have to dig in an’ scratch.”
“It doesn’t seem to me that Jonathan Pritts would do anything that isn’t right,”
Orrin argued. “Not if he knows the facts.”
Pawnee Rock was next … Torres came over to our fire to tell us Don Luis had
decided to fight shy of it. Orrin wanted to see it and so did I, so the four of
us decided to ride that way while the wagons cut wide around it.
Forty or fifty men were camped near the Rock, a tough, noisy, drunken crowd,
well supplied with whiskey.
“Looks like a war party,” Rountree commented.
Suddenly I had a bad feeling that this was the Pritts crowd, for I could think
of no reason why a bunch of that size should be camping here without wagons or
women. And I saw one of them who had been with the Back Rand crowd the other
side of Abilene.
When they saw us riding up, several got up from where they’d been loafing.
“Howdy! Where you from?”
“Passing through.” Tom Sunday glanced past the few men who had come to greet us
at their camp, which was no decent camp, but dirty, untidy and casual. “We’re
headed for the upper Cimarron,” he added.
“Why don’t you step down? We got a proposition for you.”
“We’re behind time,” Orrin told him, and he was looking at their faces as if he
wanted to remember them.
Several others had strolled toward us, sort of circling casually around as if
they wanted to get behind us, so I let the dapple turn to face them.
They didn’t take to that, not a little bit, and one redhead among them took it
up. “What’s the matter? You afraid of something?”
When a man faces up to trouble with an outfit like that you get nowhere either
talking or running, so I started the dapple toward him, not saying a word, but
walking the horse right at him. My right hand was on my thigh within inches of
my six-shooter, and it sized up to me like they figured to see what would happen
if Red crowded me.
Red started to side-step but the dapple was a cutting horse Pa had used working
stock, and once you pointed that horse at anything, man or animal, he knew what
his job was.
Red backed off, and long ago I’d learned that when you get a man to backing up
its hard for him to stop and start coming at you. Every move he made the dapple
shifted and went for him, and all of a sudden Red got desperate and grabbed for
his gun and just as he grabbed I spurred the dapple into him. The dapple hit him
with a shoulder and Red went down hard. He lost grip on the pistol which fell
several feet away.
Red lay on the ground on his back with the dapple right over him, and I hadn’t
said a word.
While everybody was watching the show Red and the dapple were putting on, Orrin
had his pistol lying there in his lap. Both Tom Sunday and Cap Rountree had
their rifles ready and Cap spoke up. “Like I said, we’re just passing through.”
Red started to get up and the dapple shifted his weight and Red relaxed. “You
get up when we’re gone, Red. You’re in too much of a sweat to get killed.”
Several of the others had seen what was going on and started toward us.
“All right, Tye?” Orrin asked.
“Let’s go,” I said, and we dusted out of there.
One thing Cap had in mind and I knew it was what he was thinking. If they were
watching us they wouldn’t have noticed the passing of the wagons, and they
didn’t. We watered at Coon Creek and headed for Fort Dodge.
The Barlow Sanderson Company stage came in while we were in Fort Dodge. Seems a
mighty fine way to travel, sitting back against the cushions with nice folks
around you. We were standing there watching when we heard the stage driver
talking to a sergeant. “Looks like a fight shaping up over squatters trying to
move in on the Spanish grants,” he said.
Orrin turned away. “Good thing we’re straying shut of that fight,” he said.
“We’ll be better off hunting cows.”
When we rode back to camp everything was a-bustle with packing and loading up.
Torres came to us. “We go, señores. There is word of trouble from home. We take
the dry route south from here. You will not come with us?”
“We’re going to the Purgatoire.”
“Then it will be adios.” Torres glanced at me. “I know that Don Luis will wish
to say good-by to you, señor.”
At the wagons Don Luis was nowhere in sight, but Drusilla was. When she saw me
she came quickly forward. “Oh, Tye! We’re going! Will I ever see you again?”
“I’ll be coming to Santa Fe. Shall I call on you then?”
“Please do.”
We stood together in the darkness with all the hurry around us of people packing
and getting ready to move, the jingle of trace chains, the movement and the
shouts. Only I felt like something was going right out from my insides, and I’d
never felt this way before. Right then I didn’t want to hunt wild cows. I wanted
to go to Santa Fe. Was this the way Orrin felt about Laura Pritts?
But how could I feel any way at all about her? I was a mountain boy who could
scarcely read printing and who could not write more than his name.
“Will you write to me, Tyrel?”
How could I tell her I didn’t know how? “I’ll write,” I said, and swore to
myself that I’d learn. I’d get Tom to teach me.
Orrin was right. We would have to get an education, some way, somehow.
“I’ll miss you.”
Me, like a damned fool I stood there twisting my hat. If I’d only had some of
Orrin’s easy talk! But I’d never talked much to any girl or even womenfolks, and
I’d no idea what a man said to them.
“It was mighty fine,” I told her, “riding out on the plains with you.”
She moved closer to me and I wanted to kiss her the worst way, but what right
had a Tennessee boy to kiss the daughter of a Spanish don?
“I’ll miss the riding,” I said, grasping at something to say. “I’ll sure miss
it.”
She stood on her tiptoes suddenly and kissed me, and then she ran. I turned
right around and walked right into a tree. I backed off and started again and
just then Antonio Baca came out of the darkness and he had a knife held low down
in his hand. He didn’t say anything, just lunged at me.
Talking to girls was one thing, cutting scrapes was something else. Pa had
brought me up right one way, at least. It was without thinking, what I did. My
left palm slapped his knife wrist over to my right to get the blade out of line
with my body, and my right hand dropped on his wrist as my left leg came across
in front of him, and then I just spilled him over my leg and threw him hard
against a tree trunk.
He was in the air when he hit it, and the knife fell free. Scooping it up, I
just walked on and never even looked back. One time there, I figured I heard him
groan, but I was sure he was alive all right. Just shook up.
Tom Sunday was in the saddle with my dapple beside him. “Orrin and Cap went on.
They’ll meet us at the Fort.”
“All right,” I said.
“I figured you’d want to say good-by. Mighty hard to leave a girl as pretty as
that.”
I looked at him. “First girl ever paid me any mind,” I said. “Girls don’t cotton
to me much.”
“As long as girls like that one like you, you’ve nothing to worry about,” he
said quietly. “She’s a real lady. You’ve a right to be proud.”
Then he saw the knife in my hand. Everybody knew that knife who had been with
the wagons. Baca was always flashing it around.
“Collecting souveniers?” Tom asked dryly.
“Wasn’t planning on it.” I shoved the knife down in my belt. “Sort of fell into
it.”
We rode on a few steps and he said, “Did you kill him?”
“No.”
“You should have,” he said, “because you’ll have it to do.”
Seems I never had a difficulty with a man that made so little impression. All I
could think of was Drusilla Alvarado, and the fact that we were riding away from
her. All the time I kept telling myself I was a fool, that she was not for me.
But it didn’t make a mite of difference, and from that day on I understood Orrin