“Be careful,” he warned. “There is much trouble in the San Juans and Uncomphagre. Glint Stockton is there, with his outlaws.”
“Any drifters riding through?” Cap asked.
Esteban glanced at him shrewdly.
“Si. Six men were here last night. One was a square man with a beard. Another”—Esteban permitted himself a slight smile, revealing beautiful teeth and a sly amusement—”another had two pistols.”
“Six, you said?”
“There were six. Two of them were larger than you, Senior Tell, very broad, powerful. Big blond men with small eyes and big jaws. One of them, I think, was the leader.”
“Know them?” Cap asked me.
“No, Cap, I don’t.” Yet even as I said it, I began to wonder. What did the Bigelows look like?
I asked Esteban, “Did you hear any names?”
“No, Senor. They talked very little. Only to ask about travelers.”
They must know that either we were behind them, or had taken another trail. Why were they following us, if they were?
The way west after leaving Del Norte lay through the mountains, over Wolf Creek Pass. This was a high, narrow, twisting pass that was most difficult to travel, a very bad place to run into trouble.
It was a pleasant evening, and it did me good to see the nice home the Mendozas had here, the baby, and their pleasure in being together. But the thought of those six men and why they were riding after us worried me, and I could see Cap had it in mind.
We saddled up and got moving. During the ride west Cap Rountree, who had lived among Indians for years, told me more about them than I’d ever expected to know. This was Ute country, though the Comanches had intruded into some of it. A warlike tribe, they had been pushed out of the Black Hills by the Sioux and had come south, tying up with the still more warlike and bloody Kiowa. Cap said that the Kiowa had killed more whites than any other tribe.
At first the Utes and the Comanches, both of Shoshone ancestry, had got along all right. Later they split and were often at war. Before the white man came the Indians were continually at war with one another, except for the Iroquois in the East, who conquered an area bigger than the Roman empire and then made a peace that lasted more than a hundred years.
Cap and I rode through some of the wildest and most beautiful country under the sun, following the Rio Grande up higher and still higher into the mountains. It was hard to believe this was the same river along which I’d fought Comanches and outlaws in Texas—that we camped of a night beside water that would run into the Gulf one day.
Night after night our smoke lifted to the stars from country where we found no tracks. Still, cold, and aloof, the snow-capped peaks lifted above us. Cap, he was a changed man, gentler, somehow, and of a night he talked like he’d never done down below. And sometimes I opened up my Blackstone and read, smelling the smoke of aspen and cedar, smelling the pines, feeling the cold wind off the high snow.
It was like that until we came down Bear Creek into the canyon of the Vallecitos.
West of us rose up the high peaks of the Grenadier and Needle Mountains of the San Juan range. We pulled up by a stream that ran cold and swift from the mountains. Looking up at the peaks I wondered again: what was it up there that got the meat I left hanging in that tree?
Cap, he taken a pan and went down to the creek. In the late evening he washed it out and came back to the fire.
There were flecks of gold in the pan . . . we’d found color. Here we would stake our claim.
VIII
We forted up for trouble.
Men most likely had been following us. Sooner or later they would find us, and we could not be sure of their intentions. Moreover, the temper of the Utes was never too certain a thing.
Riding up there, I’d had time for thinking. Where gold was found, men would come.
There would be trouble—we expected that—but there would be business too. The more I thought, the more it seemed to me that the man who had something to sell would be better off than a man who searched for gold.
We had made camp alongside a spring not far from the plunging stream that came down the mountainside and emptied into the Vallecitos. I was sure this was the stream I had followed into the high valley where my gold was. Our camp was on a long bench above the Vallecitos, with the mountainside rising steeply behind it and to the east. We were in a clump of scattered ponderosa pine and Douglas fir.
First, we shook out our loops and snaked some deadfall logs into spaces between the trees. Next we made a corral by cutting some lodgepole pine —the lodgepole pine grew mostly, it seemed, in areas that had been burned over—and laying the ends of the poles in tree forks or lashing them to trees with rawhide. It was hard work, but we both knew what needed to be done and there was little talk and no waste effort.
Short of sundown I walked out of the trees and along the bench. Looking north, we faced the widest spot we had so far seen in the canyon of the Vallecitos. It was a good mile north of our camp.
“That’s where we’ll build the town,” I told Cap. He took his pipe out of his mouth. “Town?” “Where there’s gold, there’ll be folks. Where folks are, there’s wanting. I figure we can set up store and supply those wants. Whether they find gold or not, they will be eating and needing tools, powder, blankets—all that sort of thing. It seems to be the surest way, Cap, if a man wants to make him a living. Gold is found and is mined, but the miners eat.”
“You won’t find me tending store,” Cap said. “Me, neither. But we’ll lay out the town site, you and me. Well stake the lots, and we’ll watch for a good man. Believe me, he’ll come along. Then we’ll set him up in business.”
“You Sacketts,” Cap said, “sure play hell once you get out of the mountains. Only thing puzzles me is, what kept you there so long?”
The next few days we worked sunrise to sundown. We paced off a street maybe four hundred yards long, we laid out lots, and planned the town. We figured on a general store, a livery stable, a hotel and boarding house, and two saloons. We spotted a place for a blacksmith shop, and for an assayer.
We cut logs and dragged some of them down to the site for the store, and we put up signs indicating that any folks who came along were to see us about the lots.
Meantime, we worked a little on the claim— rarely more than a pan or two a day because we had much else to do. But we found color—not a lot, but some.
We also improved our fort. Not that it looked much like one, and we didn’t want it to, but we were set up to fight off an attack if it came.
Neither one of us had much trust in the peaceful qualities of our fellowmen. Seems to me most of the folks doing all the talk about peace and giving the other fellow the benefit of the doubt were folks setting back to home in cushy chairs with plenty of grub around and the police nearby to protect them. Back there, men would set down safe of an evening and write about how cruel the poor Indian was being treated out west They never come upon the body of a friend who had been staked out on an ant hill or had a fire built on his stomach, nor had they stood off a charge of Indians.
Personally, I found Indians people to respect. Their ways weren’t our ways, and a lot of virtues they were given credit for by white men were only ideas in a white man’s head, and no Indian would have considered them virtues. Mercy rarely had any part in the make-up of an Indian.
Folks talk about human nature, but what they mean is not human nature, but the way they are brought up. It seems to me that folks who are brought up to Christian ways of thought don’t believe in the taking of life, but the Indian had no such conception. If you were a stranger you were an enemy. If you gave him gifts it was usually because you were afraid of him … or that’s how he thought.
Indians were fighting men. Fighting was their greatest sport and occupation. Our people look up to atheltes of one kind or another, but the Indian saved all his respect for fighting men. And an Indian would count the scalp of a woman or a child as well as a man’s.