Michener, James A. (149 page)

He then rode back into town, where he stalked into the law offices of Daniel Parmenteer, arresting and securing him in the same way. Leading the lawyer into the street, he banged on the door of the sheriff's office and told him to fetch his deputy and follow immediately. When the sheriff started to ask questions, he snapped: 'Otto Macnab, Texas Ranger,' and on foot he led Parmenteer to the east edge of town, where he lashed him also to the big tree.

When the sheriff arrived, Macnab told the prisoners, and the crowd that had gathered: 'Bateses, Parmenteers, people of Larkin County. The feud is over. The killing has ended. My name is Otto Macnab, Texas Ranger, and I am telling you that this town is at rest.' Some cheers greeted this welcome promise.

He then went to stand before the Bates brothers: 'You've had grievances, 1 know. And you've responded to them. But enough's enough. We will stand for no more.' Taking a long, sharp knife from his belt, he reached out and cut the two men free.

Moving to Parmenteer, he said: 'Daniel, you felt you had to vindicate your brother Cletus, and you have. We all understand, but we can tolerate no more. The feud is over.' And he cut his cords too.

But then Parmenteer asked a sensible question: 'What about Peavine? They've sent to New Mexico to bring him in to kill me and my folks.'

'I've been told that,' Macnab said, never raising his voice, 'and I shall go out now to warn Peavine not to enter this town. He is forbidden.'

With that, he turned to the sheriff: 'Now the job's yours. Watch these men. Keep the peace.' And he walked back to the center of town, where he recovered his horse, packed his mule once again,

jammed his felt hat down upon his forehead, and rode out of town to intercept the Rattlesnake.

He rode three days toward the New Mexico border, and toward dusk on the last day, saw figures on the horizon. Neither hurrying nor slowing down, he rode toward them.

They turned out to be three soldiers on patrol from Fort Elliott, and as they camped under the stars, with the soldiers providing much better food than Otto could supply, they told him that they had crossed paths with two men named Bates and Peavine.

'You say Bates and Peavine are still at Fort Elliott?'

'They helped the captain hunt for deer ... for the mess.'

In the morning the soldiers continued their patrol. Macnab headed for the distant fort, and at about noon he was rewarded by seeing two men coming eastward, each with two horses. Making sure that they must see him, he rode resolutely right at them, and at hailing distance he called out: 'Peavine! Bates! This is Otto Macnab, Texas Ranger.'

With no guns showing, he went directly up to them and said: 'I've been sent to Larkin County to stop the killing. Four days ago I arrested your two nephews, Sam and Ed, and also Lawyer Parmenteer.'

'He's a killer!' Bates growled.

'I know he is, but so were your people, Bates. And now it's ended.'

Neither of the men responded to this, so Macnab said: 'Rattlesnake, you're not to come into Larkin County. You're to turn around and head back for New Mexico. Bates, you can do as you wish.'

'He's comin' with me,' Bates said, and the one-armed man nodded.

if he steps foot in town, I shall arrest him. And if he resists, I'll shoot him.'

It was a moment of the most intense anxiety. The two men, watching Macnab's hands, realized that if they made an aggressive move, he could whip out his guns and kill one of them, but they also knew that the survivor could surely kill Macnab. Since it was likely that the Ranger would aim at Peavine, Rattlesnake was careful not to make even the slightest false move.

Showing no emotion, Macnab said: 'You can kill me, but you know the entire force of Rangers will be on your neck tomorrow, and they'll never stop. They'll chase you to California, Peavine, but they'll get you.'

There was a very long silence, after which Macnab said gently:

'Now, why don't you two fellows split up? Rattlesnake, go home.

Bates, ride back with me to a new kind of town where you can live

in peace.'

He edged his horse away, to give the men a chance to talk

between themselves, and for nearly half an hour they did while he

waited patiently, not dismounting and never taking his hands far

from his guns, but moving close to his mule, whose load he kicked

once or twice as if adjusting it.

Finally Peavine rode up to Macnab: 'I'm headin' back.' Otto nodded approvingly as the notorious killer turned and

started west, but before the man had gone even a few paces, he

called: 'If you try to come back, I'll kill you.' Rattlesnake said

nothing.

By the end of December 1883, Ranger Otto Macnab had every reason to believe that he had quelled the feud, as he had been directed to do, but in the back of his mind he still suspected that the Rattlesnake might slither back into Fort Garner to complete the killing for which he had been hired, so Macnab had the prudent thought of reporting in writing to the governor:

Fort Garner Larkin County

27 December'1883

Excellency:

Obedient to your orders 1 came to this town, arrested the leaders of both parties to the Larkin County feud and pacified them. They proved to be sensible men and tractable, and I expect no more trouble from them

However, there is a possibility that the hired killer Rattlesnake Peavine who is hiding in New Mexico might sneak back to resume the killing, as he was at one time hired by the Bates to do this. I do not know whether to stay here or return to my family and shall await your instructions.

Otto Macnab

The governor thought it safe to bring the Ranger back, but ten days after Otto rode out of Fort Garner, Peavine rode in. He headed straight for Lawyer Parmenteer's office, where he kicked open a rear door and shot Parmenteer in the back before the latter could reach for his gun.

Macnab was on his way home, well south of Palo Pinto County, riding quietly along his preferred back roads, when he stopped at

the growing village of Lampasas and sought lodging with a farmer he had assisted years before when bandits threatened the area. 'They could of used you up north,' the farmer said.

'What happened?'

'Them Larkin County maniacs.'

'What did they do?'

'Rattlesnake Peavine come into town and shot Daniel Parmenteer in the back. All hell broke loose and there must be a dozen dead.'

Macnab said nothing. He ate his evening meal of hard-fried steak and brown gravy, accepted the bed the farmer provided out of gratitude for past favors, and left early next morning. He rode mournfully south, lost in defeat, heading not for home but for Austin, where he told the governor: Tve got to go get him.' The governor, who had already accepted full blame for ordering Macnab home, said: 'Shoot that son-of-a-bitch if you have to trail him to Alaska,' and Macnab replied: 'You can depend on it.'

Now he rode west to explain things to his wife, and when she expressed her disappointment about his heading back to trouble, and at his age, he said simply: 'The world is a muddy place, and if good men don't try to clean it up, bad men will make it a swamp.'

Emma Rusk often suspected that she was having so much trouble with her white son, Floyd, because she had rejected her Indian son, Blue Cloud, for although she lavished unwavering love upon Floyd, he refused to reciprocate. At the beginning he had been a normal child, robust and lively, but from the age of six, when he began to realize who his parents were and in what ways they differed from other fathers and mothers, he began to draw away from them, and it pained her to watch the bitterness with which he reacted to life. He was not difficult, he was downright objectionable, and she sometimes thought that it would be better if he moved in with the rough-and-ready Yeagers, who might knock some sense into him.

His principal dislike was his mother, for he saw her as unlike other women, and on those painful occasions when he came upon her without her nose, he would blanch and turn away in horror, but it was when he became vaguely aware of how babies were born that he suffered his greatest revulsion, for he had learned from other children in the stone houses about his mother's long captivity with the Indians and of what they had done to her. He was not sure what rape involved, but he had been told by eager informants who knew no more than he that many Indian men had raped his

mother, and from the manner in which this was reported, he knew that something bad had happened.

He thus had two reasons for his antipathy, his mother's physical difference and the fact that she had been abused by Indians, and it became impossible for him to accept her love. Whatever she did or attempted to do he interpreted as compensation for some massive wrong in which she had participated, and in time he grew to hate the sight of her, as if she reminded him of some terrible flaw in himself.

He grew equally harsh toward his father, for he had learned from the same cruel children, who, like others their age, were eager to believe the worst and report upon it immediately, that his father was a Quaker, 'not like other people.' They said that he was so cowardly he refused to fight: 'At the tank, which he and Mr. Yeager had fenced in, this man Poteet forced him to back down. He was scared yellow.' In an area where a gun was the mark of the man, the fact that Earnshaw refused to carry one proved this charge.

There had also been an ugly incident in which a wandering badman of no great fame had stumbled into Fort Garner and tried to hold up the place. He had chosen the Rusk residence for his first strike, and finding Earnshaw with no gun, had terrorized the place for some time before Floyd escaped and ran screaming to the Yeagers: 'Pop's being shot at by a robber!'

Within the minute Frank Yeager had dashed across the open space of the parade ground, burst into the Rusk home, and shot the befuddled gunman dead. As they stood over the corpse, Yeager repeated something he had said before: 'Earnshaw, a Texan without a gun is like a Longhorn without horns. It just ain't natural.'

So now, if Floyd saw his mother as stained because of her experiences with the Indians, he saw his father as emasculated because Frank Yeager had been forced to protect the Rusk household. He was therefore a bewildered, unhappy lad as he approached his teens, and it occurred to him that he must do something about the deficiencies in which he was enmeshed. Concerning his mother, he could do nothing except continue to repel the love she tried to bestow upon him, but the glaring faults in his father's character could be corrected. For one thing, he could behave in a manner totally unlike his rather pathetic father, and he began in a calculated way to make this adjustment.

He went to Jaxifer: if I can get the money, will you help me?'

'Maybe.'

'How much must I give you for a pistol?'

'Now what do you need a pistol for?'

'Like when that man came to onr house.' 'Yep. Man oughta have a pistol, time like that.' It was agreed that Jaxifer would provide Floyd with a revolver in fairly good working order, and some shells, for six dollars, and now the problem became how to accumulate so much money.

In these troubled days the United States government did not provide enough currency to enable men to conduct their businesses. This did not mean that there wasn't enough to provide charity to feckless idlers who refused to work, it meant there wasn't enough to pay the men and women who did work. The cause of the trouble was avarice; those fortunate few who already had money, or who worked at jobs whose salaries enabled them to acquire some, saw that it was to their advantage to keep the national supply meager, for then those who lacked funds would have to work doubly hard to earn a portion of what the well-to-do already controlled.

On the Texas frontier cash was in such short supply, thanks to policy decisions formulated by the money-masters in New York and Boston, that hard-working cowboys like the two black cavalrymen rarely saw actual cash, and when they did, it was apt to be Mexican, French or English coins dating from the 1700s, with Spanish coins circulating at a premium. It was a great system for the rich, who could command excessive rates for the money they had acquired, a miserable system for people endeavoring to accumulate enough funds to start a business or keep one going

Earnshaw Rusk, a man of uncommon insight, saw early the great damage being done by the monetary policy of his nation, for although he and Emma had gained their start through the large land grants obtained by her family and from the free horses and cattle that roamed the prairie in those earlier days, he was aware that others who followed were having a desperate time. Out of regard for them, he wrote frequent letters to the Defender explaining his interpretation of the money problem. By imperceptible steps, none consciously taken at the time, he progressed from being merely aware of the problem, to a Free Silver man who argued that silver should be cast into coins at a much greater rate and at a higher value than was now being done, to an avowed Greenbacker who pleaded for the printing and circulation of more paper money, to an incipient radical Populist who believed that the government ought to protect and not harass its citizens. Long before a much greater orator and thinker than he took up the subject, Earnshaw was warning the people of Larkin County that 'we are slaves to gold,' and people in the growing town began accusing Rusk of being a radical, a socialist and an atheist, giving

his son reason for being an opponent of his father's social beliefs, a loud adherent of religion as practiced by Mrs. Yeager, and a strong advocate of guns. In one of his letters to the editor, Earnshaw had said:

I do believe the same family income buys less and less each week, even though the total supply of money diminishes. This is self-contradictory, and I cannot explain it.

The cause was simple. Floyd Rusk was systematically stealing as much as he could from both his mother and his father, and after he had paid the cavalryman more than two and a half dollars for the promised gun, his father caught him taking two Mexican coins.