Ryan Rides Back

by Bill Crider

  The old man was clearly watching him, but he no longer looked like a buzzard. He was just an old man now, so old that he seemed to have dust in his wrinkles.

  For the second time, Ryan tried to speak. His voice was more of a croak than a wheeze now, and he watched the old man rise slowly to his feet and walk over to him.

  Ryan wanted to ask the old man who he was, but he could not.

  The curandero stopped at the edge of the shadow. He had managed to rig a crude shade with dried sticks and some of the cloth from Ryan's own shirt. He couldn't move Ryan; he wasn't strong enough, and besides, there was great danger in moving him. He moistened the cloth and put it to Ryan's mouth.

  This time, Ryan was able to suck it greedily.

  Ryan never did learn the old man's name.

  Days passed, and the curandero gave him water as he needed it and eventually began to feed him. He began to cover Ryan's body with oils and poultices, and when Ryan was strong enough the curandero brewed up a batch of pulque from the cactus and got ready to do something about Ryan's arm.

  It took Ryan awhile to get drunk enough, but when he got to the stage where he was seeing two of the old man and everything else around him, the curandero gave him a stick to bite on. Ryan clamped his teeth around it and felt his teeth sink into the wood.

  The old man put his hands on Ryan's arm and Ryan bit harder. He knew what was coming, and even though the old man had done no more than touch him the pain rippled through him and caused his eyes to water. The pulque wasn't going to be enough.

  The old man didn't waste time with hesitant motions.

  He had studied Ryan's arm and knew that while he could fix the breaks—he thought there were two—there was nothing he could do about the other damage, the damage done by the bullets.

  When he snapped the first break into place, Ryan bit almost all the way through the stick. Then he passed out.

  When he woke up, the old man gave him some more pulque, which helped a little. His arm didn't hurt as much as he had thought it might, and the pain in the rest of his body seemed to have lessened slightly. For the first time, Ryan began to think about whether he would live or die. For the first time, it began to make a difference to him.

  Ryan didn't know it then, but the worst was yet to come, not from the pain, but from something different; not from pain, but from the lack of it.

  It happened after what Ryan thought must have been nine days. He was never sure of the time, because he seemed to slip into and out of consciousness so often that he couldn't keep up accurately. But nine days seemed about right.

  He had tried several times to talk to the old man. He knew a little bit of Spanish, and the old man also knew a few words, but Ryan was never sure they even remotely understood each other. He couldn't really tell the old man what he wanted. He wasn't even sure he could thank him.

  What he wanted was to stand up.

  He had thought about it for a day or two, but it hadn't seemed worth the effort. Maybe he had even been afraid of the pain it would cause, since for a day or so he had begun to feel much better. The torn and bleeding places on his body were healing, and his arm was on the mend. Standing would be a risk. He didn't want to jar anything around, didn't want to start up the pain again.

  The old man moved him a little each day. Not much, just enough to change his position ever so slightly, to make sure he was lying on a somewhat different area of his skin. But he never tried to help Ryan sit up, much less stand.

  Ryan was not a man accustomed to lying down. He was not accustomed to doing nothing. Even when he felt poorly he had always been up and about, doing whatever had to be done. He didn't want to change now; that would be too much like letting the pain get the better of him.

  So he decided to stand up. First he would sit, and then he would stand. It seemed easy enough, when he was thinking about it.

  That was the day he found out he couldn't move his legs.

  It was getting on toward late afternoon when Ryan got back to the shack. His talk with Billy Kane had left him unsatisfied, and he didn't know what to do about it. There was something very convincing in Billy's statement that he hadn't killed Sally Ryan.

  He remembered how Billy had been that night at the grove, how he had fired into the ground, and how he had stood so hesitantly before doing even that.

  Billy had been scared that night. His voice had been as shaky as his hand. Ryan found it hard to believe that Billy was a killer, even the killer of a woman.

  Ryan fed the bay and went inside. There were some tomatoes and peaches in the cans on the shelves. He could eat that and make some coffee afterward. He was hungry, but that would satisfy him. He wasn't ready to go to the cafe yet, and maybe he would never be.

  He opened the cans and ate absentmindedly, his mind on other things. As he drank the juice out of the peach can, he thought about what Sheriff Bass had said: "They always confess in the end."

  Ryan didn't think Billy would confess.

  There was something else that Bass had said: "He's soft inside as anybody I ever saw."

  Ryan thought that was true. No matter what kind of family Billy had, no matter what kind of man Kane was, Billy was soft. Too soft for killing. Ryan was sure of it.

  So what did that mean? It meant that they were going to hang the wrong man. They were going to hang a man for a murder he didn't commit.

  Ryan had ridden back to Tularosa for three reasons. One of them had been to see Billy Kane hang. When he read the news about his sister's death, he knew it was time to get back. There had been no reason for him not to believe the story about Billy Kane. It all seemed right and logical.

  He thought about the other two reasons he had ridden back to Tularosa. To settle things with Kane, and to settle things with Virginia Burley. He felt no strong urge to do either now. What he felt mostly was a desire to let it all go, to get back on the bay horse and ride away. The direction wouldn't matter, as long as the road led away from where he was. Then he could lose himself again, the way he had been lost for the past few years.

  He looked around the shack, at its bare walls of unpainted wood, its scarcely stocked shelves, its single window. His sister had died here in a struggle with her murderer, but it was nothing he could feel.

  He got up from the table and went to the window. All the land that he could see had once been his, but now it was Kane's. The thought should have made him boil, but it hardly affected him at all.

  It was getting dark now, and shadows were gathering among the trees. They would have finished Billy Kane's gallows by now, letting it sit for all the town to see and wonder at before the hanging on Saturday. If they hanged the wrong man, hardly anyone in the crowd would care. Most of them wouldn't even want to change things if they could. After all, it wasn't every day you got to see someone hang, much less one of the Kanes.

  Ryan felt the lethargy getting the best of him, knowing that what he really wanted to do was lie on a cot and forget it all: Sally, Billy, Kane, Virginia Burley. Just put them all behind him and ride on.

  But at the same time, he knew he couldn't. There was enough of the old Ryan left inside him to make that impossible. Whatever there was that hadn't been shot out, beaten out, and dragged out that night at Shatter's Grove was still strong enough to whisper in Ryan's mind and tell him that he had to do the right thing.

  He turned from the window and went outside for his horse.

  Pat Congrady lived above his store, and Ryan could see a faint light in the window. He tied his horse at the rail and climbed the wooden stairs on the outside of the building.

  There was a narrow landing at the top of the stairs, and Ryan stood on it as he knocked on the door. He was sure that Congrady had heard his boots on the steps and would be wondering who would come calling after dark.

  The door swung open. Congrady stood there looking out. The light from the room was too dim to illuminate the landing, and at first Congrady had no idea who was standing there.

  "Who . . .?" he said, squin
ting his eyes.

  "Ryan," Ryan told him.

  "Ryan?" Congrady took a step forward. "You sonofa . . ." He caught himself before he finished the phrase, but his temper was flaring. He always lived up to the cliché about people with red hair.

  "What are you doing here?" Congrady said. "It's too late now. Too late for Sally, and too late for you. I don't know what you're doing at my door, but you can leave right now. Leave, or by God I'll kick you down the stairs."

  Ryan didn't move. "You probably could. I won't try to stop you. But I think we need to talk."

  "I don't have anything to say to you, Ryan." Congrady's voice was husky with suppressed emotion. "I thought you were a man once, but you ran like a yellow dog. I don't have anything to say to someone who runs and leaves his sister. Leaves her to die."

  Congrady bit his last words off sharply and stepped back into his room, swinging the door shut after him.

  Ryan stepped forward and put his right hand on the door. "I don't blame you for the way you feel," he said. "But we still have to talk. I don't think Billy Kane killed Sally."

  The rage seemed to drain out of Congrady like water from a leaky trough. "What?" he said.

  "They're going to hang Billy for something he didn't do."

  "How do you know?"

  "I'm not sure. That's what I need to talk to you about."

  Congrady sighed and opened the door. "All right," he said. "You might as well come in."

  Chapter Six

  Kane's fat fingers twisted themselves together. In the lamplight they were even more pale than usual. McGee could hardly take his eyes off them. He and Barson sat in front of the desk in Kane's office and listened to their boss talk.

  "All right," Kane was saying. "So he is back."

  McGee wanted to say “I told you so,” but he didn't.

  Barson couldn't resist. "Maybe it's just his ghost," he said.

  Kane unclasped his hands and put them flat on the desk, staring straight at Barson. He didn't say anything, just stared.

  Barson met his eyes for a few seconds. Then his gaze slipped down to the floor and skittered around the room.

  "Sheriff Bass thinks he came back for the hangin'," McGee said, trying to break the tension.

  "There won't be a hanging," Kane said. "I thought I told you that."

  "Yeah, that's right. Sure," McGee said.

  At that moment, Martin Long slipped into the room. He entered so quietly that McGee didn't even know he was there until he had walked all the way to the desk.

  "Well?" Kane said.

  "He's stayin' at the shack," Long said. "Or somebody is. It's been cleaned up."

  "But he's not there now?"

  "Nobody's there now. I went in and checked." Long looked hurt. "If he'd been there, I'd of done something about him. You know that."

  "Maybe you wouldn't be able to," Barson said. He had recovered some of his bravado.

  "I could do it," Long said.

  "Don't be so sure," Kane said. "You might recall a time when every one of us tried. And apparently failed.”

  “I guess so," Long said.

  "No guessing is necessary now," Kane said. "Sit down, Long."

  Long lowered his thin frame into a chair. His mouth was compressed into a thin line.

  "Now," Kane said, "we have to decide what to do about Mr. Ryan. It seems certain that he has returned for more than a hanging." He glared at McGee as he spoke. "And all of you can guess what else has brought him back here, though you might wonder why he waited so long."

  McGee felt the pain in his missing finger again and reached to massage it before he remembered.

  "Hell," Barson said. "He wants a fight, we'll give him one. We got the best of him once, and we can do it again."

  "We got the best of him, did we?" Kane said.

  "Well, sure we did. We beat him half to death and that horse must of drug him twenty miles. What kind of shape do you think that left him in?"

  "It left him alive," Kane said. He leaned back in his chair and his face was in shadow. He looked like a huge headless blob of clothed flesh. Then he leaned forward again and the lamplight caught his eyes, which shone for just a second like the eyes of an animal, red in the whiteness of his face.

  "It left him alive," he repeated, "and that was a mistake. If Billy had only—" He cut off his sentence. He didn't want to pursue that train of thought. Billy's actions on that night still rankled him. "Never mind that. We won't make the same mistake again. This time, we'll kill him. This time, we won't play around with him first.”

  “When?" Long said. He was ready now.

  Barson nodded. He was ready, too.

  McGee's finger hurt, and what he wished was that he could be somewhere else. He wasn't ready now, and he wasn't sure he'd ever be ready for Ryan again. There was something spooky about him coming back right at this time, and there was even something spooky in what Barson had said about maybe it was Ryan's ghost. It wasn't that McGee believed in ghosts, exactly, but his finger hurt him, didn't it? And that was a ghost, wasn't it?

  "We'll take him later," Kane said. "He's not there now, anyway, and we've got other things to do, like getting Billy out of that jail. We don't want to stir things up too much before we take care of that."

  McGee relaxed a little. That meant he didn't have to worry about Ryan for a day or so, at least. They weren't going to break Billy out until the next night.

  "McGee went down to the jail today," Kane said. "He was doing his duty as a good citizen of the community, letting the officials of the law know about a suspicious stranger in town. Maybe he learned something that could be of use to us."

  McGee frowned. He hadn't expected to be asked anything about his visit to the jail. He hadn't been looking around for anything out of the ordinary.

  When McGee hesitated, Kane said, "Come, come, McGee. Surely you observed something while you were there. For example, how many officers were on duty?"

  That was something that McGee remembered. "There were just two of them," he said. "One outside and one inside."

  "Good," Kane said. "And that means there must be at least one more, back in the cells."

  "I guess," McGee said. "They didn't let me back there."

  "We've all seen that jail," Barson said. "Hell, I've even spent a few nights there myself. We could bust it down with a hammer, and if those three officers are just Bass, Higby, and Meadows, we can take care of them without any trouble at all."

  "Of course," Kane said. "But you're forgetting one thing."

  "What's that?" Barson said.

  "Billy's in that jail," Kane said. "And if anything happens to him, I'll kill the rest of you myself." The lamplight struck his eyes again, and he smiled.

  Ryan was uncomfortable in Congrady's room. It reminded him more of a woman's room than a man's, with frilly seat covers on the two chairs and a doily under the table lamp. There was a shelf of books, too, more books than Ryan had ever seen in one room.

  It wasn't that Ryan couldn't read. He had read the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress and some book by a man named Cooper that told about a white man who had been raised by Indians and some of his adventures. But Congrady had all kinds of books. There must have been at least thirty of them.

  Congrady was just as uncomfortable as Ryan, but for different reasons. He meant what he had said earlier. He would like to kick Ryan down the stairs. To him, Ryan was a man who had run out on his sister and left her to the mercy of Kane. And, as it turned out, to no mercy at all, though Ryan would have had no way of knowing that.

  At the same time, Congrady was curious. Why, after all this time, had Ryan returned? Congrady was both curious and a little worried. He had never known exactly what to make of Ryan in the first place. Ryan was the kind of man who wore a gun and knew how to use it, the kind of man who wasn't afraid to stand up to other men when he knew he was in the right. In fact, as far as Congrady knew, Ryan wasn't the kind of man to be afraid of anything. So why had he disappeared in the first place?

/>   Congrady, on the other hand, was a man who, despite his red hair and his fiery temper, usually backed down quickly—just as he had done with Ryan at the door. He was quick to anger, but he was just as quick to avoid a fight, unless it was with someone like Billy Kane, someone who wasn't going to give much of a fight.

  And Congrady had a storekeeper's mentality. He liked things orderly and in their places—axe handles with axe handles, three-penny nails with three-penny nails, shovels with shovels. He didn't understand a man who could just pick up and leave an untidy situation like the one Ryan had with Kane. Besides, Congrady liked working inside, wearing an apron to keep the grease off his clothes. He could do heavy lifting, and his hands weren't entirely smooth and free of calluses, but he had never wanted to work outdoors, riding a horse and working cattle.

  Congrady offered Ryan a seat, and he lowered himself stiffly and gingerly into one of the frilly chairs. Congrady sat opposite him, and the two men looked at each other warily.

  Ryan finally opened the conversation. "I understand that you're the one who found Sally's body."

  Congrady sat almost as stiffly as Ryan. "That's true. Except I didn't really find it. Billy Kane was already there."

  "But he was there all along."

  "Right. He was there. All along."

  "So you brought him in."

  "Yes. I did. I brought him in." Congrady was tapping his foot nervously on the floor.

  Ryan ignored the tapping. "I hear he was beaten up pretty bad."

  Congrady pushed himself out of the chair. "I was angry. I should have killed him." He wiped a hand over his face. "You don't know what it was like. He was just standing there, and Sally's body was on the floor. There was blood ..."

  "I guess I know what it looked like. I don't need you to tell me."

  "I'm sorry," Congrady said.

  "There's one thing that's been bothering me," Ryan said.

  Congrady sat back down. "What's that?"

  "Has anyone asked Billy what he was doing there in the first place?"