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  Most of the Cherokees had been forced to leave their lands and move west to Indian Territory, and their trails were no longer used except by some hunter or an Indian from afar. Not many of the flatlanders knew of those trails up there along the ridges, so I could come and go with nobody bothering their heads about me. After I spaded the garden plot, I plowed up a patch for seed corn, and did my planting.

  Sometimes of a nighttime I'd get to yearning after folks and I'd walk away out on Chancy Point to look down into the valley where I could see the lights of homes. Nobody down there wanted to see me—they'd think of me as that horse thief's boy, if at all.

  Of course—and the thought kept a-nagging—there was old Jerry Dunvegan. He'd been friendly when no one else would be, when I was a scared, heart-broke boy.

  It was lonesomeness started me down the mountain, and an evil day it was when I decided to call on old Jerry.

  The mule taken me down. The night was a quiet one, with a sliver of moon holding its shadow in its arms, and the darkling pines were a fringe along the sky. A ghost wind moved among the trees when I rode down to the village that had hung my pa, down to see the one man I could call friend.

  His house stood nigh the brook that tumbled down the mountain from my own ridge, and a white cow looked over the rail fence at us as we came by, with the barn and the barn smells close to hand. It was when I was turning in at the gate, with what surmising I could only guess at, that I turned and rode back and tethered my mule in the pines near the brook.

  Closing the barnyard gate behind me, I went to the kitchen door and tapped light. There was a moment of stillness within, then a footstep and a voice. "Who's there?"

  "A friend, inquiring for Jerry Dunvegart"

  The door opened a bit, and a woman stood inside. It was Jerry's oldest, a tall, thin girl, looking out at me. "I don't know you. Who is it, calling on pa?"

  "It's Otis Tom, Otis Tom Chancy, ma'am."

  She kind of caught her breath, and her features stiffened as she looked at me. "Go away from here!" she said. "You've caused trouble enough!"

  "I'm sorry, ma'am, but Mr. Dunvegan treated me kindly. I thought to bring him thanks, and news of me."

  "Go away! He's had his fill of you, and so have we all. Befriended you, did he? And a sight of trouble it caused. When they found out—"

  Her voice was getting high, and sound carried in the still night air, which made me nervous. "If you'd let me step in—" I began.

  She drew back. "Never let up on him, they didn't. They read him out of the church, and nobody'd take to him at all. That was Brimstead's doing."

  "I'd no idea. Your pa was Christian kind to me, ma'am, when I was a boy alone, and—"

  "You get out now. I've told you what trouble you caused, and if they knew you'd come here again they'd be meaner than ever."

  "Can I see Jerry?"

  "No, you can't see him. Pa's abed."

  The door behind her opened a mite, and a slim bit of a girl was standing there. It was Kitty Dunvegan, old Jerry's youngest, scarcely fourteen.

  "Kit, you get back!" the tall girl said. "And close that door!"

  "Who is it, Priss?"

  "It's that no-account Otis Tom, the horse thief's boy." She turned on me, fiercely angry. "Now you get, or I'll call Stud Pelly."

  It was no use. Stepping back from the door, I said, "Sorry ma'am, I just wanted to see your pa. He stood by me. And you know, ma'am, I never stole any horses. I don't deny pa was up on that horse. He was drunk at the time, and him unaccustomed to strong drink. When he sobered up he'd have taken that horse back, with apologies. He was that kind of man. Trouble was, Brimstead and Stud, they wanted a hanging, and they got it."

  "That makes no difference. Your pa stole that horse, and Mr. Brimstead's an important man. Why, he owns nigh half the county!"

  When the door closed I held still a minute, listening. Then I went through the barnyard, climbed over the fence, and made it to my mule.

  Behind me a door closed, so I sat my saddle, listening. Who could that be, I wondered. It had sounded like the Dunvegan door.

  Time was a-wasting, so I walked my mule off up through the trees, only returning to the trail after I'd put half a mile behind me. It was fetching up to daybreak when I reached the cabin.

  A mite hungry, I put a fire together and started to fry some hog-meat, when of a sudden I heard a whisper of sound from outside. Having no cause to expect friendship in a place where so many held hatred for me, I caught up my gun and stepped to the door.

  A girl was coming across the yard from the woods. Not from the path, but from the brook. Now a body could come up from the village that way, and much faster than by the path, but it was a climb and a scramble among rocks and brush. It was that skinny Dunvegan girl ... the young one.

  "Kit," I said, "what are you doing up here?"

  "Priss told them. I came to warn you. She told Stud and them, and they're fixing to come for you the lot of them."

  "Why? I never did anything wrong."

  "That don't make no difference to them. Stud's talking it up that they want no thief's kin around here. He's got his rope, but he says you'll get a whoppin' and a running start. He's all the time talking about that rope. It hung one man, he says, and if need be it'll hang others. Folks are afraid of him."

  "You borrowed trouble, Kit. You shouldn't have come. Now, what did you do that for?"

  She dug her toe in the ground. "Pa likes you. Priss didn't speak true, because I know pa would have wished to see you. It's true folks have treated us shabby, but pa's proud, and he pays them no mind. It's cost us a-plenty, because nobody would do business with pa. Some didn't like what he did, but most of them were just afraid to cross Brimstead."

  "You get back before they find out," I told her.

  "What will you do?"

  "I could run, but I'm of no mind for it. I'll wait and let them speak their piece. If worse comes to worst, I can get out."

  She was a slim youngster, and she had come far to warn me, so I taken her by the chin and kissed her lightly on the cheek. "You go along now," I said, "but you tell your pa I'll never forget what he did, and if he ever needs a friend, he's only to sing out and I'll come runnin'."

  She was gone in a moment, slipping into the woods like a wraith. And they were coming. From the sound of them I knew where they were on the trail, and as there seemed to be time enough, I led my mule around and down by my sneaky trail and hid him in the brush below the cabin where the rock wall fell sheer away from the cabin foundation. I tied him there and went back and filled my water bucket.

  When I heard their voices to, I stepped back inside and barred the door, then closed the shutters and barred them, opening only the loop holes. From the back window, which they could neither approach nor see, I hung a rope where I could slide down to the mule.

  There looked to be nine or ten of them, mostly loafers and no-accounts.

  "You!" came a voice. "In the house there!" That was Stud Pelly. He was a big man, not taller than most, but wider and thicker, a strong, mean man with the name of being a bully. "Come on out of there!"

  I just sat there, a-watching and a-waiting. It was in me to even the score for pa; but no man takes a life lightly if he's in his right mind, and I wasn't about to kill anybody unless they forced me to it. Besides, I'd put some miles behind me since I was the kid whose pa they'd hung. Though I was still nothing but a slim, tall boy, I'd met men and faced up to them before this, and I knew the kind of rabble I faced now.

  Pelly strode up and banged his big fist on the door. "Open up, kid! I know you're in there!"

  Softly I crept up the ladder to the loft. The cabin was built with an overhang so defenders could keep Indians from building fires against the log walls that was back in the old days.

  There was a plug right over where Pelly would be standing, a plug that stopped up a loophole. Easing it out, I looked down on Pelly, who was banging on the door again Then I taken out my pistol and thrust the muzzle through th
e hole, aiming at the log wall beside Pelly. The bullet would miss him, but he would get a face full of slivers. I squeezed the trigger.

  In the loft the gun boomed like a cannon. There was a startled cry, then a scramble of boots running and I went down the ladder to the door. I peered through one loophole after another, but I saw nothing. All was dark and still. My unexpected shot had scared them off, but they would come back, twice as many and twice as mean.

  Stud Pelly was a bragger and he would want to say he'd run me off. Well, he could say it, for I would be gone. When I came back again I would be a bigger, tougher, older man, and then I would have something to say to both Pelly and Brimstead.

  Taking what was worth taking, I slid down the rope to the mule, and took off down the old Cherokee trails. And that time I was gone for a year.

  At Independence I latched onto a freight outfit trailing west to Santa Fe. We had a couple of brushes with Indians, but nothing to amount to anything. In Santa Fe I hired out to a cattle outfit, worked a few months, then bought an outfit myself and went to hunting buffalo on the Staked Plains.

  When I rode back to Tennessee again I was astride the dun, packing a Colt revolving shotgun, a .44 Henry, and a six-shooter. The cabin was still standing, but the logs were scarred with bullets and the door had been broken down, then re-hung by somebody who was no hand with tools. The place had been swept out.

  This time I wasn't staying. It was home-sickness that brought me back, or maybe it was just trouble-hunting, for being just past eighteen I was a far different person from the thirteen-year-old who had been forced to watch his father hung. I was pushing past six feet in height, and I weighed a solid one hundred and eighty pounds. I'd done my share of hard work and fighting, and on the buffalo ranges my shooting had been as good as the best. I wasn't ready to go hunting them, but if they came for me they'd buy themselves a packet of trouble.

  Nobody came. It was quiet in the high-up hills. I went to sleep at night to the soft sound of the pines, awoke to drink good, cold spring water, and I worked a little around the place. Mostly I just stretched out on my back reading a pack of dime novels and magazines brought in from the outside. For two months I loafed and considered the future whatever of a future I hoped to have.

  That is, nobody came until the last day. There was a restlessness on me then, and a honing for far-off places. I'd cleaned my guns and was working over the leather of my gunbelt and holster when I suddenly decided to ride out for the West. My grub was about gone, so it was time to leave. I had started packing the last of my outfit when I heard a girl singing.

  She was coming up along the creek that ran downhill to the Dunvegan place, and from the way she was singing I knew she was not expecting to see anybody. Then she stepped clear of the woods and pulled up short. It was Kitty Dunvegan.

  It was Kit, only something had happened to her in the year I'd been away. She'd started showing quite a figure in all the proper places, and most of her freckles were gone, leaving only a sprinkling over her nose.

  "Oh it's you!" she said. Suddenly I was glad that I was cleaned up for travel, with a fresh shave and my hair combed and all. "I didn't think there'd be anybody here."

  "I wasn't exactly notifying folks," I said.

  "Have you been here long? I've been off to school." Her eyes went to my saddled-up horse. "You going away?"

  "It came on me to ride. To Santa Fe, maybe, or somewhere north."

  "It must be wonderful to just ride off ... anywhere you want to, like that. Have you ever been to Santa Fe?"

  "Yes, ma'am. I worked for a freight outfit going out. I rode for a cattle ranch south of there around Tularosa."

  "Are the Spanish girls pretty?"

  "I reckon so. Black eyes, and all."

  "Do you like black eyes?"

  "Until now," I said, looking into her blue eyes, "I always thought them the prettiest."

  She blushed a mite, and it was fetching. So we just sat talking for a spell, of all manner of things, and I told her some about Indian fighting on the plains of the buffalo.

  "Will you ever come back?" she asked.

  "Nothing to come back for," I said. "I've been coming for the mountains and this ol' cabin. It ain't much, but it's mine. This Chancy land is deeded land, and I kept the taxes paid, and all. But I don't know if I'll ever come again. Maybe when I'm an old man."

  "You could come to see me," she said.

  "What would your sister say? And your friends down on the flatland?"

  "I won't care. I won't care what anybody thinks."

  "I'll come then," I told her, "I'll surely come."

  She laughed suddenly. "You scared them," she said. "You scared them all that last time. Even Stud Pelly ..."

  "They came a-hunting it." I looked at her. "You the one who has been sweeping up inside?"

  Her cheeks grew pink. "I wanted it to be clean when you came back. Besides, I come here sometimes when I want to be alone. Pa said it was all right."

  "We're neighbors, like. Our deeded land fronts against yours at the bottom of the hill. Grandpa and pa, they filed on the whole ridge. The land ain't of much account, but pa wanted it. We claimed some, and bought some."

  Kit got up suddenly. "I've got to go. Priss will come looking for me."

  "Does she come up here?"

  "Oh, no. I don't believe anyone knows of that path but you and me."

  "Well, it ain't much of a path."

  All of a sudden I felt awkward. I had no idea what to do, so I thrust out my hand. "Kit, I'm coming back," I said. "You can figure on it. I daren't come back until I can stand against them. All of them, if need be."

  "Don't you be too long," she said.

  She walked away to the edge of the woods beside the brook, then looked back. "Pa wonders why you never called on your kinfolk for help," she said. "Everybody knows the Sacketts. They're fighters."

  "I never asked for help. I ain't likely to."

  That was all we said. When she was gone I threw a leg over the dun and hunted my path down the trail.

  I was going to come back, all right. I was going to come back and face up to Martin Brimstead and Stud Pelly. And then I'd go calling ... I'd go calling on Kitty Dunvegan.

  Chapter 3

  UNDER THE LOW gray sky, under the swollen clouds, our cattle moved westward. The narrow trail led between thickets of blackjack brush mixed with sumac and tangled blackberry bushes, with here and there a clump of prickly pear.

  It was a raw, rough land, brown and sad beneath the lowering sky. The wind worried my hatbrim, and my face was occasionally splashed by huge drops, seemingly out of nowhere.

  Thunder muttered sullenly above the low hills, and lightning played across the sky. I had seen such storms before this, and the dun was not a nervous horse. I had more than a storm to think of, for I was riding among enemies.

  Four days we moved westward, making eight miles the first day, then twelve, then six, and finally a mere five. The cattle were badly strung out, but they were easy enough to handle. There was little opportunity for straying, for the blackjack thickets were almost impenetrable for miles.

  Needful as it was to keep a wary eye for trouble, my thoughts kept straying. If we could get these cattle to market, I could pay my note and have several times a thousand dollars left over. With that amount of money, if I was to handle it right, I could soon be a well-off man.

  It was in my mind to become rich and then return to the mountains and show them what a Chancy could do.

  The saddle is a place for dreaming when there's hours of trail ahead, or when night-herding. And it came over me that to be rich was not enough. A man must win respect, and not the kind that can be bought with money or won with a gun. My pa always taught me that a man should strive to become somebody. He never made it himself, but that was nothing against him, because he tried. He just never held the right cards. With me it would be different.

  I won't claim that I didn't think of being a big man in the eyes of that girl back yonder. Fa
ct was, she occupied a good bit of my dreaming these days, though I'd little enough reason to think I mattered all that much.

  We made camp that night alongside a slow-moving stream with blackberry bushes, cottonwoods, and persimmons all about. It was a good camp, with a fine meadow of grass and firewood a-plenty. But when I rode up to the fire they all stopped talking, as if they had plans they didn't want me to hear.

  Dishing up my food, I sat down away from the lot of them, but before I sat down I swung my holster around between my legs where the butt would be right at my hand whilst eating.

  "You ain't a very trusting man," Gates commented.

  "I've had small reason. But don't forget one thing. You've got half your herd and a thousand dollars coming that you wouldn't have, had I shot any slower. I could have been cold under the grass back yonder.

  "And let me say this," I added. "The drive isn't over. Not by a long shot. There's rough country ahead, and some mighty mean Indians. If we get the herd through without trouble we'll be lucky."

  "Have you been through here before?" Gates asked.

  "No, but I've been through Kansas, and I've talked with men who drove up the trail from Texas. You folks are going to need me—you're going to need all the help you can get."

  They didn't like it much, but Noah Gates was a mite more pleasant for a while. Over coffee he dug at me with questions about the country to the west. Just south of our route was Arapaho country, with Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas not far off. I didn't hold back when I told them of what lay ahead. With the buffalo herds almost gone, those Indians would be hunting beef, and they knew how to get it.

  For the next two days we had good drives, with occasional flurries of rain. It was cold, wet, and miserable, but a sight better than some of the hot, dusty drives I remembered when the heat rising from the bodies of the cattle had been stifling.

  The weather was hard on the older men. Being young and tough and no stranger to work, I did more than my share. Meanwhile, I made a book tally of my stock. A man unused to working cattle might have the idea they all look alike, but a good cattleman will soon know every steer in a herd. My brands tallied to seven hundred and thirty-three.