That was Laurin for me. Just about everything.
It was late in the afternoon when Pappy woke up. I was sitting under a cottonwood up on the creek bank, flipping my new pistols over and over to get the feel of them. Pappy sat up lazily, stretching, yawning, and scratching the mangy patches of beard on his face.
“That's better,” he said. “Much better.” He got up on his feet and hobbled around experimentally. “You handle those guns pretty good, son,” he said. “Do you think you can shoot them as well?”
“Well enough, I guess.”
Pappy shook his head soberly and beat some of the dust from his battered hat. “That's one thing no man ever does—shoot well enough. Sooner or later, if you keep looking, you'll find some bird that can slap leather faster.”
“How about you?” I asked.
Pappy grinned slightly. “Maybe I haven't looked long enough,” he said. “But I don't expect to live forever.”
He began getting his stuff together, a ragged gray blanket that still had C.S.A. stenciled on it in faded black letters, a change of clothing, and that was about all. He did have some tobacco, though. He took the sack out of his shirt pocket and poured some of the powdery stuff into a little square of corn shuck, Mexican style, and tossed the makings up to me.
“You figure to ride east tonight?” he asked casually.
“That's what I had in mind.”
“Alone?”
He was holding a match up to his cigarette and I couldn't see his face. “I guess that's up to you,” I said.
He got that surprised look again. “How do you mean, son?”
He came up the slope and held a match while I got my cigarette to going. “Isn't that what you had in mind all along?” I said. “You look like a man that's just about played out. I don't know what you're running from, or how long you've been at it, but I know a man can't stay on the alert twenty-four hours a day, the way you must have been doing. I'm on my way to the Brazos country. If you want to ride along and keep clear of the bluebellies, that's all right with me. We'll take turns sleeping and watching, and split up when we get to the river.”
He tried to look all innocence, but he didn't have the face for it. “Do you think I'd let a mere boy tie up with a wanted man like me?”
“I think that's what you've been figuring on all along,” I said.
I thought for a minute that he was going to break down and have a real laugh. But he didn't. He only said, “I guess we'd better get ready to ride. The sun will be down before long.”
We made about twenty-five miles that night, and I knew before we had covered a hundred yards that I had picked the right man to get me through hostile country. Pappy knew every trick there was to learn about covering a trail. When a hard shale outcropping appeared, we followed it. When we crossed a stream we never came out near the place we went in. We even picked up the tracks of some wild cattle and followed them for two or three miles, mingling our own horses' hoofmarks with the dozens of others.
Pappy didn't ask me, but I told him about myself as we rode. I even told him about Laurin, and Ray Novak, and how we came to be on the run, but there was no way of knowing what he thought about it. He would grunt once in a while, and that was all.
The next day, when we started to ride again, Pappy found a holster for me in one of those saddlebags of his. “Some people will tell you that a good shot doesn't need but one gun,” he said, “but that's a lot of foolishness. Two of anything is better than one.”
I felt foolish at first. It seemed like a lot of hardware— a lot more than an ordinary man needed to pack. But then, Pappy Garret wasn't an ordinary man, and when you were with Pappy you did as he did.
The day after that he said we didn't have to ride at night any more. He knew the country and there was nothing to worry about between us and the Brazos. Pappy, I gathered, was figuring on tying up with a trail herd headed for Kansas, but he never said so. He never said anything much after we got to riding, except for things like: “Loosen your cartridge belt, son. Let your pistols hang where your palms can brush the butts. Boothills are full of men that had to reach that extra inch to get their guns.” Or, at the end of a day maybe, when we were sitting around doing nothing: “Clean your pistols, son. Guns are like women; if you don't treat them right, and they turn against you, you've got nobody to blame but yourself.”
It was almost sundown of the fourth day when we raised the wooded high ground with a sagging little log shack partly dug into the side of a hill. A thin little whisper of smoke was curling up from a rock chimney.
“It looks like they're expecting us,” Pappy said, squinting across the distance.
I looked at him, and he saw the question before I could ask it.“They,” he said, “could be almost anybody. Anybody but the law, that is. The shack was built a long time ago by a sheepherder, but the cattlemen chased him out of Texas before he had time to get settled good. Some of the boys I know use it once in a while. I use it myself when I'm in this part of the country.”
Well, I figured Pappy ought to know. We rode up toward the shack, and before long a man came out of it and stood there by the front door—the only door the cabin had—nursing what looked like a short-barreled buffalo gun. A Sharps maybe, about a .50 caliber, I guessed, when we got closer.
The man himself wasn't much to look at. About twenty-three or so, with a blunted, bulldog face, and long hair that hung down almost to his shoulders. His clothes were in about the same shape as Pappy's, and that wasn't saying much.
Pappy grunted as we pulled up near the crest of the hill. “It looks like one of the Creyton boys,” he said.
I had a closer look at the man. The Creyton boys had hard names in Texas. They were supposed to have been in on a bank robbery or two down on the border. There were three of them: Buck, and Ralph, and a younger one called Paul. I figured the one at the shack was Paul Creyton, because he looked too young to have done the things that Buck and Ralph had to their credit.
The man recognized Pappy as we drew up into the thicket that passed for a front yard. I saw there was a lean-to shed on the side of the shack—a place for keeping horses, I supposed—but there was no horse stable there. The man lowered his gun and came forward.
“Pappy Garret,” he said flatly, “I had an idea you was up in Kansas.”
Pappy grinned slightly and leaned across his big black's neck to shake hands. “A Texan likes to see the old home place once in a while. How are you, Paul?”
The man glanced sideways at me, and Pappy said quickly, “This is Tall Cameron, a friend of mine. He's going as far as the Brazos with me.”
We nodded at each other. Paul Creyton said, “You haven't seen Buck, have you?”
“Not for about two years,” Pappy said.
“We split up down on the Black River,” Creyton went on flatly, as if he had gone over the story a hundred times in his mind. “A Morgan County sheriff's posse jumped us just south of the river. Ralph's dead. A sonofabitch gave him a double load of buckshot. My horse played out about four miles off, down in the flats, and I had to leave him in a gully.”