We grew up on a sidehill farm in the mountains, fourteen miles from a crossroads store and twenty miles from a town – or what passed as such. We never had much, but there was always meat on the table. Galloway and me, we shot most of our eatin’ from the time I was six and him five, and many a time we wouldn’t have eaten at all if we couldn’t shoot.
Ma, she was a flatland schoolma’am until she up and married Pa and came to live in the mountains, and when we were growing up she tried to teach us how to talk proper. We both came to writing and figuring easy enough, but we talked like the boys around us. Although when it came right down to it, both of us could talk a mite of language, Galloway more than me.
Mostly Ma was teaching us history. In the South in those days everybody read Sir Walter Scott, and we grew up on Ivanhoe and the like. She had a sight of other books, maybe twenty all told, and one time or another we read most of them. After Ma died, me and Galloway batched it alone until we went west.
Galloway and me were Injun enough to leave mighty little trail behind us. We held to high country when possible, and we fought shy of traveled roads. Nor did we head for Independence, which was what might have been expected.
We cut across country, leaving the Kentucky border behind, and along Scaggs’ Creek to Barren River, but just before the Barren joined the Green we cut back, west by a mite south, for Smithland, where the Cumberland joined the Ohio. It did me good to ride along Scaggs’ Creek, because the Scaggs it was named for had been a Long Hunter in the same outfit with one of the first of my family to come over the mountains.
We bought our meals from farms along the way, or fixed our own. We crossed the Mississippi a few miles south of St. Louis.
No horses could have been better than those we had. They were fast walkers, good travelers, and always ready for a burst of speed when called upon.
Judith was quiet. Her eyes got bigger and rounder, it seemed to me, and she watched our back trail. She was quick to do what she ought and never complained, which should have been a warning. When she did talk it was to Galloway. To me she never said aye, yes, or no.
“What is it like out there?” she asked him.
“Colorado? It’s a pure and lovely land beyond the buffalo grass where the mountains r’ar up to the sky. Snow on ’em the year ’round, and the mountains yonder make our Tennessee hills look like dirt thrown up by a gopher.
“It’s a far, wide land with the long grass rippling in the wind like a sea with the sun upon it. A body can ride for weeks and see nothing but prairie and sky … unless it’s wild horses or buffalo.”
“Are the women pretty?”
“Women? Ma’am, out in that country a body won’t see a woman in months, less it’s some old squaw or an oldish white woman … or maybe a dancing girl in some saloon. Mostly a man just thinks about women, and they all get to look mighty fine after a while. A body forgets how mean and contrary they can be, and he just thinks of them as if they were angels or something.”
We saw no sign of Black Fetchen nor any of his lot, yet I’d a notion they were closing in behind us. He didn’t look like a man to be beaten, and we had stood him up in his own street, making him lose face where folks would tell of it, and we had taken his girl and the horses he wanted.
There was more to it than that, but we did not know it until later.
From time to time Judith talked some to Galloway, and we heard about her pa and his place in Colorado. Seems he’d left the horse-trading for mustanging, and then drifted west and found himself a ranch in the wildest kind of country. He started breeding horses, but kept on with the mustanging. Judith he’d sent back to be with his family and get some education. Only now he wanted her out there with him.
Now and again some of the family went west and often they drove horses back from his ranch to trade through the South. But now he wanted his daughter, and the stock she would bring with her.
Back of it all there was a thread of something that worried me. Sizing it up, I couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound just right, but there it was. Call it a hunch if you like, but I had a feeling there was something wrong in Colorado. Galloway maybe felt the same, but he didn’t speak of it any more than me.
We camped out on the prairie. It was Indian country, only most of the Indians were quiet about that time. Farmers were moving out on the land, but there were still too many loose riders, outlaws from down in the Nation, and others no better than they should be. This was a stretch of country I never did cotton to, this area between the Mississippi and the real West. It was in these parts that the thieves and outlaws got together.
Not that Galloway or me was worried. We figured to handle most kinds of trouble. Only thing was, we had us a girl to care for … one who would grab hold of a horse any time she saw a chance and head for home … and Black Fetchen.
One night we camped on the Kansas prairie with a moon rising over the far edge of the world and stars a-plenty. We could hear the sound of the wind in the grass and stirring leaves of the cottonwoods under which we had camped. It was a corner maybe half an acre in extent, at a place where a stream curled around a big boulder. There was a flat place behind that boulder where we shaped our camp; here there was a fallen tree, and firewood from dead limbs.
We built up a small fire, and after we’d eaten our beef and beans we sat about and sang a few of the old songs, the mountain songs, some of them reaching back to the time when our folks came across the water from Wales.
Judith was singing, too, and a clear, fine voice she had, better than either of us. We liked to sing, but weren’t much account.
The horses moved in close, liking the fire and the voices. It was a mighty fine evening. After Judith turned in, Galloway did likewise. I had the first watch. Taking up my rifle, I prowled around outside the trees of the small woods.
Second time around I pulled up short over on the west side. Something was moving out yonder in the dark, and I squatted down to listen, closer to the ground, to hear the rustle of the grass.
Something was coming slow … something hurt, by the sound of it. The sound was a slow, dragging movement, and a time or two I heard a faint groan. But I made no move, for I was trusting no such sound.
After a bit, I made him out, a crawling man, not many yards off. Carefully, I looked all around at the night, but I saw nothing.
I slipped back to camp. “Galloway,” I whispered “there’s a man out yonder, sounds to be hurt bad. I’m going to bring him in.”
“You go ahead. I’ll stand by.” If it was a trick, somebody would wish it wasn’t. I walked out there, spotted the man again, and spoke to him quiet-like, so’s my voice wouldn’t carry. “What’s the trouble, amigo?”
The crawling stopped, and for a moment there was silence. Then the voice came, low, conversational. “I’ve caught a bad one. Figured I glimpsed a fire.”
“You bein’ sought after?”
“Likely.”
Well, I went up to him then and picked him up and packed him into camp. He was a man of forty or so, with a long narrow face and a black mustache streaked with gray. He had caught a bad one through the body and he looked mighty peaked. The slug had gone on through, for he was holed on both sides. Whilst I set to, plugging him up, Galloway he moved out to keep an eye on the prairie.
Judith, she woke up and set to making some hot broth, and by the time I’d patched him up she was about ready with it. I figured he’d lost blood, so I mixed up some salt water and had him drink that. We had been doing that for lost blood for years back, and it seemed to help.