Max stepped off the wagon and waited for us with his hands on his hips.
“He ain’t here.”
Terry asked him, “What happened?”
“He jumped off the wagon and I lost him in the dark.”
“And you’ve been looking for him.”
Max grinned that ugly grin of his. “Sure,” he said. “A man don’t like to lose his top hand.”
Then, glancing at Terry, seeing a look on the boy’s face I’d never witnessed before, I knew Max Repper was about to lose his top teeth.
Sure enough. Terry took two steps and a little shuffle dance and hit Max square in the mouth. Max went back, but didn’t go down and now he came at Terry. Terry had his right cocked, waiting, and he started to throw it. Max put up his guard and Terry held the right, but his left came around wide and clobbered Max on the ear. Then the right followed through, straightening him up, and the left swung wide again and smacked solid against his cheekbone. Max didn’t throw a punch. He wanted to at first, then he was kept too busy trying to cover up. I thought Terry’s arms would drop off before Max caved in. Then, there it was, for a split second—Max’s chin up like he was posing for a profile—and Terry found it with the best-timed, widest-swung roundhouse I’ve ever seen.
Max went down and he didn’t move. Terry stepped inside the barn and came out with a hackamore. He looked down at Max and started to roll him over with his boot. But then he must have thought, What good will it do—He turned away, dropping the hackamore on top of Repper.
All Terry said was “Long as the boy got away…that’s the main thing.”
AFTER THAT EVERYTHING was quiet for a while. Of course what had happened made good conversation, and wherever you’d go somebody would be talking about the half-wild white boy who’d lived with Apaches. And they talked about Max Repper and Terry. Everybody agreed that was a fine thing Terry did, loosening Max’s teeth…but Terry better watch himself, the way Max holds on to a grudge with both hands and both feet.
Terry went back to his diggings and Deelie wore her tragic look like he was off to the wars. Max would come in about once a week still, but now he didn’t talk so much. Ordered what he wanted and got out.
Then one day a man named Jim Hughes came in and told how he’d seen the boy.
Jim had a one-loop outfit a few miles beyond Repper’s place. I told him it was probably just a stray reservation buck, but he said no, he came through the willows to the creek off back of his place and there was the boy lying belly down at the side of the creek. The boy jumped up surprised not ten feet away from him, scrambled for his horse, and was gone. And Jim said the boy was wearing a red shirt, the back of it all ripped.
Max heard about it too. The next day he was in asking whether I’d seen the boy. He talked about it like he was just making conversation, but Max wasn’t cut out to be an actor. He wanted to find that boy so bad, he could taste it, and it showed through soon as he started talking.
Within the next few days the boy was seen two more times. First by a neighbor of Jim Hughes’s who lived this side of him, then a day later by a cavalry patrol out of Dos Fuegos. They gave chase, but the boy ran for high timber and got away. Both times the boy’s red shirt was described.
Now there was something to talk about again; everybody speculating what the boy was up to. The cavalry station received orders from the commandant at Fort Huachuca to bring the boy in and be pretty damn quick about it. It didn’t look good to have a boy running around who’d been stolen by the Indians. This was something for the authorities. Down at the State House Saloon they were betting five to one the cavalry would never find him, and they had some takers.
Most people figured the boy was out to get Max Repper and was sneaking around waiting for the right time.
I had the hunch the boy was looking for Terry McNeil. And when Terry finally came in again (it had been almost a month), I told him so.
He was surprised to hear the boy had been seen around here and said he couldn’t figure it out. Thought the boy would be glad to get away.
“Why would he want to go back to Apaches?” I asked him.
“He lived with them,” Terry said.
“That doesn’t mean he liked them,” I said. “I could see him going back to those Mexican people, but Sahuaripa’s an awful long way off and probably he couldn’t find his way back.”
Terry shook his head. “But why would he be hanging around here?”
“I still say he’s looking for you.”
“What for?”
“Maybe he likes you.”
Terry said, “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe he likes red shirts.”
“Well,” Terry said, “I could look for him.”
“It would be easier to let him find you,” I said.
“If that’s what he wants to do.”
“Why don’t you just sit here for a while,” I suggested. “The boy knows you come here. If he wants you, then sooner or later he’ll show up.”
Terry thought about it, making a cigarette, then agreed finally that he wouldn’t lose anything by staying.
Right in front of me Deelie threw her arms around his neck and kissed him about twelve times. I thought: If that’s what having him around just a little while will do, what would happen if he agreed to stay on for life?
DURING THE NEXT four days nothing happened. There weren’t even claims of seeing the boy. Terry said, well, the boy’s probably a hundred miles away now. And I said, Either that or else he’s closing in now and playing it more careful. Repper came in once and when he saw Terry he got suspicious and hung around a long time, though acting like Terry wasn’t even there.
The night of the sixth day we were sitting out on the porch talking and smoking, like we’d been doing every evening, and I remember saying something about working up energy to go to bed, when Terry’s hand touched my arm. He said, “Somebody’s standing between those two buildings across the street.”
I looked hard, but all I saw was the narrow deep shadow between the two adobes. And I was about to tell Terry he was mistaken when this figure appeared out of the shadows. He stood there for a minute close to one of the adobes, then started across the street, walking slowly.
He came to the steps and hesitated; but when Terry stood up and said, “Regalo,” softly, the boy came up on the porch.
Deelie turned the lamp up as we went inside and I heard Terry asking the boy if he was hungry. The boy shook his head. Then we all just stood there not knowing what to say, trying not to stare at the boy. He was wearing the torn red shirt and looking at Terry like he had something to tell him but didn’t know the right words.
Then he reached into his shirt, suddenly starting to talk in Spanish. He pulled something out wrapped in buckskin, still talking, and handed it to Terry. Then he stopped and just watched as Terry, looking embarrassed, unwrapped the little square of buckskin.
Terry looked at the boy and then at me, his eyes about to pop out of his head, and I saw what he was holding…a raw gold nugget.
It must have been the size of two shot glasses; way, way bigger than any I’d ever had the pleasure of seeing. Terry put it on the counter, stepped back, and looked at it like he was beholding the palace of the king of China.
He just stared, and the boy started talking again in that rapid-fire Spanish like he was trying to say everything at once. Terry looked at the boy and he stared some more until the boy stopped talking.
“What’d he say?” I asked him.
Terry took a minute to look over at me. “He says this is mine and that he’ll show me a lot more. A place nobody knows about…”
I could believe that. You don’t find nuggets that size out in the road. And it made sense the boy might know of a mine. It was common talk that any Apache could be a rich man, the way he knew the country—the whereabouts of mines worked by the Spanish two and three hundred years ago. Sure Indians knew about them, but they weren’t going to tell whites and be crowded off their la
nd quicker than it was already happening. In three years with Chiricahuas, Regalo could have learned plenty.
I said, “Terrence, you and that red shirt have made a valuable friendship.”
TERRY WAS STILL about three feet off the ground. He said then, “But he claims he wants to live with me!”
“Well, taking him in is the least you can do, considering—”
“But I can’t—”
He stopped there. I turned around to see what Terry was looking at and there was Max Repper in the doorway, with his Henry. Max was grinning, which he hadn’t done in a month, and he came forward keeping the barrel trained at Terry.
“I knew he’d show,” Repper said, “soon as I saw you hanging around. I came for two things. Him”—he swung the barrel to indicate the boy—“and my nugget.”
“Yours?” I said.
“The boy stole it from me.”
“You never saw it before you peeked in that window.”
“That’s your say,” Repper answered.
Terry said, “What do you want with the boy?”
“I got work for him till the reservation people take him away.”
“He doesn’t belong on a reservation,” Terry said.
“That’s not my worry.” Repper shrugged. “That’s what they’re saying at Dos Fuegos will happen to him.”
Terry shook his head slowly, saying, “That wouldn’t be right.”
Repper lifted the Henry a little higher. “Just hand me the nugget.”
Terry hesitated. Then he said, “You come and take it.”
“I can do that too,” Repper said. He was concentrating on Terry and started to move toward him. His eyes went to the nugget momentarily, two seconds at best, and as they did the boy went for him. He was at Repper’s throat in one lunge, dragging him down. Terry moved then, pushing the rifle barrel up and against Repper’s face. Repper went down, the boy on top of him, and then a knife was in Regalo’s hand.
Deelie screamed and Terry lifted the boy off of Repper, saying, “Wait a minute!” Then, in Spanish, he was talking more quietly, calming the boy.
Repper sat up with his hand to his face. He had a welt across his forehead where the rifle barrel hit, but he was more mad than hurt. He said, “You think I’m going to let you get away with this?”
Terry was himself again. He said, “I don’t think you got a choice.”
“I haven’t?” Max said. “I’ll make damn sure he gets put the hell on that reservation.”
“If you can prove he’s Indian,” Terry answered.
Max gave us his sly look. “Either way,” he said. “If he ain’t Indian then he’s white, with white kin, and no authority’s going to let him get adopted by a saddle tramp who ain’t worked in two years.”
It was a good thing Max was sitting down when he said that. Max was through, and he probably knew it, but if Terry wanted the boy, then he’d sure make it plain hell for Terry to keep him.
I told Repper, “That’s up to the authorities. The thing is, this boy’s got no recollection of white kin and the only other person who knew his parents is dead. And he’s said himself he wants to live with Terry.”
Max grinned. “And I imagine Terry wants the boy, and his nugget, to live with him. But like I said, the authorities won’t see it that way.”
And then Deelie had something to say. She was looking at Max Repper, but I think talking to Terry, and she said, “No, they wouldn’t let the boy live with a saddle tramp who hasn’t worked in two years…but I’m sure they would agree that a successful mining man of Mr. McNeil’s character would be more than they could hope for…especially since he’ll be married within the week.”
That was exactly how Deelie did it. I’ve often wondered if she ever thought Terry married her just so he could raise the boy. I didn’t think he did, knowing Terry, and I doubt if Deelie really cared…long as she had him.
The stories contained in this volume originally appeared in the following publications:
“Cavalry Boots,” Zane Grey’s Western, December 1952
“Under the Friar’s Ledge,” Dime Western Magazine, January 1953
“Three-Ten to Yuma,” Dime Western Magazine, March 1953
“Long Night,” Zane Grey’s Western, May 1953
“The Captives,” Argosy, February 1955
“Jugged,” Western Magazine, December 1955
“The Kid,” Western Short Stories, December 1956
About the Author
ELMORE LEONARD has written more than forty novels during his highly successful career, including the bestsellers The Hot Kid, Mr. Paradise, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get Shorty, and Rum Punch, and the critically acclaimed collection of short stories, When the Women Come Out to Dance, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2003. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty and Out of Sight. He was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife, Christine, in Bloomfield Village, Michigan.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Resounding praise for the incomparable western fiction of New York Times bestselling Grand Master
ELMORE LEONARD
“Leonard began his career telling western stories. He knows his way onto a horse and out of a gun fight as well as he knows the special King’s English spoken by his patented, not-so-lovable urban lowlifes.”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“In cowboy writing, Leonard belongs in the same A-list shelf as Louis L’Amour, Owen Wister, and Zane Grey.”
New York Daily News
“Leonard wrote westerns, very good westerns…the way he imagined Hemingway, his mentor, might write westerns.”
Baton Rouge Sunday Advocate
“A master…Etching a harsh, haunting landscape with razor-sharp prose, Leonard shows in [his] brilliant stories why he has become the American poet laureate of the desperate and the bold…In stories that burn with passion, treachery, and heroism, the frontier comes vividly, magnificently to life.”
Tulsa World
“[Leonard’s stories] transcend the genre to work as well as any serious fiction of the era—or any era.”
Chicago Tribune
Books by Elmore Leonard
Three-Ten to Yuma and Other Stories
Blood Money and Other Stories
Moment of Vengeance and Other Stories
The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard
Mr. Paradise
When the Women Come Out to Dance
Tishomingo Blues
Pagan Babies
Be Cool
The Tonto Woman & Other Western Stories
Cuba Libre
Out of Sight
Riding the Rap
Pronto
Rum Punch
Maximum Bob
Get Shorty
Killshot
Freaky Deaky
Touch
Bandits
Glitz
LaBrava
Stick
Cat Chaser
Split Images
City Primeval
Gold Coast
Gunsights
The Switch
The Hunted
Unknown Man No. 89
Swag
Fifty-two Pickup
Mr. Majestyk
Forty Lashes Less One
Valdez Is Coming
The Moonshine War
The Big Bounce
Hombre
Last Stand at Saber River
Escape from Five Shadows
The Law at Randado
The Bounty Hunters
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THREE-TEN TO YUMA AND OTHER STORIES. Copyright © 2006 by Elmore Leonard, Inc. The Comple
te Western Stories of Elmore Leonard copyright © 2004 by Elmore Leonard, Inc.
Map designed by Jane S. Kim
Collection editor, Gregg Sutter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Microsoft Reader November 2006 ISBN 0-06-133679-3
The stories contained in this volume appeared in The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, published in December 2004 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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