The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [121]
Tio waved the barrel at him. “Come in and join your friends, Jaime.” His voice quivered to make the bravado meaningless.
Robles moved inside the door of the long barroom and saw Remillard and Judge Essery standing by the table nearest the bar. Two other men stood at the next table. One of them was the bartender, wiping his hands back and forth over his apron.
Robles spoke calmly. “You’ve done enough, Tio. Hand me the gun.”
“Enough?” Tio swung the pistol back to the first table. “I have just started.”
“Don’t talk crazy. Hand me the gun.”
“Do you think I am crazy?”
“Just hand me the gun.”
Tio smiled, and by it seemed to calm. “My foolish nephew. Use your head for one minute. What do you suppose would happen to me if I handed you this gun?”
“The law would take its course,” Jimmy Robles said. The words sounded meaningless even to him.
“It would take its course to the nearest cottonwood,” Tio said. “There are enough fools in the family with you, Jaime.” He smiled still, though his voice continued to shake.
“Perhaps this is my mission, Jaime. The reason I was born.”
“You make it hard to decide just which one is the fool.”
“No. Hear me. God made Tio Robles to his image and likeness that he might someday blow out the brains of Señores Rema-yard and Essery.” Tio’s laugh echoed in the long room.
Jimmy Robles looked at the two men. Judge Essery was holding on to the table and his thin face was white with fear, glistening with fear. And for all old man Remillard’s authority, he couldn’t do a thing. An old Mexican, like a thousand he could buy or sell, could stand there and do whatever he desired because he had slipped past the cowman’s zone of influence, past fearing for the future.
Tio raised the pistol to the level of his eyes. It was already cocked. “Watch my mission, Jaime. Watch me send two devils to hell!”
He watched fascinated. Two men were going to die. Two men he hardly knew, but he could feel only hate for them. Not like he might hate a man, but with the anger he felt for a principle that went against his reason. Something big, like injustice. It went through his mind that if these two men died, all injustice would vanish. He heard the word in his mind. His own voice saying it. Injustice. Repeating it, until then he heard only a part of the word.
His gun came out and he pulled the trigger in the motion. Nothing was repeating in his mind, now. He looked down at Tio Robles on the floor and knew he was dead before he knelt over him.
He picked up Tio in his arms like a small child and walked out of the Supreme into the evening dusk. John Benedict approached him and he saw people crowding out into the street. He walked past the sheriff and behind him heard Remillard’s booming voice. “That was a close one!” and a scattering of laughter. Fainter then, he heard Remil- lard again. “Your boy learns fast.”
He walked toward Spanishtown, not seeing the faces that lined the street, hardly feeling the limp weight in his arms.
The people, the storefronts, the street—all was hazy—as if his thoughts covered his eyes like a blindfold. And as he went on in the darkness he thought he understood now what John Benedict meant by justice.
15
The Last Shot
Original Title: A Matter of Duty
Fifteen Western Tales, September 1953
FROM THE SHADE of the pines, looking across the draw, he watched the single file of cavalrymen come out of the timber onto the open bench. The first rider raised his arm and they moved at a slower pace down the slope, through the green-tinged brush. The sun made small flashes