If a man would just sit quiet and listen he could hear all the news right there on the island, for the men who sheltered there had friends everywhere, and word came to them by several means: a man riding by on the trails might leave a message in a hollow stump, or he might arrange the branches in a certain way, or the stones beside a trail. We had our ways of knowing things, even in the swamp, but Sam Barlow was a dangerous man to us, for if people began to believe we were doing the things he did we’d have no more friends among the folks out there. It was Reconstruction law wanted us, and none of us had done any harm to the folks who lived hereabouts.
Next day I saddled up that buckskin mule and rode down the island. There was only one place where a man might walk a horse or mule to the mainland and it took sharp attention and the right knowledge of just where to turn. There was an underwater ridge a man could ride, but well out from shore a man had to make a turn. It was a Caddo who showed me the way, and the first of the others had learned it from me…if a man made to ride on he’d be off in mighty deep water or in places, in mud that was like quicksand.
It was to Fairlea I rode. The distance was short, and I wanted to look about and see what my chances were to make something of the place. Actually, it was a better place than our home place, and one which Pa had picked up while land was cheap—for that matter it was still worth nothing. There were men with thousands of acres and no money at all, nor chance to get any. Crops brought nothing but a mere living, and cattle were killed for their hides and tallow.
The point of land I’d been considering was separated even from Fairlea except by a narrow lane along the bayou. There was some three hundred acres in the piece, but it lay in a half-dozen small fields, each walled by trees and bayous, the land lying like a letter S with an extra turn to it, and the bayous bordering it until it was all but an island. The lane along the trees ended in a gate on another lane, rarely used now, and by going through the gate and crossing the land one was on Fairlea proper.
There had once been a fine mansion house on the place, but it had burned to the ground one night before we ever came to the place, and the owner lost his family there, and after that sold to my father and went off to New Orleans. I believe part of the selling price was money owed to Pa for work done, and that during the spell when the owner had thoughts of rebuilding and going on, but the memories were too strong, and he finally would have none of it. So Fairlea fell to us for labor done and a little money.
The soil was good, and it would not be difficult to get in here, plow a field and seed it without anyone being the wiser.
The sound of the oncoming riders had been in my ears for a minute or more before I realized what it meant. Somebody was coming along the unused lane at the end of the property…now in the old days it had been a rare thing for anyone to ride that way, and by the looks of the lane, all grown to grass, it was a rarer thing even now.
If riders came this way it would be a good thing to know who they were and if they came often, but I’d more than an idea they were themselves not eager to be seen, choosing such a route as this, out of the way as it was.
It was a fine spring morning, and the sun was warm and lazy. Off in the bayous behind me somewhere a loon called, a mighty far and lonesome sound, at any time. Walking right up to the fence I lay that Spencer across the top rail with my hand over the action in such a way I could cock and fire almost in the same motion. And it was well I did just that because the man on the first horse was Sam Barlow.
He was a wide, thick-set man with a sight of hair on his chest, revealed by an open shirt. Barlow had the name of being a mighty dangerous man to come up against. He had fought as a guerrilla in the war, and had been a renegade since. Under the cover of fighting Reconstruction he was raiding, looting and murdering up and down the state, and into Louisiana and Arkansas. Folks had laid much of what he’d done on Bickerstaff, Bob Lee and some of the others, but Sam Barlow was a man known for cunning as well as being mighty mean, and he seemed always to know right where the Army was so he never did come up against them. Behind him right now there were about a dozen unkempt, dirty and mangy rascals who looked fit bait for the hangman.
About fifty feet from where I stood, Sam Barlow saw me and at first he stared like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then he lifted a hand to halt the little column, but by that time he was closer.
Taking a stub of cigar from his yellow teeth, he said, “Howdy! You live around here?”
Imperceptibly the muzzle of the carbine shifted until it covered Sam Barlow’s chest. That carbine was down on the rail and partly hidden by brush…I don’t figure he saw it.
“I live all around here.”
“I’m Sam Barlow.”
Now if he figured I was going to start shaking he was a mistaken man. Names never did scare me much, and I’d come up against some men who had bigger, tougher names than this here Barlow.
“I know who you are. Mighty far north, aren’t you?”
Barlow returned that stub of cigar to his teeth. “I’m comin’ further north. I like it here.”
About that time he saw the carbine, and his lips tightened down and when his eyes lifted to mine they were wary, careful eyes. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“This is my country, Barlow. Stay the hell out of it.”
Barlow was mad, I could see that. Moreover he wasn’t so smart as I’d heard because he was going to buck that .56 caliber. He was going to bet me his life I’d miss. It was in his eyes, when a man behind him spoke. “Sam, this here is Cullen Baker.”
That stopped him. Maybe they had heard about that killing a long time back at Fort Belknap, or maybe something else but, when he heard the name, Sam Barlow changed his mind and saved his life—because if that horse had moved a foot I was going to kill him.
He knew it, too. It is one thing to jump a horse at some scared farmer. It is another thing to buck a man who can and will use a gun.
Same time, he’d no wish to lose face in front of his outfit, for the only way you lead a crowd like that was by being tougher, smarter, and maybe more brutal.
“I could use a man like you, Baker. I’ve heard tell of you.”
“Stay out of this country, Barlow. You stay south or west of the Big Thicket. You come north of it and I’ll take it unkind of you. Fact is, you come north of the Big Thicket and I’ll kill you.”
Well, sir, the planes in his face seemed to all flatten out and he made to spur his horse and when he did I cocked that .56 caliber. In that still air you could hear that carbine click as it cocked and Sam Barlow pulled his horse to a stand.
“Get out, Barlow, and take your outfit with you. There’s country south of the Big Thicket for you, and if you open your mouth even once I’ll spread you all over your saddle.”
Sam Barlow was mad—he was mad clean through—and I didn’t figure to even let him open his mouth because if he did he’d say something to try to make himself big with his crowd. It had probably been a long time since anybody told him to shut up and get out, but it had been done now, and no mistake.
They would be back, I could bet on that. Sam Barlow could not afford to take water from any man, but he would think awhile before he came back, and he would do some planning, but if he stayed south of Lake Caddo then Katy Thorne would be safe.
“And that was what you were thinking about,” I told myself. “You’ve heard of Barlow’s ways with women.”
Turning around then I saw four riders coming up the field toward me, and they were well spread out, but they were Matt Kirby, Bickerstaff and Bill Longley. On the far wing of the four was Bob Lee.
“Sam Barlow backed down,” Kirby was saying. “He backed down cold.”
“Means nothing,” I said, “I had him dead to rights. And that .56 makes quite a hole.”
“They’ll come back.” Bob Lee was a serious thinking man. He was looking past the moment, and he could see what it was we’d have to expect.
“Why, then,” Bill Longley was grinning, “we shouldn’t keep them waiting. We should go after them, Bob. We should go right down into the Thicket after them.”
They were waiting for me, but when I reached a hand for the pommel of the mule’s saddle I was thinking, “You’ve got to find a way to get a gun into action faster, Cullen Baker. Else they’ll come up on you some time. You’ve got to learn how to get a Colt into action faster than any man would ever believe possible. You’ve got to think out how they might approach you and what you’ll do in case.
“Otherwise they’ll surely kill you.”
Chapter 3
A
PISTOL WAS carried in a holster or thrust into the waistband. The habit of carrying pistols on the hip had not developed to any extent, and hand guns were only becoming common now. The Dragoon and Walker Colts were too heavy for comfort. Usually, until now a pistol had been carried on the saddle, yet for a man who needed a weapon that could be brought swiftly into action, the pistol was the best.
Long ago at Fort Belknap I’d traded several surplus rifles for a pistol. The rifles were of the muzzle-loading variety then being sold to Indians, and which I’d won gambling.
That was the time a soldier taught me the Army method of loading the Dragoon Colt, when afoot or riding horseback, and he had drilled me until I’d become far more proficient than the average cavalryman ever became. Doing things with my hands had always been easy for me—I had the knack. Maybe that was because I’d worked with my hands since a boy, braiding rawhide ropes, splicing rope we used on the farm, doing what needs to be done. So more than most, I was handy with a pistol, and felt right at home with it.
No pistol would be any use to a man in trouble unless it was out and shooting, so the problem was getting the pistol into action, then firing accurately and with speed.
That last wasn’t going to figure as troublesome. At Fort Belknap when I hung around there I’d done a sight of shooting with soldiers and proved then that what they could do I could do better. My shooting was better than any of them, and for some time I’d kept myself in money winning bets on shooting with both rifle and pistols.
Back on the island that night after the meeting with Sam Barlow I stretched out on a grassy bank just at the edge of the firelight and did some serious thinking. It was a problem I had to solve, and I’d never figured myself for too much of a thinker, but I do say I was persistent. I mean I could hold to an idea and plug away at it and size it up from all angles until it began to make sense.
After all, what’s there to thinking? The way I figure it there was so much a body could do with a mind. You could take the various possibilities and line them all up, and then eliminate the ones that weren’t practical. The main idea was to stay with an idea until all the possibilities were worked out.
Thinking was something I worked at like a prospector washing out gold. I’d take me a brain full of the coarse gravel of ideas and sift it down until the gold remained. Only sometimes I worked a long time and came up with no color showing at all.
That pistol would be in my waistband. That way I could lay a quick hand on it. What I needed was to get that pistol out and shooting, and I’d have to be prepared for a target from any direction. I wasn’t to be able to shoot just where I wanted to.
This was easier said than done. Getting up I walked off down a path where I could be alone and unobserved. Standing in a little clearing I drew the gun and aimed at a mark—too slow.
Yet why should a man aim? When I point my finger at something I just point directly at the object, so why not the same thing with a pistol? And if a man could fire from wherever he had his gun, so much the better. It would have the advantage of the unexpected, and that was a primary concern. Of course, I’d have to be careful of that trigger squeeze. A man could pull his gun barrel out of line with the target if he gave it just a might too much. Still, I’d mostly be shooting from close up, and the target would be a man’s body. I’d waste no time on head shots.
Whoever came against me would surely have help, and it was almost as sure that I’d be alone. Therefore if my gun was in action quicker then I might win with the first shot.
Nine out of ten fist fights are won with the first blow, so why not a gun battle with the first shot?
The problem was to get that gun out fast.…
Right then I started to practice, drawing that pistol again and again, and sighting at whatever mark showed. The front sight had a way of snagging on my shirttail or beltband, so I would file that off. A thin white line on the muzzle would do most as good for close work, anyway.
The problem then was to draw swiftly, to fire at once, and above all to make the first shot count.
There was no use to waste ammunition firing until I’d developed some skill, and until I’d practiced turning and aiming at targets to the side or behind me. The problem here was to focus on the target at once and let the gun muzzle go where the eyes went.
Right then I started, drawing fifty times by actual count, trying to break the draw down to its actual fundamentals. So I started trying to find the quickest and smoothest ways of grasping the gun—grasp counted for very much, and that first grip must be sure, clean and positive. If that was done half the problem was solved, for then the gun came up in line and didn’t jump when the trigger was squeezed.
At daybreak the next morning I walked down to the far end of the island where nobody could see what I was doing and I practiced for three hours. After three hours I rested and thought about it for thirty minutes and then returned to work. My life depended on my success so I wasn’t about to waste time. So I worked on steadily through the afternoon.
If the elbow was held loosely against the hip or the body above the hip my position seemed a little better, and the pistol could be pointed by the whole body.
The art of drawing a gun fast had never been developed by anyone. Until now there had been no particular reason for developing any such skill, for men fought duels on carefully paced-off ground, or they went looking for one another, gun in hand. Usually, disputes were settled by carefully arranged duels with gun, knife or sword. Moreover, the first successful repeating pistol made in any quantity was the Walker Colt, invented by Samuel Colt and designed for the Texas Rangers by order of Walker. But like the Dragoon Colt, it was heavy.
And the fast draw was of advantage only to a man who might expect attack at any time, from any direction.
That first day I worked seven hours, until my hand was sore and I was some tired out. But I had a feeling that I’d hit on something new, and that what I was doing would work in practice, and that’s the test of any idea.
Next day I rode to Fairlea and, with a team borrowed from a farmer who’d known Pa, I started breaking ground. After staying away for a few days so as to give nobody a chance for an ambush, I returned again. Each time that I came back to Fairlea I scouted all around before showing myself in the open. The chances were that Sam Barlow had no idea the field belonged to me, and most likely assumed I was merely passing through.
On the fourth day I finished my plowing, and later I dragged the field and planted my corn.
When I’d come back to Texas I’d had a little money, but most of it went to pay for the seed corn.
Time to time I’d find myself thinking of Katy Thorne, although I knew I’d no business thinking of her. But I’d keep bringing to mind the way her face looked in the candlelight, and how good it felt to be sitting in a home, with comfort around me and the sound of a woman moving about the house. But much as I wanted to, I stayed away from Blackthorne. I’d no desire to go to stirring up a lot of wishing that I’d no business with. I was a man with nothing, and with small prospects of living out the summer. Only I figured to have my say on that last point. I had most unfriendly ideas about dying, particularly from a gunshot by that riffraff that followed Reconstruction.
There had been no further forays by Sam Barlow into our neck of the woods. That country from Lake Caddo to the Oklahoma-Arkansas line he’d avoided. Bob Lee, however, and some of the other had ridden out and had themselves some gun talk with Reconstruction soldiers, in which they came off very well and the soldiers not so good.
The Reconstruction Act of 1867, followed by the removal of Governor Throckmorton from office, had been accepted by most Texans as another declaration of war. The carpetbaggers and Union Leaguers had come to Texas to get rich quick, and most of them were folks of low integrity and no morals to speak of. Here and there, however, to give them their just due, there would be one who amounted to something, and a few of these stayed on in Texas to become valued citizens. But they were mighty scarce.
Mostly those who came south were the wrong ones. They allied themselves with folks of the same kind in Texas, and they figured to force their will on us by shooting and burning which only stiffened resistance and drove many a good man into the swamps or the thickets, and most of us who took to the thickets had to learn to use our guns to live.
That section of East Texas was thickly forested with piney woods where even then folks had started a few small lumber operations, and here and there where the woods had been cleared out folks had started farming or grazing a few cows.
Unless you’ve seen an East Texas thicket you surely can’t imagine what they’re like—millions of acres covered by a dense, junglelike growth of pine, dogwood, chinquapin, elderberry, myrtle, blackjack and prickly pear. Above all, prickly pear. There was cat’s-claw, of course, and even ferns as tall as trees and wild orchids, but all through it was a growth of tall, old prickly pear with spines that would rip a man’s eyes out, and in places made a wall nothing could get through.
The Big Thicket to the south was over a hundred miles long and about fifty wide, but there were other thickets such as Mustang, Jernigan, and Blackjack Thicket, just to name a few. Here and there among the thickets there were streams of waterholes, sometimes even good-sized ponds or small lakes, teeming with fish. There was a lot of wild game, and some of the most vicious wild cattle a man ever came across. There were wild cattle in there that would stalk a man like a cougar stalks a heifer, mean as all get out.
During the Shelbyville war between the Regulators and the Moderators these thickets and the swamps along the Sulphur had offered shelter for the fighting men and refugees as well as for outlaws from the Natchez or Trammel Traces. Growing up in those swamps and thickets, I probably knew as much about them as any one man…it would take a lifetime to know it all, believe me.
Few rivers on earth could twist and turn more than the Sulphur Fork of the Red. And few offered so great a variety of hiding places as did the curves, bends, islands and swamps of the Sulphur. When in the southern part of the area the boys hid out on the island in the Lake Caddo swamps, but farther north, not too far from Boston or the Arkansas line, there were hide-outs at McFarland Island between the circle of Piney Lake, Spring Lake and the Sulphur itself. And there were two hide-outs in the Devil’s Den region between the Sulphur River and Bell’s Slough. Of course, there were others, some known to one group, some to another, but maybe I was the only one who knew them all, or so I figured. And most of them I’d learned from my friends, the Caddoes.
Bob Lee and the others left me alone. This was a time when nobody catered much to folks asking questions and a man’s business was figured to be his own. Only sometimes the boys would get to riding me.
“Got himself a girl,” Matt Kirby suggested.
“He’s sparkin’ that widow,” Jack English said. “Most ever’body else is tryin’.”
“Makes a man right uncomfortable, the way she looks at him sometimes,” Bickerstaff told them. “She’s all woman that one. Take a sight of man to keep her inside the fence.”
It was Lacy Petraine of whom they talked. She was the subject of more talk than any woman I ever did see. Mostly they called her “that New Orleans woman,” or “the widow” like that country wasn’t full of widows, those times. But when a woman who looks like she does comes into a broke country carrying a sack full of hard cash, there’s sure to be talk.
Chance Thorne was taking some rides, too. From time to time I heard talk of his being seen around the country, yet he rode quite a ways south, and what down there could be important to him? Could be he was sparking some woman himself, yet Chance was a man not likely to ride far out of his way for any woman, and who did few things without a mighty big reason. Who was south that was so important to him?
When the idea came it sort of shocked me into sitting straight up. Bob Lee turned sharp around, afraid I’d heard something that spelled trouble. “What is it, Cull?”
“Had a mite of an idea.” I wrapped my arms around my knees. “Bill,” I asked Longley, “would you do something for me?”
“You just give it a name.”
“Try to find out where Chance goes on those rides.”
Longley considered it. “You’ve got an idea where he goes?”
“I’m guessing, but I’d say the Big Thicket.”
“Sam Barlow’s country,” Bickerstaff objected. “He wouldn’t go there.”
“Maybe.”
Bob Lee took a stick from the fire to light his cigar. “You think he’s the one who’s been tipping off Sam Barlow about the Army?” He looked at me with one of those quick, sharp glances of his. “You don’t like the man. You could be prejudiced.”
“Might be,” I admitted slowly. “It could be, of course, but I just don’t believe I am, not to interfere with my judgment. Chance is a thinking man, a mighty thinking man when it comes to what is best for Chance. His side of the family were well-off, but never so much as the rest of the Thornes, and that never did set well with him. I believe he’s out to make himself some money and I think he’d play all sides to do it.”
Two days later when I was chopping weeds out of my cornfield there was a rider in the lane. The Spencer was leaning against a tree not too far off and I walked over to it, but when the rider showed up it was the horse that got me, not the rider.
“I am not flattered, Mr. Baker,” she said.
When she spoke it was in a low, confidential voice, and I looked up into the eyes of the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I knew right off it was that New Orleans woman, Lacy Petraine.
“Beautiful horse,” I told her.
Her expression did not change. “Yes, he is a fine animal. So are you, Mr. Baker.”
That was direct talk and I looked at her, measuring what I saw, and what this woman had she wasn’t pretending she didn’t have. It was there, all right. Whatever else she was she was like they said, she was all woman.