The man whose back was to me started to get up and turn and I pushed him into the fire. Then I taken a swing with my rifle and fetched the next one in the belly. He went down and I walked into that outfit and never gave them a chance to get set.
Like I said, I’m a big man, but that ain’t the important part. My shoulders and arms have beef on them from wrassling broncs and steers, from swinging an ax and rafting logs down the Mississippi, and I was feeling no mercy for an outfit that would tackle an old woman.
The one I’d shoved into the fire jumped out of it and turned, grabbing for his six-shooter. Well, if he wanted to play that way he could. I just pointed my rifle at him, which I held only in my right hand, and let him have the big one right through the third button on his shirt. If he ever figured to sew that particular button on again he was going to have a scrape it off his backbone … if he had any.
The man into whose lap I’d kicked the coffeepot had troubles enough. He was jumping around like mad and I could see I’d ruined his social life for some time to come. He’d been scalded real good and he wasn’t going to ride anywhere, not anywhere at all.
The other one was on his hands and knees, gasping and groaning. I pushed him over on his back with my boot and put the rifle in his face and looked down the barrel at him.
“You ever been to Wyoming?” I asked him. “Or Montana?”
He stared at me, his face a sickly yellow like his insides must have been.
“Well, when you can get on your feet, you start for one or the other, and you keep going. If I ever see you around again I ain’t going to like it.”
Taking up the three rifles I busted them over the nearest rock, then threw the rest of them into the fire along with the ammunition and their tent.
Then I sort of backed off into the night and went back to the house.
Aunt Em an’ Pennywell, they were on the porch watching the fire out there, and when I came up the steps I said, “You kep’ my supper warm, ma’am?”
“Yes, I did. Dish it up, Pennywell.”
When I sat down to table, Aunt Em she said nothing at all, but Pennywell was younger and almighty curious. “What happened out there? What did you do?”
“Like Samson,” I said, “I went among the Philistines and smote them, hip and thigh.” And after a good swallow of coffee, I grinned at her and said, “And one of them in the belly.”
4
The rain soaked up the ground and went on about its business, and the sun came out hot as roasting ears. When I looked out front there was nothing beyond the gate but a lot of distance. Planner’s boys had taken out, and I didn’t look for them to come back.
There was work to be done around the place. No Clinch Mountain Sackett was much account at fixin’ up. Our places yonder in the high-up hills always looked fit to fall apart, only they never done it. Still, it griped my innards to see such a fine place run down like it was. Besides, I was wishful to be handy if any of Planner’s outfit came back again.
After a day or two, and no trouble showing, I taken off to the meadows to find us some meat.
Each meadow was a mite higher than the last, and all told there was a thousand acres of good bottom land, the stream running from one to the other. There was a fair stand of grazing under the scattered trees that stretched back to the mountains from the edge of the meadows, stretching back to sheer walls that reminded me of the Hermosa Cliffs edging the Animas Valley near Durango.
Old Man Talon had known what he was about when he came to this place. He had water, grass and shade, hay and timber for the cutting. There were other, higher meadows, bordered with groves of aspen. He had what was needed, logs for building and shelter from the worst of the storms. Above all, he had a closed-in land where few cowhands were needed, and where he could cut hay on the meadows against the cold of winter.
Below the ranch lay thousands of acres of prairie completely dependent for water on his mountain land. That prairie would graze a lot of cattle, but all those vast acres were nothing but useless without water for stock. Who held the Empty held the range. No question about it.
At first I paid no mind to hunting. From time to time I glimpsed deer but passed them by to scout the country. Nowhere did I see any fresh sign of horse or man, and that was what I hunted, being doubtful of any ranch a man couldn’t get into.
There are few things men cannot do if they have a mind to, and I had a hunch Planner had been trying the easy way. Now he would have to come up with something else, and that was what we must be ready for. Meanwhile, riding and looking, I corraled myself into a patch of thinking.
Milo Talon was a far-riding man, and he’d be somewhere along the outlaw trail. He favored no country over another, but moved. He was a more slender man than me, lean and hard as seasoned timber, good with horse, rope, or gun, and a handsome devil to boot.
Brown’s Hole stuck in my mind, and it wasn’t far off. If he wasn’t there it was certainly a place where a man could start the word along the wild country trails. And if I was to get shut of this place I’d have to get him over here.
Barnabas? He was supposed to be in France. I knew nothing about France or any other place I couldn’t get to on a horse.
Planner wanted this outfit and he could buy the men to take it for him. A man who wouldn’t hesitate to get an old woman killed was a man who wouldn’t stop at much a body could think of. If he kept on pushing he was going to make me sore as a grizzly with a bad tooth, and I didn’t want that. When I get really down to gravel mad I act up something fierce, and I had enough posses hunting me here and yon as it was.
A man could live well off the country. Deer and elk were around and I’d seen a sign of bear and lion. A mountain lion swings a big circle—maybe thirty-odd miles of it—and he usually manages to live off the elk or deer that are getting on in years or are too young to escape. From time to time he takes a rancher’s calf.
Living in wild country you become like one of the animals. You learn their ways, you kill what you need to live and you bother none of the others and fight shy of them. I never killed anything unless pushed to it … including men.
Clinch Mountain, yonder in Tennessee, was mighty sparse on topsoil, at least where we Sacketts lived. It made up for beauty what it lacked in richness. Ma used to say it offered more food for the soul than for the belly, so we Sackett boys taken to making our living with rifle and trap, but we never figured to take more than our due. We trapped a stream a year or two, then held off, let it be, and worked another one to let the first recover. There was a lot we boys didn’t know, with no schoolin’ to speak of, but we learned early that if you want water on the land you need beaver in the high country. They build their dams, keep them in repair, and they hold back in ponds water that would run off down the country to the sea. I never seen the sea, but they tell me it’s off down the country somewheres.
Pa told us we held the land in trust. We were free to use it so long as it was kept in shape for the generations following after, for our sons and yours.
This was rugged country, faulted and twisted. It looked like it had been crumpled like a shoot of thin paper, with tilted layers whose saw-toothed edges had been bared down some by wind and rain. It would take months to learn all the canyons and hollows, rising higher and higher into green forest and finally to timberline and the gray and lonely peaks up yonder against the sky.
I’m tellin’ you, man, that there was country!