The Sacket Brand (1965) s-12

by Louis L'Amour

  Crawling back into the brush, I settled down to rest a bit and to try thinking things out. My head wasn't working too well and my thoughts came slow, and everything looked different somehow. I kept passing my hand over my forehead and scowling, trying to rid my eyes of the blur.

  Near as I could figure, Ange and the wagon were now about three miles off, and moving as I had to, it might take me to sundown to cover that distance. Long before that, every inch of the mesa top would be scoured by riders who would seek out every clump of brush, every tree, every hole in the rocks.

  Nobody ever denied that I was a tough man. I stand six feet three in my socks, when I own a pair, and I weigh a hundred and eighty, most of it in my shoulders and arms. I ain't what you'd call a pretty-built man, but when I take hold things generally move.

  But now I was weak as a sick cat. I'd lost a sight of blood, and used myself almighty bad. The way things stood, I couldn't run and I couldn't fight. If they found me they had me, and no two ways about it ... and they were hunting to kill.

  There was no way across that mesa but to walk or crawl, and there was no place a rider couldn't go.

  It looked to me as if I needed more of a weapon than that hand-axe I had in my pocket.

  Turning around, I crawled deeper into the brush and burrowed down into the pine needles. My head ached, my eyes blinked slowly. I was tired, almighty tired. I felt wore out.

  Ange, Ange girl, I said, I just ain't a-gonna make it. I ain't a-gonna make it right now.

  I was trying to burrow deeper, and then I stopped all movement when I heard a horse walking on frozen ground, but the sound faded off in the distance.

  My head felt all swelled up like a balloon, and I couldn't seem to lift it off the ground.

  Ange, I said, damn it, Ange, I

  ...

  Chapter two.

  Leaning my shoulder against the rough bark of a tree, I stared at the empty clearing, unwilling to believe what my eyes saw.

  The wagon was gone!

  Under the wide white moon the clearing lay etched in stillness. The surrounding trees were a wall of blackness against which nothing moved. Within the clearing itself, scarcely two acres in extent, there was nothing.

  To this place I had come after hours of unconsciousness or sleep, after hours of fitful struggle for some kind of comfort on the frozen ground, in the numbing cold.

  Only when darkness had come had I dared move, for riders had been all about me, searching relentlessly. Once, off to the right I heard faint voices, glimpsed the flicker of a fire.

  How many times they might have passed nearby I had no idea, for only occasionally was I even fully aware of things around me. Yet with the deepening shadows some inner alarm had shaken me awake, and after a moment of listening, I rolled from the pine needles in which I had buried myself, and taking up my stick, I pushed myself to my feet.

  All through my pain-racked day I had longed for this place and dreamed of arriving here. In the wagon there would be things to help me, in the wagon there would be weapons. Above all, Ange would be there, and I could be sure she was all right.

  But she was gone.

  Now, more even than care for my wounds I wanted weapons. Above all, I was a fighting man ... it was deeply grained in my being, a part of me. Hurt, I would fight; dying, I would still try to fight.

  A quiet man I was, and not one to provoke a quarrel, but if set upon I would fight back.

  I do not say this in boasting, for it was as much a part of me as the beating of my heart. It was bred in the blood-line of those from whom I come, and I could not be other than I am.

  This it was, and my love for Ange, that had carried me here. Ange, who had brought love and tenderness to the big, homely man that I am.

  Ange knew me well, and she knew I was not a man to die easily. She knew the wild lands herself, and she would have believed that she had only to wait and I would return. She would not willingly have left this place without me, knowing that even if I suffered an accident I would somehow return.

  And now a curious fact became evident to me. This place, to which I would be sure to come back, was not watched. None of the searching men were here in this most obvious of places. Why?

  The simplest reason was that they did not know of it, though a wagon is not an easy thing to conceal, nor are the mules by which it was drawn, nor the cattle. But now they were not here.

  Hesitating no longer, and using my staff, I limped into the clearing and stopped where the wagon had stood.

  There were no tracks.

  I looked to where the fire had been, and there were no coals, no ashes. The stump that I had dragged up for a backlog, which should have been smoldering yet, was gone.

  Had I then come to the wrong place? No ... the great, lightning-struck pine from the base of which I had gathered dead branches and bark to kindle our fire stood where it had been. The rock where I had sat while cleaning my rifle was there.

  But the wagon was gone, the mules, the cattle ... and Ange.

  Ange, whom I loved. Ange, who was my life; Ange, whom I had found in the high mountains of Colorado and brought home to the ranch of my brother, in Mora. [. Sackett, Bantam Books. 1961.]

  The numbness seemed to creep into my brain, the cold held me still. Leaning on my crude staff, hurting in every muscle and ligament, I looked all around me for a clue, and I found none.

  I knew she would not have left without me, and if someone or something had forced her to leave, there should still have been tracks.

  Horror crept over me. I could feel its ghostly hand crawling on my spine and neck muscles. Some awful thing had happened here, some terrible, frightful thing. The ruthless pursuit of me, the wiping out of tracks here, all of it spoke of a crime; only I refused to allow myself to think of what the crime might be.

  Stiffly, I began to move. I would find the camp of those men and see if Ange was there; in any case, I would see who my enemies were.

  The wagon and the stock must surely be there.

  Turning, I started with a lunge, only to have the end of my staff slip on the icy ground. I fell heavily, barely stifling a scream. My hands fought for a grip on the frozen ground and I struggled to get up, and then I must somehow have slipped over on my face and lost consciousness, for when I awoke the sun was shining.

  For a time I lay there, letting the sun soak away the chill in my bones, but only half aware of my surroundings. Slowly realization came to me: I was a hunted man, and here I lay almost in the open, at the foot of a pine tree.

  Carefully, I started to turn my head. A wave of sickness swept over me, but I persisted.

  My eyes came to a focus. There was no sound but the wind in the pines. The clearing was there before me, and it was empty.

  My mind was alert now, and in the broad daylight I carefully skirted the clearing. There were no tracks anywhere, none to show our arrival, none to show how the wagon had left. It had simply vanished.

  I was without weapons, without food, without clothing or shelter, but all I could think of was Ange.

  Somebody had been so desperate to have her disappear that every evidence of our presence there had been wiped out.

  An hour later, I was at the clearing where their camp had been the night before, but now all were gone.

  At least a dozen men had slept there, and there were tracks in profusion. Cigarette butts were scattered about, a coffeepot had been emptied, and a crust of bread lay upon the ground.

  But there were no wagon tracks, no tracks of small boots for which I searched. And knowing Ange, I knew that she would somehow have contrived to leave a track. She knew me, knew my methods, knew my thoroughness when on trail ... and yet, there was nothing. Wherever she was, Ange had never been in this camp.

  How could a wagon loaded with more than a ton of supplies, drawn by six big Missouri mules, disappear from a mesa that offered only two or three possible ways by which a wagon might leave it?

  Somehow my impression was growing that these men knew noth
ing of Ange or the wagon. So what then? What had happened? Where was Ange? And who had shot me, and why?

  Andwith these questions there were the others: Why were these men hunting me to kill me? Had they gone for good?

  Or would they be back?

  My hunch was that the search had only begun.

  Such a desperate search would not be ended that quickly.

  I moved off through the trees, hobbling painfully, crawling over fallen logs, occasionally pausing to rest.

  When I had left the wagon to scout for a route off Buckhead Mesa, a route into the Tonto Basin, I had skirted the mesa itself and had seen a deep canyon leading off to the southwest. It was all of five hundred feet deep, and it appeared to be wild and impassable, but there was a creek along the bottom. There would be water there, there would be game, there would be fish.

  I could no longer look to the wagon for relief. From now on I was completely on my own, alone and without any possible help. And I was surrounded by enemies unknown to me.

  By nightfall of a bitterly long day I had found a cave under a natural bridge. The bridge was a tremendous arch of travertine at least a hundred and eighty feet above the waters of the creek, and the cave was a place where a man might hide and where no trouble would come to him unless from some wandering bear or mountain lion. It was a place hidden by brush and the rock slabs all about, a place littered with dead trees brought down by flash floods.

  Using the bow and drill method, I started a small fire, and felt warmth working into my muscles. The warmth of the sun had brought some relief from the chill, but not very much.

  Making a basin by bending together the corners of a sheet of bark, I heated some water and carefully bathed my hands, then lowered my pants and looked at my leg. It was almost black from bruising, and it was swollen to half again its natural size.

  For perhaps an hour I sat there, soaking my wounds with a washcloth made from the remnants of my shirt. Whether it would help I did not know, but it felt good.

  Then after carefully extinguishing my tiny fire, I put together a bed of evergreen boughs and crawled onto it. I fell into a fitful, troubled sleep.

  Hunger woke me from a night of tormented dreams, but first of all I heated water and bathed my leg again, and drank warm water to heat my chilled body. It began to seem as if I would never be warm again, and though I was hungry, what I longed for most was clothing--warm, soft, wonderful clothing.

  Sitting there, applying hot cloths to my wounds, I got to thinking on the reason for that attack on me.

  As a general run, motives weren't hard to understand there on the frontier. Things were pretty cut and dried, and a body knew where he stood with folks. He knew what his problems were, and the problems of those about him were about the same. A man was too busy trying to stay alive and make some gain, to have time to think much about himself or get his feelings hurt. It seems to me that as soon as a man gets settled down, with meat hung out to smoke and flour in the bin, he starts looking for something to fuss about.

  Well, it wasn't that way on the frontier.

  A man could be just as mean as he was big enough to be; but if he started out to be bad he'd better be big enough or tough enough, if he figured to last.

  Such folks were usually given time to reach for a gun or they were tucked into a handy noose. I've noticed that the less a man has to worry about getting a living, the more time he has to worry about himself.

  Folks on the frontier hadn't any secret sins. The ones who were the kind for such things stayed close to well populated places where they could hide what they were. On the frontier the country was too wide, there was too much open space for a body to be able to cover anything up.

  But now somebody wanted me dead, and it was apparently that same somebody who had taken my wagon away, and Ange with it.

  I could understand a man wanting a wagon, or a man wanting Ange, and it wasn't ungallant of me to think it was more likely to be the wagon and outfit than Ange. And there was reason for that.

  One thing a man didn't do on the frontier was molest a woman, even an all-out bad woman.

  Women were scarce, and were valued accordingly. Even some pretty mean outlaws had been known to kill a man for jostling a woman on the street.

  Pretty soon my leg was feeling better.

  It was easier to handle, and some of the swelling was gone.

  Toward noontime I found me a rabbit. I twisted him out of a hole with a forked stick, broiled him, and ate him. But a man can't live on rabbits. He needs fat meat.

  Several times I saw deer, and once a fat, healthy elk, a big one that would dress two hundred and fifty pounds at least. But what I hunted was something smaller. I couldn't use that much meat, and anyway, I had nothing with which to make a kill.

  The afternoon was almost gone and weariness was coming over me when I fetched up at a rocky ledge below a point of Buckhead Mesa. Pine Creek and its wild canyon lay north and west of me, the mesa at my back.

  Night was a-coming on, and I wished myself back at my cave. Just as I was fixing to turn back, I smelled smoke. Rather, it was the smell of charred timber, a smell that lingers for days, sometimes for weeks after a burning. That smell can be brought alive again by dampness or rainfall. I knew that somebody had had a fire, and close by.

  The ledge was behind some trees and close against the face of the cliff. At this point the cliff was not sheer, though it was very steep, and ended in a mass of rubble, fallen trees, brush, and roots.

  I started working my way through the trees. The smell of charred wood grew stronger, andwith it the smell of burned flesh.

  For the first time I felt real fear, fear for Ange. Andwiththe fear, came certainty. I was sure that when I found that fire, when I found that charred wood and burned flesh, I would find my wagon, and I would find Ange.

  Chapter three.

  The wire-like brush was thick, and there was no getting through it in my present condition, half naked as I was, without ripping my hide to shreds. What I had to do was seek out a way around and through, and finally I made it. My heart was pounding with slow, heavy beats when at last I came in sight of the burned-out fire.

  I had found my wagon, and I had found my mules. But there was no sign of Ange.

  The wagon and all that was in it had been burned.

  The mules, I discovered, had each been shot in the head, then dumped over the cliff one by one.

  Afterward, somebody had come around and piled brush over the lot, then set fire to it. The killing of those fine big mules hurt me ... there'd been no better mules west of Missouri, if anywhere.

  A fine gray ash had been left by the burning of desert brush. And it was obvious that anything that scattered when the wagon struck bottom had been carefully picked up and thrown on the heap.

  Whoever had done this had made a try at wiping out all sign, just as no tracks had been left on the mesa top. Suddenly it occurred to me that whoever had done this might well come back to make sure the destruction had been complete. If they returned and found me, I would be killed, for I was in no shape to defend myself, nor had I any weapon.

  For several minutes I stood there, trying to think it out, and studying that heap of charred wood and burned mules, trying to figure out who could have done this, and why.

  The destruction was not total, for all the work somebody put to make it so, and in thinking about it I could see why. This had been a hurried job.

  Careful to disturb things as little as I might, I worked my way around the fire. A big wagon like that, made of white oak, doesn't burn so easy, in spite of the dryness of the wood. The hubs of the wheels were solid, the wagon bed was strongly made. ... And then I thought of our secret place.

  It was a box hollowed out of a block of six-by-six timber and bolted to the underside of the wagon, and in it we kept a few odds and ends of keepsakes and five gold eagles for emergency money. By lifting a wooden pin inside the wagon-box a section of the bottom lifted out.

  It made a lid for the
box.

  The canvas top of the wagon and the bows were gone, of course; the wheels were badly charred but almost intact, the body of the wagon was largely destroyed. Poking around in the mess that remained, I found the box, charred, but still whole. Breaking it open, I found the gold money, but whatever else had been inside was charred to ashes.

  Poking around where the grub box had been, I found a can of beans that had tumbled from the box when it busted open, and had rolled down among the rocks. And there was also a charred and partly burned side of bacon. What I had hoped to find was some kind of a weapon--a kitchen knife or anything--but whatever there was must have been buried in the rubble.

  There was no telling when the ones who had done this might come back, for they had been bound and determined to destroy all sign of me and my outfit, and I was feeling convinced they would return to make sure the job had been done. I'd been taking care all the time to leave no tracks; now I took a last look around.

  There lay the ashes not only of my outfit, but of my hopes as well. Ange and me had planned to start a ranch in the Tonto Basin, and I'd spent most of what I had on that outfit and on the cattle to follow.

  It was plain to see from the ways things had been piled up that somebody had stood here, carefully putting into the pile everything that was scattered, and it made no sense. In this wild country, who would ever know about what had happened here? Many a man had been murdered and just left for the buzzards, and nobody was the wiser. No, whoever and whatever, they not only wanted me dead, but everything wiped out to leave no slightest trace.

  So what did that spell for Ange?

  Always she was there in my thoughts, but I kept shoving those thoughts of her to the back of my mind.

  There was nothing I could do to help her, or even to find her, until I could get a weapon and a horse. To think of her was to be frightened, to let myself waste time in worrying--time that I'd best spend doing something. One thing I'd learned over the years: never to waste time moaning about what couldn't be helped. If a body can do something, fine--he should do it. If he can't, then there's no use fussing about it until he can do something.