Gun Shy. Les Savage Jr

Gordon again, as he crossed the basin toward the foothills. He was beaten, exhausted; he seemed incapable of any more strong feeling. The grief and the shame had joined his misery.

      He avoided the pass, crossing the ridge far west of town. The smell of sulphur came to him as he topped the cap-rock. He looked for pursuit in the basin below but could see no sign of it. Either the riders had not guessed he was at the Bayards, or the Bayards had put them off the track. Gordon remembered what his father had said about Blackhorn . . . in the Wind Rivers somewhere, near South Pass City. It seemed a futile destination, hunting for a man he had never seen. But it was all he had left.

      The South Pass Mail Road led north out of Table Rock. It took him into the mountains soon, spicy forests of fir, black with lichen on the northern slopes. He dozed in the saddle, he didn’t know how often, or how long. He rode till dawn filtered its eery undersea light through the timber and then the sun came up and touched the bright red spikes and orange blossoms on the giant firs and seemed to light their tops afire. Gordon pulled off the road and found a spring in a high park. He watered his horse and ate the cold biscuits and meat Opal had put in the saddlebags. His eyes burned and watered. There was such a powerful ache in his joints he thought he was getting the miseries. The Mail Road was far below him, a yellow thread appearing fitfully in the massed green of the timber.

      Gordon saw movement, a rider, ant-size, appearing from the trees, swallowed again in their shadow, moving north along the road. Gordon began to shiver. He led the Morgan into the trees quickly and tightened the latigo. He couldn’t stop shaking. He got into the saddle again. He cursed himself. He couldn’t honestly say he was afraid. Why was he shaking?

      He figured that if the man was following him, and looking for tracks, he would see where Gordon had pulled off the road. Gordon climbed to timberline and over a windswept ridge and found a creek on the other side where he could hide his sign for a space.

      As he rode, the gun pressed its weight against his leg. He’d already had the impulse to throw it away, a dozen times over. But he knew Bayard was right. He was going to need it to stay alive. He despised his fear of guns. He didn’t know why he feared them. Sometimes he thought it was the sound, actually hurting his ears. Sometimes he thought the pain was only in his mind. His whole life had been haunted by it. When it first appeared his father had tried to punish him out of it. Whenever Gordon shied at gunsound Bob Conners took the horsewhip to him. When that failed he had chained Gordon to a log and shot up a whole box of shells five feet from the boy. It had left Gordon in hysterics. He knew his father was only doing it for his own good. They lived in a land where a man needed a gun to survive. When they had come into the country the Indians were still on the war-path, and the hunt was a daily thing. There had probably never been a day in Bob Conners’ life that a gun had not been on him or near at hand. It was unthinkable to him that his son should be so afraid of guns.

      Gordon remembered the doctors they had gone to. The one in Laramie had said the boy was of a nervous disposition. That might account for some of it. The one in Cheyenne had tested his reflexes . . . a little hammer tapping his knee and the leg popping up. Unusually quick reflexes, the doctor said. Almost too quick. Some physical source. Definitely some physical source. He prescribed laudanum, to quiet the boy’s nerves. A horse doctor at Julesburg had suggested putting cotton in his ears, to muffle the sound, and then shooting a gun off. It hadn’t helped. . . .

      In the afternoon Gordon cut back over the ridge, found the Mail Road below him again, and watched it from cover till he was sure it was empty. Keeping to high timber, he followed the road on north. It ran through the long trough of South Pass and entered a sagebrush wasteland. Near evening, in this desolation, Gordon found the town.

      Gaping adits and rotting flumes and other signs of old diggings were everywhere. Gordon had heard that ten years ago there were four thousand people in South Pass City, but they had abandoned it when the veins pinched out. He entered the ghost town, winding his way through the grass-grown placer ditches and crumbling sluice boxes to one of the rotting cabins. When he pushed on the door it fell in before him, striking the floor with a muffled crash that lifted ancient dust against his face.

      He was afraid firelight would give him away. All he had to tether his horse with was the reins. He hitched it outside the cabin and spent a miserable night, hungry, shivering, dreaming.

      He dreamed he was locked in a little room again, so small he couldn’t turn around, like a coffin would be, only his father was in it with him, and he couldn’t cipher out how the room could be so small and his father so big, towering, a giant, casting his monstrous shadow across Gordon no matter where Gordon turned. His father was shooting off the gun. It crashed and boomed like a mountain falling down, like the world splitting open, and Gordon kept screaming and beating on the walls and all the time the noise kept getting louder, until he knew it was going to bust his head wide open, and his father kept getting bigger, and the room kept getting smaller, till it was so small he couldn’t breathe, till the coffin was like an iron band around his chest, squeezing all the air out, suffocating him.

      He woke up. He was shaking and making weird sounds in his throat. He was drenched with sweat. He couldn’t stand to stay inside the cabin and he crawled on his hands and knees out the door and sprawled weakly on the earth outside. It was an old dream. It always left him drained, spent.

      When he recovered he got shakily to his feet. He didn’t want to go back inside. He was afraid to sleep again. He went around the shack to check his horse. It was gone. Apparently it had pulled loose while he slept and drifted away. He knew the futility of trying to track it in the dark. He waited till dawn, but he soon lost its sign in the rubble of the town.

      Big Hermit Creek ran at the edge of town. He drank and washed in the brackish water, miserably trying to decide what to do. He knew about the only traffic he could count on was the weekly stage from Table Rock to Fort Washakie. They might give him a lift to the nearest way station. The outlying stations had a hard time keeping help and there might be a chance of getting a job wrangling the stage teams until he could get a lead on Blackhorn. The Indians were always drifting past the stations, and his father had said the Indians knew where Blackhorn was. It was a thin hope, but it was all he could think of. He didn’t even know what Blackhorn could do when he found the man. About all he expected was some help getting out of the country.

      In the meantime he knew he would have to do something about food. The stage might not be along for days. His belly ached and he was already getting dizzy with hunger. Walking back through town he saw gophers tunneling the main street and kept flushing jackrabbits from the weeds.

      He stopped in the street. It took a long time before he could make himself pull the gun Chaney had given him. He held the heavy Colt in his hands and stared fixedly at it. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to use one. His father had forced him to learn the handling of a gun, both six-shooter and rifle, even though he could never get Gordon to do any shooting. He had to shoot now. He would starve to death if he didn’t. He couldn’t let his fear kill him.

      A cold sweat broke out at his temples. He began to move again. Another jack broke from behind one of the shacks, bounding across Gordon’s path. Gordon made a strained sound, lifted the gun. He had the rabbit in front of his sights. When he squeezed the trigger he shut his eyes. The crash of the shot made him shout.

      He flung the gun from him. He turned and ran. After the first few steps he stopped himself. He stood shaking, his head bowed, his fists knotted, fighting the panic. He lifted his head and saw the jack far in the distance, bounding away unharmed. He felt a moment of relief. He had never been able to kill anything, or to watch it die. He remembered the first time his father had made him go hunting. Watching the first deer his father shot, watching it squeal and jump and fall, and lie kicking its life out on the ground. It had made him sick.

      The rabbit was out of sight. Gordon’s relief faded and he couldn’t feel anything. He couldn’t even feel the usual helpless disgust with himself. It seemed he was too beaten to care any more.

      He left the gun where he had thrown it, near the door of the first shack he had slept in. He went back to the creek, hunting berries. He found some chokecherries and ate too many and bloated up like a heifer with colic.

      He went