Reaching the little bend, I eased up on the bank to look through the brush. From
behind the brush and rocks I had a clear view of fifty yards or more of the
stream.
Up yonder about as far as my eyes could take me was a woman. It looked to be a
girl—a chancy judgment at that distance—and she was panning gravel, handling
that pan like she’d done it before, a lot of times before.
I looked up the bank as far as I could, but there was no camp, nor was there
anything like it that I could see. Seemed to me the situation called for study,
and if a body aims to study women it’s better done at close range, so I came
down from my perch and started around that bend. When I cleared it and had a
view of the stream again, she was gone!
Yes, sir. She was vanished out of there. Now I was a puzzled man. Surely my eyes
hadn’t played games with me. Of course, when a man is long enough without a
woman he begins to see them, or imagine them, everywhere.
I walked across that creek, which was shallow at that point, and I went
upstream, stepping careful. I’d kept my gun in my hand without really thinking,
except it seemed logical that where there’d be a pretty woman there’d likely be
a man.
When I got up to where she’d been, sure enough there were tracks in the sand. I
started to look around when a voice spoke from right behind me. I’d knowed I
should have looked into that tangle right up the slope, but I hadn’t done it.
“You stand where you be, mister,” a girl’s voice said, “and if you’re wishful of
savoring your supper, don’t fool around. Now you stick that piece back in the
leather, and you do it right quick or I’ll run a lead tunnel through your
brisket!”
“I’m a peaceful man, ma’am, plumb peaceful. I seen what looked like a woman up
here, an’—”
Her tone was scornful. “Looked like a woman? Why, you two-by-twice foreigner,
I’m more woman than you ever did see! Turn around, damn you, and take a good
look!”
Well, I turned, and from what I seen I was in no position to argue. She was
about three inches over five feet, I’d guess, and must have weighed what it
needed to fill that space out proper, with maybe a mite extry here an’ yonder.
“Yes, ma’am.” She had a cute nose, freckles, and rusty hair, and taking all in
all, the way a woman should be taken, she was pretty as a button.
She was also holding a Spencer .56 that wasn’t no way cute at all, and from the
way she held it a body could see she was no stranger to its use.
She was kind of staring at me like she couldn’t believe it, and, knowing my
ownself, I knew it wasn’t good looks she was staring at.
“Well!” she said, gesturing with the gun muzzle a mite. “You jest back up an’
set on that log, yonder. And don’t you go to stretching for that gun because by
tomorrow mornin’ your body would have drawn so many flies I’d have to find a new
place to pan.”
“I’m peaceful, ma’am, but if I have to be shot it couldn’t be by a prettier
girl.”
“Don’t give me that, Sackett! Sweet talk will get you no place with me!”
Sackett? Now, how in—
“Oh, don’t look so surprised! Up where I come from ever’body knows the Sackett
boys. How could they help it with the country overrun with them? Best thing ever
happened to Tennessee was when they opened up the west and found some way to
shuck some of you Sacketts.”
“You’re from the Cumberland?”
Her disgust was plain. “Where else? Do you conceited mountain boys think you’re
known everywhere? Who would know you were a Sackett but somebody from yonder?
You all have those same weather-beaten, homely faces and those big hands!”
“Wasn’t for your hair I’d say you was a Trelawney girl,” I said, “but the only
ones of them I ever met up with had black hair. Fact is, I run into one of them
down on the Colorado one time, and she gave me no end of trouble.”
“Served you right. Which Sackett are you, anyway?”
“William Tell. And you?”
“I’m Nell—Jack Ben’s daughter.”
Well, now. That made me back up for another look. The Sacketts ran long on boys,
the Trelawneys on girls, but when the Trelawneys number a boy in their get, he
was usually quite somebody. Ol’ Jack Ben was no exception. He was saltier than
that creek which runs into Coon Hollow an’ meaner than a tied-up wolf.
We Sacketts carried on a fightin’-shootin’ feud with the Higgins outfit for many
a year, but ol’ Jack Ben, he handled his own fightin’. I also recall that he was
most tender about what boys come a-courtin’ his girls.
You could always tell a boy who’d been tryin’ to court one of Jack Ben’s girls
because he walked kind of straight up an’ bent back, and he never set down
nowhere. That was because of the rock salt ol’ Jack Ben kep’ in his shotgun.
“You ain’t alone up here, are you?”
“S’posin’ I am? I can take care of myself.”
“Now, you see here, Nell Trelawney, there’s some folks a-comin’ along behind us
that are meaner than all get-out an’ no respecters of womanfolk, so—”
“You runnin’ scared?” she scoffed. “First time I ever heard of a Sackett runnin’
… unless pa was a-shootin’ at him.”
Darkness had kind of shut down on us. “You better get back to your camp,” I
said. “They’ll be expectin’ me back yonder.”
“You mean you ain’t goin’ to see me home? If you’re scared, I’ll tell you now.
Ol’ Jack Ben ain’t there. I am surely alone. And I ain’t scared—much of the
time.”
CHAPTER XV
“Where’s your pa?”
“He’s down to Shalako. That new town over west. He’s down there a-waitin’ for me
to come bail him out.”
“He’s in jail?”
“No such thing! He’s—he’s laid up, that’s all. We come west without—well, we
didn’t have much to do with, an’ pa figured he could mine for gold.
“Well, he tried it, and it brought on his rheumatism again and he’s laid up.
On’y things about him ain’t ailin’ is his trigger finger and his jaw.
“A man down yonder panned gold out of this stream, and he told us of it, so I
done left a note to tell pa where I’d gone, an’ then I hightailed it up here.”
“You came all the way by yourself?”
“No, sir. I got a mule down yonder. A fast-walkin’ mule and just like me he’ll
take nothing from nobody I’ve also got a dog that’s half bear.”
“You’re funnin’—half bear? It won’t work.”
“You should of told his ma that. Anyway, I reckon that ol’ he-bear wasn’t askin’
any questions. I tell you I got a dog that’s half bear.”
She glanced up at me as we walked along. “You said you took up with a Trelawney
girl out west. Which one was it?”
“You mean there’s more than the two of you come west? How much can this country
stand, all to one time? Her name was Dorinda.”
“Oh-oh-oh! Maybe I got to look at you in daylight, mister. If Dorinda took up
with you there must be more to you than I figured. She was a beautiful one,
Dorinda was.”
“Yes, ma’am, but not to be trusted. Back in the mountains we could always count
on a Trelawney girl to do her best, but that one! That Dorinda usually done her
worst. She nigh got me killed.”
We’d come up to a shelving shore where she’d put together a lean-to under some
trees Sure enough, there was a mule, a big, rawboned no-nonsense Missouri mule
that must have weighed fifteen hundred pounds and every bit of it meanness.
I heard a low growl. Mister, if that dog wasn’t half bear he was half of
something that was big, and he was mean and ugly. He must have weighed two
hundred and fifty pounds. He had a head like a bull mastiff and teeth that would
give one of them dinnysouers a scare.
“It’s all right, Neb,” Nell said. “He’s friendly.”
“If I wasn’t,” I said, “I’d start being. That’s the biggest durned dog I ever
did see.”
“He’s big, all right.”
“What do you feed him? A calf a day?”
“He rustles his own grub. Maybe he eats people. I wouldn’t know. He goes off in
the woods now and again, and when he comes back he’s licking his chops.”
“Where’d you latch onto him?”
“He took up with me. I was huntin’ elk up top and this here dog came up out of
the bottoms. There’s a place where the run drops off about twelve hundred feet,