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Duel in the Sun
by Niven Busch
Chapter One
She came and went in that land without women with as little notice as a man, always on a good horse, neither loafing nor in a hurry. She liked to hunt, but only difficult game: bobcat or lobo wolf or one of the little brown bears that grubbed for a living in the breaks of the Canadian River. Half the time, drifting along the range, she wasn't bound anywhere particular, she was just on the move. She might be clear over by the New Mexico line or south to Alamitos County; if dark caught her too far from the McCanles ranch to get back easily she'd stop and eat at any line-riders' camp she ran across —mdash; a custom which her uncle's foremen never encouraged but to which they gradually became accustomed. Before work call in the morning she'd be up and gone.
Once in this casual fashion she visited a windmill construction crew bossed by a man new to the Spanish Bit payroll. His sense of the proprieties bitterly outraged, the crew boss sat up all night with a rifle, on the alert to protect her reputation. Next morning he went to Senator Jackson T. McCanles.
"No disrespect to Miss Pearl intended, Senator, but I'm just askin' what to do." With the toe of his boot he drew a careful line in the earth, then risked a comment. "She acts like this range was some kind of ladies' seminary."
Senator McCanles looked with deceptive gentleness at the sunburned man before him. The Senator had to look up at most of his employees: he was five-two in high-heeled star-boots, a tiny man it always seemed, to own so much land and be the father of four big sons. As a rule his leathery face was expressionless, but now some violent emotion jerked over it, a wrench of the nerves, ferocious and momentary, engendered by some ancient hurt. "What Miss Pearl does or don't do is no concern of mine."
Due to the stern focus which the isolation of the frontier puts upon human relationships the story was repeated many times. It was examined beside lonely trails and campfires and over cattlemen's bars in Paradise Flats and Buffalo Springs. Nobody was led into believing for a minute that the old man's statement indicated a rift in the gloomy solidarity of the McCanles clan. The boys and the Senator would still gather darkly to defend any family member who was attacked from the outside. Nevertheless, it confirmed what had long been gossip — that the Senator held Pearl responsible for making him, as he put it, "one hand short at round-up."
It was on her account that Lewt, his second son, had got into a shooting scrape and left the range. Lewt's activities elsewhere added to the turbulent docket of family legends. Not that any scandal had attached to Pearl herself. Before her brief and fated and too-public attachment to Lewt she had been pretty well walled up on the McCanles ranch; after Lewt's going she had changed only to the extent of this unfeminine trick of lonely riding, evidently without her uncle's sanction but still, so it seemed, sticking inside the insular McCanles kingdom of steers and wire, mesa and windmills and horses, cap rock and barren trail and pleasant river shallows laced with game tracks.
Her name was Pearl Chavez. The term 'uncle' in the Southwest is used to imply practically any sort of actual or imaginary relationship. Pearl wasn't the Senator's niece, but a remote relation of his wife's, the daughter of a cousin named Raoul Chavez. Mrs. McCanles had been Laura Belle Toussaint of Huntsville where the Chavez and Toussaint families had farmed neighboring plantations. Raoul and Laura Belle had grown up together but Raoul had broken with his caste by marrying a mestizo woman from Laredo. The Indian blood showed in Pearl's long legs and ropy bluish-black hair and in her lips which had a slight bulge even when they were closed. She had rather light brown or brown-greenish eyes, lighter than her olive skin, to which they made a contrast. The rest of her, at eighteen, was more than ordinarily well-shaped but only about what you'd expect from French twice transplanted and well seasoned up with Texas sun.
There are still people in Paradise Flats who will tell you how she looked when she arrived in town one day in the spring of '83. Pearl was only twelve at the time but most of the witnesses to her arrival will declare and swear they spotted Indian the first time they laid eyes on her. In those days it was still the custom of the town to turn out in a body for the great bi-weekly event — the arrival of the Dodge-El Paso stage. Old Billy Kip, a former buffalo-hunter and the town drunk, kept watch for it from the bone-pile at the town limits. When he spied the spot of dust out on the plain he'd fire a round or two and everybody knew that within ten or fifteen minutes the six rampaging little mustang mules would come in sight with the high, leather-slung coach rocking behind and the driver standing up to put the brakes on.
That day the stage came in at noon. It was an April day and sunny, so that nearly everyone in hearing distance of Bill Kip's big rifle was on hand to view Pearl's debut. Jesse Sprague McCanles, Senator McCanles' eldest son, had waited for two hours in the Spanish Bit's best rig, a Concord buggy with spring seats and yellow wheels. A raw-boned, big-nosed man then going on twenty, he glanced expressionlessly at the skinny girl of twelve in the patched calico dress, standing in the dust while her bundle was set down.
Jesse McCanles looked down once at the girl's feet. After that he kept his eyes steadily on some spot slightly above her head. Out of deference to his self-consciousness and the McCanles reputation for temper the men soaking in front of the stage-station on the gallery of Doan and Curran's store were careful to control their grins. Still, it was funny. The girl with the long, black pigtails down her back and the deadly serious, wide-cheekboned face was curling her nude and thin and very dirty toes in the dust where the stage trail, for a few yards, became a street.
A kid without shoes! In a country where leather, like all animal products, was available to any but the most abased and shiftless! That would make telling for a long time.
Even in their poor relations, it seemed the McCanleses went whole hog! After that one downward glance at the feet with the stain and ingrained dirt of poverty and heart-wrenching childish shame upon them Jesse didn't look again. He started to take his cousin's hand, then thought better of it and reached for her bundle instead. Without a word he motioned with his head toward Doan and Curran's store and the two crossed the street in the hot sunshine, Jesse walking a step behind the girl, stiff-backed, his serious eyes moving with a controlled stare along the line of men perched on kegs and cracker boxes and chairs till, one by one, they looked away. Pearl hesitated at the door and Jesse reached past her shoulder and pulled it open, the bell jangling with the hopeful, washed-out sound of frontier store bells, and Ned Doan got up out of his whittled chair and followed him inside.
"What will it be today, Jesse?" he inquired, and Jesse, staring past the storekeeper with his somber look of quiet calculation, said mildly and firmly, "Fix her up."
He carefully avoided any reference to boots. Ned Doan, who all of a sudden had become animated with a friendly and cautious bustle, did likewise.
"Let's see now, Jesse. Maybe I have. Seems like I stocked a — that article for Mrs. Withington, out at the Rafter H. Hain't called for it yet. They might be just a shade too big for this young lady, but we'll see. Now, Miss — " turning to Pearl with a smile made up of whiskey-breath and ruined stubs of teeth, "set right here. Rest yourself a minute while we have a look . . ."
And then while Pearl, suddenly shaky from all this, seated herself on a flour barrel, Ned produced from some cranny on his high and complicated shelves a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with rawhide thongs. Squatting in front of her, Ned Doan extended toward the slender, dirtencrusted foot the opening of a shining black boot stitched round the top with butterfly designs and exuding an unutterable leathery smell, pungent and new and storelike.
"We'll just try them for size," he intoned, slipping the cavernous inside of the boot over her naked foot. "Yes, sir, mite too big, but say — a pair like this takes growin' into. Made by Sleagle in Dodge City. Yes, ma'am. I guess they wasn't just what Mis' Withington wanted. Now, Jesse, want a pair of stockings to go with 'em?"
Pearl moved her foot in the cold, smooth, wood-stiff boot; her lightcolored eyes had a hard, happy glisten in them. Jesse was again looking over her head.
"Might as well have some," he said in an offhand way as if Ned Doan's suggestion had just coincided with his own thoughts, "and see what else you got, Ned. She might as well be fixed up right."
"She might!" Ned Doan agreed aheartily, rising from his knees. Something about his movement made Jesse remember the formalities. "This is Miss Pearl Chavez," he said. "She's coming to live out at the ranch."
"Pleased to meet you, Miss Chavez," Ned Doan said, bucking his head at the stiff little figure on the barrel top. "Let's see now — I've got one or two things might betoken you . . ."
Twenty minutes later Pearl and Jesse again crossed the hot street in front of Doan and Curran's. Pearl had on a new wool blouse with puffed sleeves and a lady's riding skirt, at least two sizes too big, but — like the boots which heel-slipped coolly on the ribbed, brown cotton stockings — a matchless splendor. Jesse untied the buggy. To the stares of the sit-and-spit club on the gallery and to his own self-consciousness he made one concession: he didn't help her in. He picked up the reins and Senator Jack's big sorrel wagon horse whirled Pearl Chavez, the poor relation, out of sight behind a cloud of April dust.
