Chapter Eighteen

Tom Feathers was driving a nice bay with a white blaze face and four white stockings. You didn’t have to be a horse trader to see it was an expensive horse. So was the buggy. He wore a greatcoat over a good suit of dark clothes with a white shirt and paper collar and a necktie. Perched on his head was a little sugar-loaf hat and he wore kidskin gloves that looked as soft as butter.

“Ella,” he said as he checked the bay’s reins, then tipped his hat without really tipping it at all. He made all the right formal gestures of a man that had come calling on a lady friend, but the whole time his gaze stayed on the stranger.

“Tom,” Ella said. “I’d like you to meet my friend, John Henry Cole.”

Tom Feathers stepped from the buggy and came up the steps, his right hand extended. Cole took it and said—“Howdy.”—and felt him put a little extra into the grip. He was as tall as Cole, a little lighter built, and had keen blue eyes. He was freshly shaven and smelled of bay rum.

“Don’t believe I’ve seen you around Ogallala,” he said.

Cole opined that he wanted to know just exactly where this stranger was from and what he was doing in Ogallala. “I came up from Cheyenne,” Cole said, not wanting to pussyfoot around for the next ten minutes in useless conversation with a man he already knew he didn’t like.

“Cheyenne ….” He said the name as though trying to think exactly how many miles away it was from the front porch. “That’s quite some distance,” he concluded.

“Yes, it is,” Cole assured him. “But I figured it was worth the trip to see Ella again.”

That caused Feathers’s left eye to twitch. “Well,” he said, turning his attention to Ella, “it must have been quite a surprise to have your friend suddenly show up all the way from Cheyenne.”

“Oh, in a way, I suppose it was,” she said. “But I honestly expected him before now.” She gave Cole a smile as if she knew something Feathers didn’t. Cole gave her one back.

Without so much as missing a beat, Tom Feathers said: “Your aunt was kind enough to invite me to Sunday dinner, Ella. How could I refuse an opportunity to share the company of two beautiful women and fried chicken?”

Ella smiled like the cat that ate the canary as she put her hand through the crook of his arm and said: “Let’s go tell Aunt Laura that you’re here, then, Tom.”

Feathers removed his sugar-loaf hat before stepping through the door.

Cole thought it was damned gentlemanly of him to do so, and then cooled his heels by taking the saddle off the sorrel and letting him graze at the end of a picket rope. He checked the sorrel’s shoes to make sure they were in good order. Afterward he walked off a little distance from the house and made himself a cigarette and smoked it.

Sunday and chicken dinner, he thought, company and conversation, sitting around a big table. Civil folks, talking about civil matters—the weather, crops, politics. He thought of Bill Cody, the life he was leading, and Ike Kelly, and the life he’d been trying to lead before he was killed. He thought of old Wayback, talking about the Big Lonely, and Will Harper, a man more likely to die from a bullet than old age. He’d probably end up like Wild Bill, dead before he reached forty. These were men who didn’t care to sit around on a Sunday afternoon and talk politics and the weather and wipe chicken grease from the fingers onto a cloth napkin. Cole wondered what sort of life awaited a man between an early grave and talking politics and eating chicken around a big table on a Sunday afternoon.

Ella came out of the house and walked to where he was standing with the last of the shuck burning down between his fingers.

“John Henry, don’t you want to come inside? Dinner will be ready soon.”

“I feel out of place, Ella.”

“Don’t,” she said. “You are as welcome here as anyone.”

“I wasn’t invited.”

“You don’t require an invitation. I meant what I said earlier to Tom Feathers … I was expecting you to come before now. In fact, I waited every day for you to show up. And every day you didn’t come riding up to the house, I found myself disappointed in a way I didn’t fully understand. So now that you have finally arrived, don’t feel out of place. I want you here.”

Cole and Ella ate dinner with Aunt Laura and Tom Feathers doing most of the talking. Tom told about the shorthorn cattle he and his father were raising.

“Not like those tick-fevered longhorn cows they used to drive up here from Texas,” he said pointedly as he looked in Cole’s direction. He held a drumstick in one hand and orchestrated his conversation with it. “What bad times those used to be, when the wild and woolly cowboys would ride north with their sick cattle, raising all sorts of hell, if you’ll pardon my expression, ladies. How we ever survived either those men or their diseased animals, I’ll never know.”

“No one seemed to mind that we spent our money, as I recall,” Cole said.

Feathers looked amused that Cole had joined the conversation. “We? Were you a drover, Mister Cole? One of those Texican cowboys?”

“We got called a lot of things, Mister Feathers. Cowboy was one of them. Working men was another.”

“I see,” Feathers said, satisfied that Cole had admitted to whatever sins he believed Cole was guilty of for having been a Texas drover. “Well, point of fact is, Mister Cole, that all the money spent by the Texican cowhands hardly made up for the troubles brought on by their wild behavior. Most of the money spent by the wild Texas gentlemen was spent in the gambling dens and on Cyprians and cheap liquor. Hardly of any benefit to the decent citizens, wouldn’t you say?”

Ella placed her hand on Cole’s knee beneath the table. She knew without Cole telling her what he thought of Tom Feathers.

“You are right in one respect, Mister Feathers … the liquor was mostly of a cheap variety. Watered down.”

Feathers studied Cole for a long moment, his drumstick held aloft, the grease shiny on his fingertips. He seemed frustrated that he couldn’t say more about what he really felt about the presence of John Henry Cole in the same room with him.

Out of respect for Ella, Cole changed the subject. “I notice you wear a Deane-Adams, Mister Feathers.”

His smile was slow in coming, and it looked like it hurt him to have to do so. “Yes. I prefer it over the Colt.”

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to take a closer look at it after dinner.”

“Indeed,” he said. “Perhaps we could even have a little shooting match. How would that be?”

Normally Cole would have turned down the invitation, but there was something about Feathers’s smugness that wouldn’t allow him to do that. “Why not?”

“Good,” he said.

After the chicken, Ella’s aunt brought out a peach cobbler that she served in small blue bowls. The cobbler was still warm and Cole poured a little milk over his.

Following the complimenting of Aunt Laura on her cooking skills, Feathers and Cole excused themselves and went outside. They walked a short distance from the house.

“What shall it be, fast draw and fire, or simply target?” Feathers asked with all the confidence of a pistoleer.

“How about that fence post sticking up there,” Cole said, pointing toward the rotting stump of an old post protruding from the dead brown grass. The distance was about twenty paces.

Feathers drew and fired five times, fanning the hammer back with the edge of his left hand. Three times Cole saw the wood splinter from the post.

Drawing his self-cocker, Cole took his time, thumbed the hammer back, and fired. He did that four more times. Five times his round chewed up bark.

“That is very good marksmanship,” Feather acknowledged. “But as slow as you were, had that post been an adversary, you would well have been killed, I believe.”

“Maybe,” Cole said, “but I didn’t miss.”

Feathers looked doubtful. “I would submit that it is the man who gets off the first shot who wins the day.”

“Only if he hits his target, Mister Feathers. You can kill all the air you want to, but it’s not the air that’s going to kill you back. Two of your rounds missed the mark.”

“I have to disagree with you, Mister Cole,” he said, pointing toward the post with his chin. “My first round did find its mark, even if two missed. Had that been a man standing out there, he would have well been dead if he drew and fired his weapon as slowly as you just did.”

“I guess there’s no way of proving it unless you want to put it to the real test,” Cole said. “Do you want a real test, Mister Feathers, or is this just a game you’re enjoying playing … shooting at targets that don’t shoot back?”

It was out there in front of them now, their common dislike of one another. Cole could see the truth knotting up in Feathers’s face.

“Because my family has wealth and holdings, you don’t believe that I know what it is to pistol fight a man, isn’t that it?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think, Mister Feathers. All I know is, that shooting at a fence post doesn’t count for much in this world. Staying alive does.”

“Why’d you come here?” he asked, knocking the empty shells from his Deane-Adams.

“It’s personal, Feathers, keep out of it.”

“She won’t have you,” he said. “Not in the end, she won’t.” He was deliberate in reloading, the sun glinting off the brass cartridges. “Ella’s a fine woman. Any man can see that. She’s too fine a woman to be taken in by a man without means. What could you offer her?”

He waited to see if Cole would rise to the bait. He didn’t.

“Look out there, Mister Cole. As far as you can see, that is land my family holds. A woman needs a nest, Cole, and that is the biggest damned nest you’ll ever see.”

“What’s your point, Feathers?”

“My point, Cole, is you should ride out. Say your sentimental good-byes and ride away. Why make it hard on everybody by hanging around here? Ella’s too damned polite to ask you to go, but I’m not. Do you really think you stand a chance with her?”

“I don’t think you have.”

“Have what?”

“Ever been in a gunfight. I don’t think you know what it’s like to stand in front of another man’s pistol.” As he said this, Cole turned to walk away.

“Cole!” Feathers called when Cole had gone about fifteen feet.

Cole turned. The Deane-Adams was aimed at him.

“You forgot to reload your weapon,” Feathers said. “I didn’t.”

“You think so?” Cole said.

He looked uncertain but said: “Everyone knows a man only keeps five shells in his piece. Everyone knows a man doesn’t keep his hammer on a loaded chamber. I counted. You shot five times at that post. That means you’re carrying an empty gun.”

“Put your piece away, Feathers, before something really bad takes place here.”

He blinked. He was wondering if Cole really did have one more shell left in the self-cocker or if he was riding on empty. He was wondering something else, too. He was wondering even if Cole did have a round left in his gun whether or not Cole was fast enough to pull it and shoot him before he could pull the trigger on Cole. A man with true nerve didn’t have such thoughts. Any other man, any other time or place, Cole wouldn’t have warned him first. Too much talk in a fight just gets you killed. But he was thinking of the woman inside the house, how he’d come all this way just to see her. He didn’t want to be part of a senseless killing on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. He didn’t want her to see him like that. “You’ve got one chance, Feathers. Put it away and walk back to the house.”

Feathers blinked again, like the wind had stung his eyes, then his arm sagged to his side, the Deane-Adams dangled against his right leg.

“Next time,” Cole warned, “there’ll be no talk.”

The color was gone from Feathers’s face and his right hand shook, causing the sunlight to dance off the nickel-plated barrel of the Deane-Adams.

“I think you bluffed me,” he said as once more Cole started back toward the house.

Ella greeted them when they reached the porch. She could see the discord on their faces.

“Aunty says the gunfire hurts her ears.”

“I must be leaving now, Ella,” Tom Feathers said. “Please tell your aunt I had to leave and thank her again for me for the wonderful meal.”

After Tom Feathers climbed into his buggy and drove away, Ella turned to Cole and asked: “What was that all about?”

“I think you already know.”

“Men,” she said.

“Yeah, it usually has to do with a woman.”

“It wasn’t necessary in this case, John Henry. You must know that already. I have little interest in Tom Feathers as a suitor, or anything else for that matter.”

“I know it, but I don’t think Tom Feathers knows it.”

“So you quarreled over me?”

“No, not exactly quarreled, Ella.”

For a long moment she stood there, looking at him. “Let’s go back inside.”