the Daybreakers (1960) (4 page)

Nothing exciting or thrilling about a gunfight. She's a mighty cold proposition for both parties. One or t'other is to be killed or hurt bad, maybe both. Some folks take chances because they've got it in their minds they're somebody special, that something will protect them. It is always, they figure, somebody else who dies.

Only it ain't thataway. You can die. You can be snuffed out like you never existed at all and a few minutes after you're buried nobody will care except maybe your wife or your mother. You stick your finger in the water and you pull it out, and that's how much of a hole you leave when you're gone.

Reed Carney had been thinking of himself as a mighty dangerous man and he had talked himself into a shoot out. Maybe it was something in his walk or the way he looked or in the fact that he stopped when I started toward him. Mayhap it was something sensed rather than seen, that something within me that made me different than other men. Only suddenly I knew that by the time he had taken ten steps toward me the fight had begun to peter out of him, that for the first time he was realizing that I was going to be shooting at him to kill.

Panic can hit a man. You never really know. You can have a man bluffed and then something wild hits him and you're in a real honest-to-warchief shooting. Those others were going to wait for Reed, but I'd leave them to Cap. Reed was my problem and I knew he wanted to kill me. Or rather, he wanted it known around that he'd killed me.

As I walked toward him I knew Reed knew he should draw, and he felt sure he was going to draw, but he just stood there. Then he knew that if he didn't draw it would be too late.

The sweat was streaming down his cheeks although it wasn't a hot evening. Only I just kept walking up on him, closing in. He took a step back and his lips parted like he was having trouble breathing, and he knew that if he didn't draw on me then he would never be the same man again as long as he lived.

When I stopped I was within arm's length of him and he was breathing like he'd run a long way uphill.

"I'd kill you, Reed."

It was the first time I'd ever called him by his first name and his eyes looked right into mine, startled, like a youngster's.

"You want to be a big man, Reed, but you'll never make it with a gun. You just ain't trimmed right for it. If you'd moved for that gun you'd be dead now ... cold and dead in the dust down there with only the memory of a gnawing rat of pain in your belly.

"Now you reach down mighty careful, Reed, and you unbuckle your belt and let it fall. Then you turn around and walk away."

It was still. A tiny puff of wind stirred dust, then died out. Somewhere on the porch of the Drovers' Cottage a board creaked as somebody shifted weight. Out on the prairie a meadow lark sang.

"Unbuckle the belt!"

His eyes were fastened on mine, large and open. Sweat trickled down his cheeks in rivulets. His tongue fumbled at his lips and then his fingers reached for his belt buckle. As he let the belt fall there was a gasp from somewhere, and for a split second everything hung by a hair. There was a moment then when he might have grabbed for a gun but my eyes had him and he let the belt go.

"Was I you I'd straddle my bronc and light a shuck out of here. You got lots of country to choose from."

He backed off, then turned and started to walk away, and then as he realized what he'd done he walked faster and faster. He stumbled once, caught himself, and kept going. After a moment I scooped up the gun belt with my left hand and turned back toward the Drovers' Cottage.

They were all on the porch. Orrin, Laura Pritts and her Pa, and Don Luis ... even his granddaughter. Fetterson stood there, mad clear through. He had come itching for trouble and he was stopped cold. He had no mind to tackle Cap Rountree for fun ... nobody wanted any part of that old wolf. But he had a look in those gun-metal eyes of his that would frighten a body.

"I'll buy the drinks," I said.

"Just coffee for me," Cap replied.

My eyes were on Fetterson. "That includes you," I said.

He started to say something mean, and then he said, "Be damned if I won't. That took guts, mister."

Don Luis took the cigar from his lips and brushed away the long ash that had collected there during the moments just past. He looked at me and spoke in Spanish.

"He says we can travel west with him if we like," Cap translated, "he says you are a brave man ... and what is more important, a wise one."

"Gracias," I said, and it was about the only Spanish word I knew.

In 1867, the Santa Fe Trail was an old trail, cut deep with the ruts of the heavy wagons carrying freight over the trail from Independence, Missouri. It was no road, only a wide area whose many ruts showed the way the wagons had gone through the fifty-odd years the trail had been used. Cap Rountree had come over it first in 1836, he said.

Orrin and me, we had an ache inside us for new country, and a longing to see the mountains show up on the horizon. We had to find a place for Ma, and if we had luck out west, then we could start looking for a place.

Back home we had two younger brothers and one older, but it had been a long time since we'd seen Tell, the oldest of our brothers who was still alive and should be coming home from the wars soon. When the War between the States started he joined up and then stayed on to fight the Sioux in the Dakotas.

We rode west. Of a night we camped together and it sure was fine to set around the fire and listen to those Spanish men sing, and they did a lot of it, one time or another.

Meantime I was listening to Rountree. That old man had learned a lot in his lifetime, living with the Sioux like he did, and with the Nez Perce. First off he taught me to say that name right, and he said it Nay-Persay. He taught me a lot about their customs, how they lived, and told me all about those fine horses they raised, the appaloosas.

My clothes had give out so I bought me an outfit from one of the Spanish men, so I was all fixed out like they were, in a buckskin suit with fringe and all. In the three months since I'd left home I'd put on nearly fifteen pounds and all of it muscle. I sure wished Ma could see me. Only thing that was the same was my gun.

The first few days out I'd seen nothing of the don or his granddaughter, except once when I dropped an antelope with a running shot at three hundred yards. The don happened to see that and spoke of it.

Sometimes his granddaughter would mount her horse and ride alongside the wagons, and one day when we'd been out for about a week, she cantered up on a ridge where I was looking over the country ahead of us.

A man couldn't take anything for safe in this country. From the top of a low hill that country was open grass as far as you could see. There might be a half-dozen shallow valleys out there or ditches, there might be a canyon or a hollow, and any one of them might be chock full of Indians.

This time that Spanish girl joined me on the ridge, I was sizing up the country.

She had beautiful big dark eyes and long lashes and she was about the prettiest thing I ever did see.

"Do you mind if I ride with you, Mr. Sackett?"

"I sure don't mind, but what about Don Luis? I don't expect he'd like his granddaughter riding with a Tennessee drifter."

"He said I could come, but that I must ask your permission. He said you would not let me ride with you if it was not safe."

On the hill where we sat the wind was cool and there was no dust. The train of wagons and pack horses was a half mile away to the southeast. The first Spanish I learned I started learning that day from her.

"Are you going to Santa Fe?"

"No, ma'am, we're going wild-cow hunting along the Purgatoire."

Her name it turned out was Drusilla, and her grandmother had been Irish. The vaqueros were not Mexicans but Basques, and like I'd figured, they were picked fighting men. There was always a vaquero close by as we rode in case of trouble.

After that first time Drusilla often rode with me, and I noticed the vaqueros were watching their back trail as carefully as they watched out for Indians, and some times five or six of them would take off and ride back along the way we had come.

"Grandfather thinks we may be followed and attacked. He has been warned."

That made me think of what Jonathan Pritts had told Orrin, and not knowing if it mattered or not, I told her to tell the don. It seemed to me that land that had been granted a family long ago belonged to that family, and no latecomer like Pritts had a right to move in and drive them off.

The next day she thanked me for her grandfather. Jonathan Pritts had been to Santa Fe before this, and he was working through political means to get their grant revoked so the land could be thrown open to settlement.

Rountree was restless. "By this time we should have met up with Injuns. Keep those rides closer in, Tye, d' you hear?"

He rode in silence for a few minutes, then he said, "Folks back east do a sight of talkin' about the noble red man. Well, he's a mighty fine fighter, I give him that, but ain't no Indian, unless a Nez Perce, who wouldn't ride a couple hundred miles for a fight. Folks talk about takin' land from the Indians. No Indian ever owned land, no way. He hunted over the country and he was always fightin' other Indians just for the right to hunt there.

"I fought Injuns and I lived with Injuns. If you walked into an Injun village of your own will they'd feed you an' let you be as long as you stayed ... that was their way, but the same Injun in whose tipi you slept might follow you when you left an' murder you.

"They hadn't the same upbringin' a white man has. There was none of this talk of mercy, kindness and suchlike which we get from the time we're youngsters. We get it even though most folks don't foller the teachin'. An Injun is loyal to nobody but his own tribe ... an' any stranger is apt to be an enemy.

"You fight an Injun an' whup him, after that maybe you can trade with him. He'll deal with a fightin' man, but a man who can't protect hisself, well, most Injuns have no respect for him, so they just kill him an' forget him."

Around the fires at night there was talk and laughter. Orrin sang his old Welsh and Irish ballads for them. From Pa he'd picked up some Spanish songs, and when he sang them you should have heard them Spanish men yell! And from the far hills the coyotes answered.

Old Rountree would find a spot well back from the flames and set there watching the outer darkness and listening. A man who stares into flames is blind when he looks into outer darkness, and he won't shoot straight ... Pa had taught us that, back in Tennessee.

This was Indian country and you have to figure, understanding Indians, that his whole standing in this tribe comes from how many coups he's counted, which means to strike an enemy, a living enemy, or to be the first one to strike a man who has fallen ... they figure that mighty daring because the fallen man may be playing possum.

An Indian who was a good horse thief, he could have the pick of the girls in the tribe. Mostly because marriage was on the barter system, and an Indian could have all the wives he could afford to buy ... usually that wasn't more than two or three, and mostly one.

Orrin hadn't forgotten that Laura girl. He was upset with me, too, for leading him off again when he was half a mind to tie up with Pritts.

"He's paying top wages," Orrin said, one night.

"Fighting wages," I said.

"Could be, Tyrel," Orrin said, and no friendly sound to his voice, "that you're holding something against Mr. Pritts. And against Laura, too."

Go easy, boy, I told myself, this is dangerous ground. "I don't know them. Only from what you've said he's planning to horn in on land that doesn't belong to him."

Orrin started to speak but Tom Sunday got up. "Time to turn in," he spoke abruptly, "gettin' up time comes early."

We turned in, both of us with words we were itching to say that were better unsaid.

It rankled, however. There was truth about me having a holding against Pritts and his daughter. That I had ... she didn't look right to me, and I've always been suspicious of those too-sanctimonious men like Jonathan Pritts.

The way he looked down that thin New England nose of his didn't promise any good for those who didn't agree with him. And what I said to Orrin that time, I'd believed. If Pritts had been so much back home, what was he doing out here?

We filled our canteens at daybreak with no certain water ahead of us. A hot wind searched the grass. At Mud Creek there was enough water in the creek bottom for the horses, but when we left it it was bone dry. It was seven miles to the Water Holes, and if there was no water there it was a dry day's travel to the Little Arkansas.

The sun was hot. Dust lifted from the feet of the horses and mules, and we left a trail of dust in the air. If any Indians were around, they'd not miss us.

"A man would have to prime himself to spit in country like this," Tom Sunday remarked.

"How about the country we're heading toward, Cap?"

"Worse ... unless a man knows the land. Only saving thing, there's no travel up thataway except for Comanches. What water there is we'll likely have to ourselves."

Every day then, Drusilla was riding with me. And every day I felt myself looking for her sooner than before. Sometimes we were only out for a half hour, at most an hour, but I got so I welcomed her coming and dreaded her going.