Novel 1959 - The First Fast Draw (v5.0) Read Online Free Page A

you’ll go to jail. Also, we’re going to take steps to confiscate this land from you as an enemy of your country.”
    “You’d better look at your hole card, Colonel. There’s no record of me fighting on any side. I’ve been out West the whole time. Only fighting I’ve done was with Comanches, Utes and such like.”
    “What’s that?” The colonel turned on Reeves, his face growing red. The colonel was a man quick to anger. “Reese, is this true?”
    Reese was worried. “Colonel Belser, sir, I just know he fit for the South! Why, why, there just ain’t no other way he could fight!”
    “Joel Reese,” I explained, “was always a yellow dog. He should be right ashamed to mislead you this way. If he knows anything at all he should know that I spent the war in New Mexico and Utah. Shortly after the war broke out I drove a herd of cattle east and sold them, and then three years ago I went back West.
    “Reese hates folks around here because they’d no use for him. My advice would be to go easy on anything he may tell you. He’d be like to cause you trouble, getting even with folks he figured treated him wrong.”
    “I need no suggestions from you!” Colonel Belser was furious. He jerked his bay around…no way to treat a horse as good as that one, or any other horse, for that matter. “The records will be checked as to your service with the Confederacy. You will hear from me again.”
    “I’ll be right here,” I told him. “I’ll be growing corn.”
    Tower lingered as the others started off. “You were in New Mexico and Utah? And California?”
    “I had a horse liked to travel.”
    “Have we crossed trails before this?”
    “I cut a lot of sign in my time,” I told him, “and once I’ve seen the tracks a man leaves, I don’t forget.”
    “You mean that if you’d ever cut my trail you’d remember? Is that it?”
    “I’d remember.”
    John Tower touched a spur to his mount and rode away after the others, and of them all he was the only one who might be dangerous in the way a man was dangerous. Yet he would come at a man, face up to him, and those others would not. It was not until they were out of sight that I turned and saw the girl under the dogwood tree.
    It is a nice place to see a girl for the first time, and it had been a long, long time since I had seen such a girl. For girls of her type do not come to the Cullen Bakers of this world, for I was a rough man, grown used to rough ways, and I had no fine graces to use in meeting such a girl.
    She was taller than most girls, with dark hair and a fair skin, and she stood very still with one uplifted hand upon a dogwood branch. She wore a white dress, and she was young, but there was in her eyes none of the guilelessness of the child. Beautiful, she was. Beautiful and graceful as the dogwood beside which she stood, a dogwood covered with white blossoms, some of them fallen to the grass at her feet.
    “Did I surprise you?”
    “You weren’t expected, if that is what you mean.”
    “I am Katy Thorne, of Blackthorne.”
    There was no reason for me to love the Thornes, or even to think of them, for my only friend among them had been Will, and Will had been the strange one among the Thornes, whether those of Blackthorne or the others. His cousin Chance had been my worst enemy. And I remembered no Katy Thorne.
    “You related to Chance?”
    “I was his brother’s wife.”
    “Was?”
    “He tried to be a soldier and charged very gallantly with Pickett, at Gettysburg. Were you a soldier, Mr. Baker?”
    “No.” Maybe there was bitterness in the tone. “I have been nothing that mattered, Mrs. Thorne. I have never been anything but Cullen Baker.”
    “Isn’t it important to be Cullen Baker?”
    “Maybe, in the wrong way. Maybe”—why I said it I’ll not know—“maybe I can make it mean something to be me. But hereabouts folks have little use for me, and I’ve less use for them.”
    “I know. I saw it begin, Cullen Baker, I was there at