“But you shot Duckett?”
“Shot at him. From the sound I must have hit his rifle or a tree near him. I doubt if I did him any harm, but he came within an inch or less of nailing me. That man can shoot, an’ Lordy, is he quick!”
“Teach you to go gallivanting around in the middle of the night. Wait for them to come to you.”
“I’m a poor hand at waitin’. My style is to carry it to them, show them a fight has two sides.”
“Do you think this will do it?”
“Well,” I commented, “I’ve an idea they’ll think twice before they open a door. They know I’m huntin’ them, too, and that can be a worrisome thing.”
Two slow days went by while I worked around the place. One day I rode to the hills and shot an elk, bringing the meat down to the place. I also taken my iron out to the meadows, roped and branded a couple of yearlings.
No work had been done around there for some time and it would be a rustler’s dream to get back in there and find all that fine stock wearing no brands. After that I decided to carry an iron with me wherever I went on MT range.
Johannes Duckett didn’t shape up like the kind of man who would sit by and let me get away with shooting at him. I knew I’d be hearing from him, with or without Planner, and I also figured Duckett would go a-prowling for me. He was the kind who would be apt to shoot from anywhere, so I kept off the skyline, rode through the edge of the trees, kept myself out of range as well as I could when I’d no idea where the attack would come from or when.
Nonetheless I still had an idea of riding into Siwash and making myself known.
Em was on the lookout when she seen a rider coming. She turned to me. “Logan? What do you make of him?”
He was coming down the road at a walk, heading for the main gate. Through the glasses I could see he was riding a beat-up buckskin. He was a small-sized man with a narrow-brimmed hat, a speckled shirt and vest. Light glinted from his eyes so I reckoned him for glasses. He was wearing a six-shooter and he had him a rifle shoved down into a boot..
As he rode up to the gate he suddenly touched a spur to his buckskin and I’ll be damned if that horse didn’t just sail right over a six-bar gate that was all of five feet tall, and did it with no particular mind, sort of offhand and easy.
Em, she taken up her Sharps and that ol’ gun boomed as she put a bullet right into the dust ahead of him.
The rider he just taken off his hat, held it high, and waved it down in a low bow. But he kept comin’.
I hitched my Colt into a better position and walked out front. Nobody else was in sight, and I figured to be all ready for this man, whoever he was.
He came on up, walking his horse, and about fifty feet off he drew rein and looked at the house. For a long time he looked, then he dropped his eyes to me. One eye was covered with a kind of white film … I reckon he could only see from one.
“You’ll be Logan Sackett, I expect? I’ve come here to join you.”
“What for?”
The man did not smile. “The word is that you are about to be run off. Planner is recruiting fighters. I am Albani Fulbric, and my people have been fighting on the wrong side for a thousand years. I see no reason to change now.”
“Can you fight?”
“With any weapon … any one at all.”
“Well, it’s gettin’ on to supper time. Come in an’ set and we’ll talk it over.”
He was an odd man with an odd name, but somehow I liked the cut of him. At table he showed himself a fair hand at putting away grub, although in size he wasn’t more than two-thirds of me.
“Where’d you get a name like that?” I asked him.
“Names are how you look at ’em. My name is funny to you, yours is funny to me. Sackett—ever listen to the sound of that? Think on it, my friend.”
He reached for the beef. “Now you take my name. My folks, both sides of them, come over from Normandy with William the Conqueror. One of them was squire to Sir Hugh de Malebisse and the other rode with Robert de Brus.
“Neither one of them had anything but strong arms and the willingness to use them. One was an Albani, one a Fulbric, and you will find their names in the Doomsday Book. Bold men they were and we who follow their steps are proud to bring no shame to the names they left us.”
“They were knights?” Pennywell asked.
“They were not. They were simple men, smiths and me like, between wars, one of them settled in Yorkshire with Sir Hugh, and the other went off to Scotland, hard by. And one of the family later helped to put a Bruce on the throne of Scotland, although a lot of good it did either of them.”
I knew nothing of foreign wars or foreign parts, and the talk when not of horses and cattle or buffalo or guns was scarcely easy for me to follow, but there was a lilt to his voice like he was speaking of magic, and I liked to hear what he was saying. The names meant nothing to me, nothing at all.
“I’ve heard those names,” Em Talon said. “Talon spoke of them. His family came from France, and by all accounts a roistering lot they were, building ships and sailing them to foreign parts, and more often than not on voyages of piracy. It’s a wonder they weren’t hanged.”
“Are you a hand with cattle?” I asked him.
“I am that. I’ll handle a rope with any man, and my horse is good with cattle. I’ll earn my keep and whatever it is you’ll pay.
“That horse you see me riding has been hard used, but don’t look down upon him. He’s carried me into and out of much trouble, and time and again we’ve been to the wars. Let me put a loop over anything that walks, and that buckskin will hold it, whatever it is.
“In the saddle of that horse I’d not be afraid to rope a Texas cyclone, rope and hog-tie it, too. He’ll climb where it would put scare into a mountain goat, and one time when a man holed me with a Winchester slug, he carried me fifteen miles through the snow, then pawed on the stoop until folks came to the door to take me down.
“You can call me a dog if you will, sir, but you speak ill of my horse and I’ll put lead into you.”
“I’d never speak ill of any man’s horse,” I said sincerely. “I’ve ridden his kind, and we’ve a few fit to run with him right here on the Empty.”
If Albani was a fair hand at the table he was a better one in the field. We turned to and roped and branded fourteen head the following morning, cleaned out a waterhole where there’d been a slide, and checked out the grass on the upper meadows. He was a handy man with tools and not backward about using them, but I was wary. He’d not said much about himself beyond running off at the head about those old ancestors of his who came over … from where I wasn’t sure. I’d never heard of Normandy until Pennywell, who reads a lot of books, told me it was in France and that the Normans were originally called Northmen or Vikings, and they’d settled in there where the country looked good. Well, that made sense. Most of us who came west were wishful of the same thing.
Al—as we came to call him—was as good at working on fences, too, and we tightened up the wire where it was needed, replaced a few rotting posts, and branded more cattle in the next few days. He’d been working up Montana way and in the Dakotas and had first come west from Illinois, working on the railroad, building at first, then as a switchman.
It was the sort of story every man had to tell them days. Men moved often and turned their hand to almost anything, developing the knacks for doing things. Most men were handy with tools—their lives demanded it of them—and most men worked at a variety of jobs, usually heading toward a piece of land of their own. Some made it, some never did. In any bunkhouse you’d find men from a dozen states or territories, and men who had worked at dozens of jobs, doing whatever was needed to earn a living.