The man stepped up and held out his hand. “We might as well get to know each other. You’re bunking with me. My name’s Pete Drumm.”
Jeff nodded thoughtfully. It was a hard, tough hand.
“Ever ride a horse before?” Pat asked.
Jeff shook his head and looked carefully at the bay hitched to the porch upright.
The girl sighed. “Well, Mister, that’s a tired horse. He’s been tired for the past five years. So even if you’re lying, don’t expect to get very far very fast. Get aboard him.”
Jeff shrugged and walked over to the animal. He slipped the reins loose and climbed cautiously into the saddle, feeling his thigh muscles stretching into unaccustomed lengths and resigning himself to considerable—and probably laughable—soreness if he kept this up very long. Fortunately, the horse did no more than twitch his tail.
Pat looked up and grinned. “No, you’re never been on a horse before,” she said. “You look as though you expected to wet your pants any minute.”
He stared at her for a minute, then burst out laughing in the first genuine amusement he’d felt in weeks. Damn, he liked that girl!
She swung up into her own saddle, and they walked slowly through the town while Pat kept up a running commentary. “That’s Becker’s place. Got a wife, four kids. The kids sleep downstairs, so they can pretty much take care of themselves. That place next to them is Fritch’s. Old Fritch lives alone, but he’s a sly one. He’s got traps all around the place. Wouldn’t hurt to look up this way every once in a while, though.”
By the end of the afternoon, he had a fairly clear picture of the town’s layout. It was much like all the others he’d seen on the plains—the houses close together for protection, with fields running out in all directions. It was late fall now, and the fields were bare, but he could picture how it would look in the summer: green and prosperous, tough as the grass that constantly fought the prairie wind. He spotted a string of bare poles marching toward the horizon, and nodded at them.
“Telephone line,” the girl explained. “Branch out of Kansas City. Some easterners were through here last July, hooking up with the St. Louis exchanges. They’ll be stringing wire in the spring. All the old stuff blew down long ago, of course.” Abruptly, she turned in the saddle and looked at him. “What’s it like, back East?” she asked, laughing wryly. “Funny, how we’re all part of the same lousy mess, and there’s the big difference between city people and small-town farmers. But Pete tells me it was always like that.”
She seemed genuinely interested. To make conversation, at first, and then out of some long pent-up well of talk as he forgot himself, he began telling her about life back in New Jersey, about what the people were like, and about his family. She listened intently, asking a question here and there, occasionally making a surprisingly levelheaded comment. By the time they reined up in front of her house, she knew a great deal about him, and not even his screaming muscles and aching knees were enough to kill his odd feeling of relaxation.
But one thing he never quite let leave his mind; some way, somehow, he had to find a way to escape.
By the time he had been in Kalletsburg a week, he knew how he was going to do it. It was the only way that would work, with these people. It might take a year. Perhaps two. But when the time came, he would leave. And he found himself toying with the idea that it just might be possible to take Pat with him.
He rolled over in his bunk and clasped his hands behind his head, staring up at the lamplit ceiling.
There was no use trying to beat the system of watchers they had set up. Even when it was only Pat who was with him, there was a pistol holstered to her belt, and Drumm had meant what he’d said about his going unarmed. That had been an uncomfortable feeling to shake off in itself. His rifle was so much part of him that he had grown accustomed to its weight to balance him. He found himself misjudging the height of his shoulder, or overestimating the muscular effort needed to lift his arm. He’d felt awkward and clumsy without it, and in this short time, hadn’t quite gotten over it yet.
But he could get used to it, and get used to having it back, when the time came. Because the town’s weak spot was its smallness. He was in constant contact with everyone. In a while, they’d be completely accustomed to the sight of him. If he talked to them, and listened to what they had to say, he’d gradually become one of them. In time, too, he might start working a small field of his own. Perhaps he’d build a house. Give them a hundred signs that he was here to stay—tied to the town in the same way they were.
And then, one night, he’d disappear, and they’d be left to look for a new sheriff. And, as he’d considered before, it was just barely possible that Pat might be willing to go along with him by then.
He grinned quietly.
“What have you got to be happy about?” Drumm asked. Jeff’s grin widened. At the moment, everybody in town tacitly accepted, small-town fashion, that Pat was Drumm’s girl.
“Oh, nothing special,” he said. He lay awake for a few minutes longer, and then went quietly to sleep.
Winter came, and during its first weeks, as the plains outlaws were driven to stock whatever miserable shelters they had managed for themselves, Jeff was busy day and night. He’d spent his last winter in a cave cut into a riverbank, and he knew what the thought-processes were that rose from the sort of life. By October, he’d nailed four figurative hides to the barn door, and then the snow blocked everything off until the desperate, half- starved men began floundering toward the town in mid-December. Meanwhile, he spent his time talking to Pat or Drumm.
Drumm was as interested in his past as Pat had been, for an entirely different reason. He showed Jeff the boxed shears of paper covered by his father’s precise, economical handwriting.
“A Study of the Effects of Personal Arms on Conventional Theories of Modern Government, by Harvey Haggard Drumm, with a bow to Silas McKinley,” Jeff read, and looked up at Pete in curiosity. “A History of Theodore Berendtsen’s Northern Campaign,” he read from the label of another box, “With Additional Personal Notes.”
“Dad was in on that one,” Pete explained. “He was a corporal under one of Matt Garvin’s sons.”
Well I’ll be triple goddamned! Jeff thought. He looked at another box of manuscript, labeled The Care and Feeding of the Intellectual Militant.
“And you’re hanging on to these in hopes of getting them to a printing press sometime?” he asked.
“Better than that,” Pete said. “I’m trying to add to them. That’s why I’m so interested in your story. I want to write it down. I want to be able to have other people learn from it. See, we’re doing all right, down here. Things starting up, even without Berendtsen’s people having gone through here. Because my father came through here.”
“Just writing books?”
“Just writing books, and telling people what was in them, and about how in the East things were getting better. It makes a big difference when you know somebody’s found a way out of the hole, even if you haven’t, yet. You keep looking. You don’t just curl up and die. I guess that’s the best excuse for Berendtsen and his bully-boys. They had to live so my father could talk about the way things were getting started. But we’re past that time, now. And I’m damned glad.” Pete looked at Jeff with shrewd appraisal in his eyes. “I wouldn’t want to see any more gunmen trying to keep going, around here.”
“I guess not.”
“Yeah.”
“What ever happened to your father, anyway?” Jeff asked. He didn’t like the way the conversation was going.
Pete smiled softly. “I don’t know. I guess I was about ten or twelve when Ryder’s bunch came through here, heading for Texas. My mother had just died, and my older brother, Jim, was big enough to run our place with my help. Pop was a rotten farmer anyway, so he talked it over with us, and when Ryder’s bunch pulled out, he packed up all the blank paper he could carry and went off with them. I sort of wanted to tag along, but Pop stepped on that idea hard. He was right, I guess. Ryder wasn’t doing any fighting he could avoid, but it was still a hard life.
“Worked out best in the end, too, when Jim got killed by one of you boys. If I’d of gone, there wouldn’t have been anybody left to work the place.”
“What difference would that make, if you weren’t here to see it?”
Drumm shrugged uncertainly. “I know. But I’m here. It just—I don’t know, it just feels that way.”
Jeff tried to imagine that trait of character that would make a man think in those terms about a tract of land much like any other tract, anywhere. But he had to give up on that.
Bit by bit, he told Drumm the story of what his life had been like, beginning with his father’s death and carefully ending with Alister’s marriage to Barbara, and his departure from home. He had to watch himself to make
