We’d all heard about Vern Huddy, but like everybody after awhile, you get careless. We’d been keeping an eye on the hills and the Indians were looking around for us, but all of a sudden one day there was a rifle shot and one of our Indians was down in the dirt and dead.
He was standing not three feet from me at the time and I had just moved over to dip up some beans from the pot and he had stepped up where I had been and was waiting with his plate. I was sure that shot had been meant for me, and Vern Huddy had sighted in, then maybe had taken his eyes away when he cocked his rifle and had squeezed off his shot before he realized there’d been a change. At least, that was how I figured it. I was sorry for that Indian, but glad for me.
We moved our camp deeper into the brush and all of us stayed clear of clearings.
“Somebody’s got to go up there after him,” Logan said.
“I’ll go. I’m the best Indian. Every man has a pattern, I don’t care who he is. Rifle shots are among the worst for that sort of thing. He’s developed himself a style. If I study the places where he has been I can find the sort of places he likes to shoot from.”
It made a kind of sense, so from that day on, I took to the hills.
Stalking a killer is no job for the weak-nerved. Sooner or later your killer is going to know he is being hunted and then he becomes the hunter.
If I found him soon I’d be lucky or unlucky, depending on who saw who first. The chances are it would only be after a painstaking search. So I taken a sight on the hills after dark. I set up a forked stick out there and a prop for the butt of my rule and I figured the height of that Indian who was shot and where the bullet hit, then I sighted right back along my own rifle and pinpointed the area from which that bullet must have come.
Now I was sure Vern Huddy wouldn’t be in that spot. He’d have moved, found himself a new location. Maybe he did not know he hadn’t killed me, and maybe he did. By day I borrowed Logan’s spyglass and studied the mountainside where the bullet had come from.
Only one thing I did do before I took to the woods. I went to Shalako to pick up a few things and ran smack-dab into Meg Rossiter.
She had come to town with her pa for supplies and the like. Town was town, even when it was so small, and a girl like Meg simply had to come in.
She had come up the steps to the store just as I rode up, and we stopped there for just a minute, she holding her skirt up just a trifle to clear it from the dust, and me just about to get off my horse. Finally I said, “Howdy, ma’am!”
“How do you do?” she said cool as you please. And when I swung down and stepped up on the porch she said, “I suppose that brother of yours is proud of himself.”
“Galloway? What for?”
“For nearly killing poor Curly Dunn. That was just awful! He should be ashamed!”
Astonished, I said, “Ma’am, you don’t have the right of it. Curly got the rope around Galloway unexpected, and was taking him into the woods. Curly was talking torture and the like. Galloway got free of him and Curly’s horse dragged him, that’s all.”
“Galloway got free of him! That’s likely, isn’t it? Who helped him?”
“He was alone, ma’am. The rest of us was miles away with the herd.”
Her eyes were scornful. “That’s your brother’s story. I don’t believe any of it. Curly was not that kind of boy.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s just the way it happened.” Getting kind of irritated, I said, “Curly ain’t much. He hasn’t the nerve that Alf had or any of them, and he wouldn’t be a patch on his old man. He’s just kind of pretty and he has a real mean streak in him.”
She just glared at me and turned away and flounced into the store. Well, I just stood there mentally cussing myself and all the luck. Here I’d been setting myself up, shaping up all kinds of meetings with her in my mind, but none of them like that. I never figured that Galloway’s fracas with Curly would bother her none, least ways where I was concerned.
I guessed she was just fixed on Curly. She’d set her cap for him and she wasn’t giving any thought to anybody but him. Well, she could have him. I told myself that and stood there on the porch, wanting to go in the store and afraid she’d think I was following her, and wanting to follow her all at the same time. But I had to go in. That was what I’d come to town for.
Finally, I gave my hat brim a tug and ducked my head and went on in. Johnny Kyme, the storekeeper came over to me and said, “What can I do you for, Sackett?”
“About thirty feet of rawhide string,” I said, “and a couple of those thin-bladed hunting knives.” I also bought an extra hatchet and a few nails, with a few other odds and ends. I also bought me a pair of homespun pants (the brush doesn’t make any sound when it rubs on them like it does on jeans, or even like on buckskin) I also bought a woolen cap with earflaps, although I wouldn’t be using them. Where I was going a hat would be falling off, and I needed the bill of the cap to shade my eyes for good seeing.
Meg was coming right past me although she could just as well have gone the other way. She had her chin up and she was flouncing along, and suddenly I taken nerve and turned on her. “Ma’am, I’d admire to buy you a coffee over to the saloo—I mean, the restaurant, if you’ll be so kind.”
For a moment there she appeared about to turn me down, but I had something going for me that wasn’t me. It was that she was in Town with a capital T, and a girl when she came to Town ought to see a boy. To sit and have coffee would be nice and she could think of herself as a great lady in Delmonico’s or some such place.
She looked right at me, cool as you please. “Thank you, Mister Sackett. If you will give me your arm.”
“I’ll be back for all that,” I said to Slim over my shoulder, and walked out of there, proud as could be, with that girl on my arm like we were going to a ball or something.
Now you have to understand about that saloon. It was a saloon, but one side of it was set up for an eating place where ladies could come if they wished, and when, they were present the men kind of toned down the loud talk and the rough talk. Fact is, most of the men liked to see them there, added a touch of home or something, and most of us were a long way from womenfolks.
We went up those steps with me all red around the gills from not being used to it, and trying not to look like this was the first time or almost.
Berglund, he came over with a napkin across his arm like he was one of them high-class waiters and he said, “What’s your pleasure?” So we both ordered coffee, and he brought it to us, and then I’ll be damned if he didn’t fetch some cupcakes with chocolate high-grade all over the top. I never even knew he had such stuff.
When I said as much he replied, “Why, surely you understand that we only cater to the carriage trade? To the most elite clientele?”
I didn’t know whether I was a elite clientele or not or if it was something I should shoot him for, so I tried to look stern and unconcerned all the same so he could either think I knew what he was talking about or irritated because he said it.
We sat there, sipping coffee and eating those cakes and talking. She started in about the weather just like we hadn’t had those other words at all. I asked her about her Pa, and she asked me about Parmalee and Logan, and men somehow she got started telling me about a poem she’d been reading called the Idylls of the King, by somebody named Tennyson. I knew a puncher back in the Cherokee Nation by that name but it couldn’t be the same one. The last time I saw him I don’t think he could even read a book, let alone write one.