"As quickly as you can, snatch the pebble from my hand." "When you can take the pebble from my hand it will be time for you to leave." "Time for you to leave." "I would be grateful for some water." "You got it." "Mr." "Rankin?" "Nope." "He is here?" "Nope." "He will be here?" "When he gets back from snaking." "What is snaking?" "Rattlers." "You know, a zoo full of women wouldn't ask your questions, so state your business." "Greenhorns ain't favored on a cow spread." "I seek my brother." "Daniel Caine." "I was told in town to ask for Mr. Rankin." "There ain't nothing to ask." "Drifter's a drifter." "They drift." "What about Danny Caine?" "Leave it be." "Pa made you a foreman." "You aim to be a mother you get yourself a bonnet and a Bible." "Come on, slanty man." "Mush in a mess of wind." "I said, come on." "Your brother left some things in the bunkhouse." "You want them?" "Where does your pebble walk to, grasshopper?" "It walks. its journey is to nowhere." "Each journey begins and also ends." "Then the ending is the bottom of the pool." "Does not the pebble, entering the water, begin fresh journeys?" "It seems unceasing." "Such is the journey through life." "It begins, it ends." "Yet fresh journeys go forth." "Father begets son." "Who becomes, in turn, father, who begets son." "Then the roots I have are me." "And I am they." "Grasshopper, seek first to know your own journey's beginning and end." "Seek then the other journeys of which you are a close part." "But in this seeking, know patience." "Wear that traveler's cloak which shelters and permits you to endure." "Ain't much, slanty man, but he weren't much either." "Had a face that belonged in a bridle." "If you're any part of his blood, you're a lying coward just like him." "You hear me?" "Yes." "I called you a lying coward." "Did you hear that?" "Yes." "Well, get your gun to you." "I have no gun." "Well, then get a knife." "We're gonna do some cutting." "I have no knife." "Well, ain't he the candy head." "I wish no trouble." "Then I'm just gonna push you some, slanty man, till your brains come to order." "Then I figure you'll tell me where to find your kin." "And I'm gonna be there, all liver and lightning." "When you leave these walls you will come upon the many pillars of violence." "May not a man one with nature, seeing such pillars, avoid them?" "Other men stumble in the way." "They go in eyeless search for peace." "Must I then tumble down these pillars?" "Seek always peace." "Wear no path for the footsteps of others unless the soul is endangered." "We are all linked by our souls." "To endanger one endangers all." "And if thus endangered, master?" "In such times, the soul must be the warrior." "Any luck?" "Yeah, Joe." "I got me five of them wide-back Malapai rattlesnakes." "Joe...." "Listen to them praying." "Ed." "Ain't a worry, Joe." "They don't strike in the dark of the sack." "Don't know where from when." "Benson taught me that." "Learned it from his lnjun ma, right, Benson?" "l'd allow." "Moss here nearly stepped on one." "You know how we figure he's older than the rocks?" "An antelope couldn't have jumped higher or sweeter." "Foolishness." "Right, Clint?" "What does a mule know about rattlesnakes, you old sore-sided boar?" "Enough not to get nosy." "Then I'll talk to him." "Cookie get some bait on in there?" "On the stove." "You boys go on in." "I'll see you later." "Don't let him talk to you, Clint." "Next thing you know, you'll be coiling and rattling." "Rest of the boys get in for the gather?" "Expect them in about sundown." "Why do you do it, Ed?" "Every man learns something by watching what he's afeard of." "You, afeard of something?" "Every man's afeard of what he don't know about." "Least, the white of him is. I guess there's not enough lnjun in me, Joe." "Well...." "We're both dry and bourbon's wet." "Moss done caught sight of a man afoot." "That'd be the Chinaman." "Chinaman?" "Well, not exactly a Chinaman." "Wants to see you." "Talking to Breck now." "It ain't nothing, Ed." "We're dry and bourbon's wet." "Come on, get up!" "Let's go, get up." "I said, get up!" "Get up." "Get up." "Him?" "Yeah, him." "One-way conversation." "Now, slanty man, where you gonna meet him?" "Don't you hear nothing?" "Where you gonna meet him?" "l know less of him than you." "Well, you better start knowing." "Breck." "Breck, you pound sand into him, you're liable to find grit." "Not this thing, Pa." "He don't say more than a blink." "Breck, you're taking the wrong route." "Don't carry a gun, knife." "l told him to move on, Ed." "Now, wait a minute." "Short minute." "You enjoy being trussed up like a hog?" "What'd I tell you?" "What is it you want?" "Mr." "Rankin?" "That'd be me." "I am told I might find my brother Danny." "The drifter." "Take him on back." "His brother did it." "And this one's of the same blood." "Beating on a dead frog don't make a fight of it. I know, son, you've been wronged." "But this ain't no way to go about it." "Joe." "Come on, Breck." "Breck." "If you say so, Pa." "You better get rid of him, Ed." "If he don't stink of death, I never saw a carcass." "Your brother ain't here." "But there's a lot of us here who'd like to know where he's at." "lf my brother has done wrong, I will" "What he's done wrong, he's done." "You can't walk life out here by dues." "Now I see you ain't got a knife or a gun." "There ain't no harder land in this country this side of hell than what you're standing on." "You know, Apache'd have you drawn and quartered before you ever saw a shadow." "That's the red of it:" "Injun." "You mix the red with the white and you got a burned bear dancing on cactus." "And that'd be me." "l ask only-- -l'm telling." "You stand at the bottom of your grave and you ain't closer to death than you are on this ranch with my son." "Way he was raised, man's property can't be stole without stealing a piece of him." "Why don't you go back where you come from." "Lord puts a faith on fools." "Fools. lf they don't stay at it too long." "Come on, Billy boy!" "Come on!" "Ride him!" "Hang on there, hang on there!" "Come on!" "Come on, now!" "Thattaboy." "Who in the name of--?" "What do you think you're doing?" "Now, there goes your bet, Billy!" "You was supposed to ride him all the way." "Well, I was, till this stupid-- Mangy" "Bet was to ride him, Billy." "Don't take to dangling around like a Christmas tree." "I think your boy could have rode him, at that, general." "Helping hands is best kept to the pockets." "I thought you were in need of help." "Help?" "You know what you done?" "You lost me $20, that's what." "I could ride that wag-bait up a tree and plant him there." "But no, you gotta come in here and-- Well, who are you?" "!" "Hell with it." "Cost me $20, that fool did, Pa!" "He just did what he thought was best, son." "That horse'll be around to ride again." "These suckers know I can ride him now." "20 sweet dollars up a dude's arm!" "I'm General Thoms, the sheriff." "You passing through or staying?" "Passing through." "Well, it doesn't take long." "This will be a town, though, of size and thought." "The railroad coming in improves the purpose." "Took sand to do what you just did." "Sand?" "Guts." "Courage." "You know much about horses?" "A little." "Figures." "It takes a power of doing to step into something you haven't tried on before." "I did not...." "l did not mean to spoil your son's ride." "Just a bet." "The way of things." "Around here men'll bet on how much dirt they got on their necks." "Always a bet, son." "Where are you from?" "Not your duty to answer." "Just mine to ask." "And I'd answer, friend." "The general, he talks low but he moves high." "Got frijoles and chilies waiting, general." "Thanks." "Thanks, Ed." "Yours?" "My brother's." "Being who?" "Daniel Caine." "You don't seem much like him." "l do not know." "We have not met." "Your own brother?" "But you want to find him." "Why?" "My own brother." "And we have never met." "Do you know him?" "l had him in jail." "Fighting." "Breck Rankin and a woman." "Two divided into one." "That's always trouble." "Now, your brother's gone, son." "If he'd stayed here, he'd be dead." "And you aim to follow him, I reckon." "Yes." "You eaten?" "No." "Well, son, your brother's got a full two weeks' start on you." "Let's go inside here and have some beans and peppers." "Way Wide Ed makes them, you pack a few of those things into certain areas and the devil with a long rope can't keep up." "That old sand-pounder wasn't nothing." "I'd have been taking your money about like a thief with a basket." "But you know, they got them an old smoky dun sunfisher out at Rankin's." "That big bronc ain't never been close to rode." "Shoot, he bit Breck about to the middle." "Of course, Breck being as mean as he is, he bit him back." "Ain't that right, Pa?" "Old Violet that Breck rides?" "Well, wouldn't be a Rankin horse if it didn't want fire for breakfast." "Breck will bring him into shape." "Man." "All man, that old Breck." "Come on." "Drinks, boys." "Your son?" "Drinking?" "A boy." "Man, maybe." "He never knew his mother." "Smallpox." "You don't raise a boy in this country." "He raises himself or he doesn't get raised." "Let's try those beans." "Hey, Pa." "Here comes old thunder now." "I'll get us a couple of bowls." "Then you'd best be on your way." "Howdy, Breck." "How you doing?" "What rock you come crawling out of?" "I'm all right." "Bring out the snake skulls, the hawk is a-flying." "Breck." "General." "Have a plate of beans?" "Sure, Breck." "Set and supper." "What's he doing here?" "He just moving through with the rest of the weeds." "Come set, Breck." "Shut up, you squirrelly pig." "Now, come on, Breck." "Ain't no call for you to talk to me" "Shut up or I'm gonna shut you up final." "What's the likes of him doing here, Thoms?" "Like my son said, Breck." "Just passing through." "We done told him to leave." "You remember the other one, general?" "Now you got this one." "Feathers don't cover him." "Two things, slanty man." "Get out of my face and give me the doodads you stole off me." "My brother left the watch." "It is not yours." "My pa ain't here to help you now." "Ease off, Breck." "We can all talk." "Not with no slanty man, I won't." "Not likely." "Give me them." "Get. I done told you!" "Why, he's still alive." "But why, Pa?" "For a drifter?" "Calm down, son." "But Breck Rankin for him?" "You got any notion what old man Rankin is gonna say?" "Not to say what Rankin will do if his son dies." "He's dead, general." "You ought to have had a doctor, Pa." "You joshing?" "I been doctoring since long before rain was even wet." "I mean a real-- Well, it ain't nothing against you, Molly." "Not much to doctor, son, with lead through the center." "Pa, old man Rankin, he'll come riding in here...." "That's likely." "He'll come in so riled up he won't look to see who or what." "He'll just wreck the whole town." "Oh, shut up, Burt." "Well, that's easy for you." "Get a wall of ice over this town and you'll still do business." "But the rest of us, we'll be lucky if the walls are still standing." "Well, general." "What's to do?" "Get a casket, Burt." "Pa." "You killed his son." "That happens, boy." "Not to Mr. Edward Rankin, it don't, Pa." "He owns everything for 1 00 miles around except the breathing." "They're right, they" "He's gonna come in here and come down on them harder than toads in a cave-in." "On us too, you come to it." "He'll kill you, Pa." "He'll kill you and then where we got?" "Us." "You and me." "We're not through, son." "Pa, don't even say it." "We done everything wrong." "Well, least" " Pa." "Rankin's got all them hands and guns on every one." "Besides, he's strong enough himself to throw the moon in his boot." "I'll take care of it, boy." "Pa, you done took care of it." "And for a pilgrim like that." "You leaving?" "Yes." "That's about the only thing makes sense so far." "There was a reason to it all." "Your brother took that woman of Breck Rankin's." "He didn't win her." "He took her." "And out here, a gun, a blanket, a woman, that's considered a man's property." "You look at it, son, any way you care to but your brother took her and he went off somewhere." "And in this country, that's death in a basket." "My boy's right." "Ed Rankin will come." "With a need in mind." "Seeing in me my brother." "I don't know a lot about many things, son, but I do know men." "You've got a difference in you." "There's an ease in you." "Probably that's because you don't know this country." "Maybe I don't." "But death." "You see enough of death it starts to haunt you." "Fills your eyes, your ears, weighs in your belly." "You come to know it." "Each journey of a man crosses this path." "And each man sees death in his own mirror." "I've seen death piled around me till the air couldn't gather. I'm afraid of it." "Smote dry waiting for it." "Gone past my luck." "Ed Rankin's gone through it like I have." "But fear has never touched that man, being Indian they believing life runs flat like a table and death isn't a fence." "But I'm white." "And I know." "What do you know?" "That it ends, son." "We struggle and we grow old and it ends and that's all there is." "And it is black inside that box." "I come all the way out here and here it is waiting for me." "Grinning breathing its breath on me." "What the eye sees disappears with a blink." "Or a wandering puff of breath." "Where there was light the eye, denied, sees nothing." "Watch." "My eye is denied." "No light." "No candle." "Only nothing." "Come." "That is what the eye sees." "What the soul sees cannot be denied." "Will not the soul, too, see nothing when death blinks its eye?" "No." "The soul sees always." "Yet the body dies." "Does the sun die?" "It does not shine at night." "It shines somewhere." "You do not see it." "It does not end." "The journey goes on, from one time to another." "Nothing dies that was ever something." "Son, I don't know what the hell you're talking about." "Rankin is afraid." "How do you know that?" "l know." "l, too, was responsible for the death." "You're free, son." "You go." "Yes." "Go." "The boy's telling it, Ed." "Was you that said it." ""Mush in a mess of wind."" "Breck, your own boy." "Bury him, Ed. lt just happened." "Ain't the same times now." "You got to change with the times." "How'd it go again, boy?" "Pa didn't have no other way to it." "Breck forced him." "He was all fired up, right down to the toes." "You know how he gets." "Well, Breck, he" "Had to happen sooner or later, Ed." "You go and spill blood on the sand and you'll have more marshals sniffing around than wolves on a calf crop." "Thoms is a law man, Ed." "Law." "Ain't no other law but property." "Private property." "Now, that other one, the brother he done took Breck's girl right from behind his back." "His property." "That's right." "So Breck, he had himself a good reason." "That's right." "And I got myself the same reason." "Yes, but it won't help, Ed." "Help?" "!" "I never ask for it." "And I never give it." "I'm sorry, Joe." "Now, we been over hell edge to edge." "Now, you can smell hell, but you don't own it." "But a man owns his own blood." "And that boy, that's my blood, that's me." "Gonna kill your pa, son." "You best go tell him." "Now you're doing it right, Mr. Rankin." "We brought your son back, Mr. Rankin." "What's he doing here?" "It was him was the trigger to the doing, as you'd likely say" "Billy." "You, Thoms." "He don't know sideways from up, but you, you come to me like a big skinned mule." "I came to appeal to you, Rankin." "What's that mean, general?" "To reason it out." "Reason?" "I know the reason." "I'm looking at him." "I'll throw enough lead in that reason to drill a well." "Now, you stand aside, general, and draw your gun." "No." "l won't." "Why?" "I'm afraid." "You're afraid?" "Yes." "The general?" "The hero?" "At one time, maybe." "A coward now." "Rankin" "General, hero, coward or inside straight, you shot my boy." "That's me, now. I'm gonna kill you." "Ed, that won't help." "Oh, just leave it be to me, Joe." "Now, this is your last chance, Thoms." "Then I'm taking what's mine." "The cobweb's gonna stop a bullet?" "Get that Chinese teacup out of here." "I ask you to stop." "You'll just have to pardon my manners, sonny." "I was born on the wrong side of the bed." "Who are you?" "A man." "Not afraid, if that is what you want to know." "I'm about to know you from the inside out." "But you." "Will you know yourself from the inside out?" "You think you know me?" "Not well enough." "Let me introduce myself." "I ain't gonna kill you but this land is filling up with more shirttail lizards than rocks to hide them." "But I'm gonna teach you a lesson." "You're gonna have scars to remind you of the name of this land." "This country." "This is private property." "You're alive my boy is dead." "Discipline your body, grasshopper..." "...that you may find a greater power." "But, master, what greater power is there?" "Those who surrender themselves find inner strength." "Will this protect me more than could my arms and legs?" "When the heart knows no danger, no danger exists." "When the soul becomes a warrior, all fear melts." "As the snowflake that falls upon your hand." "These scars are gonna remind you." "Don't you get the carry of this, slanty man?" "Rankin." "Well." "The hero finally found his voice." "Nothing matters much to you." "Nothing except your property." "That's the way I've held it." "Held it with my strength." "Strength!" "What would you know about strength?" "You've always had it." "Nothing ever challenged it. lt's strength." "Like lifting up a stud horse on a bet." "Like your young years, honing your gun to quicker than a blink instead of looking at the natural wonder of things." "That isn't strength." "Strength is when you're so used up you feel like a walnut with the insides gone." "Well, now, general." "That was quite a speech." "I told you I was afraid. I said why." "Do you want me to take a shovel and dig my own grave?" "Would you take comfort in that?" "No, no. lt wouldn't give me comfort." "But it would one of my boys that might have to dig it." "You have the weakness to defend your injury with killing." "Have you not the strength to forgive?" "Well." "We done a little talking and we done a few stunts, we tried to impress one another." "But what have we learned?" "I'm gonna give you a chance I never gave anybody in my life before." "You're at the wrong place in the wrong time, do you understand that?" "Now, what is it?" "What is it you want?" "The life of Mr. Thoms." "For your fear, Mr. Rankin." "My fear?" "Of what?" "Me." "You?" "Your fear hangs in the air." "Like the smell of a man close to death." "That's enough, Ed." "Crazy, all of it's crazy." "Nothing to prove." "There is something." "Mr. Rankin knows what." "The life of Mr. Thoms for your fear." "Well." "I guess I'm gonna have to kill you too." "Your fear would yet live." "Fear?" "I ain't afraid of nothing, never been." "Where are you going?" "l said, where are you going?" "!" "Let him go, Ed." "Your fear lives, Mr. Rankin." "Here is its temple." "Ed." "Ed!" "I got no say, but I'm saying it, Mr. Rankin." "It's all gone too far." "Shoot him." "Just shoot him." "He done give you the cause." "They don't ask, they do." "Certain death, every one of them." "You would not walk among them?" "Down there?" "Down there." "Caine, you're new to this land." "That's a death that inches through you squeezing and twisting like a knife." "That's the first thing he's got right yet." "You are afraid." "Afraid?" "Yes, just as a fool would be afraid." "A fool would take a pistol and put it to his ear and pull the trigger." "What would you put on his gravestone?" ""Here lies the body of a brave man"?" "No." ""Here lies the body of a fool."" "Afraid." "And you're not?" "No." "Then go on in." "And Mr. Thoms goes free." "Your bet." "Your body." "But the big black birds'll be hovering over you in the morning." "No." "Stay." "This isn't your doing." "What I did, I did." "Leave him be, general." "Look, now." "Look carefully." "You're looking at a brave man." "As the hero said as the knife slowly turned:" ""Shake hands with every one of them."" "Master how does one find the strength within himself?" "By being one with all that is without himself." "Yet these sometimes contend." "When fire meets ice, which prevails?" "Ice." "Yet in dying, does not the ice, becoming water, also die?" "Will the fire die?" "That prevails which refuses to know the power of the other." "Where fear is, does not danger also live?" "And where fear is not, does not danger also die?" "Where the tiger and the man are two, grasshopper, he may die." "Yet where the tiger and the man are one, there is no fear, there is no danger." "For what creature, one with all nature, will attack itself?" "I'm getting mighty thirsty." "I could use some whiskey." "Go on." "Mr." "Rankin?" "You heard me." "Get out of here." "What'd he say?" "Indian." "Yeah, I know, but what'd it mean?" "There isn't an Indian word for "hero," son, but there is for "man."" "What he said is:" ""Man is often hidden."" "Come on." "Grasshopper, be yourself and never fear thus to be naked to the eyes of others." "Yet know that men so often mask themselves that what is simple is rarely understood." "The dust of truth swirls and seeks its own cracks of entry." "And a tree falling in the forest, without ears to hear, makes no sound." "Yet it falls."