Novel 1959 - The First Fast Draw (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF

could not do it without a shooting, and even if that was avoided people would speak no more to you. I’ve a black name along the Sulphur.”
    “You’ve been gone a long time, Cullen Baker. Blackthorne is deserted now, and has been since the war ended. It is Will’s house that I live in, and which he left to me when he died. Aunt Flo is with me there, and you’re not likely to see anyone but her.”
    “Chance?”
    “He’s in Boston, or wherever, and he does not often come to call, anyway. Chance likes the towns of Texas, not the plantations and ranches.”
    It would not be the first time I had been to the house of Will Thorne, for even as I made enemies that day at the mill, I had also made a friend.
    Will Thorne, in my estimation, was a man worth the lot of them, perhaps less the sportsman than the others, and much less the talker, but a man of some attainments in his own way. He studied nature a good bit, and I who had lived in the swamps found much to learn from him, as he, I suppose, learned from me.
    He did a sort of writing. I never knew much about that as I was a man who had learned to read but poorly, scarcely more than my name, which I could write, and no more. But he wrote some things for periodicals in London and in Paris, one was about a heron we have in the swamps, and another was on the beaver. I believe he wrote about butterflies and trap-door spiders, and a variety of things. It made no sense to me at first; I’d known about those things from a child, and he told me once that I’d knowledge in my head a naturalist would give years of his life to own.
    We had walked in the swamps. The trails were known to none but the Caddos and me, though later I showed a few of them to Will, and sometimes we’d hunt for plants together, or for strange birds or insects. Usually I knew where to find what he wanted, for a man who is much in the woods acquires a gift for observation.
    In Will I had a friend, and I never forgot his one question after I’d told him of some fight—there were others after the one at the mill, like the one at Fort Belknap when I killed a man—all he would say was to ask me, “Do you think you did the right thing?”
    A question like that sticks in a man’s mind, and after awhile I judged everything by it, deciding whether it was the right thing, and often if there was no other way. I expect it was a good lesson to learn, but a man in his life may have many teachers, some most unexpected. The question lies with the man himself: Will he learn from them?
    For a man to be at peace with himself was important, Will said, not what people say. People are often wrong, and public opinion can change, and the hatreds of people are rarely reasonable things. I can hear him yet. He used to say there was no use a man wearing himself out with hatred and ill-feeling, and time proved it out.
    “Will used to tell me about you when I was a little girl,” Katy said. “He said you were a fine boy. That you’d the makings of a fine man if they would just let you alone. But he said you’d the makings of a great clansman in the old days among the Highlands of Scotland. He said you’d dark blood in you, dangerous blood. But he always came back to saying you were the best of them around here, thoughtful, he used to say, and a gentleman at heart.”
    Despite myself, I was embarrassed at that. It has been rare that anyone has given me a word of praise in my life, and the last thing I’d thought of myself was a good man. But it worried me some, for Will Thorne was a man of few mistakes, and his saying that put a burden on me, his saying I was a good man almost put it up to me to be one. The idea was uncomfortable, for I’d been busy being Cullen Baker, and what he’d said about the black angers I could grasp, for it was proved too often in my life.
    We sat in the kitchen to talk, and I liked the rustle of her skirts as she moved about, making friendly sounds with glass and crockery, and tinkling a bit of