Mojave Crossing (1964)

by L'amour, Louis - Sackett's 11

  If I reached for my rifle I’d be dead before my hand fairly grasped the action, let alone got it clear of the scabbard. Yes, they had me dead to rights.

  The place they’d picked to stop me was near a big rock at one end of a small valley … and I had a strong hunch this was the very potrero that lay below the ridge where all that gold was hidden.

  It was a pretty little valley, with some fine old oaks around, and we’d stopped almost in the shade of one of them. It was a still, warm afternoon, and I could hear the birds talking it up back in the trees and brush just off the trail.

  They moved in around me in a narrowing circle.

  I let my hands rest on the pommel and tried to see my way out, but my mind was a blank.

  “He took the old man out that night, boys,”

  Dorinda said, “so he’s got to know where the gold is.”

  “He wouldn’t take me to it. Do you think he’s crazy?”

  Nobody said anything, and then after a bit one of them spoke up. “How about that, ma’am?”

  “How far can an old man crawl? It took them time to ride out and back, so if Old Ben left him up there, he can’t have gone far. There’s been no rain, so we should get a few indications of direction.”

  The black-eyed gunman tilted his Winchester.

  “You going to tell us, mister? You going to take us there?”

  Well, why not? It wasn’t my gold, and once they had it they’d have no further use for me.

  They might just let me go … although they might figure it best to shoot me so’s I couldn’t come back at them.

  “Far’s I know, he got it all. Else do you think I’d not be up there looking?”

  “If that was all there was,” Dorinda said, “he’d not have cared in the least about you seeing the place. No, it took them several nights of work to take that treasure up there from the beach, so he couldn’t possibly bring all of it away in one night.”

  “We’d have to pack grub,” I said. “It’s far from here, and I’m carrying nothing. I was figuring to stock up at Newhall’s place.”

  “He’s lying,” Dorinda said. “I tracked them part of the way.”

  Now I taken another look at her. This witch woman certainly knew a sight of things no city girl should know. She had tracked us, she said, and I had a hunch she wasn’t lying about that.

  If she had tracked us, she must be pretty good.

  “It’s not far from here,” she said. “I tracked them for several miles in this direction, and they couldn’t have ridden much further than this.”

  They were all around me. There was no chance to make a move without getting killed, or at least badly hurt. My mules were over there feeding on the grass along with my spare horses.

  “My guess is that we aren’t more than a mile or two from it right now,” Dorinda said, “and if I’d not been along he’d have gone right to it.”

  She turned toward a tall, tough-looking blond man. “Clymer, you and the Yaqui make him talk.”

  The Yaqui was flat-featured, a half-breed by the look of him, and a man who would know how to make a man die slowly. The Yaquis were said to be as good at that as the Apaches.

  If I tried a run for it, there was no shelter close by. The trees were too scattered, and that big rock was almost sheer.

  Time and again I’d been in tight spots, and somehow I’d come out of them, and it seemed as if this here one ought to be so easy. It was such a pleasant day, the sun made leaf shadows on the ground around, and a few high, lazy clouds drifted in the sky. There was no violence around … except in that ring of silent guns, aimed at me.

  It shouldn’t happen like this, I told myself. This is all wrong. There should be shouts and guns exploding, and fighting; there should be blood and the smell of gunpowder.

  There were none of those things, and here I was, flat against a wall, with no way out.

  “Get down off that horse,” Clymer said.

  He was grinning at me, and I saw he was missing two teeth. “We’re going to see what kind of stuff you got in you.”

  He gestured toward the Yaqui. “I seen him skin a man alive one time … well, almost.

  That feller got smart and done what we told him. Not soon enough, though, because when we let him be it was already too late.”

  There was a moment there when I thought about jabbing a spur into the stallion and taking my chances, but the trouble was, there wasn’t any chance. Those guns just couldn’t miss. Not all of them.

  So I swung down, and they walked me toward a big old oak. Believe me, I was sweating.

  I was scared, but I was determined not to show it, and I was watching every second for the break I hoped would come. Only it didn’t come.

  They walked me up to that tree, and suddenly I made up my mind. If they were going to kill me they might as well get it done. One thing I knew. Nobody was going to tie me up to a tree. Not unless I was dead or unconscious.

  So I made ready. If I turned fast I might lay a hand on one of those rifles, and if I had one of those I’d take somebody with me when I passed in my checks.

  “Hey,” somebody said. “Who’s that?”

  A rider was coming along the road, coming slow and easy. He was a tall man who rode well up in the saddle, and he came riding straight on.

  “Hell,” one of the men said, “it’s Nolan Sackett!”

  “Get on with it,” Dorinda said irritably.

  “This is no affair of his.”

  He rode right on up to us, and despite what Dorinda had said, nobody did anything but watch him come, including me.

  “Howdy, boys!” His eyes had plenty of time to take in the situation. “If you’re after that gold I figure I should be in for a share.”

  “You’re in for nothing!” Dorinda said angrily. “Get on with it, Clymer!”

  Nolan, he looked over at me and grinned, and then he taken a pistol from under his coat and tossed it to me.

  It was as simple as that.

  He just flicked that pistol over and I reached up and snared it, and then we stood there with two guns on them, his and mine.

  It caught them flat-footed and off guard.

  They just didn’t expect anything like that, for Nolan was one of them. The trouble was, he was also a Sackett, and blood runs thicker than branch water.

  Dorinda didn’t cut up and scream like some women might, although she was mad enough to fight a cougar. She just looked at him and then at me.

  “You boys mount up and ride,” Nolan told them. “This here’s a cousin of mine, or some sort of kin, and whilst I might have let you shoot him, I don’t cotton to seeing that Yaqui skin no Sackett out of his hide. You boys just ride out of here and count it time well spent.”

  “What if we don’t?” Clymer asked belligerently.

  “Well,” I said, “you outnumber us, but by the time we get through shootin’ a whole lot of you are going to be dead, and us, too, so what will you be fighting for?”

  “The hell with it,” one man said, and turned his horse; and after that they just drifted away, leaving us there with Dorinda Robiseau.

  “Nolan,” I said, “I’ve got it in mind to buy goods over at Newhall’s place and pack them across the Mojave to the Arizona mines.

  That’s a lot of mules for one man.”

  “You got you a partner,” he said.

  He looked over at Dorinda. “You want to come with us, Abigail?”

  “I’ll see you in hell first,” she said, and turning her horse, she rode off.

  That was no way for a lady to talk.

  A few miles down the trail I said to Nolan, “You called her Abigail.”

  “Sure … didn’t you know? She’s one of those no-account Trelawney girls from back yonder in the hills.”

  Well, I’d be damned! So that was Abigail Trelawney. But it was kind of dark back of the schoolhouse that night, and I never could tell those Trelawney girls apart.

  *

  author’s note As in all my previous book
s, the place names are those of actual places that existed as described at the time the story took place.

  Although a writer of fiction is under no compulsion to be as exact as I have chosen to be as to locale, I regard each of my novels as, in a sense, historical. Each water hole or spring, each valley, canyon, creek or mountain, each store, gambling house, or hotel exists now or did exist at the time.

  The tanks visited by Sackett after leaving Dorinda are the White Tanks, and the well he next visited was Lost Horse Well, both of which are now within the limits of Joshua National Monument. The Hidden Valley where Sackett was loaned a horse is now visited by thousands of tourists, and they enter by crawling, as he did. The Button brothers actually used the valley to hide stolen horses (nobody yet knows how the horses were taken in or out), and they were killed, sometime later, in a gun battle in San Bernardino.

  The house of Greek George was located near the intersection of Fountain Avenue and King’s Road, only a block off the famous Sunset Strip in what is now Hollywood.

  The local round-ups, called rodeos in California, were held in an area roughly between La Cienaga and Robertson streets, give or take a few blocks.

  Although California is not usually considered a western state in the “wild west” conception of the term, few states were more so. Only Texas could have had more cattle, and without doubt the greatest of all ropers, as well as some of the finest horsemen, were the early Spanish-Californian vaqueros … roping grizzlies was a favorite sport.

  By 1893 El Tejon Ranch, still one of the largest in the United States, was running more than 125,000 head of sheep and 25,000 head of cattle. Without doubt one of the greatest stock drives in western history was the movement, over uncharted trails, of 17,000 head of sheep from El Tejon Ranch to Montana in 1879, by Jose Jesus Lopez. This ranch is in the Tehachapis, only a few miles from the outskirts of Los Angeles.

  No cattle baron ruled his empire with a harsher hand than did the “Big Basque”

  Leonis, of Calabasas; and the gun battles between Carlisle and the Kings, or that between Jim McKinney and a sheriff’s posse were the equal of the OK Corral fight or any of the famous gun battles of the West. McKinney, a notorious outlaw with a number of killings behind him, shot it out in Bakersfield with Will and Burt Tibbett and Jeff Packard … McKinney was killed, as were Jeff Packard and Will Tibbett (the father of singer Lawrence Tibbett), Burt Tibbett killing McKinney. There was considerable testimony to the effect that Also Hulse, and perhaps another man, were also shooting at the deputies from the room where McKinney was killed.

  It is an ironic fact that it was in the City of the Angels that the street called the Calle de los Negros held a record for violence and killing unequaled in the West.