Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0)
Contents
NO WAY OUT
I
SAT UP and felt up under my shirt. I found the hole. Could see it by craning my neck. The bullet had gone through my shoulder, leaving an ugly blue hole where it went in, and it had come out at the back. Tearing my handkerchief, I plugged both holes, barely reaching the one back of my shoulder. The shoulder moved, so I didn’t figure I’d broken any bones, yet I had lost blood. I crawled a little further, following the way that seemed easiest, then stopped. My shoulder was really hurting now, and my throat and mouth were dry. My head felt heavy and my eyes did not seem to focus properly. Shock, maybe, as much as the bullet. What I needed was a hole. Someplace to crawl into, someplace where they couldn’t find me.
A shadow crossed my face. I glanced around, then up. A buzzard!
They would not have to look for me now. The buzzards would point the way.
Chapter 1
A
LL WINTER LONG I held them cattle up on the plateau whilst pa collected my wages down to town. Come first grass I taken them cattle down to Dingleberry’s and I told old Ding what he could do with them, that I had my fill of playin’ nursemaid to a bunch of cows.
He made quite a fuss, sayin’ as how pa had hired me out to him and I’d no choice, bein’ a boy not yet eighteen.
So I told him if he figured I’d no choice, just to watch the tail end of my horse because I was fetchin’ out of there. I knew pa was down to town gamblin’, workin’ with my money as his base, but pa was a no-account gambler, generally speakin’, and couldn’t seem to put a winnin’ hand together.
Nonetheless he might have enough put by to give me a road stake, and I could make do with five dollars, if he had it.
Only when I rode into town pa was dead. He was not only dead, he was buried, and they’d put a marker on his grave.
It taken the wind out of me. I just sort of backed off an’ set down. Pa, he was no more than forty, seemed like, and a man in fair health for somebody who spent most of his time over a card table.
There was a lot of strangers in town, but one man who knowed me and who’d knowed pa, too, he told me, “Was I you I’d git straddle of that bronc an’ light a shuck. Ain’t nothin’ around town for you no more, with your pa dead.”
“How’d he die? It don’t make no sense—him dyin’ right off, like that.”
“That’s the way folks usually die, son. Everybody knows he’s goin’ to die sometime, but nobody really expects to. You light out, son. I hear tell they’re hirin’ men for work in the mines out in the western part of the Territory.”
“How’d he die?” I persisted.
“Well, seems like he killed hisself. I never did see the body, mind. But Judge Blazer, he seen it. He shot hisself. Lost money, I reckon. You know he was always gamblin’.”
“Hell,” I said, disgusted, “he’d not kill himself for that! He’d done been losin’ money all his life! That man could lose more money than you’d ever see.”
“You take my advice, boy, an’ you light out. There’s some mighty rough folks in this town an’ they won’t take to no weteared boy nosin’ around.”
That couldn’t make no sense to me, because I’d been around rough folks all my life. We never had nothin’, our family didn’t, scrabblin’ around for whatever it was we could find after ma died an’ Pistol—that’s my brother—taken off. It just left me an’ pa, an’ we’d gone from one cow camp or minin’ camp to another. Now pa was dead an’ I was alone.
Pa wasn’t much account, I guess, as men went, but he was pa, and a kindly man most of the time. We’d never had much to say to one another but hello or good-bye or how much money was I holdin’? Nonetheless, he was pa an’ I loved him, although that was a word we’d have been shamed to use.
Pistol, he was my half brother, ten year older’n me, an’ he’d taken off a long time back, six or seven years back. Pa kind of hinted that Pistol had taken off along the outlaw trail but I never did think so. Pistol always seemed the kind to ride them straight up the middle.
The Bon Ton was down the street, and I was surely hard up for grub. I’d been so long without eatin’, my belly was beginning to think my throat was cut, so I bellied up to a table in the Bon Ton and ordered, thankin’ my stars a body could still get him a good meal for two bits.
Until I set down there, I’d had no chance to give much thought to pa. We’d sort of taken one another for granted, or so it had seemed to me. Now all of a sudden he was gone and there was a great big hole in my life and an emptiness inside me.
Nothing had ever seemed to go right for pa. A couple of times we had ourselves a little two-by-twice outfit, but the first time it was get run off or fight, an’ ma didn’t want us to fight so we pulled out. Then the Comanches run us off the next place, stealin’ our horses and cows an’ leavin’ us with a burned-up wagon and no stock. Next time pa was about to make out, ma took sick, and it needed all pa had just for doctor’s bills and such. After that pa took to gamblin’ reg’lar and it was all bad cards and slow horses.
Man at the next table was talkin’. “Never seen such a thing,” he was sayin’, “not in all my born days. When they raised him that last time, he taken out a six-shooter an’ there for a minute nobody knew what was going to happen. Then he put that gun down in the middle of the table. ‘Ought to be worth twenty dollars,’ he says, ‘and I raise you twenty.’
“Two of them stayed, and when the showdown came he was holdin’ a full house. Well, sir, that started it! You never seen the like! The cards began runnin’ his way and it seemed he couldn’t do anything wrong! If they could have gotten the governor into the game, he’d have owned the Territory! I tell you, he must have won eight, maybe ten thousand dollars!”
The waitress brought me beef and beans and filled my coffee cup. She was a pretty redhead with freckles, and when she leaned over to pour my coffee, I looked up at her and she whispered, “You be careful! You be real careful!”
“What’s that mean?” I said. “I never said a word.”
“I don’t mean that. Was I you, I’d fork that roan of yours and ride right out of town and never even look back. If’n I was you, they’d never see me for the dust.”
“Why? What have I done? I ain’t been to town for months, and no sooner do I ride in than folks start tellin’ me I should leave.”
“You better,” she warned, and walked away.
Well, I drank some coffee and it tasted mighty good. Then I went to work on the beef and beans, half-hearin’ the talk at the next table about that card game. “It was that six-shooter did it. He’d been losin’ steady until he staked that six-shooter with the pearl handle and the little red birds inlaid into the pearl. I declare, I—”
Well, I just stopped chewin’. I set there for a full minute before I leaned over to that man and said, “Sounds real pretty. Did you say red birds in a pearl handle?”
“That’s right! Talk about lucky! That gun worked a charm! Soon’s he put up that gun his luck changed an’ there was no stoppin’ him.”
“Medium-sized man, with a mustache?”
“Had him a mustache, all right, but he was a tall, thin galoot. Wore one of those Prince Albert coats, a black frock coat, y’know.” He peered at me. “D’you know him?”
“The gun sounds familiar. I got an eye for guns, and a man wouldn’t be likely to forget anything like that.”
“He sure was lucky! Won him maybe nine, ten thousand dollars! More’n that, he won the deed to some big cattle outfit up north. He seemed to make all the wrong moves, yet he kept pullin’ down the high cards.”
The other man at the table looked around. “Only reason he didn’t win all the money in the world was because those other fellers didn’t have it. He just won all they did have. I seen it.”
They went back to talkin’ amongst themselves, and I finished what was before me. Meanwhile I did some thinkin’. Now, I’m not quick to think. I act fast but I consider slow. I like to contemplate a subject, turnin’ it on the spit of my mind until I have seen all sides of it. This here shaped up like plain, old-fashioned trouble.
I was right sorry for pa. I’d be sorrier later on, for things never hit me all of a sudden. Yet maybe I shouldn’t be sorry for him, because pa died right at the peak of the greatest run of luck he’d ever had.
He died winners, and not many gamblers could say that. Certainly nobody expected pa to beat the game, but he had. If he had come off that run of luck alive, he’d have lost it all had he continued to gamble. So he passed out a winner.
Shot through the skull, though. Now how come that?
Whose was the bullet? What finger squeezed off that shot?
Now I could see why folks were suggesting I get away while I could. They didn’t want too many bodies clutterin’ up the town, and me bein’ his son and all…