“You shouldn’t say ‘ain’t.’ The word is ‘isn’t’.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I had no schooling, except what ma could give me, and I never learned to talk proper.”
“Surely you can read and write?”
“No, ma’am, I surely can’t.”
“Why, that’s awful! Everybody should be able to read. I don’t know what I would have done these past months if I could not read. I believe I should have gone insane.”
When the saddle was rigged, I helped her up. “Ma’am, I better warn you. There’s trouble acoming, so’s you’d better have it in mind. It may not be a good thing, me helping you this way. You may get into worse trouble.”
We started off, and I looked over my shoulder at her. “Somebody is following after me. I figure it’s them Cooper outlaws.”
Worst of it was, I had lost time, and here it was coming up to night, and me with a strange girl on my hands. Pa told me women had devious ways of getting to a man, but I never figured one would set out alongside a lonely trail thataway. Especially one as pretty as she was.
Moreover, she was a lady. A body could see she was quality, and she rode there beside me, chin lifted and proud like she was riding the finest thoroughbred at a county fair, or whatever.
“You running from something, ma’am? Not to be disrespectful, ma’am, but out in the desert thisaway it ain’t – isn’t – just the place a body would expect to find a lady as pretty as you.”
“Thank you.” Her chin lifted a mite higher. “Yes, I am running away. I am leaving my husband. He is a thoughtless, inconsiderate brute, and he is an Army officer at Fort Whipple.”
“He will be mighty sorry to lose you, ma’am. This here is a lonesome country. I don’t carry envy for those soldier boys out here, I surely don’t.”
“Well! It certainly is not a place to bring an officer’s bride. I’ll declare! How could he think I could live in such a place? With a dirt floor, and all?”
“What did he say when you left?”
“He doesn’t know it yet. I had been to Ehrenberg, and when we started back, I just couldn’t stand the thought, so when no one was looking, I got out of the Army ambulance I was riding in. I am going to catch the steamer at Hardyville and go home.”
When I looked to our back trail, no dust hung in the air, and I knew we were in trouble. If it had been soldiers looking for this girl, they would not have stopped so sudden-like, and it looked to me like they had headed us and laid a trap, so I swung up a draw, heading north instead of west, and slow to raise no dust.
It was a sandy wash, but a thin trail skirted the edge, made by deer or such-like and we held to it. When we had been riding for an hour, I saw dust in the air, hanging up there in a fair cloud about where I had come up to this lady. Again I turned at right angles, heading back the way I had come. Off to the north and west there was a square-topped mesa that was only a part of a long, comb-like range.
“We are followed, ma’am,” I said, “and those Coopers are mighty thoughtless folks. I got to keep you out of their hands. First off, we’ll run. If that, doesn’t work, we’ll talk or we’ll fight, leaving it up to them. You hold with me, ma’am.”
“They wouldn’t bother me,” she said. “I am the wife of an Army officer.”
“Most Western men are careful of womenfolk,” I agreed, “but don’t set no truck by being an officer’s wife. The Coopers murdered two Army officers not a week ago. Murdered them, ma’am. They just don’t care a mite who you may be. And a woman like you – they don’t often see a woman pretty as you.”
She rode up closer to me. “I am afraid I didn’t realize.”
“No, ma’am, most folks don’t” I said.
It was still the best part of two days to Hardyville, and nothing much there when we arrived. It was head of navigation on the Colorado, and last I’d seen there were only three or four buildings there, and about that many folks.
Nobody seemed to know how many Coopers there were, but the guesses ran all the way from five to nine. They were said to be renegades from down in the Cherokee nation and mighty mean.
We held to low ground, keeping off skylines, finding a saddle here and there where we could cross over ridges without topping out where we could be seen. It was darkening by then, with long shadows reaching out, and when we came up the eastern flank of that mesa I’d headed for, we rode in deep shadow.
When we found a way around the butte, we took it, and the western slope was all red from the setting sun, and mighty pretty. The wind blew cool there, but I’d found what I was hunting – a place to hole up for the night.
A man hunting a night camp with somebody trailing him has to have things in mind. He wants a place he can get into and out of without sky-lining himself or showing up plain, and he also wants a place where he can build a fire that cannot be seen, and something to spread out the smoke. And here it was, and by the look of it many an Indian had seen the worth of it before this time.
The falloff from the mesa rim made a steep slope that fell away for maybe five hundred feet. A man could ride a horse down that slope, but it would be sliding half the time on its rump. The wall of the mesa raised up sheer for some three hundred feet, but there at the foot of that cliff and atop the slope was a hollow behind some rocks and brush.
Maybe it was a half-acre of ground with grass in the bottom and some scraggly cedars at one end. We rode down into that hollow, and I reached up and handed down the lady.
“Ma’am, we’ll spend the night here. Talk low and don’t let any metal strike metal or start any rock sliding.”
“Are they that close?”
“I don’t rightly know, ma’am, but we should hope for the best and expect the worst. Pa said that was the way to figure.”
When the saddles were off, I climbed out on one of those big rock slabs to study the country. You’ve got to see country in more than one light to get the lay of it. Shadows tell a lot, and the clear air of early morning or late evening will show up things that are sun-blurred by day. A man scouting country had best size it up of an evening, for shadows will tell him where low ground is, and he can spot the likely passes if only to avoid them.
Pa, who trapped with Bridger and Carson, never lost a chance of teaching us boys how to judge terrain, and the best time was at sundown or sunup with the shadows falling toward you.
When I finished my study, I came down off the rock and cleared a spot of needles and leaves under one of those cedars that sort of arched out toward us. My fire was about the size you could hold in your two hands, for the smaller the fire, the less smoke, and such a fire will heat up just as well if a man wants to cook. And rising up through the branches thataway the smoke would be thinned out so much it could not be seen.
“I’m from Tennessee,” I said to her, “and my name is Tell Sackett.”
“Oh – I am Christine Mallory, and I was born in Delaware.”
“Howdy, Mrs. Mallory. Mostly, the Delawares a man meets out here are Indians. Good trackers and good fighting men.”
When I dug out what grub I had, I was ashamed it was so little. It was a mite Squires staked me to before I taken out. The coffee was mostly ground bean and chicory, and all else I had was jerked venison and cold flour.
When the coffee was ready I filled my cup and passed it to her. “Mrs. Mallory, this isn’t what you have been used to, but it’s all we’ve got.”
She tasted it, and if she hadn’t been a lady I think she would have spit, but she swallowed it, and then drank some more. “It’s hot,” she said, and smiled at me, and I grinned back at her. Truth to tell, that was about all a body could say for it.
“You’d better try some of this jerked venison,” I said. “If you hold it in your mouth awhile before you begin to chew, it tastes mighty wholesome. All else I’ve got is cold flour.”