Louis LAmour - Killoe

Contents

To Bill Tilghman: Frontier Marshal
who showed me how it was
done with a six gun

Chapter 1

P A CAME DOWN to the breaks along the Cowhouse where I was rousting out some steers that had taken to the brush because of the heel-flies.

Come up to the house, boy. Tap has come home and he is talking of the western lands.

So I gathered my rope to a coil and slung it on the pommel of my saddle, and stepping up to the leather, I followed Pa up through the trees and out on the open grass.

Folks were standing in the breezeway of our Texas house, and others were grouped around in bunches, listening to Tap Henry or talking among themselves.

It was not a new thing, for there had been argument and discussion going on for weeks. We all knew that something must be done, and westward the land was empty.

Tap Henry was a tall man of twenty-seven or -eight and we had been boys together, although he was a good six to seven years older than me. A hard, reckless man with a taste for wild country and wilder living, he was a top hand in any mans outfit, and a good man with a gun.

You couldnt miss Tap Henry. He was well over six feet tall and weighed a compact one hundred and ninety. He wore a freshly laundered blue shield-style shirt with a row of buttons down each side, shotgun chaps, and Spanish boots with big California spurs.

He still packed that pearl-handled six-shooter he had taken off a man he had killed, and he was handsome as ever in that hard, flashy way of his. He was our friend and, in a sense, he was my brother.

Our eyes met across the heads of the others as I rode up, and his were cold and measuring. It was a look I had seen in his eyes before, but never directed at me. It was the way he looked when he saw a possible antagonist. Recognition came suddenly to his eyes.

Danny! Dan, boy! He strode through the crowd that had gathered to hear his talk of the lands to the west, and thrust out a hand. Well, Ill be forever damned! Youve grown up!

Stepping down from the saddle, I met his grip with one of my own, remembering how Tap prided himself on his strength. For a moment I matched him, grip for grip, then let him have the better of it, for he was a proud man and I liked him, and I had nothing to prove.

It surprised me that we stood eye to eye, for he had always seemed very tall, and I believe it surprised him too.

Almost involuntarily, his eyes dropped to my belt, but I was wearing no gun. My rifle was in my saddle-boot and my knife was in its sheath.

Were going west, Danny! His hand on my shoulder, we walked back to where Pa now stood with Aaron Stark and Tim Foley. Ive scouted the land, and there is grass enough, and more!

Pa glanced curiously from one to the other of us, and from the shadow of the breezeway Zebony Lambert watched us, a strange light in his green eyes. Zebs long brown hair lay about his shoulders, as carefully combed as a womans, his eyes level and hard under the flat brim of his Spanish hat.

Zebony Lambert was my friend, but I do not think he had many friends, for he was a solitary, self-keeping sort of man little given to talk. Of medium height, his extraordinarily broad shoulders made him seem shorter, and they were well set off by the short Spanish jacket he wore, and the buckskin, bell-bottomed breeches.

Lambert and Tap had never met until now, and it worried me a little, for both were strong men, and Tap was inclined toward arrogance.

Is it true, then? I asked Pa. Is it decided?

Ayewere going west, Dan.

Tim Foley was our neighbor who ran a few cows of his own, but occasionally worked for us. A square-built man with a square, honest face. And high time, he said, for there is little grass and we have those about us who like us not at all.

How far is it, then?

Six hundred miles or less. Right across Texas and into New Mexico. If we do not go on, it will be less.

Pa looked at me. More and more he was paying mind to my judgment, and listening to what I had to say. He was still the bossI knew that and he knew it, but he had respect for my judgment, which had grown since he had been leaving the cattle business to me.

How many head, Dan? What can we muster? Pa put the question and I caught a surprised look from Tap, for he remembered me as a boy, and a boy only.

Fifteen hundred at least, and Id say a bit more than that. Tim will have a good three hundred head under his own brand, and Aaron nearly as many. When all are rounded up and the breaks swept clean, I would say close to three thousand head.

It is a big herd, and we will be short of men, Pa commented thoughtfully.

There will be three wagons, and the horse herd, I added.

Wagons? Tap objected. I hadnt planned on wagons.

We have our families, Tim said, and there are tools we must take.

There began a discussion of what to take, of trail problems and men, and I leaned against the corral rail, listening without paying much attention. In every such venture there is always more talk than is necessary, with everybody having his say, but I knew that when all was said, much of it would be left to me, and I would do as seemed best to me.

There is no point in such endless discussion, except that men become familiar with their problems. Long ago, when the first discussion of such a move began, I had also begun thinking of it, and had made some plans I thought necessary. Lambert, a thoughtful man, had contributed a few pointed and common-sense suggestions.

We could muster barely a dozen men, far too few for the task that lay ahead. Once the herd was trailbroke, four to five men might keep it moving without much trouble, but until then it would be a fight. Some of these old mossyhorns had grown up there on the Cowhouse and they had no wish to leave home.

There would be the usual human problems too, even though the people who would be accompanying our move would all be known to us. And once away from the settlements, there would be Comanches.

It was a risk, a big risk. We were chancing everything.

We might have fought it out where we were, but Pa was no hand for a fight, although he had courage enough for two men, and had seen his share of fighting in the Mexican War and with Indians. He had grown up in the Five Counties and knew what feuding meant. It was Tap who had suggested going west, and Pa fell in with it.

But there was risk connected with everything, and we were hard men bred to a hard life in a hard land, and the lives that we lived were lonely, yet rich with the voice of our singing, and with tales told of an evening by the campfire.

What pleasures we had were created by ourselves or born of the land, our clothing was made by our own hands, our houses and corrals, also. Those who rode beside us knew the measure of our strength as we knew theirs, and each knew the courage of the other.

In that country a man saddled his own broncs and fought his own battles, and the measure of his manhood was that he did what needed to be done, and did it well, and without shirking.

Me? I, Dan Killoe, was born in a claim cabin on Cowhouse Creek with the roar of buffalo guns filling the room as Pa and my Uncle Fred beat off an Indian attack. I let out my first yell in a room filled with gunsmoke, and when Ma died I was nursed by a Mexican woman whose father died fighting with the Texans at the Alamo.

When I was six, Pa met Taps Ma on a trip to Fort Worth, and married her, bringing her west to live with us, and they brought Tap along.