The Best American Noir of the Century

1940 MACKINLAY KANTOR GUN CRAZY

I first met Nelson Tare when he was around five or six years old, and I was around the same. I had watched his family moving into the creek house on a cold, snowless morning in early winter.

Two lumber wagons went by, with iron beds and old kitchen chairs and mattresses tied all over them. They rumbled down the hill past Mr. Boston’s barn and stopped in front of the creek house. I could see men and girls working, carrying the stuff inside.

In midafternoon I was outdoors again, and I coasted to the corner in my little wagon to see whether the moving-in activities were still going on.

Then Nelson Tare appeared. He had climbed the hill by himself; probably he was looking for guns, although I couldn’t know that at the time. He was a gaunt little child with bright blue beads for eyes, and a sharp-pointed nose.

He said, “Hello, kid. Want to pway?”

Nelson was only about a month younger than I, it turned out, but he still talked a lot of baby talk. I think kids are apt to do that more when their parents don’t talk to them much.

I told him that I did want to play, and asked him what he wanted to do.

He asked, “Have you got any guns?” What he actually said was, “Dot any duns?” and for a while I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then, when I understood, I coasted back to the house in my wagon, with Nelson walking beside me. We went into the living room.

I had three guns: a popgun with the pop gone, and a glass pistol that used to have candy inside — but now the candy was all eaten up — and a cap gun and holster.

The cap gun was the best. It was nickel-plated, and the holster was made of black patent leather. It was the shape and possibly half the size of an ordinary .32-caliber revolver.

Nelson Tare’s eyes pushed out a little when he saw it. He made a grab, and belted it on before I had time to protest and tell him that I wanted to play with the cap gun and he could play with the glass pistol or the broken pop rifle. He went swaggering around with the gun on, and it kind of scared me the way he did it — all of a sudden he’d snatch the revolver out of its holster and aim it at me.

I took the glass pistol and tried to imitate him. But the glass pistol couldn’t click, and at least the hammer of the cap gun would come down with a resounding click. Nelson, or Nelly, as I came to know him, fairly shot the daylights out of me. I began to protest, and he kept on advancing and kind of wrangling and threatening me, until he had me backed up in a corner.

He hadn’t taken off his little red coat with its yellow horn buttons, and he was perspiring inside it. I still recollect how he smelled when he got close enough to wool me around; I had never smelled a smell like that before. I remember his face, too, when he came close — the tiny, expressionless turquoise eyes, the receding chin and baby mouth still marked with the tag ends of his dinner; and in between them, that inhuman nose whittled out to a point.

I tried to push him away as he kept battling me and shooting me, and I guess I began to cry.

Nelson said that it wasn’t a real gun.

“It might go off!”

He said that it couldn’t go off; that it wasn’t “weal.”

“‘Course it isn’t real!” I cried. “I guess there isn’t any boy in the world got a real gun!”

Well, he said that he had one, and when I was still disbelieving he said that he would go home and fetch it. His coat had come unbuttoned in our scufflings, and I remember how he looked as I watched through the window and saw him flapping down the last length of concrete sidewalk past the big maple tree.

My mother came from upstairs while I waited at the window. She said that she had heard voices. “Did you have company?” she asked.

“It was a new boy.”

“What new boy?”

“He moved into the creek house down there.”

My mother said doubtfully, “Oh, yes. I heard there was a ditcher’s family moving in down there.”

Well, I wanted to know what a ditcher was, and while Mother was explaining to me about drainage ditches out on the prairie and how the tile was laid in them, here came Nelly hustling up the road as fast as he could leg it. He had something big and heavy that he had to carry in both hands. When he got into the yard we could see that he did have a revolver, and it looked like a real one.

Mother exclaimed, and went to open the door for him. He ducked inside, bareheaded and cold, with his dirty, thin, straw-colored hair sticking every which way, and the old red coat still dangling loose.

“I dot my dun,” he said.

It was a large revolver — probably about a .44. It had a yellow handle, but the metal parts were a mass of rust. The cylinder and hammer were rusted tight and couldn’t be moved.

“Why, little boy,” Mother exclaimed in horror, “where on earth did you get this?”

He said that he got it at home.

Mother lured it out of his hands, but only after she had praised it extravagantly. She got him to put the revolver on the library table, and then she took us both out to the kitchen, where we had milk and molasses cookies.

My father came home from his newspaper office before Nelly had gone. We showed Father the gun, and he lighted the lamp on the library table and examined the revolver thoroughly.

“My goodness, Ethel,” he said to my mother, “it’s got cartridges in it!”

“Cartridges?”

“Yes, it sure has. They’re here in the cylinder, all rusted in tight. Good thing the rest of it is just as rusty.”

He put on his coat again and said that he’d take Nelson home. It was growing dark and was almost suppertime, and he was afraid the boy might be lost there in the new surroundings of Elm City. Nelson wanted his gun, but my father said no and put it in his own overcoat pocket. I was allowed to go along with them.

When we got to the creek house, Father rapped on the door and Nelly’s mother opened it. She was a scrawny, pale-faced woman, very round-shouldered, in a calico dress. Nelly’s father wasn’t there; he had gone to take one of the teams back. There were several girls — Nelly’s sisters — strung out all the way from little kids to a big, bony creature as tall as her mother.

Father brought out the gun and said that it wasn’t wise to let little kids go carrying things like that around.

“You little devil!” said Nelly’s mother to Nelly, and she laughed when she said it. “What on earth were you doing with that?”

The girls crowded close and looked. “Why, it’s Jay’s gun!” said the eldest one.

Father wanted to know who Jay was. They laughed a lot while they were telling him, although they were remarkably close-lipped about it at the same time. All that Father could get out of them was the fact that they used to live in Oklahoma, and Jay was somebody who used to stay at their house. He had left that gun there once, and they still kept it — as a kind of memorial for Jay, it would seem.

“I swear Nelly must have taken it out of the bureau drawer,” said Mrs. Tare, still smiling. “You little devil, you got to behave yourself, you got to!” And she gave him a kind of spat with her hand, but not as if she were mad. They all seemed to think it was cute, for him to sneak off with that gun.

Father said goodbye and we went home. It was dark now, and all the way up the hill and past Mr. Boston’s farmyard, I kept wondering about this new little boy and the rusty revolver. I kept breathing hard, trying to breathe that strange oily smell out of my nose. It was the odor of their house and of themselves — the same odor I had noticed when Nelly tussled with me.

My father said quite calmly that he supposed Jay was an Oklahoma outlaw. Unintentionally, he thus gave Nelson Tare a fantastic importance in my eyes. I did not dream then that Jay, instead of old Barton Tare with his sloppy mustache, might have been Nelly’s own father. Perhaps it is a dream, even as I write the words now. But I think not.

When Nelly grew older, he possessed a great many physical virtues. He was remarkably agile in the use of his hands and arms. He had no fear of height; he would climb any windmill within reach and he could stump any boy in that end of town when it came to Stump-the-Leader. But Nelly Tare liked guns better than he did games.

At the air-rifle stage of our development, Nelly could shoot rings around any of us. He and I used to go up in our barn and lie on the moldy, abandoned hay of the old mow. There were rats that sometimes came into the chicken run next door, to eat the chickens’ food. I never did shoot a rat with my BB gun, and for some reason Nelly never did either. That was funny, because he was such a good shot. We used to amuse ourselves, while waiting for rats, by trying to peck away at the chickens’ water pan. It was a good healthy distance, and I’d usually miss. But the side of the pan which faced our way had the enamel all spotted off by Nelly’s accurate fire.

He owned an air-pump gun of his own, but not for long. He traded it to somebody for an old .22, and after that there was little peace in the neighborhood. He was always shooting at tin cans or bottles on the roadside dump. He was always hitting too.

In the winter of 1914, Nelly and I went hunting with Clyde Boston. Clyde was a huge, ruddy-faced young man at least ten years older than Nelly and I. He lived with his parents across from our corner.

One day there was deep snow, and Nelly and I were out exploring. He had his .22, and every now and then he’d bang away at a knot on a fence post. At last we wandered into Boston’s barnyard, and found Clyde in the barn, filling his pockets with shotgun shells.

He had a shotgun too — a fine repeater, gleaming blue steel — and Nelly wanted to know what Clyde was doing. “Going hunting?”

“Come on, Clyde,” I said, “let us go! Nelly’s got his gun.”

Clyde took the little rifle and examined it critically. “This won’t do for hunting around here,” he said. “I’m going out after rabbits, and you got to have a shotgun for that. Rifle bullets are apt to carry too far and hit somebody, or maybe hit a pig or something. Anyway, you couldn’t hit a cottontail on the run with that.”

“Hell I couldn’t,” said Nelly.

I said, “Clyde, you let us go with you and we’ll beat up the game. We’ll scare the rabbits out of the weeds, because you haven’t got any dog. Then you can shoot them when they run out. Maybe you’ll let us have one shot each, huh, Clyde — maybe?”

Clyde said that he would see, and he made Nelly leave his rifle at the barn. We went quartering off through the truck garden on the hillside.

The snow had fallen freshly, but already there was a mass of rabbit tracks everywhere. You could see where the cottontails had run into the thickest, weediest coverts to feed upon dry seeds.

Clyde walked in the middle, with his face apple-colored with the cold and his breath blowing out. Nelly and I spread wide, to scare up the game. We used sticks and snowballs to alarm the thickets, and we worked hard at it. The big twelve-gauge gun began to bang every once in a while. Clyde had three cottontails hanging furry from his belt before we got to the bend in the creek opposite the Catholic cemetery. Then finally he passed the gun over to me and told me I could have the next chance.

It came pretty soon. We saw a cottontail in his set — a gray little mound among the vervain stalks. I lifted the muzzle, but Clyde said that it wasn’t fair to shoot rabbits in the set, and made Nelly throw a snowball. The cottontail romped out of there in a hurry, and I whaled away with the shotgun and managed to wound the rabbit and slow him down. I fired again and missed, and Clyde caught up with the rabbit after a few strides. He put the poor peeping thing out of its misery by rapping it on the head.

I tied the rabbit to the belt of my mackinaw, and Clyde passed the shotgun over to Nelly.

Nelly’s face was pale.

“Watch your step,” said Clyde. “Remember to keep the safety on until you see something to shoot.”

“Sure,” said Nelly Tare.

We crossed the creek without starting any more rabbits, and came down the opposite side of the stream. Then a long-legged jack jumped up out of a deep furrow where there had been some fall plowing, and ran like a mule ahead of us.

“Look at those black ears!” Clyde sang out. “It’s a jack! Get him, Nelly — get him!”

Well, Nelson had the gun at his shoulder; at first I thought he had neglected to touch the safety— I thought he couldn’t pull the trigger because the safety was on. He kept swinging the muzzle of the gun, following the jackrabbit in its erratic course, until the rabbit slowed up a little.

The jack bobbed around behind a tree stump, and then came out on the other side. It squatted down on top of the snow and sat looking at us. It hopped a few feet farther and then sat up again to watch.

“For gosh sakes,” said Clyde Boston, “what’s the matter with you, kid? There he is, looking at you.”

Nelson Tare just stood like a snow man, or rather like a snow boy. He kept the rabbit covered; his dirty blue finger didn’t move. The trigger waited, the shell in the barrel waited, and so did we.

Nelly’s face was deathly white under the dirt that streaked it. The eyes were blank little marbles, as always; even his nose seemed pointed like the sights of a gun. And yet he did not shoot.

Clyde said, half under his breath, “I guess that’s what they call buck fever. You got the buck, Nelly.” He hurried over to take the shotgun.

Blood from the last-killed rabbit made little dots on the snow around my feet, though the animal was freezing fast.

“Can’t you see him, Nelly?”

Nelson said, “Yes. I —”

Clyde lost all patience. “Oh, for gosh sake!” he exclaimed, and grabbed the gun. But our combined motions startled the jackrabbit, and he vanished into the creek gorge beyond.

Something had happened there in the snow; none of us knew exactly what had happened. But whatever it was, it took the edge off our sport. We tramped along a cattle path next to the stream, with Clyde carrying the shotgun. We boys didn’t scare up any more game. Nelly kept looking at the rabbits, which bounced and rubbed their frozen red against Clyde Boston’s overalls.

Clyde teased him, all the way back to the Boston barnyard. He’d say, “Nelly, I thought you were supposed to be the Daniel Boone of the neighborhood. Gosh, Nelly, I thought you could shoot. I thought you were just gun crazy!”

We walked through the fresh warm mire behind the Boston barn. Clyde said that he didn’t need three rabbits; that his mother could use only two, and would Nelly want the other one?

“No,” said Nelson. We went into the barn, and Nelly picked up his .22 rifle.

“Look out while you’re on the way home,” said Clyde, red-faced and jovial as ever. “Look out you don’t meet a bear. Maybe he wouldn’t set around and wait like that jackrabbit did.”

Nelson Tare sucked in his breath. “You said I couldn’t shoot, didn’t you, Mister Clyde?”

“You had your chance. Look at Dave there. He’s got a rabbit to take home that he shot himself, even though he didn’t kill it first crack.”

“I can shoot,” said Nelly. He worked a cartridge into the breech of his rifle. “Dave,” he said to me, “you throw up a snowball.”

“Can’t anybody hit a snowball with a twenty-two,” said big Clyde Boston.

Nelly said, “Throw a snowball, Dave.”

I stepped down from the sill of the barn door and made a ball about the size of a Duchess apple. I threw it high toward the telephone wires across the road. Nelly Tare pinked it apart with his .22 before the ball ever got to the wires. Then he went down the road to the creek house, with Clyde Boston and me looking after him. Clyde was scratching his head, but I just looked.

Nelly began to get into trouble when he was around fourteen. His first trouble that anyone knew about happened in the cloakroom of the eighth grade at school. Miss Cora Petersen was a great believer in corporal punishment, and when Nelly was guilty of some infraction of rules, Miss Petersen prepared to thrash him with a little piece of white rubber hose. Teachers used to be allowed to do that.

But if the pupil did not permit it to be done to him, but instead drew a loaded revolver from inside his shirt and threatened to kill his teacher, that was a different story. It was a story in which the superintendent of schools and the local chief of police and hard-faced old Mr. Tare were all mixed together in the climax.

There was some talk about the reform school, too, but the reform school did not materialize until a year later.

That was after Meisner’s Hardware and Harness Store had been robbed. The thief or thieves had a peculiar taste in robbery; the cash drawer was untouched, but five revolvers and a lot of ammunition were taken away. A mile and a quarter away, to be exact. They were hidden beneath planks and straw in Mr. Barton Tare’s wagon shed, and Chief of Police Kelcy found them after the simplest kind of detective work.

This time the story had to be put in the paper, no matter how much my father regretted it. This time it was the reform school for sure.

We boys in the south end of town sat solemnly on our new concrete curbstone and talked of Nelly Tare in hushed voices. The judge had believed, sternly and simply, that Nelly was better off at Eldora than at home. He gave him two years. Nelly didn’t serve all of that time. He got several months off for good behavior, which must have come as a surprise to many people in Elm City.

He emerged from the Eldora reformatory in the spring of 1918. His parents were out of the picture by this time. His mother was dead; his father had moved to South Dakota with the two youngest girls, and the other girls had married or drifted away.

Nelly may have been under age, but when he expressed a preference for the cavalry, and when he flourished a good report sheet from the reformatory superintendent, no one cared to say him nay. Once he came home on furlough from a camp in New Mexico. I remember how he looked, standing in front of Frank Wanda’s Recreation Pool Hall, with the flashing badge of a pistol expert pinned upon his left breast, and all the little kids grouped around to admire the polish on his half-leather putts.

He never got a chance to use any guns against the Germans. He wasn’t sent to France, and came back to Elm City in the spring of 1919. It was reasonable for him to come there. Elm City was the only real hometown he had, and one of his sisters was married to Ira Flagler, a garage mechanic who lived out on West Water Street. Nelly went to live with the Flaglers.

He began working at Frank Wanda’s pool hall. I have spoken about his skill with his hands; he employed that skill to good advantage in the pool hall. He had developed into a remarkable player during his year in the Army. He also ran the cigar counter and soft drinks for Frank Wanda, who was getting old and couldn’t stand on his feet very long at a time.

It used to be that in every pool hall there was somebody who played for the house, if people came along and really wanted to bet anything. Nelly would play on his own, too, taking money away from farm boys or from some out-of-towner who thought he was good. He was soon making real money, but he didn’t spend it in the usual channels. He spent it on guns.

All sorts. Sometimes he’d have an especially good revolver down there in the billiard parlor with him, and he’d show it to me when I dropped in for cigarettes. He had a kind of private place out along the Burlington tracks where he used to practice shooting on Sundays. And in 1923 a carnival came to town.

Miss Antoinette McReady, the Outstanding Six-Gun Artiste of Two Nations, was supposed to come from Canada. Maybe she did. They built up a phony Royal Canadian Mounted Police atmosphere for her act. A fellow in a shabby red coat and yellow-striped breeches sold tickets out in front. An extra girl in the same kind of comic uniform assisted the artiste with her fancy shooting. They had a steel backstop at the rear of the enclosure to stop the bullets. I went to the carnival on the first night, and dropped in to see the shooting act.

The girl was pretty good. Her lady assistant put on a kind of crown with white chalks sticking up in it, and Miss McReady shot the chalks out of the crown quite accurately, missing only one or two shots and not killing the lady assistant at all. She did mirror shooting and upside-down-leaning-backward shooting; she balanced on a chair and shot. She was a very pretty redhead, though necessarily painted.

Then the Royal Canadian Mounted manager made a speech. He said that frequently during her extensive travels, Miss McReady had been challenged by local pistol-artists, but that she was so confident of her ability that she had a standing offer of one hundred dollars to anybody who could outshoot her.

The only condition was that the challenging local artist should agree to award Miss McReady an honorarium of twenty dollars, provided she outshot him.

Nelly Tare climbed up on the platform; he showed the color of his money and the bet was on.

Miss Antoinette McReady shot first, shooting at the tiny target gong with great deliberation; she rang the gong five out of six times. Nelly took her gun, aimed, and snapped it a few times before ejecting the empty shells, to acquaint himself with the trigger pull. Then he loaded up, with the whole audience standing to watch him. He fired his six rounds, rapid fire, and everyone yipped when he rang the gong with every shot.

Miss Antoinette McReady smiled and bowed as if she had done the shooting instead of Nelly; she went over to congratulate him. They got ready for the next competition. The girl assistant started to put on the crown thing with its chalks sticking out of the sockets. Nelly talked to her a minute in a low voice; he took the crown and put it on his own head.

He stood against the backstop. His face was very red, but he stood there stiff at Army attention, with his hands against his sides.

“Go ahead, sister,” he told Miss McReady.

Well, they made him sign a waiver first, in case of accident. You could have heard an ant sneeze in that place when Miss McReady stood up to do her shooting. She fired six times and broke four of the chalks. The people in the audience proceeded to wake up babies two blocks away, and Miss Antoinette McReady went over to Nelly with those little dancing, running steps that circus and vaudeville folks use. She made him come down to the front and take applause with her. Then she said she’d wear the crown for Nelly, and this time there was no waiver signed.

Nelly broke all six chalks in six steady shots, and Miss Antoinette McReady kissed him, and Frank Wanda had to get a new fellow for the pool hall when Nelly left town with the show after the last performance on Saturday night.

It was six months later when I heard my father exclaim, while he was taking press dispatches over the out-of-town wire. He often did that when some news came through which particularly interested or excited him. I left my desk and went to look over his shoulder, while his fat old fingers pushed out the story on the typewriter.

hampton, Colorado, April 2. — Two desperate trick-shot artists gave Hampton residents an unscheduled exhibition today. When the smoke had cleared away the Hampton County Savings Bank discovered it had paid more than $7,000 to watch the show.

Shortly after the bank opened this morning, a young man and a young woman, identified by witnesses as “Cowboy” Nelson Tare and Miss Antoinette McReady, walked into the bank and commanded tellers and customers to lie down on the floor. They scooped up $7,150 in small bills, and were backing toward an exit, when Vice-President O. E. Simms tried to reach for a telephone.

The trick-shot bandits promptly shot the telephone off the desk. They pulverized chandeliers, interior glass, and window lights in a rapid fusillade which covered their retreat to their car.

Within a few minutes a posse was in hot pursuit, but lost the trail near Elwin, ten miles south of this place. A stolen car, identified as the one used by the bandits, was found abandoned this noon near Hastings City. State and county officers immediately spread a dragnet on surrounding highways.

Nelson Tare and his female companion were easily recognized as stunt shooters with a traveling carnival which became stranded in El-win a week ago. A full description of the hard-shooting pair has been broadcast to officials of five nearby states.

All the time I was reading it, I kept thinking of Nelly Tare, half-pint size in a dirty red coat, asking me, “Dot any duns?”

They were captured in Oklahoma that summer, after another robbery. Antoinette McReady, whose real name turned out to be Ruth Riley, was sent to a women’s penal institution; Nelly Tare went to McAlester Prison. He managed his escape during the winter two years later, and started off on a long series of holdups which carried him south into Texas, over to Arkansas, and north into Missouri.

Those were the days of frequent and daring bank robberies throughout that region. There were a lot of other bad boys around, and Nelly was only one of the herd. Still, he began to appear in the news dispatches with increasing regularity, and when some enterprising reporter called him Nice Nelly, the name stuck and spread. It was a good news name, like Baby Face or Pretty Boy.

They recaptured him in Sedalia; the story of his escape from the Jefferson City Penitentiary in 1933 was front-page stuff all over the nation. It was always the same — he was always just as hard to catch up with. He was always just as able to puncture the tires of pursuing cars, to blast the headlights that tried to pick him out through the midnight dust.

Federal men didn’t enter the picture until the next January, when Nelly kidnapped a bank cashier in Hiawatha, Kansas, and carried him nearly to Lincoln, Nebraska. That little state line made all the difference in the world. The so-called Lindbergh Law had come into existence, and Nice Nelly Tare became a public enemy on an elaborate scale.

It is not astonishing that some people of Elm City basked in this reflected notoriety.

Reporters from big-city papers, photographers from national magazines, came poking around all the time. They interviewed Nelly’s sister, poor Mrs. Ira Flagler, until she was black in the face — until she was afraid to let her children play in the yard.

They took pictures of Frank Wanda’s pool hall, and they would have taken pictures of Frank if he hadn’t been dead. They managed to shake Miss Cora Petersen, late of Elm City’s eighth grade, from asthmatic retirement. Her homely double-chinned face appeared in a fine-screen cut, in ugly halftones — a million different impressions of it. read teacher’s story of how nice nelly, baby bandit, drew his first bead on her. other pictures on page seven.

Clyde Boston and I used to talk about it, over in Clyde’s office in the courthouse. Clyde Boston had been sheriff for two terms; he was just as apple-cheeked and good-natured as ever, though most of his hair was gone. He would shake his head when we talked about Nelly Tare, which we did often.

“You know,” he’d say, “a lot of people probably doubt those stories about Nelly’s fancy shooting — people who haven’t seen him shoot. But I still remember that time he had you throw a snowball for him to break with a rifle. He certainly is gun crazy.”

It was during the late summer of 1934 — the bad drought year — when Nelly held up a bank at Northfield, Minnesota, and was promptly dubbed the Modern Jesse James.

Officers picked up Nelly’s trail in Sioux Falls, and that was a relief to us in Elm City, because people had always feared that Nelly might be struck with a desire to revisit his boyhood haunts and stage a little shooting right there in the lobby of the Farmers’ National Bank. Nelly’s trail was lost again, and for two weeks he slid out of the news.

Then came the big story. Federal men very nearly recaptured him in Council Bluffs, though he got away from them even there. Then silence again.

About two o’clock of the following Thursday afternoon, I went up to the courthouse on printing business. I had stopped in at Sheriff Clyde Boston’s office and was chewing the rag with Clyde, when his telephone rang.

Clyde picked up the phone. He said, “Yes …Yes, Barney …He did? …Yes …Glad you called me.” He hung up the receiver and sat drumming his fingers against a desk blotter.

“Funny thing,” he said. “That was young Barney Meisner, down at the hardware store.”

“What did he have to say?”

“He said that one of the Flagler kids was in there a while ago and bought two boxes of forty-five shells. Funny, isn’t it?”

We looked at each other. “Maybe Ira Flagler’s decided to emulate his wife’s folks,” I said, “and take up trick shooting on the side.”

Clyde Boston squeezed out a smile. “Guess I’ll ride up to their house and ask about it.”

So I went along with him, and when we got to the green-and-white Flagler house on West Water Street, we saw a coupe parked in the drive. Clyde breathed rapidly for a moment; I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel, until he could read the license number of the car. Clyde relaxed. It was a Vera Cruz County number; it was one of our own local cars; I remembered that I had seen Ira Flagler driving that car sometimes.

Clyde parked across the street, although down a little way. He got out on the driver’s side and I got out on the other side. When I walked around the rear of the car and looked up at the Flagler house, Nelly Tare was standing on the porch with a revolver in his hand.

I guess neither Clyde nor I could have said anything if we had been paid. Clyde didn’t have his own gun on; sheriffs didn’t habitually carry guns in our county anymore. There was Nelly on the porch, covering us and looking just about the same as ever, except that his shoulders had sagged and his chin seemed to have receded a good deal more.

He said, “Lay down on the ground. That’s right — both of you. Lay down. That’s right — keep your hands up.”

When we were on the ground, or rather on the asphalt pavement which formed the last block of Water Street, Nelly fired four shots. He put them all into the hood and engine of the car, and then we heard his feet running on the ground. I didn’t look for a minute, but Clyde had more nerve than I, and got up on his haunches immediately.

By that time Nelly was in the Flagler coupe. He drove it right across their vegetable garden, across Lou Miller’s yard, and out onto the pavement of Prospect Street. Prospect Street connected with a wide gravel road that went south toward the Rivermouth country and the town of Liberty beyond. Nelly put his foot on the gas; dust went high.

Those four bullets had made hash out of the motor. The starter was dead when Clyde got his foot on it; gas and water were leaking out underneath. Mrs. Ira Flagler stumbled out upon the porch with one of her children; they were both crying hysterically.

She said, “Oh, thank God he didn’t shoot you, Mr. Boston!”

Later she told her story. Nelly had showed up there via boxcar early that morning, but Ira was working on a hurry-up job at the garage and didn’t know about it. Nelly had made his sister and the children stay in the house all day. Finally he persuaded the youngest boy that it would be great fun and a joke on everybody if he would go downtown and buy him two boxes of .45 shells.

But all this revelation came later, for Clyde Boston was well occupied at the telephone. He called the courthouse and sent a carload of vigilantes after Nelly on Primary No. 37. He called the telephone office and had them notify authorities in Liberty, Prairie Flower, Mannville, and Fort Hood. Then he called the state capital and talked to federal authorities himself. Government men started arriving by auto and airplane within two hours.

About suppertime Nelly showed up at a farmhouse owned by Larry Larsen, fourteen miles southwest of Elm City. He had been circling around all afternoon, trying to break through the cordon. They had heavy trucks across all the roads; late-summer cornfields don’t make for good auto travel, even when there has been a drought.

He took Larsen’s sedan and made the farmer fill it with gas out of his tractor tank. Nelly had cut the telephone wires; he forced the farmer’s family to tie one another up, and then he tied the last one himself. Nelly saw to it that the tying was well done; it was after eight o’clock before one of the kids got loose and they shouted forth their story over a neighbor’s telephone.

Things were wild enough down at the Chronicle office that evening. But I had a reliable staff, and at eight-thirty I thought it was safe to take a run up to the courthouse.

“I kind of expected you’d be up, Dave,” said Clyde Boston.

I told him that I thought he’d be out on the road somewhere.

“Been out for the last four hours.” He took his feet down off the desk, and then put them up again. “If I can get loose from all these state and national efficiency experts, how’d you like to take a little drive with me in your car? Mine’s kind of out of order.”

Well, I told him that I’d be glad to drive him anywhere he said, but I didn’t want to come back with bullet holes in the cowling. So he got loose from the efficiency experts, and he made me strike out south of town and then east, on Primary No. 6.

Clyde didn’t talk. Usually it was his way to talk a lot, in a blissful, middle-aged, baldheaded fashion. We passed two gangs of guards and identified ourselves each time, and finally Clyde had me stop at a farm where some cousins of his lived. He borrowed a log chain — a good big one with heavy links. This rusty mass Clyde dumped down into my clean back seat, and then he directed me to drive south again.

The katydids exclaimed in every grove.

“You know,” said Clyde, “I used to do a lot of rabbit hunting and prairie-chicken hunting down this way, when I was younger. And you used to do a lot of hiking around down here with the boys. Fact is, only boys who were raised in these parts would know this country completely. Isn’t that a fact? Outside officers wouldn’t know it.”

Well, I agreed that they wouldn’t, and then Clyde began to talk about Nelly Tare. He said that Nelly’s one chance to get out of those several hundred square miles that he was surrounded in was to ride out on a railroad train. He wouldn’t be likely to try it on foot, not unless he was crazy, and Clyde Boston didn’t think he was crazy. Except gun crazy, as always.

“Now, the railroads all cross up here in this end of the county, up north of the river. Don’t they?”

“That’s right.”

“So to get from where Nelly was at suppertime to where he’d like to be, he’d have to go diagonally from southwest to northeast. Now, the river timber runs diagonally from southwest to northeast —”

I began to see a little light. “You’re talking about the old Rivermouth road.” And Clyde said that he was.

He said that he had picnicked there with his family in recent years. The ancient timber road was still passable by car, if a driver proceeded slowly and cautiously enough. It meant fording several creeks; it couldn’t be managed when the creeks were up.

“It comes out on the prairie just below the old Bemis farm,” said Clyde. “You go down between pastures on a branch-off lane, and then you’re right in the woods. That’s where I think maybe he’ll come out.”

When he got to the Bemis place we turned off on the side lane and drove to the edge of the timber. The forest road emerged — a wandering sluice with yellow leaves carpeting it. We left my car parked at the roadside, and Clyde dragged the log chain down the timber road until he found a good place.

Cottonwoods and thin saplings made a wall along either side, where the road twisted out of the gully. A driver couldn’t tell that the road was blocked until he had climbed the last curve in low gear.

Clyde wrapped the log chain around two cottonwoods. It sagged, stiff and heavy, across the path.

I said, “He’ll kill you, Clyde. Don’t expect me to help you try to grab him and get killed at the same time.”

“There won’t be any killing.” Clyde settled himself in the darkness. “I’m going to take Nelly Tare back to Elm City. Alive.”

Old logs and gullies are thick in the Rivermouth country; hazel brush fairly blocks the forgotten road in a hundred places. It was long before Nelly’s headlights came sneaking through the trees. The katydids spoke a welcome; the dull parking lights went in and out, twisting, exploring, poking through the brush; they came on, with the motor growling in low.

Nelly made quite a spurt and went into second for a moment as the car swung up out of the gorge; sleek leaves flew from under his rear wheels; little rocks pattered back into the shrubbery.

Then Nelly saw the log chain. He jammed his brakes and the car slewed around until it was broadside. Nelly turned off the motor and lights in half a second; the car door swung; he was out on the log-chain side, and he had a gun in his hand.

“Don’t shoot, Nelly,” said Clyde Boston, stepping in front of the trees and turning on his flashlight.

I didn’t want to be killed, so I stood behind a tree and watched them. The flashlight thrust out a long, strong beam; Clyde stood fifteen feet away from the car’s radiator, but the shaft of his lamp was like whitewash on Nelly Tare.

“It’s Clyde,” the sheriff said. “Clyde Boston. You remember me? I was up at your sister’s place today.”

Nelly cried, “Turn off that light!”

“No,” Clyde said. “And I’m warning you not to shoot the light out, because I’m holding it right in front of my stomach. My stomach’s a big target. You wouldn’t want to shoot my stomach, would you, Nelly?”

Nelson Tare’s hair was too long, and he needed a shave. He looked like some wild thing that had been dug out of the woods. “Clyde! I’m telling you for the last time! Turn it off!”

Clyde’s voice was a smooth rumble. “Remember one time when we went hunting rabbits?” He edged forward a little. “You and Dave and me. Remember? A big jack sat down, waiting for you to kill him. And you couldn’t pull the trigger. You couldn’t kill him.”

Nelly had his face screwed into a wad, and his teeth showed between his lips.

“Never shot anything or anybody, did you, Nelly?” There was a snapping sound, and I jumped. It was only a stick breaking under Clyde’s foot as he moved nearer to the car. “You never shot a soul. Not a jack-rabbit or anything. You couldn’t.”

He was only ten feet away from Nelly and Nelly’s gun.

“You just pretended you could. But the guards in Oklahoma and Missouri didn’t know you the way I do. They hadn’t ever gone hunting with you, had they?”

He took another step forward. Another. Nelly was something out of a waxworks in a sideshow, watching him come. Then a vague suffusion of light began to show around them; a carload of deputies had spotted my car at the head of the lane; their headlamps came hurtling toward us.

“You shot telephones off of desks,” Clyde purred to Nelly, “and tires off of cars. You’ve been around and you’ve done a lot of shooting. But you never shot things that the blood ran out of…Now, you drop your gun, Nelly. Drop it on the ground. Gosh, I was crazy this afternoon. I shouldn’t have laid down when you told me to. I should have just stood there.”

Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong, I don’t know. The car stopped and I heard men yell, “Look out, Sheriff!” They were ready with their machine guns, trying to hustle themselves into some position where they could spatter the daylights out of Nelly Tare without shooting Clyde Boston too. Clyde didn’t give them a chance to do it. He dove forward; he flung his arms around Nelly and crushed him to the ground.

Nelly cried, and I don’t like to think about it; sometimes I wake up in the night and think I hear him crying. My memory goes back to our haymow days and to the rats in the chicken pen — the rats that Nelly couldn’t shoot — and I remember the bloody cottontails dangling from Clyde’s belt.

Nelly cried, but not solely because he was captured and would never be free again. He wept because the world realized something he had tried to keep hidden, even from himself. When he was taken back into prison, he wore an expression of tragic perplexity. It must have been hideous for him to know that he, who had loved guns his whole life long, should at last be betrayed by them.