Read Online Novel 1959 - The First Fast Draw (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Louis L’Amour
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best sense. Folks love with their blood and their flesh, Cullen, not with their brains. The sense of love is as deep as the water in Black Bayou, rich as the color of hyacinth. It makes no sense but to the people who love, and that’s enough.”
“Not for her and me, Bob Lee. And she has no such thought. It’s only that we both liked her Uncle Will, I guess, and she may have sympathy for me.”
“Have it your way,” Bob Lee told me. “You’ve much to learn of women, Cullen.”
Now no man likes to hear that. Each man believes he knows as much of women as the next, and in my time I’d known a few of them, and here and there women had been in love with me, or told it to me, but Katy Thorne was not likely to care for my kind of man, although she was a beautiful girl with a body that took a man’s breath and embarrassed me to think on, not that I’m a man strange to women.
This day’s work would bring trouble upon us all, but we had trouble already, and there was little they could do to us if we stayed to our swamps. Those carpetbagging soldiers weren’t going to come into the swamp after us, not if they were in their right minds, but Colonel Amon Belser was a proud-walking man who would not like it said that he’d been made to look the fool, nor would he like to think that Bob Lee had been among the men, and Bob Lee with a price on his head.
What graveled us was the knowing that no Reconstruction was needed here. Texas had scarce been touched by the war, only men lost, and time taken from their work by it, but the carpetbaggers flocked to Texas because there was wealth to be had there and they wanted it.
As long as Throckmorton was governor he held them back, but when they’d thrown him out and put Davis in, we all knew we were in trouble. All state and local police had been disbanded and the Reconstruction were in power everywhere. Only we knew they wanted no newspaper talk, no publicity, just loot the state and get out, that was what they were thinking of.
Feeling had been intense up North when the war ended, but right-thinking folks were already making themselves heard and the old abolitionist group of haters were losing out to the sober-minded who wished to preserve the Union and bring business back to where it had been. The Reconstruction people had been told to use discretion because, if they stirred up a fuss, feeling might turn fast against them.
“This Belser,” Jack English said, “I’ve had an eye on him, and he sets store by Katy Thorne, and that Petraine woman, too. He’d like to go after the both of them, but there’s men would kill him if he said a word to Katy Thorne, and as for Lacy Petraine, she needs no man to care for her.”
It was the first talk I’d heard of Lacy Petraine, but right then the talk began, and I listened as I rode. She was new to the Five Counties, a New Orleans woman, but who’d lived elsewhere before that, and she had cash money, which was a rare thing.
She was a beauty, they said, and a dark, flashing kind of woman who carried herself as a lady and let no man think of her otherwise. She had bought local property from folks who wanted to go West, but what she had in mind or why she wanted to stay here, there was nobody could say.
On the island that night there was talk of Sam Barlow again. Matt Kirby had come to the island with the news of how Barlow had burned out a farm near San Augustine. He had killed a man there and run off his stock.
“If he comes up this away,” Jack English suggested, “I say we run him off. I say we run him clean out of the country, or hang him.”
If a man would just sit quiet and listen he could hear all the news right there on the island, for the men who sheltered there had friends everywhere, and word came to them by several means: a man riding by on the trails might leave a message in a hollow stump, or he might arrange the branches in a certain way, or the stones beside a trail. We had our ways of knowing things, even in
“Not for her and me, Bob Lee. And she has no such thought. It’s only that we both liked her Uncle Will, I guess, and she may have sympathy for me.”
“Have it your way,” Bob Lee told me. “You’ve much to learn of women, Cullen.”
Now no man likes to hear that. Each man believes he knows as much of women as the next, and in my time I’d known a few of them, and here and there women had been in love with me, or told it to me, but Katy Thorne was not likely to care for my kind of man, although she was a beautiful girl with a body that took a man’s breath and embarrassed me to think on, not that I’m a man strange to women.
This day’s work would bring trouble upon us all, but we had trouble already, and there was little they could do to us if we stayed to our swamps. Those carpetbagging soldiers weren’t going to come into the swamp after us, not if they were in their right minds, but Colonel Amon Belser was a proud-walking man who would not like it said that he’d been made to look the fool, nor would he like to think that Bob Lee had been among the men, and Bob Lee with a price on his head.
What graveled us was the knowing that no Reconstruction was needed here. Texas had scarce been touched by the war, only men lost, and time taken from their work by it, but the carpetbaggers flocked to Texas because there was wealth to be had there and they wanted it.
As long as Throckmorton was governor he held them back, but when they’d thrown him out and put Davis in, we all knew we were in trouble. All state and local police had been disbanded and the Reconstruction were in power everywhere. Only we knew they wanted no newspaper talk, no publicity, just loot the state and get out, that was what they were thinking of.
Feeling had been intense up North when the war ended, but right-thinking folks were already making themselves heard and the old abolitionist group of haters were losing out to the sober-minded who wished to preserve the Union and bring business back to where it had been. The Reconstruction people had been told to use discretion because, if they stirred up a fuss, feeling might turn fast against them.
“This Belser,” Jack English said, “I’ve had an eye on him, and he sets store by Katy Thorne, and that Petraine woman, too. He’d like to go after the both of them, but there’s men would kill him if he said a word to Katy Thorne, and as for Lacy Petraine, she needs no man to care for her.”
It was the first talk I’d heard of Lacy Petraine, but right then the talk began, and I listened as I rode. She was new to the Five Counties, a New Orleans woman, but who’d lived elsewhere before that, and she had cash money, which was a rare thing.
She was a beauty, they said, and a dark, flashing kind of woman who carried herself as a lady and let no man think of her otherwise. She had bought local property from folks who wanted to go West, but what she had in mind or why she wanted to stay here, there was nobody could say.
On the island that night there was talk of Sam Barlow again. Matt Kirby had come to the island with the news of how Barlow had burned out a farm near San Augustine. He had killed a man there and run off his stock.
“If he comes up this away,” Jack English suggested, “I say we run him off. I say we run him clean out of the country, or hang him.”
If a man would just sit quiet and listen he could hear all the news right there on the island, for the men who sheltered there had friends everywhere, and word came to them by several means: a man riding by on the trails might leave a message in a hollow stump, or he might arrange the branches in a certain way, or the stones beside a trail. We had our ways of knowing things, even in
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