Over on the Dry Side Page 2

  “I cannot presume to speak for her, but do you stay on without fear and, if she returns, you will find you have lost nothing and perhaps gained much.”

  “They didn’t get her,” I said then. “She got away.”

  Pa looked at me, surprised. The stranger stopped with his fork halfway to his mouth. Slowly, he lowered it. “How can you know that?”

  “I seen tracks out back. They were old tracks, but a body could read ’em. Somebody came up, ridin’ easy…cantering. Of a sudden that horse was pulled up awful sharp, his hoofs dug in an’ he reared, then that horse turned in his own tracks and took off like lightnin’ for the hills.”

  “Did you see any other tracks?”

  “Yessir. They taken out after her. There was two, three of ’em…maybe four. But she had a good horse an’ a good lead.”

  “They still might have caught her.”

  “They never done it. She got into them hills, and she knowed them hills like her own hands. She…”

  “How d’you know that?” Pa said.

  “The way she taken to them hills, no stoppin’, no hesitatin’ like. She rode right into them hills and she got to the little valley yonder an’ when she got there she drove a bunch of cattle—”

  “What cattle?” Pa said. “I ain’t seen no cattle!”

  “There’s cattle,” I insisted. “She drove ’em up and then she started ’em back the way they come, wiping out her trail. Then she went into soft sand where she wouldn’t leave no tracks.”

  “Still, they might have found her.”

  “Nossir, they didn’t. They followed her into them hills, but they lost her trail under the hoofs of them cattle, like she figured they would. They hunted a long time, then they come back.”

  “Are those tracks still there?”

  “Nossir. There ain’t no tracks of any kind. On’y rains before that was soft and gentle, not enough to wipe out good tracks.”

  “Doby,” Pa never called me by name an awful lot, so he was almighty serious, “Doby, why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  I could feel my neck gettin’ red. “Pa, you was so set on this place. You takin’ to it like no other an’ all. An’ me, I liked it, too. I was afeared if you knowed you might pull out an’ leave. You might just give up an’ we’d be ridin’ the wagon agin, goin’ nowhere much. I want to stay, Pa. I want to stay right here. I want to see our work come to somethin’, an’ I want a place I know is home.”

  “Stay on,” the stranger said. “I think I can safely say it will be all right.”

  “But how?” Pa asked. “How can anybody?”

  “I can,” the stranger said, “I can say it. My name is Chantry. The dead man you buried was my brother.”

  Well, we just looked at him. Pa was surprised, and maybe I was, too, a little. I’d had a funny feelin’ all along, only mostly I was afraid he was one of them.

  “Even so,” Pa said, “what about his daughter? An’ his wife or whoever she was? Don’t she have first claim?”

  “That’s just it,” Chantry said quietly, “my brother was a widower, with neither wife nor child. He was a lot older than me. If there was a woman, then I have no idea who she was or what she was doing here.”

  Chapter 2

  *

  PA CUT HIMSELF a piece of work when he decided to farm that place, and it taken some doing for the two of us. And from time to time I headed for them hills, Pa liking fresh meat and there being no game close by ’cept an occasional deer in the meadow.

  Come daybreak, it bein’ Sunday, I taken Pa’s old rifle and saddled up the dapple. Saying nothing to Pa or Chantry, I just taken off.

  They were low, rolling hills that broke into sharp bluffs, kind of a bench, and then the high-up mountains lyin’ behind ’em. So far, I’d never been so far as the mountains, but there they lay, awaitin’ for me. They knew and I knew that one day I’d ride those trails.

  Right now I had me an idea, and huntin’ meat was second to that. Because that girl or woman, or whichever she was, headed right into them hills like she knew where she was going, and neither me nor them other folks found her. Least, I didn’t believe they had. For certain, they never found her that first day.

  If she knew where she was goin’, it stood to reason she’d rode the hills before, many times maybe, and if there was any kind of a hideout, she’d know where it was.

  It wasn’t worryin’ me much who she was. She’d either been close by when the killin’ took place, or she knew somethin’ about it. She surely didn’t waste any time askin’ questions when the shootin’ started.

  By now any sign she left would be washed away, ’less she was still back yonder and had cut fresh sign for somebody to follow. Any way you looked at it, she was headin’ for some place and I wanted to find out where. Whatever it was, or wherever she was, she figured she’d be safe when she got there. Or that’s how it looked to me.

  It was cool an’ pleasant. My horse had a liking for far-flung trails as well as me, and he pointed for the hills like he already known where he was going. The grass was bound to be thick up yonder, and the water cold and fresh.

  I never had but just the rifle. I’d always wanted me one of them pistols, but we never had the money for it. I had me a rifle and it was a good one too—a Henry. I also carried me a bowie a man could shave with, it was that sharp.

  The dapple pointed us into a fold of the hills, climbed a little bit, and we topped out on a grass knoll with the wind stirring his mane and all the world spread out before and behind.

  The ranch land lay spread behind me, but I wasn’t looking back. I was sixteen year old, and somewhere in the mountains there was a girl. Now in all my sixteen years I never stood up right close to not more than three or four girls of her age, and ever’ single time I was skeered. They just look like they knowed it all, and I didn’t know nothin’.

  That woman who rode off on that horse might be fourteen, forty, or ninety-three for all I knew, but in my mind’s eye she was young, gold-haired, and pretty. She was every princess I’d ever heard stories about, and I was goin’ to meet her.

  For three, four years now I’d been rescuing beautiful girls from Indians, bears, and buffaloes. In my dreams. But it never got down to where I had to talk to ’em. I kind of fought shy of that, even in my dreams, for I had no notion what you said to a girl.

  Settin’ there lookin’ at the mountains I kind of sized ’em up. Now mountains just ain’t all that easy to ride through or cross over. There has to be ways, and if you give study to a situation you can surely come up with one of the ways.

  Looked to me like I saw a faint trail goin’ up through the grass along the slope of a certain hill, so I taken a chance and moved out and that dapple taken that trail and held to it.

  I thought the trail seemed to peter out, but not for the dapple. He seen or smelled it, and just kept a-goin’ and we dipped down off that slope across a meadow so green it hurt your eyes, and then across a rough and randy little mountain stream that boiled along over the rocks like it was going somewhere a-purpose, and then into the trees.

  We skirted the aspens, and I seen an elk. It was a bull elk, maybe half-grown, and fat as a tick. That was meat for a coupla weeks plus jerked meat for winter, and my rifle came halfway up before I stopped it.

  That shot would go echoing off up that canyon and warn anybody, friend or enemy, that I was on my way. Unhappy and feeling bad, I let that elk go. But it was too soon to shoot. I had a sight of country to see before I started telling ever’body I was there.

  At the edge of the aspen stand, I drew up the dapple and sat and listened. The elk kinda moved off, paying me no mind. I let him walk away, then looked up at the great swell of the mountain. It was rounded green, with a battalion of aspens marching down the slope in a solid rank ’til it came to a halt. Like a troop of soldiers. From there on, it was only grass with a few dips and hollers here and there with tufts of brush showing. That trail I was following, or one kin to it, made just a little thread acro
ss that slope.

  Now trails in the mountains can be game trails, but you usually don’t see them from afar unless a body is above ’em. Trails can also be Indian trails, or they can be where some prospector has staked him a claim…or maybe even built him a cabin.

  Chantry had said his brother had no wife nor daughter. Who, then, could that mysterious girl or woman be?

  She might be some woman Chantry taken up with. Or just somebody he’d met or found who needed help.

  The dapple walked along easy-like. We dipped down into a draw, waded a branch, and had started up the opposite slope through the aspen when all of a sudden there were two men setting their horses right slam in front of me, barring the trail.

  One of them was a stocky, barrel-chested man with a broad, hard face and tiny eyes. The other man was much like him, only a mite bigger.

  “Where d’you think you’re going?” the smaller one asked me.

  “Huntin’ meat,” I said, kind of careless-like. “Figgered I might scare up a elk.”

  “This here trail’s closed, boy,” the other man said. “We got us a claim back yonder. We wouldn’t want to get hit by no stray bullets. So you just hunt down below or off to the other direction.”

  A grin broke his hard face like somebody had cracked a rock. “Why, somebody was to shoot up here we might take it wrong. We might just figure he was a-shootin’ at us an’ shoot back. You wouldn’t like that, now would you, boy?”

  He wasn’t runnin’ no bluff on me. I didn’t cotton to him, nohow, and didn’t believe he had a claim back yonder. “Nossir,” I said, “I wouldn’t like that. I wouldn’t want nobody thinkin’ I actually shot at ’im an’ missed. Thing like that,” I said, “can ruin a man’s reputation.”

  Well, they just looked at me. They’d took me for some kid they could scare, not dry behind the ears, but I never was much of a one to scare.

  Back yonder to home I’d heard a fussin’ in the pigpen one night when Pa was gone, and I’d taken down his shotgun loaded with buckshot an’ gone with a lantern to see what for. Well, I opened the door of the pigshed an’ they was all backed into a corner with a full-growed cougar lookin’ ’em straight in the eye. When that door opened he turned on me, ears back an’ tail a-lashin’. Now nobody in his right mind corners a cougar, ’cause cornered they’ll fight. But I wasn’t of no mind to let that cougar make a bait of one of our pigs, so I ups with the shotgun and let him have a blast just as he leapt at me.

  That cougar knocked me a-rollin’, tail over teakettle back out the door, an’ my head smacked up agin a rock and laid me out cold. But when Pa got home I had me a cougar skinned and the hide nailed up to dry out on the outside cabin wall.

  “Look, kid,” the bigger man said. “You’re a mite sassy for a boy your size. Somebody’ll take you off that horse an’ give you a whuppin’, if you don’t watch out.”

  “Mebbe,” I said. “But he’d be doin’ it with a chunk of lead in his belly. An’ if there was two of them, two chunks of lead.

  “This here’s a free country, wide open for all, and if you’re worried about gettin’ shot at, you just hightail it back to your claim, because I reckon I could see a claim and men workin’ and I’d put no bullet near ’em…’less they asked for it.

  “I come up this mountain for meat, an’ when I go back down, I’ll have it.” I had that Henry right across my saddle. Both men was pistol-armed and one of them had a rifle in his boot, but it was in the boot and them handguns was in their holsters. My Henry was lookin’ right at them.

  “You get your meat,” the stocky one said again. “But make sure you stay shy of this mountainside or you’ll get all the shootin’ you want and then some.”

  They turned their horses then and went back up the trail, and soon as they were out of sight, I reined my dapple over and whisked through the trees, myself. No tellin’ when they might try to circle around an’ take a shot at me.

  Followin’ that trail that day didn’t look like good business, so I angled off through the trees, just getting myself out of harm’s way. I wasn’t no way eager for a shootin’ over anything like that, but I didn’t figure to back up, neither. So I worked my way up a slope, turned north and then west with the lay of the land and the trees, and suddenly I come out atop a mesa, riding down amongst some all-fired big ponderosas, scattered spruce and aspen. Coming down through some big old trees I come upon a cabin.

  It set on a slab of solid rock with a big wide view of the whole country spread out in front. A body could see the Sleeping Ute, the great juttin’ prow of Mesa Verde, and way afar off, the Abajo and La Sal mountains of Utah. Some trees growin’ on the edge of the cliff kind of screened the cabin off, but a man with a good glass could of picked up ridin’ men some distance away.

  The builder had cut grooves in the solid rock and put in fitted squared-off timbers that were nigh two-foot through. They’d been fitted like they’d growed that way, and the roof was strongly built and solid.

  I knocked on the door, expectin’ no answer, and none came. So I lifted the latch and stepped in.

  I got a surprise.

  The place was empty. But the floor was swept clean, the hearth dusted, and everything spic an’ span. There was a faint smell in the room that wasn’t the smell of a closed-up place. It was a fresh, woodsy smell. And then I seen on a shelf behind me a pot with flowers in it and some sprigs of juniper.

  The flowers wasn’t two days old, and when I looked in the pot there was water for ’em.

  There was no bedding. There were no clothes hung on the pegs along the wall, and no dishes for cookin’ ’cept for a coffeepot.

  Outside, there was a bench by the door, and the grass below it looked like somebody had been settin’ there, time to time. That somebody could see our ranch right easy. It was miles away but the air was mountain clear, and you could see the ranch plain as day.

  By now I was three miles or more from where I’d come up against the two trouble-hunters, and I’d followed no trail to get here. Yet I knew there must be a trail. Maybe more than one.

  I scouted around the place, around the clearing. Now nobody ever said I couldn’t read sign, and by the time I’d finished and set down on that bench I knowed a thing or two.

  It was a girl or woman who come here, and she didn’t come often, but when she did she set awhile. I found no tracks but hers…not even horse tracks.

  She must have come by horse. She’d likely left it back in the brush somewheres. This was a deserted, lonely place, and it looked to me like the girl who come here liked to be alone.

  Was it the selfsame girl who’d been to Chantry’s place? I had me a feelin’ it was. From here she could see the Chantry place clear.

  Maybe, when she came here, she watched and got curious to see who was living on the Chantry place.

  Maybe.

  Whoever built this cabin had known what he was doin’, anyway. The land sloped gently away in front of the cabin for a hundred yards, and where the grass ended against the trees there were some tall old pines that make it unlikely anybody could see the cabin from way down below, even with powerful glasses.

  There was water. And beyond the pines the mountain fell clean away down through timber where no horse could go, nor a man climb up without a good struggle. Behind, there was forest that swelled up into the mountain. A trail could lead off somewhere right or left of that swell.

  Suddenly I had me a idea. That woman had cleared up this place and left flowers. She liked the place and she liked it neat. I figgered to let her know somebody was about who liked what she had done. Who liked what she liked.

  Under one eave of the house I found a small Indian pot. I taken it, rinsed it good, and half-filled it with water. Then I went down the slope and picked some flowers and put them in the water. This I left on the table where she’d be sure to see it.

  Then I scouted for a trail to go back down and found one. It was a faint trail, but it had seen some use, time to time. First off, I looked for sign. Whatever
there was seemed to be maybe a week old. I followed along, studying tracks. It was a horse that weighed no more than eight hundred pound, but with a nice, even pace. And the woman who rode that horse was small, ’cause I saw the hoof tracks when the horse was unmounted and after, and her weight didn’t make hardly a single bit of difference.

  Now I knew that trail led somewhere, and I had me a idea it led right to where those two men had come from, who braced me on the trail. So once I spotted the direction the trail taken, I moved into the timber and hightailed it for the Chantry place. To home.

  Pa was out near the barn and he looked up when I come in. “First time you ever come home without meat, boy. What’s the matter? Didn’t you see nothin’?”

  “Never got a good shot,” I said. “Next time it’ll be different.”

  “We got to have meat, son. I’ll take a walk down the meadow, come sundown. Sometimes there’s a deer feedin’ down thataway.”

  Chantry come out on the steps. He threw me a quick, hard look. He’d dusted off his black suit and polished his boots with a rag. He stood there on the steps, looking toward the mountains while I filled a bucket of water for the house. We all kept busy for a while, even Chantry, with his thoughts.

  It was coming up to sundown now, and when Pa took his rifle and started off, Chantry just stood there watching him go. “He’s a good man, your father is,” he said. “A real good man.”

  “Yessir. We’ve had us some hard luck.”

  “This is rough country,” Chantry replied. “I like what he’s doing here.”

  “He just plain fell in love with the place.…All the work that somebody else had done. He couldn’t just go off an’ leave it be.”

  “I know.” Chantry looked at me again. “Now, boy, tell me what you saw today.”

  “What I saw? I…” Well, I started to lie, but he was looking right straight into my eyes and smiling a little, and suddenly I didn’t want to lie to him. So I told him the whole business from the start. Leaving out the flowers.