Galloway (1970) (9 page)

When I walked back to the saloon I was toting a full outfit, right down to a brand spanking new Winchester. And you know something? That was the first new gun I'd ever owned. Always before it was some hand-me-down, owned by a half-dozen before me.

Berglund had him a back room and I changed there and got into my new outfit, all but the boots. I set them aside for a time when my feet would be well enough.

Then I taken that Winchester and loaded her to the guards. She was a '73, and carried seventeen bullets in the magazine and chamber.

When I came back into the saloon Berglund looked at me and said, "You're all slicked up to go courtin'. Who'll it be? Meg Rossiter?"

"She'd never look twice at me," I said. "But I'll tell you what I want to do. I want to write a letter. You got the makin's?"

So Bergland fixed me up with paper and pen, and then went to stirring up a fire.

Fine as it was in the daytime a body could always sleep under a blanket there at Shalako, which suited me.

The letter I wrote was to Parmalee. He was a flat-land Sackett, folks of which we'd heard tell but had never met up with until that trouble down in the Tonto Basin when Tyrel and Parmalee Sackett showed up.

He was an educated man. Those flatland Sacketts had money. They were well-off, and Parmalee had been to school and all. It never affected his shooting, though, so I reckon school is a thing to be wished for. Wishing never done me any good.

Parmalee had cattle, and this here was fine grazing land, and Parmalee had something else he'd need. He had nerve. When I'd finished the letter to Parmalee, telling him of the range, I suddenly had a thought. We were shaping up for trouble with the Dunns, and that was excuse enough to write to Logan.

Now Logan was a Clinch Mountain Sackett, and those boys from Clinch Mountain are rougher than a cob. There were those who called Logan an outlaw, but he was family, and he was handy with a shooting iron.

I wrote to him, too.

Trouble was, the shooting was likely to be over and done with before any of those boys ever got here, unless it was Parmalee, who was down in New Mexico, not far south of the line.

He might make it in time. And of a sudden I had a hunch we'd need him.

This country was shaping up for war.

Chapter
IX

Leaving my gear at Berglund's place, I mounted that grulla and rode down off the bench into the river bottom of the La Plata. It was very still. There was grass, and everywhere a body looked there were the tall white trunks of the aspen.

Stopping at the river I let the mustang drink from the cold water that ran down froin the melting snows on the mountains.

Across the stream I went up through the trees beyond. There was a plateau over there with good grass, a few clumps of oak brush here and there, but a fresh, green country lying at the foot of the mountains.

There were pines along the mountain slopes with thick-standing clumps of aspens of a lighter green. The aspen was usually the first tree to grow up after a burn, and the aspen groves provided a lot of food for wildlife.

Riding slowly along the edge of the mountain and up under the trees along the slope, I knew this was my country, this was where I wanted to be. This was the land I'd been looking for and no amount of Dunns would keep me off of it.

I headed back to Shalako.

The first person I saw when I walked into the saloon was old Galloway, and I never laid eyes on anybody that looked better.

"You look kind of peaked," he said, grinning at me. "I declare, the first time I leave you alone you make out to get yourself killed, or nigh onto it.

"Flagan, this here's Nick Shadow ... a good friend."

"Howdy."

"My pleasure."

We all sat down together at a table and went over what had taken place, and we came to agreement on Curly Dunn. Galloway looked me over mighty curious when I talked about Meg Rossiter, and I felt myself flushing. More because he was looking at me than anything else. It was no use him thinking there was ought between us, nor me thinking it either.

The only thing she wanted from me was distance, and I had no ache to a shoot-out with Curly Dunn over a girl that couldn't see me for dust. What I had to tell them then was about the land I'd seen, and they agreed.

I taken to Shadow. Galloway and me, we see things about the same, and anybody I liked he liked and the other way around. Nick Shadow was a tall, handsome man but one who had judgment as well as education, and the two don't always accompany one another. I've seen some men who were mighty bright in their books who couldn't tell daylight from dark when it came to judging men or the condition of things.

Now I hold by the Good Book, but in some ways I am closer to the Old Testament than the New. I believe in forgiving one's enemies, but keep your hand on your gun while you do it, mentally, at least. Because while you are forgiving him he may be studying ways to get at you.

I like my fellow man, but I also realize he carried a good measure of the Old Nick in him and he can find a good excuse for almost any king of wrongdoing or mischief. I wanted no trouble with the Dunns, and would avoid giving them cause, but at the same time I had common sense enough to realize they might not feel the same way. A man who starts imagining that others think good because he does is simply out of his mind. I've helped bury a few who did think that way ... nice, peaceful men who wanted no trouble and made none. When feeding time comes around there's nothing a hawk likes better than a nice, fat, peaceful dove.

"We can lay claim to land," I said, "but we'll have to have cattle on it. I've written to Parmalee."

"I've got a few head," Shadow said. "We might include them in the drive."

We spent the evening talking about the ranch we wanted, the cattle drive to come, and the future of the country. There was or had been a fort over on the Animas, and Berglund told us there was a house over there if you wanted to call it that. So we were not alone in the country. There was an Irishman named Tun McCluer who had moved into the country and he was getting along with the Utes ... which showed that it could be done.

McCluer told Berglund that the Utes and the Jicarillas usually got along, so the bunch who had been hunting me were likely to have been renegades, prepared to plunder anyone who crossed their trail. The Indians had men like that as well as the whites.

We stabled our horses in the livery barn and camped in the loft. Falling asleep that night I dreamed of my own outfit, and slept with the smell of fresh hay in my nostrils.

We moved over west of the town, and west of the La Plata, and we made camp there in a grove of aspen, a splendid country spread out before us. We decided we'd all spend some days working on the beginnings of a spread, and after that Nick Shadow would take off for the south to meet Parmalee and to round up his own cattle to join the herd.

"I don't need to tell you boys," he said, "but keep the Dunns in mind. They're a tough, lawless outfit and they won't take lightly to our being here. Especially after both of you have had words with Curly."

First off, we built a corral, and then a lean-to. We built them back into the woods with a screen of trees between us and the open flat. Then we went back into the trees and cut some limbs here and there, and a whole tree yonder to scatter amongst the other trees and make a sort of crude barrier for anybody who tried to come up behind us. There was nothing that would stop anyone, but nobody could come up through those trees without arousing us.

Galloway and me, we weren't like the usual cowhand, who'd rather take a whipping than do any work that can't be done on a horse. We were both planting boys from the hills, who could plow as straight a furrow as the next man, if need be, so we spaded up a corner of ground, worked over the sod and went down to the store to buy seed. We planted potatoes, carrots, pumpkins and corn, to start. We had no idea how they'd grow, but if they did they'd be a help. Starting a home in a new land is never a bed of roses, but then we didn't come looking for it to be easy.

Work pleasures me no more than the next man, but if a body is to have anything there's no other way, although we found excuses enough to get up in the saddle and go perambulating around the country. Of course, that was necessary, too.

We'd chosen to locate near the opening of Deadwood Creek, with a mighty big ridge rising to the west of us, and Baldy Mountain to the east.

We had to hunt or gather for our grub, and we Sacketts were born to it. And that Nick Shadow--he might have been born in a castle, but he knew his way around with an axe, and took mighty fast to what we showed him about rustling up grub in the forest.

Working about the place and rustling for grub as we did, we kept out of sight.

We didn't see anybody or even their tracks. Each of us would take a ride sometime during the day, and at night over the fire we'd tell of what we'd seen, so within a few days we were getting a fair picture of the country around.

Sometimes of a night we'd set about the fire and talk. Nick Shadow had education, but he never tired to hear our mountain expressions. We'd lost a few of them coming west, but an argument or a quarrel we still called an upscuddle, which seemed almighty funny to Nick.

"We don't have so many words as you," I told him, "so we have to make those we have stand up and do tricks. I never figured language was any stone-cold thing anyway. It's to provide meaning, to tell other folks what you have in mind, and there's no reason why if a man is short a word he can't invent one. When we speak of beans that have been shelled out of the pod we call 'em shuckbeans, because they've been shucked. It's simple, if you look at it."

"Learning," Galloway added, "isn't only schoolin'. It's looking, listening and making-do. If a man doesn't have much or if he's in wild country he'd better get himself to contemplate and contrive. Pa always taught us to set down and contemplate, take our problem and wrassel with it until there's an answer. And then we contrive. Back in the hills we couldn't buy much, and we didn't have any fancy fixin's, so we contrived. We put together what we could find and added it to something else."

Nick, he knew a powerful lot of poetry, and like most lonesome, wandering men we liked it. Sometimes of a night he'd set by the fire and recite. He knew a lot of poetry by that fellow Poe who'd died about the time I was born. He used to live over the mountain in Virginia ... over the mountain from us, that is, who lived on the western slope of the hills.

We'd never paid much mind to Nick Shadow's talk of gold. There'd been Spanish people in Colorado from the earliest times, and for awhile there'd been French folks coming west from New Orleans when Colorado was part of the Louisiana country. The story Nick told us about the gold he knew of was known to others, too. But treasure stories come by the dozen in gold mining country, and everybody you meet has got a mine worth a million dollars or many millions, depending on how many drinks the owner's had.

One night he said, "Finding the big caches, where they hid the millions would be accident now, because nobody knows exactly where it was hidden, but there's another treasure that might be found, so I'm going to tell you about it.

"My grandfather had a brother who trapped in this country nearly fifty years ago, and much of the sign left by those early French and Spanish miners was plainly visible when he arrived in the country.

"The others had never heard the stories of the gold found in the La Platas, nor the less known stories of diamonds found there, and Arnaud was not the man to tell them of it, but he kept his eyes open, and he had an idea where to begin looking.

"No need to go into all the details, but I figure we're not more than ten miles from that gold right now."

"Ten miles is a lot of country," Galloway suggested.

"They were headed up the La Plata, planning to take an old Indian trail that follows along the ridge of the mountains, and Arnaud was counting the streams that flowed into the river. Just past what he counted as the sixth one he saw what he was looking for ... a dim trail that led up into the peaks.

"They continued on a mile or so further and then he suggested they stop and trap out a beaver pond they'd found. Arnaud volunteered to hunt meat for them and he took off along the river, and as soon as he was out of sight of the others he started back, found his trail and started up.

"It was a steep trail, unused in a long time, and he figured that in the two miles or so of trail he climbed about three thousand feet ... he was judging in part by the change in vegetation. He reached a high saddle, crossed over and started down. He was looking for a creek that flowed out of the mountain, and he could see the canyon down which it flowed, but there was no longer a trail. That had played out when he reached the crest of the ridge.

"It was very cold, and the going was difficult. He had to move slowly because of the altitude. He crossed over the saddle, as I've said, but he had no more than started down when he heard a shot where he had left his friends. A shot, and then several shots.

"As you can imagine, he was in a quandary. If he went back to help his friends, it would take him the better part of an hour, moving as he would have to, and by then any fight would be over.

"Or perhaps they had merely killed a deer. In the final event, he continued on, found the head of the creek and found the marker, a piece of a ramrod thrust into a crack in the rock. The gold was cached just below it and to the right, and when he removed the stones he found a dozen gold bars, several sacks of dust, and one small sack of diamonds.