Novel 1959 - The First Fast Draw (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour

place, surrounded on three sides by swamp and forest. On the west there was, as I recalled, a narrow grass-grown lane along the property line. It was fenced off, concealed, yet good land and a part of a place Pa had bought for a pittance. I strongly doubted whether anyone in either Boston or Jefferson dreamed it was owned by Pa. Fairlea was my best chance.
    Bob Lee disagreed. “You’ve too many enemies. You’ll not get a chance to get your crop in, to say nothing of harvesting.”
    “It’s my feeling,” I told them. “Nobody authorized my arrest. I’ve a thought it was Chance Thorne, acting on his own. There’s still a chance they’ll leave me alone.”
    “Maybe,” Longley said dryly. “But there’s some who will remember you and be afraid, and men try to destroy anybody they are scared of.”
    “There’s something else we’ve got to talk about,” Bicker-staff suggested, “and that’s Barlow. We’re getting blamed for every thieving, murdering thing he does while he hides out in the Thickets.”
    “He has friends tipping him off,” Jack English declared. “He always knows where the Army isn’t goin’ to be.”
    While they talked of that my mind wandered back to that lonely field at Fairlea. With luck a man could get a crop into the ground there and nobody the wiser. Then with some feed to stash away I might even go wild-cow hunting down in the Thickets and come out with a herd we could drive to Sedalia or Montgomery.
    Of this much I was almighty sure: they’d not take me again and treat me as they had just now. I’d see them all in hell first, and go with them if need be. And that brought back the problem of defense. Nothing could be done until I had a gun, until I had a carbine and a Dragoon Colt.
    So I got to my feet and started toward my mule which Bill Longley had brought to the island for me. Jack English had gone with him to get it, and for that I owed them a debt that I must pay.
    Lee watched me saddle up the mule. “You fixin’ to go somewhere, Cull?”
    “Figure I’ll need my guns. I’m goin’ after them.”
    Longley had been lying on the ground chewing a blade of grass. Now he sat up and regarded me curiously, but he let the others do the talking.
    “You figure to do it alone?” Lee asked mildly.
    “A man forks his own broncs in this country,” I told him, “but I’ve nothing against you riding along if you’ve a might to.”
    “Well, now,” Longley got to his feet, “I sort of figure this might be somethin’ to see.”
    Four of them rode along: Bob Lee, Jack English, Bickerstaff and Longley. I’d have wanted no better men, anywhere.
    Jefferson lay lazy in the afternoon sun. A child rolled a hoop along the boardwalk, and a dog lay sprawled in the dust in the center of the street, flopping his tail as they rode by to indicate his satisfaction with things as they were and a willingness to let things be. Two men dozed against the wall of a store enjoying the shade and their chronic idleness.
    The street was silent. A few men riding into the street meant nothing to anybody, not those days. There were loose men from everywhere, just drifting, hunting they knew not what, men who had lost what they had in the war and were hoping, away back inside their skulls, to find it somewhere else.
    It wasn’t likely any of them would know me on sight, although, come to think of it, Joel Reese had. But then I was on the place and where a body might expect me to be.
    Stepping down from my mule, I glimpsed my reflection in the store window, a strapping big man in a cabin-spun shirt that was a size too small; my shoulders packed a lot of heavy muscle in them and it swelled that shirt considerable. First money I came by would have to go into clothes or I’d be seedplanting naked as a jaybird.
    The black hair curled over the back of my shirt collar, and I guess I looked like an uncurried broomtail, one of those wild ponies folks find running in the swamps or the off-shore islands.
    We had