about her name. “Call me Gin. Jonas calls me that, and I prefer it.”
The talk about the table was of things of which I knew nothing, and those who
spoke might well have talked a foreign tongue for all the good it did me.
Fortunately, I had never been one to speak much in company, for I’d seen all too
little of it. I’d no need to be loose-tongued, so I held my silence and
listened.
But Gin Locklear would not have it so. She turned to me and began asking me of
my father, and then of the cabin where I had lived so long alone. So I told her
of the forest and the game I had trapped, and how the Indians built their
snares.
‘Tell me about your father,” she said finally. “I mean … really tell me about
him.”
It shamed me that I could say so little. I told her that he was a tall man, four
inches taller than my five-ten, and powerful, thirty pounds heavier then my one
hundred and eighty.
She looked at me thoughtfully. “I would not have believed you so tall.”
“I am wide in the shoulders,” I said. “My arms are not long, yet I can reach
seventy-six inches—the extra breadth is in my shoulders. I am usually guessed to
be shorter than I am. Pa,” I went on, “was skillful with all sorts of weapons,
with horses, too.”
“He would be a man to know,” she said thoughtfully. “I think I’d like to know
him.”
It was not in me to be jealous. She was older than me, and a beautiful woman as
well, and I did not fancy myself as a man in whom beautiful women would be
interested. I knew none of the things about which they seemed to interest
themselves.
Yet, even while talking to Gin, I sensed the strange undercurrent of feeling at
the table. At first I believed it was between Jonas and the Tinker, and there
was something there, to be sure; but it was Franklyn Deckrow of whom I should
have been thinking.
After dinner, we three—Locklear, the Tinker, and I—stood together in Locklear’s
quarters. Deckrow had disappeared somewhere, and the three of us faced each
other. Suddenly all the guards were down.
“All right, Lengro,” Locklear said sharply, “you have come here, and not by
accident …. Why?”
“Gold,” the Tinker said simply. “It is a matter of gold, and we have waited too
long.”
“We?”
“In the old days we were not friends,” the Tinker said quietly, “but all that is
past. The gold is there, and we know it is there. I say we should drop old
hatreds and join forces.”
Jonas indicated me. “How much does he know?”
“Very little, I think, but his father knew everything. His father is the one man
alive who knew where it was.”
“And is he alive?”
“You,” the Tinker said carefully, “might be able to answer that question. Is he
alive?”
“If you suggest that I may have killed him, I can answer that. I did not. In
fact, he is the one man I have known about whom I have had doubts I might not be
able to kill him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, “but I am sure my father is
alive—somewhere.”
“You told me he planned to come back,” the Tinker said. “Do you think he would
purposely have stayed away?”
For a moment I considered that in the light of all I knew of him. A hard,
dangerous man by all accounts, yet a loving and attentive father and husband. At
home I had never heard his voice lifted in anger, had never seen a suggestion of
violence from him.
“If he could come,” I said, “he would come.”
“Then he must be dead,” the Tinker said reluctantly.
“Or prevented from returning,” Jonas interposed dryly, “as I was for four
years.”
Far into the night we talked, and much became plain which I had not understood
until then—why the Tinker had come to the mountains, and where he had come from;
and why, when we reached Jefferson, he had insisted upon turning south instead
of continuing on to the west.
I knew now that he had never intended going further west than Texas, and that he
had thought of little else for nearly twenty years. This was 1868 and the War
with Mexico lay twenty years behind, but it was during that war that it all
began.
Captain Jonas Locklear had sailed from New York bound for the Rio Grande, with
supplies and ammunition for the army of General Zachary Taylor. There the cargo
would be transshipped to a river steamer and taken upstream nearly two hundred
miles to Camargo. The Tinker had been bosun on the ship. Captain Jonas had run a
tight ship, respected but not liked by his crew—and that included the Tinker.
They had dropped the hook first off El Paso de los Brazos de Santiago, the Pass
of the Arms of St. James. From there orders took them south a few miles to Boca
del Rio, the mouth of the River, the Rio Grande.
It was there, on their first night at anchor, when all the crew were below
asleep except the Captain and the Tinker, that Falcon Sackett emerged from the
sea.
The Tinker was making a final check to be sure all gear was in place. The sea
was calm, the sky clear. There was no sound anywhere except, occasionally, some
sound of music from the cluster of miserable shacks and hovels that was the
smugglers’ town of Bagdad, on the Mexican side of the river. Captain Jonas
Locklear was wakeful, and he strolled slowly about the deck, enjoying the
pleasant night air after the heat of the day.
Both of them heard the shots.
The first shot brought them up sharp, staring shoreward. They could see nothing
but the low, dark line. More shots followed—the flash of one of them clearly
visible, a good half-mile away. Then there were shouts, arguments. These were
dying down when they heard the sound of oars in oarlocks, and a boat pulled
alongside.
There was a brief discussion in Spanish, the Tinker doing the talking. At that
time Jonas knew very little Spanish, although later he learned a good deal.
There was plenty of time to learn … in prison.
There were soldiers in the boat. They were looking for an escaped criminal, a
renegade. As the boat started to pull away they backed on their oars and the
officer in command called back. “There will be a reward … five hundred pesos
… alive!”
“Whoever he is,” the Tinker had said, “they want him badly, to pay that much.
And they want him alive. He knows something, Captain.”
“That he does,” said a voice, speaking from the sea. And then an arm reached up,
caught the chains, and pulled its owner from the dark water. He crouched there
in the chains for a moment to catch his breath, then reached up and pulled
himself to the top of the bowsprit, and came down to the deck. He was a big man,
splendidly built, and naked to the waist as well as bare-footed.
“That I do, gentlemen,” he had said quietly. “I know enough to make us all
rich.”
He was talking for his life, or at least for his freedom, and he knew he must
catch their attention at once. There on the deck, the water dripping from him,
he told them enough to convince them. And to his arguments he added one even
more convincing—a Spanish gold piece, freshly minted.
By that time they were in the Captain’s own cabin, a pot of coffee before them.
The stranger dropped the gold coin on the table, then pushed it toward them with
his forefinger. “Look at it,” he said. “It’s a pretty thing—and where that comes
from, there’s a million of them.”
Not a million dollars—a million of such coins, each of them worth many dollars.
There in the cabin of the brig, the three men sat about the Captain’s
table—Jonas Locklear, the Tinker, and the man who was to become my father,
Falcon Sackett. Jonas was the only one who was past twenty-five, but the story
they heard that night was to effect a change in all their lives.
Thirty-odd years before, Jean LaFitte, pirate and slave trader, was beating
north along the Gulf coast with two heavily laden treasure ships. During a gale
one of these ships was driven ashore, its exact position unknown. LaFitte
believed, or professed to believe, that the vessel had gone ashore on Padre
Island, that very long, narrow island that parallels many miles of the Gulf
coast of Texas. As a matter of fact, the ship had gone ashore some sixty miles
south of Padre.
Five men, and five only, made it to shore. Of these, one died within a matter of