by Lauran Paine
“Yes.”
“And if your pardner asked you to do him a favor...you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then bring me that gun.”
The boy only hesitated a second before he said: “I will. The next time I can slip away. Jack...would you ask Mister Cavin for me...about coming down here once in a while? I wouldn’t be in the way here because I wasn’t in the way at Buck’s barn.”
“You wouldn’t be in the way, son.”
“He might not give in right away. He’s sort of bull-headed sometimes.”
“Is he? What’s he do for a living, Rob?”
“Works for my uncle on one of the track gangs. That’s how I sneaked away today. He had to go out to where they’re having trouble with some new track.”
“Have you seen your uncle lately?”
“No, he doesn’t come around. Just that once...when he came for me at Amy’s house.” The blue eyes brightened. “Boy, Amy sure gave him a tongue-lashing that day.”
“What about?”
The boy’s expression clouded over, became detached and distant. “I don’t remember much of it. I guess it was about him not letting me live at the barn with you.”
“Well, that wouldn’t have been a very good place to live.”
“This would be, though.”
Jack untied the apron strings slowly, removed the covering, and tossed it on the cutting table. “Will Mister Cavin come home and find you gone?” he asked.
Rob’s glance came to rest on Jack’s face. “I guess I’d better go,” he said.
“You won’t forget to bring me the gun?”
“No, I won’t forget.”
The boy left, his crippled, slow gait heightened by reluctance. For a long time afterward Jack leaned against the cutting table without moving. Stood there woodenly with thoughts spiraling upward in his mind. And later, when he lit the lamps and went back to work, lines drawn around patterns on the sides of leather blurred. He finally went to a chair and dropped down.
His own youth returned with hurting vividness. He saw a lanky, hot-eyed rebel with his first gun. He hadn’t found it any more than Rob had found his gun...he’d stolen it. He’d gotten cartridges the same way. Then there had been days of practicing, of stubborn, blind perseverance. Of eventual unerring accuracy. Then more days of drawing, of turning holsters flesh side out, smooth side inward. Drawing, working the gun around until it rode loose. Of waxing the inside of the holster. Drawing and firing until reflexes were automatic, blurred by speed, like lightning. Weeks and months of co-ordinating the two accomplishments. Deadly accuracy and blinding speed. Days and weeks and months of practice. Then....
He got up swiftly and crossed to the cutting table. Folded his arms across his chest and leaned there, remembering. The first fight had been with a drunken, loud-mouthed cowboy. It had been so easy. The cowboy’s gun wasn’t even clear of its holster when the third eye appeared in his forehead.
Then — two years of hell-roaring wildness. Fights, drunks, robberies, killings by one of the fastest guns in the territory — and finally an ambush with a herd of stolen horses, a gunfight, captivity, the trial, and three years in the Yuma prison.
Now, at thirty-one and on the road back, he faced an image of himself. Not so big and raw perhaps but with more reason to practice with a gun. With Rob there was that haunting deformity and a sense of deep resentment — with him there’d been only wildness. Rob was walking the same trail. The same road to Yuma — if he was lucky — to a shallow grave in some unknown boothill cemetery if he was unlucky.
He thought of the clear blue eyes, the long, thin fingers, and dread moved deep in him. Enough practice would make Rob Logan a gunman second to none. It was in the boy to be that good, and who would know it better than Jack Swift of old Tularosa?
It was in him to be the best at anything he undertook. He was sensitive, observant, perfectly co-ordinated in all ways except for that crooked leg — and that was going to be the cause of his own eventual destruction, the way he was going now, and worse even, the destruction of dozens of others as well. That leg, a sense of being wronged — and an old gun.
Jack swooped up his hat, clamped it on, and left the shop. Evening shadows were coming. He walked through the cooling night as far as Buck’s barn and stopped where the short liveryman was straining to reach up far enough to light the coach lamps.
“Damned hired help,” the old man grumbled. “Forgets to light these cussed things every damned night.” He got the last wick burning, dropped down flat-footed, and squinted upward. “I never wanted to be as tall as you are...except when I have to light those blasted things.”
Buck shook his head at the lamps, then jerked his head sideways. “Come on, I got some harness needs mending,” he said.
But Jack stood still. “Do you know a man named Cavin, Buck?”
“Cavin? Cavin. Yes, I expect I do. Would he be Ernie Cavin who works for the railroad?”
“Yes. Where does he live?”
“Well,” the old man said, looking northward. “You know where my house is?”
“Yes.”
“And the next place is an old log house?”
“Yes.”
“Two houses beyond that, north, is a little shack that sets back a piece inside an old stake fence. That’s Cavin’s place.” Buck’s rheumy glance sharpened. “He owe you money?”
“No.”
“Then you must be the only man in Herd he don’t owe. Still, he’s not a bad feller when he’s sober.”
“Is he a drunk?”
The rheumy eyes twinkled. “I wouldn’t go that far. But Ernie gets his share...and danged if I don’t believe he sometimes gets my share, too.”
“Thanks.”
Jack crossed the road with the wind flattening his shirt and whipping up little gobbets of dust around his boots. He stepped up onto the far plank walk and started along it. The pleasant odor of white-oak smoke was in the air. He scarcely noticed it.
He had to pass the Southard place and the half-log, half-plank house where Rob’s grandfather had died, to get where he was going. The Logan place was forlornly dark but the Southard house was cheerily alight. He didn’t see the pale shadow on the porch in the darkening night as he swung past. It stirred quickly as he passed as though in recognition.
Passing through Ernie Cavin’s gate wasn’t a matter of opening it; he stepped over it where it lay in the grass. A broken whiskey bottle lay near. He saw it about the time the goat smell struck him. By that time he was moving toward the front door, which hung ajar.
Beyond the opening, highlighted by a lamp with a dirty mantle, was a man sprawled in a broken chair. Farther back a thin face was locked in concentration at a cook stove. A box in a corner of the room contained a sick goat kid. There was an overpowering stench to the room, and, as the man standing in darkness looked in, he saw all the squalor and filth with one sweeping glance. His fist, raised in mid-air to knock, hung motionless. The sprawled man coughed and spat.
Jack’s fist fell back to his side. He turned, went down past the broken gate, and out onto the plank walk. For a moment he breathed deeply, then he started southward back toward the shop. He did not see the opalescent apparition materialize at the Southards’ gate until a voice halted him.
“Mister Swift?”
He turned and saw her face. “Yes?”
“Is something wrong?”
He stared at her hard. “Why, no, ma’am, nothing’s wrong. Just a kid and a drunk and a shack full of goats.”
“It’s taken you a long time to find it out.”
The savage look he gave her made her draw up erect. Then he turned abruptly away and continued on his way.
The months of indecision and reluctance crystallized in him. He stumped past men who nodded and didn’t see them, past shafts of lamp
light that shone upon the fierce anger that was raging within him. He forgot the night and the people in it until a small, gnomish silhouette barred his path.
“Whoa, boy,” old Buck said. “You look like a stampede goin’ somewhere to happen.”
Jack ground to a wide-legged halt, big and glaringly silent.
“I know,” the liveryman said. “I know how it is. I’ve known all along. So have other folks. Figured one day you’d find out...and meanwhile I’ve been doin’ a heap of thinking. Now listen to me for a minute....” Buck touched his sleeve. “You’re not listenin’.”
“To what? What is there to say? You don’t put a kid out like that any more than you’d let a man have a horse when you knew he used a loaded quirt.”
“But you got to use some sense.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure.”
“How come you to know about it, Buck, and not me?”
“Amy. She comes around to visit once in a while. She’s asked a heap of questions about you, too. ’Course, I couldn’t answer ’em and ain’t certain I would have, if I’d known the answers.”
“Never mind the girl. Have you seen...?”
“Boy, you got to be careful. Don’t go off half-cocked. Josh Logan’s no upstart. A lot of men work for him. You got to sit down and think things over before you do anything. Logan’s a bad man to cross. Real bad, Jack.”
“Am I supposed to stand by and watch him take his crazy hatred for dead people out on a little kid?”
“He won’t hurt the boy.”
“You mean he won’t use a loaded quirt. How about making him live with a drunk, keeping him penned up with goats, cooking goat stew for a drunk in a place that smells like an outhouse?”
Buck stood, warp-legged, listening, wisely saying nothing and letting the big man’s fury run its course. He was old and understanding.
“I knew what you were about when you come to the barn a while back asking about Cavin,” he said, finally, when Jack became silent. “That’s why I walked over here. To head you off. But listen, Jack; hard knocks make a kid just like they make a man.”
Swift’s retort was bitter. “Who knows that better’n me? But not like that, Buck. Not living like that? In a place that stinks worse than the garbage dump.”
“I didn’t have it much different when I grew up, Jack. Lots of us didn’t.”
“Yeah, and look what lots of us turned out to be, too. Besides, does that make it necessary for him? Hard knocks on a full belly are one thing, especially if you’re learning something...growing up maybe. Like being kicked for walking too close behind a strange horse. You learn that way. This way...all he’s learning is how deep filth is. And, Buck...that kid’s got hatred growing in him. I know. I saw it. And he’s got something else, too, but you’d never believe it because he’s just a kid. I know about that, too. I know what it can lead to.”
Jack raised a thick arm and let it fall. Buck leaned upon a building and kept his voice low when he spoke.
“All right, Jack, but you raising hell is going to hurt the kid, not help him. You raise a hand against Logan an’ both you ’n’ the kid’ll think the sky fell on you. You got to do some calm thinking.”
Jack felt in a shirt pocket for his tobacco sack. His head dropped and his fingers worked like the claws of a spider while Buck went on speaking.
“Do what you can for the boy, but do it on the sly. Help him whenever you can...but don’t let Logan find out you’re doin’ it...and for gosh sakes don’t tangle with Logan. There’s talk he don’t cotton to you anyway.”
Buck studied the big man’s face, saw that the anger was ashes now, pushed off the wall, and touched Swift’s arm lightly.
“Go on home now and cool down,” he concluded. “You’ll think different in the morning. Good night.”
Jack took Buck’s advice. He went to the shop, locked the front door behind him, and passed through to his lean-to living quarters.
More time passed, days of cooling sunlight and crystal-clear nights. Then one day two weeks later Amy Southard came into the shop with a hurrying step. He saw the anxiety on her face and arose from the sewing horse, crossed to the counter, and spread his hands on it, palms downward.
“Where is he, Mister Swift?”
“Where is who?”
“Rob.”
He knew, as surely as he knew anything, what she was talking about, but so far he had not heard anything.
“Tell me about it,” he said quietly.
“He’s run away.”
The big man removed his apron, balled it up, and tossed it onto the cutting table. “You know more than that,” he said.
She pushed the words at him. “Ernie Cavin went out on the line yesterday morning, and, when he returned last night, Rob wasn’t there. He waited until this morning to say anything.”
“Yeah. Passed out waited.”
“He reported it to Sheriff Hoyt Farmer.” She was holding his gaze with her eyes. “I was sure he’d come to you.”
“He didn’t.”
“But surely you have an idea where he went.”
“I couldn’t even guess. I have no idea at all.”
“Oh,” the girl said. “Why didn’t he come to one of us?”
“I reckon you know why,” Jack said heavily.
Amy nodded, watching him, then she turned slowly, went to the doorway, and passed from sight beyond.
Jack waited until her footfalls died away, then put on his coat, picked up his hat, and left the shop. He went south along the plank walk as far as the sheriff’s office. Sheriff Farmer was standing by his saddle horse at the hitch rail outside the jailhouse, watching him approach. He nodded gravely.
“’Evening, Mister Swift.”
“’Evening, Sheriff. About that kid that disappeared....”
“Yeah. Little Rob Logan, the crippled kid. What about him?”
“Well, I was wondering if you needed any help looking for him. I sort of liked him.”
“I know,” the lawman said, looking up the roadway with his solemn glance. “I don’t imagine there’s much need for you to ride out, though. His uncle’s got a posse of railroaders searching for him. I expect they’ll find him all right.”
The unwavering glance swung back to Jack’s face. “I’d go myself except that someone stole a Morgan stud horse from Perc Merton’s place last night.” The sheriff shortened the reins in his hands and popped them together. “Bad business, horse stealin’.”
“Yeah.”
Sheriff Farmer straightened up off the hitch rack. “Anyway, kids all run off one time or another...even as you and I did. I don’t expect this’ll come to much.”
Jack left the lawman standing by his horse. He did not know that Hoyt Farmer was watching him walk away with a look of interest on his face. He didn’t know, and, if he had known, he wouldn’t have cared.
V
Jack walked back toward the shop as far as the first saloon. There, he sank down upon a bench.
He remembered the Merton place. It was about a mile from town. About as far as a kid with a crooked leg could walk. First the gun, then the bullets, now the stolen horse.
It would have taken every last shred of Rob’s courage to approach the stud horse, saddle and bridle him, get into the saddle, and ride off in the darkness. So — the kid was desperate beyond despair. He was fighting the biggest battle of his life. Not only against goat smell and a vomiting drunkard, but against his own fear, against his own bitter, fear-filled world. He was rebelling with everything that was in him against everything he knew — pain, fear, bewilderment, and ridicule — and he was doing it now on a stolen horse, with a gun he knew passably well how to handle, a handful of bullets — and with a determination only he and Jack Swift could fathom.
Rob would follow a pattern. Unless he was stopped, he would become someth
ing Sheriff Farmer, Amy Southard, or even Josh Logan would not understand.
Jack knew. It took a man who had also started life on the sundown trail to understand this, to realize how the boy would be waiting out there somewhere, high on a windy ridge, watching his back trail, full of rebellion, desperation, and hate.
An unexpected shadow loomed up. It was Sheriff Farmer’s left-handed deputy, Will Spencer, a lean, capable man with whom Jack had often been friendly. Spencer was known for the briefness of his speech and the swiftness of his draw.
He said: “Good evenin’, Jack.”
“Hello, Will.”
“You seen Amy Southard tonight?”
“I saw her about sundown.”
Spencer leaned on an upright and studied the big man’s face. “She’s plumb upset.”
“I know.”
“The boy’ll turn up.”
“Yeah,” Jack replied dryly. “He’ll turn up...about five years from now...with a fast horse, two guns, and a chip on his shoulder.”
Will Spencer’s hooded eyes widened perceptibly. “A fast horse...?”
Jack got up and faced around. Seeing the slow look of understanding, he said: “Will, how far would you go on a crooked leg? Just about that far, wouldn’t you?”
Spencer was thoughtfully silent for a time, then he began to wag his head in disbelief. “Naw, I don’t believe it. Why, Rob’d be scairt stiff of a stud horse.”
“Is he a mean horse, Will?”
“No, he’s well-mannered, but you know how they snort and paw and roll their eyes.” Another wag of the head and Spencer said: “Naw, the kid wouldn’t have the grit for that, Jack.”
Jack turned away. You couldn’t make people understand. They’d never believe what desperation could make a kid do — unless they’d been driven that far themselves. He went to Buck’s barn, hired a big chestnut horse from the night hawk, and was swinging aboard when someone spoke his name from the shadows. It was Deputy Spencer again; he was coming down the alleyway.