Gunman's Song (24 page)

“I said stay out of it, Shaw!” said Cray Dawson.

But Shaw continued, saying to Sullivan, “When I tell you this man is going to kill you deader than hell…don't think I haven't given it close consideration. He looked at the other drovers, then said to Sullivan, “You must have thought an awful lot of those two cowhands to be willing to die for them. I reckon that's admirable.” He touched his fingertips to his hat brim. “
Adios.
”

Having lost some of the heated urge to avenge his fallen cowhands, Sullivan looked troubled and bit his lip. “Shaw, if you're saying this was all a mistake—”

“I've said all I'm going to say.” Shaw shrugged. “If you want to die this way, it's not my place to stop you.” He turned to Dawson, saying, “Hurry up and shoot him, Crayton. Maybe the rest of these boys will drag him out of here, let me get back to sleep. Won't you, boys?” he asked the drovers.

The men nodded as one. Sullivan turned and saw them; then he said quickly to Cray Dawson, “Mister, I've never heard of you. But if Fast Larry Shaw says you're the fastest gun out of Somos Santos, I don't reckon anybody can blame me for not wanting to face off with you…‘specially with them two boys' deaths being an unfortunate accident, so to speak.”

Not knowing what to say, Cray Dawson stood staring silently, his hand relaxed but still close to his gun handle.

Looking at the drovers behind him, then at Lawrence Shaw, then back to Dawson, Sullivan said, “I
believe I'm going to ride away from here and call this thing square, if it's all the same with everybody?”

“You'd be wise to do so,” Shaw said quietly.

Jedson Caldwell watched as if in awe as the foreman stepped back atop his horse in silence, backed it, turned it, and led his men away, one of them lifting a coiled rope from his saddle horn and flinging it to the ground. When the riders had vanished from the moonlight back into the night, Caldwell slipped over, picked up the rope, and brought it to Shaw and Dawson. “Look,” he said in a hushed tone, “they'd already tied a hangman's knot in it!”

“There you have it,
Crayton,
” said Shaw, taking the rope and shoving it to Cray Dawson. “It looks like one way or another, your newfound reputation as a gunman just saved your life.”

Instead of taking the rope, Dawson took a step backward, letting it fall to the ground. “I've got no reputation, Shaw! I'm not a gunman! You had no right interfering!”

“I had
every
right interfering,” said Shaw. “You're riding with me, watching my back. I've got to do the same for you. You've let killing those cowhands get to you so bad that you're ready to get yourself killed as some sort of punishment for it. I'm not about to let that happen.”

“How do you know I was going to get killed?”

Dawson said defiantly. “How do you know that I haven't developed a taste for killing, just like you have?”

“I'm going to overlook that remark,” said Shaw, “because I know you're not thinking straight right now.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if letting it settle his patience. Then he said, “I'll
tell you how I know…I know because I've seen too many men die in front of me
not
to know. Do you think staying alive in this life of mine has been all about who's the fastest to draw and fire a gun?” He gave Dawson a questioning look. “If it was, I'd have been dead years ago. This is about staying alive! This is about learning something more every time a man's face hits the dirt. I can tell how many gunfights a man has been in by the amount of sweat that runs down his face.”

Cray Dawson also settled down, realizing that everything Shaw had said was true whether he'd realized it or not at the time. “All right,” he said, “I do blame myself for those two cowhands being dead; there's no way around it.”

“This place I live in somebody dies every day,” said Shaw. “Get used to it, before it gets you killed.”

“I
can't
get used to it, Shaw, at least not the way you have,” said Dawson. “I'm not a part of it like you are. I'm here to take vengeance the same as you. But when it's finished, I go home and hang up my gun. What will you do?”

Shaw's demeanor seemed to soften in reflection. “I don't know…I wish to God I did.” Then he seemed to snap out of such a line of thought and said, “But don't kid yourself thinking it'll be easy to stop, Dawson. You've got yourself a reputation to live up to whether you like it or not.”

“Or live
down,
” said Dawson, “the way I see it.”

“Up or down is your call,” said Shaw, reining his horse toward the trail. “But either way you'll have to live
with
it. That foreman and his men ain't about to tell anybody that you're an ordinary cowhand like themselves. How would that make them look, not
bringing your body back facedown over a saddle? No, sir, they're going to see to it that your reputation grows, for a while, anyway. By then somebody else will add something to it, if you don't yourself.” He tipped his hat brim down onto his forehead and added in a lowered tone of voice, “welcome to the circus, Crayton Dawson. Hope you enjoy the show.”

In the spare room behind the doctor's office, Lizzy Carnes turned her nose away and picked up the bloody discarded gauze bandage from the nightstand beside Sammy Boy's bed. She dropped the soiled bandage into an empty washpan to be thrown away. “I think you're going to kill yourself if you don't take more time to let this wound heal,” she said to Sammy Boy White, who sat on the side of the bed looking woozy and drained.

“This wound will heal just as well on horseback as it will on a feather bed,” Sammy Boy said, stifling a groan as he stretched his right arm and tried to loosen the tight pain in his badly bruised chest. “I'm breathing all right now. The doctor says as young as I am, I'll heal up quick. I can't afford to let this opportunity slip past me.”

Lizzy shook her head. “I swear it makes no sense to me, all this killing just to see who kills the other the quickest.”

“You're a whor— I mean, a
woman,
Lizzy,” said Sammy Boy. “If you don't understand it, maybe it's because you ain't meant to understand it.” He gestured toward a chair and said, “Hand me my shirt; help me get into it. Time is slipping away from us.”

“You were going to say ‘whore,' Sammy,” said Lizzy. “But being a whore doesn't make me stupid!” She snatched up the shirt and tossed it to him.

“It doesn't make you real
smart
either, does it?” Sammy replied, grinning, catching the shirt and shaking it out with one hand. “The thing is, I've got a chance here to make something out of surviving that gunfight with Fast Larry Shaw. Whether he knew it or not, Shaw just opened a big door for ol' Sammy Boy. I'm going to take advantage of it. I'm going after him.”

Lizzy looked puzzled. “That's what I can't understand, Sammy. The man could have killed you but he spared your life…why on earth would you want to kill him after him doing something like that? It looks to me like you would
thank
him for it.”

“See?” said Sammy Boy. “That's how little you know about gunslinging. I've got Fast Larry Shaw all figured out, up here.” He tapped his finger against his forehead. “This is all about who makes the first mistake, and he made a
bad
one, not killing me when he had the chance. He showed me that he's tired of being who he is. He's getting old and worn out, and it won't be long before somebody has to put him to sleep, the way you do any old dog. I plan on being the person who does it.”

“Well, all's I know is, me and Suzette met him and his friend…. I thought they were both real nice,” she said, reaching out and helping him into his shirt, then beginning to button it for him.

“Wait a minute,” said Sammy Boy, taking her by her wrist, stopping her. “You didn't, you know…with Fast Larry?”

“What?” Lizzy didn't catch on to his question.

“Damn it, Lizzy,” said Sammy Boy, “don't make me come out and say it! You and Fast Larry, you didn't do anything, did you?”

Lizzy shrugged. “No, we just met at the bar, and then he left.” She paused for a second, then added, “His friend left too, come to think of it.”

“Then you can't really say he was
nice
or nothing else, can you?” said Sammy Boy.

“He seemed nice though,” said Lizzy.

“Yeah, I bet,” said Sammy Boy, letting her go back to buttoning his shirt. “Anybody can afford to be nice when they're on top of their game.” As she finished up with his shirt, he ran his good hand along her back, up along her neck beneath her curly blond hair. “You stick with me, honey, nurse me along, help me get back to health while I find him. As soon as I kill him, we'll both be living it up somewhere, having food and drinks brought to our private railcar.”

“Do gunmen live that well?” Lizzy asked, seeming to give the matter some close consideration. “The ones I've known haven't had private railcars, that I ever knew about.”

“Why would they tell you what they had or didn't have, Lizzy?” said Sammy Boy, not liking the way she questioned his knowledge of gunmen. “All they ever wanted from you was one thing. They weren't about to tell you they had their own private railcar. Gunmen don't like telling too much about themselves.”

Lizzy didn't seem to hear him. Instead she seemed to be concentrating on something else. “Sammy, how do gunmen make that kind of money?”

“By shooting people, how do you think?” Sammy said, sounding a bit put out by her question. “By
hiring their gun to the highest bidders. To railroads, detective agencies, wealthy businessmen needing their services. If somebody squats on your land and refuses to leave, you hire a gunman. Somebody deals you dirt, takes a herd of cattle or a shipment of goods and doesn't pay you for them when the time comes, you hire a gunman. Hell, a gunman gets paid for all kinds of gun work. Sometimes they make money just in wagering themselves against some other gunman, the way me and Elton was doing. Hell, there's all sorts of ways a gunman makes money! Some that I don't even know about yet!”

“I don't think people who do that kind of work make much money, Sammy,” Lizzy said. “The ones I've known are always living hand to mouth, sleeping wherever they can, eating whenever they get a chance to.” She shook her head. “I think somebody has misinformed you about gunmen.”

“There's some who make big money,” said Sammy Boy, undaunted. “And that's the way it's going to be for me. I'll have folks bowing and scraping when I walk into a room. They'll be doing the same for you if they know you're with me. Stick with me Lizzy; you'll see. We'll both be living a whole new life before long. You can count on it.”

“I'll stick with you, Sammy,” said Lizzy, “even though Suzette says I'm making a big mistake…. I'll stick with you as long as you're honest with me and don't mistreat me.”

“That's my girl,” said Sammy Boy. He pointed at his gun belt hanging from a chair back, the butt of a new Colt sticking up from the holster. “Hand me that shooting rig. We best get on our way.”

As Sammy Boy stood up on weak legs and Lizzy
helped him strap his gun belt around his waist, Sheriff Neff stepped into the open doorway. Seeing Sammy buckle his belt and lift the Colt to check it, Neff said, “I see you've managed to get your hands on another gun before your wound barely dried over.” He stepped into the room, shaking his head in wonder. “I reckon I shouldn't be surprised you're going after Shaw. You never struck me as a man with much sense.”

Sammy Boy gave him a hard stare. “Sheriff, if you think I lived through that shoot-out in the street just to hear your law-dog mouth, you're badly mistaken.” He spun the cylinder of the new Colt, then twirled the gun on his finger, getting a feel for the balance of it. Then he slid it expertly into his holster. “From now on I'll expect you to treat me the same as you treat Fast Larry Shaw. I might not have won that fight, but I damn sure stepped up and faced the man…that's something nobody else in this horse'sass town would ever have the guts to do.”

“I didn't treat Fast Larry Shaw any different than I treat any other man,” said Sheriff Neff. “For your information I ran him out of Eagle Pass while you was still coughing up chunks of your dirty shirt.”

“Yeah,” said Sammy Boy knowingly, “I heard about how hard you ran him out of town. And I heard about how easy he gave in. You and Shaw ain't fooling me with a little stage show like that.”

“I told him to leave and he left,” said the sheriff, leveling his shoulders, but looking a bit rumpled by Sammy Boy's implication. “That's the way I've done it with his kind for years.”

“Bull!” said Sammy Boy, also leveling his shoulders, feeling the pain and stiffness across his back
and chest. “Everybody goes out of their way to treat Fast Larry Shaw like he's something special. From now on anybody don't treat me the same way, I'll put a hole in them. I've proved myself. By God, I want some respect!”