Novel 1959 - The First Fast Draw (v5.0) Read Free Page A

you. We had a difficulty up to Boston. Shot a man.”
    “Needed it, I reckon. You always were a proud man, Bob Lee, but I never knew you to shoot too quick nor to kill a man who wasn’t asking for it.”
    We talked it over some, and they told me more about the country I’d come back to, and none of it looked very good for my plans. There was one thing they forgot to tell me, but I learned it soon enough: my worst enemy was back there, and he was a big man around the country. He was a Southern man but he was thick with carpetbaggers. I would never have believed it of him.
    Some time about then we all went to sleep. Bob Lee was right. Any carpetbagger who followed them into the swamps would be crazy. Both men were tired, like men are who have spent sleepless nights of running and riding, and if a man like Bob Lee could be on the dodge, with folks everywhere around, how could I hope to stick it out?
    Nobody talked much when we saddled up come daylight. I told them about the trail into the Sulphur Swamps. Unless you know it, I’ll tell you. That Sulphur is a might twisty stream, and there’s bayous running off from it and a good bit of swamp, and those days the thickets were bigger and came closer to the Sulphur. Only a little way south was Lake Caddo, and nobody knew much about the lake but the Caddos and me.
    We parted company at the Corners. “Better come with us, Cull,” Bob Lee advised. “You won’t find anything but trouble and knowing you like I think I do, you won’t stand still for it.”
    “I’m a man wants to sleep under his own roof.”
    “You fight shy of that widow woman. She’ll make you more trouble than all them Union soldiers!” Longley said, grinning.
    When they had dusted out of sight I turned that buckskin mule down the grass-grown lane. This was a mighty good mule and he could run the legs off most horses. Maybe he wasn’t so fast for a sprint but he could hold a pace that would kill most horses, and better than any watchdog at night.
    Longley mentioned a widow. With the war over this country must be crowded with widows. Far as that went, this here was a widow-making country, and leave out the war.
    No decent woman would be wanting to have any truck with me, and if one did it would surely come to a shooting matter with a father or brother. Cullen Baker was a known man, a trouble-hunter they used to say, and a man with a drive to kill, others said. They said, too, I was drunken, but I could give them the lie on that story. I’d little taste for strong drink, and when they thought me drunk it was only with fury.
    Besides, there’d be no time for widows. It would take all my time to get a crop in, to work and even get my seed back; by now the whole ranch might have grown up to crab grass.
    Drawing my Dragoon Colt I checked the loads—paid a man to be ready, although I was hoping never to use a gun again, except for wild game. Still, I’ve noticed a ready man is often left alone, and if it took that to have peace, then I should be ready, but it took no doing for me. I’d the habits of a lifetime behind me.
    Right there in a secret pocket back of my belt there was the margin, a .41-caliber twin-barreled derringer which I carried for insurance. It was my margin of safety. Time was, a hide-out gun had been useful, and such a time might again come to me. Could be I’d never use either gun again, but I was no man to draw my teeth before I knew what the beef was like.
    Turning the corner of the back lane along which I’d come, I drew up before the gate.
    There it was, then.
    Three years I’d waited to look upon it again, and the three years seemed like ten, or even fifteen. It seemed another lifetime, another world than this, and yet I was back. All was the same and yet nothing at all was the same.
    The yard, which had been hard-packed earth there at the back of the house, had grown up to weeds and grass. The house itself looked older than it was, weather-beaten, blistered, baked and warped by