So I made ready. If I turned fast I might lay a hand on one of those rifles, and if I had one of those I’d take somebody with me when I passed in my checks.
“Hey,” somebody said. “Who’s that?”
A rider was coming along the road, coming slow and easy. He was a tall man who rode well up in the saddle, and he came riding straight on.
“Hell,” one of the men said, “it’s Nolan Sackett!”
“Get on with it,” Dorinda said irritably. “This is no affair of his.”
He rode right on up to us, and despite what Dorinda had said, nobody did anything but watch him come, including me.
“Howdy, boys!” His eyes had plenty of time to take in the situation. “If you’re after that gold I figure I should be in for a share.”
“You’re in for nothing!” Dorinda said angrily. “Get on with it, Clymer!”
Nolan, he looked over at me and grinned, and then he taken a pistol from under his coat and tossed it to me.
It was as simple as that.
He just flicked that pistol over and I reached up and snared it, and then we stood there with two guns on them, his and mine.
It caught them flat-footed and off guard. They just didn’t expect anything like that, for Nolan was one of them. The trouble was, he was also a Sackett, and blood runs thicker than branch water.
Dorinda didn’t cut up and scream like some women might, although she was mad enough to fight a cougar. She just looked at him and then at me.
“You boys mount up and ride,” Nolan told them. “This here’s a cousin of mine, or some sort of kin, and whilst I might have let you shoot him, I don’t cotton to seeing that Yaqui skin no Sackett out of his hide. You boys just ride out of here and count it time well spent.”
“What if we don’t?” Clymer asked belligerently.
“Well,” I said, “you outnumber us, but by the time we get through shootin’ a whole lot of you are going to be dead, and us, too, so what will you be fighting for?”
“The hell with it,” one man said, and turned his horse; and after that they just drifted away, leaving us there with Dorinda Robiseau.
“Nolan,” I said, “I’ve got it in mind to buy goods over at Newhall’s place and pack them across the Mojave to the Arizona mines. That’s a lot of mules for one man.”
“You got you a partner,” he said.
He looked over at Dorinda. “You want to come with us, Abigail?”
“I’ll see you in hell first,” she said, and turning her horse, she rode off.
That was no way for a lady to talk.
A few miles down the trail I said to Nolan, “You called her Abigail.”
“Sure … didn’t you know? She’s one of those no-account Trelawney girls from back yonder in the hills.”
Well, I’d be damned! So that was Abigail Trelawney. But it was kind of dark back of the schoolhouse that night, and I never could tell those Trelawney girls apart.