Code of the West

by Aaron Latham

  Then the sheriff and his favorite deputy retreated into the dark, got out matches, and struck them side by side. They watched them burn until their fingers were in danger of burning. Then they dropped them to the ground and stepped on them.

  Soon they saw a dark mass approaching slowly. This mass then divided into three horsemen leading two riderless horses. Goodnight and Loving went to meet them. Before long, they were back in the saddle.

  Goodnight reached down and pulled his ax from its scabbard. Then he took the lead in attacking the single-strand barbed-wire fence. Leaning down, he swung his ax and struck the barbed wire near where it was nailed to a slender post. The sharp blade cut the wire in two. Looking more closely, he could see now that the wire was badly rusted. Goodnight thought disapprovingly that the cowboys hadn’t used very good material to build their fence. Moving along the perimeter of the herd, he rained destruction on the no-account fence. As his furious blows fell, it was as if he were making war on barbed wire itself and all it stood for.

  While he continued to swing away, Loving and the rangers started driving the horses through the gaping hole in the fence. Now the raid got noisy. The animals, who had been dozing standing up, started to neigh and whinny. They reared and snorted. And when they started running through the gap in the barbed wire, they were as noisy as a train with hooves.

  Hearing shouts coming from Strike Town, which was only a hundred or so yards away, Goodnight sheathed his ax and joined the others herding the horses. They drove the animals away from the river. The rangers turned out to be pretty fair cowboys. They kept the herd bunched.

  Turning to look back, Goodnight saw dark running figures. Then a muzzle flash and an instant later the report of a rifle. A bullet whistled overhead. Well, people usually shot high in the dark. He just hoped they kept on shooting that way. Another flash, report, and whistle.

  Then Goodnight heard the sound of much closer gunfire. The rangers were shooting back, directly disobeying his orders. He was angry, but at the same time he realized that it was hard for men to get shot at without wanting to return fire. He just hoped his side was shooting high, too. He was afraid a stray bullet might hit some camp whore or maybe even the whore’s kid.

  The dark, chasing, firing figures ran desperately, trying to keep up, but they were on foot. And they would remain on foot for some time unless they were willing to surrender the killers among them. Goodnight and his gang, well mounted and driving more than a hundred other mounts before them, began pulling away from their pursuers.

  Then Goodnight heard a scream. It came from the direction of the camp. The voice was high-pitched, but that might have been because of the pain, so the hurting sound had not necessarily come from a woman or a child. But it might have.

  “Hold your fire!” Goodnight shouted into the night.

  The rangers didn’t hear him or just didn’t pay any attention. They kept on shooting.

  But as the pursuers fell farther and farther behind, the firing slowed and then ceased on both sides. The Goodnight gang had made rustling look easy. The leader of the gang felt an unexpected surge of elation. This was fun. The new sheriff actually enjoyed riding on the wrong side of the law. No wonder there were so many outlaws.

  114

  Goodnight’s idea was to approach Strike Town with a large force—all but one of them Association rangers—under a flag of truce. He wanted to be taken seriously, but he didn’t want any violence. Not if he could help it. He was simply going to state his proposition and then pull back and let them mull it over. But without a significant show of force, he figured they would just kill him. After all, a lot of them still figured horse stealing was a capital offense. Now he just hoped somebody in the camp had sense enough to know what a white flag was supposed to mean.

  As he bore down the tent town, the scene reminded Goodnight of one that had been burned into his brain and soul a lifetime ago: a band of warriors approaching a new settlement under a flag of truce. But now all the roles were reversed: this time it was Goodnight himself who carried the white flag. Would there be another tragedy? Would he have to keep reliving the past until he got it right? He wondered: Was there a ten-year-old girl in the camp who resembled Becky? Probably. He hoped he would not be the agent of any harm coming to her, but he knew he might be. His resolve almost failed him. Was he about to do unto others what others had so cruelly done unto him?

  “You sure you wanta go through with this here?” asked Loving, who rode beside him.

  Goodnight was startled. It was as if his friend had overheard his thoughts. He looked at Loving suspiciously.

  “I don’t wanta,” Goodnight said, “but I gotta.”

  “I mean this here’s likely to be easier to start than to finish. They’re l’ible to be purdy mad about them ponies.”

  “We been all over this.”

  “If you say so.”

  As he drew closer and closer to Strike Town, Goodnight kept glancing down at the ground to look for tarantulas. And every time he looked, he saw several. He had first noticed them early that morning when he was on his way to Mickey McCormick’s livery stable to fetch his nineteen-year-old horse, Red. Hundreds of the huge spiders were crawling across Main Street. He had encountered this phenomenon before and never understood it. For some obscure reason of their own, all the tarantulas in this part of Texas had picked today to go for a damn walk in the sun. They all crawled up out of their holes and headed for some unknown destination.

  Looking up, Goodnight saw a small party of cowboys emerging from Strike Town. There were only five of them, and they were on foot, of course. Beyond them the camp itself was now bustling with activity. He figured everybody was cranking live rounds into their breeches and preparing for a fight.

  “Hold up,” Goodnight said in a commanding voice, raising his right hand.

  His sixty-odd deputies obeyed.

  “Loving, Lefty, Reb, let’s see, Johnny Johnson, come with me. The rest of you wait up. If’n they try anything funny, come a runnin’.”

  Then Goodnight nudged his horse and moved forward again. Loving, Lefty, Reb, and Johnny followed him. The rest stayed put as they had been instructed to do. The two armies were now arranged in a fashion that recalled the battle in which the immortal Iron Jacket had lost his life. The memory made Goodnight even more nervous than he already was. Well, he had no illusions that he was immortal. He intended to be careful.

  As the emissaries drew nearer, five from one side and five from the other, Goodnight recognized one of them: Claw. Aw, hell’s bells! But he had to go through with this parley, didn’t he?

  “You see who I see?” asked Loving.

  Claw was carrying an ax.

  “I’m sorry,” said Goodnight.

  “Don’t say you’re sorry.”

  “I’m—”

  As the five spokesmen, including Claw, drew near, Goodnight dismounted. He was putting himself on the same level they were on. Following his lead, his four deputies climbed down off their horses. When Goodnight put weight on his sore leg, he winced. He hoped his adversaries didn’t notice.

  “How you doin’, Crip?” asked a familiar figure.

  Goodnight recognized the voice—and the older face. It was Gud— anuf, who wore gloves to hide his busted thumbs. He stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Claw as if they were father and son. Goodnight was jealous of Gudanuf, who seemed to be his son’s other father, while at the same time he hated that son.

  The two parties on foot advanced to within five yards of each other and stopped.

  “Goddamn you!” Claw yelled. “You stole our horses!”

  “I took ’em into custody,” said Sheriff Goodnight.

  “You what!?”

  “I arrested ’em.”

  “You cain’t arrest horses.”

  “Looks like I can.”

  The horses, 136 head in all, were now in “jail” at Will Lee’s LS Ranch. Goodnight hated leaving them there, but the LS was closest to Tascosa, and the rangers used Lee’s s
pread as their headquarters. It would have been too far to drive them to the Home Ranch. Besides, he didn’t particularly want to get his home mixed up in all these troubles.

  “You’re a damn thief, Daddy!” Claw accused.

  “Yeah,” Gudanuf echoed.

  The rangers exchanged looks. The cowboys did the same. What was going on here?

  “I’m a damn sheriff and I can arrest whoever or whatever I like,” Goodnight told Claw. “And you’re no son of mine. Not one I’d claim, anyhow. But tell you what. I’ll trade them horses for murderers.”

  “Go to hell!” said Claw.

  “You better think about it. Talk it over. I’d settle for just Lem Woodruff and you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. We got suspicions about some others, but you and Lem, we figure we got dead to rights.”

  “Who’d I kill?”

  “Sheriff Martin.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I know it. That’s good ’nough for me.”

  BOOM!

  The gunshot startled Goodnight, frightened him. What had gone wrong with his plan? Looking to his right, in the direction of the sound, he saw Reb dancing a jig and pointing his six-gun at his own feet.

  “Spiders,” Reb yelled. “Spiders is eatin’ me alive.”

  He fired again and again, but he would need all the bullets fired at Gettysburg to kill all the spiders on the move that morning.

  “Hold your fire,” Goodnight ordered.

  Reb shot again. He was in danger of shooting some of his toes off. It was almost funny the way he was dancing and firing down at his own feet.

  Goodnight caught a glimpse of Claw lifting his good hand. The cripple clutched a big, black gun that was swinging up in Goodnight’s direction. But surely Claw must understand what was happening, must see that poor Reb was scared of tarantulas, must realize that he didn’t mean to break the truce declared by the white flag. And yet Claw’s gun kept on coming up. Goodnight was momentarily paralyzed. He couldn’t believe that all his careful planning and plotting had come to this. He didn’t know whether to dodge to the left, dodge to the right, duck, or try to draw. And so he did nothing. Just stood there waiting to be killed. He could see his son thumbing back the hammer on his gun.

  115

  Goodnight felt something slam into his side that emptied his lungs. He thought he had been shot, but then he realized that the force that had hit him was Loving. Then he heard the sound of the gunshot. Knocked sideways, Goodnight saw his friend grab his own face. Oh, no! Not that! The blood spurted from between Loving’s fingers. Then he went down.

  Goodnight thought: He won’t be so pretty no more.

  Then he couldn’t believe he could be thinking such a terrible thought. He hated himself. He would have to make up for the way his crazy mind worked. He must somehow atone.

  Suddenly, a blood anger drove all other thoughts from his mind. He just wanted to kill the Claw! Destroy him! He hated Gudanuf, too, with a new energy. Avenge blood with blood!

  Letting his own momentum carry him to the ground, Goodnight rolled and drew his gun at the same time. He fired and rolled. Fired and rolled. He was a damn tumbleweed spitting mean lead.

  He was amazed: Claw and Gudanuf turned and ran. He thought in the Human tongue: They are running-hearts.

  Now Goodnight realized that everybody was shooting. Not only the up-front rangers—Reb, Lefty, and Johnny—but the sixty-odd backup rangers were also blazing away. And all of Strike Town seemed to be shooting back.

  Realizing that he would never catch Claw or Gudanuf in a foot race, not with a bad leg, Goodnight turned back to his horse. He grabbed the horn and pulled himself back up into the saddle and set off after his blood foes, riding directly into a driving storm of bullets. Goodnight galloped into Strike Town, the bullets dodging him, right into the midst of the “enemy.”

  He was so focused on his pursuit of his monstrous son—and his son’s new “father”—that he didn’t notice the hot, blazing wildfire until it roared at him. His horse reared. Then he realized that cowboys were fleeing all around him. Flames were chasing at their heels. The strikers were in too much of a hurry to bother with killing him. Goodnight hadn’t seen how the fire got started, so it might have been lit accidentally by the flame from a gun barrel, but he doubted it. He remembered Will Lee’s wanting to burn down Strike Town and figured one or more of the rangers had probably done his bidding. Goodnight felt guilty. He hadn’t even succeeded in controlling his “own” men.

  And yet the blaze might well have saved his life. It certainly gave the cowboys something to do besides shoot at him. They weren’t just fleeing from the fire itself but also from all the critters fleeing the fire. Tarantulas and rattlesnakes and rats moved in a wave in front of the wave of flame. The fire chased the varmints, who chased the out-of-work cowpokes. Naturally, a lot of God’s creatures, including the strikers, lost the race. Goodnight heard screams of pain and imagined cowboys being bitten by rattlers. Or struck by bullets from the continuing gunfire. Wounded, would they be able to keep going, or would they fall and be burned in the fire? Worse yet, not all the cries seemed to come from cowboys. Surely some of those wails came from women and their children. Some of them were losing the race, too.

  Goodnight saw a young boy—he looked to be no more than ten years of age—trying to outrun the flames that burned the clothes on his back. And the back itself! No matter how fast he ran, he would never outrace that fire that rode and spurred him so brutally. Goodnight saw a ten-year-old girl running with her red hair on fire. Somehow all the children seemed to him to be ten years old. All frightened. Some of them doomed. And Goodnight realized that he himself had loosed this Judgment Day, this fire-next-time storm.

  The fire raced through the grass, charged deep into Strike Town, and then slowed somewhat. It seemed to want to take its time and do its job thoroughly. It was as if it relished its work and wanted to make it last, wanted to savor it. Now tents and crudely built lean-tos and shacks were in flames. Bedding was burning. Carefully hoarded supplies were on fire.

  Then Goodnight had a terrible vision: Loving on fire. Gravely wounded, but perhaps not yet dead, he was back there in the flames. Helpless to save himself, he was being burned alive. Cooked. Roasted. Now Goodnight smelled the terrible stench of human flesh burning. It was a sweet, suffocating odor like no other. Was he smelling the flaming body of Loving?

  Goodnight realized that he had lost sight of Claw and Gudanuf— the fire had taken his entire attention—but he couldn’t worry about them now. He had to get back to Loving, had to pull his burning body from the fire, had to save whatever was left to save.

  Goodnight turned his horse and spurred it directly into the flame. The animal reared and snorted, but the habit of a lifetime, the custom to obey, was stronger than the instinct to flee from fire. The aging Red charged the blaze, Goodnight spurred him to jump, and he cleared the wall of flame. The horse—singed but not ablaze—came down on the smoldering grass behind the fireline. Hoping its hooves would protect it from the embers over which it trod, Goodnight rode off toward the spot where Loving had fallen.

  When he reached the spot, he rode back and forth, criss-crossing the ground. He saw smoking snakes twisting in agony, saw burned-out tarantulas, saw cooked ground squirrels and roasted rats, saw a blackened, grotesque Reb who had survived Shiloh but hadn’t lived through this fire and firefight. But Goodnight didn’t see Loving. He must be around here somewhere. Goodnight became frantic. He was afraid he wouldn’t find Loving and even more afraid he would. What had he done to his friend? Where was he? Maybe he had managed to drag himself off somewhere to burn and die. Perhaps this wasn’t even the right place. He had figured it was because he had seen poor Reb’s body, but Reb wasn’t necessarily killed at the same time or in the same place as Loving. Who knew what had happened to Reb?

  Goodnight spurred Red. He raced up the fire line searching for Loving. (He reminded himself that Revelie would have called it a quest.)
Not finding his best friend, he galloped back down the fire line. Where was he? What had happened to him? He could already feel the grieving beginning. Luckily, he had had a lot of practice. Oh, no, don’t think like that. Keep looking. Keep hoping. Keep trying. Keep striving. Keep on seeking. And keep on not yielding. Hell! Where? Where? Damn it, where!

  Turning Red, a little too sharply, Goodnight headed back down the fire line once again. Where was Loving?

  “Loving!”Goodnight screamed above the roar of the fire and guns.“Loving! Loving! Loving!”

  Turning Red once again, Goodnight once more patrolled the steadily advancing fire line. Was Loving already dead? Was that why he didn’t answer?

  “Loving! Loving! Where are you, Loving! Loving! Loving! LOVING!”

  Out of breath, Goodnight stopped shouting. He felt guilty. Why couldn’t he keep on screaming when his friend’s life was at risk? Why was he so tired?

  “Boats!” an excited voice cried. “They’re gittin’ away in boats!”

  Goodnight glanced in the direction of the river and saw men scrambling into rowboats. These small craft were normally used as ferries for crossing the flood. He reined in his horse, used his right hand to shade his good eye, and stared at the river’s edge in search of the monster, his son. It was hard to make out faces—much less hands—at that distance. Still, Goodnight thought he saw a familiar figure. And was that Gudanuf in the boat with him? He wasn’t sure, but if it was Claw, if it was Gudanuf, he couldn’t let them get away. Reluctantly leaving Loving to his fate, Goodnight turned his horse and spurred it toward the water.

  116

  Once more, Goodnight lifted old Red and they jumped the wall of fire. In midair, the heat burned him right through his boots, so he knew the horse beneath him was suffering. As he landed, he noticed that a cowboy was pointing a six-gun at him, but he really didn’t pay much attention. He was in too big a hurry to worry about bullets. He heard the sound of the gun going off, but he didn’t feel anything. He was a little disappointed in the cowboy for not being a better marksman. These striking cowpunchers just weren’t sharp anymore. They hadn’t guarded their horses properly. Now they weren’t shooting worth a darn. He expected better of the cowboys of the South Plains. It was as if they were letting down the country. Pretty soon, this corner of Texas would have a reputation for shoddy work. Oh, hell, more crazy thoughts. Why couldn’t he keep his mind on what he was supposed to be doing?