Louis L'Amour - The Lonely Men

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 job, or on a place of my own.

It meant hard work, and lots of it. Living a life is much like climbing mountains -- the summits are always further off than you think, but when a man has a goal, he always feels he's working toward something.

The next morning, when I'd been working an hour by sun, I hit the pocket.

It was a crumbling ledge of decomposed quartz, seemingly unrelated to what was on either side, and the piece that I found was no bigger than an upright piano, but it seemed to be only the top of a larger ledge. Anyway, in the next three hours I broke up enough of that quartz to get out maybe two thousand dollars' worth of gold.

Pete Kitchen was going to be almighty pleased. I dumped one of my other sacks back in the hole and filled the sack with the rich stuff. I was just loading the last of it and was too busy to be rightly paying mind to anything else when I hear a voice saying, "Looks like this trip is going to pay off mighty handsome."

Laura Sackett was there, and three men were with her -- Arch Hadden, Johnny Wheeler, sometime gunman for a smuggling outfit, and one of the gents who had been with Hadden in the fight at Dead Man's Tank. They had come down here for only one reason, and that was to kill me, and they wanted to tell me about it.

There was no call for conversation, not having to stall like before, so I just peeled back my forty-five and wasted no time.

I turned and saw and drew and fired, all kind of in one breath. My first shot took Johnny Wheeler, whose hand was lingering around the butt of his six-gun as if he was minded to use it.

That shot hit right where the ribs spread apart. My second shot was for Arch Hadden, but it missed. Arch had suddenly whipped his horse around and was running like all get-out.

Laura's horse reared up and she toppled from the saddle, and of a sudden the other gunman was shooting past me. I turned to see the Apaches coming down and recognized one of them as Kahtenny.

Me, I dove into that hole I'd been digging and had sense enough to grab the picket ropes of my horses, which I'd had up, loading for the homeward trip.

The Apaches swept by and I saw that third gunman go down. I heard the bark of Apache guns and saw the dust jump from his vest. He came up shooting, only another bullet nailed him.

They caught Arch Hadden.

I saw them catch him. It was Kahtenny and two others, and I saw him turn to fight as they rode up, but a rope sailed out, and then another, and the Apaches had themselves a prisoner.

Well, I'd told him. He had stolen Kahtenny's squaw, and he had been warned. With Apaches, nothing much was doubtful from here on -- only how long Hadden had the guts to stick it out.

This was a hard land, and the rules were written plain in the way we lived. If you overstepped the rules you had bought yourself trouble, and from now on it was going to be settled between Hadden and Kahtenny.

Me, I got up and went to my horses. I fed shells into my six-shooters again, and then I walked over to the man I'd shot to see if he was alive. He wasn't. Johnny Wheeler was buzzard meat.

I taken his guns off, and what he had on him for identification. Might be somebody, somewhere, who'd be wishful to know what happened.

And then Laura Sackett got up off the ground and we just looked at each other. I never did see such hatred in anybody's eyes.

"Downright mis'rable, ain't we?" I said calmly. "You'd think one of us Sacketts would be considerate enough to die so's you could get some of that bile out of your system."

"I suppose you're going to kill me?" she said.

"No, I ain't. It would be a kindness to the world, but I never shot a woman yet, and don't figure to now. No, I'm just goin' to leave you. I'm just goin' to mount up and ride right out of here."

"You'd leave me here?" She was incredulous. "There's a horse yonder. You get on that horse and ride."

Putting my foot in the stirrup, I swung into the saddle, and you can just bet that before I swung a-straddle of that horse I swung the animal around so I could keep an eye on her whilst I was doing it.

I taken a turn around the saddlehorn with the lead rope of the pack horse, and she said, "What if those Indians come back?"

"It's their tough luck, ma'am," I said, "but I hope not, for their sakes.