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

the mill the day you gave Chance Thorne a hiding.”
    “You were
there?
” I was astonished.
    “Sitting in the surrey with my father and Will Thorne. I thought Chance deserved everything he got.”
    It was one day I’d not forget, for I’d come as a stranger with a sack of grain to the mill for grinding. We’d been down from Tennessee only a few days, and I’d not been off the place. Soon as I showed up Chance started on me, and the boys around followed his lead. He started making fun of my shabby homespun clothes. They were patched and they were worn, but they were all I had. They had shouted at me and laughed at me but I’d taken my grain to the mill, and when I came out and started to hoist it to the mule’s back they rushed at me and jerked my suspenders down and then they clodded me with chunks of dirt.
    It wasn’t in me to hurry. That was what made some of the men turn to watch, I think, for I heard somebody speak of it. The first thing I did, with clods splattering about me, was to pull up my pants and fix my suspenders. Then still with dirt splattering me, I hoisted my sack into place, and then I picked up a chunk of wood and started for them, and they scattered like geese, all but Chance Thorne.
    He waited for me. He was a head taller than me, and some heavier, and he was dressed in store-bought clothes, which I’d never had and had only rarely seen. He looked at me and he was contemptuous. “Put down that club,” Chance had said, “and I’ll thrash you.”
    A dozen men were watching now, and none of them likely to be my friends. So when I put the club down he rushed me before I could straighten up, and he expected to smash my face with his fists as I tried to straighten, but in the Tennessee mountains a boy has to fight, and sometimes I’d fought men grown. So I didn’t straighten, I just dove at his knees and brought Chance down with a thud.
    He got up then, and I smashed his lips with my fist as he started to get up, like he’d tried with me, and my fist was hardened by work and it split his lips and covered his fine shirt with blood.
    Maybe it was the first time Chance had seen his own blood and it shocked him, but it angered him, too. He walked at me, swinging both his fists, but there was a deeper anger in me, and an awful loneliness for there were boys cheering him on, and none of them with a shout for me. I was bitter lonely then, and it made the hate rise in me, and I walked into his fists driving with my own. There was nothing in him that could stand against the fierce anger I had, and he backed up, and there was a kind of white fear in his eyes. He sorely wanted help, he wanted to yell, but I ducked low and hit him in the belly, and saw the anguish in his face, and white to the lips I set myself and swung a wicked one square at that handsome face. He went down then and he rolled over in the dust, and he could have got up, but he didn’t; he lay there in the dust and he was beaten, and I had an enemy for all my years.
    Other men rushed from the mill then, Chance’s father and uncle among them, and they rushed at me, so I backed to my club and picked it up. I was a lone boy but I was fierce angry with hating them and wanting to be away, and hating myself because I was afraid I would cry.
    “Leave him alone!” I did not know Will Thorne then, a tall, scholarly man. “Chance began it.”
    Chance’s father’s face was flushed and angry. “You tend to your knitting, Will! I’ll teach this young rascal to—”
    He paused in his move toward me, for I’d backed to the mule and was set with my club. I was only a boy, but I was man tall and strong with work in field and forest. “You come at me,” I said, “and I’ll stretch you out.”
    He shook a fist at me. “I’ll have you whipped, boy! I’ll have you whipped within an inch of your life!”
    Then I’d swung to my mule’s back and rode away, but I did not ride fast.
    And that was the beginning of it.
    A few days later when I