The Daybreakers (1960) s-6

by Louis L'Amour

  A man couldn't walk down to the corner and buy a paper. Nor did he have a postman to deliver it to him. I've known cowhands to memorize the labels off canned fruit and vegetables for lack of reading.

  Cap knew that country, knew every creek and every fork. There were no maps except what a man had in his skull, and nobody of whom to ask directions, so a body remembered what he saw. Cap knew a thousand miles of country like a man might know his kitchen at home.

  These mornings the air was fresher. There was a faint chill in the air, a sign we were getting higher. We were riding along in the early hours when we saw the wagons.

  Seven wagons, burned and charred. We moved in carefully, rifles up and ready; edged over to them, holding to a shallow dip in the prairie until we were close up.

  Folks back east have a sight to say about the poor Indian but they never fought him. He was a fighter by trade, and because he naturally loved it, mercy never entered his head. Mercy is a taught thing. Nobody comes by it natural. Indians grew up thinking the tribe was all there was and anybody else was an enemy.

  It wasn't a fault, simply that nobody had ever suggested such a thing to him. An enemy was to be killed, and then cut up so if you met him in the afterlife he wouldn't have the use of his limbs to attack you again. Some Indians believed a mutilated man would never get into the hereafter.

  Two of the men in this outfit had been spread-eagled on wagon wheels, shot full of arrows, and scalped. The women lay scattered about, their clothing ripped off, blood all over. One man had got into a buffalo wallow with his woman and had made a stand there.

  "No marks on them," I said, "they must have died after the Indians left."

  "No," Cap indicated the tracks of moccasins near the bodies. "They killed themselves when their ammunition gave out." He showed us powder burns on the woman's dress and the man's temple. "Killed her and then himself."

  The man who made the stand there in the wallow had accounted for some Indians.

  We found spots of blood on the grass that gave reason to believe he'd killed four or five, but Indians always carry their dead away.

  "They aren't mutilated because the man fought well. Indians respect a fighter and they respect almost nobody else. But sometimes they cut them up, too."

  We buried the two where they lay in the wallow, and the others we buried in a common grave nearby, using a shovel found near one of the wagons. Cap found several letters that hadn't burned and put them in his pocket. "Least we can do," he said, "the folks back home will want to know."

  Sunday was standing off sizing up those wagons and looking puzzled. "Cap," he said, "come over here a minute."

  The wagons had been set afire but some had burned hardly at all before the fire went out. They were charred all over, and the canvas tops were burned, of course.

  "See what you mean," Orrin said, "seems to be a mighty thick bottom on that wagon."

  'Too thick," Sunday said, "I think there's a false bottom."

  Using the shovel he pried a board until we could get enough grip to pull it loose. There was a compartment there, and in it a flat iron box, which we broke open.

  Inside were several sacks of gold money and a little silver, coming to more than a thousand dollars. There were also a few letters in that box.

  "This is better than hunting cows," Sunday said. "We've got us a nice piece of money here."

  "Maybe somebody needs that money," Orrin suggested. "We'd better read those letters and see if we can find the owner."

  Tom Sunday looked at him, smiling but something in his smile made a body think he didn't feel like smiling. "You aren't serious? The owner's dead."

  "Ma would need that money mighty bad if it had been sent to her by Tyrel and me," Orrin said, "and it could be somebody needs this money right bad."

  First off, I'd thought he was joking, but he was dead serious, and the way he looked at it made me back up and take another look myself. The thing to do was to find who the money rightfully belonged to and send it to them ... if we found nobody then it would be all right to keep it.

  Cap Rountree just stood there stoking that old pipe and studying Orrin with care, like he seen something mighty interesting.

  There wasn't five dollars amongst us now. We'd had to buy pack animals and our outfit, and we had broke ourselves, what with Orrin and me sending a little money to Ma from Abilene. Now we were about to start four or five months of hard work, and risk our hair into the bargain, for no more money than this.

  "These people are dead, Orrin," Tom Sunday said irritably, "and if we hadn't found it years might pass before anybody else did, and by that time any letter would have fallen to pieces."

  Standing there watching the two of them I'd no idea what was happening to us, and that the feelings from that dispute would affect all our lives, and for many years. At the time it seemed such a little thing.

  "Not in this life will any of us ever find a thousand dollars in gold. Not again. And you suggest we try to find the owner."

  "Whatever we do we'd better decide somewheres else," I commented. "There might be Indians around."

  Come dusk we camped in some trees near the Arkansas, bringing all the stock in close and watering them well. Nobody did any talking. This was no place to have trouble but when it came to that, Orrin was my brother ... and he was in the right.

  Now personally, I'm not sure I'd have thought of it. Mayhap I wouldn't have mentioned it if I did think of it ... a man never knows about things like that.

  Rountree hadn't done anything but listen and smoke that old pipe of his.

  It was when we were sitting over coffee that Tom brought it up again. "We'd be fools not to keep that money, Orrin. How do we know who we'd be sending it to?

  Maybe some relative who hated him. Certainly, nobody needs it more than we do."

  Orrin, he just sat there studying those letters. "Those folks had a daughter back home," Orrin said, finally, "an' she's barely sixteen. She's living with friends until they send for her, and when those friends find out she isn't going to be sent for, and they can expect no more money, then what happens to that girl?"

  The question bothered Tom, and it made him mad. His face got red and set in stubborn lines, and he said, "You send your share. I'll take a quarter of it ... right now. If I hadn't noticed that wagon the money would never have been found."

  "You're right about that, Tom," Orrin said reasonably, "but the money just ain't ours."

  Slowly, Tom Sunday got to his feet. He was mad clear through and pushing for a fight. So I got up, too.

  "Kid," he said angrily, "you stay out of this. This is between Orrin and me."

  "We're all in this together, Cap an' me as much as Orrin and you. We started out to round up wild cattle, and if we start it with trouble there's no way we can win."

  Orrin said, "Now if that money belonged to a man, maybe I'd never have thought of returning it, but with a girl as young as that, no telling what she'll come to, turned loose on the world at that age. This money could make a lot of difference."

  Tom was a prideful and stubborn man, ready to take on the two of us. Then Rountree settled matters.

  "Tom," he said mildly, "you're wrong, an' what's more, you know it. This here outfit is four-sided and I vote with the Sackett boys. You ain't agin democracy, are you, Tom?"

  "You know darned well I'm not, and as long as you put it that way, I'll sit down! Only I think we're damned fools."

  "Tom, you're probably right, but that's the kind of a damned fool I am," said Orrin. "When the cows are rounded up if you don't feel different about it you can have my share of the cows."

  Tom Sunday just looked at Orrin. "You damned fool. Next thing we know you'll be singing hymns in a church."

  "I know a couple," Orrin said. "You all set down and while Tyrel gets supper, I'll sing you a couple."

  And that was the end of it ... or we thought it was. Sometimes I wonder if anything is ever ended. The words a man speaks today live on in his thoughts or the memorie
s of others, and the shot fired, the blow struck, the thing done today is like a stone tossed into a pool and the ripples keep widening out until they touch lives far from ours.

  So Orrin sang his hymans, and followed them with Black, Black, Black, Lord Randall, Barbara Allan and Sweet Betsy. When Orrin finished the last one Tom reached over and held out his hand and Orrin grinned at him and shook it.

  No more was said about the gold money and it was put away in the bottom of a pack and to all intents it was forgotten. If that amount of gold is ever forgotten.

  We were getting into the country of the wild cattle now. Cap Rountree as well as others had noticed these wild cattle, some of them escaped from Spanish settlements to the south, and some escaped or stampeded by Indians from wagon trains bound for California.

  No doubt Indians had killed a few, but Indians preferred buffalo, and many of these cattle had come south with buffalo herds. There was no shortage of buffalo in 1867, and the Indians only killed the wild cattle when there was nothing else.

  The country we were going to work lay south of the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, between the Purgatoire and Two Buttes Creek, and south to the Mal Pais. It was big country and it was rough country. We rode south through sage plains with some mesquite, with juniper and pinon on the hills.

  Cap had in his mind a hidden place, a canyon near the base of a mountain where a cold spring of sweet water came out of the rocks. There was maybe two hundred acres of good grass in the bottom, grass belly-high to a horse, and from the look of it nobody had seen it since Cap Rountree stumbled on it twenty years back.

  First off, we forted up. Behind us the cliffs lifted sheer with an overhang that provided shelter from above. Right out in front there was four or five acres of meadow with good grass, edged on the far side by trees and rocks. Beyond that was the bowl with the big pasture as we called it, and in an adjoining canyon was a still larger area where we figured to trap the wild cattle and hold them.

  We spent that first day gathering fuel, adding a few rocks to our fort, and generally scouting the country close around our hideout. Also, I killed a deer and Cap got a buffalo. We brought the meat into camp and started jerking it.

  Next morning at daybreak we started out to scout the country. Within an hour's riding we'd seen sixty or seventy head. A man never saw such cattle. There was a longhorn bull in that crowd that must have stood seven feet and would have weighed sixteen hundred pounds. And horns? Needle-sharp.

  By nightfall we had a good bunch of cattle in the bowl or drifted toward it. By the third day we had more than a hundred head in that bowl and we were beginning to count our money.

  It was slow, patient work. Push them too fast and they would stampede clear out of the country, so we tried to move them without them guessing what we planned.

  We had two things to accomplish: to catch ourselves some wild cattle and to stay alive while doing it. And it wasn't only Indians we had to think about, but the cattle themselves, for some of those tough old bulls showed fight, and the cows could be just as mean if they caught a man afoot. Of a night we yarned around the fire or belly-ached about somebody's cooking. We took turn about on that job.

  We kept our fires small, used the driest wood, and we moved around only when we had to. We daren't set any patterns of work so's Indians could lay for us. We never took the same trail back that we used on the way out, and we kept our eyes open all the time.

  We gathered cattle. We sweated, we swore, and we ate dust, but we gathered them up, six one day, twelve another, nineteen, then only three. There was no telling how it would be. We got them into the bowl where there was grass and plenty of water and we watched them get fat. Also, it gave them time to settle down.

  Then trouble hit us. Orrin was riding a sorrel we had picked up in Dodge. He was off by himself and he started down a steep hillside and the sorrel fell. That little sorrel got up fast with Orrin's foot caught in the stirrup and he buckled down to run. There was only one way Orrin could keep from being dragged to death, and that was one reason cowhands always carried pistols. He shot the sorrel.

  Come nightfall there was no sign of Orrin. We had taken to coming in early so if anything went wrong with any of us there would be time to do something before night.

  We set out to look. Tom went south, swinging back toward the east, Cap went west, and I followed up a canyon to the north before topping out on the rim. It was me found him, walking along, packing his saddle and his Winchester.

  When he put down the saddle on seeing me, I rode up to him. "You took long enough," he grumbled, but there was no grumble in his eyes, "I was fixing to cache my saddle."

  "You could have fired a shot."

  "There were Indians closer than you," he said.

  Orrin told us about it around the fire. He had shucked his saddle off the dead sorrel and started for camp, but being a sly one, he was not about to leave a direct trail to our hideout, so he went downhill first and stumbled on a rocky ledge which he followed sixty or seventy yards.

  There had been nine or ten Indians in the party and he saw them before they saw him, so he just laid right down where he was and let them pass by. They were all warriors, and the way they were riding they might miss his dead horse.

  "They'll find it," Cap told us, "it's nigh to dark now, so they won't get far tonight. Likely they'll camp somewhere down the creek. At daybreak they'll see the buzzards."

  "So?"

  "That's a shod horse. It isn't likely they'd pass up a chance to get one man afoot and alone."

  Any other time we could have high-tailed it out of the country and left them nothing but tracks, but now we were men of property and property ties a man down.

  "Think they'll find us?"

  "Likely," Cap said. "Reckon we better hold to camp a day or two. Horses need the rest, anyway."

  We all sat there feeling mighty glum, knowing the chances were that if the Indians didn't find us they would stay around the country, looking for us. That meant that our chance of rounding up more cattle was coming down to nothing.

  "You know what I think?" They waited for me to speak up. "I think we should cash in our chips. I think we should take what we've got and hit the trail for Santa Fe, sell what we've got, and get us a proper outfit. We need three or four horses per man for this kind of work."

  Tom Sunday flipped his bowie knife into the sand, retrieved it and studied the light on the blade while he gave it thought. "Not a bad idea," he said. "Cap?"

  "If Orrin's willin'." Cap hesitated. "I figure we should dust out of here, come daybreak."

  "Wasn't what I had in mind," I said, "I meant to leave right now ... before those Indians find that sorrel."

  The reason I hadn't waited for Orrin to speak was because I knew he was pining to see that yellow-haired girl and I had some visiting in mind my own self.

  Only it wasn't that ... it was the plain, common-sense notion that once those Indians knew we were here, starting a herd might be tough to do. It might take them a day or two to work out our trail. Chances were by the time they found we were gone we'd be miles down the trail.

  So I just picked up my saddle and headed for my horse. There is a time that calls for action and when debate makes no sense. Starting a herd in the middle of the night isn't the best thing to do, but handling cattle we'd be scattered out and easy picking for Indians, and I wanted to get started.

  We just packed up and lit out. Those cattle were heavy with water and grass and not in the mood for travel but we started them anyhow. We put the north star at our backs and started for Santa Fe.

  When the first sun broke the gray sky we had six miles behind us.

  Chapter VI

  We had our troubles. When that bunch began to realize what was happening they didn't like it. We wore our horses to a frazzle but we kept that herd on the trail right up to dusk to tire them out as much as to get distance behind us. We kept a sharp lookout, but we saw no Indians.

  Santa Fe was a smaller town than we expected
, and it sure didn't shape up to more than a huddle of adobe houses built around a sunbaked plaza, but it was the most town I'd ever seen, or Orrin.

  Folks stood in the doorways and shaded their eyes at us as we bunched our cows, and then three riders, Spanish men, started up the trail toward us. They were cantering their horses and staring at us, then they broke into a gallop and came charging up with shrill yells that almost started our herd again. It was Miguel, Pete Romero, and a rider named Abreu.

  "Ho!" Miguel was smiling. "It is good to see you, amigo. We have been watching for you. Don Luis has asked that you be his guests for dinner."

  "Does he know we're here?" Orrin was surprised.

  Miguel glanced at him. "Don Luis knows most things, senor. A rider brought news from the Vegas."

  They remained with the herd while we rode into town.

  We walked over to the La Fonda and left our horses in the shade. It was cool inside, and quiet. It was shadowed there like a cathedral, only this here was no cathedral. It was a drinking place, and a hotel, too, I guess.

  Mostly they were Spanish men sitting around, talking it soft in that soft-sounding tongue of theirs, and it gave me a wonderful feeling of being a travelled man, of being in foreign parts. A couple of them spoke to us, most polite.

  We sat down and dug deep for the little we had. Wasn't much, but enough for a few glasses of wine and mayhap something to eat. I liked hearing the soft murmur of voices, the clink of glasses, and the click of heels on the floor. Somewhere out back a woman laughed, and it was a mighty fine sound.

  While we sat there an Army officer came in. Tall man, thirtyish with a clean uniform and a stiff way of walking like those Army men have. He had mighty fancy mustaches.

  "Are you the men who own those cattle on the edge of town?"

  "Are you in the market?" Orrin said.

  "That depends on the price." He sat down with us and ordered a glass of wine. "I will be frank, gentlemen, there has been a drought here and a lot of cattle have been lost. Most of the stock is very thin. Yours is the first fat beef we've seen."