There were three men settin' by that fire and I stood up and walked amongst them. I was right on them before they saw me and I kicked the boiling coffeepot into the lap of the nearest one.
The man whose back was to me started to get up and turn and I pushed him into the fire. Then I taken a swing with my rifle and fetched the next one in the belly. He went down and I walked into that outfit and never gave them a chance to get set.
Like I said, I'm a big man, but that ain't the important part. My shoulders and arms have beef on them from wrassling broncs and steers, from swinging an ax and rafting logs down the Mississippi, and I was feeling no mercy for an outfit that would tackle an old woman.
The one I'd shoved into the fire jumped out of it and turned, grabbing for his six-shooter. Well, if he wanted to play that way he could. I just pointed my rifle at him, which I held only in my right hand, and let him have the big one right through the third button on his shirt. If he ever figured to sew that particular button on again he was going to have a scrape it off his backbone ... if he had any.
The man into whose lap I'd kicked the coffeepot had troubles enough. He was jumping around like mad and I could see I'd ruined his social life for some time to come. He'd been scalded real good and he wasn't going to ride anywhere, not anywhere at all.
The other one was on his hands and knees, gasping and groaning. I pushed him over on his back with my boot and put the rifle in his face and looked down the barrel at him.
"You ever been to Wyoming?" I asked him. "Or Montana?"
He stared at me, his face a sickly yellow like his insides must have been.
"Well, when you can get on your feet, you start for one or the other, and you keep going. If I ever see you around again I ain't going to like it."
Taking up the three rifles I busted them over the nearest rock, then threw the rest of them into the fire along with the ammunition and their tent.
Then I sort of backed off into the night and went back to the house.
Aunt Em an' Pennywell, they were on the porch watching the fire out there, and when I came up the steps I said, "You kep' my supper warm, ma'am?"
"Yes, I did. Dish it up, Pennywell."
When I sat down to table, Aunt Em she said nothing at all, but Pennywell was younger and almighty curious. "What happened out there? What did you do?"
"Like Samson," I said, "I went among the Philistines and smote them, hip and thigh." And after a good swallow of coffee, I grinned at her and said, "And one of them in the belly."
Chapter 4
The rain soaked up the ground and went on about its business, and the sun came out hot as roasting ears. When I looked out front there was nothing beyond the gate but a lot of distance. Flanner's boys had taken out, and I didn't look for them to come back.
There was work to be done around the place. No Clinch Mountain Sackett was much account at fixin' up. Our places yonder in the high-up hills always looked fit to fall apart, only they never done it. Still, it griped my innards to see such a fine place run down like it was. Besides, I was wishful to be handy if any of Flanner's outfit came back again.
After a day or two, and no trouble showing, I taken off to the meadows to find us some meat.
Each meadow was a mite higher than the last, and all told there was a thousand acres of good bottom land, the stream running from one to the other. There was a fair stand of grazing under the scattered trees that stretched back to the mountains from the edge of the meadows, stretching back to sheer walls that reminded me of the Hermosa Cliffs edging the Animas Valley near Durango.
Old Man Talon had known what he was about when he came to this place. He had water, grass and shade, hay and timber for the cutting. There were other, higher meadows, bordered with groves of aspen. He had what was needed, logs for building and shelter from the worst of the storms. Above all, he had a closed-in land where few cowhands were needed, and where he could cut hay on the meadows against the cold of winter.
Below the ranch lay thousands of acres of prairie completely dependent for water on his mountain land. That prairie would graze a lot of cattle, but all those vast acres were nothing but useless without water for stock. Who held the Empty held the range. No question about it.
At first I paid no mind to hunting. From time to time I glimpsed deer but passed them by to scout the country. Nowhere did I see any fresh sign of horse or man, and that was what I hunted, being doubtful of any ranch a man couldn't get into.
There are few things men cannot do if they have a mind to, and I had a hunch Flanner had been trying the easy way. Now he would have to come up with something else, and that was what we must be ready for. Meanwhile, riding and looking, I corraled myself into a patch of thinking.
Milo Talon was a far-riding man, and he'd be somewhere along the outlaw trail. He favored no country over another, but moved. He was a more slender man than me, lean and hard as seasoned timber, good with horse, rope, or gun, and a handsome devil to boot.
Brown's Hole stuck in my mind, and it wasn't far off. If he wasn't there it was certainly a place where a man could start the word along the wild country trails. And if I was to get shut of this place I'd have to get him over here.
Barnabas? He was supposed to be in France. I knew nothing about France or any other place I couldn't get to on a horse.
Flanner wanted this outfit and he could buy the men to take it for him. A man who wouldn't hesitate to get an old woman killed was a man who wouldn't stop at much a body could think of. If he kept on pushing he was going to make me sore as a grizzly with a bad tooth, and I didn't want that. When I get really down to gravel mad I act up something fierce, and I had enough posses hunting me here and yon as it was.
A man could live well off the country. Deer and elk were around and I'd seen a sign of bear and lion. A mountain lion swings a big circle - maybe thirty-odd miles of it - and he usually manages to live off the elk or deer that are getting on in years or are too young to escape. From time to time he takes a rancher's calf.
Living in wild country you become like one of the animals. You learn their ways, you kill what you need to live and you bother none of the others and fight shy of them. I never killed anything unless pushed to it ... including men.
Clinch Mountain, yonder in Tennessee, was mighty sparse on topsoil, at least where we Sacketts lived. It made up for beauty what it lacked in richness. Ma used to say it offered more food for the soul than for the belly, so we Sackett boys taken to making our living with rifle and trap, but we never figured to take more than our due. We trapped a stream a year or two, then held off, let it be, and worked another one to let the first recover. There was a lot we boys didn't know, with no schoolin' to speak of, but we learned early that if you want water on the land you need beaver in the high country. They build their dams, keep them in repair, and they hold back in ponds water that would run off down the country to the sea, I never seen the sea, but they tell me it's off down the country somewheres.
Pa told us we held the land in trust. We were free to use it so long as it was kept in shape for the generations following after, for our sons and yours.
This was rugged country, faulted and twisted. It looked like it had been crumpled like a sheet of thin paper, with tilted layers whose saw-toothed edges had been honed down some by wind and rain. It would take months to learn all the canyons and hollows, rising higher and higher into green forest and finally to timberline and the gray and lonely peaks up yonder against the sky.
I'm tellin' you, man, that there was country!
The stock I'd seen was in good shape in spite of the fact they'd been kept in the high country, pasture Talon probably held back for the hot weather. Ordinarily up to this time they'd have been down on the flat plains, but due to the shenanigans of Flanner's boys they had to be holed up in the hills, which meant scant feed for later in the year.
On the way back I killed me a deer, dressed and skinned it, then rode on to the ranch.
When I got there Aunt Em was al
ready looking rested. Pennywell was pert, kind of flirty when she looked my way, but I fought shy of her. She bit her lips every time she turned her back to make them redder, and I'd seen her pinching her cheeks to bring the color to them. Not that she needed it much.
If she was setting her cap for me she was wastin' time. I'm too old a coon to be caught by the first trap I see, and I'd baited too many traps myself not to recognize the signs.
We set up to table and it was fine cookin', mighty fine. I said as much and Em said Pennywell done it, so I knew they were in it together. No wet-behind-the-ears girl could put vittles like that together.
Mostly when a girl invites a man to supper her sister or her mother or some friend fix up the meal, and all she does is put on a fussy little postage-stamp apron and set the table and dish it up just like she'd done it all herself.
By the hour I was gettin' irritated. I could have been into Arizona, almost, by this time, and headed for Californy and that ocean-sea. I was out there before, but never got right where I could see it. This time it would be different.
There was nothing out there but silence and the empty prairie, but I wanted them to come. I wanted them to come so's I could have it done with and be gone.
I never was much on waiting unless it was for game. I get meaner and meaner as time goes on. And I don't like being corraled. It just don't set right.
Which brought me around to thinking of Brown's Hole. Brown's Hole was a colossal big hollow set down amongst the mountains with mighty few ways to get in or out. It was a trapper's rendezvous one time, then mostly an outlaw hangout, although a few cattlemen had wintered herds there.
There were a few horse and cattle thieves who holed up between runnin' off one man's stock and another's. Tip Gault was there. For an outlaw he was a decent sort and a man I respected. I couldn't say the same for Mexican Joe. Mexicans and me usually got along. I'd spent some time down Sonora way, and they raised some of the best riders and ropers you'll find anywhere, and some mighty fine folks. But Mexican Joe was another sort of hombre entirely. The way I heard it he'd been run out of Mexico for things he'd done, but he was a mighty mean man with either gun or knife, favoring the latter.
I'd seen him a time or two, and he'd seen me, but so far we'd never locked horns.
What I had to do was make a fast ride to the Hole and back, trying to get out without Flanner knowing I was gone, and then get back before he found out. Anybody in the Hole might know where Milo was, but the ones most likely to know or to pass the word along were Tip Gault or Isom Dart.
Gault's outfit rustled horses and cattle mostly. It was not much of a business with them. They were just out to get money enough to throw a wingding once in awhile and have eating money.
Dart was a horse thief, too, but more cautious. He'd come close to losing his hair or winding up at the end of a rope not long before and he was a cautious man. That first close shave had taught him a lesson. He'd been a slave, freed by the war, and had come west under another name. He knew everybody along the outlaw trail and would give the word to any drifter who came along. Wherever Milo Talon was, he'd hear that word sooner or later, I hoped it would be sooner. What I really hoped was that Milo would be wintering in the Hole from time to time and they might know where he'd gone.
"Aunt Em," I said, when supper was finished, "I got to ride off a ways."
"Are you pullin' your stakes?"
"No, ma'am, but we got to get word to your son. I think if I rode out of here a spell I could give the word to a man who would pass it along."
She looked up at me, Em did. That old woman was no fool; she'd lived close to the edge for a good long time and she knew things.
"You going into the Hole?"
"Well ... " I hesitated, not wanting to lie, "I guess that's the best grapevine in the world, out of there."
"You mean Isom Dart? You tell him you're a friend of mine. We saw him through it once when he was bad hurt."
"Flanner's cookin' up something, and I hate to pull out like this, but it's got to be done."
We talked it around over coffee, thinking over the trail I had to ride. Aunt Em had been in the Hole herself, with her husband when they first came west
"We wintered in there our ownselves," she said. "We'd heard of it from some Cherokees who held cattle there."
Pennywell hadn't much to say. She sat across the table looking big-eyed at me and making me uneasy. When a talking woman sits quiet a man had better look at his hole card and keep a horse saddled.
The old house was warm and quiet. Taking up a rifle I walked out the back door and around to the front, holding close to the wall. Nothing showed against the skyline, but probably they wouldn't, anyway.
I stood listening for a while, but the sounds seemed right and I went back to the stable, forked down some hay for the stock, and looked over the horses. Then I went to the bunkhouse and got a pair of old, wore-out boots somebody had cast off. I taken them to the house.
"Ma'am," I said to Pennywell, "I want you to put these on."
She looked at the boots and then at me. "They're too big," she said, "and too old. Besides, I've got shoes."
"You've got none that make man tracks, and that's what I want."
She put on the boots and we walked out to the gate and up where the Flanner gunmen had their camp. We walked around, leaving tracks. They'd figure mine were the big ones, but they'd surely figure there was at least one more man on the place.
Later that night I got moccasins out of my saddlebags, put them on, and went out again. That way they'd see those tracks, too.
We Sacketts were mountain folk, and that meant we'd been woodsmen before we were riders. All of us had growed up among Indians and had learned to like moccasins for work in timber country; a man can feel a dry stick under his foot and not step down on it with a moccasin. With a boot or shoe it isn't that easy to go quiet.
Time was wasting, so when I came back I turned in for an hour or two of sleep. When I woke up, I got dressed and went into the kitchen.
Em Talon was there, and there was hot coffee on the stove. "I figured you'd be riding," she said. "Nothing like coffee to set a man on the right trail."
"Thanks," I said. I taken the coffee and set down across that well-washed kitchen table. "Aunt Em, you're quite a woman."
"Always wanted to be six feet high," she said, "my brothers were all six-footers, and I aimed to be high as them. I never quite made it."
"You stand tall in any outfit," I said. "I'd like to have known your husband."
"Talon was a man ... all man. He walked strong and he thought right, and no man ever left his door hungry, Indian, black man, or white. Nor did he ever take water for any man."
"He was a judge of land," I said, "and of women."
"We had it good together," Em said quietly, "we walked a quiet way, the two of us, and never had to say much about it to one another."
She paused. "I just looked at him and he looked at me and we knew how it was with each other."
Hours later, well down the trail to Brown's Hole, I remembered that. Well, they'd been lucky. It was not likely I'd ever find a woman like that, but no matter what any man says, there's nothing better than two, a man and woman, who walk together. When they walk right together there's no way too long, no night too dark.
Chapter 5
The Union Pacific tracks lay to the north, and beyond was the Overland Trail to California. On the Pacific side of South Pass that route divided into two, the northern becoming the trail to Oregon.
Horse and cattle thieves operating out of Brown's Hole had developed a thriving business stealing stock from emigrants on one trail and selling to those on the other. Occasionally the thieves drove their stolen stock into Brown's Hole for sale the following season. The grass was good, and by comparison with the country around the winters were mild.
To the north and east lay the Hole-in-the-Wall country; north and west from there, the Crazy Mountains with the border of Canada beyond. To the southwes
t of Brown's Hole lay Utah's San Rafael Swell with its Robbers' Roost, and south of that, Horse Thief Valley near Prescott, and a ranch near Alma, New Mexico. This was the country of the so-called Outlaw Trail.
In fact it was a maze of trails, obvious and hidden, and along those trails ranchers or homesteaders were friendly to drifting men, asking no questions, and providing no information to strangers.
Originally most of the trails had been scouted by Indians or mountain men, and here and there they had located hideouts away from prying eyes. A drifting man might ride from the Mexican border to Canada and be assured of meals and shelter or an exchange of horses anywhere along the route.
Those who rode the outlaw trail were not all wanted men; some were tough cowhands or drifters who traveled with the seasons and had friends among the wild bunch. A few were occasional outlaws, rustling a few cows when the occasion offered, playing it straight the rest of the time.
Milo Talon was known along the Trail. As there was constant movement up and back, it seemed the best way to get in touch with him was just to ride to the Hole and pass the word.
Morning came with me a-horseback. By daylight I'd put the Empty far behind and was snaking along a trail up through the pines and skirting the aspen groves. It was a fine, clear morning with the air washed clean by rain and drops hanging silver on every leaf. Even the wild things a body saw didn't seem to mind him much, so pleased they were with the morning.
My horse and me were of a mind. We taken our time, just breathing the good air, keeping an eye out for trouble, but just enjoying it. Far off and below I seen a dot that had to be buffalo. Most of them had been killed off, but here and there small herds had taken to the mountain valleys. Maybe two hundred in the lot I saw.
Of a sudden I rode out on a grassy slope that dropped steeply off into a valley far, far below. Ahead of me and a mite higher was a thick stand of aspen, and turning my horse I skirted the edge of that grove until I came on a likely spot. Putting my horse on a picket rope, I bunched a few sticks and with some shredded bark and twigs built myself a coffee-making fire.
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