the Sky-Liners (1967)

by L'amour, Louis - Sackett's 13

  When I threw a leg over that black horse and settled down into the leather I almost forgave that Judith. This was more horse than I'd ever sat atop of. It made a man proud. No wonder Fetchen wanted that fool girl, if he could get these horses along with her.

  We taken out.

  Galloway led the way, keeping off the road and following a cow path along the stream.

  When we were a mile or so out of town, Galloway edged over close to me. "Flagan, there's one thing you don't know. We got to watch that girl. Her grandpa whispered it to me. She thinks highly of Black Fetchen. She figures he's romantic - dashing and all that. We've got to watch her, or she'll slip off and go back."

  Serve her right, I thought.

  Chapter 2

  Now, there's no accounting for the notions of womenfolks, particularly when they are sixteen. She came of good people. We Sacketts had dealt with several generations of Irish horse-traders, and found them sharp dealers, but so were we all when it came to swapping horseflesh. There were several thousand of them, stemming from the eight original families, and it was a rare thing when one married outside the clans.

  I thought about Black Fetchen. To give the devil his due, I had to admit he was a bold and handsome man, and a fine horseman. He was hell on wheels in any kind of a fight, and his kinfolk were known for their rowdy, bullying ways. Judith had seen Fetchen ride into town, all dressed up and flashy, with a lot of push and swagger to him. She knew nothing of the killings behind him.

  We rode a goodly distance, holding to mountain trails. Judith rode along meek as a lamb, and when we stopped I figured she was plumb wore out. She ate like a hungry youngster, but she was polite as all get out, and that should have warned me. After I banked the fire I followed Galloway in going to sleep. Judith curled up in a blanket close by.

  The thing is, when a man hunts out on the buffalo grass he gets scary. If he sleeps too sound he can lose his hair, so a body gets fidgety in his sleep, waking up every little while, and ready to come sharp awake if anything goes wrong.

  Of a sudden, I woke up. A thin tendril of smoke lifted from the banked fire, and I saw that Judith was gone. I came off the ground, stamped into my boots, and grabbed my pistol belt.

  It took me a minute to throw on a saddle and cinch up, then I lit out of there as if the devil was after me. The tracks were plain to see. There was no need to even tell Galloway, because when he awakened he could read the sign as easy as some folks would read a book.

  She had led her horse a good hundred yards away from camp, and then she had mounted up, held her pace down for a little bit further, and then started to canter.

  At the crossing of the stream the tracks turned toward the highroad, and I went after her. For half a mile I let that black horse run, and he had it in him to go. Then I eased down and took my rope off the saddle and shook out a loop.

  She heard me coming and slapped her heels to her horse, and for about two miles we had us the prettiest horse race you ever did see.

  The black was too fast for her, and as we closed in I shook out a loop and dabbed it over her shoulders. The black was no roping horse, but when I pulled him in that girl left her horse a-flyin' and busted a pretty little dent in the ground when she hit stern first.

  She came off the ground fighting mad, but I'd handled too many fractious steers to be bothered by that, so before she knew what was happening I had her hog-tied and helpless.

  For a female youngster, she had quite a surprising flow of language, shocking to a man of my sensibilities, and no doubt to her under other circumstances. She'd been around horse-trading men since she was a baby, and she knew all the words and the right emphasis.

  Me, I just sat there a-waiting while she fussed at me. I taken off my hat, pushed back my hair, settled my hat on my head again, all the time seeming to pay her no mind. Then I swung down from the saddle and picked her up and slung her across her horse, head and heels hanging. And then we trotted back to camp.

  Galloway was saddled up and ready to ride. "What all you got there, boy?" he called to me.

  "Varmint. I ketched it down the road a piece. Better stand shy of it because I figure it'll bite, and might have a touch of hydrophoby, judgin' by sound."

  Wary of heels and teeth, I unslung her from the saddle. "Ma'am, I'm of no mind to treat anybody thisaway, but you brought it on yourself. Now, if you'll set easy in the saddle I'll unloose you."

  Well, she spoke her piece for a few minutes and then she started to cry, and that done it. I unloosed her, helped her into the saddle, and we started off again, with her riding peaceable enough.

  "You just wait," she said. "Black Fetchen will come. He will come riding to rescue me."

  "You or the horses," I said. "I hear he's a man sets store by good horseflesh."

  "He will come."

  "You'd best hope he doesn't, ma'am," Galloway suggested. "We promised to deliver you to your pa in Colorado, and that's what we aim to do."

  "If he really loves you," I said, "he'd think nothing of riding to Colorado. Was I in love with a girl, that would seem a short way to go."

  "You!" she said scornfully. "Who would ever love you?"

  Could be she was totally right, but I didn't like to think it. Nobody ever did love me that I could remember of, except Ma. Galloway, he was a rare hand with the girls, but not me. I never knew how to sit up and carry on with them, and likely they thought me kind of stupid. Hard to find two brothers more alike and more different than Galloway and me.

  Both of us were tall and raw-boned, only he was a right handsome man with a lot of laughter in him, and easy-talking except in times of trouble. Me, I was quieter, and I never smiled much. I was taller than Galloway by an inch, and there was an arrow scar on my cheekbone, picked up on the Staked Plains from a Comanche brave.

  We grew up on a sidehill farm in the mountains, fourteen miles from a crossroads store and twenty miles from a town - or what passed as such. We never had much, but there was always meat on the table. Galloway and me, we shot most of our eatin' from the time I was six and him five, and many a time we wouldn't have eaten at all if we couldn't shoot.

  Ma, she was a flatland schoolma'am until she up and married Pa and came to live in the mountains, and when we were growing up she tried to teach us how to talk proper. We both came to writing and figuring easy enough, but we talked like the boys around us. Although when it came right down to it, both of us could talk a mite of language, Galloway more than me.

  Mostly Ma was teaching us history. In the South in those days everybody read Sir Walter Scott, and we grew up on Ivanhoe and the like. She had a sight of other books, maybe twenty all told, and one time or another we read most of them. After Ma died, me and Galloway batched it alone until we went west.

  Galloway and me were Injun enough to leave mighty little trail behind us. We held to high country when possible, and we fought shy of traveled roads. Nor did we head for Independence, which was what might have been expected.

  We cut across country, leaving the Kentucky border behind, and along Scaggs' Creek to Barren River, but just before the Barren joined the Green we cut back, west by a mite south, for Smithland, where the Cumberland joined the Ohio. It did me good to ride along Scaggs' Creek, because the Scaggs it was named for had been a Long Hunter in the same outfit with one of the first of my family to come over the mountains.

  We bought our meals from farms along the way, or fixed our own. We crossed the Mississippi a few miles south of St. Louis.

  No horses could have been better than those we had. They were fast walkers, good travelers, and always ready for a burst of speed when called upon.

  Judith was quiet. Her eyes got bigger and rounder, it seemed to me, and she watched our back trail. She was quick to do what she ought and never complained, which should have been a warning. When she did talk it was to Galloway. To me she never said aye, yes, or no.

  "What is it like out there?" she asked him.

  "Colorado? It's a pure and lovely land beyond the
buffalo grass where the mountains r'ar up to the sky. Snow on 'em the year 'round, and the mountains yonder make our Tennessee hills look like dirt thrown up by a gopher.

  "It's a far, wide land with the long grass rippling in the wind like a sea with the sun upon it. A body can ride for weeks and see nothing but prairie and sky ... unless it's wild horses or buffalo."

  "Are the women pretty?"

  "Women? Ma'am, out in that country a body won't see a woman in months, less it's some old squaw or an oldish white woman ... or maybe a dancing girl in some saloon. Mostly a man just thinks about women, and they all get to look mighty fine after a while. A body forgets how mean and contrary they can be, and he just thinks of them as if they were angels or something."

  We saw no sign of Black Fetchen nor any of his lot, yet I'd a notion they were closing in behind us. He didn't look like a man to be beaten, and we had stood him up in his own street, making him lose face where folks would tell of it, and we had taken his girl and the horses he wanted.

  There was more to it than that, but we did not know it until later.

  From time to time Judith talked some to Galloway, and we heard about her pa and his place in Colorado. Seems he'd left the horse-trading for mustanging, and then drifted west and found himself a ranch in the wildest kind of country. He started breeding horses, but kept on with the mustanging. Judith he'd sent back to be with his family and get some education. Only now he wanted her out there with him.

  Now and again some of the family went west and often they drove horses back from his ranch to trade through the South. But now he wanted his daughter, and the stock she would bring with her.

  Back of it all there was a thread of something that worried me. Sizing it up, I couldn't find anything that didn't sound just right, but there it was. Call it a hunch if you like, but I had a feeling there was something wrong in Colorado. Galloway maybe felt the same, but he didn't speak of it any more than me.

  We camped out on the prairie. It was Indian country, only most of the Indians were quiet about that time. Farmers were moving out on the land, but there were still too many loose riders, outlaws from down in the Nation, and others no better than they should be. This was a stretch of country I never did cotton to, this area between the Mississippi and the real West. It was in these parts that the thieves and outlaws got together.

  Not that Galloway or me was worried. We figured to handle most kinds of trouble. Only thing was, we had us a girl to care for ... one who would grab hold of a horse any time she saw a chance and head for home ... and Black Fetchen.

  One night we camped on the Kansas prairie with a moon rising over the far edge of the world and stars a-plenty. We could hear the sound of the wind in the grass and stirring leaves of the cottonwoods under which we had camped. It was a corner maybe half an acre in extent, at a place where a stream curled around a big boulder. There was a flat place behind that boulder where we shaped our camp; here there was a fallen tree, and firewood from dead limbs.

  We built up a small fire, and after we'd eaten our beef and beans we sat about and sang a few of the old songs, the mountain songs, some of them reaching back to the time when our folks came across the water from Wales.

  Judith was singing, too, and a clear, fine voice she had, better than either of us. We liked to sing, but weren't much account.

  The horses moved in close, liking the fire and the voices. It was a mighty fine evening. After Judith turned in, Galloway did likewise. I had the first watch. Taking up my rifle, I prowled around outside the trees of the small woods.

  Second time around I pulled up short over on the west side. Something was moving out yonder in the dark, and I squatted down to listen, closer to the ground, to hear the rustle of the grass.

  Something was coming slow ... something hurt, by the sound of it. The sound was a slow, dragging movement, and a time or two I heard a faint groan. But I made no move, for I was trusting no such sound.

  After a bit, I made him out, a crawling man, not many yards off. Carefully, I looked all around at the night, but I saw nothing.

  I slipped back to camp. "Galloway," I whispered "there's a man out yonder, sounds to be hurt bad. I'm going to bring him in."

  "You go ahead. I'll stand by." If it was a trick, somebody would wish it wasn't. I walked out there, spotted the man again, and spoke to him quiet-like, so's my voice wouldn't carry. "What's the trouble, amigo?"

  The crawling stopped, and for a moment there was silence. Then the voice came, low, conversational. "I've caught a bad one. Figured I glimpsed a fire."

  "You bein' sought after?"

  "Likely."

  Well, I went up to him then and picked him up and packed him into camp. He was a man of forty or so, with a long narrow face and a black mustache streaked with gray. He had caught a bad one through the body and he looked mighty peaked. The slug had gone on through, for he was holed on both sides. Whilst I set to, plugging him up, Galloway he moved out to keep an eye on the prairie.

  Judith, she woke up and set to making some hot broth, and by the time I'd patched him up she was about ready with it. I figured he'd lost blood, so I mixed up some salt water and had him drink that. We had been doing that for lost blood for years back, and it seemed to help.

  He was game, I'll say that for him. Whilst Judith fed soup into him, I had a look at his foot.

  "Wagon tongue fell on it," he said. "Rider jumped his horse into camp and knocked the wagon tongue over and she hit me on the instep."

  His foot was badly swollen, and I had to cut the boot off. He stared at me between swallows of soup. "Look at that now!" he worried. "Best pair of boots I ever did have! Bought 'em a month back in Fort Worth."

  "You a Texan?"

  "Not reg'lar. I'm an Arkansawyer. I been cookin' for a cow outfit trailin' stock up from the Nueces country. Last evenin' a man stopped by our wagon for a bite of grub. He was a lean, dark, thin sort of man with narrow eyes. He was rough-dressed, but he didn't look western." He glanced up, suddenly wary. "Fact is, he talked somewhat like you boys."

  "Don't be troubled. There's no kin of ours about here."

  "He wore a sort of red sash and carried a rifle like he was born to it - "

  "Colby Rafin!" Judith said.

  "You called it, I didn't," I said.

  "Anyway, he et and then rode off. About the time we'd been an hour abed, they come a-hellin' out of the night. Must've been a dozen of them or twenty. They come chargin' through camp, a-shootin' and a-yellin' and they drove off our herd, drove them to hell off down the country."

  "You'd better catch some rest. You look done in."

  He looked straight at me. "I aint a-gonna make it, amigo, an' you know it."

  Judith, she looked at me, all white and funny, but I said to him, "You got anybody you want us to tell?"

  "I got no kin. Bald-Knobbers killed them all, a long time back. Down Texas way my boss was Evan Hawkes, a fine man. He lost a sight out there this night - his herd, his outfit, and his boy."

  "Boy?"

  "Youngster ... mebbe thirteen. He had been beggin' the boss to let him ride north with us instead of on the cars. We were to meet Hawkes in Dodge."

  "Are you sure about the boy?"

  "Seen him fall. A man shot right into him, rode over him. If any of our outfit got away it was one of the boys on night herd."

  He sat quiet for a while, and I stole a glance at Judith. She was looking almighty serious, and she had to realize that bunch of raiders that stole the herd and killed the boy had been the Fetchen outfit. Colby Rafin was never far from Black.

  "They know they got you?"

  "Figured it. They knew I was knocked down by the wagon tongue, and then one of them shot into me as he jumped his horse over."

  As carefully as I could, I was easing the biggest sticks away from the fire so it would burn down fast. One thing was sure. That Fetchen outfit had followed us west. But this was no place or time to have a run-in with them.

  The man opened his eyes after a
bit and looked at Judith. "Ma'am? In my shirt pocket I got a gold locket. Ain't much, mebbe, but my ma wore it her life long, and her ma before her. I'd take it kindly, if you'd have it as a present."

  "Yes ... thank you."

  "You got tender hands, ma'am, mighty gentle hands. Been a long time since a woman touched me ... gentlelike. It's a fine thing to remember, ma'am."

  I'd moved off to the edge of the darkness, listening for trouble riding our way, but I could faintly hear him still talking. "That tall man here," he said, "he carries the look of an eagle. He'll make tracks in the land, ma'am. You better latch onto him, ma'am, if you ain't spoke for. His kind run mighty scarce."

  After a moment, he opened his eyes again. "You knowed that man come to my camp?"

  "Colby Rafin." She was silent for a moment, and then she said, "They were looking for us, I think."

  "For him?" he half-lifted a hand toward me. "They're crazy!"

  Galloway came in out of the dark, and I whispered to him about Rafin and how the herd was lost.

  "It's like them - outlaws always. Now they've turned cattle thieves."

  Neither one of us had much to say, because we were both thinking the same thing. The Fetchens had come west, all right, and they had come a-hunting us. The trouble was they had us outnumbered by a good bit, and running off this herd showed they'd taken the full step from being rowdies and trouble makers to becoming genuine outlaws. From now on it would be a fight to the death against an outfit that would stop at nothing ... and us with a girl to watch out for.

  That Colorado ranch began to look mighty far away, and I was cursing the hour when I first saw Costello or Judith.

  Not that we minded a fight. We Sacketts never had much time for anything else. If we weren't fighting for our country we were fighting men who still believed in rule by the gun, and no Sackett I ever heard of had ever drawn a gun on a man except in self-defense, or in defense of his country or his honor.

  Right then I was glad Galloway stood beside me. Nobody ever needed an army when they had Galloway, and maybe one other Sackett ... it didn't make much difference which one.