She was gone in a moment, slipping into the woods like a wraith. And they were coming. From the sound of them I knew where they were on the trail, and as there seemed to be time enough, I led my mule around and down by my sneaky trail and hid him in the brush below the cabin where the rock wall fell sheer away from the cabin foundation. I tied him there and went back and filled my water bucket.
When I heard their voices to, I stepped back inside and barred the door, then closed the shutters and barred them, opening only the loop holes. From the back window, which they could neither approach nor see, I hung a rope where I could slide down to the mule.
There looked to be nine or ten of them, mostly loafers and no-accounts.
“You!” came a voice. “In the house there!” That was Stud Pelly. He was a big man, not taller than most, but wider and thicker, a strong, mean man with the name of being a bully. “Come on out of there!”
I just sat there, a-watching and a-waiting. It was in me to even the score for pa; but no man takes a life lightly if he’s in his right mind, and I wasn’t about to kill anybody unless they forced me to it. Besides, I’d put some miles behind me since I was the kid whose pa they’d hung. Though I was still nothing but a slim, tall boy, I’d met men and faced up to them before this, and I knew the kind of rabble I faced now.
Pelly strode up and banged his big fist on the door. “Open up, kid! I know you’re in there!”
Softly I crept up the ladder to the loft. The cabin was built with an overhang so defenders could keep Indians from building fires against the log walls that was back in the old days.
There was a plug right over where Pelly would be standing, a plug that stopped up a loophole. Easing it out, I looked down on Pelly, who was banging on the door again Then I taken out my pistol and thrust the muzzle through the hole, aiming at the log wall beside Pelly. The bullet would miss him, but he would get a face full of slivers. I squeezed the trigger.
In the loft the gun boomed like a cannon. There was a startled cry, then a scramble of boots running and I went down the ladder to the door. I peered through one loophole after another, but I saw nothing. All was dark and still. My unexpected shot had scared them off, but they would come back, twice as many and twice as mean.
Stud Pelly was a bragger and he would want to say he’d run me off. Well, he could say it, for I would be gone. When I came back again I would be a bigger, tougher, older man, and then I would have something to say to both Pelly and Brimstead.
Taking what was worth taking, I slid down the rope to the mule, and took off down the old Cherokee trails. And that time I was gone for a year.
At Independence I latched onto a freight outfit trailing west to Santa Fe. We had a couple of brushes with Indians, but nothing to amount to anything. In Santa Fe I hired out to a cattle outfit, worked a few months, then bought an outfit myself and went to hunting buffalo on the Staked Plains.
When I rode back to Tennessee again I was astride the dun, packing a Colt revolving shotgun, a .44 Henry, and a six-shooter. The cabin was still standing, but the logs were scarred with bullets and the door had been broken down, then re-hung by somebody who was no hand with tools. The place had been swept out.
This time I wasn’t staying. It was home-sickness that brought me back, or maybe it was just trouble-hunting, for being just past eighteen I was a far different person from the thirteen-year-old who had been forced to watch his father hung. I was pushing past six feet in height, and I weighed a solid one hundred and eighty pounds. I’d done my share of hard work and fighting, and on the buffalo ranges my shooting had been as good as the best. I wasn’t ready to go hunting them, but if they came for me they’d buy themselves a packet of trouble.
Nobody came. It was quiet in the high-up hills. I went to sleep at night to the soft sound of the pines, awoke to drink good, cold spring water, and I worked a little around the place. Mostly I just stretched out on my back reading a pack of dime novels and magazines brought in from the outside. For two months I loafed and considered the future whatever of a future I hoped to have.
That is, nobody came until the last day. There was a restlessness on me then, and a honing for far-off places. I’d cleaned my guns and was working over the leather of my gunbelt and holster when I suddenly decided to ride out for the West. My grub was about gone, so it was time to leave. I had started packing the last of my outfit when I heard a girl singing.
She was coming up along the creek that ran downhill to the Dunvegan place, and from the way she was singing I knew she was not expecting to see anybody. Then she stepped clear of the woods and pulled up short. It was Kitty Dunvegan.
It was Kit, only something had happened to her in the year I’d been away. She’d started showing quite a figure in all the proper places, and most of her freckles were gone, leaving only a sprinkling over her nose.
“Oh it’s you!” she said. Suddenly I was glad that I was cleaned up for travel, with a fresh shave and my hair combed and all. “I didn’t think there’d be anybody here.”
“I wasn’t exactly notifying folks,” I said.
“Have you been here long? I’ve been off to school.” Her eyes went to my saddled-up horse. “You going away?”
“It came on me to ride. To Santa Fe, maybe, or somewhere north.”
“It must be wonderful to just ride off … anywhere you want to, like that. Have you ever been to Santa Fe?”
“Yes, ma’am. I worked for a freight outfit going out. I rode for a cattle ranch south of there around Tularosa.”
“Are the Spanish girls pretty?”
“I reckon so. Black eyes, and all.”
“Do you like black eyes?”
“Until now,” I said, looking into her blue eyes, “I always thought them the prettiest.”
She blushed a mite, and it was fetching. So we just sat talking for a spell, of all manner of things, and I told her some about Indian fighting on the plains of the buffalo.
“Will you ever come back?” she asked.
“Nothing to come back for,” I said. “I’ve been coming for the mountains and this ol’ cabin. It ain’t much, but it’s mine. This Chancy land is deeded land, and I kept the taxes paid, and all. But I don’t know if I’ll ever come again. Maybe when I’m an old man.”
“You could come to see me,” she said.
“What would your sister say? And your friends down on the flatland?”
“I won’t care. I won’t care what anybody thinks.”
“I’ll come then,” I told her, “I’ll surely come.”
She laughed suddenly. “You scared them,” she said. “You scared them all that last time. Even Stud Pelly …”
“They came a-hunting it.” I looked at her. “You the one who has been sweeping up inside?”
Her cheeks grew pink. “I wanted it to be clean when you came back. Besides, I come here sometimes when I want to be alone. Pa said it was all right.”
“We’re neighbors, like. Our deeded land fronts against yours at the bottom of the hill. Grandpa and pa, they filed on the whole ridge. The land ain’t of much account, but pa wanted it. We claimed some, and bought some.”
Kit got up suddenly. “I’ve got to go. Priss will come looking for me.”
“Does she come up here?”
“Oh, no. I don’t believe anyone knows of that path but you and me.”
“Well, it ain’t much of a path.”
All of a sudden I felt awkward. I had no idea what to do, so I thrust out my hand. “Kit, I’m coming back,” I said. “You can figure on it. I daren’t come back until I can stand against them. All of them, if need be.”
“Don’t you be too long,” she said.
She walked away to the edge of the woods beside the brook, then looked back. “Pa wonders why you never called on your kinfolk for help,” she said. “Everybody knows the Sacketts. They’re fighters.”