unpleasant, but when he saw me he grinned and held out his hand. We talked a few
minutes and had coffee together, and it seemed like old times.
“One thing,” he said, “you don’t have to worry about. Reed Carney is dead.”
“What happened?”
“Chico Cruz killed him over to Socorro.”
It gave me a cold feeling, all of a sudden, knowing that gun-slinging Mexican
was still around, and I found myself hoping that he did not come up this way.
When I’d been on the job about a week I was out to the ranch one day when I saw
that shining black buckboard coming, only it wasn’t Orrin driving. It was Laura.
I walked down from the steps to meet her. “How are you, Laura? It’s good to see
you.”
“It isn’t good to see you.” She spoke sharply, and her lips thinned down. Right
at that moment she was a downright ugly woman. “If you have any feeling for your
brother, you will leave here and never come back.”
“This is my home.”
“You’d better leave,” she insisted, “everybody knows you’re a vicious killer,
and now you’ve wheedled the deputy’s job out of Sexton, and you’ll stay around
here until you’ve ruined Orrin and me and everybody.”
She made me mad so I said, “What’s the difference between being a killer and
hiring your killing done?”
She struck at me, but I just stepped back and she almost fell out of the
buckboard. Catching her arm, I steadied her, and she jerked away from me. “If
you don’t leave, I’ll find a way to make you. You hate me and my father and if
it hadn’t been for you there wouldn’t have been any of this trouble.”
“I’m sorry. I’m staying.”
She turned so sharply that she almost upset the buggy and drove away, and I
couldn’t help wondering if Orrin had ever seen her look like that. She wasn’t
like that hammer-headed roan I’d said she was like. That roan was a whole damned
sight better.
Ma said nothing to me but I could see that she missed Orrin’s visits, which
became fewer and fewer, Laura usually contrived to have something important to
do or somewhere important for him to be whenever he thought about coming out.
There was talk of rustling by Ed Fry who ranched near Tom’s place, and we had
several complaints about Tom Sunday. Whatever else Tom might be, he was an
honest man. I got up on Kelly and rode the big red horse out to Sunday’s place.
It was a rawhide outfit. I mean it the western way where a term like that is
used to mean an outfit that’s held together with rawhide, otherwise it would
fall apart. Tom Sunday came to the door when I rode up and he stood leaning
against the doorjamb watching me tie my horse.
“That’s a good horse, Tye,” he said, “you always had a feeling for a good
horse.”
He squatted on his heels and began to build a smoke. Hunkering down beside him I
made talk about the range and finally asked him about his trouble with Fry.
He stared at me from hard eyes. “Look, Tye, that’s my business. You leave it
alone.”
“I’m the law, Tom,” I said mildly. “I want to keep the peace if I can do it.”
“I don’t need any help and I don’t want any interference.”
“Look, Tom, look at it this way. I like this job. The boys do all there is to do
on the ranch, so I took this job. If you make trouble for me, I may lose out.”
His eyes glinted a little with sardonic humor. “Don’t try to get around me, Tye.
You came down here because you’ve been hearing stories about me and you’re
worried. Well, the stories are a damned lie and you know it.”
“I do know it, Tom, but there’s others.”
“The hell with them.”
“That may be all right for you, but it isn’t for me. One reason I came down was
to check on what’s been happening, another was to see you. We four were mighty
close for a long time, Tom, and we should stay that way.”
He stared out gloomily. “I never did get along with that high-and-mighty brother
of yours, Tye. He always thought he was better than anybody else.”
“You forget, Tom. You helped him along. You helped him with his reading, almost
as much as you did me. If he is getting somewhere it is partly because of you.”
I figured that would please him but it didn’t seem to reach him at all. He threw
his cigarette down. “I got some coffee,” he said, and straightening up he went
inside.
We didn’t talk much over coffee, but just sat there together, and I think we
both enjoyed it. Often on the drives we would ride for miles like that, never
saying a word, but with a kind of companionship better than any words.
There was a book lying on the table called Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I’d
read parts of some of Dickens’ books that were run as serials in papers. “How is
it?” I asked.
“Good … damned good.”
He sat down opposite me and tasted the coffee. “Seems a long time ago,” he said
gloomily, “when you rode up to our camp outside of Baxter Springs.”
“Five years,” I agreed. “We’ve been friends a long time, Tom. We missed you, Cap
and me, on this last trip.”
“Cap and you are all right. It’s that brother of yours I don’t like. But he’ll
make it all right,” he added grudgingly, “he’ll get ahead and make the rest of
us look like bums.”
“He offered you a job. That was the deal: if you won you were to give him a job,
if he won he would give you a job.”
Tom turned sharply around. “I don’t need his damned job! Hell, if it hadn’t been
for me he’d never have had the idea of running for office!”
Now that wasn’t true but I didn’t want to argue, so after awhile I got up and
rinsed out my cup. “I’ll be riding. Come out to the house and see us, Tom. Cap
would like to see you and so would Ma.” Then I added, “Orrin isn’t there very
much.”
Tom’s eyes glinted. “That wife of his. You sure had her figured right. Why, if I
ever saw a double-crossing no-account female, she’s the one. And her old man …
I hate his guts.”
When I stepped into the saddle I turned for one last word. “Tom, stay clear of
Ed Fry, will you? I don’t want trouble.”
“You’re one to talk.” He grinned at me. “All right, I’ll lay off, but he sticks
in my craw.”
Then as I rode away, he said, “My respects to your mother, Tye.”
Riding away I felt mighty miserable, like I’d lost something good out of my
life. Tom Sunday’s eyes had been bloodshot, he was unshaven and he was careless
about everything but bis range. Riding over it, I could see that whatever else
Tom might be, he was still a first-rate cattleman. Ed Fry and some of the others
had talked of Tom’s herds increasing, but by the look of things it was no
wonder, for there was good grass, and he was keeping it from overgrazing, which
Fry nor the others gave no thought to … and his water holes were cleaned out,
and at one place he’d built a dam in the river to stop water so there would be
plenty to last.
There was no rain. As the months went by, the rains held off, and the ranchers
were worried, yet Tom Sunday’s stock, in the few times I rode that way, always
looked good. He had done a lot of work for a man whose home place was in such
rawhide shape, and there was a good bit of water dammed up in several washes,
and spreader dams he had put in had used the water he had gotten to better
effect, so he had better grass than almost anybody around.
Ed Fry was a sorehead. A dozen times I’d met such men, the kind who get
something in their craw and can’t let it alone. Fry was an ex-soldier who had
never seen combat, and was a man with little fighting experience anywhere else,
and in this country, a man who wasn’t prepared to back his mouth with action was
better off if he kept still. But Ed Fry was a big man who talked big, and was
too egotistical to believe anything could happen to him.
One morning when I came into the office I sat down and said, “Bill, you could do
us both a favor if you’d have a talk with Ed Fry.”
Sexton put down some papers and rolled his cigar in his jaws. “Has he been
shooting off his mouth again?”