The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour: Vol 3 Part 36

The colonel was a hard-minded man and a driver. Once started after a man, he wouldn't be likely to stop. Shiloh was an Injun on a trail, with his meanness to keep him at it. Up there in those rocks, cold as it was, it didn't look good for me.

The colonel, he swung down like on a parade ground, his fine dark hair almost to his shoulders, those shoulders so square under that blue cavalry overcoat.

They went to building a fire, all but Shiloh. He commenced to hunger around, tryin' to make out my trail. Shiloh smelled c.o.o.n, he did. He had it in mind that I was close by, and he was like an old hound on the hunt.

Colonel Metcalf, he watched Shiloh, and finally, sort of irritable-like, he said, "Let it go, Johnson. Time enough at daybreak."

"He's close by, Colonel," Shiloh said. "I know he is. That horse of his was about done up."

The colonel's tone was edged a mite. "Let it wait!" He turned then, abruptly, and walking to the fire he put his hands out to the blaze. Shiloh Johnson, he stood there, not liking it much. But Colonel Metcalf ran the biggest brand in the Willow Springs country and when he spoke, you listened. He was no man to cross.

Shiloh was right about my horse. That Injun pony had plenty of heart but not much else. He did all he could for me, and died right up in the rocks not far off the trail. They would find him in the morning, and then they would know how close they had been.

They would know they had come within a few minutes of takin' the man who walked up to Tate Lipman and shot him dead on his own ranch. Shot him dead with half his ranch hands a-standin' by.

Only they never heard what I said to him in that one particular instant before I did it. Only Tate Lipman heard me, which was the way it had to be. It was only that I wanted him to know why he was dyin' that I spoke at all.

In that partic'lar instant, I said to him, "Rosa Killeen is a good girl, Tate. She ain't the kind you called her. An' you ain't going to worry her no more." Then he died there on the hard-packed clay, his blood covering his shirt and the ground. Before his men knew what was happenin' I threw down on them. Then I locked the pa.s.sel o' them in the bunkhouse and throwed my leg over a saddle.

Me, I ain't much account, I reckon. I'm a driftin' man, a top hand on any man's outfit, but too gun-handy for comfort. Twenty-two years old and six men dead behind me, not any home to my name, nor place to go.

But Rosa Killeen was a good woman, and n.o.body knowed it better than me, who was in love with her.

She lived alone in that old red stone house back of the cottonwoods, and she had her a few chickens, a cow or two, and she lived mighty nice.

Once I fetched her cow for her, and she gave me eggs a couple of times, and now or again I'd set my saddle and talk to her, tellin' her about my family back in Texas and the place they had. I come of good stock, but my line played out of both money and folks just when I was pa.s.sin' ten. Whatever I might have been had my pa lived, I don't know, but I became a lonesome boy who was gun-handed and salty before I stretched sixteen.

Rosa was the best thing in my life, and soon it seemed she set some store by me. Only she had education, and even if she was alone, she lived like a lady.

Folks said she had night visitors ... an' folks ought to be left to their opinions, but once a subject's been raised a couple of times it goes to bein' a rumor, and when the rumor is about a good girl like Rosa and it's bein' spread intentional-like-well, that tries my temper. That time with Shiloh, he saw that it riled me and so he kept it up. I told him to stop and 1 told him what kind of yellow dog I thought he was, and he grinned that mean grin of his and put his hand on the b.u.t.t of that Navy Colt, so I hit him. He was set for a gunfight and it took him by surprise. He went down and I s.n.a.t.c.hed his pistol away and tossed it out where the horses were picketed.

He got up and we' fought. I knocked him down 'til he didn't have the wind nor the will to get up. Then I told him there, and the rest of them, too. "She's a lady, an' n.o.body talks one word again' her. If he does, he better come a-smokin'. You understand that, Shiloh?"

It went against him, standin' there like that with four men lookin' on, four who saw me beat him down, an' him fighting dirty, too. Johnny Mex Palmer was right, I knew he was right ... I should have got at him with a gun and killed him then and there, but Shiloh was still alive, and now it was his turn.

Not only Shiloh knew Rosa had a night visitor. Me, I knew it , too. One night I had stopped my horse to watch her window light and wish . . . well, things I shouldn't be wishin'. I saw that horse ride up and saw a man with a wide hat go in. He stayed more than two hours and rode away . . . oh, I saw that, all right. But Rosa was a good girl, and n.o.body could make me feel different.

I asked her about it. Maybe I shouldn't have, it bein' none of my business, but there was a certain way that I felt about her an' I knew if I didn't ask I'd be worryin' and goin' crazy. So I asked but she didn't tell me, least not straight up like I wanted.

"I can't tell you, Rye," she said. "I'm sorry. I promise you if s not ... a romance." She blushed, an' wouldn't look me in the eye. "You've got to believe me, but that's all I can say." Well, I can't say I was satisfied, but I was surprised how much better I felt. I believed her and I loved her and that's all that mattered.

Only I wasn't the only one who saw. Tate Lipman had seen him, too, and from all I heard, Tate knew who it was. I didn't know, nor did I want to. Me, I was trying to be a trustin' man.

Yet I'll not soon forget the mornin' Johnny rode up to camp and swung down. "Rye," he said, "Rosa asked me to see if you'd come over. She told me to say she was in trouble, and would you come."

That Injun pony was the freshest horse in camp, for we'd been runnin' the wild ones. When I was in the leather, I looked back at them, but mostly at Shiloh.

"See you," I said, but there was a promise in it, too, and I didn't think any of them would make any remarks when I was gone.

She was by the gate when I came riding, and she was pale and scared. "I shouldn't have called you, Rye, but I didn't know what to do, and you told me-"

"Ma'am," I said, "I'm right proud you called. Proud it was me you thought of."

There was nothing but honesty in her eyes when she looked up at me, those dark and lovely eyes that did such things to the inside of me that I couldn't find words to tell. "I think of you a lot, Rye, I really do.

"Rye, Tate Lipman saw the . . . man who comes to see me. Oh, Rye, you know it's not what people think. I can't make them believe, but I hope you do. I'm a good woman, but I'm a good woman with secrets that I have to keep. It would hurt some good folks if I didn't. The man who visits me is a fine man, and I can't let harm come to him."

"All right," I said. Lookin' into her clear blue eyes I could do nothing but believe her.

'Tate Lipman saw him, Rye. And he's heard bad things people are saying about me. Tate rode over today. He ... he said that no girl like me had a right to choose her man. If one man could have me, then he could, too. If I hadn't had the shotgun he might have-" She put her hand on my sleeve to hold me back. "No, wait, Rye. Let me tell."

"I'll see Tate," I told her. "He won't bother you no more."

"I want to tell you, Rye," she said. 'Tate had seen this other man. He said if I refused him he would tell everyone what I was up to and who with. He laughed at me when I tried to tell him it wasn't what he thought, that I hadn't done anything people wouldn't approve of.

"Rye, believe me, if he does it would ruin the reputation of a man and a woman, and I would have to move away from the only people I love. ... It would hurt me, Rye, and it would ruin a man who has been kind to me."

"I'll talk to Tate."

"Will he listen?" She seemed frightened then. "Rye, I don't want anything to happen to you. Please, I-"

That Injun pony put more miles behind him, and then I was ridin' up to Tate Lipman's place and saw him there before the house. The hands were settin' around by the bunkhouse and they could hear no word.

He was a big, red-faced man, Tate was. He figured he was a big wheel in this country, with a wide spread and ten tough hands to ride it. I'd never liked his kind, and I had heard him say there lived no woman who couldn't be had for a price, and mostly the price was mighty cheap.

What he seen when he seen me wasn't much. I'm a tall man and was a tall boy, mostly on the narrow side with a kind of quiet face. Not much beard yet, although I'm a full twenty-two, two years older than Rosa. My hair was light brown but curly because of the Irish in me, and I w,as wearin' some old Levi's and a buckskin jacket, much wore.

Well, I spoke my piece quiet and easy, tellin' him what it was I'd come for. His face just turned flat and ugly, and his hand dropped for his gun, and in that minute he was sure he was goin' to shoot me down.

My Colt came up slick an' smooth-like, and there was one stark, clean-cut moment when I saw the shock in his eyes, and when he knew he was goin' to die. And then my bullet dusted him on both sides and he took a short step to his toes and went down on his face, and I turned on them by the bunkhouse.

So that was how it was, and now Rosa Killeen was behind me, and I believed in what little she'd told me with no thought that it might be otherwise. She'd hoped I could reason with Tate, but he was too big-headed, and that I knew. It was a grave on a windy hill for him and a fast horse for me.

Only the horse wasn't fast. Just a game, tough little pony with twenty miles under him when they first gave chase . . .

The night was cold and the wind bitter. ... I made myself small among the boulders, with my hands under my arms. I watched the wind bend the fire over, the fire that made coffee for those men down below.

They bedded down, finally, Shiloh mighty reluctant. Hate grows hot and strong in his breed of man, and I knew that Shiloh and me would see each other across a gun barrel, one day.

Night made all things black, and it was like a great tunnel filled with roaring wind, a long wind that bent the trees down and skittered the dry leaves along the hard ground.

They had a rope stretched for my neck down there, a rope they figured to use. Tall Colonel Metcalf and Shiloh. The colonel would order it done like a man orders executions in the army, and he would stand by slapping his leg with his quirt when they set the knot, and Shiloh would look on, smiling that old secret smile of his, knowing the only man who ever beat him was on the end of that hemp.

It took me most of an hour to work my way around to where the horses were picketed, ten of them close together for warmth, but the colonel's blood-bay off to one side, like the aristocrat he was.

Crouched down in the brush, I put my fingers back in my armpits to warm them before moving out to untie that rope. The wind moaned in the long canyon, the rushing leaves swept by, and the dry branches brushed their cold arms together like some skeleton things, hanging up there between me and the black night sky.

Then, when I was inching to the edge of the clearing, a man came out of the trees. It was Colonel Metcalf.

He crossed to the big bay and stroked his neck, feeding him a carrot or something that crunched in the night. I could hear the faint sound below the rush of the wind, so close was I. And then I saw the colonel hang something across the bay's withers, and after a minute he turned and walked back to camp.

Scarcely had he gone when Shiloh moved like an Indian out of the brush, and stood there, looking around. It was too dark to see very well, yet I could picture him in my mind's eye, clear and sharp. Shiloh was a big man with stooped and heavy shoulders and a long face, strong-boned and with eyes deep set. You looked at him, then looked again. You thought something was wrong with his face. The second look showed nothing, but it left you the impression. He was a narrow, mean man, this Shiloh Johnson.

After a minute he followed the colonel, not going to the bay horse at all.

Waiting there in the blackness, I could see, faintly the movements of Shiloh as he eased into his bed in the shelter of a log. When the movement under the blankets ceased, I straightened up.

There was a piece of carrot lying where it had fallen and I picked it up. After a minute, the bay took it from me, and then I untied the picket rope and walked him across the pine needles and down into the sand beyond. When I got him to where my saddle was cached, I saddled up, then put the bit between his teeth.

For the first time, I examined the sack that Colonel Metcalf had placed across the bay's shoulders. It was a sack of oats-maybe for a half dozen feedings. A strange thing to leave on a horse's back in the middle of the night.

It was a good horse I rode now, and I treated him like the gentleman he was, let him take his own pace, but held him away into the dark country, toward the high meadows and the long bare ridges. It was a strange land to me, and this worried me some, for Shiloh knew it well, and the colonel almost as well. Along the pifion slopes and into the aspen I rode, down gra.s.sy bottoms where the long wind moaned and into the dark pines, and through canyons among the rocks, and stopping at lonely creeks for a drink and then on.

When I had four hours of riding behind me I stopped and walked ahead of my horse, spelling him a might. I made coffee then, from the little a cowhand always has with him, and let the bay crop the rich green gra.s.s.

Moving on, I turned at right angles and, climbing ahead of the horse, went right up a steep gravelly ridge. On top, just short of the skyline, I walked him along for half a mile, then picking a saddle, crossed the ridge and went down into the trees.

Sighting a dozen steers feeding, I started them off and drove them ahead of me for a ways, and then turned and started them back. They bunched for thirty or forty yards, enough to wipe out my horse tracks, and then I turned and rode downstream, keeping to the water until it became knee deep, when I scrambled out. So it went for two days.

Mine was a tough trail, hard to follow even for such a tracker as Shiloh, but he worried me, nonetheless. He knew the country, and when a man doesn't, he may lose a lot of time and distance.

Twice I'd killed rabbits, once a sage hen ... at dusk I killed another, and in a tiny hollow among the trees and rocks I built a masked fire, built it in a hole and screened it so there'd be no glow on the trees overhead.

Along the way I'd seen some Indian breadroot, and dug a dozen of them. While fixing the sage hen I let these roots roast on the hot stones near the fire. Then I made some desert tea from the ephedra.

When I'd eaten I looked to the bay, moved him to better gra.s.s, scouted around, and then returned to my camp. Uneasy as I was, I was dead for sleep, and figured it was safe enough. . . .

When I opened my eyes, Colonel Metcalf was sitting on a rock with a gun in his hand. "You're Tyler?" he said it, rather than asked, and he seemed to be measuring me, judging me.

Taking it careful, I sat up. There was a gun near my saddle, easy to hand.

"Do you know who I am?"

"Colonel Metcalf," I said. "I reckon ever'body knows you."

He kept his eyes on me. "Do you know who else I am?"

Some puzzled, I shook my head. And then he said sort of quiet-like, "Tyler, I'm the man who should have killed Tate Lipman."

It took awhile for it to sink in, but even then I was not sure. "What does that mean?" I asked him.

"It has been said that the evil that men do lives after them-sometimes, Tyler, it lives with them. You deserve to know what I shall tell you. But only one other person knows. No one else must ever learn of it."

None of this made sense to me, so I sat still. Believe me, I was some worried. If he was here, then Shiloh wouldn't be far behind. And the rest of them, with the rope they carried for me.

He was freshly shaved. His clothes had been brushed. He looked like he always had, like Colonel Andrew Metcalf with his wide ranch and his position in town. His word was law . . . and mostly it was a good law. He was a hard man, but just-or so they said.

My fingers opened, and when his attention shifted an instant, they inched a little toward my gun.

"Tyler," he spoke quietly, "I'm Rosa Killeen's father."

That stopped me ... it stopped me cold. I sat with my mouth half open, just looking at him.

"Her mother was a good woman ... a fine woman. We crossed the plains together before the war, and her husband died on the way out. I was a young lieutenant then, riding with the escort, and she was a beautiful woman. . . . She had never loved her husband. He'd been . . . not a bad man but an unthinking one. After his death we were much together. Too much, and we both were young.

"She came of a fine old family, a very proud family. They were Spanish Californians mixed with Irish.

"The Army had orders waiting for me in Santa Fe, and they took me into the East and then to the Confederate War. It was a long time later that I got a letter she had written me. She was dying and there had been a baby girl ... it was mine.

"I had married during the war. There was nothing I could do but provide for the child in every way I could. But I had to do so secretly ... to have publicly accepted Rosa as mine would have been disastrous to my marriage, and would have all too plainly pointed the finger of scorn at her mother's family.

"I paid for Rosa's education and, when she grew old enough, kept her near me. It was all I could do, and Rosa understood the situation and accepted it. We did not, neither of us, foresee Tate Lipman."

Why was he telling this to me? If Shiloh and the others came up, not even Metcalf could keep them from putting a rope around my neck. Lipman had two riders in that crowd, two mighty tough men, and Shiloh would never give up this chance to get me where he wanted me.

But I sat still, waiting him out ... all I knew was that I wanted to live, and to live I had to have that gun. No man at twenty-two is ready to die, and I sure wasn't. Especially for killin' a no-good like Tate Lipman.

"That ain't no business of mine," I told him. "I killed Tate Lipman because he had it comin'. No matter who her father was, Rosa is a fine girl."

"You love her?"

He looked at me sharply when he said that, those cold blue eyes of his direct and clear.

"Yes," I said, and meant it.

He got up. "Then pick up that gun you've been wanting to get your hand on," he said quietly, "and-"

Shiloh stepped out of the trees. "No, you don't," he said. "You touch that gun and I'll cut you down."

There it was . . . the one thing I'd been afraid of- Shiloh gettin' the drop on me, like he had now.

"Shiloh, there's reasons for all of this-" The colonel started to speak, but Johnson shook his head.

"No, you don't," he said again. "I heard all that talk. It don't make no difference to me." I could see the satisfaction in his eyes, the pleasure at having me under his gun. "Tyler-murdered Lipman. It was seen. He'll hang for it."

It was there, plain and cold. Nothing the colonel could say was going to stop it now.

"I been suspicious o' you, Metcalf." There was no t.i.tle used this time, and I could see the colonel heard the change in Johnson's att.i.tude. "I seen you go to your horse that night, seen you leave that bag. Right then I couldn't figure why. . . . Come daylight, your horse gone, I figured some of it."

He had never once taken his eyes from me, and his gun was rock steady. With some men there might have been a chance. Shiloh was n.o.body to fool with.

"Only thing," he said it slow, like it tasted good to him, "I can't decide whether to shoot you now or see you hang."

There was silence in the clearing. Far off, I heard the wind in the pine tops, far off and away. It was a lonesome sound.

"I'm holding a gun, too, Shiloh," Metcalf said quietly.

"If you shoot, I'll kill you."