Then the Sacketts came in. They were warned, only they did not go. Curly had gone and picked himself a fight and gotten whipped, and that had been a blow. Bull Dunn knew how important is the reputation for invincibility, and the defeat of Curly by a man in bad physical condition threw a shadow over that reputation.
Suddenly everything had gone wrong.
Worst of all, Rocker was failing him, and Rocker had always been the smartest in the lot, the smartest and the quietest. The rest of them, well they were a wild lot, obeying nobody but him, listening to nobody but him. And until now they had believed nothing could whip them. Bull Dunn was not that kind of a fool. It was good for them to believe that as long as he, who was the boss, knew better. Bull Dunn had seen quiet communities suddenly rise up in anger, and suddenly the trees began blossoming with hanged men.
He knew all about that. He had left Virginia City, up in Montana Territory, just before the hanging started. Just a hunch that he had, a sudden waking up in the morning with an urge to ride … and he had ridden.
When the news reached him that Henry Plummer and the rest of them were left dancing at the end of a rope he had known he was right.
Had his senses dulled over the years? Was that what Rocker was feeling now? The Rocker had always been cautious, however. He was good with the six-shooter, probably the best Bull ever had seen, but he had a tendency to caution the others scoffed at, but not in front of the Rocker.
“All right, Rocker, you’ve been right before. We’ll make one more try … just one. If that doesn’t work we’ll ride north out of here, head for Brown’s Hole.”
Rocker Dunn was uneasy, but he knew there was no use arguing, as even this concession was more than he had hoped for. And of course, the old Bull might know what he was talking about.
Yet he could not but remember the broken, bleeding body of Curly … he had never liked Curly, brother or no. There was something unhealthy about him. Nonetheless, to see him come in like that… what was it about those Sacketts?
There was that Texas Ranger, McDonald, who said, “There’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps a-coming.”
Maybe that was it.
Chapter XV
The cattle came in before noon of the day following the fight in the streets of Shalako. They came in bunched nicely and moving well. Parmalee had brought them over the trail losing no flesh and ready for a final polish before cold weather set in.
Yet the work had just begun with the bringing of the cattle, and while the Indians rode herd, I taken Galloway, Nick, and Charlie Farnum out to make hay. There were high meadows where the hay was good, and we bought extra scythes at the store in town and went to work. Galloway and me, we’d had a spell of this as boys, and we went down the line cutting a wide swath, swinging the blades to a fine rhythm. Nick and Charlie were new at it and made more work of it.
We kept our guns handy, and usually one or two of the Indians were on lookout. We used the boys for this. They were sharp-eyed and eager to be helping, and lookout was warriors’ work, so they loved it.
We saw nothing of the Dunns.
My thoughts kept a-turning toward Cherry Creek and the Rossiter place but there was just too much work for any one of us to shake loose. Anybody who thinks that ranching is just sitting and watching cows grow fat has got another guess a-coming. Ranching is mostly hard work, can-see to can’t-see, as we used to say. Daylight to dark, for pilgrims.
Parmalee came out with a scythe on the third morning and threw us all a surprise. He was maybe the best of the lot at mowing hay. When it came to that, a body could see why. Down there in the flatlands they had more hay to mow than we folks on the uplands. Why, where I came from even the cows had legs shorter on one side than the other from walking on the sidehills!
The peaches and apples we grew on those mountains were so accustomed to the downhill pull you could only make half a pie with them because they insisted on slipping over to one side.
Bats and birds taken from those mountains down to the flatlands used to have to set down in the grass, they’d get so disoriented. They were used to flying alongside the land instead of over it.
If a man took a wrong step when plowing he was apt to fall into his neighbor’s pasture or maybe his watermelon patch, which led to misunderstandings.
Church was down in the valley, so we never walked to church in the morning, we slid. We had the name of being good Christian folk in our part of the Cumberland because we just couldn’t be backsliders.
Even Logan came out from town and took a hand at the haying. He was a powerful big man and he cut a wider swath than any of us. He’d put in a full day’s work by morning and then he’d set by the fire and make comments about us being so slow. But we got the hay down and we got it stacked, and Logan proved a hand at that, too, but nobody could top off a stack as well as Parmalee.
Parmalee was a great one for reading, too, and he went nowhere without his books. I never could see why he needed them for he could remember nigh all he read, and it was a-plenty. Of a night by the fireside when somebody would start to tellin’ stories of ha’nts and such, he would recite poetry to us. He’d set there like he was telling a story and it would just come a-rolling out.
He’d read poetry by Greeks even, and some by the Frenchies, and he had a way of saying it that was a caution. He and Nick Shadow would sit there spoutin’ poetry at each other, sometimes for hours. Whenever one of them didn’t start it, Logan would. Where he picked up book knowledge I don’t know, and he always pleaded that he knew nothing, but he did know a surprising lot. One time he admitted that he was snowed in one winter with five books of which he read them all, over and over. One of them was the Bible. He knew all the stories but didn’t seem to have picked up much of the morals.
Logan Sackett was from Clinch Mountain, and those Clinch Mountain Sacketts were rough, lawless boys. They were fierce feuders and fighters and they went their own way, most of them lone-wolfing it until trouble showed to another Sackett.
He was a story-teller when it came to that, and could yarn on for hours about country he’d seen or about bad men. Mostly in those days our world was small. Folks got around a good bit and so we exchanged information backwards and forwards of the country. We knew about trails, marshals, bad men, bad horses, tough bartenders and the like in countries we’d never seen because word was sort of passed around.
Guns, riding, and cattle were our business, so we heard plenty of stories about tough old mossy-horn steers, about bad horses and men who could top them off. Every outfit had at least one man who was salty with a gun, and each one had a bronc rider. We bragged on our roping or cutting horses, not often the same ones, and how tough were the drives we made. We ate beans, beef, and sourdough bread, and we had molasses for sweetening. We slept out in the open, rain or shine, and we rode half-broke horses that could shake the kinks out of a snake.
It was a rough, hard, wonderful life and it took men with the bark on to live it. We didn’t ask anything of anybody and as long as a man did his work nobody cared what else he was or did.
Logan Sackett wasn’t a bad man in the eastern sense. Out west he was. In the west a bad man was not necessarily an evil man or an outlaw … he was a bad man to tangle with. He was a man to leave alone, and such a one was Logan. He was mighty abrupt with a six-shooter, and if you spoke rough to him you had better start reaching when you started speaking, and even then you’d be too slow with it.
Logan had the name of being an outlaw. I suspect he’d rustled a few head of steers in his time, and maybe his stock didn’t always wear the brands they’d started out with. I wouldn’t be surprised if here and there he hadn’t stood some stagecoach up while he shook the passengers down. About that side of his life I asked no questions. However, I’ll bank on one thing. He never done anything mean or small in his life.