He opened his eyes, saw the horseman coming down the trail…a horseman who had topped the swale while he had been day dreaming of the house and cottonwoods.
Squinting his eyes against the sun, Benton recognized the man. Jake Rollins, who rode for Dan Watson’s Anchor brand. And remembered, even as he recognized him, that he did not like Jake Rollins.
Rollins urged his big black horse to one side of the trail and stopped. Benton pulled in the buckskin.
“Howdy, Jake,” he said.
Rollins stared, eyes narrowing.
“You spooked me for a minute, Ned,” said Rollins. “Didn’t look for you…”
“The war’s over,” Benton told him. “You must have heard.”
“Sure. Sure I heard, all right, but…” He hesitated, then blurted it out. “But we heard that you was dead.”
Benton shook his head. “Close to it a dozen times, but they never did quite get me.”
Rollins laughed, a nasty laugh that dribbled through his teeth. “Them Yanks are damn poor shots.”
It isn’t funny, Benton thought. Nothing to make a joke of. Not after a man has seen some of the things I have.
“They aren’t poor shots,” Benton told him. “They’re plain damn fools for fighting. Hard to lick.”
He hesitated, staring across the miles of waving grass. “In fact, we didn’t lick them.”
“Folks will be glad to see you home,” Rollins told him, fidgeting in the saddle.
“I’ll be glad to see them, too,” Benton replied soberly.
And he was thinking: I don’t like this man. Never liked him for his dirty mouth and the squinted, squeezed look about him. But it’s good to see him. Good to see someone from home. Good to hear him talk familiarly about the folks one knows.
Rollins lifted the reins as a signal and the horse started forward.
“I’ll be seeing you,” said Rollins.
Benton touched the buckskin with a spur and even as he did the warning hit him straight between the shoulder blades…the little dancing feet that tapped out danger. The signal that he’d known in battle, as if there were something beyond eyes and ears to guard a man and warn him.
Twisting swiftly in the saddle, he was half out of it even before he saw the gun clutched in Rollins’ hand and the hard, blank face that had turned to ice and granite beneath Rollins’ broad-brimmed hat.
The spur on Benton’s left boot raked viciously across the buckskin’s flank as he pulled it from the stirrup and the horse reared in fright and anger, hoofs clawing empty air, bit chains rattling as he shook his head.
The gun in Rollins’ hand spoke with sudden hate and Benton felt the buckskin jerk under the impact of the bullet. Then his feet were touching ground and he was dancing away to give the horse room to fall while his hands swung for his sixguns.
Rollins’ guns hammered again, but his horse was dancing and the slug went wild, hissing ankle high through the waving grass.
For an instant the ice-hard face of the mounted man melted into fear and within that instant Benton’s right gun bucked against his wrist.
Rollins’ horse leaped in sudden fright and Rollins was a rag doll tied to the saddle, flapping and jerking to the movement of the horse…a wobbling, beaten, spineless rag doll that clawed feebly at the saddle horn while crimson stained his bright blue shirt.
Rollins slumped and slid and the horse went mad. Leaping forward, Benton seized the dragging reins, swung his weight against its head while it fought and shied and kicked at the dragging, bumping thing that clung to the off-side stirrup.
Still hanging tightly to the reins, Benton worked his way around until he could seize the stirrup and free the boot that was wedged within it. The horse calmed down, stood nervously, snorting and suspicious.
Rollins lay sprawled grotesquely in the trampled grass. Benton knew he was dead. Death, he told himself, staring at the body, has a limpness all its own, a certain impersonality about it that is unmistakable.
Slowly, he led Rollins’ horse back to the trail. His own horse lay there, dead, shot squarely through the throat where it had caught the bullet when it reared.
Benton stood staring at it.
A hell of a way, he thought, a hell of a way to be welcomed home.
Benton pulled up the big black horse on top of the rise that dipped down to the ranch buildings and sat looking at them, saw that they were old and dingy and very quiet. Once they had seemed large and bright and full of life, but that might have been, he told himself, because then he had not seen anything with which he might compare them. Like the plantations along the Mississippi or the neat, trim farms of the Pennsylvania countryside or the mansions that looked across Virginia rivers.
A thin trickle of smoke came up from the kitchen chimney and that was the only sign of life. No one stirred in the little yard, no one moved about the barn. There was no sound, no movement. Only the lazy smoke against the setting sun.
Benton urged the black horse forward, moved slowly down the hill.
No one came out on the porch to greet him. There was no Rover bounding around a corner to warn him off the place. There was no call from the bunkhouse, no whooping from the barn.
Once Benton tried to yell himself, but the sound dried in his throat and his tongue rebelled and he rode on silently.
One dreary rooster looked up from his scratching as he reached the hitching post, stared at him for a moment with a jaundiced eye that glared from a tilted head, then went back to scratching.
Slowly, Benton climbed the rickety steps that led to the porch, reached for the front door knob, then hesitated. For a moment he stood, unmoving…at last lifted his fist to knock.
The knocking echoed hollowly in the house beyond the door and he knocked again. Slow footsteps came across the floor inside and the door swung open.
A man stood there…an old man, older than Benton had remembered him, older than he had ever thought he’d look
“Pa!” said Benton.
For a long instant the old man stood there in the door, staring at him, as if he might not recognize him. Then one hand came out and clutched Benton’s arm, clutched it with a bony, firm and possessive grip.
“Ned!” the old man said. “My boy! My boy!”
He pulled him in across the threshold, shut the door behind them, shutting out the empty yard and silent barn, the scratching rooster and the rickety steps that led up the slumping porch.
Benton reached out an arm across the old man’s shoulders, hugged him close for a fleeting moment. How small, he thought, how stringy and how boney…like an old cow pony, all whanghide and guts.
His father’s voice was small, just this side of a whisper.
“We heard that you got killed, Ned.”
“Didn’t touch me,” Benton told him. “Where’s Ma?”
“Your ma is sick, Ned.”
“And Rover? He didn’t come to meet me.”
“Rover’s dead,” said his father. “Rattler got him. Wasn’t so spry no more and he couldn’t jump so quick.”
Silently, side by side, walking softly in the darkening house, they made their way to the bedroom door, where the old man stepped aside to let his son go ahead.
Benton halted just inside the door, staring with eyes that suddenly were dim at the white-haired woman propped up on the pillows.
Her voice came to him across the room, small and quavery, but with some of the old sweetness that he remembered.
“Ned! We heard…”
He strode swiftly forward, dropped on his knees beside the bed.
“Yes, I know,” he told her. “But it was wrong. Lots of stories like that and a lot of them are wrong.”