Collection 1997 - End Of The Drive (v5.0) (8 page)

He gulped and turned green around the jowls and white around the eyes, so I knocked down a hand he stuck at me and belted him again in the same place. Then I caught him by the shirt front before he could fall and backhanded him twice across the mouth for good measure.

Griselda was a-hauling at my arms. “Stop it, you awful man! You hurt him!”

“That ain't surprising, Griselda,” I said. “It was what I had in mind.”

So I went back to making bear-sign, and after a bit Arvie got up, with Griselda helping, and he wiped the blood off his lips and he said, “I'll get even! I'll get even with you if it's the last thing I do!”

“And it just might be,” I said, and watched them walk off together.

There went Griselda. Right out of my life, and with Arvie Wilt, too.

Two days later I was out of business and broke. Two days later I had a barrel of doughnuts I couldn't give away and my private gold rush was over. Worst of all, I'd put all I'd made back into the business and there I was, stuck with it. And it was Arvie Wilt who did it to me.

As soon as he washed the blood off his face he went down to the settlement. He had heard of a woman down there who was a baker, and he fetched her back up the creek. She was a big, round, jolly woman with pink cheeks, and she was a first-rate cook. She settled down to making apple pies three inches thick and fourteen inches across and she sold a cut of a pie for two bits and each pie made just four pieces.

She also baked cakes with high-grade all over them. In mining country rich ore is called high-grade, so miners got to calling the icing on cake high-grade, and there I sat with a barrel full of bear-sign and everybody over to the baker woman's buying cake and pie and such-like.

Then Popley came by with Griselda riding behind him on that brown mule, headed for the baker woman's. “See what a head for business Arvie's got? He'll make a fine husband for Griselda.”

Griselda? She didn't even look at me. She passed me up like a pay-car passing a tramp, and I felt so low I could have walked under a snake with a high hat on.

Three days later I was back to wild onions. My grub gave out, I couldn't peddle my flour, and the red ants got into my sugar. All one day I tried sifting red ants out of sugar; as fast as I got them out they got back in until there was more ants than sugar.

So I gave up and went hunting. I hunted for two days and couldn't find a deer, nor anything else but wild onions.

Down to the settlement they had a fandango, a real old-time square dance, and I had seen nothing of the kind since my brother Orrin used to fiddle for them back to home. So I brushed up my clothes and rubbed some deer grease on my boots, and I went to that dance.

Sure enough, Griselda was there, and she was with Arvie Wilt.

Arvie was all slicked out in a black broadcloth suit that fit him a little too soon, and black boots so tight he winced when he put a foot down.

Arvie spotted me and they fetched to a halt right beside me. “Sackett,” Arvie said, “I hear you're scraping bottom again. Now my baker woman needs a helper to rev up her pots and pans, and if you want the job—”

“I don't.”

“Just thought I'd ask,”—he grinned maliciously—“seein' you so good at woman's work.”

He saw it in my eyes so he grabbed Griselda and they waltzed away, grinning. Thing that hurt, she was grinning, too.

“That Arvie Wilt,” somebody said, “there's a man will amount to something. Popley says he has a fine head for business.”

“For the amount of work he does,” somebody else said, “he sure has a lot of gold. He ain't spent a day in that shaft in a week.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Ask them down to the settlement. He does more gambling than mining, according to some.”

That baker woman was there, waltzing around like she was light as a feather, and seeing her made me think of a Welshman I knew. Now you take a genuine Welshman, he can talk a bird right out of a tree…I started wondering…how would he do with a widow woman who was a fine baker?

That Welshman wasn't far away, and we'd talked often, the year before. He liked a big woman, he said, the jolly kind and who could enjoy making good food. I sat down and wrote him a letter.

Next morning early I met up with Griselda. “You actually marrying that Arvie?”

Her pert little chin came up and her eyes were defiant. “A girl has to think of her future, Tell Sackett! She can't be tying herself to a—a—ne'er—do—well! Mr. Wilt is a serious man. His mine is very successful,” her nose tilted, “and so is the bakery!”

She turned away, then looked back, “And if you expect any girl to like you, you'd better stop eating those onions! They're simply awful!”

And if I stopped eating wild onions, I'd starve to death.

Not that I wasn't half-starved, anyway.

That day I went further up the creek than ever, and the canyon narrowed to high walls and the creek filled the bottom, wall to wall, and I walked ankle deep in water going through the narrows. And there on a sandy beach were deer tracks, old tracks and fresh tracks, and I decided this was where they came to drink.

So I found a grassy ledge above the pool and alongside an outcropping of rock, and there I settled down to wait for a deer. It was early afternoon and a good bit of time remained to me.

There were pines on the ridge behind me, and the wind sounded fine, humming through their needles. I sat there for a bit, enjoying the shade, and then I reached around and pulled a wild onion from the grass, lifting it up to brush away the sand and gravel clinging to the roots.…

I
T WAS SUNDOWN when I reached my shanty, but I didn't stop, I rode on into the settlement. The first person I saw was the Welshman. He was smiling from ear to ear, and beside him was the baker woman.

“Married!” he said cheerfully. “Just the woman I've been looking for!”

And off down the street they went, arm in arm.

Only now it didn't matter anymore.

For two days then I was busy as all get-out. I was down to the settlement and back up above the narrows of the canyon, and then I was down again.

Putting my few things into a pack, and putting the saddle on that old mule of mine, I was fixing to leave the claim and shanty for the last time when who should show up but Frank Popley.

He was riding his brown mule with Griselda riding behind him, and they rode up in front of the shack. Griselda slid down off that mule and ran up and threw her arms around me and kissed me right on the lips.

“Oh, Tell! We heard the news! Oh, we're so happy for you! Pa was just saying that he always knew you had the stuff, that you had what it takes!”

Frank Popley looked over at me and beamed. “Can't keep a good man down, boy! You sure can't! Griselda, she always said, ‘Pa, Tell is the best of the lot,' an' she was sure enough right!”

Suddenly a boot crunched on gravel, and there was Arvie, looking mighty mean and tough, and he was holding a Walker Colt in his fist, aimed right at me.

Did you ever see a Walker Colt? Only thing it lacks to be a cannon is a set of wheels.

“You ain't a-gonna do it!” Arvie said. “You can't have Griselda!”

“You can have Griselda,” I heard myself say, and was astonished to realize that I meant it.

“You're not fooling me! You can't get away with it.” And his thumb came forward to cock that pistol.

Like I said, Arvie wasn't too smart or he'd have cocked his gun as he drew it, so I just fetched out my six-shooter and let the hammer slip from under my thumb as it came level.

Deliberately, I held it a little high, and the .44 slug smashed him in the shoulder. It knocked him sidewise and he let go of that big pistol and staggered back two steps and sat down hard.

“You're a mighty disagreeable man, Arvie,” I said, “and not much account. When the boys down at the settlement start finding the marks you put on those cards you'll have to leave the country, but I reckon you an' Griselda deserve each other.”

She was looking at me with big eyes and pouty lips because she'd heard the news, but I wasn't having any.

“You-all been washing gold along the creek,” I said, “but you never stopped to think where those grains of gold started from. Well, I found and staked the mother lode, staked her from Hell to breakfast, and one day's take will be more than you've taken out since you started work. I figure now I'll dig me out a goodly amount of money, then I'll sell my claims and find me some friends that aren't looking at me just to see what I got.”

They left there walking down that hill with Arvie astride the mule making pained sounds every time it took a step.

W
HEN I HAD pulled that wild onion up there on that ledge overlooking the deer run, there were bits of gold in the sand that clung to the roots, and when I scraped the dirt away from the base of that outcrop, she was all there…wire gold lying in the rock like a jewelry store window.

Folks sometimes ask me why I called it the Wild Onion Mining Company.

END OF THE DRIVE

W
E CAME UP the trail from Texas in the spring of '74, and bedded our herd on the short grass beyond the railroad. We cleaned our guns and washed our necks and dusted our hats for town; we rode fifteen strong to the hitching rail, and fifteen strong to the bar.

We were the Rocking K from the rough country back of the Nueces, up the trail with three thousand head of longhorn steers, the first that spring, although the rivers ran bank full and Comanches rode the war trail.

We buried two hands south of the Red, and two on the plains of the Nation, and a fifth died on Kansas grass, his flesh churned under a thousand hoofs. Four men gone before Indian rifles, but the death-songs of the Comanches were sung in the light of a hollow moon, and the Kiowa mourned in their lodges for warriors lost to the men of the Rocking K.

We were the riders who drove the beef, fighting dust, hail, and lightning, meeting stampedes and Kiowa. And we who drove the herd and fought our nameless, unrecorded battles often rode to our deaths without glory, nor with any memory to leave behind us.

The town was ten buildings long on the north side of the street, and seven long on the south, with stock corrals to the east of town and Boot Hill on the west, and an edging of Hell between.

Back of the street on the south of town were the shacks of the girls who waited for the trail herds, and north of the street were the homes of the businessmen and merchants, where no trail driver was permitted to go.

We were lean and hard young riders, only a few of us nearing thirty, most of us nearer to twenty. We were money to the girls of the line, and whiskey to the tenders of bars, but to the merchants we were lean, brown young savages whose brief assaults on their towns were tolerated for the money we brought.

That was the year I was twenty-four, and only the cook was an older man, yet it was my fifth trip up the trail and I'd seen this town once before, and others before that. And there were a couple I'd seen die, leaving their brief scars on the prairie that new grass would soon erase.

I'd left no love in Texas, but a man at twenty-four is as much a man as he will be, and a girl was what I wanted. A girl to rear strong sons on the high plains of Texas, a girl to ride beside me in the summer twilight, to share the moon with me, and the high stars over the caprock country.

For I had found a ranch, filed my claims, and put my brand on steers, and this drive was my last for another man, the last at a foreman's wages. When I rode my horse up to the rail that day, I saw the girl I dreamed about…the girl I wanted.

She stood on the walk outside the store and she lifted a hand to shade her eyes, her hair blowing light in the wind, and her figure was long and slim and the sun caught red lights in her hair. Her eyes caught mine as I rode tall in the leather, the first man to come up the street.

She looked grave and straight and honestly at me, and it seemed no other girl had ever looked so far into my heart. At twenty-four the smile of a woman is a glory to the blood and a spark to the spirit, and carries a richer wine than any sold over a bar in any frontier saloon.

I'd had no shave for days, and the dust of the trail lay on my clothes, and sour I was with the need of bathing and washing. When I swung from my saddle, a tall, lonely man in a dusty black hat with spurs to my heels, she stood where I had seen her and turned slowly away and walked into the store.

W
E WENT TO the bar and I had a drink, but the thing was turning over within me and thinking of the girl left no rest for me. She was all I could think about and all I could talk about that afternoon.

So when I turned from the bar Red Mike put a hand to my sleeve. “It's trouble you're headed for, Tom Gavagan,” he said. “It's been months since you've seen a girl. She's a bonny lass, but you know the rule here. No trail hand can walk north of the street, nor bother any of the citizens.”

“I'm not one to be breakin' the law, Mike, but it is a poor man who will stop shy of his destiny.”

“This is John Blake's town,” he said.

The name had a sound of its own, for John Blake was known wherever the trails ran; wherever they came from and where they ended. He was a hard man accustomed to dealing with hard men, and when he spoke his voice was law. He was a square, powerful man, with a name for fair dealing, but a man who backed his words with a gun.

“It is a time for courting,” I said, “although I want trouble with no man. And least of all John Blake.”

When I turned to the door I heard Red Mike behind me. “No more drinking this day,” he said. “We've a man to stand behind.”

W
HEN THE DOOR creaked on its spring a man looked around from his buying, and the keeper of the store looked up, but the girl stood straight and tall where she was, and did not turn. For she knew the sound of my heels on the board floor, and the jingle of my Spanish spurs.