The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [201]
“You know now?”
Tobin knew. Maybe he couldn’t believe it, but he knew and in the instant he was pushing himself from the bar, dipping that stung hand to get at the Navy Colt. The barrel was just clear of the holster when Lefton’s quirt cracked Tobin’s wrist like a pistol shot, and slapped the Colt right out of his hand. For a moment Tobin was wide open, not sure what to do. Then he saw it coming and tried to cover, but not soon enough and Lefton’s quirt lashed across his face cutting him from cheekbone to nose. The quirt came back, catching him across the forehead and his hat went spinning.
Tobin threw up his arms to cover his face, but now Lefton let go of the quirt. He came up with a fist under Tobin’s jaw, and when Tobin’s guard came apart, the same fist chopped back-handed, like a counterpunch, and smacked hard. This man knew how to fight. The fist swung low again, into Tobin’s belly, and when he doubled up, Lefton’s knee came up against his jaw. That straightened Tobin good. When he was just about upright the fist came around like a sledgehammer and the next second Tobin was spread-eagle on the floor.
He must have been conscious, though I don’t know how; for then Lefton looked down at him and said, “You know what you’re going to do now, don’t you? As soon as you find a left-handed currycomb.”
We just stood there until he got Tobin to his feet and out the door; then Brady said, “Mrs. Lefton, you’ve got yourself a man.” And the way he said man, it meant everything it could mean plus how Joe Brady felt about the matter.
Mrs. Lefton smiled. “I’ve known that for some time,” she said mildly—to tell us that there had never been any doubt about it as far as she was concerned. She excused herself right after that.
As soon as the door closed behind her, Brady, like a little kid with a story to tell, filled in the part we didn’t know about.
He said on that day last May, after we’d gone, Lefton came back in and poured himself a mescal drink. But he didn’t drink it. He just stared at it for the longest time. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Suddenly, then, he swept the drink off and brought his fist down on the bar hard enough to break a bone. He held on to the bar then with his head down and Brady said he thought the man was going to cry. But he never did, and after a minute he went outside.
THE CHANGE IN him began right after that, Brady told. It was as if Tobin’s quirt had jolted him back to reality. He found himself at deep bottom and now there was only one direction to go, if he had the guts.
Not until a few days later, Brady said, did he realize that Lefton had stopped drinking. He started drawing his wages, did his work all right, and about the middle of July he disappeared for three days. When he came back he had four mustangs on a string. The next day he built a mesquite corral off back of the adobes and that night he wrote a letter to his wife.
By the time his wife arrived, the end of August, Lefton had broken and sold better than a dozen horses. Understand now, when he started this he didn’t know the first thing about breaking horses. What happened was, the time he disappeared, he went to Sudan to find something to invest in with the money he’d saved. He happened to talk to a mustanger who told him there was money in horse trading if he could stand getting his insides jolted up.
Lefton hired a couple of Tonkawa boys to scare up green horses and from that day on he was in business. The mustanger in Sudan taught him a few things, but most of it Lefton learned himself. The hard way. He took a beating from those horses, but he never quit and Brady said it was like watching a man do penance. Maybe Lefton felt the same way about it, I don’t know.
Brady said that two weeks ago, when Lefton’s count had reached forty sold he’d wondered why Lefton stayed around instead of expanding and locating where business would be better. Brady said today, though, he understood why Lefton had wanted to