Treasure Mountain s-17

by Louis L'Amour

  Still, I'd want to be the last to go. I'd want to see her safely to bed before I cashed in my checks. Maybe it is easier for a man to be alone than a woman. I wouldn't know much about such things.

  They are gettin' busy over yonder. Voices are closer. I reckon the fussin' and the feudin' are shapin' up to start. I reckon this is how some of those old Trojans felt when they put on their armor for the last fight, when the Greeks were closing in and they knew they weren't going to make it.

  But I am going to make it. No man should go down the long way without leaving something behind him, and all I've got to leave will disappear when the dust settles.

  A man can carve from stone, he can write fine words, or he can do something to hold himself in the hearts of people. I hadn't done any of those things, not yet.

  Maybe I never would.

  The wind was dying. Leaves hanging still. There was the coolness of the mountains around me. This here place must be close onto twelve thousand feet up.

  A shade less, because there were trees around me. But the trees stopped not fifty yards off, and even here there weren't very many.

  Looked like something moved atop that knoll. I'd like to burn him a mite, like to singe his scalp so's he'll know it ain't all going to be fun.

  They were comin' now. Some movement down the ledge. I ate the last strip of bacon and refilled my cup with coffee. A bullet nudged at the rock over my head, spilling fragments into my coffee. I swore. Now they shouldn't ought to have done that. A body can take just so much, and I set store by a good cup of coffee.

  If I stayed back close to the rocks nobody was going to get a real good shot at me, so I just set there. When shootin' time come, I'd do my share. No use to take the fun away from those anxious folks down there. A couple of more shots from down the ledge, but they done nobody any harm. I took another gulp of coffee and looked out yonder at the mountain peaks. Some of them were fifty, sixty miles off.

  I wished I could see the one called the Sleeping Ute, but that mountain was hidden behind the rim yonder. When I leaned forward to take up the pot, that gent atop the knoll shot right into my fire. I slapped around, putting out sparks. He was going to get almighty annoying if he kept that up.

  There were several more shots, but I finished my coffee before I took up my rifle.

  Thing about fightin' with folks unused to fightin' is that a body should give them time. They get eager to get on with it and haven't the patience to set and wait. Me, I was in no hurry. I wasn't going no place.

  First thing you know they were shootin'--scatterin' lead every which way--but I just set back in my corner enjoying my coffee and let them have at it.

  They were wishful that I'd move out where I could shoot back so that gent atop the knoll could settle my hash. I'd no mind to let him do it.

  Finally, I just got tired of the racket. The horses were in the best spot of all. They hadn't picked no fight. I had them in a place where bullets couldn't reach, and they had sense enough to stand there and switch flies off one another.

  After a mite I decided that gent on the knoll might be gettin' eager enough to make a fool of himself, so I took my rifle and edged around to where I could peek up yonder without showing too much. Sure enough, I saw his rifle barrel.

  Then I saw something against the sky--a shoulder in a blue shirt, maybe. It disappeared, but folks being what they are, I just waited, knowing he'd be apt to do the same thing again, and he did.

  Me, I just up with that '73 and shot him, right in the whatever it was he was showin'. I heard a yelp, then a rifle fell loose on the grassy slope of that knoll, and I edged out to where I could see down the ledge.

  I caught a glimpse of a plaid shirt down thataway. I triggered the '73, and whatever I'd shot at disappeared.

  After that there was a kind of letup in the shootin'.

  Those shots hadn't stopped them, just made them a mite more cautious. They knew now it wasn't going to be all downhill, but I'm tellin' the world I was a mighty lonesome man, a-settin' there, waitin' for them to come.

  And only a few miles off I had family tough enough to whip an army. Looked to me like I had it to do all by myself. Well, that was the way I'd done most things my life long.

  I fed a couple of cartridges into my rifle and took a look at the horses. They were standing, half-asleep, undisturbed by the doings of us humans. I went down among them and talked to 'em a little and then eased myself back up to where I'd been.

  There was no easy way out of this, but one thing I knew: come nighttime I wasn't going to set waitin'. I was going out among 'em. And I was going shootin'.

  Come hell or high water, I was going out yonder. If they wanted to land this fish, they were going to find out they had something on the hook.

  Chapter XXIV

  It was a long day. From time to time a shot came into the hollow, but they made no frontal attack. The failure of the shots from the top of the knoll had apparently left them at a loss, and they hadn't figured out what to do.

  Nobody ever won a fight by setting back and waiting, at least, not in my circumstances. In any case, my only way of fighting was to attack, and I believe in it, anyway. Attack, always attack.

  They had me bottled up where I couldn't move by day, but night was something else, and I intended to move out and hunt them down. No doubt they planned to come and get me as soon as darkness fell.

  Lying there I studied the possible routes out of my cul-de-sac, and getting out was no problem for a man on foot. In my saddlebags I carried my moccasins. I'd been a woodsman before I was ever a rider, and it come natural to me to move quiet.

  Many a time as a boy I had either to ease up on game or not get a shot. A kill meant that I'd eat, and often it was only me and the family when pa was gone and the other boys still too young to hunt.

  Judging by what Andre had said Pa had come here. Probably he had died here. And he must have had the gold when he reached this place.

  What had become of it? Was it still hidden close by?

  I set back and took a careful look around. Supposin' I had gold to hide, quite a bit of it. Where would I hide it where it would be unlikely to be found?

  Supposin' I was here, figured I still had a fightin' chance, but knew I might have to slip out and travel light, just like I was going to do when darkness came?

  Where would I hide the gold?

  There was a level place of green grass, partly protected from rifle fire by a shoulder of the rock that walled the ledge. There was a sort of cove in the wall, scarcely more than enough to hide the two horses.

  A tree that must have fallen five or six years ago lay close by, its trunk breaking up to pay its debt to the soil it came from. Lying near to it was the fallen tree with the brown needles still in place. It must have been broken off this past winter. Those trees hadn't been there when pa made his stand--if he did.

  I had another thing to go by. Pa had known all the Indian ways of marking a trail, and he had taught them to us boys. One way was to place one rock atop another as a trail marker and a rock alongside the marker to show the direction of travel. Often when we were youngsters he'd lay out a trail for us to follow.

  He'd gather a tuft of grass and tie it around with more grass, or he'd break a branch and stick it in the ground to show the way he'd gone.

  Often the Indians would bend a living tree to mark the way. From time to time in wandering the woods one will wonder about a tree that grows parallel to the ground for a ways. Chances are it was some marker used by Indians in the long ago.

  Pa taught us boys as best he could. He'd find a spot in the deep woods and he'd clear the ground of all leaves, branches, stones, and whatever. Then he'd smooth out the dust, leaving some food, both meat and seeds, in the center. We'd surround it with a circle of branches or stones, and we'd come back each morning to see who'd been there.

  It wasn't long until we boys could tell the track of any animal or bird or reptile that crossed the smooth dust. Pa was forever pointing at some track
s or tree or bunch of rocks and asking us what we thought. Happened there, or what was happening. It's an amazing thing how much a boy can learn in a short time.

  You found where animals had fought, mated, and died. You learned which animals moved about at night, which would come for meat, and which for seeds or other food.

  We got so we just saw things without having to look for them. It was natural to us to know what was happening in the mountains and in the forest. Just as people differ one from another, so do the trees, even the trees of one species.

  After a while I put my fire together again and fixed a little food, made fresh coffee, and took time to study the situation. Pa had been in this spot twenty years ago, and things would have looked very different. The older of the fallen trees would have been growing then, and several others within the range of my eyes would have been fair-sized trees. Others, larger and older, might now be gone.

  The high winds, snows, and ice of the alpine heights are hard on trees. The bristlecone pine, which seems to survive anything, outlasts the others. This shelf where I had taken refuge would be deep under snow much of the year, and when pa was here some snow might have still been left. To understand his situation I had to bring back the shelf the way it must have been when he saw it.

  Surely there'd have been snow where I sat, snow in this pocket and along the side where the shadows stayed almost all day long. He'd have made his notch somewhere here, but the tree might have fallen. It might be this very tree that was rotting away before me, or it might have been burned in campfires or fallen clear over the rim. There were scattered carcasses of trees along the steep slope below the cliff.

  Pa respected his boys, respected our knowledge of things, and if he'd had the chance he'd have left us a clue, some hint as to where the gold was, and maybe as to what had become of him.

  Had the journal ended with the loss of that daybook? Or had he some other means of writing? I'd better consider that.

  I needed Orrin here. He had a contemplative mind and he was a lawyer, a man accustomed to dealing with the trickiness of the human mind. Tyrel would have been a help, too, for Tyrel took nothing for granted. He was a right suspicious man. He liked folks, but never expected much of them. If his best friend betrayed him he'd not be surprised. He figured we were all human, all weak at times, and mostly selfish. And we all, he figured, had traits of nobility, self-sacrifice, and courage. In short, we were folks, people.

  Tyrel never held it against any man for what he did. He trusted nobody too much, liked most people, and he was wary. But at a time like this he would have been a help. He had a reasoning, logical brain unhampered by much sentiment.

  One thing was a help. We Sacketts bred true. I mean, we bred to type. Like the Morgan horse. Pa used to say he'd known a sight of Sacketts one time and another, and they varied in size, but most of them ran to dark, kind of Indian-like features and to willingness to fight. Even those Clinch Mountain Sacketts, who were a cattle-rustling, moonshining lot, would stand fast in a showdown, and they'd never go back on their word or fail a friend.

  They might steal his horse, if it was a good one and chance offered, but they were just as like to stand over his wounded body and fight off the redskins or give him one of their own horses, even their only horse, to get away on.

  Logan and Nolan, for example. They were Clinch Mountain Sacketts, and their pa was meaner than a rattlesnake in the blind, but they never walked away from a friend in trouble, or anybody else, for that matter.

  Nolan was forted up down in the Panhandle country with some Comanches yonder a-shootin' at him. One of them got lead into him. He nailed that one right through the ears as he turned his head to speak to the other one, and then he wounded the last one. Nolan walked in on him, kicked the gun out of his hand, and stood there looking down at him, gun in his fist, and that Comanche glared right back at him, dared him to shoot, and tried to spit at him.

  Nolan laughed, picked that Injun up by the hair and dragged him to his horse. He loaded that Indian on, tied him in place, then mounted his own horse and rode right to that Comanche village.

  He walked his horse right in among the lodges and stopped.

  The Comanches were fighters. No braver men ever lived, and they wanted Nolan's hair, but they came out and gathered around to see what he had on his mind.

  Nolan sat up there in the middle of his mustang, and he told them what a brave man this warrior was, how he had fought him until he was wounded, his gun empty, and then had cussed him and tried to fight him with his hands.

  "I did not kill him. He is a brave man. You should be proud to have such a warrior. I brought him back to you to get well from his wounds. Maybe some day we can fight again."

  And then he dropped the lead rope and rode right out of that village, walking his horse and never looking back.

  Any one of them could have shot him. He knew that. But Indians, of any persuasion, have always respected bravery, and he had given them back one of their own and had promised to fight him again when he had his strength.

  So they let Nolan ride away, and to this day in Comanche villages they tell the story. And the Indian he brought back tells it best.

  I didn't really have time to contemplate the past. I had mighty little time left and I wanted to find out what happened to pa.

  Clouds were making up. Nearly every afternoon there was a brief thundershower high up in the mountains, and now the clouds were gathering. I guess I was feeling kind of pleased about that. I had an idea those folks were new to the high-up hills and if so they were in for a shock.

  Rain can fall pretty hard, and of course you're right in the clouds. Right amongst them. Lightning gets to flashing around, and even without it flashing the electricity in the air makes your hair prickle like a scared dog's.

  I didn't much relish running around atop that mountain with a rifle in my hands, but it looked like I had it to do.

  The bulging dark clouds moved down and began to spatter rain, and I came off that log where I was settin' like a chipmunk headin' for a tree. I went around the tree holding my rifle in one hand, scrambled up the rocks, took a quick look, and ran on the double for that knoll.

  If they broke and ran for shelter, I would make it. I started up the knoll knowing that in just about a minute it was going to be all wet grass, slippery as ice. Just as I was topping out on the rise a man raised up, rifle in hand.

  He'd no idea there was anybody even close. He was getting set to run for shelter from the rain, I figure, and was taking a quick look before he left; and there I was, coming up out of that drifting cloud right at him.

  Neither of us had time to think. My Winchester was in my right hand in the trail position, and when he hove up in front of me I just drove the muzzle at him. It was hanging at my side at arm's length. When that man came up off the ground I swang it forward and there was power behind it.

  The muzzle caught him right under the nose, smashing up hard. It knocked him right over backwards, and he let a scream out of him like you never heard. It must've hurt real bad.

  He tumbled head over heels down the side of that steep knoll and wound up at the bottom, his face all bloody. I stood there looking down at him.

  The knoll was kind of like a pyramid too narrow for its height, covered with grass and scattered rocks. That cloud was drifting over, and he could see me up there, rifle in hand.

  He figured I was going to kill him, and for a moment there I gave it thought.

  "You get off down the mountain, boy," I told him, "and you keep goin'. You folks are about to get me upset."

  Still looking at me, he began to back himself off, still lying on the grass, the rain pelting him. I looked around and there was nobody in sight. I turned and went back down the knoll to my hideout.

  When I got to the horses I pulled the picket pins and coiled the ropes. I stowed them away and gathered the reins and was just about to stick a toe in a stirrup when I realized how wet my feet were going to get in those moccasins.

&n
bsp; My boots were handy so I got into my slicker and set down to haul on my boots when my eyes leveled on that crack in the rocks.

  It wasn't no kind of a place, just a layered rock where one layer had fallen or been pulled out leaving a kind of gap not over two inches wide. It was deeper than it looked at first, and there was something in there.

  I slipped my hand in and found myself touching some kind of a book. I took it out and it was another daybook, almost like the first, but it was in worse shape.

  When I scrambled up that rock wall I must have stepped on a piece of the rock that had been shoved in there to keep the wet off and the animals from gettin' at it.

  It was a daybook, and I knew it had been pa's. I shifted it to my left hand and started to slip it into my coat pocket when a voice said, "I'll take that!"

  It was Andre Baston, and he was right on the bank with a gun on me.

  Chapter XXV

  There's times when a man might talk himself out of trouble, but this wasn't one of those times. Andre Baston was a killing man and he had a gun on me. I've known men who would have shot me and taken the book out of my dead hand, but Baston was not only a killer, he was cruel. He liked somebody to know he was going to kill 'em.

  Moreover he'd been used to those set-tos where there's a challenge, seconds meet, a duel is arranged, and two men walk out on the greensward--whatever that is--and, after a certain number of paces, they turn around and shoot at each other most politely.

  Me, I'd grown up to a different manner of doing. You drew and you shot, and no fancy didoes were cut. Nobody needed to tell me what Andre had in mind. I had the same thing in mind for him only I wasn't wastin' around about it.

  He'd said, "I'll take that!" And he had a gun on me.

  A man who doesn't want to get shot hadn't better pack a gun in the first place.

  I knew when I laid my hand on that gun that I was going to get shot, but I also had it in mind to shoot back.

  I figured, All right, he's going to nail me, but if he kills me I'll take him with me, and if he doesn't kill me I'll surely get him.