by Ed Gorman
I was on my way to the saloon—being in dusty need of a beer—when a man said, "Wait a minute. I want to talk to you when I'm done here." He stood on the edge of the boardwalk. He had been busy jabbing his finger into another man's chest. He was a stout man in a white Stetson, a blue suit, and a considerable silver badge. After he got my attention, he turned back to the man he'd been arguing with. "Lem, how many damned times I got to tell you about that horse of yours, anyway?"
Horse and owner both looked suitably guilty, their heads dropped down.
"You know we got an ordinance here . . . any horse that damages a tree, the owner gets fined one hundred dollars. Now, I've warned you and warned you and warned you . . . but this time I'm gonna fine you. You understand?"
The farmer whose horse had apparently knocked down the angled young sapling to the right of the animal looked as if somebody had hit him in the stomach. Hard. "I can't afford no one hundred dollars, Sheriff."
"You can pay it off at ten dollars a month. Now you get Clyde here the hell out of town and keep him out of town."
"Don't seem right, folks fining other folks like that. God made us all equal, didn't He?"
"He made us equal, but He didn't make all of us smart. Fella lets his horse knock down the same tree three times in one month . . . that sure don't say much for brains . . . horse or man." He had an impish grin, the sheriff, and he looked right up at the horse and said, "Now, Clyde, you get that damned dumb owner of yours the hell out of here, all right?"
The farmer allowed himself a long moment of sullenness then took the big paint down the long, narrow road leading out of town.
"Looks like you were headed to the saloon," the sheriff said. "So was I." He put his hand out. "Patterson, Deke Patterson. I already know who you are, Mister Donnelly." Then the impish grin again. "You look even younger than they say you do."
Inside, I had had two sips of my beer when Patterson leaned and said, "I need to be honest with you, Mister Donnelly."
"Oh?"
"I grew up with Jim Hornaday over in what's now Nebraska. He's my best friend."
"I see."
"I wouldn't want to see him die."
I smiled. "Then you're the only one in Drago."
He laughed. "I saw Patience headed over to your hotel. She tell you they were engaged and then he broke it off?"
"Uh-huh."
"And she asked you to kill him?"
"Uh-huh."
"She tell you why he broke it off?"
"Uh-uh."
"Because he walked along the river one night and there on a blanket he found Patience and this traveling salesman. Sounds like an off-color joke, but it wasn't. Old Jim took it pretty hard."
"Don't blame him," I shrugged. "But it's no different in any other town. People always have their own reasons for wanting you to fight somebody."
The grin. "You mean, in addition to just liking to see blood and death in the middle of Main Street?"
"Sounds like you don't think much of people."
"Not the side of people I see, I don't." He had some more beer and then looked around. On a weekday afternoon, the saloon held long shadows and silent roulette wheels and a barkeep who was yawning. Patterson suddenly looked right at me. There was no impish grin now. All his toughness, which was considerable, was in his brown eyes. "He's hoping you kill him."
"What?"
Patterson nodded. "He's never been the same since he accidentally killed that little cousin of yours. For a long time, he couldn't sleep nights. He just kept seeing her face. That's when he took up the bottle and it's been downhill since. He keeps getting in gunfights, hoping somebody'll kill him. That's what he really wants . . . death. He won't admit it, maybe not even to himself, but the way he pushes himself into gun battles when he's been drinking . . . well, somebody's bound to kill him sooner or later. And I know that's what he wants because he can't get your little cousin out of his mind."
"I didn't come here to kill him, Sheriff. My reputation is made up. I got forced into three fights and won them, but I'm not a gunfighter. I'm really not."
He regarded me silently for a long moment and then said, with an air of relief, "I do believe you're telling me the truth, Mister Donnelly."
"I sure am. I didn't even know Hornaday was here."
"Then you don't blame him for killing your little cousin?"
"Some of my kin do, but I don't. It was accidental. It was terrible she died but nobody meant for her to die."
He asked the barkeep for two more beers. "One more thing, Mister Donnelly."
"You could always call me Donny."
"One more thing, then, Donny. And this won't be easy if you've got any pride, and I suspect you do. He's gonna try and goad you into a fight, but you can't let him. Because the condition he's in . . . the whiskey and all . . ."
I stopped him. "I don't have that much pride, Sheriff. I don't want to kill Hornaday. Sounds like he's doing a good job of it himself, anyway."
We talked about the town and how it probably wasn't a good thing for me to stay much past tomorrow morning, and then I drifted back to my hotel and my room and there he sat on my bed, a man with an angular face marked with chicken pox from his youth. These days, he resembled a preacher, black suit and hat and starched white shirt. Only the brocaded red vest hinted at the man's festive side. He'd never been known to turn down a drink, that was for sure.
"You're her cousin?"
"I am."
"And you know who I am?"
"Yes, I do, Mister Hornaday."
"I killed her."
"I know."
"I didn't mean to kill her."
"I know that, too."
"And I'm told you came here to kill me."
"That part you got wrong, Mister Hornaday."
"You didn't come here to kill me?"
"No, I didn't, Mister Hornaday."
"Maybe you're not as good as they say, then."
"No, I'm not, Mister Hornaday, and I don't want to be, either. I want to be a happy, normal man. Not a gunfighter."
"That's what I wanted to be once." His dark gaze moved from me to the window where the dusty town appeared below. "A happy, normal man." He looked back at me. "You should want to avenge her, you know."
"It was a long time ago."
"Ten years, two months, one week and two days."
If I hadn't believed he was obsessed with killing poor little Charity before, I sure did now.
"It was an accident, Mister Hornaday."
"That what her mother says?"
"I guess not."
"Or her father?"
"No, he doesn't think it was an accident, either."
"But you do, huh?"
"I do and so do most other people who saw it."
He got up from the bed, the springs squeaking. His spurs chinked loudly in the silence. He came two feet from me and stopped.
The backhand came from nowhere. He not only rocked me, he blinded me momentarily too. He wasn't a big man, Hornaday, but he was a strong and quick one.
"That make you want to kill me?"
"No, sir."
He drove a fist deep into my stomach. I wanted to vomit. "How about that?"
I couldn't speak. Just shook my head.
He took a gold railroad watch from the pocket of his brocaded vest. "I'll be in the street an hour and a half from now. Five o'clock sharp. You be there, too, you understand me?"
He didn't wait for a reply. He left, spurs still chinking as he walked heavily down the hallway, and then down the stairs.
The next hour I packed my warbag and tried to figure which direction I'd be heading out. There was always cattle work in Kansas and right now Kansas sounded good, a place where nobody had ever heard of me, a place I should have gone instead of coming here.
I was just getting ready to leave the room when I heard the gunfire from down the street. A nervous silence followed and then shouts—near as loud as the gunfire itself—filled the air. I could hear people's feet
slapping against the dusty street as they ran in the direction of the gun shots.
I leaned out the window, trying to see what was going on. A crowd had ringed the small one-story adobe building with SHERIFF on a sign above the front door. A man in a brown suit carrying a Gladstone bag came running from the east. The crowd parted immediately, letting him through. He had to be a doctor. Nobody else would have gotten that kind of quick respect, not even a lawman.
I was turning back to the door when somebody knocked. Patience Falkner said, "Did you hear what happened?"
"Why don't you come in and tell me."
She didn't look so pretty or well kempt anymore and I felt a kind of pity for her. Whatever had happened, it took all her vanity and poise away. She looked tired and ten years older than she had earlier this morning.
"Jim killed Sheriff Patterson."
"What?"
She nodded, sniffling back tears. "The two best friends that ever were." She glanced away and then back at me and said, "I should have my tongue cut out for what I said to you this morning. I don't want Jim dead. I love him."
She was in my arms before I knew it, warm of flesh and grief, sobbing. "I wasn't true to him. That's why he wouldn't marry me. It was all my fault. I never should've asked you to kill him for me. And now he's killed the sheriff . . . They'll kill Jim, won't they?"
There was no point in lying. "I expect they will. Why'd he kill him, anyway?"
She leaned back and looked at me. I thought she might say something about my baby face. "You. You were what they were fighting about. Jim told Patterson that he'd called you out for five this afternoon. Patterson told him to call it off but Jim wouldn't. Jim was drinking and angry and Patterson gave him a shove and . . . Jim took his gun out and they wrestled for it and it went off. Jim didn't mean to kill him but . . ."
"Where is he now?"
"Nobody knows. Ran out the back door of the jail."
I shook my head. This was a town I just plain wanted out of. I eased her from my arms, picked up my Winchester and warbag, and walked to the door.
"You're leaving town?"
"I am."
"Then . . . then you're not going to fight him?"
"No, ma'am, I'm not."
"Oh, thank God . . . thank you, mister. Thank you very much."
"But if you're going to say goodbye to him, you better find him before that crowd does."
Even from here I sensed that the crowd was becoming a mob. Pretty soon there would be liquor, and soon after that talk of lynching. The territory prided itself on being civilized. But it wasn't that civilized. Not yet, anyway.
I'd paid a day in advance so I went down the back stairs of the hotel. The livery was a block straight down the alley. I paid the stocky blacksmith with some silver and then walked back through the sweet-sour hay-and-manure smells of the barn to where my mount was waiting to be saddled.
I went right to it, not wanting to be detained in any way. Kansas sounded better and better. I had just finished cinching her up when somebody said, "You probably heard I killed the sheriff, Donnelly. He was my best friend."
The voice was harsh with liquor. I turned slowly from the mount and said, "Little girls and best friends, Hornaday. Not a record to be proud of."
"I didn't say anything about being proud, cowboy. I didn't say anything about being proud at all."
The men in front had overheard our conversation and had walked through the barn shadow to get here quickly. There were three of them. They were joined moments later by Patience Falkner.
"Jim . . ." she started to say.
But his scowl silenced her.
We stood in the fading light of the dying day, just outside a small rope corral where the six horses inside looked utterly indifferent to the fate of all human beings present. Couldn't say I blamed them. Hornaday eased the right corner of his black coat back so he could get at his gun quick and easy.
"Even if you don't draw, cowboy, I'm going to draw and kill you right on the spot. That's a promise."
"I don't want this fight, Hornaday."
"What if I told you I killed that cousin of yours on purpose?"
"I wouldn't believe you."
"I killed my best friend, didn't I?"
"That could have been accidental, too."
By now there were twenty people filling the barn door, standing in the deep slice of late-afternoon shadow.
"You've got to fight me," Hornaday said. "A reputation like yours . . ."
"You need to get yourself sober, Hornaday. You need to take a different look at things."
"I'm counting to three," Hornaday said.
"Like I said, Hornaday, I don't want this."
"One."
"Hornaday . . ."
"Two."
"Jim, please . . ." the Falkner woman cried. "Please, Jim . . ."
But then he did just what he'd promised. Feinted to his right, scooped out his six-shooter, and aimed right at me. What choice did I have?
I was all pure instinct by then. Scooping out my own gun, aiming right at him, listening to the shots bark on the quiet end of the day. His knees went and then his whole body, a heap suddenly on the dusty earth. Nobody moved or spoke.
I just stood there and watched Patience Falkner flutter over to him and awkwardly cradle him and then sob with such force that I knew he had just died.
The blacksmith went over and picked up Hornaday's Colt, which had fallen a few feet away. He picked it up, looked it over. He'd probably talk all night at the saloon how strange it felt holding the same gun Jim Hornaday had used to kill all those men.
Then he said, "I'll be dagged."
"What is it?" I said.
The blacksmith glanced around at the curious crowd and then walked the gun over to me.
"Looks like you performed an execution here today, mister," the livery man said.
He handed me the gun. All six chambers were empty. Jim Hornaday had fought me without bullets.
They got the Falkner woman to her feet and led her sobbing away, and then the mortician brought his wagon and they loaded up the body and by then the deputy sheriff had finished all his questions of the crowd and me, so I was up on my roan and riding off. I tried hard not to think about Hornaday and how I'd helped him commit suicide. I tried real hard.
The Long Ride Back
Soon as I snuck into his campsite and kicked him in the leg so he'd jerk up from his blanket, I brought down the stock of my single-shot 40-90 Sharps and did some real damage to his teeth.
He was swearing and crying all the time I got him in handcuffs, spraying blood that looked black in the dawn flames of the fading campfire.
In the dewy grass, in the hard frosty cold of the September morning, the white birches just now starting to gleam in the early sunlight, I got the Kid's roan saddled and then went back for the Kid himself.
"I ain't scared of you," he said, talking around his busted teeth and bloody tongue.
"Well, that makes us even. I ain't scared of you, either."
I dragged him over to the horse, got him in the saddle, then took a two-foot piece of rawhide and lashed him to the horn.
"You sonofabitch," the Kid said. He said that a lot. Then I was up in my own saddle and we headed back to town. It was a long day's ride.
* * *
"They'll be braggin' about ya, I suppose, over to the saloon, I mean," the Kid said a little later, as we moved steadily along the stage road.
"I don't pay attention to stuff like that."
"How the big brave sheriff went out and captured the Kid all by his lonesome."
"Why don't you be quiet for a while?"
"Yessir. All by his lonesome. And you know how many murder counts are on the Kid's head? Why, three of them in Nebraska alone. And two more right here in Kansas. Why, even the James Boys walked wide of the Kid—and then here's this hick sheriff capturin' him all by hisself. What a hero."
This time I didn't ask him.
I leaned over and backhanded him so
hard, he started to slide off his saddle. Through his pain and blood, he started calling me names again.
It went like that most of the morning, him starting up with his ugly tongue and me quieting him down with the back of my hand.
At least the countryside was pretty, autumn blazing in the hills surrounding this dusty valley, chickenhawks arcing against the soft blue sky.
Then he said, "You goin' to be there when they hang me?"
I shrugged.
"When they put the rope around my neck and the hood over my face and give the nod to the hangman?"
I said nothing. I rode. Nice and steady. Nice and easy.
"Oh, you're a fine one, you are," the Kid said. "A fine one."
Around noon, the sun very high and hot, I stopped at a fast blue creek and gave the horses water and me and the Kid some jerky.
I ate mine. The Kid spit his out. Right in my face.
Then we were up and riding again.
"You sonofabitch," the Kid said. There was so much anger in him, it never seemed to wane at all.
I sighed. "There's nothing to say, Kid."
"There's plenty to say and you know it."
"In three years you killed six people, two of them women, and all so you could get yourself some easy money from banks. There's not one goddamned thing to add to that. Not one goddamned thing." Now it was me who was angry.
"You sonofabitch," he said, "I'm your son. Don't that mean anything?"
"Yeah, Karl, it means plenty. It means I had to watch your mother die a slow death of shame and heartbreak. And it means you put me in a position I didn't ask for—you shot a man in cold blood in my jurisdiction. So I had to come after you. I didn't want to—I prayed you'd be smart enough to get out of my territory before I found you. But you weren't smart at all. You figured I'd let you go." I looked down at the silver star on my leather vest. "But I couldn't, Karl. I just couldn't."