Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories Read Online Free Page A

right
hand that had betrayed him after all those years of serving him
well. He flexed the fingers again and swung it down by his holster,
as if recalling the memory of it sound and steady could restore its
feeling that way.
    A small sound made him look up. Lars was
standing a few feet away, looking at him as if he had been halted
by an unexpected sight. Lars’ eyes went from Vern’s face to his
right hand, which Vern had taken in his left by habit, to rub it in
the way he knew was useless now. He let go of it, but Lars had seen
enough to be suspicious. He came forward, his eyes behind their
small square spectacles still shifting from the younger man’s face
to his hand.
    “Vern!” he said. “What in samhill you been
holding out on me for? What’s the matter with that hand?”
    Vern tried to smile at him, not succeeding.
“I broke it, Lars. It’s all right now.”
    “What was it—the hand?”
    “No, the wrist. But it doesn’t make any
difference now.”
    “Can you shoot with it?” Lars demanded
abruptly.
    “Not so well as I used to. But I told you,
Lars, it doesn’t matter now. It’s all right.”
    “You can doggone well say it ain’t!” said
Lars, scrambling to get in front of him as Vern stepped from the
horse’s stall. “You mean to tell me you’re going out to face Johnny
Benson with a bum hand, and him not knowing it? Nobody knowing it?
Why, it ain’t fair! He’ll kill you. You can’t do it,
Vern.”
    He blocked Vern’s way again, looking up at
him earnestly. “This’s why you done what you did before, wasn’t
it?”
    “It doesn’t matter now,” Vern repeated. He
was going to offer Lars his right hand to shake, but something in
him shrank from the thought. He put his left hand on the older
man’s shoulder for a second. “I’ll be seeing you, Lars.”
    “Vern, you can’t do it! Vern, listen to me!
Vern!”
    But Vern Lennox was gone, leaving the stable
and walking up the street with longer strides than usual, paying no
attention to Lars’ alarmed protests rising behind him.
    He walked uptown, toward where the meeting
was to take place. Benson was nowhere to be seen yet when he came
in view of the saloon, so he leaned his shoulder against the post
of a porch, deep in the morning coolness of a shadowed place not
yet touched by the sun that day, and gazed out at the street. The
rising sun bathed the town in a light that made even the plain
square houses and storefronts seem beautiful. He looked at it all
for the last time, its beauty—the beauty of familiarity, and of his
love for it—rankling with a slight pain in his heart, and thought
that it was a stiff price to pay for honor.
    And it was then that he saw the truth as
clearly as the sun-washed street in front of him. His cowardice was
not fear of death or pain; his real cowardice lay in fearing to
appear before his town shorn of the skills he believed they
respected him for. Fearing to be small, to rest only on his own
merits as a man and a friend. Was he really any better than Johnny
Benson, who wanted to be pointed out as the gunman that everyone
feared?
    There was a movement on the porch of the
saloon. Johnny Benson stepped out from among the men there and came
down the steps, his thumbs hooked in his belt. Even at this
distance the defiant tilt of his head was discernible as he cocked
it sideways and looked down the street for his rival.
    Vern Lennox leaned slowly forward from his
post, and walked a few steps toward the middle of the street. The
truth did him no good now. Had he told his friends the truth
before, he might at least have had their pity; his pride had only
left him open to their conjecture and censure. The solution was the
same; the only way to wipe out his cowardice as he saw it now was
to vindicate himself in their eyes.
    There were people all along the
street—hanging back from the edges of the boardwalks for safety,
but still watching from the fancied shelter of open doorways and
their neighbors’ shoulders.