It was pine-blank murder. There was no getting ’round that. And it was about as simple a piece o’ business that been done on Caney Creek from the mouth to the head in many a sweet day. But there always something that lets the coon out of the trap. A fellow does a grain o’ something that goes agin’ him, or draps a careless word that sets the woods afire with deputy sheriffs.
When Clayt Darrow first mentioned it to me, I tells him he’s a damn fool right off. If you want to kill a man you better put blinders even on the nag you’re riding.
Clayt reminds me of a dog trying to lay down on shuck. He’d been trying to make up his mind to it a long time, but he ain’t got the nerve. He knows I ain’t been packing no particular brotherly love for Sibo Bonner since my foxhound tuk up with him six months ago. That is, I hear tell my dog is at his place, though I ain’t sot eyes on him and I’ve watched by the hour from the top of the mountain. Anyway my pap didn’t like his pap, and my grandpap and his grandpap swapped a couple o’ shots at each other way back. I always reckoned Sibo was a rattlesnake.
I knowed Clayt would make up his mind to it sooner or later. Me and Clayt had been running ’round together nigh on ten years, ever since we was little scrappers. We’d done lots o’ meanness. Once we got us a hollow log and stretched a strip o’ dried bull’s hide over it and sawed on it with a bow made out of a hickory limb. You could have heard that noise ten miles on a cold night, and it sounded like a passel o’ wildcats screaming and tearing each other’s eyeballs out. The cattle all over the country jumped the fences and went flying the other way; the horses and mules kicked the barn doors down and tuk out after them. Well, we done more thangs than I could tell in a full moon, but we never done a thang that we got by with. Clayt always give us away. He got too tickled over something we’d done. He’d look guilty as the devil for a month after we’d pulled a little meanness.
Me and Clayt had done a lot o’ thangs together but we ain’t never killed a man. We’s cut saddles off of horses hitched at the church-house at night just for puore cussedness; we’d tuk boards out o’ swinging bridges and watched somebody drop through to the creek. I reckon we done about everything mean thar is to do on this green airth. But you could depend on Clayt letting it out some-way. Afore long I stopped running with Clayt. I was gitting sort o’ tired rotting out six-months terms in jail because Clayt couldn’t keep his face straight and his tongue civil.
When Clayt named it to me about killing Sibo Bonner I laughed plumb in his face. He says I got a yellow streak running down my back wider than a handsaw. Then he names my hound dog to me Sibo had fetched off; then he says he’d be willing to bet me a war pension, if he had one, that Sibo would never let me git in shouting distance o’ Ransey. And I knowed my chances o’ sparking Ransey was pore as a mare’s skeleton when the buzzards got through with it.
Clayt says he’ll split that bunch o’ money Sibo is packing since he sold that bunch o’ timber on Big Branch with me. I kin have my foxhound back, and I’ll be setting pretty as a beagle with Ransey.
I tells Clayt he’s a damn fool if he thinks I’m a-going to get messed up with him in any sort o’ scrape. I ain’t never had a mind to kill nobody. It made me kind of woozy down in the stomach when I thought about pinting a gun at a fellow when he ain’t expecting it and sending a slug o’ lead into his heart. But I knowed Clayt was a-going to do it. He got sort of franzied at first, but with about four or five shots o’ rotgut he’d put a case o’ dynamite under the courthouse if it entered his mind he wanted to do it.
No amount of talking would have got me into that mess but I listened to how he was a-going to do it. I reckon it was slick because it was so simple. He was going to wade up Caney for a mile, blow his fox horn outside Sibo’s house, and when he came out take him between the eyes with his gun. Then he’d wade back down the creek. Clayt had been more careful about his tracks than anything else, saying a fellow couldn’t make tracks on a streak o’ water, which was right nigh the truth.
We argued about where it would be best to take Sibo. I allowed behind the ear was the best place, just like you would a shoat at hog-killing time, but Clayt thought different. Between the eyes he says is the best place, and I got to reckoning if it was his killing he’d have the right to do it the way he wanted to.
As the night come ’round for Clayt to do his business I got powerful uneasy. I wanted to let Sibo know somehow, but I figured I better keep my mouth out o’ Clayt’s doings.
Well, Clayt done it just like he said he was a-going to. I heard it first thing the next morning and I tuk out for town. It’s a pretty good thing to be ’round and let folks see how clear your conscience is after such doings. And instead o’ going the shortcut through the gap I tuk right down Caney way, square by Sibo’s homeseat.
When I come in sight thar was a powerful big crowd thar, but somehow I didn’t feel any longing to see Sibo in the fix he was in. As I come to the edge of the yard where it tetched the creek, Ransey come running down to stop me. Her eyes were red as beet pickles from crying, but she had her chin up, and I reckon she was prettier then than ever I seed her. I felt plumb sorry for her, and begin to wish I’d tipped her ole man off.
“Pap has a hound dog in the cow stall that somebody says belongs to you. He’s had him for nigh three weeks and ain’t been able to find out who he belongs to. He’s been a-hanging ’round.”
I begin to git sorrier than ever. It would tetch a body’s soul to see Ransey looking like that. I told her I was powerful sorry to hear about her pa. Then I asks her where he was shot at, in the forehead or behind the ear? I reckon I must have looked funny the minute I said that. I could have bit my tongue square off. She didn’t say nothing for a minute; then all of a sudden she screamed. You could have heard her a mile.