Louis L’Amour The Sacketts
When my roan topped out on the ridge, the first thing I saw was that girl. She was far off, but a man riding lonesome country gets so he can pick out anything strange to it, and this girl was standing up straight beside the trail like she was waiting for a stage. Trouble was, nothing but riders or freight wagons used that trail, and seldom.
With fifty pounds of gold riding with me and three days ahead of me, I was skittish of folks. Most times wild country is less trouble than people, no matter how rough the country. And no woman had a right to be standing out there in that empty desert-mountain country.
We Sacketts began carrying rifles as soon as we stood tall enough to keep both ends off the ground.
When I was fourteen I traveled from Cumberland Gap in Tennessee down to the Pine Log Mountains in Georgia, living on cougar meat and branch water, and I killed my own cougars.
Man-grown at fifteen, I hoofed it north and joined up with the Union and fought at Shiloh, and after our outfit was surrendered by a no-account colonel, I was among those exchanged to go north and fight the Sioux in Dakota.
At nineteen I saddled our roan and fetched it for the west to try my hand at gold-panning, but I wasn’t making out. Seems like everybody in camp was showing color but me, and I was swallowing my belt notch by notch for lack of eating when those four men came to my fire.
Worst of it was, I couldn’t offer them. There I was, booting up for a fresh day with my coffeepot on the fire so’s people wouldn’t know I hadn’t even coffee, but all there was in the pot was water. I dearly wanted to offer them, but I was shamed to admit I was fresh out of coffee – three days out, actually. And so hungry that my stomach thought my throat had been cut.
“Tell,” Squires suggested, “you’ve had no luck with mining, so nobody would suspect you of carrying gold. If you rode out of camp today, folks would take it for granted you had called it deep enough and quit. That way you could carry our gold to Hardyville and nobody the wiser.”
The four men facing me had taken out the most dust and, knowing about the Coopers, they were worried men. Three of them were family men and that gold meant schooling for their youngsters and homes for their wives and capital for themselves. They were poor, hard-working men, deserving what they had dug up.
Thing was, how to get it past the Coopers?
“We’ll give you one hundred dollars,” Hodge said, “if you make it through.”
With the best of luck it was a five-day ride, which figured out to twenty dollars a day. With such a grubstake I could take out for California or come back with a grubstake.
My belly was as empty as my prospect hole, and it didn’t seem like I had much choice. Coopers or no Coopers, it sized up like the fastest hundred dollars I would ever make. It was Bill Squires done it for me, as we’d talked friendly ever since I staked claim on the creek.
Jim Hodge, Willy Mander and Tom Padgett stood there waiting for me to speak up, and finally I said, “I’ll do it, of course, and glad of the chance.
Only, I am a stranger, and – ”
“Squires swears by you,” Padgett interrupted, “and even if we don’t know you very well, he’s known you and your family. If he says you are honest, that’s all there is to it.”
“And this is a chance to get you a stake,” Squires interrupted. “What can you lose?”
Well, the last two men who rode out of camp with gold were found dead alongside the trail, shot down like you’d shoot a steer; and one of them was Jack Walker, a man I’d known. Neither of them was carrying as much as I’d have.
“Take a pack horse,” Squires suggested, “load your gear.” He glanced around and lowered his voice, “It seems like somebody here in camp informs the Coopers, but nobody will know about this but us, and all of us have a stake in it.”
Later, when the others had gone, Squires said, “Hope you didn’t mind my saying I’d known your family. They were willing to trust you if I did, but I wanted them to feel better.”
So I packed up and rode off, and in my saddlebags there was fifty pounds of gold, worth around a thousand dollars a pound at the time, and in my pocket I’d a note signed by all four men that I was to have a hundred dollars when the gold was delivered. Never had I seen that much cash money, and since the war I’d not had even ten dollars at one time.
Now, that woman standing down there sized up like trouble aplenty. Pa, he always warned us boys to fight shy of women. “They’ll trouble you,” pa said. “Love ’em and leave ’em, that’s the way. Don’t you get tangled up with no female woman. They got more tricks they can do than a monkey on sixty feet of grapevine.”
“Don’t believe that, Tell,” ma would say. “You treat women right. You treat a woman like she was your sister, you hear?”
Pa, he would say, “There’s two kinds of women, Tell, good and bad, and believe me, a good woman can cause a man more trouble than a bad one. You fight shy of them.”
So I fought shy. Of mountain cats and bears, of muskrat and deer, even of horses and cows I knew a sight, but I wasn’t up on womenfolk. Orrin now – he was my brother – he was a fiddler and a singer, and fiddlers and singers have a way with women. At home when strange womenfolk showed up, I’d taken to the hills.
Looked to me like I was fair trapped this time, but I wasn’t about to turn and run. Any woman waiting in lonesome country was a woman in trouble. Only I begun to sweat. I’d never been close to no lone woman before.
Worst of it was, there was somebody on my trail. A man like me, riding somewhere, he doesn’t only watch the trail ahead, he looks back. Folks get lost because when they start back over a trail they find it looks a sight different facing the other way. When a man travels he should keep sizing up the country, stopping time to time to study his back trail so he recognizes the landmarks.
Looking back, I’d seen dust hanging in the air. And that dust stayed there. It had to be somebody tracking me down, and it could mean it was the Coopers.
Right then I’d much rather have tangled with the Coopers than faced up to that woman down there, but that no-account roan was taking me right to her.
Worst of it was, she was almighty pretty. There was a mite of sunburn on her cheekbones and nose, but despite that, she was a fine-looking girl.
“How do you do?” You’d of thought we were meeting on the streets of Nashville. “I wonder if you could give me a lift to Hardyville?”
My hatbrim was down over my eyes, and I sized up the country around, but there was no sign of a horse she might have ridden to this point, nor any sign of a cabin or camp.
“Why, I reckon so, ma’am.” I got down from the saddle, thinking if trouble came I might have to fetch that big Colt in a hurry. “My pack horse is packing light so I can rig that pack saddle so’s you can ride it sidesaddle.”
“I would be grateful,” she said.
First off, it shaped like a trap. Somebody knowing I had gold might have this woman working with them, for it troubled me to guess how she came here. There were a sight of tracks on the ground, but all seemed to be hers. And then I noticed a thin trail of smoke from behind a rock.
“You have a fire?”
“It was quite cold last night.”
When she caught my look, she smiled. “Yes, I was here all night.” She looked directly at me from those big blue eyes. “And the night before.”
“It ain’t a likely spot.”
She carried herself prim, but she was a bright, quick-to-see girl, and I cottoned to her. The clothes she wore were of fine, store-bought goods like some I’d seen folks wear in some of those northern cities I’d seen as a soldier. Where I came from it was homespun, or buckskin.
“I suppose you wonder what I am doing here?”
“Well, now.” I couldn’t help grinning. “It did come to my mind. Like I said, it ain’t a likely spot.”