Rogers Road, you silly son of a bitch,” Sloan said, closing in.
“Great. Maybe I ought to go claim it by bringing you in,” Tom said. He took a quick glance at the man as he approached, but he kept walking.
Tom had not set fire to the patch of woods, not the patch on Rogers Road, not any forest at all. There were dozens of men who hated Fitz-Blackwell, hated the killing of the oaks. They despised the removal of the livestock and the end of open range in the Zion community and elsewhere. Almost any man in the rural area could be guilty. He understood Sloan had no evidence against him. He was free of guilt, but he often wondered what good this was in such a crooked and fallen world.
When Tom placed his hand on the brass doorknob, he felt a shove to his shoulder, then a second push to his back almost simultaneously. He was nearly knocked off balance, his chest hitting the door, but he was able to spin around, and Sloan was the perfect distance from Tom’s right fist. He hit the man square in the nose with a solid blow, one sure and effective punch to the face, which made his nose butterfly into a crimson spectacle of smashed flesh.
“Don’t put your hands nowhere on me,” Tom said.
Sloan was stunned. He was as large as Marshal Brownlow, even a little taller, and stouter. Now he was holding his nose with his hat knocked off his head. He started backing up, crawfishing like a coward down the sidewalk.
Tom pursued him with his fists in front of his chest like a welterweight boxer. He slammed him with a right jab to the torso and then a left fist to the temple. Sloan went down, his knees buckling, and he looked to the sky as if watching a long line of shooting stars in the broad daylight.
So Tom stood his ground and saw Sloan pull to his knees and spit out a line of bloody phlegm. He watched the man almost a minute, trying to ascertain if there was any fight left in him. Sloan started staggering back to his Scout.
Thinking the threat was over, Tom went inside the store.
“Howdy, Hardin,” Jack Beam said.
“I’d like a hundred pound sack of heavy grain,” Tom said to the storekeeper. The place smelled of mothballs and fertilizer. His hands trembled.
Beam stood behind the counter. He wore a striped railroad engineer’s cap, overalls, and a starched long sleeve shirt. “All right,” he said, writing on a gray receipt pad. “You been doing okay, Hardin? I say, you look a bit flustered.”
“I was fine until recently.”
“Yeah. Why’s that?”
“I had to knock the fire out of Sloan Parnell on your front steps.”
“No kidding? I saw Parnell and some half-dressed girl out yonder earlier.” Beam looked up from his receipt pad.
“I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with him,” Tom said.
“He’s got that bad Parnell blood in him is all. They’re rich and inbred as a coop of speckled chickens. All of ’em is so damned scared somebody outside the family might steal their money. He’s just like his old daddy, P.T. ‘The Drunk’ Parnell, a trifling cur of a man, if you were to solicit my honest opinion. I hate like hell to see a Parnell come in here on account they’re always trying to beat me out of something I’ve got.”
“Well, that’s according to their nature.”
“That’s the Lord’s own truth. You think you’re going to have trouble with him when you go back to your truck?” Beam asked. He turned around and picked up a worn Fox double barrel shotgun from where it was leaned against the wall. He popped open the breech and checked the two sixteen gauge shells, the brass showing.
“I don’t think I’ll have any trouble. He’s probably long gone by now. I rattled him pretty good. Might have broken his nose.”
“I’d be pleased to run him off or call the law or something, but the law won’t do nothing.”
“No, not much around here.”
He leaned the shotgun against the wall again. “It’ll come to two and a quarter.”
Tom paid him in cash.
Beam called his helper.