Free Texas Drive by Bill Dugan Page A

decision, Theodore. Not man. Man has no right to judge his fellows, not the way you are doing. And when a man tries to pass judgment on another culture, he is trespassing all the more on alien territory. He flies too close to the sun, and he gets burned. That is a law of nature. It is, even more, a law of God, Theodore.
    Or so Jacob would have it.
    The first blush of his rage long since faded, reason was crowding him, nudging the passion aside, making him wonder why he was there at all. He wondered, but deep down he knew the answer. It was one he didn’t like, so he chose to wonder still, in hopes that there might be some other, still hidden, reason.
    And in the other ear, Johnny kept shouting, trying to drown Jacob out: “You yellow bastard … you yellow bastard.” And Ted knew he wouldn’t be there at all unless he at least half believed that Johnny was right. He was trying to prove something to himself, and to Johnny. It didn’t seem to matter that Johnny wasn’t even there, and might never know what he’d been trying to do.
    He could die out here, and when somebody stumbled over the gleaming cage of his ribs, another rack of bones on the dry-as-dust rim of the canyon, no one would know who he had been, or what his name was. And no one would care! Bones were all too common out here. The irony was that bones had no color. A Comanche and a white man, stripped of flesh and sinew, looked the same. After death, the same wind whistled through the white pipe organ, playing the same monotonous song for Comanche and Texan alike.
    And Ted Cotton wondered whether that was all he had left. Maybe that’s how he wanted it to end. Maybe he was even right to want that.
    Maybe.
    But he’d never know; not until it was too late to change his mind.
    As he neared the far end of the canyon, he heard something far below him. Almost certain it was a horse, he dismounted. Creeping close to the edge of the rim, he took cover behind a jumble of rocks. Cocking an ear, he strained to hear it again. After a long moment, it drifted up to him, the shuddering whinny of a horse.
    Then, metal struck rock, and he knew it was a shod horse. Creeping even closer to the rim, he leaned out to look down into the canyon. Almost directly beneath him, several horses, on a string, shuffled nervously. As he tried to get even closer, one hand slipped on the sandy rock. He landed hard on his elbow, dislodging a chink of stone. He reached for it, but it skittered away from his fingertips and disappeared over the rim.
    Ted pressed himself flat, waiting an eternity before he heard the rock land below. The horses nickered, and he heard one or two of them paw at the ground. It was almost as if they sensed something, even at this distance.
    He was breathing shallowly, his throat constricting and the air whistling noisily down into his lungs. His mouth was dry, and he tried to moisten his lips with his tongue. The rasp sounded like emery paper and left them as dry as they had been.
    A whiff of burning wood drifted up from below.The Comanches weren’t waiting for him, they were pitching camp. They’d never have risked a fire if they thought someone was on their trail. That tipped the odds a little in his favor. But not much. He repositioned the hand and levered himself up again. Wrapping one leg around a rock, he slid closer to the rim. With his hat off, he peeked out over the rock straight down nearly two hundred feet.
    There was no sign of the Comanches. His skin went cold. Maybe they
were
aware of him. Maybe this was all a decoy, while they slipped up behind him. He was suddenly paralyzed. It wasn’t fear. It was that sudden flash of understanding. Life was more complicated than he was willing to see. This wasn’t about life and death, exactly. It was more about the way the two intersected.
    The seamless web of connections. Ted and the Comanche he’d killed, Johnny and his dead Indian, Jack Wilkins and the red man who’d lifted his scalp. And now this, just the