Had his senses dulled over the years? Was that what Rocker was feeling now? The Rocker had always been cautious, however. He was good with the six-shooter, probably the best Bull ever had seen, but he had a tendency to caution the others scoffed at, but not in front of the Rocker.
“All right, Rocker, you’ve been right before. We’ll make one more try … just one. If that doesn’t work we’ll ride north out of here, head for Brown’s Hole.”
Rocker Dunn was uneasy, but he knew there was no use arguing, as even this concession was more than he had hoped for. And of course, the old Bull might know what he was talking about.
Yet he could not but remember the broken, bleeding body of Curly … he had never liked Curly, brother or no. There was something unhealthy about him.
Nonetheless, to see him come in like that… what was it about those Sacketts?
There was that Texas Ranger, McDonald, who said, “There’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps a-coming.”
Maybe that was it.
Chapter XV
The cattle came in before noon of the day following the fight in the streets of Shalako. They came in bunched nicely and moving well. Parmalee had brought them over the trail losing no flesh and ready for a final polish before cold weather set in.
Yet the work had just begun with the bringing of the cattle, and while the Indians rode herd, I taken Galloway, Nick, and Charlie Farnum out to make hay.
There were high meadows where the hay was good, and we bought extra scythes at the store in town and went to work. Galloway and me, we’d had a spell of this as boys, and we went down the line cutting a wide swath, swinging the blades to a fine rhythm. Nick and Charlie were new at it and made more work of it.
We kept our guns handy, and usually one or two of the Indians were on lookout.
We used the boys for this. They were sharp-eyed and eager to be helping, and lookout was warriors’ work, so they loved it.
We saw nothing of the Dunns.
My thoughts kept a-turning toward Cherry Creek and the Rossiter place but there was just too much work for any one of us to shake loose. Anybody who thinks that ranching is just sitting and watching cows grow fat has got another guess a-coming. Ranching is mostly hard work, can-see to can’t-see, as we used to say.
Daylight to dark, for pilgrims.
Parmalee came out with a scythe on the third morning and threw us all a surprise. He was maybe the best of the lot at mowing hay. When it came to that, a body could see why. Down there in the flatlands they had more hay to mow than we folks on the uplands. Why, where I came from even the cows had legs shorter on one side than the other from walking on the sidehills!
The peaches and apples we grew on those mountains were so accustomed to the downhill pull you could only make half a pie with them because they insisted on slipping over to one side.
Bats and birds taken from those mountains down to the flatlands used to have to set down in the grass, they’d get so disoriented. They were used to flying alongside the land instead of over it.
If a man took a wrong step when plowing he was apt to fall into his neighbor’s pasture or maybe his watermelon patch, which led to misunderstandings.
Church was down in the valley, so we never walked to church in the morning, we slid. We had the name of being good Christian folk in our part of the Cumberland because we just couldn’t be backsliders.
Even Logan came out from town and took a hand at the haying. He was a powerful big man and he cut a wider swath than any of us. He’d put in a full day’s work by morning and then he’d set by the fire and make comments about us being so slow. But we got the hay down and we got it stacked, and Logan proved a hand at that, too, but nobody could top off a stack as well as Parmalee.
Parmalee was a great one for reading, too, and he went nowhere without his books. I never could see why he needed them for he could remember nigh all he read, and it was a-plenty. Of a night by the fireside when somebody would start to tellin’ stories of ha’nts and such, he would recite poetry to us. He’d set there like he was telling a story and it would just come a-rolling out.
He’d read poetry by Greeks even, and some by the Frenchies, and he had a way of saying it that was a caution. He and Nick Shadow would sit there spoutin’ poetry at each other, sometimes for hours. Whenever one of them didn’t start it, Logan would. Where he picked up book knowledge I don’t know, and he always pleaded that he knew nothing, but he did know a surprising lot. One time he admitted that he was snowed in one winter with five books of which he read them all, over and over. One of them was the Bible. He knew all the stories but didn’t seem to have picked up much of the morals.
Logan Sackett was from Clinch Mountain, and those Clinch Mountain Sacketts were rough, lawless boys. They were fierce feuders and fighters and they went their own way, most of them lone-wolfing it until trouble showed to another Sackett.
He was a story-teller when it came to that, and could yarn on for hours about country he’d seen or about bad men. Mostly in those days our world was small.
Folks got around a good bit and so we exchanged information backwards and forwards of the country. We knew about trails, marshals, bad men, bad horses, tough bartenders and the like in countries we’d never seen because word was sort of passed around.
Guns, riding, and cattle were our business, so we heard plenty of stories about tough old mossy-horn steers, about bad horses and men who could top them off.
Every outfit had at least one man who was salty with a gun, and each one had a bronc rider. We bragged on our roping or cutting horses, not often the same ones, and how tough were the drives we made. We ate beans, beef, and sourdough bread, and we had molasses for sweetening. We slept out in the open, rain or shine, and we rode half-broke horses that could shake the kinks out of a snake.
It was a rough, hard, wonderful life and it took men with the bark on to live it. We didn’t ask anything of anybody and as long as a man did his work nobody cared what else he was or did.
Logan Sackett wasn’t a bad man in the eastern sense. Out west he was. In the west a bad man was not necessarily an evil man or an outlaw … he was a bad man to tangle with. He was a man to leave alone, and such a one was Logan. He was mighty abrupt with a six-shooter, and if you spoke rough to him you had better start reaching when you started speaking, and even then you’d be too slow with it.
Logan had the name of being an outlaw. I suspect he’d rustled a few head of steers in his time, and maybe his stock didn’t always wear the brands they’d started out with. I wouldn’t be surprised if here and there he hadn’t stood some stagecoach up while he shook the passengers down. About that side of his life I asked no questions. However, I’ll bank on one thing. He never done anything mean or small in his life.
We’d all heard about Vern Huddy, but like everybody after awhile, you get careless. We’d been keeping an eye on the hills and the Indians were looking around for us, but all of a sudden one day there was a rifle shot and one of our Indians was down in the dirt and dead.
He was standing not three feet from me at the time and I had just moved over to dip up some beans from the pot and he had stepped up where I had been and was waiting with his plate. I was sure that shot had been meant for me, and Vern Huddy had sighted in, then maybe had taken his eyes away when he cocked his rifle and had squeezed off his shot before he realized there’d been a change. At least, that was how I figured it. I was sorry for that Indian, but glad for me.
We moved our camp deeper into the brush and all of us stayed clear of clearings.
“Somebody’s got to go up there after him,” Logan said.
“I’ll go. I’m the best Indian. Every man has a pattern, I don’t care who he is.
Rifle shots are among the worst for that sort of thing. He’s developed himself a style. If I study the places where he has been I can find the sort of places he likes to shoot from.”
It made a kind of sense, so from that day on, I took to the hills
.
Stalking a killer is no job for the weak-nerved. Sooner or later your killer is going to know he is being hunted and then he becomes the hunter.
If I found him soon I’d be lucky or unlucky, depending on who saw who first. The chances are it would only be after a painstaking search. So I taken a sight on the hills after dark. I set up a forked stick out there and a prop for the butt of my rule and I figured the height of that Indian who was shot and where the bullet hit, then I sighted right back along my own rifle and pinpointed the area from which that bullet must have come.
Now I was sure Vern Huddy wouldn’t be in that spot. He’d have moved, found himself a new location. Maybe he did not know he hadn’t killed me, and maybe he did. By day I borrowed Logan’s spyglass and studied the mountainside where the bullet had come from.
Only one thing I did do before I took to the woods. I went to Shalako to pick up a few things and ran smack-dab into Meg Rossiter.
She had come to town with her pa for supplies and the like. Town was town, even when it was so small, and a girl like Meg simply had to come in.
She had come up the steps to the store just as I rode up, and we stopped there for just a minute, she holding her skirt up just a trifle to clear it from the dust, and me just about to get off my horse. Finally I said, “Howdy, ma’am!”
“How do you do?” she said cool as you please. And when I swung down and stepped up on the porch she said, “I suppose that brother of yours is proud of himself.”
“Galloway? What for?”
“For nearly killing poor Curly Dunn. That was just awful! He should be ashamed!”
Astonished, I said, “Ma’am, you don’t have the right of it. Curly got the rope around Galloway unexpected, and was taking him into the woods. Curly was talking torture and the like. Galloway got free of him and Curly’s horse dragged him, that’s all.”
“Galloway got free of him! That’s likely, isn’t it? Who helped him?”
“He was alone, ma’am. The rest of us was miles away with the herd.”
Her eyes were scornful. “That’s your brother’s story. I don’t believe any of it.
Curly was not that kind of boy.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s just the way it happened.” Getting kind of irritated, I said, “Curly ain’t much. He hasn’t the nerve that Alf had or any of them, and he wouldn’t be a patch on his old man. He’s just kind of pretty and he has a real mean streak in him.”
She just glared at me and turned away and flounced into the store. Well, I just stood there mentally cussing myself and all the luck. Here I’d been setting myself up, shaping up all kinds of meetings with her in my mind, but none of them like that. I never figured that Galloway’s fracas with Curly would bother her none, least ways where I was concerned.
I guessed she was just fixed on Curly. She’d set her cap for him and she wasn’t giving any thought to anybody but him. Well, she could have him. I told myself that and stood there on the porch, wanting to go in the store and afraid she’d think I was following her, and wanting to follow her all at the same time. But I had to go in. That was what I’d come to town for.
Finally, I gave my hat brim a tug and ducked my head and went on in. Johnny Kyme, the storekeeper came over to me and said, “What can I do you for, Sackett?”
“About thirty feet of rawhide string,” I said, “and a couple of those thin-bladed hunting knives.” I also bought an extra hatchet and a few nails, with a few other odds and ends. I also bought me a pair of homespun pants (the brush doesn’t make any sound when it rubs on them like it does on jeans, or even like on buckskin) I also bought a woolen cap with earflaps, although I wouldn’t be using them. Where I was going a hat would be falling off, and I needed the bill of the cap to shade my eyes for good seeing.
Meg was coming right past me although she could just as well have gone the other way. She had her chin up and she was flouncing along, and suddenly I taken nerve and turned on her. “Ma’am, I’d admire to buy you a coffee over to the saloo–I mean, the restaurant, if you’ll be so kind.”
For a moment there she appeared about to turn me down, but I had something going for me that wasn’t me. It was that she was in Town with a capital T, and a girl when she came to Town ought to see a boy. To sit and have coffee would be nice and she could think of herself as a great lady in Delmonico’s or some such place.
She looked right at me, cool as you please. “Thank you, Mister Sackett. If you will give me your arm.”
“I’ll be back for all that,” I said to Slim over my shoulder, and walked out of there, proud as could be, with that girl on my arm like we were going to a ball or something.
Now you have to understand about that saloon. It was a saloon, but one side of it was set up for an eating place where ladies could come if they wished, and when, they were present the men kind of toned down the loud talk and the rough talk. Fact is, most of the men liked to see them there, added a touch of home or something, and most of us were a long way from womenfolks.
We went up those steps with me all red around the gills from not being used to it, and trying not to look like this was the first time or almost.
Berglund, he came over with a napkin across his arm like he was one of them high-class waiters and he said, “What’s your pleasure?” So we both ordered coffee, and he brought it to us, and then I’ll be damned if he didn’t fetch some cupcakes with chocolate high-grade all over the top. I never even knew he had such stuff.
When I said as much he replied, “Why, surely you understand that we only cater to the carriage trade? To the most elite clientele?”
I didn’t know whether I was a elite clientele or not or if it was something I should shoot him for, so I tried to look stern and unconcerned all the same so he could either think I knew what he was talking about or irritated because he said it.
We sat there, sipping coffee and eating those cakes and talking. She started in about the weather just like we hadn’t had those other words at all. I asked her about her Pa, and she asked me about Parmalee and Logan, and men somehow she got started telling me about a poem she’d been reading called the Idylls of the King, by somebody named Tennyson. I knew a puncher back in the Cherokee Nation by that name but it couldn’t be the same one. The last time I saw him I don’t think he could even read a book, let alone write one.
From all she had to say it was quite a book, and she was taken with this here Lancelot who went around sticking things with a spear. There wasn’t much I could say, not having read the book except to comment that it must take a mighty big horse to carry a man with all that iron on him. I don’t think she thought that comment was very much in the line of her thinking. And she kept talking about chivalry and romance and her eyes got kind of starry until I began wondering where I could buy myself one of those suits.
Anyway, we had us a nice talk and I was right sorry to finish the coffee and those little cakes, but it did look like we were going to part friendly when all of a sudden she says, “You aren’t the only pebble on the beach.”
What she meant I didn’t know for awhile, and then she said, “Mr. Huddy has been calling on me. He’s very nice.”
And before I thought what I was saying I said, “He’s the one who has been trying to kill us. He hides up in the hills and shoots at us. He killed one of our Indian boys the other day.”
Her face went kind of white and she jumped up so quick she almost upset the table, and then she said “Flagan Sackett, I never want to see you again!”
And she left out of there.
Berglund, he was polishing a glass and he said, looking at nobody, “It’s better to have them mad at you than indifferent.”
“Oh, shut up!” I said politely, and walked out of there, mad at me, mad at Berglund, and mad at Meg Rossiter.
Chapter XVI
What I said was true, but that didn’t make any difference and it was the wrong thing to say right then, and to her. Meg Rossiter was a lone girl in a country filled with men, m
ost of them older than her. There weren’t any parties or dances or box-socials or the like to go to. She hadn’t much chance to be a girl or to flirt.
Dumb as I was about women I’d watched them enough to know they like to play one man off against another, and like to feel wanted even if they ain’t. Now Meg had set her cap or seemed to for Curly Dunn, and right away I come around saying he doesn’t amount to much, and then Curly set to to prove me right.
No matter what she said to me she must have heard talk at the store. Johnny Kyme was a married man and his wife was a friend of Meg’s and there was no nonsense about her. She knew what a skunk Curly was, but that didn’t help Meg. Then we have a nice get-together like, and then she springs this Vern Huddy on me. Maybe she wants to make me jealous, maybe she just wants to feel courted, but right away I have to go make him out as bad as Curly or worse.
Back in the woods next morning we got together for a bit. Logan was there, Parmalee, Galloway, and Nick Shadow. Charlie Farnum came up as we started to talk. Everybody knew what I was starting out to do, and everybody knew it was a life-and-death matter. I was going into the woods after a man who was a dead shot, who moved like a cat, and had the senses of a wild animal, or so we’d heard. One was going to be dead before I came out of the woods. I knew it and they knew it.
He seldom shot, almost never missed, and of the few reported to have lived after he shot them, none could say they had seen him or even knew he was about.
We talked a mite of everything else and then I got up and taken my rifle. “I’m not going to take a horse,” I said. “When you have a horse and you leave it you’ve got to come back to it and the killer knows it. I don’t want to be tied to anything.”
It was early morning and a mist lay in the valleys. All was very still. At such times every sound in the forest seems magnified if there is a sound, but I heard nothing, moving carefully, taking my time. The route I chose was roundabout.
Where Vern Huddy would be I had no idea, only that he would likely not be where I would expect to find him.
Galloway (1970) Page 12
