Free Valley Thieves by Max Brand

the flood when it was poured on one patch or another. New green tops were pricking the black of the earth, here and there. I saw the dirty yellow of ripe onions, ready to be dug up; tomato vines were growing up on frames, and off in the distance there was a woman bending over a broad-bladed hoe. The flash of it seemed to strike right into me.
    The back of the house was more irregular than the front of it, because here big cabins or little ones had been added to the long structure and the rear showed the differences in size. Finally, we came to a door, where Chuck halted me. He kept his rifle in both hands and kicked the door.
    "Who's there?" called a voice that was so husky and deep that it seemed one could count the number of vibrations per second that went to the make-up of the sound.
    "Chuck. I got something to show you," said the youngster.
    "Open the door and come in."
    Chuck opened the door with his left hand, keeping the rifle carefully under his right elbow. But I had no intention of trying to escape. I felt as though I were in the center of a hostile kingdom—as though a great continent had swallowed me up.
    I stepped through that doorway and found myself before Old Man Cary.
    It was a naked sort of a room with nothing much to it except a broad open hearth and an iron crane hanging in it, with a black pot that hung from the crane, over the low welter of the fire. The smell of the cooking broth was stale through the room. Everything seemed to be soaked with the greasy odor, as though that same pot had been boiling there for years. Mutton was the smell, and if you know mutton, you know what I mean when I speak of the greasy rankness. The air was filled with it. Not this day's cooking only, but a stale offense that rose out of the ground and seeped out from the dark walls.
    I say it came out of the ground because there was no wooden flooring. There was just beaten earth. Some of that earth was so footworn that it seemed to have a sheen about it, to my eyes.
    Old Man Cary sat in a corner near the fire, with a rug pulled over his legs—an old, tattered, time-worn rug that was once the pelt of some sort of animal. Now, half the fur had been worn away. He had a broad bench beside him, and that bench was littered with revolvers and rifles which he was cleaning. I could imagine that he cleaned the guns for the entire clan and during that cleaning took heed of the way the different weapons had been used.
    Now I hope you have some idea of what the place was like, but when it comes to Old Man Cary himself, it's hard to make a picture of him. He still had the great Cary frame which his descendants had inherited from him; he still sat as high as many a man stands. But there was no flesh on him. He was eaten away. Death had been at him for a long time and death was still at work. If it could not strike the old giant to the heart or the brain, it could at least worry him down little by little. His face had shrunk so that it seemed very small, unmatched to the size of his head, like a boy's face under a mature skull.
    And his eyes were bright, sharp, young, under the wrinkling folds of the lids. He lifted those eyes to Chuck as he said:
    "Who knocked at my door?"
    "I did, Grandpa," said Chuck.
    "You lie," said the old man. "You didn't knock. You kicked that door."
    "Look," said Chuck. "I had my hands full of the gun, like this here, and I had to kind of rap the door with my foot."
    "If you ever kick my door again," said that husky voice; which seemed to be tearing the fiber of the throat, "I'll nail you to a tree and take your hide off. Now, what you brought here to me?"
    He turned his glance on me.
    Chuck was so scared that he had to draw breath a couple of times before he could stammer out that I said my name was Bill Avon, that he had found me up the creek, and that I said I was coming to try to buy cattle, and that everybody ought to know that Cary cattle were not for sale at this time of year.
    "They ought to know, ought they?"