heard the stage driver talking to a sergeant. 'Looks like a fight shaping up over squatters trying to move in on the Spanish grants,' he said.
Orrin turned away. 'Good thing we're straying shut of that fight,' he said.
'We'll be better off hunting cows.'
When we rode back to camp everything was a-bustle with packing and loading up.
Torres came to us. 'We go, senores. There is word of trouble from home. We take the dry route south from here. You will not come with us?'
'We're going to the Purgatoire.'
'Then it will be adios.' Torres glanced at me. 'I know that Don Luis will wish to say good-by to you, senor.'
At the wagons Don Luis was nowhere in sight, but Drusilla was. When she saw me she came quickly forward. 'Oh, Tye! We're going! Will I ever see you again?'
'I'll be coming to Santa Fe. Shall I call on you then?'
'Please do.'
We stood together in the darkness with all the hurry around us of people packing and getting ready to move, the jingle of trace chains, the movement and the shouts. Only I felt like something was going right out from my insides, and I'd never felt this way before. Right then I didn't want to hunt wild cows. I wanted to go to Santa Fe. Was this the way Orrin felt about Laura Pritts?
But how could I feel any way at all about her? I was a mountain boy who could scarcely read printing and who could not write more than his name.
'Will you write to me, Tyrel?'
How could I tell her I didn't know how? 'I'll write,' I said, and swore to myself that I'd learn. I'd get Tom to teach me.
Orrin was right. We would have to get an education, some way, somehow.
'I'll miss you.'
Me, like a damned fool I stood there twisting my hat. If I'd only had some of Orrin's easy talk! But I'd never talked much to any girl or even womenfolks, and I'd no idea what a man said to them.
'It was mighty fine,' I told her, 'riding out on the plains with you.'
She moved closer to me and I wanted to kiss her the worst way, but what right had a Tennessee boy to kiss the daughter of a Spanish don?
'I'll miss the riding,' I said, grasping at something to say. 'I'll sure miss it.'
She stood on her tiptoes suddenly and kissed me, and then she ran. I turned right around and walked right into a tree. I backed off and started again and just then Antonio Baca came out of the darkness and he had a knife held low down in his hand. He didn't say anything, just lunged at me.
Talking to girls was one thing, cutting scrapes was something else. Pa had brought me up right one way, at least. It was without thinking, what I did. My left palm slapped his knife wrist over to my right to get the blade out of line with my body, and my right hand dropped on his wrist as my left leg came across in front of him, and then I just spilled him over my leg and threw him hard against a tree trunk.
He was in the air when he hit it, and the knife fell free. Scooping it up, I just walked on and never even looked back. One time there, I figured I heard him groan, but I was sure he was alive all right. Just shook up.
Tom Sunday was in the saddle with my dapple beside him. 'Orrin and Cap went on.
They'll meet us at the Fort.'
'All right,' I said.
'I figured you'd want to say good-by. Mighty hard to leave a girl as pretty as that.'
I looked at him. 'First girl ever paid me any mind,' I said. 'Girls don't cotton to me much.'
'As long as girls like that one like you, you've nothing to worry about,' he said quietly. 'She's a real lady. You've a right to be proud.'
Then he saw the knife in my hand. Everybody knew that knife who had been with the wagons. Baca was always flashing it around.
'Collecting souveniers?' Tom asked dryly.
'Wasn't planning on it.' I shoved the knife down in my belt. 'Sort of fell into it.'
We rode on a few steps and he said, 'Did you kill him?'
'No.'
'You should have,' he said, 'because you'll have it to do.'
Seems I never had a difficulty with a man that made so little impression. All I could think of was Drusilla Alvarado, and the fact that we were riding away from her. All the time I kept telling myself I was a fool, that she was not for me.
But it didn't make a mite of difference, and from that day on I understood Orrin a lot better and felt sorry for him.
Nothing changed my mind about that narrow-between-the-ears blonde, though. That roan horse never had been any account, and miserable, contrary and ornery it was, too.
We could see the lights of the Fort up ahead and behind me the rumble of those wagon wheels as the train moved out, the rattle of trace chains, and the Mexicans calling to each other.
'Tom,' I said, 'I got to learn to write. I really got to learn.'
'You should learn,' he told me seriously, 'I'll be glad to teach you.'
'And to read writing?'
'All right.'
We rode in silence for a little while and then Tom Sunday said, 'Tye, this is a big country out here and it takes big men to live in it, but it gives every man an equal opportunity. You're just as big or small as your vision is, and if you've a mind to work and make something of yourself, you can do it.'
He was telling me that I could be important enough for even a don's daughter, I knew that. He was telling me that and suddenly I did not need to be told. He was right, of course, and all the time I'd known it. This was a country to grow up in, a land where a man had a chance.
The stars were bright. The camp lay far behind. Somebody in the settlement ahead laughed and somebody else dropped a bucket and it rolled down some steps. A faint breeze stirred, cool and pleasant. We were making the first step. We were going after wild cows.
We were bound for the Purgatoire.
Chapter V
Cap Rountree had trapped beaver all over the country we were riding toward. He had been there with Kit Carson, Uncle Dick Woolton, Jim Bridger, and the Bents.
He knew the country like an Indian would know it.
Tom Sunday ... I often wondered about Tom. He was a Texan, he said, and that was good enough. He knew more about cattle than any of us.
Orrin and me, well, most of what we'd had all our lives came from our own planting or hunting, and we grew up with a knowledge of the herbs a man can eat and how to get along in the forest.
The country we were riding toward was Indian country. It was a place where the Comanches, Utes, Arapahos, and Kiowas raided and fought, and there were Cheyennes about, too. And sometimes the Apaches raiding north. In this country the price for a few lazy minutes might be the death of every man in the party.
It was no place for a loafer or one lacking responsibility.
Always and forever we were conscious of the sky. City folks almost never look at the sky to the stars but with us there was no choice. They were always with us.
Tom Sunday was a man who knew a sight of poetry, and riding across the country thataway, he'd recite it for us. It was a lonely life, you know, and I expect what Sunday missed most was the reading. Books were rare and treasured things, hard to come by and often fought over. Newspapers the same.
A man couldn't walk down to the corner and buy a paper. Nor did he have a postman to deliver it to him. I've known cowhands to memorize the labels off canned fruit and vegetables for lack of reading.
Cap knew that country, knew every creek and every fork. There were no maps except what a man had in his skull, and nobody of whom to ask directions, so a body remembered what he saw. Cap knew a thousand miles of country like a man might know his kitchen at home.
