The Big Sky Read Free Page A

his open jaw skewed over and his eyes rolling as he lay in the dirt. It was all right, too. It was what Mose had asked for. Mose was older than him, by two year anyway, and a sight too big for his breeches. A body could take so much and then, if he was a man, he didn't take any more, leastwise as long as he could hit back.
    He figured he might have done for Pap, too. It was a keen lick he'd fotched him. And, like with Mose, it was all right. It pleasured Pap to beat on somebody, especially when he was mean with liquor. It didn't seem like liquor acted on Pap the way it did on others. It didn't make him laugh and feel big. He just got meaner and meaner and his face screwed down like a crazy man's, and, when he came home, everybody better act like he was God Almighty or Pap would whop him. Like as not he would anyway, far as that went.
    Boone figured he hadn't done anything that a true man wasn't bound to do. A man couldn't look himself in the face if he let people make little of him. What if he did have some store liquor in him when he tackled Mose? It was still right, and it settled things man to man, like they ought to be settled. And still the Napiers had gone to law and put the high sheriff after him. And it would be like Pap to get the law on his side, being he couldn't do for himself. It wasn't fair, bringing in the sheriff, just because a body did what he had to. It wasn't right to set the law on a man, making him feel small and alone, making him run away. It wasn't right, all taking sides against one and the one not in the wrong.
    It was like people and things were all banded against him, the trail losing itself in the dark and the trees hunched close around him and the night dripping wet and maybe unfriendly eyes watching from it, laughing when he stumbled. It was enough to put a lonesome fright in the heart and a lump in the throat.
    Pap would know where to look for him. Dan would tell, if Pap pushed him. Dan knew as well as anybody that he'd strike for St. Louis, aiming to move into Injun country from there and so, maybe, to meet up with Uncle Zeb Calloway. Uncle Zeb was Ma's brother and had lit out ten years before to trap varmints in the west. He had fought with the Injuns and killed buffalo and made many a far journey into country where you mightn't see another man for a year, unless it was an Injun and you dropped to the ground and bellied up and leveled on him. That one time when Uncle Zeb came back to Kentucky for a visit, he wore buckskins that were black from grease and blood and camp fire, and he smelled of smoke and musk and liquor, and when he told about where he had been it was almost like a speechmaking. He spoke in a big voice and waved his arms and talked about being free like it was something you could heft. Pap sat around and drank and watched Uncle Zeb when he was talking, and as the drink took hold and his face got darker, he tried to make out that the west wasn't so much, after all, but Uncle Zeb looked at him, like you'd look at something too small to take notice of. And sometimes Uncle Zeb went quiet, looking away like he didn't see, and Dan put questions to him to get him started again.
 
    Daylight came slow and gloomy, but the rain had fallen off to a drizzle and the drizzle by and by dried up in the cold air. The sky was still gray, though, and low, and when Boone paused on a ridge to look back the distances were shut off by mist. He moved off the trail anyhow, now that day had come, and in a close grove of black oak unwrapped the hen and tore a leg-and-thigh off. It wasn't much more than a bite, hungry as he was, but when he had sucked the bones clean he wound the rag back around the rest of the hen and stuffed it in the sack and set about charging Old Sure Shot, the long-barreled Kentucky rifle that Pap had set such store by. Pap would hardly let a body look at it, he prided it that much. The feel of the smooth steel and dressed sugar wood was good to the hand.
    The loading done, Boone