Over on the Dry Side Page 3

  “You think she and those men came from the same outfit?”

  “There ain’t too many outfits around I know of. I think maybe it’s the same outfit. She bein’ a woman.…Maybe she’s got different feelings.”

  “That might be the reason. And sometimes an honest person gets roped into a setup they don’t rightly know how to get clear of. What about that cabin? Anything strike you odd about it?”

  “Yessir. I believe it was built by the same man who built this. The same kind of work.…Only that place up there is older. I think maybe he lived up there first and kept lookin’ down on this flat country and decided to come down here and settle.”

  “Might be right. Or maybe he just wanted two homes. One up high, one down below.” He looked at me again. “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Doban Kernohan. They call me Doby.”

  “Irish.…Well, we come of the same stock, Doby. I’m Irish, too.…Mostly Irish. My family left the old country a long time ago, and an ancestor of mine went to Newfoundland, then to the Gaspé Peninsula. From there to here, it’s a long story.”

  “You got a first name, mister?”

  “Owen. A name that is sometimes Irish, and sometimes Welsh, they tell me. Well, there’s been a sight of changing of names, Doby, especially among the Irish.

  “There was a time long ago when Irishmen were ordered by law to take an English name, and around about fourteen sixty-five, a time later, all those in four counties were to take the name of a town, a color, or a skill. Such as Sutton, Chester, Cork, or Kinsale for the town. Or the colors—any one they’d happen to choose. Or a trade, such as carpenter, smith, cook, or butler, to name just a few.

  “And some of the Irish changed their names because there was a move against us. Many in my family were killed, and when my great-grandfather escaped to England he was advised never to tell his true name, but to take another…or he’d be hunted down. So he took the name Chantry, although how he came by it I do not know, unless he happened to see and like the name, invented it, or took it from some man he admired. In any event, the name has served us well, and we, I trust, have brought it no dishonor.”

  “I know little Irish history,” I said.

  “That’s likely, Doby, but the thing to remember is that this is your country now. It’s well to know about the land from which you came. There’s pride in a heritage, but it’s here you live. This is the land that gives you bread.

  “Yet it’s a good thing to know the ways of the old countries, too, and there’s no shame in remembering. There’s some as would have it a disgrace to be Irish.…You’ll find places in eastern cities where they’ll hire no man with an Irish look or an Irish name. A good many of those who come here are poor when they land, and nobody knows what lays behind them.

  “Some are from families among the noblest on earth, and there’s many another who’s put a ‘Mac’ or an ‘O’ to his name to which he’s not entitled. But a man is what he makes himself, no matter what the blood or barony that lays behind him.”

  “What was your family name, Mr. Chantry, sir?”

  “We’ll not be talking of that, Doby. Three hundred years gone by and every child of the family has known the name. But not one has spoken it aloud. And so we shall not. Chantry is the name we’ve taken, and Chantry is the name we’ll keep.”

  “Did you come here to claim your brother’s ranch? Pa says it’s yours by right.”

  “No, lad, I came not for that. There was another thought in my mind, though t’was my brother I wished to see. The ranch will be your Pa’s and after him yours—but only to keep, and not to sell. I’ll make a deed that way.…But I’ll want living quarters here when I pass by, and I think I’ll claim the cabin up there the mountains are holding for me.”

  Something in my face drew his notice, for I was right worried, thinking of the girl. “What is it, boy? What’s troubling you?” he asked.

  “It’s just the girl…the woman, sir. I believe she likes the mountain place. I believe she goes there to be alone. She left some flowers there…” I said.

  “If she loves the place she can come when she wills, but give it up, I’ll not.” Owen tapped his breast pocket. “I’ve a deed here to all the land you’ve claimed and more. Even the slope of the mountain is mine, and a bit beyond it, here and there.

  “Four sections your father has claimed, and those four sections he can have. There’s thirty more I’ll keep for myself, for I’ve a love for this western land, and here I may stop one day after I’ve done some things that need doing.”

  It was the most I’d heard him talk, and the most he did talk for many another day.

  *

  AT DAYBREAK MY eyes opened to hear the echo of a rifle, and I came bolt upright and scared. Pa was puttin’ on his pants and reaching for his gun.

  But we couldn’t see aught. Only that Chantry was gone and his horse was gone, too. But an hour later when he came in he had some nice cuts of venison wrapped in its own hide.

  “Here’s some meat,” he said. “I’ll not be a drone, Kernohan.”

  Chantry did his share of the woodcuttin’ too, and he was a better than fair hand with an ax, cuttin’ clean and sure and wasting no effort. Yet he stayed close to the house, spending most of his time on the porch with his glass in his hand to study the rise of the mountains.

  Once I asked if I could look through it. “Yes,” he said, “but handle it gentle. There’s not its like in the world, I’m thinking. It was made some time ago by a man in a country far from here. He was the greatest master of his craft, and the lenses of this scope he ground himself.”

  It was astonishing the way the mountains leaped up at you. Far away as we were, you could almost reach out and touch the trees. I could even make out the cabin behind its trees, the bench at the door.

  Was it that he was watching? I felt a pang of jealousy, then. Was he watching for her?

  Chapter 3

  *

  IT WAS LONELY country. When Chantry come along he brought some news. We’d heard nothing of what went on. Here and there a prospector worked in the hills, but they were shy of Indians and so kept out of sight, just comin’ and goin’ on the run.

  South of us, in New Mexico, folks had told us there wasn’t no white men at all, that those who come before us had just gone on through or left their hair in some Indian’s wickiup.

  Some had come, all right, as we had, but they’d not stayed and there was no record of their comings and goings. Pa found a rusted Patterson Colt once, down on a wash to the south of us. An’ a couple of bones an’ a few metal buttons, all that was left to show for somebody who tried to move into that country.

  But there was Indians a-plenty, though a body saw mighty few of ’em. There were Utes to the north and around us, Navajos to the west and south, and Apaches east. Some friendly, some almighty mean and evil. Some just plain standoffish, wantin’ to stay to themselves and not be bothered. Well, we didn’t aim to bother them none.

  “I never give ’em much thought,” Pa said. “No more’n I would a white stranger. They’re folks. They got their ways, we got ours. If we cross, we’ll talk it over or fight, whichever way they want it to be.”

  Chantry agreed. “You can’t talk about all Indians the same way, boy. Any time a man comes along and says ‘Indians’ or ‘Mexicans’ or ‘Englishmen’ he’s bound to be wrong. Each man is a person unto himself, and you’ll find good, bad, and indifferent wherever you go.”

  Didn’t seem to me that Owen Chantry was taking any chances, though. When he put his pants on in the morning he also put on his gun belt and his gun. Most men put their hat on first. He put on that gun belt ’fore he drew on his boots.

  “You figurin’ on trouble?” I asked him once.

  He threw me a hard look. “Boy,” he said, “when a man comes at me shooting I figure he wants a fight. I surely wouldn’t want him to go away disappointed.

  “I don’t want trouble or expect trouble, but I don’t want to be found dead because
I was optimistic. I’ll wear the gun, use my own good judgment, be careful of what I say, and perhaps there won’t be trouble.”

  He still didn’t tell us why he’d come to start with, and it was a question you didn’t ask. He was more than welcome. In them days you could ride a hundred miles in any direction and not see a soul.

  Once Chantry got started he was a natural-born storyteller. Of a nighttime, when the fire burned down on the hearth and the shadows made witches on the walls. He’d been a sight of places and he’d read the stories of ancient times, the old stories of Ireland, of the sea and some folks called the Trojans who lived somewheres beyond the mountains and did a lot of fighting with the Greeks over a woman. And stories of Richard the Lion-Hearted, who was a great fighter but a poor king.

  An’ stories of Jean Ango, whose ships had been to America before Columbus. And of Ben Jonson, a poet, who could lift a cask of canary wine over his head and drink from the bunghole. He told of Gessar Khan, stories that happened in the black tents of nomads in haunted deserts on the flanks of a land called Tibet.

  An’ so our world became a bigger place. He had him a way with words, did Owen Chantry, but he was a hard man, and dangerous.

  We found that out on the cold, still morning when the strangers come down the hills.

  I’d gone to put hay down the chutes to the mangers for the stock, an’ I was in the loft with a hayfork when they come.

  Pa was in the yard, puttin’ a harness on the mules for the plowing.

  They come ridin’ up the trail, five rough men ridin’ in one tight bunch, astride better horses than we could afford, and carryin’ their guns.

  They drew up at the gate. And one of the men outs with his rope, tosses a noose over the gatepost, and starts to pull it down.

  “Hey!” Pa yelled. “What d’you think you’re doin’? Leave that be!”

  “We’re tearin’ it down so you’ll have less to leave behind. When you go.” The speaker was a big brawny man with a gray hat.

  “We’re not goin’ nowhere,” Pa said quietly. He dropped the harness where he stood and faced them. “We come to stay.”

  The two men I’d met on the trail were in the bunch, but my rifle was inside the house. Pa’s was too.

  We might just as well have had no weapons for the good they could do us now.

  “You’re goin’,” the brawny man said. “You’re ridin’ out of here before sundown, and we’ll burn this here place so nobody else will come back.”

  “Burn it? This fine house, built by a man with skill? You’d burn it?”

  “We’ll burn any house and you in it if you don’t leave. We didn’t invite you here.”

  “This here is open land,” Pa said. “I’m only the first. There’ll be many more along this way ’for long.”

  “There’ll be nobody. Now I’m through talkin’. I want you out of here.” He looked around. “Where’s that loud-mouthed boy of yours? One of my men wants to give him a whippin’.”

  I’d dropped from the loft and stood just inside the barn. “I’m here, and your man ain’t goin’ to give me any kind of a whippin’…not if it’s a fair fight.”

  “It’ll be a fair fight.”

  The words come from the steps, and we all looked. Owen Chantry stood there in his black pants, his polished boots, a white shirt, and a black string tie.

  “Who in hell are you?” The brawny man was angry some, but not too worried.

  “The name is Owen Chantry,” he replied quietly.

  The stocky man I’d met on the trail got down from his horse and come forward. He stood there, awaitin’ the outcome.

  “Means nothing to me,” the brawny man said.

  “It will,” Chantry said. “Now take your rope off that post.”

  “Like hell I will!” It was the man with the rope who shouted at him.

  In the year of 1866, the fast draw was an unheard of thing out west of the Rockies. In Texas (so Chantry told me later), Cullen Baker and Bill Longley had been usin’ it, but that was about the extent of it ’til that moment.

  Nobody saw him move, but we all heard the gun. And we seen that man with the rope drop it like something burned him, and something had.

  The rope lay on the ground and that man was shy two fingers.

  I don’t know whether Chantry aimed for two fingers, one finger, or his whole hand, but two fingers was what he got.

  Then Owen Chantry come one foot down the steps and then the other. He stood there, his polished boots a-shinin’ and that gun in his hand. First time I’d ever seen that gun out’n the scabbard.

  “The name,” he said, “is Owen Chantry. My brother lived on this place. He was killed. These folks are living here now, and they’re going to stay.

  “I, too, am going to stay, and if you have among you the men who killed my brother, your only chance to live is to hang them. You have two weeks in which to find and hang those men.…Two weeks.”

  “You’re slick with that gun,” the brawny man said, “but we’ll be back.”

  Owen Chantry come down another step, and then another. A stir of wind caught the hair on his brow and ruffled it a mite and flattened the fine material of his white shirt against the muscles of his arms and shoulders.

  “Why come back, Mr. Fenelon?” Chantry said pleasantly. “You’re here now.”

  “You know my name?”

  “Of course. And a good deal more about you, none of it good. You may have run away from your sins, Mr. Fenelon, but you can’t escape the memory of them.…Others have the same memories.”

  Chantry walked out a step toward him, still with that gun in his hand. “You’re here already, Mr. Fenelon. Would you like to choose your weapon?”

  “I can wait,” Fenelon said. He was staring at Chantry, hard-eyed, but wary. He didn’t like nothin’ he saw.

  “And you?” Chantry looked at the stocky man who was settin’ to whip me. “Can you wait too?”

  “No, by the Lord, I can’t! I come to slap some sense into that young’un, and I aim to do it!”

  Chantry never moved his eyes from them. “Doby, do you want to take care of this chore right now, or would you rather wait?”

  “I’ll take him right now,” I said, and I walked out there and he come for me, low an’ hard.

  My Pa come from the old country as a boy and settled in Boston, where there was a lot of Irish and some good fightin’ men amongst ’em. He learned fightin’ there, and when I was growing up he taught me a thing or two. Pa was no great fightin’ man, but he was a good teacher. He taught me something about fighting and something about Cornish-style wrestling. There were a lot of Cousin Jacks in the mines, then as ever, and Pa was quick to see and learn. But he was a teacher, not a fighter.

  Me, I started scrappin’ the minute they took off my diapers. Most of us did, them days.

  Here I was sixteen, with plenty of years already spent on an ax handle, a plow, and a pick and shovel. So when he come at me, low and hard like that, I just braced myself, dropped both hands to the back of his head, and shoved down hard with them.

  I was thoughtful to jerk my knee up hard at the same time.

  There’s something about them two motions together that’s right bad for the complexion and the shape of a nose.

  He staggered back, almost went down on his knees, and then come up. And when he did his nose was a bloody smear. He had grit, I’ll give him that. He come for me again and I fetched him a swing and my fist clobbered him right on the smashed-up nose.

  He come in, flailing away at me with both fists, and he could hit almighty hard. He slammed me first with one fist and then with the other, but I stood in there and taken ’em and clobbered him again, this time in the belly.

  He stood flatfooted then, fightin’ for wind, so I just sort of set myself and swung a couple from the hip. One of them missed as he pulled back, but the other taken him on his ear and his hands come up so I belted him again in the belly.

  He taken a step back and my next swing turne
d him halfway round and he went down to his knees.

  “That’s enough, Doby,” Chantry said. “Let him go.”

  So I stepped back, but watchin’ him. Fact is, I was scared. I might have got my ears pinned back, tacklin’ him thataway…Only he made me mad, there by the road.

  “Now, gentlemen,” Chantry said, “I believe you understand the situation. We are not looking for trouble here. These good people only wish to live, to work the ranch, to live quietly.

  “As for myself, I’ve told you what I expect. I know either you or someone you know killed my brother. I’ll leave it to you. Hang them, or I shall hang you.…One by one.

  “Now you may go. Quietly, if you please.”

  And they rode away, the stocky one lagging behind, dabbing at his nose and mouth with a sleeve. First one, then the other.

  Pa looked at me in astonishment. “Doby, I didn’t know you could fight like that!”

  I looked back at him, kind of embarrassed. “I didn’t either, Pa. He just gimme it to do.”

  Suppertime, watching the clouds hanging around the highup mountains, I thought of that girl and wondered what she was to them and would anything happen when they rode home.

  “You don’t really b’lieve they’ll hang their own men, do you?” Pa asked.

  “Not right away,” Chantry said quietly. “Not right away.”

  We looked at him, but if he knew it he gave no sign, and I wondered just how much he believed what he said.

  “You’d really hang ’em?” Pa asked him then.

  Owen Chantry didn’t reply for a minute, and when he did he spoke low. “This is new country, and there are few white men here. If there is to be civilization, if people are to live and make their homes here, there must be law.

  “People often think of the law as restrictions, but it needn’t be, unless it’s carried to extremes. Laws can give us freedom, because they offer security from the cruel, the brutal, and the thieves of property.

  “In every community—even in the wildest gangs and bands of outlaws—there is some kind of law, if only the fear of the leader. There has to be law, or there can be no growth, no security.