War Party (Ss) (1982) (8 page)

With fifty pounds of gold riding with me and three days ahead of me, I was skittish of folks. Most times wild country is less trouble than people, no matter how rough the country. And no woman had a right to be standing out there in that empty desert-mountain country.

We Sacketts began carrying rifles as soon as we stood tall enough to keep both ends off the ground.

When I was fourteen I traveled from Cumberland Gap in Tennessee down to the Pine Log Mountains in Georgia, living on cougar meat and branch water, and I killed my own cougars.

Man-grown at fifteen, I hoofed it north and joined up with the Union and fought at Shiloh, and after our outfit was surrendered by a noaccount colonel, I was among those exchanged to go north and fight the Sioux in Dakota.

At nineteen I saddled our roan and fetched it for the west to try my hand at gold-panning, but I wasn't making out. Seems like everybody in camp was showing color but me, and I was swallowing my belt notch by notch for lack of eating when those four men came to my fire.

Worst of it was, I couldn't offer them. There I was, booting up for a fresh day with my coffeepot on the fire so's people wouldn't know I hadn't even coffee, but all there was in the pot was water. I dearly wanted to offer them, but I was shamed to admit I was fresh out of coffee-three days out, actually. And so hungry that my stomach thought my throat had been cut.

"Tell," Squires suggested, "you've had no luck with mining, so nobody would suspect you of carrying gold. If you rode out of camp today, folks would take it for granted you had called it deep enough and quit. That way you could carry our gold to Hardyville and nobody the wiser."

The four men facing me had taken out the most dust and, knowing about the Coopers, they were worried men. Three of them were family men and that gold meant schooling for their youngsters and homes for their wives and capital for themselves. They were poor, hard-working men, deserving what they had dug up.

Thing was, how to get it past the Coopers? "We'll give you one hundred dollars,"

Hodge said, "if you make it through."

With the best of luck it was a five-day ride, which figured out to twenty dollars a day. With such a grubstake I could take out for California or come back with a grubstake.

My belly was as empty as my prospect hole, and it didn't seem like I had much choice.

Coopers or no Coopers, it sized up like the fastest hundred dollars I would ever make. It was Bill Squires done it for me, as we'd talked friendly ever since I staked claim on the creek.

Jim Hodge, Willy Mander and torn Padgett stood there waiting for me to speak up, and finally I said, "I'll do it, of course, and glad of the chance.

Only, I am a stranger, and- "

"Squires swears by you," Padgett interrupted, "and even if we don't know you very well, he's known you and your family. If he says you are honest, that's all there is to it."

"And this is a chance to get you a stake," Squires interrupted. "What can you lose?"

Well, the last two men who rode out of camp with gold were found dead alongside the trail, shot down like you'd shoot a steer; and one of them was Jack Walker, a man I'd known. Neither of them was carrying as much as I'd have.

"Take a pack horse," Squires suggested, "load your gear." He glanced around and lowered his voice, "It seems like somebody here in camp informs the Coopers, but nobody will know about this but us, and all of us have a stake in it."

Later, when the others had gone, Squires said, "Hope you didn't mind my saying I'd known your family. They were willing to trust you if I did, but I wanted them to feel better."

So I packed up and rode off, and in my saddlebags there was fifty pounds of gold, worth around a thousand dollars a pound at the time, and in my pocket I'd a note signed by all four men that I was to have a hundred dollars when the gold was delivered.

Never had I seen that much cash money, and since the war I'd not had even ten dollars at one time.

Now, that woman standing down there sized up like trouble aplenty. Pa, he always warned us boys to fight shy of women. "They'll trouble you," pa said. "Love 'em and leave 'em, that's the way. Don't you get tangled up with no female woman. They got more tricks they can do than a monkey on sixty feet of grapevine."

"Don't believe that, Tell," ma would say. "You treat women right. You treat a woman like she was your sister, you hear?"

Pa, he would say, "There's two kinds of women, Tell, good and bad, and believe me, a good woman can cause a man more trouble than a bad one. You fight shy of them."

So I fought shy. Of mountain cats and bears, of muskrat and deer, even of horses and cows I knew a sight, but I wasn't up on womenfolk. Orrin now-he was my brother-he was a fiddler and a singer, and fiddlers and singers have a way with women. At home when strange womenfolk showed up, I'd taken to the hills.

Looked to me like I was fair trapped this time, but I wasn't about to turn and run.

Any woman waiting in lonesome country was a woman in trouble. Only I begun to sweat.

I'd never been close to no lone woman before.

Worst of it was, there was somebody on my trail. A man like me, riding somewhere, he doesn't only watch the trail ahead, he looks back. Folks get lost because when they start back over a trail they find it looks a sight different facing the other way. When a man travels he should keep sizing up the country, stopping time to time to study his back trail so he recognizes the landmarks.

Looking back, I'd seen dust hanging in the air. And that dust stayed there. It had to be somebody tracking me down, and it could mean it was the Coopers.

Right then I'd much rather have tangled with the Coopers than faced up to that woman down there, but that no-account roan was taking me right to her.

Worst of it was, she was almighty pretty. There was a mite of sunburn on her cheekbones and nose, but despite that, she was a fine-looking girl.

"How do you do?" You'd of thought we were meeting on the streets of Nashville. "I wonder if you could give me a lift to Hardyville?"

My hatbrim was down over my eyes, and I sized up the country around, but there was no sign of a horse she might have ridden to this point, nor any sign of a cabin or camp.

"Why, I reckon so, ma'am." I got down from the saddle, thinking if trouble came I might have to fetch that big Colt in a hurry. "My pack horse is packing light so I can rig that pack saddle so's you can ride it sidesaddle."

"I would be grateful," she said.

First off, it shaped like a trap. Somebody knowing I had gold might have this woman working with them, for it troubled me to guess how she came here. There were a sight of tracks on the ground, but all seemed to be hers. And then I noticed a thin trail of smoke from behind a rock.

"You have a fire?"

"It was quite cold last night."

When she caught my look, she smiled. "Yes, I was here all night." She looked directly at me from those big blue eyes. "And the night before."

"It ain't a likely spot."

She carried herself prim, but she was a bright, quick-to-see girl, and I cottoned to her. The clothes she wore were of fine, store-bought goods like some I'd seen folks wear in some of those northern cities I'd seen as a soldier. Where I came from it was homespun, or buckskin.

"I suppose you wonder what I am doing here?"

"Well, now." I couldn't help grinning. "It did come to my mind. Like I said, it ain't a likely spot."

"You shouldn't say 'ain't.' The word is 'isn't*/'

"Thank you, ma'am. I had no schooling, except what ma could give me, and I never learned to talk proper."

"Surely you can read and write?"

"No, ma'am, I surely can't."

"Why, that's awful! Everybody should be able to read. I don't know what I would have done these past months if I could not read. I believe I should have gone insane."

When the saddle was rigged, I helped her up. "Ma'am, I better warn you. There's trouble acoming, so's you'd better have it in mind. It may not be a good thing, me helping you this way. You may get into worse trouble."

We started off, and I looked over my shoulder at her. "Somebody is following after me. I figure it's them Cooper outlaws."

Worst of it was, I had lost time, and here it was coming up to night, and me with a strange girl on my hands. Pa told me women had devious ways of getting to a man, but I never figured one would set out alongside a lonely trail thataway. Especially one as pretty as she was.

Moreover, she was a lady. A body could see she was quality, and she rode there beside me, chin lifted and proud like she was riding the finest thoroughbred at a county fair, or whatever.

"You running from something, ma'am? Not to be disrespectful, ma'am, but out in the desert thisaway it ain't-isn't-just the place a body would expect to find a lady as pretty as you."

"Thank you." Her chin lifted a mite higher. "Yes, I am running away. I am leaving my husband. He is a thoughtless, inconsiderate brute, and he is an Army officer at Fort Whipple."

"He will be mighty sorry to lose you, ma'am. This here is a lonesome country- I don't carry envy for those soldier boys out here, I surely don't."

"Well! It certainly is not a place to bring an officer's bride. I'll declare! How could he think I could live in such a place? With a dirt floor, and all?"

"What did he say when you left?" "He doesn't know it yet. I had been to Ehrenberg, and when we started back, I just couldn't stand the thought, so when no one was looking, I got out of the Army ambulance I was riding in. I am going to catch the steamer at Hardyville and go home."

When I looked to our back trail, no dust hung in the air, and I knew we were in trouble.

If it had been soldiers looking for this girl, they would not have stopped so sudden-like, and it looked to me like they had headed us and laid a trap, so I swung up a draw, heading north instead of west, and slow to raise no dust.

It was a sandy wash, but a thin trail skirted the edge, made by deer or such-like and we held to it. When we had been riding for an hour, I saw dust in the air, hanging up there in a fair cloud about where I had come up to this lady. Again I turned at right angles, heading back the way I had come. Off to the north and west there was a square-topped mesa that was only a part of a long, comb-like range.

"We are followed, ma'am," I said, "and those Coopers are mighty thoughtless folks.

I got to keep you out of their hands. First off, we'll run. If that doesn't work, we'll talk or we'll fight, leaving it up to them. You hold with me, ma'am."

"They wouldn't bother me," she said. "I am the wife of an Army officer."

"Most Western men are careful of womenfolk," I agreed, "but don't set no truck by being an officer's wife. The Coopers murdered two Army officers not a week ago. Murdered them, ma'am. They just don't care a mite who you may be. And a woman like you-they don't often see a woman pretty as you."

She rode up closer to me. "I am afraid I didn't realize."

"No, ma'am, most folks don't" I said.

It was still the best part of two days to Hardyville, and nothing much there when we arrived. It was head of navigation on the Colorado, and last I'd seen there were only three or four buildings there, and about that many folks.

Nobody seemed to know how many Coopers there were, but the guesses ran all the way from five to nine. They were said to be renegades from down in the Cherokee nation and mighty mean. We held to low ground, keeping off skylines, finding a saddle here and there where we could cross over ridges without topping out where we could be seen.

It was darkening by then, with long shadows reaching out, and when we came up the eastern flank of that mesa I'd headed for, we rode in deep shadow.

When we found a way around the butte, we took it, and the western slope was all red from the setting sun, and mighty pretty. The wind blew cool there, but I'd found what I was hunting -a place to hole up for the night.

A man hunting a night camp with somebody trailing him has to have things in mind.

He wants a place he can get into and out of without skylining himself or showing up plain, and he also wants a place where he can build a fire that cannot be seen, and something to spread out the smoke. And here it was, and by the look of it many an Indian had seen the worth of it before this time.

The falloff from the mesa rim made a steep slope that fell away for maybe five hundred feet. A man could ride a horse down that slope, but it would be sliding half the time on its rump. The wall of the mesa raised up sheer for some three hundred feet, but there at the foot of that cliff and atop the slope was a hollow behind some rocks and brush.

Maybe it was a half-acre of ground with grass in the bottom and some scraggly cedars at one end. We rode down into that hollow, and I reached up and handed down the lady.

"Ma'am, we'll spend the night here. Talk low and don't let any metal strike metal or start any rock sliding."

"Are they that close?"

"I don't rightly know, ma'am, but we should hope for the best and expect the worst.

Pa said that was the way to figure."