Laurin's face was cameo-soft and pale in the lamplight, and that was the way I remembered it.
“Take care of yourself, Tall. Don't ... let anything happen.”
“Don't worry. There's nothing to worry about.”
“Will I hear from you?”
“Sure. Anyway, I'll be back before you know it.”
Ray Novak was sitting his horse impassively. Nothing showed on his face, but I could guess at what was happening inside him. All the time we had been here, Laurin hadn't even looked at him. Only when we reined our horses around to leave did she say:
“Good-by, Ray.”
And he said, “Good-by, Laurin.” And we rode out of the yard. I looked back once and she was still standing there by the steps, pale and beautiful in the flickering light from the oil lamp, and I realized what a lucky guy I really was. I could even afford to feel sorry for Ray Novak.
We rode east for what must have been two hours. I figured the Yankees would be so lost by now that they would be lucky to find their way home. And, as we put distance between us and John's City, I did some thinking about Ray Novak, trying to figure out what had got into him back there at Daggert's Road.
I added together all the things I knew about him and was a little surprised when it didn't come to much. The Novak ranch had been next to ours for as long as I could remember, and I had known him all that time, or thought I had known him. We had gone to Professor Bigloe's Academy together—a hell of a fancy name, I thought, for a school that held classes three times a week in the smelly parlor of Ma Simpson's boarding house, but it was the only school anywhere near John's City, and it was considered quite the thing. They said Old Man Bigloe had been a professor at the University of Virginia before they kicked him out for drunkenness. He always kept a bottle in the inside breast pocket of his frock coat, and he couldn't get through a spelling lesson without stepping back to Ma Simpson's kitchen three or four times to take a nip. Maybe he had had a good brain once, but it was
Anyway, he managed to get most of us through four steps of arithmetic and some spelling and history. The history and geography came together in the same class and it was the only class that Old Man Bigloe really liked. He would get to talking about Italy, and then Rome, and finally he'd get down to Caesar and he wouldn't give a damn if you threw spit balls or not. He was a thin man with a perpetual stoop to his shoulders, and sometimes he would go for two weeks without shaving. He always got a funny look in his eyes when he got to talking about Rome and those places, and it was generally agreed that he was crazy. During classes, Ma Simpson would always sit, fat and watchful, in one corner of the parlor, peeling potatoes or paring apples. She always arranged to have a murderous-looking butcher knife in her hands, just in case Old Man Bigloe had a “spell” and tried to kill somebody. But he never did.
So that was Professor Bigloe's Academy. Professor Bigloe's Academy for Learning and Culture, if you want the whole name. We went there three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the boys riding in on horseback. There was a lot of hell raised, and a lot of fights; but now that I came to think of it, Ray Novak hadn't figured in any of them.
Maybe it was because of his size. He was a year or two older than most of us, and big for his age anyway. But then Criss Bagley had been bigger than any of us, and that hadn't kept him out of fights. I thought about that and finally had to admit that there was something about Ray Novak—but I didn't know what—that made you think twice before starting anything with him. He always had that quiet, sober look, even as a kid, and he didn't go in much for horseplay, as most of us did. He came to Old Man Bigloe's academy for a curious reason, it seemed to the rest of us. To learn.
And, too, Ray's pa was the town marshal, and that made him something a little different. His pa had taught him everything there was to know about guns and shooting, and he was the only boy around John's City who could throw a tin can in the air and put two .44 bullets through it before it hit the ground. I only saw him do it once, but he did it so easily and perfectly that I knew it was no accident.
I don't think I ever liked Ray Novak much after that, although I had never thought about it until now. I remember practicing with Pa's old .44, the one I was wearing now, until my thumb was raw from pulling the hammer back, but one bullet in the can was the best I could do. I think that hit me harder than anything. I didn't mind it much when Ray would make one of his occasional rides over to the Bannerman ranch—trying to act as if he was just out looking for strays, and just happened to be on that part of the range. I knew that Laurin Bannerman was the real reason for his drifting off the home range. But I also knew that he was too bashful to do anything about it, except gawk. And, anyway, Laurin was mine.
Which was fine, but it didn't tell me the reason for that scared look on Ray Novak's face back there at the arroyo, while the cavalry was pounding by.
The sky in the east began to pale and we pulled our horses up to let them blow. Ray dropped down from his saddle and stretched, and I did the same. The morning was cool, and sharp with the early-spring smell of green things. I began to think of bacon, and coffee, and fresh-cooked cornbread.
“I figure we've got about another hour of riding time,” Ray said. “We'll have to start looking for a place to bed down before long.”
I said, “We'll ride until we find a place.”
But Ray shook his head in that sober, solemn way of his. “I don't want to run into any more cavalry or police. Not in the daylight. We're in enough trouble as it is.”
I asked a question then, one I had been remembering about: “Are you afraid of trouble?”
He looked at me and answered in one word: “Yes.”
Then, after thinking a moment, he went on, “I don't like this running. If we run into the state police and they recognize us there'll be a fight, and almost always when there's a fight, somebody doesn't walk away from it. That's the kind of trouble I'm afraid of. We're on the wrong side of the law.”
“What law?” I said. “The Davis police? The Yankee soldiers, and the carpetbaggers, and scalawags, and bureau agents? If that's the law, I'm just as glad to be on the other side.”
But he kept shaking his head. “There has to be law.”
He was a nut on the subject. The law was all he knew, I guess. He had lived it, talked it, breathed it, ever
