Turning toward Tyrel’s wife, a lovely, dark-eyed, dark-haired girl who looked like a princess out of a book. I said, “Ma’am, I’m William Tell Sackett, and you’ll be Drusilla, my brother’s wife.”
She put her hands on mine and stood on tiptoe and kissed me, and my face colored up and I went hot clean to my boots. Tyrel laughed, and then he looked past me into the darkness and said, “It’s all right, Cap. This is my brother Tell”
He came in out of the darkness then, a thin old man with cold gray eyes and a gray mustache above a hard mouth. There was no give to this man, I figured. Had I been a wrong one I would have been killed.
We shook hands and neither of us said anything. Cap was not a talkative man, and I am only at times.
Ma turned her head. “Juana, come get my son his supper.”
I couldn’t believe it—Ma with household help. Long as I could recall, nobody had done for us boys but Ma herself, working early and late and never complaining.
Juana was a Mexican-Indian girl and she brought the food in fancy plates. I looked at it and commenced to feel mighty uncomfortable. I’d not eaten a meal in the presence of a woman for a long time, and was embarrassed and worried. I’d no idea how to eat proper. In a trail camp a body eats because he’s hungry and doesn’t think much of the way he does it.
“If it’s all the same to you,” I said, “I’ll go outside. Under a roof like this I’m mighty skittish.”
Brasilia took my sleeve and led me to the chair. “You sit down, Tell. And don’t you worry. We want you to eat with us and we want you to tell us what you’ve been doing.”
First I thought of that gold.
I went out and fetched it. Putting my saddlebags down on the table, I took out a chunk of the gold, still grainy with quartz fragments, but gold.
It shook them. Nothing, I’d figured, would ever shake Tyrel, but this did.
While they looked at the gold I went to the kitchen and washed my hands in a big basin and dried them on a white towel.
Everything was spotless and clean. The floor was like the deck of a steamboat I traveled on one time on the Mississippi. It was the kind of living I’d always wanted for Ma, but I’d had no hand in this. Orrin and Tyrel had done it.
While I ate, I told them about the gold. I’d taken a big slab of bread and buttered it liberal, and I ate it in two bites, while talking and drinking coffee. First real butter I’d tasted in more than a year, and the first real coffee in longer than that.
Through the open door into the parlor I could see furniture made of some dark wood, and shelves with books. While they talked, I got up and went in there, taking the lamp along. I squatted on my heels to look at the books, fair hungering for them. I taken one down and turned the leaves real slow, careful not to dirty them, and tested the weight of the book in my hand. A book as heavy as one of these, I figured, must make a lot of sense.
I rested a finger on a line of print and tried to get the way of it, but there were words I’d never seen before. Back to home we’d had no books but an almanac and the Bible.
There was a book there by a man named Blackstone, seemed to be about the law, and several others. I felt a longing in me to read them all, to know them, to have them always at my hand. I looked through book after book, and sometimes I would find a word I could recognize, or even a sentence I could make out.
Such words would catch my eye like a deer taking off into the woods or the sudden lift of a gun barrel in the sun. One place I found something I puzzled out, and I do not know why it was this I chose. It was from Blackstone.
“. . . that the whole should protect all its parts, and that every part should pay obedience to the will of the whole; or, in other words, that the community should guard the rights of each individual member, and that (in return for this protection) each individual should submit to the laws of the community; without which submission of all it was impossible that protection could be extended to any.”
It took me a spell, working that out in my mind, to get the sense of it. Yet somehow it stayed with me, and in the days to come I thought it over a good bit.
Returning the books to their places, I stood up, and I looked around very carefully. This was Ma’s home, and it was Tyrel’s and Orrin’s. It was not mine. They had earned it with their hands and with their knowing ways, and they had given this place to Ma.
Tyrel was no longer the lean, hungry mountain boy. He stood tall now, and carried himself very straight and with a kind of style. He wore a black broadcloth coat and a white shirt like a man born to them and, come to think of it, he was even better-looking than Orrin.
I stared at myself in the mirror. No getting around it, I was a homely man. Over-tall and mighty little meat, with a big-boned face like a wedge. There was an old scar on my cheekbone from a cutting scrape in New Orleans. My shoulders were heavy with muscle, but a mite stooped. In my wore-out army shirt and cow-country jeans I didn’t come to much.
My brothers were younger than me, and probably brighter. Hands and a strong back were all I had. I could move almost anything I put a hand to, and I could ride and rope, but what was that?
My mind turned back to that passage in the book. There was the kind of rule for men to live by. I’d no idea such things were written down in books.
Orrin had come while I was inside, and he’d taken his gee-tar and was singing. He sang “Black, Black, Black,” “Barb’ry Alien,” and “The Golden Vanity.”
It was like old times . . . only it wasn’t old times and the boys had left me far, far behind. Twenty-eight years old in a few days—with years of brute hard living behind me—but if Orrin and Tyrel could do it, I was going to try.
Come daylight, I was going to shape my way for the mountains, for the high far valley, and the stream. First I must sell my gold and buy an outfit. Then I would light out. And it was best I go soon, for the Bigelows might come hunting me. Turned out less simple than that.
Las Vegas was the nearest place I could get the land of outfit I wanted. We hitched up, Tyrel and me, and we drove down to Las Vegas with Cap riding horseback along with us. That old coot was a man to ride the river with, believe me.
“Wherever you go,” Cap told me, “if you show that gold you’ll empty the town. They’ll foller you . . . they’ll track you down, and if they get a chance, they’ll kill you. That’s the strike of a lifetime.”
Riding to Las Vegas I got an idea. Somewhere on that stream that ran down from the mountains I would stake a claim, and folks would think the gold came from that claim and never look for the other.
“You do that,” Cap’s old eyes twinkled a mite, “and I’ll give you a name for it. You can call it the Red Herring.”
When I showed my gold in the bank at Las Vegas the man behind the wicket turned a little pale around the eyes, and I knew what Cap Rountree had said was truth. If ever there was greed in a man’s eyes, it was in his. “Where did you get this gold?” he demanded.
“Mister,” I said, “if you want to buy it, quote me a price. Otherwise I’ll go elsewhere.” He was a tall, thin man with sharp gray eyes that seemed to have only a black speck for a pupil. He had a thin face and a carefully trimmed mustache.
He touched his tongue to his lips and lifted those eyes to me. “It might be st——”
When he saw the look in my eyes he stopped, and just at that moment, Tyrel and Orrin came in. Orrin had come down earlier than we had for some business. They walked over. “Is anything wrong, Tell?” “Not yet,” I said.