“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.”