Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) (3 page)

“They didn’t say?”

“Nary a word.”

So we set up to the table and finished the grub Jack had left from the stage crowd. It was venison steak and beans. Between the two of us we must have drunk a gallon of black coffee.

“That Heseltine,” Jack suggested, “he had him a woman over to Granada. Worked in a saloon.”

“Aren’t many women in this country,” Con Judy said.

“And he’s got money,” I added.

When we rode into Granada it was blowing a norther and it was cold. Made a body wonder what he’d done with his summer’s wages.

Had the dust been just a mite thicker we could have gone right past the place without ever seeing the town.

There was a scattering of such towns over thousands of square miles—a half-dozen soddies, a saloon, and what passed for a store. There would be stacks of buffalo hides dried stiff as boards, corrals, and a lean-to that was both stable and blacksmith shop. Sometimes there was a creek, often just a seep of water or a spring. Occasionally there was a dug well.

The houses were unpainted, and grayed by wind and sun, street alternately muddy or dusty. This place was no better or no worse than any town beginning from nothing, struggling to make a shape and a plan for itself.

The man in the saloon said, “She’s gone. Feller rode in here yestiddy. He done showed her some gold money and she lit out like her skirts was afire.”

That was the way of it. We were always a little late, or a little too far behind.

We ate what the man had to offer, and neither of us did much talking. Finally Con said, “We might find a trail after this dust, but likely not. Heseltine has money and he has a girl, so I’m guessing he’ll ride for some place where he can spend money. That means Denver City or Leadville.”

We rode westward, and in the long silences of the prairie trail, with only the whisper of hoofs in the brown grass of autumn, my thoughts kept turning back to pa. It was little enough of a life he’d had, and I knew that the only way I could repay him was to trail those men down and take our money back to Texas. Pa had been a man to stand on principle, and I said as much to Con.

Con was older than me by ten years, I surmised, although he never said and folks in the West weren’t much on asking or answering personal questions. A man was what he did, how he shaped up at work, or against trouble.

Con was hard to place. Mostly he spoke like an educated man, but other times he’d talk careless like those of us who didn’t know any better. No two men can ride a trail together without coming to know each other, and I came to know Con Judy.

I found myself wanting to be like him. And after I’d been with him a while, I began to speak better—a little more the way he did.

He took to calling me Shell. That was after I told him my right name was Edwin Shelvin Tucker.

“Shell,” he said once, “the thing that shows the man is his willingness to accept responsibility for himself and his actions. Only a tinhorn blames what he is on his folks or the times or something else besides himself. There have been good men and great men in all periods of history, and they did it themselves.”

The way he said things they never seemed like preaching, and even had they been, I’d have listened. Con Judy was the kind of man you believed. When I stacked Kid Reese and Doc Sites up against him, they came out the short-horns they were.

We found no more tracks and we looked for none. We were heading for Denver City, a fast-growing town with saloons and dance halls that were wide open to a man with money.

There was something nagging at me, and I mentioned it to Con. “That Heseltine now…I wonder how he’ll like sharing that money with Sites and Reese? And even if he’s willing, how about her?”

Con smiled. “You’re growing up, Shell. I’d lay even money they’ve all done some thinking about that.”

Never in my born days had I seen such a place as Denver. Brick blocks were going up all about, and several had been completed. The log cabins and sod houses that had been the beginning of the town looked down-at-heel and shabby beside the new buildings. Nor had I ever seen so many people. You’d have thought there was a picnic in town.

“How will we ever find them?” I asked Con. “I never saw so many people before.”

“We’ll call on Jim Cook. He’s been a lawman here, and he makes it his business to know all the crooks in the country and to keep them located. If they’re here or have been here, he will know.”

Jim Cook was a fine, tall man with a mustache. “Yes, I know the man. I believe he’s in Leadville. There are more outlaws in that town today than any place in Colorado or Kansas.”

We had camped in an arroyo. Con was making coffee and I had washed out my shirt and hung it on a bush to dry in the sun. Many a time I’d had to let the heat of my body dry a wet shirt, for a man couldn’t pack much in the way of clothes when he was hightailing it across country.

“After you catch up to them, what then?” Con asked me.

Con had a way of asking questions that set a man to thinking. Worrying, even.

Well, what would I do? Until now everything had been ordered by circumstances, or by pa. There had been work to do, and not much choice about when to do it.

If a man wanted to eat he had to work, and he had to be at it from sunup to sundown. I’d done a lot of daydreaming, and a certain amount of that goes into the making of a man, but all that talk with Reese and Sites had been another kind of daydreaming.

Ofttimes a boy gets rid of some of the restlessness that’s in him by imagining he’s a wild
bandito
on the Texas plains, and he thinks outlaws are bold and daring men. The trouble comes when he has to face up to reality, and then such daydreams had best be forgotten. There’s something almighty real about a sheriff’s posse, a loaded gun, and a hangman’s noose.

What would I do? Get the money back, ride to Texas, and pay those folks what they had coming.

There’d be a little left, and there was the place. It was a good place, but it wasn’t in me to go back there alone and raise cows.

Con said nothing more, but he surely didn’t need to. He could ask questions a man found hard to answer, questions that made him face up to himself. When a man answered questions like that he found himself a lot wiser about himself and the world.

Like Con said one time, a man should stop ever’ now and again and ask himself what he was doing, where he was going, and how he planned to get there. And the hardest thing to learn is that there aren’t any shortcuts.

His questions nagged at me because whilst I had big ideas of what I wanted to do and become, I hadn’t any way of making them into reality. I could imagine myself riding fine horses and wearing the best clothes, buying drinks in saloons, and maybe gambling a little for big stakes, but nowhere could I see where the money was coming from.

I said as much.

“Can you read?”

“Sure.”

“Then read. Read anything, everything. You’ll come up with an idea. But about the gambling for big stakes…forget it. That’s just a way of showing off. If a man is something and somebody, he doesn’t have to show off.”

Come sunup, we were on the trail to Leadville.

The night we rode into the town there had been rain, and the clouds hung low among the mountains, right down over the store-tops, in fact, because Leadville was a high-up town. We’d had to stop again and again to let our horses get their breath.

The trail had been wet, and here the streets were muddy. Chestnut Street was empty when we slopped up the road between the rows of buildings. A horse was standing three-legged in the rain, bedraggled, woebegone, and miserable-looking.

We glimpsed a book-store sign, and one for a Justice of the Peace, then Goldsoll’s Loan Office, with a doctor’s rooms upstairs.

We drew rein, sizing up the town, and looking for a saloon or a restaurant. Bob Heseltine and the others would be spending and gambling, and the sooner I could get our money back the more there would be to get.

Midnight was already long gone, but when we rounded a corner we saw some saloon lights shining through the rain, and beyond them a livery stable.

We put up our horses, walking through the place to see if any of the horses was familiar. The hostler watched us, his eyes gloomy. “Huntin’ somebody?”

“Might be.”

“They come, they go.”

“Three men and a woman, a young woman…might be a dance-hall girl.”

He studied us. “You’d not be wanting them. Not now.”

“Why not now?”

“They’ve got friends. In this town you’d better have the right friends or you have nothing. And if you don’t have the right friends all you’ll have is enemies.”

We walked up the street to a saloon and went up to the bar. Wet as it was, there were a good many men there.

The bartender started to place a bottle on the bar, then looked up and saw Con Judy. “Oh? Didn’t recognize you, Mr. Judy.”

He put the bottle away and got out a fresh one, a good brand of Scotch whiskey.

“Have you seen Bob Heseltine?”

“I saw him. He’s over on State Street with a couple of friends and a girl…Ruby Shaw. She has friends over there…if you know what I mean.”

Con filled our glasses. “Who’s marshal now?”

“Mart Duggan. He’s mean and dangerous, but he doesn’t hunt trouble unless it hunts him…unless he’s drinking.”

“Ben…this is my partner, Shell Tucker. A favor to him is a favor to me.”

Ben extended a hand. He was a medium-built man with sandy hair plastered down over a round head. He had a quick, friendly way and a firm grip. “Ben Garry here. I’ve known Con for quite a spell.”

We finished our drinks, and then pushed our way through the crowd, studying every face we saw. At the door Con stepped out first, and when I joined him, indicated the room we had left with a jerk of his head.

“They’re all here, Shell. Rounders and drifters from every mining and cattle camp in the country. There’s money to be made here and they can smell it. Ever do any mining, Shell?”

“No, sir. I’m pretty good with a pick and shovel, but no mining.”

A lighted window showed a restaurant still open, and we crossed the street.

“There’s beef,” the man said, “and beans and potatoes. Might scare you up a piece of pie, but I ain’t cookin’ no more tonight. I’m done played out.”

“It’ll do…if there’s coffee.”

“There’s a-plenty.” He brought a fire-blackened pot to the table. “We fix a fair meal in the evenin’, and there’s breakfast, if’n I get up in time.”

He put beef and beans on the table, and some slabs of homemade bread and butter. “Make our own butter. Have our own cows. We got us four Holsteins and we’re buyin’ more. Brung ’em over the trail m’self.”

We ate in silence, but finally I asked a question that had been on my mind for days. “Do you think they know they’re being followed?”

“I believe so.”

“Then we might run into trouble when we don’t expect it?”

“You must always expect it. When you start hunting men, they can hunt as well. Regardless of that, it pays to be on your toes. This town is rough, and the country is rough.”

It was raining harder outside. If they were in Leadville the chances were slight they would attempt to leave in this storm. The trails were slippery and narrow, with always the danger of slides. Mountain country was new to me, and worrisome. There were too few trails and passes.

“The best trails are the Indian trails,” Con advised. “Not many know of them. Indians traded back and forth across the country, traveling hundreds of miles…like the merchant caravans of the Middle Ages.”

Now, I’d never heard about merchant caravans and wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by the Middle Ages, so I kept my mouth shut and listened.

“Up in Minnesota they mine a soft red stone that is easily carved and smoothed. They call it pipestone. You will find that kind of stone among Indians all over the country.

“Shells, too. There are different types in different waters. Most of them are classified. Men have devoted years to studying the various types of shells.”

Con Judy, who rarely talked more than two or three sentences at a time, told me then of the trade trails left by ancient Indians.

“Ancient Indians? You mean different from the ones here now?”

“Yes. Just as we have pushed them back, they pushed others before them. It’s happened all the way across the world, Shell, and you’ll see it happening right here.”

“Then the best fighters end up by owning the country?”

He chuckled. “Not exactly, Shell. Let’s put it this way: the ones who wind up on top are usually those with the most efficient life-style.”

Just what he meant by that I wasn’t sure, but before I could ask him he said, “We’d better get some sleep,” and pushed back from the table.

“And then I’ve got to find Heseltine,” I said. “It isn’t likely they’ll be traveling on a night like this, not with a girl, and all.”

“They’ll hole up,” Con agreed.

He paid for our meal and we started for the door. I was studying about what he meant by life-style, and I had just pushed open the door when I remembered my Winchester. I’d left it lying across the table next to ours.

Turning sharply, I bumped Con hard and we both staggered and almost fell.

But we both heard the gun and we heard the bullet strike.

Had I not turned just as I did, I’d have been a dead man.

Chapter 4

B
EHIND US A light went out, then another, and there was darkness. Neither of us moved. I was on one knee just inside the door, my heart pounding.

Scared? Well, I should reckon. It taken some time to get used to the idea that I’d been shot at. A body thinks of such things, but thinking isn’t like the real thing. Somebody out there had shot, and shot to kill, and he’d been shooting at me.

That takes some getting used to. In all that gunplay I’d practiced and all the gun battles I’d played out in my mind, there’d been nothing like this. That man out there was trying to
kill
me!

Kid Reese? Doc Sites? Or was it Heseltine?

“Stay right where you are, Shell,” Con warned.

You want to know something? I wasn’t figuring on going no place a-tall.