still held to a mustache, like most men those days, but it was trimmed careful.
In the six years below the border I’d taken on weight, and while I was no taller
than five-ten, I now weighed two hundred and ten pounds, most of it in my chest
and shoulders. Folks looked at me, all right.
As I ate, I kept an eye on that blue-eyed man, who was young and lean-faced and
wore a tied-down gun. Presently another man came in and sat down beside him, his
back to me. When he turned around a few minutes later and he looked at me, I saw
he was Duncan Caffrey.
He’d changed some. His face looked like it always did, but he was big and
strong-looking. His eyes were a lot harder than I recalled, and when he put his
hand on the back of the other man’s chair I noticed the knuckles were scarred
and broken. He’d been doing a lot of fighting. Reminded me of what the Tinker
had said about the knuckles of Jem Mace, that champion fighter who’d trained
him.
Caffrey looked hard at me, and he sort of frowned and looked away, and suddenly
it came on me that he wasn’t sure. True, I was a whole lot heavier than when
he’d last seen me, and a lot darker except where the beard was shaved off, and
even that had caught some sun riding down from Rio Grande City.
When I stood up and paid for my supper I saw in the mirror what was wrong. The
mustache changed me a good bit, and the scars even more. I had forgotten the
scars. There were three of them, two along my cheek and one on my chin, all made
from the cuts of that quirt, which had cut like a knife into my flesh, and no
stitches taken in the cuts.
Outside on the street a sudden thought came to me. If that blue-eyed man was a
killer, and if Caffrey was pointing me out to him, then I’d better dust out.
With my hands I was all right, but I hadn’t shot a six-shooter, except for the
other day, not in six years.
Riding out of town, I headed east, then circled and took the north road. A few
days after, I pulled up at the jacal where I’d left the mare. A young woman came
to the door, shading her eyes at me. She looked shabby and tired. The little boy
who stood beside her stared at me boldly, but I thought they were both
frightened.
“Do you not remember me, senora? I rode from here many years ago—with Miguel and
Senor Locklear.”
There seemed to be a flicker of recognition in her eyes then, but all she said
was, “Go away. Miguel is dead.”
“Dead, senora?”
“Si.” Her eyes flickered around as if she were afraid of being observed. “He
returned from Mexico, and then one day he did not come back to me. He was shot
out on the plains—by bandidos.”
“Ah?” I wondered about those bandidos and about Franklyn Deckrow. Then I changed
the subject. “When I was here I left a mare that was to have a colt. You
promised to see to the birth and care for it.”
Her eyes warmed. “I remember, senor.”
“The colt … is it here?”
The boy started to interrupt, but she spoke quickly to him in Spanish. I now
spoke the tongue well, but they were not close to me and I missed the words.
“It is here, senor. Manuel will get it.”
“Wait.” I looked at the boy. “You have ridden the colt?”
“The mule, senor? Si, I have ridden him.” There was no friendliness in his eyes.
He was all of eleven or twelve, but slight of build.
“Does he run, then? Like the wind?”
Excitement came into his eyes and he spoke with enthusiasm. “Si, senor. He
runs.”
Juana came a step from the jacal. “He loves the mule,” she said. “I am afraid he
loves it too much. I always told him you would come for it.”
“You told him I would come back?”
“Si, senor. Miguel did not believe you were dead. He never believed it. But he
was the only one. Although the senora—Senora Sackett—she sometimes thought you
were alive.”
“Senora Sackett?”
“Your father’s wife, senor. The sister of Senor Locklear.”
So Gin had married my father. She was my stepmother now. Well, thinking back, I
could not be surprised. From the first, there had been something between them.
Juana came out to my horse as the boy walked reluctantly away to get the mule.
“There has been much trouble,” she said. “Senor Deckrow lets us to live here,
but he warned us never to talk to strangers, and he said if you ever came back,
to send Manuel at once to tell him.”
Just then my horse’s head came up and I looked around, and there stood the mule
colt. No question but what it was a mule. It was tall, longer in the body than
most mules, it seemed, and with long, slim legs. But it was a mule, almost a
buckskin in color, and like enough to any mule I’d ever seen.
You could tell by the way he followed that boy that there was a good feeling
between them. But when I walked over, he stretched his nose to me.
“And the mare?”
“Wolves, senor, when this one was small. If I had not come upon them, he would
be dead also.”
Rubbing the mule’s neck, I considered the situation. “Manuel,” I said, “I think
you and Juana should come away from here. I think you should go to San Antonio,
or somewhere. You’ll need to have schooling.”
“How? We have no money. We have no way to go. We have only our goats and a few
chickens.”
“You have horses?”
“No, senor. The horses belong to Senor Deckrow.”
“Ride them, anyway, and you two come away to San Antonio.” I paused. “If Deckrow
hears you have talked to me, there may be trouble. Besides, I want a boy who can
ride the mule … I mean who can race him. Could you do that, Manuel?”
His eyes sparkled, but he said seriously, “Si, I could do it. He runs very fast,
senor.”
“He’s bred for it,” I said. “Can you go tonight?”
“What of the goats?”
“Goats,” I said, “can get along. Leave them.”
We didn’t waste time. They’d little enough to take, and Manuel taken my horse
and went out and caught up a couple of ponies in no time. He was a hand with a.
rope, which I wasn’t. Lately I’d begun to think I wasn’t a hand with anything,
although all the way from Brownsville to the ranch I practiced with that Walch
Navy, which I fancied beyond other guns.
The trail we chose was made by Kansas-bound cattle. Seemed to me I owed Miguel
something, and I did not trust that Deckrow. So I’d be killing two birds with
one stone by escorting Manuel and his mother to San Antonio and getting Manuel
to ride my mule for me.
“You think that mule can beat this horse?” I asked Manuel.
“Of a certainty,” he replied coolly. “He can run, this mule.”
So we laid it out between us to race to a big old cottonwood we could see away
up ahead, maybe three-quarters of a mile off. On signal, we taken off.
Now that Mexican horse was a good cutting horse and trained to start fast.
Moreover, it was an outlaw’s horse, and an outlaw can’t afford not to have the
best horse under him that he can lay hands on. That roan took off with a bound
and within fifty yards he was leading by two lengths, and widening the distance
fast. We were halfway to that cotton-wood before that mule got the idea into his
head that he was in a race. By the time we’d covered two-thirds of the distance
we were running neck-and-neck, and then that mule just took off and left us.
Oakville was the town where I decided to make my play, and by the size of my
bankroll it was going to be a small one. When you came to sizing it up, Oakville
wasn’t a lot of town, there being less than a hundred people in it, but it had
the name of being a contentious sort of place. Forty men were killed there in
the ten years fallowing the War Between the States. It lay right on the trail up
from the border and a lot of Kansas cattle went through there, time to time.
When we came riding into town I told Manuel and his Ma to find a place to put
up, and I gave them a dollar.
It was a quiet day in town. A couple of buckboards stood on the street, and four
or five horses stood three-legged at the hitch-rails. When I pushed through the