The Guns of William Longley
Donald Hamilton
We’d been up north delivering a herd for Old Man Butcher the summer I’m telling about. I was nineteen at the time. I was young and big, and I was plenty tough, or thought I was, which amounts to the same thing up to a point. Maybe I was making up for all the years of being that nice Anderson boy, back in Willow Fork, Texas. When your dad wears a badge, you’re kind of obliged to behave yourself around home so as not to shame him. But Pop was dead now, and this wasn’t Texas.
Anyway, I was tough enough that we had to leave Dodge City in something of a hurry after I got into an argument with a fellow who, it turned out, wasn’t nearly as handy with a gun as he claimed to be. I’d never killed a man before. It made me feel kind of funny for a couple of days, but like I say, I was young and tough then, and I’d seen men I really cared for trampled in stampedes and drowned in rivers on the way north. I wasn’t going to grieve long over one belligerent stranger.
It was on the long trail home that I first saw the guns one evening by the fire. We had a blanket spread on the ground, and we were playing cards for what was left of our pay—what we hadn’t already spent on girls and liquor and general hell-raising. My luck was in, and one by one the others dropped out, all but Waco Smith, who got stubborn and went over to his bedroll and hauled out the guns.
. . .
