The Desperado

Chapter 4

around the second day, on the trail back to John's City, I began to think straight again. I began to wonder if maybe Pappy hadn't been right again and I was acting like a damn fool by going back and asking for more trouble from the police. Maybe—but I had a feeling that wouldn't be wiped away by straight thinking. It was a feeling of something stretching and snapping my nerves like too-tight banjo strings. I couldn't place it then, but I found out later what the feeling was. It was fear.

Up until now it was just a word that people talked about sometimes. I always thought it was something a man felt when a gun was pointed at him and the hammer was falling forward, of when a condemned man stood on the gallows scaffold waiting for the trap to spring. But then I remembered that I hadn't felt it when Paul Creyton had taken a shot at me a few nights back. This was something new. And I couldn't explain it. When I felt it, I just pushed Red a little harder in the direction of John's City.

We made the return trip in three days, because I wasn't as careful as Pappy had been about covering my trail. We came onto the John's City range from the north, and I made for the Bannerman ranch first because it was closer than our own place, and I wanted to see if Laurin was all right. I remember riding across the flat in the brilliant afternoon, wondering what I would do if the cavalry or police happened to be waiting for me there at the Bannermans'. I had been around Ray Novak and his pa enough to be familiar with the law man's saying: “If you want to catch a fugitive, watch his woman.”

But I didn't see anything. I raised the chimney of the Bannerman ranch house first, sticking clear-cut against the ice-blue sky. And pretty soon I could make out the whole house and the corrals and outbuildings, and that feeling in my stomach came back again and told me that something was wrong.

It was too quiet, for one thing. There are sounds peculiar to cattle outfits—the sound of blacksmith hammers, the rattle of wagons, or clop of horses—sounds you don't notice particularly until they are missing. There were none of those sounds as I rode into the ranch yard.

And there were other things. There were no horses in the holding corrals, and the barn doors flapped forlornly in the prairie wind, and the bunkhouse, where the ranch hands were supposed to be, was empty. The well-tended outfit I had seen a few days before looked like a ghost ranch now. And, somehow, I knew it all tied up with that feeling I had been carrying.

I rode Red right up to the back door and yelled in.

“Laurin! Joe! Is anybody home?”

It was like shouting into a well just to hear your voice go round and round the naked walls, knowing that nobody was going to answer.

“Laurin, are you in there?”

Joe, the old man, the ranch hands, they didn't mean a damn to me. But Laurin...

I didn't dare think any further than that. She was all right. She had gone away somewhere, visiting maybe. Shehad to be all right.

I dropped down from the saddle, took the back steps in one jump, and rattled the back door.

“Laurin!”

I hadn't expected anything to happen. It was just that I didn't know what else to do. I was about to turn away and ride as fast as I could to some place where somebody would tell me what was going on here. Something was crazy. Something was all wrong. I could sense it the way a horse senses that he's about to step on a snake, and I wanted to shy away, just the way a horse would do. I took the first step back from the door, when I heard something inside the house.

It moved slowly, whatever it was. Not with stealth, not as if it was trying to creep up on something. More as if it was being dragged, or as if it was dragging itself. Whatever it was, it was coming into the kitchen, toward the back door where I still stood. Then I saw what it was.

“Joe,” I heard myself saying, “my God, what happened to you?”

He was hardly recognizable as a man. His face had been beaten in, his eyes were purplish blue and swollen almost shut. His mouth was split open and dried blood clung to his chin. Blood was caked on his face and in his hair and smeared all over the front of his shirt.

“What are you doing here?” he asked dully. I noticed then that his front teeth were missing. But I only noted it in passing. In the back of my mind. I could think of only one thing then—Laurin.

I jerked the screen door open and went inside. “Joe, where's Laurin? Is she all right?”

He looked at me stupidly and I grabbed the front of his shirt and shook him.

“Answer me, goddamn you! Where's Laurin?”

He shook his head dumbly and began to sag. I held him up and pulled a kitchen chair over with my foot and let him sit down.

“So help me God,” I said, “if you don't tell me what happened to Laurin I'll finish what somebody else started.”

He worked his mouth. I couldn't tell if he understood me or not. It took him a long time to get a sound out. He worked his mouth, rubbed his bloody face, licked his split lips.

Then, “Laurin...” he said finally. “She's ... all right.”

I realized that I had been holding my breath all the time it had taken him to get those words out. Now I let it out. It whistled between my teeth, and my heart began to beat and blood began to flow. Relief washed over me like cool water on a hot day.

“Where is she, Joe? Tell me that.”

He started to get up, then sat down again. He made meaningless motions with his hands. Whoever had worked on him had done a hell of a good job. I wondered if maybe there wasn't a hole in the back of his head where all his brains had leaked out.

“Answer me, Joe! Where is she? Where is Laurin?”

“Your place,” he managed at last. “Your place... with your ma.”

I didn't stop to wonder what Laurin would be doing at our ranch. I was too relieved to wonder about anything then. Joe started to stand up again and I pushed him down.

“Stay where you are,” I said. “I'll get you some water.”

I found a bucket of water and a dipper and a crock bowl on the kitchen washstand. Then I got some dish towels out of the cupboard and brought the whole business over and put it on the kitchen table. I wet the towel and wiped some of the blood off his face. I squeezed some water over his head and cleaned a deep scalp wound behind his ear. That was about all I could do for him. He didn't look much better after I had finished, but he seemed to feel better.

I gave him a drink out of the dipper and said, “Can you talk now?”

He touched his mouth gently, then his eyes and nose. “Yes,” he said. “I guess I can talk.”

“What happened to you?” I asked. “What happened out there?” I motioned toward the empty corrals and barns and bunkhouse out in the ranch yard.

“The police,” he said. “The goddamned state police. They came here yesterday morning wanting to know where you were. When we didn't tell them, they ran off all the livestock—that's where the hands are, looking for the cattle. They threatened to burn the place if we didn't tell them. They're mad. Crazy mad. That bluebelly that Ray gave the beating to was the governor's nephew, or cousin, or something, and all hell's broke loose in John's City. They're out to get every man that ever said a word against the carpetbag rule. They want you especially bad, I guess.”

“Why do they want me so bad? Hell, I wasn't the one that hit the governor's kinfolks.”

“Because you're the only one that got away from them,” Joe Bannerman said. “Ray Novak came back and gave himself up. But they're not satisfied. They got to thinking about that fight you had a while back. They won't be satisfied until they've got you on the work gang, right alongside of Ray Novak.”

So Ray Novak had come back. Gave himself up to carpetbag law. It didn't surprise me the way it should have. Maybe I knew all along that sooner or later all of that law-and-order his old man had pounded into him would come to the top. Well, that was all right with me. He could put in his time on the work gang if he wanted to, but not me. Not while I had two guns to fight with.

Joe Bannerman was studying me quietly, through those purple slits of eyes. Something was going on in that mind of his, but I couldn't make it out at first. There was something about it that made me uneasy.

“The police,” I said, “they came back today to have another go at finding out where I'd gone. Is that how you got that face?”

He nodded and looked away. It hit me then, and I knew what it was about his eyes that worried me. For some crazy reason, Joe Bannerman was feeling sorry for me. That wasn't like him. Refusing to give information to the bluebellies was different—any honest rancher would have done the same thing—but that look of sympathy—I hadn't been ready for that. Not from Joe Bannerman.

He said, “Tall, have you been home yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I wanted to make sure that Laurin was all right.”

He looked at his hands as if there was something very special about them. As if he had never seen another pair just like them before.

“I thought maybe you knew,” he said. “I figured maybe that was the reason you came back.”

I looked at him. “You thought I knew what?”

“About your pa.”

“Goddammit, Joe, can't you come out and tell something straight, without breaking it into a hundred pieces? What about Pa?”

Then he lifted his head and he must have looked at me for a full minute before he finally answered.

“Tall, your pa's dead.”

I don't know how long I stood there staring at him, wanting to curse him for a lousy liar, and all the time knowing that he was telling the truth. That was the answer to the feeling I'd had. It all made sense now. Pa, a part of me, had died.

Somehow I got out of the house. I remember Joe Bannerman saying, “Tall, be careful. There's cavalry and police everywhere.”

I punished Red unmercifully going across the open range southeast toward our place. I rode like a crazy man. The sensible part of my brain told me that there was no use taking it out on Red. It wasn't his fault. If it was anybody's fault, it was my own. But the burning part of my brain wanted to hit back and hurt something, as Pa had been hurt, and Red was the only thing at hand.

But all the wildness went away the minute our ranch house came into sight, and there was nothing left but emptiness and ache. There were several buggies and hacks of one kind or another sitting in front of the house, and solemn, silent men stood around in little clusters near the front porch. I swung Red around to come in the back way, and the men didn't see me.

I didn't see any police. All the men were ranchers, friends of Pa's. The womenfolk, I knew, would be inside with Ma. As I pulled Red into the ranch yard, Bucky Stow, one of our hands, came out of the bunkhouse. When he saw who it was, he hurried toward me in that rolling, awkward gait that horsemen always have when they're on the ground.

“Tall, for Christ's sake,” he said, “you oughtn't to come here. The damn bluebellies are riled up enough as it is.”

I dropped heavily from the saddle and put the reins in his hands. I noticed then that I had brought blood along Red's glossy ribs where I had raked him hard with my spur rowels, and for some crazy reason that made me almost as sick as finding out about Pa. Pa had loved that horse.

But I slapped him gently on the rump and he seemed to understand. I said, “Give him some grain, Bucky. All he wants.”

“Tall, you're not going to stay here, are you?”

I left him standing there and headed toward the house. I went into the kitchen where two ranch wives were rattling pots and pans on the kitchen stove. They looked up startled, as I came in. I didn't notice who they were. I went straight on through the room and into the parlor where the others were.

The minute I stepped into the room everything got dead quiet. Ma was sitting dry-eyed in a rocker, staring at nothing in particular. Laurin was standing beside her with a coffee pot in one hand, holding it out from her as if she was about to pour, but there was no cup. She stared at me for a moment. Then, without a word, she began getting the other women out of the room.

In a minute the room was empty, except for just me and Ma. I don't believe it was until then that she realized that I was there. I walked over to her, not knowing what to do or say. When at last she looked up and saw me, I dropped down and put my head in her lap the way I used to do when I was a small boy. And I think I cried.

One of us must have said something after that, but I don't remember. After a while one of the ranch wives, well meaning, came in from the kitchen and said timidly:

“Tall, hadn't you better eat something?”

It was so typical of ranch wives. If there's nothing that can possibly be done, they want to feed you. Ma would have done the same thing if she had been in the woman's place.

I got to my feet and said, “Later, not now, thank you.” The words sounded ridiculous, like somebody turning down a second piece of cake at a tea party. And out there somewhere Pa was dead.

The woman disappeared again, and I touched Ma's head, her thin, gray hair. “Ma...” But I didn't know how to go on. I wasn't any good at comforting people. And besides, she was still too numb with shock to understand anything I could say to her.

As I stood there looking at her, the ache and emptiness in my belly began to turn to quiet anger. Slowly, I began to put things together that I had been too numb to think about before. Instinctively, I knew that Pa hadn't died in any of the thousand and one ways a man could die around a ranch. He had been killed. I didn't know by whom, but I would find out. And when I did...

Ma must have sensed what I was thinking. She looked up at me with those wide, dry eyes of hers. She noticed the two .44's that I had buckled on, and I saw a sudden stark fear looking out at me.

“Tall ... no! There's nothing you can do now. There's nothing you can do to bring him back.”

But that anger that had started so quietly was now a hot, blazing thing. I heard myself saying:

“He won't get away with it, Ma. Whoever it was, I'll find him. Texas isn't big enough for him to hide where I can't find him. The world isn't that big. And when I do find him...”

That helplessness and terror in her eyes stopped me. She looked at me, and kept looking at me, as if she had never seen me before. I should have kept my thoughts to myself, but it was too late to change that now.

“Ma,” I said, “don't worry about me.”

But she didn't say anything. She just kept looking at me.

I went back to the kitchen and motioned to one of the ranch wives. “Would you mind looking after Ma for a while?” I asked. “I want to go outside for a minute, where the men are.”

“Of course, Tall.” She was a tremendous, big-bosomed woman, holding a steaming coffee pot in her hand. She had that same look of sympathy in her eyes that I had noticed with Joe Bannerman, and I hated it.

I went out the back way instead of the front, where I would have to pass through the parlor again and face that look of Ma's. Jed Horner was the first man I saw, a small rancher to the south, down below the arroyo. He and Cy Clanton were talking quietly near the end of the front porch. Neither of them seemed especially surprised to see me. They came forward solemnly to shake hands, something they never would have bothered about if Pa had been alive.

“We guessed that you'd be comin' back, Tall,” Jed Horner said soberly, “as soon as you got the word.”

“I guess you know all about it, don't you?” Cy Clanton asked.

“I don't know anything,” I said, the words coming out tight. “But I'd like to know.”

The two men nodded together, both of them glancing curiously at my two pistols. Then I noticed something strange for a gathering like this. All the men were armed, not only with the usual side guns, but some of them with shotguns and rifles.

“It was the police,” Horner said. “Some damned white trash from down below Hooker's Bend somewhere. It seems like all the Davis police in Texas have congregated here at John's Qty. They claim they're goin' to teach us ranchers to be Christians if they have to kill half of us doin' it.” Then he patted the old long-barreled Sharps that he held in the crook of his arm. “But we've got some idea about that ourselves.”

“About Pa,” I said. “I want to know how it happened.”

“The police, like I said,” Horner shrugged. “There must have been about a dozen of them, according to your ma. They started pushin' your pa around, tryin' to make him tell where you'd gone, and one of them hit him with the barrel of his pistol. That, I guess, was the way it happened.”

“The funeral was yesterday,” Cy Clanton said. “We buried him in the family plot, in the churchyard at John's City. There wasn't a better man that your pa, Tall. If the police want a war, that's what they're goin' to get.”

The anger was like a knife in my chest. The other men drifted over one and two at a time until I was completely surrounded now. Their eyes regarded me soberly.

I said, “Does anybody know the one that did it? The one that swung the pistol?”

Pat Roark, a thin, sharp-eyed man about my own age, said, “I heard it was the captain of the Hooker outfit. It seemed like he was a friend of that carpetbagger you gun-whipped a while back. Name of Thornton, I think.”

I knew what to do then. I turned to Bucky Stow, who had sidled in with the group of men. “Bucky, cut out a fresh horse for me, will you? I guess I'll be riding into John's City.”

There was a murmur among the men. A sound of uneasiness. “Don't get us wrong, Tall,” Jed Horner said. “We're behind you in whatever you decide to do about this. Like I said, there wasn't a better man than your pa. But I think you ought to know it would be taking an awful chance riding right into town that way. Police are o thick as lice on a dog's back.”

I turned on him. “You don't have to go with me. It's my job and I can take care of it myself.”

“Tall, you know we don't mean it that way. If that's what you want, why, I guess you can count on us to be with you.”

The other men made sounds of agreement, but a bit reluctantly. Then a man I hadn't noticed before pushed his way to the front. He was a small man with a ridiculously large mustache, and dark, intelligent little eyes peering out from under bushy gray eyebrows. He was Martin Novak, Ray Novak's father.

“Don't you think you ought to think this over, Tall?” he asked quietly. “Is it going to settle anything if you and the other ranchers go riding into town, looking for a war?”

“I'm not asking anybody to go with me,” I said.

He regarded my two pistols, and I wondered if Ray had told him about Pappy Garret. But those eyes of his didn't tell me a thing. Then he seemed to forget me and turned slowly in a small circle, looking at the other men.

“Why don't you break it up?” he asked quietly. “Go on home and give things a chance to straighten out by themselves. It'll just make things worse—somebody else will get killed—if you all go into town looking for trouble.” Then he turned back to me. “Tall, you're wanted in these parts by the law. These other men will be breaking the law, too, if they tie up with you in this thing. Sooner or later there'll be real law in Texas. When that happens, this man Thornton will get what's coming to him. I'll give you my word on that.”

He actually meant every word of what he was saying. He had lived law for so long that anything that walked behind a tin badge got to be a god to him.

“Do you expect me to do like your son?” I asked tightly. “Would you want me to give myself up to the bluebellies, after what they have just done here?”

He started to say something, and then changed his mind. He looked at me for a long moment, then, “I guess it wouldn't do any good to tell you what I think, Tall. You'd go on and do things your own way.”

He turned and walked through the circle of ranchers. I heard Pat Roark saying, “Well, I'll be damned. I never figured the marshal would back down on his own people when it came to a fight with the bluebellies.”

Then Bucky Stow came out of the barn leading a saddled bay over to where we were. Slowly, the circle begin to break up and the men went, one and two at a time, to get their horses.

I said, “Thanks, Bucky,” as I took the bay's reins. “Take good care of Red. I'll want him when I get back.”

Bucky shuffled uncomfortably. He was a quiet man who never said much, and I'd never known him to carry a gun, much less use one. He said, “Tall, I guess you know how I felt about your pa. I'd be glad to...”

“You stay here, Bucky. You look after the womenfolks.”

His eyes looked relieved. I led the bay over toward the corral where the ranchers were getting their horses cinched up. I hadn't taken more than a dozen steps when Laurin came out on the front porch.

“Tall?”

I wasn't sure that I wanted to talk to Laurin now. There was only one thing in my mind—a man by the name of Thornton. But she called again, I paused, and then I went over to the end of the porch. Her eyes had that wide, frightened look that I had seen in Ma's eyes a few minutes before.

“Tall,” she said tightly, “don't do it. They'll kill you in a minute if you go into town looking for trouble.”

I tried to keep my voice even. “Nothing's going to happen to me. You just stay here and take care of Ma. There's nothing to worry about.”

She made a helpless little gesture with her hands. Even through all the bitterness that was in me, I thought how beautiful she was and how much I loved her.

“Tall, please, for my sake, for your mother's sake, don't do anything now.”

“I have to do something,” I said. “Don't you see that?” “I just know that there's going to be more trouble, and more killing. It will be the start of a war if you go into town bent on revenge.”

I tried to be patient, but there was something inside me that kept urging me to strike out and hurt. I said, “What do you want me to do, turn yellow like Ray Novak, and turn myself over to the bluebellies?”

“It wouldn't be turning yellow, Tall.” Her voice was breathless, the words coming out fast, stumbling over each other in their haste. “Tall, can't you see what you'll be starting? If you can't think of yourself, think of others. Of me, and your mother.”

The ranchers were waiting. They had their horses saddled, and the only thing holding them up was myself. I started backing away. “This is man's business,” I said. “Women just don't understand things like this.” Then I added, “Don't worry. Everything's going to be all right.” But the words sounded flat and stale in my own ears.

We rode away from the ranch house with me in the van, and Pat Roark riding beside me. There was about a dozen of us, and we rode silently, nobody saying a word. I concentrated on the thud of the bay's hoofs, and the little squirts of powdery red dust that rose up, and a lazily circling chicken hawk up above, cutting clean wide swaths against a glass sky. I didn't dare to think of Pa. There would be time enough for that.

We traveled south on the wagon road that we always used going to Garner's Store, across the arroyo and onto the flats. We reached Garner's Store, a squat boxlike affair made of cottonwood logs and 'dobe bricks, about an hour after leaving the ranch house. It set in the V of the road, where the wagon tracks leading from the Bannerman and the Novak ranches came together. As we sighted the store, we saw two Negro police leave in a cloud of dust, heading south toward John's City.

There was no use going after them. A dozen armed men couldn't very well ride into town and expect to surprise anybody. We pulled our horses up at the store and let them drink at the watering trough. After a while Old Man Garner came out looking vaguely worried.

I said, “Those were Davis police, weren't they, the ones that fogged out of your place a few minutes back?”

The old man nodded. “I guess they was kind of ex-pectin' something out of your pa's friends, Tall. Anyway, they stayed here until they saw you comin', and then they lit out for town.”

Pat Roark said, “Did they mention what outfit they was out of?”

The old man thought. “They mentioned Hooker's Bend. I reckon they come from around there.”

Pat looked at me. “You ready to ride, Tall?”

“I'm ready.”