the Daybreakers (1960) (6 page)

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 a lot better and felt sorry for him.

Nothing changed my mind about that narrow-between-the-ears blonde, though. That roan horse never had been any account, and miserable, contrary and ornery it was, too.

We could see the lights of the Fort up ahead and behind me the rumble of those wagon wheels as the train moved out, the rattle of trace chains, and the Mexicans calling to each other.

"Tom," I said, "I got to learn to write. I really got to learn."

"You should learn," he told me seriously, "I'll be glad to teach you."

"And to read writing?"

"All right."

We rode in silence for a little while and then Tom Sunday said, "Tye, this is a big country out here and it takes big men to live in it, but it gives every man an equal opportunity. You're just as big or small as your vision is, and if you've a mind to work and make something of yourself, you can do it."

He was telling me that I could be important enough for even a don's daughter, I knew that. He was telling me that and suddenly I did not need to be told. He was right, of course, and all the time I'd known it. This was a country to grow up in, a land where a man had a chance.

The stars were bright. The camp lay far behind. Somebody in the settlement ahead laughed and somebody else dropped a bucket and it rolled down some steps. A faint breeze stirred, cool and pleasant. We were making the first step. We were going after wild cows.

We were bound for the Purgatoire.

Chapter
V

Cap Rountree had trapped beaver all over the country we were riding toward. He had been there with Kit Carson, Uncle Dick Woolton, Jim Bridger, and the Bents.

He knew the country like an Indian would know it.

Tom Sunday ... I often wondered about Tom. He was a Texan, he said, and that was good enough. He knew more about cattle than any of us.

Orrin and me, well, most of what we'd had all our lives came from our own planting or hunting, and we grew up with a knowledge of the herbs a man can eat and how to get along in the forest.

The country we were riding toward was Indian country. It was a place where the Comanches, Utes, Arapahos, and Kiowas raided and fought, and there were Cheyennes about, too. And sometimes the Apaches raiding north. In this country the price for a few lazy minutes might be the death of every man in the party.

It was no place for a loafer or one lacking responsibility.

Always and forever we were conscious of the sky. City folks almost never look at the sky to the stars but with us there was no choice. They were always with us.

Tom Sunday was a man who knew a sight of poetry, and riding across the country thataway, he'd recite it for us. It was a lonely life, you know, and I expect what Sunday missed most was the reading. Books were rare and treasured things, hard to come by and often fought over. Newspapers the same.

A man couldn't walk down to the corner and buy a paper. Nor did he have a postman to deliver it to him. I've known cowhands to memorize the labels off canned fruit and vegetables for lack of reading.

Cap knew that country, knew every creek and every fork. There were no maps except what a man had in his skull, and nobody of whom to ask directions, so a body remembered what he saw. Cap knew a thousand miles of country like a man might know his kitchen at home.

These mornings the air was fresher. There was a faint chill in the air, a sign we were getting higher. We were riding along in the early hours when we saw the wagons.

Seven wagons, burned and charred. We moved in carefully, rifles up and ready; edged over to them, holding to a shallow dip in the prairie until we were close up.

Folks back east have a sight to say about the poor Indian but they never fought him. He was a fighter by trade, and because he naturally loved it, mercy never entered his head. Mercy is a taught thing. Nobody comes by it natural. Indians grew up thinking the tribe was all there was and anybody else was an enemy.

It wasn't a fault, simply that nobody had ever suggested such a thing to him. An enemy was to be killed, and then cut up so if you met him in the afterlife he wouldn't have the use of his limbs to attack you again. Some Indians believed a mutilated man would never get into the hereafter.

Two of the men in this outfit had been spread-eagled on wagon wheels, shot full of arrows, and scalped. The women lay scattered about, their clothing ripped off, blood all over. One man had got into a buffalo wallow with his woman and had made a stand there.

"No marks on them," I said, "they must have died after the Indians left."

"No," Cap indicated the tracks of moccasins near the bodies. "They killed themselves when their ammunition gave out." He showed us powder burns on the woman's dress and the man's temple. "Killed her and then himself."

The man who made the stand there in the wallow had accounted for some Indians.

We found spots of blood on the grass that gave reason to believe he'd killed four or five, but Indians always carry their dead away.

"They aren't mutilated because the man fought well. Indians respect a fighter and they respect almost nobody else. But sometimes they cut them up, too."

We buried the two where they lay in the wallow, and the others we buried in a common grave nearby, using a shovel found near one of the wagons. Cap found several letters that hadn't burned and put them in his pocket. "Least we can do," he said, "the folks back home will want to know."

Sunday was standing off sizing up those wagons and looking puzzled. "Cap," he said, "come over here a minute."

The wagons had been set afire but some had burned hardly at all before the fire went out. They were charred all over, and the canvas tops were burned, of course.

"See what you mean," Orrin said, "seems to be a mighty thick bottom on that wagon."

'Too thick," Sunday said, "I think there's a false bottom."

Using the shovel he pried a board until we could get enough grip to pull it loose. There was a compartment there, and in it a flat iron box, which we broke open.

Inside were several sacks of gold money and a little silver, coming to more than a thousand dollars. There were also a few letters in that box.

"This is better than hunting cows," Sunday said. "We've got us a nice piece of money here."

"Maybe somebody needs that money," Orrin suggested. "We'd better read those letters and see if we can find the owner."

Tom Sunday looked at him, smiling but something in his smile made a body think he didn't feel like smiling. "You aren't serious? The owner's dead."

"Ma would need that money mighty bad if it had been sent to her by Tyrel and me," Orrin said, "and it could be somebody needs this money right bad."

First off, I'd thought he was joking, but he was dead serious, and the way he looked at it made me back up and take another look myself. The thing to do was to find who the money rightfully belonged to and send it to them ... if we found nobody then it would be all right to keep it.

Cap Rountree just stood there stoking that old pipe and studying Orrin with care, like he seen something mighty interesting.

There wasn't five dollars amongst us now. We'd had to buy pack animals and our outfit, and we had broke ourselves, what with Orrin and me sending a little money to Ma from Abilene. Now we were about to start four or five months of hard work, and risk our hair into the bargain, for no more money than this.

"These people are dead, Orrin," Tom Sunday said irritably, "and if we hadn't found it years might pass before anybody else did, and by that time any letter would have fallen to pieces."

Standing there watching the two of them I'd no idea what was happening to us, and that the feelings from that dispute would affect all our lives, and for many years. At the time it seemed such a little thing.

"Not in this life will any of us ever find a thousand dollars in gold. Not again. And you suggest we try to find the owner."

"Whatever we do we'd better decide somewheres else," I commented. "There might 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.