“What?”
“Cold flour – it’s a borrowed thing, from the Indians. Only what I have here is white-man style. It’s parched corn ground up and mixed with a mite of sugar and cinnamon. You can mix it with water and drink it, and a man can go for miles on it. Mighty nourishing too. Pa was in Montana one time and traveled two weeks on a couple of dry quarts of it.”
Last time I got up to scout the country around I caught the gleam of a far-off campfire.
Standing there looking across country and watching the stars come out, I thought of that girl and wondered if I would ever have me a woman like that one, and it wasn’t likely. We Sacketts are Welsh, and a proud people, but we never had much in the way of goods. Somehow the Lord’s wealth never seemed to gather to us; all we ever had was ourselves and our strength and a will to walk the earth with honesty and pride.
But this girl was running away, and it didn’t seem right. She was huddled to the fire, wrapped in one of my blankets when I came down to the fire. Gathering cedar boughs and grass, I made her a bed to one side, but close to the fire.
“The fire smells good,” she said.
“That’s cedar,” I said, “and some creosote brush. Some folks don’t like the smell of creosote. Those Spanish men call it hediondilla, which means little stinker. Some of the Indians use it for rheumatism.”
Nobody said anything for a while, and then I said, “Creosote-brush fires flavor beans – the best ever. You try them sometime, and no beans ever taste the same after.”
The fire crackled, and I added a few small, dry sticks and then said, “It ain’t right, leaving him thisaway. He’s likely worried to death.”
She looked across the fire at me, all stiff and perky. “That is none of your business!”
“Mrs. Mallory, when you saddled yourself on me, you made it my business. Girl who marries a soldier ought to think to live a soldier’s life. Strikes me you’ve no nerve, ma’am, you cut and run because of dirt floors. I’d figure if a girl loved a man it wouldn’t make her no mind. You’re spoiled, ma’am. You surely are.”
She got up, standing real stiff, coming the high and mighty on me. “If you do not want me here, I will go.”
“No, you won’t. First off, you haven’t an idea where you are or which way to go to get there. You’d die of thirst, if that lion didn’t get you.”
“Lion?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I wasn’t exactly lying, because somewhere in Arizona there was sure to be a lion prowling. “There’s snakes, too, and at night you can’t see them until they get stepped on.”
She stood there looking unsure of herself, and I kept on with what I had to say. “Woman needs a man out here – needs him bad. But a man needs a woman too. How do you think that man of yours feels now? His wife has shamed him before others, taking on like a girl-baby, running off.”
She sat down by the fire, but she looked at me with a chilly expression. “I will thank you to take me to Hardyville. I did not mean to ‘saddle’ myself on you, as you put it. I will gladly pay you for your trouble.”
“Ain’t that much money.”
“Don’t say ‘ain’t’!” She snapped her eyes at me.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, “but you better get you some shut-eye. We got to ride fifty miles tomorrow, and I can’t be bothered with any tired female. You sit up on that horse tomorrow or I’ll dump you in the desert.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“Yes, ma’am, I surely would. And leave you right there, and all your caterwauling wouldn’t do you a mite of good. You get some sleep. Come daylight we’re taking out of here faster than a scared owl.”
Taking up my rifle I went out to scout the country, and setting up there on that rock slab I done my looking and listening. That fire was still aburning, away off yonder, like a star fallen out of the sky.
When I came back, she was lying on the bed I’d made, wrapped in a blanket, already asleep. Seen like that with the firelight on her face she looked like a little girl.
It was way shy of first light when I opened my eyes, and it’d taken me only a minute or two to throw the saddles on those broncs. Then I fixed that pack saddle for her to ride. My outfit was skimpy, so it wasn’t much extra weight, carrying her.
When I had coffee going, I stirred her awake with a touch on the shoulder, and her eyes flared open and she was like to scream when she saw me, not that I’d blame her. In my sock feet I stand six-three, and I run to shoulders and hands, with high cheekbones and a wedge face that sun had made dark as any Indian. With no shave and little sleep I must have looked a frightening thing.
“You better eat a little,” I said. “You got five minutes.”
We rode out of there with the stars still in the sky, and I was pleasant over seeing no fire over yonder where it had been the night before.
It was just shy of noon, with the sun hot in the sky, when we crossed a low saddle and started out across a plain dotted with Joshua trees – named by the Mormons who thought they looked like Joshua lifting his arms to Heaven.
We came down across that country, and there had been no dust in the sky all morning, but of a sudden four men rode up out of a draw, and it was the Coopers. Their description had been talked around enough.
“Howdy, Coopers! You hunting something?”
They looked at Christine Mallory and then at me. “We’re looking for you,” one said, “and that gold, but we’ll take the lady, too, sort of a bonus-like.”
Like I said, when you’ve quit running, you can talk or you can fight, and times like this I run long on talk.
“You’ll take nothing,” I said. “You are talking to Tell Sackett – William Tell Sackett, to be exact, as my pa favored William Tell in his thinking. We Sacketts hail from the Cumberland Gap in Tennessee, and pa always taught us never to give up nothing without a fight. Specially money or a woman.
“Now,” I continued on before they could interrupt, “back to home, folks used to say I wasn’t much for fiddling or singing, and my feet was too big for dancing, but along come fighting time, I’d be around.
“Couple of you boys are wearing brass buttons. I figure a forty-four slug would drive one of those buttons so deep into your belly a doc would have to get him a search warrant to find it.”
My horse was stepping around kind of un-easy-like, and I was making a show of holding him in.
“Anyway,” I said, “this here is General James Whitfield Mallory’s wife, and if you so much as lay a hand to her, this territory wouldn’t be big enough to hold you. He’s the kind to turn out the whole frontier Army just to hunt you.”
My horse gave a quick sidestep about then, and when he swung his left side to them, I used the moment to fetch out my gun, and when the roan stopped sidestepping, I had that big Colt looking at them.
Pa, he set me to practicing getting a gun out as soon as the end of my holster quit cutting a furrow in the ground when I walked. Pa said to me, “Son, you ever need that gun, you’ll need it in your fist, not in no holster.”
They were surprised when they saw that gun staring them down, and this George Cooper was mad clean through. “That ain’t going to cut no ice,” he said. “We want you, we’ll take you.”
“One thing about this country,” I said, “a man’s got a right to his opinion. Case like this here, if you’re wrong, you don’t get a chance to try it over. Any time you want to give it a try,” I said, “you just unlimber and have at it.”
Nobody had anything to say, none of those Coopers looking anything but mad right about then, so I kept on, figuring when we were talking we weren’t fighting.
“I got me a bet, Coopers; I got me a bet says I can kill three of you before you clear leather – and that last man better make it a quick shot or I’ll make it four.”
“You talk a good fight,” George Cooper said.
“You can call my hand. You got the right. One thing I promise, if I don’t kill you dead with my first shots, I’ll leave you lay for the buzzards and the sun.”