Boardman walked forward again. “Well?” he said, fluffing back the tails of his coat with his hands behind him. The gold chain of his watch stood out in the sunlight, as did the muddy pawprints on his vest. “Well, what am I t’ do?”
“Now hush,” Old Nathan said firmly to the bitch. He rose to his full height, topping his visitor’s average frame by a full hand’s breadth.
“I kin make it so’s ye kin plow yer newground,” the cunning man went on. “If thet’s what ye want. And the cost of it to you is a hundred minted dollars.”
“What?” the younger man blurted, stepping back as if his bitch had leaped up in his face. “Why, I paid Bully Ransden only ten to clear it, and he thought himself paid well.”
“I ain’t sellin’ ye forty acres, John Boardman,” the cunning man replied with his jaw and black beard thrust out. “What I hev to offer is Sally Ann Hewitt, and whether er no she’s a hundred dollars value is a question ye’ll answer yerself.”
“You think I cain’t pay thet,” the younger man said in flat anger, meeting Old Nathan’s eyes.
“I think yer daddy kin,” said the cunning man. “But it makes no matter to me, yea ‘r nay.”
“Then ye’ll hev yer silver money,” said his visitor. “Though I reckon you’re humbug, and we’ll hev that money back outen yer hide if ye fail us.”
” ‘Us,’ ” Old Nathan repeated with a sneer. “Oh, aye, you’d do wonders, boy. But I’ll not fail.”
In the pasture behind him, Spanish King bawled a challenge to the world.
* * *
When Old Nathan saw him, Bully Ransden was plowing on a hilltop a furlong from the road. Unlike horses, bulls have no certain gait between ambling and a panic rush, so the younger man easily had time to outspan his plow oxen and trot down the hill. He met Old Nathan and King in front of the cabin Ransden shared with a black-haired woman. The homeplace, where Ransden’s mother still lived, was a quarter mile away on the far side of the acreage.
“So-o-o . . .” said Bully Ransden, arms akimbo and his legs spread to put one boot just within each of the road’s single pair of wagon ruts. “Where d’ye think you wuz goin’, old man?”
“You know me, Cullen Ransden,” Old Nathan replied. He laid an arm over the neck of Spanish King and murmured, “Whoa, now, old friend, we’ll have us t’ drink and a bit uv rest here.”
He was a fine figure to look at, was Bully Ransden. He stood as tall as Old Nathan and supported with his broad shoulders a bulk of muscle that the older man could never have matched at the height of his physical powers long decades before.
Ransden’s long hair was bright blond, the sole legacy he had received from the father who had beaten the boy and the boy’s mother indiscriminately . . . until the night the eleven-year-old Cullen proved that fury and an axe handle made him a better man than his father. The elder Ransden had bolted into the night, streaming blood and supplications, never to be seen since in the county.
Cullen Ransden had now spent a decade reinforcing the lesson he had taught himself that night: that his will and his strength would gain him aught in the world that he wanted. All the county knew him as Bully, but no one as yet had shown that wisdom of his to be false.
“Oh, I know the humbug what skins fools worse’n a Yankee peddler,” Ransden said in mock agreement.
He took a step forward and Old Nathan stepped also, halving the distance between them to little more than the reach of a fist. It was a dangerous choice, putting his back to the horns of Spanish King. If he did not step forward, however, it would look as though he were trying to shelter in the bull’s strength—a challenge that Ransden would likely meet with a blow of his ox-driving whip to King’s nose.
Besides, Old Nathan was as little willing to crouch away from trouble as the bull was, or Bully Ransden.