The Way Of The West Read online

  Ingram appeared, disfigured, vastly unministerial, with Astrid Vasa at his side, and a small corps of men, heavily armed, walking behind the couple.

  The crowd gave way.

  ‘Brother Pedrillo was right, after all’ said a bystander. ‘This feller sure is muy diablo.’

  ‘Muy diablo!’ murmured Astrid, looking fondly up at her hero. ‘Do you hear what they’re saying about you?’

  ‘Ah, my dear,’ said the battered hero. ‘I hear it, and I’m afraid it shows me that I have done my last work for the church.’

  ‘Bah!’ said Astrid. ‘You can do better work now than you’ve ever done before. You can build hospitals over the whole face of the country, if you have a mind to. By jiminy, I’ll make Dad give you the money for another one right away, if you’ll have it!’

  The minister made no reply.

  He was too busy thinking of various widely disjointed phases of this business, and most of all he was wondering what sort of report would go back to the reverend council which had dispatched him to this far mission in the West.

  He said good night to Astrid at her house, and went on up the street toward his own little shack. And as he came, the crowd—which was returning from the region of the jail, where they had been picking up the detailed story of the fight—gave way around him, and let him have a clean pathway. He had been downtrodden, cheaper than dirt in their eyes. He was something else now. He moved among them like a Norse god, a figure only dimly conceived in the midst of winter storm and mist. So Reginald Oliver Ingram walked down the main street of Billman and entered his shack.

  As he entered, the strong odor of cigar smoke rolled out toward him. He lighted the lantern, and saw Brother Pedrillo seated in his one comfortable chair, smiling broadly at him.

  ‘These cigars of yours,’ said Brother Pedrillo, ‘are very good. And I thought that, after all, you probably owed me one, being muy diablo, as it appears you are!’

  There was a change in the church affairs of Billman. Indeed, for the first time in the history of the town, the activities of the church had to do with something more than weddings and funerals. Men who were a little past the first flush of wild youth formed the habit of drifting into the church on Sundays. Because, for one thing, all the other best men in the community were fairly sure to be there. They came for the sake of talking business after the church session had ended.

  But then they began to grow a little more enthusiastic about the church itself. The manner of the young minister was not that of one speaking from a cloud. He spoke calmly and earnestly about such matters of the heart and soul as interest all men, and with such a conversational air that sometimes his rhetorical questions actually drew forth answers from his congregation. No one could ever have called it an intense congregation, or one that took its religion with a poisonous seriousness. But, before the winter came, it was a congregation which supported two schools and a hospital. It acquired a mayor and a legal system that worked as smoothly as the system in any Eastern city. And it was noted with a good deal of interest that in the political campaigns there was one speaker who was always upon the winning side, and he was none other than the gentleman of the clerical collar—young Reginald Oliver Ingram.

  ‘How come?’ asked a stranger from Nevada. ‘Might it be because he’s got such a pretty wife, maybe, that he’s got such a powerful lot of influence with people?’

  ‘I’ll tell you the real reason of it,’ replied a townsman, drawing the Nevada man aside. ‘You take another look. Now, what d’you see?’

  ‘I see a big sap of a sky pilot.’

  ‘Stranger, I’m an old man. But don’t speak like that to one of the younger boys of the town, or they’ll knock your head off. I’ll tell you the real reason why Ingram runs this town. It ain’t just because he’s a parson. It’s because he’s muy diablo, and we all know it!’

  Copyright

  A LEISURE BOOK®

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  The Way of the West copyright © 2008 Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  Long Ride, Hard Ride by Elmer Kelton first appeared in Western Novels and Short Stories (4/53). Copyright © 1953 by Stadium Publishing Corporation. Copyright © renewed 1981 by Elmer Kelton.

  The Morning War copyright © 2008 by Cotton Smith.

  The Desert Pilot by Max Brand copyright © 1927 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1954 by Dorothy Faust.

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