mood, all right, but it did not prepare him for what was to come. She turned on him suddenly, and her eyes glistened with indignation.
“You're right proud of yourself, aren't you?” she snapped. “You think you're something big, don't you, because your father scared a drunken old smithie out of Plainsville?”
Jeff felt the heat anger in his face. “I didn't say a thing about old man Jorgenson, or Alex either!”
“But you were thinking it!” she accused unreasonably. “Oh, I can see the smugness on your face, Jefferson Blaine!”
How could a man defend himself against an assault like that?
“And another thing,” she said. “I heard my father tell Todd not to have anything to do with you or your pa. So don't go running after him.”
If she were a boy, Jeff thought angrily.
But she wasn't. She was a frail girl with pink lips and flashing brown eyes and a yellow ribbon in her hair. Just the same, her words hurt. So Ford Wintworth, her pa, had forbidden Todd to have anything to do with him! And that probably went for Amy too.
Jeff looked at her, then turned suddenly in anger and started to walk away.
He had taken fewer than a dozen paces when his feet began to drag. Darn it, he thought, he'd never understand girls if he lived to be a hundred. She had ruined her birthday party only to take his part—now he couldn't even get her to look at him!
Yet he consciously slowed down until she caught up with him again. “What're you mad about?” he demanded.
“I didn't say I was mad,” she said coolly.
“I've got eyes. What difference does it make, anyway, what happens to Alex Jorgenson and his old man?”
“If you don't know, I can't tell you.”
There seemed to be nothing else to say. Amy could use words like a lash, but they made clean wounds that healed quickly. Whatever's ailing her, Jeff thought, she'll soon get over it. They walked the rest of the way to the academy in silence.
In Elec Blasingame's office, where the county rented space in the basement of the Masonic Temple, Nathan Blaine took a chair and waited. After a minute the marshal came in from another room and said shortly, “You took your time about getting here.”
“I didn't know it was urgent,” Nathan said quickly.
“Old Feyor Jorgenson and his kid pulled out of town in the middle of the night; scared for their lives. That's how urgent it is.”
Nathan's hand moved toward a tobacco sack in his shirt pocket. He said nothing.
Elec Blasingame was a bulldog of a man. He was squat and thick, almost completely bald. He had the enlarged, blue-veined nose of a heavy drinker, but few had ever seen him drunk. He had been marshal of Plainsville for fourteen years, through good times and bad. There were four graves on the wrong side of the town cemetery, four dead men who had thought Blasingame was just another town marshal who would back down when the going got tough.
Elec's jaws bulged as he glared at Nathan. “Nate,” he said, “we've had a quiet town here since the cow outfits shifted away from Plainsville; people have got to like it that way. Now what you've been doing the past twelve years ain't much my business; I'm just the town marshal. But if you ever bear down on your gun again, the way you did with Jorgenson, you're going to have me to contend with. Is that clear?”
Nathan held a sulphur match to his cigarette and shot the stick on the floor. “Did you see me throw down on Jorgenson?”
“You know what I mean,” Blasingame said harshly. “A name followed you to Plainsville when you came back. When you use a hardcase reputation to scare a man, it's the same as pulling a pistol.”
Nothing showed in Nathan's face. “I'll remember. Is that all, Elec?”
“No,” Blasingame said, “it isn't.” He pulled up a tilt-back chair and sat solidly behind an unfinished plank table that served as a desk. “I've been thinking about that boy of yours, Nate. Doesn't it seem to you he's a little young to be so handy with a forty-five?”
Nathan studied the top of his thin cigarette. “A man can't start too young learning to protect himself.”
“Protect himself? Is that what the boy is doing?” The marshal planted his elbows on the table, shoving his blunt face at Nathan. “The way I got it, your boy challenged young Jorgenson to a pistol duel. Now that's a hell of a thing for a kid to think up all by himself!”
Grayness edged Nathan Blaine's thin lips. “Maybe he had a reason.”
“What kind of reason could a kid like Jeff have to want to shoot another boy?” Blasingame demanded. Suddenly his big fist hit the table. “Damn it, Nate, I'm scared for that boy of yours, and that's God's truth! Can't you see what you've done to him? Teaching a boy like that to use a gun is like giving a baby dynamite caps to play with!”
The fire in Nathan's eyes burned slowly. “Jeff's just a boy, like any other.”
The marshal came half out of his chair. “Wes Hardin was just a boy too, once. But he'd killed a passel of men by the time he was sixteen. They say Will Bonney could cut a notch for every year of his age when he was twenty-one. Bill Longley had a price on his head when he wasn't any older than Jeff is now.”
Angrily, Nathan tramped his cigarette under a boot heel. “Look here, Elec, what are you trying to say?”
