Tom turned his horse as if to ride after her, and for the first time he saw me. His cheeks flushed.
“You didn’t have to listen!” he said irritably. “What do you take me for?”
“A Texan alone in a town that dislikes Texans,” I said quietly. “Look!”
Across the street Tod Mulloy had reined in his horse, and in his hands he held a Winchester.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said.
He fell in beside me and, almost reluctantly, Tom followed.
In silence we rode almost to the herd before Tom spoke. “Conn … I’ve got to go over there tonight. I’ve got to.”
The worst of it was, I knew how he felt. I knew how he felt about the girl, and about Aaron McDonald, for McDonald’s very attitude was an insult and a challenge.
Over such things the fortunes of men are altered. As for me, I was old enough and wise enough in such a situation, to ride away, but how could he be, at his age?
And could I have ridden away if it were Kate back there?
Chapter 3
Dick Hardeman was at the herd when we arrived, and he had three hands with him. That spelled something to me; it was getting on to dark and a poor time to start moving a herd, but it did give me an estimate of the feeling in town.
“Thought we’d pick up the cattle now, Mrs. Lundy,” Hardeman said awkwardly. “No use you having the trouble of them.”
“It’s that bad, is it?” Trust Kate to see through anything like that.
“Yes, ma’am, it is.” Hardeman’s face was gloomy. “If I were you I’d move off away from here as soon as ever it’s dark … and leave a fire going.”
“You think they’ll come after us?” Tom was incredulous. “Whatever for?”
“Aaron McDonald,” Hardeman said dryly, “is a proud man. If he lives to be a hundred he will never forget that cuffing you gave him, Conn. You’ve made an enemy for life.”
“He had it coming.”
“I agree.” He paused, then he asked, “Was that true? Were you with Sheridan?”
“Sure … the boys know it. Ran Priest was a Union man, too. But as far as we’re concerned, the war is over.”
When they had moved off with the herd, we stood around our fire. Only the remuda was left, that and the chuck wagon and Kate’s ambulance.
“We will do as Hardeman suggested,” Kate said. “We will move off to that knoll over there. There’s a sort of hollow just over the top, and we’ll bed down there.”
“I’d like to ride in there,” Rule Carson said bitterly, “and shoot hell out of the place!”
“That’s enough of that,” Kate said quietly. “We’ve had trouble enough for this trip. I don’t want to take any more empty saddles back to Texas.”
“Nobody’s waiting for me,” Rule said truculently.
“There’s a bunk at the Tumbling B that would miss you, Rule,” Kate said, and there were several chuckles, for Carson was a man who liked his sleep.
Red Mike took up a rifle and moved away from the fire to stand watch toward the town. Tod Mulloy and Delgado went toward the horses and bunched them as if for night, lined them up with the knoll so their blackness blended with the shadows of the hill, making them invisible from the town. Then very slowly they drifted the remuda away.
The sun was scarcely down before the two wagons rolled out, and within an hour the move had been accomplished.
“If you ask me,” Red Mike said, “that Tallcott was doing a lot of thinking about the gold in that sack, ma’am.”
Kate stood over the small fire that we had built, well sheltered from view. “Conn, why don’t you let some of the boys sleep right now? There’s four hours of good sleep before midnight.”
When the three men who were standing the first guard had drifted out to their positions, Kate and I sat over the last coals.
Maybe Tom Lundy hadn’t used good judgment in getting himself in a stew over Linda McDonald but, after all, he wasn’t the first man to get involved with the wrong woman … and no one could deny that she was pretty.
Trouble might have developed without that. When there is so much underlying bad feeling, it takes small reason to start trouble, and in the past some of the Texas boys, sore over the defeat of the South, had been only too ready to start shooting again. And there were always hotheads ready to shoot back.
Men like McDonald, with their precise, narrow way of looking at things, could not know what it meant to a bunch of men, all of them young and full of vinegar, to let off a bit of steam. By the time they’d been three months or so on the trail north, eating the dust of the drag, chasing strays, fighting Indians, stampedes, and ornery broncs, working from before daylight until after dark, they were ready to let go a little.
One time I had heard a cowhand asked what a chuck wagon looked like, and he said, “How would I know? I never saw one in the daylight!”
Moreover, I couldn’t find it in me to blame Tom. The good Lord knew I’d done my share in making a fool of myself, and had no patent on the idea, either. If McDonald had just let the thing alone it would probably have all been over by now. As it was, men might die before it was settled.
The night on the plains was a time of quietness. Only a far-off coyote, complaining to the listening stars, caused a faint break in the stillness, and his voice seemed only to make the silence more silent still.
The dull red of the coals were a somber light in their small pocket of heat. From time to time their seeking heat seized upon some overlooked bit of drywood, and then a tiny blaze would leap up briefly, consuming the wood.
“I’d like us to be moving before daylight,” Kate said, “and if we pull out toward the west we can swing wide around the town. That way we can avoid trouble, and we might see something of that country out there.”
We sat there, talking quietly, but all the while my ears were straining into the darkness, listening for sounds I hoped not to hear.
“I never knew you were a Union man, Conn,” Kate said. “You’ve never talked much about yourself.”
“You’ve heard enough stories.”
“But you never know which ones are true. After all, I know nothing of you except that you were a gun-fighter or something. You just came riding up when I needed help, and you stayed. I wouldn’t know what to do without you, Conn.”
That made me feel the fool. Kate would get along, for there was a resilience in her like fine-tempered steel. She reminded me of a Toledo blade, a rapier I saw once in Spain. She had great strength, but she wasn’t rigid … like McDonald, for example.
It was she who had built that ranch, built it from the grass roots up, and it had taken some doing. In my way, I’d helped.
“There’s little enough to tell about me,” I said. “They tell me I was born back on the Rapidan River in Virginia, but my folks moved to Texas. When I was nine the Apaches wiped them out and carried me off into Mexico. For three years I was an Apache, then I stole a pony and rode out of the Sierra Madre and back to Texas.”
Pa had walked to the spring for a bucket of water, and I had taken the axe and was hitting a couple of strokes at an old mesquite stump in the yard. It was a big old thing, and without a stump-puller it would be a long, hard job getting it out – and there was much else to do. So Pa left an axe sitting beside it, and any time one of us passed we worked at cutting the tap root or other roots to loosen it up.
Ma was inside putting up her hair, for this was Sunday, and when Pa returned from the spring there was to be a Bible reading.
It was a fair time for us all, for there’d been little else but work from the time when Pa first decided to settle on the creek. On Sundays, though, after the Bible reading, Pa and Ma would read from one of the other books we had, and lately I’d taken my turn. I liked best the poems “Marmion” or “Lochinvar,” but some of the others were good, too – like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
All of a sudden Ma called from the house, and there was something funny about her voice. She said, “Conn, come in here right away … don’t argue.”