by Lauran Paine
The north-south stage road ran on ahead, so bright in the moonlight it seemed to glow. He rode out in plain sight, the only moving, living thing, riding steadily southward toward Beatty. While the world slept, he was fully awake, feeling confident and strong and free. He took a deep, sweet breath. In this world there was only one vice, only one crime, only one sin—failure. You could be anyone you desired to be; you could do anything you wanted to do, but you could not fail, for the good and orderly people of this world respected only success and they despised only failure. Well, sometimes it took a man ten, maybe fifteen years to learn this, but once learned it was not a lesson a bitter man readily forgot. Promise anything, say anything, be anything, only just don’t fail!
His horse’s hoofs scuffed up pale moonlighted dust; each iron footfall had a separate echo in the stillness of the roadway. The wide, straight roadway narrowed a little as it entered town, but continued to flow southward through Beatty and out as far as the eye could see, southward. He dismounted at the livery barn and tied up at the hitch rail. Then he leaned there, gazing at the town. At the Royal Antler Saloon, at the Cowmen’s & Drovers’ Bank, at the Beatty Mercantile Company store front, at the Hereford County Sheriff’s Office, at the Queens & Aces Café, at the Beatty Hotel, and the Hereford County Abstract Office—Land Sales Our Specialty. And finally he gazed longest at the square brick courthouse.
Twelve years ago, he thought, a barefoot kid walked north out of this town in the middle of the night. And now he’s back. Fine, that’s the way it should be. Judge . . . you sleep good tonight, hear? And you, too, Sheriff. And the rest of you good, substantial citizens . . . you well-fed sanctimonious buzzards . . . you all sleep good tonight, you hear? Because Tom Barker is back and from this night on you’re not going to sleep so good . . . any of you!
II
“Get up, damn you! Get outen them blankets, you dirty little . . . !”
It was late in the night and his head rang from the first blow. He leaped up—and fell, tangled in the bedding. He rolled away from the arcing boot of his father, wide-awake in mind but still sluggish in body, terribly frightened but wide-awake.
“I’m awake, Paw. I’m up . . .”
The arm had clubbed downward again, striking hard.
“Please, Paw, I’m up. I’m up.”
“Yes, you’re up, you sneakin’ little snake, an’ you helped her, didn’t you?”
The arm was rising again.
“No, Paw, I didn’t help anyone. Honest I didn’t.”
The arm descended again, and that time the boy’s knees went soft. Something warm ran down his cheek from an ear.
“Where is she, damn you?”
“Who, Paw?”
The man’s wildness remained but its first force was spent. He stood there in the lean-to, reeling like a tree in a high wind, his beard awry, his face shiny with sweat, and his black eyes burning with an endless cruelty and hatred. “Your maw, that’s who. Don’t lie to me, damn you. You helped her, didn’t you? Who did she go with? Where did they go?”
“Honest, Paw, I don’t know.”
“Oh, don’t you, now!”
The man moved forward, his arm rising. He was a massive person, a freighter by trade. His strength and harshness were famous as far away as Chihuahua. The boy quailed, giving ground, sick in his stomach with fear. One blow felled him, lifted him bodily, and hurled him against the wall, and left him crumpled, white nightshirt spotted with blood.
* * * * *
Later, with the night as quiet as death, the boy had stirred, sat up, seen that his father was gone, and had gone out to the well to wash his face and daub at his torn ear, swollen as large as his fist. And then he had heard the man coming along the road roaring drunk, had run back for his clothes, put them on in panting haste, and had fled into the night without his shoes.
First, he had hidden at Grogan’s Livery Barn, but the night hawk had run him off. Later, after sunup, he had begged Moses Beach to let him work for his meals and hide in the store until his father went south with the wagons again. But Beach had also run him off. Then his father had come searching and in terror he had gone to Judge Montgomery, ashamed that Antoinette should see his swollen, purple face, the blood on his clothing, and the terror in his eyes. Portly Judge Montgomery had taken him to Sheriff Tim Pollard and there at the jailhouse, when his father had come in red-eyed and reeling, he had been handed over.
He had never been able to recall accurately what had followed. He remembered being knocked down twice before they had gotten home, but beyond that he knew nothing at all until, after nightfall, he had found himself lying in the yard with his father’s drover’s whip in the roiled dust beside him, its shot-loaded handle less than ten inches from his head. And that was the night he had left Beatty, sore outside and sick inside, walking barefoot northward.
Then had come the long years between when he had wandered among rough towns and hard men, growing larger, taller, hard-muscled, and as agile as a cat, becoming the deceptively calm-eyed and soft-spoken man he now was. And through those years he had never ceased to cherish the memory of a beautiful woman with dark-red hair, a sad mouth, and gentle blue eyes who had deserted her husband and abandoned her son.
Many a night, with his body turning soft against the hard ground, he had smoked and watched night come on, each silver star a tear, each reddening rampart a wealth of auburn hair, each sighing breeze a smile, letting memory and longing work their sad magic in the one soft spot that remained to him. What had become of her? Who was that man? Of course he had been the one, but it had taken years for the boy to understand this. All he knew, then, before she had left, was that during those long months when his father was away with the wagons, that a man would come to the house, would call for her in a top buggy, would bring her presents from St. Louis or St. Joe.
He had been a middle-size man with a constant, big-toothed smile and a way of looking from beneath his lashes that had been cultivated. And he was a soft-spoken man with a gentle air, and that, too, had been part of his cultivated personality. Did she, even yet, in her new life, think of the little boy back in Beatty? Yes, she would remember him. A mother couldn’t ever forget.
He could visualize her very clearly sitting somewhere combing her hair with silver-backed brushes; they had initials engraved on them but he could not make them out, and the room she was in was a fine one. It had flowery paper on the walls and a thick carpet underfoot. It was somewhere in the East, maybe in St. Louis, or maybe even farther East, maybe in Chicago or Cincinnati or New York. In his sadness he had always been glad for her. He had only wished he might have been with her. But he couldn’t, although he had never permitted himself to believe she hadn’t wanted him with her. It was the man with the false smile; he had not wanted her son to be with her. He had wanted her for himself alone.
Also during those years he had heard of his father. Down along the border and over into New Mexico—even as far south as Chihuahua—there were tales of terrible drunks, savage fights, legends of bitterness, of cruelty, and unrestrained ferocity. They had left him unmoved. He had never doubted that he and his father would one day meet again face to face, but this plausibility had long since ceased to mean anything to him. He had neither pity nor hatred for the man. He thought of him only as a failure, a man who goaded oxen and mule trains, a laborer, a drover who sweated and froze and fought to deliver the goods of others. He remembered the beatings and cursings, but only distantly and vaguely; they might have happened to someone else. He rarely thought of the man at all, and, when he did, it was simply to measure him by the same yardstick he measured all men with—success or failure. Beyond that his father might have been dead—or as vanished as his mother—or as meaningless and distant as all those departed yesterdays. With the exception of the one memory, the past was past and he did not mean for it to influence him in the future, beyond putting to practice the lessons it had taught him.
Now, standing in the paling light of a new day, smoking an
d watching the town, he could afford a small smile. The lessons he had learned were practical ones. The hand dangling above his gun holstered at his hip, for instance, was very experienced. The dark eyes, beguilingly gentle, were all-seeing. The naturally dark face, further colored by Arizona’s fierce sun, hid all emotion behind its smoothness, its blank, almost melancholy expression. Only the square jaw, thin lip line, and molded thrust of chin offered any clue of the inner man Tom Barker had become.
III
Judge Montgomery remembered hearing what had sounded to him like a shot. But he had been busy at the courthouse, and, since no one had mentioned it, he had forgotten about it until, upon arriving home in the warm brightness of a long summer evening, he found Sheriff Tim Pollard on the porch with his daughter. The judge was a stout man with a handsome head and thick gray hair. He looked every inch a judge, or a senator, or perhaps an Indian commissioner from Washington. He was a punctual, orderly person whose long tenure of respectability had covered him with layer after layer of decorum. He disliked spontaneity, had never in his life given a snap judgment, and he abhorred raw emotionalism in any of its myriad forms. Violence, rawness, sensationalism in any form was anathema to him, and, because he was this way, the substantial people of Hereford County had returned him to office at every election in the past twenty years.
Judge Montgomery’s own life having been an orderly sequence of dignified advancement under the law, he looked upon any other kind of progress as a form of sordidness. He outwardly respected the people of Hereford County who had won the wilderness from the Indians with guns and scalping knives, but inwardly he disapproved of them strongly. They were crude, savage, dirty people, in his opinion no better than the Indians themselves. Therefore, when he saw Tim Pollard, himself an old Indian fighter, sitting on the porch with Antoinette, his secret antagonism rose up. Besides it was a beautiful evening, he was a little tired, and had been looking forward to relaxing in the soft, silent twilight. He nodded to the sheriff, smiled at Antoinette, touched her shoulder lightly in passing, and sank down upon a chair with a repressed sigh.
“There was a killing in town today, Judge,” Pollard said.
Remembering the gunshot sound, Judge Montgomery nodded without speaking. He knew Tim Pollard; the sheriff would tell his story in his own way and in his own good time.
“Charley Ingersoll got it.”
Judge Montgomery drew up in his chair. Ingersoll was one of the more prominent settlers. He was an industrious man, a hard worker, violent tempered perhaps, but substantial, and a man with a good bank balance. Anger slowly built up in the judge. “Tim, we’ve got to do something about those cowboys. I’ve been telling you for years there’s got to be an ordinance against carrying pistols in town.”
“It wasn’t the cowmen this time, Judge.”
“No? Then who?”
Tim Pollard ran the back of one freckled hand under his drooping longhorn mustache; he squinted toward the faraway hills where the sun was fast disappearing. He pushed long legs out in front of him and regarded the scuffed toes of his boots.
“Well?” the judge said impatiently.
“You recollect Tom Barker’s kid?”
“His kid?”
“Yeah. Think back, Judge. You recollect how Tom’s wife run off one night, and old Tom went around town like a crazy man for a couple days afterward?”
“I recall that,” Judge Montgomery said shortly, finding the subject sordid and therefore unpleasant, particularly so in front of his daughter.
“Recollect young Tom . . . the kid . . . hidin’ from old Tom and tryin’ to get folks to keep the old man away from him?”
“Hmmmmm, vaguely, Tim.”
Pollard turned a long, thoughtful gaze on the judge. “He went to you an’ you brought him to me.”
“Well, what of it?”
“And I turned him over to his old man.”
The judge was frowning. “I remember now,” he said. “It was back a few years.”
Antoinette spoke for the first time. “It was over ten years ago.” She was watching her father now. “He ran away that same night.”
Sheriff Pollard nodded slowly. “That’s right. He run off that night and no one ever heard of him again. Well, Judge . . . he’s back. It was young Tom Barker who killed Charley Ingersoll today.”
The judge digested this in silence. He could not place the boy’s face at all; he remembered only the general details of that earlier sordidness, and, since he had no respect at all for the elder Tom Barker, he found it easy to extend this antipathy to the returned son. “Did you arrest him?” he now asked the sheriff.
“No.”
“No? Well, why not, Tim?”
“Charley was beatin’ his horse at the emporium hitch rail, Judge. He was usin’ a pick handle. Young Barker walked up, knocked Charley down, took up the pick handle, and worked him over a mite with it.” Pollard’s words fell quietly, slowly into the soft glow of dying day. He was squinting far out again, and obviously his mind was reliving the events of another decade. “Well, Charley commenced to get up. Young Barker stood back. Charley went for his gun under his coat and quicker’n scat young Tom killed him.” The sheriff was looking steadily now at Antoinette. “It was a fair fight, Judge. Ingersoll was killed going for his gun.”
“Witnesses?” the judge asked mechanically.
“Four.”
“I see. And I suppose they were Barker’s friends.”
“Nope, not a one of ’em knew him.”
“Correction, Sheriff,” Antoinette said. “One of them did.”
Pollard’s blank face puckered into the smallest of rueful smiles. “Excuse me, Toni.” He shifted his gaze to the judge. “One of ’em recognized him right off as young Tom Barker. She was the only one who did, though.”
“She?” Judge Montgomery said, then, with understanding coming, he looked incredulously at his daughter. “You, honey?”
Antoinette nodded.
“But what were you doing . . . why, you might have been hurt?” Judge Montgomery’s face reddened. “Tim, confound it, I’m going to insist on a special meeting of the town council. Now, tonight, we’re going to pass that no guns ordinance.”
Pollard was tugging at his mustache. He said: “It’ll be a good thing, all right, Judge. Only I think there’s something else ought to be tended to first.”
“What? What can possibly be more important . . . ?”
“Young Tom Barker.”
Judge Montgomery fixed angry eyes on the sheriff. He had known Tim Pollard many years; the sheriff was a dry and laconic man; he emphasized his opinions with a minimum number of words. “Elaborate, Tim. What about young Barker?”
“Judge, I’ve seen a heap of gunmen in my time. I don’t mean just the fast guns, either . . . I mean the kind of men who use guns to serve their private ends. That’s the kind of a killer young Tom Barker is.”
“I don’t follow you, Tim.”
“A killer rides into town, Judge. He shoots someone, collects his five hundred dollars, and rides on to the next town. That’s the kind of gunman most of us are familiar with. But in the past few years another kind of gunman has come along. The Wyatt Earp kind. They don’t kill just for the five hundred. They don’t kill for hire at all. They use their guns to get something they particularly want, something like wealth or position. That’s the kind of a gunman young Tom Barker is. He’s in Beatty for a good reason.”
Judge Montgomery settled back in his chair. He, too, turned his gaze outward toward the marching ranks of shadows moving down the distant hills. He said quietly: “I take it you talked to him.”
“I did.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. He offered to surrender his gun. Told me why he shot Charley Ingersoll. That’s all.”
“Did you ask him why he came back?”
“Yup. He said it wasn’t any of my business . . . which it wasn’t.”
“Then what makes you leery of him, Tim?”
&
nbsp; “A feelin’ I’ve got, Judge. Like I said, I’ve seen a heap of gunmen in my time. Young Tom’s not in Beatty to look up any old friends because he’s got none here. He’s here for a good reason and he aims to stay until he’s worked it out.”
A long interval of silence descended. Antoinette finally arose. “I’ll get you both some lemonade,” she said. “Mister Beach got a fresh load of Sonora lemons in today.”
After she was gone, the judge settled deeper into his chair, sighed, put both hands palms down on his paunch, and let his eyelids droop. He felt resigned, remote, pleasantly loose. “If Ingersoll’s killing was justifiable homicide, Tim,” he murmured, “I suppose that’s that. But I’m still going to push for the town ordinance against firearms.”
“The ordinance will help,” Sheriff Pollard replied, bending forward to make a cigarette. “But that doesn’t solve the Barker problem. He’ll kill again, Judge.”
“Who?”
Pollard shrugged. “How would I know? I just know that he will. He’s in Beatty for a damned good reason, Judge. The first one of us who gets in his way will get called out.”
“Well, what do you suggest? We can’t just run him out of town. He has his legal rights.”
“I got nothing to suggest. I just wanted you to know that your gun ordinance all of a sudden ain’t so important to me anymore.”
“You’re barking up a tree, Tim. The boy has a bad background. He won’t stay long in a place as quiet and orderly as Beatty.”
Sheriff Pollard lit his cigarette, smoked it a moment in silence, then grunted. As far as he was concerned the conversation was ended, and it had run just about as he had expected it to. Judge Montgomery was a good man for the town, and on the bench, but he’d never, in Pollard’s opinion, been much of a man in a lot of other ways.