since he was old enough to know what a sheriff's star was. And he couldn't remember the time when his pa hadn't worn a star. Which was all right, as far as I was concerned —I'd never heard anything against Marshal Martin Novak. But all this talk of Reconstruction Law, as the turncoats called it, was beginning to disgust me.
I said, “Look, if you're so goddamned set on law and order, what are you running for? After you hit that cavalryman why didn't you go right on down to the jail and give yourself up? You seem to be forgetting one thing: Right now I'd be back on the ranch in my own bed if it hadn't been for you. If you hadn't come running like a wall- eyed coot and got me mixed up in it. Why did you run in the first place, that's what I want to know, if you're so damned set on the law being enforced?”
The more I talked the madder I got, and I said things that I wouldn't have said if I hadn't been so hot. It was as much my fault as his. If I hadn't clubbed that carpetbagger the Yankees wouldn't have been so worked up. Ray would have got off with a few days in jail and that would have been the end of it. But now it meant six months on the work gang, if they caught him. And me too. And I didn't intend to spend six months on the work gang, no matter whose fault it was.
For a long minute Ray Novak said nothing. In the first pale light of dawn, I could see his face getting hot and red, and I knew the smart thing
“Well,” I said, “what are you going to do about it?”
He just stood there, getting hotter, and doing nothing. I guess Ray Novak wasn't used to being talked to like that. He was a lot like his pa—the quiet, serious kind, commanding respect but not making a show of it. He didn't know what to do now, with an eighteen-year-old standing up and the same as calling him yellow. For a minute I thought he might go for his gun, and at that point I didn't care one way or another.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and I could almost see him taking hold of himself. He said softly, “I guess we both need some sleep. We'd better be riding on.”
“Just a minute,” I said. “I want to know what you're going to do. You'd better know now that if we run into any law I'm not giving myself up for a spell on the work gang. If you don't feel the same way about it, we'd better split up here and now.”
He gave it careful thought before answering. “Tall,” he said finally, “I told you once I was sorry for dragging you into this. That's all I can do. If I had been smart, I would have given myself up in John's City. But I wasn't smart. Now it looks like we'll have to hide out for a little while. I'll hide out but I don't intend to fight the law, if it comes to that. If you don't want to ride with me, we'll split up, and no hard feelings.”
He was a hard guy to hate for a long stretch of time. He was so dead serious about everything. “Oh, hell,” I said. “Let's go.”
So we rode on, neither of us saying anything. For a while I amused myself by thinking of the cavalry, and how foolish they must look pounding up and down the arroyo and wondering what had happened to us. I enjoyed that. It was the same as a military victory, for the war was not over in Texas. It would never be over as long as Sheridan sent men like Throckmorton and his bluebelly generals to rule Texas with soldiers. Or men like Pease, who threw out all the judges and sheriffs and mayors who might have been able to keep some semblance of law and order and put in his own scalawags who didn't give a damn for anything except to bleed the ranchers and farmers and cotton growers, and fatten their own bank accounts back in New York or Ohio or Pennsylvania or wherever they came from. And even worse, men like E. J. Davis.
E. J. Davis, the “reconstruction governor.” Colonel Davis, commanding officer of the First Texas Cavalry, U.S. Volunteers. But I'd heard him called other things, standing under the wooden awning of Garner's Store, listening to old men talk. Old men with angry faces and outraged eyes, some of them with Minie balls of the war still lodged in their lank, hungry bodies. “That bastard, Davis,” was the way they usually put it. “Commanding officer of the First Texas Traitors, Cowards, and Sons-of-bitches.” Around the time war broke out, Davis rounded up all the scum in Texas—or that's the way I always heard it, anyway—called them the First Texas Cavalry, and offered its services to the North. And, as reward for this thoughtfulness and foresight, Sheridan, in his fine office in New Orleans, from behind a blue cloud of fifty-cent-cigar smoke, had decided that E. J. Davis was just the man for the governor's office in Texas.
Oh, there was an election. General Philip Sheridan was a man to do things right. When the people of Texas began to get restless and complained that their livestock was all dying and the children weren't getting enough to eat because the Northern army was taking everything, the General began to give it some thought. By God, if the people of Texas didn't like the army, then he would give them a governor. There would be an election and they could choose anybody they wanted.
The only trouble was, if you wanted to vote, you had to take the “Ironclad Oath,” and that weeded everybody out except the newly freed slaves, and some white trash, and maybe the veterans of the First Texas Cavalry, U.S. Volunteers. Davis won in a walk. “The people's choice!” the scalawag newspapers said.
While the war was going on, I wasn't old enough to understand everything about it. But I understood the bitterness as the ranchers' big herds dwindled down to a few mangy-looking old mossyhorns, and I remembered trying to eat meat without salt because ships couldn't get through the Northern blockade. And, somehow, I knew it was all the Yankees' fault.
Hating came as natural as breathing, in those days, in Texas. I remember overhearing a conversation in front of the hardware store in John's City, where some men were laughing over the old joke of “You know what I just heard? A feller back there claims 'damn Yankee' is two words instead of one!” I laughed, but it wasn't until a couple of years later that I found out what it was about. Even Professor Bigloe said “damnyankee” and I figured he ought to know.
That was Texas, after the war. Broke and hungry, and if it tried to lift itself to its knees it got a kick in the gut for its trouble. Pa got off easier than most ranchers, because he had been too old to go to war and was able to stay on the ranch and look after his herd. Most of the ranchers weren't so lucky. After they got back, they found that their cattle had scattered from hell to Georgia —what was left of them after the Union soldiers took what they wanted. And the Confederate soldiers too, for that matter. And the calves were unbranded and wild and belonged legally to anybody who could catch them and burn them with his own iron. Most of the cattlemen had to start all over again, and if they got their beef back it was usually with a gun. The best guarantee of ownership was a fast draw and a sure aim.
After Davis came the Davis police, or state police, and the governor was burned in effigy so often that the smell of smoke would automatically bring out a squad of soldiers with bayoneted rifles. The police were supposed to take the place of the soldiers who were being gradually drawn out of the South. But they weren't any better. They were worse, if anything.
Thinking of the Davis police brought me back to Ray Novak. Old Martin Novak was hit hardest of all by the police, because he had to sit back and watch white trash and hired gunmen take over his marshal's job and run it to
