The man at the corner of the barn was crawling. Pierson nodded at him. “He’s gettin’ away, Ben.”
“Let him go. He won’t travel far with what he’s carrying. I know where I put it.”
Norman Shelde was still in the saddle, and he was alive. Either I’d shot too quick, trying to get the other man, or his horse had stepped over, for my bullet had smashed his gun hand, cutting deep into the web of flesh that joins the thumb to the hand. The bullet had gone right up the forearm and smashed through the arm at the elbow.
We just stood there, I don’t know how many seconds, and the shock was getting to me. I was shaking a little from reaction, and to cover it I started to talk.
“The odds weren’t just like you figured, Shelde,” I said, “so now you’re finished. Unless you’re pretty good with your left hand you’d better just ride out of here to some place where nobody knows you.”
The blood was dripping from his hand and arm, and when he moved the hand it looked like the thumb was dangling. That his arm was smashed at the elbow anybody could see.
He just stared at me, then at it. He was numb, shocked into silence.
“I didn’t want to kill anybody,” Pierson said. “I’m a friendly man. I never figured to hurt anybody at all, but they come at me.”
Elsa was out there. “You did just fine!” she said. “You did just what you had to do, and I’m right proud of you! You’d have done it before if I’d kept still, only I knew they’d never leave you to one man. It wasn’t like them.”
“I still want to leave here,” Pierson said. “I want to go to The Dalles.”
“Let’s round up those cattle,” I said, “it’s a long ride to South Pass.”
CHAPTER 24
* * *
I HAD PICKED UP mail from home at the last station, but there had been no time to read it. Hurriedly, I had stuffed it into my saddlebags and had been busy on other things.
Now I was trailing southeast toward the Blue Mountains with one hundred and twenty-two head of mixed stuff, most of it young. The grazing was fairly good, and by scouting ahead and locating likely meadows I would have little trouble with my small herd.
I had picked up three more horses from Pierson, and he and his daughters had helped with the crossing and to get started on the trail away from the Landing.
At the end of the first day Pierson drew up and thrust out his hand. “Ain’t likely I can ever thank you enough,” he said simply. “I would have faced those men but Ma couldn’t see me leaving my two girls without a pa in this country, an’ she was right. I’d likely have got one or two, but they’d surely have killed me.”
“Maybe,” I said. “You never know. Anyway, your family will do better at The Dalles, I’m thinking.”
I lifted a hand to them and turned away. The heads of the cattle were bobbing, dust was lifting from the road, and deep-marked in the sod to left and right were the ruts of long-gone wagons, the pioneer wagons, the first to cut this road.
The Blue Mountains hung in the misty distance, shadowy, changing, elusive, until a man could not say if they were mountains or only a mirage of mountains. We worked the cattle slowly on, taking our time, letting them fatten for the long drives to come, and saving our few horses.
Uruwishi, ancient as the ancient hills, rode like a young boy, and the gleam in his eyes was good. Once, reined in beside the road to let the cattle pass, I said to him, “I would like to have seen you as a young man, Uruwishi. You must have been something then!”
“I was a warrior,” he said simply. “I counted plenty coups, took many scalps.”
“What do you want for Short Bull?” I asked. “What do you see for him?”
He stared after the young Indian and then said, “I would wish he could ride the land as I did when I was young. Now he cannot, for the land has changed. He must go the white man’s way.”
“You think it is the best way?”
He looked at me. “No,” he said, “but it is here.”
After a while I told him, “Both of you can stay at South Pass with us. You’re good men, and we need good men.”
“In a white man’s town?”
“It is a man’s town,” I said.
To tell the truth I’d never given much thought to that side of it and thought there might be some argument from Webb and Neely. Webb would grumble, but when he saw the Indians would stand to their guns in time of trouble and do their share of what had to be done, he would say no more. As for Neely, I was used to him.
Of course, I had not opened the letters yet.
It wasn’t until a few days later, camped under the pines at Emigrant Springs, that I finally read them. There were three, from Ruth Macken, from Lorna, and from Ninon.
I opened Mrs. Macken’s letter first, for she was the one who would tell me most about our town and the people in it, and I was hungry to know. It seemed I had been away for such a long, long time.
Dear Mr. Shafter:
You will wish to know what has happened, or is about to happen, but first let me say there is no sickness here. That all is well I would hesitate to say. Since you left there has been a great change, and not all of it for the better.
Neely Stuart has done well with his mining. I believe he exaggerates what he takes from his claim, but it is considerable. He has hired both Ollie Trotter and that Pappin man to work for him on his claim, and that gives him more time to stir trouble.
Moses Finnerly has taken to preaching. John was holding services in the school building so Neely built Finnerly a church of his own, which the Stuarts, the Crofts, and several new families attend. I gather he devotes most of his time to preaching against. Against Mormons, Indians, John Sampson, our school, Drake Morrell, and often veiled references to your brother or myself.
Ninon will tell you what she wishes in her letter, but she is discontented. Since you left she has been unhappy, continually wishing you were back, and fearing you will marry somebody while gone. She has been used to a more exciting life than we can offer here, and I know she yearns for the theater.
Moses Finnerly has several times stopped her and tried to get her to come to his church, to sing in his choir. He wants her to be a soloist. I am not sure his motives are what one would expect of a minister of the gospel, but our Ninon is not one to be misled. She is young, but much too wise in the way of the world to be fooled by anyone as clumsy as the Reverend.
Mr. Stuart has evidently been paying Pappin and Trotter very well, for both men spend more than any honest workman should. Mr. Webb still attends our church, and has taken a profound dislike to “that gospel shouter” and his cohorts.
We still do not have a marshal, although Mr. Trotter considers himself such. Mr. Stuart appointed him guard at the mine, and Trotter has taken to wearing a badge. Two weeks ago a stranger in town suddenly untied one of Mr. Webb’s horses and started to ride away. Webb came to the door and shouted at him to come back and when he kept going, Mr. Webb shot him. I saw it, and it was a very good shot. It was with a Dragoon Colt and the man was at least one hundred yards off. The man fell, hit the dirt and started to rise, and Mr. Webb shot him again.
Ollie Trotter was in the saloon (oh, yes, we have one of those!), and he stepped to the door with a gun in his hand and demanded who had shot, and Mr. Webb turned on him and said he had, and what did he propose to do about it?
Mr. Trotter looked down the street at the horse thief, then at Mr. Webb, and went back inside the saloon.
The saloon was opened by a huge man who calls himself Dad Jenn. I suspect that part of the money came from Mr. Stuart from the way Jenn defers to him and to no one else. There are several toughs hanging about there much of the time.
My store is open, and I have done well. On the day it opened a dozen Mormons appeared and bought supplies. The freighting is done by a young Irishman named Filleen who has a livery stable. At last count we had sixty-two people in our town and four business establishments. Bud is working for Mr. Filleen and conducts the store for h
im when Mr. Filleen is out of town, freighting.
There was a little more, but that was the gist of it, and I wondered at how much had happened in the short time since I had been gone. The other letters I saved until later.
We moved on to Meacham’s Blue Mountain Tavern, nooned there, where I mailed a brief reply to Mrs. Macken and a note to Cain. We drove on into the Blue Mountains with the Wallowas a purple haze off to the east. After crossing the divide we turned over into a mountain meadow and bedded down. The next day we drove to Brown Town and bedded down southeast of town. I needed more help—the old man wasn’t going to stand up to this night work, and there was also the question of supplies. We’d managed to keep eating, all right, shooting an occasional deer, elk, or big horn, but we needed coffee.
Leaving the Indians with the stock I took a packhorse and rode over to Brown Town.
A few years before, maybe two or three, a man named Ben Brown had come back up the country to establish a home on a bench above the Umatilla River. Later he opened a store in his house as Ruth Macken had done in a like situation. A couple of other places had sprung up nearby.
“Howdy,” Brown said as I came through the door. “Seen your cattle. Where you headed?”
“South Pass, and I need another hand. Close up your store and come along.”
Brown chuckled. “Now that’s an idea. Fact is, I’d like to. Always wanted to prowl around in them Wind Rivers. The mountains, I mean. Afraid I can’t help you thataway.”
He took the list of supplies I’d made out and glanced over it. “Well, I can’t come up with most of this stuff.” He indicated my herd. “See you got a couple of Injuns along.”
“Umatillas. The old man is Uruwishi. I hear he used to be a big man among them.”
“He still is.” Brown looked at me thoughtfully. “That Injun was a big warrior in his time and a great wanderer and hunter. How’d you get him to ride along with you?”
“His grandson is with me, too. He’s sung his deathsong, and says this is his last ride.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it. That old coot can ride forever and outlast most of the young bucks in his tribe. Get him to telling stories, sometime. He knows ’em.”
He filled my order while I stood there, smelling the good smells of freshly ground coffee, of canvas, new leather, dry goods, and the like. I ate a couple of crackers from the cracker barrel and cut myself a slice of cheese from the big cheese he had on the counter.
This man had a nice little business going for him and I did not blame him for not wanting to pull out. I’d said it just in idle talk, anyway, but looking around me made me think of my own future. By the time this ride was over I should have worked out some sort of a plan for myself. From what Ruth Macken had said our town was growing, and I wasn’t altogether sure I’d like what I’d find.
“Got some paper? I’ll take the time to write a letter.”
Brown shoved a box across the table at me. “Help yourself. The ink’s there. Only got a quill pen…make them ourselves. Hard to replace others, this far out.”
So I sat down there on a stool by the counter and wrote out a letter to Cain. I told him a lot of things, but nothing about the shootings. That I hoped would be forgotten, and that the story would never get to them at South Pass.
We have one hundred and twenty-two head of young stuff, I told Cain, and they are coming on fine. By the look of things we will have several calves before we get to South Pass. The grass has been fair so far, and old Uruwishi says he knows the good meadows along the way.
We have had good weather, but clouds are building, and it looks like rain.
The way it looks now we will drive down Baker Valley, cross the Snake above the mouth of the Boise, go up Indian Creek to its head, across Camas Prairie, then across Wood River, and on across the Lava Beds near the sinks of Lost River. We will cross the Snake again near Eagle Rock, then take the Lander Cutoff through the mountains.
All of this planning may have to be thrown out the window if grass is not there or if conditions change the situation.
Brown told me the country ahead was in good shape. “Union’s the next place you’ll reach…it’s an easy drive, and there’s good grass. Better drive on past before you bed ’em down, though, so’s you won’t have trouble. They’re good folks but they take notions against people comin’ along and eatin’ up all their grass.”
We started them up in the morning when the dew was fresh on the grass, and the trail we took was traveled, for it was the way of the rolling wagons. This was the way they had come, those people bound for Oregon, this was their trail. The ruts they cut in the grass were there and the names they carved on the trees. The graves they left at the trail side were there, too, to mark the ones who did not finish the journey to the promised land.
Like them we had traveled on, stopping short of where we had planned to go, and suddenly when we topped out on the rise above the Grande Ronde, a wide bowl-like valley in the mountains, I knew this was the land where we had intended to come, to such a place as this. Yet we moved our cattle on, two calves to follow now.
We rolled down to the town of Union, scarcely begun yet, and bedded our cattle down beyond the fences that marked the land of Conrad Miller, the first settler there.
He came out to greet us, and to try to trade for our calves, but we would have none of it, for troublesome as they might be upon the trail, they would be the beginning of something at our destination.
At each place we stopped I asked for books. I was given some, and I bought some, and I traded for others. “You’re luckier than you know,” one trader said to me, “and you’re getting better books than you will five or ten years from now.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Travel will be easier. People traveling west will not have to consider each ounce of weight. Now they only bring the best, the ones that can be read over and over with profit, so the books you trade for are the good ones. Later the trash will come.”
“I’d find something to learn in any of it,” I said, “for even a man who writes trash has to think, to select, to try to write as well as he can.”
“Maybe.” The man was doubtful.
“I am an ignorant man,” I said, and there was no modesty in me when I said it, for it was simply the truth. “The little I have learned only shows me how very much there is to learn.”
“You won’t read much tonight,” he said, “even with four new books in your duffel. Unless I’m mistaken that storm has caught up with us.”
Oh, he was right! Far righter than he knew, for the clouds moved on and hung low and the rain pelted down, and the cattle got up, their horns glistening in the lightning flashes, and we were busy to hold them. Thunder rumbled in the hills nearby, and the trees bent before the wind, leaves lashing under the whipping of rain and wind.
There was no rest that night, for we rode round and round. Old Uruwishi did his bit, and we held them there on the grass until the storm had gone. Then we returned to our beds, to find them soaked and wet, but we crawled in anyway and slept.
Short Bull turned me out a few hours later. “There’s men coming,” he said, “maybe they make trouble.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked out to meet them.
They pulled up, a half dozen hard cases if ever I saw them. The first one was a big man with wide, sloping shoulders and a shock of blond, long uncut hair. He had small, cruel eyes, and I knew him for a tough, dangerous man.
“You drivin’ this herd?” He spoke roughly.
Now the night before had been long. I was tired. I had slept all night in my clothes, I hadn’t had a shave, a wash, or coffee, and I was feeling it. Normally I am, I think, a cautious man, but there was no caution in me now.
“I am.”
“We’ve come to cut them,” he said, “you’ve pulled in some local brands.”
“What’s your brand?”
“That makes no difference. I’ll know it when I see it.”
“There ar
e one hundred and twenty-four head here,” I said, “counting the two day-old calves. I started out of the Landing with one hundred and twenty-two head. There isn’t a brand in there but mine.”
“We’ll just have a look.”
“Like hell you will.”
He turned his eyes on me like he hadn’t seen me before, and he looked carefully.
“You’re asking for trouble,” he said.
“I’m ready for trouble, mister. I was born ready for trouble. I started from the Landing with this herd and we left three dead men on Washington grass, and a fourth who’ll carry the mark of that shooting his life long.
“Now I am in no mood for trifling. If you want to cut this herd you’re going to ride right over me to do it, so deal your hand and pick up your cards.”
They did not like it. They had thought to find some farmer or small rancher whom they could frighten into stealing half his cattle. I knew what they were and what they intended, and this morning I didn’t care. I was feeling mean and ornery as an old mossyhorn steer, and I’d called their hand.
Suddenly from back in the brush somebody jacked a shell into a Winchester, and they all heard the sound and knew what it meant. Somebody else was there, somebody they could not see but who could see them. It was no longer robbing some quiet farmer, some married man with responsibilities; it meant getting somebody killed for a few head of cattle.
“You walk a wide trail, stranger,” the big blond man said, “one day I’ll call your hand.”
“Do it now,” I said. “I’m here, you’re here.”
“I’ll wait,” he said. “I’ll wait until there’s nobody lyin’ up in the brush, ready to stretch my hide.”
“I don’t give a damn what you do, start shooting or start riding.”
He turned his horse. “All right,” he said, and then asked, “who’d you shoot up north?”
“We nailed three of them out of four,” I said, not bragging but hoping he’d accept the lesson and keep away. “And Norm Shelde won’t be shooting with that hand any more.”
Bendigo Shafter (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 18