The Daybreakers

*

Chapter I

My Brother, Orrin Sackett, Was Big Enough To Fight Bears With A switch. Me, I was the skinny one, tall as Orrin, but no meat to my bones except around the shoulders and arms. Orrin could sing like an angel, or like a true Welshman which was better than any angel. Far away back and on three sides of the family, we were Welsh. Orrin was a strapping big man, but for such a big man he was surprising quick.

Folks said I was the quiet one, and in the high-up hills where we grew up as boys, folks fought shy of me come fighting time. Orrin was bigger than me, fit to wrassle a bull, but he lacked a streak of something I had.

Maybe you recall the Sackett-Higgins feud? Time I tell about, we Sacketts were just fresh out of Higginses. Long Higgins, the mean one, was also the last one.

He came hunting Sackett hide with an old squirrel rifle. It was Orrin he was hunting, being mighty brave because he knew Orrin wouldn't be packing anything in the way of sidearms at a wedding.

Orrin was doing no thinking about Higginses this day with Mary Tripp there to greet him and his mind set on marrying, so I figured it was my place to meet Long Higgins down there in the road. Just as I was fixing to call him to a stand, Preacher Myrick drove his rig between us, and by the time I got around it Long Higgins was standing spraddle-legged in the road with a bead on Orrin.

Folks started to scream and Long Higgins shot and Mary who saw him first pushed Orrin to save him. Only she fell off balance and fell right into the bullet intended for Orrin.

"Long!"

He turned sharp around, knowing my voice, and he had that rifle waist-high and aimed for me, his lips drawed down hard. Long Higgins was a good hip shot with a rifle and he shot quick ... maybe too quick.

That old hog-leg of mine went back into the holster and Long Higgins lay there in the dust and when I turned around, that walk up into the trees was the longest I ever did take except one I took a long time later.

Ollie Shaddock might have been down there and I knew if Ollie called I'd have to turn around, for Ollie was the Law in those mountains and away back somewheres we were kin.

When Ma saw me cutting up through the woods she knew something was cross-ways.

Took me only a minute to tell her. She sat in that old rocker and looked me right in the eye while I told it. "Tye," she was almighty stern, "was Long Higgins looking at you when you fetched him?"

"Right in the eye."

"Take the dapple," Ma said, "he's the runningest horse on the mountain. You go west, and when you find a place with deep, rich soil and a mite of game in the hills, you get somebody to write a letter and we'll come down there, the boys an' me."

She looked around at the place, which was mighty rundown. Work as we would, and us Sacketts were workers, we still hadn't anything extra, and scarcely a poor living, so Ma had been talking up the west ever since Pa died.

Most of it she got from Pa, for he was a wandering and a knowing man, never to home long, but Ma loved him for all of that, and so did we young 'uns. He had a Welshman's tongue, Pa did, a tongue that could twist a fine sound from a word and he could bring a singing to your blood so you could just see that far land yonder, waiting for folks to come and crop it.

Those old blue eyes of Ma's were harder to face than was Long Higgins, and him with a gun to hand. "Tye, do you reckon you could kill Ollie?"

To nobody else would I have said it, but to Ma I told the truth. "I'd never want to, Ma, because we're kin but I could fetch him. I think maybe I can draw a gun faster and shoot straighter than anybody, anywhere."

She took the pipe from her lips. "Eighteen years now I've seen you growing up, Tyrel Sackett, and for twelve of them you've been drawing and shooting. Pa told me when you was fifteen that he'd never seen the like. Ride with the law, Tye, never against it." She drew the shawl tighter about her knees. "If the Lord wills we will meet again in the western lands."

The way I took led across the state line and south, then west. Ollie Shaddock would not follow beyond the line of the state, so I put Tennessee behind me before the hills had a shadow.

It was wild land through which the trail led, west out of Tennessee, into Arkansas, the Ozarks, and by lonely trails into Kansas. When I rode at last into the street at Baxter Springs folks figured me for one more mountain renegade coming to help keep tick-infected Texas cattle out of the country, but I was of no such mind.

It was eight miles to where the Texas men held their cattle, so there I rode, expecting no warm welcome for a stranger. Riding clear of the circling riders I rode up to the fire, the smell of grub turning my insides over. Two days I'd been without eating, with no money left, and too proud to ask for that for which I could not pay.

A short, square man with a square face and a mustache called out to me. "You there! On the gray! What do you want?"

"A job if one's to be had, and a meal if you've grub to spare. My name is Tyrel Sackett and I'm bound westward from Tennessee toward the Rockies, but if there's a job I'll ride straight up to it."

He looked me over, mighty sharp, and then he said, "Get down, man, and come to the fire. No man was ever turned from my fire without a meal inside him. I'm Belden."

When I'd tied Dapple I walked up to the fire, and there was a big, handsome man lying on the ground by the fire, a man with a golden beard like one of those Vikings Pa used to tell of. "Hell," he said agreeably, "it's a farmer!"

"What's wrong with farming?" I asked him. "You wouldn't have your belly full of beans right now if they'd not been farmed by somebody."

"We've had our troubles with farmers, Mr. Sackett," Belden said, "there's been shooting, the farmers killed a man for me."

"So," said a voice alongside, "so maybe we should kill a farmer."

He had an itch for trouble and his kind I'd met before. He was a medium-tall man with a low hanging shoulder on his gun side. His black brows met over his nose and his face was thin and narrow. If it was trouble he was hunting he was following the right trail to get it.

"Mister," I told him, "any time you think you can kill this farmer, you just have at it."

He looked across the fire at me, surprised I think, because he had expected fear. My clothes showed I was from the hills, a patched, old homespun shirt, jeans stuffed into clumsy boots. It was sure that I looked like nothing at all, only if a man looked at the pistol I wore he could see there'd been a sight of lead shot out of that barrel.

"That's enough, Carney!" Mr. Belden said sharply. "This man is a guest at our fire!"

The cook brought me a plate of grub and it smelled so good I didn't even look up until I'd emptied that plate and another, and swallowed three cups of hot black coffee. Up in the hills we like our coffee strong but this here would make bobwire grow on a man's chest in the place of hair.

The man with the golden beard watched me and he said to Mr. Belden, "Boss, you better hire this man. If he can work like he can eat, you've got yourself a hand."

"Question is," Carney broke in, "can he fight?"

It was mighty quiet around that fire when I put my plate aside and got up.

"Mister, I didn't kill you before because when I left home I promised Ma I'd go careful with a gun, but you're a mighty tryin' man."

Carney had the itch, all right, and as he looked across the fire at me I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to kill this man.

"You promised Ma, did you?" he scoffed. "We'll see about that!"

He brought his right foot forward about an inch and I durned near laughed at him, but then from behind me came a warm, rich voice and it spoke clear and plain. "Mister, you just back up an' set down. I ain't aimin' to let Tyrel hang up your hide right now, so you just set down an' cool off."

It was Orrin, and knowing Orrin I knew his rifle covered Carney.

"Thanks, Orrin. Ma made me promise to go careful."

"She told me ... an' lucky for this gent." He stepped down from the saddle, a fine, big, handsome man with shoulders wide enough for two strong men. He wore a belt gun, too, and I knew he could use it.

"Are you two brothers?" Belden asked.

"Brothers from the hills," Orrin said, "bound west for the new lands."

"You're hired," Mr. Belden said, "I like men who work together."

So that was how it began, but more had begun that day than any of us could guess, least of all the fine-looking man with the beard who was Tom Sunday, our foreman on the drive. From the moment he had spoken up all our lives were pointed down a trail together, but no man could read the sign.

From the first Orrin was a well-loved man. With that big, easy way of his, a wide smile, as well as courage and humor enough for three men, he was a man to ride the trail with. He did his share of the work and more, and at night around the fire he would sing or tell yarns. When he sang to the cows in that fine Welsh baritone of his, everybody listened.

Nobody paid me much mind. Right off they saw I could do my work and they let me do it. When Orrin told them I was the tough one of the two they just laughed.

Only there was one or two of them who didn't laugh and of these one was Tom Sunday, the other Cap Rountree, a thin, wiry old man with a walrus mustache who looked to have ridden a lot of trails.

The third day out, Tom Sunday fetched up alongside me and asked, "Tye, what would you have done if Reed Carney had grabbed his gun?"

"Why, Mr. Sunday," I said, "I'd have killed him."

He glanced at me. "Yes, I expect you would have."

He swung off then, only turned in his saddle. "Call me Tom. I'm not much on long-handled names."

Have you seen those Kansas plains? Have you seen the grass stretch away from you to the horizon? Grass and nothing but grass except for flowers here and there and maybe the white of buffalo bones, but grass moving gentle under the long wind, moving like a restless sea with the hand of God upon it?

On the fifth day when I was riding point by myself, and well out from the herd a dozen men came riding out of a ravine, all bunched up. Right off I had a smell of trouble, so instead of waiting for them to come up, I rode right to meet them.

It was a mighty pleasant day and the air was balmy with summer. Overhead the sky was blue and only a mite of cloud drifting like a lost white buffalo over the plain of the sky. When they were close I drew up and waited, my Spencer .56 cradled on my saddle, my right hand over the trigger guard.

They drew up, a dirty, rough-looking bunch--their leader mean enough to sour cream. "We're cuttin' your herd," he was a mighty abrupt man, "we're cuttin' it now. You come through the settlements an' swept up a lot of our cattle, an' they've et our grass."

Well, I looked at him and I said, "I reckon not." Sort of aimless-like I'd switched that Spencer to cover his belt buckle, my right finger on the trigger.

"Look here, boy," he started in to bluster.

"Mister," I said, "this here Spencer ain't no boy, an' I'm just after makin' a bet with a fellow. He says one of those big belt buckles like you got would stop a bullet. Me, I figure a chunk of lead, .56 caliber would drive that buckle right back into your belly. Mister, if you want to be a sport we can settle that bet."

He was white around the eyes, and if one of the others made a wrong move I was going to drop the bull of the herd and as many others as time would allow.

"Back," it was one of the men behind the leader, "I know this boy. This here is one of them Sacketts I been tellin' you about." It was one of those no-account Aikens from Turkey Flat, who'd been run out of the mountains for hog stealing.

"Oh?" Back smiled, kind of sickly. "Had no idea you was friends. Boy," he said, "you folks just ride on through."

"Thanks. That there's just what we figured to do."

They turned tail around and rode off and a couple of minutes later hoofs drummed on the sod and here came Mr. Belden, Tom Sunday, Cap Rountree, and Reed Carney, all asweat an' expecting trouble. When they saw those herd cutters ride off they were mighty surprised.

"Tye," Mr. Belden asked, "what did those men want?"

"They figured to cut your herd."

"What happened?"

"They decided not to."

He looked at me, mighty sharp. Kneeing Dapple around I started back to the herd.

"Now what do you make of that?" I could hear Belden saying. "I'd have sworn that was Back Rand."

"It was," Rountree commented dryly, "but that there's quite a boy."

When Orrin asked me about it at fire that night, I just said, "Aiken was there.

From Turkey Flat."

Carney was listening. "Aiken who? Who's Aiken?"

"He's from the mountains," Orrin said, "he knows the kid."

Reed Carney said nothing more but a couple of times I noticed him sizing me up like he hadn't seen me before. There would be trouble enough, but man is born to trouble, and it is best to meet it when it comes and not lose sleep until it does. Only there was more than trouble, for beyond the long grass plains were the mountains, the high and lonely mountains where someday I would ride, and where someday, the Good Lord willing, I would find a home.

How many trails? How much dust and loneliness? How long a time until then?

Chapter II

There was nothing but prairie and sky, the sun by day and the stars by night, and the cattle moving westward. If I live to be a thousand years old I shall not forget the wonder and the beauty of those big longhorns, the sun glinting on their horns; most of them six or seven feet from tip to tip. Some there were like Old Brindle, our lead steer, whose horns measured a fair nine feet from point to point, and who stood near to seventeen hands high.

It was a sea of horns above the red, brown, brindle, and white-splashed backs of the steers. They were big, wild, and fierce, ready to fight anything that walked the earth, and we who rode their flanks or the drag, we loved them and we hated them, we cussed and reviled them, but we moved them westward toward what destination we knew not.

Sometimes at night when my horse walked a slow circle around the bedded herd, I'd look at the stars and think of Ma and wonder how things were at home. And sometimes I'd dream great dreams of a girl I'd know someday.

Suddenly something had happened to me, and it happened to Orrin too. The world had burst wide open, and where our narrow valleys had been, our hog-backed ridges, our huddled towns and villages, there was now a world without end or limit. Where our world had been one of a few mountain valleys, it was now as wide as the earth itself, and wider, for where the land ended there was sky, and no end at all to that.

We saw no one. The plains were empty. No cattle had been before us, only the buffalo and war parties of Indians crossing. No trees, only the far and endless grass, always whispering its own soft stories. Here ran the antelope, and by night the coyotes called their plaintive songs to the silent stars.

Mostly a man rode by himself, but sometimes I'd ride along with Tom Sunday or Cap Rountree, and I learned about cattle from them. Sunday knew cows, all right, but he was a sight better educated than the rest of us, although not one for showing it.

Sometimes when we rode along he would recite poetry or tell me stories from the history of ancient times, and it was mighty rich stuff. Those old Greeks he was always talking about, they reminded me of mountain folk I'd known, and it fair made me ache to know how to read myself.

Rountree talked mighty little, but whatever he said made a sight of sense. He knew buffalo ... although there was always something to learn about them. He was a mighty hard old man, rode as many hours as any of us, although he was a mighty lot older. I never did know how old he was, but those hard old gray eyes of his had looked on a sight of strange things.

"Man could make some money," Rountree said one day, "over in the breaks of western Kansas and Colorado. Lots of cows over there, belongin' to nobody, stuff drifted up from the Spanish settlements to the south."

When Rountree spoke up it was because there was an idea behind it. Right then I figured something was stirring in that coot's skull, but nothing more was said at the time.

Orrin and me, we talked it over. Each of us wanted a place of our own, and we wanted a place for Ma and the boys. A lot of cattle belonging to no man ... it sounded good to us.

"It would take an outfit," Orrin said.

Tom Sunday, I was sure, would be for it. From things he'd said on night herd I knew he was an ambitious man, and he had plans for himself out west. Educated the way he was, there was no telling how far he would go. Time to time he talked a good deal about politics ... out west a man could be whatever he was man enough to be, and Tom Sunday was smart.

"Orrin and me," I said to Rountree, "we've been talking about what you said.

About those wild cows. We discussed the three of us and maybe Tom Sunday, if you're willing and he wants to come in."

"Why, now. That there's about what I had in mind. Fact is, I talked to Tom. He likes it."

Mr. Belden drove his herd away from the Kansas-Missouri border, right out into the grassy plains, he figured he'd let his cows graze until they were good and fat, then sell them in Abilene; there were cattle buyers buying and shipping cattle from there because of the railroad.

Anybody expecting Abilene to be a metropolis would have been some put out, but to Orrin and me, who had never seen anything bigger than Baxter Springs, it looked right smart of a town. Why, Abilene was quite a place, even if you did have to look mighty fast to see what there was of it.

Main thing was that railroad. I'd heard tell of railroads before, but had never come right up to one. Wasn't much to see: just two rails of steel running off into the distance, bedded down on crossties of hewn logs. There were some stock pens built there and about a dozen log houses. There was a saloon in a log house, and across the tracks there was a spanking-new hotel three stories high with a porch along the side fronting the rails. Folks had told me there were buildings that tall, but I never figured to see one.

There was another hotel, too. Placed called Bratton's, with six rooms to let.

East of the hotel there was a saloon run by a fat man called Jones. There was a stage station ... that was two stories ... a blacksmith shop and the Frontier Store.

At the Drovers' Cottage there was a woman cooking there and some rooms were let, and there were three, four cattle buyers loafing around.

We bunched our cows on the grass outside of town and Mr. Belden rode in to see if he could make a deal, although he didn't much like the look of things.

Abilene was too new, it looked like a put-up job and Kansas hadn't shown us no welcome signs up to now.

Then Mr. Belden came back and durned if he hadn't hired several men to guard the herd so's we could have a night in town ... not that she was much of a place, like I said. But we went in.

Orrin and me rode down alongside the track, and Orrin was singing in that big, fine-sounding voice of his, and when we came abreast of the Drovers' Cottage there was a girl a-setting on the porch.

She had a kind of pale blond hair and skin like it never saw daylight, and blue eyes that made a man think she was the prettiest thing he ever did see. Only second glance she reminded me somehow of a hammer-headed roan we used to have, the one with the one blue eye ... a mighty ornery horse, too narrow between the ears and eyes. On that second glance I figured that blonde had more than a passing likeness to that bronc.

But when she looked at Orrin I knew we were in for trouble, for if ever I saw a man-catching look in a woman's eyes it was in hers, then.

"Orrin," I said, "if you want to run maverick a few more years, if you want to find that western land, then you stay off that porch."

"Boy," he put a big hand on my shoulder, "look at that yaller hair!"

"Reminds me of that hammer-headed, no-account roan we used to have. Pa he used to say, 'Size up a woman the way you would a horse if you were in a horse trade; and Orrin, you better remember that."

Orrin laughed. "Stand aside, youngster," he tells me, "and watch how it's done."

With that Orrin rode right up to the porch and standing up in his stirrups he said, "Howdy, ma'am! A mighty fine evening! Might I come up an' set with you a spell?"

Mayhap he needed a shave and a bath like we all did, but there was something in him that always made a woman stop and look twice.

Before she could answer a tall man stepped out. "Young man," he spoke mighty sharp, "I will thank you not to annoy my daughter. She does not consort with hired hands."

Orrin smiled that big, wide smile of his. "Sorry, sir, I did not mean to offend.

I was riding by, and such beauty, sir, such beauty deserves its tribute, sir."

Then he flashed that girl a smile, then reined his horse around and we rode on to the saloon.

The saloon wasn't much, but it took little to please us. There was about ten feet of bar, sawdust on the floor, and not more than a half-dozen bottles behind the bar. There was a barrel of mighty poor whiskey. Any farmer back in our country could make better whiskey out of branch water and corn, but we had our drinks and then Orrin and me hunted the barrels out back.

Those days, in a lot of places a man might get to, barrels were the only place a man could bathe. You stripped off and you got into a barrel and somebody poured water over you, then after soaping down and washing as best you could you'd have more water to rinse off the soap, and you'd had yourself a bath.

"You watch yo'self," the saloon keeper warned, "feller out there yestiddy shot himself a rattler whilst he was in the barrel."

Orrin bathed in one barrel, Tom Sunday in another, while I shaved in a piece of broken mirror tacked to the back wall of the saloon. When they finished bathing I stripped off and got into the barrel and Orrin and Tom, they took off. Just when I was wet all over, Reed Carney came out of the saloon. My gun was close by but my shirt had fallen over it and there was no chance to get a hand on it in a hurry.

So there I was, naked as a jaybird, standing in a barrel two-thirds full of water, and there was that trouble-hunting Reed Carney with two or three drinks under his belt and a grudge under his hat.

It was my move, but it had to be the right move at the right time, and to reach for that gun would be the wrong thing to do. Somehow I had to get out of that tub and there I was with soap all over me, in my hair and on my face and dribbling toward my eyes.

The rinse water was in a bucket close to the barrel so acting mighty unconcerned I reached down, picked it up, sloshing it over me to wash off that soap.

"Orrin," Carney said, grinning at me, "went to the hotel and it don't seem hardly right, you in trouble and him not here to stand in front of you."

"Orrin handles his business. I handle mine."

He walked up to within three or four feet of the barrel and there was something in his eyes I'd not seen before. I knew then he meant to kill me.

"I've been wonderin' about that. I'm curious to see if you can handle your own affairs without that big brother standing by to pull you out."

The bucket was still about a third full of water and I lifted it to slash it over me.

There was a kind of nasty, wet look to his eyes and he took a step nearer. "I don't like you," he said, "and I--" His hand dropped to his gun and I let him have the rest of that water in the face.

He jumped back and I half-jumped, half-fell out of the barrel just as he blinked the water away and grabbed iron. His gun was coming up when the bucket's edge caught him alongside the skull and I felt the whiff of that bullet past my ear.

But that bucket was oak and it was heavy and it laid him out cold.

Inside the saloon there was a scramble of boots, and picking up the flour-sack towel I began drying off, but I was standing right beside my gun and I had the shut pulled away from it and easy to my hand it was. If any friends of Carney's wanted to call the tune I was ready for the dance.

The first man out was a tall, blond man with a narrow, tough face and a twisted look to his mouth caused by an old scar. He wore his gun tied to his leg and low down the way some of these fancy gunmen wear them. Cap Rountree was only a step behind and right off he pulled over to one side and hung a hand near his gun butt. Tom Sunday fanned out on the other side. Two others ranged up along the man with the scarred lip.

"What happened?"

"Carney here," I said, "bought himself more than he could pay for."

That blond puncher had been ready to buy himself a piece of any fight there was left and he was just squaring away when Cap Rountree put in his two-bit's worth.

"We figured you might be troubled, Tye," Cap said in that dry, hard old voice, "so Tom an' me, we came out to see the sides were even up."

You could feel the change in the air. That blond with the scarred lip--later I found out his name was Fetterson--he didn't like the situation even a little.

Here I was dead center in front of him, but he and his two partners, they were framed by Tom Sunday and Cap Rountree.

Fetterson glanced one way and then the other and you could just see his horns pull in. He'd come through that door sure enough on the prod an' pawin' dust, but suddenly he was so peaceful it worried me.

"You better hunt yourself a hole before he comes out of it," Fetterson said.

"He'll stretch your hide."

By that time I had my pants on and was stamping into my boots. Believe me, I sure hate to face up to trouble with no pants on, and no boots. So I slung my gun belt and settled my holster into place. "You tell him to draw his pay and rattle his hocks out of here. I ain't hunting trouble, but he's pushing, mighty pushing."

The three of us walked across to the Drovers' Cottage for a meal, and the first thing we saw was Orrin setting down close to that blond girl and she was looking at him like he was money from home. But that was the least of it. Her father was setting there listening himself ... leave it to Orrin and that Welsh-talking tongue of his. He could talk a squirrel right out of a walnut tree ... I never saw the like.

The three of us sat down to a good meal and we talked up a storm about that country to the west, and the wild cattle, and how much a man could make if he could keep Comanches, Kiowas, or Utes from lifting his hair.

Seemed strange to be sitting at a table. We were all so used to setting on the ground that we felt awkward with a white cloth and all. Out on the range a man ate with his hunting knife and what he could swab up with a chunk of bread.

That night Mr. Belden paid us off in the hotel office, and one by one we stepped up for our money. You've got to remember that neither Orrin or me had ever had twenty-five dollars of cash money in our lives before. In the mountains a man mostly swapped for what he needed, and clothes were homespun.

Our wages were twenty-five dollars a month and Orrin and me had two months and part of a third coming. Only when he came to me, Mr. Belden put down his pen and sat back in his chair.

"Tye," he said, "there's a prisoner here who is being held for the United States Marshal. Brought in this morning. His name is Aiken, and he was riding with Back Rand the day you met them out on the prairie."

"Yes, sir."

"I had a talk with Aiken, and he told me that if it hadn't been for you Back Rand would have taken my herd . . or tried to. It seems, from what he said, that you saved my herd or saved us a nasty fight and a stampede where I was sure to lose cattle. It seems this Aiken knew all about you Sacketts and he told Rand enough so that Rand didn't want to call your bluff. I'm not an ungrateful man, Tye, so I'm adding two hundred dollars to your wages."

Two hundred dollars was a sight of money, those days, cash money being a shy thing.

When we walked out on the porch of the Drovers' Cottage, there were three wagons coming up the trail, and three more behind them. The first three were army ambulances surrounded by a dozen Mexicans in fringed buckskin suits and wide Mexican sombreros. There were another dozen riding around the three freight wagons following, and we'd never seen the like.

Their jackets were short, only to the waist, and their pants flared out at the bottom and fitted like a glove along the thighs. Their spurs had rowels like mill wheels on them, and they all had spanking-new rifles and pistols. They wore colored silk sashes like some of those Texas cowhands wore, and they were all slicked out like some kind of a show.

Horses? Mister, you should see such horses! Every one clean-limbed and quick, and every one showing he'd been curried and fussed over. Every man Jack of that crowd was well set-up, and if ever I saw a fighting crowd, it was this lot.

The first carriage drew up before the Drovers' Cottage and a tall, fine-looking old man with pure white hair and white mustaches got down from the wagon, then helped a girl down. Now I couldn't rightly say how old she was, not being any judge of years on a woman, but I'd guess she was fifteen or sixteen, and the prettiest thing I ever put an eye to.

Pa had told us a time or two about those Spanish dons and the senoritas who lived around Santa Fe, and these folks must be heading that direction.

Right then I had me an idea. In Indian country the more rifles the better, and this, here outfit must muster forty rules if there was one, and no Indian was going to tackle that bunch for the small amount of loot those wagons promised.

The four of us would make their party that much stronger, and would put us right in the country we were headed for. Saying nothing to Sunday or Rountree, I went into the dining room. The grub there was passing fine. Situated on the rails they could get about what they wanted and the Drovers' Cottage was all set up to cater to cattlemen and cattle buyers with money to spend. Later on folks from back east told me some of the finest meals they ever set down to were in some of those western hotels ... and some of the worst, too.

The don was sitting at a table with that pretty girl, but right away I could see this was no setup to buck if a man was hunting trouble. There were buckskin-clad riders setting at tables around them and when I approached the don, four of them came out of their chairs like they had springs in their pants, and they stood as if awaiting a signal.

"Sir," I said, "from the look of your outfit you'll be headed for Santa Fe. My partners and me ... there are four of us ... we're headed west. If we could ride along with your party we'd add four rifles to your strength and it would be safer for us."

He looked at me out of cold eyes from a still face. His mustache was beautifully white, his skin a pale tan, his eyes brown and steady. He started to speak, but the girl interrupted and seemed to be explaining something to him, but there was no doubt about his answer.

She looked up at me. "I am sorry, sir, but my grandfather says it will be impossible."

"I'm sorry, too," I said, "but if he would like to check up on our character he could ask Mr. Belden over there."

She explained, and the old man glanced at Mr. Belden across the room. There was a moment when I thought he might change his mind, but he shook his head.

"I am sorry." She looked like she really was sorry. "My grandfather is a very positive man." She hesitated and then she said, "We have been warned that we may be attacked by some of your people."

I bowed ... more than likely it was mighty awkward, it was the first time I ever bowed to anybody, but it seemed the thing to do.

"My name is Tyrel Sackett, and if ever we can be of help, my friends and I are at your service." I meant it, too, although that speech was right out a book I'd heard read one time, and it made quite an impression on me. "I mean, I'll sure come a-foggin' it if you're in trouble."

She smiled at me, mighty pretty, and I turned away from that table with my head whirling like somebody had hit me with a whiffletree. Orrin had come in, and he was setting up to a table with that blond girl and her father, but the way those two glared at me you'd have sworn I'd robbed a hen roost.

Coming down off the steps I got a glimpse into that wagon the girl had been riding in. You never seen the like. It was all plush and pretty, fixed up like nothing you ever saw, a regular little room for her. The second wagon was the old man's, and later I learned that the third carted supplies for them, fine food and such, with extra rifles, ammunition, and clothing. The three freight wagons were heavy-loaded for their rancho in New Mexico.

Orrin followed me outside. "How'd you get to know Don Luis?"

"That his name? I just up an' talked to him."

"Pritts tells me he's not well thought of by his neighbors." Orrin lowered his voice. "Fact is, Tyrel, they're getting an outfit together to drive him out."

"Is that Pritts? That feller you've been talking to?"

"Jonathan Pritts and his daughter Laura. Mighty fine New England people. He's a town-site developer. She wasn't pleased to come west and leave their fine home behind and all their fine friends, but her Pa felt it his duty to come west and open up the country for the right people."

Now something about that didn't sound right to me, nor did it sound like Orrin.

Remembering how my own skull was buzzing over that Spanish girl I figured he must have it the same way over that narrow-between-the-eyes blond girl.

"Seems to me, Orrin, that most folks don't leave home unless they figure to gain by it. We are going west because we can't make a living out of no side-hill farm. I reckon you'll find Jonathan Pritts ain't much different."

Orrin was shocked. "Oh, no. Nothing like that. He was a big man where he came from. If he had stayed there he would be running for the Senate right now."

"Seems to me," I said, "that somebody has told you a mighty lot about her fine friends and her fine home. If he does any developin' it won't be from goodness of his heart but because there's money to be had."

"You don't understand, Tyrel. These are fine people. You should get acquainted."

"We'll have little time for people out west rounding up cows."

Orrin looked mighty uncomfortable. "Mr. Pritts has offered me a job, running his outfit. Plans to develop town sites and the like; there's a lot of old Spanish grants that will be opened to settlement."

"He's got some men?"

"A dozen now, more later. I met one of them, Fetterson."

"With a scarred lip?"

"Why, sure!" Orrin looked at me mighty curious. "Do you know him?"

For the first time then I told Orrin about the shindig back of the saloon when I belted Reed Carney with the bucket.

"Why, then," Orrin said quietly, "I won't take the job. I'll tell Mr. Pritts about Fetterson, too." He paused. "Although I'd like to keep track of Laura."

"Since when have you started chasing girls? Seems to me they always chased after you."

"Laura's different ... I never knew a city girl before, and she's mighty fine.

Manners and all." Right then it seemed to me that if he never saw them again it would be too soon ... all those fancy city manners and city fixings had turned Orrin's head.

Another thing. Jonathan Pritts was talking about those Spanish land grants that would be opened to settlement. It set me to wondering just what would happen to those Spanish folks who owned the grants?

Sizing up those riders of the don's I figured no rawhide outfit made up of the likes of Fetterson would have much chance shaking the don's loose from their land. But that was no business of ours. Starting tomorrow we were wild-cow hunters.

Anyway, Orrin was six years older than me and he had always had luck with girls and no girl ever paid me much mind, so I was sure in no position to tell him.

This Laura Pritts was a pretty thing ... no taking that away from her.

Nonetheless I couldn't get that contrary hammerheaded roan out of mind. They surely did favor.

Orrin had gone back into the cottage and I walked to the edge of the street.

Several of the don's riders were loafing near their wagons and it was mighty quiet.

Rountree spoke from the street. "Watch yourself, Tye."

Turning, I looked around.

Reed Carney was coming up the street.

Chapter III

Back in the hills Orrin was the well-liked brother, nor did I ever begrudge him that. Not that folks disliked me or that I ever went around being mean, but folks never did get close to me and it was most likely my fault. There was always something standoffish about me. I liked folks, but I liked the wild animals, the lonely trails, and the mountains better.

Pa told me once, "Tyrel, you're different. Don't you ever regret it. Folks won't cotton to you much, but the friends you will make will be good friends and they'll stand by you."

Those days I thought he was wrong. I never felt any different than anybody else, far as I could see, only now when I saw Reed Carney coming up the street, and knowing it was me he was coming to kill, something came up in me that I'd never felt before, not even when Long Higgins started for Orrin.

It was something fierce and terrible that came up and liked to choke me, and then it was gone and I was very quiet inside. The moments seemed to plod, every detail stood out in sharp focus, clear and strong. Every sense, every emotion was caught and held, concentrated on that man coming up the street.

He was not alone. Fetterson was with him, and the two who had come from the saloon when I laid Carney low with the bucket. They were a little behind him and spread out.

Orrin was inside somewhere and only that dry, harsh old man with his wolf eyes was there. He would know what was to be done, for nobody needed to tell him how to play his cards in a situation like this ... and no one needed to tell me.

Suddenly, with a queer wave of sadness and fatality, I realized that it was for moments such as this that I had been born.

Some men are gifted to paint, some to write, and some to lead men. For me it was always to be this, not to kill men, although in the years to come I was to kill more than I liked, but to command such situations as this.

Reed was coming up the street and he was thinking what folks would say when they told the story in the cow camps and around the chuck wagons. He was thinking of how they would tell of him walking up the street to kill Tyrel Sackett.

Me, I wasn't thinking. I was just standing there. I was just me, and I knew some things were inevitable.

On my right a door closed and I knew Don Luis had come out on the porch. I even heard, it was that still, the scratch of the match when he lit his cigar.

When Reed started at me he was more than a hundred yards off, but when he had covered half the distance, I started to meet him.

He stopped.

Seems like he didn't expect me to come hunting it. Seems like he figured he was the hunter and that I would try to avoid a shoot out. Seems like something had happened to him in that fifty yards, for fifty yards can be a lifetime.

Suddenly, I knew I didn't have to kill him. Mayhap that was the moment when I changed from a boy into a man. Somewhere I'd begun to learn things about myself and about gunfights and gunfighters. Reading men is the biggest part; drawing fast, even shooting straight, they come later. And some of the fastest drawing men with guns were among the first to die. That fast draw didn't mean a thing ... not a thing.

The first thing I was learning was there are times when a man had to kill and times when he had no need to.

Reed Carney wanted a shoot out and he wanted to win, but me, I'm more than average contrary. Watching Reed come up the street, I knew I didn't need a gun for him; suddenly it came over me that Reed Carney was nothing but a tinhorn. He fancied himself as a tough man and a gunfighter, but he didn't really want anybody shooting at him. The trouble with having a reputation as a tough man is that the time always comes when you have to be a tough man. It's a whole lot different.

Nothing exciting or thrilling about a gunfight. She's a mighty cold proposition for both parties. One or t'other is to be killed or hurt bad, maybe both. Some folks take chances because they've got it in their minds they're somebody special, that something will protect them. It is always, they figure, somebody else who dies.

Only it ain't thataway. You can die. You can be snuffed out like you never existed at all and a few minutes after you're buried nobody will care except maybe your wife or your mother. You stick your finger in the water and you pull it out, and that's how much of a hole you leave when you're gone.

Reed Carney had been thinking of himself as a mighty dangerous man and he had talked himself into a shoot out. Maybe it was something in his walk or the way he looked or in the fact that he stopped when I started toward him. Mayhap it was something sensed rather than seen, that something within me that made me different than other men. Only suddenly I knew that by the time he had taken ten steps toward me the fight had begun to peter out of him, that for the first time he was realizing that I was going to be shooting at him to kill.

Panic can hit a man. You never really know. You can have a man bluffed and then something wild hits him and you're in a real honest-to-warchief shooting. Those others were going to wait for Reed, but I'd leave them to Cap. Reed was my problem and I knew he wanted to kill me. Or rather, he wanted it known around that he'd killed me.

As I walked toward him I knew Reed knew he should draw, and he felt sure he was going to draw, but he just stood there. Then he knew that if he didn't draw it would be too late.

The sweat was streaming down his cheeks although it wasn't a hot evening. Only I just kept walking up on him, closing in. He took a step back and his lips parted like he was having trouble breathing, and he knew that if he didn't draw on me then he would never be the same man again as long as he lived.

When I stopped I was within arm's length of him and he was breathing like he'd run a long way uphill.

"I'd kill you, Reed."

It was the first time I'd ever called him by his first name and his eyes looked right into mine, startled, like a youngster's.

"You want to be a big man, Reed, but you'll never make it with a gun. You just ain't trimmed right for it. If you'd moved for that gun you'd be dead now ... cold and dead in the dust down there with only the memory of a gnawing rat of pain in your belly.

"Now you reach down mighty careful, Reed, and you unbuckle your belt and let it fall. Then you turn around and walk away."

It was still. A tiny puff of wind stirred dust, then died out. Somewhere on the porch of the Drovers' Cottage a board creaked as somebody shifted weight. Out on the prairie a meadow lark sang.

"Unbuckle the belt!"

His eyes were fastened on mine, large and open. Sweat trickled down his cheeks in rivulets. His tongue fumbled at his lips and then his fingers reached for his belt buckle. As he let the belt fall there was a gasp from somewhere, and for a split second everything hung by a hair. There was a moment then when he might have grabbed for a gun but my eyes had him and he let the belt go.

"Was I you I'd straddle my bronc and light a shuck out of here. You got lots of country to choose from."

He backed off, then turned and started to walk away, and then as he realized what he'd done he walked faster and faster. He stumbled once, caught himself, and kept going. After a moment I scooped up the gun belt with my left hand and turned back toward the Drovers' Cottage.

They were all on the porch. Orrin, Laura Pritts and her Pa, and Don Luis ... even his granddaughter. Fetterson stood there, mad clear through. He had come itching for trouble and he was stopped cold. He had no mind to tackle Cap Rountree for fun ... nobody wanted any part of that old wolf. But he had a look in those gun-metal eyes of his that would frighten a body.

"I'll buy the drinks," I said.

"Just coffee for me," Cap replied.

My eyes were on Fetterson. "That includes you," I said.

He started to say something mean, and then he said, "Be damned if I won't. That took guts, mister."

Don Luis took the cigar from his lips and brushed away the long ash that had collected there during the moments just past. He looked at me and spoke in Spanish.

"He says we can travel west with him if we like," Cap translated, "he says you are a brave man ... and what is more important, a wise one."

"Gracias," I said, and it was about the only Spanish word I knew.

In 1867, the Santa Fe Trail was an old trail, cut deep with the ruts of the heavy wagons carrying freight over the trail from Independence, Missouri. It was no road, only a wide area whose many ruts showed the way the wagons had gone through the fifty-odd years the trail had been used. Cap Rountree had come over it first in 1836, he said.

Orrin and me, we had an ache inside us for new country, and a longing to see the mountains show up on the horizon. We had to find a place for Ma, and if we had luck out west, then we could start looking for a place.

Back home we had two younger brothers and one older, but it had been a long time since we'd seen Tell, the oldest of our brothers who was still alive and should be coming home from the wars soon. When the War between the States started he joined up and then stayed on to fight the Sioux in the Dakotas.

We rode west. Of a night we camped together and it sure was fine to set around the fire and listen to those Spanish men sing, and they did a lot of it, one time or another.

Meantime I was listening to Rountree. That old man had learned a lot in his lifetime, living with the Sioux like he did, and with the Nez Perce. First off he taught me to say that name right, and he said it Nay-Persay. He taught me a lot about their customs, how they lived, and told me all about those fine horses they raised, the appaloosas.

My clothes had give out so I bought me an outfit from one of the Spanish men, so I was all fixed out like they were, in a buckskin suit with fringe and all. In the three months since I'd left home I'd put on nearly fifteen pounds and all of it muscle. I sure wished Ma could see me. Only thing that was the same was my gun.

The first few days out I'd seen nothing of the don or his granddaughter, except once when I dropped an antelope with a running shot at three hundred yards. The don happened to see that and spoke of it.

Sometimes his granddaughter would mount her horse and ride alongside the wagons, and one day when we'd been out for about a week, she cantered up on a ridge where I was looking over the country ahead of us.

A man couldn't take anything for safe in this country. From the top of a low hill that country was open grass as far as you could see. There might be a half-dozen shallow valleys out there or ditches, there might be a canyon or a hollow, and any one of them might be chock full of Indians.

This time that Spanish girl joined me on the ridge, I was sizing up the country.

She had beautiful big dark eyes and long lashes and she was about the prettiest thing I ever did see.

"Do you mind if I ride with you, Mr. Sackett?"

"I sure don't mind, but what about Don Luis? I don't expect he'd like his granddaughter riding with a Tennessee drifter."

"He said I could come, but that I must ask your permission. He said you would not let me ride with you if it was not safe."

On the hill where we sat the wind was cool and there was no dust. The train of wagons and pack horses was a half mile away to the southeast. The first Spanish I learned I started learning that day from her.

"Are you going to Santa Fe?"

"No, ma'am, we're going wild-cow hunting along the Purgatoire."

Her name it turned out was Drusilla, and her grandmother had been Irish. The vaqueros were not Mexicans but Basques, and like I'd figured, they were picked fighting men. There was always a vaquero close by as we rode in case of trouble.

After that first time Drusilla often rode with me, and I noticed the vaqueros were watching their back trail as carefully as they watched out for Indians, and some times five or six of them would take off and ride back along the way we had come.

"Grandfather thinks we may be followed and attacked. He has been warned."

That made me think of what Jonathan Pritts had told Orrin, and not knowing if it mattered or not, I told her to tell the don. It seemed to me that land that had been granted a family long ago belonged to that family, and no latecomer like Pritts had a right to move in and drive them off.

The next day she thanked me for her grandfather. Jonathan Pritts had been to Santa Fe before this, and he was working through political means to get their grant revoked so the land could be thrown open to settlement.

Rountree was restless. "By this time we should have met up with Injuns. Keep those rides closer in, Tye, d' you hear?"

He rode in silence for a few minutes, then he said, "Folks back east do a sight of talkin' about the noble red man. Well, he's a mighty fine fighter, I give him that, but ain't no Indian, unless a Nez Perce, who wouldn't ride a couple hundred miles for a fight. Folks talk about takin' land from the Indians. No Indian ever owned land, no way. He hunted over the country and he was always fightin' other Indians just for the right to hunt there.

"I fought Injuns and I lived with Injuns. If you walked into an Injun village of your own will they'd feed you an' let you be as long as you stayed ... that was their way, but the same Injun in whose tipi you slept might follow you when you left an' murder you.

"They hadn't the same upbringin' a white man has. There was none of this talk of mercy, kindness and suchlike which we get from the time we're youngsters. We get it even though most folks don't foller the teachin'. An Injun is loyal to nobody but his own tribe ... an' any stranger is apt to be an enemy.

"You fight an Injun an' whup him, after that maybe you can trade with him. He'll deal with a fightin' man, but a man who can't protect hisself, well, most Injuns have no respect for him, so they just kill him an' forget him."

Around the fires at night there was talk and laughter. Orrin sang his old Welsh and Irish ballads for them. From Pa he'd picked up some Spanish songs, and when he sang them you should have heard them Spanish men yell! And from the far hills the coyotes answered.

Old Rountree would find a spot well back from the flames and set there watching the outer darkness and listening. A man who stares into flames is blind when he looks into outer darkness, and he won't shoot straight ... Pa had taught us that, back in Tennessee.

This was Indian country and you have to figure, understanding Indians, that his whole standing in this tribe comes from how many coups he's counted, which means to strike an enemy, a living enemy, or to be the first one to strike a man who has fallen ... they figure that mighty daring because the fallen man may be playing possum.

An Indian who was a good horse thief, he could have the pick of the girls in the tribe. Mostly because marriage was on the barter system, and an Indian could have all the wives he could afford to buy ... usually that wasn't more than two or three, and mostly one.

Orrin hadn't forgotten that Laura girl. He was upset with me, too, for leading him off again when he was half a mind to tie up with Pritts.

"He's paying top wages," Orrin said, one night.

"Fighting wages," I said.

"Could be, Tyrel," Orrin said, and no friendly sound to his voice, "that you're holding something against Mr. Pritts. And against Laura, too."

Go easy, boy, I told myself, this is dangerous ground. "I don't know them. Only from what you've said he's planning to horn in on land that doesn't belong to him."

Orrin started to speak but Tom Sunday got up. "Time to turn in," he spoke abruptly, "gettin' up time comes early."

We turned in, both of us with words we were itching to say that were better unsaid.

It rankled, however. There was truth about me having a holding against Pritts and his daughter. That I had ... she didn't look right to me, and I've always been suspicious of those too-sanctimonious men like Jonathan Pritts.

The way he looked down that thin New England nose of his didn't promise any good for those who didn't agree with him. And what I said to Orrin that time, I'd believed. If Pritts had been so much back home, what was he doing out here?

We filled our canteens at daybreak with no certain water ahead of us. A hot wind searched the grass. At Mud Creek there was enough water in the creek bottom for the horses, but when we left it it was bone dry. It was seven miles to the Water Holes, and if there was no water there it was a dry day's travel to the Little Arkansas.

The sun was hot. Dust lifted from the feet of the horses and mules, and we left a trail of dust in the air. If any Indians were around, they'd not miss us.

"A man would have to prime himself to spit in country like this," Tom Sunday remarked.

"How about the country we're heading toward, Cap?"

"Worse ... unless a man knows the land. Only saving thing, there's no travel up thataway except for Comanches. What water there is we'll likely have to ourselves."

Every day then, Drusilla was riding with me. And every day I felt myself looking for her sooner than before. Sometimes we were only out for a half hour, at most an hour, but I got so I welcomed her coming and dreaded her going.

Back in the mountains I'd known few girls. Mostly I fought shy of them, not figuring to put my neck in any loops I couldn't pull out of ... only I had a feeling I was getting bogged down with Drusilla.

She was shy of sixteen, but Spanish girls marry that young and younger, and in the mountains they did also. Me, I had nothing but a dapple horse, a partnership in some mules, and my old Spencer and a Colt pistol. It didn't count up to much.

Meanwhile, I'd been getting to know the vaqueros. I'd never known anybody before who wasn't straight-out American, and back in the hills we held ourselves suspicious of such folk. Riding with them, I was finding they were good, solid men.

Miguel was a slim, wiry man who was the finest rider I ever knew, and maybe a couple of years older than me. He was a handsome man with a quick laugh, and like me he was always ready to ride far afield.

Juan Torres was the boss of the lot, a compact man of forty-three or four, who rarely smiled but was always friendly. Maybe he was the finest rifle shot I ever saw ... he had worked for Don Luis Alvarado since he, Torres, was a boy, and thought of him like he was a god.

There was Pete Romero, and a slim, tough young devil called Antonio Baca ... the only one who didn't have the Basque blood. It seemed to me he thought he was a better man than Torres, and there was something else I figured was just my thinking until Cap mentioned it.

"Did you ever notice how young Baca looks at you when you ride with the senorita?"

"He doesn't seem to like it. I noticed that."

"You watch yourself. That boy's got a streak of meanness."

That was all Cap said, but I took it to mind. Stories I'd heard made out these Spanish men to be mighty jealous, although no girl was going to look serious at me when there were men around like Orrin and Tom Sunday.

There's no accounting for the notions men get, and it seems to me the most serious trouble between men comes not so much from money, horses, or women, but from notions. A man takes a dislike to another man for no reason at all but that they rub each other wrong, and then something, a horse or a woman or a drink sets it off and they go to shooting or cutting or walloping with sticks.

Like Reed Carney. Only a notion. And it could have got him killed.

At the Little Arkansas we camped where a little branch flowed from a spring in the bluff and ran down to the river. It was good water, maybe a mite brackish.

After night guard was set I slipped out of camp with a rifle and canteen and went down to the Little Arkansas. Dark was coming on but a man could see. Moving down to the river's edge ... there was more sand than water ... I stood listening.

A man should trust his senses and they'll grow sharper from use. I never took it for granted that the country was safe. Not only listening and watching as I moved, but testing the air for smells. Out on the prairie where the air is fresh a man can smell more than around people, and after awhile he learns to smell an Indian, a white man, a horse, or even a bear.

Off in the distance there was heat lightning, and a far-off nimble of thunder.

Waiting in the silence after the thunder a stone rattled across the river and a column of riders emerged from the brush and rode down into the river bed. There might have been a dozen, or even twenty, and although I could not make them out I could see white streaks on their faces that meant they were painted for war.

Crossing the stream sixty, seventy yards below me they rode out across the prairie. They would not be moving this late unless there was a camp not far off, and that meant more Indians and a possible source of trouble.

When they had gone I went back to camp and got Cap Rountree. Together, we talked to Torres and made what plans we could.

Daylight came, and on the advice of Torres, Drusilla remained with the wagons.

We moved slowly, trying to keep our dust down.

It was dry ... the grass was brown, parched and sun-hot when we fetched up to Owl Creek and found it bone-dry. Little and Big Cow Creeks, also dry.

This last was twenty miles from our last night's camp and no sign of water, with another twenty to go before we reached the Bend of the Arkansas.

"There'll be water," Rountree said in his rasping voice, "there's always water in the Arkansas."

By that time I wasn't sure if there was any water left in Kansas. We took a breather at Big Cow Creek and I rinsed out Dapple's mouth with my handkerchief a couple of times. My lips were cracked and even Dapple seemed to have lost his bounce. That heat and the dry air, with no water, it was enough to take the spry out of a camel.

Dust lifted from the brown grass ... white buffalo bones bleached in the sun. We passed the wrecks of some burned-out wagons and the skull of a horse. In the distance clouds piled up enormous towers and battlements, building dream castles in the sky. Along the prairie, heat waves danced and rippled in the sun, and far off a mirage lake showed the blue of its dream water to taunt our eyes.

From the top of a low hill I looked around at miles of brown emptiness with a vast sweep of sky overhead where the sun seemed to have grown enormously until it swept the sky. From my canteen I soaked my handkerchief and sponged out the Dapple's mouth, again. It was so dry I couldn't spit.

Far below the wagons made a thin trail ... the hill on which I sat was low, but there was a four-mile-long slope leading gradually up to it. The horizon was nowhere, for there was only a haze of heat around us, our horses slogging onward without hope, going because their riders knew no better.

The sky was empty, the land was still ... the dust hung in the empty air. It was very hot.

Chapter IV

Rountree humped his old shoulders under his thin shirt and looked ready to fall any minute but the chances were he would outlast us all. There was iron and rawhide in that old man.

Glancing back I saw a distant plume of dust, and pointed it out to Orrin who gave an arm signal to Torres. We got down from our horses, Orrin and I, and walked along to spell our mounts.

"We got to get that place for Ma," I said to Orrin, "she ain't got many years.

Be nice if she could live them in comfort, in her own home, with her own fixin's."

"We'll find it."

Dust puffed from each step. Pausing to look back, he squinted his eyes against the glare and the sting of sweat. "We got to learn something, Tye," he said suddenly, "we're both ignorant, and it ain't a way to be. Listening to Tom makes a man think. If a body had an education like that, no telling how far he'd go."

"Tom's got the right idea. In this western land a man could make something of himself."

"The country makes a man think of it. It's a big country with lots of room to spread out ... it gives a man big ideas."

When we got back into the saddle the leather was so hot on my bottom I durned near yelled when I settled down into my seat.

After a while, country like that, you just keep moving putting one foot ahead of the other like a man in a trance. It was dark with the stars out when we smelled green trees, grass, and the cool sweetness of water running. We came up to the Arkansas by starlight and I'd still a cup of brackish water in my canteen. Right away, never knowing what will happen, I dumped it out, rinsed the canteen and filled it up again.

Taking that canteen to Drusilla's wagon I noticed Baca watching me with a hard look in his eyes. She was too good for either of us.

The four of us built our own fire away from the others because we had business to talk.

"The don has quite a place, Torres tells me. Big grant of land. Mountains, meadows, forest ... and lots of cattle." Cap had been talking to Torres for some time. "Runs sheep, too. And a couple of mines, a sawmill."

"I hear he's a land hog," Orrin commented. "Lots of folks would like to build homes there, if he'd let 'em."

"Would you, Orrin, if you owned the land?" Tom asked mildly.

"Nobody has a right to all that. Anyway, he ain't an American," Orrin insisted.

Rountree was no hand to argue but he was a just old man. "He's owned that land forty years, and he got it from his father who moved into that country back in 1794. Seems they should have an idea of who it belongs to."

"Maybe I was mistaken," Orrin replied. "That was what I'd heard."

"Don Luis is no pilgrim," Rountree told us, "I heard about him when I first come west. He and his pappy, they fought Utes, Navajo, and Comanches. They worked that land, brought sheep and cattle clear from Mexico, and they opened the mines, built the sawmill. I reckon anybody wants to take their land is goin' to have to dig in an' scratch."

"It doesn't seem to me that Jonathan Pritts would do anything that isn't right,"

Orrin argued. "Not if he knows the facts."

Pawnee Rock was next ... Torres came over to our fire to tell us Don Luis had decided to fight shy of it. Orrin wanted to see it and so did I, so the four of us decided to ride that way while the wagons cut wide around it.

Forty or fifty men were camped near the Rock, a tough, noisy, drunken crowd, well supplied with whiskey.

"Looks like a war party," Rountree commented.

Suddenly I had a bad feeling that this was the Pritts crowd, for I could think of no reason why a bunch of that size should be camping here without wagons or women. And I saw one of them who had been with the Back Rand crowd the other side of Abilene.

When they saw us riding up, several got up from where they'd been loafing.

"Howdy! Where you from?"

"Passing through." Tom Sunday glanced past the few men who had come to greet us at their camp, which was no decent camp, but dirty, untidy and casual. "We're headed for the upper Cimarron," he added.

"Why don't you step down? We got a proposition for you."

"We're behind time," Orrin told him, and he was looking at their faces as if he wanted to remember them.

Several others had strolled toward us, sort of circling casually around as if they wanted to get behind us, so I let the dapple turn to face them.

They didn't take to that, not a little bit, and one redhead among them took it up. "What's the matter? You afraid of something?"

When a man faces up to trouble with an outfit like that you get nowhere either talking or running, so I started the dapple toward him, not saying a word, but walking the horse right at him. My right hand was on my thigh within inches of my six-shooter, and it sized up to me like they figured to see what would happen if Red crowded me.

Red started to side-step but the dapple was a cutting horse Pa had used working stock, and once you pointed that horse at anything, man or animal, he knew what his job was.

Red backed off, and long ago I'd learned that when you get a man to backing up its hard for him to stop and start coming at you. Every move he made the dapple shifted and went for him, and all of a sudden Red got desperate and grabbed for his gun and just as he grabbed I spurred the dapple into him. The dapple hit him with a shoulder and Red went down hard. He lost grip on the pistol which fell several feet away.

Red lay on the ground on his back with the dapple right over him, and I hadn't said a word.

While everybody was watching the show Red and the dapple were putting on, Orrin had his pistol lying there in his lap. Both Tom Sunday and Cap Rountree had their rifles ready and Cap spoke up. "Like I said, we're just passing through."

Red started to get up and the dapple shifted his weight and Red relaxed. "You get up when we're gone, Red. You're in too much of a sweat to get killed."

Several of the others had seen what was going on and started toward us.

"All right, Tye?" Orrin asked.

"Let's go," I said, and we dusted out of there.

One thing Cap had in mind and I knew it was what he was thinking. If they were watching us they wouldn't have noticed the passing of the wagons, and they didn't. We watered at Coon Creek and headed for Fort Dodge.

The Barlow Sanderson Company stage came in while we were in Fort Dodge. Seems a mighty fine way to travel, sitting back against the cushions with nice folks around you. We were standing there watching when we heard the stage driver talking to a sergeant. "Looks like a fight shaping up over squatters trying to move in on the Spanish grants," he said.

Orrin turned away. "Good thing we're straying shut of that fight," he said.

"We'll be better off hunting cows."

When we rode back to camp everything was a-bustle with packing and loading up.

Torres came to us. "We go, senores. There is word of trouble from home. We take the dry route south from here. You will not come with us?"

"We're going to the Purgatoire."

"Then it will be adios." Torres glanced at me. "I know that Don Luis will wish to say good-by to you, senor."

At the wagons Don Luis was nowhere in sight, but Drusilla was. When she saw me she came quickly forward. "Oh, Tye! We're going! Will I ever see you again?"

"I'll be coming to Santa Fe. Shall I call on you then?"

"Please do."

We stood together in the darkness with all the hurry around us of people packing and getting ready to move, the jingle of trace chains, the movement and the shouts. Only I felt like something was going right out from my insides, and I'd never felt this way before. Right then I didn't want to hunt wild cows. I wanted to go to Santa Fe. Was this the way Orrin felt about Laura Pritts?

But how could I feel any way at all about her? I was a mountain boy who could scarcely read printing and who could not write more than his name.

"Will you write to me, Tyrel?"

How could I tell her I didn't know how? "I'll write," I said, and swore to myself that I'd learn. I'd get Tom to teach me.

Orrin was right. We would have to get an education, some way, somehow.

"I'll miss you."

Me, like a damned fool I stood there twisting my hat. If I'd only had some of Orrin's easy talk! But I'd never talked much to any girl or even womenfolks, and I'd no idea what a man said to them.

"It was mighty fine," I told her, "riding out on the plains with you."

She moved closer to me and I wanted to kiss her the worst way, but what right had a Tennessee boy to kiss the daughter of a Spanish don?

"I'll miss the riding," I said, grasping at something to say. "I'll sure miss it."

She stood on her tiptoes suddenly and kissed me, and then she ran. I turned right around and walked right into a tree. I backed off and started again and just then Antonio Baca came out of the darkness and he had a knife held low down in his hand. He didn't say anything, just lunged at me.

Talking to girls was one thing, cutting scrapes was something else. Pa had brought me up right one way, at least. It was without thinking, what I did. My left palm slapped his knife wrist over to my right to get the blade out of line with my body, and my right hand dropped on his wrist as my left leg came across in front of him, and then I just spilled him over my leg and threw him hard against a tree trunk.

He was in the air when he hit it, and the knife fell free. Scooping it up, I just walked on and never even looked back. One time there, I figured I heard him groan, but I was sure he was alive all right. Just shook up.

Tom Sunday was in the saddle with my dapple beside him. "Orrin and Cap went on.

They'll meet us at the Fort."

"All right," I said.

"I figured you'd want to say good-by. Mighty hard to leave a girl as pretty as that."

I looked at him. "First girl ever paid me any mind," I said. "Girls don't cotton to me much."

"As long as girls like that one like you, you've nothing to worry about," he said quietly. "She's a real lady. You've a right to be proud."

Then he saw the knife in my hand. Everybody knew that knife who had been with the wagons. Baca was always flashing it around.

"Collecting souveniers?" Tom asked dryly.

"Wasn't planning on it." I shoved the knife down in my belt. "Sort of fell into it."

We rode on a few steps and he said, "Did you kill him?"

"No."

"You should have," he said, "because you'll have it to do."

Seems I never had a difficulty with a man that made so little impression. All I could think of was Drusilla Alvarado, and the fact that we were riding away from her. All the time I kept telling myself I was a fool, that she was not for me.

But it didn't make a mite of difference, and from that day on I understood Orrin a lot better and felt sorry for him.

Nothing changed my mind about that narrow-between-the-ears blonde, though. That roan horse never had been any account, and miserable, contrary and ornery it was, too.

We could see the lights of the Fort up ahead and behind me the rumble of those wagon wheels as the train moved out, the rattle of trace chains, and the Mexicans calling to each other.

"Tom," I said, "I got to learn to write. I really got to learn."

"You should learn," he told me seriously, "I'll be glad to teach you."

"And to read writing?"

"All right."

We rode in silence for a little while and then Tom Sunday said, "Tye, this is a big country out here and it takes big men to live in it, but it gives every man an equal opportunity. You're just as big or small as your vision is, and if you've a mind to work and make something of yourself, you can do it."

He was telling me that I could be important enough for even a don's daughter, I knew that. He was telling me that and suddenly I did not need to be told. He was right, of course, and all the time I'd known it. This was a country to grow up in, a land where a man had a chance.

The stars were bright. The camp lay far behind. Somebody in the settlement ahead laughed and somebody else dropped a bucket and it rolled down some steps. A faint breeze stirred, cool and pleasant. We were making the first step. We were going after wild cows.

We were bound for the Purgatoire.

Chapter V

Cap Rountree had trapped beaver all over the country we were riding toward. He had been there with Kit Carson, Uncle Dick Woolton, Jim Bridger, and the Bents.

He knew the country like an Indian would know it.

Tom Sunday ... I often wondered about Tom. He was a Texan, he said, and that was good enough. He knew more about cattle than any of us.

Orrin and me, well, most of what we'd had all our lives came from our own planting or hunting, and we grew up with a knowledge of the herbs a man can eat and how to get along in the forest.

The country we were riding toward was Indian country. It was a place where the Comanches, Utes, Arapahos, and Kiowas raided and fought, and there were Cheyennes about, too. And sometimes the Apaches raiding north. In this country the price for a few lazy minutes might be the death of every man in the party.

It was no place for a loafer or one lacking responsibility.

Always and forever we were conscious of the sky. City folks almost never look at the sky to the stars but with us there was no choice. They were always with us.

Tom Sunday was a man who knew a sight of poetry, and riding across the country thataway, he'd recite it for us. It was a lonely life, you know, and I expect what Sunday missed most was the reading. Books were rare and treasured things, hard to come by and often fought over. Newspapers the same.

A man couldn't walk down to the corner and buy a paper. Nor did he have a postman to deliver it to him. I've known cowhands to memorize the labels off canned fruit and vegetables for lack of reading.

Cap knew that country, knew every creek and every fork. There were no maps except what a man had in his skull, and nobody of whom to ask directions, so a body remembered what he saw. Cap knew a thousand miles of country like a man might know his kitchen at home.

These mornings the air was fresher. There was a faint chill in the air, a sign we were getting higher. We were riding along in the early hours when we saw the wagons.

Seven wagons, burned and charred. We moved in carefully, rifles up and ready; edged over to them, holding to a shallow dip in the prairie until we were close up.

Folks back east have a sight to say about the poor Indian but they never fought him. He was a fighter by trade, and because he naturally loved it, mercy never entered his head. Mercy is a taught thing. Nobody comes by it natural. Indians grew up thinking the tribe was all there was and anybody else was an enemy.

It wasn't a fault, simply that nobody had ever suggested such a thing to him. An enemy was to be killed, and then cut up so if you met him in the afterlife he wouldn't have the use of his limbs to attack you again. Some Indians believed a mutilated man would never get into the hereafter.

Two of the men in this outfit had been spread-eagled on wagon wheels, shot full of arrows, and scalped. The women lay scattered about, their clothing ripped off, blood all over. One man had got into a buffalo wallow with his woman and had made a stand there.

"No marks on them," I said, "they must have died after the Indians left."

"No," Cap indicated the tracks of moccasins near the bodies. "They killed themselves when their ammunition gave out." He showed us powder burns on the woman's dress and the man's temple. "Killed her and then himself."

The man who made the stand there in the wallow had accounted for some Indians.

We found spots of blood on the grass that gave reason to believe he'd killed four or five, but Indians always carry their dead away.

"They aren't mutilated because the man fought well. Indians respect a fighter and they respect almost nobody else. But sometimes they cut them up, too."

We buried the two where they lay in the wallow, and the others we buried in a common grave nearby, using a shovel found near one of the wagons. Cap found several letters that hadn't burned and put them in his pocket. "Least we can do," he said, "the folks back home will want to know."

Sunday was standing off sizing up those wagons and looking puzzled. "Cap," he said, "come over here a minute."

The wagons had been set afire but some had burned hardly at all before the fire went out. They were charred all over, and the canvas tops were burned, of course.

"See what you mean," Orrin said, "seems to be a mighty thick bottom on that wagon."

'Too thick," Sunday said, "I think there's a false bottom."

Using the shovel he pried a board until we could get enough grip to pull it loose. There was a compartment there, and in it a flat iron box, which we broke open.

Inside were several sacks of gold money and a little silver, coming to more than a thousand dollars. There were also a few letters in that box.

"This is better than hunting cows," Sunday said. "We've got us a nice piece of money here."

"Maybe somebody needs that money," Orrin suggested. "We'd better read those letters and see if we can find the owner."

Tom Sunday looked at him, smiling but something in his smile made a body think he didn't feel like smiling. "You aren't serious? The owner's dead."

"Ma would need that money mighty bad if it had been sent to her by Tyrel and me," Orrin said, "and it could be somebody needs this money right bad."

First off, I'd thought he was joking, but he was dead serious, and the way he looked at it made me back up and take another look myself. The thing to do was to find who the money rightfully belonged to and send it to them ... if we found nobody then it would be all right to keep it.

Cap Rountree just stood there stoking that old pipe and studying Orrin with care, like he seen something mighty interesting.

There wasn't five dollars amongst us now. We'd had to buy pack animals and our outfit, and we had broke ourselves, what with Orrin and me sending a little money to Ma from Abilene. Now we were about to start four or five months of hard work, and risk our hair into the bargain, for no more money than this.

"These people are dead, Orrin," Tom Sunday said irritably, "and if we hadn't found it years might pass before anybody else did, and by that time any letter would have fallen to pieces."

Standing there watching the two of them I'd no idea what was happening to us, and that the feelings from that dispute would affect all our lives, and for many years. At the time it seemed such a little thing.

"Not in this life will any of us ever find a thousand dollars in gold. Not again. And you suggest we try to find the owner."

"Whatever we do we'd better decide somewheres else," I commented. "There might be Indians around."

Come dusk we camped in some trees near the Arkansas, bringing all the stock in close and watering them well. Nobody did any talking. This was no place to have trouble but when it came to that, Orrin was my brother ... and he was in the right.

Now personally, I'm not sure I'd have thought of it. Mayhap I wouldn't have mentioned it if I did think of it ... a man never knows about things like that.

Rountree hadn't done anything but listen and smoke that old pipe of his.

It was when we were sitting over coffee that Tom brought it up again. "We'd be fools not to keep that money, Orrin. How do we know who we'd be sending it to?

Maybe some relative who hated him. Certainly, nobody needs it more than we do."

Orrin, he just sat there studying those letters. "Those folks had a daughter back home," Orrin said, finally, "an' she's barely sixteen. She's living with friends until they send for her, and when those friends find out she isn't going to be sent for, and they can expect no more money, then what happens to that girl?"

The question bothered Tom, and it made him mad. His face got red and set in stubborn lines, and he said, "You send your share. I'll take a quarter of it ... right now. If I hadn't noticed that wagon the money would never have been found."

"You're right about that, Tom," Orrin said reasonably, "but the money just ain't ours."

Slowly, Tom Sunday got to his feet. He was mad clear through and pushing for a fight. So I got up, too.

"Kid," he said angrily, "you stay out of this. This is between Orrin and me."

"We're all in this together, Cap an' me as much as Orrin and you. We started out to round up wild cattle, and if we start it with trouble there's no way we can win."

Orrin said, "Now if that money belonged to a man, maybe I'd never have thought of returning it, but with a girl as young as that, no telling what she'll come to, turned loose on the world at that age. This money could make a lot of difference."

Tom was a prideful and stubborn man, ready to take on the two of us. Then Rountree settled matters.

"Tom," he said mildly, "you're wrong, an' what's more, you know it. This here outfit is four-sided and I vote with the Sackett boys. You ain't agin democracy, are you, Tom?"

"You know darned well I'm not, and as long as you put it that way, I'll sit down! Only I think we're damned fools."

"Tom, you're probably right, but that's the kind of a damned fool I am," said Orrin. "When the cows are rounded up if you don't feel different about it you can have my share of the cows."

Tom Sunday just looked at Orrin. "You damned fool. Next thing we know you'll be singing hymns in a church."

"I know a couple," Orrin said. "You all set down and while Tyrel gets supper, I'll sing you a couple."

And that was the end of it ... or we thought it was. Sometimes I wonder if anything is ever ended. The words a man speaks today live on in his thoughts or the memories of others, and the shot fired, the blow struck, the thing done today is like a stone tossed into a pool and the ripples keep widening out until they touch lives far from ours.

So Orrin sang his hymans, and followed them with Black, Black, Black, Lord Randall, Barbara Allan and Sweet Betsy. When Orrin finished the last one Tom reached over and held out his hand and Orrin grinned at him and shook it.

No more was said about the gold money and it was put away in the bottom of a pack and to all intents it was forgotten. If that amount of gold is ever forgotten.

We were getting into the country of the wild cattle now. Cap Rountree as well as others had noticed these wild cattle, some of them escaped from Spanish settlements to the south, and some escaped or stampeded by Indians from wagon trains bound for California.

No doubt Indians had killed a few, but Indians preferred buffalo, and many of these cattle had come south with buffalo herds. There was no shortage of buffalo in 1867, and the Indians only killed the wild cattle when there was nothing else.

The country we were going to work lay south of the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, between the Purgatoire and Two Buttes Creek, and south to the Mal Pais. It was big country and it was rough country. We rode south through sage plains with some mesquite, with juniper and pinon on the hills.

Cap had in his mind a hidden place, a canyon near the base of a mountain where a cold spring of sweet water came out of the rocks. There was maybe two hundred acres of good grass in the bottom, grass belly-high to a horse, and from the look of it nobody had seen it since Cap Rountree stumbled on it twenty years back.

First off, we forted up. Behind us the cliffs lifted sheer with an overhang that provided shelter from above. Right out in front there was four or five acres of meadow with good grass, edged on the far side by trees and rocks. Beyond that was the bowl with the big pasture as we called it, and in an adjoining canyon was a still larger area where we figured to trap the wild cattle and hold them.

We spent that first day gathering fuel, adding a few rocks to our fort, and generally scouting the country close around our hideout. Also, I killed a deer and Cap got a buffalo. We brought the meat into camp and started jerking it.

Next morning at daybreak we started out to scout the country. Within an hour's riding we'd seen sixty or seventy head. A man never saw such cattle. There was a longhorn bull in that crowd that must have stood seven feet and would have weighed sixteen hundred pounds. And horns? Needle-sharp.

By nightfall we had a good bunch of cattle in the bowl or drifted toward it. By the third day we had more than a hundred head in that bowl and we were beginning to count our money.

It was slow, patient work. Push them too fast and they would stampede clear out of the country, so we tried to move them without them guessing what we planned.

We had two things to accomplish: to catch ourselves some wild cattle and to stay alive while doing it. And it wasn't only Indians we had to think about, but the cattle themselves, for some of those tough old bulls showed fight, and the cows could be just as mean if they caught a man afoot. Of a night we yarned around the fire or belly-ached about somebody's cooking. We took turn about on that job.

We kept our fires small, used the driest wood, and we moved around only when we had to. We daren't set any patterns of work so's Indians could lay for us. We never took the same trail back that we used on the way out, and we kept our eyes open all the time.

We gathered cattle. We sweated, we swore, and we ate dust, but we gathered them up, six one day, twelve another, nineteen, then only three. There was no telling how it would be. We got them into the bowl where there was grass and plenty of water and we watched them get fat. Also, it gave them time to settle down.

Then trouble hit us. Orrin was riding a sorrel we had picked up in Dodge. He was off by himself and he started down a steep hillside and the sorrel fell. That little sorrel got up fast with Orrin's foot caught in the stirrup and he buckled down to run. There was only one way Orrin could keep from being dragged to death, and that was one reason cowhands always carried pistols. He shot the sorrel.

Come nightfall there was no sign of Orrin. We had taken to coming in early so if anything went wrong with any of us there would be time to do something before night.

We set out to look. Tom went south, swinging back toward the east, Cap went west, and I followed up a canyon to the north before topping out on the rim. It was me found him, walking along, packing his saddle and his Winchester.

When he put down the saddle on seeing me, I rode up to him. "You took long enough," he grumbled, but there was no grumble in his eyes, "I was fixing to cache my saddle."

"You could have fired a shot."

"There were Indians closer than you," he said.

Orrin told us about it around the fire. He had shucked his saddle off the dead sorrel and started for camp, but being a sly one, he was not about to leave a direct trail to our hideout, so he went downhill first and stumbled on a rocky ledge which he followed sixty or seventy yards.

There had been nine or ten Indians in the party and he saw them before they saw him, so he just laid right down where he was and let them pass by. They were all warriors, and the way they were riding they might miss his dead horse.

"They'll find it," Cap told us, "it's nigh to dark now, so they won't get far tonight. Likely they'll camp somewhere down the creek. At daybreak they'll see the buzzards."

"So?"

"That's a shod horse. It isn't likely they'd pass up a chance to get one man afoot and alone."

Any other time we could have high-tailed it out of the country and left them nothing but tracks, but now we were men of property and property ties a man down.

"Think they'll find us?"

"Likely," Cap said. "Reckon we better hold to camp a day or two. Horses need the rest, anyway."

We all sat there feeling mighty glum, knowing the chances were that if the Indians didn't find us they would stay around the country, looking for us. That meant that our chance of rounding up more cattle was coming down to nothing.

"You know what I think?" They waited for me to speak up. "I think we should cash in our chips. I think we should take what we've got and hit the trail for Santa Fe, sell what we've got, and get us a proper outfit. We need three or four horses per man for this kind of work."

Tom Sunday flipped his bowie knife into the sand, retrieved it and studied the light on the blade while he gave it thought. "Not a bad idea," he said. "Cap?"

"If Orrin's willin'." Cap hesitated. "I figure we should dust out of here, come daybreak."

"Wasn't what I had in mind," I said, "I meant to leave right now ... before those Indians find that sorrel."

The reason I hadn't waited for Orrin to speak was because I knew he was pining to see that yellow-haired girl and I had some visiting in mind my own self.

Only it wasn't that ... it was the plain, common-sense notion that once those Indians knew we were here, starting a herd might be tough to do. It might take them a day or two to work out our trail. Chances were by the time they found we were gone we'd be miles down the trail.

So I just picked up my saddle and headed for my horse. There is a time that calls for action and when debate makes no sense. Starting a herd in the middle of the night isn't the best thing to do, but handling cattle we'd be scattered out and easy picking for Indians, and I wanted to get started.

We just packed up and lit out. Those cattle were heavy with water and grass and not in the mood for travel but we started them anyhow. We put the north star at our backs and started for Santa Fe.

When the first sun broke the gray sky we had six miles behind us.

Chapter VI

We had our troubles. When that bunch began to realize what was happening they didn't like it. We wore our horses to a frazzle but we kept that herd on the trail right up to dusk to tire them out as much as to get distance behind us. We kept a sharp lookout, but we saw no Indians.

Santa Fe was a smaller town than we expected, and it sure didn't shape up to more than a huddle of adobe houses built around a sunbaked plaza, but it was the most town I'd ever seen, or Orrin.

Folks stood in the doorways and shaded their eyes at us as we bunched our cows, and then three riders, Spanish men, started up the trail toward us. They were cantering their horses and staring at us, then they broke into a gallop and came charging up with shrill yells that almost started our herd again. It was Miguel, Pete Romero, and a rider named Abreu.

"Ho!" Miguel was smiling. "It is good to see you, amigo. We have been watching for you. Don Luis has asked that you be his guests for dinner."

"Does he know we're here?" Orrin was surprised.

Miguel glanced at him. "Don Luis knows most things, senor. A rider brought news from the Vegas."

They remained with the herd while we rode into town.

We walked over to the La Fonda and left our horses in the shade. It was cool inside, and quiet. It was shadowed there like a cathedral, only this here was no cathedral. It was a drinking place, and a hotel, too, I guess.

Mostly they were Spanish men sitting around, talking it soft in that soft-sounding tongue of theirs, and it gave me a wonderful feeling of being a travelled man, of being in foreign parts. A couple of them spoke to us, most polite.

We sat down and dug deep for the little we had. Wasn't much, but enough for a few glasses of wine and mayhap something to eat. I liked hearing the soft murmur of voices, the clink of glasses, and the click of heels on the floor. Somewhere out back a woman laughed, and it was a mighty fine sound.

While we sat there an Army officer came in. Tall man, thirtyish with a clean uniform and a stiff way of walking like those Army men have. He had mighty fancy mustaches.

"Are you the men who own those cattle on the edge of town?"

"Are you in the market?" Orrin said.

"That depends on the price." He sat down with us and ordered a glass of wine. "I will be frank, gentlemen, there has been a drought here and a lot of cattle have been lost. Most of the stock is very thin. Yours is the first fat beef we've seen."

Tom Sunday glanced up and smiled. "We will want twenty-five dollars per head."

The captain merely glanced at him. "Of course not," he said, then he smiled at us and lifted his glass. "Your health--"

"What about Don Luis Alvarado?" Orrin asked suddenly.

The captain's expression stiffened a little and he asked, "Are you one of the Pritts crowd?"

"No," Tom Sunday said, "we met the don out on the Plains. Came west from Abilene with him, as a matter of fact."

"He's one of those who welcomed us in New Mexico. Before we took over the Territory the Mexican government was in no position to send troops to protect these colonies from the Indians. Also, most of the trade was between Santa Fe and the States, rather than between Santa Fe and Mexico. The don appreciated this, and most of the people here welcomed us."

"Jonathan Pritts is bringing in settlers," Orrin said.

"Mr. Pritts is a forceful and energetic man," the captain said, "but he is under the false impression that because New Mexico has become a possession of the United States ... I should say, a part of the United States ... that the property rights of all Spanish-speaking people will be tossed out the window."

There was a pause. "The settlers--if one wishes to call them that--that Jonathan Pritts is bringing in are all men who bring their guns instead of families."

I had me another glass of wine and sat back and listened to the captain talking with Tom Sunday. Seems the captain was out of that Army school, West Point, but he was a man who had read a sight of books. A man never realizes how little he knows until he listens to folks like that talk. Up where I was born we had the Bible, and once in a while somebody would bring a newspaper but it was a rare thing when we saw any other kind of reading.

Politics was a high card up in the hills. A political speech would bring out the whole country. Folks would pack their picnic lunches and you'd see people at a speech you'd never see elsewhere. Back in those days 'most every boy grew up knowing as much about local politics as about coon dogs, which was about equal as to interest.

Orrin and me, we just set and listened. A man can learn a lot if he listens, and if I didn't learn anything else I was learning how much I didn't know. It made me hungry to know it all, and mad because I was getting so late a start.

We'd picked up a few more head of cattle coming south and the way it was going to figure out, each of us would have more than a thousand dollars of his own when we'd settled up. Next day Orrin and Cap went to the stage office and arranged to ship east the gold we'd found in the wagon.

The itch to see the town got the best of me so I walked outside. Those black-eyed senoritas was enough to turn a man's good sense. If Orrin would look at some of these girls he'd forget all about Laura. It was no wonder he fell for her. After a man has been surrounded for months by a lot of hard-handed, hairy-chested men even the doggiest kind of female looks mighty good.

Most of all right now I wanted a bath and a shave. Cap, he followed me.

"Seems to me there's things around town need seeing to," I suggested.

"You look here, Tyrel, if you're thinkin' of what I think you're thinkin' you'd better scout the country and study the sign before you make your move. If you figure to court a Spanish gal you'd also better figure to fight her man."

"Seems like it might be worth it."

This was siesta time. A dog opened one eye and wagged a tail to show that if I didn't bother him he'd be pleased. Me, I wasn't of a mind to bother anybody.

Taking it slow, I walked down the dusty street. The town was quiet. A wide door opened into a long, barnlike building with a lot of tubs and water running through in a ditch. There was homemade soap there and nobody around. There was a pump there, too. It was the first time I ever saw a pump inside a house. Folks are sure getting lazy ... won't even go outside the house to pump.

This here must be a public bathhouse, but there was nobody around to take my money. I filled a tub with water, stripped off and got in and when I'd covered with soap, head to foot, three women came in with bundles of clothes on their heads.

First off I stared and they stared and then I yelled. All of a sudden I realized this here was no bathhouse but a place to wash clothes.

Those Spanish girls had taken one look and then they began to shriek, and first off I figured they were scared, but they weren't running, they were just standing there laughing at me.

Laughing!

Grabbing a bucket of water I doused myself with it and grabbed up a towel. Then they ran outside and I could hear screams and I never crawled into my clothes so fast in all my born days. Slinging gun belt around me at a dead run I beat it for my horse.

It must have been a sight, me all soapy in that tub. Red around the gills. I started Dapple out of town on a run and the last thing I could hear was laughter. Women sure do beat all.

Anyway, I'd had a bath.

Morning was bright and beautiful like nine mornings out of ten in the high desert country. We met the captain and turned the cattle over to him. We'd finally settled on twenty dollars a head, which was a very good price at the time and place.

First off, as we rode into town, a girl spotted me. She pointed her finger at me, gasped, and spoke excitedly to the girl with her, and then they both began to look at me and laugh.

Orrin was puzzled because the girls always noticed him first and paid me no mind. "Do you know those girls?"

"Me? I never saw them before in my life." But it gave me a tip-off as to what it was going to be like. That story must be all over Santa Fe by now.

Before we reached the La Fonda we'd passed a dozen girls and they all laughed or smiled at me. Tom Sunday and Orrin, they hadn't an idea of what was going on.

The La Fonda was cool and pleasant again, so we ordered wine and a meal. The girl who took our order realized all of a sudden who I was and she began to giggle. When she went out with our order, two or three girls came from the kitchen to look at me.

Picking up a glass of wine, I tried to appear worldly and mighty smug about it all. Fact was, I felt pretty foolish.

Orrin was getting sore. He couldn't understand this sudden interest the girls were taking in me. He was curious, interested and kind of jealous all to once.

Only thing I could do was stand my ground and wear it out or high-tail it for the brush.

Santa Fe was a small town, but it was a friendly town. Folks here all wanted the good time that strangers brought. Those years, it was a town at the end of things, although it was old enough to have been a center of everything. And the girls loved a fandango and enjoyed the presence of the Americans.

There was a cute little button of a Mexican girl and every time I'd see her she'd give me a flashing glance out of those big dark eyes, and believe me, I'd get flustered.

This one had a shape to take a man's eye. Every time she'd pass me on the streets she'd give a little more swish to her skirts and I figured we could get acquainted if I just knew how to go about it. Her name was Tina Fernandez.

Night of the second day, there was a knock at the door and when I opened it Fetterson was standing there.

"Mr. Pritts wants to see you, all of you. He wants to talk business."

We looked at each other, then Orrin got up to go. The rest of us followed him and a Mexican standing at the bar turned his back on us. Anybody who was friendly to Jonathan Pritts would find few friends in Santa Fe.

It wasn't just that which worried me. It was Orrin.

Jonathan Pritts had four men outside the adobe where he lived and a few others loafing near the corral. Through the bunkhouse door I could see several men, all armed.

One thing you've got to watch, Tyrel, I told myself, is a man with so many fighters around. He wouldn't have all those men unless he figured he'd need them.

Rountree glanced at me. He was badger tough and coon smart. Sunday paused on the porch and took out a cigar; when he reached back and struck the match on his pants three chairs creaked as men put their hands to their guns. Tom didn't let on he noticed but there was a sly smile around his mouth.

Laura came to meet us in a blue dress that brought out the blue in her eyes, so she looked like an angel. The way she offered both hands to Orrin and the way she looked at him ... it was enough to make a man gag. Only Orrin wasn't gagging. He was looking like somebody had hit him with a fence post.

Cap was uncommon sour but Sunday--always a hand with the ladies--gave her a wide smile. Sometimes I thought it irritated him that Laura had chosen to fall for Orrin and not him. Her eyes looked past Orrin at me and our minds were hitched to the same idea. We simply did not like each other.

Jonathan Pritts entered wearing a preacher's coat and a collar that made you wonder whether he was going to offer prayer or sell you a gold brick.

He passed around a box of cigars and I was glad I didn't smoke. Orrin accepted a cigar, and after the slightest hesitation, Tom did too.

"I don't smoke," I said.

"Will you have a drink?"

"I don't drink," I said.

Orrin looked at me, because while I don't care for the stuff I sometimes drink with friends.

"You boys have done well with your cattle," Pritts said, "and I like men with business minds. However, I am wondering what you plan to do with the proceeds of your success. I can use men who want to invest business brains and capital, men who can start something and carry it through."

Nobody said anything and he brushed the ash from his cigar and studied the glowing end for a minute.

"There may be a little trouble at first. The people on the land are not Americans and may resent our moving in."

Orrin spoke slowly. "Tyrel and me came west hunting land. We're looking for a home."

"Good! New Mexico is now a part of the United States, and it's time that we American citizens had the benfits."

He drew deep on his cigar. "The first comers will be first served."

"The way it sounds," I said, "you plan to shove out the first comers and move in yourself."

Pritts was mad. He was not accustomed to straight talk--least of all from men like us. He said nothing for a moment and Laura sat down near Orrin and I got a whiff of her perfume.

"The Mexicans have no rights," Pritts replied. "The land belongs to us freeborn Americans, and if you come in with us now you will have shares in the company we are forming."

"We need a home for Ma," Orrin said, "we do need land."

"If we get it this way, there'll be blood on it," I said, "but first we should get Mr. Pritts' proposition in writing, just what he has in mind, and how he aims to settle up." That was Pa talking. Pa always said, "Get it in writing, boy."

"A gentleman's word," Pritts replied stiffly, "should be enough."

I got up. I'd no idea what the others figured to do and didn't much care. This sanctimonious old goat was figuring to steal land from folks who'd lived on it for years.

"A man who is talking of stealing land with guns," I said, "is in no position to talk about himself as being a gentleman. Those people are American citizens now as much as you or me."

Turning around, I started for the door, and Cap Rountree was only a step behind me. Tom Sunday hesitated, being a polite man, but the four of us were four who worked and travelled together, so he followed us. Orrin lagged a little, but he came.

Pritts yelled after us, his voice trembling he was so mad. "Remember this! Those who aren't with me are against me! Ride out of town and don't come back!"

None of us were greenhorns and we knew those men on the porch weren't knitting so when we stopped, the four of us faced out in four directions. "Mr. Pritts," I said, "you've got mighty big ideas for such a small head. Don't you make trouble for us or we'll run you back to the country they run you out of."

He was coming after us and he stopped in midstride, stopped as though I'd hit him with my fist. Right then I knew what I'd said was true ... somebody had run him out of somewhere.

He was an arrogant man who fancied himself important, and mostly he carried it off, but now he was mad. "We'll see about that!" he shouted. "Wilson, take them!"

Rountree was facing the first man who started to get out of a chair, which was Wilson, and there was no mercy in old Cap. He just laid a gun barrel alongside of Wilson's head and Wilson folded right back into his chair.

The man facing Orrin had a six-shooter in his stomach and I was looking across a gun barrel at Pritts himself. "Mr. Pritts," I said, "you're a man who wants to move in on folks with guns. Now you just tell them to go ahead with what they've started and you'll be dead on the floor by the tune you've said it."

Laura stared at me with such hatred as I've ever seen on a woman's face. There was a girl with a mighty big picture of her pa and anybody who didn't see her pa the way she did couldn't be anything but evil. And whoever she married was always going to play second fiddle to Jonathan Pritts.

Pritts looked like he'd swallowed something that wasn't good for him. He looked at that Navy Colt and he knew I was not fooling. And so did I.

"All right." He almost choked on it. "You can go."

We walked to our horses with nobody talking and when we were in our saddles Orrin turned on me. "Damn you, Tye, you played hell. You the same as called him a thief."

"That land belongs to Alvarado. We killed a lot of Higginses for less."

That night I slept mighty little, trying to figure out if I'd done right. Anyway I looked at it, I thought I'd done the right thing, and I didn't believe my liking for Drusilla had a thing to do with it. And believe me, I thought about that.

Next morning I saw Fetterson riding out of town with a pack of about forty men, and Wilson was with him. Only Wilson's hat wasn't setting right because of the lump on his skull. They rode out of town, headed northeast.

About the time they cleared the last house a Mexican boy mounted on a speedy looking sorrel took off for the hills, riding like the devil was on his tail.

Looked to me like Don Luis had his own warning system and would be ready for Fetterson before he got there. Riding that fast he wouldn't be riding far, so chances were a relay of horses was waiting to carry the word. Don Luis had a lot of men, lots of horses, and a good many friends.

Orrin came out, stuffing his shirt into his pants. He looked mean as a bear with a sore tooth. "You had no call to jump Mr. Pritts like that."

"If he was an honest man, I'd have nothing to say."

Orrin sat down. One thing a body could say for Orrin, he was a fair man.

"Tyrel," he said at last, "you ought to think before you talk. I like that girl."

Well ... I felt mighty mean and low down. I set store by Orrin. Most ways he was smarter than me, but about this Pritts affair, I figured he was wrong.

"Orrin, I'm sorry. We never had much, you and me. But what we had, we had honest We want a home for Ma. But it wouldn't be the home she wants if it was bought with blood."

"Well ... damn it, Tyrel, you're right, of course. I just wish you hadn't been so rough on Mr. Pritts."

"I'm sorry. It was me, not you. You ain't accountable for the brother you've got."

"Tyrel, don't you talk thataway. Without you that day back home in Tennessee I'd be buried and nobody knows it better than me."

Chapter VII

This was raw, open country, rugged country, and it bred a different kind of man.

The cattle that went wild in Texas became the longhorn, and ran mostly to horns and legs because the country needed a big animal that could fight and one who could walk three days to get water. Just so it bred the kind of man with guts and toughness no eastern man could use.

Most men never discover what they've got inside. A man has to face up to trouble before he knows. The kind of conniving a man could get away with back east wouldn't go out here. Not in those early years. You can hide that sort of behavior in a crowd, but not in a country where there's so few people. Not that we didn't have our own kinds of trickery and cheating.

Jonathan Pritts was one of those who mistook liberty for license and he figured he could get away with anything. Worst of all, he had an exaggerated idea of how big a man he was ... trouble was, he wasn't a big man, just a mean one.

We banked our money with the Express Company in Santa Fe, and then we saddled up and started back to the Purgatoire after more cattle. We had us an outfit this time. Dapple was still my horse, and a better no man was likely to have, but each of us now had four extra mounts and I'd felt I'd done myself proud.

The first was a grulla, a mouse-colored mustang who, judging by disposition, was sired out of a Missouri mule by a mountain lion with a sore tooth. That grulla was the most irritating, cantankerous bit of horseflesh I ever saw, and he could buck like a sidewinder on a red-ant hill. On the other hand he could go all day and night over any kind of country on less grass and water than one of Beale's camels. My name for him was Sate, short for Satan.

There was a buckskin, a desert horse used to rough going, but steady. In many ways the most reliable horse I had. His name was Buck, like you might expect.

Kelly was a big red horse with lots of bottom. Each horse I paid for out of my own money, although Sate they almost gave me, glad to be rid of him, I expect.

First time I straddled Sate we had us a mite of a go-around. When I came off him I was shook up inside and had a nosebleed, but I got off when I was good and ready and from that time on Sate knew who was wearing the pants.

My fourth horse I bought from an Indian. We'd spent most of the day dickering with Spanish men, and this Indian sat off to one side, watching. He was a big-framed Nez Perce from up Idaho, Montana way.

He was at the corral at sunup and by noontime I'd not seen him have a bite to eat. "You're a long way from home," I said, slicing off a chunk of beef I'd had fixed for a lunch and handed it to him. He looked at me, a long, careful look, then he accepted it. He ate slow like a starving man who can't eat a lot at first because his stomach shrinks up.

"You speak English?"

"I speak."

Splitting my grub down the middle, I gave him half, and we ate together. When we'd finished he got up. "Come--you see horse."

The horse was a handsome animal, a roan with a splash of white with red spots on the white, the kind of horse they call an appaloosa. Gaunt as his owner he stood a good sixteen hands. Looked like this Indian had come a long way on short rations. So I swapped him my old rifle (I'd bought a .44 Henry the day before) and some grub. I threw in my old blanket.

We were a week out of Santa Fe when we found a spot in the bend of a creek among some rocks. When we'd forted up they left it to me to scare up some fresh meat as we planned to live off the country and stretch our store-bought rations.

That Montana horse could move. He could get out and go, lickety-brindle, and he was smart. We passed up antelope because no matter what folks tell you it's the worst kind of Rocky Mountain meat. Old-timers will tell you that cougar meat is best. Lewis and Clark said that, and Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Uncle Dick Woolton, Jim Baker ... they all agreed.

Morning, with a bright sun over far hills, shadows lying in the folds and creases of the country, sunlight on cotton-wood leaves and sparkling on the river water ... a meadow lark calling. Montana horse and me, we sure loved it.

We took off along an old deer trail. This was higher country than before, the plateaus giving way to long ridges crested with pines and slopes dotted with juniper or pinon.

Suddenlike, I saw a deer ... and then another. Tethering Montana horse I moved up with my rifle. Feeding deer are easy to stalk if a man is careful on his feet and doesn't let them get wind of him. When deer put their heads down to graze, you can move up on them, and you can keep moving, very quiet. When their tails start to switch they're going to look up, so you freeze in position. He may be looking right at you when he looks up, and he might look a long time, but if you stand right still, after awhile he will decide you're a harmless tree or stump and go back to feeding.

I worked my way up to within fifty yards of a good big buck and then I lifted my rifle and put a bullet behind the left foreleg. There was another deer no further off and on my left, and as I fired at the first one I swung the rifle just as he was taking his first jump and my bullet broke his neck as he hit ground.

Working fast, I butchered those deer, loaded the choice cuts into their hides and mounted Montana horse. When I came out of the trees a couple of miles further on a half-dozen buffalo were running across the wind. Now no buffalo runs without reason.

Pulling up on the edge of the trees I knew we'd be hard to see, for that roan and me with my buckskin outfit fitted into the country like part of it. No man in this country ever skylines himself if he can help it.

Sometimes the first man to move is the first to die, so I waited. The sun was bright on the hillside. My horse stamped a foot and switched his tail. A bee hummed around some leaves on a bush nearby.

They came in a single file, nine of them in a row. Utes, from the description I'd heard from Cap. They came out of the trees and angled along the slope in front of me.

Now most times I prefer to stand my ground and fight it out for running can make your back a broad target, but there are times to fight and times to run and the wise man is one who can choose the right time for each. First off, I sat still, but they were riding closer and closer to me, and if they didn't see me their horses would. If I tried to go back into the trees they'd hear me.

Sliding my rifle across my saddle I said a prayer to the guardian angel of fools and covered maybe thirty yards before they saw me. One of them must have spoken because they all looked.

Indians can make mistakes like anybody. If they had all turned and come at me I'd have had to break for the brush and I'd have been fairly caught. But one Indian got too anxious and threw up his rifle and fired.

Seeing that rifle come up, I hit the spurs to Montana horse and went away from there, but in the split seconds before I hit him with the spurs, I fired. As I'd been timing my horse's steps I'd shot at the right time and I didn't miss.

My shot took out, not the Indian shooting at me but the one who seemed to be riding the best horse. My shot was a hair ahead of his and he missed when Montana horse jumped. We took out ... and I mean we really lit a shuck. There was nothing around there I wanted and what I wanted most was distance from where I was.

With that first Indian down I'd cut my sign right across their trail and now they wanted me mighty bad, but that horse didn't like Utes any better than I did. He put his ears back and stretched out his tail and left there like a scared rabbit.

My next shot was a miss. With Montana horse travelling like he'd forgot something in Santa Fe, there wasn't much chance of a hit. They had all come right at me with the shooting and I saw unless I did something drastic they had me so I swung and charged right at the nearest Indian. He was fifty yards ahead of the nearest Ute and which shot got his horse I don't know, but I fired three or four shots at him.

Dust jumped from the horse's side and the horse went down throwing his rider over his head into the grass, and when I went by at a dead run I shot into that Indian as I rode.

They were all messed up for a minute or two, switching directions and running into each other, but meanwhile I rode through a small creek and was out on the open prairie beyond.

We were eight to ten miles from camp and I wasn't about to lead these Utes full tilt into my friends. And then I saw a buffalo wallow.

Slowing Montana horse we slid into that wallow and I hit ground and threw my shoulder into the horse and grabbed his off foreleg, hoping to throw him, but Montana horse seemed to know just what I wanted and he went down and rolled on his side like he had been trained for it ... which he probably had, the Nez Perce using appaloosas for war horses.

Dropping to one knee, the other leg stretched out ahead of me, I drew a careful bead on the chest of the nearest Ute and squeezed off my shot. There was a minute when I believed I'd missed, and him coming right into my sights, then his horse swung wide and dumped a dead Ute into the grass. There was a bright stain of blood on the horse's side as he swung away.

It was warm and still. Patting Montana horse I told him, "You rest yourself, boy, we'll make out."

He rolled his eyes at me like he understood every word.

You would never have believed that a moment ago there was shooting and killing going on, because suddenly everything was still. The hillside was empty, those Indians had gone into the ground faster than you would believe. Lying there, knowing any moment might be my last, I liked the feel of the warm sun on my back, the smell of parched brown grass and of dust.

Three of the Utes were down in the grass and there were six left. Six to one might seem long odds but if a man has nerve enough and if he thinks in terms of combat, the advantage is often against sheer numbers. Sheer numbers rob a man of something and he begins to depend ... and in a fighting matter no man should depend. He should do what has to be done himself.

My canteen was full and I'd some jerked meat in my saddlebag, lots of fresh meat, and plenty of ammunition.

They would try to come over the rise behind me. That crest, only a couple of feet away, masked my view of the far slope. So I had out my bowie knife and began cutting a trench. That was a nine-inch blade, sharp enough to shave with, and I worked faster than ever in my born days.

It took me only minutes to have a trench that gave me a view of the back slope, and I looked around just in time. Four of them were coming up the slope toward me on foot and running bent over. My shot was a miss ... too quick. But they hit dirt. Where there had been running Indians there was only grass stirring in the wind.

They would be creeping on their bellies now, getting closer. Taking a chance, I leaped up. Instantly, I spotted a crawling Indian and fired, then dropped into my hole with bullets spearing the air where I'd been. That was something I couldn't try again, for now they'd be expecting.

Overhead there were high streamers of white clouds. Turning around I crawled into my trench, and just in time. An Indian was coming up that back slope, bent over and coming fast and I let him come. It was high time I shortened the odds against me, so I put my rifle in position, reached down to ease my Colt for fast work in case the others closed in at the same time. That Ute was going to reach me with his next rush. Some were down, but I doubted if more than one was actually dead. I wasn't counting any scalps until I had them.

Minutes loitered. Sweat trickled down my cheeks and my neck. I could smell the sweat of my own body and the hot dust. Somewhere an eagle cried. Sweat and dust made my skin itch, and when a big horsefly lit on Montana, my slap sounded loud in the hot stillness.

Eastern folks might call this adventure, but it is one thing to read of adventure sitting in an easy chair with a cool drink at hand, and quite another thing to be belly down in the hot dust with four, five Indians coming up the slope at you with killing on their minds.

A grasshopper flew into the grass maybe fifteen yards down slope, then took off at once, quick and sharp. That was warning enough. Lifting the rifle I steadied it on that spot for a quick shot, then chanced a glance over my shoulder. Just as I looked back that Ute charged out of the grass like he was bee-stung.

My guess had been right, and he came up where that grasshopper had lit. My sights were on the middle of his chest when I squeezed off my shot and he fell in plain sight.

Behind me their feet made a whisper in the dry grass and rolling over I palmed my Colt and had two shots off before I felt the slam of the bullet. The Utes vanished and then I was alone but for a creeping numbness in my left shoulder and the slow welling of blood.

Sliding back from the trench I felt sickish faint and plugged the hole with a handkerchief. The bullet had gone through and I was already soaked with blood on my left side. With bits of handkerchief I plugged the bullet hole on both sides and knew I was in real trouble.

Blinking against the heat and sudden dizziness I fed shells into my guns. Then I took the plug from my canteen and rinsed my mouth. It was lukewarm and brackish.

My head started to throb heavily and it was an effort to move my eyebrows. The smell of sweat and dried grass grew stronger and overhead the sky was yellow and hot as brass. From out of an immeasurable distance a buzzard came.

Suddenly I hated the smells, hated the heat, hated the buzzard circling and patient--as it could be patient--knowing that most things die.

Crawling to the rim of the buffalo wallow my eyes searched the terrain before me, dancing with heat waves. I tried to swallow and could not, and Tennessee and its cool hills seemed very far away.

Through something like delirium I saw my mother rocking in her old chair, and Orrin coming up from the spring with a wooden bucket full of the coldest water a man could find.

Lying in a dusty hole on a hot Colorado hillside with a bullet hole in me and Utes waiting to finish the job, I suddenly remembered what day it was. It had been an hour ... or had it been more? It had been at least an hour since the last attack. Like the buzzards, all those Utes needed was time, and what is time to an Indian?

Today was my birthday ... today I was nineteen years old.

Chapter VIII

Long fingers of shadow reached out from the sentinel pines before I took my next swallow of water. Twice I'd sponged out the mouth of that Montana horse, who was growing restless and harder to keep down.

No chance to take a cat nap, or even take my eyes off the country for more than a minute because I knew they were still out there and they probably knew I was hurt. My shoulder was giving me billy-hell. Even if I'd had a chance to run for it Montana horse would be stiff from lying so long.

About that time I saw the outfit coming up the slope. They rode right up to that buffalo wallow bold as brass and sat their horses grinning at me, and I was never so glad to see anybody.

"You're just in time for tea," I said, "you all just pull up your chairs. I've got the water on and she'll be ready any minute."

"He's delirious," Tom Sunday grinned like a big ape. "He's gone off his rocker."

"It's the heat," Orrin agreed. "The way he's dug in you'd think he'd been fighting Indians."

"Hallucinations," Rountree added, "a plain case of prairie sickness."

"If one of you will get off his horse," I suggested, "I'll plain whip him till his hair falls out, one-handed at that. Where've you been? Yarning it in the shade?"

"He asks us where we've been?" Sunday exclaimed. "And him sitting in a nice cool hole in the ground while we work our fool heads off."

Rountree, he cut out and scouted around, and when he rode back he said, "Looks like you had yourself a party. By the blood on the grass you got two, anyway."

"You should backtrack me." I was feeling ornery as a stepped-on baby. "If I didn't score on five out of nine Utes, I'll put up money for the drinks."

"Only three took off when we showed up," Sunday agreed.

Grabbing my saddle horn I pulled myself into the leather; for the first time since I'd sighted those Utes I could count on another day of living.

For the next three days I was cook which comes of having a bum wing on a cow outfit. Cap was a fair hand at patching up wounds and he made a poultice of herbs of some kind which he packed on my shoulder. He cleaned the wound by running an arrow shaft through with a cloth soaked in whiskey, and if you think that's entertainment, you just try it on for size.

On the fifth day I was back in the saddle but I fought shy of Sate, reckoning he'd be too much for me, feeling like I was. So I worked Dapple and Buck to a frazzle, and ended up riding Montana horse who was turning into a real cow horse.

This was rougher country than before. We combed the breaks and drifted the cattle into a rough corral. It was hot, rough, cussing work, believe you me.

Here and there we found some branded stock, stuff that had stampeded from trail herds further east, or been driven off by Indians.

"Maybe we should try Abilene this time," I suggested to the others. "The price would be better. We just happened to be lucky in Santa Fe."

Seven hundred head of cattle was what we started out with, and seven hundred head can be handled by four men if they work like dogs and are passing lucky.

As before, we let them graze as they moved. What we wanted was fat cattle at selling time. In that box canyon they had steadied down a good bit with plenty of water and grass and nothing much to do but eat and lie around.

First night out from the Purgatoire we bedded down after a long drive with the cattle mighty tired. After awhile Orrin stopped near me.

"Tyrel, I sure wish you and Laura cottoned to each other more'n you do."

"If you like her, Orrin, that's what matters. I can't be no different than I am, and something about her doesn't ring true. Orrin, the way I see it, you'd always play second fiddle to her old man."

"That's not true," He said, but there wasn't much force in it.

After awhile we met again and stopped together. "Ma's not getting younger," he said, "and we've been gone a year."

A coyote made talk to the stars, but nothing else seemed to be stirring.

"If we sell this herd we'll have more money than any Sackett ever heard of, and I figure we should buy ourselves an outfit and start ranching. Then we ought to get some book learning. Especially you, Orrin. You could make a name for yourself."

Orrin's thoughts were afar off for a minute or two, gathering dreams somewhere along tomorrow's road. "I've had it in mind," he said finally.

"You've a talking way with you, Orrin. You could be governor."

"I haven't the book learning."

"Davy Crockett went to Congress. Andrew Johnson was taught to read and write by his wife. I figure we can get the book learning. Hell, man, if youngsters can learn we should be able to throw it and hog-tie it. I figure you should study law. You've got a winning way with that Welsh tongue of yours."

We drove through Dodge on to Abilene, and that town had spread itself all over the prairie, with saloons side by each, all of them going twenty-four hours to the day, and packed most of the time.

Everywhere a man looked around the town there were herds of Texas cattle. "We came to the wrong market," Cap said dourly, "we should have sold out in Dodge."

We swung the herd into a tight circle and saw several riders coming toward us.

Two of them looked like buyers and the other two looked like trouble. Orrin did his talking to the first two, Charlie English and Rosie Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum was a stocky man with mild blue eyes, and I could tell by the way he was sizing up our cattle that he knew beef.

"How many head have you got?" he asked Orrin.

"Seven hundred and forty, as of last night," Orrin said, "and we want a fast deal."

The other two had been studying our herd and sizing us up.

"I should think you would," one of them said, "those are stolen cattle."

Orrin just looked at him. "My name is Orrin Sackett, and I never stole anything in my life." He paused. "And I never had anything stolen from me, either."

The man's face shadowed. "You've got Two-Bar cattle in that herd," he said, "and I'm Ernie Webb, foreman of the Two-Bar."

"There are Two-Bar cows in that herd, and we rounded them up in the Colorado country along with a lot of wild cattle. If you want to claim them get your boss and we'll talk a deal, but he'll pay for the rounding up and driving."

"I don't need the boss," Webb replied, "I handle my own trouble."

"Now see here," Rosenbaum interfered quietly. "There's no need for this. Sackett is reasonable enough. Get your boss and when the matter is settled, I'll buy."

"You stay out of this." Webb was staring at Orrin, a trouble-hunting look on his face. "This is a rustled herd and we're taking it over."

Several rough-looking riders had been drifting closer, very casually. I knew a box play when I saw one. Where I was sitting Webb and his partner couldn't see me because Sunday was between us. They'd never seen Orrin before but they'd both seen me that day on the plains of east Kansas.

"Cap," I said, "if they want it, let's let them have it."

"Tom," I wheeled my horse around Sunday which allowed me to flank Webb and his partner, "this man may have been foreman for Two-Bar once, but he also rode with Back Rand."

Cap had stepped down from his saddle and had his horse between himself on the oncoming riders, his rifle across his saddle. "You boys can buy the herd," Cap said, "but you'll buy it the hard way."

The riders drew up.

Rosenbaum was waiting right in the middle of where a lot of lead could be flying but there wasn't a quiver in him. For a man with no stake in the deal, he had nerve.

Webb had turned to look at me, and Orrin went on like he hadn't been interrupted. "Mr. Rosenbaum, you buy these cattle and keep track of any odd brands you find. I think they'll check with those in our tally books, and we'll post bond for their value and settle with any legitimate claimant but nobody is taking any cattle from us."

Ernie Webb had it all laid out for him nice and pretty, and it was his turn to call the tune. If he wanted to sashay around a bit he had picked himself four men who could step to the music.

"It's that loudmouth kid," Webb said, "somebody will beat it out of him someday, and then rub his nose in it."

"You try," Orrin invited. "You can have any one of us, but that kid will blow you loose from your saddle."

We sold out for thirty-two dollars a head, and Rosenbaum admitted it was some of the fattest stock brought into Abilene that year. Our herd had grazed over country no other herds travelled and with plenty of water. We'd made our second lucky drive and each of us had a notion we'd played out our luck.

When we got our cash we slicked out in black broadcloth suits, white shirts, and new hats. We were more than satisfied and didn't figure to do any better than what we had.

Big John Ryan showed up to talk cattle. "This the Sackett outfit?"

"We're it."

"Hear you had Tumblin' R stock in your herd?"

"Yes, sir. Sit down, will you?" Orrin told him about it. "Seven head, including a brindle steer with a busted horn."

"That old devil still alive? Nigh cost me the herd a few times and if I'd caught him I'd have shot him. Stampede at the drop of a hat and take a herd with him."

"You've got money coming, Mr. Ryan. At thirty-two dollars a head we figure--"

"Forget it. Hell ... anybody with gumption enough to round up those cows and drive them over here from Colorado is entitled to them. Besides, I just sold two herds of nearly six thousand head ... seven head aren't going to break me."

He ordered a drink. "Fact is, I'd like to talk to you boys about handling my herd across the Bozeman Trail."

Orrin looked at me. "Tom Sunday is the best cattleman among us. Orrin and me, we want to find a place of our own."

"I can't argue with that. My drive will start on the Neuces and drive to the Musselshell in Montana. How about it, Sunday?"

"I think not. I'll trail along with the boys."

There I sat with almost six thousand dollars belonging to me and about a thousand more back in Sante Fe, and I was scared. It was the first time in my life I'd ever had anything to lose. The way I saw it unless a man knows where he's going he isn't going anywhere at all. We wanted a home for Ma, and a ranch, and we also wanted enough education to face the changing times. It was time to do some serious thinking.

A voice interrupted. "Aren't you Tyrel Sackett?"

It was the manager of the Drovers' Cottage. "There's a letter for you."

"A letter?" I looked at him stupidly. Nobody had ever written me a letter.

Maybe Ma ... I was scared. Who would write to me?

It looked like a woman's handwriting. I carefully unfolded the letter. It scared me all hollow. Worst of it was, the words were handwritten and the letters were all which-way and I had a time making them out. But I wet my lips, dug in my heels, and went to work--figuring a man who could drive cattle could read a letter if he put his mind to it.

First off there was the town: Santa Fe. And the date. It was written only a week or so after we left Santa Fe.

Dear Mr. Sackett:

Well, now! Who was calling me mister? Mostly they called me Tyrel, or Tye, or Sackett.

The letter was signed Drusilla.

Right about then I started to get hot around the neck and ears, and took a quick look to see if anybody noticed. You never saw so many people paying less attention to anybody.

They heard I was in Santa Fe and wondered why I did not visit them. There had been trouble when some men had tried to take part of the ranch but the men had gone away. All but four, which they buried. And then her grandfather had gone to town to see Jonathan Pritts. In my mind's eyes I could see those two old men facing each other, and it must have been something to see, but my money was on the don. She ended with an invitation to visit them when I was next in Santa Fe.

Time has a way of running out from under a man. Looked like a man would never amount to much without book learning and every day folks were talking of what they read, of what was happening, but none of it made sense to me who had to learn by listening. When a man learns by listening he is never sure whether he is getting the straight of things or not.

There was a newspaper that belonged to nobody and I took that; it took me three days to work my way through its four pages.

There was a man in town with gear to sell, and figuring on buying an extra pistol, I went to see him. The gun I bought, and some boxes of shells, but when I saw some books in his wagon I bought them without looking.

"You don't want to know what they are?"

"Mister, I don't see that's your business, but the fact is, I wouldn't know one from the other. I figured if I studied out those books I'd learn. I'd work it out."

He had the look of a man who knew about writing and printing. "These aren't the books I'd recommend for a beginner, but you may get something out of them."

He sold me six books and I took them away.

Night after night I sat by the campfire plugging away at those books, and Tom Sunday sure helped a lot in telling me what words were about. First off, I got a surprise by learning that a man could learn something about his own way of living from a book. This book by an Army man, Captain Randolph Marcy, was written for a guide to parties traveling west by wagon. He told a lot of things I knew, and a good many I didn't.

Cap Rountree made out like he was sour about the books. "Need an extry pack horse for all that printed truck. First time I ever heard of a man packin' books on the trail."

Chapter IX

Santa Fe lay lazy in the sun when we rode into town. Nothing seemed to have changed, yet there was a feeling of change in me. And Drusilla was here, and this time I would call at her home. I'd never called on a girl before.

My letter from Drusilla was my own secret and I had no idea of telling anyone about it. Not even Orrin. When Drusilla wrote I didn't answer because I couldn't write and if I'd traced the letters out--well, it didn't seem right that a man should be writing like a child.

First off when we got to Santa Fe I wanted to see Drusilla, so I went about getting my broadcloth suit brushed and pressed out. It was late afternoon when I rode to the ranch. Miguel was loafing at the gate with a rifle across his knees.

"Senor! It is good to see you! Every day the senorita has asked me if I have seen you!"

"Is she in?"

"Senor, it is good that you are back. Good for them, and good for us too." He indicated the door. The house surrounded a patio, and stood itself within an adobe wall fifteen feet high. There was a walk ran around the inside near the top of the wall, and there were firing positions for at least thirty men on that wall.

Don Luis sat working at a desk. He arose. "Good afternoon, senor. It is good to see you. Was your venture a success?"

So I sat down and told him of our trip. A few of the cattle had carried his brand and we had kept the money for him and this I now paid.

"There is much trouble here," Don Luis said. "I fear it is only the beginning."

It seemed to me he had aged a lot in the short time since I'd last seen him.

Suddenly, I realized how much I liked that stern, stiff old man with his white mustache.

Sitting back in his chair, he told me how Pritts' men made their first move.

Forty in the group had moved on some flat land well within the Grant and had staked claims there, then they had dug in for a fight. Knowing the manner of men he faced, Don Luis held back his vaqueros.

"There are, senor, many ways to victory, and not all of them through violence.

And if there was a pitched battle, some of my men would be hurt. This I wished to avoid."

The invaders were watched, and it was noted when Pritts and Fetterson returned to Santa Fe on business that several bottles appeared and by midnight half the camp was drunk. Don Luis was close by, but he held back his vaqueros who were eager for a fight.

By three in the morning when all were in a drunken sleep, Don Luis' vaqueros moved in swiftly. The invaders were tied to their horses and started back down the road toward Santa Fe. Their tents and equipment were burned or confiscated, their weapons unloaded and returned to them. They were well down the trail when several riders returning from Mora engaged in a running gun battle with the vaqueros. Four of the invaders were killed, several wounded. Don Luis had two men wounded, none seriously.

"The advantage was ours," Don Luis explained, "but Jonathan Pritts is a very shrewd man and he is making friends, nor is he a man to suffer defeat without retaliation. It is difficult," he added, "to carry out a project with the sort of men he uses. They are toughs and evil men."

"Don Luis," I said, "have I your permission to see Miss Drusilla?"

He arose. "Of course, senor. I fear if the privilege were denied that I should have another war, and one which I am much less suited to handle.

"We in New Mexico," he added, "have been closer to your people than our own. It is far to Mexico City, so our trade has been with you, our customs affected by yours. My family would disapprove of our ways, but on the frontier there is small time for formality."

Standing in the living room of the lovely old Spanish home, I felt stiff in my new clothes. Abilene had given me time to get used to them, but the awkwardness returned now that I was to see Drusilla again. I could hear the click of her heels on the stone flags, and turned to face the door, my heart pounding, my mouth suddenly so dry I could scarcely swallow.

She paused in the doorway, looking at me. She was taller than I had remembered, and her eyes were larger. She was beautiful, too beautiful for a man like me.

"I thought you had forgotten us," she said, "you didn't answer my letter."

I shifted my hat in my hands. "It looked like I'd get here as fast as the letter, and I'm not much hand at writing."

An Indian woman came in with some coffee and some little cakes and we both sat down. Drusilla sat very erect in her chair, her hands in her lap, and I decided she was almost as embarrassed as I was.

"Ma'am, I never called on a girl before. I guess I'm almighty awkward."

Suddenly, she giggled. "And I never received a young man before," she said.

After that we didn't have much trouble. We both relaxed and I told her about our trip, about founding up wild cattle and my fight with the Indians.

"You must be very brave."

Well, now. I liked her thinking that about me but fact is, I hadn't thought of much out there but keeping my head and tail down so's not to get shot, and I recalled being in something of a sweat to get out of there.

I've nothing against a man being scared as long as he does what has to be done ... being scared can keep a man from getting killed and often makes a better fighter of him.

We sat there in that cool, spacious room with its dark, massive furniture and tiled floors and I can tell you it was a wonderful friendly feeling. I'd never known a house like that before, and it seemed very grand and very rich.

Dru was worried about her grandfather. "He's getting old, Tyrel, and I'm afraid for him. He doesn't sleep well, and sometimes he paces the floor all night long."

Torres was waiting for me when I went to get my horse almost an hour later.

"Senor," he said carefully, "Don Luis likes you and so does the senorita. Our people, they like you too."

He studied me searchingly. "Senor Pritts hates us, and he is winning friends among your people. He spends much money. I believe he would take everything from us."

"Not while I'm alive."

"We need a sheriff in this country, a man who will see justice done." He looked at me. "We ask only for justice."

"What you say is true. We do need a sheriff."

"The don grows old, and he does not know what to do, but all my life I have been with him, senor, and I do not think that to fight is enough. We must do something else, as your people would. There are, senor, still more Mexicans than Anglos. Perhaps if there was an election. ..."

"A Mexican sheriff would not be good, Juan. The Americans would not be willing to recognize him. Not those who follow Pritts."

"This I know, senor. We will talk of this again."

When I walked into the La Fonda that night Ollie Shaddock was standing at the bar having a drink. He was a broad man with a shock of blond hair and a broad, cheerful face.

"Have a drink," he said, "I resigned my sheriffing job to bring your Ma and the boys west."

"You brought Ma?"

"Sure enough. Orrin's with her now."

He filled my glass from the bottle. "Don't you be thinkin' of me as sheriff. You done right in killin' Long. I'd have had to arrest you but the law would have freed you. He had a gun pointed when you killed him."

We didn't say anything more about it. It was good to have Ollie Shaddock out here, and I owed him a debt for bringing Ma. I wanted to see her the worst way but Ollie had something on his mind.

"Folks talk you up pretty high," he said.

"It's Orrin they like."

"You know something, Tyrel? I've been giving some thought to Orrin since I got here. He's a man should run for office."

It seemed a lot of folks had running for office on their minds, but this was a new country and in need of law. "He's got it in mind," I said.

"I've been in politics all my years. I was a deputy sheriff at seventeen, sheriff at nineteen, justice of the peace at twenty-four and served a term in the state legislature before I was thirty. Then I was sheriff again."

"I know it."

"Orrin looks to me like a man who could get out the vote. Folks take to him. He talks well, and with a mite more reading he could make something of himself, if we managed it right."

"We?"

"Politics ain't much different, Tyrel, than one of these icebergs you hear tell of. Most of what goes on is beneath the surface. It doesn't make any difference how good a man is, or how good his ideas are, or even how honest he is unless he can put across a program, and that's politics.

"Statesmanship is about ten percent good ideas and motives and ninety percent getting backing for your program. Now I figure I know how to get a man elected, and Orrin's our man. Also, you can be a big advantage to him."

"Folks don't take to me."

"Now that's as may be. I find most of the Mexicans like you. They all know you and Orrin turned Pritts down when he invited you to join him, and the vaqueros from the Alvarado ranch have been talking real friendly about you."

He chuckled. "Seems the women like you too. They tell me you provided more entertainment in one afternoon than they had in years."

"Now, look--!" I could feel myself getting red around the ears.

"Don't let it bother you. Folks enjoyed it, and they like you. Don't ask me why."

"You seem to have learned a lot since you've been here."

"Every man to his job, mine's politics. First thing is to listen. Learn the issues, the personalities, where the votes are, where the hard feelings are."

Ollie Shaddock tasted his whiskey and put the glass back on the bar. "Tyrel, there's trouble brewing and it will come from that Pritts outfit. That's a rough bunch of boys and they'll get to drinking and there'll be a killing. Chances are, it will be a riot or something like that."

"So?"

"So we got to go up there. You and me and Orrin. When that trouble comes Orrin has to handle it."

"He's no officer."

"Leave that to me. When it happens, folks will want somebody to take over the responsibility. So Orrin steps in."

He tossed off his whiskey. "Look ... Pritts wants Torres killed, some of the other key men. When the shooting starts some of those fur thieves and rustlers he's got will go too far.

"Orrin steps in. He's Anglo, so all the better Americans will be for him. You convince the Mexicans Orrin is their man. Then we get Orrin appointed marshal, run him for sheriff, start planning for the legislature."

Ollie made a lot of sense, and it beat all how quickly he had got hold of the situation, and him here only a few weeks. Orrin was the man for it all right. Or Tom Sunday.

"What about Tom Sunday?"

"He figures he's the man for the job. But Tom Sunday can't talk to folks like Orrin can. He can't get down and be friends with everybody the way Orrin can.

Orrin just plain likes people and they feel it ... like you like Mexicans and they know it. Anyway," he added, "Orrin is one of ours and one thing about Orrin. We don't have to lie."

"Would you lie?"

Ollie was embarrassed. "Tyrel, politics is politics, and in politics a man wants to win. So he hedges a little."

"Whatever we do has to be honest," I said. "Look, I'm no pilgrim. But there's nothing in this world I can't get without lying or cheating. Ma raised us boys that way, and I'm glad of it."

"All right, honesty is a good policy and if a man's honest it gets around. What do you think about Orrin?"

"I think he's the right man."

Only as I left there and started to see Ma, I was thinking about Tom Sunday. Tom was our friend, and Tom wasn't going to like this. He was a mite jealous of Orrin. Tom had the best education but folks just paid more mind to Orrin.

Ma had aged ... she was setting in her old rocker which Ollie had brought west in his wagon, and she had that old shawl over her knees. When I walked in she was puffing on that old pipe and she looked me up and down mighty sharp.

"You've filled out. Your Pa would be proud of you."

So we sat there and talked about the mountains back home and of folks we knew and I told her some of our plans. Thinking how hard her years had been, I wanted to do something for her and the boys. Bob was seventeen, Joe fifteen.

Ma wasn't used to much, but she liked flowers around her and trees. She liked meadow grass blowing in the wind and the soft fall of rain on her own roof. A good fire, her rocker, a home of her own, and her boys not too far away.

Ollie Shaddock wasted no time but rode off toward Mora. He was planning on buying a place, a saloon, or some such place where folks could get together. In those days a saloon was a meeting place, and usually the only one.

Of the books I'd bought I'd read Marcy's guide books first, and then that story, The Deerslayer. That was a sure enough good story too. Then I read Washington Irving's book about traveling on the prairies, and now was reading Gregg on Commerce of the Prairies. Reading those books was making me talk better and look around more and see what Irving had seen, or Gregg. It was mighty interesting.

Orrin and me headed for the hills to scout a place for a home. Sate was feeling his oats and gave me a lively go-around but I figured the trip would take some of the salt out of him. That Satan horse really did like to hump his back and duck his head between his legs.

We rode along, talking land, cattle, and politics, and enjoying the day. This was a far cry from those blue-green Tennessee mountains, but the air was so clear you could hardly believe it, and I'd never seen a more beautiful land. The mountains were close above us, sharp and clear against the sky, and mostly covered with pines.

Sate wasn't cutting up any more. He was stepping right out like he wanted to go somewhere, but pretty soon I began to get a feeling I didn't like very much.

Sometimes a man's senses will pick up sounds or glimpses not strong enough to make an impression on him but they affect his thinking anyway. Maybe that's all there is to instinct or the awareness a man develops when he's in dangerous country. One thing I do know, his senses become tuned to sounds above and below the usual ranges of hearing.

We caught, of a sudden, a faint smell of dust on the air. There was no wind, but there was dust. We walked our horses forward and I watched Sate's ears. Those ears pricked up, like the mustang he was, and I knew he was aware of something himself.

My eyes caught an impression and I walked my horse over for a look where part of the bark was peeled back from a branch. There were horses' tracks on the ground around the bush.

"Three or four, wouldn't you say, Tyrel?"

"Five. This one is different. The horses must have stood here around two hours, and then the fifth one came up but he didn't stop or get down."

Several cigarette butts were under a tree near where the horses had been tethered, and the stub of a black cigar. We were already further north than we had planned to go and suddenly it came to me. "Orrin, we're on the Alvarado grant."

He looked around, studied our back trail and said. "I think it's Torres.

Somebody is laying for him."

He walked his horse along, studying tracks. One of the horses had small feet, a light, almost prancing step. We both knew that track. A man who can read sign can read a track the way a banker would a signature. That small hoof and light step, and that sidling way of moving was Reed Carney's show horse.

Whoever the others had been, and the chances were Reed Carney had joined up with Fetterson and Pritts, they had waited there until the fifth man came along to get them. And that meant he could have been a lookout, watching for the man they were to kill.

Now we were assuming a good deal. Maybe. But there was just nothing to bring a party up here ... not in those days.

Orrin shucked his Winchester.

It was pine timber now and the trail angled up the slope through the trees. When we stopped again we were high up and the air was so clear you could see for miles. The rim was not far ahead. We saw them.

Four riders, and below on the slope a fifth one, scouting. And off across the valley floor, a plume of dust that looked like it must be the one who was to be the target.

The men were below us, taking up position to cover a place not sixty yards from their rifles. They were a hundred feet or so higher than the rider, and he would be in the open.

Orrin and me left our horses in the trees. We stood on the edge of the mesa with a straight drop of about seventy feet right ahead of us, then the talus sloped away steeply to where the five men had gathered after leaving their horses tied to the brush a good hundred yards off.

They were well concealed from below. There was no escape for them, however, except to right or left. They could not come up the hill, and they could not go over the rim. Orrin found himself a nice spot behind a wedged-up slab of rock.

Me, I was sizing up a big boulder and getting an idea. That boulder sat right on the edge of the mesa, in fact it was a part of the edge that was ready to fall ... with a little help.

Now I like to roll rocks. Sure, it's crazy, but I like to see them roll and bounce and take a lot of debris with them. So I walked to the rim, braced myself against the trunk of a gnarled old cedar and put my feet against the edge of that rock.

The rider they were waiting for was almost in sight. When I put my boots against that rock my knees had to be doubled up, so I began to push. I began to straighten them out. The rock crunched heavily, teetered slightly, and then with a slow, majestic movement it turned over and fell.

The huge boulder hit with a heavy thud and turned over, gained speed, and rolled down the hill. The riders glanced around and seemed unable to move, and then as that boulder turned over and started to fall, they scattered like sheep.

At the same instant, Orrin lifted his rifle and put a bullet into the brush ahead of their horses. One of the broncs reared up and as Orrin fired again, he jerked his head and ripping off a branch of the brush, broke free and started to run, holding his head to one side to keep from tripping on the branch.

The lone horseman had come into sight, and when he stared up the mountain, I lifted my hat and waved, knowing from his fawn-colored sombrero that it was Torres. Doubtfully, he lifted a hand, unable to make us out at that distance.

One of the men started for their horses and Orrin put a bullet into the ground ahead of him and the man dove for shelter. Orrin levered another shot into the rocks where he disappeared then sat back and lighted up one of those Spanish cigars.

It was downright hot. Settling in behind some rocks I took a pull at my canteen and figured down where they were it had to be hotter than up here where we had some shade.

"I figure if those men have to walk home," Orrin said, "It might cool their tempers some."

A slow half hour passed before one of the men down below got ambitious. My rifle put a bullet so close it must have singed his whiskers and he hunkered down in the rocks. Funny part of it was, we could see them plain as day. Had we wanted to kill them we could have. And then we heard a horse coming through the trees and I walked back to meet Torres.

"What happens, senor?" He looked sharply from Orrin to me.

"Looks like you were expected. Orrin and me were hunting a place for ourselves and we found some tracks, and when we followed them up there were five men down there." I showed him where. Then I explained our idea about the horses and he agreed.

"It will be for me to do, senor."

He went off down the slope and after awhile I saw him come out of the trees, untie the horses and run them off.

When Torres rode back Orrin came up to join us. "It is much you have done for me," Torres said. "I shall not forget."

"It is nothing," I said, "one of them is Reed Carney."

"Gracias, Senor Sackett," Torres said. "I believed I was safe so far from the hacienda, but a man is safe nowhere."

Riding back toward Mora I kept still and let Orrin and Torres get acquainted.

Torres was a solid man and I knew Orrin would like him, and Torres liked people, so the contrary was true.

Torres turned off toward the ranch and we rode on into Mora. We got down in front of the saloon and strolled inside. It took one glance to see we weren't among friends. For one thing there wasn't a Mex in the place and this was mostly a Mexican town, and there were faces I remembered from Pawnee Rock. We found a place at the bar and ordered drinks.

There must have been forty men in that saloon, a dusty, dirty lot, most of them with uncut hair over their collars, and loaded down with six-shooters and bowie knives. Fetterson was at the other end of the bar but hadn't seen us.

We finished our drinks and edged toward the door and then we came face to face with Red ... the one my horse had knocked down at Pawnee Rock.

He started to open his mouth, but before he could say a word, Orrin clapped him on the shoulder. "Red! You old sidewinder! Come on outside and let's talk!"

Now Red was a slow-thinking man and he blinked a couple of times, trying to decide what Orrin was talking about, and we had him outside before he could yell. He started to yell but Orrin whooped with laughter and slapped Red on the back so hard it knocked all the breath out of him. Outside the door I put my knife against his ribs and he lost all impulse to yell. I mean he steadied down some.

"Now wait a minute," he protested, "I never done you boys any harm. I was just--"

"You just walk steady," I told him, "I'm not in the mood for trouble myself. I got a backache and I don't feel up to a shooting, so don't push me."

"Who's pushing?"

"Red," Orrin said seriously, "you're the kind of a man we like to see. Handsome, upstanding ... and alive."

"Alive!" I added, "But you'd make a handsome corpse, Red."

By now we had him out in the dark and away from his friends, and he was scared, his eyes big as pesos. He looked like a treed coon in the lanternlight. "What you goin' to do to me?" he protested. "Look, I--"

"Red," Orrin said, "There's a fair land up north, a wide and beautiful land.

It's a land with running water, clear streams, and grass hip-high to a tall elk.

I tell you Red, that's a country!"

"And you know something, Red?" I put in my two-bits' worth. "We think you should see it."

"We surely do." Orrin was dead serious. "We're going to miss you if you go, Red.

But Red, you stay and we won't miss you."

"You got a horse, Red?"

"Yeah, sure." He was looking from one to the other of us. "Sure, I got a horse."

"You'll like that country up north. Now it can get too hot here for a man, Red, and the atmosphere is heavy ... there's lead in it, you know, or liable to be.

We think you should get a-straddle of that cayuse of yours, Red, and keep riding until you get to Pike's Peak, or maybe Montana."

"To--tonight!" he protested.

"Of course. All your life you've wanted to see that country up north, Red, and you just can't wait."

"I--I got to get my outfit. I--"

"Don't do it, Red." Orrin shook his head, big-eyed. "Don't you do it." He leaned closer. "Vigilantes, Red. Vigilantes."

Red jerked under my hand, and he wet his lips with his tongue. "Now, look here!" he protested.

"The climate's bad here, Red. A man's been known to die from it. Why, I know men that'd bet you wouldn't live to see daybreak."

We came to a nice little gray. "This your horse?"

He nodded.

"You get right up into the saddle, Red. No--keep your gun. If somebody should decide to shoot you, they'd want you to have your gun on to make it look right.

Looks bad to shoot an unarmed man. Now don't you feel like traveling, Red?"

By this time Red may have been figuring things out, or maybe he never even got started. Anyway, he turned his horse into the street and went out of town at a fast canter.

Orrin looked at me and grinned. "Now there's a traveling man!" He looked more serious. "I never thought we'd get out of there without a shooting. That bunch was drinking and they would have loved to lynch a couple of us, or shoot us."

We rode back to join Cap and Tom Sunday. "About time. Tom has been afraid he'd have to go down and pull you out from under some Settlement man," Cap said.

"What do you mean ... Settlement man?"

"Jonathan Pritts has organized a company which he calls the Settlement Company.

You can buy shares. If you don't have money you can buy them with your gun."

Orrin had nothing to say, he never did when Pritts' name was mentioned. He just sat down on his bed and pulled off a boot.

"You know," he said reflectively, "all that talk about the country up north convinced me. I think we should all go."

Chapter X

Mora lay quiet in the warm sun, and along the single street, nothing stirred.

From the porch of the empty house in which we had been camping, I looked up the street, feeling the tautness that lay beneath the calm. Orrin was asleep inside the house, and I was cleaning my .44 Henry. There was trouble building and we all knew it.

Fifty or sixty of the Settlement crowd were in town, and they were getting restless for something to do, but I had my own plans and didn't intend they should be ruined by a bunch of imported trouble makers.

Tom Sunday came out on the porch and stopped under the overhang where I was working on my rifle. He took out one of those thin black cigars and lighted up.

"Are you riding out today?"

"Out to the place," I said, "we've found us a place about eight or nine miles from here."

He paused and took the cigar from his mouth. "I want a place too, but first I want to see what happens here. A man with an education could get into politics and do all right out here." He walked on down the street.

Tom was no fool; he knew there was going to be a demand for some law in Mora, and he intended to be it. I knew he wouldn't take a back seat because of Orrin.

It worried me to think of what would happen when Orrin and Tom found out each wanted the same office, although I doubted if Orrin would mind too much.

When I finished cleaning my rifle I saddled up, put my blanket roll behind the saddle and got ready to ride out. Orrin crawled out of bed and came to the door.

"I'll be out later, or Cap will," he said. "I want to keep an eye on things here." He walked to the horse with me. "Tom say anything?"

"He wants to be marshal."

Orrin scowled. "Damn it, Tyrel, I was afraid of that. He'd probably make a better marshal than me."

"There's no telling about that, but I'd say it was a tossup, Orrin, but you can win in the election. I just hate to see you two set off against each other.

Tom's a good man."

Neither one of us said anything for a while, standing there in the sun, thinking about it. It was a mighty fine morning and hard to believe so much trouble was building around us.

"I've got to talk to him," Orrin said at last, "this ain't right. We've got to level with him."

All I could think of was the fact the four of us had been together two years now, and it had been a good period for all of us. I wanted nothing to happen to that. Friendships are not so many in this life, and we had put rough country behind us and kicked up some dust in our passing, and we had smelled a little powder smoke together and there's nothing binds men together like sweat and gunsmoke.

"You go ahead, Orrin. We'll talk to Tom tomorrow."

I wanted to be there when it was talked out, because Tom liked me and he trusted me. He and Orrin were too near alike in some ways, and too different in others.

There was room enough for both of them, but I was quite sure that Tom would want to go first.

It took me a shade more than an hour to ride down to where we figured to start ranching. There were trees along the river there, and some good grass, and I bedded down at the mouth of the gap, in a corner among the rocks. Picketing Montana horse, I switched from boots to moccasins and scouted around, choosing the site for the house and the corrals.

The bench where the house was to be was only twenty feet above the river, but above the highest watermark. The cliff raised up behind the bench, and the location was a good one.

Peeling off my shirt, I worked through the afternoon clearing rocks and brush off the building site and pacing it off. Then I cut poles and began building a corral for our horses, for we would need that first of all. Later, when dark began to come, I bathed in the creek and putting on my clothes, built a small fire and made coffee and chewed on some jerked beef.

After I'd eaten I dug into my saddlebags for a book and settled down to read.

Time to time I'd get up and look around, or stand for a spell in the darkness away from the fire, just listening. By the time the fire was burning down I moved back from the fire and unrolled my bed. A bit of wind was blowing up and a few clouds had drifted over the stars.

Taking my rifle I went out to check on Montana horse who was close by. I shifted his picket pin a little closer and on fresh grass. There was a feel to the night that I didn't like, and I found myself wishing the boys would show up.

When I heard a sound it was faint, but Montana horse got it, too. His head came up and his ears pricked and his nostrils reached out for the smell of things.

Putting a hand on his shoulder, I said, "All right, boy. You just take it easy."

Somebody was out there in the night, calling to me. Now a man who goes rushing out into the night will sooner or later wind up with a bullet in his belly. Me, I circled around, scouting, and moving mighty easy. I had a sight more enemies in this country than friends.

It wasn't any time at all until I saw a standing horse, heard a low moan, and then I moved in. It was a man on the ground, and he was bad hurt.

"Senor!" the voice was faint. "Please ... it is Miguel. I come to you ... I bring you troubles."

So I scooped him off the ground and put him on his horse. "You hang on," I said.

"Only a few yards."

"Men come to kill me, senor. It will be trouble for you."

"I'll talk to them," I said, "I'll read 'em from the Scriptures."

He passed out, but I got him to camp and unloaded him. He was shot all right.

He'd had the hell shot out of him. There was a bullet hole in his thigh and there was another high in his right chest that had gone clean through. His clothes were soaked with blood and he was all in.

There was water by the fire so I peeled back his clothes and went to work. First off, I bathed away the blood and plugged the holes to stop the bleeding. Come daylight, if he made it, I was going to have to do more.

With the tip of my bowie I slit the hide and eased a bullet out from under the skin of his back, then bathed the wound and fixed it up as best I could. I could hear riders working their way down the country, a-hunting him. Sooner or later they'd see the reflection of my fire and then I'd have to take care of that.

Moving Miguel back out of the firelight, I got him stashed away when I heard them coming, and they came with a rush.

"Hello, the fire!"

"You're talking. Speak your piece."

"We're hunting a wounded greaser. You seen him?"

"I've seen him and he's here, but you can't have him."

They rode up to the fire then and I stepped up to the edge of the light. Trouble was, one of those riders had a rifle and it was on me, and the range wasn't fifteen feet.

That rifle worried me. They had me sweating. A fast man on the draw can beat a man who has to think before he can fire, but that first shot better be good.

"It's Sackett. The kid they say is a gunfighter."

"So it's Sackett," it was a sandy-haired man with two tied-down guns like one of these here show-off gunmen, "I ain't seen none of his graveyards."

"You just ride on," I said, "Miguel is here. He stays here."

"Talking mighty big, ain't you?" That man was Charley Smith, a big man, bearded and tough, hard to handle in a difficulty it was said. The one with the rifle was thin, angular, with a bobbing Adam's apple and a shooting look to him.

"He's wounded," I said, "I'll take care of him."

"We don't want him alive," Smith said. "We want him dead. You give him to us and you're out of it."

"Sorry."

"That's all right," Sandy said, "I like it this way. I prefer it this way."

That Sandy didn't worry me as much as the man with the rifle. Although the chances were that Sandy had practiced some with those guns. Even a show-off may be pretty fast, and I had that to think about.

Of one thing I was sure. There was no talking my way out of this. I could stand by and see them kill Miguel or I could fight them.

Now I'm not a smoking man myself, but Miguel's makings had fallen from his pocket and I'd picked them up, so I got them out and started to roll a smoke and while I talked I went right on building that smoke.

What I needed was an edge, and I needed it bad. There was the man with the rifle and Charley Smith and there was this Sandy lad who fancied himself with six-shooters. There might be more back in the dark but those three I had to think about.

"Miguel," I said, and I was talking for time, "is a good man. I like him. I wouldn't interfere in any fight of his, but on the other hand, I don't like to see a wounded man shot without a chance, either."

Smith was the cagey one. He was looking around. I guessed Smith was worried about Orrin. He knew we were a team, and he knew there was four of us, and there might be, just might be, somebody out there in the dark.

Now I was doing some serious thinking. A man who holds a gun on somebody is all keyed up and ready to shoot when he first gets the drop on you, but after awhile his muscles get a little heavy, and his reactions will be a little slower.

Moreover, these fellows outnumbered me three to one. They had the advantage, so they just didn't think anybody would be fool enough to tackle them. That there was against them too. It sort of made them relax mentally, if you get what I mean.

Only any move I made must be timed just right and I had to slicker them into thinking of something else.

If they killed Miguel when he was wounded in my camp, I'd never feel right again ... even if I lived.

"Miguel," Smith said, "is one of Alvarado's men. We're running them out."

"Where's your brother?" The man with the rifle was asking. He'd had some of his attention on the shadows out there. In his place I'd have been giving them plenty of thought.

"He's around. Those boys are never far off."

"Only one bed." That was Sandy shooting off his fat mouth.

"I can see it." That was the man with the two big pistols who wanted to kill me.

He could make it sound mighty big, later. Charley Smith was going to kill me because he didn't want anybody around taking a shot at him later.

Putting that cigarette between my lips I stooped down and picked up a burning twig to light it. I lifted it to my cigarette, holding it in my fingers while I had my say.

"The four of us," I said, "never spread out very far. We work together, we fight together, and we can win together."

"They ain't around," Sandy-boy said, "only one bed, only his horse and the greaser's."

Up on the hills there was a stirring in the pines and because I'd been hearing it all evening I knew it was a wind along the ridge, but they stopped talking to listen.

"I'm a Sackett," I said conversationally, "out of Tennessee. We finished a feud a couple of years ago ... somebody from the other outfit shot a Sackett and we killed nineteen Higginses in the next sixteen years. Never stop huntin'. I got a brother named Tell Sackett ... best gunshot ever lived."

I was just talking, and the twig was burning. Charley Smith saw it. "Hey!" he said. "You'll burn--!"

The fire touched my fingers and I yelped with pain and dropped the twig and with the same continuing movement I drew my gun and shot that rifleman out of the saddle.

Sandy was grabbing iron when I swung my gun on him and thumbed my hammer twice so it sounded like one shot and he went backwards off his horse like he'd been hit with an axe.

Swinging my gun on Smith I saw him on the ground holding his belly and Tom Sunday came riding up with a Henry rifle.

"Smartest play I ever saw," he said, watching Smith on the ground. "When I saw you lighting up I knew there had to be something ... knowing you didn't smoke."

"Thanks, you sure picked a good time to ride up."

Sunday got down and walked over to the man who'd held the rifle. He was dead with a shot through the heart and Sandy had taken two bullets through the heart also. Sunday glanced at me. "I saw it but I still don't believe it."

Thumbing shells into my gun I walked over to Miguel. He was up on one elbow his face whiter than I'd have believed and his eyes bigger. "Gracias, amigos," he whispered.

"Orrin told me you'd come out here and I was restless so I figured I'd ride out and camp with you. When I saw you in the middle of them I was trying to figure out what to do that wouldn't start them shooting at you. Then you did it."

"They'd have killed us."

"Pritts will take your helping Miguel as a declaration of war."

There was more sound out in the darkness and we pulled back out of the light of the fire. It was Cap Rountree and two of Alvarado's hands. One of them was Pete Romero, but the other was a man I didn't know.

He was a slim, knifelike man in a braided leather jacket, the most duded-up man I ever saw, but his pearl-handled six-shooter was hung for business and he had a look in his eyes that I didn't like.

His name was Chico Cruz.

Cruz walked over to the bodies and looked at them. He took out a silver dollar and placed it over the two bullet holes in Sandy's chest. He pocketed the dollar and looked at us.

"Who?"

Sunday jerked his head to indicate me. "His ... and that one too." He indicated the man with the rifle. Then he explained what had happened, not mentioning the burning twig, but the fact that I'd been covered by the rifle.

Cruz looked at me carefully and I had a feeling this was a man who enjoyed killing and who was proud of his ability with a gun. He squatted by the fire and poured a cup of coffee. It was old coffee, black and strong. Cruz seemed to like it.

Out in the darkness, helping Romero get Miguel into the saddle, I asked, "Who's he?"

"From Mexico. Torres sent for heem. He is a bad man. He has kill many times."

Cruz looked to me like one of those sleek prairie rattlers who move like lightning and kill just as easily, and there was nothing about him that I liked.

Yet I could understand the don sending for him. The don was up against a fight for everything he had. It worried him, and he knew he was getting old, and he was no longer sure that he could win.

When I came back to the fire, Chico Cruz looked up at me. "It was good shooting," he said, "but I can shoot better."

Now I'm not a man to brag, but how much better can you get?

"Maybe," I said.

"Someday we might shoot together," he said, looking at me through the smoke of his cigarette.

"Someday," I said quietly, "we might."

"I shall look forward to it, senor."

"And I," I smiled at him, "I shall look back upon it."

Chapter XI

We expected trouble from Pritts but it failed to show up. Orrin came out to the place and with a couple of men Don Luis loaned us and help from Cap and Tom we put a house together. It was the second day, just after work finished when we were setting around the fire that Orrin told Tom Sunday he was going after the marshal's job.

Sunday filled his cup with coffee. His mouth stiffened up a little, but he laughed. "Well, why not? You'd make a good marshal, Orrin ... if you get the job."

"I figured you wanted it ...." Orrin started to say, then his words trailed off as Tom Sunday waved a hand.

"Forget it. The town needs somebody and whoever gets it will do a job. If I don't get it and you do, I'll lend a hand ... I promise that. And if I get it, you can help me."

Orrin looked relieved, and I knew he was, because he had been worried about it.

Only Cap looked over his coffee cup at Tom and made no comment, and Cap was a knowing man.

Nobody needed to be a fortuneteller to see what was happening around town. Every night there were drunken brawls in the street, and a man had been murdered near Elizabethtown, and there had been robberies near Cimarron. It was just a question of how long folks would put up with it.

Meanwhile we went on working on the house, got two rooms of it up and Orrin and me set to making furniture for them. We finished the third room on the house and then Orrin and me rode with Cap over to the Grant where we bought fifty head of young stuff and drove it back and through the gap where we branded the cattle and turned them loose.

Working hard like we had, I'd not seen much of Drusilla, so I decided to ride over. When I came up Antonio Baca and Chico Cruz were standing at the gate, and I could see that Baca was on duty there. It was the first time I'd seen him since the night he tried to knife me on the trail.

When I started to ride through the gate, he stopped me. "What is it you want?"

"To see Don Luis," I replied.

"He is not here."

"To see the senorita, then."

"She does not wish to see you."

Suddenly I was mad. Yet I knew he would like nothing better than to kill me.

Also, I detected something in his manner ... he was insolent. He was sure of himself.

Was it because of Chico Cruz? Or could it be that the don was growing old and Torres could not be everywhere?

"Tell the senorita," I said, "that I am here. She will see me."

"It is not necessary." His eyes taunted me. "The senorita is not interested in such as you."

Chico Cruz moved his shoulders from the wall and walked slowly over. "I think," he said, "you had better do like he say."

There was no burned-match trick to work on them, and anyway, I wasn't looking for a fight with any of Don Luis' people. The don had troubles of his own without me adding to them. So I was about to ride off when I heard her voice.

"Tye!" She sounded so glad I felt a funny little jump inside me. "Tye, why are you waiting out there? Come in!"

Only I didn't come in, I just sat my horse and said, "Senorita, is it all right if I call here? At any time?"

"But of course, Tye!" She came to the gate and saw Baca standing there with his rifle. Her eyes flashed. "Antonio! Put that rifle down! Senor Sackett is our friend! He is to come and go as he wishes, do you understand?"

He turned slowly, insolently away. "Si," he said, "I understand."

But when he looked at me his eyes were filled with hatred and I glanced at Cruz, who lifted a hand in a careless gesture.

When we were inside, she turned on me. "Tye, why have you stayed away? Why haven't you been to see us? Grandfather misses you. And he wanted to thank you for what you did for Juan Torres, and for Miguel."

'They were my friends."

"And you are our friend."

She looked up at me, then took my hand and led me into another room and rang a little bell. She had grown older, it seemed, in the short time since I had last seen her. She looked taller, more composed, yet she was worried too, I could see that.

"How is Don Luis?"

"Not well, Tye. My grandfather grows old. He is more than seventy, you know. I do not even know how old, but surely more than that, and he finds it difficult to ride now.

"He fears trouble with your people. He has many friends among them, but most of them resent the size of the ranch. He wants only to keep it intact for me."

"It is yours."

"Do you remember Abreu?"

"Of course."

"He is dead. Pete Romero found him dead last week, ten miles from here. He had been shot in the back by someone with a Sharps buffalo gun."

"That's too bad. He was a good man."

We drank tea together, and she told me all that had been happening. Some days now it was difficult for the don to get out of bed, and Juan Torres was often off across the ranch. Some of the men had become hard to handle and lazy.

Apparently, what had happened today was not the only such thing.

Don Luis was losing his grip when he needed desperately to be strong, and his son, Drusilla's father, had long been dead.

"If there is any way that I can help, you just call on me."

She looked down at her hands and said nothing at all, and I sort of felt guilty, although there was no reason why. There was nobody I loved so much as Drusilla, but I'd never talked of love to anybody, and didn't know how to go about it.

"There's going to be trouble at Mora," I said, "it would be well to keep your men away from there."

"I know." She paused. "Does your brother see Senorita Pritts?"

"Not lately." I paused, uncertain of what to say. She seemed older.

So I told her about the place we had found, and thanked her for the help of the men the don had sent to help us with the adobe bricks. Then I told her about Tom Sunday and Orrin, and she listened thoughtfully. All the Mexicans were interested in the selection of the marshal, for it was of great importance to them. His authority would be local, but there was a chance he could move into the sheriff's job and in any case, the selection of a man would mean a lot to the Mexicans who traded in Mora and who lived there, as many did.

What I was saying wasn't at all what I wanted to say, and I searched for the words I wanted and they would not come. "Dru," I said suddenly, "I wish--"

She waited but all I could do was get red in the face and look at my hands.

Finally, I got up, angry with myself. "I've got to be going," I said, "only--"

"Yes?"

"Can I come back? I mean, can I come to see you often?"

She looked straight into my eyes. "Yes, you can, Tye. I wish you would."

When I rode away I was mad with myself for saying nothing more. This was the girl I wanted. I was no hand with women but most likely Drusilla considered me a man who knew a lot about women, and figured if I had anything to say, that I'd say it.

She had a right to think that, for a man who won't speak his mind at a time like that is no man at all. More than likely she would think I just didn't want to say anything. If she thought of me that way at all.

That was a gloomy ride home, and had anybody been laying for me that night I'd have been shot dead I was that preoccupied. When I rode up to the house I saw Ollie's horse tied outside.

Ollie was there, along with a man who operated a supply store in Mora. His name was Wilson. "The time is now, Orrin. You've got to come in and stay in town a few days. Charley Smith and that sandy-haired man who was with him have done a lot to rile folks around town, and they were mighty impressed the way Tyrel handled them."

"That was Tyrel, not me."

"They know that, but they say you're two of a kind. Only," ... Ollie looked apologetically at me, "they don't figure you're as mean as your brother. I mean they like what happened out here, only they don't hold with killing."

Orrin glanced at him. "There wasn't another thing Tyrel could have done, and mighty few who could have done what he did."