left home, at the age of fifteen, he never saw his mother again.
“I’ll teach you to damn well do what I tell you to do,” Angus Livermore yelled at Dusty. Angus Livermore had married Dusty’s mother shortly after Dusty’s father died.
Dusty, fifteen at the time, and Livermore were standing in the barn, and Livermore was angry because he didn’t think Dusty had done a good enough job in mucking out the stalls. Livermore took a cat-o’-nine-tails that he had constructed from old leather reins, each of the seven leather straps embedded with nails and other sharp bits of metal, and began beating Dusty. He beat Dusty until Dusty was crying for mercy, and when Dusty’s mother came out to the barn to beg him to stop, Livermore took the cat-o’-nine-tails to her.
“I’ll not have you buttin’ in to the way I treat this boy!” Livermore said. Each lash of the cat brought red whelps and blood. “I’ve told you before, you only got two things to do on this farm. Cook my meals and warm my bed!”
Livermore continued to beat the woman until she was too weak to even cry out anymore. But because he was beating Dusty’s mother, he had forgotten, temporarily, about Dusty, and Dusty was able to get away from him.
Dusty didn’t go far. He went only as far as the door to the barn, where he saw the axe he had used earlier in the day to chop up firewood. Grabbing the axe, he stepped up behind his stepfather and swung it as hard as he could. The axe opened up the side of Livermore’s head, spilling brain, blood, and bone. He was dead before he hit the ground. Dusty left that same day, but not until he wrote a letter explaining that he was the one who had killed Livermore.
In the twelve years after Dusty had left home, he had been a pony express rider, and spent some time at sea before going to war. Not until the war was over did he come back home, and when he did, he found the barn had fallen down and the house nearly so. There was no livestock, not so much as a chicken, and in the fields where cotton and corn had grown before, there was nothing but weeds.
Dusty walked through the house, which had been emptied of anything of any value. When he came back out onto the front porch, he saw Mr. Dement, who he remembered as their next-door neighbor.
“You would be Dusty, wouldn’t you?” Dement asked.
“Yes.”
“I seen you ride by and thought that might be you. But, bein’ as you’re all grow’d up now, I wasn’t real sure.”
“Do you know where my Ma is, Mr. Dement?”
“I sure do.” Dement pointed. “She’s lyin’ over there, next to your Pa. I’m surprised you didn’t see that first thing when you come up.”
“No, sir, I didn’t think to look. I didn’t even know she was dead.”
“She’s been dead six months now,” Dement said. “Had a real nice funeral for her, we did. Nobody in her family come, ’cause she didn’t have nobody but you, and most figured you’d been kilt in the war. All the neighbors come, though.”
Dusty walked over to the place where his father had been buried. Next to him was a newer gravestone:
EMMA MCNALLY
1821–1865
He was glad to see that Livermore’s grave was not there with his parents. He didn’t know where it was, nor did he care. As Dusty stood over the graves, looking down at them, Dement walked up to stand alongside him.
“You should have come back,” Dement said. “Miz Emma missed you somethin’ terrible.”
“I always thought that if I came back, I would just cause trouble for her,” Dusty said.
“I thought it might be somethin’ like that,” Dement said. “Then, like I said, awhile ago I seen you ridin’ up the lane, and I was pretty sure it might be you.” So I brung you this letter which your Ma wrote not long before she died. She wanted me to give it to you. In it, she tells how she told the sheriff that she kilt Mr. Livermore after he beat her real bad. They had a trial and found that she had a good enough reason for killin’ him, so they let her go.”
“Wasn’t her that killed him,” Dusty said. “It was me.”
“Yep, after all these years, most particular with you not comin’ back and all, I sort of figured it might have been you that done it,” Dement said. “But I figure that you done it for the same reason your Ma said she done it for, and that makes it all right in my book. It don’t matter none now anyhow, seein’ as it’s all said an’ done. Will you be farmin’ the place?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t made up my mind,” Dusty said.
“The place is yours now, but I’ve had the papers all drawed up in case you’d be willin’ to sell it.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
Dusty knew that the farm was worth more than that. But he also knew that he had no wish to stay around. And five hundred dollars was a lot more than he had now.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
Now, a quarter of a century after he sold the farm to Dement, Dusty had no regrets. After a bit of a wild spree where he had actually robbed a couple of stagecoaches and even a train, he had settled down here on Live Oaks, and the people here were the closest thing to a family he had ever had.
He hoped that things could be worked out between Big Ben and Rebecca.
As Dusty started back toward the bunkhouse, Mo and Tom tossed him a wave as they rode out toward the field. With no stock on the range, most of the work being done at the ranch now was maintenance, and he saw that Mo and Tom had wire and pliers with them in order to make some repairs on the fence line.
Nobody had ever said anything directly to him, but Dusty couldn’t help but harbor the idea that, somehow, Rebecca’s leaving had something to do with Tom.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I understand that you have yet to replace your stock,” Hurley said. The two men were in William Hurley’s office, a place that had almost become Big Ben’s home away from home since he sold all his stock.
“I haven’t yet, but I’m going to have to do something fairly soon,” Big Ben said. “Otherwise I’ll be having to let some of my permanent hands go and I would hate to do that. But there is only so much make-work that can done on a ranch that has no cows.”
“Are you going to buy Herefords?”
“I suppose I will,” Big Ben said. “I certainly see no profit in buying any more Longhorns. I sure hate having to do that though. Walter Hannah is my friend, but if he gets something on you, he never lets go of it. The moment the first Hereford sets foot on my ranch is the moment he will start crowing.”
“Maybe you would feel better about it if you knew that Herefords were bringing thirteen dollars a head this morning,” Hurley said.
“Yes. Well, that’s why I came into town today. I wanted to check the highest price being paid, just to reinforce my decision. So I guess I’ll be buying Herefords.”
“That’s a good move,” Hurley said. He chuckled. “Though the truth is, if you were just buying according to the highest price, you wouldn’t be buying Herefords.”
“I wouldn’t?” Big Ben replied, curious by the strange answer. “What would I be buying?”
“Black Angus.”
“Black Angus? Yes, I think I have heard of those. I haven’t seen any in Texas, though.”
“That’s because there aren’t any Black Angus in Texas,” Hurley said.
