Well, most of my life I’d been lighting a shuck. First, it was hungering for strange country, so I took off down the Natchez Trace for New Orleans. Another time I rode a flatboat down river to the same place.
Had me a time aboard those flatboats. Flatboat men had the name of being tough to handle. Lean and gangling like I was, they taken me for a greener, but away back of yonder in the hills boys take to fighting the way they take to coon dogs or making ‘shine, so I clobbered them good.
I’m named for William Tell, whom Pa held in admiration for his arrow-shooting and his standing on principle. Speaking of standing, I stand six feet and three inches in my sock feet, when I have socks, and weigh one hundred and eighty pounds, most of it crowded into chest and shoulders, muscled arms, and big hands. Back to home I stood butt of all the funning because of my big hands and feet.
No Sackett was ever much on the brag. We want folks to leave us alone and we leave them alone, but when fighting time comes, we stand ready.
Back in the mountains, and in the army, too, I threw every man I tackled at wrestling. Pa raised us on Cornish-style wrestling and a good bit of fist work he’d learned from an Englishman prizefighter.
“Boys,” Pa used to say, “avoid conflict and trouble, for enough of it fetches to a man without his asking, but if you are attacked, smite them hip and thigh.”
Pa was a great man for Bible speaking, but I never could see a mite of sense in striking them hip mid thigh. When I had to smite them I did it on the chin or in the belly.
It is a far piece from Montana to New Mexico astride of a horse, but I put together a skimpy outfit and headed west for Virginia City and Alder Gulch. A day or two I worked there, and then pulled out for Jackson’s Hole and the Teton Mountains.
It came over me I wanted to hear Orrin singing the old songs, the songs our people brought from Wales, or the songs we had from others like us traveling from Ireland, Scotland and England. Many happy thoughts of my boyhood time were memories of singing around the fire at home. Orrin was always the leader in that, a handsome, singing man, the best liked of us all. We held no envy, being proud to call him brother.
When I started for New Mexico the last thing I was hunting was gold or trouble, and usually they come as a pair. Gold is a hard-found thing, and when a man finds it he’s bound to fetch trouble a-keeping it.
Seems like a man finds gold only when he ain’t hunting it. He picks up a rock to throw at something and that rock turns out to be mostly gold, or he trips over a ledge and finds himself sitting astride the Mother Lode.
This whole shooting match of a thing started because I was a curious man. There I was, dusting my tail down a south-going trail with no troubles. A time or two I cut Indian sign, but I fought shy of them.
Back in my army days I heard folks tell of what a bad time the Indians were getting, and some of them, like the Cherokee, who settled down to farming and business, did get a raw deal; but most Indians would ride a hundred miles any time to find a good fight, or a chance to steal horses or take a scalp.
When the war ended I joined up to fight the Sioux and Cheyenne in Dakota after the Little Crow massacre in Minnesota. The Sioux had moved off to the west so we chased them, and a couple of times we caught them … or they caught us. Down Texas way I’d had trouble with the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapahoe, and even the Apache, so I had respect for Indians.
It was a slow-riding time. Of a morning the air was brisk and chill with a hint of frost in the higher altitudes, but the days were warm and lazy, and by night the stars were brighter than a body would believe.
There’s no grander thing than to ride wild country with time on your hands, so I walked my horses down the backbone of the Rockies, through the Tetons and south to South Pass and on to Brown’s Hole. Following long grass slopes among the aspen groves, camping in flowered meadows beside chuckling streams, killing only when I needed grub, and listening then to the long echo of my rifle shot —believe me, I was having me a time.
Nothing warned me of trouble to come.
Thinking of Orrin’s mellow Welsh voice a-sing-ing, I came fresh to hear my own voice, so I took a swallow from my canteen and tipping my head back, I gave out with song.
It was “Brennan on the Moor,” about an Irish highwayman, a song I dearly loved to hear Orrin sing.
I didn’t get far. A man who plans to sing while he’s riding had better reach an understanding with his horse. He should have him a good voice, or a horse with no ear for music.
When my voice lifted in song I felt that cayuse bunch his muscles, so I broke off short.
That appaloosa and me had investigated the capabilities of each other the first couple of times I got up in the saddle, and I proved to him that I could ride. That horse knew a thing or two about bucking and pitching, and I had no notion of proving myself again on a rocky mountainside.
And then we came upon the ghost of a trail.
II
It was a sliver of white quartz thrust into a crack in a wall of red sandstone.
Riding wild country, a man who wants to keep his hair will be wary for anything out of the ordinary. He learns to notice the bent-down grass, the broken twig, the muddied water of a stream.
Nature has a way that is simple, direct, and familiar. Animals accept nature pretty much as they find it. Although they build lairs and nests for themselves they disturb their surroundings mighty little. Only the beaver, who wants to make his home in water, and so builds his dams, will try to alter nature. If anything is disturbed the chances are a man did it.
This was lonesome country, and that quartz had not come there by accident. It had to be put there by hand.
The last settlement I’d seen was South Pass City, far away to the north, and the last human had been a greasy trapper who was mostly hair and wore-out buckskins. He and his pack asses went by me like a pay wagon passing a tramp. They simply paid me no mind.
That was two weeks ago. Since then I’d seen neither men nor the tracks of men, although I’d passed up lots of game, including one old silver-tip grizzly that was scooping honey out of a hollow tree.
That bear was minding his business so I minded mine. We Sackett boys never killed anything we didn’t need to eat unless it was coming at us. A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
However, this quartz, being where it was, struck me as an interesting thing. If it was to mark a trail of some land there was no indication of that trail on the ground, and some kinds of soil will hold trail marks for years.
Prying that sliver of quartz from its crack, I gave it study. It seemed to have been there for years and years.
I put it back where I’d found it and unlimbered my field glasses. These were war booty, taken from the body of a Rebel colonel down near Vicksburg, he being in no shape to object. Sure enough, some distance off I saw another gleam of white in the face of a rock.
Homesickness had started me south, but it was plain old-fashioned curiosity that led me to follow that white-quartz trail.
No doubt about it, I’d stumbled upon a trail the like of which I’d never seen before, and whoever conceived the idea must have been mighty knowing, for it was unlikely to be noticed. Yet it could easily be followed for, even in the almost dark, those white fragments would catch the light.
For more than an hour I followed the strange trail up the mountainside, through the trees. The pines thinned out and I rode around groves of aspen, and soon I was close to timberline in the wildest, loneliest country a man was likely to see.
Above me were gray granite shoulders of bare rock, streaked with occasional snow. There were stunted trees, more often than not lightning-blasted and dead, and many fallen ones. The air was so fresh it was like drinking cold water to breathe it, and there was a touch of chill. It was very clear, and a body could see for miles.