Well, this Boley sort of backed off and flattened his hair down. A shotgun has
that effect on a lot of folks. It seems somehow dampening to the spirits.
“Mr. McCaire,” Orrin suggested, “why not give this further thought? We’ve no
desire for trouble. As a matter of fact, this man here and those with him have
already been notified of their arrest for possession of stolen property and an
apparent theft of horses.”
“You’re no officer!”
“I made a citizen’s arrest, but even so, every lawyer is an officer of the
court.”
Charley McCaire was simmering down a mite, but I had my doubts whether he’d
changed his mind. My gun was one thing he could not sidestep. After Boley’s move
I had drawn without starting anything, and fast enough so that nobody had a
chance to do much about it. A man could see that somebody was going to get shot,
and Charley was smart enough to see he was first man up on the list.
“How do I know you ain’t bluffin’? I don’t know what your brother’s road brand
is, or even that he’s fixin’ to move stock.”
“Unless I am mistaken about my brother, Mr. McCaire, he’s on the trail of this
missing stock right now, and unless I am again mistaken I would say you’re a lot
better off with us than with him.
“Tyrel,” he added, “doesn’t have the patience that Tell and I have, and I think
he’s every bit as good with a gun as Tell, here. Back home we always figured him
to be the mean one of the family.”
We didn’t want any shooting. The incident had happened unexpectedly, and now a
wrong word could turn that meadow into a bloodbath.
The next thing we heard was a pound of hooves, and into the valley came Tyrel,
riding straight up in the saddle, young and tall in a fitted buckskin jacket of
the Spanish style.
Behind him were half a dozen riders, all Mexicans, sporting big sombreros,
bandoliers, and six-shooters as well as rifles. I knew those vaqueros of Tyrel’s
and they were a salty lot. He wouldn’t have a man on the place who wasn’t a
fighter as well as a stockman.
Believe me, they were a pretty sight to see. He always mounted his men well, and
those vaqueros rode like nothing you ever saw. They were a bold, reckless lot of
men, and they’d have followed Tyrel through the bottom layer of hell.
“Looks like you boys found my horses,” he said. He glanced over at Charley
McCaire, then at the others. Tyrel looked better than I’d ever seen him. He was
six feet two in his sock feet; he must’ve weighed a good one-ninety, and not an
ounce of it was excess weight.
“You’ll find the brands altered,” said Orrin.
Tyrel glanced at him. Orrin said, “This is Charley McCaire, of the Three Eights.
Some of his hands got a little ambitious, but it’s all straight now.”
The vaqueros bunched the horses and started them toward the trail, then held up.
The Tinker turned his horse and waited for Priest to come alongside. Then Tyrel
turned to his men.
“We’re taking our horses back,” he said, “and, at the request of my brother
we’re making no further move, but if any of you ever see one of these men near
any of my stock, shoot him.”
The vaqueros sat their horses, rifles ready, while the rest of us bunched our
stock and started moving. Then they rode to join us.
Glancing back, I saw McCaire jerk his hat from his head and throw it to the
ground, but that was all I saw, and I was too far away to hear what he said.
Tyrel and Orrin rode point, and I guess Orrin was filling in the blank spaces on
the horse stealing and then on pa. I trailed off to one side, away from the dust
of the horses and riders. I needed to think, and a riding man is always better
thinking off by himself. Leastways, that’s the way I think best, if I think at
all.
Sometimes I wonder how much thinking anybody does, and if their life hasn’t
shaped every decision for them before they make it. But now I had to consider
pa. I had to put myself in his place.
The gold Pierre and the others were hunting seemed to be in the San Juans, and
certainly, the last I heard, there was a lot of it. Also, that was a mighty
bunch of mountains, some thundering deep canyons, and a lot of high, rough
country no white man had ever ridden over.
Galloway and Flagan Sackett had moved some stock there near the town of Shalako
and set up camp. They’d established no proper ranch yet, as they were still kind
of looking around, but from all they’d said in their letters it was our kind of
country.
I’d been to the San Juans before. It was in the mountains above Vallecitos where
I’d found Ange and Tyrel as well as pa had been through Baker Park and the
country around Durango. Pa had known that country pretty well—probably as well
as anybody could know it without a good many years up there.
The way I figured it, we’d take the same route north Cap Rountree an’ me had
taken when we went back up the Vallecitos to stake our claims. We’d ride north
from Mora, go up through the Eagle’s Nest country and E-town, then to the San
Luis Valley and west on the trail into the San Juans.
Suppose pa was still alive, like ma thought? Suppose he was busted up and back
in a corner of the mountains he couldn’t get out of? Or held by Indians? I
hadn’t a moment’s thought that such could be true, but pa was a tough man, a
hang-in-there-an’-fight sort of man, and a body would have to go all the way to
salt him down.
We camped that night by a spring of cold, clear water where there was grass for
the horses. When everybody was around the fire, I took my Winchester and climbed
to the rim of the mesa. There was an almighty fine view up there. The sun was
gone, but she’d left gold in the sky and streaks of red, as well as a few pink
puffballs of cloud.
Up there on the rimrock I sat down and let my legs hang over and looked to the
west.
Tyrel had Drusilla, and Orrin had the law, at least, and most womenfolks catered
to him, but what did I have? What would I ever have? Seemed like I just wasn’t
the kind to make out with womenfolks, and I was a lonesome man who was wishful
of a home and a woman of my own.
Folks had it down that I was a wanderin’ man, but most wanderin’ men I’ve known
only wandered because of the home they expected to find … hoped to find, I
mean.
Looking westward the way we were to ride, I wondered if I’d find what I was
hunting. Flagan had said there were some other Sacketts out there. No kind of
kin to us that we knowed of, but good folks by all accounts, and we’d fight shy
of them and try to make them no trouble.
Glancing back, as I stood up to go back down the cliff trail, I glimpsed a
far-off campfire, a single red eye, winking, but with evil in it.
Somebody back yonder the way we had come, somebody trailing us, maybe.
Charley McCaire? Or Andre Baston?
Or both?
CHAPTER XII
About noontime a few days later, we rode up to San Luis, and the first man I saw
was Esteban Mendoza. He’d married Tina, a girl Tyrel had helped out of a bad
situation some years back during the settlement fight.
“Ah, senor! When I see you far away I say to Tina it is you! No man sits a
saddle as do you! What can I do for you?”
“We want to get under cover, and we want a good bait for our stock.”
When he had shown us where to put our horses, he stopped to talk while I
stripped the gear from my appaloosa. “Is it trouble, amigo?”
I warned him about the kind of people who might be riding our trail, and then I
asked him, “Esteban, you’ve been here awhile now. Who is the oldest man in town?
I mean, somebody with a good memory that can reach back twenty years?”
“Twenty years? It is a long time. A man remembers a woman, a fight, perhaps a
very good horse for twenty years, but not much else.”
“This is a man—several men—who came through here headed for the San Juans and
Wolf Creek Pass.”
He shrugged. “It is a long time, amigo.”
“One of them was my father, Esteban. He did not come back from that ride.”