Kid Reese relaxed when he saw me. “It’s all right, Bob. He’s a friend of ours.” “I see you found pa’s horse.” I was mighty dry in the mouth, all of a sudden. “And our money.” Heseltine turned his head around at me, real slow. His hard blue eyes looked mean at you over high cheekbones. Dad’s lips kind of at nned down, and Kid Reese taken a slow breath, just a-staring at me.
Firelight flickered on their faces, on the shining flanks of their horses, and on the gold and silver coins heaped on the blanket. It flickered off their gun barrels, too.
“What d’you mean? Your money?” Heseltine demanded. ‘This here is our money.” ‘Hey, now!” I objected. “Look ‘allyou look.” Heseltine fixed me mith those hard blue eyes. “I never seen you before. You come ridin” in here and lay claim to our money. You ain’t about to get it.
Not a lousy two-bits worth.” ” They know me.” I indicated Doc and the Kid. “And they know that horse. Pa bought that horse in East Texas, and has papers on him.
The Kid knows that horse-he’s seen me ride him often enough. And that’s pa’s sadcue.” Nobody said anything, and suddenly I was scared.
Sure, me and the Kid and Doc, we had talked big of robberies and such, but that was fool kid talk … or was it?
“Thaes his pa’s horse, all right,” Reese admitted.
‘allyou shut your trap,” Heseltine said.
that money belongs to us and to the folks back home,” I said.
“You know that, Doc.” “Hell,” Doc said, “they never did nothing for me back there.” “You could come in mith us,” Reese suggested. “Just like we planned it would be when Bob came back. We can start right from here, the four of us-but with money.” We had done some talking about rustling cattle and robbing stages or banks, but now they wanted to steal our money, the money pa and me and our neighbors had sweated for. Right then I began to take a different view of things. It was one thing to talk of being bandits, but I guess I’d never really thought of it as anything but talk.
Now I could see how it hurt a man to be robbed of what he’d worked hard for.
“Pa’s back up the creek with his leg broke,” I said, not thinking how much I was giving away to them.
“I’ve got to get back to him with that horse and the money.” Bob Heseltine was facing me. “You may have been a friend to the boys here, but you’re not taking any money away from here. Not you nor anybody else.” All three of them were facing me, all squared away to make their fight. Kid Reese was suddenly grinning like a fool. He’d always looked down on me, anyway. Doc had a rifle in his hands, and Heseltine had laid it on the line for them.
They stood ready to kill me. And these were the boys I’d been hanging out with all summer. These were the friends Id defended to my pa.
They had me euchered. Pa, he used to tell me that when a man was holding the wrong cards it was always better not to try to buck the game. It was better to throw in your cards and wait for another deal.
Only thing I was wondering now was, would they let me get out of here?
‘allyou won’t be needin” pa’s horse,” I said.
I caught up the reins and rode out of there, but it was all seeming unreal to me. I was expecting any minute to get a bullet in the back.
It was Heseltine who worried me. Then I heard Reese say, “You ain’t going to let him ride off? He’ll have the law on us.” ‘For what? For finding money?” But I kept on going.
Riding back to where pa Iay, I kept telling myself that if it hadn’t been for pa I’d have shot it out with them, but way down deep I wasn’t so sure.
Pa was setting up, his back against a tree. He looked mighty relieved when I rode in, but his face was gray and drawn. He was surely in pain.
So I built us a fire and made coffee whilst I told him about it.
“Son, we’ve got to get our money. Folks trusted us with their stock, an” we given our word.i I comi So I explained about “Bob Heseltine, who was maybe as tough as Wild Bill Hickok.
‘Who says so, boy? Those tlxo-by-twice hitch-rack outlaws?
Neither Sites nor Reese would know a tough man if they saw one.” “I saw him. He sizes up mighty mean.pa looked at me out of those level gray eyes of his.
Old eyes, I suddenly realized. I’d never thought of pa as old, but he was. I’d been a son born to his later years.
“How tough are you, boy?” he asked now.
The?” I was startled. I’d never thought of myself as really tough.
well, I take that back. Time to time down in the gully where I’d practiced with a six-shooter I had told myself what I’d do if faced with trouble … only this here was no daydream. “Why, I don’t know.
I guess a man has to find out.” What surprised me more than anything was pa suggesting I might be tough. He’d always played that down.
comallyore right, son. You never know how tough a man is until you’ve tried him. Edwin, you hep me up on that horse. We’re a-gain! back.” ‘allyou got you a broke leg.” ‘My trigger finger ain’t broke.” Pa, he looked at me.
‘Edwin, you and me worked side by side doing the work of five or six men to put that herd together.
We taken it up the trail short-handed.
We held it together against Indians, haflstorrns, and stampede. We taken it over land and through water and we ate dust and went through hell to do it.
‘ationow those three are takire it from us, three men who were never good for anything, nor did an honest day’s work in their lives. If a man won’t fight for what is rightly his, if he won’t fight for what he believes, then he ain’t much account.
We’re going” back up there, you and me, and if it’s fight they want they’ve bought themselves a packet.” Well, I just looked at him. I’d never seen pa like that, nor believed he had it in him. I’d seen him fight Indians from inside a house, but I’d never seen him r’or up all teeth an’talon like this.
All of a sudden I was wondering how I’d measure up when the showdown came … and to at I’d been low-rating pa all this time.
They were gone. There was a thin smoke from a dying fire, and some trampled sod, but they had taken out.
“Scared,” pa said, Contempt in his tone, comScared of a boy and a man with a broke leg.
We got to catch them.” “Look, pa, yore in no shape to ride. We can go home and-was ‘Boy, What’re you talkin” about? It’s a week’s ride to the ranch, three days to the nearest folks we know. If they get that much start we’ll never catch them.” They did not sleep that night, I was sure, and neither did we. The moon was high and white, the cap-rock prairies like a floor covered with thin grass. The tracks were there, the only marks across that grass where nothing had walked since the buffalo passed.
Pa sat straight in his saddle. He neither whimpered nor groaned.
When we watered in a coulee with day a-coming I thought I’d never seen a man so drawn and tight, yet all the night long he had followed a trail that.
was scarcely more than a shadow on the grass.
There in that coulee I helped pa down and covered him with a blanket.
He slept some, so I unsaddled the horses and let them roll in the dust, then picketed them out. I lay down, just to relax a mite, and when I opened my eyes the sun was over the horizon in the east.
Pa floundered into a sitting position and I scouted buffalo chips to make a fire. Careful to make no smoke, for this was Comanche country, I made coffee and sliced bacon into a skillet.
“We got to find a place,” I said. “You surely need rest.” ‘I spent more years in the saddle than on my back, son, and if I die it’ll be in the saddle.” When I helped him into the saddle again I accidentally bumped his leg and he winced, his face went white, and sweat started from his forehead. Ashamed of my clumsiness, I climbed aboard the hammer-headed roan I was riding.
That horse was not one a man would choose a-purpose. He was raw-boned and no-account-looking and he had a devil in his eye, but he could go all night and the next morning, then give him a few mouthfuls of antelope bush or bunchgrass and a hatful of water, and he’d be off and going again.