Ernest Haycox - The Greatest Westerns of Ernest Haycox

"Yo' got him. Come away an' let Nelson bury its own carrion."

Quagmire stood at his elbow, face seamed with great wrinkles. Gillette drew a breath and bolstered his gun. He said something to Quagmire, whereat the puncher stared queerly. The marshal came along at an unhurried gait, still smoking; and the marshal threw out a warning as he walked. "Better lower your belt two inches, Gillette. It's too high."

Gillette headed for the hotel. The last idea in his head was that he hadn't finished his meal and that he'd better go back and drink the coffee even if he wasn't hungry. Directly at that point the whole significance of the scene broke across his mind. "Then it wasn't a bull whip after all, but the guns. The man's dead. Another chore done. I can see the end of the trail."

He was at the hotel door, facing Lorena Wyatt. Where she came from he didn't know. But she was there, supporting herself against the wall, eyes aflood with strange mists.

"Settled?" he asked. The memory of the gun play was wiped out; all else for the moment ceased to matter. He drove directly at the thing he wanted to know. "Settled? I'll follow, no matter where you go. It can't be any other way."

"She's gone, Tom. One of the men brought us to town in the buckboard. I'm going back with you."

His head dropped. "Well—"

"Never ask me any questions about it. There is the one thing I'll hide from you. The rest of me is yours."

He took her by the arm, throwing a swift glance at Quagmire. "Go get a preacher."

A half hour later they were travelling away from Nelson and back to the ranch, while from a second-story window of the hotel Christine Ballard watched them fade into the dusk of the prairie; she was dry-eyed, her training wouldn't let her cry now. But when the last vague outline of Gillette drooped into the swirling shadows and was lost it was to her as if the light of the world had been extinguished. She crouched down, her head resting on the window ledge. And long after Nelson had sunk to rest she was still in that same position.

Quagmire rode through the night with the silhouette of the buckboard ahead of him. The stars were scattered in the sky, shimmering like diamond dust; the wind bore up the cry of a coyote on some distant ridge. The loneliness of the ages was in that solitary chant, and Quagmire, hearing it, drooped a little lower in the saddle, cigarette tip making a criss-cross pattern in the velvet shadows. "Yestiday I was a kid an' my mammy sung songs to me soundin' like that. To-morrow I'm dead. It's jes' a day between sleeps. There's a couple which neither asked nothin' from the universe an' accidental they busted through the crooked game for a win—temporary. Well, somebody's got to win temporary. A minute to smile and an hour to cry—then we sleeps, an' them stars keep on shinin' like that an' some other ki-ote howls out on the same old ridge. Man is mortal. Go along, pony. Wish I had as little to think about as yo' did. Yeah, man is mortal."

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Table of Contents

The Lone Buckaroo

The Octopus

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Law

Trono Versus Stubbins

In Powder's Bastille

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"Politeness is shorely a shield that stops many a bullet. Still an' all, if a feller has got to insinuate hisself into another party's quarrel, it's plumb best to omit apologies until the shootin' is over...I nev' yit did see a red- headed gent that wa'n't burnin' to right the wrongs of this yere unjust world."—Parting advice of Joe Breedlove to Tom Lilly.

The blazing, blood-red sun dropped over the western rim and left the valley to a twilight peace. Tom Lilly riding his weary buckskin toward the distant huddle of buildings that formed the isolated town of Powder, felt the first of the evening's breeze. It had all the effect of a cold shower on man and beast; Lilly wiped the crusted sweat from his face and washed his parched throat with a drink.

"Another day, another dollar. Buck, you got a restless, homeless no-account for a rider."

The pony raised its ears and quickened the pace Dust rose behind in swirling eddies. Night threw successive darkening cobalt shadows across the land, through which twinkled here and there the light of a homesteader's shack; eastward the high mesa became nothing but a stark outline against the sky.

It was new country to Tom Lilly. For that reason and no other was he here. The lure of the unknown, the unseen drew him like a magnet. Beyond the hill was always the promise of fairer fields, the hint of great adventure. And as tired as he was, a small excitement burned in his blue eyes and compressed the muscles of his lean, sun-blackened face as he drew upon Powder and beheld the lights shining out of the windows into the rutty, dusty street. This was the whole story of Tom Lilly and explained the wistfulness of his features, the temper that slumbered fitfully beneath the sorrel-red thatch of hair. He was a wanderer, a seeker of something that could never come to pass; Joe Breedlove, his partner back on the H-H, had said this in plain blunt language—though rather sorrowfully—when Tom was on the point of moving.

"Yuh ain't foolin' me, old-trapper, with that poker face o' yourn. I reads you mos' clearly. Yore a red-haired gent with misbegotten idears o' romance. All red-heads is the same, which is a fact. Yuh have traveled a hell of a lot o' trails before yuh camped here, without findin' anything to please yuh. Better stick to these diggin's, amigo. Yuh won't locate any better. All you'll do is grow gray an' mis'ble. Ain't I seen how these roamers end up? Usually over a bar'l o' spuds in some town restaurant. Yeah, a broken-down old codger washin' dishes fer a livin'. Ain't that a fine end fer an A-l top hand?"

But Tom Lilly tightened his cinches and tied down his blanket roll, smiling in a faint sheepish way. "Lots of country I ain't seen, Joe. If I don't like it I'll mosey back."

Joe Breedlove shook his head. "Yore kind don't back track." Then the man's big paw gripped his friend's arm. "Well, yuh know best. If yuh ever git in a jam, drop a line or send up a smoke signal. I'll come-a-runnin'."

"Sho'," muttered Tom, losing his grin. He had ridden off with a very brief farewell. Now, as he entered this straggling town street, he was recalling those words. "The hardest part about movin'," he said to himself "is leavin' a good Joe like that behind." He had said goodbye often, yet never with quite the same depression of spirit. "He was shore a square gent. Well, here we are, and where are we?"

Powder was just another desert town. Tom Lilly had seen a hundred built in the same loose-jointed shackling fashion, with a dozen or more false-fronted frame buildings abutting a dirt street. There would be two or three saloons with their kerosene lights beckoning through the swinging doors, a general store, a restaurant, a jail and, somewhere near the edge of town, a livery stable. Lilly rode slowly, looking for this latter establishment. Men moved in the shadows, their cigarette tips gleaming. Dishes rattled in the restaurant and from the nearest saloon came the flat, unmelodious notes of a piano. Powder was tuning up for the night, given a new lease on life by the evening breeze. Lilly, turning his horse into the stable, felt depressed. It was the same old story over again; Joe Breedlove was right—he would travel the long trail until he could no longer sit in the saddle, looking for something not to be found. How could he find it when he didn't know what he looked for? Just another stray critter never thrown and branded. He slipped off the buckskin, seeing the stable roustabout amble through the door.

"This pony," said he, "gets oats. Where's yore brush and currycomb?"