there.”
“Would you like to see me shoot, sir?”
“I would, indeed. Shall we go outside?” He watched as I dug into my luggage for ammunition, and then we went outside. Felicia saw us and followed along. At the back of the house I asked for bottles and received several from the cook. One of these I suspended by a string from the branch of a tree. We walked back twenty paces and, turning suddenly, I drew and fired, smashing the bottle.
Without waiting for any comment, I tossed another bottle into the air, drew, fired from the hip, and smashed the bottle, and then smashed the largest fragment as it fell. “May I try?” Sir Richard asked. He placed a bottle thirty paces off, took careful aim, and broke it.
He glanced at the pistol. “It does have a very light pull, doesn’t it?”
Suddenly he smiled. “You are an excellent shot, my boy,” he said. “I would never try anything like that. And had I not seen you fire from the hip, I should not have believed it could be done with accuracy.” We walked back to the house, and for the first time since I had known her, Felicia was silent. I thought she was a bit awed. At least, I preferred to think that was how she felt, for I had had little enough luck at impressing her, and I had wanted to, very much.
Alone in Sir Richard’s study, we talked for a while and then he glanced at me suddenly. “You spoke of my son’s killers being punished. What was their sentence?”
“There was no sentence, sir, because there was no judge, no jury. There is no law in that region, sir, and very little in the region to which they fled.”
“Then what happened?”
For an instant, I hesitated, wanting to avoid telling him, but I could not lie to this man. “I killed them, sir.”
“You killed them?”
“Yes, sir, Jim Sotherton was my friend – the only friend I had, in fact – and they used him rather badly.”
“I see.” After a minute he said, “We will say nothing of this to anyone else – they would be shocked.”
“And you, sir?”
He smiled at me. “Conn, I followed a Pathan tribesman for three weeks once, before I got a shot at him. He had killed a brother officer of mine.”
He filled his pipe. “It is rather a different life on the frontier, isn’t it, boy?”
Sir Richard had given me one more thing before I returned to my own country. He had given me an unforgettable year of travel on the Continent.
“My sister,” he told me, “willed her money to James, and James left it to go to Felicia, but to be used as I saw fit, as a protection for us in the event we came upon hard times. So I want you to take money enough from that estate to see Europe.”
He denied my protests, and said quietly, “You owe it to yourself, boy. Someday you may have a family of your own, and you will want to contribute to their education. Also, you owe it to James. He would have wished it so.”
My protests were not very strong in the beginning, and that quieted them forever, so I accepted money and a drawing account, and spent the next year in traveling – without ever forgetting the West.
The only thing I did not like about it, Sir Richard insisted I leave my gun with him until I returned to England.
By the time I returned to the States I was nineteen years old; the year was 1858.
Chapter 6
That year, for a short while I was not sure whether I wished to remain in the West, but that uncertainty lasted about as long as it took me to get a saddle on a horse, mount up, and feel the wind on my face and see the long grass bending under it
Now, riding back to the camp on the knoll, I tried to recall a Frank Shalett from those years before my trip to Europe, but I could not remember the name. So he must be someone I had known later, or the relative of someone I’d known.
In the camp there was much speculation on who McDonald and Shalett would have coming on the train.
“He’ll round up some of those Bald Knobbefs,” Harvey Nugent suggested. “There’s aplenty of boys back in the Missouri hills who’d fight for wages.”
Kate Lundy was waiting for me by her ambulance, face to the wind, a few strands of hair blowing. No getting around it, she was a handsome woman. Even among beautiful women in England or on the Continent she would have been considered so.
“What will they do, Conn?” she asked.
“It isn’t what they will do. It is what we must do. We’ve got to stop that train before it gets here. We’ve got to turn it around and send those boys right back to where they came from.”
“They’ll fight.”
“Sure – if we give them the chance.”
That outfit we had, they were ready for it, I could see that, and man for man I’d match them with any bunch of fighting men anywhere. Only we were spread out too much. Priest and Naylor were over at the new town. Red Mike was off down the trail somewhere, rounding up more fighting men. Our fence ran down both sides of the town, so my force was split in two by the enemy. And that wasn’t good at all, for the fence must be guarded or they’d get out there and cut our wire.
So far, we had turned away several herds, and I could imagine what they were thinking down there in town. Some of them would quit and go, especially the ones who had never favored McDonald or his ways, but there was no quit in Aaron McDonald himself.
“I’m going to head them off, Kate,” I said. “I’m going to take a few of the boys and head them off before they are ready for us.”
D’Artaguette I wanted. That Frenchman would stand hitched, come hell or high water. Red Mike wasn’t here, but I’d take Meharry, Rowdy Lynch, Gallardo, and Battery Mason. That should do it.
Yet the whole setup worried me because we were spread so thin, and those men down there in town were not fools. Most of them were fighting men, and many of them had bought lots or built houses and so had at stake something more than merely a desire to fight.
“Kate,” I said, “we’re going to get some wire cut; and we’re going to have to stand for it.”
Her face hardened, for Kate Lundy was a fighter, too, and there was no more give in her than there was in McDonald.
“While I’m gone they might mount a real attack,” I went on, “and we’re outnumbered, so I want you to pull the men off the wire. On this side of town, bunch them here, well dug in and ready to make a stand.