realized that I was there. I walked over to her, not knowing what to do or say. When at last she looked up and saw me, I dropped down and put my head in her lap the way I used to do when I was a small boy. And I think I cried.
One of us must have said something after that, but I don't remember. After a while one of the ranch wives, well meaning, came in from the kitchen and said timidly:
“Tall, hadn't you better eat something?”
It was so typical of ranch wives. If there's nothing that can possibly be done, they want to feed you. Ma would have done the same thing if she had been in the woman's place.
I got to my feet and said, “Later, not now, thank you.” The words sounded ridiculous, like somebody turning down a second piece of cake at a tea party. And out there somewhere Pa was dead.
The woman disappeared again, and I touched Ma's head, her thin, gray hair. “Ma...” But I didn't know how to go on. I wasn't any good at comforting people. And besides, she was still too numb with shock to understand anything I could say to her.
As I stood there looking at her, the ache and emptiness in my belly began to turn to quiet anger. Slowly, I began to put things together that I had been too numb to think about before. Instinctively, I knew that Pa hadn't died in any of the thousand and one ways a man could die around a ranch. He had been killed. I didn't know by whom, but I would find out. And when I did...
Ma must have sensed what I was thinking. She looked up at me with those wide, dry eyes of hers. She noticed the two .44's that I had buckled on, and I saw a sudden stark fear looking out at me.
“Tall ... no! There's nothing you can do now. There's nothing you can do to bring him back.”
But that anger that had started so quietly was now a hot, blazing thing. I heard myself saying:
“He won't get away with it, Ma. Whoever it was, I'll find him. Texas isn't big enough for him to hide where I can't find him. The world isn't that big. And when I do find him...”
That helplessness and terror in her eyes stopped me. She looked at me, and kept looking at me, as if she had never seen me before. I should have kept my thoughts to myself, but it was too late to change that now.
“Ma,” I said, “don't worry about me.”
But she didn't say anything. She just kept looking at me.
I went back to the kitchen and motioned to one of the ranch wives. “Would you mind looking after Ma for a while?” I asked. “I want to go outside for a minute, where the men are.”
“Of course, Tall.” She was a tremendous, big-bosomed woman, holding a steaming coffee pot in her hand. She had that same look of sympathy in her eyes that I had noticed with Joe Bannerman, and I hated it.
I went out the back way instead of the front, where I would have to pass through the parlor again and face that look of Ma's. Jed Horner was the first man I saw, a small rancher to the south, down below the arroyo. He and Cy Clanton were talking quietly near the end of the front porch. Neither of them seemed especially surprised to see me. They came forward solemnly to shake hands, something they never would have bothered about if Pa had been alive.
“We guessed that you'd be comin' back, Tall,” Jed Horner said soberly, “as soon as you got the word.”
“I guess you know all about it, don't you?” Cy Clanton asked.
“I don't know anything,” I said, the words coming out tight. “But I'd like to know.”
The two men nodded together, both of them glancing curiously at my two pistols. Then I noticed something strange for a gathering like this. All the men were armed, not only with the usual side guns, but some of them with shotguns and rifles.
“It was the police,” Horner said. “Some damned white trash from down below Hooker's Bend somewhere. It seems like all the Davis police in Texas have congregated here at John's Qty. They claim they're goin' to teach us ranchers to be Christians if they have to kill half of us doin' it.” Then he patted the old long-barreled Sharps that he held in the crook of his arm. “But we've got some idea about that ourselves.”
“About Pa,” I said. “I want to know how it happened.”
“The police, like I said,” Horner shrugged. “There must have been about a dozen of them, according to your ma. They started pushin' your pa around, tryin' to make him tell where you'd gone, and one of them hit him with the barrel of his pistol. That, I guess, was the way it happened.”
“The funeral was yesterday,” Cy Clanton said. “We buried him in the family plot, in the churchyard at John's City. There wasn't a better man that your pa, Tall. If the police want a war, that's what they're goin' to get.”
The anger was like a knife in my chest. The other men drifted over one and two at a time until I was completely surrounded now. Their eyes regarded me soberly.
I said, “Does anybody know the one that did it? The one that swung the pistol?”
Pat Roark, a thin, sharp-eyed man about my own age, said, “I heard it was the captain of the Hooker outfit. It seemed like he was a friend of that carpetbagger you gun-whipped a while back. Name of Thornton, I think.”
I knew what to do then. I turned to Bucky Stow, who had sidled in with the group of men. “Bucky, cut out a fresh horse for me, will you? I guess I'll be riding into John's City.”
There was a murmur among the men. A sound of uneasiness. “Don't get us wrong, Tall,” Jed Horner said. “We're behind you in whatever you decide to do about this. Like I said, there wasn't a better man than your pa. But I think you ought to know it would be taking an awful chance riding right into town that way. Police are o thick as lice on a dog's back.”
I turned on him. “You don't have to go with me. It's my job and I can take care of it myself.”
“Tall, you know we don't mean it that way. If that's what you want, why, I guess you can count on us to be with you.”
The other men made sounds of agreement, but a bit reluctantly. Then a man I hadn't noticed before pushed
