That was how Plainsville got to be a squatter town. It was rare to see a man wearing a revolver on Main Street any more, unless he was a traveler, and Jeff could remember when every man in town had a heavy Colt's slapping against his thigh. There were no more flashy cowhands with colorful neckerchiefs and bench-made boots and fancy rigs.
All you saw now were bib overalls and thick-soled boots or brogans, and if a man carried a gun at all, likely it would be a shotgun—which was just about as low as a man could sink.
Jeff trudged down toward the bottom of the slope, powdery red dust squirting up between his toes at every step. What I'm going to have when I grow up, he thought, is a pair of bench-made boots, with fancy stitching on the side. Not that he wasn't grown up now, but he had no money.
That was a detail that he would work out later. Now he thought about the boots. They would have built-up leather heels and soles as thin as paper, so that he would have the feel of the stirrup when he rode. He would have his initials on them, and maybe a butterfly stitched in red and green and yellow thread, although such doings were pretty fancy for a working cowhand. Maybe he'd skip the butterfly—he didn't want the other hands laughing at him.
He thought about those boots for a long while as he followed Bessie's eternally switching tail along the path. He was close enough to town to smell the woodsmoke from all the cookstoves, and it made him hungrier than ever. Just his initials on the boots would be enough. He hoped that Aunt Beulah would have fried chicken and gravy and biscuits, as they usually did when they had important company.
The horse was right where Todd Wintworth had said it was, the reins looped over the makeshift hitching rack by the cowshed. The animal was a real beauty, too; black as charcoal and well cared for. Jeff paid special attention to the tooled leather saddle, and to the well-rubbed boot which held a walnut-stocked Winchester. That was the kind of rig Jeff would have some day. His hands itched to ease that Winchester out of the boot and just feel it.
He kept glancing back at the horse and rig as he put Bessie in the stall and measured out a bucketful of feed. He was curious as to why a man who owned an outfit like that would be visiting with the Sewells.
Aunt Beulah put no store in guns of any kind, nor in men who carried them. Neither did Uncle Wirt, for that matter. He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword, they said. Not that it many any sense; in all Jeff's twelve years he had never once seen a man carry a sword in Plainsville.
But that was the way they were, especially Aunt Beulah. Whenever you did something she didn't like, she always had some scripture quote handy to prove that it was wrong.
Anyway, his chores for the day were over, unless there was some stove wood to be chopped. All that was left was the milking, and Uncle Wirt usually took care of that. Jeff took one last covetous look at the booted rifle and started for the house.
“Jefferson, have you got the cow stalled and the feed put out?”
It was his Aunt Beulah, who had just come to the kitchen door to peer out at him. She was a tight-knitted little woman with thinning gray hair and piercing gray eyes. The only time Jeff had ever seen any color in her face had been several years ago when she came down with the slow fever—all other times her face was as gray as lye-bleached leather.
Aunt Beulah's mouth reminded Jeff of a steel trap that had snapped shut on something, especially when she was mad or upset. And that was exactly the way her mouth looked now, like a steel trap, locked tight.
“Yes, ma'am,” Jeff said, “Bessie's put up in the shed. Who we got visiting?”
“You didn't jog her down that path, did you?” Aunt Beulah asked, ignoring his question.
“No, ma'am,” Jeff said, stamping the dust from his bare feet on the platform porch.
“I've seen some of them cowboys jogging them,” Aunt Beulah said indignantly. “It's a sin and a crime to jog a cow when she's heavy with milk. Come on in. Supper will be on pretty soon.”
Jeff stepped into a kitchen heavy with the rich aroma of frying chicken, and his mouth watered. Nobody in the world could cook like Aunt Beulah. He sure hoped the company, whoever it was, didn't like the gizzard, because that was his favorite part.
Now Jeff's attention was drawn again to his aunt, and he shuffled his feet uneasily on the scrubbed kitchen floor. He didn't like the tightness of her mouth and the sharp jutting of her small chin. He searched his mind for something that he had done wrong, but he could think of nothing—not anything recent.
Her mouth came open for just an instant, and then snapped shut almost immediately. She took his arm and turned him toward the parlor. “Come with me, Jefferson,” she said shortly. “There's somebody you—you'll have to meet.”
This was a pretty strange way for his aunt to act about company, Jeff was thinking, but he had learned long ago net to argue with her when she was like this. He walked willingly into the small, immaculate parlor.
His Uncle Wirt, a small man with drooping mustaches and a glistening bald head, was sitting very stiff and erect in one of the uncomfortable parlor chairs, as though someone were holding him there at the point of a gun. He blinked when Jeff came into the room and tried hard to relax.
“Jeff,” he said, clearing his throat, “come on in. Here's somebody wants to see you.”
To Jeff's way of thinking, Uncle Wirt seemed every bit as upset as Aunt Beulah. But he didn't give it a second thought when he saw the man sitting across the room from his uncle—a tall, dark-complexioned man with eyes as dark as an owl's, with shaggy black brows, and a mouth so full and wide that Jeff was briefly reminded of the catfish he sometimes caught in Garter's pond.
When the man stood up, the entire room seemed to grow in size. He said softly, “So you're Jeff!”
That was all he said, and he stood there with his arms hanging relaxed. Jeff didn't know what to say, so he said nothing.
Jeff could hear the old pendulum clock on the mantle ticking away the seconds, and still no one said a thing.
The instant the stranger stood up from his chair, Jeff vaguely realized that something was wrong. The picture was not quite complete. It was just a feeling he had that something was missing, but he couldn't put his finger on it until he saw the cartridge belt hanging on the hat tree in the hall. Then he knew what it was.
This man wore a gun.
Not in Aunt Beulah's house, he wouldn't, but you could see that he didn't feel quite right about the absence of that Colt's heavy weight on his hip. It was as obvious as a man going to church without his shirt.
There were men like that. Jeff could remember seeing two or three of them before, during the squatter trouble, when the big outfits were putting Territory guns on their payrolls. Not that this dark stranger was a Territory man, or an outlaw, or anything like that. He didn't have that mean, hunted look that men get when they've run too far and too long. Still, Jeff couldn't imagine what this man was doing in his Aunt Beulah's and Uncle Wirt's house.