the Mountain Valley War (1978)

by L'amour, Louis - Kilkenny 03

  Jack was going about the business of making a bed on the floor as though he had spent his life at it. He was pleased with this chance to show some skill, some ability to accomplish.

  Trent checked his guns as he had checked them every night of his life, and for a minute after the checking, he held them, thinking. Then he hung the gun belts on the peg once more. The time was not yet.

  Chapter 2

  The early-morning sun was just turning the dew-drenched grass into settings for diamonds when Trent was out of his pallet and roping horses. Yet, early as it was, when he returned to the cabin the fire was lit and Sally was preparing breakfast. She smiled bravely, but he could see she had been crying.

  Jack, only now beginning to understand what had happened, was showing his grief through his anger, but was very quiet, moving about the business of taking up the pallets and stowing them away. Trent was less worried about Jack then about Sally, for he knew her story.

  According to what Dick Moffit told him, he had found Sally Crane hiding in the bushes some six years before, after he and those with him had come upon a few burned-out wagons. Her family had been murdered by a party of renegades posing as Indians, and she had been picking wildflowers when the attack came, suddenly and without warning.

  Dick Moffit and his wife made a home for her, and when Dick's wife had died a year before, Sally had quietly taken over the cooking and housekeeping, which she had only shared before. She had shown herself a cool, competent girl, but two such tragedies were shock enough for anyone to stand.

  "You're being a very brave girl, Sally. You'll make some lucky man a good wife."

  "I hope to," she said.

  "Anybody can take the easy times," he said. "It's when the going gets rough that the quality shows. Now, when we've had breakfast, we're riding over to the Hatfields'. You already know them, so there's nothing I can say except that they are the salt of the earth.

  "The Hatfields know who they are, they know what they believe in, and their kind will last. Other kinds of people will come and go. The glib and confident, the whiners and complainers, and the people without loyalty, they will disappear, but the Hatfields will still be here plowing the land, planting crops, doing the hard work of the world because it is here to be done. Consider yourself fortunate to know them."

  When breakfast was over he took them to the saddled horses. Then he walked back inside, and when he returned he carried an old Sharps rifle. He held it in his hands for a moment, looking at it, then he held it up to Jack.

  "Jack," Trent said, "when I was fourteen I was a man. Had to be. Well, it looks like your father dying has made you a man, too.

  "I'm giving you this Sharps. She's an old gun but she shoots straight. I'm not giving this gun to a boy, but to a man, and a man doesn't ever use a gun unless he has to. He never wastes lead shooting carelessly. He shoots only when he has to and when he can see what it is he's shootin' at.

  "This gun is a present with no strings attached except that any man who takes up a gun accepts responsibility for what he does with it. Use it to hunt game, for target practice, or in defense of your home or those you love.

  "Keep it loaded always. A gun's no good to a man when it's empty, and if it is settin' around, people aren't liable to handle it carelessly. They'll say, 'That's Jack Moffit's gun and it is always loaded.' It is the guns people think are empty that cause accidents."

  "Gosh!" Jack stared at the Sharps. "That's a weapon, man!" He looked at Trent with tears of gratitude in his eyes. "I sure do promise, Mr. Trent! I'll never use a gun unless I have to."

  Trent swung into the saddle and led the way into a narrow game trail through the forest. He was under no illusions as to what lay ahead. In this remote corner of southwestern Idaho the law was far away and Hale was a widely known and respected man. The natural assumption of any law officers would be that Hale was in the right. He was known as a respectable, law-abiding citizen always prepared to help with any good cause. Those opposed to him would have to prove their case.

  "You know, Jack," he commented, "there's a clause in the Constitution that says the right of an American to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged; The man who put that clause there had just completed a war that they won simply because seven out of every ten Americans had their own rifles and knew how to use them. They wanted a man to always be armed to defend his home or his country.

  "Right now there's a man in this area who is trying to take away the liberty and freedom from some men. When a man starts that, and when there is no law to help, a man has to fight. I've killed men, Jack, and it's a bad thing, but I never killed a man unless he forced me into a corner where it was me or him.

  "This country is big enough for all of us, but some men become greedy for money or power and come to believe that because they have the money and the power, whatever they do is right. Your father died in a war for freedom just as much as if he was killed on a battlefield.

  "Whenever a brave man dies for what he believes, he wins more than he loses. Maybe not for him but for men like him who wish to live honestly and decently.

  "Hale showed no interest in this land until we moved here. He's got plenty of land, and every man jack of us filed on our land and we have all built cabins and put in crops. Our part of the bargain with the government has been fulfilled so far, and we have legal right to our land, and Hale has no claim on it except that he wants it. He's never run stock up here and he has never used any water here."

  The trail narrowed and grew rough, and there was no chance for conversation. Trent felt the quick excitement he always felt when riding up to this place. It was a windy plateau among the tall pines, and when they topped out he drew rein as he always did at that point to look out over the vast sweep of country that lay below and around.

  On one side lay the vast sweep of country in which Cedar Valley was a mere fleck on the great page of the country. A blue haze seemed always to hang over that distant range and those that succeeded it. Here the air was fresh and clear with all the crispness of the high peaks and a sense of limitless distance.

  Skirting the rim, Trent led on and finally came to the second place where he always stopped. Westward and south lay an enormous sweep of country that was totally uninhabited so far as anyone knew. Avoided even by the Indians, it was in part a desert, in a greater part merely a wilderness of rocks and lava. Gouged out and channeled by no man knew what forces, there were the beds of long-vanished rivers, craters, weird formations of rock, and canyons impossibly deep and not even to be seen until one reached the very rim. There were places where a reasonably strong man could pitch a rock across a canyon that was two thousand feet deep. It was a vast, unbelievable wilderness, ventured into by no man.

  An Indian had once told Trent that his father knew of a way across the country, and even of a horse trail to the bottom of the deepest canyon, but no living man knew it, but nobody seemed to care. It was to most men simply a place to be avoided, but Trent felt drawn to it, his own loneliness challenged by that vaster loneliness below.

  Often there was a haze of dust or distance hanging over the area so its details could not be clearly seen, yet Trent had taken the time to ride often to this place and study the terrain below in all its various lights and shadings, for no land looks the same at sunrise as at sunset, and during the day it presented many aspects.

  Far and away were ragged red mountains, broken like the stumps of broken teeth gnawing at the sky.

  "Someday," he told himself, "I'm going down there and look around, although it looks like the hot mouth of hell."

  Parson Hatfield and his four tall sons were all in sight when the three rode into the yard. All were carrying their long Kentucky rifles.

  " 'Light, Trent. I was expectin' almost anybody else. There's been some ructions down the valley."

  "They killed Moffit. You know Sally and Jack. I figured you could make a place for 'em. Kind of awkward for me, with no woman around."

  "You thought right, son. The good Lord
takes care of his own, but we uns has to help now and again. There's always room for one more under a Hatfield roof."

  Quincey Hatfield, the oldest of the boys, joined them. "Pa tell you about ol' Leathers?"

  "Leathers?" Trent's awareness of Hale's strength warned him of what was to come. "What about him?"

  "He won't sell nothin' to we uns no more." Quincey spat and shifted his rifle. "That means we got to go three days across country to get supplies, an' no tellin' what he'll do whilst we're gone."

  Trent nodded. "Looks like he plans to freeze us out or kill us off. What are you folks planning to do?"

  Parson Hatfield shook his head. "Nothin' so far. We sort of figured we might get together with the rest of the nesters and work out some sort of a proposition. I'll send one of the boys down to round up Smithers, O'Hara, an' young Bartram. Whatever we do, we should ought to do it together."

  He rubbed his grizzled jaw and a sly look came into his blue eyes. "Y' know, Trent, I always had me an idea you was some shakes of a fightin' man your own-self. I got an idea with some guns on you'd stack up right with some of those hard cases Hale has ridin' for him."

  Tent smiled. "Parson, I'm a peace-lovin' man who come into the hills because they were restful. All I want is to be let alone."

  "What if they don't let you alone?" Parson chewed his tobacco slowly, contemplatively.

  "If they start bothering me and killing my friends, I might get upset. You folks want to farm and raise stock. I want to do that, too, but I also want to sit quiet sometimes and watch the smoke curl up from my chimney."

  Hatfield shrugged a thin shoulder. "I got no worries about you, Trent. I haven't spent my life a-feudin' and a-fightin' without knowin' how a man shapes up.

  "O'Hara will fight, and so will young Bartram. As to Smithers, he's a nervy enough man, but he's never had to use a gun. Hell stand pat, but whether he can make do when it comes to a downright shootin' fight, I ain't so sure.

  "My young uns, they cut their teeth on a rifle stock, so I reckon when the fightin' starts, I'll be bloodin' the two young uns like I done the olders back in Kansas."

  "What about the women?" Trent asked. "Maybe we should get them off to somewhere across the wild country before the shootin' starts. There aren't many of us, and Hale must have fifty riders, all told."

  "He's got the riders," Parson Hatfield admitted grimly. "He surely has. But I'd rather tackle the whole fifty than Ma if I told her she'd have to git out until the fightin's past.

  "You got no women of your own, Trent, so you don't know how impossible ornery one can be when you tell her she's got to leave, for whatever reason.

  "Ma loaded rifles for me when we was feudin' back in Kaintuck, and she done the same in Kansas when we fit Injuns. She ain't no ways gun-shy, and when it comes to that, Ma has done a sight o' shootin' her ownself.

  "Quince's wife feels the same, an' so does Jesse's. Those gals was brung up on the frontier, Trent, and they can stand with a man whether it be shootin', fightin', or workin'."

  Trent shrugged. "You know them better than I do, Parson, but we've got an argument when the others get here. If each one of us tries to guard his own place, we'll be wiped out. It will be one man against a dozen or two dozen or whatever Hale makes up his mind to send. They've got to leave their places and come here, and together we can make a stiff fight of it. Scattered, they'll cut us down one by one."

  He turned to his horse. "Parson, I'm going down to Cedar to have a talk with Leathers. We've got to know where he stands, and if he isn't going to sell to us, we have to find another way."

  Parson's lean face was bleak. "Reckon they got us by the short hairs, Trent. If we can't get grub, we can't stay on, and whilst huntin' will do some of it, we'd have to have more than we could scratch up."

  Trent lifted a hand and turned his horse into a trail. Not the usual trail, for that would be watched, but an old Indian trail known to few. He realized what a chance he was taking, for the killing had begun. Dick Moffit was dead, and he himself had been threatened. Hale riders would be carrying fire and death throughout the mountains now; yet, if he could see King Bill, there might be a chance to avert disaster. There was a chance that Hale himself did not even know of the killing; and if approached, he might stop it before it went further.

  Parson Hatfield watched him ride away, then spat into the dust. "Quince, you an' Jesse catch up your bosses and ride along after him. He's surely goin' to git hisself into trouble."

  A few minutes later the two tall mountain men had started down the trail on their flea-bitten mustangs. They were solemn, slow-talking young men who chewed tobacco and lived for their crops and their families.

  "Quince? What's Pap sendin' us along for? You know that man ain' about to need no he'p."

  "He's but one, an' they are many. Maybe Pappy figgers we'll learn somethin'. Anyway, when Trent comes out of Cedar, hell most likely come a-flyin'. Do no harm to have a couple of rifles to keep folks from crowdin' him too much."

  "Well, I got me powder an' shot enough. I'd surely hate to run short when somebody was just a-sweatin' to get hisself shot."

  It was going to be one of those white-moon nights when the trees stood black against the sky and there was darkness in the hollows of the hills.

  A good night for coon hunting or feudin', and a good night to be hunting them Haleses.

  Chapter 3

  With no knowledge of those following, Trent rode rapidly. He knew what lay before him and did not, in all honesty, expect results. King Bill Hale was not likely to listen to a mere nester, to someone he considered far beneath him. If he thought of those people who lived in the high meadows at all, he thought of them with some distaste, as a minor annoyance to be brushed aside.

  The Hatfields were simple, hard-working people unlikely to ever attain to wealth or more than a competent security. Simple folk they might be, but not to be taken lightly or ignored. They were God-fearing, stern, and fierce to resent any intrusion on their personal liberty. It was such men as these who had destroyed Major Patrick Ferguson and his command at Kong's Mountain. Not understanding what manner of men he dealt with, Ferguson had threatened them with fire and hanging, and they had responded by coming down from the mountains with their long Kentucky rifles.

  These were the sort of men who had been the backbone of all the early American armies. They were fence-corner soldiers who knew nothing of parades but only that war was a matter of killing and keeping from being killed.

  They were like Ethan Alien, Daniel Boone, the Green Mountain boys, Kit Carson, and Jim Bridger. They had learned their fighting by constant frontier warfare, and many of their type, the Hatfields included, carried some Indian blood in their veins and carried it proudly.

  They knew nothing of Prussian methods of close-order drill, and did nothing by the numbers. Often they had flat feet, and few of them had all their teeth, but they fought from cover and made every shot count, so they lived, while many of the enemy died.

  The Hale ranch was the greatest power in this part of the country, and its riders were hired as much for their ability with guns as for their skill with cattle. King Bill, shrewd as he was, had grown overconfident as he grew older. He had never known men of the Hatfield caliber. His life had been one of continual success, and he could not envision defeat by what he considered a bunch of poor white trash.

  Trent considered the question as he rode. Hale might win, but not without a terrible price.

  O'Hara? The big Irishman was affable and friendly, yet his easy manner masked a man who was blunt and hard. He wanted no trouble, but his past had been filled with it, from his first arrival from the old country to his years of laying track for the Union Pacific. He had won because he knew not the meaning of defeat. He won because he kept bulling on ahead, blind to the forces against him, blind to all those who opposed him.

  As for himself, Trent had no illusions. A peace-loving man he was, yet there was something in him, too, of the old Viking berserk. His good sense told hi
m there was no profit in fighting, but there was a savage something in him that gloried in battle. There was also a fierce resentment for those who abused their power, and a strong streak of rebellion ever ready to well up and express itself in battle.

  He had never sought a battle, yet in all honesty he admitted he had never edged too far away from one, either. He now called himself Trent, but the man known as Kilkenny wore the same skin and walked in the same boots.

  Had Hale been less blinded by his own success and his power, he would have seen what he was riding into, for Parson Hatfield was no Dick Moffit.

  The trail skirted deep canyons, leading down from the high, cool meadows to the hotter flatlands below. At long last King Bill might have realized that when the low country was parched with summer heat the meadows in the mountains lay knee-deep with lush green grass and there were shaded pools and swift-running streams.

  On the outskirts of town Trent drew rein to study the situation. Riding in was going to be much easier than getting out. None knew him here, to be awed by his reputation. Anyway, the old days were passing. One heard little of Ben Thompson or King Fisher. Billy the Kid had been killed by Pat Garrett, Virgil Earp had killed Billy Brooks. Names of men once mighty in the west were sliding into the grave or into oblivion.

  As for himself, few men could describe him. He had come and gone like a shadow, and where he was now, no man could say, and only one woman.

  King Bill Hale owned even the law in Cedar Bluff. He himself had called the election to choose the sheriff and the judge. In the broadest sense, there had been no unfairness in the election. The few nesters and the honest people of the town had too few votes to stand against his fifty riders; and of course, many of the townspeople admired and liked King Bill.

  He was always ready to give money to any worthy cause, always superficially friendly. Greeted many people but rarely stopped to talk.

  Trent himself had ridden into town to vote, and had voted for O'Hara. There had been no more than a dozen votes cast for the big Irishman. One vote for O'Hara had been that of the one person Trent studiously avoided, the half-Spanish, half-Irish girl Nita Riordan.