“I want to find out about my family.”
Sarah Sue Tanis was a long-faced, leather-tough woman in her early forties. She had often cared for Dunc when he was little more than a baby, but she wasn't remembering that now. “There ain't no Lesters in these hills,” she said, her voice filled with hate. “We're decent, God-fearin' folks up here, and there ain't no room among us for preacher killers or their families!”
“Preacher killers?”
“I reckon you know what I'm talkin' about, Dunc Lester. Ike Brunner told us how you shot old Mort Stringer down in cold blood and then shot young Cal in the leg when he tried to stop you! All over that no-account girl of the preacher's.”
Anger welled up in him until he felt limp and sickish. But all he said was “Is that the reason you people burned us out?”
She said nothing, but grinned in self-righteous hatred.
“Where's my family? Where'd you run them off to— you and all the other decent, God-fearin' folks around here?”
“You might look in Arkansas,” she snapped. “I don't reckon you'll find them in Oklahoma.”
An overpowering sense of helplessness dulled the edge of Dunc's anger. He knew there was no use talking to Sarah Sue Tanis o/her husband. Because Ike Brunner had brought them corn in dry years, because he had brought doctors for their sick and filled their heads full of lies, they now believed everything he told them.
Sarah Sue hadn't shot him with that long-barreled rifle because it would be too much like shooting one of her own kin, but that wasn't saying that she wouldn't shoot him the next time he came. He reined the bay around and rode toward the dark timber.
He camped that night under a sandstone overhang not far from Ulster's Cave. Wolflike, he crouched under the shelter of rock listening to the sounds of the night, wondering what he was going to do next. If he was smart, he told himself, he would light out for Arkansas and look for his folks. He would forget that he had ever lived in these hills or had been hooked up with the Brunners. That would be the smart thing to do. The only healthy thing.
But he didn't feel smart. And he didn't think he would soon forget the Brunners in Arkansas or anywhere else. And besides, there was that girl of Mort Stringer's, who had haunted his mind since the first moment he had seen her.
It was a funny thing, saving a person's life like that. It made a man feel almost like God to hold a life in his hands, knowing that it was within his power to save it or let it go. Dunc wondered if that was the reason Leah Stringer was so constantly in his mind these days, in spite of all the other things he had to plague him.
At last he untied a small gunny sack that he had brought behind his saddle, took out a handful of parched com, and began to eat. The corn had come from Owen Toller's barn, and Dunc had parched it himself when he got back to the hills. On long hunting trips or forced marches, Indians could live for weeks on corn like this. And so could a white man, if he had to.
Dunc cracked the hard, half-burned kernels between his teeth, chewing and swallowing automatically, his mind on other things. When, several days ago, he had first discovered what the gang had done to his family and to the farm, a wildness had seized him, and he had been driven by it ever since. Now, at last, fatigue had subdued the wildness. Hopelessness had blunted his anger. What was left was a quiet, pulsating hate that he knew would be with him always. All these hills were now his enemies. And Ike Brunner could not be found.
Now that he could be more rational in his mind, Dunc realized that he was probably lucky that he had not been able to find Ike Brunner. In a fight with the gang, he wouldn't have lasted five minutes.
But this knowledge did not ease the tension within hint, or put down his lust for revenge.
And still it was not revenge alone that drove him and would not let him rest. At last he was beginning to understand a little of what Ike and Cal Brunner were doing to these hill people. If the Brunners would lie to them about one thing, it stood to reason that they would lie again. Dunc thought about this. For the first time in his life he began to wonder if the hillfolks necessarily had to be always right, and the lowland people always wrong. Ike Brunner's argument that they had the right to plunder from the rich sounded good to people who were hungry and tired of being pushed around, but how much real truth was there in the argument?
To a hill boy like Dunc Lester, this was a strange trail for the mind to take. It was like a deer trace in the woods that twisted and turned and circled in upon itself and led nowhere. Still, he had glimpsed something here that bothered him. He had set out with hate for the Brunners alone, but now he was beginning to doubt the motives of his own people. His own family, for that matter.
Had his pa tried to stop him when he decided to join the Brunner gang?
Dunc smiled with vague bitterness as he remembered. His pa had given him his blessings and the only saddle horse that the family owned. “Son,” he had said, soberly shaking Dunc's hand, “we're proud of you. These Brunner boys, they've got the right idea on how to handle these outsiders!” Dunc's ma had made up a grub sack for him, and her faded eyes had glistened with pride. Her son was joining the gang. Dunc's father had presented him with his most prized possession, the, shotgun, and his brother-in-law had pitched in with a saddle.
Oh, it had been quite a day, Dunc remembered, when he first rode off to join the Brunners. He had never seen soldiers marching off to war, but that was the way it must have been, on a smaller scale.
This was a shocking line of thought for his mind to be taking, but the facts were much too clear to be ignored. A monster of the people's own making was loose in the hills. This, Dunc knew, was the core of the matter that had been gnawing at his conscience.
Then from some dark room of his mind came the memory of how, long ago, Gabe Tanis had found a young wolf pup in the woods and had brought it home. Wolves were bad in those days; they would come right up to the cabin and attack the livestock. Gabe claimed he was going to bring this wolf up like a pet and teach it to fight off the other wolves. He fed the pup the best of everything and spent hours every day training it, and people came from all over to see the pup and praise Gabe for his ingenuity. The only way to fight a wolf is with another wolf, Gabe said. But when the pup grew up it turned on Gabe and bit him through the hand, and finally it had to be shot.
Maybe, Dunc thought, the Brunner gang is working out like Gabe's wolf. At first it seemed like a good idea, but now it had turned. In one quick bite it had devoured the Lester farm and family. The harmless pup that everybody liked to pet and feed had grown into a full-sized wolf.
