the wind, then after a bit a stirring made by no bear or deer in the world.
My bronc snorted and my pack horse blew. I could see their legs in the faint glow of the coals, and nothing moved near them . . . but something was out there in the night.
A long slow time dragged by and the coals glowed a duller red. Leaning back against the wall, I dozed a little, but alert for trouble if need be.
There was no other sound.
Morning was painting a sunrise on a storm-gored ridge beyond the dark sentinel pines when I got up, stretched my stiff muscles. Studying the trees across the valley and the slope above them, I failed at first to notice what was closest to home. The rest of that meat had been pulled from the tree and a good-sized hunk had been cut off.
Whoever had cut it off had made work of it with a dull blade, and to take the risk of approaching a man's camp whoever it was must have been hungry.
Hanging the meat up again, I went out and killed and dressed another buck. I hung it in a tree also, and rode away, I wanted nobody going hungry where I could lend a hand. Whoever or whatever it was would have meat as long as that buck lasted.
The trail going out was worse than coming in, but with some scrambling and slipping we reached the high basin. We rode past that lake of ghost water and headed for the lowlands once more. But once through the keyhole pass I did not follow the same trail, taking a rough, unlikely way that nobody was apt to find, unless maybe a mountain goat.
Turning in my saddle, I looked back at the peaks. 'Whoever you are,' I said aloud, 'expect me back, for I'll be riding the high trails again, a-hunting for gold'
Chapter IV
I sighted the ranch, I drew up on the trail and looked across the bottom. There was a rocky ridge where the Mora River cut through, and the ranch was there beside it. That light over there was home, for home is where the heart is, and my heart was wherever Ma was, and the boys.
Walking the appaloosa down the trail, I could smell the coolness rising from the willows along the Mora, and the hayfields over in the big valley called La Cueva.
A horse whinnied, and a dog started to bark, and then another dog. Yet no door opened and the light continued to burn. Chuckling, I walked my horse along and kept my eyes open. Unless I was mistaken, one of the boys or somebody would be out in the dark watching me come up, maybe keeping me covered from the darkness until my intentions were clear.
Getting down from the saddle, I walked up the steps to the porch. I didn't knock, I just opened the door and stepped in.
Tyrel was sitting at a table with an oil lamp on it, and Ma was there, and a girl who had to be Tyrel's wife.
The table was set for four, and I stood there, long and tall in the door, feeling my heart inside me so big I felt choked and awkward. My clothes were stiff and I knew I was trail-dusty and mighty mean-looking.
'Howdy, Ma. Tyrel, if you'll tell that man behind me to take his gun off my back, I'll come in and set.'
Tyrel got up. 'Tell... I'll be damned.'
'Likely,' I said, 'but don't blame it on me. When I rode off to the wars I left you in good hands.'
Turning toward Tyrel's wife, a lovely, dark-eyed, dark-haired girl who looked like a princess out of a book. I said, 'Ma'am, I'm William Tell Sackett, and you'll be Drusilla, my brother's wife.'
She put her hands on mine and stood on tiptoe and kissed me, and my face colored up and I went hot clean to my boots. Tyrel laughed, and then he looked past me into the darkness and said, 'It's all right, Cap. This is my brother Tell'
He came in out of the darkness then, a thin old man with cold gray eyes and a gray mustache above a hard mouth. There was no give to this man, I figured. Had I been a wrong one I would have been killed.
We shook hands and neither of us said anything. Cap was not a talkative man, and I am only at times.
Ma turned her head. 'Juana, come get my son his supper.'
I couldn't believe it--Ma with household help. Long as I could recall, nobody had done for us boys but Ma herself, working early and late and never complaining.
Juana was a Mexican-Indian girl and she brought the food in fancy plates. I looked at it and commenced to feel mighty uncomfortable. I'd not eaten a meal in the presence of a woman for a long time, and was embarrassed and worried. I'd no idea how to eat proper. In a trail camp a body eats because he's hungry and doesn't think much of the way he does it.
'If it's all the same to you,' I said, 'I'll go outside. Under a roof like this I'm mighty skittish.'
Brasilia took my sleeve and led me to the chair. 'You sit down, Tell. And don't you worry. We want you to eat with us and we want you to tell us what you've been doing.'
First I thought of that gold.
I went out and fetched it. Putting my saddlebags down on the table, I took out a chunk of the gold, still grainy with quartz fragments, but gold.
It shook them. Nothing, I'd figured, would ever shake Tyrel, but this did.
While they looked at the gold I went to the kitchen and washed my hands in a big basin and dried them on a white towel.
Everything was spotless and clean. The floor was like the deck of a steamboat I traveled on one time on the Mississippi. It was the kind of living I'd always wanted for Ma, but I'd had no hand in this. Orrin and Tyrel had done it.
While I ate, I told them about the gold. I'd taken a big slab of bread and buttered it liberal, and I ate it in two
