Now that he had time, he thought about what he’d said to Scott and Scott to him. Mostly he kept hearing that damn calm, quiet voice: <<“Its always been about the money for you.”>> Like it was a fact. <<“You just have a price.”>> His brother hadn’t betrayed any emotion--no anger or scorn--no fear in that voice either. Johnny had to admire that. He knew that he’d lost his temper back inside, when his punch had sent Scott toppling over in the chair. But even before, Johnny figured he’d gone too far, played it so well trying to convince the Velasquez’ and Gordon that Scott must have believed him too.
He remembered what Gordon had said about Scott writing that message to Murdoch, telling their father that Johnny was in on the ransom plan. <<And then if he doesn’t go and try to use his one bullet on the Velasquez’ anyway.>> If Scott hadn’t done that, maybe Diablo would have decided to finish off ol’Johnny Madrid for good.
When Johnny arrived in Morro Coyo, he learned that his brother had been transported by buckboard back to Lancer. He didn’t hang around to ask any other questions. It wasn’t a surprise that Murdoch would be wanting to get Scott home if at all possible, but moving him so quickly didn’t sound good to Johnny. He figured that could mean that his reflexes had taken over and he‘d shot too well----that Scott was dying, if he wasn’t already dead. If that were the case, Johnny decided he could wait until morning to find out. And he’d spend the night praying that Scott didn’t share a slow, agonizing death with Eduardo Velasquez.
Johnny headed towards the recently visited line shack; he knew he could get some food there, take care of the graze on his leg. He dreaded returning to the hacienda. He pictured the questioning looks, Teresa’s sad face, Murdoch . . . What would he say to Murdoch? Would Murdoch give him a chance to say anything? If Johnny found out Scott was dead, that he’d killed him, well, he’d just leave. <<“Right . . . Just take off’--- that’s . . . original.”>> Johnny shook his head. Hell, even if Scott pulled through, he’d probably end up going anyway---and it was pretty unlikely that his brother would come after him again. Johnny wasn’t very good at explaining, couldn’t figure what he’d ever say to Boston that would make things right. So it looked like the Velasquez’ would have their revenge; whether Scott Lancer lived or died, Johnny was certain that he’d lost his brother . . . .
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It was nearing sunset the next day before Johnny finally turned up at the ranch house. Since it was suppertime, he expected that most everyone would be occupied, that he might be able to find his way to Scott‘s room unnoticed. Johnny remembered when Scott had moved from the large guest room in which he’d been settled upon his arrival at Lancer. When Scott had told Murdoch that he rather enjoyed the idea of having an exterior door to his room, his older brother had given Johnny a sly grin and a meaningful look. Now Johnny hesitated a long moment outside that door. Then he quietly pushed it open and was momentarily overwhelmed with relief when he saw Scott lying there in the bed. Teresa was seated beside Scott--- she was leaning forward to smooth the blanket. The girl looked up at the sound of Johnny expelling the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. She said “Johnny”, in a tone that sounded as if she wasn’t altogether pleased to see him. Teresa quickly glanced at Scott, then back at Johnny again: “He just fell asleep.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t wake him.” Johnny removed his hat as he walked to the foot of the bed and gazed down at his brother. Scott’s face was pretty bruised up and he had a bandage on the cut above the now quite colorful left eye. He seemed to be breathing easy enough . . .
Seeing Johnny’s expression, Teresa relented. “He was asking for you,” she volunteered.
“Teresa,“ he said without looking at her, “you think maybe you could let Murdoch know I’m here?” The girl gave him a long look, before hurrying from the room.
Johnny sat for a few moments in the chair that Teresa had vacated. Then he slowly stood up and replaced his hat. <<Might as well get this done,>> he thought.
He found Murdoch and Teresa standing at the foot of the stairs. “Johnny, where have you been? We were worried about you”, Murdoch asked as Teresa hurriedly brushed past Johnny on her way back to Scott’s room.
“Yeah, well . . “
Murdoch fixed him with a stern look. “I want to hear exactly what happened, Son. Now.” Then he abruptly turned and headed into the library. Johnny followed, watched as Murdoch poured himself a drink. When the older man turned back to face him, Johnny quietly said, “You might as well pour me one too.” Johnny removed his hat again, as he crossed the room to accept the extended glass. Murdoch sat down and waited expectantly. His younger son positioned himself on the edge of a chair facing him, looking at his glass as his gathered his thoughts.
Without looking up at the man seated across from him, Johnny quickly outlined the story. “A while back, I shot the Velasquez’ younger brother in a gunfight. They heard I was here, figured they could pay me back by killin’ Scott. Seemed like I could keep him alive a while longer if they thought he didn’t matter to me that much. “
“And the ransom was to buy more time.”
Johnny looked up at this. “Yeah.” He took one sip of his drink before he continued, eyes on Murdoch’s face now. “Something tipped them off that maybe I wasn’t tellin’ the truth, so they set it up so he’d have to face me.”
“Scott hasn’t said much, except that they had a gun on you . . . he seems to feel that you had no choice.”
It was with a flash of anger that Johnny realized what they all must think, that he’d put a bullet in Scott just to save his own hide. Not so very long ago, he wouldn’t have cared enough to try to explain. Now he was going to say it, and Murdoch could believe him or not. “There was a third man on the roof. Ready to put a bullet in the back of Scott’s head--- if I didn’t drop him myself.”
There was a silence as Murdoch considered this. Finally he said, “Sounds to me as if you made the right decision, Son.”
His voice still barely containing his anger, Johnny responded, “Scott don’t know that.”
“You’ll have a chance to tell him. The doctor says he’s going to be okay.”
Anger subsided as Johnny absorbed this welcome information. Then he tossed back his drink. “I still shot him, Murdoch. And he ain’t never gonna forget the things I said.”
“Such as?“
Johnny got up and paced restlessly around the room. He addressed his next words to the walls. “That he was nothin’ to me. How I wanted all this,” he gestured to the room, “to be just mine.”
“And you think Scott believed that.”
“Yeah.“ Johnny was certain of it. He wasn’t about to explain that his words had been most convincing because Scott had heard them before. That he‘d actually meant them the first time he’d said them to his brother. It was something he couldn’t ever change, any more than he could alter the events in his past which had caught up with him and put Scott in danger. Wearily, Johnny turned back towards Murdoch. “Then I said I wanted to be rid of him. Called him a traitor and said I’d been hopin’ Cassidy would catch up with him and save me the trouble.”
Murdoch started perceptibly at the name Cassidy. “You said that to Scott?”
Johnny met his father’s eyes. “Yeah.”
Murdoch got up and crossed to his desk. He pulled an envelope out of a drawer and walked over to Johnny. “Here. It’s the ransom note and the message that Scott sent.”
Johnny reluctantly removed a sheet of paper from the envelope and unfolded it. Below Gordon’s demand for $6000 in cash, to be placed in a box and left in care of Gus at the saloon, he saw a few lines written in Scott’s flowing script. “Johnny seems to be working with them," his brother had written.
Johnny read the rest of the short message and stared at his brother’s distinctive signature--the crossing of the two ‘Ts” in his first name beginning the large looping “L” of Lancer. Finally, he looked up at Murdoch, who was perched on the edge of a table, watching him. Holding up the note, Johnny said: “’Seems to be’ . . . yeah, so,---- he’s got a real polite way of puttin’ it.”
“Johnny, whatever he wrote, Scott knew they were going to read it. But I thought he was trying to get a message to me ----with Cassidy’s letter.” Murdoch gestured at the envelope in Johnny’s left hand. Johnny held it up and fished out two more pages. As Murdoch turned to pour himself another drink, Johnny found where the letter started with “Dear Scott”, and sat down. He suddenly felt very tired. The events, and the liquor, were catching up with him. Reading didn’t come easily, and he didn’t really care what someone like Cassidy had to say, but Murdoch seemed to think it was important.
When he reached it, the sentence leapt out at him: “Of course, the truly bad seeds always stay the way they are“, Cassidy had written. Johnny angrily tossed the pages to the floor as he stood up. “Some message--,“ he said coldly. “So I’m the ‘bad seed’ that stays that way?” He turned to leave.
“Johnny, wait.” Murdoch’s voice was a command. “Sit down.” Johnny merely turned and stared at him. “It’s the second page“, Murdoch said, “the one that Scott put on top."
As Johnny still stood motionless, Murdoch stepped over to the fallen papers, picked them up, and in a milder voice, made his instruction a request. “Please, Son, sit down.”
Johnny edged back to the chair he had just vacated, but put his hat squarely on his head as he lowered himself and then leaned back into it. Murdoch stood over him, holding the letter. “Your brother folded the pages so that this paragraph would be the first thing that I saw,” he said and then started to read: “He probably didn’t tell you this, but Johnny . . . “. Murdoch continued with Cassidy’s account of Johnny’s attempt to forcibly escort the ex-lieutenant from town, as well as the threat that Johnny had made against the man if he ever considered returning. Dan had concluded with “Johnny hasn’t known you as long as I have, but your brother never doubted you. I’m glad to know, Scott, that you have someone that you can always rely upon.”
In the shadow of his hat brim, Johnny blinked, hard. <<Something else that fool Cassidy was dead wrong about.>>
“You never told us that you’d gone after Cassidy on your own.”
“Didn’t work, did it?”
“That’s not the point, Johnny. Scott wanted me to know. And if you told him that you were hoping that Cassidy would find him and kill him, then Scott knew you were lying.”
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Johnny slept in the next day. When he finally wandered out of his room, he encountered Teresa coming out of Scott’s, carrying a tray. He figured that Murdoch must have said something to her, because she was smiling at him this morning. “I haven’t told him that you’re here,” she said, nodding at the half open door expectantly. Johnny didn’t smile as he moved towards it.
On the other side of that door, Scott Lancer looked up at the ceiling and thought about how many times he’d been shot since arriving in California; easily more than during his entire military career. None of them too serious, fortunately. But this time . . .
When he’d been standing in the alley opposite Johnny Madrid, waiting to be gunned down, a memory had come to him. It was something his brother had said once, that to avoid being killed by a bullet to the heart, you should shift your weight to the right, fall to the right. <<Well, falling wouldn’t have been particularly difficult>>. Of course Scott hadn’t fallen, but through sheer will had forced himself to stand still, and wait. And then, when he had decided to trust Johnny Lancer, to try to help his brother by drawing his gun and firing at the Velasquez brothers, everything had happened so quickly. He couldn’t remember whether he’d moved right or not, but he shouldn‘t have needed to. What Scott did recall vividly was knowing that he had been hit, and knowing exactly who had fired the bullet.
The searing wound on his left side had been one more addition to his collection of pain. Lying on the ground, Scott had been vaguely aware of Murdoch’s presence, his father’s voice like distant rumbling thunder. Then he’d had to endure various disembodied hands probing the injured area. Scott hadn’t completely blacked out until he’d been lifted into the buckboard. The next thing that he could remember was waking up in his own bed, with Teresa’s angelic face hovering nearby. She’d eventually told him that it had been Johnny who had gone to Spanish Wells for the doctor and that his brother had not yet returned to the ranch. Then it had been Murdoch at his bedside, demanding to know what had happened. Scott had told him only parts of the story, giving Johnny every benefit of the doubt. But he still had his own unanswered questions.
During the conversation between Johnny and the outlaws, Scott had wanted to believe that he was listening to his brother, Johnny Lancer. But what he had heard, and very clearly, were the words of the mercenary, Johnny Madrid. It was only afterwards that he had come to believe that the ransom scheme must be his brother’s effort to gain time in order to work some unknown plan. But whatever Johnny’s “plan” had been, it clearly hadn’t worked out very well at all, leaving him instead with two bad options: shooting Scott or being shot himself. Johnny had made his choice. Now it seemed that he had also decided to leave Lancer yet again. <<Probably for good this time--------- >> Scott was thinking when he heard a soft knock on the door.
“Might as well get it said. Just go on in and get it done.” Johnny had muttered these and similar phrases to himself. But he had continued to stand in the hall outside Scott’s room for quite a few minutes. Finally, he tapped lightly on the door and waited until he heard Scott’s voice murmur, “Come in.” Scott was propped up on a stack of pillows, and he was clearly surprised to see Johnny enter. Well, it was apparent that Scott couldn’t actually “see” any thing with his left eye, but Johnny felt the right one tracking him from the door, across the room, and over to the chair beside the bed, to Scott‘s left. Johnny sat down and then realized that he still didn’t know what to say.
Not that it mattered, because Scott had something on his mind. He was the first to break the lengthening silence. “Listen, Johnny,” he said slowly, “ . . . I wanted you to know that . . . I didn’t mean . . what you may have thought . . . about your moth--”
Johnny finally cut him off. “Weren’t no worse than anything I said to you.”
Scott shook his head in disagreement. “But I wasn’t entirely certain why you said those things, or what you were doing," he admitted. “Not until I thought about it afterwards, and particularly what you’d said about Dan Cassidy.”
“Never thought you were a traitor, Scott,“ Johnny said quietly. Then he shrugged. “So we put on a pretty good show for the Velasquez brothers.”
Scott looked away, then sighed and decided that he just wasn’t able to leave it at that. He searched Johnny’s face with his one good eye. “It wasn’t all show. There was some truth to it.”
Leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees, Johnny looked down at the floor, “Yeah,“ he said, in a tired voice. Then he looked right back at his brother and said, with some intensity, “Still just words, Scott.”
Scott considered this for a long moment. “As in ‘actions speak louder’?” he asked, finally.
“Yeah, somethin’ like that.”
Leaning back against the pillows, Scott looked up at the ceiling. “All right,” he said, his voice taking on a harder edge. “Then let me just ask you why. . .” He stopped himself and took a breath. Johnny sat silently, waiting to hear which of his actions his brother would question first. But when Scott did continue, it wasn’t one of the questions that Johnny had been expecting. “So tell me, Johnny," Scott asked in a milder tone, “where was Gordon?”
Johnny was surprised at that; he hadn’t believed that Scott knew about Gordon. He answered carefully: “On the roof behind you. . . I didn’t have a clear shot at him, if that’s what you’re askin’.”
Johnny watched for a long moment as his brother thought this over, puzzled it out, fit the pieces together. Finally, Scott turned to him, and in that calm, matter-of-fact voice of his, he said: “If you’d missed me entirely, I’d be dead.”
Although feeling as if a tremendous weight had been lifted, Johnny resisted the urge to leap up, and instead leaned back in the chair. He managed a casual reply: “That’s how I figured it.”
Scott spoke deliberately and sincerely, although with a somewhat rueful smile: “Well, then, Brother, thank you.”
Johnny managed a small smile of his own, reached out, and lightly clasped Scott’s upper arm as he rose from his seat. Deciding that there was something more that he had to say, he sat back down again. Johnny knew that he wouldn’t--couldn’t--- apologize to his brother for being Johnny Madrid. From what he knew about Scott, maybe he didn‘t need to. “Listen, Scott, . . .“ he said, finally, addressing his brother’s damaged profile, “Look, ----I’m sorry . . . ‘bout messing up your face. . .
Scott slowly turned his battered visage towards Johnny, and gazed at him with one blue eye. “Johnny”, he said very seriously, “I was actually much more concerned about what you did to my hair.”
Johnny managed to restrain himself from taking a friendly slap at his injured brother, but was unable to halt the grin from spreading over his face. He stood quickly and turned away. Noting that defensive movement by his younger brother, Scott smiled fondly at Johnny’s back, a smile that swiftly disappeared when Johnny turned once more to face him. Placing his hat squarely on his head, Johnny looked down at Scott. “You really weren’t plannin’ to draw.”
“No, I wasn’t."
“So why’d you change your mind?”
Scott was surprised by the question. “Well, it was the Latin-----germanitas. I‘m glad you thought of it,” he said, then added more softly, “Though I almost missed it.”
Johnny made a self-deprecating sound. “I prob’ly didn’t say it right.”
“No, not exactly.” Scott smiled. “But it sounded very good to me, Brother.”
Johnny grinned at him. Pointing at Scott, he said, “You need to just stay out of trouble now, Boston.”
As Johnny headed towards the door, Scott settled back on his pillows and looked up at the ceiling.
“Johnny?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t forget we still have that fence to mend.”
“Right. Well, I ain’t startin’ without you.”
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EPILOGUE
Even though the brothers rarely spoke of it, an incident as dramatic and disturbing as the "gunfight", as well as the events leading up to it, could not help but have a lasting impact.
Once he had learned that his brother was not severely injured, Johnny had not lost too much sleep over wounding Scott; given the sudden turn of events with which he'd been presented, he felt that he'd had no other recourse. He had not had a clear shot at Gordon and could not possibly have beaten Diego Velasquez, whose gun was already drawn. Still, the memory of hours of agonizing uncertainty about his accuracy drove him to be even more diligent in seeking opportunities for practice. Rather than the gunshot wound, it was the small jagged scar on his brother's brow that haunted him. Although it healed well, it would always be faintly visible. It was a memento of the very last time that Johnny would reflexively presume the most unfavorable interpretation of Scott's words. For Johnny, that mark would remain a reminder not only of a momentary loss of control, but also of the manner in which his past had reached out to touch his brother.
While growing up in the border towns, and during his career as a gunfighter, Johnny had encountered only a very few men after whom he wished to pattern himself. Those men whom he had identified as models had been singled out for their pride and cunning, their ability to fight and, of course, their proficiency with a gun. It appeared that this man from the East also possessed admirable qualities: strength, courage and self control. Somewhat to his surprise, Johnny had also come to appreciate as well Scott's ability to trust and willingness to forgive. Despite his initial negative impression, even disregard, of his Boston brother, Johnny now knew that Scott Lancer was someone that he both wanted and needed at his side. Johnny figured that he would value Scott’s trust more than most--- and he didn’t plan on ever again needing his forgiveness. In his heart, Johnny believed that Scott's faith and compassion would eventually cause his brother grief. Someone had to help Boston stay out of trouble, and Johnny resolved to be vigilant in that regard.
While Scott's nights were for a short time filled with images of being gunned down by Johnny Madrid, he was gratified to know that he had weathered the real life ordeal while still maintaining the self control which was so important to him. "Forgiving" Johnny had not been very difficult once Scott fully understood the circumstances and the motivations behind his brother's actions. Johnny's need for independence and his skill with a weapon were unquestioned, but Scott was also coming to appreciate some of his brother's complexities. In the aftermath, Scott carried with him a conviction that his impulse to trust his brother had been, and would continue to be, validated. He firmly believed that the future would confirm the words that Dan Cassidy, of all people, had written: that his brother Johnny was someone that he could always rely upon.
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Also to my husband for being so understanding about this new hobby.
Sharon
2003
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