Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) (2 page)

Pa sat straight in his saddle. He neither whimpered nor groaned. When we watered in a coulee with day a-coming I thought I’d never seen a man so drawn and tight, yet all the night long he had followed a trail that was scarcely more than a shadow on the grass.

There in that coulee I helped pa down and covered him with a blanket. He slept some, so I unsaddled the horses and let them roll in the dust, then picketed them out. I lay down, just to relax a mite, and when I opened my eyes the sun was over the horizon in the east.

Pa floundered into a sitting position and I scouted buffalo chips to make a fire. Careful to make no smoke, for this was Comanche country, I made coffee and sliced bacon into a skillet.

“We got to find a place,” I said. “You surely need rest.”

“I spent more years in the saddle than on my back, son, and if I die it’ll be in the saddle.”

When I helped him into the saddle again I accidentally bumped his leg and he winced, his face went white, and sweat started from his forehead. Ashamed of my clumsiness, I climbed aboard the hammer-headed roan I was riding.

That horse was not one a man would choose a-purpose. He was raw-boned and no-account-looking and he had a devil in his eye, but he could go all night and the next morning, then give him a few mouthfuls of antelope bush or bunchgrass and a hatful of water, and he’d be off and going again.

All the time I kept thinking what would happen when we fetched up to Heseltine and them. There was nothing behind me that made me fit to buck the likes of them. I said as much.

“You can be as tough as you’re of a mind to be, son. I’ve watched you, boy. I’ve watched you work and seen you ride the rough string, and you’ve got all any man has got. I’ve seen you handle that gun, too, and you’re good, boy, mighty good. I know nothing about Heseltine, but there’s nothing in Sites or Reese that need worry you.”

Pa had never said a word of praise to me that I could recall. Nor had I any idea he’d seen me practicing with a gun. But he had to be wrong. I’d never fought with any man, with either knuckle or gun.

Heseltine was a hard man. I won’t deny the clothes he wore added to it. There was a swagger about him. My clothes were nothing. I’d never owned a store-bought suit. I had a shirt my shoulders were beginning to split, and I’d outgrown my jeans two summers ago. My boots were down-at-heel.

The wind was raw and cold on the high plains. Hunching our shoulders, we pushed against it, riding a land that offered us nothing but prairie and sky.

We had only their tracks to guide us, and the anger that grew more terrible as the hours drew on. Pa sat up in his saddle and made no sound. His cheeks hollowed down and his eyes sank back into his skull, but the light in them scared me. If I was Bob Heseltine I’d be a worried man.

“You’ve got the makin’s, Edwin,” he said suddenly. “You’ll make big tracks on the land. There was a Texas Ranger once who said there was no stoppin’ a man who knew he was in the right and kept a-comin’.”

Big tracks on the land. They were words he used of few men, only such as Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, Goodnight, and Slaughter.

Pa began to speak of them, telling me stories of the Goodnight-Loving Trail, of mountain men, trail drivers, and Texas Rangers. Of ancestors of ours who fought with the Green Mountain Boys, of Decatur and Andy Jackson, and all sorts of people and things I’d never guessed he knew of. Alongside of some of those men, Bob Heseltine didn’t sound like much; all the stories I’d heard of him began to sound like a man hollering into an empty rain barrel—the sound coming back, but nothing there.

Cold, spitting rain began to fall, the tracks grew faint. From time to time we’d find a hoof-print, the stub of a cigarette, or some small thing to mark their passing.

Pa’s leg looked awful. It was swollen around the splint, but he wouldn’t let me touch it. He’d taken his knife and slit his pants-leg to ease the pressure, and toward nightfall he asked me to split his boot. His gasp of relief when I done it told me how awful the pain had been before.

When I got back into the saddle it came over me all of a sudden that pa wasn’t going to make it.

I knew then that he knew it, too. He was just hanging on, hoping we’d come up with them whilst he could stand beside me at the showdown. He would get back the money he’d been trusted with, and he could leave me fixed for the future.

That was it. I knew what he was thinking, and why. He was thinking of the two things that meant most to him. His given word, and me.

Was I worth it? Was I really worth all that? Was I worth any part of the hard work and suffering pa had gone through?

Was I?

Chapter 2

A
MOMENT THERE I sat very still…what
would
I do?

There had always been pa. Somehow I’d never had to worry because he was always there, telling me what to do. Time to time he got my dander up and I’d growl around for a few days, or I’d ride off to town to talk to Doc or the Kid, but when I got around to riding home, pa was always there.

Come to think of it, he had never held it up to me.

Inside me there was a horrible, sinking feeling. Without pa, what was there? I’d be alone.

So far as I knew, I had no kinfolk anywheres at all, and the friends I had were pa’s friends.

“Your ma,” he said suddenly, “was a fine woman. I wish you could have knowed her. Educated, too. She came of good folks, and she had book learnin’.

“Her family was New England Irish…lace-curtain Irish. Time was I mentioned her family name to an Irishman and he says hers was an old family, born of the old chiefs of Ireland going back to before the Danes came.”

Ma died when I was three and I remembered her only as somebody warm and wonderful who held me close and made much of me when I was hurt or feeling bad. She’d been a pretty woman. Pa said it, and that much I remembered. She died of a fever on Cache Creek when we was traveling to Texas.

I
T WAS SUNDOWN when we saw the fire, and it was far off. The country was no longer level, but broken into ravines, some of them choked with brush.

We forked out our rifles and closed in, but before we got within hailing distance we saw there were a couple of wagons and off to one side some mules picketed. It was a camp of buffalo hunters.

One man taken one look at pa and said, “Mister, you better let me help you off that horse.”

“My son will do it,” pa said, and I helped him down, but as my hands took his weight I felt him tremble, and when I got him stretched out alongside the fire I looked into his eyes and saw that he was dying.

There was choking fear in me. I glanced around at their faces. “Is anybody here a doctor? Pa’s in bad shape.”

One man was already rolling his sleeves. “I ain’t no saw-bones, but I’ll see what I can do.”

When he cut away pa’s pants-leg I couldn’t stand to look. The jagged end of the bone had come through the flesh and the wound looked ugly.

That man who’d said he was no doctor worked fast and he seemed to know exactly what to do.

Another man handed me a cup. “You’re done up, boy. Have some coffee.”

Whilst the man worked on pa and I ate and drank, I told them our story.

“They were here,” one of them said. “They pulled in last night and left shy of daylight. You aren’t about to catch them.”

“I got to. Pa taken them cows up the trail on trust, and the folks who trusted their cattle to him need their money.”

There was a lean, well-set man with a reddish mustache who sat back from the fire.

He looked over at me. “My friend, you’d have to tie into three men, and they’d be ready for you.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “but they’ve got our money. I got to get it back.”

“Do you know those men?”

So I explained about Doc and Reese and Heseltine, and how pa and me had words and I’d gone off and left him, and had I been there I could have caught that horse. Then I told about facing the three of them and backing down.

“You did right.” The big bearded man who seemed to be the head man spoke emphatically. “I didn’t cotton to that outfit myself. You’d have had no chance with the three of them…and your pa was waiting, his leg broken.”

The man who had been treating pa walked over to me, rolling down his sleeves. “You’d better go sit by him, and you’d better stay with him. I think he’d like it.”

Pa was resting quiet when I got to him. I could smell whiskey, and I guessed they had given it to him to ease the pain.

He caught hold of my hand. “Son, I never been much of a father. If your mother had lived I’d have done better. She had a feeling for things I never rightly had. Ever since your ma died I been trying to think out what she would have had me do with you. My own father was killed in a river accident when I was four.”

“You done all right, pa. I just ain’t much account.”

“No, you’re a good boy. You always were. I don’t hold it against you that you looked up to Doc Sites and Kid Reese. They must have seemed a lot more exciting than me.”

“They couldn’t hold a candle to you. Not even in their best days.”

“I’d seen their like before.” He looked at me. “When I was a boy, not much older than you, I traipsed around with some men not any better than Sites and Reese. I nigh got myself into more trouble than I could handle. I knew what could come of it.”

He lay very still for a while and his breathing was slow and awful heavy. He seemed to have trouble catching his breath.

“I’m sorry for the folks at home,” he said. “Teale wanted to send his girl to school, and Sackleton planned to buy a milk cow for his wife. Most of them needed money to tide them over until planting time. Now they’ll be hard up.”

“I’ll get it back, pa. If it’s the last thing I do.”

“I wouldn’t put it on you, son. You’ll have to make your own way now.”

He knew he wasn’t going to make it. Right there he said it, and I sat there beside him, holding his hand, wishing I’d not said some of the mean things I’d said, wishing I’d listened more than I had, understood him better. I’d never stood in his boots, trying to make a living against the works of nature and the changes of money value and the like. I’d never had a boy to raise all alone.

“Pa,” I whispered, not able to speak out loud, “pa, I’ll make it. I really will. I know what you tried to do for me, and I’ll pay them back. You gave your word, and now I give you mine.”

He kind of squeezed my hand, so I guess he heard me, and then he was dead. He went easy at the last, just a sort of sigh.

Gangrene had set in, the bearded man said, and the poison was all through him. They might have saved his life by taking off his leg, but nobody there had ever done the like, and anyway, he wouldn’t hear of it.

We laid him to rest on a high knoll alongside the river, and I set up there with a cinch-ring held by two sticks and burned his name and the date into a wooden slab. Not that it would last long—things don’t in that country. It was little enough mark for him to leave on the land. He lay there alone like many another before and after, simple men who just wanted to build their homes, and to help build a country.

If he was to make any mark at all it had to be through me. I was all he left in the world, aside from a worn-out saddle and a hard-used Winchester.

When I stuck that slab into the ground I went down the knoll to saddle up.

The man with the reddish mustache, he was standing there beside the fire, and he said, “You fixing to take in after those men?”

“Yes, sir. That’s what pa would have done.”

“Mind if I ride along? That’s a lonely ride you’ve got ahead of you.”

Well, I just looked at him and felt a lump come into my throat. “Yes, sir. If you’ve a mind to.”

“He was quite a man, that father of yours. Only death could stop a man like that.”

“Death won’t. I’m a-goin’ to ride in his place.”

“Were you very close? You and your pa?”

“No, sir. I wouldn’t listen to him. I figured I was a whole sight smarter. I never guessed how much he knew.”

“You aren’t alone. A lot of us didn’t listen when we should have. It takes time for a boy to appreciate his father.”

He turned to the bearded man. “Wright, will you take my hides off my hands? And we’ll need a couple of pack horses and some grub.”

“All right, Con. Take what you’ve the need for.”

And that was how I met Con Judy, and how we rode together on a trail that wasn’t to see an end for a long, long time.

Chapter 3

T
HE TRAIL LED toward the Canadian, and I learned a thing or two about Con Judy. Pa had been a good man on a trail, but he couldn’t match up with Con. Time and again when I lost the trail he would pick it up, seeming to know almost by instinct the way they had taken.

Nobody talked less than he did, but you can learn about a man by riding with him. He never wasted a motion, never took an unnecessary chance. He scouted every possible ambush, every creek-crossing. He never made a point of it, but he knew what he was doing.

One day I told him what Doc and the Kid had said about Bob Heseltine. When I finished Con simply said, “You never know how a man will stack up until he’s faced with it.”

When pa died he left mighty little. He had eighteen dollars and a few cents in his pockets, and a worn-out pistol. His Winchester was better than mine. On the ranch we’d left behind there was a cabin, a corral, and a few head of scrub cattle alongside a water hole.

Eighteen dollars wasn’t going to carry me far, but I had eight dollars of my own money and I could sell his pistol and my Winchester. They wouldn’t bring much, but I’d get maybe fifteen to twenty dollars for them.

Toward sundown of the third day we rode up to Happy Jack’s stage station. Whilst Con sat his horse, rifle in hand, I scouted the corral. None of the horses I was looking for was there.

Happy Jack came out, rolling down his sleeves. He had been washing up dishes after feeding the stage passengers. He didn’t know me from Adam, but he knew Con Judy. I was to find that a lot of folks did.

“They were here,” Happy Jack said. “Rode in about sundown last night. Bought themselves a meal and a couple of bottles and paid for it with gold money. I figure they’re headed for Mobeetie or Dodge.”