Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) Read Free

a few mouthfuls of antelope bush or bunchgrass and a hatful of water, and he’d be off and going again.
    All the time I kept thinking what would happen when we fetched up to Heseltine and them. There was nothing behind me that made me fit to buck the likes of them. I said as much.
    “You can be as tough as you’re of a mind to be, son. I’ve watched you, boy. I’ve watched you work and seen you ride the rough string, and you’ve got all any man has got. I’ve seen you handle that gun, too, and you’re good, boy, mighty good. I know nothing about Heseltine, but there’s nothing in Sites or Reese that need worry you.”
    Pa had never said a word of praise to me that I could recall. Nor had I any idea he’d seen me practicing with a gun. But he had to be wrong. I’d never fought with any man, with either knuckle or gun.
    Heseltine was a hard man. I won’t deny the clothes he wore added to it. There was a swagger about him. My clothes were nothing. I’d never owned a store-bought suit. I had a shirt my shoulders were beginning to split, and I’d outgrown my jeans two summers ago. My boots were down-at-heel.
    The wind was raw and cold on the high plains. Hunching our shoulders, we pushed against it, riding a land that offered us nothing but prairie and sky.
    We had only their tracks to guide us, and the anger that grew more terrible as the hours drew on. Pa sat up in his saddle and made no sound. His cheeks hollowed down and his eyes sank back into his skull, but the light in them scared me. If I was Bob Heseltine I’d be a worried man.
    “You’ve got the makin’s, Edwin,” he said suddenly. “You’ll make big tracks on the land. There was a Texas Ranger once who said there was no stoppin’ a man who knew he was in the right and kept a-comin’.”
    Big tracks on the land. They were words he used of few men, only such as Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, Goodnight, and Slaughter.
    Pa began to speak of them, telling me stories of the Goodnight-Loving Trail, of mountain men, trail drivers, and Texas Rangers. Of ancestors of ours who fought with the Green Mountain Boys, of Decatur and Andy Jackson, and all sorts of people and things I’d never guessed he knew of. Alongside of some of those men, Bob Heseltine didn’t sound like much; all the stories I’d heard of him began to sound like a man hollering into an empty rain barrel—the sound coming back, but nothing there.
    Cold, spitting rain began to fall, the tracks grew faint. From time to time we’d find a hoof-print, the stub of a cigarette, or some small thing to mark their passing.
    Pa’s leg looked awful. It was swollen around the splint, but he wouldn’t let me touch it. He’d taken his knife and slit his pants-leg to ease the pressure, and toward nightfall he asked me to split his boot. His gasp of relief when I done it told me how awful the pain had been before.
    When I got back into the saddle it came over me all of a sudden that pa wasn’t going to make it.
    I knew then that he knew it, too. He was just hanging on, hoping we’d come up with them whilst he could stand beside me at the showdown. He would get back the money he’d been trusted with, and he could leave me fixed for the future.
    That was it. I knew what he was thinking, and why. He was thinking of the two things that meant most to him. His given word, and me.
    Was I worth it? Was I really worth all that? Was I worth any part of the hard work and suffering pa had gone through?
    Was I?
    Chapter 2
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    A MOMENT THERE I sat very still…what
would
I do?
    There had always been pa. Somehow I’d never had to worry because he was always there, telling me what to do. Time to time he got my dander up and I’d growl around for a few days, or I’d ride off to town to talk to Doc or the Kid, but when I got around to riding home, pa was always there.
    Come to think of it, he had never held it up to me.
    Inside me there was a horrible, sinking feeling. Without pa, what was there? I’d be alone.
    So