The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [199]
As I said, we’d come over to the east range to gather and by the time we’d got back to the home ranch the trail drive was about to get under way and, thank the Lord, we saw little of Tobin for the next forty-someodd days. Chris and Kite and Vicente and I were swing riders when we were on the move; but Tobin, because he was a new man, had to ride drag and eat dust all the way.
We left Sudan, where the El Centro main herd was headquartered, about the first of May, and it wasn’t till the middle of June that I had my bath in the Grand Central Hotel in Ellsworth.
I’ll tell you the truth: I thought of that one-armed man about every day of the drive, though I never talked about him to the others.
Still, I knew they were thinking about him the way I was. Picturing him standing there with his one arm held tight against his belly after Tobin had quirted him—holding it like that because he didn’t have another hand to rub the sting with. Maybe we should all have jumped Tobin and beat his hide off, but that wouldn’t have proved anything. I think we were all waiting to see this one-armed man stand his ground and fight back, and though he wouldn’t have had a chance, at least he would have felt better after.
Why did Tobin lay it on him? I don’t know. I’ve seen men like Tobin before and since, but not many, thank the Lord. That kind always has to be proving something that other people don’t even bother about. Maybe Tobin did it to show us he had no use for a man who couldn’t stand on his own two feet. Maybe he did it just so he could see how low a man could slip. Then he could say to himself, “Tobin, boy, you’ll never be like that, even if both your arms were gone.”
And probably Tobin would be judging himself right. No one could say that he wasn’t like a piece of rawhide. He was hard on himself even, would take the meanest horse in the remuda and be the last one in at night just so he could say he worked harder than anybody else. But that’s all you could say for him.
And why did John Lefton, a man who had been a cavalry officer and gone through the war, stand there and take it? That I don’t know either. Maybe he had too much pride.
After running for eight years, it was a long way to look back to what he was. And the mescal would blur it to make it farther. I remember sitting in the tub in the Grand Central Hotel and saying, “The hell with him,” like that was final. But it wasn’t that easy. There was something about him that told you that at least one time he had been much man.
We did see John Lefton again.
No…I don’t want to jump to it. I’ll tell it the way it happened.
We came back from Ellsworth and most of that fall Chris and me worked a company herd up on the Canadian near Tascosa. Then toward the middle of November we were ordered back to Sudan. One day, right after we were back, the company man, C. H. Felt, said he was sending us over to the east range with a wagon full of alfalfa to scatter for the winter graze. I asked him who was going and he said Chris and Kite and Vicente… that’s right, and Tobin Royal.
THAT’S HOW THE same five of us come to ride down that gray windy grade into Brady’s yard that November afternoon.
No one was in sight, not even the dog we could hear barking off somewhere behind the adobes. Kite swung down and took my reins as I dismounted. Vicente took Chris’s. That left Tobin Royal to care for his own. He was still riding that big sorrel.
Chris and I went inside the adobe and right away Chris said, “Something’s different here.”
“You just never seen the place empty, is all.”
He kept looking all around to see if he could place what it was. Then I started looking around and it was an unnaturally long moment before it dawned on me what it was.
The place was clean. Not just swept clean and dusted, but there was wax on the bar and three tables and fresh paint on the places it belonged.
“Chris, the place