The stock I’d seen was in good shape in spite of the fact they’d been kept in the high country, pasture Talon probably held back for the hot weather. Ordinarily up to this time they’d have been down on the flat plains, but due to the shennanigans of Planner’s boys they had to be holed up in the hills, which meant scant feed for later in the year.
On the way back I killed me a deer, dressed and skinned it, then rode on to the ranch.
When I got there Aunt Em was already looking rested. Pennywell was pert, kind of flirty when she looked my way, but I fought shy of her. She bit her lips every time she turned her back to make them redder, and I’d seen her pinching her cheeks to bring the color to them. Not that she needed it much.
If she was setting her cap for me she was wastin’ time. I’m too old a coon to be caught by the first trap I see, and I’d baited too many traps myself not to recognize the signs.
We set up to table and it was fine cookin’, mighty fine. I said as much and Em said Pennywell done it, so I knew they were in it together. No wet-behind-the-ears girl could put vittles like that together.
Mostly when a girl invites a man to supper her sister or her mother or some friend fix up the meal, and all she does is put on a fussy little postage-stamp apron and set the table and dish it up just like she’d done it all herself.
By the hour I was gettin’ irritated. I could have been into Arizona, almost, by this time, and headed for Californy and that ocean-sea. I was out there before, but never got right where I could see it. This time it would be different.
There was nothing out there but silence and the empty prairie, but I wanted them to come. I wanted them to come so’s I could have it done with and be gone.
I never was much on waiting unless it was for game. I get meaner and meaner as time goes on. And I don’t like being corraled. It just don’t set right.
Which brought me around to thinking of Brown’s Hole. Brown’s Hole was a colossal big hollow set down amongst the mountains with mighty few ways to get in or out. It was a trapper’s rendezvous one time, then mostly an outlaw hangout, although a few cattlemen had wintered herds there.
There were a few horse and cattle thieves who holed up between runnin’ off one man’s stock and another’s. Tip Gault was there. For an outlaw he was a decent sort and a man I respected. I couldn’t say the same for Mexican Joe. Mexicans and me usually got along. I’d spent some time down Sonora way, and they raised some of the best riders and ropers you’ll find anywhere, and some mighty fine folks. But Mexican Joe was another sort of hombre entirely. The way I heard it he’d been run out of Mexico for things he’d done, but he was a mighty mean man with either gun or knife, favoring the latter.
I’d seen him a time or two, and he’d seen me, but so far we’d never locked horns.
What I had to do was make a fast ride to the Hole and back, trying to get out without Planner knowing I was gone, and then get back before he found out. Anybody in the Hole might know where Milo was, but the ones most likely to know or to pass the word along were Tip Gault or Isom Dart.
Gault’s outfit rustled horses and cattle mostly. It was not much of a business with them. They were just out to get money enough to throw a wingding once in awhile and have eating money.
Dart was a horse thief, too, but more cautious. He’d come close to losing his hair or winding up at the end of a rope not long before and he was a cautious man. That first close shave had taught him a lesson. He’d been a slave, freed by the war, and had come west under another name. He knew everybody along the outlaw trail and would give the word to any drifter who came along. Wherever Milo Talon was, he’d hear that word sooner or later. I hoped it would be sooner. What I really hoped was that Milo would be wintering in the Hole from time to time and they might know where he’d gone.
“Aunt Em,” I said, when supper was finished, “I got to ride off a-ways.”
“Are you pullin’ your stakes?”
“No, ma’am, but we got to get word to your son. I think if I rode out of here a spell I could give the word to a man who would pass it along.”
She looked up at me, Em did. That old woman was no fool; she’d lived close to the edge for a good long time and she knew things.
“You going into the Hole?”
“Well …” I hesitated, not wanting to lie, “I guess that’s the best grapevine in the world, out of there.”
“You mean Isom Dart? You tell him you’re a friend.of mine. We saw him through it once when he was bad hurt.”
“Planner’s cookin’ up something, and I hate to pull out like this, but it’s got to be done.”
We talked it around over coffee, thinking over the trail I had to ride. Aunt Em had been in the Hole herself, with her husband when they first came west.
“We wintered in there our ownselves,” she said. “We’d heard of it from some Cherokees who held cattle there.”
Pennywell hadn’t much to say. She sat across the table looking big-eyed at me and making me uneasy. When a talking woman sits quiet a man had better look at his hole card and keep a horse saddled.
The old house was warm and quiet. Taking up a rifle I walked out the back door and around to the front, holding close to the wall. Nothing showed against the skyline, but probably they wouldn’t, anyway.
I stood listening for a while, but the sounds seemed right and I went back to the stable, forked down some hay for the stock, and looked over the horses. Then I went to the bunkhouse and got a pair of old, wore-out boots somebody had cast off. I taken them to the house.
“Ma’am,” I said to Pennywell, “I want you to put these on.”
She looked at the boots and then at me. “They’re too big,” she said, “and too old. Besides, I’ve got shoes.”
“You’ve got none that make man tracks, and that’s what I want.”
She put on the boots and we walked out to the gate and up where the Planner gunmen had their camp. We walked around, leaving tracks. They’d figure mine were the big ones, but they’d surely figure there was at least one more man on the place.
Later that night I got moccasins out of my saddlebags, put them on, and went out again. That way they’d see those tracks, too.
We Sacketts were mountain folk, and that meant we’d been woodsmen before we were riders. All of us had growed up among Indians and had learned to like moccasins for work in timber country, a man can feel a dry stick under his foot and not step down on it with a moccasin. With a boot or shoe it isn’t that easy to go quiet.
Time was wasting, so when I came back I turned in for an hour or two of sleep. When I woke up, I got dressed and went into the kitchen.
Em Talon was there, and there was hot coffee on the stove. “I figured you’d be riding,” she said. “Nothing like coffee to set a man on the right trail.”
“Thanks,” I said. I taken the coffee and set down across that well-washed kitchen table. “Aunt Em, you’re quite a woman.”
“Always wanted to be six feet high,” she said, “my brothers were all six-footers, and I aimed to be high as them. I never quite made it.”
“You stand tall in any outfit,” I said. ‘Td like to have known your husband.”
“Talon was a man … all man. He walked strong and he thought right, and no man ever left his door hungry, Indian, black man, or white. Nor did he ever take water for any man.”
“He was a judge of land,” I said, “and of women.”
“We had it good together,” Em said quietly, “we walked a quiet way, the two of us, and never had to say much about it to one another.”
She paused. “I just looked at him and he looked at me and we knew how it was with each other.”
Hours later, well down the trail to Brown’s Hole, I remembered that. Well, they’d been lucky. It was not likely I’d ever find a woman like that, but no matter what any man says, there’s nothing better than two, a man and woman, who walk together. When they walk right together there’s no way too long, no night too dark.