Free The Gun Fight by Richard Matheson Page A

missing staples, once a sagging post. Each time, he’d gotten the supplies he needed from the saddle-fastened pouch in which were staples, a hatchet, a pair of wire cutters, and a coil of stay wire.
    Finding a fence section that needed repairs, Benton would ease himself off the bay and ground the open reins. Socks would then remain in place without being tied while his master worked. The work completed, Benton would take hold of the reins and raise the stiffness of his batwing chaps over the saddle.
    “Come on, churnhead,” he would say softly and the bay would start along the line again.
    Benton’s horse was one of the two cutting horses in the ranch’s small remuda, a bridle-wise gelding that Benton had spent over a year in training. Cutting was a ticklish and difficult job, the most exacting duty any horse could be called upon to perform. It demanded ofthe mount an apex of physical and mental control plus a calm dispatch that would not panic the animal being cut from the herd. A cutting horse had to spin and turn as quickly as the cow, always edging the reluctant animal away from the herd without frightening it. This twisting and turning entailed much good riding too and, although Benton had ridden since he was eight, the process of sitting a cutting horse had taken all the ability he had.
    Benton knew he rode Socks on jobs that any ordinary cow horse could manage. But he was extremely fond of the bay and never demanded a great deal of it outside of its cutting duties. Riding fence was no effort for the bay. It enjoyed the ambling walk with its master in the warm, sunlight-brimming air. Benton would pat the bay’s neck as they rode.
    “Hammerhead,” he’d tell the horse, “someday we’ll all be rich and ride to town in low-necked clothes and have thirty hands workin’ for us.”
    The bay would snort its reply and Benton would pat it again and say, “You’re all right, fuzz tail.”
    When Benton rode the range, he wore a converted Colt-Walker .44 at his left side, butt forward. Sometimes it seemed as if it even worried Julia for him to wear a gun around the ranch.
    “Honey, you want a snake to kill me?” he’d say with a grin.
    “I don’t want
any
thing to kill you,” she’d answer grimly. “Or any
body.
”
    That day, while riding fence, Benton reached across his waist and drew out the pistol with an easy movement. He held it loosely in his hand and looked at its smooth metal finish, the notches of the cylinder, the curved trigger in its heavy guard.
    He often found himself looking at the Colt; it was the only thing he had that really reminded him of the old days. He’d killed nine men with this pistol in the line of Ranger duty. There was Jack Kramer in TrinityCity, Max Foster outside of Comanche, Rebel Dean, Johnny Ostrock, Bob Melton, Sam and Barney Dobie, Aaran Graham’s two sons; nine men lying in their graves because of the mechanism in this four-pound piece of apparatus.
    Benton hefted the pistol in his palm, wondering if he missed the old days, wondering if violence had become a part of him. He slipped his finger into the guard and spun the pistol around backward and forward in the old way, then shoved it back into its holster with a quick, blurred movement of his hand. Miss it,
hell.
He was alive, he had a good little layout, a wonderful wife; one day there would be children—that was enough for any man.
    He was grateful the percentages had passed over him. By Ranger standards he had outlived himself at least five times. Another month in the service, another year maybe and he would have died like the others, like the many others. As horrible as it had been, the incident with Graham and his sons had spared him that.
    Benton threw back his shoulders and took a deep breath of the clean air. Life, he thought, that’s what counts; killing is for animals.
    He found the trapped calf near the spring. It was stuck under the fence where it had tried to wriggle through a gap caused by water erosion.