The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by Dorothy M. Johnson
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
by Dorothy M. Johnson (1949)
(Version 1.0)
Bert Barricune died in 1910. Not more than a dozen persons showed up for his funeral. Among them was an earnest young reporter who hoped for a human-interest story; there were legends that the old man had been something of a gunfighter in the early days. A few aging men tiptoed in, singly or in pairs, scowling and edgy, clutching their battered hats — men who had been Bert's companions at drinking or penny ante while the world passed them by. One woman came, wearing a heavy veil that concealed her face. White and yellow streaks showed in her black-dyed hair. The reporter made a mental note: Old friend from the old District. But no story there — can't mention that.
One by one they filed past the casket, looking into the still face of old Bert Barricune, who had been nobody. His stubbly hair was white, and his lined face was as empty in death as his life had been. But death had added dignity.
One great spray of flowers spread behind the casket. The card read, "Senator and Mrs. Ransome Foster." There were no other flowers except, almost unnoticed, a few pale, leafless, pink and yellow blossoms scattered on the carpeted step. The reporter, squinting, finally identified them: son of a gun! Blossoms of the prickly pear. Cactus flowers. Seems suitable for the old man — flowers that grow on prairie wasteland. Well, they're free if you want to pick 'em, and Barricune's friends don't look prosperous. But how come the Senator sends a bouquet?
There was a delay, and the funeral director fidgeted a little, waiting. The reporter sat up straighter when he saw the last two mourners enter.
Senator Foster — sure, there's the crippled arm — and that must be his wife. Congress is still in session; he came all the way from Washington. Why would he bother, for an old wreck like Bert Barricune?
After the funeral was decently over, the reporter asked him. The Senator almost told the truth, but he caught himself in time. He said, "Bert Barricune was my friend for more than thirty years."
He could not give the true answer: He was my enemy; he was my conscience; he made me whatever I am.
Ransome Foster had been in the Territory for seven months when he ran into Liberty Valance. He had been afoot on the prairie for two days when he met Bert Barricune. Up to that time, Ranse Foster had been nobody in particular — a dude from the East, quietly inquisitive, moving from one shack town to another; just another tenderfoot with his own reasons for being there and no aim in life at all.
When Barricune found him on the prairie, Foster was indeed a tenderfoot. In his boots there was a warm, damp squidging where his feet had blistered, and the blisters had broken to bleed. He was bruised, sunburned, and filthy. He had been crawling, but when he saw Barricune riding toward him, he sat up. He had no horse, no saddle and, by that time, no pride.
Barricune looked down at him, not saying anything. Finally Ranse Foster asked, "Water?"
Barricune shook his head. "I don't carry none, but we can go where it is."
He stepped down from the saddle, a casual Samaritan, and with one heave pulled Foster upright.
"Git you in the saddle, can you stay there?" he inquired.
"If I can't," Foster answered through swollen lips, "shoot me."
Bert said amiably, "All right," and pulled the horse around. By twisting its ear, he held the animal quiet long enough to help the anguished stranger to the saddle. Then, on foot — and like any cowboy Bert Barricune hated walking — he led the horse five miles to the river. He let Foster lie where he fell in the cottonwood grove and brought him a hat full of water.
After that, Foster made three attempts to stand up. After the third failure, Barricune asked, grinning, "Want me to shoot you after all?"
"No," Foster answered. "There's something I want to do first."
Barricune looked at the bruises and commented, "Well, I should think so." He got on his horse and rode away. After an hour he returned with bedding and grub and asked, "Ain't you dead yet?"
The bruised and battered man opened his uninjured eye and said, "Not yet, but soon." Bert was amused. He brought a bucket of water and set up camp — a bedroll on a tarp, an armload of wood for a fire. He crouched on his heels while the tenderfoot, with cautious movements that told of pain, got his clothes off and splashed water on his body. No gunshot wounds, Barricune observed, but marks of kicks, and a couple that must have been made with a quirt.
After a while he asked, not inquisitively, but as one who has a right to know how matters stood, "Anybody looking for you?"
Foster rubbed dust from his clothes, being too full of pain to shake them.
"No," he said. "But I'm looking for somebody."
"I ain't going to help you look," Bert informed him. "Town's over that way, two miles, when you get ready to come. Cache the stuff when you leave. I'll pick it up."
Three days later they met in the town marshal's office. They glanced at each other but did not speak. This time it was Bert Barricune who was bruised, though not much. The marshal was just letting him out of the one-cell jail when Foster limped into the office. Nobody said anything until Barricune, blinking and walking not quite steadily, had left. Foster saw him stop in front of the next building to speak to a girl. They walked away together, and it looked as if the young man were being scolded.
The marshal cleared his throat. "You wanted something, Mister?"
Foster answered, "Three men set me afoot on the prairie. Is that an offense against the law around here?"
The marshal eased himself and his stomach into a chair and frowned judiciously. "It ain't customary," he admitted. "Who was they?"
"The boss was a big man with black hair, dark eyes, and two gold teeth in front. The other two — "
"I know. Liberty Valance and a couple of his boys. Just what's your complaint, now?" Foster began to understand that no help was going to come from the marshal.
"They rob you?" the marshal asked.
"They didn't search me."
"Take your gun?"
"I didn't have one."
"Steal your horse?"
"Gave him a crack with a quirt, and he left."
"Saddle on him?"
"No. I left it out there."
The marshal shook his head. "Can't see you got any legal complaint," he said with relief. "Where was this?"
"On a road in the woods, by a creek. Two days' walk from here."
The marshal got to his feet. "You don't even know what jurisdiction it was in. They knocked you around; well, that could happen. Man gets in a fight — could happen to anybody."
Foster said dryly, "Thanks a lot."
The marshal stopped him as he reached the door. "There's a reward for Liberty Valance."
"I still haven't got a gun," Foster said. "Does he come here often?"
"Nope. Nothing he'd want in Twotrees. Hard man to find." The marshal looked Foster up and down. "He won't come after you here." It was as if he had added, Sonny! "Beat you up once, he won't come again for that."
And I, Foster realized, am not man enough to go after him.
"Fact is," the marshal added, "I can't think of any bait that would bring him in. Pretty quiet here. Yes sir." He put his thumbs in his galluses and looked out the window, taking credit for the quietness.
Bait, Foster thought. He went out thinking about it. For the first time in a couple of years he had an ambition — not a laudable one, but something to aim at. He was going to be the bait for Liberty Valance and, as far as he could be, the trap as well.
At the Elite Cafe he stood meekly in the doorway, hat in hand, like a man who expects and deserves to be refused anything he might ask for. Clearing his throat, he asked, "Could I work for a meal?"
The girl who was filling sugar bowls looked up and pitied him. "Why, I should think so. Mr. Anderson!" She was the girl who had walked away with Barricune, scolding him.
The proprietor came from the kitchen, and Ranse Foster repeated his question, cringing, but with a suggestion of a sneer.
"Go around back and split some wood," Anderson answered, turning back to the kitchen.
"He could just as well eat first," the waitress suggested. "I'll dish up some stew to begin with."
Ranse ate fast, as if he expected the plate to be snatched away. He knew the girl glanced at him several times, and he hated her for it. He had not counted on anyone's pitying him in his new role of sneering humility, but he knew he might as well get used to it.
When she brought his pie, she said, "If you was looking for a job. . .”
He forced himself to look at her suspiciously. "Yes?"
"You could try the Prairie Belle. I heard they needed a swamper."
Bert Barricune, riding out to the river camp for his bedroll, hardly knew the man he met there. Ranse Foster was haughty, condescending, and cringing all at once. He spoke with a faint sneer, and stood as if he expected to be kicked.
"I assumed you'd be back for your belongings," he said. "I realized that you would change your mind."
Barricune, strapping up his bedroll, looked blank. "Never changed it," he disagreed. "Doing just what I planned. I never give you my bedroll."
"Of course not, of course not," the new Ranse Foster agreed with sneering humility. "It's yours. You have every right to reclaim it."
Barricune looked at him narrowly and hoisted the bedroll to sling it up behind his saddle. "I should have left you for the buzzards," he remarked.
Foster agreed, with a smile that should have got him a fist in the teeth. "Thank you, my friend," he said with no gratitude. "Thank you for all your kindness, which I have done nothing to deserve and shall do nothing to repay."
Barricune rode off, scowling, with the memory of his good deed irritating him like lice. The new Foster followed, far behind, on foot.
Sometimes in later life Ranse Foster thought of the several men he had been through the years. He did not admire any of them very much. He was by no means ashamed of the man he finally became, except that he owed too much to other people. One man he had been when he was young, a serious student, gullible and quick-tempered. Another man had been reckless and without an aim; he went West, with two thousand dollars of his own, after a quarrel with the executor of his father's estate. That man did not last long. Liberty Valance had whipped him with a quirt and kicked him into unconsciousness, for no reason except that Liberty, meeting him and knowing him for a tenderfoot, was able to do so. That man died on the prairie. After that, there was the man who set out to be the bait that would bring Liberty Valance into Twotrees.
Ranse Foster had never hated anyone before he met Liberty Valance, but Liberty was not the last man he learned to hate. He hated the man he himself had been while he waited to meet Liberty again.
The swamper's job at the Prairie Belle was not disgraceful until Ranse Foster made it so. When he swept floors, he was so obviously contemptuous of the work and of himself for doing it that other men saw him as contemptible. He watched the customers with a curled lip as if they were beneath him. But when a poker player threw a white chip on the floor, the swamper looked at him with half-veiled hatred — and picked up the chip. They talked about him at the Prairie Belle, because he could not be ignored.
At the end of the first month, he bought a Colt .45 from a drunken cowboy who needed money worse than he needed two guns. After that, Ranse went without part of his sleep in order to walk out, seven mornings a week, to where his first camp had been and practice target shooting. And the second time he overslept from exhaustion, Joe Mosten of the Prairie Belle fired him.
"Here's your pay," Joe growled, and dropped the money on the floor.
A week passed before he got another job. He ate his meals frugally in the Elite Cafe and let himself be seen stealing scraps off plates that other diners had left. Lillian, the older of the two waitresses, yelled her disgust, but Hallie, who was young, pitied him.
"Come to the back door when it's dark," she murmured, "and I'll give you a bite. There's plenty to spare."
The second evening he went to the back door, Bert Barricune was there ahead of him. He said gently, "Hallie is my girl."
"No offense intended," Foster answered. "The young lady offered me food, and I have come to get it."
"A dog eats where it can," young Barricune drawled. Ranse's muscles tensed and rage mounted in his throat, but he caught himself in time and shrugged. Bert said something then that scared him: "If you wanted to get talked about, it's working fine. They're talking clean over in Dunbar."
"What they do or say in Dunbar," Foster answered, "is nothing to me."
"It's where Liberty Valance hangs out," the other man said casually. "In case you care."
Ranse almost confided then, but instead said stiffly, "I do not quite appreciate your strange interest in my affairs."
Barricune pushed back his hat and scratched his head. "I don't understand it myself. But leave my girl alone."
"As charming as Miss Hallie may be," Ranse told him, "I am interested only in keeping my stomach filled."
"Then why don't you work for a living? The clerk at Dowitts' quit this afternoon."
Jake Dowitt hired him as a clerk because nobody else wanted the job.
"Read and write, do you?" Dowitt asked. "Work with figures?"
Foster drew himself up. "Sir, whatever may be said against me, I believe I may lay claim to being a scholar. That much I claim, if nothing more. I have read law."
"Maybe the job ain't good enough for you," Dowitt suggested.
Foster became humble again. "Any job is good enough for me. I will also sweep the floor."
"You will also keep up the fire in the stove," Dowitt told him. "Seven in the morning till nine at night. Got a place to live?"
"I sleep in the livery stable in return for keeping it shoveled out."
Dowitt had intended to house his clerk in a small room over the store, but he changed his mind. "Got a shed out back you can bunk in," he offered, "You'll have to clean it out first. Used to keep chickens there."
"There is one thing," Foster said. "I want two half-days off a week."
Dowitt looked over the top of his spectacles. "Now what would you do with time off? Never mind. You can have it — for less pay. I give you a discount on what you buy in the store."
The only purchase Foster made consisted of four boxes of cartridges a week.
In the store, he weighed salt pork as if it were low stuff but himself still lower, humbly measured lengths of dress goods for the women customers. He added vanity to his other unpleasantnesses and let customers discover him combing his hair admiringly before a small mirror. He let himself be seen reading a small black book, which aroused curiosity.
It was while he worked at the store that he started Twotrees' first school. Hallie was responsible for that. Handing him a plate heaped higher than other customers got at the café she said gently, "You're a learned man, they say, Mr. Foster."
With Hallie he could no longer sneer or pretend humility, for Hallie was herself humble, as well as gentle and kind. He protected himself from her by not speaking unless he had to.
He answered, "I have had advantages, Miss Hallie, before fate brought me here."
"That book you read," she asked wistfully, "what's it about?"
"It was written by a man named Plato," Ranse told her stiffly. "It was written in Greek."
She brought him a cup of coffee, hesitated for a moment, and then asked, "You can read and write American, too, can't you?"
"English, Miss Hallie," he corrected. "English is our mother tongue. I am quite familiar with English."
She put her red hands on the cafe counter. "Mr. Foster," she whispered, "will you teach me to read?"
He was too startled to think of an answer she could not defeat.
"Bert wouldn't like it," he said. "You're a grown woman besides. It wouldn't look right for you to be learning to read now."
She shook her head. "I can't learn any younger." She sighed. "I always wanted to know how to read and write."
She walked away toward the kitchen, and Ranse Foster was struck with an emotion he knew he could not afford. He was swept with pity. He called her back.
"Miss Hallie. Not you alone — people would talk about you. But if you brought Bert — "
"Bert can already read some. He don't care about it. But there's some kids in town." Her face was so lighted that Ranse looked away.
He still tried to escape. "Won't you be ashamed, learning with children?"
"Why, I'll be proud to learn any way at all," she said.
He had three little girls, two restless little boys, and Hallie in Twotrees' first school sessions — one hour each afternoon, in Dowitt's storeroom. Dowitt did not dock his pay for the time spent, but he puzzled a great deal. So did the children's parents. The children themselves were puzzled at some of the things he read aloud, but they were patient. After all, lessons lasted only an hour.
"When you are older, you will understand this," he promised, not looking at Hallie, and then he read Shakespeare's sonnet that begins:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
and ends:
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Hallie understood the warning, he knew. He read another sonnet, too:
When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
and carefully did not look up at her as he finished it:
For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Her earnestness in learning was distasteful to him — the anxious way she grasped a pencil and formed letters, the little gasp with which she always began to read aloud. Twice he made her cry, but she never missed a lesson.
He wished he had a teacher for his own learning, but he could not trust anyone, and so he did his lessons alone. Bert Barricune caught him at it on one of those free afternoons when Foster, on a horse from the livery stable, had ridden miles out of town to a secluded spot.
Ranse Foster had an empty gun in his hand when Barricune stepped out from behind a sandstone column and remarked, "I've seen better."
Foster whirled, and Barricune added, "I could have been somebody else — and your gun's empty."
"When I see somebody else, it won't be," Foster promised.
"If you'd asked me," Barricune mused, "I could've helped you. But you didn't want no helping. A man shouldn't be ashamed to ask somebody that knows better than him." His gun was suddenly in his hand, and five shots cracked their echoes around the skull-white sandstone pillars. Half an inch above each of five cards that Ranse had tacked to a dead tree, at the level of a man's waist, a splintered hole appeared in the wood. "Didn't want to spoil your targets," Barricune explained.
"I'm not ashamed to ask you," Foster told him angrily, "since you know so much. I shoot straight but slow. I'm asking you now."
Barricune, reloading his gun, shook his head. "It's kind of late for that. I come out to tell you that Liberty Valance is in town. He's interested in the dude that anybody can kick around — this here tenderfoot that boasts how he can read Greek."
"Well," said Foster softly. "Well, so the time has come."
"Don't figure you're riding into town with me," Bert warned. "You're coming all by yourself."
Ranse rode into town with his gun belt buckled on. Always before, he had carried it wrapped in a slicker. In town, he allowed himself the luxury of one last vanity. He went to the barbershop, neither sneering nor cringing, and said sharply, "Cut my hair. Short."
The barber was nervous, but he worked understandably fast.
"Thought you was partial to that long wavy hair of yourn," he remarked.
"I don't know why you thought so," Foster said coldly.
Out in the street again, he realized that he did not know how to go about the job. He did not know where Liberty Valance was, and he was determined not to be caught like a rat. He intended to look for Liberty.
Joe Mosten's right-hand man was lounging at the door of the Prairie Belle. He moved over to bar the way.
"Not in there, Foster," he said gently. It was the first time in months that Ranse Foster had heard another man address him respectfully. His presence was recognized — as a menace to the fixtures of the Prairie Belle.
When I die, sometime today, he thought, they won't say I was a coward. They may say I was a damn fool, but I won't care by that time.
"Where is he?" Ranse asked.
"I couldn't tell you that," the man said apologetically. "I'm young and healthy, and where he is is none of my business. Joe'd be obliged if you stay out of the bar, that's all."
Ranse looked across toward Dowitt's store. The padlock was on the door. He glanced north, toward the marshal's office.
"That's closed, too," the saloon man told him courteously. "Marshal was called out of town an hour ago."
Ranse threw back his head and laughed. The sound echoed back from the false-fronted buildings across the street. There was nobody walking in the street; there were not even any horses tied to the hitching racks.
"Send Liberty word," he ordered in the tone of one who has a right to command. "Tell him the tenderfoot wants to see him again."
The saloon man cleared his throat. "Guess it won't be necessary. That's him coming down at the end of the street, wouldn't you say?"
Ranse looked, knowing the saloon man was watching him curiously.
"I'd say it is," he agreed. "Yes, I'd say that was Liberty Valance."
"I'll be going inside now," the other man remarked apologetically. "Well, take care of yourself." He was gone without a sound.
This is the classic situation, Ranse realized. Two enemies walking to meet each other along the dusty, waiting street of a western town. What reasons other men have had, I will never know. There are so many things I have never learned! And now there is no time left.
He was an actor who knew the end of the scene but had forgotten the lines and never knew the cue for them. One of us ought to say something, he realized. I should have planned this all out in advance. But all I ever saw was the end of it.
Liberty Valance, burly and broad-shouldered, walked stiff-legged, with his elbows bent.
When he is close enough for me to see whether he is smiling, Ranse Foster thought, somebody's got to speak.
He looked into his own mind and realized, This man is afraid, this Ransome Foster. But nobody else knows it. He walks and is afraid, but he is no coward. Let them remember that. Let Hallie remember that.
Liberty Valance gave the cue. "Looking for me?" he called between his teeth. He was grinning.
Ranse was almost grateful to him; it was as if Liberty had said, The time is now!
"I owe you something," Ranse answered. "I want to pay my debt."
Liberty's hand flashed with his own. The gun in Foster's hand exploded, and so did the whole world.
Two shots to my one, he thought — his last thought for a while.
He looked up at a strange, unsteady ceiling and a face that wavered like a reflection in water. The bed beneath him swung even after he closed his eyes. Far away someone said, "Shove some more cloth in the wound. It slows the bleeding."
He knew with certain agony where the wound was — in his right shoulder. When they touched it, he heard himself cry out.
The face that wavered above him was a new one, Bert Barricune's.
"He's dead," Barricune said.
Foster answered from far away, "I am not."
Barricune said, "I didn't mean you."
Ranse turned his head away from the pain, and the face that had shivered above him before was Hallie's, white and big-eyed. She put a hesitant hand on his, and he was annoyed to see that hers was trembling.
"Are you shaking," he asked, "because there's blood on my hands?"
"No," she answered. "It's because they might have been getting cold."
He was aware then that other people were in the room; they stirred and moved aside as the doctor entered.
"Maybe you're gonna keep that arm," the doctor told him at last. "But it's never gonna be much use to you."
The trial was held three weeks after the shooting, in the hotel room where Ranse lay in bed. The charge was disturbing the peace; he pleaded guilty and was fined ten dollars.
When the others had gone, he told Bert Barricune, "There was a reward, I heard. That would pay the doctor and the hotel."
"You ain't going to collect it," Bert informed him. "It'd make you too big for your britches." Barricune sat looking at him for a moment and then remarked, "You didn't kill Liberty."
Foster frowned. "They buried him."
"Liberty fired once. You fired once and missed. I fired once, and I don't generally miss. I ain't going to collect the reward, neither. Hallie don't hold with violence."
Foster said thoughtfully, "That was all I had to be proud of."
"You faced him," Barricune said. "You went to meet him. If you got to be proud of something, you can remember that. It's a fact you ain't got much else."
Ranse looked at him with narrowed eyes. "Bert, are you a friend of mine?"
Bert smiled without humor. "You know I ain't. I picked you up off the prairie, but I'd do that for the lowest scum that crawls. I wisht I hadn't."
"Then why — "
Bert looked at the toe of his boot. "Hallie likes you. I'm a friend of Hallie's. That's all I ever will be, long as you're around."
Ranse said, "Then I shot Liberty Valance." That was the nearest he ever dared come to saying "Thank you." And that was when Bert Barricune started being his conscience, his Nemesis, his lifelong enemy and the man who made him great.
"Would she be happy living back East?" Foster asked. "There's money waiting for me there if I go back."
Bert answered, "What do you think?" He stood up and stretched. "You got quite a problem, ain't you? You could solve it easy by just going back alone. There ain't much a man can do here with a crippled arm."
He went out and shut the door behind him.
There is always a way out, Foster thought, if a man wants to take it. Bert had been his way out when he met Liberty on the street of Twotrees. To go home was the way out of this.
I learned to live without pride, he told himself. I could learn to forget about Hallie.
When she came, between the dinner dishes and setting the tables for supper at the cafe, he told her.
She did not cry. Sitting in the chair beside his bed, she winced and jerked one hand in protest when he said, "As soon as I can travel, I'll be going back where I came from."
She did not argue. She said only, "I wish you good luck, Ransome. Bert and me, we'll look after you long as you stay. And remember you after you're gone."
"How will you remember me?" he demanded harshly.
As his student she had been humble, but as a woman she had her pride. "Don't ask that," she said, and got up from the chair.
"Hallie, Hallie," he pleaded, "how can I stay? How can I earn a living?"
She said indignantly, as if someone else had insulted him, "Ranse Foster, I just guess you could do anything you wanted to."
"Hallie," he said gently, "sit down."
He never really wanted to be outstanding. He had two aims in life: to make Hallie happy and to keep Bert Barricune out of trouble. He defended Bert on charges ranging from drunkenness to stealing cattle, and Bert served time twice.
Ranse Foster did not want to run for judge, but Bert remarked, "I think Hallie would kind of like it if you was His Honor." Hallie was pleased but not surprised when he was elected. Ranse was surprised but not pleased.
He was not eager to run for the legislature — that was after the territory became a state — but there was Bert Barricune in the background, never urging, never advising, but watching with half-closed, bloodshot eyes. Bert Barricune, who never amounted to anything, but never intruded, was a living, silent reminder of three debts: a hat full of water under the cotton-woods, gunfire in a dusty street, and Hallie, quietly sewing beside a lamp in the parlor. And the Fosters had four sons.
All the things the opposition said about Ranse Foster when he ran for the state legislature were true, except one. He had been a lowly swamper in a frontier saloon; he had been a dead beat, accepting handouts at the alley entrance of a cafe; he had been despicable and despised. But the accusation that lost him the election was false. He had not killed Liberty Valance. He never served in the state legislature.
When there was talk of his running for governor, he refused. Handy Strong, who knew politics, tried to persuade him.
"That shooting, we'll get around that. 'The Honorable Ransome Foster walked down a street in broad daylight to meet an enemy of society. He shot him down in a fair fight, of necessity, the way you'd shoot a mad dog — but Liberty Valance could shoot back, and he did. Ranse Foster carries the mark of that encounter today in a crippled right arm. He is still paying the price for protecting law-abiding citizens. And he was the first teacher west of Rosy Buttes. He served without pay.' You've come a long way, Ranse, and you're going further."
"A long way," Foster agreed, "for a man who never wanted to go anywhere. I don't want to be governor."
When Handy had gone, Bert Barricune sagged in, unwashed, unshaven. He sat down stiffly. At the age of fifty, he was an old man, an unwanted relic of the frontier that was gone, a legacy to more civilized times that had no place for him. He filled his pipe deliberately. After a while he remarked, "The other side is gonna say you ain't fitten to be governor. Because your wife ain't fancy enough. They're gonna say Hallie didn't even learn to read till she was growed up."
Ranse was on his feet, white with fury. "Then I'm going to win this election if it kills me."
"I don't reckon it'll kill you," Bert drawled. "Liberty Valance couldn't."
"I could have got rid of the weight of that affair long ago," Ranse reminded him, "by telling the truth."
"You could yet," Bert answered. "Why don't you?"
Ranse said bitterly, "Because I owe you too much. . . . I don't think Hallie wants to be the governor's lady. She's shy."
"Hallie don't never want nothing for herself. She wants things for you. The way I feel, I wouldn't mourn at your funeral. But what Hallie wants, I'm gonna try to see she gets."
"So am I," Ranse promised grimly.
"Then I don't mind telling you," Bert admitted, "that it was me reminded the opposition to dig up that matter of how she couldn't read."
As the Senator and his wife rode home after old Bert Barricune's barren funeral, Hallie sighed. "Bert never had much of anything. I guess he never wanted much."
He wanted you to be happy, Ranse Foster thought, and he did the best he knew how.
"I wonder where those prickly-pear blossoms came from," he mused.
Hallie glanced up at him, smiling. "From me," she said.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by Dorothy M. Johnson
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
by Dorothy M. Johnson (1949)
(Version 1.0)
Bert Barricune died in 1910. Not more than a dozen persons showed up for his funeral. Among them was an earnest young reporter who hoped for a human-interest story; there were legends that the old man had been something of a gunfighter in the early days. A few aging men tiptoed in, singly or in pairs, scowling and edgy, clutching their battered hats — men who had been Bert's companions at drinking or penny ante while the world passed them by. One woman came, wearing a heavy veil that concealed her face. White and yellow streaks showed in her black-dyed hair. The reporter made a mental note: Old friend from the old District. But no story there — can't mention that.
One by one they filed past the casket, looking into the still face of old Bert Barricune, who had been nobody. His stubbly hair was white, and his lined face was as empty in death as his life had been. But death had added dignity.
One great spray of flowers spread behind the casket. The card read, "Senator and Mrs. Ransome Foster." There were no other flowers except, almost unnoticed, a few pale, leafless, pink and yellow blossoms scattered on the carpeted step. The reporter, squinting, finally identified them: son of a gun! Blossoms of the prickly pear. Cactus flowers. Seems suitable for the old man — flowers that grow on prairie wasteland. Well, they're free if you want to pick 'em, and Barricune's friends don't look prosperous. But how come the Senator sends a bouquet?
There was a delay, and the funeral director fidgeted a little, waiting. The reporter sat up straighter when he saw the last two mourners enter.
Senator Foster — sure, there's the crippled arm — and that must be his wife. Congress is still in session; he came all the way from Washington. Why would he bother, for an old wreck like Bert Barricune?
After the funeral was decently over, the reporter asked him. The Senator almost told the truth, but he caught himself in time. He said, "Bert Barricune was my friend for more than thirty years."
He could not give the true answer: He was my enemy; he was my conscience; he made me whatever I am.
Ransome Foster had been in the Territory for seven months when he ran into Liberty Valance. He had been afoot on the prairie for two days when he met Bert Barricune. Up to that time, Ranse Foster had been nobody in particular — a dude from the East, quietly inquisitive, moving from one shack town to another; just another tenderfoot with his own reasons for being there and no aim in life at all.
When Barricune found him on the prairie, Foster was indeed a tenderfoot. In his boots there was a warm, damp squidging where his feet had blistered, and the blisters had broken to bleed. He was bruised, sunburned, and filthy. He had been crawling, but when he saw Barricune riding toward him, he sat up. He had no horse, no saddle and, by that time, no pride.
Barricune looked down at him, not saying anything. Finally Ranse Foster asked, "Water?"
Barricune shook his head. "I don't carry none, but we can go where it is."
He stepped down from the saddle, a casual Samaritan, and with one heave pulled Foster upright.
"Git you in the saddle, can you stay there?" he inquired.
"If I can't," Foster answered through swollen lips, "shoot me."
Bert said amiably, "All right," and pulled the horse around. By twisting its ear, he held the animal quiet long enough to help the anguished stranger to the saddle. Then, on foot — and like any cowboy Bert Barricune hated walking — he led the horse five miles to the river. He let Foster lie where he fell in the cottonwood grove and brought him a hat full of water.
After that, Foster made three attempts to stand up. After the third failure, Barricune asked, grinning, "Want me to shoot you after all?"
"No," Foster answered. "There's something I want to do first."
Barricune looked at the bruises and commented, "Well, I should think so." He got on his horse and rode away. After an hour he returned with bedding and grub and asked, "Ain't you dead yet?"
The bruised and battered man opened his uninjured eye and said, "Not yet, but soon." Bert was amused. He brought a bucket of water and set up camp — a bedroll on a tarp, an armload of wood for a fire. He crouched on his heels while the tenderfoot, with cautious movements that told of pain, got his clothes off and splashed water on his body. No gunshot wounds, Barricune observed, but marks of kicks, and a couple that must have been made with a quirt.
After a while he asked, not inquisitively, but as one who has a right to know how matters stood, "Anybody looking for you?"
Foster rubbed dust from his clothes, being too full of pain to shake them.
"No," he said. "But I'm looking for somebody."
"I ain't going to help you look," Bert informed him. "Town's over that way, two miles, when you get ready to come. Cache the stuff when you leave. I'll pick it up."
Three days later they met in the town marshal's office. They glanced at each other but did not speak. This time it was Bert Barricune who was bruised, though not much. The marshal was just letting him out of the one-cell jail when Foster limped into the office. Nobody said anything until Barricune, blinking and walking not quite steadily, had left. Foster saw him stop in front of the next building to speak to a girl. They walked away together, and it looked as if the young man were being scolded.
The marshal cleared his throat. "You wanted something, Mister?"
Foster answered, "Three men set me afoot on the prairie. Is that an offense against the law around here?"
The marshal eased himself and his stomach into a chair and frowned judiciously. "It ain't customary," he admitted. "Who was they?"
"The boss was a big man with black hair, dark eyes, and two gold teeth in front. The other two — "
"I know. Liberty Valance and a couple of his boys. Just what's your complaint, now?" Foster began to understand that no help was going to come from the marshal.
"They rob you?" the marshal asked.
"They didn't search me."
"Take your gun?"
"I didn't have one."
"Steal your horse?"
"Gave him a crack with a quirt, and he left."
"Saddle on him?"
"No. I left it out there."
The marshal shook his head. "Can't see you got any legal complaint," he said with relief. "Where was this?"
"On a road in the woods, by a creek. Two days' walk from here."
The marshal got to his feet. "You don't even know what jurisdiction it was in. They knocked you around; well, that could happen. Man gets in a fight — could happen to anybody."
Foster said dryly, "Thanks a lot."
The marshal stopped him as he reached the door. "There's a reward for Liberty Valance."
"I still haven't got a gun," Foster said. "Does he come here often?"
"Nope. Nothing he'd want in Twotrees. Hard man to find." The marshal looked Foster up and down. "He won't come after you here." It was as if he had added, Sonny! "Beat you up once, he won't come again for that."
And I, Foster realized, am not man enough to go after him.
"Fact is," the marshal added, "I can't think of any bait that would bring him in. Pretty quiet here. Yes sir." He put his thumbs in his galluses and looked out the window, taking credit for the quietness.
Bait, Foster thought. He went out thinking about it. For the first time in a couple of years he had an ambition — not a laudable one, but something to aim at. He was going to be the bait for Liberty Valance and, as far as he could be, the trap as well.
At the Elite Cafe he stood meekly in the doorway, hat in hand, like a man who expects and deserves to be refused anything he might ask for. Clearing his throat, he asked, "Could I work for a meal?"
The girl who was filling sugar bowls looked up and pitied him. "Why, I should think so. Mr. Anderson!" She was the girl who had walked away with Barricune, scolding him.
The proprietor came from the kitchen, and Ranse Foster repeated his question, cringing, but with a suggestion of a sneer.
"Go around back and split some wood," Anderson answered, turning back to the kitchen.
"He could just as well eat first," the waitress suggested. "I'll dish up some stew to begin with."
Ranse ate fast, as if he expected the plate to be snatched away. He knew the girl glanced at him several times, and he hated her for it. He had not counted on anyone's pitying him in his new role of sneering humility, but he knew he might as well get used to it.
When she brought his pie, she said, "If you was looking for a job. . .”
He forced himself to look at her suspiciously. "Yes?"
"You could try the Prairie Belle. I heard they needed a swamper."
Bert Barricune, riding out to the river camp for his bedroll, hardly knew the man he met there. Ranse Foster was haughty, condescending, and cringing all at once. He spoke with a faint sneer, and stood as if he expected to be kicked.
"I assumed you'd be back for your belongings," he said. "I realized that you would change your mind."
Barricune, strapping up his bedroll, looked blank. "Never changed it," he disagreed. "Doing just what I planned. I never give you my bedroll."
"Of course not, of course not," the new Ranse Foster agreed with sneering humility. "It's yours. You have every right to reclaim it."
Barricune looked at him narrowly and hoisted the bedroll to sling it up behind his saddle. "I should have left you for the buzzards," he remarked.
Foster agreed, with a smile that should have got him a fist in the teeth. "Thank you, my friend," he said with no gratitude. "Thank you for all your kindness, which I have done nothing to deserve and shall do nothing to repay."
Barricune rode off, scowling, with the memory of his good deed irritating him like lice. The new Foster followed, far behind, on foot.
Sometimes in later life Ranse Foster thought of the several men he had been through the years. He did not admire any of them very much. He was by no means ashamed of the man he finally became, except that he owed too much to other people. One man he had been when he was young, a serious student, gullible and quick-tempered. Another man had been reckless and without an aim; he went West, with two thousand dollars of his own, after a quarrel with the executor of his father's estate. That man did not last long. Liberty Valance had whipped him with a quirt and kicked him into unconsciousness, for no reason except that Liberty, meeting him and knowing him for a tenderfoot, was able to do so. That man died on the prairie. After that, there was the man who set out to be the bait that would bring Liberty Valance into Twotrees.
Ranse Foster had never hated anyone before he met Liberty Valance, but Liberty was not the last man he learned to hate. He hated the man he himself had been while he waited to meet Liberty again.
The swamper's job at the Prairie Belle was not disgraceful until Ranse Foster made it so. When he swept floors, he was so obviously contemptuous of the work and of himself for doing it that other men saw him as contemptible. He watched the customers with a curled lip as if they were beneath him. But when a poker player threw a white chip on the floor, the swamper looked at him with half-veiled hatred — and picked up the chip. They talked about him at the Prairie Belle, because he could not be ignored.
At the end of the first month, he bought a Colt .45 from a drunken cowboy who needed money worse than he needed two guns. After that, Ranse went without part of his sleep in order to walk out, seven mornings a week, to where his first camp had been and practice target shooting. And the second time he overslept from exhaustion, Joe Mosten of the Prairie Belle fired him.
"Here's your pay," Joe growled, and dropped the money on the floor.
A week passed before he got another job. He ate his meals frugally in the Elite Cafe and let himself be seen stealing scraps off plates that other diners had left. Lillian, the older of the two waitresses, yelled her disgust, but Hallie, who was young, pitied him.
"Come to the back door when it's dark," she murmured, "and I'll give you a bite. There's plenty to spare."
The second evening he went to the back door, Bert Barricune was there ahead of him. He said gently, "Hallie is my girl."
"No offense intended," Foster answered. "The young lady offered me food, and I have come to get it."
"A dog eats where it can," young Barricune drawled. Ranse's muscles tensed and rage mounted in his throat, but he caught himself in time and shrugged. Bert said something then that scared him: "If you wanted to get talked about, it's working fine. They're talking clean over in Dunbar."
"What they do or say in Dunbar," Foster answered, "is nothing to me."
"It's where Liberty Valance hangs out," the other man said casually. "In case you care."
Ranse almost confided then, but instead said stiffly, "I do not quite appreciate your strange interest in my affairs."
Barricune pushed back his hat and scratched his head. "I don't understand it myself. But leave my girl alone."
"As charming as Miss Hallie may be," Ranse told him, "I am interested only in keeping my stomach filled."
"Then why don't you work for a living? The clerk at Dowitts' quit this afternoon."
Jake Dowitt hired him as a clerk because nobody else wanted the job.
"Read and write, do you?" Dowitt asked. "Work with figures?"
Foster drew himself up. "Sir, whatever may be said against me, I believe I may lay claim to being a scholar. That much I claim, if nothing more. I have read law."
"Maybe the job ain't good enough for you," Dowitt suggested.
Foster became humble again. "Any job is good enough for me. I will also sweep the floor."
"You will also keep up the fire in the stove," Dowitt told him. "Seven in the morning till nine at night. Got a place to live?"
"I sleep in the livery stable in return for keeping it shoveled out."
Dowitt had intended to house his clerk in a small room over the store, but he changed his mind. "Got a shed out back you can bunk in," he offered, "You'll have to clean it out first. Used to keep chickens there."
"There is one thing," Foster said. "I want two half-days off a week."
Dowitt looked over the top of his spectacles. "Now what would you do with time off? Never mind. You can have it — for less pay. I give you a discount on what you buy in the store."
The only purchase Foster made consisted of four boxes of cartridges a week.
In the store, he weighed salt pork as if it were low stuff but himself still lower, humbly measured lengths of dress goods for the women customers. He added vanity to his other unpleasantnesses and let customers discover him combing his hair admiringly before a small mirror. He let himself be seen reading a small black book, which aroused curiosity.
It was while he worked at the store that he started Twotrees' first school. Hallie was responsible for that. Handing him a plate heaped higher than other customers got at the café she said gently, "You're a learned man, they say, Mr. Foster."
With Hallie he could no longer sneer or pretend humility, for Hallie was herself humble, as well as gentle and kind. He protected himself from her by not speaking unless he had to.
He answered, "I have had advantages, Miss Hallie, before fate brought me here."
"That book you read," she asked wistfully, "what's it about?"
"It was written by a man named Plato," Ranse told her stiffly. "It was written in Greek."
She brought him a cup of coffee, hesitated for a moment, and then asked, "You can read and write American, too, can't you?"
"English, Miss Hallie," he corrected. "English is our mother tongue. I am quite familiar with English."
She put her red hands on the cafe counter. "Mr. Foster," she whispered, "will you teach me to read?"
He was too startled to think of an answer she could not defeat.
"Bert wouldn't like it," he said. "You're a grown woman besides. It wouldn't look right for you to be learning to read now."
She shook her head. "I can't learn any younger." She sighed. "I always wanted to know how to read and write."
She walked away toward the kitchen, and Ranse Foster was struck with an emotion he knew he could not afford. He was swept with pity. He called her back.
"Miss Hallie. Not you alone — people would talk about you. But if you brought Bert — "
"Bert can already read some. He don't care about it. But there's some kids in town." Her face was so lighted that Ranse looked away.
He still tried to escape. "Won't you be ashamed, learning with children?"
"Why, I'll be proud to learn any way at all," she said.
He had three little girls, two restless little boys, and Hallie in Twotrees' first school sessions — one hour each afternoon, in Dowitt's storeroom. Dowitt did not dock his pay for the time spent, but he puzzled a great deal. So did the children's parents. The children themselves were puzzled at some of the things he read aloud, but they were patient. After all, lessons lasted only an hour.
"When you are older, you will understand this," he promised, not looking at Hallie, and then he read Shakespeare's sonnet that begins:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
and ends:
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Hallie understood the warning, he knew. He read another sonnet, too:
When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
and carefully did not look up at her as he finished it:
For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Her earnestness in learning was distasteful to him — the anxious way she grasped a pencil and formed letters, the little gasp with which she always began to read aloud. Twice he made her cry, but she never missed a lesson.
He wished he had a teacher for his own learning, but he could not trust anyone, and so he did his lessons alone. Bert Barricune caught him at it on one of those free afternoons when Foster, on a horse from the livery stable, had ridden miles out of town to a secluded spot.
Ranse Foster had an empty gun in his hand when Barricune stepped out from behind a sandstone column and remarked, "I've seen better."
Foster whirled, and Barricune added, "I could have been somebody else — and your gun's empty."
"When I see somebody else, it won't be," Foster promised.
"If you'd asked me," Barricune mused, "I could've helped you. But you didn't want no helping. A man shouldn't be ashamed to ask somebody that knows better than him." His gun was suddenly in his hand, and five shots cracked their echoes around the skull-white sandstone pillars. Half an inch above each of five cards that Ranse had tacked to a dead tree, at the level of a man's waist, a splintered hole appeared in the wood. "Didn't want to spoil your targets," Barricune explained.
"I'm not ashamed to ask you," Foster told him angrily, "since you know so much. I shoot straight but slow. I'm asking you now."
Barricune, reloading his gun, shook his head. "It's kind of late for that. I come out to tell you that Liberty Valance is in town. He's interested in the dude that anybody can kick around — this here tenderfoot that boasts how he can read Greek."
"Well," said Foster softly. "Well, so the time has come."
"Don't figure you're riding into town with me," Bert warned. "You're coming all by yourself."
Ranse rode into town with his gun belt buckled on. Always before, he had carried it wrapped in a slicker. In town, he allowed himself the luxury of one last vanity. He went to the barbershop, neither sneering nor cringing, and said sharply, "Cut my hair. Short."
The barber was nervous, but he worked understandably fast.
"Thought you was partial to that long wavy hair of yourn," he remarked.
"I don't know why you thought so," Foster said coldly.
Out in the street again, he realized that he did not know how to go about the job. He did not know where Liberty Valance was, and he was determined not to be caught like a rat. He intended to look for Liberty.
Joe Mosten's right-hand man was lounging at the door of the Prairie Belle. He moved over to bar the way.
"Not in there, Foster," he said gently. It was the first time in months that Ranse Foster had heard another man address him respectfully. His presence was recognized — as a menace to the fixtures of the Prairie Belle.
When I die, sometime today, he thought, they won't say I was a coward. They may say I was a damn fool, but I won't care by that time.
"Where is he?" Ranse asked.
"I couldn't tell you that," the man said apologetically. "I'm young and healthy, and where he is is none of my business. Joe'd be obliged if you stay out of the bar, that's all."
Ranse looked across toward Dowitt's store. The padlock was on the door. He glanced north, toward the marshal's office.
"That's closed, too," the saloon man told him courteously. "Marshal was called out of town an hour ago."
Ranse threw back his head and laughed. The sound echoed back from the false-fronted buildings across the street. There was nobody walking in the street; there were not even any horses tied to the hitching racks.
"Send Liberty word," he ordered in the tone of one who has a right to command. "Tell him the tenderfoot wants to see him again."
The saloon man cleared his throat. "Guess it won't be necessary. That's him coming down at the end of the street, wouldn't you say?"
Ranse looked, knowing the saloon man was watching him curiously.
"I'd say it is," he agreed. "Yes, I'd say that was Liberty Valance."
"I'll be going inside now," the other man remarked apologetically. "Well, take care of yourself." He was gone without a sound.
This is the classic situation, Ranse realized. Two enemies walking to meet each other along the dusty, waiting street of a western town. What reasons other men have had, I will never know. There are so many things I have never learned! And now there is no time left.
He was an actor who knew the end of the scene but had forgotten the lines and never knew the cue for them. One of us ought to say something, he realized. I should have planned this all out in advance. But all I ever saw was the end of it.
Liberty Valance, burly and broad-shouldered, walked stiff-legged, with his elbows bent.
When he is close enough for me to see whether he is smiling, Ranse Foster thought, somebody's got to speak.
He looked into his own mind and realized, This man is afraid, this Ransome Foster. But nobody else knows it. He walks and is afraid, but he is no coward. Let them remember that. Let Hallie remember that.
Liberty Valance gave the cue. "Looking for me?" he called between his teeth. He was grinning.
Ranse was almost grateful to him; it was as if Liberty had said, The time is now!
"I owe you something," Ranse answered. "I want to pay my debt."
Liberty's hand flashed with his own. The gun in Foster's hand exploded, and so did the whole world.
Two shots to my one, he thought — his last thought for a while.
He looked up at a strange, unsteady ceiling and a face that wavered like a reflection in water. The bed beneath him swung even after he closed his eyes. Far away someone said, "Shove some more cloth in the wound. It slows the bleeding."
He knew with certain agony where the wound was — in his right shoulder. When they touched it, he heard himself cry out.
The face that wavered above him was a new one, Bert Barricune's.
"He's dead," Barricune said.
Foster answered from far away, "I am not."
Barricune said, "I didn't mean you."
Ranse turned his head away from the pain, and the face that had shivered above him before was Hallie's, white and big-eyed. She put a hesitant hand on his, and he was annoyed to see that hers was trembling.
"Are you shaking," he asked, "because there's blood on my hands?"
"No," she answered. "It's because they might have been getting cold."
He was aware then that other people were in the room; they stirred and moved aside as the doctor entered.
"Maybe you're gonna keep that arm," the doctor told him at last. "But it's never gonna be much use to you."
The trial was held three weeks after the shooting, in the hotel room where Ranse lay in bed. The charge was disturbing the peace; he pleaded guilty and was fined ten dollars.
When the others had gone, he told Bert Barricune, "There was a reward, I heard. That would pay the doctor and the hotel."
"You ain't going to collect it," Bert informed him. "It'd make you too big for your britches." Barricune sat looking at him for a moment and then remarked, "You didn't kill Liberty."
Foster frowned. "They buried him."
"Liberty fired once. You fired once and missed. I fired once, and I don't generally miss. I ain't going to collect the reward, neither. Hallie don't hold with violence."
Foster said thoughtfully, "That was all I had to be proud of."
"You faced him," Barricune said. "You went to meet him. If you got to be proud of something, you can remember that. It's a fact you ain't got much else."
Ranse looked at him with narrowed eyes. "Bert, are you a friend of mine?"
Bert smiled without humor. "You know I ain't. I picked you up off the prairie, but I'd do that for the lowest scum that crawls. I wisht I hadn't."
"Then why — "
Bert looked at the toe of his boot. "Hallie likes you. I'm a friend of Hallie's. That's all I ever will be, long as you're around."
Ranse said, "Then I shot Liberty Valance." That was the nearest he ever dared come to saying "Thank you." And that was when Bert Barricune started being his conscience, his Nemesis, his lifelong enemy and the man who made him great.
"Would she be happy living back East?" Foster asked. "There's money waiting for me there if I go back."
Bert answered, "What do you think?" He stood up and stretched. "You got quite a problem, ain't you? You could solve it easy by just going back alone. There ain't much a man can do here with a crippled arm."
He went out and shut the door behind him.
There is always a way out, Foster thought, if a man wants to take it. Bert had been his way out when he met Liberty on the street of Twotrees. To go home was the way out of this.
I learned to live without pride, he told himself. I could learn to forget about Hallie.
When she came, between the dinner dishes and setting the tables for supper at the cafe, he told her.
She did not cry. Sitting in the chair beside his bed, she winced and jerked one hand in protest when he said, "As soon as I can travel, I'll be going back where I came from."
She did not argue. She said only, "I wish you good luck, Ransome. Bert and me, we'll look after you long as you stay. And remember you after you're gone."
"How will you remember me?" he demanded harshly.
As his student she had been humble, but as a woman she had her pride. "Don't ask that," she said, and got up from the chair.
"Hallie, Hallie," he pleaded, "how can I stay? How can I earn a living?"
She said indignantly, as if someone else had insulted him, "Ranse Foster, I just guess you could do anything you wanted to."
"Hallie," he said gently, "sit down."
He never really wanted to be outstanding. He had two aims in life: to make Hallie happy and to keep Bert Barricune out of trouble. He defended Bert on charges ranging from drunkenness to stealing cattle, and Bert served time twice.
Ranse Foster did not want to run for judge, but Bert remarked, "I think Hallie would kind of like it if you was His Honor." Hallie was pleased but not surprised when he was elected. Ranse was surprised but not pleased.
He was not eager to run for the legislature — that was after the territory became a state — but there was Bert Barricune in the background, never urging, never advising, but watching with half-closed, bloodshot eyes. Bert Barricune, who never amounted to anything, but never intruded, was a living, silent reminder of three debts: a hat full of water under the cotton-woods, gunfire in a dusty street, and Hallie, quietly sewing beside a lamp in the parlor. And the Fosters had four sons.
All the things the opposition said about Ranse Foster when he ran for the state legislature were true, except one. He had been a lowly swamper in a frontier saloon; he had been a dead beat, accepting handouts at the alley entrance of a cafe; he had been despicable and despised. But the accusation that lost him the election was false. He had not killed Liberty Valance. He never served in the state legislature.
When there was talk of his running for governor, he refused. Handy Strong, who knew politics, tried to persuade him.
"That shooting, we'll get around that. 'The Honorable Ransome Foster walked down a street in broad daylight to meet an enemy of society. He shot him down in a fair fight, of necessity, the way you'd shoot a mad dog — but Liberty Valance could shoot back, and he did. Ranse Foster carries the mark of that encounter today in a crippled right arm. He is still paying the price for protecting law-abiding citizens. And he was the first teacher west of Rosy Buttes. He served without pay.' You've come a long way, Ranse, and you're going further."
"A long way," Foster agreed, "for a man who never wanted to go anywhere. I don't want to be governor."
When Handy had gone, Bert Barricune sagged in, unwashed, unshaven. He sat down stiffly. At the age of fifty, he was an old man, an unwanted relic of the frontier that was gone, a legacy to more civilized times that had no place for him. He filled his pipe deliberately. After a while he remarked, "The other side is gonna say you ain't fitten to be governor. Because your wife ain't fancy enough. They're gonna say Hallie didn't even learn to read till she was growed up."
Ranse was on his feet, white with fury. "Then I'm going to win this election if it kills me."
"I don't reckon it'll kill you," Bert drawled. "Liberty Valance couldn't."
"I could have got rid of the weight of that affair long ago," Ranse reminded him, "by telling the truth."
"You could yet," Bert answered. "Why don't you?"
Ranse said bitterly, "Because I owe you too much. . . . I don't think Hallie wants to be the governor's lady. She's shy."
"Hallie don't never want nothing for herself. She wants things for you. The way I feel, I wouldn't mourn at your funeral. But what Hallie wants, I'm gonna try to see she gets."
"So am I," Ranse promised grimly.
"Then I don't mind telling you," Bert admitted, "that it was me reminded the opposition to dig up that matter of how she couldn't read."
As the Senator and his wife rode home after old Bert Barricune's barren funeral, Hallie sighed. "Bert never had much of anything. I guess he never wanted much."
He wanted you to be happy, Ranse Foster thought, and he did the best he knew how.
"I wonder where those prickly-pear blossoms came from," he mused.
Hallie glanced up at him, smiling. "From me," she said.