I, Tom Horn

by Will Henry

  The little slant-eye lady gave me a look.

  She put out a hand, no bigger than a child's, and let it light like a butterfly where no lady's hand ought to settle on a strange man's leg.

  "Mr. Horn," she said, that soft I had to cock my head to hear it, "I was looking out there. And do you know what I saw? I saw a man who was the one I had seen in all of my own nights of lying sleepless, thinking of the West. I told myself then that I would know this man when I saw him. It is a little frightening, Mr. Horn. I don't know yet what to make of it."

  "Of what, miss?"

  "Of you," she said, and the small hand tightened, just before it fluttered away. "You are the man in the dream."

  Well, I flushed up some, which she couldn't see due to the dark, then got a little riled. This had gone about as far as was decent. I wasn't going to try throwing a leg over the new schoolmarm her first night. Nor was I aiming to let her see I was thinking of it, which I sure was. She was female female. Slant eyes or not.

  "Well, ma'am," I said, slapping Buck and Becky with the lines, "don't make nothing of such oddments of the mind. You need a Apache Injun to tell you what dreams mean, and the nearest one is a week's train ride from Albany County, Wyoming. I learnt to read visions living with them Injuns, and I can tell you your case ain't unusual. You're likely one of us shadder people"

  "What people, Mr. Horn?"

  "Shadder people; you know, what follers you around when there's sun to see it by."

  "Oh!" She squealed it like it was something great. "You and I are shadow people! How quaint."

  "Maybe," I said. "I got to know you better before I'm sure you're shadder people. But you got the feel."

  She slid that hand back onto my leg.

  "And so do you have the feel, Mr. Horn," she murmured. "I just know we will get better acquainted." She stopped and leaned over toward me, anxious. "We will, won't we?" she said. "I mean, get to be friends?"

  I shook up the team again.

  "We will, and right fast," I gritted out twixt fixed teeth, "happen you keep putting your hand there."

  She give a fluttery gasp and lifted her hand like she had fried it on a stovelid.

  "Mr. Horn! Such talk. I would never think to—"

  "Yes ma'am, I know you would never," I said. "That's how come I said it. You just hang on now, Miss Kimmell. I am going to make up some time along this here level stretch." I give Buck a shot with the popper of the buggy whip and cracked Becky in the butt with a loop of her line. "Hee-yahh!" I yelled. "Hi-yup, hi-yup!"

  And there wasn't anymore said until we had got around to the good-nights and thank-you-so-muches in the ranchyard of the Miller place.

  Then I said the wrong thing, forever sure.

  Gun Talk

  I will never know why I said yes to Dora Miller when I was already getting back in the spring wagon to leave. Lord knew I was well shut of the slanty-eyed schoolmarm and she of Tom Horn and the ideas she'd fired up in him.

  But Mrs. Miller urged me to stay the night, saying her boys Vic and Gus wanted me to. They had heard of Tom Horn, naturally. You know how kids are. They will follow you like tramp dogs, if you carry guns and ride fast horses. So I give in to the invitation, sort of flattered.

  After a good supper, it set out to be one of the nicest evenings ever for a man of my calling. It is not that many fine summer nights you get to sit with a family of good folks in their pioneer ranch house and be the center of the talk and attention. I confess it favored me of the Millers. But it also let Glendolene Kimmell take side-look liberties with "my western man," as she sniggered it a little too loud, and cozy; it was getting close in there.

  I was glad enough when Gus, the younger boy, informed me I was to sleep "out in the yard" with him and the other boy, Victor. They had a tent out there fixed for summer bunking. I wasn't specially ready for bed, but I was of a mind to get away from Miss Kimmell. She looked even better in the candleshine and coal-oil lamplight than out on the prairie by star-view. In fact, one time Jim Miller caught my eye and rolled both his up in his head toward the ridgepole of his shack, like as to say, "Oh, my, ain't she somewhat!" And I had to nod back and wink to answer him, yes indeedy. "I'm right glad," I told him, aside, when he come out with me and the boys to the tent, "that it's you, not me, going to have her in the next room all winter. I will bet your good wife don't close her both eyes till Miss Glendolene gets took back to Iron Mountain depot. Was I you, I would spend the summer out here with the boys."

  Jim Miller give me a knock in the ribs with his elbow. "And was I you," he chuckled, "I wouldn't waste no more summer nights sleeping with boys in tents. From them smoky looks the schoolmarm was fetching you, all you got to do is snap your fingers."

  "Well," I grinned, giving my fingers a couple of pops, "I will commence practicing. But tonight I promised Gus and Vic to tell them about the Cherry Cow Injuns, and how I caught Geronimo for General Crook."

  "I thought it was General Miles?" Miller says, kind of cutty. "And time afore that, General Orlando Willcox."

  I didn't take him out on it. No man likes to be made small of before his kids. Especially boys.

  "It was Crook," I said. "Miles come later and Willcox earlier."

  "Oh, well, whichever, I won't stay for it," the ranchman said. "The boys won't limber up in front of their pa. Yonder they come with your bedding." His voice went cautious. "Listen, Horn," he said, "be easy with the gun shooting and such in your stories. We've got fresh neighbor trouble, and there's bad blood here enough already that it wouldn't be I wise to fire them up any. Particularly Vic. He's scairt halfways sick now."

  "What you talking about, Miller?" I said. "Kels Nickell?"

  "Him and his crazy kid Willie."

  "It's that serious twixt them and you Millers?"

  "Horn," he answered, and the tone left no question of his tearfulnesses, "it has become the hell of my life, and I can't tell you the hurt it's brung me and Dora, already." I thought he was going to weep, he was so sudden atremble with remembering whatever it was of hell that Kels Nickell had brought the Miller family. But he steadied, and I said, "All right, Jim. I understand. Don't fret about the boys. I'll not stir them any."

  Jim Miller shook my hand without another word and went inside again, and me and the boys got ready for bed.

  It was fun with the boys after we was stretched out on our soogans, the juney bugs bumping the net outside and the crickets sawing their leg bones off, and way over on the Sybille a loafer wolf howling lonesome and long, and, down on Little Piney Lake, a loon hollering its wild, shivery cries.

  "I would give my saddle and summer savings to be like you, Mr. Horn," Gus, the younger boy, said. "Riding at night out yonder there with all them sounds and scary things, only not scairt of them."

  "Well," Victor said, "neither would we be scairt had we guns like Mr. Horn's. Specially that Winchester."

  "If you'd like," I told them, "I will show you how to shoot it in the morning. We'll go down to the meadow and let her rip. I got two spare boxes of ammo that is getting old, and I will want to buy some new for it, anyway."

  "Cripes!" Gus said. "You mean I can fire it myself?"

  "Sure, if your pa will let you."

  "Gawd Amighty," the older boy said. "Shooting Tom Horn's own Winchester. Wait'll I brag on that!"

  We fell still, the three of us, and I reminded them we would do the shooting only if their father said. "He don't like guns, it seems," I finished, "so we got to work him up careful. It'll be our secret plan."

  They liked that fine. Boys just naturally love guns and secrets. I had no fear they would peep.

  We quit talking again. After a spell, Victor said, "Pa's all right. It's just what happened with him and his rifle that's soured him; he kilt our little brother."

  "Oh," I said, "that's mighty sad. I didn't know that."

  "Yup," Gus said. "Kilt him pretty bloody. It wasn't apurpose, though."

  "Cripes, Mr. Horn knows that!" Victor was ired.

  I
reared up on an elbow. "No, Vic, I didn't know anything about it," I said. "How come Little Brother to get shot?"

  Well, they told me, the two of them, one breaking in to patch up any part of the tale that the other forgot, how it had gone to bring Little Brother Miller to his death.

  The Miller and Nickel places butted against one another, and there'd been constant hazing of stock back and forth over the common boundary, each rancher protecting his grass from outside animals. Then Nickell had brought in 1,400 head of sheep. The Miller pasture began to grow white woolballs all over it from the Nickell sheep, and the Miller cows wouldn't eat proper because of the smell of the stuff. As for Nickell, Miller's cows muddied the creek above Nickell's sheep pasture, and the damn-fool woolies wouldn't drink from the stream. It got bad, with threats going both ways.

  Then, one day, Victor Miller was herding some strayed sheep off Miller grass, afoot. Willie Nickell had showed up riding a snorty horse and had tried to run down the Miller boy, and nearly did so. On one pass, the running horse hit the dodging Victor and knocked him spinning. Victor was on the ground and Willie trying to make the horse go back at him when Jim Miller hove into view with his rifle and fired a warning shot that busted the horn off Willie Nickell's saddle, which happened to have been borrowed without consent from his father's hook in the barn.

  Well, old man Nickell had come storming over that night to demand payment for a new saddle horn and apology for shooting at his boy, and Jim Miller had just said, "Goddamn you, Nickell, you son of a bitch, you keep your idiot kid away from my boys. He comes on Miller land again, or puts that horse at either of my lads, here, one more time, and it won't be his saddle horn that gets shot off. Now you better get off my place and stay off it. I will have a gun in my hand from now on."

  Kels Nickell wasn't the one to back off.

  "I won't come again without a rifle, either," he warned rancher Miller. "Somebody is going to get hurt, sure."

  It wasn't two days later that Jim Miller, loading his old .38-40 Winchester in the house before going out, had accidentally let the hammer fall on a live round. The bullet struck Little Brother, playing only six, eight feet away, and splatted parts of him all over the kitchen table.

  "Ma went loonyheaded for a week," young Gus said, as Victor finished the gruesome tale. "Pa just picked up baby brother, what he could of him, carried him out of the house and put him in the oat bin in the barn, and come back out and stood there in the rain looking up into the sky. He said in a loud voice that me and Vic heard—we was hiding in the loft because the grief of ma and pa was so fearful—that God would surely take his vengeance on Kels Nickell. Then he shook his hand up at the falling rain and yelled, 'Lord, you hear me? You don't strike down this man who has killed my baby boy, I will surely kill him myself!' "

  "He did say that?" I asked, to make certain. "That he would kill Kels Nickell?"

  "Sure, but he never would do it." It was Victor Miller. "Pa ain't that kind. He grieves worse nor a dog over dead puppies. But he ain't going to shoot Nickell."

  I let the juney bugs butt their shelly heads against the netting for a spell. I could hear Victor Miller breathing hard and could understand his pa not wanting him worked up. "How about Willie Nickell?" I said. "He ever come around again?"

  "Nope, but he's done shot at Vic two times," Gus said.

  "Where?"

  "Over the yon rock outcrop, in the milk cow pasture."

  "You mean where the one-mile gate is? That ridge?" I scowled. "Hell, that's Nickell pasture and their gate."

  "Sure it is. But we always let the latch post down careful and close it tight with the loop wire. Shucks, they ride our pasture!"

  "He missed us and we run like hell," Vic broke in. "I was by myself the first time. Then Gus was with me the other. It was Willie doing the shooting, all right. We know that old Henry rifle's bark. It's a .44 rimfire. His pa lets him use it on sheep guard. Willie goes out with the flock when the dago herder spies a coyote or loafer wolf hanging around. Willie's a damn good shot, that's why."

  I nodded, frowning. "If Willie's such a deadeye," I asked, "how come he missed you both times?" I put it to Victor Miller, since he'd been the one to get two times fired on. "You know," I went on, "it ain't a bad idea laying out up on that ridge. Happen you want to kill somebody coming through that pasture gate, it ain't."

  Unthinking, I idled along. "You got good cover to take a hold and brace a aimed shot. There's hard-rock trail coming and going, so's you won't leave no tracks. No sir," I shook my head. "Maybe your friend Willie ain't so crazy, after all, boys." I paused, eyeing Vic. "You ever think about it that way, boy?"

  "Cripes!" the older lad breathed, face in a flush.

  "Yeah," I nodded. "But you're saying he missed you both times by accident. Or hoping that's it, ain't you?"

  "By damn, I don't rightly know," Victor Miller said. "Maybe it was just too long a shot. Maybe he was trying to kill us and didn't miss by no accident. But then maybe he was only meaning to scare the shit out of us, like our pa done to him when Willie run me down with his horse."

  "Yeah, Mr. Horn." It was young Gus siding his older brother. "Willie's not right upstairs, you know. He is scary to look at when he gets mad. Turns white and his eyeballs roll opposite ways. You know, like a bronc being drug to the snubbing post." Gus paused, and it was plain he was roused. "Vic's some older than Willie, but he is bad scairt of him all the same, ain't you, Vic?"

  Victor admitted he was much afraid of the Nickell boy, who was but fourteen to Vic's eighteen years of age. "Willie always has to get his 'evens,' " Victor said. "Onct at school, he told me he figured I was to blame for all the trouble twixt our kin. Said his pa told him that. Willie, he vowed to me that he would pay me good for what I'd done to him. I asked him what that was, and he didn't even know. Said to never mind, that he would get his evens on me and I had better look out for him."

  "Yeah," young Gus echoed again. "He's crazy; you got to be afeered of somebody crazy."

  "I reckon," I said, pondering it. "But you boys just take him at his word. Stay shut of him. Don't egg him on or rile him unneedful. Person that has got his brains working wrong ain't to be reasoned with, nor run a bluff on. You both of you do as Willie says; keep far away from him. I don't like this business of him firing shots at you and him hid out to do it. I am going to check into it with Kels Nickell. Meanwhile, you two keep it quiet twixt the three of us." I give them a nod, man-to-man style. "We'll be working on the case together."

  They liked that grand, but Victor saw the hole in it. "Cuss it, Mr. Horn," he said, "meanwhile could be our ass. Willie's got a gun he can get to, and we ain't. Pa won't even let us clean his .38-40."

  "Yeah, that's so," agreed Gus, the lighter spirited of them. "But, hell, Vic, we can kipe that old .45-90 of Grandpa Miller's. I know where pa's got it hid."

  "Shit," Victor said, "you cain't hit nothing with that blunderbuss. It ain't even got a blade in the front sight slot. Nor it won't lever the second cartridge in, neither. No sir, by God." He stopped, and I didn't like the look, nor the continuing flush of his face. "We got to get us a new sizzler of a cartridge like Mr. Horn's thutty-thutty; with a gun like that, you could hit the son of a bitch, I will bet. We'd ought to do it, too, by God, before he gets one of us. Hell, it would be nothing to it. You know, Mr. Horn, just like the way you said a minute ago."

  I didn't care much for the sound of that, either.

  "What the hell you mean?" I said, sharp and quick.

  "Well, you know, like you said to do it," the boy answered. "From up on the ridge. Laying your sights on him square in the middle of one-mile gate. Hell, Willie comes through that gate near every day taking the milk stock to grass and back. It would be a turkey shoot, sure enough." He skipped his pace to take a gulp of breath and winced me again. "You know, like you said, Mr. Horn."

  Well, being cautious not to overpush it, I shushed that line right there.

  "Vic," I said, "I didn't 'say' to do it that way. I said it w
as one good way to take that shot, happen a person was serious. Now, I've told you I'm going to talk to Willie's pa about the shooting, and I don't want to hear such nonsense from you, meantime, that you're aiming to ambush Willie Nickell, or that Tom Horn done told you how to do it. If we cain't talk without you grabbing the bit in your back teeth and running off as locoed as you claim Willie is, we will blow out the candle right now."

  I did it, too, huffing like I was ired and putting out the tent candle with one magnified snort.

  In a way, I wasn't shamming, though.

  I had gotten onto uneasy ground with the boys, and I'd done it through my own weak spot of talking too much when I'd ought to be damned tacit. Accusing Victor Miller of not understanding what was said, and babbling on too much as I had about their made-up boys' yarn of the Nickell kid trying to kill them, well, it was Tom Horn doing what he done next best to what he got paid for doing—whicht was talking too much about what he got paid to do.

  "Tell you what," I offered to the boys, who were both laying too quiet and breathing too short to suit me. "Sometime soon, when I get back, say, we will the three of us go up on that Nickell ridge and see if we cain't spot us something of clues. You know, like maybe if Willie forgot to pick up his empty brass. You'd be surprised how frequent that happens."

  "Cripes!" Victor said. "I never would of thought to do that."

  "You done the right thinking and the right thing, too," I assured him. "You got out of there, pronto."

  "Cripes," was all that Victor Miller answered me. "Them empty cartridges. Think of that!"

  "We'll do it," I said. "Remind me next time I ride this way. Meantime, don't talk to nobody."