Chancy by Louis L’Amour
chapter 1
When I rode out of the timber I fell in with a cow outfit, and a sorry lot of rawhiders they were.
They had a fire going and coffee on, and the smell of the coffee and of bacon frying fairly set my stomach to asking questions of my face. I’d come a far piece with nothing to chew on but my thoughts.
When I came up to the fire not one of them upped to say aye, yes, or no. They just sat there looking beat. This was a played-out hand if ever I saw one.
“Howdy,” I said. “You folks taking on any help?”
There was a thin, stooped-down man, with every bone showing through his thin cotton shirt, who looked around at me. If that man’s cattle were as poor as he was, there’d not be fat enough on ary one of them to grease a skillet.
“Was I to hire you, I couldn’t pay. We’re fresh out of everything a man needs most.”
Well, I could have fetched him some ideas on that score, because I’d already seen the girl who stood with her back against the chuck wagon.
“Where you driving the herd?”
“We ain’t. Not no more. We were headed for a valley out yonder where the grass stands high. Now it looks like we ain’t a-goin’ anywhere at all.”
“What happened?”
“Sheriff in this town lays claim to a bunch of our cattle. Swears they’re local brands.”
“Ain’t the cattle yours?”
“Rightly they are, but there’s a point of question and the sheriff knows it. Cattle have been running on Texas grass since Spanish days, with nobody laying claim to hide nor hair of them. Folks branded a few of them, but the War between the States cut that short, so they just ran free and bred free. We made a gather of them, and started north.
“We had a few brands among them. Men died during the war, and then in the Injun fightin’ an’ such. These brands we have nobody laid claim to, and we honestly tried to run them all down. Now this man claims they’re local cattle that drifted south.”
“All the way to Texas?” I said. “Swimming those rivers and all? It ain’t likely. Away out west it might happen, but there’s too much good grass around here for cows to leave it. He’s running a bluff on you.”
“You et, son? I got no kind of job for you, but no man ever walked away from Noah Gates’s fire without he’d et if he was a mind to.”
All I owned was on my back or on my horse. That excepts a lay of ridge-country land back in Tennessee, and the offer of that meal sounded fresh and likely to me. So I out with my skinning knife and edged up to the fire, helping myself to beef and beans.
Nobody had much to say as they moved to the fire to partake. It looked to me as if this outfit was fresh out of hope and gumption, as well as other things. They were oldish men, most of them with families at home, likely, and wondering what their womenfolks would do if they didn’t come back.
They weren’t the frontier type of man. These were the second string, and good men often enough, but hard work and bad crops or bad luck had probably wiped out their efforts, and had taken away a good deal of their will to fight back.
Only a few weeks before I’d left the faraway hills of Tennessee to make myself a place in the world, and when I finally taken off there was nothing left in the cabin but a chunk of side meat off a razor-back hog and some fresh ground meal. I taken that grub and rattled my hocks out of there.
When I rode up to this cow outfit I was three days without eating except for some hazelnuts I’d found, but the longer I sat there listening to their talk the more it seemed to me that this sheriff, as he called himself, was running a blazer on Gates and his outfit. The worst of it was, he looked likely to make it stick. Now, I was just a riding-through stranger, but I’d set up to good grub for the first time in days, and I didn’t like to think of some no-account running me away from the trough.
Back in my mountains, folks run long on fighting. A man may not have much, but he sets store by his pride as a free-born American citizen, and is ready to fight for what he believes, you choose the time and place.
Back in the hills when you’d hunted ‘coon, drunk a little ‘shine, and courted the girls, there wasn’t much else to do but fight. Now, I never cared much for the jug, but I was a fair hand at courting. But with me it was mostly the fighting. It was just fighting in good spirits, knuckle and skull, root-hog-or-die land of fighting among us boys. And what these folks needed right now was the will to fight.
Only that honed no blades for me. Pa, he always said a man had to look spry for himself, because nobody would do it for him; your opportunities didn’t come knocking around, you had to hunt them down and hog-tie them. Maybe it was that idea I was considering, and maybe it was the beans in the pot, or it might have been that redhead girl standing over there casting eyes at me, time to time.
So I spoke free, and I told them were they my cows nobody would take them without they had a fight.
“Ain’t much we can do,” Gates said. “That sheriff’s a mighty hard man, and it’s a hard lot he has with him. Even if we got shut of this place, there’s nothing but Injuns west, and trouble of every kind.”
“What about that valley with the tall grass?” I asked.
“Maybe that was just a dream. Anyway, none of us ever saw it. A passing stranger told us of it—a roving man by the name of Sackett, far riding from the western lands.”
“If a Sackett told you that valley was there, it was there,” I said, me being kin of theirs, although distant.
Now, I was doing some contemplating. This here wasn’t an organized state yet, so there weren’t any county officials, and no sheriffs. Getting the herd together had taken the last bit of gumption these men had, and the long, hard trail drive had worn them down and whipped them. And I was betting that town outfit had seen that very thing.
“Mr. Gates, what brands were they about to take?”
“Circle Three, Ten Bar, Shamrock, and Slash Seven. That adds up to about half the herd.”
Well, a man doesn’t look on opportunity too often, and even though the deck was stacked against them, I felt like taking a hand. “Mr. Gates,” I said, “you sell those brands to me. You sell them to me right now.”
“Sell them? Son, you got that kind of money?”
“No, sir. I haven’t got a cent, but I’ll give you a hand-writ note for one thousand dollars for those cows, all the brands you’ve named, sight unseen.”
“You’re talkin’ foolish, boy.”
“You want my note for a thousand dollars, or you want nothing? That’s what they’ll leave you. Looks to me as if you’ve got to fight or quit. Now I’m giving you something else. You sell those cows to me and the fight becomes mine.”
“They’ll ride rough-shod over you, boy.”
“Sell to him.” The speaker was a burly, sort of fat man with a stubble of beard over a weak chin. “What can we lose?”
Then we heard the sound of their horses, and it seemed to me Gates turned a shade sicker than he had been before. “I’d write a bill of sale,” I said. “All you’ve got to do is sign it.”
There were six men with that so-called sheriff. To me he was just a thief wearing a stolen badge, and those with him were a mean, shifty-looking lot, but hard men, every one of them.
“We’ve come to make our cut by daylight, Gates. You just stand aside and there’ll be no trouble.”
“The cattle belong to us,” Gates said. “We gathered them down on the Trinity.”
The sheriff just grinned, a taunting, ugly kind of a grin. Oh, he’d sized them up, all right! He knew this outfit had no heart for a fight.
So I taken a letter from my pocket, and on the back of a page of that letter I wrote: In consideration of $1,000 payable when the herd is sold, I hereby sell and release title to all Circle Three, Ten Bar, Shamrock, and Slash Seven cattle to the bearer of this note.