Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Seeing my grim expression, my kin were sick with dread, looking away like they’d been whipped across the mouth. The Collins clan, not to mention the Watson women at the plantation-the whole damned bunch, in short-would be greatly relieved if Edgar Watson would make himself scarce for a few more years if not the remainder of his life. Billy was too eager to tell me about the Smallwood and McKinney families who had moved south to Fort Ogden and Arcadia. “Man could do a heck of a lot worse than a fresh start down in that new country, that’s what they wrote back to their kinfolks.” He frowned to show how much honest cogitation he’d put into this matter. “Yessir, Ed, a hell of a lot worse!” That was the first time I ever heard a Collins swear in the presence of a woman. I winced and shifted as if mortally offended, to see if Minnie would squeal “Bill-lee!” which of course she did.

Sprawled in the old rocker while Nin scurried to find bedding, I told him, “I will head on south, send for my family when I find a place.” Ninny fetched me Mandy’s address at Broken Bow in the Indian Territory, so relieved I would be gone by daybreak that she promised the family would send to Arkansas for my wife and children and take good care of them until they could rejoin me. They also promised they would tell Will Cox to keep an eye out for a nigra named Frank Reese, give him some work despite his hard appearance.

Those Collinses were greatly relieved to see the dawn. “You haven’t seen hide nor hair of me,” I reminded Billy, who came outside as I swung up into the saddle. The moon was going down behind the pinelands. “Last you heard, Ed Watson is dead in Arkansas.”

“Watson is dead,” he nodded earnestly.

I forded the Santa Fe below Fort White and headed south across the Alachua Prairie where the early Indians and Spaniards ran their cattle. To the east that early morning, strange dashes of red color shone through the blowing tops of prairie sedges where the sun touched the crowns of sandhill cranes. Their wild horn and hollow rattle drifted back on a fresh wind as the big birds drifted over the savanna. That blood-red glint of life in the brown grasslands, that long calling-why should such fleeting moments pierce the heart? And yet they do. That was what Charlie my Darling made me see. They do.

Bear and panther sign were everywhere in this wild country. Plenty of deer and wild boar, too, and scrub cattle spooked on their dim trails through the palmetto. I tended south and east along what one old bush rat called the Yeehaw Marshes, from the yee and haw of the wagon harness of the pioneers moving south down the peninsula. In the Peace River country, I met a man planting wild oranges. He had high hopes that citrus would do well here and invited me to throw in with him; I thanked him but said no. I aimed to clear my own piece of the backcountry. Next morning I rode down along the river and on into Arcadia that afternoon.

As far away as the Arkansas prison, the word was out that a closemouthed man easy with horse and gun could make good money a lot faster in De Soto County, Florida, than anywhere west of the Mississippi. Unlike most prison rumors, this one turned out to be true. For a few years in the early nineties, the range wars around Arcadia beat anything the Wild West had to offer. The ranchers were advertising for more gunslingers as far off as St. Louis and every outfit had its own gang of riders. With so many rough men in the saloons, a man could get his fill of fighting any time he wanted and be lulled to sleep at night by the pop of gunfire. A lot of these brawls might start with fists but every man was quick to use a weapon before the other feller beat him to it. Fifty bloody fights a day were not uncommon, it was claimed; four men were killed in one shootout alone. The year before, a new brick jail had to be built to hold the overflow, and as it turned out, that new jail saved my life.

A rancher with the wherewithal could hire new riders any day at the nearest saloon, but Arcadia House was where you met all the best people, and a stranger could lean back on the bar and wait there like a whore to be looked over. I had hardly started on my second whiskey when a big man, Durrance, bought my third. Will Durrance spoke of the hard feelings over the rangeland on Myakka Prairie and the cattle rustling all across the county-not just one steer shot to eat by some mangy cracker in the piney woods but whole damn herds up to a hundred head. Most of that range was unfenced and choked with dry palmetto thicket. A steer could wander halfway across Florida, get lost for two years before it wandered out again, and never be missed. Plenty of calves were dropped in the deep scrub and went unbranded, so naturally, an enterprising man burned his own brand as fast as he could get a rope on ’em, figuring the next man along would do the same. Local hospitality for any stranger in the bush was to hang him from the nearest oak for peace of mind. “Better safe than sorry” was a popular expression. A lone rider who wanted to arrive some place picked his own route across cattle country, telling no one.

I was here to put a stake together for a new start in life and had vowed to avoid trouble but Arcadia was no place to say any such thing, not if you wanted a good job. I told Durrance Jack Watson was his man.

“Well, now, Jack, I reckon you know how to ride?”

“Well, now, Will, I rode here from Arkansas by way of Carolina and never split my ass in two, not so’s you’d notice, so I reckon I’ll make it ten miles out to Myakka Prairie.” Durrance paid down cash for my drinks, supper, and bed, also the first real bath since I swam the Arkansas, and he threw in a week’s pay in advance.

Next morning I bought me a shave and a new blue denim shirt and rode out to the ranch. Will Durrance lived in a cleared-off pinewood lot fenced with barbed wire. His two-story house had windows high up on the outside wall-too high for assassins to shoot through even from horseback, Durrance explained. He set out a tobacco can and gave me and two other hands new Winchester repeating rifles, saying, “All right, boys, let’s see how good you can shoot these Winnies.” The other two shot well enough when they lined up each shot, and Durrance nodded: they slid their new repeaters into saddle scabbards, grinning. To buy these new-model Winnies would cost ’em two months’ pay. Come my turn, I danced that can all the way across the cowpen about as fast as I could pull the trigger, till Durrance hollers, “That’s enough, Jack, for Chrissakes! Don’t go wastin them good bullets!”

His cow hunters, as they call ’em here in Florida, looked me over sideways, rolling smokes. Two backwoods brothers by the name of Granger, tall bony fellers with single thick black brows over long noses, looked like T ’s. I knew this breed, knew that easing by in life was their ambition: Durrance must have signed them on to keep ’em from rustling his stray beefs. The frowns on those T faces told me they were worried this man Watson might set a bad example, make ’em earn their keep. This Jack was no sodbuster, not the way he handled that repeater: this feller had gunslinger written all over him, and trouble, too.

Will Durrance confided that his life was threatened by a feller named Quinn Bass, the bad news in a big cattle clan around Kissimmee. Young Quinn liked to play with gun or knife “with any man at any time on any terms and on any provocation”-that was his boast. Quinn had escaped from the new jail where he was held in the killing of a nigra and what he did was go straight over and kill that nigra’s friend who’d been arm-twisted to testify against him, and now he was walking around town acting untouchable. Because the citizenry was naturally upset by the expense and failure of their new jail, not to speak of the failure to arrest an escaped criminal charged with two murders, the sheriff had posted a reward of one thousand dollars for the capture of Quinn Bass, dead or alive.