Shane: Chapters 12–16

He was sitting idly in his saddle, but the pose did not fool you.

Fletcher was smiling and affable.

I’ll boost the ante to twelve hundred.

She sat beside him on the step, her hand on the wood between them, and his covered hers and the moments merged in the slow, dwindling procession of time.

But there was scant work in me. I kept at it for a couple of rows, then the hoe dropped and I let it lie.

She stopped abruptly at the house corner, clutching at the wood, panting and irresolute.

They were part of him, part of the man, of the full sum of the integrate force that was Shane.

Father’s head lolled back and Shane caught it and eased it and the big shoulders forward till they rested on the table, the face down and cradled in the limp arms.

His gaze seemed to widen and encompass us all, mother and the still figure of father and me huddled on a chair by the window, and somehow the room and the house and the whole place.

But when I parted the bushes and pushed forward to peer out, he was moving at a moderate pace and was only almost abreast of me.

He was the man I saw that first day, a stranger, dark and forbidding, forging his lone way out of an unknown past in the utter loneliness of his own immovable and instinctive defiance.

When he dismounted, he did not slip the reins over the horse’s head as the cowboys always did. He left them looped over the pommel of the saddle and the horse seemed to know what this meant.

This was the Shane of the adventures I had dreamed for him, cool and competent, facing that room full of men in the simple solitude of his own invincible completeness.

They stopped again on a figure over by the wall and the beginnings of a smile showed in them and he nodded almost imperceptibly.

He understood the fact, assessed it, accepted it.

They faced each other in the aisle and the men along the bar jostled one another in their hurry to get to the opposite side of the room.

“I had a few things to say to Fletcher,” he said gently. “That can wait. You’re a pushing man, Wilson, so I reckon I had better accommodate you.”

And then there was no escape, for that gentle voice was pegging him to the immediate and implacable moment.

Across the stunned and barren silence of the room Shane’s voice seemed to come from a great distance.

The light in his eyes was unsteady like the flickering of a candle guttering toward darkness.

He knew what goes on in a boy’s mind and what can help him stay clean inside through the muddled, dirtied years of growing up.

I stared dumbly at him, and because I was just a boy and helpless I turned away and hid my face against the firm, warm flank of the horse.

I strained my eyes after him, and then in the moonlight I could make out the inalienable outline of his figure receding into the distance.

I strained my eyes after him, and then in the moonlight I could make out the inalienable outline of his figure receding into the distance.

There were men on the porch behind me, but I was aware only of that dark shape growing small and indistinct along the far reach of the road.

He glared at the walls as if they stifled him and strode out the door into the yard.

The sun was beginning to rise through the cleft in the mountains across the river, not the brilliant glory of midday but the fresh and renewed reddish radiance of early morning.

For a time they inclined to the notion, spurred by the talk of a passing stranger, that he was a certain Shannon who was famous as a gunman and gambler way down in Arkansas and Texas and dropped from sight without anyone knowing why or where.

When that notion dwindled, others followed, pieced together in turn from scraps of information gleaned from stray travelers.

He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.