There had been no further forays by Sam Barlow into our neck of the woods. That country from Lake Caddo to the Oklahoma-Arkansas line he’d avoided. Bob Lee, however, and some of the other had ridden out and had themselves some gun talk with Reconstruction soldiers, in which they came off very well and the soldiers not so good.
The Reconstruction Act of 1867, followed by the removal of Governor Throckmorton from office, had been accepted by most Texans as another declaration of war. The carpetbaggers and Union Leaguers had come to Texas to get rich quick, and most of them were folks of low integrity and no morals to speak of. Here and there, however, to give them their just due, there would be one who amounted to something, and a few of these stayed on in Texas to become valued citizens. But they were mighty scarce.
Mostly those who came south were the wrong ones. They allied themselves with folks of the same kind in Texas, and they figured to force their will on us by shooting and burning which only stiffened resistance and drove many a good man into the swamps or the thickets, and most of us who took to the thickets had to learn to use our guns to live.
That section of East Texas was thickly forested with piney woods where even then folks had started a few small lumber operations, and here and there where the woods had been cleared out folks had started farming or grazing a few cows.
Unless you’ve seen an East Texas thicket you surely can’t imagine what they’re like—millions of acres covered by a dense, junglelike growth of pine, dogwood, chinquapin, elderberry, myrtle, blackjack and prickly pear. Above all, prickly pear. There was cat’s-claw, of course, and even ferns as tall as trees and wild orchids, but all through it was a growth of tall, old prickly pear with spines that would rip a man’s eyes out, and in places made a wall nothing could get through.
The Big Thicket to the south was over a hundred miles long and about fifty wide, but there were other thickets such as Mustang, Jernigan, and Blackjack Thicket, just to name a few. Here and there among the thickets there were streams of waterholes, sometimes even good-sized ponds or small lakes, teeming with fish. There was a lot of wild game, and some of the most vicious wild cattle a man ever came across. There were wild cattle in there that would stalk a man like a cougar stalks a heifer, mean as all get out.
During the Shelbyville war between the Regulators and the Moderators these thickets and the swamps along the Sulphur had offered shelter for the fighting men and refugees as well as for outlaws from the Natchez or Trammel Traces. Growing up in those swamps and thickets, I probably knew as much about them as any one man…it would take a lifetime to know it all, believe me.
Few rivers on earth could twist and turn more than the Sulphur Fork of the Red. And few offered so great a variety of hiding places as did the curves, bends, islands and swamps of the Sulphur. When in the southern part of the area the boys hid out on the island in the Lake Caddo swamps, but farther north, not too far from Boston or the Arkansas line, there were hide-outs at McFarland Island between the circle of Piney Lake, Spring Lake and the Sulphur itself. And there were two hide-outs in the Devil’s Den region between the Sulphur River and Bell’s Slough. Of course, there were others, some known to one group, some to another, but maybe I was the only one who knew them all, or so I figured. And most of them I’d learned from my friends, the Caddoes.
Bob Lee and the others left me alone. This was a time when nobody catered much to folks asking questions and a man’s business was figured to be his own. Only sometimes the boys would get to riding me.
“Got himself a girl,” Matt Kirby suggested.
“He’s sparkin’ that widow,” Jack English said. “Most ever’body else is tryin’.”
“Makes a man right uncomfortable, the way she looks at him sometimes,” Bickerstaff told them. “She’s all woman that one. Take a sight of man to keep her inside the fence.”
It was Lacy Petraine of whom they talked. She was the subject of more talk than any woman I ever did see. Mostly they called her “that New Orleans woman,” or “the widow” like that country wasn’t full of widows, those times. But when a woman who looks like she does comes into a broke country carrying a sack full of hard cash, there’s sure to be talk.
Chance Thorne was taking some rides, too. From time to time I heard talk of his being seen around the country, yet he rode quite a ways south, and what down there could be important to him? Could be he was sparking some woman himself, yet Chance was a man not likely to ride far out of his way for any woman, and who did few things without a mighty big reason. Who was south that was so important to him?
When the idea came it sort of shocked me into sitting straight up. Bob Lee turned sharp around, afraid I’d heard something that spelled trouble. “What is it, Cull?”
“Had a mite of an idea.” I wrapped my arms around my knees. “Bill,” I asked Longley, “would you do something for me?”
“You just give it a name.”
“Try to find out where Chance goes on those rides.”
Longley considered it. “You’ve got an idea where he goes?”
“I’m guessing, but I’d say the Big Thicket.”
“Sam Barlow’s country,” Bickerstaff objected. “He wouldn’t go there.”
“Maybe.”
Bob Lee took a stick from the fire to light his cigar. “You think he’s the one who’s been tipping off Sam Barlow about the Army?” He looked at me with one of those quick, sharp glances of his. “You don’t like the man. You could be prejudiced.”
“Might be,” I admitted slowly. “It could be, of course, but I just don’t believe I am, not to interfere with my judgment. Chance is a thinking man, a mighty thinking man when it comes to what is best for Chance. His side of the family were well-off, but never so much as the rest of the Thornes, and that never did set well with him. I believe he’s out to make himself some money and I think he’d play all sides to do it.”
Two days later when I was chopping weeds out of my cornfield there was a rider in the lane. The Spencer was leaning against a tree not too far off and I walked over to it, but when the rider showed up it was the horse that got me, not the rider.
“I am not flattered, Mr. Baker,” she said.
When she spoke it was in a low, confidential voice, and I looked up into the eyes of the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I knew right off it was that New Orleans woman, Lacy Petraine.
“Beautiful horse,” I told her.
Her expression did not change. “Yes, he is a fine animal. So are you, Mr. Baker.”
That was direct talk and I looked at her, measuring what I saw, and what this woman had she wasn’t pretending she didn’t have. It was there, all right. Whatever else she was she was like they said, she was all woman.
“This was the sort of horse I was thinking about,” I said thoughtfully.
“I came here to talk to you about a job, Mr. Baker.”
“I’m not hiring anybody,” I said. “I can’t afford it.” She ignored it. “I need a man—”
“Most women do,” I told her innocently.
Her lips tightened. “Mr. Baker, apparently I am wasting my time. I heard of your trouble with the Reconstruction people and they are a group with whom I have some influence. If you accept the job I have for you, I can promise you that you will no longer be annoyed.”
She was mad, but she wasn’t backing off. Maybe I don’t have any clothes to speak of, and I’m not much at dancing, but when I see that look in a woman’s eyes I take it she’s not thinking of playing whist.
“Mr. Baker, I am buying property. I sometimes carry a little money, and I need a man who can ride with me whom people respect and who can use a gun. With Sam Barlow and his kind I no longer feel safe.”
“You’d be better off to talk to Colonel Belser. He would be glad to provide an escort, or do it himself.”
“He offered, but I want no connection with him or what he represents. You see, Mr. Baker, I intend to make my home here, and I can imagine it will be difficult for those who were too frien
dly with the carpetbaggers when the carpetbaggers are gone.”
“Somebody should tell that to Chance Thorne.”
Putting a hand on the fence at a place where there was no brush, I vaulted it and walked over to her. She sat her horse watching me with a quirt in her hand and a pistol in a saddle scabbard, but I walked around the horse, sizing it up. I always had a good eye for horse flesh—but I was not missing the woman either.
When I was around on the other side I put my hand up as if to reach for her but just caressed the horse. She was looking at me, and I’ll give her this, she wasn’t scary. In such a position, lonely like it was, most women would have been. I figure she had an idea she could handle whatever showed up, any way she chose to handle it.
“If you are interested in fine horse,” she said, “you should work for me. I have several of the very best.”
“How’d you know to find me here?”
“You had been described to me, and I was riding by. I am interested in property, Mr. Baker, and have been looking for something I can buy.”
“I am not for sale.”
She got mad then, really mad. “You flatter yourself, Mr. Baker. I assure you, any interest I had in your working for me is ended.”
She rode away, her back rigid with anger, but when I walked back to my hoe the zest for work was gone. No question about it, I’d acted like a country bumpkin, which was what I was, only I needn’t have acted it. And she was a sight of woman—most woman I’d seen in one package for a long time. The sort of woman who’d give a man all he’d ask for, and then some.
Hiding the hoe I mounted my mule and rode back into the swamp and dismounting in a quiet place I started working with the pistol. When the sweat was streaming from me and my hand was getting sore again, I let up. But it had seemed to be coming faster, with less lost motion and a surer grasp of the gun on that first grab. It had to be like that, for if danger came there would be no room for failure.
Seeing Lacy Petraine brought Katy Thorne to mind. Katy didn’t have the flesh of that New Orleans woman, but her beauty was just as great. She had a way of carrying herself, cool, poised, and graceful…I must find some excuse for seeing Katy.
It was Matt Kirby who knew about Lacy Petraine. Or as much as anybody knew about her. She looked twenty-three or-four, but the way Matt figured it she just had to be at least six years older. Her Pa had owned a plantation near New Orleans, the way Matt had it, and Lacy was of French-Spanish-Irish ancestry, but by the time she was a girl her father had gambled away most of what they had, and she had moved into New Orleans with her father. The year she was sixteen he had died of yellow fever, and she married an Irish gambler named Terence O’Donnell.
He was, according to Matt, a gentleman. He was thirty-two when she married him, handsome, shrewd, and as skillful and successful at gambling as her Pa had been otherwise.
They left New Orleans for Atlanta, and later Matt heard tell of her in Charleston, Richmond and New York. Some said she had been in Havana, too. Then one night on a riverboat Terence dealt the wrong card to the wrong man, was challenged and killed. He left his young wife with a knowledge of cards and fourteen thousand dollars in money.
At eighteen she took off for Europe with two Negro girls for slaves and a big Negro man who was nearly sixty but mule-strong. Next two years she lived in Paris, London, Vienna, Rome, Venice and Madrid, and then she’d been in some sort of a mixup with a man, or so Matt had it from her maid. A love affair that turned out wrong, from what he said. She married André Petraine who was the bastard son of a prominent Frenchman. André tried to blackmail his father and was murdered, quick and simple. Same night they gave Lacy passage to New York and the suggestion she go there and stay.
On the way back some men taught her to play poker, and lost three thousand dollars doing it. Supplying money to an old friend of O’Donnell’s, she opened a gambling house in Charleston. Before the war began she sold the gambling house and invested in cotton, sold it well in London and remained there during most of the war.
Matt Kirby had served during part of the war with the friend who had operated her Charleston place, and it was from him that he had pieced together much of the story. Without allegiance to anyone she had returned with sufficient cash to buy land, and it was East Texas she chose, feeling that with Reconstruction sure to go out in a few years she could be one of the wealthiest women in that area.
It was a good scheme, the way Kirby had it, and the way it seemed to figure out. We’d heard around that she was buying land, and that she wasn’t a bit upset by the Barlow raids, or any other for that matter. The more folks were frightened the more apt they would be to sell out for a cheap price. According to all accounts she was a woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it.
One thing started me to wondering about how much she wanted me to work for her and how much she might have other ideas in mind. She owned the old Drummond place which adjoined Fairlea on the north, and she owned another farm south of my place.
No matter. I’d my own plans to think of, and with a crop in the ground I could start looking farther ahead. There were occasional drives of cattle to Shreveport or Sedalia, and in the Thickets there were thousands of head, unbranded, and whose ownership would be impossible to trace. Deep in the swamp, under the dark-leaved cypress and the hanging moss, I thought it out, figured just how it could be done, and how it had to be done. And no day went by when I did not practice with a gun.
* * *
ONE NIGHT, WE were sitting around the fire when suddenly out in the swamp, a fish jumped. We all knew the sound yet the suddenness of it caught us by surprise and in an instant there was nobody about the fire, nothing but the fire burning alone, the empty beds and saddles. In the thick shade of a cypress I looked down at the pistol in my hand and could not remember drawing it.
So that was the way it was then. I was learning, all right, I was faster, much faster.
Nobody moved. Here and there a rifle barrel gleamed in the brush around the clearing while we listened, and then we heard another noise, not of the swamp. A rider was coming who knew the way to come. We waited in the shadows, almost counting the steps. When the rider came into the circle of light it was Matt Kirby.
He was a broad, solid man with a wide face and jaw, a quiet man who drank too much, yet always managed to be where the soldiers were not. He dismounted and went to the fire, pouring black coffee into a smoke-blackened tin cup.
“Raid south of here,” he said as we started to come in, “and a woman killed. They say Cullen done it.”
“There it is, Cull,” Longley said. “They’ll mean it now.”
“Three posses out,” Kirby said. “That’s why I hightailed it back here. The orders are to shoot to kill, and if you’re taken alive, to hang you.”
“That would be Barlow,” I said. “I told him to stay away from here.”
Bickerstaff got up. “Cullen, you’ve got to run. Even this place isn’t safe.”
“I’ll stay.”
“We can go to Devil’s Den,” Lee suggested. “It’s farther north and no way they could find us there.”
Devil’s Den was one of the best places, difficult to get at, and easy to defend. No posse in their right minds would attempt to even come near the place.
“You go ahead,” I told them. “I’m going into the Big Thicket.”
They all sat around looking at me, trying to see what it was in my mind. All I knew was Sam Barlow was there and the time had come for a killing, for an old-fashioned gut-shooting. I was going to see Sam Barlow. I was going to read him from the Scriptures.
“Heard something else,” Kirby said. “There’s a dozen riders camped on Blackthorne. They pulled in there while I was coming across country.”
If these were Barlow’s men on Blackthorne, and I had no idea who else they might be, Katy was in trouble. Getting up I walked to my mule and began to saddle up. It might be too late, even now.
Longley came over to me where I was cinching up. �
�What’s bitin’ you, Cull? You takin’ off like a sca’ed pa’tridge?”
“Katy Thorne and her aunt live alone on Blackthorne.”
“You set store by that gal?”
“I do.”
“Then you just hold up while I get my saddle.”
Bob Lee came up to his horse packing his saddle under his arm. “I take it mighty hard, you fixing to ride off into trouble alone, Cull. A man would think you had no friends.”
“I’m obliged.”
Watching them saddle up gave me a strange, warm, odd sort of feeling. There had not been many friends for me during the years I’d ridden the country, or wherever I lived, and there are fewer friends when trouble raises its hand.
Not that I deserved friends. I’d lived too much alone and with a chip on my shoulder, always wanting friendship but wary of folks, fearful of what might come of trying friendship. Thing is, if a man wants friends he’s got to be friendly. Takes a man a sight of time to learn the simplest things, it seems.
Matt Kirby switched his saddle to Bickerstaff’s spare horse, and when we rode out of there I felt better than any king with an army at his back, for these were good men who rode beside me, and like myself they were men driven to the wall with only ourselves to fight for, and the things in which we believed. If it was Sam Barlow on Blackthorne he’d better make himself scarce before we got there or he’d be planted in that swampy ground.
No moon lit the sky when we rode down the dark lanes, the sound of our horses’ hoofs hard upon the roads, or whispering through the grassy fields, but we needed no moon for we were men to whom darkness was a friend. We rode dark horses and our clothes were dark, with no white shirts and no ornaments on our saddles or anything to make a target for a seeing man.
The First Fast Draw Page 7