Then I checked my guns again, and mounting up, I rode down off the mesa.
Now the chips were down. They would be hunting me, but I would be hunting them too, and there was no mercy in me. There was only the desire to hunt them down on their bloody trail, and give them a chance to try killing somebody who was not a woman alone.
There wasn’t much to Globe in those days, just a few shacks, cabins, and tents scattered along the bank of Pinal Creek. And there were three saloons. I rode up to the first one and swung down, and I saw folks a-looking at me.
Being taller than most, standing six foot three in my socks and somewhat more in boots, I’m accustomed to folks looking at me. But maybe this time there was something else.
In the saloon there were maybe seven or eight men, and I looked around at them. “I’ll buy a drink,” I said. “I’ll buy a drink for the house.”
Some of them hesitated, but not for long. A square-jawed man studied me a moment, took up his glass, and looked across it at me. “You aren’t celebrating, friend.”
“I’m hunting information. I’m looking for a cow outfit that had some hands working the Mogollon country a couple of weeks ago.”
Nobody said anything, and finally the man nest to me said, “What’s the trouble, mister?”
“It’s an outfit that has a couple of hands workin’ for them named Macon and Dancer.”
“You take my advice”-it was a stocky, swarthy-looking man who spoke-“you’ll fork that horse of yours and ride out of here.”
“I wasn’t asking for advice.”
The swarthy man grinned at me, but it wasn’t friendly. “Why, you damned fool! Macon is the saltiest man with a gun in this country.”
“You called me a damned fool.”
He put down his glass. “So?”
He was expecting me to reach for my gun, but I couldn’t trust my grip, not yet, anyway. So I hit him.
He was almost as tall as me and somewhat heavier – by twenty pounds, maybe. But that first punch counts for a lot, and I meant it to. My left fist smashed him in the teeth, and my right came around and clobbered him on the ear. That ear split and blood started to flow, and he was clawing for a gun, so I reached in and grabbed his belt, jerked him toward me, and then threw him back. He hit the wall with a thud, and when he started to come at me again I gave him a taste of my knuckles in the mouth again, and then both fists in the stomach. He folded up and went down, and I kicked his gun away.
“You talk to me again,” I said, “you call me mister.”
Then I walked back to the bar and took up my drink.
“That cow outfit,” the square-jawed man said, “why are you hunting them?”
The man I’d clobbered was slowly getting off the floor, so I shucked my gun. I couldn’t trust myself to draw fast, although I could do all right once it was out. So I just taken it out and held the gun on him and I said, “If you’re a friend of Macon’s, tell him he didn’t kill me the first time. And tell him the next time I’ll be looking right at him.”
The square-jawed man looked at me from cold, steady eyes. “Are you implying that Sonora Macon shot you in the back?”
With my left hand I removed my hat. They could all see the livid bullet scar, still fresh, with the hair shaved back by the Army surgeon. “I wouldn’t know him if I saw him, but he knew my back. He shot me off a cliff up on Buckhead Mesa.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“You can believe it.” I tossed off the rest of my drink and stepped back from the bar. “You can tell them, any of them you see, that I’m hunting them.
“They ran me ragged when I was hurt and unarmed, they ran me all over that country. But now I’ll be running them. You tell any man of that outfit they can fight or hunt a hole, but I’m coming for them.”
“You talk large, stranger.”
“Anyone that doubts me,” I said, “can come asking.”
“That outfit has forty men, forty very tough men. Forty good men.”
“Good men? Mister, one or more of those men murdered my wife, killed my mules, burned my wagon.”
“Killed your wife?”
Now there was quiet in the room. Men looked at me, glasses in their hands, all movement stilled by what I had said.
“I left my wife at my wagon and went scouting a way down off Buckhead. Somebody shot at me an hour or so later, then they hunted for my body. I heard them. I heard the names of Macon and Dancer.
“My wife was a good girl. She was strangled, mister, and whoever did it wears her marks on his face. There was blood and torn flesh under her fingernails.
“Then he killed my mules, burned my wagon and the mules, and tried to wipe out all trace of what he had done. He murdered my wife on the twenty-fifth of last month. Mister, there weren’t too many men in that part of the country at that time. So I’ll find them.”
There was a mutter of anger from the men in the room. The square-jawed man’s face was white and stiff, but he did not speak. He turned back to the bar. “I’ll have another drink,” he said thickly.
The bartender rested his hands on the bar. “Anybody who would murder a woman is a no-good skunk. I’ll lend a hand with the rope, mister.”
One of the men spoke up. “Who might you be, mister? We don’t know you.”
“I am Tell Sackett,” I said, “William Tell Sackett, of Tennessee, Colorado, and a lot of other places.”
“You related to the Mora gunfighter?”
“Brother. I taught him to shoot. Although,” I added, “he done all right when he taken it up.”
The man beside me finished his drink, turned away from the bar, and went outside.
“Who might he be?” somebody asked.
“Cattleman, I guess,” another answered. “He’s a stranger to me.”
Nobody said anything more for a while. Presently the bartender said, “You eaten tonight, mister? You set down over at the table, and I’ll fix you up.”
Suddenly I was awful tired. My strength was coming back, but that short fight had been too much, too soon. So I leathered my gun and walked over to the table and dropped into a chair.
The bartender brought me food and a pot of coffee, and I thanked him. I ate and drank, but all the while I was thinking of Ange, and away down inside me something burned like a cold fire.
It gnawed away at my insides until there was nothing else in me, nothing to think of, nothing to dream of . . . only the man I wanted to find, the man I wanted to kill.
Man … or men … There might have been more than one.
chapter six
When I’d eaten my fill and drunk my coffee I went outside and stood where the wind came down the draw. It was a wild night, with clouds racing down the long black sky, lighted weirdly by a hiding moon. I stood there alone on what passed for a street, and felt the loneliness and the pain tearing at me.
Ange! . . . Ange had died horribly and alone, attacked while waiting for me, and never a chance at life, for she had spent her years so much alone before I found her high in those Colorado mountains.
Ange, who was beautiful and tender and thoughtful, who could not bear to see nothing suffer, and who was always thinking of what she could do for me to make my life a happier thing. And little enough of happiness had come my way until Ange came.
Now she was gone, and the thought of it was almost too much for me.
Deep down within me an awful rage was burning. I banked the fires of it and waited, knowing my time would come. My horse turned his head and looked at me in a woe-begone manner, for the wind was cold and the night was late, so I went over to him and, taking my Winchester from the scabbard, I stepped into the saddle and walked him down the empty street where dry leaves blew, and the dust.
There was no livery stable in town, only a corral with a few horses standing, tails to the wind. Some boulders and the wall of the mountain made a partial break. So I stripped the leather from him and put it under a little shelter built for the purpose, and then I rubbed him all over with handfuls of grass and turned him into the corral, first standing by while he ate a bit of corn from the sack I carried. It was a small sack, but there was enough to give him the extra something he might need for a long stretch of hard going.