the First Fast Draw (1959) Read online

  Some time maybe I'd find me a woman. Not in this country. I'd go away for that. Hereabouts the name of Cullen Baker was a bad name and nobody was likely to want me.

  There would be trouble enough, but trouble begins with people and I would stay shut of them. None of them had any use for me, anyway, and that would make it a simple thing. Run down the way the place was sure to be, I'd have my work cut out for me

  without traipsing off to town, tomcatting around and maybe getting my tail in a crack.

  Longley got up quietly when I figured he was asleep, and rusded an armful of dry wood. If a man can find dry wood after three days of rain he's a man to ride the river with.

  Bob Lee turned over and sat up, reaching for his pipe.

  Longley squatted over the fire. "Seems quiet," he said. "Bob, you reckon them carpetbaggers from up the state at Boston will come into the swamps hunting us?"

  "Not unless they're crazier'n they look." Bob Lee turned to me. "You awake, Cullen? We should have explained it to you. We had a difficulty up in Boston. Shot a man."

  "Needed it, I reckon. You always were a proud man, Bob Lee, but I never knew you to shoot too quick nor to kill a man who wasn't asking for it."

  We talked it over some, and they told me more about the country I'd come back to, and none of it looked very good for my plans. There was one thing they forgot to tell me, but I learned it soon enough: my worst enemy was back there, and he was a big man around the country. He was a Southern man

  but he was thick with carpetbaggers. I would never have believed it of him.

  Some time about then we all went to sleep. Bob Lee was right. Any carpetbagger who followed them into the swamps would be crazy. Both men were tired, like men are who have spent sleepless nights of running and riding, and if a man like Bob Lee could be on the dodge, with folks everywhere around, how could I hope to stick it out?

  Nobody talked much when we saddled up come daylight. I told them about the trail into the Sulphur Swamps. Unless you know it, I'll tell you. That Sulphur is a might twisty stream, and there's bayous running off from it and a good bit of swamp, and those days the thickets were bigger and came closer to the Sulphur. Only a little way south was Lake Caddo, and nobody knew much about the lake but the Caddos and me.

  We parted company at the Corners. "Better come with us, Cull," Bob Lee advised. "You won't find anything but trouble and knowing you like I think I do, you won't stand still for it."

  "I'm a man wants to sleep under his own roof."

  "You fight shy of that widow woman.

  She'll make you more trouble than all them Union soldiers!" Longley said, grinning.

  When they had dusted out of sight I turned that buckskin mule down the grass-grown lane. This was a mighty good mule and he could run the legs off most horses. Maybe he wasn't so fast for a sprint but he could hold a pace that would kill most horses, and better than any watchdog at night.

  Longley mentioned a widow. With the war over this country must be crowded with widows. Far as that went, this here was a widow- making country, and leave out the war.

  No decent woman would be wanting to have any truck with me, and if one did it would surely come to a shooting matter with a father or brother. Cullen Baker was a known man, a trouble-hunter they used to say, and a man with a drive to kill, others said. They said, too, I was drunken, but I could give them the lie on that story. I'd litde taste for strong drink, and when they thought me drunk it was only with fury.

  Besides, there'd be no time for widows. It would take all my time to get a crop in, to work and even get my seed back; by now the whole ranch might have grown up to crab grass.

  Drawing my Dragoon Colt I checked the

  loads-paid a man to be ready, although I was hoping never to use a gun again, except for wild game. Still, I've noticed a ready man is often left alone, and if it took that to have peace, then I should be ready, but it took no doing for me. I'd the habits of a lifetime behind me.

  Right there in a secret pocket back of my belt there was the margin, a .41-caliber twin- barreled derringer which I carried for insurance. It was my margin of safety. Time was, a hide-out gun had been useful, and such a time might again come to me. Could be I'd never use either gun again, but I was no man to draw my teeth before I knew what the beef was like.

  Turning the corner of the back lane along which I'd come, I drew up before the gate.

  There it was, then.

  Three years I'd waited to look upon it again, and the three years seemed like ten, or even fifteen. It seemed another lifetime, another world than this, and yet I was back. All was the same and yet nothing at all was the same.

  The yard, which had been hard-packed earth there at the back of the house, had grown up to weeds and grass. The house itself looked older than it was, weather- beaten, blistered, baked and warped by sun and rain.

  The sun, the rain, the wind let nothing alone, but they worry at it, smooth it and rough it again until it is their own. I was like that, myself. A man shaped by storms and hot suns, but most of all by the thousand storms I kept buried inside, all of them crowding at my lips and eyes for expression, working their way down into my quiet fingers, feeding anger through my veins that I'd had to fight back, again and again.

  For what they said of me was true. I was a killing man, a man of frightful rages that all my life I'd had to keep back inside me. Once in a while when something would go against me, I'd tear loose and it frightened me, for I had no grudge against any man, nor did I know what it meant to hate. To be wary, yes, for I knew there were hating folks about, but for myself, I hated no man. Only there was a point beyond which I'd not be pushed, and when beyond that point the fury came up in me, cold, dangerous and mighty.

  Swinging down from the saddle I opened the gate, taking my time, almost scared to go in, for opening that gate was opening the memories I'd fought back for a long while now.

  It seemed any minute Ma was going to open the door and call me for supper, or Pa would come, holding out his hand to greet me. Only they weren't going to come out, and nobody at all was coming to that door, which had remained unopened these two years now.

  Leading the mule through the gate I dropped the bridle reins and walked slowly forward, and in my throat there was a lump.

  Nobody was there. The kitchen door hung on old strap hinges, dried and shrunk from the neat fit Pa had given it when he built the place with his own hands, me helping as much as I could. A boy then I'd known little of the slights a man learns by working with his hands, and all I'd had to help was a strong back and arms for lifting.

  The boards on the stoop were warped and gray, and brown leaves had gathered in the corner between the stoop and the house. Only the iris still grew along the path where Ma had planted it, and the redbud tree Pa and me dug up from the river's edge was well- grown now and making like a tree more than a shrub like they usually are. These things can last, I think, the trees a man plants and the wells he digs ... I do not know if the buildings last.

  The door opened stiffly under my hand, and when I went through the door there were tears down my cheeks like I was a pigtailed girl.

  Empty, the way it was, it looked like I'd never seen it. Everything a body could carry off had been toted away except the big copper kettle near the fireplace which was unhandy to load on a horse. The rooms were empty and here and there the chunking had fallen from between the logs in the log part of the house which we had built first. Later, Pa started to build the rest of it with planks, and he was fixing to give Ma a real home at last. He never done it though, and hard work caught up with Ma first; she'd never been real strong.

  She was buried out there back of the orchard, where they'd put Pa . . . somebody told me that; I'd not been here myself.

  An owl had been roosting in the kitchen and left his sign around the way an owl does. A body would think there was fifty of them rather than one. There was dust over everything, and when Ma had lived there never was dust. She never had much to do with, but she ma
de out, and that place had been spic and span like I'd never seen another

  place. It had been a home blessed by care if not by money.

  At the fireplace I could see where night- stoppers had left the remains of their meal- only the mice had been at it.

  Outside again, not liking the hollow sound of my feet on the board floors, I saw the weeds had grown up among the roses, and I could see there would be a sight of work to keep me busy.

  "Well, Pa," I said aloud, "what you wished it to be, that's what I'll make it."

  When I went outside once more that old buckskin mule was cropping grass like it was the day before Judgment. Seeing he liked it so much, I picketed him there, and then took my Spencer and strolled down toward the swamp.

  Ever go back to a place and walked down the paths you walked as a boy? The old paths, the unforgotten paths? The sun was hot on the green leaves and grass, the path was overgrown, and the blackberries had straggled over it and were choked with grass . . . many a time I snagged myself on those briars, and tore my shirt, too. The biggest, blackest and juiciest berries always seemed to hang in the places hardest to get at.

  Every step was a memory for me, and

  time to time I'd just stop and stand there, remembering. The mist used to rise off these swamps sometimes in the morning. The tops of trees in the low ground would be like islands lost in a vast sea of cloud. Here was where the deer used to come to eat the green grass and get into Pa's corn-many a time I got me a deer down at the end of the cornfield.

  It was warm and lazy in the sun and a big bumblebee buzzed fatly among the leaves. Folks are always talking about how busy a bee is, shows they never really watched a bee. A bee makes so much fuss with all his perambulating around that folks think they're doing a sight of work, but believe me, I've watched bees by the hour and I can tell you all that buzzing is a big fraud. The bees I've watched always buzzed in the sunniest places around the best-smelling flowers, just loafing their heads off fussing around in the play of sun and shadow at the swamp's edge. Busy? Not so's you could notice.

  Used to be deer along the swamp edge but tonight my luck was played out, so I contented myself with a duck who got up lazy from the water, the dark, dark water among the lily pads. The Spencer took his head off just as he was clearing the water so when I started back toward the place I had my supper. And then I heard voices and knew it was the sound of trouble.

  Three mounted men at their horses in the yard, sizing up my mule. There was a tall man astride a mighty handsome bay gelding, and the next man was Joel Reese about whom I could remember nothing good, and the third man was a fellow with a face to remember-if a man was smart.

  "Whose mule is that?" The man on the bay gelding was talking. There was authority in his voice, but my first impression was he was an empty man, impressed overmuch with himself, but knowing all the time there was nothing inside him. "You told me the place was deserted, Reese."

  "Some rider-by or all-nighter," Reese explained. "The place has been abandoned for years and sometimes folks stop the night when passing through."

  Looked to me like this was my time to talk up, for they had not seen me yet. "The place isn't abandoned and it is not for sale," I said. "I'll be living here myself."

  They turned sharp around to look at me, and Joel Reese grinned at me, with a mean glint in his little eyes. "Colonel, this is that Cullen Baker I told you about."

  The colonel had a cold eye, and there was nothing pleasant in his eyes when he looked at me, but I'd looked into eyes over a gun barrel that were colder than these.

  It was that third man who was holding my attention. The colonel was no fighting man and Reese would only fight if he had an edge, a big edge. But the other man was a different kettle of fish. That third man was a full-fledged red-in-the-comb fighting man who had grown his own spurs. I knew the type.

  "Seems I should know you." I looked di- recdy at him for the first time.

  "The name is John Tower. I've come into the country since you left."

  "Were you ever west of the Rockies?"

  Tower's eyes became suddenly alive. "Could be," he said. "A man gets around."

  The colonel interrupted. "Baker, you fought with the Confederacy. You are known hereabouts as a trouble-maker. We will have no trouble from you, do you hear? The slightest evidence of trouble from you, or interference with the Reconstruction program, and you'll go to jail. Also, we're going to take steps to confiscate this land from you as an enemy of your country."

  "You'd better look at your hole card, Colonel. There's no record of me fighting on any side. I've been out West the whole time. Only fighting I've done was with Comanches, Utes and such like."

  "What's that?" The colonel turned on Reeves, his face growing red. The colonel was a man quick to anger. "Reese, is this true?"

  Reese was worried. "Colonel Belser, sir, I just know he fit for the South! Why, why, there just ain't no other way he could fight!"

  "Joel Reese," I explained, "was always a yellow dog. He should be right ashamed to mislead you this way. If he knows anything at all he should know that I spent the war in New Mexico and Utah. Shortly after the war broke out I drove a herd of cattle east and sold them, and then three years ago I went back West.

  "Reese hates folks around here because they'd no use for him. My advice would be to go easy on anything he may tell you. He'd be like to cause you trouble, getting even with folks he figured treated him wrong."

  "I need no suggestions from you!" Colonel Belser was furious. He jerked his bay around ... no way to treat a horse as good as that one or any other horse for that matter. "The records will be checked as to your service

  with the Confederacy. You will hear from me again."

  "I'll be right here," I told him. "I'll be growing corn."

  Tower lingered as the others started off. "You were in New Mexico and Utah? And California?"

  "I had a horse liked to travel."

  "Have we crossed trails before this?"

  "I cut a lot of sign in my time," I told him, "and once I've seen the tracks a man leaves, I don't forget."

  "You mean that if you'd ever cut my trail you'd remember? Is that it?"

  "I'd remember."

  John Tower touched a spur to his mount and rode away after the others, and of them all he was the only one who might be dangerous in the way a man was dangerous. Yet he would come at a man, face up to him, and those others would not. It was not until they were out of sight that I turned and saw a girl under the dogwood tree.

  It is a nice place to see a girl for the first time, and it had been a long, long time since I had seen such a girl. For girls of her type do not come to the Cullen Bakers of this world, for I was a rough man, grown used to

  rough ways, and I had no fine graces to use in meeting such a girl.

  She was taller than most girls, with dark hair and a fair skin, and she stood very still with one uplifted hand upon a dogwood branch. She wore a white dress, and she was young, but there was in her eyes none of the guilelessness of the child. Beautiful, she was. Beautiful and graceful as the dogwood beside which she stood, a dogwood covered with white blossoms, some of them fallen to the grass at her feet.

  "Did I surprise you?"

  "You weren't expected, if that is what you mean."

  "I am Katy Thorne of Blackthorne."

  There was no reason for me to love the Thornes, or even to think of them, for my only friend among them had been Will, and Will had been the strange one among the Thornes, whether those of Blackthorne or the others. His cousin Chance had been my worst enemy. And I remembered no Katy Thorne.

  "You related to Chance?"

  "I was his brother's wife."

  "Was?"

  "He tried to be a soldier and charged very gallantly with Pickett, at Gettysburg. Were you a soldier, Mr. Baker?"

  "No." Maybe there was bitterness in the tone. "I have been nothing that mattered, Mrs. Thorne. I have never been anything but Cullen Baker."

  "Isn't i
t important to be Cullen Baker?"

  "Maybe, in the wrong way. Maybe"-why I said it I'll not know-"maybe I can make it mean something to be me. But hereabouts folks have little use for me, and I've less use for them."

  "I know. I saw it begin, Cullen Baker, I was there at the mill the day you gave Chance Thorne a hiding."

  "You were there?" I was astonished.

  "Sitting in the surrey with my father and Will Thorne. I thought Chance deserved everything he got."

  It was one day I'd not forget, for I'd come as a stranger with a sack of grain to the mill for grinding. We'd been down from Tennessee only a few days, and I'd not been off the place. Soon as I showed up Chance started on me, and the boys around followed his lead. He started making fun of my shabby homespun clothes. They were patched and they were worn, but they were all I had. They had shouted at me and laughed at me

  but I'd taken my grain to the mill, and when I came out and started to hoist it to the mule's back they rushed at me and jerked my suspenders down and then they clodded me with chunks of dirt.

  It wasn't in me to hurry. That was what made some of the men turn to watch, I think, for I heard somebody speak of it. The first thing I did, with clods splattering about me, was to pull up my pants and fix my suspenders. Then still with dirt splattering me, I hoisted my sack into place, and then I picked up a chunk of wood and started for them, and they scattered like geese, all but Chance Thorne.

  He waited for me. He was a head taller than me, and some heavier, and he was dressed in store-bought clothes, which I'd never had and had only rarely seen. He looked at me and he was contemptuous. "Put down that club," Chance had said, "and I'll thrash you."

  A dozen men were watching now, and none of them likely to be my friends. So when I put the club down he rushed me before I could straighten up, and he expected to smash my face with his fists as I tried to straighten, but in the Tennessee mountains a boy has to fight, and sometimes