Sackett (1961) (6 page)

Then I stepped outside and we walked back to our outfit. I said to Cap. "You tired?"

"No," he said, "and a few miles will do us no harm."

We rode out. Couple of times I caught Cap sizing me up, like, but he said nothing at all. Not for several miles, anyway, then he asked, "You realize you called that boy a bastard?"

"Well, now. That's strong language, Cap, and I never use strong language."

"You talked him out of it. You made him look the fool."

"A soft answer turneth away wrath," I said. "Or that's what the Good Book says."

We rode on for a couple of long hours and then camped in the woods on Comanche Creek, bedding down for a good rest.

We slept past daylight and took our time when we did get up, so we could watch our trail and see if anybody was behind us.

About an hour past daylight we saw a half-dozen riders going north. If they were following us, they did not see our tracks. We had made our turn in the creek bottom, and by this time any tracks left there had washed away.

It was on to midday before we started out, and we held close to the east side of the valley where we could lose our shape against the background of trees, rocks, and brush. We were over nine thousand feet up, and here the air was cool by day and right cold by night.

We cut across the sign of those riders and took the trail along Costilla Creek, and up through the canyon. At Costilla Creek the riders had turned right on the most obvious trail, but Cap said there was an old Indian trail up Costilla, and we took it. We rode into San Luis late in the afternoon. It was a pleasant little town where the folks were all of Spanish descent. We corralled our stock, hiring a man to watch over our gear again. Then we walked over to Salazar's store. Folks all over this part of the country came there for supplies and news. A family named Gallegos had founded that store many years back, and later this Salazar took it over.

These were friendly, peaceful folks. They had settled in here years before, and were making a good thing of it. We were buying a few things when ,. all of a sudden a woman's voice said, "Senor?"

We turned around; she was speaking to Cap. Soon as he saw her, he said, "Buenos dias, Tina. It has been a long time."

He turned to me. "Tina, this is Tell Sackett, Tyrel's brother."

She was a pretty little woman with great big eyes. "How do you do, Senor? I owe your brother much thanks. He helped me when I had need."

"He's a good man."

"Si... he is,"

We talked a mite, and then a slender whip of a Mexican with high cheek bones and very black eyes came in. He was not tall, and he wouldn't have weighed any more than Cap, but it took only a glance to see he was mucho hombre.

"It is my hoosband, Esteban Mendoza." She spoke quickly to him in Spanish, explaining who we were.

His eyes warmed and he held out his hand.

We had dinner that night with Tina and Esteban, a quiet dinner, in a little adobe house with a string of red peppers hanging on the porch. Inside there was a black-eyed baby with round cheeks and a quick smile.

Esteban was a vaquero, or had been. He had also driven a freight team over the road to Del Norte.

"Be careful," he warned. "There is much trouble in the San Juans and Uncomphagre. Glint Stockton is there, with his outlaws."

"Any drifters riding through?" Cap asked.

Esteban glanced at him shrewdly.

"Si. Six men were here last night. One was a square man with a beard. Another"--Esteban permitted himself a slight smile, revealing beautiful teeth and a sly amusement--"another had two pistols."

"Six, you said?"

"There were six. Two of them were larger than you, Senior Tell, very broad, powerful. Big blond men with small eyes and big jaws. One of them, I think, was the leader."

"Know them?" Cap asked me.

"No, Cap, I don't." Yet even as I said it, I began to wonder. What did the Bigelows look like?

I asked Esteban, "Did you hear any names?"

"No, Senor. They talked very little. Only to ask about travelers."

They must know that either we were behind them, or had taken another trail. Why were they following us, if they were?

The way west after leaving Del Norte lay through the mountains, over Wolf Creek Pass. This was a high, narrow, twisting pass that was most difficult to travel, a very bad place to run into trouble.

It was a pleasant evening, and it did me good to see the nice home the Mendozas had here, the baby, and their pleasure in being together. But the thought of those six men and why they were riding after us worried me, and I could see Cap had it in mind.

We saddled up and got moving. During the ride west Cap Rountree, who had lived among Indians for years, told me more about them than I'd ever expected to know. This was Ute country, though the Comanches had intruded into some of it. A warlike tribe, they had been pushed out of the Black Hills by the Sioux and had come south, tying up with the still more warlike and bloody Kiowa. Cap said that the Kiowa had killed more whites than any other tribe.

At first the Utes and the Comanches, both of Shoshone ancestry, had got along all right. Later they split and were often at war. Before the white man came the Indians were continually at war with one another, except for the Iroquois in the East, who conquered an area bigger than the Roman empire and then made a peace that lasted more than a hundred years.

Cap and I rode through some of the wildest and most beautiful country under the sun, following the Rio Grande up higher and still higher into the mountains. It was hard to believe this was the same river along which I'd fought Comanches and outlaws in Texas--that we camped of a night beside water that would run into the Gulf one day.

Night after night our smoke lifted to the stars from country where we found no tracks. Still, cold, and aloof, the snow-capped peaks lifted above us. Cap, he was a changed man, gentler, somehow, and of a night he talked like he'd never done down below. And sometimes I opened up my Blackstone and read, smelling the smoke of aspen and cedar, smelling the pines, feeling the cold wind off the high snow.

It was like that until we came down Bear Creek into the canyon of the Vallecitos.

West of us rose up the high peaks of the Grenadier and Needle Mountains of the San Juan range. We pulled up by a stream that ran cold and swift from the mountains. Looking up at the peaks I wondered again: what was it up there that got the meat I left hanging in that tree?

Cap, he taken a pan and went down to the creek. In the late evening he washed it out and came back to the fire.

There were flecks of gold in the pan . . . we'd found color. Here we would stake our claim.

Chapter
VII

We forted up for trouble.

Men most likely had been following us. Sooner or later they would find us, and we could not be sure of their intentions. Moreover, the temper of the Utes was never too certain a thing.

Riding up there, I'd had time for thinking. Where gold was found, men would come.

There would be trouble--we expected that--but there would be business too. The more I thought, the more it seemed to me that the man who had something to sell would be better off than a man who searched for gold.

We had made camp alongside a spring not far from the plunging stream that came down the mountainside and emptied into the Vallecitos. I was sure this was the stream I had followed into the high valley where my gold was. Our camp was on a long bench above the Vallecitos, with the mountainside rising steeply behind it and to the east. We were in a clump of scattered ponderosa pine and Douglas fir.

First, we shook out our loops and snaked some deadfall logs into spaces between the trees. Next we made a corral by cutting some lodgepole pine --the lodgepole pine grew mostly, it seemed, in areas that had been burned over--and laying the ends of the poles in tree forks or lashing them to trees with rawhide. It was hard work, but we both knew what needed to be done and there was little talk and no waste effort.

Short of sundown I walked out of the trees and along the bench. Looking north, we faced the widest spot we had so far seen in the canyon of the Vallecitos. It was a good mile north of our camp.

"That's where we'll build the town," I told Cap. He took his pipe out of his mouth. "Town?" "Where there's gold, there'll be folks. Where folks are, there's wanting. I figure we can set up store and supply those wants. Whether they find gold or not, they will be eating and needing tools, powder, blankets--all that sort of thing. It seems to be the surest way, Cap, if a man wants to make him a living. Gold is found and is mined, but the miners eat."

"You won't find me tending store," Cap said. "Me, neither. But we'll lay out the town site, you and me. Well stake the lots, and we'll watch for a good man. Believe me, he'll come along. Then we'll set him up in business."

"You Sacketts," Cap said, "sure play hell once you get out of the mountains. Only thing puzzles me is, what kept you there so long?"

The next few days we worked sunrise to sundown. We paced off a street maybe four hundred yards long, we laid out lots, and planned the town. We figured on a general store, a livery stable, a hotel and boarding house, and two saloons. We spotted a place for a blacksmith shop, and for an assayer.

We cut logs and dragged some of them down to the site for the store, and we put up signs indicating that any folks who came along were to see us about the lots.

Meantime, we worked a little on the claim-- rarely more than a pan or two a day because we had much else to do. But we found color--not a lot, but some.

We also improved our fort. Not that it looked much like one, and we didn't want it to, but we were set up to fight off an attack if it came.

Neither one of us had much trust in the peaceful qualities of our fellowmen. Seems to me most of the folks doing all the talk about peace and giving the other fellow the benefit of the doubt were folks setting back to home in cushy chairs with plenty of grub around and the police nearby to protect them. Back there, men would set down safe of an evening and write about how cruel the poor Indian was being treated out west They never come upon the body of a friend who had been staked out on an ant hill or had a fire built on his stomach, nor had they stood off a charge of Indians.

Personally, I found Indians people to respect. Their ways weren't our ways, and a lot of virtues they were given credit for by white men were only ideas in a white man's head, and no Indian would have considered them virtues. Mercy rarely had any part in the make-up of an Indian.

Folks talk about human nature, but what they mean is not human nature, but the way they are brought up. It seems to me that folks who are brought up to Christian ways of thought don't believe in the taking of life, but the Indian had no such conception. If you were a stranger you were an enemy. If you gave him gifts it was usually because you were afraid of him ... or that's how he thought.

Indians were fighting men. Fighting was their greatest sport and occupation. Our people look up to atheltes of one kind or another, but the Indian saved all his respect for fighting men. And an Indian would count the scalp of a woman or a child as well as a man's.

This was wrong to our way of thinking, but his thinking was altogether different.

The Indian, before the white man took up the West, was physically cleaner than the white man. He bathed often, and it wasn't until white man's liquor and poverty caught up with him that he lost the old ways. But the Indian warrior would have been ashamed of all the milk-sop talk about the poor Indian. He was strong, he was proud, and he was able to handle his own problems.

It was Sunday before trouble showed. Sunday was a quiet time for us. Cap was busy scraping and tanning some elk and deer hides, and after cleaning my weapons and catching a bait of trout, I settled down to study Blackstone.

It was a warm, lazy day, with sunlight sparkling on the creek waters, and scarce a breeze stirring the pines overhead. Time to time my thoughts would drift from my study to that high valley. If I wanted to go up and get some of that gold I would have to find another way into that valley before snow fell and closed it off.

"Tell..."

Cap spoke softly, and I got up and walked over to him. He was looking off through the trees, and we could see four riders over by the town site. They turned toward us, and I got out my field glass. There was nothing familiar about any of them. While I watched they started in our direction, and the last man in line checked his pistol.

Down the bench, maybe fifty yards or so, they slowed to a stop, seeing the corral with the horses in it, and the smoke from our fire. Then they came on up.

Me, I was wearing an old U.S. Army hat, a wore-out blue army shirt and jeans, and I had me a belt gun on. When I sighted them coming I taken up my Winchester, and Cap and me stood out to greet them.

" 'Light," I said. "Ain't often we have visitors."

"Looks of that town site, you must be expectin' plenty," one of them said. "What would a man want with a town here?"

"Well, sir," I said, "we took a notion. Cap Roun-tree an' me, we like to go to town of an evening when the chores are done. There ain't no town close up, so we decided to build our own. We laid her out and started cuttin' timber. Then we held an election."