Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) Page 2

  The wind was raw and cold on the high plains. Hunching our shoulders, we pushed against it, riding a land that offered us nothing but prairie and sky.

  We had only their tracks to guide us, and the anger that grew more terrible as the hours drew on. Pa sat up in his saddle and made no sound. His cheeks hollowed down and his eyes sank back into his skull, but the light in them scared me. If I was Bob Heseltine I’d be a worried man.

  “You’ve got the makin’s, Edwin,” he said suddenly. “You’ll make big tracks on the land. There was a Texas Ranger once who said there was no stoppin’ a man who knew he was in the right and kept a-comin’.”

  Big tracks on the land. They were words he used of few men, only such as Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, Goodnight, and Slaughter.

  Pa began to speak of them, telling me stories of the Goodnight-Loving Trail, of mountain men, trail drivers, and Texas Rangers. Of ancestors of ours who fought with the Green Mountain Boys, of Decatur and Andy Jackson, and all sorts of people and things I’d never guessed he knew of. Alongside of some of those men, Bob Heseltine didn’t sound like much; all the stories I’d heard of him began to sound like a man hollering into an empty rain barrel—the sound coming back, but nothing there.

  Cold, spitting rain began to fall, the tracks grew faint. From time to time we’d find a hoofprint, the stub of a cigarette, or some small thing to mark their passing.

  Pa’s leg looked awful. It was swollen around the splint, but he wouldn’t let me touch it. He’d taken his knife and slit his pants-leg to ease the pressure, and toward nightfall he asked me to split his boot. His gasp of relief when I done it told me how awful the pain had been before.

  When I got back into the saddle it came over me all of a sudden that pa wasn’t going to make it.

  I knew then that he knew it, too. He was just hanging on, hoping we’d come up with them whilst he could stand beside me at the showdown. He would get back the money he’d been trusted with, and he could leave me fixed for the future.

  That was it. I knew what he was thinking, and why. He was thinking of the two things that meant most to him. His given word, and me.

  Was I worth it? Was I really worth all that? Was I worth any part of the hard work and suffering pa had gone through?

  Was I?

  Chapter 2

  *

  A MOMENT THERE I sat very still…what would I do?

  There had always been pa. Somehow I’d never had to worry because he was always there, telling me what to do. Time to time he got my dander up and I’d growl around for a few days, or I’d ride off to town to talk to Doc or the Kid, but when I got around to riding home, pa was always there.

  Come to think of it, he had never held it up to me.

  Inside me there was a horrible, sinking feeling. Without pa, what was there? I’d be alone.

  So far as I knew, I had no kinfolk anywheres at all, and the friends I had were pa’s friends.

  “Your ma,” he said suddenly, “was a fine woman. I wish you could have knowed her. Educated, too. She came of good folks, and she had book learnin’.

  “Her family was New England Irish…lace-curtain Irish. Time was I mentioned her family name to an Irishman and he says hers was an old family, born of the old chiefs of Ireland going back to before the Danes came.”

  Ma died when I was three and I remembered her only as somebody warm and wonderful who held me close and made much of me when I was hurt or feeling bad. She’d been a pretty woman. Pa said it, and that much I remembered. She died of a fever on Cache Creek when we was traveling to Texas.

  *

  IT WAS SUNDOWN when we saw the fire, and it was far off. The country was no longer level, but broken into ravines, some of them choked with brush.

  We forked out our rifles and closed in, but before we got within hailing distance we saw there were a couple of wagons and off to one side some mules picketed. It was a camp of buffalo hunters.

  One man taken one look at pa and said, “Mister, you better let me help you off that horse.”

  “My son will do it,” pa said, and I helped him down, but as my hands took his weight I felt him tremble, and when I got him stretched out alongside the fire I looked into his eyes and saw that he was dying.

  There was choking fear in me. I glanced around at their faces. “Is anybody here a doctor? Pa’s in bad shape.”

  One man was already rolling his sleeves. “I ain’t no saw-bones, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  When he cut away pa’s pants-leg I couldn’t stand to look. The jagged end of the bone had come through the flesh and the wound looked ugly.

  That man who’d said he was no doctor worked fast and he seemed to know exactly what to do.

  Another man handed me a cup. “You’re done up, boy. Have some coffee.”

  Whilst the man worked on pa and I ate and drank, I told them our story.

  “They were here,” one of them said. “They pulled in last night and left shy of daylight. You aren’t about to catch them.”

  “I got to. Pa taken them cows up the trail on trust, and the folks who trusted their cattle to him need their money.”

  There was a lean, well-set man with a reddish mustache who sat back from the fire.

  He looked over at me. “My friend, you’d have to tie into three men, and they’d be ready for you.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “but they’ve got our money. I got to get it back.”

  “Do you know those men?”

  So I explained about Doc and Reese and Heseltine, and how pa and me had words and I’d gone off and left him, and had I been there I could have caught that horse. Then I told about facing the three of them and backing down.

  “You did right.” The big bearded man who seemed to be the head man spoke emphatically. “I didn’t cotton to that outfit myself. You’d have had no chance with the three of them…and your pa was waiting, his leg broken.”

  The man who had been treating pa walked over to me, rolling down his sleeves. “You’d better go sit by him, and you’d better stay with him. I think he’d like it.”

  Pa was resting quiet when I got to him. I could smell whiskey, and I guessed they had given it to him to ease the pain.

  He caught hold of my hand. “Son, I never been much of a father. If your mother had lived I’d have done better. She had a feeling for things I never rightly had. Ever since your ma died I been trying to think out what she would have had me do with you. My own father was killed in a river accident when I was four.”

  “You done all right, pa. I just ain’t much account.”

  “No, you’re a good boy. You always were. I don’t hold it against you that you looked up to Doc Sites and Kid Reese. They must have seemed a lot more exciting than me.”

  “They couldn’t hold a candle to you. Not even in their best days.”

  “I’d seen their like before.” He looked at me. “When I was a boy, not much older than you, I traipsed around with some men not any better than Sites and Reese. I nigh got myself into more trouble than I could handle. I knew what could come of it.”

  He lay very still for a while and his breathing was slow and awful heavy. He seemed to have trouble catching his breath.

  “I’m sorry for the folks at home,” he said. “Teale wanted to send his girl to school, and Sackleton planned to buy a milk cow for his wife. Most of them needed money to tide them over until planting time. Now they’ll be hard up.”

  “I’ll get it back, pa. If it’s the last thing I do.”

  “I wouldn’t put it on you, son. You’ll have to make your own way now.”

  He knew he wasn’t going to make it. Right there he said it, and I sat there beside him, holding his hand, wishing I’d not said some of the mean things I’d said, wishing I’d listened more than I had, understood him better. I’d never stood in his boots, trying to make a living against the works of nature and the changes of money value and the like. I’d never had a boy to raise all alone.

  “Pa,” I whispered, not able
to speak out loud, “pa, I’ll make it. I really will. I know what you tried to do for me, and I’ll pay them back. You gave your word, and now I give you mine.”

  He kind of squeezed my hand, so I guess he heard me, and then he was dead. He went easy at the last, just a sort of sigh.

  Gangrene had set in, the bearded man said, and the poison was all through him. They might have saved his life by taking off his leg, but nobody there had ever done the like, and anyway, he wouldn’t hear of it.

  We laid him to rest on a high knoll alongside the river, and I set up there with a cinch-ring held by two sticks and burned his name and the date into a wooden slab. Not that it would last long—things don’t in that country. It was little enough mark for him to leave on the land. He lay there alone like many another before and after, simple men who just wanted to build their homes, and to help build a country.

  If he was to make any mark at all it had to be through me. I was all he left in the world, aside from a worn-out saddle and a hard-used Winchester.

  When I stuck that slab into the ground I went down the knoll to saddle up.

  The man with the reddish mustache, he was standing there beside the fire, and he said, “You fixing to take in after those men?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what pa would have done.”

  “Mind if I ride along? That’s a lonely ride you’ve got ahead of you.”

  Well, I just looked at him and felt a lump come into my throat. “Yes, sir. If you’ve a mind to.”

  “He was quite a man, that father of yours. Only death could stop a man like that.”

  “Death won’t. I’m a-goin’ to ride in his place.”

  “Were you very close? You and your pa?”

  “No, sir. I wouldn’t listen to him. I figured I was a whole sight smarter. I never guessed how much he knew.”

  “You aren’t alone. A lot of us didn’t listen when we should have. It takes time for a boy to appreciate his father.”

  He turned to the bearded man. “Wright, will you take my hides off my hands? And we’ll need a couple of pack horses and some grub.”

  “All right, Con. Take what you’ve the need for.”

  And that was how I met Con Judy, and how we rode together on a trail that wasn’t to see an end for a long, long time.

  Chapter 3

  *

  THE TRAIL LED toward the Canadian, and I learned a thing or two about Con Judy. Pa had been a good man on a trail, but he couldn’t match up with Con. Time and again when I lost the trail he would pick it up, seeming to know almost by instinct the way they had taken.

  Nobody talked less than he did, but you can learn about a man by riding with him. He never wasted a motion, never took an unnecessary chance. He scouted every possible ambush, every creek-crossing. He never made a point of it, but he knew what he was doing.

  One day I told him what Doc and the Kid had said about Bob Heseltine. When I finished Con simply said, “You never know how a man will stack up until he’s faced with it.”

  When pa died he left mighty little. He had eighteen dollars and a few cents in his pockets, and a worn-out pistol. His Winchester was better than mine. On the ranch we’d left behind there was a cabin, a corral, and a few head of scrub cattle alongside a water hole.

  Eighteen dollars wasn’t going to carry me far, but I had eight dollars of my own money and I could sell his pistol and my Winchester. They wouldn’t bring much, but I’d get maybe fifteen to twenty dollars for them.

  Toward sundown of the third day we rode up to Happy Jack’s stage station. Whilst Con sat his horse, rifle in hand, I scouted the corral. None of the horses I was looking for was there.

  Happy Jack came out, rolling down his sleeves. He had been washing up dishes after feeding the stage passengers. He didn’t know me from Adam, but he knew Con Judy. I was to find that a lot of folks did.

  “They were here,” Happy Jack said. “Rode in about sundown last night. Bought themselves a meal and a couple of bottles and paid for it with gold money. I figure they’re headed for Mobeetie or Dodge.”

  “They didn’t say?”

  “Nary a word.”

  So we set up to the table and finished the grub Jack had left from the stage crowd. It was venison steak and beans. Between the two of us we must have drunk a gallon of black coffee.

  “That Heseltine,” Jack suggested, “he had him a woman over to Granada. Worked in a saloon.”

  “Aren’t many women in this country,” Con Judy said.

  “And he’s got money,” I added.

  When we rode into Granada it was blowing a norther and it was cold. Made a body wonder what he’d done with his summer’s wages.

  Had the dust been just a mite thicker we could have gone right past the place without ever seeing the town.

  There was a scattering of such towns over thousands of square miles—a half-dozen soddies, a saloon, and what passed for a store. There would be stacks of buffalo hides dried stiff as boards, corrals, and a lean-to that was both stable and blacksmith shop. Sometimes there was a creek, often just a seep of water or a spring. Occasionally there was a dug well.

  The houses were unpainted, and grayed by wind and sun, street alternately muddy or dusty. This place was no better or no worse than any town beginning from nothing, struggling to make a shape and a plan for itself.

  The man in the saloon said, “She’s gone. Feller rode in here yestiddy. He done showed her some gold money and she lit out like her skirts was afire.”

  That was the way of it. We were always a little late, or a little too far behind.

  We ate what the man had to offer, and neither of us did much talking. Finally Con said, “We might find a trail after this dust, but likely not. Heseltine has money and he has a girl, so I’m guessing he’ll ride for some place where he can spend money. That means Denver City or Leadville.”

  We rode westward, and in the long silences of the prairie trail, with only the whisper of hoofs in the brown grass of autumn, my thoughts kept turning back to pa. It was little enough of a life he’d had, and I knew that the only way I could repay him was to trail those men down and take our money back to Texas. Pa had been a man to stand on principle, and I said as much to Con.

  Con was older than me by ten years, I surmised, although he never said and folks in the West weren’t much on asking or answering personal questions. A man was what he did, how he shaped up at work, or against trouble.

  Con was hard to place. Mostly he spoke like an educated man, but other times he’d talk careless like those of us who didn’t know any better. No two men can ride a trail together without coming to know each other, and I came to know Con Judy.

  I found myself wanting to be like him. And after I’d been with him a while, I began to speak better—a little more the way he did.

  He took to calling me Shell. That was after I told him my right name was Edwin Shelvin Tucker.

  “Shell,” he said once, “the thing that shows the man is his willingness to accept responsibility for himself and his actions. Only a tinhorn blames what he is on his folks or the times or something else besides himself. There have been good men and great men in all periods of history, and they did it themselves.”

  The way he said things they never seemed like preaching, and even had they been, I’d have listened. Con Judy was the kind of man you believed. When I stacked Kid Reese and Doc Sites up against him, they came out the short-horns they were.

  We found no more tracks and we looked for none. We were heading for Denver City, a fast-growing town with saloons and dance halls that were wide open to a man with money.

  There was something nagging at me, and I mentioned it to Con. “That Heseltine now…I wonder how he’ll like sharing that money with Sites and Reese? And even if he’s willing, how about her?”

  Con smiled. “You’re growing up, Shell. I’d lay even money they’ve all done some thinking about that.”

  Never in my born days had I seen such a place as Denver. Brick blocks were going u
p all about, and several had been completed. The log cabins and sod houses that had been the beginning of the town looked down-at-heel and shabby beside the new buildings. Nor had I ever seen so many people. You’d have thought there was a picnic in town.

  “How will we ever find them?” I asked Con. “I never saw so many people before.”

  “We’ll call on Jim Cook. He’s been a lawman here, and he makes it his business to know all the crooks in the country and to keep them located. If they’re here or have been here, he will know.”

  Jim Cook was a fine, tall man with a mustache. “Yes, I know the man. I believe he’s in Leadville. There are more outlaws in that town today than any place in Colorado or Kansas.”

  We had camped in an arroyo. Con was making coffee and I had washed out my shirt and hung it on a bush to dry in the sun. Many a time I’d had to let the heat of my body dry a wet shirt, for a man couldn’t pack much in the way of clothes when he was hightailing it across country.

  “After you catch up to them, what then?” Con asked me.

  Con had a way of asking questions that set a man to thinking. Worrying, even.

  Well, what would I do? Until now everything had been ordered by circumstances, or by pa. There had been work to do, and not much choice about when to do it.

  If a man wanted to eat he had to work, and he had to be at it from sunup to sundown. I’d done a lot of daydreaming, and a certain amount of that goes into the making of a man, but all that talk with Reese and Sites had been another kind of daydreaming.

  Ofttimes a boy gets rid of some of the restlessness that’s in him by imagining he’s a wild bandito on the Texas plains, and he thinks outlaws are bold and daring men. The trouble comes when he has to face up to reality, and then such daydreams had best be forgotten. There’s something almighty real about a sheriff’s posse, a loaded gun, and a hangman’s noose.

  What would I do? Get the money back, ride to Texas, and pay those folks what they had coming.

  There’d be a little left, and there was the place. It was a good place, but it wasn’t in me to go back there alone and raise cows.