Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) Read Free Page A

far as I knew, I had no kinfolk anywheres at all, and the friends I had were pa’s friends.
    “Your ma,” he said suddenly, “was a fine woman. I wish you could have knowed her. Educated, too. She came of good folks, and she had book learnin’.
    “Her family was New England Irish…lace-curtain Irish. Time was I mentioned her family name to an Irishman and he says hers was an old family, born of the old chiefs of Ireland going back to before the Danes came.”
    Ma died when I was three and I remembered her only as somebody warm and wonderful who held me close and made much of me when I was hurt or feeling bad. She’d been a pretty woman. Pa said it, and that much I remembered. She died of a fever on Cache Creek when we was traveling to Texas.

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    I T WAS SUNDOWN when we saw the fire, and it was far off. The country was no longer level, but broken into ravines, some of them choked with brush.
    We forked out our rifles and closed in, but before we got within hailing distance we saw there were a couple of wagons and off to one side some mules picketed. It was a camp of buffalo hunters.
    One man taken one look at pa and said, “Mister, you better let me help you off that horse.”
    “My son will do it,” pa said, and I helped him down, but as my hands took his weight I felt him tremble, and when I got him stretched out alongside the fire I looked into his eyes and saw that he was dying.
    There was choking fear in me. I glanced around at their faces. “Is anybody here a doctor? Pa’s in bad shape.”
    One man was already rolling his sleeves. “I ain’t no saw-bones, but I’ll see what I can do.”
    When he cut away pa’s pants-leg I couldn’t stand to look. The jagged end of the bone had come through the flesh and the wound looked ugly.
    That man who’d said he was no doctor worked fast and he seemed to know exactly what to do.
    Another man handed me a cup. “You’re done up, boy. Have some coffee.”
    Whilst the man worked on pa and I ate and drank, I told them our story.
    “They were here,” one of them said. “They pulled in last night and left shy of daylight. You aren’t about to catch them.”
    “I got to. Pa taken them cows up the trail on trust, and the folks who trusted their cattle to him need their money.”
    There was a lean, well-set man with a reddish mustache who sat back from the fire.
    He looked over at me. “My friend, you’d have to tie into three men, and they’d be ready for you.”
    “Yes, sir,” I said, “but they’ve got our money. I got to get it back.”
    “Do you know those men?”
    So I explained about Doc and Reese and Heseltine, and how pa and me had words and I’d gone off and left him, and had I been there I could have caught that horse. Then I told about facing the three of them and backing down.
    “You did right.” The big bearded man who seemed to be the head man spoke emphatically. “I didn’t cotton to that outfit myself. You’d have had no chance with the three of them…and your pa was waiting, his leg broken.”
    The man who had been treating pa walked over to me, rolling down his sleeves. “You’d better go sit by him, and you’d better stay with him. I think he’d like it.”
    Pa was resting quiet when I got to him. I could smell whiskey, and I guessed they had given it to him to ease the pain.
    He caught hold of my hand. “Son, I never been much of a father. If your mother had lived I’d have done better. She had a feeling for things I never rightly had. Ever since your ma died I been trying to think out what she would have had me do with you. My own father was killed in a river accident when I was four.”
    “You done all right, pa. I just ain’t much account.”
    “No, you’re a good boy. You always were. I don’t hold it against you that you looked up to Doc Sites and Kid Reese. They must have seemed a lot more exciting than me.”
    “They couldn’t hold a candle to you. Not even in their best days.”
    “I’d seen their like