OLD NATHAN(6)

"I think yer daddy kin," said the cunning man. "But it makes no matter to me, yea 'r nay."

"Then ye'll hev yer silver money," said his visitor. "Though I reckon you're humbug, and we'll hev that money back outen yer hide if ye fail us."

" 'Us,' " Old Nathan repeated with a sneer. "Oh, aye, you'd do wonders, boy. But I'll not fail."

In the pasture behind him, Spanish King bawled a challenge to the world.

* * *

When Old Nathan saw him, Bully Ransden was plowing on a hilltop a furlong from the road. Unlike horses, bulls have no certain gait between ambling and a panic rush, so the younger man easily had time to outspan his plow oxen and trot down the hill. He met Old Nathan and King in front of the cabin Ransden shared with a black-haired woman. The homeplace, where Ransden's mother still lived, was a quarter mile away on the far side of the acreage.

"So-o-o . . ." said Bully Ransden, arms akimbo and his legs spread to put one boot just within each of the road's single pair of wagon ruts. "Where d'ye think you wuz goin', old man?"

"You know me, Cullen Ransden," Old Nathan replied. He laid an arm over the neck of Spanish King and murmured, "Whoa, now, old friend, we'll have us t' drink and a bit uv rest here."

He was a fine figure to look at, was Bully Ransden. He stood as tall as Old Nathan and supported with his broad shoulders a bulk of muscle that the older man could never have matched at the height of his physical powers long decades before.

Ransden's long hair was bright blond, the sole legacy he had received from the father who had beaten the boy and the boy's mother indiscriminately . . . until the night the eleven-year-old Cullen proved that fury and an axe handle made him a better man than his father. The elder Ransden had bolted into the night, streaming blood and supplications, never to be seen since in the county.

Cullen Ransden had now spent a decade reinforcing the lesson he had taught himself that night: that his will and his strength would gain him aught in the world that he wanted. All the county knew him as Bully, but no one as yet had shown that wisdom of his to be false.

"Oh, I know the humbug what skins fools worse'n a Yankee peddler," Ransden said in mock agreement.

He took a step forward and Old Nathan stepped also, halving the distance between them to little more than the reach of a fist. It was a dangerous choice, putting his back to the horns of Spanish King. If he did not step forward, however, it would look as though he were trying to shelter in the bull's strength—a challenge that Ransden would likely meet with a blow of his ox-driving whip to King's nose.

Besides, Old Nathan was as little willing to crouch away from trouble as the bull was, or Bully Ransden.

"Well, where's the water, then?" King grumbled as he sidled to the hitching post before Ransden's door and began rubbing his black hide on it.

"I'd thank'ee fer a bucket uv water, as the day's a hot'un," said the cunning man. His shirt of homespun wool, gray where it was dry, was black with sweat in the middle of the back and beneath his armpits. As he stood, he lifted his hat and fanned himself with it, smelling nervousness and anger in his own perspiration.

"Cull, what—" called a clear voice.

As both men turned to look over the back of Spanish King, a woman appeared at the open door of the cabin. She wore a gingham dress over a shift, and the body beneath was so youthfully taut that it had shape despite the loose garments. Her hair was black and might have fallen to her ankles had it not been caught up with pins and combs. Amazingly, it was clean and shone like strands of burnished metal when the sunlight past the edge of the porch touched it.

"Well," she continued, "what do we hev?"

"We got the liar as says he'll plow Boardman's newground when I couldn't," said Bully Ransden. He glanced back at the cunning man with the eye of a butcher for a hog squealing in the chute. "It's what he does, milk old women and boys with no more balls 'n old women."

"Ransden, leave this be afore—" Old Nathan began, his mind white with the fear of the thing Bully was about to say and what would come when he replied.

"Ye know, Ellie," Bully Ransden continued, still astraddle the center of the path, "his own balls, they wuz shot off by the Redcoats at New Or-leens."

"Did your mother tell you that, Cullen Ransden?" Old Nathan said softly. His skin formed layers, hot and prickly on the outside while the inner surface froze against his flesh as hard as the ice on which Satan shivered in Hell. "And did she tell ye besides how thet came t' be her business?"

The younger man could have been blasted by a thunderbolt without the hair prickling up more sharply on his head and arms. He struck with the suddenness of reflex and the skill of long years' practice with the blacksnake whip in his hand.