Ride the Dark Trail (1972)

by L'amour, Louis - Sackett's 18

  I hit ground knees bent, heels dug in, with bullets kicking dust all around me. My mind was a blur but I went for that door and hit it with my shoulder. Like I said, I’m a big man and strong, and even weak as I was I tore that door loose and plunged into the kitchen. A sandy-haired man with a double-barrel shotgun was right square in front of me and I banged a shot at him, then lunged on in, jerking up the muzzle of my rifle. It missed his throat and tore his nose wide open and he screamed like a scared woman. I came around with the butt and there was a dull thunk as he hit the floor under my feet.

  In the next room there was a sudden explosion, a yell, and I shifted the rifle to my left hand, grabbed up the shotgun, and plunged into the living room.

  There were four men there and Em Talon and Pennywell lying in a corner. Pennywell seemed to have a bloody lip. I swung that shotgun around and let go with both triggers at twelve-foot range. She boomed like a cannon and the room was so full of smoke that my eyes stung with it. My head was buzzing and my knees felt like they were going to go any minute but I levered shot after shot into the smoke where those men were.

  A man rushed through the smoke, six-gun in hand, his hat gone, hair wild, his blue eyes staring. I was to his right and he looked at me and swung the gun at me. I threw the shotgun at his face and followed it in. I had the rifle but I forgot it. I just taken a swing with my big right fist and clobbered him right over one of those blue eyes. His knees started to go and I taken that rifle in both hands and took a full swing at his belly with the butt. He folded like a wet sack and when he hit the floor on his knees I booted him in the face.

  Staggering, I went down. My knees hit, and I lunged to get up and fell down. I tried to get up and rolled over in time to see a man come busting in from the front door.

  He was a square-built man in a red-checkered shirt and he had a gun. He seen me and he throwed down on me. I figured he had me dead to rights. I looked square into that pistol and knew I’d bought it, but my whole life didn’t pass in front of me. All I could think of was getting up and at him, knowing I’d never make it in time.

  Behind me a gun boomed, then boomed again. That man stood up on his tiptoes, his gun dribbled from fingers gone rubber, and he fell all in one piece. As I turned my head, there was Em Talon holding a big Dragoon Colt she’d had hid somewhere in the folds of her dress.

  Next thing I knew Pennywell was beside me, hauling me over to the wall, and the room was quiet. After a bit there was a moan … and it was me. Then somebody said, “Don’t shoot! For God’s sake, don’t shoot!” And a man, bloody and dying, staggered past me to the door.

  A window opened and the smoke started to suck out and the air cleared up. Three men were on the floor, but what shape they were in I don’t know. They just laid there as Em knelt alongside of me and stared down at me. “You come just right, boy, you surely did. They got Barnabas tied up and they’ve shot Al.”

  “Milo’s here. I shot to warn him.”

  “Milo? Then they better hunt cover.”

  They never tried to move me. They fetched a pillow for my head and they bathed my wounds that had tore loose and after a while they fed me some broth. Part of my weakness was just sheer hunger, but the blood I’d lost had done me no good.

  Of the three men on the floor two of them were dead. One of them had caught most of the shotgun blast and the other had taken two forty-fours from Em’s Dragoon Colt.

  The man I’d hit in the belly with the rifle butt was still alive although he was in bad shape. The others, one way or another, got out of the house and we never did know what became of them. Anyway, they were gone and there was no sign of Flanner. He’d been there, but crippled or not, he was gone before the shooting was over.

  Em told me three of them had been down on their knees at loopholes letting Milo ride up. Somebody among them knew who he was and Flanner wanted him dead. With Em and Barnabas prisoners they expected to force one or the other to sign over the MT to them.

  Three weeks I lay abed, waited on by Pennywell and Em. Three weeks when I lay mighty weak and came close to cashing in. Barnabas, Milo, and Al Fulbric rode into town but the Flanner outfit had scattered.

  Albani Fulbric had been shot, all right, and had him a concussion, but no more than that and a minor flesh wound that gave him no trouble.

  With Barnabas and Milo around things were back to normal. Al taken it easy a few days and then he set to and worked like the hand he was. I was the only one laid up, and I was sick enough so I scarcely knew where I was or what was keeping for the first ten days.

  With the return of the Talon boys the house took on a new air. It surely didn’t seem like that house was too big for them. They sang and roughhoused and told stories of the years between when they had been apart. Barnabas had traveled in Europe, had served in the army of France, and he was an educated man. Lyin’ there in bed I listened to the easy flow of his talk and for the first time felt envy of another man.

  When I was a boy yonder in the mountains we had to walk or ride miles to the nearest school, and often enough there was work to keep us from it, and nobody to make us go when there wasn’t. We youngsters tried to duck out of school whenever possible, and it shamed me to think there were now youngsters who knew more than me, who could write better and read better.

  I had never given thought to it before, and I could work as well as any man, but then I began to notice men like me ending up setting by with nothing to live on while others had a-plenty. Barnabas had plenty of schooling, and even Milo had a good bit I didn’t know nothing but how to use a gun, ride a horse, and track game … or men.

  Jake Flanner had disappeared. So had Johannes Duckett. Nobody had seen either one, and that tough lot who were hired by Flanner had all shaken the dust of the country from their hocks. The Flanner saloon and hotel had been taken over by Dorothy Arribas, while Con Wellington had opened his store full blast and was doing a good business.

  But lyin’ up like I was I done some thinking, and I wasn’t at all sure those two were gone. A man as anxious to get even as Flanner, who’d done as much and spent as much, wasn’t about to quit while losing. As for Duckett, he seemed ready to do whatever Flanner wanted.

  Pennywell, she was around and about. She’d put up her hair and she was making eyes at all three of us, although the Talon boys the most. Em watched it and she was amused more than anything else. Barnabas didn’t seem to be aware of her as more than just another person around, but Milo, I seen him looking her over once or twice.

  Em had been to town, bought herself dress material, and was sewing up some new duds for herself. The boys shaped up the place and the cattle were loosed on the open range to get the best of the grass that was left.

  I lay back in bed and stared up there at the ceiling wondering what was next for me. I never gave thought to it before, taking things as they came, but here I was laid up, mending slowly but surely, but seeing this big house around me and those folks. There was a strong feeling between Milo and Barnabas … brothers they were, and different as two men can be, and as boys they’d fought like cats and dogs, or so they said, but it was good to see them now. They made a team, the two of them, and between them the old Empty began to shape up.

  Maybe I lay abed a mite longer than needful. It was simply that I hated to leave that old house, Pennywell and Em and all of them. My own family busted up early, going off in different directions. We had a strong feeling for kinfolk in trouble, but my own family had scattered to the winds. Even Nolan, who was my twin brother, I’d not seen in a coon’s age.

  But the time had come for ridin’ and one morning I rolled out of bed and put on my hat. Seems like in cow country a man always puts on his hat first. I slid into my jeans, and pretty raunchy they were, although Em and Pennywell had each taken a hand at putting them in shape. My shirt was patched up - Em had wanted to give me one of the boys’ shirts but it wouldn’t fit no way. I was too big in the shoulders and chest for either of them.

  I was on my feet and slinging
my gun belt around my hips when Pennywell came in. She taken one look and called out, “Em! Mrs. Talon! Logan is up!”

  Em Talon came in and taken a long look at me. “Well, I knew I wasn’t going to keep no Sackett in bed for long. Come on down, son, and have you some breakfast. You need to get some red meat into you, for blood. You lost a-plenty.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and went.

  Chapter 18

  For three days I did nothing but sit on the porch and look down the road toward Siwash. Everything was moving along on the Empty - the cattle were grazing on the prairie grass where they had not been able to graze freely since Flanner came into the country. The place was getting fixed up, and Em was for the first time looking kind of easy in the mind. She was sleeping all night, and so was Pennywell.

  The Talon boys were out on the range most of the time, branding calves and picking up what mavericks they could find left over from the years since the Empty had been properly worked.

  Me, I sat there on the porch and tried to think out what was in the thoughts of Jake Flanner and Johannes Duckett. Yet my mind kept straying down the trail to California. Soon I’d be well enough to go there. There was nothing to keep me longer. The boys were back, Em Talon was in good shape, and nobody would try to take the Empty with even Milo around. I’d seen Milo in action a time or two and knew he could handle whatever came his way.

  In the three days of sitting on the porch I saw nothing to worry a man. In fact I saw nothing but grass and cows, with a few white clouds lazing it across a blue sky. On the fourth day I went out to the corral when the boys were topping off their horses. I was getting restless. Soon I’d be getting hog-fat with just setting by.

  I taken up a rope, shook out a loop, and caught up that roan horse. He dodged around a bit but once the loop settled over his neck he stood by. I petted him a mite and talked to him, fed him a carrot, and slapped the saddle on him. He humped his back a mite, but by this time we’d become right friendly and he didn’t feel like offering much of an argument. Anyway, I’d had it out with him before this and he knew who was boss.

  Pennywell came to the door, drying her hands on a dish towel. “Logan Sackett, you must be a great big fool to try to ride in your condition. You tie that horse up and come in here!”

  “Time for me to be headin’ down the trail, ma’am. I never stay long in one place, and I’ve been around here a sight too long.”

  ” ‘Rolling stones gather no moss,’” she said pertly.

  “I never saw moss grow on anything but dead wood and half-buried rocks,” I said, “and anyway, a wandering bee gets the honey.”

  “A lot of honey you’ve had!”

  “That’s because you kept your eyes on Milo,” I said, grinning at her. “An’ I don’t blame you. He’s a sight prettier than me!”

  “Depends on who’s looking,” she said. She watched me swing the horse around. “Where you all goin’? Em’s in town. She’s goin’ to be mighty upset.”

  “Who rode with her?” Suddenly I was scared. “She wasn’t alone, was she?”

  “Who is there? Barnabas went to the mountains after a deer, an’ Milo, him and Al, they went scouting the grass in the high meadows. Anyway, Em can take care of herself.”

  I taken up my saddlebags and slapped them over the saddle, then my rifle. “You tell the boys I said so long,” I said. “I’ll see Em in Siwash.”

  Swinging into the saddle I taken off down the trail to Siwash. Maybe it was because I’d been sick, but I was scared. Em had gone off alone, and that was what Flanner would be waitin’ for. The boys figured he’d left the country, but not me. He was a vengeful man, and she’d crippled him bad. But he’d been whipped in what he’d tried against her. Maybe he had left the country but I didn’t believe it.

  The roan had been in the corral for a while and he was ready to go, so we taken the trail to Siwash and I scouted for sign of Em. Most of the time I’d been watching that trail, but a time or two I’d gone inside or out back and on one of those times she had taken out for town.

  In no time at all I picked up mule tracks. She was walking him along, paying no mind to anything it seemed like. Anyway, from the steps of that mule she’d been letting him make his own speed, which was a bit slower than slow. That mule had no business anywhere and he was in no hurry to get there.

  Meanwhile I swept the country toward Siwash, studying for sign. Nothing and nobody. Not even a dust cloud. Overhead the sky was still a clear blue dotted with fleecy clouds like lambs on a blue pasture. The roan taken me down into a hollow, then up the other side, and I’d gone several hundred yards when it came to me that the tracks were gone … played out.

  I rode on a mite farther, still studying for sign, but there was nothing. That old woman and her mule were suddenly leaving no tracks at all. Town was only a half mile farther so I booted that roan and we went into town a-flyin’.

  The first person I saw was Dolores Arribas. “You seen Em Talon?” I asked her.

  “She ain’t in town. If she was she’d have come to see me.”

  Con Wellington came to the door, his store apron on. “She hasn’t been in,” he said. “I’ve been expectin’ her.”

  “You,” I said to them, “you find her if she’s in town, I mean you go to every door. You be mighty damn sure she ain’t here, because when I come back I’ll be hunting mean.”

  Swinging the roan around I hightailed it back down the trail to where her trail wiped out. I found tracks before she reached the shallow bottom I’d crossed when her tracks disappeared, but I found none on the other side. She was gone.

  She’d disappeared like she’d turned ghost or something. I could believe that of her, but not of her mule. A mule is a notional sort of critter and that mule wasn’t going to vanish … not before dinner time, anyway.

  A quick swing up the draw, scouting for tracks, showed nothing at all. Not a turned grass blade, nothing. Then I went back to the trail and set my horse a-studying the premises. Folks just don’t vanish; so somehow, some way, she’d been made to disappear … but how? This time when I gave study I wasn’t looking for her tracks, I was looking for any kind of sign, anything at all.

  I’d gone over that ground two or three times before I seen it, a straight line in the dust almost under the edge of some prickly pear and right in the bottom of the draw.

  Now who would draw such a line? And for what? I studied it as I sat my saddle, and I came no nearer to guessing the cause of it. Getting down, I trailed the reins of the roan and studied the ground. There was an area about twelve by twenty that was totally free of tracks except for those made by my own horse as I rode to Siwash.

  Turning down the draw I stopped and studied the sand before I taken a single step. There was sand, a few scattered rocks, and some brush, nothing much to attract the attention. Yet some of the grass was kind of pushed down, and the leaves of some sunflowers were bruised and the flowers crushed. Something had pressed them down, something heavy, but what it was or how it had been done, I couldn’t guess.

  Wandering on down the draw about a hundred yards, I found here and there some scratch marks in the sand like somebody had brushed out tracks. Now I’d done that a time or two myself but it never fools a good tracker because he will ask himself why the scratch marks or brush marks or whatever? You don’t need hoof tracks or foot tracks to follow a trail. All a body needs are the indications that somebody passed that way, and most of the ways a man can brush out a trail show up just as well as his tracks.

  The draw merged into a wider one that turned off to the southeast, and there around the corner I found where several horses had been tied … at least three, I guessed. There were several cigarette butts, like one of the men had been holding the horses or staying with them at least.

  Up the draw I found what I was hunting - a mule track among the horse tracks as they went away. It taken no great figuring to see the mule was led. It might have been a pack mule except that Em Talon rode a mule and I knew the tracks her
mule left.

  Putting a toe to the track, I squinted at it, then sized up the other horse tracks one by one. Now a track of man or beast reads as plain as a signature to a good reader of sign. By the time I’d followed on a ways I knew each of those horses … and one of them was the horse ridden by Jake Flanner when he gave me the beating and left me for dead in the mountains.

  Turning around I walked back to my roan, gathered the reins, and stepped into the saddle.

  It was a long trail. They hadn’t killed Em outright so it looked to be some plan of torture or ransom or something of the kind. Knowing what I did about Flanner I knew Em could not expect to get out of it alive … and I knew she knew it.

  Fortunately, I was on the trail, and I was on it sooner than they figured anybody would be. I’d ridden the owl-hoot trail too long not to know about every dodge a man can use, and it hadn’t taken me long to work out their direction. The way I surmised, they’d not expect pursuit before nightfall when Em didn’t return to the Empty.

  The sun was slanting down already, but it didn’t look like I was more than a couple of hours behind them, and I could follow a trail like the one they now left with my horse at a gallop. The strides of their horses were longer. They were making good time now, but I could see the mule was making trouble. He was hanging back, and I hoped they wouldn’t lose patience and shoot the old fellow. Em set store by that beast.

  Now the route left the draw and taken off across the plains, cutting in closer and closer to the hills. It was an area I’d never seen and knew nothing about. I kept watch as far ahead as I could, knowing they might come in sight and they might also lay ambush for me. There was no dust clouds, nothing. Within an hour I’d gained on them. Some of the tracks were right fresh, but it was coming on for sundown and once it grew dark I’d lose the trail. And night would give Jake Flanner time to work on Em.