Читать книгу Gun Shy - Les Savage Jr. - Страница 4

THERE WERE GUNSHOTS in Table Rock. The town was half a mile away but the sound brought Gordon Conners to his feet, trembling. He stood on top of the huge overhanging rock that gave the town its name. From the flat-topped vantage he could see the buildings far below— the gray shafthouses and black smokestacks of the coal mine, the gleaming spiderweb of railroad tracks, the flimsy tarpaper shacks and false-fronted frames clinging precariously to the steep streets. He could see a crowd on Main, in front of one of the saloons, but it was too far away to make out what they were doing. He was still trembling and dry-mouthed. It was what the sound of gun-fire always did to him.

Shading his eyes he saw a rider leave the outskirts of town and take the trail leading to the rock. He recognized a paint horse and realized it was probably Opal Bayard. She was the niece of Roland Bayard, one of the few friends Gordon’s father had in town. Opal knew how much time Gordon spent on the rock, dreaming a young man’s dreams. His hazel eyes watched the approaching rider. The eyes changed color as the light changed, turned black by the shadow of his thin hand. His face was thin too, almost fragile, topped by shaggy black hair that hadn’t felt scissors for six months.

Opal forced the laboring paint up the steep trail till it snorted with the effort. She was eighteen—two years younger than Gordon—a girl with sun-colored hair and a woman’s shape to her body that even the yards of her long riding skirt couldn’t hide. Gordon moistened his lips. He wished he wasn’t so abashed with girls. The Bayards were the richest family in Table Rock, and Opal had been educated in a St. Louis Academy. It always made him feel like he was standing up before a schoolmarm. But it was more than that. It all seemed tied up with his daydreaming, his fear of guns, the things in him that didn’t belong to a farmer’s son. At twenty, a man should know more about women.

“Gordon,” Opal called. “Gordon—it’s your father. They think he rustled some Crazy Moon beef.”

He started running to meet her. “That shooting— they’re not—”

“No, no—just some Crazy Moon cowhands. They’ve been drinking in the saloon—working themselves up to this. I was in Uncle’s office when I heard . . . Gordon, they’re going after your father!”

It kicked the wind out of him. It made his voice sound thick and strange. “Opal—give me your horse. You’ve got to.”

She pulled the paint to a stop as he reached her. She looked at him for an instant, her lips parted, as though to say something. Then she stepped down. He uncinched the clumsy sidesaddle, jumped on the paint bareback. He gave a last look at the girl, then wheeled the paint and broke into a gallop down the trail. He saw a dozen riders leave Table Rock. They passed the spot where the trail met the road long before he reached it. There were some stragglers still coming from town. As Gordon got to the road a man on a roan passed, carrying a rifle across his saddlebow. Then a pair of younger men. One was Billy Halleck, a big redhead, two years older than Gordon. His front teeth had already been chipped in a dozen brawls and they showed in a wicked grin as he saw Gordon. He hauled his horse to a halt.

“Better stay here, Gordon,” Halleck said, winking at his companion. “There’s liable to be some shootin’ when they catch your pa. You wouldn’t want to hear any shootin’, would you?”

Halleck laughed and kicked his horse, plunging on down the road.

The man with Halleck held in his horse, eying Gordon. The man, a stranger, gave Gordon a long look out of pale eyes. His face was dark, long, his mustache thin. He wore a waist-length blanket coat, the lashes dangling. At his belt was a black-handled gun.

“So you’re the kid they say is gun shy,” the man said. “I feel sorry for you. Gun shy—in country like this.”

Shaking his head the man pushed his sorrel on down the road where Billy Halleck was waiting for him.

Gordon sat his horse, this talk of guns turning him sick with fear. And the sickness grew when he remembered what Halleck had said: “There’s liable to be some shootin’ when they catch your pa.” He tried to swallow and it seemed his throat was swollen with fear. He knew how bad the feeling was among the cattlemen. They had been nearly driven to the wall by rustling this last year. Not a month ago a pair of saddle bums had been caught with a running iron down near Green River and had been lynched.

The road followed the pass through the foothills into Stirrup Basin beyond. It was the route the Crazy Moon riders had taken. There was still a faint haze of dust that marked their passage. He knew he could never hope to catch them that way. By heading directly over the ridge he could cut off three miles. It was a horse-killing route but the only way he could reach home ahead of the others.

He sent the paint plunging across the road and up the steep rocky slope. The tall, yellow rabbitbrush whipped against the horse’s legs. There was a throbbing ache between Gordon’s shoulders. It made him realize the muscles had been knotted up ever since leaving the rock, rigid with the tension of anticipating more shots.

It filled him with helpless fury. There was nothing he could do about it. One gunshot and he was spooked for the rest of the day. It had been with him all his life. His father had told him he was no better than a gun shy horse—and had tried to cure him the way he would a horse. When the whippings and the tricks and the threats and the briberies had failed, his father had taken Gordon to a doctor. The doctor could find nothing wrong. He said the boy would grow out of it. That had been a long time ago.

Gordon reached the rust-colored rimrock, a sandstone ledge that had been scoured by the wind and the rain till its countless miniature caverns gave it a weird moth-eaten look. The hot breeze brought him the smell of the sulphur springs on his flank.

Stirrup Basin spread below him—the sage flats and the grama meadows and the green band of willows where Sulphur Creek wound through the wastes to the point where the house and corrals had been built. Gordon’s father, Bob Conners, had brought his family here a few months before, and had filed on a homestead.

Crossing the creek, Gordon looked to his right and saw the first riders appearing in the pass. He had gotten ahead of them. The paint waded belly-deep across the creek and lunged into the buckbrush of the bottoms. Gordon headed up the dry wash that led to the house. He fought to halt his horse as he caught sight of a bunch of cattle ahead of him, held by a pair of riders. One of the men was enormously tall, with a longhorn mustache and a hard hat. Gordon recognized Tom Union, one of the Crazy Moon hands.

He realized that this must be where they had found the rustled cattle. One rider must have gone back for the rest of the Crazy Moon crew while Union and the second man held the evidence in the wash.

Union shouted when he saw Gordon and put spurs to his horse. Gordon drove the paint up out of the wash and headed in a dead run toward the cottonwood grove. He couldn’t believe his pa had brought those cattle here. His pa wasn’t the kind to rustle. It had to be some kind of mistake. Some kind of mixup.

As he ran into the grove he saw Union appear at the edge of the wash. The man pulled to a halt, silhouetted there, evidently not wanting to get any closer to the house till he had the rest of the crew with him.

Through the cottonwoods Gordon could see the dugout. Bob Conners had made a single room by cutting a niche deep into a head-high hummock of land, so all they had to put up was the sod-brick front wall and the roof. Gordon knew that at this time of day his father would be ploughing in the fields beyond the house. It was why he wouldn’t know about the cattle being held in the wash. Gordon galloped the paint past the house and up the low ridge.

He saw his father in the field. Bob Conners had halted his mule and his bull-tongue plough. He had one hand shading his eyes and was staring at the yellow cloud of dust the riders had lifted in the pass. When he saw Gordon on the paint he walked across the furrows toward him. Bob Conners was a tall man, dusty, stooped with the ague and with a lifetime of labor. He had knobby joints, and a ploughman’s callouses made horny ridges on his immense hands.

“So you come home, tail between your legs,” he said disgustedly. “Maybe now you’ll stand up like a man and shoot a gun—”

Gordon, trying to catch his breath, made an impatient gesture. He and his father had quarreled this morning. Quarreled because Gordon wouldn’t take a rifle and go into the hills after deer.

“Pa, you got to get away,” Gordon said. “They’re comin’ to string you up. Say you rustled some Crazy Moon stuff. I saw it down there in the wash.”

Conners reached the top of the ridge, breathing heavily. He stared at Gordon, the blood draining from his face, and then looked again toward the yellow dust hanging over the pass. Gordon heard the door of the dugout creak on its rawhide hinges. He turned to see his mother coming out, drawn by the sound of his horse, or their voices. Sarah Conners was a bent woman, turned old before her time by her frontier labors. Her hands were corded and dirty—and one of them was held at her throat in a frightened way. Her voice sounded strained.

“What is it, Bob?”

Bob Conners had Gordon’s same hazelnut eyes that seemed to change color according to the light. They had turned a shining green in the bright afternoon sun, as he continued to stare toward the pass.

“Maybe we’re about to pay a debt, Sarah,” he said. “It’s been a long time acomin’. Git inside, both of you.”

He grabbed Gordon’s arm in a grip that hurt, pulling him off the paint and turning him down the low ridge. Gordon followed his mother into the dugout. It smelled of wet earth and the floor was still gluey from the water that had seeped through the sod roof during the last rain. Gordon’s father pulled the door shut and barred it. He crossed the room to take his big Sharps down from its antler rack over the fireplace. Gordon had never seen anything spook his pa, or hurry him. He spoke as deliberately as he moved.

“Now, you listen to me. If they start shooting, you git out the back way. Both of you. Hear me, Gordon? You git your ma to Roland Bayard’s—”

“I’m agoin’ to stand with you,” Sarah said. “All we got to do is wait for Sheriff Simms.”

“Simms won’t come,” Conners said. “You know how they got him sewed up in this county.”

“It don’t matter,” Gordon said. “Ma’s right. We can’t leave you.”

“If you’re bound determined to look so brave, you better have a gun,” Conners said. Gordon couldn’t tell if it was sarcasm in his father’s voice or not. His father held the Sharps out abruptly. Gordon stood as if frozen. It was what his father had done earlier in the day, when they quarreled. Gordon took a step back, away from the rifle. He couldn’t help it. He saw the bitter shape come to the older man’s lips.

“Pa,” Sarah said. “When are you agoin’ to accept the fact Providence didn’t give us a boy like the rest?”

Conners turned his back. He began taking some linen-cased cartridges out of the box, moving so slow Gordon thought he was counting them.

“It may be they’ll follow you to Bayard’s,” Conners said. “They know him’n me were friends. If Bayard can’t protect you—you got one chance left. Find Blackhorn.”

Gordon stared at his father. It was the first time he had heard Blackhorn’s name mentioned in ten years. The man was a legendary figure to Gordon. Someone he had never seen. Gordon never knew whether Blackhorn was Bob Conners’ closest friend or his worst enemy. Something dark had happened between them a long time ago, something Gordon had never been told.

“Pa,” Sarah said. “Why Blackhorn? This ain’t got nothing to do with that.”

“How do you know?” Bob Conners’ face looked sunken, haunted. His eyes made a catlike glow in the dim light from the bottle window. The earth began to tremble beneath their feet and Gordon knew it was the riders approaching. Conners made a motion toward the back door. “Open it, boy.”

Not many dugouts had back doors. It was one of the strange quirks in his father that Gordon had never fathomed. Bob Conners never had a house with only one way out. He had cut his room into the hummock, instead of a sidehill, so that he could dig a rear passage that opened out on the opposite side of the hump of land. Gordon unbarred the waist-high door. It scraped wet clay from the floor as he pulled it open. He realized the earth had stopped trembling.

“Bob Conners!”

The voice was muffled, hollow, coming from some distance outside. Gordon figured the riders had halted among the cover of trees. The breechblock made a soft click as Conners opened the action of the Sharps, shoving one of the cartridges home. Sarah made a sighing sound.

“Come out, Conners,” the man called again. Gordon recognized the heavy voice of Rodger MacLane, the Crazy Moon owner. Conners went to the window, calling outside.

“We can talk from here.”

“Ain’t no talking to do,” MacLane answered. “Tom Union and two other riders o’ mine found some of my beef in your draw. You done a helluva sloppy job changing my Crazy Moon to your Stirrup.”

“If I’d blotted your brand do you think I’d be fool enough to leave the beef around for anybody to stumble across?”

“We didn’t come to argue, Conners. You got a minute to come out.”

“What for?”

“A trial,” MacLane answered.

“The judge with you?”

“We got enough men for a jury.”

“A Crazy Moon jury. That’ll make sure of a hangin’.”

“There’s more than Crazy Moon men here, Conners. The town’s fed up with men like you. I’ve lost half a thousand head of beef in four months. Anvil’s lost cows. So has Seventy-Seven. We’re fed up with men like you. If the law won’t stop it we will. That minute’s just about up.”

“There’s my woman and boy in here.”

“You can’t call Gordon a boy any more. Have you got anything to prove he wasn’t in on the rustling?”

“That’s what I thought,” Conners muttered. He glanced at his wife and son. “Git in that tunnel—both of you.”

Gordon looked at the big gun in his father’s hands. If it came to a shooting . . . a tremor ran through him. He couldn’t control it.

“Ma,” he said. “You go on.”

“You go with her,” Conners said. “Do as I say, boy, or I’ll meet you in hell with a horsewhip.”

MacLane called from outside. “Your last chance, Conners.”

Conners didn’t answer. He sent his son a savage glance. Gordon’s palms were clammy.

“I can’t go,” he said. “Ma, you git out. Please. You git out.”

There was a smash of a shot. The bullet cracked the door and thudded into the clay behind Gordon. Conners smashed the bottles out of the narrow window with his rifle butt.

“Git out,” he shouted. “Sarah—git out!”

He fired through the opening. The shot made a roar in the room. The shock of it seemed to shake Gordon’s whole body. It was answered from outside by a barrage. Bullets cracked through the door, smashed through the broken bottles of the window. The deafening sound sent a senseless panic through Gordon. He saw his father clap his hands to his face and stagger backward. Then Gordon couldn’t see any more. He couldn’t see or think. His only sensation was the noise, the shattering crash of guns, the roar in his ears that was so close to pain and yet not a pain.

He found himself in the tunnel, stooped over, clawing his way through like some wild animal in a trap. He didn’t know how he had gotten there. He couldn’t remember leaving the room. He was halfway through the narrow tunnel when he realized he was alone. His mother had not followed. There was no more shooting.

The shots still seemed to echo through the corridors of his mind, but he realized it was inside, some trick of his brain. The shooting had stopped. He crouched against the wall, holding his head, shaking violently.

“Ma,” he called. “Ma. . . .”

There was no answer. He wanted to run. He knew the shooting would begin again. He had to run. Hating himself, hating his weakness, he forced himself to turn back. He crawled along the tunnel. He was drenched with sweat, suffocated by his panic. He came out into the room, fighting for control. His father lay in the shambles below the broken window, hands still held against his bloody face. His mother lay huddled in the corner against the wall. Gordon went to one knee beside her. She had been hit twice. He saw that she was dead.

“Gordon . . .” It came from Bob Conners. He still had one hand held blindly to his smashed face. Gordon saw that he had been hit in the body too. His chest was soaked with blood. He was fumbling for something beneath his shirt, pulling out a thin wallet. He made a rattling sound in his throat. “Blackhorn . . . last I heard . . . up in the Wind Rivers somewhere—near South Pass City . . . the Indians will know . . .”

Gordon realized he would have been lying beside his father and mother if he hadn’t thrown himself into the tunnel during the firing. A sense of guilt swept him. He saw that his father meant him to take the wallet. It was wet with blood, in his hand. A convulsion shook Conners. He made a choking sound, clawed feebly at Gordon’s arm. He sagged back. The hand slid off his wrecked face.

“Conners,” MacLane called from outside. “You’ve killed one of my men. You come out or we come in!”

Gordon stared at his father. His brain seemed numb. He couldn’t feel anything. His father was dead. There was something wrong with him. His father was dead and his mother was dead and he couldn’t feel anything. He looked at the Sharps his father had dropped. He reached out. He made a broken sound. He couldn’t pick it up.

The shooting started again.

He fought it for a moment. The effort brought a sob from him. Then he lost control. He turned and ran. He couldn’t help himself. It was inside his head again, the sound, the roar, the crashing of guns, louder than reality, engulfing him with a primitive terror. He was in the tunnel, his head scraping dank clay from the low roof. He was at the other end, clawing to unbar the door. He was so panicked that he didn’t even wait to see if anybody was outside.

He plunged into the brush that screened the door. The low ridge of earth hid him from the riders as he ran for the creek. Nobody knew about the back way out and apparently the fight had kept them all around front.

Gordon reached the river, his shirt half torn off by the clawing brush. He was still wild with panic. He turned downstream in the shallows of the river. He ran like an animal.