Cap got to his feet. 'Might's well come along,' he said, 'if you don't find any gold you'll still see some fine country.'
'Thanks,' he said, 'I'll stay here.'
We mounted up and Tom put a hand on my saddle. 'Tye,' he said, 'I've got nothing against you. You're a good man.'
'So's Orrin, Tom, and he likes you.'
He ignored it. 'Have a good time. If you get in trouble, write me and I'll come up and pull you out of it.'
'Thanks. And if you get in trouble, you send for us.'
He was still standing there on the steps when we rode away, and I looked back when I could barely make him out, but he was still standing there.
'Long as I've known him, Cap,' I said, 'that was the first time I ever saw Tom Sunday without a shave.'
Cap glanced at me out of those cold, still eyes. 'He'd cleaned his gun,' he said. 'He didn't forget that.'
The aspen were like clusters of golden candles on the green hills, and we rode north into a changing world. 'Within two weeks we'll be freezin' our ears off,'
Cap commented.
Nonetheless, his eyes were keen and sharp and Cap sniffed the breeze each morning like a buffalo-hunting wolf. He was a new man, and so was I. Maybe this was what I was bred for, roaming the wild country, living off it, and moving on.
In Durango we hired out and worked two weeks on a roundup crew, gathering cattle, roping and branding calves. Then we drifted west into the Abajo Mountains, sometimes called the Blues. It was a mighty big country, two-thirds of it standing on edge, seemed like. We rode through country that looked like hell with the fires out, and we camped at night among the cool pines.
Our tiny fire was the only light in a vast world of darkness, for any way we looked there was nothing but night and the stars. The smell of coffee was good, and the smell of fresh wood burning. We hadn't seen a rider for three days when we camped among the pines up there in the Blues, and we hadn't seen a track in almost as long. Excepting deer tracks, cat or bear tracks.
Out of Pioche I got a job riding shotgun for a stage line with Cap Rountree handling the ribbons. We stayed with it two months.
Only one holdup was attempted while I rode shotgun because it seemed I was a talked-about man. That one holdup didn't pan out for them became I dropped off the stage and shot the gun out of one of the outlaw's hands--it was an accident, as my foot slipped on a rock and spoiled my aim--and put two holes in the other one.
We took them back into town, and the shot one lived. He lived but he didn't learn ... six months later they caught him stealing a horse and hung him to the frame over the nearest ranch gate.
At South Pass City we holed up to wait out a storm and I read in a newspaper how Orrin was running for the state legislature, and well spoken of. Orrin was young but it was a time for young men, and he was as old as Alexander Hamilton in 1776, and older than William Pitt when he was chancellor in England. As old as Napoleon when he completed his Italian campaign.
I'd come across a book by Jomini on Napoleon, and another by Vegetius on the tactics of the Roman legions. Most of the time I read penny dreadfuls as they were all a body could find, except once in a while those paper- bound classics given away by the Bull Durham company for coupons they enclosed. A man could find those all over the west, and many a cowhand had read all three hundred and sixty of them.
We camped along mountain streams, we fished, we hunted, we survived. Here and yonder we had a brush with Indians. One time we outran a bunch of Blackfeet, another time had a set-to with some Sioux. I got a nicked ear out of that one and Cap lost a horse, so we came into Laramie astride Montana horse, the both of us riding him.
Spring was coming and we rode north with the changing weather and staked a claim on a creek in Idaho, but nothing contented me any more. We had made our living, but little more than that. We'd taken a bunch of furs and sold out well, and I'd made a payment to Don Luis and sent some money home.
There was a two-by-four town near where we staked our claim. I mean, there was no town but a cluster of shacks and a saloon called the Rose-Marie. A big man with a square red face, sandy-red hair and small blue eyes ran the place. He laid his thick hands on the bar and you saw the scars of old fist fights there, and those little eyes studied you cruel ... like he was figuring how much you'd be worth to him.
'What'll you have, gents? Something to cut the dust?'
'Out of that bottle in the cabinet,' I said, as I'd seen him take a drink out of it himself. 'We'll have a shot of that bourbon.'
'I can recommend the barrel whiskey.'
'I bet you can. Give it to us from the bottle.'
'My own whiskey. I don't usually sell it.'
There were two men sitting at a back table and they were sizing us up. One thing I'd noticed about those men. They got their service without paying. I had a hunch they worked for the firm, and if they did, what did they do?
'My name is Brady,' the red-haired man said, 'Martin Brady.'
'Good,' I said, 'a man should have a name.' We put our money on the bar and turned to go. 'You keep that bottle handy. We tried that river whiskey before.'
After three days we had only a spot or two of color. Straightening up from my pick I said, 'Cap, the way I hear it we should have a burro, and when the burro strays, we follow him, and when we find that burro he's pawing pay dirt right out of the ground, or you pick up a chunk to chunk at the burro and it turns out to be pure-dee gold.'
'Don't you believe all you hear.' He pushed his hat back. 'I been lookin' the ground over. Over there,' he indicated what looked like an old stream bed, 'that crick flowed for centuries. If there's gold in the crick there's more of it under that bench there.'
Up on the bench we cut timber and built a flume to carry water and a sluice box.
Placer mining isn't just a matter of scooping up sand and washing it out in a pan. The amount of gold a man can get that way is mighty little, and most places he can do as well punching cows or riding shotgun on a stage.
The thing to do is locate some color and then choose a likely spot like this bench and sink a shaft down to bedrock, panning out that gravel that comes off the bedrock, working down to get all the cracks and to peel off any loose slabs and work the gravel gathered beneath them. Gold is heavy, and over the years it works deeper and deeper through loose earth or gravel until it reaches bedrock and can go no further.
When we started to get down beyond six feet we commenced getting some good color, and we worked all the ground we removed from there on down. Of a night I'd often sit up late reading whatever came to hand, and gradually I was learning a good bit about a lot of things.
On the next claim there was a man named Clark who loaned me several books. Most of the reading a man could get was pretty good stuff ... nobody wanted to carry anything else that far.
Clark came to our fire one night. 'Cap, you make the best sourdough bread I ever ate. I'm going to miss it.'
'You taking out?'
'She's deep enough, Cap, I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm going back to the States, to my wife and family. I worked in a store for six, seven years and always wanted one of my own.'
'You be careful,' Cap said.
Clark glanced around, then lowered his voice. 'Have you heard those yarns, too?
About the killings?'
'They found Wilton's body last week,' I said, 'he'd been buried in a shallow grave but the coyotes dug him out.'
'I knew him.' Clark accepted another plate of beans and beef and then he said, 'I believe those stories. Wilton was carrying a heavy poke, and he wasn't a man to talk it around.'
He forked up some more beans, then paused. 'Sackett, you've been talked up as a man who's good with a gun.'
'It's exaggerated.'
