I’ve seen men hanged for cold-blooded murder, for rustlin’ cattle, and for courtin’ the wrong gal too fervently, but I’d never seen a man hanged for this before—nor since. And I don’t reckon I ever will see the like of it again.
Old One-Eye wasn’t called that because he was a cyclops. He had two eyes; it’s just that one of ‘em didn’t work so good. Or at all, maybe. He’d been that way ever since I knowed ‘im. Maybe he was born that way; I don’t know; I didn’t know him that well. I don’t even know what his Christian name was. George? Bill? I don’t know. Everybody only ever called ‘im One-Eye. One-Eye Hogan.
One-Eye’s demise all took place in the course of a forenoon one day in the spring of the year. He claimed he had just borrowed the horse, but if he borrowed it the same as he borrowed other things, the lender (who wasn’t home at the time One-Eye did the borrowing) wasn’t likely to see that horse again this side of kingdom come. Old One-Eye had a bad memory when it came to returning things he borrowed.
As I said, in the course of just one morning the whole thing took place: the borrowing; the gettin’ up of the search party, or vigilante group, whatever you want to call ‘em; the catchin’ of One-Eye asleep beneath some cottonwoods, with the borrowed horse tied nearby; the informal trial there and ... well, I reckon I’m gettin’ ahead of myself.
Yes, I was there. I saw pretty much all of it. I was just a young ‘un at the time. I happened to come on the scene as I was riding my mule, Dapple, to school. I rode up to see what was happening. I knew everyone there. They was all neighbors of our’n. Mr. McCarthy, the rancher who had involuntarily lent the horse that was tied to the tree next to One-Eye, was none too glad to see me there.
“Now Strip, what’re you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“No,” I lied. “I was just there, but they let us out for the day on account of the teacher being taken sick.”
I figured whatever was happening there was about to become more interesting than the ciphering Miss Van Tassel liked to start the day out with.
“You go along home, then,” Mr. McCarthy said, “I don’t reckon your father would want you to be here.”
“He wouldn't’ mind,” I said, as brash as I could.
“I reckon that’s so,” Mr. Harris, our closest neighbor, put in. “Glen don’t hold nuthin’ back from Strip. He don’t mollycoddle him one bit, nosiree.”
Mr. McCarthy then just gave me kind of a disgusted look and says, “Well, then, just stay out of it and don’t say anything. It’s none of your concern, no how.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. From that point on they all as much as ignored me completely; they seemed to have forgotten I was there at all.
In his defense, One-Eye claimed he had only borrowed the horse, not stolen it. He said he done it because his horse had come up lame, and he had left his horse in McCarthy’s corral as collateral.
“Well, there’s somethin’ to that,” Mr. Call said. “Everybody knows that old hag of his, and him leavin’ it in your corral is a clear indication that he wasn’t tryin’ to hide that he’d been there.”
After brief discussion of this evidence, the self-designated judge and jury reluctantly accepted One-Eye’s version of the matter.
But Mr. McCarthy then said, “There is one more thing, though, One-Eye: Did you stop to eat at my cabin this morning?”
One-Eye admitted that he had.
“Can you read?”
“Yes, I can read,” One-Eye replied, a bit miffed by the question.
“Well, then, did you read my sign on the wall over the dinner table?”
“I noticed that there was a sign there, but I didn’t go to the trouble of reading it.”
McCarthy and the group of ranchers drew away and discussed One-Eye’ confession in low tones for a few minutes. They finally come to a decision. Mr. McCarthy turned to the defendant and delivered the verdict:
“One-Eye, you must swing, after all.”
I hadn’t heard what the ranchers had been whispering amongst themselves, so I was confused by this. So was One-Eye, understandably.
“Why? You know I was just a-borrowin’ your horse!”
“That may be, but what we’re hangin’ you for is for failing to read the sign—or for readin’ it and not followin’ through.”
And they did; hang him, I mean. I didn’t see it done; I had seen enough, and knew just about how things were gonna go: One-Eye would either blubber and beg or get terrible mad and start using hard language, so me and Dapple, we rode off at that point.
Later, though, I heard what happened after that: Mr. McCarthy invited his cohorts to view for themselves the scene he had come across early that morning.
Entering the cabin, Mr. McCarthy showed them the dirty plates, cups, and utensils that had been left on the table. Then he pointed to the sign on the wall, which read:
All are welcome to my grub
Take anything you wishes
But ‘fore you leave my little shack
Be damn sure you wash the dishes
The moral of the story may be about helping out with the dishes; or the lesson may be that there’s no real difference between being able to read but choosing not to and being illiterate.