was it going to end?
It doesn't happen often, but once or twice in a life-time a man takes a look at himself and sees himself as he really is, and I guess that was what I did then. I knew where it would end. In a deadwood saloon with a bullet in my back, the way the end had come to Hickok. Over a dice table, the way it had come to Hardin. Or on a lonesome Texas hilltop, where Pappy Garret's career had ended. Not even Pappy had been able to go on forever.
And what about the kid? What about that girl of his, and that little cocklebur ranch that he was so set on?
That, I suppose, was the way my mind was running when the kid spoke. I didn't hear what he said, and it wasn't important anyway, because I was thinking of something else. Then he spoke again and I stood up and said:
“I wish to hell you'd stop whining.” My voice was hard and full of anger, and the kid looked as if I had just hit him across the face with a pistol barrel. He didn't understand what I was mad at. And he wasn't alone. Neither did I.
“There's one thing you'd better understand,” I said. “If you're not willing to take the hard bumps when they come, then we'd better split up here and now.”
That outburst kind of knocked the wind out of him, I guess, because he just sat there with his mouth open. He groped around for words, but this was a situation that he had never even thought about and he couldn't find any words to fit it. I said, “You've done nothing but complain. Not that I expect much out of you, because I haven't had time to teach you anything. But guts come natural, and if you haven't got them you're no good to me or anybody else.”
He closed his mouth finally and stared at me with bugging eyes.
He said hoarsely, “I didn't mean to complain. If I was doing it I didn't know it.”
“You didn't know it,” I said. “You don't know anything, and that's the whole trouble.”
Something had gone wrong, but he couldn't understand it. He stood up and wiped his face and shifted from one foot to the other. “Well,” he said, “I know I'm pretty green. But I can learn—you said so yourself.”
“Maybe I was wrong. I've been wrong before.”
He shuffled around some more, putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out. He walked around in a little circle, still not able to understand what had happened. “Maybe,” he said, “I got things all mixed up. I thought all along that you were glad to have me ride with you. I thought we were going to be—well, partners. Something like that.”
“You thought we were going to be partners,” I said dryly, and his face turned beet-red. Then he stopped his marching around and really looked at me for the first time.
“I guess I was jumping at conclusions,” he said after a long pause. “I had kind of a crazy idea that you liked me.”
“I like you well enough, but that doesn't mean that I want to take you to raise.”
He took it all right until then. But now he started to burn. His face started to cloud up and his mouth clamped down to a grim line.
“If I was being so much trouble,” he said tightly, “why did you let me ride this far with you?”
“I do crazy things sometimes. I guess everybody does.”
At last he began to get it.
“Are you trying to tell me that you don't want me around any more?” he said. “Is that it?”
I said, “That's it.”
And that tore it open. He hadn't believed that a crazy thing like this could happen, for no reason at all. But it finally sank in. For a long moment he just stood there staring at me like a backwoods nester looking at a circus freak.
Then he turned and walked stiffly to the wash. He came back with his saddle over his shoulder and headed down to where the horses were grazing.
It was all over. And the whole thing was almost as much a mystery to me as it was to the kid. I needed him. He was my life insurance. And now he was going.
I stood there on a knoll watching him cinch up, wondering how I was going to fight off a detachment of cavalry by myself. After a while he got the saddle on to suit him and he rode up to where I was.
“Well,” he said, “I guess this is good-by, Mr. Cameron. No hard feelings.”
“No hard feelings,” I said. “Part of that silver is still yours.”
“I don't want the silver,” he said.
He started to pull away and I happened to think of something else. “Where do you aim to go, kid?”
“Back to Texas,” he said without turning around.
Back to the work gang. Back to that wind-swept, thorn-daggered land where strong men broke their hearts scrabbling around for a kind of living. Back home.
“Well, good-by, kid.”
But he didn't hear me. He rode straight over a rise and dipped out of sight. And that was the last I saw of him. It was hard to believe that just a few minutes ago both of us had been sitting here waiting for the end. Now there were just me and Bama—and the crazy thing about it was that I wasn't sorry.
I stood there for a long time trying to understand why I had deliberately sent him away. He was sure to wind up on the work gang—but then, there were worse things than a work gang. Maybe that was the answer. I waited until I was sure that he was well in the hills, and then I went back to the wash.
