The Desperado

by Clifton Adams

  It sounded foolish to me. And dangerous. What if soldiers heard the shooting? But I looked at Pappy, and his face was set and dead serious. I shrugged. “All right, if you say so.”

  I jerked at my righthand gun, but before I could clear leather the morning came to life with one explosion crowding on top of another. Pappy had emptied his own pistols into the log before I had started to shoot.

  Pappy looked at me mildly and began punching the empties out of his two .44's. I didn't even bother to draw my own guns. My insides turned over and got cold as I thought of what Pappy could have done to me the other night, if he had wanted to. I breathed deeply a few times before I tried to speak.

  At last I said, “All right, Pappy. Where do I start to learn?”

  He grinned faintly. “With the holsters first,” he said. “If you don't get your pistols out of your holsters, it doesn't make a damn how good a shot you are.” He made me unbuckle my cartridge belts and he examined the leather carefully. “See here?” he said, working one of the .44's gently in and out of the holster. “It binds near the top where it's looped on the belt.”

  We went up to where the blanket rolls were, and Pappy got some saddle soap out of his bags. “You don't develop a fast draw all at once,” he said, rubbing the saddle soap into the leather with his hands. “You cut away a piece of a second here, a piece of a second there, until you've got rid of every bit of motion and friction that's not absolutely necessary. All men aren't made to draw alike. Some like a cross-arm draw, or a waistband draw. Or a shoulder holster under the arm is the best for some men. You've got to find out what comes easiest and then work on it until it's perfect.”

  He stood back for a moment, looking at me as if I was a horse that he had just bought and he wasn't sure yet what kind of a deal he'd got.

  Finally he shook his head. “Your arms are too long for the cross-arm or border draw. That goes the same for the waistband. At the side is the best place, low on your thighs, where your hands cup near the butts when you stand natural. You can't work out any certain way to stand, you've got to be able to shoot from any position.”

  He handed the belts and holsters back and I buckled them on again like he said. He looked at me critically.

  “Unload your pistols and try drawing.”

  I punched the live rounds out and shoved the guns back in my holsters. Then I grabbed for them and snapped a few times at a spot in front of me.

  “Again,” Pappy said.

  I did it all over again, but Pappy wasn't satisfied. He went over to where his saddle rig was and cut a pair of narrow leather thongs from his own bridle reins. Then he made me stand still, with my legs apart, while he put the thongs through the bottom of my holsters and tied them down to my thighs. “Arms too long, that makes the holsters too low,” he said briefly. “They'll flap when you walk if you don't tie them down. Now try it again.”

  I pulled two more times and snapped on empty chambers so Pappy could get the right perspective.

  “I guess they'll do,” he said reluctantly. “Now we'll get to the shooting. The drawing can come later.”

  The dozen boxes of cartridges that I'd got from Old Man Garner went that afternoon. And most of Pappy's extra ammunition went the next day.

  “Hell, no!” Pappy would shout when I tried to shoot from the hip. “Aim. That's the reason they put front and rear sights on a pistol, to aim with.”

  Then I would try it again, holding the pistol straight in front of me, like a girl, aiming and shooting at whatever target Pappy happened to pick. Once in a while Pappy would nod. Once in a great while he would grunt his approval.

  “Now aim without drawing your gun,” Pappy said finally. “Imagine that you've got your pistol out in front of you, aiming carefully over the sights!” He threw an empty cartridge box about thirty yards down the draw. “Aim at that,” he said.

  I stood with my arms at my sides, trying to imagine that I was aiming at the box.

  “Now draw your pistol and fire. One time. Slow.”

  I drew and fired, surprised to see the box jump crazily as the bullet slammed into it.

  “Now with the other hand,” Pappy said.

  I tried it again with the left hand and the box jumped again.

  I turned around and Pappy was looking at me strangely. “That'll do for today,” he said. He rubbed the ragged beard on his chin, glaring down the draw at the cartridge box. “You've still got a lot to learn,” he said gruffly, “but I guess you'll do. It took me two years to learn to shoot like that.”

  I thought I had been doing something big when, as a kid, I had managed to put a bullet in a tossed-up tin can. But I knew that hadn't been shooting. Not shooting as an exact, deadly science, the way Pappy had worked it out.

  The next day we worked on my draw, starting with empty pistols, drawing in carefully studied movements. It was agonizingly slow at first. Arms, and hands, and position of the body had to be correct to the hundredth of an inch. Only after everything was as perfect as it could possibly be did Pappy let me try for speed.

  I watched Pappy do it slowly and it seemed so easy. His hands cupping around the butts, starting the upward pull. Thumbs bringing the hammers back as the pistols began to slide out of the holsters, forefingers slipping into the trigger guard. Then firing both pistols, not at the same time, as it seemed, but working in rhythm, taking the kick on one side and then on the other.

  “All right, try it,” Pappy said.

  He pitched out another cartridge box, and I drew slowly, carefully, for the first few times to get the feel of it. Then, as I bolstered the pistols again, Pappy shouted:

  “Hit it!”

  I wheeled instinctively, catching a glimpse of the small cardboard box that Pappy had tossed in the air. The pistols seemed to jump in my hands. The right one roared. Then the left one crowded on top of it. The cartridge box jerked crazily in the air, then fluttered in pieces to the ground.

  I stood panting as the last piece of ragged cardboard hitthe earth. I could feel myself grinning. I thought, Ray Novak and his two bullets in a tin can! I wondered what Ray Novak would say to shooting like this. I was pleased with myself, and I expected Pappy to be pleased with the job of teaching he had done. But when I turned, he was frowning.

  “Take that silly grin off your face,” he said roughly. “Sure you can shoot, but there's nothing so damned wonderful about that. I could teach the dumbest state policeman in Texas to shoot the same way, if I had the time. You just learn faster than others, that's all.”

  I didn't know what was wrong with him. He had worked from sunup to sundown for two days teaching me to shoot, and now that I had finally caught the knack of it, it made him mad.

  Then his face softened a little and he looked at me soberly. “Now don't get your back up, son. I'm just trying to tell you that knowing how to shoot and draw isn't enough. Boothills are full of men who could outdraw and outshoot both of us. Shooting a man who's as good as you are, and shooting a pasteboard box, are two different things. Look....”

  He drew his pistols and held them out to me butts first.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Is this the way you'd disarm a man? Make him hand over his pistols butts first?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Then take them.”

  I reached for them. The pistols whirled almost too fast to see, with no warning, no twist of the hand. With his fingers in the trigger guards, Pappy had flipped the pistols over, forward, cocking the hammers as they went around. In a split second—as long as it takes a man to die—he had whirled the .44's all the way around, cocked them, and snapped, with both muzzles against my chest.

  The pistols were empty. Pappy had seen to that beforehand. If they had been loaded I would have died without ever knowing how. My mouth had suddenly gone dry. I swallowed to get my stomach out of my throat.

  Pappy holstered one pistol and casually began to load the other. “I said it once before,” he said. “When it comes to guns, a
man is never good enough. Now get your blanket roll together. We've stayed in one place too long already.”

  That night it rained, but we moved anyway, because Pappy said we had already used more luck than Indian Territory allowed. That night it caught up with us.

  First, we almost rode into a detail of cavalry and, later, a hunting party of Cheyennes that had strayed off the reservation. We pulled up in a thicket of scrub oak and waited for the Indians to pass. I looked at Pappy and his face was just a blur in the rain and darkness, and I swore at myself for not bringing a slicker when I left John's City.

  Pappy said, “I don't like it. With Indians off the reservation, there's bound to be cavalry all over this part of the Territory. Two stray riders wouldn't have much of a chance getting to Kansas.”

  I said, “The cattle trail can't be far from here. We can move in that direction, and if the cavalry sees us we can tell them we're drovers, looking for strays.”

  Pappy gave a sudden shrug. He didn't think much of the idea, but, with cavalry and Indians on the other side of us, there wasn't anything else to do. Pappy didn't mention Buck Creyton, and neither did I. After the Indians had passed on in the darkness, behind a slanting gray sheet of rain, we began moving to the west.

  I think I smelled coffee even before I heard the nervous bawling of the cattle. Steaming, soothing coffee to warm a man's insides, and Pappy and I both needed it. We pulled up on a rise and looked down at the flatland below that some outfit was using for bedground. A herd of what seemed to be a thousand or more cattle was milling restlessly, and above the beat of the rain we could hear the night watch crooning profanely.

  But the thing that caught our attention was the coffee. We could see a fire going under a slant of canvas that we took to be the chuck wagon, and that was where the smell was coming from.

  Pappy looked at me. “You ever see that outfit before?”

  “I don't know. I can't see enough of it to tell.”

  We were both thinking how good a hot cup of coffee would taste. We sat for a moment with rain in our face, rain plastering our clothing, rain running off our hats and slithering down our backs and filling our boots. Without a word, we started riding toward the fire.

  As we circled the herd I heard one of the night herders croon, “Get on it there, you no-account sonofabitch,” to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” There were three or four men standing under the canvas where the coffee smell was coming from. Pappy and I left our horses beside the chuck wagon and ducked in under the canvas sheet.

  “Can you spare a couple of cups of that?” Pappy-said to the cook, nodding at the big tin coffee pot.

  The cook, a grizzled old man half asleep, grunted and got two tin cups and poured. The other men looked at us curiously, probably wondering where the hell we came from and where we left our slickers. I took a swallow of the scalding coffee, and another man ducked in under the canvas, cursing and shaking water from his oilskin rain hat. He looked at me and said:

  “Well, I'll be damned.”

  For a minute, I stopped breathing. The man was Bat Steuber, the remuda man I had met back at Red River Station. We had run onto the same outfit that Buck Creyton was working for.

  Chapter 8

  BAT STEUBER looked at us for a long minute, but I couldn't tell what he was thinking. Finally he turned to the other men and said, “The boss says, every man in the saddle that's supposed to be on night watch.”

  Cursing, the men left one at a time, got on their horses, and rode toward the herd again. Bat got his coffee and came over to the edge of the canvas where Pappy and I had moved.

  “Is this Pappy Garret?” he said to me.

  “That's right.”

  For a moment, he looked at Pappy with a mixture of awe and admiration. “I'm glad to know you, Pappy. I've heard about you.” Then he laughed abruptly. “As who hasn't?”

  Pappy nodded, looking at me. Steuber's voice went down almost to a whisper as he turned to me again. “Kid, it looks like I got you in a mess of trouble without meaning to. He's after you now instead of Pappy. Me and my goddamned big mouth.”

  “Who's after me?” I said.

  “Buck Creyton.” Steuber wiped his face nervously. “Hell, kid, I wasn't trying to get you into trouble. I was just trying to get Buck cooled down. He wasn't worth a damn on the herd as long as that temper of his was boiling. Anyway, after you left that day Buck was hellbent on a shoot-out with Pappy here. And I said, 'Hell, Buck, what makes you think Pappy Garret killed your brother? It don't stand to reason. He wouldn't have no call to shoot Paul for nothing—and you know damn good and well that your brother wasn't going to pick a fight with a man like Pappy.'”

  Steuber wiped his face again. “That was all I said,” he went on. “I remember Buck didn't say a word for a long time, and I could see him thinking about it, way at the back of those eyes of his. And finally he said, 'That goddamned punk kid.'”

  I felt my insides freeze as I remembered those kill-crazy eyes of Buck Creyton's. Pappy didn't say anything. He didn't move.

  I said, “Where's Creyton now?”

  “Out with the herd somewhere.” Steuber made a helpless gesture. “Hell, kid, I'm sorry....”

  “Ferget it,” I said. “If you see him, tell him the punk kid is down at the chuck wagon. Tell him if he wants to shoot off his mouth to do it to my face.”

  I could feel Pappy stiffen. Bat Steuber's eyes flew wide and he searched around for something to say, but the words wouldn't come. After a minute he made that same helpless gesture again. “All right, kid, if that's the way you want it.” He ducked out into the rain.

  Pappy said flatly, “Now that was a damn-fool thing to do.”

  I said, “Maybe. But a showdown has got to come sometime, and it might as well be now. I should have told him that first day when he was gunning for you, but I guess I lost my guts for a minute.”

  “You're not ready for a man like Creyton,” Pappy said. “Now get that red horse of yours and we'll ride toward Kansas.”

  “And get taken by the cavalry?”

  I looked at Pappy and his eyes were sober and sad. I said, “It's no good like this, Pappy. I appreciate what you've done for me, but you can't fight my fights for me. Remember what you said: 'A man does his own killing, and that's enough'? Well, this is between me and Buck Creyton. I don't want to go along for a month, or six months, or a year, looking over my shoulder every time I hear a sound and expecting Buck Creyton to be there. And sooner or later hewould be there, and maybe by that time I'd have lost my guts again.”

  For a long moment Pappy didn't move, didn't say anything. Then, at last, he got out a soggy sack of tobacco and his corn-shuck papers and began rolling a cigarette. After he had finished, he handed the makings to me.

  “If that's the way it has to be,” he said, “then I can't help you. It'll be between just you and Buck.”

  We stood there watching the rain, listening to the crooning of the night watch, and the nervous bawling of the cattle. After a while, I got a rag from the cook, wiped my guns dry, and put in fresh cartridges. After that there was nothing to do but wait.

  Pappy didn't try to change my mind again. I guess he knew what it was like to be hunted, not only by the law, but by other killers like himself. And he knew it was better to get it over with now before the slow rot of time ate your guts away.

  There was no way of knowing how long it would take the word to get to Creyton, but it would get to him. All I had to do was stand here, and before long he would be coming after me. I couldn't tell if I was scared or not. I wasn't very curious about it. There was an emptiness in my belly, and a dull ache... and maybe I was scared, after all. But not so much of Buck Creyton. My mind kept going back to better days and better lands, and, no matter how I fought it, I couldn't keep my thoughts away from Laurin.

  That was what I was afraid of, not of getting killed, but of leaving Laurin.

  In the darkness, we heard the hurried sucking sound of soggy boots coming toward
the chuck wagon. I turned quickly. Beside me, Pappy jerked out of the weary slouch that he had fallen into.

  “Watch it, son,” he said quietly. “Don't frame yourself against the firelight.”

  The boots came on. A blurred figure began to take shape in the rain, walking quickly and making sloshing sounds in the gummy mud. But it wasn't Buck Creyton. It was a man I had never seen before, in dripping, rattling oilskins. He ducked under the shelter and stood glaring angrily at us.

  “Get the hell out of here,” he said abruptly. “I don't know who you are, but you're not goin' to start a shootin' scrape and stampede a thousand head of steers. Not if I can help it.”