The sun is at its meridian when one of the passing images fixes in
his head as suddenly and securely as the bobbling ball falls into a slot
on the turning roulette wheel. The vision is of Arthur Baker. Will
Anderson sets down his jug and stares hard at the trees beyond the
sunbright cornfield but he is seeing only Baker. But for Baker’s lies to
Mary she would not be in her misery. But for the injury to her heart,
his sons would not have set upon stealing Segur’s horses. But for that
rash rustling foray, Bill and Jim would not now be wanted men and
in peril of their lives, nor he himself feeling his world spun out of
control. . . .
The force of this besotted epiphany suffices to launch him from
his rocker and he totters for an instant at the earth’s wild reel
beneath him. Then steadies and grabs up the shotgun and lurches
down the steps and rushes staggering to the stable. Mary cries from
the window for him to come back. Jenny’s face is wide-eyed and gaping beside hers. Josephine bounds to the door, sensing in her soul
some vague but horrible misfortune to come from whatever manic
mission he is bent on, some catastrophe to befall them all unless he is
stopped right now. In her terror she raises the Walker in a two-hand
grip and puts the nub of the front sight on his distancing back and
cocks the piece. She hears her sisters shouting at her as she holds the
trembling gunsight on him and feels the trigger under her finger. And
then he is into the stable and she lowers the revolver and thumbs
down the hammer. Her sisters gape on her with horror—then rush to
her to hug her tight. They are clutching to each other as his horse
bursts from the stable with his heels in its flanks. He heads for
Baker’s house with shotgun in hand and no thought at all but that if
Segur is there he will kill him too.
Arthur Baker’s farm lies a mile north of his Santa Fe Trail store and
some dozen miles from the Anderson place. On this midday he is in
his upstairs den attending to some business papers, pausing now and
then to reflect on lovely Clara and his wedding to her just five days
hence. Now he hears a pounding of hooves drawing nearer and his
curiosity is piqued, for his farm is a placid place where even a galloping horse is a rare excitement. He goes to the window and sees a
rider trailing a plume of dust and coming hard down the road. A pair
of men digging postholes pause to stare after the horseman in the
risen haze. The rider turns off the road and onto the lane to the
house and Baker now recognizes Will Anderson and sees the shotgun
in his hand—sees him rein up almost directly below his window and
slide out of the saddle and lose his footing and go sprawling and one
of the shotgun’s barrels discharges its crunching load into the side of
the house and Baker feels himself flinch and his breath wedges in his
throat.
Will Anderson scrambles to his feet, snarling and cursing, and
lurches out of sight under the porch roof. Near to panic, Baker hastens to the guncase against the wall and takes up a singlebarrel shotgun and checks the load, which almost falls out of the breech for the
violent trembling of his hands. He steps into the hallway as a downstairs door crashes hard against a wall in a thunderous shatter of
glass. A high shriek from the housekeeper and low cursing from
Anderson. Baker’s legs tremulous as he waits at the top of the walled
and L-shaped stairway. Anderson’s maledictions louder, his boots
stomping on the lower leg of the stairs. He appears on the middle
landing with the shotgun at his waist and looks up and his red
clenched face loosens in surprise to see Baker standing there with his
own shotgun at the shoulder.
The walls jar with the blast of Baker’s weapon and the compact
load of buckshot enters Will Anderson at a point between the left
shoulder and the neck and breaks apart the clavicle and several
upper ribs and bores through the torso at an angle traversing an
assortment of organs including the heart and both lungs and bursts
out just above the right hip to splatter a thick mortal portion of him
over the wainscoting. Will in a spasm jerks the trigger of the other
barrel and detonates a fistsized hole through the landing wall and
then his shotgun clatters as he topples backward to sprawl headdown on the lower stairway, his eyes wide but forever done with seeing. Blood rolling from his gaping wounds and sopping his hair and
cascading down the steps to shape a bright gleaming pool on the
wooden floor. All amid the housekeeper’s continuing screams.
Butch Berry sat his horse and kept hidden at the edge of the woods as
he regarded the Anderson house across the open patch of ground this
warm and cloudless midday. Smoke swirling from the kitchen chimney. Chickens pecking in the dirt and the pigs snortling in the wallow. Will’s rocker stood empty on the porch. Butch thought the elder
Anderson might be sleeping—or passed out, the way the man had
been drinking lately.
He had been riding hard all morning since departing the camp at
daybreak and had not yet eaten. He hoped the girls had something
tasty simmering in the cookpot. He chucked his horse forward and
out of the woods and rode up to the house.
He hallooed loudly and dismounted at the front porch and slung
the reins round a post. As he started up the steps two men came out
the door with cocked pistols pointed at him. Another showed himself at the window and held him in his riflesight. Butch Berry stood
fast.
One of the pistolmen ordered him to cross his arms and then
took his revolver off his belt and then reached down and removed his
bootknife as well. Voices rose up behind and he turned to see a group
of men gathered at the door of the barn and looking at him, all of
them armed with long guns and one with his pant leg cut open to the
knee and showing a bandage above his boot.
The man who’d disarmed him now prodded him into the house
with a pistol muzzle at his spine. In the center of the lamplit room a
body lay on planking set across sawhorses. It took Butch Berry a
moment to recognize the colorless waxen face as that of Will Anderson, who now bore but a vague resemblance to the living man. His
hair looked stiff and mudcaked and then Butch understood that the
crusting was dried blood.
The sisters were seated on the other side of the body and all three
staring at Butch—Jenny weeping softly and Mary redeyed and
drawn, Josephine tightlipped, her aspect more outraged than
bereaved. Moonfaced Sheriff Horner of Agnes City, a man of amiable and fair reputation, sat over coffee with two men at the table on
which lay Bill Anderson’s Walker Colt with a cord looped through
the trigger guard. One man lean and grayly mustached. The other
Arthur Baker, whose eyes could not hide his fear.
The lean man pushed an empty chair out from the table with his
foot. “Sit,” he said. “We got a proposition for the Anderson boys.
You and your brother too. Hear it out careful and then take it to
them.”
The news of their father’s death stunned them all the more for
Arthur Baker being the instrument of it. That clumsyfoot fop of a
storekeeper.
“Sheriff Horner’s calling it self-defense plain and simple,” Butch
Berry said.
Butch was on the porch the next morning with the Anderson girls,
the sheriff and Segur when Bill and Jim appeared out of the woods
and rode up to the house. Arthur Baker was in the barn with several
of his armed men about him and would not show his face throughout the proceedings.
The Anderson family’s two wagons—one covered and one not—
stood before the house, each already hitched to its brace of mules
and bearing what possessions the sisters had selected to keep, and so
the remaining business did not take long. There was little talk
beyond the girls’ weepy greetings as they embraced their brothers.
Bill informed the sheriff that he would not dishonor his father by
burying him in Kansas but would take the body back to Missouri.
The sheriff squinted at this news and took a quick look back into
the house where the body yet lay on the planking. “It’s a long ways
to Missouri and he’s already dead two days.”
Bill Anderson looked at him without expression. The sheriff
shrugged. “Hell, he’s