ReadWest

by Elmer Kelton

  She raised her eyebrows. “I might have. I was in a hurry.”

  He tipped back his head and gazed at the rock wall towering above them. “Long ways to go,” he said.

  They exchanged another glance, and with the horses in tow, they resumed their trek up the mountain.

  ****

  Page was eating fried beefsteak in a roadhouse near Iron Mountain when a man walked up beside him and spoke in a familiar voice.

  “Your name’s Page, isn’t it?”

  He turned and looked up at a bearded face and a narrow dark hat. “Yes, it is. And your name’s Snell.”

  “That’s right.” Snell held out his hand.

  Page shook it. “Where’s your friend Grady?”

  “Oh, he’ll be along.” Snell paused and then said, “Well, you never know when you’ll meet up again. When I saw you sitting here, I thought, I know that fella.”

  “Small world. By the way, how did things turn out at LeBlanc Station that day?”

  “All right for us, I suppose. Grady and I took off not too long after you did. Actually, we saddled up when Callahan went after you, and we got out of there just as he was coming back.”

  “I saw that.”

  “We went to the river and followed it out east. Rough ride, but we made it.”

  “How about Callahan?”

  “Oh, I thought you’d heard. He and that fella Brewer both died. Them and two others. The rest of ’em lammed out of there. And someone set fire to the place. Burned to the ground.”

  “Too bad for Callahan. Gettin’ killed, that is.”

  Snell gave a shrug. “Reap what you sow. At least he got some of ’em.” Snell seemed to hesitate for a couple of seconds.

  “How about that woman Claire?”

  “I put her on the train in Rock River about ten days ago.”

  “That was the long way around.”

  “We went over the mountain.”

  Snell raised his eyebrows. “That must have been quite a climb.”

  “We made it.”

  “Uh-huh.” Snell paused again, and Page wondered if he was trying to figure out the sequence. But all he said was, “So Claire took off.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She wasn’t such a bad one.”

  Page didn’t answer.

  “Did you ever find out who put the bun in her oven?”

  Page raised his eyebrows. “She didn’t say, and I never asked. It was none of my concern.”

  Snell seemed to catch the reference. “Just curious,” he said.

  “Lots of people are.”

  Mike Kearby, like Elmer Kelton, writes with a spirited voice that his fellow Texans love. Winner of the Will Rogers Medallion Award in 2011 and 2012, Kearby is mostly known for his gripping historical novels set in the American West, but he has also dedicated his efforts toward reaching young readers through his collaborative novel project and his graphic novels, Texas Tales Illustrated. www.mikekearby.com.

  LEGEND

  The Provocation

  To the west, an unassuming yet deadly, flat land beckoned. The lone man with the mocking name shaded his eyes and stared into the desolation. Delilah, he mouthed. A slight smile escaped his lips as he remembered the story from his mother’s favorite book. Then, just as quickly, cold annoyance replaced the man’s small pleasure. He readjusted the rifle draped across his right shoulder and gazed over the miles of sand hills that raced toward the horizon. Years of infliction had left him emotionally hardened and sufficiently roused for what lay ahead. “Won’t be that bad,” he murmured into the vastness and remembered the men who had left him here. “Can’t be that bad.”

  At first, he figured they assumed he was merely one more lost soul at the mercy of their justice. Afterward, he knew different. Like most towns he traveled through, they had come of specific purpose. But their mistake was this: they didn’t know him.

  No one ever had. He had learned early on that a solitary man on the plains always kept his rifle within arm’s reach during the day and hidden nearby at night. It was that knowledge that had kept him upright for thirty years. It was that knowledge that would see him through the retribution he was bound and dutifully obligated to return upon those men that had rushed him from the southwest hours earlier.

  They had started on the soles of his feet, cutting diagonal slants across each foot with a castrating knife. Six held him down while the other, a mountain of a man the others called Pete did the knife work. He gritted his teeth during the ordeal and in the soft glow of the fire he studied Pete’s facial features. Studied them like a buyer studies cattle at the railhead. And when Pete was finished, he knew him. Knew Pete’s every feature. How close his eyes sat to his nose, the size of his lips and the cut of his jaw. No matter what else Pete did in this lifetime, he would never be able to disguise himself from him. And each time he took a step from this day forward, he would know and remember Pete.

  He glanced down at his bootless, bleeding feet and then took the first step into the sand. The pain was exquisite. A stab of white blinded him momentarily. The man sucked in a breath and remained expressionless. “Not bad at all.” A second step followed the first. The sand worked into the cuts on the bottom of his feet heightening his senses. Like salt on a wound, he thought. The man took a third step and then a fourth. The hurting shrunk into a single point centered in the middle of his forehead directly between both eyes. His smile returned. “Change’ll be coming for the lot of you,” he vowed, and then took a long series of steps. He was moving quickly now. “Yessir, change’ll be coming. That’s for sure.”

  The Situation

  Mal Connors stared at the men on horseback in the street outside of Taylor's Saloon. He took a quick headcount of the bunch slightly opening his lips as he counted. A riderless horse was tied on a stringer to the lead rider’s saddle. “Appears you all made it back.”

  The lead rider, Bob Selden, a smallish man with a bushy beard tilted a wide-brimmed sombrero back off his head and nodded. “Every man one of us, Mal.”

  Connors shifted his weight and squinted at the man. “I understand that to mean you found him.”

  The smallish man tugged at his ear and thought for a second. “Yes, we did, Mal. Fact is, he wasn’t really that hard a man to find.”

  A series of chuckles bounced around the group.

  “That his horse?”

  “Yep.”

  “And?” Connors asked.

  From the back, a large man pushed his mount forward, unpinning a deputy’s badge as he came. “And,” the big man said.

  Connors waited.

  The massive man leaned off his saddle and extended the badge toward Connors. “And he won’t be bothering to come through our town anytime soon.”

  Connors took the badge and glanced past the big man back to the smallish man. “That so, Bob?”

  “That’s so, Mal. Pete convinced him otherwise.”

  Connors let his gaze drift back to Pete Ward. “What’d you do to him, Pete?”

  “Just took a little of the gruffness out of him.”

  Muted laughter from lowered chins sounded from the remaining posse members.

  Connors issued a hard glare at the group and then asked, “What’s that mean, Pete?”

  “Nothing bad, Mal. I just cut the soles of his feet, that’s all.”

  Connors frowned.

  “With a castrating knife, Mal,” Bob Selden added.

  Connors shook his head at the large man. “You think that’s gonna make him stay away, Pete?”

  “Well, it’ll definitely make his getting here somewhat difficult and a whole lot of painful.”

  Connors shook his head. “Hell, Pete. All you’ve done is guarantee he’ll come our way now.”

  Selden took a step forward. “Pete cut his soles pretty good, Mal.”

  Ward lifted his brow and smiled. “I wouldn’t worry too much. I made the cuts deep and at an angle. I don’t figure a bootless man cut that way is going to want to walk seven miles over b
low sand.”

  “That what you figure, Pete?”

  “That sand will work into those cuts like ground glass.”

  Connors pushed Ward’s badge back toward the big man.

  “What’s this for, Mal?”

  “We ain’t done yet, Pete.”

  Ward took the badge. A confused look muddled his face. “What’s left to do? I told you he ain’t coming here. I made sure he got that message.”

  “That so?”

  The big man smiled. “I’d stake my life on it, Mal.”

  “I’d say that’s about right, Pete.”

  “Huh?”

  “You should have done what I told you to do.”

  “Begging your pardon, Mal, but bribing some Billy Yank hard case with a jug of liquor and vittles to go around us—,”

  “Go ahead and speak your mind, Pete.”

  “Well, it seemed to show us as scared to our women and kids, that’s all.”

  “You should be scared, Pete. All of you should be scared.”

  “He ain’t coming our way, Mal.”

  “So you said.”

  Selden looked down at the dirt street. “What’s got you so riled?”

  “You put this town in a situation, Bob. You and Pete did. That's what's got me so riled.”

  Selden grabbed the front brim of his hat and pulled it back forward so that it rested low on his forehead. “I ain't following.”

  “A situation, Bob. That's a state of affairs almost beyond one’s ability to deal with and the situation you've put us in is going to require some great doing to overcome.”

  Pete Ward laughed a confrontational laugh.

  Connors snapped his head in Ward's direction. “You think this is funny, Pete?”

  Ward snapped back on his heels at the call-out. “No,” he said and stared full in the face at Connors. “What I think is that you're overplaying all of this for no good reason. Hell, Mal, he's a nobody, plain and simple.”

  “You don't know him, Pete. He would have taken the liquor. He would have taken the food. Probably had a good laugh at our expense, but he would have moved on. He would have ridden past us. But not now. Now he’s gonna be wanting to come straight for us.”

  Selden looked at Ward and shrugged. “How can you be so sure, Mal?”

  Connors moved for the riderless horse. “Because he’s a man that always does just what you don’t figure him to do.”

  “He knows there are at least seven of us to his one.”

  Connors untied the reins from the stringer and made three wraps around the biscuit. He pointed the animal east and then slapped its hindquarters.

  Selden watched the horse kick both legs back and then race away. “I’ve never known you to be like this, Mal. What’s put such a bee in your bonnet?”

  Connors watched the runaway horse raise a trail of dust. “Only that I know him, Bob. I know him as well as any man.”

  Ward squinted at the sheriff. “That's so?”

  “It's so, Pete.”

  “Well, if you know him so well, how come it is you didn't ride out and give him his bribe?”

  “I was determined to avoid provoking past agitations in the man.”

  Bob Selden frowned at the sheriff's words and turned sideways to glance at the others. “Damn, Mal,” he muttered in a short fuse of a breath. “Don't tell me you two were in Andersonville together.”

  Connors stood solidly and let his eyes answer for him.

  The others murmured their discomfort at the sheriff's revelation.

  “Who is he, Mal?” Selden asked.

  “Name's Legend. John Legend. And I can vouch that while most of us struggle daily to stay shut of our inner-demons, John, well, John is one of those rare breeds who not only accepts his madness, but remains duty bound to follow it to its natural conclusion.”

  Returned Favors

  John Legend stood in the middle of the sand hills and rolled a smoke, still avoiding the natural inclination to brush the fine-sand particles from the soles of his feet as infliction for a man like Legend was as much pleasure as pain.

  Beyond, to the west not more than a mile distant, the shacks of what passed for a town rose out of the blow sand. The horse had returned a few miles previously. The animal's arrival however hadn't set well with him. John Legend didn't believe in gifts passed on from the Almighty or even in the Almighty himself for that matter. Spending six months at Camp Sumter during the War had broken him of that childhood imposed belief system and infused him with a new doctrine, one that was more easily accepted when grim rigor set its claws into a man. This new dogma, borne out of the suffocating excrement in that swamp of a Georgia prison, came without heady promises of the hereafter. It was a religion that promised the faithful with the absolute that no matter the manner in which a man lived his life, he would always be guaranteed an earthen coffin.

  Legend retrieved a Lucifer from his shirt pocket and struck the match head against the back of his dungarees. He looked at the horse as he enjoyed his first inhalation. They had returned it as apology. He understood that plain enough. Someone in the ramshackle of a town had convinced the others that what they had done was wrong and amends were in order. He exhaled the calming smoke and fitted his bare right foot into one of the horse's cratered hoof prints. The tracks led all the way back to town. He smiled in enjoyment as the grains of rock pushed against one another and forced themselves deeper into the sliced cuts on his feet. He reckoned he'd allow the horse to walk alongside him for awhile. It wasn't that far to the town and the sand helped him keep his focus. He'd be there soon enough. And when he arrived, he was going to be sure and thank those seven boys for their earlier visit. He settled his left foot into the next track and drew deeply on the cigarette. The rolled paper flared red. Yep, that seemed to be a good plan. He was going to walk into town and thank them all, especially that one big fella that called himself Pete.

  Sand Hills Palaver

  The seven watched the man called John Legend walking out of the sand hills. Short puffs of dust danced around his ankles at each footfall. To their consternation, he was leading the horse out of the desert, something that no sane man would be known to do. And for all the big talk earlier, Pete Ward was first to call Mal Connors' name out. Although Bob Selden's shout was so close in time that Mal who was sitting on the porch outside his office thought it peculiar to hear an echo sound across flat land.

  Connors looked out to the assembled posse and then out toward the desert. A hundred yards away, out on the edge of the sand, he watched as John Legend walked leisurely toward the roadway that led into town. Connors inhaled and just as quickly exhaled at the sight of the man. His stomach growled in-between the two breaths and for a brief moment, Mal fretted over turning down the lunch his wife had offered him some thirty minutes earlier. His stomach rumbled again, and he responded by pushing his tongue roughly against the wad of tobacco in his mouth. The action forced a fair spit's worth of tobacco juice to roll down his throat. He reckoned that was as good a way as any to quiet his hunger.

  Seconds later, he rose from his stool and unbuckled his gun belt. One thing was certain, he was not going out to face John Legend with a Colt strapped on his thigh. The man was already thoroughly provoked. No need in adding to that arousal.

  They met midway between town and desert. John Legend squinted at the man who had walked out to meet him without a gun and seemed troubled in expression as to why a man would do such a thing. He studied the man from boot to hat with a careful eye.

  “You weren't with the other bunch.”

  “No, I wasn't, John.”

  Legend squinted uncomfortable at his name. “Do I know you?”

  Connors lifted the brim of his hat and allowed Legend to take a better look.

  “Hmmmph,” Legend mumbled after some time. “How come you didn't come out before?”

  Connors lowered his brim. “I figured if you were anything like me, it had taken the better part of a decade just to forget that past time.”


  “Hmmmph,” Legend mumbled once more.

  “I didn't want to be the one that disrupted the little bit of peace that men like us have achieved by having you recall old wounded memories.”

  Legend smiled. It was a tight, flat smile, but a smile nonetheless. “You the one who sent back the horse, Mal?”

  Connors nodded. “If it means anything, John, I sent them out with whiskey and vittles. They were supposed to influence you to move around us, not cut your feet.”

  “I'm sure it means something, Mal.”

  “John, can I ask you to go around, now? There's not much to the town, nothing that would interest a man like yourself anyway.”

  “A man like me?”

  “No offense, John.”

  “None taken. Hey, do you still remember how Andersonville smelled?” Legend muttered thickly. “I do, and after all this time.”

  Connors inhaled, and now, he could smell the camp again. He felt himself gag slightly as the aroma of human excrement and infected limbs swirled inside his nostrils. After a moment, he realized he was huffing for breath.

  Legend tilted his head and observed Connors' discomfort. “Appears you still do, too.”

  Connors snorted as the recalled smell saturated his chew. He dug a finger around the inside of his cheek and dug out the tobacco wad. He flipped the chaw to the ground and then turned and spit behind his left heel. When he turned back, he gestured at Legend's swollen feet. “I'll get my wife to doctor your feet, and I promise she'll send you off with a fair bit of food and drink.”

  “That sounds mighty neighborly, Mal. And I'll take you up on it just as soon as I thank those boys of yours for visiting with me earlier.”

  Connors ran a dry tongue over his lips and nodded back toward town. “John, all of those men, were just that during the war . . . boys. They don't have any idea about how men like me and you think.”

  “And how do men like you and me think, Mal?”

  Connors grunted, “All of them have wives, John, and most, kids.”