Gambling Man

But they had never scared Jefferson Blaine, for in his adventurous young soul he had always been one of them, even though he was a town boy and had no horse to ride or Colt's to shoot. When they laughed, Jeff laughed. He would run into the street and wave to them, not at all afraid that the excited horses would trample him to death, as his Aunt Beulah often said they would.

There was one time in particular that he would never forget, and that was when a whooping cowboy had swooped him right off the ground and flung Jeff up behind the saddle. He had never felt so big in his life as he had that day, his arms hugging the big cowhand's waist as they made two complete runs of Main Street.

Aunt Beulah had heard about it, of course, and that night Uncle Wirt had dragged him behind the smokehouse and given him the breaching of his life. But he was never sorry about it. He'd have done it again, any time.

But the good old days were gone forever, Jeff thought sourly, trudging the path to Harkey's pasture, where the Seweli cow was kept. Every morning, even in the winter, he had to take Bessie to the pasture, and every evening he had to bring her back for milking; Aunt Beulah was dead set on having a cow for fresh milk and butter.

Far up the path another barefoot “cowboy” plodded toward the pasture to fetch the family cow, and at the foot of the path others were coming. The way it is now, Jeff thought bitterly, living in Plainsville wasn't like living in town and it wasn't like living on a ranch. It was just somewhere in between, the same as living nowhere.

At the pasture's barbed-wire gate Jeff cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed, “S-o-o-o, Bessie!” He hoped the fool cow would have sense enough to come without his having to look for her. Several cows were right at the gate waiting to be taken home, but not Bessie. The fool critter was probably up to her knees in some bog and he'd have to go pull her out.

He cupped his hands and bellowed again, and after a while he saw Bessie's tan and white spotted hide moving through the stand of willows near the pond. This was his lucky day, he thought. But he did not feel elated.

Todd Wintworth, who was Jeff's age, was hazing his own family cow through the barbed-wire gate. Jeff scrunched down by a fence post to wait for Bessie. Todd came up to him swinging a piece of rope as if it were a lariat.

“You got Bessie trained pretty good,” Todd said. “I had to go in after Blackie. Darn fool ain't got enough sense to know when it's time to eat.”

The two boys sat on the ground, chewing the young grass thoughtfully. Below them lay the town, such as it was. The pasture lay on a gradual slope to the east, and now they had a bird's-eye view of Plainsville's tar-paper roofs and dusty streets. The houses were not much more than frame shacks, and not many of them were painted. Each house had its own little plot of ground for vegetables, and most of them had cowsheds and hen houses as well.

By golly, Jeff thought, it looks more like a ghost town than a place where fifty or sixty families live!

He turned his attention to the sun, now settling behind the western prairie. It was sluggish and red, like some enormous tick that had gorged itself with blood. He studied the pattern of woodsmoke coming from the tin stovepipes sticking through the tar-paper roofs and wondered what Aunt Beulah was fixing for supper.

Todd Wintworth jumped up suddenly and hurled a stone at his cow. “There, Blackie! Get back on the path!” He shrugged with disgust and looked at Jeff. “Guess I better go, else I'll be chasin' that fool clear up to the Territory. By the way, Amy wants to know if you're aimin' to come to her Japanese garden party tomorrow.”

Amy was Todd Wintworth's sister, as pretty as a calendar picture, Aunt Beulah said, and Jeff was inclined to agree. Still, it made him feel kind of foolish having a girl tagging around after him the way Amy Wintworth did. They used to tease him about it at the academy, until he'd lost his temper and bloodied some noses. Lately, he had made a point of ignoring her when he thought somebody might be watching.

But secretly he was pleased that Amy was stuck on him. There were plenty of boys at the academy who wouldn't mind some teasing, if Amy Wintworth would just look in their direction.

He shrugged now, as though Amy Wintworth's party was a lot of fool kid stuff. But he said, “I'll think about it, maybe.”

Todd heaved two more stones at the straying Blackie, then started the trek down the long slope. He was about twenty paces away when he stopped and called: “Say, I almost forgot. Who've the Sewell's got visitin' with them?”

Jeff blinked. “Visiting?”

“Sure. I saw a black horse tied at your cowshed when I came past. There was a man takin' in a saddle roll.”

“I don't know about any visitors,” Jeff said. “I haven't been home since the academy let out.”

Todd called something that Jeff didn't understand, and then started running through the weeds to head Blackie back to the path. Whoever the visitor was, Jeff hoped Aunt Beulah had fixed company rations for supper, because all this traipsing back and forth to the pasture had made him hungry.

By this time Bessie had arrived at the gate. Jeff pushed a rope loop off the gate post and a section of the barbed wire fence fell to the ground. He put the fence up again after the cow was out and followed Bessie's switching tail down the path to Plainsville.

Jeff soon forgot about the visitor that Todd Wintworth had mentioned. He turned his mind to remembering the rowdy, violent nights that had been Plainsville's before the cattlemen started avoiding the town.

Time was when the piano in Bert Surratt's saloon had been pounded half the night and could be heard from one end of town to the other. There had been hardly a night that you didn't hear gunfire. More than once old Abe Roebuck, the carpenter and town handyman, had been called out of bed in the middle of the night to go to work on a new pine burying box.

Oh, there had been excitement, all right, and Jeff didn't think he would ever forgive the squatters for ending it.

No more would the bawling, leather-lunged cowhands come storming into Plainsville, blowing in their pay and putting some life into the place. The big outfits like the Cross 4, the Big Hat, and the Snake, all said they'd be damned if they'd trade in a town where squatters were catered to. And from that time on they had taken their business to Yellow Fork, which was not as handy as Plainsville but at least was a place that understood cattlemen.

That was how Plainsville got to be a squatter town. It was rare to see a man wearing a revolver on Main Street any more, unless he was a traveler, and Jeff could remember when every man in town had a heavy Colt's slapping against his thigh. There were no more flashy cowhands with colorful neckerchiefs and bench-made boots and fancy rigs.

All you saw now were bib overalls and thick-soled boots or brogans, and if a man carried a gun at all, likely it would be a shotgun—which was just about as low as a man could sink.

Jeff trudged down toward the bottom of the slope, powdery red dust squirting up between his toes at every step. What I'm going to have when I grow up, he thought, is a pair of bench-made boots, with fancy stitching on the side. Not that he wasn't grown up now, but he had no money.

That was a detail that he would work out later. Now he thought about the boots. They would have built-up leather heels and soles as thin as paper, so that he would have the feel of the stirrup when he rode. He would have his initials on them, and maybe a butterfly stitched in red and green and yellow thread, although such doings were pretty fancy for a working cowhand. Maybe he'd skip the butterfly—he didn't want the other hands laughing at him.

He thought about those boots for a long while as he followed Bessie's eternally switching tail along the path. He was close enough to town to smell the woodsmoke from all the cookstoves, and it made him hungrier than ever. Just his initials on the boots would be enough. He hoped that Aunt Beulah would have fried chicken and gravy and biscuits, as they usually did when they had important company.

He kept glancing back at the horse and rig as he put Bessie in the stall and measured out a bucketful of feed. He was curious as to why a man who owned an outfit like that would be visiting with the Sewells.

Aunt Beulah put no store in guns of any kind, nor in men who carried them. Neither did Uncle Wirt, for that matter. He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword, they said. Not that it many any sense; in all Jeff's twelve years he had never once seen a man carry a sword in Plainsville.

But that was the way they were, especially Aunt Beulah. Whenever you did something she didn't like, she always had some scripture quote handy to prove that it was wrong.

Anyway, his chores for the day were over, unless there was some stove wood to be chopped. All that was left was the milking, and Uncle Wirt usually took care of that. Jeff took one last covetous look at the booted rifle and started for the house.

“Jefferson, have you got the cow stalled and the feed put out?”

It was his Aunt Beulah, who had just come to the kitchen door to peer out at him. She was a tight-knitted little woman with thinning gray hair and piercing gray eyes. The only time Jeff had ever seen any color in her face had been several years ago when she came down with the slow fever—all other times her face was as gray as lye-bleached leather.

Aunt Beulah's mouth reminded Jeff of a steel trap that had snapped shut on something, especially when she was mad or upset. And that was exactly the way her mouth looked now, like a steel trap, locked tight.

“Yes, ma'am,” Jeff said, “Bessie's put up in the shed. Who we got visiting?”

“You didn't jog her down that path, did you?” Aunt Beulah asked, ignoring his question.

“No, ma'am,” Jeff said, stamping the dust from his bare feet on the platform porch.

“I've seen some of them cowboys jogging them,” Aunt Beulah said indignantly. “It's a sin and a crime to jog a cow when she's heavy with milk. Come on in. Supper will be on pretty soon.”

Jeff stepped into a kitchen heavy with the rich aroma of frying chicken, and his mouth watered. Nobody in the world could cook like Aunt Beulah. He sure hoped the company, whoever it was, didn't like the gizzard, because that was his favorite part.

Now Jeff's attention was drawn again to his aunt, and he shuffled his feet uneasily on the scrubbed kitchen floor. He didn't like the tightness of her mouth and the sharp jutting of her small chin. He searched his mind for something that he had done wrong, but he could think of nothing—not anything recent.

Her mouth came open for just an instant, and then snapped shut almost immediately. She took his arm and turned him toward the parlor. “Come with me, Jefferson,” she said shortly. “There's somebody you—you'll have to meet.”

This was a pretty strange way for his aunt to act about company, Jeff was thinking, but he had learned long ago net to argue with her when she was like this. He walked willingly into the small, immaculate parlor.

His Uncle Wirt, a small man with drooping mustaches and a glistening bald head, was sitting very stiff and erect in one of the uncomfortable parlor chairs, as though someone were holding him there at the point of a gun. He blinked when Jeff came into the room and tried hard to relax.

“Jeff,” he said, clearing his throat, “come on in. Here's somebody wants to see you.”

To Jeff's way of thinking, Uncle Wirt seemed every bit as upset as Aunt Beulah. But he didn't give it a second thought when he saw the man sitting across the room from his uncle—a tall, dark-complexioned man with eyes as dark as an owl's, with shaggy black brows, and a mouth so full and wide that Jeff was briefly reminded of the catfish he sometimes caught in Garter's pond.

When the man stood up, the entire room seemed to grow in size. He said softly, “So you're Jeff!”

That was all he said, and he stood there with his arms hanging relaxed. Jeff didn't know what to say, so he said nothing.

Jeff could hear the old pendulum clock on the mantle ticking away the seconds, and still no one said a thing.

The instant the stranger stood up from his chair, Jeff vaguely realized that something was wrong. The picture was not quite complete. It was just a feeling he had that something was missing, but he couldn't put his finger on it until he saw the cartridge belt hanging on the hat tree in the hall. Then he knew what it was.

This man wore a gun.

Not in Aunt Beulah's house, he wouldn't, but you could see that he didn't feel quite right about the absence of that Colt's heavy weight on his hip. It was as obvious as a man going to church without his shirt.

There were men like that. Jeff could remember seeing two or three of them before, during the squatter trouble, when the big outfits were putting Territory guns on their payrolls. Not that this dark stranger was a Territory man, or an outlaw, or anything like that. He didn't have that mean, hunted look that men get when they've run too far and too long. Still, Jeff couldn't imagine what this man was doing in his Aunt Beulah's and Uncle Wirt's house.

At last the stranger said, “Miss Beulah, ain't you going to tell the boy who I am?”

Aunt Beulah's face was grayer than Jeff had ever seen it, and her grim mouth was clamped tight. Finally Uncle Wirt stirred uneasily.

“Jeff,” he said, “this here's your pa.”

It made so little sense that Jeff would have thought that his uncle was joking, except that Uncle Wirt never joked about anything. This black-eyed stranger was his pa?

The man said in that same quiet voice, “Don't you have anything to say, Jeff?”

Jeff cleared his throat. He had never been in a situation like this before—he was afraid the stranger was funning him. At last he spoke up, his voice amazingly loud.

“I guess you got the wrong boy, mister. My pa's dead.”

A cloud crossed the man's eyes as he looked at Aunt Beulah. “Did you tell him I was dead, Miss Beulah?”

Jeff's aunt glanced at her husband. “No, I didn't!” she snapped.

“That's funny, ain't it? I wonder where he got the idea?”

“I told Jefferson you was likely dead,” Aunt Beulah replied sternly. “What did you expect us to think, after twelve years?”

The stranger stood for a moment, very still. Then in four giant strides he crossed the room and stood in front of Jeff. “My name,” he said, “is Nathan Blaine. Some call me Nate. A little more than twelve years ago I married the prettiest girl in southwest Texas. She was your Aunt Beulah's baby sister—Lilie Burton her name was before we were married. Lilie was your mother, Jeff. And I'm your pa. Do you want to shake hands?”

Jeff couldn't take his gaze from the stranger's face. He said, “You ain't funnin' me, are you, mister?”

“Ask your uncle, Jeff. Ask your aunt.”

“I never saw you before! How could you be my pa?”

Jeff turned his gaze to his aunt and saw that it was true. He felt strange and kind of choked, and he didn't know exactly what to do. The stranger was holding out his big, lean hand, and Jeff stared at it for maybe two or three long ticks of the mantle clock.

Then they shook hands.