be Indians around.”
Come dusk we camped in some trees near the Arkansas, bringing all the stock in
close and watering them well. Nobody did any talking. This was no place to have
trouble but when it came to that, Orrin was my brother … and he was in the
right.
Now personally, I’m not sure I’d have thought of it. Mayhap I wouldn’t have
mentioned it if I did think of it … a man never knows about things like that.
Rountree hadn’t done anything but listen and smoke that old pipe of his.
It was when we were sitting over coffee that Tom brought it up again. “We’d be
fools not to keep that money, Orrin. How do we know who we’d be sending it to?
Maybe some relative who hated him. Certainly, nobody needs it more than we do.”
Orrin, he just sat there studying those letters. “Those folks had a daughter
back home,” Orrin said, finally, “an’ she’s barely sixteen. She’s living with
friends until they send for her, and when those friends find out she isn’t going
to be sent for, and they can expect no more money, then what happens to that
girl?”
The question bothered Tom, and it made him mad. His face got red and set in
stubborn lines, and he said, “You send your share. I’ll take a quarter of it …
right now. If I hadn’t noticed that wagon the money would never have been
found.”
“You’re right about that, Tom,” Orrin said reasonably, “but the money just ain’t
ours.”
Slowly, Tom Sunday got to his feet. He was mad clear through and pushing for a
fight. So I got up, too.
“Kid,” he said angrily, “you stay out of this. This is between Orrin and me.”
“We’re all in this together, Cap an’ me as much as Orrin and you. We started out
to round up wild cattle, and if we start it with trouble there’s no way we can
win.”
Orrin said, “Now if that money belonged to a man, maybe I’d never have thought
of returning it, but with a girl as young as that, no telling what she’ll come
to, turned loose on the world at that age. This money could make a lot of
difference.”
Tom was a prideful and stubborn man, ready to take on the two of us. Then
Rountree settled matters.
“Tom,” he said mildly, “you’re wrong, an’ what’s more, you know it. This here
outfit is four-sided and I vote with the Sackett boys. You ain’t agin democracy,
are you, Tom?”
“You know darned well I’m not, and as long as you put it that way, I’ll sit
down! Only I think we’re damned fools.”
“Tom, you’re probably right, but that’s the kind of a damned fool I am,” said
Orrin. “When the cows are rounded up if you don’t feel different about it you
can have my share of the cows.”
Tom Sunday just looked at Orrin. “You damned fool. Next thing we know you’ll be
singing hymns in a church.”
“I know a couple,” Orrin said. “You all set down and while Tyrel gets supper,
I’ll sing you a couple.”
And that was the end of it … or we thought it was. Sometimes I wonder if
anything is ever ended. The words a man speaks today live on in his thoughts or
the memories of others, and the shot fired, the blow struck, the thing done
today is like a stone tossed into a pool and the ripples keep widening out until
they touch lives far from ours.
So Orrin sang his hymans, and followed them with Black, Black, Black, Lord
Randall, Barbara Allan and Sweet Betsy. When Orrin finished the last one Tom
reached over and held out his hand and Orrin grinned at him and shook it.
No more was said about the gold money and it was put away in the bottom of a
pack and to all intents it was forgotten. If that amount of gold is ever
forgotten.
We were getting into the country of the wild cattle now. Cap Rountree as well as
others had noticed these wild cattle, some of them escaped from Spanish
settlements to the south, and some escaped or stampeded by Indians from wagon
trains bound for California.
No doubt Indians had killed a few, but Indians preferred buffalo, and many of
these cattle had come south with buffalo herds. There was no shortage of buffalo
in 1867, and the Indians only killed the wild cattle when there was nothing
else.
The country we were going to work lay south of the Mountain Branch of the Santa
Fe Trail, between the Purgatoire and Two Buttes Creek, and south to the Mal
Pais. It was big country and it was rough country. We rode south through sage
plains with some mesquite, with juniper and pinon on the hills.
Cap had in his mind a hidden place, a canyon near the base of a mountain where a
cold spring of sweet water came out of the rocks. There was maybe two hundred
acres of good grass in the bottom, grass belly-high to a horse, and from the
look of it nobody had seen it since Cap Rountree stumbled on it twenty years
back.
First off, we forted up. Behind us the cliffs lifted sheer with an overhang that
provided shelter from above. Right out in front there was four or five acres of
meadow with good grass, edged on the far side by trees and rocks. Beyond that
was the bowl with the big pasture as we called it, and in an adjoining canyon
was a still larger area where we figured to trap the wild cattle and hold them.
We spent that first day gathering fuel, adding a few rocks to our fort, and
generally scouting the country close around our hideout. Also, I killed a deer
and Cap got a buffalo. We brought the meat into camp and started jerking it.
Next morning at daybreak we started out to scout the country. Within an hour’s
riding we’d seen sixty or seventy head. A man never saw such cattle. There was a
longhorn bull in that crowd that must have stood seven feet and would have
weighed sixteen hundred pounds. And horns? Needle-sharp.
By nightfall we had a good bunch of cattle in the bowl or drifted toward it. By
the third day we had more than a hundred head in that bowl and we were beginning
to count our money.
It was slow, patient work. Push them too fast and they would stampede clear out
of the country, so we tried to move them without them guessing what we planned.
We had two things to accomplish: to catch ourselves some wild cattle and to stay
alive while doing it. And it wasn’t only Indians we had to think about, but the
cattle themselves, for some of those tough old bulls showed fight, and the cows
could be just as mean if they caught a man afoot. Of a night we yarned around
the fire or belly-ached about somebody’s cooking. We took turn about on that
job.
We kept our fires small, used the driest wood, and we moved around only when we
had to. We daren’t set any patterns of work so’s Indians could lay for us. We
never took the same trail back that we used on the way out, and we kept our eyes
open all the time.
We gathered cattle. We sweated, we swore, and we ate dust, but we gathered them
up, six one day, twelve another, nineteen, then only three. There was no telling
how it would be. We got them into the bowl where there was grass and plenty of
water and we watched them get fat. Also, it gave them time to settle down.
Then trouble hit us. Orrin was riding a sorrel we had picked up in Dodge. He was
off by himself and he started down a steep hillside and the sorrel fell. That
little sorrel got up fast with Orrin’s foot caught in the stirrup and he buckled
down to run. There was only one way Orrin could keep from being dragged to
death, and that was one reason cowhands always carried pistols. He shot the
sorrel.
Come nightfall there was no sign of Orrin. We had taken to coming in early so if
anything went wrong with any of us there would be time to do something before
night.
We set out to look. Tom went south, swinging back toward the east, Cap went
west, and I followed up a canyon to the north before topping out on the rim. It
was me found him, walking along, packing his saddle and his Winchester.
When he put down the saddle on seeing me, I rode up to him. “You took long
enough,” he grumbled, but there was no grumble in his eyes, “I was fixing to
cache my saddle.”