Novel 1959 - The First Fast Draw (v5.0) (5 page)

Bob Lee stood silent, a fine man, but with sharp-honed pride brought to an edge by family position and the anger in him that he had to run, I’d have said he would be lucky to last the year. As for me, I intended to fight shy of trouble. The carpetbaggers would pass as all thing do, and I’d show my patience—although I’d little of that—and try to wait them out.

“We’ll have small chance,” Bob Lee said, “unless we’re armed and ready. You’d better give thought to that, Cullen, and go to your plow with your Spencer in a scabbard on the plow handle.”

“This land is mine,” I said. “I mean to crop it, and I’ll buy cattle when I can, and horses, too. I mean to breed horses here, when it can be safely done.”

“There’s wild cattle in the thickets, Cullen. We could get together and round up a bunch and drive them to Fort Worth. If you want, tell me and I can have fifty men for you in a couple of days.”

“There’s that many?”

“In the thickets? There’s more, man. And they’ll fight, if it comes to that.”

“I want no fighting. It is peace I have come for, and it is peace I will have.”

When they were gone I waited until the sound of their going had faded away, losing itself among the night sounds. What Bob Lee had said was true. If they came upon me in the fields it would be well to have a gun, for it was always better to talk peace with a solid argument at hand. The Spencer carbine was not too long, easy to swing into line, but I must have another Colt. It was a hard-hitting pistol with a good range.

Yet it was not of peace I was thinking when the trouble came. It was of Katy Thorne.

There was a faint whisper of a boot in the grass but my mind was elsewhere and the warning was an instant late. A gun jammed hard against my spine and a hand wrenched the Colt from my belt and another hand, rising almost from the ground, grasped the barrel of my Spencer. The gun muzzle at my back was an insistent argument, I relaxed my hold on the carbine and stood quiet.

“Welcome home, Cullen.” That would be the voice of Chance Thorne, and a fine voice he had, faintly mocking now. “I was afraid you had gone for good.”

At the moment there was nothing to say, and certainly nothing to do. Lee and Longley would be deep into the swamp by now, and whatever was done I must do myself. So I stood very still and I think my silence began to worry them.

“Shall we take him back?” It was Reese speaking. “Or just leave him here?”

“The colonel wishes to speak to him, but the colonel is sure he will resist, so naturally he expects to see him in rather rough condition, and in a mood to answer questions.”

Reese said, “What are we waiting for?” And struck out viciously. And as he struck I kicked him in the groin. He screamed out like an animal in pain, and then they closed in around me. My swinging fist smashed at a face and I had the savage pleasure of feeling the bone crunch, and then I plunged forward, punching with both hands, fighting to get clear of the circle. And then out of nowhere a pistol barrel caught me across the skull and my knees went rubbery and I fell, and then they closed in, kicking and striking as I rolled on the ground, trying to evade them. Their very numbers interfered with brutality.

Suddenly Chance parted the group and said, “I waited a long time for this!” And he kicked me in the head.

Only a quick turn of my head saved me the full force of that kick, but I pushed my face into the soft grass and relaxed as if unconscious, which I nearly was. There was a heavy throbbing inside my skull and I wondered if it had been cracked, and vaguely I heard someone say, “Throw him over a horse.” And in the brief moment before consciousness slipped away, I felt a swift, savage exultation that so far they had not found my derringer.

Only I knew that I must live. Regardless of everything, I must live and make them pay. They had come upon me in a mob, too cowardly to face me alone, and no man deserves to be beaten and hammered by a mob, and the men who make up a mob are cowards. But cowards can die, and being cowards death is a bitterness beyond anything a brave man can feel.

“You take my advice,” I heard Joel Reese say, “and you’ll hang him now.”

“Did I ask your advice?” Chance spoke contemptuously. “Did I ever take your advice?”

When they threw me over the horse I was only vaguely conscious, but when the horses started down the lane I knew I had a chance if they kept on along this route. It was a slim chance, but I’d no intention of taking any more than I’d had; as long as they believed me unconscious I had a chance.

The rider who rode the horse over which they’d thrown me had kicked me in the head when mounting, and the boot in the stirrup was beside my skull, and I could hear the slight tinkle of the spur. When they made the turn along the swamp it was my chance and it had to come now. Grabbing the boot I jammed the spur into the horse’s ribs as hard as I could shove.

It was unexpected, the man’s foot was easy in the stirrup, and the startled horse lunged in pain, plunging off the trail into the brush and grass, and when the horse plunged I went off the saddle into the edge of the swamp.

There was a mad moment while the rider fought his horse before he was aware of what had happened, and in that moment I reached my feet and made three fast strides, and then dove head-first into the brush, squirming forward. Behind me there were shouts, screams of fury, and then shots cut the brush past my head. The earth turned to mud and then water and I splashed through the reeds and rank water-grass and lowered myself into the dark water.

There was an instant when my hand slid along a mossy log and I shuddered, thinking it an alligator, and then I half-waded, half-swam over to a mud bank and crawling out, lay gasping with pain.

My skull pounded like a huge drum, every throb was one of pure agony, and my body was wracked with pain, bruised from the kicking, and bloody as well. And that blood would mean added danger in the swamp.

Yet I knew my position would be secure only for minutes, and after that, I had to move.

Behind me there were shouts and the splashing and cursing of the searchers.

This was my first night at home, and already I was a hunted man. Deep within me there was a pounding hatred of those who had done this to me. They had mobbed me, beaten me, and for no reason. Yet
they
had declared war,
I
had not. Be it on their own heads, I told myself. Whatever comes now, they have asked for it.

Chapter 2

A
FTER A TIME my breath came easier, and I lay very still, trying to plan. I had come no more than sixty feet from that swampy shore, and I knew this bank upon which I lay sprawled for I had fished from it many a time. It was only a narrow, projecting tongue of swampy ground that reached out like a pointing finger into the dark waters.

It was this vicinity that was favored by the huge old ’gator locally known as Ol’ Joe, and reputed to have eaten more than three men, yet it was this water I must swim, and there was no other way out. It could be no more than a minute or two before either Chance Thorne or Joel Reese remembered the mud bar.

To walk back to the mainland was to invite capture, for already the search along the shore was nearing the connecting point. Getting to my feet I hobbled across the mud bar to the far side.

There was a knifing pain in my side, and one leg was badly bruised and probably torn. Ol’ Joe was a chance I had to accept, wherever he was he would be sure to catch the scent of blood in the water. On the other hand it would make the pursuers no more eager to investigate until daylight.

Walking into the dark water until it was chest-high, I struck out. Swimming was something at which I’d always been handy, and I moved off into the water making almost no sound. Despite the throbbing in my skull and the stiff, bruised muscles I must swim about two hundred yards into the swamp before there would be a place to land.

Taking each stroke by itself, neither thinking nor trying to plan beyond the other side, I swam steadily, keeping my mind away from Ol’ Joe.

Behind me there was a shout of triumph and I knew they had found some tracks. Glancing back I saw lanterns bobbing along the swamp shore.

Somewhere out here, and my swimming should have put me in a direct line with them, were a few old cypresses standing in the water. They were heavy with Spanish moss and a tangle of old boughs and might offer a hide-out. A few minutes later my hand struck an underwater root, then feeling around, caught a low-hanging limb. Taking a good grip I pulled myself up out of the water.

The air was cold after the water and my teeth chattered. From limb to limb I climbed until there was a place on some twisted limbs where I could make a nest for myself. Removing my belt I belted myself around a branch of the tree and lay there in the darkness, teeth rattling with cold, mosquitoes swarming around.

The last thing I recalled was the lights along the shore line and then I must have slept or become unconscious for when I opened my eyes again the sky was gray in the east, and their campfires were large on the shore, waiting for daylight and serious search.

Something was wrong with one of my eyes and when I felt of it with careful fingers I found it swollen enormously, and fast shut. There was a great welt above one ear, and a wide cut on my scalp. Every muscle was stiff and sore, and my head throbbed with a dull pound. The flesh of my left arm was badly torn by the hobnails of a boot, and only the fact that it had been cushioned from beneath by grass and soft earth had saved it from breaking. No matter how I felt, I could wait no longer, for this place while good enough at night, would never survive a search by day.

Peering about, turning my head awkwardly because of the one eye I could use, I searched for some escape. And then I glimpsed a huge old log half concealed by vines. It was afloat, but hung up on a root of the very cypress where I was hiding.

There was movement around the fires and their voices carried to me as I climbed down the tree, every move painful, and my head feeling like a keg half-full of water, sloshing around and hard to manage.

By bending branches I got the log loose. By the sound of the voices I knew the searchers were drinking, which would make it worse for me if caught. Then pushing the log free with a broken branch for a pole, I started to move. The swamp was one of the arms of Lake Caddo, which nobody knew much about, and my guess was that a hundred years from now, folks still would not know all its tortuous sloughs and the hyacinth-clogged bayous of sluggish brown water. Yet around this lake with its bayous and sloughs, and the swamps along the Sulphur I’d spent most of my boyhood, and I figured to know this swamp country in both Louisiana and Texas as well as anybody.

Keeping that clump of cypress between the shore and me, I poled steadily, every bruised muscle aching, pushing deeper and deeper into the swamp. Where I was going now they would not follow me even if they knew of it, and I was mighty sure they didn’t. I was going to the island.

No more than a half-dozen men knew of that island before the war, and probably nobody had learned of it since unless taken there by one of those who knew. Hidden from sight in a wilderness of moss-hung cypress, the approaches seemingly clogged by hyacinth or lily pads, the island was a quarter of a mile long, and at its widest no more than a hundred yards. The highest point was about six feet above the water, but without a guide who knew the area the island simply could not be found. From a dozen yards away it was invisible in the jungle of trees, moss and vines. The Caddo Indians had known of it, and a few of the mixed-blood Caddo-Negroes who lived in the swamp knew of it.

There were several of these islands, although the others were smaller and, but for one other, more exposed. Yet it was likely that none of them were known to these fellows who mostly had ridden down from Boston, Texas.

A heron flew up and spread wide wings…poling on along the bayou, my head throbbing, muscles aching, finding a way through the lilies that would close after me.

How far had I come? A mile? Two miles? Moving as though in a trance, thinking only of putting distance between myself and the searchers who must now be looking for me. If they caught up with me before I reached the island I would be caught with nothing but the derringer to protect me, and it was useless at a distance. Moreover, I needed rest and a chance to gather my strength after the brutal beating I’d taken. My only chance was on that island where I was almighty sure Bob Lee, Longley and maybe Bickerstaff would be.

The sun was hot, and the water dead and still. Occasionally there were wide pools to cross, but mostly it was a matter of finding a way through the fields of lilies and hyacinth that choked many wide areas. If Ol’ Joe had been around he certainly wasn’t making himself known to me.

Every move of the pole was an effort now. Sometimes I could touch no bottom for some distance, nor could I always pole off the hyacinth although in most places there was enough thick growth to give a man some purchase. When I reached those places where I touched no bottom I just had to float, or paddle a bit with my hands to keep moving.

The sun was terribly hot and I needed water. The swamp water could be drunk if a man needed it bad enough, but folks got fever from it, I’d heard, and I was in trouble enough.

And I was still poling along, half-delirious when the log run aground. Several times I tried to force it on, and then looked up through a haze of pain and saw the bank of the island rising before me. But it was not a part of it that I remembered. Clumsily, I scrambled up the bank and fell flat, lying in the warm sunshine, letting the tired muscles relax. My brain was foggy and I seemed to have a hard time getting to my feet, but I knew that I must keep moving. The swamp has a way of destroying anything that becomes helpless, and to keep moving was my only salvation.

The earth was damp and in deep shadow once I left the shore, except where here and there the foliage overhead thinned out allowing enough sunlight to dapple the earth with light and shadow. Once, so weak that if it had been closer I could not have avoided it, I passed a huge diamond-back rattler coiled on a log.

Once, staggering, I fell to my knees and doubted whether I could get up—somehow I did. Vaguely then, my surroundings grew familiar. So on I went, although my strength seemed gone. Stumbling, falling, often entangled in brush, twice wading almost neck-deep in water, I kept going until struggling through the last forest of cattails I crawled up on a grassy shore near the camp. And there Bill Longley found me.

There were three days then of which I remember nothing. Then, slowly, the cuts and abrasions healed, and my head stopped its throbbing. The fierce anger faded, but left behind a sullen hatred. And there was deperation also, for it seemed a door was closing behind me, and that whatever I had come back for was slipping away, and would be lost.

Loafing about the island camp, I tried to think things out. This must not stop me. True it was that I had been set upon and beaten, yet if ever I was to be anything but what I was, I must make myself a man of substance, of property. And my only chance for that was to return to the land, to plant my crops, to buy my stallion and brood mares, and to win the fight on my own terms.

My immediate reaction was to get a gun and hunt them down, one by one, saving Chance for the last, and kill each man of them who had set upon me.

Yet there had been enough of killing, and, at the end, where would I be? An outlaw and a hunted man, without friends, without a place in the world. It would be too easy to be whipped, to sit back and admit that I’d been defeated. Down inside I knew they’d made me eat dirt, but it had been the dirt of my own field, and I could find it not unappetizing.

There were a dozen men on the island now. Bob Lee was there, so was Bill Longley and Bickerstaff, who was a good man and a hard one. All of these men were only a generation removed from those who fought at the Alamo and San Jacinto.

Listening to their desultory conversation I kept to my own thoughts with half my mind. There was that land Pa owned down on Big Cypress Bayou, the place called Fairlea. It was situated in an out-of-the-way place, surrounded on three sides by swamp and forest. On the west there was, as I recalled, a narrow grass-grown lane along the property line. It was fenced off, concealed, yet good land and a part of a place Pa had bought for a pittance. I strongly doubted whether anyone in either Boston or Jefferson dreamed it was owned by Pa. Fairlea was my best chance.

Bob Lee disagreed. “You’ve too many enemies. You’ll not get a chance to get your crop in, to say nothing of harvesting.”

“It’s my feeling,” I told them. “Nobody authorized my arrest. I’ve a thought it was Chance Thorne, acting on his own. There’s still a chance they’ll leave me alone.”

“Maybe,” Longley said dryly. “But there’s some who will remember you and be afraid, and men try to destroy anybody they are scared of.”

“There’s something else we’ve got to talk about,” Bicker-staff suggested, “and that’s Barlow. We’re getting blamed for every thieving, murdering thing he does while he hides out in the Thickets.”

“He has friends tipping him off,” Jack English declared. “He always knows where the Army isn’t goin’ to be.”

While they talked of that my mind wandered back to that lonely field at Fairlea. With luck a man could get a crop into the ground there and nobody the wiser. Then with some feed to stash away I might even go wild-cow hunting down in the Thickets and come out with a herd we could drive to Sedalia or Montgomery.

Of this much I was almighty sure: they’d not take me again and treat me as they had just now. I’d see them all in hell first, and go with them if need be. And that brought back the problem of defense. Nothing could be done until I had a gun, until I had a carbine and a Dragoon Colt.

So I got to my feet and started toward my mule which Bill Longley had brought to the island for me. Jack English had gone with him to get it, and for that I owed them a debt that I must pay.

Lee watched me saddle up the mule. “You fixin’ to go somewhere, Cull?”

“Figure I’ll need my guns. I’m goin’ after them.”

Longley had been lying on the ground chewing a blade of grass. Now he sat up and regarded me curiously, but he let the others do the talking.

“You figure to do it alone?” Lee asked mildly.

“A man forks his own broncs in this country,” I told him, “but I’ve nothing against you riding along if you’ve a might to.”

“Well, now,” Longley got to his feet, “I sort of figure this might be somethin’ to see.”

Four of them rode along: Bob Lee, Jack English, Bickerstaff and Longley. I’d have wanted no better men, anywhere.

Jefferson lay lazy in the afternoon sun. A child rolled a hoop along the boardwalk, and a dog lay sprawled in the dust in the center of the street, flopping his tail as they rode by to indicate his satisfaction with things as they were and a willingness to let things be. Two men dozed against the wall of a store enjoying the shade and their chronic idleness.

The street was silent. A few men riding into the street meant nothing to anybody, not those days. There were loose men from everywhere, just drifting, hunting they knew not what, men who had lost what they had in the war and were hoping, away back inside their skulls, to find it somewhere else.

It wasn’t likely any of them would know me on sight, although, come to think of it, Joel Reese had. But then I was on the place and where a body might expect me to be.

Stepping down from my mule, I glimpsed my reflection in the store window, a strapping big man in a cabin-spun shirt that was a size too small; my shoulders packed a lot of heavy muscle in them and it swelled that shirt considerable. First money I came by would have to go into clothes or I’d be seedplanting naked as a jaybird.

The black hair curled over the back of my shirt collar, and I guess I looked like an uncurried broomtail, one of those wild ponies folks find running in the swamps or the off-shore islands.

We had pulled up in front of the military headquarters, and I walked right in, asking nobody yes or no. There was a soldier dozing on a chair near the door with a rifle across his knees. He gaped at me, then started to pick up that rifle but something in my eyes made him change his mind. Maybe it was because I was a-figuring to stretch him out if he made a move to swing that gun on me. And I was positioned to do it.

This soldier was the Reconstruction vintage, if you know what I mean. He was no veteran. Likely he never killed nothing more than a squirrel, or something he could aim at two hundred yards off…It was a sight different to look up and see a full-grown man staring at him, just a-waiting for him. This boy had a uniform coat and cap, but only homespun pants—and he was asking for no trouble.