The First Fast Draw

by Louis L'Amour

“I know. I saw it begin, Cullen Baker, I was there at the mill the day you gave Chance Thorne a hiding.”

  “You were there?” I was astonished.

  “Sitting in the surrey with my father and Will Thorne. I thought Chance deserved everything he got.”

  It was one day I’d not forget, for I’d come as a stranger with a sack of grain to the mill for grinding. We’d been down from Tennessee only a few days, and I’d not been off the place. Soon as I showed up Chance started on me, and the boys around followed his lead. He started making fun of my shabby homespun clothes. They were patched and they were worn, but they were all I had. They had shouted at me and laughed at me but I’d taken my grain to the mill, and when I came out and started to hoist it to the mule’s back they rushed at me and jerked my suspenders down and then they clodded me with chunks of dirt.

  It wasn’t in me to hurry. That was what made some of the men turn to watch, I think, for I heard somebody speak of it. The first thing I did, with clods splattering about me, was to pull up my pants and fix my suspenders. Then still with dirt splattering me, I hoisted my sack into place, and then I picked up a chunk of wood and started for them, and they scattered like geese, all but Chance Thorne.

  He waited for me. He was a head taller than me, and some heavier, and he was dressed in store-bought clothes, which I’d never had and had only rarely seen. He looked at me and he was contemptuous. “Put down that club,” Chance had said, “and I’ll thrash you.”

  A dozen men were watching now, and none of them likely to be my friends. So when I put the club down he rushed me before I could straighten up, and he expected to smash my face with his fists as I tried to straighten, but in the Tennessee mountains a boy has to fight, and sometimes I’d fought men grown. So I didn’t straighten, I just dove at his knees and brought Chance down with a thud.

  He got up then, and I smashed his lips with my fist as he started to get up, like he’d tried with me, and my fist was hardened by work and it split his lips and covered his fine shirt with blood.

  Maybe it was the first time Chance had seen his own blood and it shocked him, but it angered him, too. He walked at me, swinging both his fists, but there was a deeper anger in me, and an awful loneliness for there were boys cheering him on, and none of them with a shout for me. I was bitter lonely then, and it made the hate rise in me, and I walked into his fists driving with my own. There was nothing in him that could stand against the fierce anger I had, and he backed up, and there was a kind of white fear in his eyes. He sorely wanted help, he wanted to yell, but I ducked low and hit him in the belly, and saw the anguish in his face, and white to the lips I set myself and swung a wicked one square at that handsome face. He went down then and he rolled over in the dust, and he could have got up, but he didn’t; he lay there in the dust and he was beaten, and I had an enemy for all my years.

  Other men rushed from the mill then, Chance’s father and uncle among them, and they rushed at me, so I backed to my club and picked it up. I was a lone boy but I was fierce angry with hating them and wanting to be away, and hating myself because I was afraid I would cry.

  “Leave him alone!” I did not know Will Thorne then, a tall, scholarly man. “Chance began it.”

  Chance’s father’s face was flushed and angry. “You tend to your knitting, Will! I’ll teach this young rascal to—”

  He paused in his move toward me, for I’d backed to the mule and was set with my club. I was only a boy, but I was man tall and strong with work in field and forest. “You come at me,” I said, “and I’ll stretch you out.”

  He shook a fist at me. “I’ll have you whipped, boy! I’ll have you whipped within an inch of your life!”

  Then I’d swung to my mule’s back and rode away, but I did not ride fast.

  And that was the beginning of it.

  A few days later when I had come to town Thorne was waiting for me with a horse whip. When I’d started to dismount, he came at me with the whip, but seeing it coming I swung on the mule again and slammed him with my bare heels. Thorne was coming at me, but before he saw what was coming the mule was charging him. He drew back the whip too late, and the mule struck him with a shoulder and knocked him into the dust with half the town looking on. And then I had ridden out of town.

  The next thing was worst of all, for the Thornes were good haters and they believed themselves the best in the community, with a reputation to uphold. We were working in the field, Pa and me, and four men came for me. Pa tried to stop them and one knocked him out with a club, and then they set on me with the whip. When they were through I was bloody and miserable, but not a sound did I make until they were gone. Then bloody and scarce able to walk, I helped Pa home and to bed, and put cold cloths on his head. Then I got down Pa’s shotgun and started for town.

  Haas and Gibson, two of the men who had done the whipping, were drinking their bonus in the saloon. When I got down from the mule it was past dark and the street was nigh empty. Up in front of the hotel I saw a man stop and look back, and then I’d stepped inside. Haas saw me first.

  “Gib!” His voice was shaking. “Gib, look!”

  Gibson turned and he reached for the pistol under his coat, and I shot, but not to kill. The shotgun was heavy loaded but I shot between them, close-standing as they were, and both men went down, both of them catching some shot.

  They lay there shocked and bloody in the sawdust. “I done you no harm,” I told them, “but you set on me an’ Pa. Was I you I’d stay clear of us from now on, an’ if Pa dies I’ll kill the both of you.”

  Turning toward the door I stopped. “Don’t you set up to give this boy no beating again, because I got the difference.”

  That was the summer I was fifteen.

  Folks fought shy of me the few times I did come to town and I didn’t come except when must be. Most of the year I spent in the swamps along the Sulphur, hunting, trapping, staying away from people, except the Caddos. But that had been the beginning of it. From then on I’d the reputation of a bad one and folks kept their daughters away from me, and even the men stayed clear of me.

  Pa worked on, but he was never quite the same after that blow on the skull. Maybe it wasn’t so much the blow what did the harm, but the feeling that here where he’d planned to start over, to build something of a place for Ma and me, here he had failed to do so. It was no fault of his, but he lost heart then and the fire went out of him. After Ma died he just continued on and went through the motions, but Pa was gone and I knew it.

  Katy Thorne had reminded me and it all came back, the sound of Ma mixing batter in a wooden bowl, the weariness in Pa’s face as he came up from the field, the morning singing of the birds, and the sullen splash of fish in the still water, the sound of dogs raising a coon out there on a still moonlit night.

  These things had meant home to me, but Ma and Pa were gone and the memories of hunting wild cattle in the Big Thicket to the south was an empty memory, and the smell of damp earth and the warm sun of planting time…I had been a fool to come back.

  “I’ve no cause to love the Thornes,” I said, “only Will. I liked Will.”

  “I come here to gather flowers,” she said. “I was surprised when I saw you.”

  Walking to the house I put my rifle down and started plucking the duck.

  “You only fired once.”

  “There was only one duck.”

  She was silent, watching me as I worked. “A duck should hang for a while.”

  “He’ll do his hanging inside me then. This is my supper.”

  “It’s a small supper for a hungry man. Come to Blackthorne for supper. There’s a baked ham.”

  “Do you know what you’re asking, ma’am? Cullen Baker to come to Blackthorne? I could not do it without a shooting, and even if that was avoided people would speak no more to you. I’ve a black name along the Sulphur.”

  “You’ve been gone a long time, Cullen Baker. Blackthorne is deserted now, and has been since the war ended. It is Will’s house that I
live in, and which he left to me when he died. Aunt Flo is with me there, and you’re not likely to see anyone but her.”

  “Chance?”

  “He’s in Boston, or wherever, and he does not often come to call, anyway. Chance likes the towns of Texas, not the plantations and ranches.”

  It would not be the first time I had been to the house of Will Thorne, for even as I made enemies that day at the mill, I had also made a friend.

  Will Thorne, in my estimation, was a man worth the lot of them, perhaps less the sportsman than the others, and much less the talker, but a man of some attainments in his own way. He studied nature a good bit, and I who had lived in the swamps found much to learn from him, as he, I suppose, learned from me.

  He did a sort of writing. I never knew much about that as I was a man who had learned to read but poorly, scarcely more than my name, which I could write, and no more. But he wrote some things for periodicals in London and in Paris, one was about a heron we have in the swamps, and another was on the beaver. I believe he wrote about butterflies and trap-door spiders, and a variety of things. It made no sense to me at first; I’d known about those things from a child, and he told me once that I’d knowledge in my head a naturalist would give years of his life to own.

  We had walked in the swamps. The trails were known to none but the Caddos and me, though later I showed a few of them to Will, and sometimes we’d hunt for plants together, or for strange birds or insects. Usually I knew where to find what he wanted, for a man who is much in the woods acquires a gift for observation.

  In Will I had a friend, and I never forgot his one question after I’d told him of some fight—there were others after the one at the mill, like the one at Fort Belknap when I killed a man—all he would say was to ask me, “Do you think you did the right thing?”

  A question like that sticks in a man’s mind, and after awhile I judged everything by it, deciding whether it was the right thing, and often if there was no other way. I expect it was a good lesson to learn, but a man in his life may have many teachers, some most unexpected. The question lies with the man himself: Will he learn from them?

  For a man to be at peace with himself was important, Will said, not what people say. People are often wrong, and public opinion can change, and the hatreds of people are rarely reasonable things. I can hear him yet. He used to say there was no use a man wearing himself out with hatred and ill-feeling, and time proved it out.

  “Will used to tell me about you when I was a little girl,” Katy said. “He said you were a fine boy. That you’d the makings of a fine man if they would just let you alone. But he said you’d the makings of a great clansman in the old days among the Highlands of Scotland. He said you’d dark blood in you, dangerous blood. But he always came back to saying you were the best of them around here, thoughtful, he used to say, and a gentleman at heart.”

  Despite myself, I was embarrassed at that. It has been rare that anyone has given me a word of praise in my life, and the last thing I’d thought of myself was a good man. But it worried me some, for Will Thorne was a man of few mistakes, and his saying that put a burden on me, his saying I was a good man almost put it up to me to be one. The idea was uncomfortable, for I’d been busy being Cullen Baker, and what he’d said about the black angers I could grasp, for it was proved too often in my life.

  We sat in the kitchen to talk, and I liked the rustle of her skirts as she moved about, making friendly sounds with glass and crockery, and tinkling a bit of silver now and again. The fire made a good homely sound, too, and the water boiling in the pot. I was a man unused to such sounds, knowing the crackling of a fire from my own lonely camps and not from a hearth.

  Aunt Flo was napping somewhere in the house while Katy got supper, and it was a rare surprise to me to see how sure she was about it, with no finagling and nonsense, but with deft hands and of one mind about what to do. I’d never thought to see a Thorne preparing her own meal, least of all a meal for me.

  She put the dishes on a small table in a corner of a room, a friendly sort of table, and not like the long one in the dining room, which scared me to look at, it was so far from end to end. There she lighted the candles, and a soft glow they made, which was as well, for I’d had no chance to shave the day, and my clothes were shabby and worn from riding in all kinds of weather. I was shy about them, the big hulking fool that I was, and no man to be eating supper with such a girl.

  Yet she was easy to be with, easier than any girl I’d met, and here and there I’d known a few, although not always of the nicest. The sort you tumble in the hay with, or take a walk with out in the grass away from the wagons. Yes, I’d known them, but some of them were good girls, too. Maybe it was wrong of me to walk out with them that way, but when the urge is on a man his conscience is often forgot.

  “Tell me about the West,” Katy asked me over coffee. “It has always fascinated me. If I had been a man, I should have gone West.”

  Tell her of the West? Where could a man begin? Where could he find words to put the pictures before her that he saw when she asked about the West? How could he tell her of fifty-mile drives without water and the cattle dying and looking wild-eyed into the sun? How could he tell her about the sweat, the dust, the alkali? Or the hard camps of hard men where a word was a gun and a gun was a death? And plugging the wound with a dirty handkerchief and hoping it didn’t poison? What could a man tell a woman of the West? How could he find words for the swift-running streams, chuckling over rocks, for the mountains that reached to heaven and the clouds that choked the valleys among the high peaks? What words did he have to talk of that?

  “There’s a wonder of land out there, Mrs. Thorne,” I said, “a wide wonder of it, with distances that reached out beyond your seeing where a man can ride six days and get nowhere at all. There are canyons where no white man has walked, canyons among the unfleshed bones of the mountains, with the soil long gone if ever there was any, like old buffalo bones where the buzzards and coyotes had been at them. There’s campfires, ma’am, where you sit over a tiny fire with a million tiny fires in the sky above you like the fires of a million lonely men. You hover over your fire and hear the coyotes speaking their plaintive words at the moon, and you smell the acrid smoke and you wonder where you are and if there’s Comanches out there, and your horse comes close to the fire for company and looks out into the dark with pricked-up ears. Chances are the night is empty, of living things, anyway, for who can say what ghosts may haunt a country the like of that?

  “Sometimes I’d be lazy in the morning and lie in my blankets after sunup, and I’d see deer coming down to the waterhole to drink. Those days a man didn’t often camp right up against a waterhole. It wasn’t safe, but that wasn’t the reason. There’s other creatures need water besides a man, and they won’t come nigh it if a man is close by, so it’s best to get your water and then sleep back so the deer, the quail, and maybe a cougar can come for water, too.

  “Times like that a man sees some strange sights. One morning I watched seven bighorn sheep come down to the water. No creature alive, man or animal, has the stately dignity of a bighorn. They came down to water there and stood around, taking another drink now and again. Tall as a burro most of them, and hair as soft as a fawn’s belly. A man who travels alone misses a lot, ma’am, but he sees a lot the busy, talky folks never get a chance to see.

  “Why, I’ve stood ten feet from a grizzly bear stuffing himself with blackberries and all he did was look at me now and again. He was so busy at those berries he’d no time for me. So I just sat down and watched him and ate my own fixin’s right there, for company. He paid me no mind, and I paid him little more. When I’d eaten what I had, I went back to my horse and when I left I called out to him and said, ‘Goodbye, Old Timer,’ and lifted a hand, and would you believe it, ma’am, he turned and looked after me like he missed my company.”

  I was silent, suddenly embarrassed at having talked so all-fired much. It wasn’t like me to go to talking like that. Shows
what candelight and a pretty woman can do to a man’s judgment of the fitness of things.

  Aunt Flo had not come down, although I heard some stirring about upstairs. For me it was just as well. I’m no hand at getting acquainted with people in bunches. I’d rather cut one out of the herd and get acquainted slow-like so I can really know what the person is like. Never much of a talker I’d little business with women. It’s been my observation that the men with fluent tongues are the ones who get the womenfolks, and a slick tongue will get them even faster than money.

  “If you loved it so much out there, Cullen, why did you come back?”

  Well…there was that question I’d been asking myself, and of which I didn’t rightly know the answer. There were answers I’d given myself, however.

  “It’s all the home I ever had,” I told her, trying to make the words answer my own problem. “My folks are buried out there back of the orchard where Ma used to walk. The land is mine, and it is good land. Pa would work from daylight to dark out there, trying to make it pay. I don’t know, maybe it was a feeling I had for him or just wanting to be some place familiar, and there was nothing out West that belonged to me. Maybe, rightly speaking, I’m no wanderer at all, but just a homebody who would rather be unhappy among familiar surroundings and faces than happy anywhere else.”

  “I don’t believe that.” Katy got up to clear the dishes. “And don’t call me Mrs. Thorne. We’re old friends, Cullen. You must call me Katy.”

  Standing up I seemed most too high for the little room where we’d been eating, so I fetched dishes to the kitchen and got my hat to go.

  “Come again, Cullen, when you’ve a wish to talk or want a meal cooked by other than your own hands.”

  At the door I paused. “Katy…ma’am, the light must be out when I go out the door. There’s folks about would just as soon have a shot at me if the chance was there.”

  Outside in the dark I stepped to the side of the door and let my shadow lose itself in the shadow of the house. Caution becomes a man in strange country, and this country would be strange to me for a few days until the feel was in me again.