He knew then he had done what he could do, and there was nothing to do but wait. He dropped into Duffy’s chair and relaxed.
Word seemed to have gotten around, for no one appeared on the street. The store was open, as was the saloon, but nobody was in either place. Several times Julie came to the door and looked across the street at the young man in the chair by the barn door. Each time he was whittling. Once he even seemed to be asleep.
It was almost eleven o’clock when they heard them coming. They thundered across the bridge just outside of town and came racing around the bend and through the trees. They came at a dead run, piled off their horses and rushed for the fresh horses at the hitch-rail. Hart reached his horse and grabbed at the slipknot, and Duffy’s man hit him.
There was no warning. Duffy’s man had tied that horse within an easy step and his left hook caught Hart on the chin and he went down, spun halfway around, and grabbed for his gun.
Duffy’s man slapped away the gun hand and smashed Hart with a big, work-hardened fist. Knocking him back against the rail he proceeded to slug him in the belly, then on the chin with both hands. Hart went down, battered and bleeding. Only then did Duffy’s man disarm him.
The other outlaws had leaped for their saddles and no sooner did they hit leather than all hell broke loose. The horses were big, fresh, and full of corn, and they began to pitch madly as if on signal. A girth broke, and then another. Men plunged into the dust, and as they hit, men rushed from the stores and ran among them, clubbing with gun barrels and rifle butts.
Duffy himself was there, moving with surprising agility for one of his age and bulk. Only one man made a break for it. He was near the stable and his cinch did not break. He got his horse turned and as he did so he lifted his pistol and took careful aim at Duffy’s man.
The hostler sprang for the shotgun beside the door, knowing he would never reach it in time. Then a rifle shot rang out and as Duffy’s man swung around with the shotgun in his hands, he saw the outlaw topple from his saddle into the dust.
He glanced around and saw Julie standing in the door with an old Sharps .50 in her hands, a thin wraith of smoke issuing from the muzzle.
As suddenly as that, it was over. Clip Hart was staggering to his feet, his jaw hanging and obviously broken. There was a deep cut over one eye, and his trigger finger was broken, apparently when he fell or when the gun was slapped from his hand.
One man was dead. Duffy himself had killed him when he stepped from the store. The man Julie had shot had a broken shoulder and an ugly wound where the bullet had ripped the flesh. The others had aching heads and one a broken collarbone.
Herded together in front of the livery stable, they were standing there when the posse arrived, staring at their captors who proved to be four old men, two boys of fourteen, a girl with an apron, and Duffy’s man.
“They held up our bank and killed a cashier,” the man with the badge told them. “If they’d gotten on those fresh horses they’d have gotten clean away. What happened?”
Duffy had been removing saddles from the horses and now he lifted a saddle blanket and lifted an ugly-looking cocklebur with blood on its stiff spines. “Somebody,” he said, “put one of these under each blanket, and then cut the cinches halfway through.”
The badge wearer looked at Duffy’s man. “You did that?”
“Picked the meanest-looking burrs I could find. What else could I do? I’m no gunfighter!”
The sheriff looked at Hart. “Well, you’re some kind of a fighter, and whatever it is, you’ll do. Thanks.”
Duffy looked at his holster. “Thought we was too old, did you? Well, we got fight left in us yet, ain’t we boys?”
The storekeeper gestured toward the saloon. “I’m standing for the drinks, young or old.”
“Have your drink,” Duffy’s man said, “I’ll be along soon.”
He looked over at Julie. “As I said, this seemed a good place to stop.”
“Are you a good man with an ax?”
“I am. But you know, it gets mighty lonely up there in the mountains. And it would help if I had somebody to cook for me, too.”
“Can you cook at all?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I can.”
He gestured toward the church, half-hidden among the cottonwoods. “The preacher will be home tomorrow. We should make an early start.”
“I will be ready.” Suddenly, she was embarrassed. She dried her hands on her apron. “You go along and have that drink now.”
At the saloon the men lifted their glasses to him. “Not me,” he said, “I might never have done it but for something a speaker once said.”
He lifted his glass. “We drink to the speaker. To Patrick Henry,” he said.
“To Pat Henry,” they replied.
BIG MAN
Cherry Noble rode into Wagonstop on a black mule. He was six feet seven in his socks, and he habitually wore boots. He weighed three hundred and thirty pounds. He swung down from the mule and led it and his three pack animals to water. As he stood by the trough with his mules, the bystanders stared in unadulterated amazement.
Noble looked up, smiling in a friendly fashion. “What’s off there?” He indicated the country to the west with a bob of his head.
From where he stood nothing was visible to the west but the sun setting over a weird collection of red spires and tabletopped mountains.
Lay Benton replied. “Nothin’ but wilderness, some of the wildest, roughest country on earth and some bloodthirsty Indians.”
“No people?”
“None.”
“Water? And grass maybe?”
“Could be a little. Who knows?”
“Then that’s where I’ll go. I’ll go there so when folks do come there’ll be a place waiting for them. Sooner or later people come to most every place, and mostly when they get there they are hot and tired. I’ll have grass, water, and beef a-waiting.”
“You’d be crazy to try,” Benton said. “No white man could live in that country even if the Indians would let him.”
Cherry Noble’s laugh boomed, his face wrinkling with the memories of old smiles. “They’ll let me stay, and I guess there’s no place a man can’t live if he sets his mind to it.” He slapped a bulging saddlebag. “Know what I’ve got here? Cherry pits, that’s what! When I stop I plan to plant cherries! Ain’t no better fruit, anywhere, and that’s why people call me as they do. Noble’s my name and folks call me Cherry. You could trail me across the country by the trees I’ve planted.”
Lay Benton was a trouble-hunter, and he did not like Cherry Noble. Lay had been the biggest man around until Noble arrived, and he still considered himself the toughest. The big man’s easy good humor irritated him. “If you go into that country,” he said contemptuously, “you’re a fool!”
” ‘Better to be a fool than a knave,’ ” quoted Noble. He was smiling, but his eyes were measuring Benton with sudden attention and knowledge.
Benton came to his feet ready for trouble. “What was that you called me?”
Cherry Noble walked to the foot of the steps where Benton stood. “Friend,” he” spoke gently, still smiling, “I didn’t call you, but if you heard your name just keep a-coming.”
Benton was irresolute. Something in the easy movement and confidence of the big man disturbed him. “You don’t make sense!” he said irritably. “What’s the matter? Are you crazy?”
Noble chuckled, his big hands on his hips. “Now as to that,” he said judiciously, “there’s a division of opinion. Some say yes, some say no. Me, I’ve not rightly decided, but at any rate I’m not a very wise man.”
“Feller back in Missouri when I was about hip-high to a short burro, he give me five books, he did. He said, ‘Son, you take these books and you read them. Then you read them through again and then you ponder on ’em. After that you give them to somebody else, but there’ll be something that will stay with you all the days of your life. I’m giving you the greatest gift any man can give to another.’ ”
Cherry Noble put one huge booted foot on the step. “Now I read them there books, and more times than twice. One was the Bible, mighty good reading whether a man is of a religious turn or not. Another was a bunch of poetry like by a man named Shakespeare. That one only made occasional sense to me until the third time around and then everything began to fall into place, and it’s stayed in my mind ever since. Then there was a book on law, or that’s what I was told, by Blackstone. Seemed to me that book made a lot of sense, and mostly it was rules and ideas on how folks can get along together. There was another by a man named Plato that seemed to me conversations with some other folks, but one that worried me some was an account of the death of this Socrates.”