“This was the sort of horse I was thinking about,” I said thoughtfully.
“I came here to talk to you about a job, Mr. Baker.”
“I’m not hiring anybody,” I said. “I can’t afford it.” She ignored it. “I need a man—”
“Most women do,” I told her innocently.
Her lips tightened. “Mr. Baker, apparently I am wasting my time. I heard of your trouble with the Reconstruction people and they are a group with whom I have some influence. If you accept the job I have for you, I can promise you that you will no longer be annoyed.”
She was mad, but she wasn’t backing off. Maybe I don’t have any clothes to speak of, and I’m not much at dancing, but when I see that look in a woman’s eyes I take it she’s not thinking of playing whist.
“Mr. Baker, I am buying property. I sometimes carry a little money, and I need a man who can ride with me whom people respect and who can use a gun. With Sam Barlow and his kind I no longer feel safe.”
“You’d be better off to talk to Colonel Belser. He would be glad to provide an escort, or do it himself.”
“He offered, but I want no connection with him or what he represents. You see, Mr. Baker, I intend to make my home here, and I can imagine it will be difficult for those who were too friendly with the carpetbaggers when the carpetbaggers are gone.”
“Somebody should tell that to Chance Thorne.”
Putting a hand on the fence at a place where there was no brush, I vaulted it and walked over to her. She sat her horse watching me with a quirt in her hand and a pistol in a saddle scabbard, but I walked around the horse, sizing it up. I always had a good eye for horse flesh—but I was not missing the woman either.
When I was around on the other side I put my hand up as if to reach for her but just caressed the horse. She was looking at me, and I’ll give her this, she wasn’t scary. In such a position, lonely like it was, most women would have been. I figure she had an idea she could handle whatever showed up, any way she chose to handle it.
“If you are interested in fine horse,” she said, “you should work for me. I have several of the very best.”
“How’d you know to find me here?”
“You had been described to me, and I was riding by. I am interested in property, Mr. Baker, and have been looking for something I can buy.”
“I am not for sale.”
She got mad then, really mad. “You flatter yourself, Mr. Baker. I assure you, any interest I had in your working for me is ended.”
She rode away, her back rigid with anger, but when I walked back to my hoe the zest for work was gone. No question about it, I’d acted like a country bumpkin, which was what I was, only I needn’t have acted it. And she was a sight of woman—most woman I’d seen in one package for a long time. The sort of woman who’d give a man all he’d ask for, and then some.
Hiding the hoe I mounted my mule and rode back into the swamp and dismounting in a quiet place I started working with the pistol. When the sweat was streaming from me and my hand was getting sore again, I let up. But it had seemed to be coming faster, with less lost motion and a surer grasp of the gun on that first grab. It had to be like that, for if danger came there would be no room for failure.
Seeing Lacy Petraine brought Katy Thorne to mind. Katy didn’t have the flesh of that New Orleans woman, but her beauty was just as great. She had a way of carrying herself, cool, poised, and graceful…I must find some excuse for seeing Katy.
It was Matt Kirby who knew about Lacy Petraine. Or as much as anybody knew about her. She looked twenty-three or-four, but the way Matt figured it she just had to be at least six years older. Her Pa had owned a plantation near New Orleans, the way Matt had it, and Lacy was of French-Spanish-Irish ancestry, but by the time she was a girl her father had gambled away most of what they had, and she had moved into New Orleans with her father. The year she was sixteen he had died of yellow fever, and she married an Irish gambler named Terence O’Donnell.
He was, according to Matt, a gentleman. He was thirty-two when she married him, handsome, shrewd, and as skillful and successful at gambling as her Pa had been otherwise.
They left New Orleans for Atlanta, and later Matt heard tell of her in Charleston, Richmond and New York. Some said she had been in Havana, too. Then one night on a riverboat Terence dealt the wrong card to the wrong man, was challenged and killed. He left his young wife with a knowledge of cards and fourteen thousand dollars in money.
At eighteen she took off for Europe with two Negro girls for slaves and a big Negro man who was nearly sixty but mule-strong. Next two years she lived in Paris, London, Vienna, Rome, Venice and Madrid, and then she’d been in some sort of a mixup with a man, or so Matt had it from her maid. A love affair that turned out wrong, from what he said. She married André Petraine who was the bastard son of a prominent Frenchman. André tried to blackmail his father and was murdered, quick and simple. Same night they gave Lacy passage to New York and the suggestion she go there and stay.
On the way back some men taught her to play poker, and lost three thousand dollars doing it. Supplying money to an old friend of O’Donnell’s, she opened a gambling house in Charleston. Before the war began she sold the gambling house and invested in cotton, sold it well in London and remained there during most of the war.
Matt Kirby had served during part of the war with the friend who had operated her Charleston place, and it was from him that he had pieced together much of the story. Without allegiance to anyone she had returned with sufficient cash to buy land, and it was East Texas she chose, feeling that with Reconstruction sure to go out in a few years she could be one of the wealthiest women in that area.
It was a good scheme, the way Kirby had it, and the way it seemed to figure out. We’d heard around that she was buying land, and that she wasn’t a bit upset by the Barlow raids, or any other for that matter. The more folks were frightened the more apt they would be to sell out for a cheap price. According to all accounts she was a woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it.
One thing started me to wondering about how much she wanted me to work for her and how much she might have other ideas in mind. She owned the old Drummond place which adjoined Fairlea on the north, and she owned another farm south of my place.
No matter. I’d my own plans to think of, and with a crop in the ground I could start looking farther ahead. There were occasional drives of cattle to Shreveport or Sedalia, and in the Thickets there were thousands of head, unbranded, and whose ownership would be impossible to trace. Deep in the swamp, under the dark-leaved cypress and the hanging moss, I thought it out, figured just how it could be done, and how it had to be done. And no day went by when I did not practice with a gun.
O
NE NIGHT, WE were sitting around the fire when suddenly out in the swamp, a fish jumped. We all knew the sound yet the suddenness of it caught us by surprise and in an instant there was nobody about the fire, nothing but the fire burning alone, the empty beds and saddles. In the thick shade of a cypress I looked down at the pistol in my hand and could not remember drawing it.
So that was the way it was then. I was learning, all right, I was faster, much faster.
Nobody moved. Here and there a rifle barrel gleamed in the brush around the clearing while we listened, and then we heard another noise, not of the swamp. A rider was coming who knew the way to come. We waited in the shadows, almost counting the steps. When the rider came into the circle of light it was Matt Kirby.
He was a broad, solid man with a wide face and jaw, a quiet man who drank too much, yet always managed to be where the soldiers were not. He dismounted and went to the fire, pouring black coffee into a smoke-blackened tin cup.
“Raid south of here,” he said as we started to come in, “and a woman killed. They say Cullen done it.”
“There it is, Cull,” Longley said. “They’ll mean it now.”
“Three posses out,” Kirby said. “That’s why I hightailed it back here. The orders are to shoot to kill, and if you’re taken alive, to hang you.”
“That would be Barlow,” I said. “I told him to stay away from here.”
Bickerstaff got up. “Cullen, you’ve got to run. Even this place isn’t safe.”
“I’ll stay.”
“We can go to Devil’s Den,” Lee suggested. “It’s farther north and no way they could find us there.”
Devil’s Den was one of the best places, difficult to get at, and easy to defend. No posse in their right minds would attempt to even come near the place.
“You go ahead,” I told them. “I’m going into the Big Thicket.”
They all sat around looking at me, trying to see what it was in my mind. All I knew was Sam Barlow was there and the time had come for a killing, for an old-fashioned gut-shooting. I was going to see Sam Barlow. I was going to read him from the Scriptures.
“Heard something else,” Kirby said. “There’s a dozen riders camped on Blackthorne. They pulled in there while I was coming across country.”
If these were Barlow’s men on Blackthorne, and I had no idea who else they might be, Katy was in trouble. Getting up I walked to my mule and began to saddle up. It might be too late, even now.
Longley came over to me where I was cinching up. “What’s bitin’ you, Cull? You takin’ off like a sca’ed pa’tridge?”
“Katy Thorne and her aunt live alone on Blackthorne.”
“You set store by that gal?”
“I do.”
“Then you just hold up while I get my saddle.”
Bob Lee came up to his horse packing his saddle under his arm. “I take it mighty hard, you fixing to ride off into trouble alone, Cull. A man would think you had no friends.”
“I’m obliged.”
Watching them saddle up gave me a strange, warm, odd sort of feeling. There had not been many friends for me during the years I’d ridden the country, or wherever I lived, and there are fewer friends when trouble raises its hand.
Not that I deserved friends. I’d lived too much alone and with a chip on my shoulder, always wanting friendship but wary of folks, fearful of what might come of trying friendship. Thing is, if a man wants friends he’s got to be friendly. Takes a man a sight of time to learn the simplest things, it seems.
Matt Kirby switched his saddle to Bickerstaff’s spare horse, and when we rode out of there I felt better than any king with an army at his back, for these were good men who rode beside me, and like myself they were men driven to the wall with only ourselves to fight for, and the things in which we believed. If it was Sam Barlow on Blackthorne he’d better make himself scarce before we got there or he’d be planted in that swampy ground.
No moon lit the sky when we rode down the dark lanes, the sound of our horses’ hoofs hard upon the roads, or whispering through the grassy fields, but we needed no moon for we were men to whom darkness was a friend. We rode dark horses and our clothes were dark, with no white shirts and no ornaments on our saddles or anything to make a target for a seeing man.
“They’ll take time to settle in camp,” Kirby said, reassuring me. “They’ll be under the big trees between the house and the river.”
The house they spoke of was the big house, Blackthorne itself, and some three hundred yards from Will’s old place where Katy was…and Blackthorne closed these many months now, closed and still. No doubt they figured to loot the big house, and it would be a rich place to take, bank on that.
I cared just nothing for what they took from Blackthorne, but if Katy was touched, or even if they talked rough to her or threatened her, I’d bury Sam Barlow deep. For I was a man with one thought nor anything to lose but my life, which might be called a wasted thing, even now.
There was no moon when we started, but by the time we turned into the grass lane that led to a broken-down fence the moon was chinning itself on the horizon trees, and the vague light in the sky was lowering itself through the trees but little enough of it was showing when we rode into the orchard and up through the aisle between the trees. With luck we would arrive unseen and unheard.
It was very still, with only the frogs croaking, but when we were but halfway through the big orchard we heard drunken voices near Will’s house and then a pounding on the door. Looked like we’d arrived right on time.
“Open up! Open up in there or we’ll bust the door!”
Inside me something started to swell and grow, and I knew what it was because I’d felt it before, the black angry rage, the choking fury that rose inside me until it filled me with a roaring anger, and then a strange and frightening coldness. I knew myself, and was frightened at these rages of mine, and fought them down, but not now.
From inside the house we heard Katy speak, heard faintly as we walked our horses on the grass of the long untouched orchard. “Go away! Go, or I’ll shoot!”
“Now you see here,” one of the men called persuasively, “you can’t shoot us all and we sure enough aim to come in. Now you be a good girl and open that door. You can’t shoot us all.”
Now the night was still, like I said, and by that time we were right up to the house, and so when the sound of his voice died I spoke quiet but clear enough. “She can’t shoot you all,” I said. “But
we
can.”
You might say there was a change you could feel. You might say these were startled men, and if you said it, you’d be right. Nobody much bothered Barlow men, they’d had their own way about things, but now they were called upon by a voice from the night.
These men standing there before that house where I’d been received in friendship were killers and rapers of women, they were horse thieves, deserters and rascals, and bad as I might be, I’d never touched the level of such scum as these.
“Stay out of this, whoever you are, and you won’t get hurt.”
Why, I was mad. I was mad and ugly and I laughed, and I am afraid it was not a good laugh. “Are you Barlow men?” I asked.
“We are, and what of it?”
“I told Barlow to stay the hell out of this country. You want to leave now or be buried here?”
The moon was behind the trees, but the light filtered through the cypresses and fell across the door of the house where Katy lived, and the Barlow men stood in the vague light of the coming moon, but we were scattered out on the edge of the orchard, its blackness behind us, and they could see nothing, but could hear a voice only.