“You got him?”
Parker nodded.
“He’s dead?”
“No, not dead.”
Hub’s eyes puckered a little. They held to Parker’s face for a long time without moving. The silence drew out to its maximum limit.
Hub gently nodded. “Yeah,” he softly said. “Yeah, Park, I know.”
Parker turned, saw Amy watching him, too, and said: “I don’t know what made me do it. I held low at the last minute. I put two slugs into him…one in each shoulder. I was holding on his eyes before that…right between them.” He looked and acted disappointed in himself; the memory of his murdered brother reproached him for that poorly done job. All the sustaining drive was gone out of him. There was no sense of triumph, no sense of satisfaction at all. “I wanted to kill him, but I didn’t.”
“I’ve been there,” murmured Hub. “It’s like an invisible hand comes at the last second and pushes the barrel down. Park, let me tell you something. No man ever lived to regret not killing another man when he had the chance, but the West’s full of men who live constantly with regrets about killing other men. Listen to me. You did just right. You did what a real man would’ve done…not a trigger-happy man.”
Amy put her hand upon Parker’s arm. “Hub’s right. Ever since I left you and returned to this room, we’ve been talking. He’s right, Parker. You’ll know that’s so when you’re yourself again.” Her fingers tightened on his arm, holding him. “I wanted you to come back. I didn’t even care how you got Swindin. I just wanted you back again.” Her fingers loosened, fell away; her smoky eyes were tenderly on him. “I was being a woman, thinking like that, a female woman, not the cold, logical woman you accused me of being over in Hub’s office. I guess it took a certain kind of man to make me become that kind of a woman.”
Parker’s eyes flickered when the door opened behind him. Lew Morgan strode in, still wet and disheveled. He looked at those solemn faces and had the good sense to keep quiet.
Parker stepped past Lew. He walked out of the room, left the door ajar, and passed on down the hall. Amy straightened up off the wall, turning toward the door.
“Close it,” Hub said to Lew. Morgan, not immediately comprehending, did not move until Amy was part way along. Then, with sudden understanding, he caught her, drew her back inside, and pushed at the door.
Hub said: “Amy, let him go. He’s got to find the answer.”
“Will he come back, Hub?”
“He’ll come back. They always come back. Some take longer than others, but they always return. It’s not easy…after the last gunshot echo has died…to live with yourself. But with him it’s maybe even harder. He didn’t kill when he thought he should have. He’s going out by his brother’s grave, I think, to ask himself over and over…‘Why, why did I fire low?’” Hub paused to breathe shallowly, then he said: “If there’s an answer anywhere for him, it’ll be out there. Have patience, Amy. He’ll come back to you.”
Outside, where that lowering hot sun was staining the Laramie Plains blood-red, there was a residual sound of diminishing excitement in town. It rose up to Hub Wheaton’s roadside window and for a long while was the only sound in that room.
About the Author
Lauran Paine who, under his own name and various pseudonyms has written over 1,000 books, was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His family moved to California when he was at a young age and his apprenticeship as a Western writer came about through the years he spent in the livestock trade, rodeos, and even motion pictures where he served as an extra because of his expert horsemanship in several films starring movie cowboy Johnny Mack Brown. In the late 1930s, Paine trapped wild horses in northern Arizona and even, for a time, worked as a professional father. Paine came to know the Old West through the eyes of many who had been born in the previous century, and he learned that Western life had been very different from the way it was portrayed on the screen. “I knew men who had killed other men,” he later recalled. “But they were the exceptions. Prior to and during the Depression, people were just too busy eking out an existence to indulge in Saturday-night brawls.” He served in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War and began writing for Western pulp magazines following his discharge. It is interesting to note that all of his earliest novels (written under his own name and the pseudonym Mark Carrel) were published in the British market and he soon had as strong a following in that country as in the United States. Paine’s Western fiction is characterized by strong plots, authenticity, an apparently effortless ability to construct situation and character, and a preference for building his stories upon a solid foundation of historical fact. Adobe Empire (1956), one of his best novels, is a fictionalized account of the last twenty years in the life of trader William Bent and, in an off-trail way, has a melancholy, bittersweet texture that is not easily forgotten. In later novels like The White Bird and Cache Cañon, he showed that the special magic and power of his stories and characters had only matured along with his basic themes of changing times, changing attitudes, learning from experience, respecting Nature, and the yearning for a simpler, more moderate way of life.
Other Books by Lauran Paine:
GUNMAN
FEUD ON THE MESA
HOLDING THE ACE CARD
THE DARK TRAIL
BORDER TOWN
OPEN RANGE
GUNS IN THE DESERT
GATHERING STORM
NIGHT OF THE COMANCHEROS
GUNS IN OREGON
RAIN VALLEY
Copyright
A LEISURE BOOK®
October 2009
Published by special arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency.
Copyright © 2006 by Mona Paine
“Vermilion Kid” first appeared in Double-Action Western Action (9/55). Copyright © 1955 by Columbia Publications, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Lauran Paine. Copyright © 2006 by Mona Paine for restored material.
“Boothill’s Ferryman” first appeared in Double-Action Western Action (4/57). Copyright © 1957 by Columbia Publications, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1985 by Lauran Paine. Copyright © 2006 by Mona Paine for restored material.