covered half the distance, I started to meet him.
He stopped.
Seems like he didn’t expect me to come hunting it. Seems like he figured he was
the hunter and that I would try to avoid a shoot out. Seems like something had
happened to him in that fifty yards, for fifty yards can be a lifetime.
Suddenly, I knew I didn’t have to kill him. Mayhap that was the moment when I
changed from a boy into a man. Somewhere I’d begun to learn things about myself
and about gunfights and gunfighters. Reading men is the biggest part; drawing
fast, even shooting straight, they come later. And some of the fastest drawing
men with guns were among the first to die. That fast draw didn’t mean a thing
… not a thing.
The first thing I was learning was there are times when a man had to kill and
times when he had no need to.
Reed Carney wanted a shoot out and he wanted to win, but me, I’m more than
average contrary. Watching Reed come up the street, I knew I didn’t need a gun
for him; suddenly it came over me that Reed Carney was nothing but a tinhorn. He
fancied himself as a tough man and a gunfighter, but he didn’t really want
anybody shooting at him. The trouble with having a reputation as a tough man is
that the time always comes when you have to be a tough man. It’s a whole lot
different.
Nothing exciting or thrilling about a gunfight. She’s a mighty cold proposition
for both parties. One or t’other is to be killed or hurt bad, maybe both. Some
folks take chances because they’ve got it in their minds they’re somebody
special, that something will protect them. It is always, they figure, somebody
else who dies.
Only it ain’t thataway. You can die. You can be snuffed out like you never
existed at all and a few minutes after you’re buried nobody will care except
maybe your wife or your mother. You stick your finger in the water and you pull
it out, and that’s how much of a hole you leave when you’re gone.
Reed Carney had been thinking of himself as a mighty dangerous man and he had
talked himself into a shoot out. Maybe it was something in his walk or the way
he looked or in the fact that he stopped when I started toward him. Mayhap it
was something sensed rather than seen, that something within me that made me
different than other men. Only suddenly I knew that by the time he had taken ten
steps toward me the fight had begun to peter out of him, that for the first time
he was realizing that I was going to be shooting at him to kill.
Panic can hit a man. You never really know. You can have a man bluffed and then
something wild hits him and you’re in a real honest-to-warchief shooting. Those
others were going to wait for Reed, but I’d leave them to Cap. Reed was my
problem and I knew he wanted to kill me. Or rather, he wanted it known around
that he’d killed me.
As I walked toward him I knew Reed knew he should draw, and he felt sure he was
going to draw, but he just stood there. Then he knew that if he didn’t draw it
would be too late.
The sweat was streaming down his cheeks although it wasn’t a hot evening. Only I
just kept walking up on him, closing in. He took a step back and his lips parted
like he was having trouble breathing, and he knew that if he didn’t draw on me
then he would never be the same man again as long as he lived.
When I stopped I was within arm’s length of him and he was breathing like he’d
run a long way uphill.
“I’d kill you, Reed.”
It was the first time I’d ever called him by his first name and his eyes looked
right into mine, startled, like a youngster’s.
“You want to be a big man, Reed, but you’ll never make it with a gun. You just
ain’t trimmed right for it. If you’d moved for that gun you’d be dead now …
cold and dead in the dust down there with only the memory of a gnawing rat of
pain in your belly.
“Now you reach down mighty careful, Reed, and you unbuckle your belt and let it
fall. Then you turn around and walk away.”
It was still. A tiny puff of wind stirred dust, then died out. Somewhere on the
porch of the Drovers’ Cottage a board creaked as somebody shifted weight. Out on
the prairie a meadow lark sang.
“Unbuckle the belt!”
His eyes were fastened on mine, large and open. Sweat trickled down his cheeks
in rivulets. His tongue fumbled at his lips and then his fingers reached for his
belt buckle. As he let the belt fall there was a gasp from somewhere, and for a
split second everything hung by a hair. There was a moment then when he might
have grabbed for a gun but my eyes had him and he let the belt go.
“Was I you I’d straddle my bronc and light a shuck out of here. You got lots of
country to choose from.”
He backed off, then turned and started to walk away, and then as he realized
what he’d done he walked faster and faster. He stumbled once, caught himself,
and kept going. After a moment I scooped up the gun belt with my left hand and
turned back toward the Drovers’ Cottage.
They were all on the porch. Orrin, Laura Pritts and her Pa, and Don Luis …
even his granddaughter. Fetterson stood there, mad clear through. He had come
itching for trouble and he was stopped cold. He had no mind to tackle Cap
Rountree for fun … nobody wanted any part of that old wolf. But he had a look
in those gun-metal eyes of his that would frighten a body.
“I’ll buy the drinks,” I said.
“Just coffee for me,” Cap replied.
My eyes were on Fetterson. “That includes you,” I said.
He started to say something mean, and then he said, “Be damned if I won’t. That
took guts, mister.”
Don Luis took the cigar from his lips and brushed away the long ash that had
collected there during the moments just past. He looked at me and spoke in
Spanish.
“He says we can travel west with him if we like,” Cap translated, “he says you
are a brave man … and what is more important, a wise one.”
“Gracias,” I said, and it was about the only Spanish word I knew.
In 1867, the Santa Fe Trail was an old trail, cut deep with the ruts of the
heavy wagons carrying freight over the trail from Independence, Missouri. It was
no road, only a wide area whose many ruts showed the way the wagons had gone
through the fifty-odd years the trail had been used. Cap Rountree had come over
it first in 1836, he said.
Orrin and me, we had an ache inside us for new country, and a longing to see the
mountains show up on the horizon. We had to find a place for Ma, and if we had
luck out west, then we could start looking for a place.
Back home we had two younger brothers and one older, but it had been a long time
since we’d seen Tell, the oldest of our brothers who was still alive and should
be coming home from the wars soon. When the War between the States started he
joined up and then stayed on to fight the Sioux in the Dakotas.
We rode west. Of a night we camped together and it sure was fine to set around
the fire and listen to those Spanish men sing, and they did a lot of it, one
time or another.
Meantime I was listening to Rountree. That old man had learned a lot in his
lifetime, living with the Sioux like he did, and with the Nez Perce. First off
he taught me to say that name right, and he said it Nay-Persay. He taught me a
lot about their customs, how they lived, and told me all about those fine horses
they raised, the appaloosas.
My clothes had give out so I bought me an outfit from one of the Spanish men, so
I was all fixed out like they were, in a buckskin suit with fringe and all. In
the three months since I’d left home I’d put on nearly fifteen pounds and all of
it muscle. I sure wished Ma could see me. Only thing that was the same was my
gun.
The first few days out I’d seen nothing of the don or his granddaughter, except
once when I dropped an antelope with a running shot at three hundred yards. The