“Answer me, Joe! Where is she? Where is Laurin?”
“Your place,” he managed at last. “Your place... with your ma.”
I didn't stop to wonder what Laurin would be doing at our ranch. I was too relieved to wonder about anything then. Joe started to stand up again and I pushed him down.
“Stay where you are,” I said. “I'll get you some water.”
I found a bucket of water and a dipper and a crock bowl on the kitchen washstand. Then I got some dish towels out of the cupboard and brought the whole business over and put it on the kitchen table. I wet the towel and wiped some of the blood off his face. I squeezed some water over his head and cleaned a deep scalp wound behind his ear. That was about all I could do for him. He didn't look much better after I had finished, but he seemed to feel better.
I gave him a drink out of the dipper and said, “Can you talk now?”
He touched his mouth gently, then his eyes and nose. “Yes,” he said. “I guess I can talk.”
“What happened to you?” I asked. “What happened out there?” I motioned toward the empty corrals and barns and bunkhouse out in the ranch yard.
“The police,” he said. “The goddamned state police. They came here yesterday morning wanting to know where you were. When we didn't tell them, they ran off all the livestock—that's where the hands are, looking for the cattle. They threatened to burn the place if we didn't tell them. They're mad. Crazy mad. That bluebelly that Ray gave the beating to was the governor's nephew, or cousin, or something, and all hell's broke loose in John's City. They're out to get every man that ever said a word against the carpetbag rule. They want you especially bad, I guess.”
“Why do they want me so bad? Hell, I wasn't the one that hit the governor's kinfolks.”
“Because you're the only one that got away from them,” Joe Bannerman said. “Ray Novak came back and gave himself up. But they're not satisfied. They got to thinking about that fight you had a while back. They won't be satisfied until they've got you on the work gang, right alongside of Ray Novak.”
So Ray Novak had come back. Gave himself up to carpetbag law. It didn't surprise me the way it should have. Maybe I knew all along that sooner or later all of that law-and-order his old man had pounded into him would come to the top. Well, that was all right with me. He could put in his time on the work gang if he wanted to, but not me. Not while I had two guns to fight with.
Joe Bannerman was studying me quietly, through those purple slits of eyes. Something was going on in that mind of his, but I couldn't make it out at first. There was something about it that made me uneasy.
“The police,” I said, “they came back today to have another go at finding out where I'd gone. Is that how you got that face?”
He nodded and looked away. It hit me then, and I knew what it was about his eyes that worried me. For some crazy reason, Joe Bannerman was feeling sorry for me. That wasn't like him. Refusing to give information to the bluebellies was different—any honest rancher would have done the same thing—but that look of sympathy—I hadn't been ready for that. Not from Joe Bannerman.
He said, “Tall, have you been home yet?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I wanted to make sure that Laurin was all right.”
He looked at his hands as if there was something very special about them. As if he had never seen another pair just like them before.
“I thought maybe you knew,” he said. “I figured maybe that was the reason you came back.”
I looked at him. “You thought I knew what?”
“About your pa.”
“Goddammit, Joe, can't you come out and tell something straight, without breaking it into a hundred pieces? What about Pa?”
Then he lifted his head and he must have looked at me for a full minute before he finally answered.
“Tall, your pa's dead.”
I don't know how long I stood there staring at him, wanting to curse him for a lousy liar, and all the time knowing that he was telling the truth. That was the answer to the feeling I'd had. It all made sense now. Pa, a part of me, had died.
Somehow I got out of the house. I remember Joe Bannerman saying, “Tall, be careful. There's cavalry and police everywhere.”
I punished Red unmercifully going across the open range southeast toward our place. I rode like a crazy man. The sensible part of my brain told me that there was no use taking it out on Red. It wasn't his fault. If it was anybody's fault, it was my own. But the burning part of my brain wanted to hit back and hurt something, as Pa had been hurt, and Red was the only thing at hand.
But all the wildness went away the minute our ranch house came into sight, and there was nothing left but emptiness and ache. There were several buggies and hacks of one kind or another sitting in front of the house, and solemn, silent men stood around in little clusters near the front porch. I swung Red around to come in the back way, and the men didn't see me.
I didn't see any police. All the men were ranchers, friends of Pa's. The womenfolk, I knew, would be inside with Ma. As I pulled Red into the ranch yard, Bucky Stow, one of our hands, came out of the bunkhouse. When he saw who it was, he hurried toward me in that rolling, awkward gait that horsemen always have when they're on the ground.
“Tall, for Christ's sake,” he said, “you oughtn't to come here. The damn bluebellies are riled up enough as it is.”
I dropped heavily from the saddle and put the reins in his hands. I noticed then that I had brought blood along Red's glossy ribs where I had raked him hard with my spur rowels, and for some crazy reason that made me almost as sick as finding out about Pa. Pa had loved that horse.
But I slapped him gently on the rump and he seemed to understand. I said, “Give him some grain, Bucky. All he wants.”
“Tall, you're not going to stay here, are you?”
I left him standing there and headed toward the house. I went into the kitchen where two ranch wives were rattling pots and pans on the kitchen stove. They looked up startled, as I came in. I didn't notice who they were. I went straight on through the room and into the parlor where the others were.
The minute I stepped into the room everything got dead quiet. Ma was sitting dry-eyed in a rocker, staring at nothing in particular. Laurin was standing beside her with a coffee pot in one hand, holding it out from her as if she was about to pour, but there was no cup. She stared at me for a moment. Then, without a word, she began getting the other women out of the room.
In a minute the room was empty, except for just me and Ma. I don't believe it was until then that she realized that I was there. I walked over to her, not knowing what to do or say. When at last she looked up and saw me, I dropped down and put my head in her lap the way I used to do when I was a small boy. And I think I cried.
One of us must have said something after that, but I don't remember. After a while one of the ranch wives, well meaning, came in from the kitchen and said timidly: