'Just a bit. Are you ready for some lunch?'
'Yes, please.'
'Say hello to your visitor.'
The old man looked over at Earl.
'Howdy,' he said. 'Care for some lunch? The girl makes a fine tomato soup.'
'It's only Campbell's out of a can,' Sally called from inside.
'That would be fine, sir.' That said, the old man sat back and quietly contemplated the meadows for a while. Earl did nothing to hurry him along, figuring that Ed Mcgriffin would take his own sweet time about things.
The girl, Sally, brought a tray, with a bowl of tomato soup, a few saltines and a glass of Coca-Cola with ice. The old man crunched up the crackers into the soup?Earl saw that his fingers were still clever and firm?and commenced to eat with considerable gusto. Earl had a bowl of soup too, though he passed on the crackers.
When the eating was done, Mr. Ed belched, and Sally came to take the trays away. Then he said, 'I now have to pee. You can wait another few minutes, can't you, sir?'
'I sure can.'
'Well, I have to say, you're a patient fellow. You don't believe in speeding things along, do you?'
'Things will happen or not, and whether you speed them up don't matter much, I've noticed,' Earl said.
'True enough,' said the old man. Earl helped him rise and watched as he found his legs, and then stomped inside. A few minutes later he returned.
'Now I won't have to pee for at least another seven, or maybe even eight, minutes. Well, go ahead, then. Speak your piece. I get fellows up here all the time, want to hear about the old days or want me to dictate stories to some magazine or other. That what you want, young fellow? I do have to levy a small fee, you understand. Milk money.' 'No, sir,' said Earl. 'I think I'm up on what you've done. I do have an offer, however.' And he told him who he was, who he knew, and what he wanted.
When he was done, the old man sighed. Then he said, 'You say it's up a river. Now, how the hell is an old coot like me going to get up a river?
I can't sit still in a boat, I have to pee every three seconds, I can't run, much less climb stairs or dig a hole. I can't even paint a house no more, and I made my living painting houses.'
'But you can still shoot, I'd bet. As good as ever.' 'Probably,' the old man said. 'I'd say it's like riding a bicycle.
Once you learn, you don't never forget.'
'Can you still throw five glass balls in the air, draw and hit all five double-action before they hit the ground?'
'Before they hit the ground? Hell, boy, I can hit them before they reach apogee. Maybe now the fifth ball would be in descent when I pinged it, but none of them would touch the planet whole again.'
'That's what I thought. And five shots in a two-inch group at twenty-five feet in less than four-fifths a second?'
'I reckon. If not that exact, close enough so's no one would note the difference without electric timing gear. Say, seven-eighths a second.
I always could shoot a Smith.38 right dandy.'
'I'd imagine practice had a bit to do with it.'
'It's better to be talented than to be a hard worker. But to be a talented hard worker, that's the best combo, son.' 'Many a man has said you are the best revolver shooter who ever lived, bar none.'
'That may be so. I try not to dwell on it now that the end of the journey has been glimpsed.'
'Do you wish you'd been around in the days when the Earps and the Clantons ruled, when Billy and Bat and Wild Bill were the fancy Dans?
You'd have been better than them all.'
'And then I'd be famous? Someone might have made a movie about me and gotten it all wrong, and then cheated me out of my money. So I've done all right, I suppose. But yes, now and then, a little part of me wishes that just once I'd gone up against a bad man for all the stakes.
Now you offer me a chance, but it's too late. Maybe five years ago.
Three even. But as you can see, I'm not vigorous no more.'
'Well, here's the funny part. Everything I told you was true, and we are going to go in come dark of moon and set it right. And you will be able to go along if you so choose.'
'Son, I?'
'Mr. Mcgriffin, I have a way. It's a new way, ain't nobody hardly never thought of before. I'll get you into that town no more tuckered than if you'd taken a Sunday walk in the park. High and dry, too. And I'll match you against some bad boys who think that their guns are the loudest. You will prevail. You may not survive, but you will prevail.
And if you do survive, I'll get you back just as high and dry as I got you in. And you'll be on your way, and you'll be able to consider your life as complete. You will have done all the things a man of the gun can do, including the most important: using that gun in service to justice.'
'Mr. Swagger, I'd never call a man who won the Medal of Honor a liar, but unless they build a railroad track into that swamp in less than three weeks, I'm stuck here.' I So Earl told him.
'Well, you've figured it out right pretty.'
'You've figured it out right pretty but for one thing,' came the voice of the girl. She walked into the porch from the living room, where she'd evidently been sitting, and listening. 'That one thing is me.'
'Ma'am?' said Earl.
'Now Sally,' said old Ed, 'don't get your back up.' 'Sir,' Sally said to Earl, her features bunched and her eyes forceful, 'if you think I'm going to let this fine old fellow travel all that way by himself, you must have left your head in Buffalo Bend, or wherever it is you come from. He only has me in this world, and I only have him, and if he's going on some fool trip of adventure, you'd best believe I'm coming too, and I won't hear another word or there'll be trouble. I may look frail but I pack a punch.' 'Sweetie,' said Earl, 'you'd be stuck down in a farmhouse with a bunch of old fellows, none of whom has a tenth the grace and manners of your grand pap here. I can't think it would be pleasant.'
'And who'll cook for this geezer crusade?'
'Ma'am, it'll mostly be beans and franks.'
'Well, I know ten ways to cook beans and ten ways to cook franks, and someone has to mulch grand pap food and make sure he don't wander off.
I will go with grand pap or grand pap will go nowhere, and that is the truth. And you had better adjust to that now, or you will be an unhappy fellow for some time to come.'
'When Sally speaks, what she declares is usually what happens,' said Mcgriffin.
Earl shook his head.
'You won't have a fun time. It ain't a party.'
'I can handle myself,' she said, and as she was Ed Mcgriffin's granddaughter, Earl knew she spoke the truth.
IT was a snitch who told Bigboy first, and he just laughed. But then another snitch told him, and this time it wasn't so much fun. The third time he heard, it began to sound ominous. So naturally he went to see the warden, who had the keenest insights into Negro psychology of anyone in the world, to have a chat.
'Warden, it's the niggers. You know how you've always said they let us rule them because they have no hope of anything else, and so in the end they come to think such an arrangement is necessary and even right, to save them from themselves.'
'Yes, Bigboy, I believe I do. Our enemy is hope and belief. We must crush them because that is our duty. But if they grow, they can grow in wild ways, and bring down the most intricate and stable of edifices.'
'There's a disease spreading.'
'Yes?'
The two men were in the warden's office on the first floor of the ghastly old house just inside the prison walls. Bigboy actually hated this place, for its smell of rot and corruption, of damask crackling toward dust and wood turning to mush, was faintly sickening. He never understood why a brilliant man like the warden took such pleasure in it.
