The Transgressors Read Online Free PDF Page A

be you won’t need to think of nothin’ at all.”
    He was hurt. Lord was quickly contrite. “I’m sorry, Dave; it’s just a habit I’ve slipped into. I’m not man enough to fill your boots, and I’d never have the heart to try. But I’d surely like to be your chief deputy.”
    “Well, now,” Bradley said as he cleared his throat noisily, “can’t think of a man I’d rather have, when it comes to that. But, Tom—Tom, boy”—over his glasses, he shot Lord a steel-blue glance—“watch yourself, huh? You got something eatin’ you. Drag it out in the open. Don’t let it take over with you.”
    “I’ll watch it. I won’t let it take over,” Lord promised.
    “You do that. Because there ain’t nothing uglier than a law man turned mean. He’s back behind his badge, and the common folks’re out in front of him. Kinda got the world by the tail, y’ know. Just pinchin’ it a little to begin with, then swingin’ it. An’ then taking a try at poppin’ its neck.”
    The other deputies also noticed Lord’s clownish gibing, but they could not see it as that—without regarding themselves as ridiculous—nor did they interpret it for what it was. Tom was just tryin’ to be friendly, that was all. Just tryin’ to be one of the boys. And if he maybe worked a little too hard at it, you couldn’t fault a man for that. Why old Tom was one of the finest fellas you’d want to meet: always ready for a pint or a poker game, and plen-ty man besides. Don’t let the way he looks fool you, mister. There’s a fella that c’d hunt bears with a switch.
    Far from being envious, they were pleased and proud of his eventual appointment as chief deputy. Ol’ Tom had it coming to him, if anyone did, and it was best all around that he should have it. If you’d picked one of them, now, one of the old-line deputies, the others would have been sore. But with Tom having a little somethin’ extra, it was all right. Made things pretty nice, any way you looked at it. Tom never hit you in the face with his learnin’—just talked an’ acted like anyone else—but don’t think he didn’t have it! Prob’ly the smartest man this side of the Pecos. And having a fella like that for chief deputy, well, it was plumb nice. Sort of made everything classier, like Pardee County was really comin’ up in the world.
    So everyone was happy about Tom Lord’s new job. Everyone was content with his tenancy of it.
    Everyone, that is, but the tenant himself.
    He knew, by now, that far-west Texas must be his home forever. He had spent too much of his life here, become too much a part of the land and its people, to adapt to another place. And that was all right. He liked it here. He only disliked his existence here—the insistent necessity to be what he was not. Perhaps, if he was allowed to choose, if he had a free choice of being what he was or being something else, then the status quo would be tolerable. He might even decide to continue it.
    But to have no choice, to be force-fed with a way of life, to have to sneak and crawl inside a tightening shell.…
    It was not too late to break out of it. The desire to do so was still in him. Only one thing was needed: money. And where a fellow like him was going to lay his hands on any real money.…
    Out of the dead and buried past, a voice whispered to him, whispered that the money could be had. It had been almost three decades since he had last heard that voice, almost thirty years since its owner had walked out of his life, with an impenetrable wall rising up behind her. But now she spoke to him again; hazily, he relived the brief moments of their long-ago parting:
    The perfume…the moonlight drifting through the window…the cottonwood trees rustling in the wind…and a tiny gloved hand gently urging him to wakefulness:
    And he, peevishly, “What you want, Mama? What you all dressed up for?”
    “Ssh, darling. I want you to take this. Take very good care of it. It’s a-all—all I have to