the Mountain Valley War (1978) (2 page)

"I know. I came by that way. You youngsters wash up and we'll have something to eat. Then you can tell me about it."

"They came in about sunup this mornin'," Jack said later. "They tol' Pap he had two hours to git loaded an' git movin'. Pap allowed as how he was on government land, filed on an' settled legal, an' he wasn't movin' for no man."

"And then?" Trent asked.

"The young un, he shot Pap, shot him three times before he could move, then after he fell the young un stood astride Pap's body and emptied the gun into him."

That, of course, would be Cub Hale. He remembered the slim, pantherlike young man in white buckskins riding his white horse, that handsome young man who liked to destroy anything that thwarted him.

Yet it was not his fight. Not yet it wasn't.

"How'd you kids happen to come here?"

"We had to get away. Sally was gatherin' wood for the fire, just like me, an' when I come up with her, we both started back. Then we heard the talk, and when I started out, Sally, she held me back. I had no gun, and there was nothing I could do but get myself killed, she said."

"Did they look for you?"

"Uh-huh. We heard one of them say he wanted Sally. But they surely couldn't find us, as we knowed that place too well."

"You came here on horseback?"

"Uh-huh. Pap always kept some horses corraled back in a canyon, so we caught us up a couple of them and come over here bareback, ridin' with a mane-holt."

"Pa said," Sally intervened, "that if anything ever happened to him, we were to come to you. You were the closest one, and he said you were a good man and could be trusted."

"Pap said he figured if the truth was known, you were somebody who was almighty good with a gun," Jackie interrupted. "He said you might be on the dodge, but if you were, he'd bet it was nothing you had to be ashamed of!"

"All right," Trent conceded, "you can stay here tonight, and tomorrow I'll ride with you over to the Hatfields'. It's about time the Parson and I had a talk, anyway."

He turned back to the stove. "Looks like I'd best cook up some more grub. I wasn't planning on company."

"Let me do it," Sally suggested. "I can cook."

"She surely can!" Jack said enthusiastically. "She cooked for us all the time."

A horse's hoof clicked on stone, and instantly Trent doused the light. "Down!" he said sharply. "On the floor!"

They could hear the horses coming closer. From the sound, Trent could tell there were at least two and they had split apart to provide less of a target.

"Halloo, the house! Step out here!"

"Who's asking? And what do you want that can't be done better by daylight?"

"It doesn't make a damn bit of difference who it is! We're speakin' for King Bill Hale! You've got until noon tomorrow to get out. You're camping on Hale range!" There was a moment's silence. "We're moving everybody off!"

"Except those you're murdering, is that it?" Trent commented. "You trot right back and tell Hale we're staying. This land was filed on, all fitting and proper, and Hale is bucking the United States government on this, and anybody who helps is a party to it."

He glimpsed the shine of a rifle barrel. "Don't try it, Dunn! If you weren't such a damned fool, you'd know you were outlined against the sky. A blind man could put a hole in you."

Dunn cursed bitterly. "You'll see, Trent! We'll be back!"

"Tell Hale to send me enough men to start a graveyard. And, Dunn, you be sure and come, d' you hear?"

When they had gone, Trent turned to Sally and Jack. "Time for bed. Sally, you take my room, and Jack and me, we'll bed down out here."

"But I don't want to take your bed," she protested.

"Go ahead. You will need all the sleep you can get. This trouble has just started, and it will be a long time before it's over. Get some sleep, now."

"I'm not afraid." Sally looked at him with large, serious eyes. "You'll take care of us, I know."

He stood for a long moment, staring after her. It was a strange feeling to be trusted so implicitly. The childish sincerity of the girl stirred him as nothing ever had. He recognized the feeling for what it was-- the need within himself to protect and care for something beyond himself. It was that, in part, that had led him into so many fights that were not his; and yet, was not the cause of human freedom and liberty every man's trust?

There was something else, too, that was not generally recognized--that just as the maternal instinct is the strongest a woman has, just so the instinct to protect is the strongest for a man.

Jack was going about the business of making a bed on the floor as though he had spent his life at it. He was pleased with this chance to show some skill, some ability to accomplish.

Trent checked his guns as he had checked them every night of his life, and for a minute after the checking, he held them, thinking. Then he hung the gun belts on the peg once more. The time was not yet.

Chapter
2

The early-morning sun was just turning the dew-drenched grass into settings for diamonds when Trent was out of his pallet and roping horses. Yet, early as it was, when he returned to the cabin the fire was lit and Sally was preparing breakfast. She smiled bravely, but he could see she had been crying.

Jack, only now beginning to understand what had happened, was showing his grief through his anger, but was very quiet, moving about the business of taking up the pallets and stowing them away. Trent was less worried about Jack then about Sally, for he knew her story.

According to what Dick Moffit told him, he had found Sally Crane hiding in the bushes some six years before, after he and those with him had come upon a few burned-out wagons. Her family had been murdered by a party of renegades posing as Indians, and she had been picking wildflowers when the attack came, suddenly and without warning.

Dick Moffit and his wife made a home for her, and when Dick's wife had died a year before, Sally had quietly taken over the cooking and housekeeping, which she had only shared before. She had shown herself a cool, competent girl, but two such tragedies were shock enough for anyone to stand.

"You're being a very brave girl, Sally. You'll make some lucky man a good wife."

"I hope to," she said.

"Anybody can take the easy times," he said. "It's when the going gets rough that the quality shows. Now, when we've had breakfast, we're riding over to the Hatfields'. You already know them, so there's nothing I can say except that they are the salt of the earth.

"The Hatfields know who they are, they know what they believe in, and their kind will last. Other kinds of people will come and go. The glib and confident, the whiners and complainers, and the people without loyalty, they will disappear, but the Hatfields will still be here plowing the land, planting crops, doing the hard work of the world because it is here to be done. Consider yourself fortunate to know them."

When breakfast was over he took them to the saddled horses. Then he walked back inside, and when he returned he carried an old Sharps rifle. He held it in his hands for a moment, looking at it, then he held it up to Jack.

"Jack," Trent said, "when I was fourteen I was a man. Had to be. Well, it looks like your father dying has made you a man, too.

"I'm giving you this Sharps. She's an old gun but she shoots straight. I'm not giving this gun to a boy, but to a man, and a man doesn't ever use a gun unless he has to. He never wastes lead shooting carelessly. He shoots only when he has to and when he can see what it is he's shootin' at.

"This gun is a present with no strings attached except that any man who takes up a gun accepts responsibility for what he does with it. Use it to hunt game, for target practice, or in defense of your home or those you love.

"Keep it loaded always. A gun's no good to a man when it's empty, and if it is settin' around, people aren't liable to handle it carelessly. They'll say, 'That's Jack Moffit's gun and it is always loaded.' It is the guns people think are empty that cause accidents."

"Gosh!" Jack stared at the Sharps. "That's a weapon, man!" He looked at Trent with tears of gratitude in his eyes. "I sure do promise, Mr. Trent! I'll never use a gun unless I have to."

Trent swung into the saddle and led the way into a narrow game trail through the forest. He was under no illusions as to what lay ahead. In this remote corner of southwestern Idaho the law was far away and Hale was a widely known and respected man. The natural assumption of any law officers would be that Hale was in the right. He was known as a respectable, law-abiding citizen always prepared to help with any good cause. Those opposed to him would have to prove their case.

"You know, Jack," he commented, "there's a clause in the Constitution that says the right of an American to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged; The man who put that clause there had just completed a war that they won simply because seven out of every ten Americans had their own rifles and knew how to use them. They wanted a man to always be armed to defend his home or his country.

"Right now there's a man in this area who is trying to take away the liberty and freedom from some men. When a man starts that, and when there is no law to help, a man has to fight. I've killed men, Jack, and it's a bad thing, but I never killed a man unless he forced me into a corner where it was me or him.

"This country is big enough for all of us, but some men become greedy for money or power and come to believe that because they have the money and the power, whatever they do is right. Your father died in a war for freedom just as much as if he was killed on a battlefield.

"Whenever a brave man dies for what he believes, he wins more than he loses. Maybe not for him but for men like him who wish to live honestly and decently.

"Hale showed no interest in this land until we moved here. He's got plenty of land, and every man jack of us filed on our land and we have all built cabins and put in crops. Our part of the bargain with the government has been fulfilled so far, and we have legal right to our land, and Hale has no claim on it except that he wants it. He's never run stock up here and he has never used any water here."

The trail narrowed and grew rough, and there was no chance for conversation. Trent felt the quick excitement he always felt when riding up to this place. It was a windy plateau among the tall pines, and when they topped out he drew rein as he always did at that point to look out over the vast sweep of country that lay below and around.

On one side lay the vast sweep of country in which Cedar Valley was a mere fleck on the great page of the country. A blue haze seemed always to hang over that distant range and those that succeeded it. Here the air was fresh and clear with all the crispness of the high peaks and a sense of limitless distance.

Skirting the rim, Trent led on and finally came to the second place where he always stopped. Westward and south lay an enormous sweep of country that was totally uninhabited so far as anyone knew. Avoided even by the Indians, it was in part a desert, in a greater part merely a wilderness of rocks and lava. Gouged out and channeled by no man knew what forces, there were the beds of long-vanished rivers, craters, weird formations of rock, and canyons impossibly deep and not even to be seen until one reached the very rim. There were places where a reasonably strong man could pitch a rock across a canyon that was two thousand feet deep. It was a vast, unbelievable wilderness, ventured into by no man.

An Indian had once told Trent that his father knew of a way across the country, and even of a horse trail to the bottom of the deepest canyon, but no living man knew it, but nobody seemed to care. It was to most men simply a place to be avoided, but Trent felt drawn to it, his own loneliness challenged by that vaster loneliness below.

Often there was a haze of dust or distance hanging over the area so its details could not be clearly seen, yet Trent had taken the time to ride often to this place and study the terrain below in all its various lights and shadings, for no land looks the same at sunrise as at sunset, and during the day it presented many aspects.

Far and away were ragged red mountains, broken like the stumps of broken teeth gnawing at the sky.

"Someday," he told himself, "I'm going down there and look around, although it looks like the hot mouth of hell."

Parson Hatfield and his four tall sons were all in sight when the three rode into the yard. All were carrying their long Kentucky rifles.

" 'Light, Trent. I was expectin' almost anybody else. There's been some ructions down the valley."

"They killed Moffit. You know Sally and Jack. I figured you could make a place for 'em. Kind of awkward for me, with no woman around."

"You thought right, son. The good Lord takes care of his own, but we uns has to help now and again. There's always room for one more under a Hatfield roof."

Quincey Hatfield, the oldest of the boys, joined them. "Pa tell you about ol' Leathers?"

"Leathers?" Trent's awareness of Hale's strength warned him of what was to come. "What about him?"

"He won't sell nothin' to we uns no more." Quincey spat and shifted his rifle. "That means we got to go three days across country to get supplies, an' no tellin' what he'll do whilst we're gone."