The Desperado by Clifton Adams Page B

came in. I didn't notice
who they were. I went straight on through the room and into the parlor
where the others were.
    The minute I stepped into the room everything got dead quiet. Ma was
sitting dry-eyed in a rocker, staring at nothing in particular. Laurin
was standing beside her with a coffee pot in one hand, holding it out
from her as if she was about to pour, but there was no cup. She stared
at me for a moment. Then, without a word, she began getting the other
women out of the room.
    In a minute the room was empty, except for just me and Ma. I don't
believe it was until then that she realized that I was there. I walked
over to her, not knowing what to do or say. When at last she looked up
and saw me, I dropped down and put my head in her lap the way I used to
do when I was a small boy. And I think I cried.
    One of us must have said something after that, but I don't remember.
After a while one of the ranch wives, well meaning, came in from the
kitchen and said timidly:
    “Tall, hadn't you better eat something?”
    It was so typical of ranch wives. If there's nothing that can
possibly be done, they want to feed you. Ma would have done the same
thing if she had been in the woman's place.
    I got to my feet and said, “Later, not now, thank you.” The words
sounded ridiculous, like somebody turning down a second piece of cake
at a tea party. And out there somewhere Pa was dead.
    The woman disappeared again, and I touched Ma's head, her thin, gray
hair. “Ma...” But I didn't know how to go on. I wasn't any good at
comforting people. And besides, she was still too numb with shock to
understand anything I could say to her.
    As I stood there looking at her, the ache and emptiness in my belly
began to turn to quiet anger. Slowly, I began to put things together
that I had been too numb to think about before. Instinctively, I knew
that Pa hadn't died in any of the thousand and one ways a man could die
around a ranch. He had been killed. I didn't know by whom, but I would
find out. And when I did...
    Ma must have sensed what I was thinking. She looked up at me with
those wide, dry eyes of hers. She noticed the two .44's that I had
buckled on, and I saw a sudden stark fear looking out at me.
    “Tall ... no! There's nothing you can do now. There's nothing you can
do to bring him back.”
    But that anger that had started so quietly was now a hot, blazing
thing. I heard myself saying:
    “He won't get away with it, Ma. Whoever it was, I'll find him. Texas
isn't big enough for him to hide where I can't find him. The world
isn't that big. And when I do find him...”
    That helplessness and terror in her eyes stopped me. She looked at
me, and kept looking at me, as if she had never seen me before. I
should have kept my thoughts to myself, but it was too late to change
that now.
    “Ma,” I said, “don't worry about me.”
    But she didn't say anything. She just kept looking at me.
    I went back to the kitchen and motioned to one of the ranch wives.
“Would you mind looking after Ma for a while?” I asked. “I want to go
outside for a minute, where the men are.”
    “Of course, Tall.” She was a tremendous, big-bosomed woman, holding a
steaming coffee pot in her hand. She had that same look of sympathy in
her eyes that I had noticed with Joe Bannerman, and I hated it.
    I went out the back way instead of the front, where I would have to
pass through the parlor again and face that look of Ma's. Jed Horner
was the first man I saw, a small rancher to the south, down below the
arroyo. He and Cy Clanton were talking quietly near the end of the
front porch. Neither of them seemed especially surprised to see me.
They came forward solemnly to shake hands, something they never would
have bothered about if Pa had been alive.
    “We guessed that you'd be comin' back, Tall,” Jed Horner said
soberly, “as soon as you got the word.”
    “I guess you know all about it, don't you?” Cy Clanton