Zeke and Ned

by Larry McMurtry

  Zeke was troubled by the light on the ridge. He had only glimpsed it once, out of the corner of his eye, but the light had been made by a lantern, of that he was sure. Who would be up in the hills with a lantern, in the hour before dawn? Coon hunters usually gave up and went home well before this time—and if it was coon hunters, they would have hounds. He heard no hounds.

  “It might be possemen,” he said, but Becca did not respond. From the way her head lolled against his shoulder, he knew she must be asleep. Like Becca, he began to regret leaving Ned’s so abruptly. At the time, it had seemed vitally important to get started for home; but now, it seemed only a silliness. Why had they not just rested for a night on a pallet? Then if it was a posse on the hill and the posse showed up at Ned’s house, he and Ned, with their combined firepower, could put it to rout.

  That opportunity was lost, for he was two miles gone from Ned’s, on a slow mule. A well-mounted posse could beat him here and have Ned shot or captured or hanged long before he could be there to help.

  It was still a good mile to Tuxie Miller’s place, and he could not get there in time to send a warning to Ned, even if the argumentative Dale Miller would allow Tuxie to take a warning. Besides, Tuxie’s tired horse was still over at Ned’s, a point Zeke just now came to realize.

  If there was somebody up there with a lantern, it would more than likely flash again. Zeke sat where he was, watching the hills for ten more minutes, stroking Pete so he would not bark.

  But no lantern flashed. Zeke began to wonder if he had really seen a flash; perhaps Becca was right. Perhaps he had only seen a shooting star. Mounted as he was, with a sleeping wife on a slow mule, he could not easily go investigating.

  Then Zeke remembered Old Turtle Man. The old healer was known to travel at all hours. He might be up on the ridge, on some errand of healing.

  The thought did not quite still his worries, for he could not get the notion of a posse out of his mind. He tried to persuade himself that he had been seeing things, but the flash nagged at him. He just was not sure.

  No second flash came, and his eyes became tired from scanning the hills. Finally, he kicked the mule with his heels, and he and Becca headed on toward home.

  31

  IN THE DAYS AFTER THE DEPUTIZING OF TAILCOAT JONES, JUDGE Isaac Parker began to exhibit signs of an uneasy conscience. Martha Parker, who had often been the person who made the Judge’s conscience uneasy, was quick to note the indicators. The Judge, a solid sleeper who would normally be unlikely to wake up if the house was burning down around him, ceased to sleep well. He began to toss and turn, muttering curses in his restlessness. Once Mart heard him say “owl,” though no owls had been around to bother them. Another time, she distinctly heard him say “Mr. President,” though he appeared to be asleep.

  Besides being a solid sleeper, the Judge was also an accomplished eater. He could readily dispose of several eggs at breakfast, as well as a sizeable intake of steak, bacon, pork chops, or whatever meats might be available. He preferred his coffee scalding—instead of sipping it as most folks would, he blew on it a time or two, and then drank it down like water.

  The morning after Mart heard him say “Mr. President” in his sleep, he came plodding downstairs and requested a single egg for breakfast.

  “Fry it hard, I might want to bounce it,” the Judge said. He was usually neat at breakfast, but this morning, his suspenders were unsnapped, and his shirttail out.

  “Are you sick? Tuck your shirt in,” Mart said, crisply.

  “I’ll answer the question—no, I ain’t sick—but I won’t obey the command,” the Judge said, sitting down at the table, his shirttail not tucked in.

  “Ike, are you ornery today, and if so, why?” Mart inquired. “Are you sure you only want one egg?”

  “You’d never make a lawyer, Mart—you can’t keep to the subject at hand,” the Judge informed her.

  “I ain’t trying to make a lawyer, Ike, I’m bein’ a wife,” she told him. “I’m trying to find out what’s the matter with you.”

  “I guess I’m like a preacher who’s decided to sin with a deacon’s wife,” the Judge said. “I’ve reached the point where I’d rather break the law than enforce it.”

  Mart cracked his egg, and dropped it in the skillet, a frown on her face. She did not like to hear mention of the sin of adultery, at her breakfast table or anywhere else. Her husband knew that, plain and clear.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’ll thank you to clean up your mouth,” Mart admonished.

  The Judge was so taken aback by the sudden reprimand that he sat in silence and listened to the egg sizzle in the skillet. When Mart served it, it certainly looked hard enough to bounce.

  “Many thanks,” the Judge said. “And for your information, it is a fact that preachers have been known to be taken in sin with wives of deacons.”

  “You can eat your dern facts for a while, and see how you like it,” Mart said.

  Conversation choked off for several minutes. Then husband and wife commenced apologies at the same time. Neither heard the other’s apology, and both left the table with a sense of grievance. It was not until the Judge was correctly dressed and about to go out the door, that Mart tried again to find out what was bothering him.

  “It ain’t like you to toss in your sleep and call out names,” Mart said. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s that business in Tahlequah,” the Judge said, looking down the hill at the swollen Arkansas River. It had rained somewhere upstream, and the river was in a flooded state.

  “Ike, the President himself told you to do what you did,” Mart said.

  “Yes, and I should have told him I resign,” the Judge confessed. “Now I’ve deputized a bunch of hard killers. I’ll be surprised if more honest men don’t die before this is over.”

  Then he gave Mart a peck—he did not want her to think he was hopelessly ornery—and headed down the hill. He wanted to have a walk by the old, muddy river before he opened court for the day.

  32

  LYLE MILLER WAS TEN, AND PRONE TO DISOBEDIENCE. HE SLIPPED out of the house before daylight, while his mother, Dale, was nursing the new baby. He raced down to the livestock lots, caught the colt, and was about to ride down to the creek to a place where there was a mess of crawdad nests, when he happened to look up and see the lights on the hill. Lyle enjoyed poking a stick down the crawdad holes. Sometimes the old crawdads would grab the stick with their pinchers, and he could pull them up. He carried an old can that he kept the crawdads in. His favourite trick to play on his sisters was to put crawdads under their covers. His mother had whopped him several times for doing it, but Lyle was determined to get back at his sisters for all the mean things they did to him.

  Seeing lights on the hill made him forget the crawdads, for he had never seen lights on the hill that early before. It made him feel strange. It was still misty; Lyle could not see the top of the ridge because of the mists. Once in a while, the old healing man, the one who had saved his pa when his pa had been so sick, would wander the hills with a lantern. But these lights were not made by one old man; several men with lanterns were shuffling around up in the hills among the trees.

  He heard a horse nicker, and his colt nickered back.

  Then his mother was there. Somehow she had slipped out of the house and caught him with the colt. He knew it meant a licking for sure. She still had the baby with her. She had slipped along so fast that the baby had lost the breast. His mother’s breast was still oozing milk. Lyle was shocked at the sight, since his mother was always careful to cover herself with a shawl when she was nursing the baby.

  “Ma, I was just gonna . . . ,” Lyle said, before his mother grabbed his chin, and pulled his face close to hers.

  “Do you think you can find your way to Ned’s house?” she asked him, in a low tone.

  “Yes,” Lyle answered. “Me and Pa, we’ve been there a lot.”

  “Riding a trail with your pa and riding one by yours
elf are two different things, Lyle,” his mother told him. “I wouldn’t make you risk it if I had a choice, but I don’t. You need to slip out the back of the barn and ride down the creek a ways, before you turn back to the trail.”

  Lyle felt scared all of a sudden. He had only meant to go poke at crawdads with a stick. He did not understand why the lights were in the hills, or why he had to go to Ned’s, or why his mother had squeezed his jaw and whispered to him in a serious tone. He had never ridden very far without his pa—what if he got lost, and a bear ate him?

  “There’s some men on the hill,” Dale said. “I expect it’s a posse from Arkansas. You’ve got to go to Ned’s and tell him the posse’s coming, Lyle. If they take him by surprise, they’ll kill him.”

  “But they ain’t at Ned’s, Ma . . . they’re here,” Lyle pointed out.

  “They’re here, but they won’t stay,” Dale explained. “You need to leave by the back door of the barn, and you need to leave now— before it gets any lighter, else they’ll see you.”

  “What’ll I say if they stop me?” Lyle asked. “They might take me to jail.”

  “No, they won’t . . . you’re a boy, and you ain’t done nothing,” his mother said. “I doubt they’re bad enough to disturb ten-year-olds. Now get!”

  “I wish Pa could go,” Lyle said. But he said it to himself. His mother was already slipping back toward the house, holding the baby to her breast as she moved along.

  Lyle took the colt back into the barn, and then out the back door before he mounted. He was not worried about the trail, or about the men up in the hills—he was only worried about bears. He did not believe the colt could outrun a bear; he began to regret contemplating the crawdad hunt at all. Now he might get eaten, and all because he wanted to get back at his sisters.

  But his mother had told him to go, and he did not dare linger. The one thing that cheered him a bit was that Ned Christie’s new wife made good flapjacks. Maybe when he got there, she would make him some, for being so brave about the bears.

  33

  DALE MILLER STOOD AT HER KITCHEN WINDOW, BURPING HER NEW-BORN baby, Sarah, as the possemen came slowly down the hill toward her house. There were ten riders in all. The lead man was a short, red-haired fellow riding a pinto. He wore an old grey jacket that looked like it had once been part of a Confederate uniform. The other men wore long coats, and carried rifles across their saddles.

  “It’s ten of them, Tuxie,” she said. “They’ve raised a force to take Ned.”

  Tuxie had just saucered his coffee. He had looked forward to a peaceful breakfast, but it looked as if peace was over. He sipped some coffee anyway, since the posse was still a good fifty yards away.

  “If it’s only ten, I doubt they’ll take Ned,” Tuxie replied. “Ned will shoot five or six of them, and the rest will run.”

  “Yes, but then they’ll come back,” Dale said. “When they come back, there’ll be twenty of them, or thirty. I doubt it will end until he’s dead.”

  “Oh, now . . . ,” Tuxie said. He did not believe it would go that far.

  Dale was thinking of Jewel. The girl had no idea what it meant to be a mother; she was only just learning what it meant to be a wife. Now a posse of ten riders had come looking for her husband—and they looked to be a rough bunch, too.

  “All this is because Zeke Proctor couldn’t be content with his wife,” Dale said. “He slipped out with a woman, and now there’s war.”

  “Well, but that wasn’t Ned’s fault,” Tuxie said. He was hungry for sausage, but the posse was nearly there.

  “Ned went to court with him—that was the fault,” Dale said. “He should have stayed home and let Zeke worry about his own foolishness.

  “It’s when you don’t mind your own business that things like this get started,” she added, with a pointed look at Tuxie.

  Then she started outside to face the posse. Tuxie got up to come with her, reaching for his big shotgun as he rose.

  “Leave that gun, Tuxie,” she ordered. “There’s ten of them. I don’t want you to give them a reason to shoot you.”

  Tuxie reluctantly left the gun. The only person he recognized, when he stepped out the door, was Bill Pigeon—and he looked an awful sight. His pants seemed to have been burned off him, and his bare legs were blistered and raw looking. Bill was shivering and shaking, as if he had the chills. They had tied him to his horse.

  The red-headed man in the old Confederate jacket rode over to parley. He rode so close that Tuxie had to turn his head or else have the horse slobber on him.

  “We’re U.S. marshals,” the redhead informed him. “We’ve come for Ned Christie. Bring him out.”

  “Oh, Ned don’t live here,” Tuxie informed the red-headed man. “This is the Miller farm.”

  The redhead glanced at Bill Pigeon, who was shivering as if he had pneumonia.

  “Bill Pigeon says that’s his horse in the lots,” the redhead said. “If his horse is here, I expect he is, too.”

  “Nope, he ain’t,” Tuxie said. “His horse was rode down, so he left it with us and borrowed one of ours to go on a trip.”

  A lank man broke from the group, loped down to the lots, rode into the barn, and loped back. Tuxie did not like the lank man’s looks, or the redhead’s, either. He was building up a little irritation from having to stand so close to a slobbering horse. But it was his farm, and he did not intend to back up just because the man was rude and rode his horse too close to a person. He thought Dale had been wrong not to allow him to bring the shotgun. The red-headed Reb probably would not have ridden the horse right into his face if he had been armed with his shotgun.

  Dale herself had not said a word, which was unusual. She stood beside him silently, keeping her eyes to herself. She still had baby Sarah over her shoulder, trying to get her to relieve her belly with a good burp.

  “We ain’t got grub enough to offer you breakfast, but you’re welcome to water your horses, if they’re thirsty,” Tuxie said, in an effort to be polite.

  The lank man rode up beside the redhead, and a third rider, the tallest and roughest of the lot, joined them.

  “Did you find the colt?” he asked, looking at the lank man.

  “No colt,” the lank man answered. “Just that grey horse, and two plow mules.”

  “Did you find the colt’s tracks, then?” the tall man asked. One of his hands rested on his pistol butt. He took the gun out of its holster, and began to click the hammer.

  The lank man looked startled.

  “You didn’t tell me to track it, Tail,” he said. “It ain’t in the barn, though—I looked.”

  “There was a colt in that barn earlier today,” the man clicking the pistol said. “I heard it whinny. Now if I send you to locate a colt, and it ain’t there, tracking it would be one way to locate it, wouldn’t it, Marshal Ankle?”

  “I believe that would just be common sense, wouldn’t it?” he added, in a tone as sharp as a rattler’s fangs. “I don’t like to lose track of a colt when we’re trying to arrest a dangerous criminal. For all I know, Ned Christie could have caught that colt and ridden off on it. Get out of the way, Beezle.”

  The redhead looked agitated.

  “What?” he asked.

  Just as the redhead turned to look at the tall man in the dusty black coat, the man backhanded him with the pistol, right in the face. The redhead did not fall off his horse, but when the pistol hit his face, it made a sound like a tree branch cracking in a heavy wind. Blood began to pour out of his mouth, along with a goodly number of the man’s teeth.

  “Clean out your ears so you can hear an order when I give it. I despise having to repeat myself,” the tall man said. “And the order was, get out of my way!”

  The redhead immediately jerked his horse backward, enabling the tall man to lean over and backhand the fellow who had been remiss in not tracking the colt. The pistol barrel caught the man across the forehead, knocking him backward off his horse. The blow had been a hard one; the lank man d
id not so much as twitch, once he hit the ground.

  Tailcoat Jones then turned his attention to the Millers, smiling an icy smile.

  “Excuse my manners,” he said. “It’s deuced hard to get competent help in Arkansas. Was it Ned Christie took the colt?”

  Tuxie was startled to hear that the colt was gone. He had supposed the animal had merely wandered into the barn.

  “No, Ned ain’t here, and he ain’t been here since he borrowed that horse,” he explained. “That colt belongs to our boy Lyle. If it ain’t there, Lyle must have slipped off early.”

  “Slipped off and went where?” Tailcoat inquired. He believed the Indian. He looked too honest to lie.

  But then there was the white woman. No woman, white or Indian, was too honest to lie, not when a friend was involved—or a child.

  “Crawdad fishing, I expect,” Tuxie said. “There’s a big patch of crawdad nests about a mile down the creek. If Lyle ain’t on his pallet, then I expect that’s where he’s gone.”

  He started to ask Dale if she had seen Lyle that morning, but thought better of it. The man on the ground still had not twitched. His forehead had been sliced open by the blow from the gun barrel, so clean that Tuxie could see his skull-bone. The tall fellow who complained of poor help had whipped the pistol around so quick that Tuxie had not really even seen it, though he sure heard the barrel hit. A man could die from a lick that hard, delivered right to the forehead. In such circumstances, Tuxie thought he should leave his wife out of the discussion.

  Tailcoat Jones looked at the woman. Though she had not spoken, she had an impudent stance. His suspicion was that she had slipped out somehow and sent the boy off to warn Ned Christie. He had a notion to take her over by the woodpile and have her horsewhipped for her treachery.

  He considered whipping her, for a moment. He particularly hated to be interfered with by some damn sly female with a brat at her teat. But if he whipped the woman, he would have to shoot the husband, and he did not want to start the day by shooting the husband, whom he had nothing against.