Get Your Man

Front matter

Get Your Man

By B. M. Bower and Buck Connor. Authors of “Five Hundred Head for a Ranger,” Etc.

Like the man without a country is the man in this story who was dismissed from the Texas Rangers after a love affair that blinded him to duty. To get back into the service becomes an obsession with him. There is a terrific fight between two men in the tale—one fighting for his life, and the other for what makes life worth while.

II

A shock sometimes does more for a man than months of reasoning. King went to the post office, stood before the ink-spattered desk, chose a sputtering stub pen, curled his lip contemptuously, and began to write his resignation from the Texas Ranger force. Two lines down from the top he stopped and cursed the pen for dropping a blot on the words “Unavoidable circumstances.” That is how he was going to put it, and he hoped that the captain would get the inner meaning of the phrase and feel ashamed of his picayunish interpretation of discipline. The captain had known well enough that King would go to Tobin—and bring back his man or men if it were humanly possible to do so. Five minutes to say good—by to Lisa—fiddlesticks! That wasn’t it; the captain had it in for him, and took this as an excuse to get rid of him. King understood that very well; and, without bawling out the captain or any one else, he meant to word that resignation so that the captain would read his real meaning between the lines.

Kicked out of the service—that was what it practically amounted to. A woman—even the sweetest little girl in the world, he made haste to pay mental tribute—surely does play hob with a man’s life. If she would marry him, he’d take her away. What did it amount to, after all, if she were half “greaser?” There wasn’t a girl in Texas to compare with her in looks2 He was going to say disposition, also, but his natural honesty stopped him. Her disposition. he had to confess, was no milder than the chili which she ground for the frijoles.

King borrowed another sheet of paper, took the other pen off the desk, and started again. This time he did not write "unavoidable circumstances” at all, and he did not curl his lip. Instead, his eyebrows were pinched together and his nostrils were white, and when he signed his name at the bottom, the letters were quavery as though an old man had written them. It was a hard document to write.

At headquarters, whither he rode in haste to present his resignation and have it over with before the captain could accuse him of reluctance, he packed his few belongings, presented his resignation to the captain without a salute and with no speech on the subject, and left while the captain was still leaning forward to pick up the letter from the corner of the desk where King had dropped it. The boys, scenting trouble in his return and guessing shrewdly what it was, tactfully avoided meeting him. King set that down to ostracism, and resented it—just as he would have resented their friendliness had they been stupid enough to show any.

For the first time since she had smiled invitingly with a droopy-lashed, sidelong glance that tingled his blood, King went without eagerness to see Lisa that evening. He was going away somewhere—anywhere. To stay in Ysleta, and meet the boys and the curious looks of the townspeople was not to be considered at all; not even to be near Lisa would he stay—and that morning he had believed that no power on earth was strong enough to drive him from her!

Her viperish denunciation of Bill Gillis and Captain Oakes and the whole Ranger force grated upon him. Her arms around his neck were more clinging than sweet, and, when she wept, with her face against his breast, he noticed that weeping made her eyelids red. She had wept before now, and he had comforted her without ever seeing the disfigurement of red lids.

“I’m all outa sorts, little girl,” he said finally, puzzled because her presence could not soothe his hurt; puzzled, also, because his tongue would not say what he had intended to say to her; would not ask her to marry him on the morrow, and go away with him somewhere. “I guess this upheaval has upset me, somehow. I hate to inflict such a mood on you—so I’ll go and cuss it off, and then we’ll talk things over. Good night, sweetheart—I’ll see you to-morrow, early.”

She did not want him to go, and she pouted and cried a few more tears. But King went, just the same, which should have been more enlightening to him than it was. He did not realize that Lisa was already beginning to lose her spell over him.

The next day the perverse mood still held him to a degree. He had not slept at all, though he went early to his room in the little hotel where he had left his “war bag.” All through the night memory had ridden him hard. Trails he had taken with his fellow Rangers—nights when he had crouched on guard, straining his eyes into the blackness, not daring to move lest some little noise betray his presence there and bring a questing bullet that way; summer scenes, wherein laughter had mingled with the smoke of many cigarettes, and life had seemed clean and good and worth the living.

King did not know what ailed him that he must remember all these things just when he least wanted to recall them. He would rather think of Lisa—but his mind kept drifting away from her. He would picture her in some desireful pose—and, the first he knew, her image would fade like a “dissolve” scene in motion pictures, and the face of Bill Gillis or Kent or little Charlie Horne would look out at him. So he had lain until daybreak.

He drew his savings from the bank. He even made a purposeless trip to El Paso before he went to see Lisa; that is, it proved purposeless. He went to buy Lisa a ring, but he got no farther with the buying than a half-hearted inspection of a jeweler’s window. None of the rings on display seemed to hit his fancy, so he turned away, without looking farther.

Because he had no ring, in the last minutes of good-by, when his infatuation flamed up again while he held her in his arms and muttered promises and love words in her ear, King took from his watch chain the charm he had worn ever since he joined the service, and pressed it into her little, warm palm for a keepsake. It was not of much value, but she had often taken it in her fingers and admired the queer streakings of red in the dull-green stone inclosed in a horseshoe band of gold.

“When I come back,” said King dully, “I’ll bring you something else. Will you go with me when I come back after you, sweetheart?”

“When will that be?" Lisa was turning the trinket in her hand and staring, as she had stared so many times, at the tiny initials, K. A. M., which King had filed in the edge of the horseshoe band. She did not look up at him.

“When I’ve got a place fixed for you. I don’t know when that will be, but it will be just as quick as I can make it. I’m going to leave town to-day. I hate the place.”

“You hate it—and I will be here all the while?” Lisa showed a dimple. “You men say the craziest things2”

The gawky, half-grown sister interrupted them then, and in a few minutes King left. Lisa had not said in so many words that she would go with him, but at the door, as he was leaving, she lifted the watch charm to her lips and looked at him with deep, tragic eyes. That last glimpse of her stayed vividly with King, and did a great deal toward fusing the hot, passing emotion he called love into the deep, lasting attachment which is love’s real self.

After that, King wandered here and there for a while. He worked for the Tijana China outfit on their beef round-up, thrashed a man who had been so unwise as to refer banteringly to King as “the famous ex-Ranger,” and took his saddle and rifle and bedding roll elsewhere. King was extremely touchy on the subject of Texas Rangers.

He bought a horse and a burro and went down into the wilderness of Brewster County, wandering alone in the hills on the pretense that he was prospecting—not for gold, but for a piece of fertile land, where he could get water on the soil and build a ranch for Lisa and himself. He clung with a persistence that was almost dogged to the idea of making a home for Lisa.

He could have gone back to see her, but the desire for her presence was not too great to be borne with fortitude; not half as great, for instance, as the nagging hunger that filled him for “the boys”—Bill and Vaughan and Kent and Charlie Horne.

He used to sit by his camp fire in the hills, and smoke and stare into the shadows, and relive his days and nights with them. Sometimes he dreamed of Lisa, but not as often as you might think. Primarily King Marshall was a man’s man. The image of Lisa grew hazy, and the thought of her more a sense of responsibility for her future than a poignant longing for her immediate presence; whereas the thought of the boys became a growing hunger to have speech with them.

When the nights grew frosty, he drifted into Chico, which is a little “brush town,” a day’s ride from the railroad. He had no particular reason for stopping there, but he was so dismally adrift and without any definite purpose that he stayed.

"Why don’t you buy me out, King, so I can quit this dang place?” the dissatisfied owner of the one little livery stable suggested to him one day, when King was sunning himself apathetically on the bench by the stable door. Without consciously deciding to change his name, he had given it as King when he arrived, and let the Marshall slide into oblivion.

“What you got against me, Murphy?” King retorted, grinning.

“Not a thing. You could have worse things wished on yuh than this here livery business. Ain’t nothing the matter with it—not a thing. But I don’t want it no longer. I want to go to Californy and live.” Murphy nursed his knees and stared down the street as far as the first crook. “I’d sell it cheap,” he added wistfully.

“How cheap—just as she stands?” It occurred to King that Lisa, being half Mexican, would probably not object to Chico. But he had no great enthusiasm for the idea—or for anything else, for that matter.

“Just as she stands? King, I’ll put on my coat and walk out uh here fer four hundred and fifty dollars. And I own the stable and the house and ground as far back as the crick. You know the horses I've got—nothin’ fancy, but they make me a livin’—the burros and the rigs I'll make yuh a present of. Four hundred and fifty cash—that’s how bad I want to leave!”

A gift, almost. King said he would take it. He would have fifty dollars or so left—enough to send for Lisa. And the stable was earning a little money every day in the year. The stage that came three times a week from the railroad kept a team here always, which was a steady income, even though it was small. King paid Murphy the money that day, and that is how he came to settle down in Chico.

It was on the very next mail day, when the little store post office was crowded, that King received his second shock. He had a letter from Lisa—forwarded from Marfa, where she had written her last; a tender, misspelled affair with six crosses after her name to signify that she sent him six kisses. King's heart warmed toward her when he read the letter, and he made up his mind that he would send a letter back on the stage next day, with fifty dollars for her fare. and ask her to come at once and take charge of the tidy little place which Murphy’s wife was leaving so eagerly.

Beside him a big, fat-checked Mexican was reading a letter avidly, with little exclamations of delight now and then. King glanced at him carelessly, and caught the Ysleta postmark on the envelope which the Mexican—one Pancho Mazon—held face out in one hand while he read his letter. King glanced again, to make sure, for the envelope looked very much like the one he had stuffed in his own pocket. just then Pancho looked up, showing his teeth in a broad smile.

“Look, fellows!—what I gets for my birthday!” he cried jubilantly. “My little sweetheart, she sends.” He held up the gift for all to see—he seemed a jovial fellow who must share his joys and his griefs with all his world.

King looked and chilled with the curious sensation that comes when one has felt the treachery of a friend.

A watch charm with a quaintly marked cornelian set in a horseshoe band of plain gold—he knew it as he knew the look of his two hands. He knew—and yet he reached out and took the dangling trinket from the amazed Pancho, turned it over, and saw the tiny initials he had painstakingly filed there during one bored afternoon when he had been left in charge of the Ranger office.

He laughed—because there seemed nothing in the world to say—gave the charm back to Pancho, and walked out, tearing Lisa’s letter into little bits and scattering the pieces for the wind to play with. By sheer coincidence, he unconsciously quoted Bill Gillis in the only sentence he spoke. “The lyin’ little hussy!” he said, and that was all.

He went back to his livery stable. He took a basin and a sponge and began bathing the saddle galls on one of his horses, and, whenever he thought of Lisa Gonzales, and her six cross kisses at the bottom of the letter she had written him, he called her the name he had called her before—the name Bill Gillis had called her. He tried not to think of her, however; and, after a while, he succeeded.

But there he was, settled in Chico—which he did not like as a town—with a livery stable he did not want on his hands. Had he been free of it, he would have drifted God knows where. But he was not free. No one else seemed to hanker for the livery business, especially now that winter was with them.

III

One day in late spring the stage came in from the railroad, loaded with passengers and camp outfit, and stopped at King’s stable to dump three sacked saddles off there. King was used to that sort of thing, and he did not leave his work in the dim-lighted stall at the far end when he heard the arrival in front. Juan, his stableboy, was out there and would see to things, and if any one wanted the boss, why, Juan had but to lift his voice a little. King had fallen into a passive kind of devotion to his horses, and in the same ratio he had come to feel no interest whatever in men. If a man came to hire a horse, King would look at him, make a swift appraisement, and choose the horse according to his opinion of the man. Beyond that and collecting payment, his interest did not go.

Juan did not call him, so King went on trimming the mane of a horse he had just bought. Even when he heard footsteps coming down the stable, he did not leave the stall to see who was coming—because no inkling of the immediate future did fate permit him.

“He’s back, somewhere—I dunno; you will find, all righ’,” he heard Juan’s voice announcing cheerfully near the door.

King frowned a little, and moved down to the horse’s rump—saw who was coming, and retreated precipitately into the shadow. He was not quite quick enough; for Bill Gillis, coming toward him, glimpsed his face and his hat above it, and knew him at the first glance. Bill dove into the stall and grabbed King by the shoulders and shook him a little, and laughed.

“Dog-gone you, King, I’m so tickled I can’t say ‘howdy!’ ” Bill said, and laughed again. “I kinda wondered if the King that owns this stable was you—don’t know what gave me the notion, but I just naturally had to hunt you up to make sure. How are yuh, anyway? Darn it, are yuh dumb?”

“just about,” King confessed, in a queer, shaky voice, and bit his under lip sharply. He laid one arm over Bill’s shoulder and looked out over his head and winked very fast for a minute.

“You popped in on me kinda sudden, Bill,” he remarked, when he was sure of his voice. “Give a feller time to get used to the notion.” His hand tightened on Bill’s shoulder, and he pushed him back a little and looked down at him avidly. “You blamed little, sawed-off runt, I sure am glad to see yuh,” he added, in the tone that Bill knew of old. “Down here alone?"

“Captain and Vaughan are here,” Bill said, still grinning for the simple reason that his face refused to do anything else just then. “We came down to ride the big pastures—and I guess I might as well start pickin’ out the horses we’ll want from you, King.”

“Fly at it,” King agreed absently, trying to adjust himself to this unexpected turn; trying, also, to decide whether he really was glad or sorry to have Bill there, for sometimes it is better not to have a happier past recalled. “I’ve got some good ones, Bill—and you’re dead welcome to the best I got.”

Bill covertly eyed King, while he chose what horses they would need, and told as much of the Ysleta news as was tactful. He did not, for instance, say anything about Lisa Gonzales marrying a Mexican—one Pancho Mazon, who had started a new cantina, that had already acquired a reputation of its own. He thought of it, and wondered how King would take the news if he were to tell him.

King stood in the wide doorway, with his hands in his pockets, and watched Bill go off up the street in search of the captain and Vaughan. He watched Bill, and his eyes were wistful and his mouth had a twist of bitterness. He saw the captain, broad-shouldered, straight, and purposeful in his movements, come out of the post, office, with Vaughan at his heels. He saw Bill hurrying to meet them—and King turned back into the stable and took down his saddle from its rusty spike.

“Clean up Mouse and Faro and Come Again,” he called to Juan. “And clean ’em good, or I’ll just about break yuh in two. They’re for them three that come in on the stage.” He slapped the saddle on his big black, Noches, cinched it hurriedly, and dropped the stirrups into place. “If anybody asks for me,” he told Juan, as he led the horse to the doorway, “just say I’ll be back muy pronto.”

It would have been unjust to accuse King of running away from the Rangers. As a matter of fact, he was attempting something a great deal more foolish than that, for he was trying to run away from himself. He rode out into the hills until they were piled high all around him, and then he let the reins lie loose on Noches’ neck, and wandered aimlessly, not caring where the horse took him, so he headed into further wildness.

He returned after dark, and his black horse showed dust-colored streaks where the sweat had dried on his hips and legs, and his neck shone wet to show that his homeward pace had not been slow. Supper time was past, but King waved Juan's solicitious anxiety to help, and himself rubbed down Noches and loosened the hay in his manger and kicked the bedding into a softer pile.

The little man who had come on the stage, Juan informed King deprecatingly, had come with two others, and asked for King. They had waited a little, and gone off to their camping place by the high bank next the arroyo where was the little spring. At sundown the little man had come again, and had waited on the bench. He had gone not ten minutes ago. He left word that the three horses be brought to their camp at sunrise.

“All right. You go to bed. I’ll lock up,” King told him shortly, and stood in the doorway, rolling a cigarette, while he watched Juan disappear up the crooked street that lay quiet and dark under the starlight. He sat down on the bench and stared at the bluffs beyond the town. After a while he got up and went to the corner of the stable nearest the arroyo, and stood there, leaning one shoulder against the adobe wall, while he stared hard at the glow on the opposite bank from a camp fire. In his eyes there was again a great hunger, and his lips had a twist of bitterness.

He walked slowly down toward the glow. When he was close enough to see the little, licking flames, and could hear the cheerful snapping, he stopped and stood hesitating over whether he should go on. Forms in the firelight he did not see—since this was a Ranger camp, and since Rangers are rather particular about revealing themselves unnecessarily in the light of their camp fires. He waited for a minute and went back and sat hunched together on the bench beside the stable door.

He was very quiet, and very, very bitter toward life.

When Juan came swiftly down the street, just before daylight, to feed the horses that were ordered for sunrise, he found them munching contentedly, heads buried to the eyes in fresh piles of secate. Also they were sleek from long brushing, and King was settling the saddle of Captain Oakes upon the back of Come Again. the best horse in the stable barring King’s own private horse, Noches. Whereupon Juan immediately became abjectly apologetic for being so late—though he really had come early.

When King himself led the horses out and swung into Vaughan’s saddle with the lead ropes of the other two in his hand, Juan felt that he trembled—literally—upon the brink of dismissal. Señor King must be very mad, indeed, when he would not let Juan take the horses to camp. He looked after King, and got no encouragement from the gloomy face of his master. Something was very wrong—and yet in his heart Juan knew that he had come early enough.

King rode slowly down the arroyo to where the Rangers had made camp. Every step that the horses took, King cursed himself for coming. Yet his eyes went searching eagerly for the camp and for sight of the men who had for three years and more been his close comrades. When he saw them, however, he sat a little stiffer in the saddle; and when he reached their breakfast fire, and dismounted just outside its zone of heat, his manner was carefully neutral, as though he were delivering the horses to strangers; Bill was down at the little stream.

“Why, hello, King!” Vaughan hurried forward and took his hand and pumped it up and down. “You old sun of a gun, you’re lookin’ fine!”

“Howdy, King,” the captain greeted him easily—with a warmth in his manner that King had never expected to see again. “Good horses you’ve brought us,” he added, while he shook hands, his keen little eyes taking in line by line the trimness of the mount King had chosen for his use. “You haven't forgotten my fancy for a long—legged animal under me, I see. I rode a burro once for two hundred miles—since then I want to know that my feet aren’t going to drag on the ground every time I straighten my legs.”

“He’s a good horse,” King said simply, turning to pat the hard-muscled neck and to hide a sudden mistiness in his eyes. “He’l1 carry you all day and all night, and then some. I’ve named him Come Again. After you’ve rode—him, you’ll know why.”

“What’s the pedigree uh that there critter under my saddle?” Vaughan looked up from the skillet of sputtering eggs to demand. “What’s his name?”

“Him? Faro—and you don’t go up against any brace game when you crawl in his middle, either.” King had himself in hand now, and he faced Vaughan with a smile that reached his eyes. “He’s a right true little caballo—and he’s a cat for climbing, if you want to know. He’ll take yuh anywhere you point him, Vaughan. Bill picked ’em out of a dozen or so I’ve got down there.”

The captain, rubbing the nose of Come Again, gave King a keen glance. “So you’ve branched out into the livery business,” he remarked. “Doing pretty well?" Casual as the question was on its surface, King felt an underlying anxiety for his welfare; knew, too, that Vaughan had looked up and was waiting for the answer.

“Oh—all right, I guess,” he said indifferently. “Making money, far as that goes.”

Then Bill came and slapped King on the back just as he used to do in the old days. King stayed and ate breakfast with them, and was afterward surprised to remember how matter of course it had seemed.

Having lived for several months in that part of the country, and being engaged in a business that brought him into contact with the riders thereof, King knew a good deal about the fence troubles and the gossip of altered brands and the like. What he knew told them freely, just as though it was his business to help them. He advised them as to short cuts through the hills, and he offered to keep an eye on the camp while the three were out riding. Juan was astonished to hear his master come whistling back to the stable that morning.

The cheerfulness, however, fluctuated a good deal in the next three days. Mixed with King’s pleasure in renewing old friendships was the bitterness of knowing that he was, after all, an outsider; that when the captain assigned certain tasks to his men, he must sit apart and never be ordered anywhere because he had forfeited his right to wear the Ranger star. He did not feel like whistling when that fact was forced coldly in upon his consciousness.

Then, one evening Come Again came hobbling painfully to the stable, with Captain Oakes, riding slack in the saddle, hurt so badly that King had to steady him to the bench beside the stable door. Juan produced a bottle of whisky from somewhere, and, with the temporary strength lent by a swallow or two, the captain got to his camp bed and let King bathe his bruised leg and the strained tendons of his knee, and afterward make him a comforting cup of coffee.

Accident had befallen Come Again, the best “rope horse” in that part of the country. The captain had wanted to inspect more closely a doubtful brand on a particularly wild steer, and had roped it. But the ground was broken into treacherous, small ridges and water-deepened ruts, and when the steer bolted around Come Again, the horse was jerked backward into a ditch, and thrown, and the captain had not been able to jump free because of the rope. The wonder was, he admitted to King, that neither had broken a bone or two.

The next day King spent with the captain, leaving Juan to tend the stable and doctor Come Again. That is why King was in camp when a Mexican brought Captain Oakes a message which had been sent from El Paso, and was permitted by fate to have another chance at the thing he wanted most in his life.

In effect, the telegram said that one Bull Dawson, who had been an outlaw so long that he had almost become an institution in southwestern Texas, had murdered and robbed two men under peculiarly brutal circumstances—even for Bull Dawson. He was somewhere in Brewster County, according to last reports. And, while a sheriff and posse were scouring the northern part, the Rangers were asked to head him off if he got as far down as the hills around Chico.

“I don’t see how we can do anything about it,” Captain Oakes grumbled, handing the telegram to King—so nearly had the gap between them been bridged. "I can’t call Gillis and Vaughan off their work, and I can’t go out after him myself, crippled like this. Bull’s the kind of man it takes a Gatlin gun to make any impression_on. He’s been shot so often he don’t think anything of a bullet or two under his skin.”

King flicked the ashes thoughtfully off his cigarette. “What kinda lookin’ fellow is he?” he wanted to know. He had heard of Bull Dawson often enough, but always in a general way—the name standing for the ultimate depths of depravity and the ultimate heights of strength and ferocity and animal cunning.

“Big—over six foot. Weighs about two hundred. He’s a fighter, of course —but he’d just as soon shoot a man in the back. Had a black beard last time his description came in to the office, and hair streaked with gray. Eyes are black, too—the snaky kind.”