Sackett (1961) (3 page)

We were nip and tuck with a pistol. Maybe I was a shade better with a rifle, but it was always a question.

Right now the question was one of gold. Pa, he always advised us boys to take time to contemplate. I taken it now.

First off, I had to figure what to do. The gold was here, but it had to be kept secret until I could get it laid claim to officially, and get it out.

Gold is never a simple thing. Many a man has wished he had gold, but once he has it he finds trouble. Gold causes folks to lose their right thinking and their common sense. It had been lied for and killed for, and I was in a lawless land.

Gold has weight, and when a body carries it, it is hard to hide. Gold seems almost to have an odor. Folks can smell it out even faster than gossip.

Finding the gold had been one thing, but getting it out was another. I'd no tools, and nothing in which to carry it but my saddlebags. Nearly all my money had gone to buy grub and gear for this trip south. I wanted to take enough gold out now to buy a mining outfit.

Seemed to be a sight of gold here, near as I could judge, as much as a body could want, but mostly I wanted enough for cattle and a place of my own, and enough to buy time for a little book learning.

It ain't right for a man to be ignorant, but in the hills we had school only one year out of three, and the time might not last over two, three months. When I got all squared away with a pencil I could write my name ... Pa and Tyrel could read it, too. Only one of my officers in the army could read it, but he told me not to worry. "A man who can shoot like you can," he said, "isn't likely to have anybody question the way he signs his name."

But even if a man pays no mind to himself, he has to think of his youngsters, when and if. We Sacketts were healthy breeders, running long on tall boys. Counting ourselves, we had forty-nine brothers and cousins. Pa had two sisters and five brothers living. Starting a feud with us didn't make any kind of sense. If we couldn't outshoot them we could outbreed them.

A man who expects to sire children doesn't want to appear the fool in front of them. We Sacketts believed young folks should respect their elders, but their elders had to deserve respect. Finding the gold could mean all the difference to me.

While I was contemplating, I was unsaddling my horses and settling down for the night. The season was well into spring and fetching up to summer. The snow was almost off the mountains although in this kind of country it never seemed to leave entirely, and there was no telling when it might snow again.

If I went out, got an outfit and came back, it would be a close thing to get out some gold and leave before snow fell. High up as I was, snow could be expected nine months out of the year. And when snow fell, that valley up above would fill up and the stream would freeze over. Anybody caught in this valley would be stuck for the winter.

Yet a heavy rain could make that narrow chute impassable for days. Allowing for rain spells and snow, there were probably not over fifty or sixty days a year when a man could get in or out of the valley. ... Unless there was another way in.

It left me with a worried, uneasy feeling to think I was in a jug that might be stoppered at any time.

Making coffee over my fire, I studied about my situation. Those Bigelows now, the brothers of the man I'd had to shoot . . . they might think I had run from them, and they might try to follow me.

During that ride south I'd taken no more than usual precautions with my trail, and it fretted me to think that they might follow me south, and bother Orrin and Tyrel. Our family had had enough of feuding, and I'd no right to bring trouble to their door.

That the Bigelows would follow me to this place I did not expect. From my first discovery of the strange trail, I had taken care to cover my tracks and leave nothing for anybody to find.

A wind scurried my fire, just a mite of wind, and my eyes strayed to that old breastplate against the wall. Did the ghosts of men really prowl in the night? Never a man to believe in ha'nts, I was willing to believe that if a place was to be ha'nted, this was a likely one.

Empty as this valley seemed, I had the feeling of somebody looking over my shoulder, and the horses were restless too. Come sleeping time, I brought them in off the grass where they had been picketed and kept them closer to the fire. A horse makes the best sentinel in many cases, and I had no other. However, I was a light sleeper.

At daylight I shagged it down to the stream and baited a hook for trout. They snagged onto my hook and put up a fight like they were sired by bulldogs, but I hauled them in, fried them out, and made a tasty breakfast.

Making a handle out of a stick I split the end and wedged in a rounded stone, then lashed it in place. Using that and a few blades of stone, I started to work on that ore in the end of the tunnel. By sundown I had broken my axe handle twice at the hammer end, but had knocked off about three hundredweight of ore.

Long after nightfall I sat beside my fire and broke up that quartz. It was rotten quartz, some of which I could almost pull apart with my fingers, but I hammered it down and got some of the gold out. It was free gold, regular jewelry store stuff, and I worked until after midnight.

The crackling of my fire in the pine-scented night was a thing to pleasure me, but I walked down to the bank of the stream in the darkness and bathed in the cold water of the creek. Then I went back to the cave where I was camped and went to work on a bow.

Growing up with Cherokees like we did, all of us boys hunted with bows and arrows, even more than with guns. Ammunition was hard to come by when Pa was off in the western lands, and sometimes the only meat we had was what we killed with a bow and arrow.

My fire was burning wood that held the gathered perfume of years, and it smelled right good, and time to time the flames would strike some pitch and flare up, changing color, pretty as all get-out. Suddenly the heads of my horses came up, then I was over in the deep shadows with my Winchester cocked.

Times like that a man raised to wild country doesn't think. He acts without thinking ... or he may never get a chance to think again.

For a long time I waited, not moving a muscle, listening into the night. Firelight reflected from the flanks of my horses. It could be a bear or a lion, but from the way the horses acted I did not think so.

After a while the horses went back to eating, so I took a stick and snaked the coffeepot to me and had some coffee and chewed some jerked beef.

Awakening in the gray morning light, I heard a patter of rain on the aspen leaves, and felt a chill of fear ... if it started to rain and that chute filled up with run-off water it might be days before I could get out.

So I sacked up my gold. The horses seemed happy to have me moving around. There was about three pounds of gold, enough and over for the outfit I'd need.

When I went outside I saw that the trout I'd cleaned and hung in a tree against breakfast were gone. The string with which I'd suspended the meat had been sawed through by a dull blade . . . or gnawed by teeth.

I stood looking at the ground. Under the tree there were several tracks. They were not cat tracks, they were the tracks of little human feet. They were the tracks of a child or a small woman.

My skin crawled . . . nothing human could be in a place like this; yet come to think of it, I couldn't recall ever hearing of a ha'nt with a taste for trout.

We Welsh, like the Irish and the Bretons, have our stories of the Little People, all of which we love to yarn about, but we do not really believe in such things. But in America a man heard other tales. Not often, for Indians did not like to talk of them, and never spoke of them except among themselves. But I'd talked to white men who took squaws to wife, and they lived among Indians, and heard the tales.

Up in Wyoming I rode by to look at the Medicine Wheel, a great wheel of stone with twenty-odd spokes, well over a hundred feet across. The Shoshones copied their medicine lodge from that wheel, but all they can say about who built the wheel is that it was done by "the people who had no iron."

A hundred miles away to the southwest there was a stone arrow pointing toward the wheel. It pointed a direction for someone--but who?

My gold was sacked to go, but I needed meat, and disliked to fire a gun in that valley. So I stalked a young buck and killed him with an arrow, butchered him, and carried the meat back to the cave, where I cut a fair lot of it into strips and hung them on a pole over a fire to smoke.

Then I broiled a steak of venison and ate it, decided that wasn't enough for a man my size, and broiled another.

Hours later the wind awakened me. The fire was down to red coals and I was squirming around to settle down for sleep again when my mustang blew.

Me, I came out of those blankets like an eel out of greased fingers, and was back in the shadows again with my rifle hammer eared back before you could say scat.

"All right, boy." The horses would know I was awake and they were not alone. At first there was no sound but the wind, then after a bit a stirring made by no bear or deer in the world.

My bronc snorted and my pack horse blew. I could see their legs in the faint glow of the coals, and nothing moved near them . . . but something was out there in the night.

A long slow time dragged by and the coals glowed a duller red. Leaning back against the wall, I dozed a little, but alert for trouble if need be.

There was no other sound.

Morning was painting a sunrise on a storm-gored ridge beyond the dark sentinel pines when I got up, stretched my stiff muscles. Studying the trees across the valley and the slope above them, I failed at first to notice what was closest to home. The rest of that meat had been pulled from the tree and a good-sized hunk had been cut off.

Whoever had cut it off had made work of it with a dull blade, and to take the risk of approaching a man's camp whoever it was must have been hungry.

Hanging the meat up again, I went out and killed and dressed another buck. I hung it in a tree also, and rode away, I wanted nobody going hungry where I could lend a hand. Whoever or whatever it was would have meat as long as that buck lasted.

The trail going out was worse than coming in, but with some scrambling and slipping we reached the high basin. We rode past that lake of ghost water and headed for the lowlands once more. But once through the keyhole pass I did not follow the same trail, taking a rough, unlikely way that nobody was apt to find, unless maybe a mountain goat.

Turning in my saddle, I looked back at the peaks. "Whoever you are," I said aloud, "expect me back, for I'll be riding the high trails again, a-hunting for gold"

Chapter
IV

I sighted the ranch, I drew up on the trail and looked across the bottom. There was a rocky ridge where the Mora River cut through, and the ranch was there beside it. That light over there was home, for home is where the heart is, and my heart was wherever Ma was, and the boys.

Walking the appaloosa down the trail, I could smell the coolness rising from the willows along the Mora, and the hayfields over in the big valley called La Cueva.

A horse whinnied, and a dog started to bark, and then another dog. Yet no door opened and the light continued to burn. Chuckling, I walked my horse along and kept my eyes open. Unless I was mistaken, one of the boys or somebody would be out in the dark watching me come up, maybe keeping me covered from the darkness until my intentions were clear.

Getting down from the saddle, I walked up the steps to the porch. I didn't knock, I just opened the door and stepped in.

Tyrel was sitting at a table with an oil lamp on it, and Ma was there, and a girl who had to be Tyrel's wife.

The table was set for four, and I stood there, long and tall in the door, feeling my heart inside me so big I felt choked and awkward. My clothes were stiff and I knew I was trail-dusty and mighty mean-looking.

"Howdy, Ma. Tyrel, if you'll tell that man behind me to take his gun off my back, I'll come in and set."

Tyrel got up. "Tell... I'll be damned."

"Likely," I said, "but don't blame it on me. When I rode off to the wars I left you in good hands."

Turning toward Tyrel's wife, a lovely, dark-eyed, dark-haired girl who looked like a princess out of a book. I said, "Ma'am, I'm William Tell Sackett, and you'll be Drusilla, my brother's wife."

She put her hands on mine and stood on tiptoe and kissed me, and my face colored up and I went hot clean to my boots. Tyrel laughed, and then he looked past me into the darkness and said, "It's all right, Cap. This is my brother Tell"

He came in out of the darkness then, a thin old man with cold gray eyes and a gray mustache above a hard mouth. There was no give to this man, I figured. Had I been a wrong one I would have been killed.

We shook hands and neither of us said anything. Cap was not a talkative man, and I am only at times.

Ma turned her head. "Juana, come get my son his supper."

I couldn't believe it--Ma with household help. Long as I could recall, nobody had done for us boys but Ma herself, working early and late and never complaining.

Juana was a Mexican-Indian girl and she brought the food in fancy plates. I looked at it and commenced to feel mighty uncomfortable. I'd not eaten a meal in the presence of a woman for a long time, and was embarrassed and worried. I'd no idea how to eat proper. In a trail camp a body eats because he's hungry and doesn't think much of the way he does it.