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Arizona Rancher Buck Turner rescued a space alien
from a crashed flying saucer, taking him back home to his wife. As a
self-taught country doctor - the best health care option in their remote
area - wife Edith becomes occupied with nursing the creature back to health.
Buck travels to Contention City to seek help in a
land dispute from Sheriff Brucker. Help is not forthcoming.
Contention City is in the middle of a silver boom. It’s a rowdy, violent
place. Sheriff Brucker has all the work he can handle to keep the peace.
Jedidiah Buckmaster and I didn't agree about most
subjects, but we did agree on the things that mattered most: religion;
politics and business. That’s why he was as close to me as a brother,
closer than my natural brother up in Montana. I never saw Joseph anymore,
and he wasn't much of a writer. He'd sent one letter in ten years.
But there was Jed, a dozen miles away as a crow
flies, ready to fill Joseph's shoes. We were both sixteen when we met
punching cattle in Texas. He'd come west from Virginia to find work and
adventure, not knowing a thing about being a cowboy. Since I'd been born in
Texas and raised around crops and cattle, I helped Jed out I could. Not only
was it the right thing to do, but also it was funny, trying to watch him
learn how to handle a rope, fire a rifle accurately mounted and calm an
enraged bull.
We worked closely together for a couple years.
Afterward, we said our goodbyes and went separate ways, tired of the
itinerant lifestyle and aware that the only cattle drives in the future were
going to be the ones in our memories. Times were changing. The west was
fencing off.
Unknown to each other, we both met women and
settled in southeastern Arizona. I was almost shocked to death a few years
later the day I met him, Elizabeth and their children heading west driving a
wagon filled with all their worldly possessions. I couldn't believe what my
eyes were telling me when they were seeing him. The world isn't as big as
you sometimes think it is.
We visited occasionally. He lived down the trail
on the way to Contention City. We played a game of highly competitive
horseshoes, sat, had a few glasses of whatever liquor he made, talked about
our work, our families and old times.
Some people would have a problem with our ritual,
but I don't drink unless it's with another man on a social occasion. I
don't subscribe to Temperance Union notions. God Himself put alcohol on this
Earth. Its existence means he doesn't favor temperance. It's there if we
choose to employ it. Like any gift, it can be abused.
If there was a way Jed Buckmaster and Ike Renner
could trade ranches, I'd be all for it. I'd love to have my old Virginia
buckskin buddy as a neighbor. I'm sure Renner would like to trade ranches,
his being in the run down condition it is.
That was a foolish notion because there was no way
Jed would agree and he'd be a fool to. The J/B Ranch was weathering the
drought in fine fashion, even better than mine. I won't take anything away
from him. Jed has always been hard working. Nowadays he's hard-working and
knowledgeable.
Jed's thoughts on Renner were the same as mine:
"You've got to get rid of that man somehow. He's going to drag your
operation right down along with his."
"Don't I know it." I was visiting,
getting back from Contention City the second time I went to see Brucker
about the same issue, sipping his Monongahela.
"Can't say you wouldn't be justified going
over there and shooting him right now."
"Couldn't do that," I said.
"Wouldn't be right."
"Men have killed for less."
I shrugged. "I know. Just never fancied
myself a murderer."
He smiled. "That wife of yours got to you
with all that doctoring."
"No."
"You're the good sort even if you’ve been
whipped. Salt of the Earth. You know what you have to do. You tried talking
to him again?"
"I did. He won't listen. Never would. The man
was just plain stupid before," I said, my voice quivering with anger.
Thinking about it still makes me angry. "Now he's stupid and
desperate." I shook my head.
It takes as much brains as brawn to succeed in
agriculture. Renner had all the brawn he needed, but was painfully short of
brains. Having a good brain is like having a good, strong medicine against
self-created troubles.
Jed and I would have both liked to spend all our
money buying the latest and greatest of everything from back East. Who
wouldn't? We don't. Before buying anything, we ask ourselves if we're going
to regret these purchases tomorrow. When you make your living from the land,
it's boom and bust. You've always got to save for the future. Still, you
don't want to be a skinflint either. A skinflint will worry too much about
taking out loans. You've got to spend money to make money. It's all about
being smart.
"From the first, it was all coming to
this," I said of the situation between Ike Renner and me. "I tried
talking to him, acting like it was all some kind of mistake. He allowed it
was. Then I kept seeing his cattle on my land and watched him snip the
barbwire to let them across. I told him if I saw him do it again, I'd shoot
his cattle the next time. He says, 'You do that and I'll shoot you.' I could
see all that talk wasn’t leading anywhere and told him: 'You don't need to
go shooting anybody, and I don't need to go shooting cattle.'
"He minds his manners for a while but then I
noticed his cattle coming over again, like he's daring me to go through with
my threat. Like he doesn't care," I said.
"He doesn't care," Jed agreed.
"This is bad for business."
Jed nodded and chuckled. "A fool like Renner
doesn't care about business or what’s fair. That's why he's in the means
he's in right now.
"What did the sheriff say when you rode in to
talk to him?"
"He says we need to handle it ourselves. He
can't come and he's awfully sorry. He wouldn't have chosen to make the
jurisdiction so large. He knows we're suffering out here from the drought
and that tempers are growing short. He says I should encourage Renner to get
out of the cattle business and go work in a mine."
"Well?" Jed said, seeing my
exasperation. "Doesn't sound like a halfway bad idea."
"Do you think Renner would listen to me? He's
got it in his mind how my property is his property and that I'm his enemy
and that's all there is to it."
"I'd talk to him," Jed offered.
"That wouldn't do any good either," I
said. "Renner knows you and I are buddies. He'd see you as me."
"Then I don't see there's anything you can
do. It's war. You see one of his cattle on your side of the fence, you shoot
it. You see ten, you shoot ten. That way nobody can accuse you of rustling.
You see him cutting your fence, or knocking it down, you shoot him. It's
that simple. You can't be playing soft with him anymore. It's come down to
that.
"And don't let that bleeding heart of yours
get in the way of doing what you need to do. You see his children starving
or his woman looking beaten? Look the other way. That's his problem. It's
his soul."
"I can't be like that," I said.
"You do what you need to do. You got to stand
up for your rights."
I sat in silence. What could I say? Jed made
sense. I didn't believe it was right to kill anyone, even someone who was
suicidal and who had nothing to lose.
It was going to be either us or them. No question
about who it should be.
"I'll just give it awhile longer. If he
doesn't move or give it up, I'll kill him.”
That would be more trouble. I’d have to see to
it that his widow and kids were supported. Then I’d have to lease out his
land to run cattle on and manage everything. You couldn’t expect a woman
to know much about ranching and I couldn’t let them perish.
I’d do the right thing by them if they’d let
me. I’m that sort of man.
"That's right," Jed said, nodding.
"Self justice. That's the way we have to be. Someday you'll be able to
go to a sheriff and ask them to help you out and they are going to be able
to. They can do that back east but not here, not now. Some people are just
weak in morals and we've got to take care of them ourselves. That's the way
it is."
There was nothing more to say. We just sat gazing
at the setting sun until I said it was time that I get going home.
Forty-niner knew the way home. I just had to stay put on the horse while he
walked.
There's only so much one man and two deputies can
do. They had their hands full with the houseful of troubles that Contention
City was. I didn't blame Sheriff Brucker for my problems with Renner, even
though he should have come out there. The K-10 and Lazy-R were in his
jurisdiction. I'll allow that the boundaries were set up before Contention
City boomed by an over-ambitious Council, but we couldn't wait while
bureaucrats fixed it up. We paid them taxes. We deserved service.
I'd never be one to criticize Brucker. I met him
and I could see he was the idealistic type, as honest as a summer day is
long. A town is lucky when they get themselves a sheriff like Brucker.
Contention City was tough on a sheriff. I wouldn't
want the job. I told Jed: "You couldn't pay me enough to do what he
does." There were too many violent people attracted to that town. Life
is too short to make it any shorter by catching a bullet from somebody's
handgun. I wanted to live long enough to see grandchildren.
Out in the country, I could raise a few crops and
fatten my cattle undisturbed. We didn't have to worry about getting shot by
some drunken silver speculators. True, Caleb might have been bored. Becky
might have been getting to the age where she'd get bored too, but, as a
father, I didn't have to worry about them encountering the sinfulness that
would lead them into a misspent youth. They only had the good example set by
Edith, myself and the God-fearing neighbors we let them by.
Furthermore, it's better to be bored and virtuous
when you are alive than to be in Hell when you are dead.
Caleb and Becky were fine children. Caleb was an
obedient son. Becky, less so. But how many other little girls would turn
away from their wood dolls or the pretty china ones to care for an ugly
stranger? So many other little girls would look at the creature and cry,
"Eww!"
Becky treated the creature like a living doll. She
fed him, brought him water to drink, helped him clean up, and dressed him
afterward.
She'd talk to him. The creature tried to talk back,
but had difficulty making understandable sounds. His voice box was somehow
different from ours. My wife said we’d have to cut him open to find out
exactly how. When he spoke, it sounded like someone gargling at a high pitch.
I wondered how one could understand another.
Edith speculated he would have even made sense to
somebody who spoke his language. He seemed to have some kind of brain injury
that was healing, she said. "A race that was like that wouldn't be able
to build the kind of a skyship that you were describing. But his body is
repairing itself, faster than a human’s would. Someday he'll be able to
speak his own language at least."
I smiled at the creature, "How are you
doing?"
The creature nodded, keeping his large, bulging eyes
fixed on mine.
"You don't realize how lucky you are to be in
the good hands of my two women," I said.
The creature nodded again. I suspected that was the
only way he knew to let me know that he heard me.
"You're going to be better - and then you're
going to answer some questions," I said. "I've got lots and lots of
them for you."
I couldn't wait. If only I had some guarantee, I'd
be able to understand that gargle someday.
The creature had become the center of everyone’s
life except Caleb. The boy had all of the usual things young men have on their
minds.
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