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 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 directly 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 troublemaker. 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 the 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 it 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 I’d fought men grown. So I didn’t straighten, I just dove at his knees and brought Chance down with a thud.
He got up then, and I smashed his lips with my fist as he started to get up, like he’d tried with me, and my fist was hardened by work and it split his lips and covered his fine shirt with blood.
Maybe it was the first time Chance had seen his own blood and it shocked him, but it angered him, too. He walked at me, swinging both his fists, but there was a deeper anger in me, and an awful loneliness for there were boys cheering him on, and none of them with a shout for me. I was bitter lonely then, and it made the hate rise in me, and I walked into his fists driving with my own. There was nothing in him that could stand against the fierce anger I had, and he backed up, and there was a kind of white fear in his eyes. He sorely wanted help, he wanted to yell, but I ducked low and hit him in the belly, and saw the anguish in his face, and white to the lips I set myself and swung a wicked one square at that handsome face. He went down then and he rolled over in the dust, and he could have got up, but he didn’t; he lay there in the dust and he was beaten, and I had an enemy for all my years.
Other men rushed from the mill then, Chance’s father and uncle among them, and they rushed at me, so I backed to my club and picked it up. I was a lone boy but I was fierce angry with hating them and wanting to be away, and hating myself because I was afraid I would cry.
“Leave him alone!” I did not know Will Thorne then, a tall, scholarly man. “Chance began it.”
Chance’s father’s face was flushed and angry. “You tend to your knitting, Will! I’ll teach this young rascal to—”
He paused in his move toward me, for I’d backed to the mule and was set with my club. I was only a boy, but I was man tall and strong with work in field and forest. “You come at me,” I said, “and I’ll stretch you out.”
He shook a fist at me. “I’ll have you whipped, boy! I’ll have you whipped within an inch of your life!”
Then I’d swung to my mule’s back and rode away, but I did not ride fast.
And that was the beginning of it.
A few days later when I had come to town Thorne was waiting for me with a horse whip. When I’d started to dismount, he came at me with the whip, but seeing it coming I swung on the mule again and slammed him with my bare heels. Thorne was coming at me, but before he saw what was coming the mule was charging him. He drew back the whip too late, and the mule struck him with a shoulder and knocked him into the dust with half the town looking on. And then I had ridden out of town.
The next thing was worst of all, for the Thornes were good haters and they believed themselves the best in the community, with a reputation to uphold. We were working in the field, Pa and me, and four men came for me. Pa tried to stop them and one knocked him out with a club, and then they set on me with the whip. When they were through I was bloody and miserable, but not a sound did I make until they were gone. Then bloody and scarce able to walk, I helped Pa home and to bed, and put cold cloths on his head. Then I got down Pa’s shotgun and started for town.
Haas and Gibson, two of the men who had done the whipping, were drinking their bonus in the saloon. When I got down from the mule it was past dark and the street was nigh empty. Up in front of the hotel I saw a man stop and look back, and then I’d stepped inside. Haas saw me first.
“Gib!” His voice was shaking. “Gib,
look!
”
Gibson turned and he reached for the pistol under his coat, and I shot, but not to kill. The shotgun was heavy loaded but I shot between them, close-standing as they were, and both men went down, both of them catching some shot.
They lay there shocked and bloody in the sawdust. “I done you no harm,” I told them, “but you set on me an’ Pa. Was I you I’d stay clear of us from now on, an’ if Pa dies I’ll kill the both of you.”
Turning toward the door I stopped. “Don’t you set up to give this boy no beating again, because I got the difference.”
That was the summer I was fifteen.
Folks fought shy of me the few times I did come to town and I didn’t come except when must be. Most of the year I spent in the swamps along the Sulphur, hunting, trapping, staying away from people, except the Caddos. But that had been the beginning of it. From then on I’d the reputation of a bad one and folks kept their daughters away from me, and even the men stayed clear of me.
Pa worked on, but he was never quite the same after that blow on the skull. Maybe it wasn’t so much the blow what did the harm, but the feeling that here where he’d planned to start over, to build something of a place for Ma and me, here he had failed to do so. It was no fault of his, but he lost heart then and the fire went out of him. After Ma died he just continued on and went through the motions, but Pa was gone and I knew it.
Katy Thorne had reminded me and it all came back, the sound of Ma mixing batter in a wooden bowl, the weariness in Pa’s face as he came up from the field, the morning singing of the birds, and the sullen splash of fish in the still water, the sound of dogs raising a coon out there on a still moonlit night.
These things had meant home to me, but Ma and Pa were gone and the memories of hunting wild cattle in the Big Thicket to the south was an empty memory, and the smell of damp earth and the warm sun of planting time…I had been a fool to come back.
“I’ve no cause to love the Thornes,” I said, “only Will. I liked Will.”
“I come here to gather flowers,” she said. “I was surprised when I saw you.”
Walking to the house I put my rifle down and started plucking the duck.
“You only fired once.”
“There was only one duck.”
She was silent, watching me as I worked. “A duck should hang for a while.”
“He’ll do his hanging inside me then. This is my supper.”
“It’s a small supper for a hungry man. Come to Blackthorne for supper. There’s a baked ham.”
“Do you know what you’re asking, ma’am? Cullen Baker to come to Blackthorne? I could not do it without a shooting, and even if that was avoided people would speak no more to you. I’ve a black name along the Sulphur.”
“You’ve been gone a long time, Cullen Baker. Blackthorne is deserted now, and has been since the war ended. It is Will’s house that I live in, and which he left to me when he died. Aunt Flo is with me there, and you’re not likely to see anyone but her.”