Kennedy had killed a man in El Paso and a drover in Wichita, and he was real slick with the Colt. Luke would be just as good and, on account of how he looked like a man who hard wintered, I figured maybe even a shade better.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and said, “Clem, the money belongs to Mr. Prather. He told me to give it to Ma.”
Kennedy snorted. “Old lady Prather ain’t my ma. Besides, we need that thirty thousand more than she does.” The man’s hand was very close to his gun, his slicker brushed back. “Now do you hand it over or do we just take it?”
I was cursing myself for letting these two get the sneak on me. They must have left their horses somewhere back in the hills and walked up on me quiet as thieves in a dark alley.
I played for time, trying to hold on to my hair a bit longer. “Clem, you know how much Mr. Prather needs that money. After the three bad years he’s had, the boss is in hock to the banks up to his ears. The money will pay his way.”
All this was true. Simon Prather didn’t trust banks, but he’d borrowed heavily from them, and there was a twenty-five thousand dollar lien on the ranch. The thirty thousand dollars in my saddlebags represented his last chance of getting out from under all that debt and holding on to the SP Connected.
The man called Luke twisted his lips in a sneer. “Don’t you worry none about Prather, boy,” he said. “He’s already a half-dead man. He’s dead from”—his hand went to the middle of his chest and swept across to his left shoulder—“from here to here, an’ his mouth is so twisted he can’t even sup his soup.” Luke’s hand dropped to his gun again. “Don’t you be worrying none about that half-dead man on account of how in a few weeks’ time he’ll be beyond caring about his ranch. Just hand over those damn saddlebags.”
It came to me then that Kennedy and his companion were sure-thing killers and that was the only reason I was still alive. We were standing only a few feet apart, and they knew if lead started flying I could get a bullet into at least one of them before they dropped me.
I guessed they had figured the odds and had decided it was better to take the money without gunplay and put a bullet in my back later.
“Listen, boy,” Kennedy said, his voice real soft and reasonable, “we can split the wampum in those saddlebags three ways. That’s ten thousand for you, Dusty, more money than you could make in a lifetime punching cows.” Kennedy turned to his companion. “Ain’t that right, Luke, a three-way split, fair and honest as the day is long.”
“Oh sure,” Luke said, smiling real thin. “Share and share alike is what I always say.” He stretched out his arm. “Here’s my hand on it, boy, and I’ll surely be offended if’n you don’t take it, me trying my best to mend fences an’ all.”
Now I might have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night. I knew if I took Luke’s hand he’d pull me off- balance so Kennedy could get a bullet into me. I stood right where I was and shook my head. “I don’t shake hands with thieving trash,” I said.
Well, that tipped over the outhouse sure enough.
Luke’s smile slipped and he said, “I’m sorely disappointed in you, boy.”
And he went for his gun.
I don’t remember drawing. But suddenly the Colt was in my hand and I realized with a jolt of surprise, I was faster, a lot faster, than Luke. I fired and saw my bullet take him square in the chest, his own shot following a split second later, but flying wild.
Kennedy had his gun out and we both fired at the same time. I felt his bullet burn across my left thigh, and I hit too high, taking him in the shoulder.
My ears ringing from the sound of gunfire, I stepped out of my own powder smoke and saw Luke lying on his back, the rain battering down on his face. He was dead as he was ever going to be.
Kennedy was half bent over, groaning. He was out of the fight, his shattered right shoulder a bloody mess, gun dangling loose from a scarlet-streaked hand.
The man’s face was deathly white under his tan and he snarled a vile oath. “Damn you, boy, I never pegged you for a gunfighter.”
“There’s much you don’t know about me, Clem,” I replied, trying my hardest to make what I hoped was a grown man’s reply. “You should have steered well clear of me.” I nodded toward Luke’s body. “Ride on out of here and take that with you.”
“Hard talk, Dusty,” Kennedy said. “Mighty mean and hard.”
“You dealt the cards, Clem,” I said. “I’m just playing out the hand you gave me.”
“You think you being a gunfighter an’ all will help you get that money to Texas?” Kennedy asked, his eyes ugly.
“Clem, I’m no gunfighter,” I said. “Before today, I’d never killed a man and right now the fact that I have is troubling me plenty.”
“Well, you practice with that Colt, boy. There will be others after me and they won’t be near as trusting an’ friendly as me and Luke was.” Kennedy gasped in pain as he straightened. “No man should have thirty thousand dollars all to his ownself when poor folks are hurting.”
“The money isn’t mine,” I said. “And it isn’t yours either.”
“You’ll never make it back across the Red, Dusty,” Kennedy said. “Luke Butler was a named man and he had friends.”
I nodded. “Maybe so, but I reckon I’ll take my chances.”
Later, after he’d caught up his horses, I stood in the rain and watched Kennedy ride away, Luke Butler’s body draped facedown across the saddle of his buckskin.
Kennedy glanced over his shoulder once, with eyes that burned hot with hate, like he wanted to remember me for all time. Then he turned back and I watched him go until he was swallowed up by the hills and the shifting steel curtain of the rain.
It was still not yet one, but the afternoon had turned cheerless and dark. The clouds and hills had merged into a gloomy, uniform gray, so there was no telling where the land ended and the sky began. Off to my left, a jay fluttered among the branches of a cedar growing at the base of a low mesa, sending down a shower of water. The branches shook again for a few moments as the bird sought a new perch and then the tree returned to stillness.
The bullet that had burned across my thigh had not broken the skin, but my leg felt numb and sore as I scouted the area for a few minutes, saw no one and returned to the shelter of the cave. I teased the fire into flame and put the coffee back on to heat.
When I sat and rolled a smoke I was surprised that my hands were steady. I lit the cigarette with a brand from the fire and set to studying on what had happened.
Clem Kennedy had called me a gunfighter and that was a label I did not want to wear. Back in Dodge, I’d seen the named shootist Buck Fletcher kill a man in the Long Branch. After the smoke cleared, I’d looked into Fletcher’s eyes and seen only despair and something else . . . hopelessness maybe, like he knew he was a man caught in a trap of his own making and there was no way out.
I didn’t want to end up like that. I wanted a place of my own with a wife and kids, smoke from our cabin tying bows in the air, the white laundry fluttering on the wash line and an ugly spotted dog sleeping on the stoop.
Gunfighter.
I’d killed Luke Butler, a gunman of reputation, and where Western men gathered, that was a fact that would be noted and talked about.
Clem had been right. Others would come. Most would be motivated by the lure of easy money, but there would be a few with a completely different agenda. Those would be wild ones and they’d test me with their own lives to see how I stacked up, how I ranked in the gunfighter hierarchy.
I poured coffee into my cup and drank it strong and scalding hot.
My heart was heavy as lead, my spirits troubled, and beyond the shelter of the cave roof the raking rain rattled relentlessly as it continued to fall.
Then I heard the flat boom of a rifle shot. And another.
