The pistols were empty. Pappy had seen to that beforehand. If they had been loaded I would have died without ever knowing how. My mouth had suddenly gone dry. I swallowed to get my stomach out of my throat.
Pappy holstered one pistol and casually began to load the other. “I said it once before,” he said. “When it comes to guns, a man is never good enough. Now get your blanket roll together. We've stayed in one place too long already.”
That night it rained, but we moved anyway, because Pappy said we had already used more luck than Indian Territory allowed. That night it caught up with us.
First, we almost rode into a detail of cavalry and, later, a hunting party of Cheyennes that had strayed off the reservation. We pulled up in a thicket of scrub oak and waited for the Indians to pass. I looked at Pappy and his face was just a blur in the rain and darkness, and I swore at myself for not bringing a slicker when I left John's City.
Pappy said, “I don't like it. With Indians off the reservation, there's bound to be cavalry all over this part of the Territory. Two stray riders wouldn't have much of a chance getting to Kansas.”
I said, “The cattle trail can't be far from here. We can move in that direction, and if the cavalry sees us we can tell them we're drovers, looking for strays.”
Pappy gave a sudden shrug. He didn't think much of the idea, but, with cavalry and Indians on the other side of us, there wasn't anything else to do. Pappy didn't mention Buck Creyton, and neither did I. After the Indians had passed on in the darkness, behind a slanting gray sheet of rain, we began moving to the west.
I think I smelled coffee even before I heard the nervous bawling of the cattle. Steaming, soothing coffee to warm a man's insides, and Pappy and I both needed it. We pulled up on a rise and looked down at the flatland below that some outfit was using for bedground. A herd of what seemed to be a thousand or more cattle was milling restlessly, and above the beat of the rain we could hear the night watch crooning profanely.
But the thing that caught our attention was the coffee. We could see a fire going under a slant of canvas that we took to be the chuck wagon, and that was where the smell was coming from.
Pappy looked at me. “You ever see that outfit before?”
“I don't know. I can't see enough of it to tell.”
We were both thinking how good a hot cup of coffee would taste. We sat for a moment with rain in our face, rain plastering our clothing, rain running off our hats and slithering down our backs and filling our boots. Without a word, we started riding toward the fire.
As we circled the herd I heard one of the night herders croon, “Get on it there, you no-account sonofabitch,” to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” There were three or four men standing under the canvas where the coffee smell was coming from. Pappy and I left our horses beside the chuck wagon and ducked in under the canvas sheet.
“Can you spare a couple of cups of that?” Pappy-said to the cook, nodding at the big tin coffee pot.
The cook, a grizzled old man half asleep, grunted and got two tin cups and poured. The other men looked at us curiously, probably wondering where the hell we came from and where we left our slickers. I took a swallow of the scalding coffee, and another man ducked in under the canvas, cursing and shaking water from his oilskin rain hat. He looked at me and said:
“Well, I'll be damned.”
For a minute, I stopped breathing. The man was Bat Steuber, the remuda man I had met back at Red River Station. We had run onto the same outfit that Buck Creyton was working for.
Chapter 8
BAT STEUBER looked at us for a long minute, but I couldn't tell what he was thinking. Finally he turned to the other men and said, “The boss says, every man in the saddle that's supposed to be on night watch.”
Cursing, the men left one at a time, got on their horses, and rode toward the herd again. Bat got his coffee and came over to the edge of the canvas where Pappy and I had moved.
“Is this Pappy Garret?” he said to me.
“That's right.”
For a moment, he looked at Pappy with a mixture of awe and admiration. “I'm glad to know you, Pappy. I've heard about you.” Then he laughed abruptly. “As who hasn't?”
Pappy nodded, looking at me. Steuber's voice went down almost to a whisper as he turned to me again. “Kid, it looks like I got you in a mess of trouble without meaning to. He's after you now instead of Pappy. Me and my goddamned big mouth.”
“Who's after me?” I said.
“Buck Creyton.” Steuber wiped his face nervously. “Hell, kid, I wasn't trying to get you into trouble. I was just trying to get Buck cooled down. He wasn't worth a damn on the herd as long as that temper of his was boiling. Anyway, after you left that day Buck was hellbent on a shoot-out with Pappy here. And I said, 'Hell, Buck, what makes you think Pappy Garret killed your brother? It don't stand to reason. He wouldn't have no call to shoot Paul for nothing—and you know damn good and well that your brother wasn't going to pick a fight with a man like Pappy.'”
Steuber wiped his face again. “That was all I said,” he went on. “I remember Buck didn't say a word for a long time, and I could see him thinking about it, way at the back of those eyes of his. And finally he said, 'That goddamned punk kid.'”
I felt my insides freeze as I remembered those kill-crazy eyes of Buck Creyton's. Pappy didn't say anything. He didn't move.
I said, “Where's Creyton now?”
“Out with the herd somewhere.” Steuber made a helpless gesture. “Hell, kid, I'm sorry....”
“Ferget it,” I said. “If you see him, tell him the punk kid is down at the chuck wagon. Tell him if he wants to shoot off his mouth to do it to my face.”
I could feel Pappy stiffen. Bat Steuber's eyes flew wide and he searched around for something to say, but the words wouldn't come. After a minute he made that same helpless gesture again. “All right, kid, if that's the way you want it.” He ducked out into the rain.
Pappy said flatly, “Now that was a damn-fool thing to do.”
I said, “Maybe. But a showdown has got to come sometime, and it might as well be now. I should have told him that first day when he was gunning for you, but I guess I lost my guts for a minute.”
“You're not ready for a man like Creyton,” Pappy said. “Now get that red horse of yours and we'll ride toward Kansas.”
“And get taken by the cavalry?”
I looked at Pappy and his eyes were sober and sad. I said, “It's no good like this, Pappy. I appreciate what you've done for me, but you can't fight my fights for me. Remember what you said: 'A man does his own killing, and that's enough'? Well, this is between me and Buck Creyton. I don't want to go along for a month, or six months, or a year, looking over my shoulder every time I hear a sound and expecting Buck Creyton to be there. And sooner or later hewould be there, and maybe by that time I'd have lost my guts again.”