man to dinner.'
He looked around again. The man lying on the floor was being examined. The doctor looked up. 'This man has three broken ribs and a punctured lung,' he said quietly.
'That's his problem,' I said harshly. 'Anybody who fools around with the bandwagon is likely to get hit with a horn.'
'Those are my sentiments,' Oury said crisply. The keys jangled, the door swung wide. 'Come, Mr. Sackett, you are my guest.'
'I don't mind if I do,' I said, 'but I warn you, I'm an eating man, just getting my appetite back.'
The Shoo-Fly was almost empty when we went in, but a few minutes afterward it was crowded to the doors.
When I'd eaten, I sat back in my chair. One of the Tucson citizens came in with my Winchester and gun belt. 'If you're staying in town,' he said, 'you'd better go armed.'
'I am staying,' I replied, 'until this matter is cleared up. I did nothing wrong out there. I killed a good man, a tough man. He might have lived for hours in that boiling hot sun with those slivers burning into him. He was not a man to die easy.'
'I might have asked for the same thing,' somebody said.
I was quiet after that. I'd eaten well, and I had my guns on again, and all I wanted was to get this affair cleared up and pull out for Tyrel's outfit in New Mexico. As for this town, it was no place for me until my enemies had drifted, and being drifters, I knew they'd soon be gone.
The doctor came in and gave me a hard look. 'I'll say this for you,' he said, 'you're a bad man to corner. You've put four men in bed. One of them has a smashed cheekbone, his face is ripped open, and he's lost nine teeth. One has a torn shoulder muscle, another has a dent in his skull and his scalp is ripped right across the top, laid open for five inches. The one with the punctured lung will live if he's lucky. All said and done, you put four men out of action, and injured six or seven more.'
'They came after me,' I said. The outer door opened then and two men came in.
One was Captain Lewiston, the other was Toclani, the Apache scout. They looked around until their eyes spotted me, and they came over to my table.
'Sackett,' Lewiston said, 'Toclani has talked to Kahtenny. They verify your story. Kahtenny told us in detail, as did several other Apaches, what was happening out there during the attack when you shot Higgins.'
'You talked to Kahtenny?' I asked Toclani.
'He, too.' He indicated Lewiston. 'We ride together to Apache camp.'
I looked at Lewiston. 'You taken a long chance, man.'
'It was simple justice. I knew that the people who would surely know what happened were the Apaches. I did not know they would talk, but Toclani came with me, and Kahtenny had much to say of you, Sackett. He said you were a brave man, a strong man, and a warrior.'
'Did he get his squaw back?'
'Yes, and he thanks you.' Lewiston looked at me. 'He may come in. All because of that, he may come in.'
'I hope he does,' I said. 'He's a good Indian.'
And so it was over. Nobody wanted me back in jail any longer, but I figured to stay around until the sheriff came back so as there'd be no argument. Around town folks stopped to speak to me on the street, and several thanked me for bringing the youngsters back.
But I saw nothing of Laura ... had she left town? Or was she still there, waiting, planning?
My mind kept turning to Dorset Although it was in my thoughts, I'd no right to go a-courting, for I'd no money and no prospects worth counting on. Mr.
Rockfellow, who had a herd he wanted pushed over into the Sulphur Springs Valley, hired me and some other hands, but it was a short job, and left me with nothing more than eating money.
The sheriff came back to town, and after hearing what had happened he gave me a clean bill on the charges against me, so I figured to saddle up and show some dust, only I hadn't enough cash to lay in supplies to take me anywhere.
Then at the Shoo-Fly I heard that Pete Kitchen had located himself a mining claim down in the Pajaritos, so I rode down. When he found out I was a hand with a pick and shovel, as well as with a cutting horse and a rope, he hired me for the job.
When he was laying out the grub for me to take along he put in a couple of hundred rounds of .44's. 'With your kind of luck, and that being Injun country, you're liable to need them.'
Well, I almost backed out. I'd had my fill of Apache fighting, and wanted nothing so much as a spell of setting and contemplating.
The Pajaritos are not much when it comes to mountains. They are named for an odd birdlike formation on the butte. I rode down there, leading a jack mule, and I found the mining claim.
There was a wash where run-off water had cut down among the rocks and laid bare some ore. It wasn't of much account, but gave promise of growing richer as it went deeper.
On the back side of a knoll, partly screened by brush and boulders, I made me a camp. On some rough grass nearby I picketed my stock. Then I sat down to contemplate what lay before me.
Now, I'm no mining man, but you don't prospect around, work in mines, or even loaf around mining towns without picking up some of the lingo as well as a scraping of information.
This whole place was faulted. Movements of the earth in bygone times had tilted and fractured the crust until you had a good idea of what lay under you as well as in front of you. The gold, what there was of it, occurred in quartz veins. It looked to me like what they call a cretaceous bed that had rested on diorite, but some of the dikes that intruded offered a chance of some likely ore.
My job was to cut into that, do enough work to establish a right to the claim for Kitchen, and maybe explore enough so as he'd have an idea what lay below.
Doing the work I was going to do wasn't going to help much, but I wanted to do the best job for him I could. I never did figure a man hired to do a job should just do it the easiest way. I figure a man should do the best he knows how. So I taken up my pick and went to work on that bank.
While I had a little blasting powder and some fuse, I had no notion of using it.
Blasting makes an awful lot of noise, enough to bring every Apache in the country around, and I hoped to do my work quietlike, by main strength and awkwardness, and then pack up and light a shuck for Kitchen's ranch.
After working a couple of hours I sat down to take some rest, and began to notice the bees. Some had gone past while I was working, and now I noticed more of them. I left my pick and shovel and, taking up my Winchester, which I kept ready to hand, I went off up the mountain. Just over the shoulder of it I picked up tracks of a desert fox, just enough to indicate direction.
Between occasional tracks and the bees, I located a rock tank, nigh full of water. Two streams of run-off water coming down off the butte had worn places in the rocks. With a branch from an ocotillo, a dead branch I found nearby, I tried to measure the depth of water in the tank. I touched no bottom, but it was anyway more than six feet deep ... water enough for my stock and me. It was half hidden under an overhang, and the water was icy cold and clean.
Next morning, after a quick breakfast, I got at my work again. Here and there I found a good piece of ore which I put aside. Now I was doing the same thing most prospectors do. I was putting aside the best pieces, an easy way to lead others to invest, and to lead yourself into believing you've got more than you have.
Using water from the tank, I washed out a couple of pans from the dry wash below the claim and picked up a few small colors, nothing worth getting excited about.
Unless that vein widened out below where I'd been digging, it was going to cost Pete more to get the gold than it was worth.
By nightfall the cut I'd made was beginning to look like something. I'd sacked up three sacks of samples and had crushed a few of them and panned out the fragments, getting a little color.
The next two days I worked from can-see to can't-see, and had enough done to count this as a working claim. One more day for good measure, and I would saddle up for Tucson.
This spell had given me some time to think, and it showed me there was no sense in saddle-tramping around, riding the grub line or picking up a day of work hither and yon. It was time I settled in for a lifetime at some kind of
