The Sacketts - Lonely On The Mountain Part 10

When it was over, he'd gone to fightin' Injuns and then quit the army and joined up with a cattle drive. He'd covered a far stretch of country before their paths crossed again in the western lands. So far as they knew. Tell had not been back to Tennessee, which was surprising because there'd been a girl back yonder that he'd been shinin' up to when the war started.

Tyrel was the youngest but already married and owner of a ranch, part of which his wife brought to him, but which he'd helped to save from renegades in the Land Grant fights. He was better off than any of them. He owned land and stock, but he owed money, and this trip was costing him.

This was wide-open country, yet there were unexpected hollows and valleys, and a man had to keep his wits about him. There were sloughs, small lakes usually surrounded by a thick stand of cattails. The hills were green now; only a few days had made a striking difference. The gra.s.s was short but long enough to color the hills with springtime. Wild flowers were everywhere, harebell, silverberry, and blue-eyed gra.s.s as well as wild parsley and yellow violet Here and there were small herds of antelope, and occasionally they saw a buffalo.

That night by their small fire he warned them again. "This here's Sioux country, and they're first-cla.s.s fighting men. You got to expect them all the time."

On the third day they killed a buffalo for fresh meat and skinned it out with the meadowlarks calling. Orrin's eyes kept roving, searching, watching, yet a part of his mind was far away, with Nettie Molrone, wondering where she was and how she fared.

Douglas Molrone a" he must remember the name and listen for it, yet the gold fields had a way of devouring men, of chewing them up and spitting them out at the ragged ends of the world. It was whiskey and hard work that did them in, standing in cold streams, panning for the elusive gold.

So many times even the best discoveries somehow seemed to come to nothing. Tell had struck it rich in the mountains of Colorado only to have the vein play out. He had taken out a goodly sum, but part of it had gone back into searching for the lost vein. Sometime, somebody would discover it, broken off and shifted by some convulsion of the earth.

In the distance, they could see the flat-looking blue shadow that was the Turtle Mountains. Not mountains at all but a plateau of rolling country scattered with lakes and pretty meadows among the trees.

The dim trail they were following, probably made by mtis buffalo hunters, skirted the Turtle Mountains on the north, but Orrin led the way south, skirting the plateau's eastern end and making camp near a slough almost in the shadow of the hills.

"Keep your rifles handy," he advised, "but be d.a.m.ned sure you see what you're shooting at. You boys know as well as I do that some or all of them might come through a stampede. If it takes place at night there'd likely be only two, three men on night herd, and they'd know you can't stop a buffalo stampede."

"So?" Fleming asked.

"It's likely they'd scatter. They'd take out an' run," Haney said. "That's what I'd do. A dead cowhand ain't no good to anybody."

"If my brothers or Cap come through this, they'd more than likely take to the hills. There's water there, and there are hideouts and small game."

They were camped in a small hollow with some low brush around, a few polished granite boulders left by a vanished glacier, and several tall cottonwoods. The slough where they watered their stock was about fifty yards below. Baptiste built a small fire and roasted buffalo steaks. Orrin could not rest but prowled about outside of the hollow, listening for any small sound.

He heard nothing but the expected sounds of the night.

It was very still. To the north loomed the bulk of the plateau; to the west the land fell gradually away into a vast plain, which he suspected was a prehistoric lake bed. Behind him there was a faint rustling of wind in the cottonwood leaves and a low murmur of voices.

Somewhere out in that great silence were his brothers and Cap, alive or dead, and he had to find them.

He walked out a few steps farther, listening. Overhead were the stars, and the sky was very clear. He moved out still farther, haunted by the feeling that something was out there, something vague that he could not quite realize.

He let his eyes move slowly all around the horizon, searching for any hint of a fire. He turned his head this way and that, trying for a smell of smoke.

Nothing!

Were they gone, then? Truly gone? After all, there is a time for each of us.

Faintly, something stirred. His gun came easily into his hand. He waited, listening. There was nothing more.

Some small animal, perhaps.

After a few minutes, he went back to the fire. In the morning, they would continue on to the westward. Then he would climb the plateau and see what he could see from that height. Certainly, he could see farther, and he might detect some movement out there. Also, he should check for tracks.

The trouble was there were, so he had heard, many lakes in the Turtles and no end to available water. It was not as simple as in the desert where waterholes were few.

"Charlie," he suggested, "you take the first watch. Give yourself an hour and a half, then awaken Shorty. The same for you, Shorty, and then call Haney and Haney will call me."

"You t'ink I am too old?" Baptiste asked.

"You have to get up early, anyway, and you'll have to watch the camp tomorrow. You get some sleep now."

Fleming took up his rifle. "Anything else?"

"Don't sit by the fire. Stay out on the edge somewhere."

He unrolled his bed and pulled off his boots, then his gun belt. Shorty was asleep almost as soon as he hit his blankets, and Haney followed suit. Baptiste stirred about a bit, then settled down.

Orrin lay still, listening. The fire had burned down to reddish coals. His six-gun was ready at his hand. He heard a brief stirring outside of camp, then stillness.

Haney touched his shoulder just as his eyes were opening. Haney squatted on his heels. "Quiet," he said, "but there's an uneasy feelin' in the air."

"Everybody asleep?"

"Sure, except maybe that Frenchman. I don't know if he ever sleeps."

Orrin sat up and tugged on his boots. For a moment he waited, listening and looking at the coals. If they were to keep the fire, he must add fuel, but he did not want it to flare up. He slung his gun belt around his hips as he stood up, then moved on cat feet over to the fire and with a stick pushed some of the charcoal into the redder coals. If there was a flare-up, it would be slight.

Moving back into the shadows, he retrieved his rifle, stood it against a tree, and shrugged into a buckskin jacket, then moved out to where the horses were. Their quiet munching indicated there was, for the moment, nothing to suggest trouble.

The stars were still bright overhead, but there were clouds in the northwest. After a circling of the camp, he sat down on a rock in the shadows of a larger one and began to consider the situation.

Except for what he had been told, he had no further evidence that his brothers had not continued on west. Knowing them as he did, he knew nothing would turn them from the way they had chosen. If they had been attacked and killed, he would know it within hours, for the battle site could not be far off.

Yet he must not lose time looking for them. He would look, but he would also round up what cattle he could find. It was likely that the cattle were scattered in bunches, for they would certainly try to find one another, and by this time they would have done so.

Soon he must awaken Baptiste and let him prepare breakfast for an early start, for today they would not only search for his brothers and their riders but would begin gathering cattle, if there were any to be found.

He got up suddenly and moved away, impatient with himself. This, of course, was a family matter and not to be avoided, but he had wasted time, too much time. No man knew how much or how little he had, but there were things that he, Orrin Sackett, wanted to do, wanted to become.

He had been admitted to the bar, had begun a practice of sorts, mixed with some political activity, but not enough of either. He had too much to learn to be losing any time. When this was over, he would get right back to Colorado and try to become the man he wished to be.

He remembered something pa said. Pa quoted it, rather, from a distant relative gone long before. "There's two kinds of people in the world, son, those who wish and those who will. The wishers wish to be rich, they wish to be famous, they wish to own a farm or a fine house or whatever. The ones who will, they don't wish, they start out and do it. They become what they want to or get what they want. They will it."

Well, he wasn't going to be a wisher. He'd been lucky. He'd begun to get himself an education. He'd not gone to school long, as there wasn't a school to go to most of the time. But there'd been books.

Suddenly, he was alert. Something was moving out there. He melded his shadow against a tree, listening. There was no further sound.

Orrin's rifle came up in his two hands, ready for a shot or a blow.

After a minute, with no farther sound, he eased back close to where Baptiste lay. The old man was already sitting up, shaking out his boots.

"Somet'ing," he whispered, "somet'ing, he come. He come soon."

Standing back a little, Orrin threw several branches on the fire. It flared up, and he added some heavier wood.

When he stood up again, it was faintly gray. Baptiste was working over the fire, and Orrin went out to where the horses were and saddled his mount.

"Comes a man," Baptiste said. "You see?"

Highpockets Haney stood up on his bed, looking. Orrin walked closer.

Down on the flat, if it could be called that, there was a man, a big man who moved like a bear. He came on slowly, head down, plodding.

Some fifty yards away, he stopped and looked at them. "I'm the Ox," he said. "I'm coming in."

Chapter XIII.

Orrin waited, his hands on his hips while the big man lumbered closer. He was huge, not as tall as Orrin's six feet four inches but thicker and wider. He gave off a sense of shocking physical power, to such a degree that Orrin was irritated by it.

A civilized man with some sense of decency and proportion, he bristled at the sight of the man. He had the good sense to realize it was something of the same feeling two stallions must feel when first they met. He had had his share of fights, but he had never wanted to hit a man until now.

"All right," Orrin said, "you are called the Ox. What else are you? Who are you?"

The Ox knew who he was facing. He did not know the man or care, but he sensed a rival male beast and welcomed it. He was a creature nature had bred to destroy.

"There was a stampede, buffalo. Everything went with them. Men, horses, cattle, everything. There was nothing I could do."

"Where were you when it happened?"

"Off to one side. I was swinging wide around the herd. They came out of the night like a" like an avalanche. And then it was all gone."

"Where's your horse?"

"Gone. He went crazy when the stampede came, and he threw me. He ran away following the herd."

"Get something to eat. You look all in." The trouble was that he did not, and Orrin sat down across the fire from him. Something here was wrong, completely wrong. The Ox did not look done in; he did not look tired or hungry. He had appeared so, coming up the slope from the flat, but no longer. His gun was still in its holster.

Orrin's sense of justice warred with his innate dislike of the man he was watching. He warned himself to dismiss his antagonism and judge fairly.

"Was this the Sackett herd?" he asked.

The big man was eating, not very seriously. A really hungry man did not gulp food, he savored it, he ate slowly. A truly hungry man cannot gulp food because his stomach has shrunk. He is more apt to eat in small bites. The Ox ate as one does who has already eaten his fill, which is a different thing altogether.

"It was. Gilcrist and me, we hired on some time back. The drive was headed west. All gone now, all gone."

"What happened to the Sacketts?"

"Dead, I reckon. They must be dead."

"But if you were off to one side, mightn't they have been, also?"

The Ox squinted his eyes. Orrin suspected he did not like the thought. "Maybe, but I ain't seen them."

'Where have you been since?"

"Hidin' from Injuns. I ain't seen any, but I think it was them started the stampede."

Orrin watched the Ox put down his plate. The man's movements were easy, perfectly controlled. There was much about him that was puzzling. He was, Orrin was sure, a much brighter man than he at first appeared and probably a better-educated one.

Orrin stood up. "All right, boys, as soon as you're through eating, let's move out. Work south and east, and stay together, two by two. I'll ride with Fleming.

"You" a" he turned on the Ox, "help Baptiste a" and tomorrow we'll start you riding for us."

The Ox started to speak, then turned away obviously irritated.

"Work south and east but not too far east. Anything you find, start this way. We'll try to bunch them on the flat down there."

"That's crazy!" the Ox exclaimed. "They're scattered to h.e.l.l and gone!"

"Maybe," Orrin agreed, "but we'll find out, won't we?"

It was a long, hard day. Fleming and Orrin worked south and for some time saw nothing. Twice Orrin cut the sign of old Indian travels. Then they came upon three young steers and started them west.

"Take them along, Fleming," Orrin said. "They'll be a start, anyway, and I'll work on south."

"But I think a""

"It's all right," Orrin said blandly.

Fleming, none too pleased, rode off herding his three steers.

Orrin waited until he was some distance off and then turned back. In less than three hundred yards, he found what he had seen a few minutes before, the tracks of two shod horses and a trail obviously made that day. One of the horses had been carrying a very heavy man.

At a point where the trail would have brought them within sight of Orrin's camp, the two riders had suddenly turned south. Orrin followed, swinging along the trail in a wide circle. There, in the shade of some cottonwoods, one of the riders had dropped from the saddle and walked away.

The other rider had gone off to the west, leading a spare horse.

Orrin Sackett glanced off to the east where the rider had taken the spare horse and then turned in the saddle and glanced up at the plateau of the Turtles. "I'd lay a little bet," he muttered aloud.

He rode south, swinging in a wide circle toward the west, and in a little hollow found six head of cattle gathered around a small seep. He moved them out toward the northwest, picking up two more on the way.

By the time he reached the gathering place, there were at least thirty head there, and Fleming was bringing in another.

Throughout the day, they worked, finding more and more of the scattered groups with occasionally a buffalo calf running with them. By sundown, they had gathered nearly three hundred head.

Baptiste had shifted camp farther west by a good five miles, with the Turtle Mountains still looming close on the north. He had a good fire going on some broiled buffalo steaks for all hands as well as more of his beans. He had made sourdough bread, and they ate simply but well.

The Ox was irritable and not talkative. It was obvious things had not gone as he expected. Baptiste was wary, watchful, and kept a gun handy, not trusting the Ox.