Louis LAmour - The Daybreakers: The Sacketts Series, Book 6

Contents

THE SACKETTS

T HEIR STORY IS the story of the American frontier, an unforgettable chronicle of the men and women who tamed a wilderness and built a nation with their dreams and their courage.

Created by master storyteller Louis LAmour, the Sackett saga brings to life the spirit and adventures of generations of pioneers. Fiercely independent and determined to face any and all challenges, they discovered their destiny in settling a great and wild land.

Each Sackett novel is a complete, exciting historical adventure. Read as a group, they tell the thrilling epic tale of a country unlike any the world has ever known. And no one writes more powerfully about the frontier than Louis LAmour, who has walked and ridden down the same trails as the Sackett family he has immortalized. The Sackett novels represent LAmour at his very best and are one of the greatest achievements of a truly legendary career.

T HE S ACKETTS

Sacketts Land

To the Far Blue Mountains

The Warriors Path

Jubal Sackett

Ride the River

The Daybreakers

The Courting of Griselda
(from the collection End of the Drive)

Lando

Sackett

Booty for a Badman
(from the collection War Party)

Mojave Crossing

The Sackett Brand

The Sky-Liners

The Lonely Men

Mustang Man

Galloway

Treasure Mountain

Ride the Dark Trail

Lonely on the Mountain

Chapter 1

M Y BROTHER, ORRIN Sackett, was big enough to fight bears with a switch. Me, I was the skinny one, tall as Orrin, but no meat to my bones except around the shoulders and arms. Orrin could sing like an angel, or like a true Welshman which was better than any angel. Far away back and on three sides of the family, we were Welsh. Orrin was a strapping big man, but for such a big man he was surprising quick.

Folks said I was the quiet one, and in the high-up hills where we grew up as boys, folks fought shy of me come fighting time. Orrin was bigger than me, fit to wrassle a bull, but he lacked a streak of something I had.

Maybe you recall the Sackett-Higgins feud? Time I tell about, we Sacketts were just fresh out of Higginses.

Long Higgins, the mean one, was also the last one. He came hunting Sackett hide with an old squirrel rifle. It was Orrin he was hunting, being mighty brave because he knew Orrin wouldnt be packing anything in the way of sidearms at a wedding.

Orrin was doing no thinking about Higginses this day with Mary Tripp there to greet him and his mind set on marrying, so I figured it was my place to meet Long Higgins down there in the road. Just as I was fixing to call him to a stand, Preacher Myrick drove his rig between us, and by the time I got around it Long Higgins was standing spraddlelegged in the road with a bead on Orrin.

Folks started to scream and Long Higgins shot and Mary who saw him first pushed Orrin to save him. Only she fell off balance and fell right into the bullet intended for Orrin.

Long!

He turned sharp around, knowing my voice, and he had that rifle waist-high and aimed for me, his lips drawed down hard.

Long Higgins was a good hip shot with a rifle and he shot quickmaybe too quick.

That old hog-leg of mine went back into the holster and Long Higgins lay there in the dust and when I turned around, that walk up into the trees was the longest I ever did take except one I took a long time later.

Ollie Shaddock might have been down there and I knew if Ollie called Id have to turn around, for Ollie was the Law in those mountains and away back somewheres we were kin.

When Ma saw me cutting up through the woods she knew something was cross-ways. Took me only a minute to tell her. She sat in that old rocker and looked me right in the eye while I told it. Tye, she was almighty stern, was Long Higgins looking at you when you fetched him?

Right in the eye.

Take the dapple, Ma said, hes the runningest horse on the mountain. You go west, and when you find a place with deep, rich soil and a mite of game in the hills, you get somebody to write a letter and well come down there, the boys an me.

She looked around at the place, which was mighty rundown. Work as we would, and us Sacketts were workers, we still hadnt anything extra, and scarcely a poor living, so Ma had been talking up the west ever since Pa died.

Most of it she got from Pa, for he was a wandering and a knowing man, never to home long, but Ma loved him for all of that, and so did we younguns. He had a Welshmans tongue, Pa did, a tongue that could twist a fine sound from a word and he could bring a singing to your blood so you could just see that far land yonder, waiting for folks to come and crop it.

Those old blue eyes of Mas were harder to face than was Long Higgins, and him with a gun to hand. Tye, do you reckon you could kill Ollie?

To nobody else would I have said it, but to Ma I told the truth. Id never want to, Ma, because were kin but I could fetch him. I think maybe I can draw a gun faster and shoot straighter than anybody, anywhere.

She took the pipe from her lips. Eighteen years now Ive seen you growing up, Tyrel Sackett, and for twelve of them youve been drawing and shooting. Pa told me when you was fifteen that hed never seen the like. Ride with the law, Tye, never against it. She drew the shawl tighter about her knees. If the Lord wills we will meet again in the western lands.

The way I took led across the state line and south, then west. Ollie Shaddock would not follow beyond the line of the state, so I put Tennessee behind me before the hills had a shadow.

It was wild land through which the trail led, west out of Tennessee, into Arkansas, the Ozarks, and by lonely trails into Kansas. When I rode at last into the street at Baxter Springs folks figured me for one more mountain renegade coming to help keep tick-infected Texas cattle out of the country, but I was of no such mind.

It was eight miles to where the Texas men held their cattle, so there I rode, expecting no warm welcome for a stranger. Riding clear of the circling riders I rode up to the fire, the smell of grub turning my insides over. Two days Id been without eating, with no money left, and too proud to ask for that for which I could not pay.

A short, square man with a square face and a mustache called out to me. You there! On the gray! What do you want?

A job if ones to be had, and a meal if youve grub to spare. My name is Tyrel Sackett and Im bound westward from Tennessee toward the Rockies, but if theres a job Ill ride straight up to it.

He looked me over, mighty sharp, and then he said, Get down, man, and come to the fire. No man was ever turned from my fire without a meal inside him. Im Belden.

When Id tied Dapple I walked up to the fire, and there was a big, handsome man lying on the ground by the fire, a man with a golden beard like one of those Vikings Pa used to tell of. Hell, he said agreeably, its a farmer!

Whats wrong with farming? I asked him. You wouldnt have your belly full of beans right now if theyd not been farmed by somebody.

Weve had our troubles with farmers, Mr. Sackett, Belden said, theres been shooting, the farmers killed a man for me.

So, said a voice alongside, so maybe we should kill a farmer.

He had an itch for trouble and his kind Id met before. He was a medium-tall man with a low hanging shoulder on his gun side. His black brows met over his nose and his face was thin and narrow. If it was trouble he was hunting he was following the right trail to get it.