Now Logan was a Clinch Mountain Sackett, and those boys from Clinch Mountain are rougher than a cob. There were those who called Logan an outlaw, but he was family, and he was handy with a shooting iron.
I wrote to him, too.
Trouble was, the shooting was likely to be over and done with before any of those boys ever got here, unless it was Parmalee, who was down in New Mexico, not far south of the line.
He might make it in time. And of a sudden I had a hunch we’d need him.
This country was shaping up for war.
Chapter IX
Leaving my gear at Berglund’s place, I mounted that grulla and rode down off the bench into the river bottom of the La Plata. It was very still. There was grass, and everywhere a body looked there were the tall white trunks of the aspen.
Stopping at the river I let the mustang drink from the cold water that ran down froin the melting snows on the mountains.
Across the stream I went up through the trees beyond. There was a plateau over there with good grass, a few clumps of oak brush here and there, but a fresh, green country lying at the foot of the mountains.
There were pines along the mountain slopes with thick-standing clumps of aspens of a lighter green. The aspen was usually the first tree to grow up after a burn, and the aspen groves provided a lot of food for wildlife.
Riding slowly along the edge of the mountain and up under the trees along the slope, I knew this was my country, this was where I wanted to be. This was the land I’d been looking for and no amount of Dunns would keep me off of it.
I headed back to Shalako.
The first person I saw when I walked into the saloon was old Galloway, and I never laid eyes on anybody that looked better.
“You look kind of peaked,” he said, grinning at me. “I declare, the first time I leave you alone you make out to get yourself killed, or nigh onto it.
“Flagan, this here’s Nick Shadow … a good friend.”
“Howdy.”
“My pleasure.”
We all sat down together at a table and went over what had taken place, and we came to agreement on Curly Dunn. Galloway looked me over mighty curious when I talked about Meg Rossiter, and I felt myself flushing. More because he was looking at me than anything else. It was no use him thinking there was ought between us, nor me thinking it either.
The only thing she wanted from me was distance, and I had no ache to a shoot-out with Curly Dunn over a girl that couldn’t see me for dust. What I had to tell them then was about the land I’d seen, and they agreed.
I taken to Shadow. Galloway and me, we see things about the same, and anybody I liked he liked and the other way around. Nick Shadow was a tall, handsome man but one who had judgment as well as education, and the two don’t always accompany one another. I’ve seen some men who were mighty bright in their books who couldn’t tell daylight from dark when it came to judging men or the condition of things.
Now I hold by the Good Book, but in some ways I am closer to the Old Testament than the New. I believe in forgiving one’s enemies, but keep your hand on your gun while you do it, mentally, at least. Because while you are forgiving him he may be studying ways to get at you.
I like my fellow man, but I also realize he carried a good measure of the Old Nick in him and he can find a good excuse for almost any king of wrongdoing or mischief. I wanted no trouble with the Dunns, and would avoid giving them cause, but at the same time I had common sense enough to realize they might not feel the same way. A man who starts imagining that others think good because he does is simply out of his mind. I’ve helped bury a few who did think that way … nice, peaceful men who wanted no trouble and made none. When feeding time comes around there’s nothing a hawk likes better than a nice, fat, peaceful dove.
“We can lay claim to land,” I said, “but we’ll have to have cattle on it. I’ve written to Parmalee.”
“I’ve got a few head,” Shadow said. “We might include them in the drive.”
We spent the evening talking about the ranch we wanted, the cattle drive to come, and the future of the country. There was or had been a fort over on the Animas, and Berglund told us there was a house over there if you wanted to call it that. So we were not alone in the country. There was an Irishman named Tun McCluer who had moved into the country and he was getting along with the Utes … which showed that it could be done.
McCluer told Berglund that the Utes and the Jicarillas usually got along, so the bunch who had been hunting me were likely to have been renegades, prepared to plunder anyone who crossed their trail. The Indians had men like that as well as the whites.
We stabled our horses in the livery barn and camped in the loft. Falling asleep that night I dreamed of my own outfit, and slept with the smell of fresh hay in my nostrils.
We moved over west of the town, and west of the La Plata, and we made camp there in a grove of aspen, a splendid country spread out before us. We decided we’d all spend some days working on the beginnings of a spread, and after that Nick Shadow would take off for the south to meet Parmalee and to round up his own cattle to join the herd.
“I don’t need to tell you boys,” he said, “but keep the Dunns in mind. They’re a tough, lawless outfit and they won’t take lightly to our being here. Especially after both of you have had words with Curly.”
First off, we built a corral, and then a lean-to. We built them back into the woods with a screen of trees between us and the open flat. Then we went back into the trees and cut some limbs here and there, and a whole tree yonder to scatter amongst the other trees and make a sort of crude barrier for anybody who tried to come up behind us. There was nothing that would stop anyone, but nobody could come up through those trees without arousing us.
Galloway and me, we weren’t like the usual cowhand, who’d rather take a whipping than do any work that can’t be done on a horse. We were both planting boys from the hills, who could plow as straight a furrow as the next man, if need be, so we spaded up a corner of ground, worked over the sod and went down to the store to buy seed. We planted potatoes, carrots, pumpkins and corn, to start. We had no idea how they’d grow, but if they did they’d be a help. Starting a home in a new land is never a bed of roses, but then we didn’t come looking for it to be easy.
Work pleasures me no more than the next man, but if a body is to have anything there’s no other way, although we found excuses enough to get up in the saddle and go perambulating around the country. Of course, that was necessary, too.
We’d chosen to locate near the opening of Deadwood Creek, with a mighty big ridge rising to the west of us, and Baldy Mountain to the east.
We had to hunt or gather for our grub, and we Sacketts were born to it. And that Nick Shadow—he might have been born in a castle, but he knew his way around with an axe, and took mighty fast to what we showed him about rustling up grub in the forest.
Working about the place and rustling for grub as we did, we kept out of sight.
We didn’t see anybody or even their tracks. Each of us would take a ride sometime during the day, and at night over the fire we’d tell of what we’d seen, so within a few days we were getting a fair picture of the country around.
Sometimes of a night we’d set about the fire and talk. Nick Shadow had education, but he never tired to hear our mountain expressions. We’d lost a few of them coming west, but an argument or a quarrel we still called an upscuddle, which seemed almighty funny to Nick.
“We don’t have so many words as you,” I told him, “so we have to make those we have stand up and do tricks. I never figured language was any stone-cold thing anyway. It’s to provide meaning, to tell other folks what you have in mind, and there’s no reason why if a man is short a word he can’t invent one. When we speak of beans that have been shelled out of the pod we call ‘em shuckbeans, because they’ve been shucked. It’s simple, if you look at it.”
“Learning,” Galloway added, “isn’t only schoolin’. It’s looking, listening and making-do. If a man
doesn’t have much or if he’s in wild country he’d better get himself to contemplate and contrive. Pa always taught us to set down and contemplate, take our problem and wrassel with it until there’s an answer. And then we contrive. Back in the hills we couldn’t buy much, and we didn’t have any fancy fixin’s, so we contrived. We put together what we could find and added it to something else.”
Nick, he knew a powerful lot of poetry, and like most lonesome, wandering men we liked it. Sometimes of a night he’d set by the fire and recite. He knew a lot of poetry by that fellow Poe who’d died about the time I was born. He used to live over the mountain in Virginia … over the mountain from us, that is, who lived on the western slope of the hills.
We’d never paid much mind to Nick Shadow’s talk of gold. There’d been Spanish people in Colorado from the earliest times, and for awhile there’d been French folks coming west from New Orleans when Colorado was part of the Louisiana country. The story Nick told us about the gold he knew of was known to others, too. But treasure stories come by the dozen in gold mining country, and everybody you meet has got a mine worth a million dollars or many millions, depending on how many drinks the owner’s had.
One night he said, “Finding the big caches, where they hid the millions would be accident now, because nobody knows exactly where it was hidden, but there’s another treasure that might be found, so I’m going to tell you about it.
“My grandfather had a brother who trapped in this country nearly fifty years ago, and much of the sign left by those early French and Spanish miners was plainly visible when he arrived in the country.
“The others had never heard the stories of the gold found in the La Platas, nor the less known stories of diamonds found there, and Arnaud was not the man to tell them of it, but he kept his eyes open, and he had an idea where to begin looking.
“No need to go into all the details, but I figure we’re not more than ten miles from that gold right now.”
“Ten miles is a lot of country,” Galloway suggested.
“They were headed up the La Plata, planning to take an old Indian trail that follows along the ridge of the mountains, and Arnaud was counting the streams that flowed into the river. Just past what he counted as the sixth one he saw what he was looking for … a dim trail that led up into the peaks.
“They continued on a mile or so further and then he suggested they stop and trap out a beaver pond they’d found. Arnaud volunteered to hunt meat for them and he took off along the river, and as soon as he was out of sight of the others he started back, found his trail and started up.
“It was a steep trail, unused in a long time, and he figured that in the two miles or so of trail he climbed about three thousand feet … he was judging in part by the change in vegetation. He reached a high saddle, crossed over and started down. He was looking for a creek that flowed out of the mountain, and he could see the canyon down which it flowed, but there was no longer a trail. That had played out when he reached the crest of the ridge.
“It was very cold, and the going was difficult. He had to move slowly because of the altitude. He crossed over the saddle, as I’ve said, but he had no more than started down when he heard a shot where he had left his friends. A shot, and then several shots.
“As you can imagine, he was in a quandary. If he went back to help his friends, it would take him the better part of an hour, moving as he would have to, and by then any fight would be over.
“Or perhaps they had merely killed a deer. In the final event, he continued on, found the head of the creek and found the marker, a piece of a ramrod thrust into a crack in the rock. The gold was cached just below it and to the right, and when he removed the stones he found a dozen gold bars, several sacks of dust, and one small sack of diamonds.
“It was too much to carry and now that he knew where it was he could come back any time. He took one sack of dust and dropped a couple of the diamonds in it and thrust it into his pack. Then he recovered the gold and started back.
“There had been no more shooting, but when he came near the bottom of the hill he took great care, studying out his trail in advance. He was still some distance from the beaver pond when he saw Mohler. He was lying face down in the grass with five arrows in his back, a golden carpet of dandelions all about him.
“Arnaud watched for several minutes but there was no movement from the body, no sign of life. From where he lay he could see the dead man still had his rifle and tomahawk, so the body had not been looted.
“Easing back into the brush he worked his way around toward the pond, and there near a fallen log he saw another one. He couldn’t make out who it was, but this body had been stripped, scalped, and mutilated.
“The fact that the one body had been stripped and the other had not implied the Indians were still around, so he moved back into the brush and lay quiet, listening.
“He stayed there all day without moving on the theory that if he did not move he would make no sound and leave no tracks. Several times he saw Indians, but each time they passed some distance away, and finally they mounted up and rode away.
“When it was dark he went down to Mohler, but the man was cold in death and had been stripped and robbed in the meantime. The others, if any remained alive, were busy getting away from there, and that was what he decided to do. The Utes had gone downstream, so he went upstream with the idea of striking the highline trail. He did, found one of the others of his party still alive, and together they got out of the country.”
“But the gold is still there?”
“The gold and the diamonds. Of the two he got out with, one was worthless. The other was an excellent stone, however, and with the results he bought a small farm in French Canada.”
“He never came back?”
“He decided to let well enough alone. He married, had children, but none of them were inclined toward adventure. I gathered they did not have much faith in their father’s stories. Their own lives were rather prosaic and his stories were unbelievable to them … but not to me.”
“Well,” I said, “it won’t do any harm to look. You say the place is close by?”
“Right back of that peak yonder. The start of that trail can’t be three miles from here.” He glanced over at Galloway. “Now you know why I was so willing to come along. I’ve been up here before, but these rivers were named when Arnaud was in here, and I wasted time on the Florida and the Animas before I realized they had to be wrong.”
We brought our horses in from their picket-ropes and after watering them, turned them into the corral. Then we bedded down and went to sleep.
There for a few minutes I lay awake, considering that gold. If we had it we could buy more cattle, fix our place up better, but I wasn’t counting any gold we didn’t have. A lot of folks had their hands on that gold and it hadn’t done any of them much good.
The fire died down to coals, and I could hear the rustling of the aspens and the faint sounds the horses made in the corral.
I wondered, suddenly, what had become of that wolf.
Chapter X
Many a campfire dies down with talk that doesn’t count up to much in the sunlight.
Around the fire is the time to talk of treasure, and ha’nts and witches and such, but come broad day there’s work to be done. Somewhere back down the line Parmalee Sackett should be starting north with a herd, and it was time for Nick Shadow to ride down to meet him.
It was also time for somebody to ride down to Shalako and burden themselves with grub for the next two weeks of work, and it spelled out to be me for that job.
The past few days had helped a sight when it came to my strength catching up to itself, and I felt a whole lot better. Still, we didn’t want to leave our place alone too long. Not that we had anything there. Galloway, he said to me, “Flagan, let’s ride this out for awhile. Let’s sleep out and see what they do.
If there’s to be a fraction over this let’s not have anything they can bum.” …
So we hadn’t
.
Nevertheless the thought of that gold was in all our minds, and it was in our thoughts to ride up there someday and have a look for it. Right now we had to pin down the things that were sure or that we were trying to make sure.
Shalako lay still under the afternoon sun when I rode into town. I was still wearing the moccasins because my feet were not quite well, and they were almighty tender around the edges where the flesh had been broken and torn and mashed by rocks, but otherwise I was dressed pretty well for the time, and for a working cowhand.
The first thing I saw was the buckboard from the Rossiter outfit, and Meg about to get down, so I swung my horse alongside and stepped down in time to take her hand and help her down.
She smiled, but I’d say it was a might cool, but when she taken my hand to step down she done it like a real lady, and I could see she set store by such things.
Fact is, I set store by them myself. It pleasures a man to do graceful things for a lady, and if she’s pretty, so much the better. We’d be a sorry world without the courtesies, as Ma used to say.
“My!” Meg said. “I would scarcely know you!”
Me, I blushed like a fool, which I have a way of doing whenever a woman says “I, yes, or no” to me. And the blushing makes me mad at myself, which makes me blush all the more. So I stood there, all red around the ears like a dirt-kicking country boy.
“I got me an outfit,” I said finally. And then I added, “We’re fixing to go ranching, me and Galloway and Nick Shadow.”
“How nice!” she said primly, and then with a little edge to her voice she said, “I’m surprised you have the nerve after the way you backed down for Curly Dunn.”
Now I never backed down for no man, and she knew it, but girls like to put a man in a bad place and she had done it to me. Like a fool I started in to argue the question, which I shouldn’t have done. “I never backed down for him,” I said, “or any man.”
She turned away from me. “If I were you,” she said, “I’d leave while I could.
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