“He knew the story would be told, and he wanted them to know they could be seen a long time before they reached the house, and that an attacker could be fired upon from any place within the house.”
“But you’ve so much furniture!” Pennywell exclaimed. “How ever did you get it out here?”
“Talon made some of it. Like I said, he was handy. The rest of it we brought out. Talon had trapped for fur, and he kept on trapping. He found some gold here and yon in the mountain streams, and he ordered what he had a mind to. We brought us a whole wagon train of things out from the east, for Talon liked to live well, and that’s the sort of thing you break into mighty easy.”
Sittin’ back in that big hidebound chair I could see behind her words. Seeing the Indians filtering back from their hunt, riding through an area they probably only saw race or twice a year, anyway, to find this great house reared up, staring out over the plains with the great, empty eyes of its windows.
To them it must have been a kind of magic. It had been built quickly. Talon was a driving man, by all accounts, and the mountain men he had helping him were not the kind to stay in one place for long. How many he had to help Em never said, but there were four who had lived in a cabin on the place while Talon rode east to find his bride. There might have been more.
Probably Talon and Sackett had framed much of the structure before their help arrived, and certainly the plan I must have been put together in his mind whilst working on the rivers or building for other men.
Sitting there, eyes half closed, listening to her tell it in that old Tennessee mountain tone of hers, I found myself getting restless again. Nobody had the right to take from them what they had built.
Me, I was never likely to build anything. A no-account drifter like me leaves no more mark behind him than you leave a hole in the water when you pull your finger out. Every man could leave something, or should. Well, maybe it wasn’t in me to build much, but I surely could keep the work of other men from being destroyed.
I was going to ride into Siwash and open the place up. I was going in there and drive Len Spivey and his kind clear out of the country.
I’d go tonight.
10
Now I never laid claim to having no corner on brains, and most of what I picked up in the way of knowledge was knocked into my head one way or the other. What I’ve learned, or most of it, has been concerned with just staying alive.
Guns, horses, hitches, and half-nelson’s are more in line with my thinking, but here and there just plain looking and seeing what you look at has taught me something. Also, whilst never much of a hand to go to the mat with a book, I’m a good listener.
Folks who have lived the cornered sort of life most scholars, teachers, and storekeepers live seldom realize what they’ve missed in the way of conversation. Some of the best talk and the wisest talk I’ve ever heard was around campfires, in saloons, bunkhouses, and the like. The idea that all the knowledge of the world is bound up in schools and schoolteachers is a mistaken one.
There have been a lot of men who just didn’t give a damn about tending store or keeping school but who just cut loose their moorings and went adrift.
Wandering men see a lot, and all knowledge is a matter of comparison and the deductions made from it. Moreover, in any crowd of drifters you’ll find men of the finest scholastic education as well as men who have just seen a lot and have been putting two and two together.
One time or another I’ve heard a lot of campfire talk about towns and how they came to be, and a good many sprang up from river crossings. Folks like to camp close to streams for the sake of water, but crossing a big river was quite an operation, so they’d go into camp after they’d crossed over. That is, the smart ones would. Those who went into camp to cross over in the morning often found the water so high come morning they were stuck for several days.
Rome, London, Paris … all of them sprang from river crossings, and usually there was some bright gent around who was charging toll to cross over. Any time you find a lot of people who have to have something or do something you’ll also find somebody there charging them for doing it.
When people stop at a stream crossing they camp and look around, and you can bet somebody has set up store with things for them to want.
The town of Siwash came to be in just that way. The stream was no great shakes, but there was a good flowing spring, and a man came in, stopped his travels, and began raising sheep. A few months later a man came along headed for the Colorado gold fields, he seen that spring and knowing that water was sometimes more precious than gold, waited until the sheepman’s back was turned and then split his skull with an ax, buried him deep, and planted a crop of corn and melons over the ground where he buried the sheepman.
It was the age-old conflict between the farmer and the stock raiser that probably began when Cain killed Abel. Cain was not only the first farmer according to the Good Book, but he built the first city mentioned in the Bible, and this farmer, seeing that lots of people stopped at his spring for fresh water, set up store and began selling vegetables and corn.
He would probably have done all right in the fullness of time but for a gambler with rheumatism in his hands. The gambler rode into town and stopped to watch the business. He listened to the rustle of the cottonwood leaves and the lovely sound of flowing water from the spring, and that night he brought out a greasy deck of cards. Rheumatism in the hands was spelling his finish as a gambler, but those hands still were good enough to deal three queens to Cain.
Cain hadn’t seen a woman for a long time so when those three queens showed up together he overrated their value, and when the rheumatic gambler showed his four aces Cain discovered he was no longer a farmer and keeper of a store but a wanderer. The gambler wanted him out of there so he made him a present of his horse … and perhaps with a warning from a friendly ghost, he didn’t turn his back when Cain picked up his ax. So Cain rode out into the world again, and the gambler became a storekeeper and a tiller of the fields.
He called the place Siwash. Nobody knew why, including him. The name came to him, and he used it. By that tune he was selling supplies to the MT ranch, and to several others in the vicinity.
Siwash wasn’t a big town. A man with good legs could walk all around it in five minutes, but you could have done the same thing with the first settlement of Troy, which also was built around a spring and on a trade route.
The gambler with the rheumatic hands was still there, and his hands were in even worse shape. The hands that could no longer deal one off the bottom or build up a bottom stock couldn’t handle a gun either, so the oldest citizen in Siwash was also the most peaceful.
When Jake Planner showed up and began quietly taking over the gambler considered shooting him until he saw what happened to several others with the same idea. So he smiled at Jake’s stories and kept a gun handy just in case.
Nevertheless, he harbored no good wishes for Planner; he wished the man out of there, and not merely because he wanted to be top dog. The gambler’s name was Con Wellington, and his hands being what they were he wanted peace. It took no wise man to see that there would never be peace where Jake Planner was. So Con Wellington waited, listened, and bided his time, and as all things eventually came to him, he knew Planner had been stopped cold by Emily Talon and Logan Sackett.
Logan was no stranger. They’d never been friends, had scarcely met, in fact. Logan had once sat in a poker game with Wellington, whose hands were not rheumatic at the time, but Con knew a good deal about Logan Sackett and he dealt his cards with extreme care.