“They burned us out!” Jackie cried out, his face twisted and pale. “Them Hales done it! An’ they kilt Pappy!”
“I know.” Trent looked at them gravely. “I came by that way. Come on out here an’ we’ll eat. Then you can tell me about it.”
“They come in about sunup this mornin’,” Jack said. “They told Pap he had two hours to get loaded an’ movin’. Pap, he allowed he wasn’t movin’. This was government land an’ he was settled legal, an’ he was standin’ on his rights.”
“What happened?” Trent asked. He sliced more bacon and dropped it in the pan.
“The young ’un, he shot Pap. Shot him three times afore he could move. Then after he fell, he emptied his gun into him.”
Something sank within Trent, for he could sense the fight that was coming. The “young ’un” would probably be Cub Hale. He remembered that slim, erect, panther-like young man in white buckskins and riding his white horse, that young, handsome man who loved to kill. Here it was, and there was no way a man could duck it. But, no. It wasn’t his fight. Not yet, it wasn’t.
“How’d you kids happen to come here?” he asked kindly.
“We had to get away. Sally was gettin’ wood for the house, an’, when I met her, we started back. Then we heard the shootin’, an’, when I looked through the brush, I seen the young ’un finishin’ Pap. I wanted to fight, but I ain’t got no gun.”
“Did they look for you?” Trent asked.
“Uhn-huh. We heard one of ’em say he wanted Sally!” Jackie glanced at the girl, whose face was white, her eyes wide. “They allowed there wasn’t no use killin’ her…yet!”
“You had horses?” Trent asked.
“Uhn-huh. We done left them in the brush. We wasn’t sure but what they’d come here, too. But we come here because Pap, he done said if anythin’ ever happened to him, we was to come here first. He said you was a good man, an’ he figgered you was some shakes with a gun.”
“All right.” Trent dished them out some food. “You kids can stay here tonight. I got blankets enough. Then in the mornin’ I’ll take you down to Parson’s.”
“Let me fix that,” Sally pleaded, reaching for the skillet. “I can cook.”
“She sure can,” Jackie declared admiringly. “She cooked for us all the time.”
A horse’s hoof clicked on a stone, and Trent doused the light instantly. “Get down,” he whispered hoarsely. “On the floor. Let’s see who this is.”
He could hear the horses coming closer, two of them from the sound. Then a voice rang out sharply.
“Halloo, the house! Step out here!”
From inside the door, Trent replied shortly: “Who is it? What d’ you want?”
“It don’t make a damn who it is! Trent, we’re givin’ you till noon tomorrow to hit the trail! You’re campin’ on Hale range! We’re movin’ everybody off!”
Trent laughed harshly. “That’s right amusin’, friend,” he said dryly. “You go back an’ tell King Bill Hale that I’m stayin’ right where I am. This is government land, filed on all fittin’ an’ proper.” He glimpsed the light on a gun barrel and spoke sharply. “Don’t try it, Dunn. I know you’re there by your voice. If you’ve got a lick of sense, you know you’re outlined against the sky. A blind man could get you both at this range.”
Dunn cursed bitterly. Then he shouted: “You won’t get away with this, Trent!”
“Go back an’ tell Hale I like it here, an’ I’m plannin’ to stay!”
When they had gone, Trent turned to the youngsters. “We’ll have a little time now. Sally, you take the bed in the other room, Jackie an’ me, we’ll bunk out here.”
“But…?” Sally protested.
“Go ahead. You’ll need all the sleep you can get. I think the trouble has just started. But don’t be afraid. Everything is goin’ to be all right.”
“I’m not afraid.” Sally Crane looked at him with large, serious eyes. “You’ll take care of us, I know.”
He stood there a long minute staring after her. It was a strange feeling to be trusted, and trusted so implicitly. The childish sincerity of the girl moved him as nothing had ever moved him before. He recognized the feeling for what it was, the need within him to protect and care for something beyond himself. It was that, in part, that during these past years had led him to fight so many fights that were not his. And yet, was not the cause of human liberty and freedom always every man’s trust?
Jackie was going about the business of making a bed on the floor as though he had spent his life at it. He seemed pleased with this opportunity to show some skill, some ability to do things.
Trent reached up and took down his guns and checked them as he had every night of the entire year in which they had hung from the peg. For a minute after he completed the check, he held them. He liked the feel of them, even when he hated what they meant. Slowly he replaced them on the peg.
Chapter II
The early morning sun was just turning the dew-drenched grass into settings for diamonds when Trent was out of his pallet and roping some horses. Yet, early as it was when he returned to the cabin, the fire was going and Sally was preparing breakfast. She smiled at him, but her eyes were red and he could see she had been crying.
Jackie, beginning to realize now the full meaning of the tragedy, was showing his grief through his anger, but was very quiet. Trent was less worried about Jackie than about Sally. Only six years before, according to what Dick Moffitt had told him, Sally Crane had been found hiding in the bushes. Her father’s wagons had been burned and her parents murdered by renegades posing as Indians. Since then, Dick had cared for her. Dick’s wife had died scarcely a year before, and the girl had tried to take over the household duties, yet even to a Western girl, hardened to a rough life, two such tragedies, each driving her from a home, might be enough to upset her life.
When breakfast was over, he took them out to the saddled horses. Then he walked back to the cabin alone, and, when he returned, he carried an old Sharps rifle. He looked at it a moment, and then he glanced up at Jackie. The boy’s eyes were widening, unbelieving, yet bright with hope.
“Jackie,” Trent said quietly, “when I was fourteen, I was a man. Had to be. Well, it looks like your pappy dyin’ has made you a man, too. I’m goin’ to give you this Sharps. She’s an old gun, but she can shoot. But Jackie, I’m not givin’ this gun to a boy. I’m givin’ it to a man. I’m givin’ it to Jackie Moffitt, an’ he’s already showed himself pretty much of a man. A man, Jackie, he don’t ever use a gun unless he has to. He don’t go around shootin’ heedless-like. He shoots only when he has to, an’ then he don’t miss. This gun’s a present, Jackie, an’ there’s no strings attached, but it carries a responsibility, an’ that is never to use it against a man unless it’s in defense of your life or the lives or homes of those you love. You’re to keep it loaded always. A gun ain’t no good to a man unless it’s loaded, an’, if it’s seen settin’ around, people won’t be handlin’ it careless. They’ll say ‘that’s Jackie Moffitt’s gun, an’ it’s always loaded.’ It’s always guns people think are empty that kill people by accident.”
“Gosh!” Jackie stared in admiration at the battered old Sharps. “That’s a weapon, man!” Then he looked up at Trent, and his eyes were filled with tears of sincerity. “Mister Trent, I sure do promise! I’ll never use no gun unless I have to!”
Trent swung into the saddle and watched the others mount. He carried his own Winchester, one of the new 1873 models that were replacing the old Sharps on the frontier. He was under no illusions. If King Bill Hale had decided to put an end to the nesters among the high peaks, he would probably succeed. But Hale was so impressed with his own power that he was not reckoning with the Hatfields, O’Hara, or himself.
“Y’know, Jackie,” Trent said thoughtfully, “there’s a clause in the Constitution that says the right of an American to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged. They put that in there so a man would always have a gun to defend his hom
e or his liberty. Right now there’s a man in this valley who is tryin’ to take the liberty an’ freedom of some men away from ’em. When a man starts that, and when there isn’t any law to help, you got to fight. I’ve killed men, Jackie, an’ it ain’t a good thing, no way. But I never killed a man unless he deserved killin’ an’ unless he forced me to a corner where it was me or him. This here country is big enough for all, but some men get greedy for money or power, an’, when they do, the little men have to fight to keep what they got. Your pappy died in a war for freedom just as much as if he was killed on a battlefield somewheres. Whenever a brave man dies for what he believes, he wins more’n he loses. Maybe not for him, but for men like him that want to live honest an’ true.”
The trail narrowed and grew rougher, and Trent felt a quick excitement within him, as he always did when he rode up to this windy plateau. They went up through the tall pines toward the knife-like ridges that crested the divide, and, when they finally reached the plateau, he reined in, as he always did when he reached that spot.
Off over the vast distance that was Cedar Valley lay the blue haze that deepened to purple against the far-distant mountains. Here the air was fresh and clear, crisp with the crispness of the high peaks and the sense of limitless distance.
Skirting the rim, Trent led on and finally came to the second place he loved, a place he not only loved but which was a challenge to all that was in him. For here the divide, with its skyscraping ridges, was truly a divide. It drew a ragged, mountainous line between the lush beauty of Cedar Valley and the awful waste of the scarred and tortured Smoky Desert.
Always there seemed a haze of dust or smoke hanging in the sky over Smoky Desert, and what lay below it, no man could say, for no known trail led down the steep cañon to the waste below. An Indian had once told him his fathers knew of a trail to the bottom, but no living man knew it, and no man seemed to care, nobody but Trent, drawn by his own loneliness to the vaster loneliness below. Far away were ragged mountains, red, black, and broken like the jagged stumps of broken teeth gnawing at the sky. It was, he believed, the far edge of what was actually an enormous crater, greater than any other of its kind on earth.
“Someday,” he told his companions, “I’m goin’ down there. It looks like the mouth of hell itself, but I’m goin’ down.”
Parson Hatfield and his four tall sons were all in sight when the three rode up to the cabin. All were carrying their long Kentucky rifles.
“Alight, Trent,” Parson drawled, widening his gash of a mouth into a smile. “We was expectin’ ’most anybody else. Been some ructions down to the valley.”
“Yeah.” Trent swung down. “They killed Dick Moffitt. These are his kids, Parson. I figgered maybe you could make a place for ’em.”
“You thought right, son. The good Lord takes care of His own, but we have to help. There’s always room for another beneath the roof of a Hatfield.”
Quincy Hatfield, oldest of the lean, raw-boned Kentucky boys, joined them. “Howdy,” he said. “Did Pap tell you all about Leathers?”
“Leathers?” Trent frowned in quick apprehension. “What about him?”
“He ain’t a-goin’ to sell anything to us no more.” The tall young man spat and shifted his rifle to the hollow of his arm. “That makes the closest store over at Blazer, an’ that’s three days across the mountains.”
Trent shrugged, frowning. “Aims to freeze us out or kill us off.” He glanced at Parson speculatively. “What are you plannin’?”
Hatfield shook his head. “Nothin’ so far. We sort of figgered we might get together with the rest of the nesters an’ try to figger out somethin’. I had Jake ride down to get O’Hara, Smithers, an’ young Bartram. We got to have us a confab.” Parson Hatfield rubbed his long, grizzled jaw and stared at Trent. His gray eyes were inquisitive, sly. “Y’know, Trent, I always had me an idea you was some shakes of a battler yourself. Maybe, if you’d wear some guns, you’d make some of them gun-slick hombres of Hale’s back down cold.”
Trent smiled. “Why, Parson, I reckon you guess wrong. Me, I’m a peace-lovin’ hombre. I like the hills, an’ all I ask is to be let alone.”
“An’ if they don’t let alone?” Parson stared at him shrewdly, chewing his tobacco slowly and watching Trent with his keen gray eyes.
“If they don’t let me alone? An’ if they start killin’ my friends?” Trent turned to look at Hatfield. “Why, Parson, I reckon I’d take my guns down from that peg. I reckon I’d fight.”
Hatfield nodded. “That’s all I wanted to know, Trent. I ain’t spent my life a-feudin’ without knowin’ a fightin’ man when I see one. O’Hara an’ young Bartram will fight. Smithers, too, but he don’t stack up like no fightin’ man. My young ’uns, they cut their teeth on a rifle stock, so I reckon when the fightin’ begins I’ll be bloodin’ the two young ’uns like I did the two older back in Kentucky.”
Trent kicked his toe into the dust. “Don’t you reckon we better get the womenfolks off to Blazer? There ain’t many of us, Parson, an’ Hale must have fifty riders. We better get them out while the gettin’ is good.”
“Hale’s got more’n fifty riders, but the women’ll stay, Trent. Ma, she ain’t for goin’. You ain’t got no woman of your own, Trent, so I don’t reckon you know how unpossible ornery they can be, but Ma, she’d be fit to be tied if it was said she was goin’ to go to Blazer while we had us a scrap. Ma loaded rifles for me in Kentucky when she was a gal, an’ she loaded ’em for me crossin’ the plains, an’ she done her share of shootin’. Trent, I’d rather face all them Hales than Ma if we tried to send her away. She always says her place is with her menfolks, an’ there she’ll stay. I reckon Quince’s wife feels the same, an’ so does Jesse’s woman.”
Trent nodded. “Parson, we got us an argument when the rest of them get here. They’ve got to leave their places an’ come up here. Together, we could make a pretty stiff fight of it. Scattered, they’d cut us down one by one.” He swung into the saddle. “I’m goin’ down to Cedar Bluff. I’m goin’ to see Leathers.”
Without waiting for a reply, Trent swung the buckskin away and loped down the trail. He knew very well he was taking a chance. The killing had started. Dick Moffitt was down. They had burned his place, and within no time at all the Hale riders would be carrying fire and blood through the high hills, wiping out the nesters. If he could but see King Bill, there might be a chance.
Watching him go, Parson Hatfield shook his head doubtfully and then turned to his eldest. “Quince, you rope yourself a horse, boy, an’ you an’ Jesse follow him into Cedar Bluff. He may get hisself into trouble.”
A few minutes later the two tall, loose-limbed mountain men started down the trail on their flea-bitten mustangs. They were solemn, dry young men who chewed tobacco and talked slowly, but they had grown up in the hard school of the Kentucky mountains, and they had come West across the plains.
Chapter III
Unknowing, Trent rode rapidly. He knew what he had to do, yet, even as he rode, his thoughts were on the Hatfields. He liked them. Hardworking, honest, opinionated, they were fierce to resent any intrusion on their personal liberty, their women’s honor, or their pride.
They were the kind of men to ride the river with. It was such men who had been the backbone of America, the fence-corner soldier, the man who carried his rifle in the hollow of his arm, but the kind of men who knew that fighting was not a complicated business but simply a matter of killing and keeping from being killed. They were men of the blood of Dan Boone, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, the Green Mountain Boys, Dan Freeman, and those who whipped the cream of the British regulars at Concord, Bunker Hill, and New Orleans. They knew nothing of Prussian methods of close-order drill. They did nothing by the numbers. Many of them had flat feet and many had few teeth. But they fought from cover and they made every shot count—and they lived while the enemy died.
The Hale Ranch was a tremendous power, and it had many riders, and they were men hired for their ability with
guns as well as with ropes and cattle. King Bill Hale, wise as he was, was grown confident, and he did not know the caliber of such men as the Hatfields. The numbers Hale had might lead to victory, but not until many men had died.
O’Hara? The big Irishman was blunt and hard. He was not the shrewd fighter the Hatfields were, but he was courageous, and he knew not the meaning of retreat. Himself? Trent’s eyes narrowed. He had no illusions about himself. As much as he avoided trouble, he knew that within him there was something that held a fierce resentment for abuse of power, for tyranny. There was something in him that loved battle, too. He could not dodge the fact. He would avoid trouble, but when it came, he would go into it with a fierce love of battle for battle’s sake. Someday, he knew, he would ride back to the cattle in the high meadows, back to the cabin in the pines, and he would take down his guns and buckle them on, and then Kilkenny would ride again.
The trail skirted deep cañons and led down toward the flat bottom land of the valley. King Bill, he knew, was learning what he should have known long ago, that the flatlands, while rich, became hot and dry in the summer weather, while the high meadows remained green and lush, and there cattle could graze and grow fat. And King Bill was moving to take back what he had missed so long ago. Had the man been less blinded by his own power and strength, he would have hesitated over the Hatfields. One and all, they were fighting men.
Riding into Cedar Bluff would be dangerous now. Changes were coming to the West, and Trent had hoped to leave his reputation in Texas. He could see the old days of violence were nearing an end. Billy the Kid had been killed by Pat Garrett. King Fisher and Ben Thompson were heard of much less; one and all, the gunmen were beginning to taper off. Names that had once been mighty in the West were already drifting into legend. 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.
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