I, Tom Horn

by Will Henry

  "Never would," Victor swore.

  "All right. Get to sleep now. Got to be sharp eyed for our target practice tomorrow."

  The boy reached silently in the tent's gloom to touch the cold steel of my Winchester, where the rifle slept by my side. "Thutty-thutty," he said sleepily. "And always pick up your empties—never leave your brass behind—that's right, ain't it, Tom—I mean, Mr. Horn."

  I didn't need to answer him. He trailed it off, and I lay there a good while after they were both breathing easy and deep, as asleep as only boys can get.

  It bothered me that young fellows like the Miller brothers would know of me and of the system that never failed, and that it excited them to where they would come right out and talk about using it themselves. My God, I thought, just to settle a feudy neighbor grudge twixt their two fathers? And giving me the credit for the idea? Well, Christ, it was enough to keep a man awake nights. Good Jesus, they was only boys!

  Well, of course that was it; being only boys they was only talking: they wasn't going to do nothing, only talk of it. I had to remember that. And remember who it was they were talking for. It wasn't for some clod-busting farmer like their own pa, or Kels Nickell. Hell no, and not quite. It was for me, Tom Horn, the great manhunter. The one who did use the system that never failed.

  Somehow, the reassurance fell short.

  I didn't sleep good that night. I couldn't get it out of my mind that I had made a bad mistake somewhere with these Miller boys.

  Or with one of them anyways.

  Caliber .30-30

  Next morning—it would be a Tuesday, July 16—came off very hot. We all was slow to get up. Miller was to take Miss Kimmell over to the Iron Mountain School, which they called the Miller-Nickell school. When they'd gone, Mrs. Miller took into the family wash, leaving me with the two boys. Naturally, they hadn't given me the least chance to dodge them, as they expected their "shooting lessons."

  Well, I didn't want to get to fooling with that business when their dad wasn't there. Neither did I want to fret their ma with it, whiles Jim was off the place. So I just had to tell them it was off for the morning, and maybe we could get to it after noon dinner. They understood about the problem (with their pa) but nonetheless insisted I had promised them "something" to do. Seeing they wasn't going to leave off trailing me, I gave in.

  "All right," I said, "how'd you like to learn a little scouting? It's more important than shooting anyways. You got to scout any job you do beforehand. That's so you don't give your cow thief the drop on you."

  I saw them fetch a funny little look back and forth betwixt the two of them, and I backtracked quick.

  "Course, rustlers is only part of your range detective work," I said. "But it's the part everybody talks about, rustlers. You know," I said, "like them damn thieving Nickells."

  They both fair glowed at that. Cripes! By damn! Shit yes! Why them dirty Nickells even stole Miller beef, and that wasn't fair!

  I nodded but said no more here.

  The truth was that Miller was more generally suspected for raising his family on free beef, than was Kels Nickell. Kels's problem was mostly Kels. Every cowman in two counties hated him. All would be happy to see him "spoilt" by any big outfit's pasture rider. But I wanted these two boys to get it back to their father what I said; so he would know Tom Horn hadn't ridden Miller grass just to bring the new school-marm up from Iron Mountain depot.

  "Any particular place you'd like to scout?" I asked Gus and Victor.

  "Nope, you're the leader," Gus said. He talked more and sooner than Vic did. It should have warned me, the older boy's quiet, but it didn't. My sombra was asleep again. I rode square into it.

  "Vic," I asked, "what do you say?"

  "I'd like to scout the Nickell ridge," he said, quick enough this time. "Maybe see where Willie laid up to pot-shoot at us. Mighten be we could find them empty shells you said about."

  "It might be you're right," I agreed. "Let's ride."

  Gus bounced along behind Victor for a few strides, then called to me, 'Hey, what if they see us?"

  I lifted a hand to him, gesturing him to not fret.

  "They won't," I told him. "That's where the scouting comes in. You ain't never seen, unless you aim deliberate to be seen. The Cherry Cow Apaches learnt me that."

  "Cripes!" said Gus Miller. "Just like the Injuns!"

  His older brother Vic shook his head.

  "No, by God," he said, "just like Tom Horn."

  We didn't stay long on the ridge, once I'd found the three empty copper-case .44 rimfire shells. There was no mistaking the raised-up H headstamp on the shells. Nor the bulge up where the bullet seats that all them old Henrys put in those soft copper casings. But the Miller boys fooled around long enough that I got the fantods.

  There was something about the ragged, dark granite of that outcrop looking down three hundred yards away, on one-mile gate of the Nickell milk cow pasture, that turnt me hunchy and spooky. It wasn't like I was proving that Willie Nickell likely had lain up here and lobbed those missing long shots down at the Miller boys. Nor it wasn't just like me being up there answering Victor Miller's intent questions about exactly how Tom Horn would lay up in those rocks to take his bead on a cow thief coming through one-mile gate. Say, one who had a fresh-dressed beef in the bed of the wagon he was driving. A beef that Tom Horn could see through his field glasses was the crumple-horn long yearling he had only yesterday branded with the I-M iron. No, it was scarier than that. It was like Tom Horn really was laying up there glassing that gate. Like Tom Horn really was lining up the front blade in the buckhorn rear sight. Jesus, it was eerie, and I didn't like it worth a damn.

  "Come on," I said, something rough, "let's drift."

  "No, wait," Victor frowned. "Where would you lay your sights from here?"

  "Well, one thing," I answered him, short, "I wouldn't lay them nowhere at all from this distance with a damned Henry .44 short. I would get me another gun for openers."

  "A .30-30," said Victor Miller, not as a question.

  "It's what I carry, kid," I said. "Now you know that." Then, growling my uneasiness. "I told you, let's git. So, goddamnit, let's git—!"

  We slid back down from skyline and went for the horses tethered in some bull pine clumps sheltering the west rise of the Nickell ridge. It was then about eleven a.m. We made it back to Miller's for noon dinner, just as Jim and Miss Kimmell rolled into the yard from school.

  Dora Miller had made some spit-roasted beef ribs over the pit in the yard. There was potato salad, pickled snap beans, hot corn dodgers, and a molasses skillet cake that plain melted on the way to your mouth.

  I noted Miss Kimmell didn't stow much away and remember wondering how she had got all those nice plump things under her trim white-collar gray gingham dress without she et better than that. Being sparing by nature, I put away sufficient for the two of us.

  My appetite didn't go unnoticed.

  "By jings, Tom," Gus Miller said, "I will bet you don't pack in any such vittles when you are tracking down a rustler! No sir. Your old Cap horse would bust his ass—well, excuse me, uh, he would surely strain his crupper some. How do you manage?"

  His mother broke in to remind him I was Mr. Horn, not "Tom," to children, and Jim Miller sent him to the house until he could remember not to say vulgar things with his mouth full and in front of the new schoolmarm (who I could see was having a struggle to keep from laughing out loud, and I liked that in her). But Victor Miller was still present and he said, "Yeah, how do you manage, Mr. Horn?"

  I answered him straight enough.

  It was a way I had of not letting such chances slip by, where I could use them, in a safe way, to advertise my Tom Horn trademarks. In that manner, certain habits of Horn could be used to do the work of Horn himself. That is to say, instead of laying up all night watching somebody's place that was a known cow thief, you would just scatter around a cheese rind, some raw bacon bits, and a crust of rye bread. When the "rancher" seen that, the nape-hair
s of his neck would lift up and spike into his shirt collar and he would say, soft to himself, "Jesus Christ, Tom Horn," and likely he would be moving to some new part of the country with not a shot fired in anger, or a note nailed to his door.

  So I said to Victor Miller, "Well, boy, you know me; I carry some rat cheese, hunk of salt bacon, loaf of rye bread. That's if I'm on the stalk. If I'm just riding, I always add coffee and sugar. But on the hunt, it is just cold water and no fires." I saw the looks going back and yon with Miller and his wife, and I give a laugh and patted Victor on the shoulder. "Shucks," I said, "don't suck all that in like it was the Gospel. You find any old moldy bread or cheese rinds in Mr. Coble's spring wagon yonder? Well, hardly! Ain't I done told you that 99 percent of a pasture rider's work is riding pastures? Next time you see me going by, you look for that old coffee pot tied back of my saddle. You'll see it."

  They let down, with that, and we finished the meal in a good spirit again. Jim Miller even agreed when Victor asked if we might now have the shooting practice that Mr. Horn had promised to show. "Yes," the rancher said, surprising me. "Go and fetch your brother. You ladies excuse us," he said. "Dora," he added to his wife, "you and Miss Kimmell get dressed for it, providing you want to go to town. I am going in, when we finish shooting."

  Dora Miller sort of looked puzzled.

  "What you going to do in town, Jim?" she frowned.

  "Get me something," was all he told her. "Be ready."

  There was a swale down back of the house. We went down there and the boys set targets for me and I busted them, shooting from hip, shoulder, free of body with two hands, and one-handed, cocking the lever by throwing the rifle out and back and firing it dead on. They got their turns on some easy tomato cans on a rock ledge. I took note that Victor was a careful and close holder, a natural, too, on shooting free. Gus could not hit the ledge, let alone the cans. Jim Miller was little better. It was plain to see how his poor other kid had got hurt by his handling of firearms. But now he was dead serious.

  "Horn," he said, when we had used my two boxes and put up the rifle, "let me see that piece again. I want to study it." While he turned the model 94 this way and then that, he asked questions about the new .30-30 caliber, muzzle velocity, recoil kick, distance carry, fall of trajectory, various bullet weights, everything about my gun and what I loaded in it. I never see a man so intrigued of a gun. Particularly where he was so edgy about them, and sorrowed.

  He could see me studying him. He gave the weapon back.

  "I suppose it's the best," he said, "or you wouldn't have it."

  "The best I know, Jim. It comes either soft point or the metal patch bullets, 160 grains, with the new Winchester powder that hops either load along at about two thousand or so feet per second. That's 30 grains of powder, mister."

  "Smokeless powder, eh?"

  "Yes sir, not like your old .38-40."

  "Must be the most accurate, too."

  "Some cuss it, some kiss it," I said. "Depends what you want it for. On thin-skinned game it's a killer."

  "Thin-skinned game, Horn?" Miller was eyeing me uneasylike.

  "Sure, Jim," I said. "You know, like rabbit, antelope —a man."

  I caught Victor Miller looking open-mouth at me and nodding his head to every word I was saying to his dad. "Thutty-thutty, pa," he said. "Got to be."

  His father scowled and looked off. "Go on up to the house, boys," he said. "Harness the wagon for the womenfolk. I'll be along. Tell your mother to fetch—" He turned back to me. "What's the gun cost, Horn?"

  "Don't know right now. Mine was $14.75 with the octagon barrel. Round barrel's cheaper and just as good."

  "Tell your mother to bring fifteen dollars, boy. No, wait." Again the turn to me. "What's the shells, Horn?"

  "They was $.67 for a box of twenty. $3.32 per hundred."

  "'Tell your mother to bring another five dollars," Jim Miller said to the flush-faced Vic, "and hop it!"

  He stood behind with me a minute, whiles the two boys galloped for the house.

  "Horn," he said, after another moment, "did the boys tell you about Little Brother?"

  "Yes."

  "I appreciate your help with the rifle information," he said. "I can't stand to look at the old gun and today pitched it down the Clay Crick bluff. But I must have a new one or be helpless to them goddamn Nickells."

  "Go careful," I advised him. "Kels is dangerous."

  Jim Miller looked at me, shaking his head.

  "I don't fear him," he said. "He the same as killed Little Brother. I never carried a gun about before then. It was Kels Nickell made me do it."

  "Better leave it sleep with the little tyke, Jim."

  "No, they owe me a life over there."

  "That why you want the new rifle?"

  "No, that is only to defend my family."

  'Would you gun down Kels?"

  "I don't know. I don't see how I could."

  I nodded, watching him. "How about Willie?" I said.

  "No, no, no! My God, Horn. A child?"

  "Just wondering," I said. 'We'd better get on up the rise. Yonder's your missus waving her shawl."

  We walked up together and I seen only Gus and his ma in the Miller wagon, with Vic fussing with the team's headstalls and bit chains. "You got the money, mother?" Jim Miller said. Dora Miller said she had, and Jim got in the wagon and took up the lines without another word to anybody. Victor swung up beside him, and Jim whipped the team out of the yard. I was still watching them go when I heard the kitchen door fall to behind me.

  "Is that you, Mr. Horn?" said the deep soft voice.

  I stood there a minute before turning. I had begun to tremble. I knew I was trapped. I could hear it in the way she spoke to me. Hardly over a murmur. Husky in the throat. Damn her anyways. I had to get going.

  "Mr. Horn—"

  I turned about slow, holding my eyes down the way that was my manner to throw people off.

  It didn't throw her off. "Look at me," she said.

  I brought up my eyes.

  And flinched clear down to the loins.

  She was standing there in the late summer afternoon breeze, with the button-front gray gingham dress on.

  Only it was unbuttoned.

  And blowed apart by the light wind.

  There wasn't nothing under it.

  Just Miss Kimmell.

  Smooth People

  Glendolene was what any man would dream to play with. She was a tiny thing but the loveliest without clothes that I ever seen. Her spirit, too, was forward and full of excitement. She was not afeared of a man. Yet neither was she ever loose that I knew of. With me, she had just met her "western man." To the rest of Wyoming she was that "dark little schoolmarm" and proper and prim as some convent girl. There was never a breath of scandal to her name and, saving again for me, I don't know that she so much as batted an eyelash at other men.

  But that day in that old July-hot ranch house, with nobody to home and nobody likely to come calling, she was a woman so heated to have a man that I could scarcely stay with her. I never did know, and do not now know, how I felt about Miss Kimmell. I was ma'aming her the first and last days that I saw her. But those that say I was cruel to her, or treated her low down, or laughed at how she hung after me, are damned scoundrels. I did call her a slant eye and say some other unkind things about her later. But I never made cheap of her, nor so much as hinted of our secrets.

  If I never loved her, I surely liked her a lot.

  But she was one of those women who lacked her ordinary pride with one man, and it was me that was the one. Other than for that, she went about the country with her small chin elevated and looking Wyoming square in the eye. I will sure remember her well.

  She was smooth people.

  The Millers hadn't got home by suppertime. Me and Glendolene was hungry as wolves. I had to cook the feed as she didn't know a stewpot from a Dutch oven. I made a stew from some cold roast beef. We had white potatoes, hot biscuit, canned corn, and co
ffee with real cream. The schoolmarm couldn't get over how fast I got it all whipped together. I had my reasons for the haste. All the while I was being the chef, she was sort of laying and sashaying about the place in a kind of negligee bathrobe she had ordered out of the Sears catalog. It was called La Parisienne from the label in its neckband. Glendolene said it made her feel like a French fille de joie which she explained was not a happy female foal but a high-class "lady of the evening," in Paris talk.

  I told her I didn't know what it felt like, but I could sure as hell tell her what it looked like, and that was a short, light supper, and then back into Jim and Dora's back-east feather bed.

  "It shows everything you got," I told her, "and you got everything."

  She laughed easy and a lot. It made a delicious sound when she did. Sort of gurgly and shiny eyed, like a kid would laugh from purely being tickled. But she was no kid. God, but that body of hers. It made me think of Pajarita Morena, that first time at numero tres, in Santa Fe. I never forgot that night, or the filmy La Parisienne that clung to Glendolene Kimmell close as the ivory skin it covered. I think of Pajarita and Santa Fe. I think too of sweet Nopal and Fish Hawk Meadow. And a hundred forgot names and faces in between. But remembering Pajarita I am sad, and dreaming of dear Nopal my chest hurts with love of her and what we lost. The others were just women to be had as men have most women, for a night, even for a morning, but then spun away like a good or poor cigar, whichever it had been, but left to smolder out in the dirt of the back trail. Glendolene, silk-bodied, cowboy-struck little Miss Kimmell, wasn't like any of them.

  You don't have to love a woman to know when she loves you and to give her, for that, a special place with Pajarita, the little bird, and sweet Nopal, my Apache bride.

  We made up the feather bed and straightened the shack to look like it did when Dora Miller left it. Then we went out on the front stoop to watch the moon rise over Iron Mountain. Likewise, we watched the road for first glint of the Miller wagon lantern. But mostly we just lay back easy on the warm boards of the floor, bracing against the wall planks, smelling the night, and resting. It had been some afternoon, fierce and fun and soft-tender by turn. We was both just plain loved out. And satisfied to hunker there in the coming breeze, catching each other up on who we were that had been so fevered of each other the past six, eight hours.