Lando by Louis L’Amour
Chapter One
We Sacketts were a mountain folk who ran long on boy children and gun-shooting,
but not many of us were traveled men. And that was why I envied the Tinker.
When first I caught sight of him he was so far off I couldn’t make him out, so I
taken my rifle and hunkered down behind the woodpile, all set to get in the
first shot if it proved to be a Higgins. Soon as I realized who it was, I turned
again to tightening my mill, for I was fresh out of meal and feeling hunger.
Everybody in the mountains knew the Tinker. He was a wandering man who tinkered
with everything that needed fixing. He could repair a clock, sharpen a saw, make
a wagon wheel, or shoe a horse.
Fact was, he could do almost anything a body could think of that needed doing,
and he wandered up and down the mountains from Virginia to Georgia just a-fixing
and a-doing. Along with it, he was a pack peddler. He carried a pack would have
put a crick in a squaw’s back, and when he fetched up to my cabin he slung it
down and squatted on his heels beside it.
“If you reckoned I was a Higgins,” he said, “you can put it out of mind. Your
Cousin Tyrel cut his notch for the last Higgins months ago. You Sacketts done
cleaned them out.”
“Not this Sackett. I never shot nary a Higgins, although that’s not to say I
wouldn’t had they come at me.”
“Tyrel, him an’ Orrin, they taken out for the western lands. Looks to me like
you’re to be the last of the Sacketts of Tennessee.”
“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” said I, a-working at my mill. “I’ve given
thought to the western lands myself, for a man might work his life away in these
mountains, and nothing to show for it in the end.”
The Tinker, he just sat there, not saying aye, yes, or no, but I could see he
had something on his mind, and given time would have his say.
“You’re the one has the good life,” I said. “Always a-coming and a-going along
the mountains and down to the Settlements.”
There was a yearning in me to be off the mountain, for I’d lived too long in the
high-up hills, knowing every twisty creek to its farthest reaches, and every
lightning-struck tree for miles.
Other than my cabin, the only places I knew were the meetinghouse down to the
Crossing where folks went of a Sunday, and the schoolhouse at Clinch’s Creek
where we went of a Saturday for the dancing and the fighting.
“Tinker,” I said, ‘Tve been biding my time until you came along, for come sunup
it is in my mind to walk away from the mountains to the western lands.”
Filling the mill’s hopper, I gave the handles a testing turn, then added, “If
you’ve a mind to, I’d like you to come with me.”
Now, the Tinker was a solitary man. A long-jawed man, dark as any Indian, but of
a different cast, somehow, and he’d an odd look to his yellow eyes. Some said he
hailed from foreign lands, but I knew nothing of that, nor ought of the ways of
foreign folk, but the Tinker knew things a body could scarcely ken, and held a
canny knowledge of uncanny things.
Beside a fire of an evening his fingers worked a magic with rope or yarn,
charming queer, decorative things that women took fancy to, but the likes of
which none of us had ever seen.
“I have given it thought, Lando,” he answered me, “but I am a lone man with no
liking for company.”
“So it is with me. But now it is in my mind to go to the western lands and there
become rich with the things of this earth. You have the knack for the doing of
things, and I have a knack for trade, and together we might do much that neither
could do alone.”
“Aye … you have a knack for trade, all right. A time or two you even had the
better of me.”
A time or two, he said? Every time. And well he knew it, too, but it was not in
me to bring that up. “Except for one thing,” I said. “You never would trade me a
Tinker’s knife.”
He took out his pipe and settled to smoke, and I knew it was coming, this thing
he had on this mind. “You have enemies. Is that why you have chosen to leave at
this time?”
It ired me that he should think so, but I held my peace, and when I spoke at
last, my voice was mild. “Will Caffrey and his son? They have reason to fear me,
and not I to fear them. It was my father’s mistake to leave me with Will Caffrey
to be reared by him, but Pa was not himself from the grief that was on him, and
in no condition for straight thinking.”
“Caffrey had a good name then,” the Tinker said, “although a hard-fisted man and
close with money. Only since he became a rich man has he become overbearing.”
“And it was the gold I claimed from him at Meeting that made him rich, and none
of his earning. He had it from my father to pay for my keep and education.”
“You put your mark upon his son.”
“He asked it of me. He came at me, a-swinging of his fists.”
When I had emptied the meal from the hopper, I tightened the mill and filled the
hopper again, for such a mill as that of mine could grind only to a certain
coarseness on the first grinding, and then the mill must be tightened and the
meal reground before it was fit for the baking or for gruel.
“They are saying how you faced Will Caffrey at Meeting, and him a deacon of the
church and all, and demanded he return the money your father left with him, and
all the interest he had from its use.
“They tell how he flustered and would give you the lie, but all knew how five
years ago you ran from his farm and have lived alone in this cabin since, and
how, suddenly, after your father left Will Caffrey had money with which to buy
farms and cattle.
“You’ll not be forgiven this side of the grave, not by Will Caffrey. He is a
proud man and you have shamed him at Meeting.”
“The money is rightfully mine, Tinker. When he decided my father would not
return, he took me from school and put me to work in the fields, and sent his
son to school in my place.”
The mill was ready, and again I ground my meal, the noise allowing for no talk,
but when I’d emptied the hopper I said, “If it is enemies I have, it is the
Caffreys. I know of no others.”
He shot me a curious glance, which puzzled me with its content “Not three tall,
mustached men with dark hair and long faces? Three tall men as alike as peas in
a pod … named Kurbishaw?”
“It was my mother’s name.”
“They are riding to kill you.”
“You saw them where?”
“In the Cherokee towns. They asked questions there.”
“The Indians are my friends. They will tell them nothing.”
“When last I saw them they had old Midah Wolf and were buying him drink.”
Midah was an old man with a love for the bottle and a memory of youth that only
drink could bring back. When drunk, he was enemy to no man and would surely
talk. He would be sorry after, but that would be of no help.
“The Kurbishaws are my mother’s folk. They will surely be coming for other
reasons.”
“I have heard them say, ‘We have killed the wolf, now we shall kill the whelp.'”
They had killed the wolf? If by that they meant my father, I did not believe
them. My father might have many faults, but lack of shrewdness was not one of
them. As I grew older I had remembered his actions around our mountain cabin,
and now I knew that he had been aware of danger, that he had lived no moment
without that awareness.
Yet he had not returned … had they killed him, indeed?
“I have only my father’s wornout rifle,” I said, “and a dislike for shooting men
I do not know, nor have I any appetite for violence.”
The Tinker glanced at me shrewdly, and I wondered what went on behind those
yellow eyes. Was he my friend, in truth? Had I learned this doubt of people? Was
it acquired by brief but hard experience?
“If they find the way to the Crossing, Caffrey will be quick to tell them where
you are.” The Tinker turned his yellow eyes straight at me. “Did you never