Roney

by Sevenstars

Missing Scenes from "Glory Road."

Roney

by Sevenstars

SUMMARY: Three Missing Scenes from "Glory Road," as Slim comes to understand something of Jess's relationship with Roney Bishop—and the one developing between Jess and his new "family." I also thought it would be worthwhile to address Roney's assertion, in his very first scene, that he's trying to find Jess—why wasn't anything further made of this? Thanks as always to Noelle for beta chores.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Andy didn't have much to say after Jess and Jonesy had gone off with Miss Essie and her driver. He did his chores quietly, helped see to the relays, washed up for supper without being told, but once Slim dished out, all he did was push the food around his plate with his fork.

"Eat your supper, Andy," Slim told him.

"Not hungry."

"Don't lie," Slim ordered, sharper than he'd meant to, and the boy's head snapped up. "You've been out in the fresh air workin' all day. You have to be hungry," Slim amended.

"Not."

"Andy—"

"I guess I know if I'm hungry or not!" his brother exploded, his voice full of sobs like broken springs in a hotel bed. "And don't say that about lyin'! You don't know anythin' about it!"

Slim couldn't have been more astonished if their gentle old Holstein cow had suddenly grown rattlesnake fangs and bitten him. He stared unbelievingly at Andy's white, furious face. "You don't know!" Andy repeated. "You weren't there—you didn't see! He was afraid, Slim. He was afraid!"

"Who was afraid, Andy?" Now Slim was confused.

"Jess! He was afraid of that man, the man who was drivin' for Miss Essie. I know he was! I could feel it the way he took hold of my arms. I could see it in his eyes, in his face. I could hear it in his voice, same as I could hear it in yours that time the stage wheeler kicked Jonesy and we thought his leg was busted. He was afraid, Slim, that's why he asked me to lie!"

Confusion gave way to bewilderment. Why would Jess—a man who'd not-quite-admitted, his very first evening here, to being a professional gunslick at least part of the time—have been afraid of Miss Essie's driver? Oh, sure, the man carried a gun, but so did most men who didn't spend all their time in a town. And, yes, there'd been a fine silver-ornamented saddle fastened onto the side of the wagon—not the kind of hull a common cowhand would own—and odds were it wasn't the lady preacher's, which would have made it his; likely he'd lost his horse somewhere—things like that happened all too often, gopher and dog and badger holes, snakebite, lions, bears, horse thieves, plain pulled picket pegs—and hired on with her to get himself a stake to buy another. Any cowhand would be proud to own a fancy hand-tooled saddle one day, but very few went so far as to consider that much ornament—and fewer still ever afforded it. That meant this man Bishop wasn't a common cowhand—might even be in the same line Jess was (or had been). Still, he'd surely seemed pleasant enough, a genial, smiling soul with a cheery way about him...

Then, out of nowhere, Slim found himself remembering a line out of Hamlet, as he'd read it in their complete edition of Shakespeare. 'One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.'

But Jess had told him that Bishop had saved his life once—why would a villain do a thing like that?

Maybe for reasons of his own. If there was one thing Slim had learned in his reading, it was that villains always had reasons. They might not be reasons a righteous person could sympathize with, but reasons they were.

Why would you want to avoid a man who had done you such a favor? Because of one of those reasons? Because you thought he might want you to repay him in some way that didn't track with your ethics?

You should have asked, his conscience growled. You know Jess has a code. It may not always be the same as yours, but he has it and he lives by it.

You should have given him a chance.

/I can't have him corrupting Andy's morals,/ he protested. /It's one thing to tell stories about his travels, or take the boy fishin' on Sundays, but to ask him to lie for him.../

And don't you think he had his reasons too? You've worked with horses most of your life, you know they fight what they fear. So do people. Maybe getting Andy to lie to Bishop was the only way Jess could see of fighting the situation he was in. He couldn't have gotten out of the house without Bishop seeing him. Maybe he was worried that they might come to gunfire, and he didn't want you, or Jonesy, or Andy getting caught in the middle of it.

/If that was it—no, it can't have been. Bishop didn't make any kind of play. I'd have seen./

Doesn't change the facts. If a man's afraid, something makes him so.

"Andy," he began carefully, "you know, Jess never made us any promises about staying. He would have moved on eventually, more than likely, or I'd have had to let him go for the winter—"

"But you didn't have to drive him away!" Andy shouted. "He was my friend! He wanted to be your friend! You could have listened. You could have tried to understand!" He jumped up, knocking his chair backward to the floor, and raced out the kitchen door, slamming it behind him.

Slim sat where he was, stunned not so much by the vehemence of the boy's outburst as by what he had said. He wanted to be your friend...

Could that be true? Slim knew that a child lives closer to elemental things than do those who have matured and, often, substituted reason for feeling; he has an instinctive wisdom, though he often can't articulate it well. Was it just wishful thinking on Andy's part, a longing to find a way to keep this charming drifter in his life, or was there a solid foundation to it?

He wished Jonesy was here so he could bounce the notion off his father's old friend. Slim had never doubted that Jonesy's age and experience had given him a lot of wisdom and insight; he'd been depending on that wisdom and insight ever since he'd come home from the war to a dead father and a widowed mother struggling to keep the place going on her own.

He half expected to hear Andy's horse Chaps taking off for Laramie, but half an hour went by, an hour, and he didn't. He sat there staring at his food until it went cold and there was nothing to do but scrape it into the lidded galvanized bucket of scraps they kept for the dogs and cats and chickens. It was while he was doing this that he heard the front door open, the light steps, the quiet click of the bunkroom door opening and closing. Andy had cried himself out, probably in the loft or one of the haystacks, and now he was taking the only way he had to avoid another painful confrontation, going early to bed. He'd wash his face and get into his nightshirt and curl up under his blankets, and if Slim went in he'd just pretend to be asleep.

Maybe it would be better to give him some time. Maybe in the morning...

**SR**

Nothing had improved by the time Jonesy unexpectedly came home on the first outbound stage some thirty-six hours later. "Thanks for the lift, Charlie," he told the driver.

"Any time, Jonesy."

"H'lo, Jonesy," Andy mumbled, and went back to unhooking the tired horses.

"I wasn't expectin' you back so soon," Slim told him. "I figured sure, with Sunday comin' up, Miss Essie would need you a few days at least."

Jonesy shrugged. "No need for a piano player when you've got no piano. Hers got busted all to perdition." Then he said: "Bishop's dead."

"Dead!" Slim repeated. "How'd that happen?"

"I'm not exactly sure," Jonesy admitted. "I mean, I know how he got dead, and I know who did it, but I still can't quite figure out how it happened—does that make sense?"

"No," Slim told him. "There's lemonade in the icehouse. Let's get this stage off and then we'll sit down and you can tell me about it."

Andy went on glumly and silently stripping the horses and rubbing them down as the two men retreated to the porch. "He's takin' it hard, isn't he?" Jonesy guessed. "Jess goin', I mean."

Slim nodded. "About Bishop," he prompted.

"Well, it was the peculiarest thing," Jonesy began. "Seemed like he'd kinda fallen for Miss Essie. Got the notion in his head somehow that it was mutual, that she was gonna settle down on some little spread with him. So last night, preachin' in the Stockmen's, she got to talkin' about how she was never gonna stop travellin' around spreadin' God's word, and—well, I'll be straight with you, Slim, it was like she'd hit him plumb in the mouth. He got this funny light in his eyes and pulled a little knuckleduster derringer out of his coat and it seemed like he figured that if he couldn't have her God wasn't gonna either."

"Is she all right?" Slim demanded. He hadn't had much opportunity to get to know Miss Essie, but he'd liked her—her infectious good cheer, her evident enthusiasm for the work she did.

"She's fine. Shook up some maybe, but not hurt." Then: "Jess killed him."

"Jess killed him?!" Now Slim was well and truly shocked. "He told me Bishop saved his life once! You don't pay back that kind of debt by killing the man you owe it to."

"He didn't have a choice, Slim. Bishop was gonna kill Miss Essie. Jess was the only one in the place had a gun. There wasn't even a bottle on the bar that somebody could'a' hit the man with—it was closed for the service. Would you rather he'd'a' let Bishop shoot her?"

"No, of course not." Bishop would have hung for it, of course. You just didn't go around killing women, not in this country. But Jess was a Texan, with the Southern reverence for womanhood, and he wouldn't have been able to just stand by and let it happen, even knowing what it would lead to. "Is Jess in trouble?" he added, not knowing he was going to ask the question until it was out.

"No, not at all. The place was packed with witnesses, which is another funny thing—Bishop just didn't seem to care that a hundred people would'a' seen him do it, that there'd been no way he could'a' got out of a noose. Everybody agreed Jess shot to save Miss Essie and himself. Law couldn't touch him."

Slim found a slow sigh of relief welling up out of his lungs. Out of nowhere he thought: I've never known anybody—not even Andy, as perplexing as he is sometimes—that could make me feel so many different ways in such a short time... After a moment: "Is he comin' back?"

"I don't know," said Jonesy. "Haven't seen him since he finished givin' his statement at the jail. You know, Slim, Bishop didn't just happen by here."

"How do you mean?" Slim remembered what he'd been thinking last night.

"Well, Miss Essie told me he hitched on with her at Carpenter, right after she'd come over the Colorado line. Said he'd heard there was an old friend of his workin' at a relay station outside Laramie and he wanted to get there."

"An old friend," Slim repeated. "Jess?"

"He didn't say, but the sign's not hard to read, even to somebody like me that can hardly track a cow through a cornfield."

Slim supposed that between the Carlin incident and the stage-office robbery—or rather attempted robbery—about three weeks later, the word would by now have begun to get out about Jess being here. He wondered why Bishop might have been looking for him. "Andy said Jess was afraid of him," he mentioned, again not realizing the words were coming until they'd been spoken.

"That I can well believe," Jonesy declared.

"You can? Why?"

"I've seen a lot of men in my life, Slim. Good men, bad men, in-between men like most of us. And even a few men it seems the Lord slipped up on a bit, when He was makin' 'em. Men with... somethin' in 'em that's broken, or maybe that ought to be there and isn't. Bishop... the way he went off when he realized Miss Essie didn't aim to settle down, with him or anybody—it was scary, Slim. Even for me."

"But..." Slim hesitated, trying to frame the words. "He didn't mean Jess any harm, did he? He seemed happy to have found him, when he walked in here and found Jess trying to hide behind the door."

"I don't think he meant him any harm, no," Jonesy allowed. "But I think he'd have led him into harm, sooner or later." He shook his head. "That boy's way better off without an 'old friend' like that one."

Slim thought about this for a minute, remembering what Andy had said about Jess "being afraid" of Roney. "Do you think... do you suppose he knew Bishop was... capable of something like that?"

"I guess that would depend on just how well he knew the man," Jonesy replied. "I know he told me that he ran into Bishop again a few months after they met and Bishop beat up a saloon girl in Wichita pretty badly. So, yeah, I'd say he probably had some hint, at least." He drilled Slim with a look. "If you're thinkin' maybe that's why he left—because he knew Bishop wasn't quite right and thought he might be some danger to the rest of us—that occurred to me, too. I can tell you this: I feel a lot more trust for that youngster now than I ever did before, even after that robbery in town. Knowin' he'd be willing to leave us, leave a place where I think he was startin' to get comfortable, because he figured that was the best way to keep us safe... that's not somethin' a lot of men would do."

It was a lot to think about. So much that Slim didn't even remember that he'd been meaning to ask about Jess wanting to be his friend.

**SR**

"How'd you get it, boy?" Jonesy demanded in delight, when they'd finished singing all the songs they could easily think of. "Miss Essie had give it up for lost."

"Swapped," said Jess. "Roney had that silver-trimmed saddle, and him bein' a stranger with no known kin, the county took it as part of his estate. It was worth three hundred new, but I won a hundred at poker and took it off their hands—it more'n paid off the county funeral, which was mostly what they cared about—and then I offered it to the smith for the piano, him havin' bought it from Miss Essie in hopes of repairin' it. He agreed to fix it up quick, and take the saddle in trade."

Jonesy shook his head in marvelling disbelief. "Son, you're a natural-born businessman. Why, the piano I been savin' for lists at two-fifty to three hundred."

"How's Miss Essie gonna hold her services without one?" Slim wondered. "Why didn't she stay and wait till it was fixed? Laramie doesn't have a church yet. Even a lady preacher would be better than none."

"Reckon she's kinda like me, too used to the Big Open to stay set in one place," Jess replied, and Slim's eyes narrowed. "She said the Lord was callin' her on to California, and she figured that was more important than a piano, even if it had been her grandma's. Said she could always hire somebody to make music for her, even if it was just a fiddle or an accordion or somethin'."

"I guess that's true," Slim allowed, and sighed. "I hope she'll be all right. There's some mighty rough country between here and California. A woman travellin' alone—" Then: "Music may be the food of love, as the poet says, but we could use somethin' a little more solid than that in our stomachs. How about some supper, Jonesy?"

"Doggone, Slim, I'm sorry! I was just so plain overcome to find Jess in here pickin' away at this piano, and then to have him tell me it was mine— Come on, Andy, let's round up some food."

"I'll take care of the horses," Slim offered. "We forgot all about 'em when we heard the music. Want to help, Jess?"

"Sure. I put mine in the barn so you wouldn't spot him when you rode in."

Outside, Jess went straight to work stripping the gear off Andy's and Jonesy's mounts while Slim saw to Alamo. He watched the Texan across the chestnut's back for a few minutes, trying to decide how to begin. "Jess..."

The younger man's head came up. "I know, Slim. I shouldn't'a' made Andy lie for me. I—maybe you won't believe this, but there was part of me that didn't really want to. I just... I didn't know what else to do. Roney..."

"Andy said you were afraid of him," Slim mentioned.

"I was." Jess's response was so soft it was barely audible. "And that ain't a thing I'm much given to sayin' about men. Mostly I figure if you can see a man and fight him, it's enough. But..." Long pause. "You ever have to do with a locoed horse?"

"Time to time," Slim agreed. Locoweed was one of the great scourges of the range: like larkspur or green alfalfa, it could kill a whole herd of horses. Like many other poisonous plants, it was liable to come up in the spring before anything else did, and stock just naturally went after it; cows were the commonest victims, steers next, but the effects weren't as pronounced in them as in horses—or as dangerous, since you didn't ride beef critters. Horses would eat it only sometimes, especially when grazing was scarce, but were the likeliest of all to become addicted, and once they got the habit they'd go without food or even water to look for the stuff, just like dope fiends. It affected them in different ways—some went into fits, some lay groaning, some foamed at the mouth, and some fell dead—but most often it manifested in their behavior: a locoed horse would rear and shy at nothing, stumble, and stagger, and also attack other animals, riders and their mounts, and people on foot, by rearing and striking hammerlike blows with its forehooves. Other symptoms included loss of weight and of sense of direction, irregularity of gait, lack of muscle control, nervousness, weakness, withdrawal from other animals, and sometimes violent reaction when disturbed, all signs of the weed's injury to the brain, eyesight, and nervous system. Yet some sufferers appeared quite normal until they were placed under a little stress, like a ride, whereupon they'd begin to sweat a little, then perhaps fall down or run blindly through a fence, besides not responding to their usual cues.

"You know the way their eyes get, that strangely gentle look?" Jess pursued. "I reckon maybe I should'a' been warned by his eyes, the first time I met him. But I'd been four days on the prairie with a busted leg and no food or water, and I wasn't fixin' to look a gift horse in the mouth, you might say."

"I can see that," Slim agreed. "But people don't eat loco."

"No, they don't. It don't mean they can't be loco. Roney was, I reckon. He was—you just couldn't count on how he'd react. Most times he was cheerful as a lark, like he thought the world was all sunlight and song and God in his heaven, but he could be smilin' bright as the sun at noon, and then the least little thing would set him off. Somethin' you or I wouldn't think was an insult, he'd take it right to heart and act like it was the biggest offense since Fort Sumter was bombarded. And yet the anger could all melt away like snow in springtime, only faster, and he'd be—well, anyhow he'd seem—just like any ordinary man again. Or he'd hear a joke, and it was like he didn't know how long a man ought to laugh. Or... well, out on the road goin' to Laramie, the stage passed us, and he couldn't stand still for that—he close to wrecked the wagon tryin' to pass it. Like it was an insult to his drivin', or somethin', to have somethin' else get by him, even somethin' with twice as many horses as he had. Seemed like, anythin' another man might feel, he'd feel too much—does that make sense?"

"I think so," said Slim, remembering what Jonesy had said about "men with somethin' in 'em that was broken." "Just a little stress set him off. Like some loco horses."

"Somethin' else too," Jess went on. "I know you and me, we don't always see right and wrong the same way. But Roney... he never seemed to see wrong at all. What he wanted, he wanted, and it didn't matter what anybody else had to say about it. Most folks got a... like a voice inside 'em that tells 'em when they're doin' somethin' they shouldn't; even I do, though you might not believe that. I don't reckon Roney did. I don't rightly know why he never turned outlaw, with a... a mind like he had. He'd'a' been one of the worst—worse'n Carlin; even Carlin had some loyalty to the men that followed him, that was why he wanted to get Pete out of jail. And the time I was with him, just here lately, he kept on remindin' me he'd saved my life. A man don't do that, if he's any good."

Slim nodded solemnly. It was a tenet of proper range behavior. You assumed that the man you had helped would keep his own score and make his own opportunity to settle the debt. "Jonesy said," he said, "that Miss Essie told him Bishop came up this way lookin' for you, on purpose."

"Did he?" Jess got a sudden haunted look in his eyes, but it drained away as quickly as it had come, as he remembered that Roney was dead and couldn't make demands of him, ever again. "I wonder what he had planned. Must'a' been somethin'. Maybe I was lucky he fell in with her first and got to thinkin' he was in love with her." Pause, then, softly: "I didn't want to kill him, Slim. No more'n I wanted to have to make Andy lie for me. But he just wouldn't have it no other way, and I—I couldn't let him kill her."

"I know about it. Jonesy told me."

"I figured he would." Another of those long, painful hesitations that Slim was coming to know and expect whenever the inarticulate Texan was struggling to find the right way to express his thoughts. "I reckon me turnin' up here with that piano... maybe it looks a little like a bribe. Maybe in a sort of a way it is. It's just... you and yours been so decent to me these last six weeks... I didn't want to go without doin' somethin' to show how grateful I was. I figured the piano would be somethin' all of you could take pleasure from."

"Go?" Slim repeated. "Who said anything about goin'?"

"I thought you did. 'Cause of Andy, and the lie."

Now it was Slim's turn to hesitate, to search for the right words. Certainly he didn't want to underrate the importance of Jess's respecting his authority over Andy, or underemphasize how he valued truth. Still... "Fear—true fear—it's a sickness. And it's just as disabling as any spots, or fever, or anything else you might come down with. And, like delirium, it can make you say and do things you never would if you were in your right mind, if you weren't so crazy stressed and could think things through. I think any man who was in the war—like you and me—can testify to that; can say he's seen it, if not felt it. From what you tell me of Bishop, he was... somebody... something... that any normal man would fear, once he realized what he was facing. Maybe, if I'd had the chance to see him in the ways you had, I'd have known. There was just... never any occasion for him to show me that side of himself."

"You don't want Andy tellin' lies. Not even for a... friend. You made that pretty clear."

"No, I don't. You know yourself, out here a man's word—no, not just his word, everything he says—has to be good. To call a man a liar is to invite him to shoot you."

Jess nodded, looking more miserable than ever. "I know."

"But when I look back on it," Slim went on, "I see that he knew all along it was wrong for him to do it. I could tell by his voice, by his eyes. I understand that even as upset as I was with him, I'm not really afraid that one lie means he'll turn out a habitual liar. He has that good sound foundation, Jess. He knows right from wrong, unlike Roney, and he has a conscience—that 'voice inside him' you mentioned—that tells him when he's stepped over the line. I don't think he wanted to lie any more than you wanted him to. And, that bein' true, I see that I overreacted. I shouldn't have made you think that, because you slipped up one time, I didn't want you around here any more. If that was the way I operated, I'd have sent Andy away a long time ago."

"He tried to get out of it," said Jess. "You wouldn't'a' known, not bein' there. It upset him plenty, that I'd ask that. And I—it ain't that I want him to think I'm perfect, or nothin'; I know I'm a far distance from bein' that. I just..."

"You look at him, and you see that brother you had," Slim supplied. "The one who died of the cholera. You want to be a good example to him, the way you would have been to your brother."

"I do." It was almost a whisper. "I want..." He paused again, swallowed, and looked up. "I want to ask you to forgive me, Slim, for what I done. To ask for another chance. I know it ain't an excuse, but it's been a long time since I been around anybody quite like you. It's gonna take me a while to... to get broke to it. Just like it takes a while to break a horse the slow way."

For a moment Slim was genuinely stunned. Had Jess not felt the hand on his shoulder, not heard Slim say Welcome home? And then he understood. The insight came to him all in a flash, without fully knowing where it was from: that he was dealing with a man whose tough exterior and devil-may-care manner concealed a personality that took things deeply to heart, an insecurity that needed to be addressed whenever he felt he had let someone else down. Jess not only knew he'd done wrong; for some reason he expected that doing wrong would mean being abandoned, turned out, as he had apparently been, more than once, when people found out about his... profession. The expectation was so reflexive that he really hadn't been aware of Slim's welcome—or if he had, he'd believed it just a matter of form, not something genuinely meant; perhaps he had thought that Slim had been reluctant to turn him out in front of Andy, when the boy had so clearly shown his joy at the Texan's return. This was a man who wasn't afraid of anything he could see to shoot at or hit with his fist, but was terrified of being less than others expected of him—according to his picture of those expectations. Who almost felt that this kind of failure was inevitable. Who couldn't believe that he might ever find a place where he'd be welcome and accepted—not even when it was a place where he'd saved everyone's lives once, and Andy's twice. (Maybe twice and three times, if Bishop had found some reason to go off...) What kind of life must this young Texan have had before he came here, how many times must his hopes and his trust have been betrayed, if his trust in others, or perhaps his belief in his own worth, was as low as all that? Slim suddenly remembered that it was betrayal that had brought him here, six weeks ago, chasing the supposed "friend" who had assaulted and robbed him.

There must have been so many times when he'd offered his trust and loyalty—a precious gift from any man, but even more so from a young one as deeply and frequently hurt as Slim thought this one must have been—only to see it scornfully refused, or trampled on in the end, thrown away like something worthless. Like the best of the horses he loved, he was brave and willing, and perhaps he had hoped that would be enough; and in the end, like too many horses, he had suffered for it. His courage couldn't be questioned; his capacity for loyalty, for compassion, for selflessness and generosity, was plain; his knowledge of his own abilities, and his confidence in them, was thorough and deservedly real. But somehow, whether from loss (like his brother's death of cholera) or repeated betrayal (like Pete Morgan's) or some of both, he'd come, perhaps without fully realizing it, to the conclusion that human connections didn't last and couldn't be counted on. Life and other people had wounded him repeatedly—sometimes wounds of the spirit, sometimes of the flesh—until he had gotten shy of any kind of extended relationship, and even, as Slim had noticed several times, of physical contact; even after six weeks, he still shied away from being touched, except by Andy. In time he had become so accustomed to being used—or being scared and alone—that he'd begun to doubt there was any other way to live, or that he deserved it if it did. That he'd concluded that only his fast gun could make up for what he had lost, and provide everything—almost everything—he needed in life. He preferred to keep control in his own hands, either by steadfastly refusing all overtures or by accepting them only reluctantly and on the most qualified possible basis.

And yet, unlike so many other people, he didn't wear a mask. He was straight and honest: with Jess, what you saw was what you got. That he'd tried to make Slim understand what he was—and what he'd tried, over and over, to be instead—was proof of that; it wasn't his fault he didn't have the right words to explain himself. And still he longed for that trust, that acceptance, that support, the genuine return of his own passionate loyalty. Wanted them, searched for them, knew somehow that they were all that could save him from an early grave in some cowtown Boot Hill. That he had come so close, just now, to humbling himself—and to a man who was still essentially a stranger to him—spoke powerfully of his need, and of how keenly aware he was of it, whether he wanted to admit it to himself or not.

At the same time, Slim understood that Jess's uncertainties would have to be handled diplomatically. If he thought that Slim really knew what was driving him, he might believe he was being forgiven out of pity—and that he wouldn't bear. His pride was almost all he had, and it would have to be respected. He'd have to be led to believe that there was a logical, sensible reason for Slim to think that he regretted what he'd done, that he truly wanted to be given the opportunity to learn from his mistake.

There's a lot more to him than a fast gun, Slim told himself. I should have known, after some of the things he said on the porch. I did know, somehow, right from the start, or I wouldn't have asked him to stay the first time. Now he's lettin' me see it, or some of it, whether he knows what he's doin' or not. Layin' himself open to bein' betrayed again, because he knows that what he wants is worth it—if he can get it.

"The best way," he said. "The way that lasts." He saw the wild hope flare in Jess's deep-blue eyes, only to be instantly throttled down again. "People have to learn the right way to behave for the place they're in; it doesn't just come to them. Andy said I should have tried to understand why. You've told me why, and I do understand. I can't exactly say I believe you were right. But I believe you thought you were right, just the way a young horse thinks it's right when it tries to buck the saddle off, afraid it's been attacked by a cougar. It thinks its life is in danger. So did you."

"Maybe not my life so much," Jess said slowly. "These last years, I... I ain't set a lot of value on that. It was just... that sense of wrongness. I can fight a man with a gun, or a knife, or fists. I can't fight somethin' like that."

"No. Nobody can." Slim's voice was quiet. "Jonesy thought that was why you left: because you were worried that if you stayed, Roney would too, and that might put the rest of us in danger. We'll never know, of course; my pa used to say that only God can look down the road we didn't take. But I can't fault you for the sentiment; I appreciate it that you thought so highly of our safety. And as for the lie—like Andy—you know you were wrong. And you've paid for it, havin' to kill Roney and leave that debt unsettled. I don't have a right to ask more of you than that." He took a deep breath. "I said twice before, I could use an extra man. I haven't seen anyone else comin' around here lookin' for work lately." And this time he held out his hand for the shake they'd never shared.

Jess took a moment to absorb and believe, and then his own met it solidly, the sudden grin on his face making him look at least five years younger. "I don't say I won't make mistakes," he said cautiously then, sobering again. "You might have to keep an eye on me and warn me, time to time. Just think of me as... well, another little brother you got to raise right."

"Fair enough," Slim agreed. "Now let's finish with these horses. Jonesy will be callin' us to supper before we know it."

-30-