However, and he realized it with surprise, for the first time he was thinking of doing something for someone else.
True, Baldwin had ordered him beaten, but in a measure he had paid him for that. What he wanted to do had no concern with his own feelings. He wanted to help Nancy Kerrigan.
He closed his eyes against the ache in his head, but her image remained with him. How different it might have been had he met such a girl instead of Lottie! But would it? For he was dying now, bit by bit, day by day.
Yet time remained, and he had always loved a good fight. He would help Nancy, he would whip Baldwin, and he would go out with that, at least, completed.
For a man who had fought all his life, it would be best to go out fighting. Too often men were concerned merely with living, even if they must crawl to survive. He would fight Port Baldwin, he would beat him. Nancy would have her ranch, she would…
At some point he went to sleep.
Chapter 7
When he awoke it was dark. He could hear the stirrings and the sound of dishes that meant suppertime. Flint sat up and put his feet to the floor.
When Nancy came in he was strapping on his gun belt.
“You’re being very foolish,” she said severely. “You need rest.”
“I’ll get all the rest I need soon enough.” He paused, looking at her in the half-light. “Right now I’m hungry. Anyway,” he added brusquely, “I’m not a man who could ever lie abed when there are things to be done.”
He tucked the other pistol into his waistband and donned his coat, following Nancy into the main room. She had lovely shoulders, and when she turned to look at him, it was with a quick, direct gaze.
The ranch house was spacious and comfortable. There were books in some shelves across the room, and he went to look at them. Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Shakespeare, Hume’s History of England.
He was not surprised by the quality of the authors, for he had read the journals of the trappers who came West, and he had known many Western men, and knew of the books they read. They could carry few so they carried the best.
Nancy returned to his side. “You are interested in books?” she asked.
“As you’ve noticed, Miss Kerrigan, I am a lonely man, and such men are inclined to read. Luckily, one of my teachers got me started on Plutarch and Montaigne.”
“You’re a puzzling man. You give the impression of being educated, and yet —”
“My reactions yesterday disturbed you, is that it? Why do people so readily assume that a man of education cannot also be a man of violence — when violence is called for?”
“Christopher Marlowe was put under bond to keep him from beating up the constable on his way home, and Socrates was a soldier as well as a good wrestler. Remember how he threw Alcibiades, who was interrupting his conversations? Threw him and held him down, and Alcibiades was noted for his strength.”
“And Ben Jonson. He once met in single combat in the open field between the assembled armies the best fighter in the French forces, and defeated him.”
“Believe me, the list is a long one, and many men of education have on occasion been men of violence. An educated man demands his right to information, for example. Take it from him or censor it and he is apt to become violent.”
“Are you a Western man, Mr. Flint?”
“I suppose. All Western men are from somewhere else, when it comes to that. At the stage station in Alamitos I heard German, Swedish, and Irish accents in just a few minutes, but I suppose being a Western man is a matter of psychology. The mere fact that a man chooses to come West indicates a difference of temperament or attitude, and then there’s bound to be changes due to the landscape and the conditions. I suppose the basic difference is that men want to survive, to mate, and to have security . . . and out here the other considerations are out-weighed by the necessity to survive.”
“Mr. Flint —?”
“Call me Jim. I am used to it.”
“All right — Jim. When you found Ed, was he able to talk? He was on a business trip for the ranch, and we don’t know whether he was shot when he was going out or coming back.”
“He was worried. He muttered something about Santa Fe, and about someone called Gladys, that was all. No, he was never conscious while he was with me.”
She led the way to the long table, and he seated her. “Thank you,” she said. “That is a courtesy I do not often encounter.”
The hands came in slowly and sat down, stealing glances at Flint.
“Would you like to tell me about it?” he asked. “I know you are in trouble. Maybe I can help.”
“Porter Baldwin is going to need a lot of land for forty thousand head of cattle,” Nancy said. “It’s as simple as that.”
He needed to ask no more questions. Few pioneer ranchmen had ever filed on their land. Indeed, when many of them settled in the West there was no legal way to file and nobody to dispute their claims but wild Indians. Later, the courts and the congressmen of settled states were inclined to dismiss all the ranchers might have done and open their grazing land to settlement. Such action was not, naturally, appreciated by the cattlemen.
In some cases ranchers had purchased land from Indians, but the government rarely accepted such purchases as legal. Flint was completely aware of all these factors, and knew what the usual steps were.
“Have you had your hands file claims for you?”
She looked up quickly, and he was aware of the sudden attention from down the table.
“Isn’t that illegal?” Nancy asked quietly. “But to reply to your question: yes. We have no choice, and if any of the men wish to keep their claims, they may. If not, we will buy their rights from them. It is either that or lose the ranch my father and uncle worked so hard to build.”
“There may be other alternatives,” Flint replied. “Are you running cattle on railroad land?”
“No, we are not. Tom Nugent does, and some of the others. Of course, Port Baldwin is. But we never have used any of that graze that we know of, as we hold our cattle farther south.”
Long after dinner they sat on the wide veranda and listened to Johnny Otero singing near the bunkhouse.
Flint led Nancy to talking of the ranch, and learned the whole story of her efforts to improve it. He was surprised by her appreciation of the grazing problem, and what she had done about it. One of her hands had been a German who remained at the ranch an entire summer making repairs in the house, building cabinets and furniture. He had told her about grazing methods in Germany and Switzerland, and from him she learned the use of spreader dams, dams built to spread the runoff from hillsides instead of letting it trickle away. Wells had been dug, seeps cleaned out, herds trimmed to avoid overgrazing.
“My father was a great believer in children being given responsibility, Jim. He gave me things to do as early as I can remember. And he used to talk to me about the ranch, and explain everything he did, and why he did it.”
“You know how children are. They are always curious and they want to know something about everything. I don’t remember a single question of mine that he left unanswered. Sometimes when I would ask him something he thought was intelligent he would give me a gift or take me somewhere that I wanted to go.”
“He never gave me anything really big that I didn’t earn. Sometimes I had to do very little to earn whatever he gave, but it was usually something. Why, before I knew the ABCs I could name every cattle brand in this part of the state, and I could recognize all the plants that poison stock such as loco weed and larkspur.”
Long after he lay in bed he thought of her and the long talk on the darkening porch. He could not remember ever talking so long to any one person, not even Flint.
He was very stiff, and no matter how he turned there was a sore spot. For three days he loafed about the ranch, and during all that time he was aware that Pete Gaddis, Johnny Otero, or a hulking brute of a man with a good-natured face, Julius Bent, was always around.
He learned that Baldwin had tried to get a warrant for his arrest but the local judge refused. “I saw what happened,” the judge rasped, “and as far as I am concerned it was justified. It was self-defense.”