"You mean, the main purpose of this drive was to shoot those guns?"
"That was one. I had others."
"I want to go home," she said. "Now."
"If you wish. Here."
He gave Gillom the pint bottle. Gillom winked at him, grinned at his mother, and shoved it in his jacket.
Bond Rogers' fingers worked the wool of her shawl in frustration. Striding to the phaeton, she opened the rear door herself, seated herself. Books joined her. Gillom untied the team and climbed aboard. Instead of taking the reins, however, he stepped up and sat facing his passengers on the top of the front seat. Just then the gray sky above them was slit by a knife of blue, and such was the position of the sun behind the ceiling of cloud that the vehicle and its occupants were encompassed by light. It was a phenomenon.
Gillom gazed at the gun man as does a pup its master. "Mr. Books, how many men have you killed?"
"Gillom, you have no right to ask that," his mother rebuked.
Books considered his questioner. "I disremember," he said.
"How could you kill so many?"
"Gillom!"
"Everybody has laws he lives by, I expect. I have mine as well."
"What laws?"
Bond Rogers was dismayed. Yet she waited, evidently as curious as her son.
"I will not be laid a hand on. I will not be wronged. I will not stand for an insult. I don't do these things to others. I require the same from them."
To untangle his tongue, Gillom made a face. "What I meant was, how could you get into so many fights and always come out on top? I tied you."
"I had to," said Books. "It isn't being fast, it is whether or not you're willing. The difference is, when it comes down to it, most men are not willing. I found that out early. They will blink an eye, or take a breath, before they pull a trigger. I won't."
As miraculously as the sky had opened, it was sealed, and the three sat once more in chill and shade. A wind mourned through the dry leaves of the cottonwoods. The team stomped, restive.
"Do you regret the life you've lived, Mr. Books?" the woman asked.
He looked a hole through Gillom. "I regret I quit school too soon. And frittered away my young years in bad company. At that age, I was too big for my britches."
"I was thinking of your victims."
"Mrs. Rogers, I have never killed a good man."
"How do you know? It's the Lord who should judge, surely, not weak, mortal creatures like us."
Books lay back against the leather. He seemed weary. "From my observation, ma'am, the Lord has not made a very damned good job of it. Let me put an individual at the business end of a gun and I will judge as well as He can."
That evening he perused his newspaper. He noted two items in particular, the first in the humor column:
"Last night, when I accepted Harry" said Miss Stockson Bonds, who was suspicious as well as homely, "he kissed me on the forehead."
"The idea!" exclaimed Miss Pepprey.
"I wonder why he didn't kiss me on the lips," said Miss Stockson Bonds. "Oh, horrors! Probably he had been drinking!"
"Very likely," said Miss Pepprey. "That is, if he proposed to you."
The drive into the valley and the tensions between mother, son, and himself, strung as taut between the three as telephone wires, had worn him to the bone. Pain made the paper rustle in his fingers. He had had to take two doses of laudanum since their return, and he could wait no longer for another. He took a spoonful.
The second item was an advertisement:
Yes, August Flower has the largest sale of any medicine in the civilized world. Your mothers and grandmothers never thought of using anything else for Indigestion or Biliousness, Doctors were scarce, and they seldom heard of Appendicitis, Nervous Prostration or Heart Failure. They used August Flower to clean out the system and stop fermentation of undigested food, regulate the action of the liver, and stimulate the nerves, and that is all they took when feeling dull and bad with headaches and other aches. You only need a few doses of Green's August Flower, in liquid form, to make you satisfied that there is nothing seriously the matter with you!
He stripped to his longjohns, used the slop-jar, opened the windows, pulled out the lamp, and got into bed, pearl-handled Remington under the covers, black under his pillow.
Pain woke him at one o'clock. The analgesic effect of the laudanum was of shorter duration now. He had another spoonful, and slept again.
He woke again just after four in the morning. This was a new agony. It was as though two iron screws were being rotated inch by inch into his pelvic region, laterally, from hip to hip, and upward, from genitals to navel. In too much haste for the spoon, he tilted the bottle. Pressure on his bladder would have roused him in any event. Taking the slop-jar from under the bed, he squatted over it and waited for relief. Frequently, such was the state of his plumbing, he had to wait three or four minutes to achieve flow.
He closed his eyes, conjecturing drowsily whether or not he had made a mistake after all, allowing Gillom Rogers to target-practice with one of the guns the day before. At a certain age, boys fell in love with firearms more readily than with girls. Some of them never recovered.
He opened his eyes. They sent to his brain the impression of a shadow upon the lace curtain of the window at the south. His brain resisted the impression. It was four in the morning. The moon would have declined. He squinted.
The shadow moved.
Books did likewise.
Deliberately, without waste motion, and soundlessly, he lifted the slop-jar to a place between the library table and the armchair, out of the way.
Kneeling by the bed, he bunched the sheet and blankets lengthwise and eased the black-handled pistol from beneath the pillow.
As he let himself down by the bed onto his back, one hand on the frame under the mattress, gun in the other, he became conscious of a second shadow, this one in the curtain folds of the western window. So there were two of them.
He crabbed himself under the bed—not at the center, under the bunched covers, but at the side. The fingers of his left hand clenched the frame.
The curtains at the south window were parted by the head and shoulders of a man. He hesitated, adjusting his vision.
Extending his arm, the intruder fired four rounds into what resembled a sleeping figure in the center of the bed. After the last he climbed rapidly over the sill into the room.
Simultaneously, there was a gunflash through the west window and, having fired, the second assailant propelled himself through it with such awkward force that he tore the curtain from the wall.
Standing over the bed, the first man let go a fifth, an insurance, round into the bunched covers.
In close confines, the reports were like detonations. The floor of the room seemed to heave. The walls of the room hurled thunder at each other. Six rounds had been fired within twenty seconds, five by the man who had entered through the south window, one by the man through the west. Books had counted.
Using his left arm, levering his upper body into the open like a reptile striking from a crevice, he fired twice at the man to his left, the west, heard the smack of lead into flesh, then recoiled below.
The man grunted, fell backward, shrouded in lace, crashing against the washbowl to the floor.
Still crouched over the bed, the first intruder fired at Books's gunflash, and the bullet splintered a corner of the library table.
Instantly, levering himself even with the upper edge of the mattress, Books fired once at him. He staggered backward to the wall, dropped his empty weapon.
"Don't kill me, Books, oh Christ don't kill me!" he screamed. "I'm shot out!"
Books came cautiously to his knees.