the Lonely Men (1969)

by L'amour, Louis - Sackett's 14

  "What was it? What happened?" somebody yelled, and there was panic in the voice.

  Drawing back on the pipe, I held it waist high and jammed it through again, further into them.

  Another scream, then a cry, "Back! For God's sake, let us out of here!"

  Somebody else yelled, "What's the matter? You gone crazy? Let's get him!"

  Jerking the pipe back, I smashed hard at the voice and heard a scream. Then came a shout, "Get out! Get out!"

  Men were fighting and struggling to get out of the narrow passageway. Thrusting my pipe through the bars this tune at ankle height, I heard several of them go sprawling. Somebody jerked a gun and fired blindly through the bars, the shot missing me by several feet. I drove my bar at the flash and heard a grunt, then anguished cries of pain, and stampeding feet. Suddenly the passage was empty except for somebody who lay groaning on the floor.

  "Serves you right," I said calmly. "Whoever you are, you got what you had coming."

  "Help! For God's sake, help me!"

  "How am I going to do that?" I said. "I'm behind bars. You just crawl outside and get some of those murdering friends of yours to help."

  There was another shuddering groan and I heard the sound of dragging. I stood my pipe against the cell wall, and waited. If they came again it would be to shoot, but I had a hunch they wouldn't come.

  Now I heard angry questions outside in the street, and then the outer door opened. A match scratched and somebody lit the lamp. Men appeared in the passageway. One of them was Oury, whom I knew to be a reputable man.

  "What's happened? What's going on here?" he said.

  A man was lying on the floor, and a trail of blood showed where another had dragged himself. A loose coil of rope and a six-shooter lay just outside the cell.

  "Seems I had visitors," I said, leaning on the bars. "They wanted me for a necktie party. Only I didn't think it ought to go on without some sort of official plannin', so those folks, they taken off."

  Oury's face was grim. "I am sorry, young man. Those were a bunch of drunken teamsters and drifters, not citizens of Tucson."

  "I figured as much," I said. "Mr. Oury, do you reckon you could get somebody to bring me a pot of coffee from the Shoo-Fly, and something to eat? I'm getting almighty hungry."

  "I will do more than that. Jim" -- he turned to one of the others -- "get me the keys. I am taking this young man to dinner."

  He looked around again. The man lying on the floor was being examined. The doctor looked up. "This man has three broken ribs and a punctured lung," he said quietly.

  "That's his problem," I said harshly. "Anybody who fools around with the bandwagon is likely to get hit with a horn."

  "Those are my sentiments," Oury said crisply. The keys jangled, the door swung wide. "Come, Mr. Sackett, you are my guest."

  "I don't mind if I do," I said, "but I warn you, I'm an eating man, just getting my appetite back."

  The Shoo-Fly was almost empty when we went in, but a few minutes afterward it was crowded to the doors.

  When I'd eaten, I sat back in my chair. One of the Tucson citizens came in with my Winchester and gun belt. "If you're staying in town," he said, "you'd better go armed."

  "I am staying," I replied, "until this matter is cleared up. I did nothing wrong out there. I killed a good man, a tough man. He might have lived for hours in that boiling hot sun with those slivers burning into him. He was not a man to die easy."

  "I might have asked for the same thing," somebody said.

  I was quiet after that. I'd eaten well, and I had my guns on again, and all I wanted was to get this affair cleared up and pull out for Tyrel's outfit in New Mexico. As for this town, it was no place for me until my enemies had drifted, and being drifters, I knew they'd soon be gone.

  The doctor came in and gave me a hard look. "I'll say this for you," he said, "you're a bad man to corner. You've put four men in bed. One of them has a smashed cheekbone, his face is ripped open, and he's lost nine teeth. One has a torn shoulder muscle, another has a dent in his skull and his scalp is ripped right across the top, laid open for five inches. The one with the punctured lung will live if he's lucky. All said and done, you put four men out of action, and injured six or seven more."

  "They came after me," I said. The outer door opened then and two men came in.

  One was Captain Lewiston, the other was Toclani, the Apache scout. They looked around until their eyes spotted me, and they came over to my table.

  "Sackett," Lewiston said, "Toclani has talked to Kahtenny. They verify your story. Kahtenny told us in detail, as did several other Apaches, what was happening out there during the attack when you shot Higgins."

  "You talked to Kahtenny?" I asked Toclani.

  "He, too." He indicated Lewiston. "We ride together to Apache camp."

  I looked at Lewiston. "You taken a long chance, man."

  "It was simple justice. I knew that the people who would surely know what happened were the Apaches. I did not know they would talk, but Toclani came with me, and Kahtenny had much to say of you, Sackett. He said you were a brave man, a strong man, and a warrior."

  "Did he get his squaw back?"

  "Yes, and he thanks you." Lewiston looked at me. "He may come in. All because of that, he may come in."

  "I hope he does," I said. "He's a good Indian."

  And so it was over. Nobody wanted me back in jail any longer, but I figured to stay around until the sheriff came back so as there'd be no argument. Around town folks stopped to speak to me on the street, and several thanked me for bringing the youngsters back.

  But I saw nothing of Laura ... had she left town? Or was she still there, waiting, planning?

  My mind kept turning to Dorset Although it was in my thoughts, I'd no right to go a-courting, for I'd no money and no prospects worth counting on. Mr.

  Rockfellow, who had a herd he wanted pushed over into the Sulphur Springs Valley, hired me and some other hands, but it was a short job, and left me with nothing more than eating money.

  The sheriff came back to town, and after hearing what had happened he gave me a clean bill on the charges against me, so I figured to saddle up and show some dust, only I hadn't enough cash to lay in supplies to take me anywhere.

  Then at the Shoo-Fly I heard that Pete Kitchen had located himself a mining claim down in the Pajaritos, so I rode down. When he found out I was a hand with a pick and shovel, as well as with a cutting horse and a rope, he hired me for the job.

  When he was laying out the grub for me to take along he put in a couple of hundred rounds of .44's. "With your kind of luck, and that being Injun country, you're liable to need them."

  Well, I almost backed out. I'd had my fill of Apache fighting, and wanted nothing so much as a spell of setting and contemplating.

  The Pajaritos are not much when it comes to mountains. They are named for an odd birdlike formation on the butte. I rode down there, leading a jack mule, and I found the mining claim.

  There was a wash where run-off water had cut down among the rocks and laid bare some ore. It wasn't of much account, but gave promise of growing richer as it went deeper.

  On the back side of a knoll, partly screened by brush and boulders, I made me a camp. On some rough grass nearby I picketed my stock. Then I sat down to contemplate what lay before me.

  Now, I'm no mining man, but you don't prospect around, work in mines, or even loaf around mining towns without picking up some of the lingo as well as a scraping of information.

  This whole place was faulted. Movements of the earth in bygone times had tilted and fractured the crust until you had a good idea of what lay under you as well as in front of you. The gold, what there was of it, occurred in quartz veins. It looked to me like what they call a cretaceous bed that had rested on diorite, but some of the dikes that intruded offered a chance of some likely ore.

  My job was to cut into that, do enough work to establish a right to the claim for Kitchen, and maybe explore enough so as he'd have an
idea what lay below.

  Doing the work I was going to do wasn't going to help much, but I wanted to do the best job for him I could. I never did figure a man hired to do a job should just do it the easiest way. I figure a man should do the best he knows how. So I taken up my pick and went to work on that bank.

  While I had a little blasting powder and some fuse, I had no notion of using it.

  Blasting makes an awful lot of noise, enough to bring every Apache in the country around, and I hoped to do my work quietlike, by main strength and awkwardness, and then pack up and light a shuck for Kitchen's ranch.

  After working a couple of hours I sat down to take some rest, and began to notice the bees. Some had gone past while I was working, and now I noticed more of them. I left my pick and shovel and, taking up my Winchester, which I kept ready to hand, I went off up the mountain. Just over the shoulder of it I picked up tracks of a desert fox, just enough to indicate direction.

  Between occasional tracks and the bees, I located a rock tank, nigh full of water. Two streams of run-off water coming down off the butte had worn places in the rocks. With a branch from an ocotillo, a dead branch I found nearby, I tried to measure the depth of water in the tank. I touched no bottom, but it was anyway more than six feet deep ... water enough for my stock and me. It was half hidden under an overhang, and the water was icy cold and clean.

  Next morning, after a quick breakfast, I got at my work again. Here and there I found a good piece of ore which I put aside. Now I was doing the same thing most prospectors do. I was putting aside the best pieces, an easy way to lead others to invest, and to lead yourself into believing you've got more than you have.

  Using water from the tank, I washed out a couple of pans from the dry wash below the claim and picked up a few small colors, nothing worth getting excited about.

  Unless that vein widened out below where I'd been digging, it was going to cost Pete more to get the gold than it was worth.

  By nightfall the cut I'd made was beginning to look like something. I'd sacked up three sacks of samples and had crushed a few of them and panned out the fragments, getting a little color.

  The next two days I worked from can-see to can't-see, and had enough done to count this as a working claim. One more day for good measure, and I would saddle up for Tucson.

  This spell had given me some time to think, and it showed me there was no sense in saddle-tramping around, riding the grub line or picking up a day of work hither and yon. It was time I settled in for a lifetime at some kind of job, or on a place of my own.

  It meant hard work, and lots of it. Living a life is much like climbing mountains -- the summits are always further off than you think, but when a man has a goal, he always feels he's working toward something.

  The next morning, when I'd been working an hour by sun, I hit the pocket.

  It was a crumbling ledge of decomposed quartz, seemingly unrelated to what was on either side, and the piece that I found was no bigger than an upright piano, but it seemed to be only the top of a larger ledge. Anyway, in the next three hours I broke up enough of that quartz to get out maybe two thousand dollars' worth of gold.

  Pete Kitchen was going to be almighty pleased. I dumped one of my other sacks back in the hole and filled the sack with the rich stuff. I was just loading the last of it and was too busy to be rightly paying mind to anything else when I hear a voice saying, "Looks like this trip is going to pay off mighty handsome."

  Laura Sackett was there, and three men were with her -- Arch Hadden, Johnny Wheeler, sometime gunman for a smuggling outfit, and one of the gents who had been with Hadden in the fight at Dead Man's Tank. They had come down here for only one reason, and that was to kill me, and they wanted to tell me about it.

  There was no call for conversation, not having to stall like before, so I just peeled back my forty-five and wasted no time.

  I turned and saw and drew and fired, all kind of in one breath. My first shot took Johnny Wheeler, whose hand was lingering around the butt of his six-gun as if he was minded to use it.

  That shot hit right where the ribs spread apart. My second shot was for Arch Hadden, but it missed. Arch had suddenly whipped his horse around and was running like all get-out.

  Laura's horse reared up and she toppled from the saddle, and of a sudden the other gunman was shooting past me. I turned to see the Apaches coming down and recognized one of them as Kahtenny.

  Me, I dove into that hole I'd been digging and had sense enough to grab the picket ropes of my horses, which I'd had up, loading for the homeward trip.

  The Apaches swept by and I saw that third gunman go down. I heard the bark of Apache guns and saw the dust jump from his vest. He came up shooting, only another bullet nailed him.

  They caught Arch Hadden.

  I saw them catch him. It was Kahtenny and two others, and I saw him turn to fight as they rode up, but a rope sailed out, and then another, and the Apaches had themselves a prisoner.

  Well, I'd told him. He had stolen Kahtenny's squaw, and he had been warned. With Apaches, nothing much was doubtful from here on -- only how long Hadden had the guts to stick it out.

  This was a hard land, and the rules were written plain in the way we lived. If you overstepped the rules you had bought yourself trouble, and from now on it was going to be settled between Hadden and Kahtenny.

  Me, I got up and went to my horses. I fed shells into my six-shooters again, and then I walked over to the man I'd shot to see if he was alive. He wasn't. Johnny Wheeler was buzzard meat.

  I taken his guns off, and what he had on him for identification. Might be somebody, somewhere, who'd be wishful to know what happened.

  And then Laura Sackett got up off the ground and we just looked at each other. I never did see such hatred in anybody's eyes.

  "Downright mis'rable, ain't we?" I said calmly. "You'd think one of us Sacketts would be considerate enough to die so's you could get some of that bile out of your system."

  "I suppose you're going to kill me?" she said.

  "No, I ain't. It would be a kindness to the world, but I never shot a woman yet, and don't figure to now. No, I'm just goin' to leave you. I'm just goin' to mount up and ride right out of here."

  "You'd leave me here?" She was incredulous. "There's a horse yonder. You get on that horse and ride."

  Putting my foot in the stirrup, I swung into the saddle, and you can just bet that before I swung a-straddle of that horse I swung the animal around so I could keep an eye on her whilst I was doing it.

  I taken a turn around the saddlehorn with the lead rope of the pack horse, and she said, "What if those Indians come back?"

  "It's their tough luck, ma'am," I said, "but I hope not, for their sakes.

  Apaches aren't bad folks. They have trouble enough without wishin' you on them.

  Only it might work out for the best. A session with some of those Apache squaws might teach you some manners." I touched my hat, "I hope I won't be seein' you, ma'am. Good-bye!"

  That black of mine went down into the arroyo as if he knew what was behind him, and when he topped out on the rise beyond we were out of rifle shot. I pulled up then and looked back.

  She had caught one of the horses and was trying to mount. The horse was worried by her skirt, and was sidling around.

  That was the last I saw of her, of Laura, who had been Orrin's wife.

  I rode east, with the sun going down behind me, the feel of a good saddle under me, and a horse between my legs. The trail dipped into a wide hollow, shadowy with evening, and somewhere a quail called. Across yonder hills, miles away, was Pete Kitchen's. I'd make camp before I got there, because nobody in his right mind rode up to Pete's in the nighttime.

  He was paying me twenty dollars for the job, and might cut me in for some of the profits. Anyway, it was a road stake, and maybe before lining out for somewhere across the country I'd just ride around and call on Dorset.

  I liked that little girl. She was pert and she was pretty, and she
had nerve.

  A star came out, the desert night was soft, and a coolness came over it.

  It came on me to sing, but my horse was carrying me along nicely, and I was not wishful for trouble.