Louis LAmour - Jubal Sackett: The Sacketts Series, Book 4

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.

To Hazel and Charlie Daniels
His fiddle-playing would bring
The Sacketts right down from the hills

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

A COLD WIND blew off Hanging Dog Mountain and I had no fire, nor dared I strike so much as a spark that might betray my hiding place. Somewhere near, an enemy lurked, waiting.

Yesterday morning, watching my back trail, I saw a deer startle, cross a meadow in great bounds, and disappear into the forest. Later, shortly after high sun, two birds flew up suddenly. Something was following me.

Warm in my blanket, I huddled below a low earthen bank, concealed by brush and a fallen tree. The wind swept by above me, worrying my mind because its sound might cover the approach of an enemy creeping closer. There he could lie waiting to kill me when I arose from my hiding place.

I, Jubal Sackett, was but a days journey from our home on Shooting Creek in the foothills of the Nantahalas, close upon Chunky Gal Mountain.

All the enemies of whom I knew were far from here, yet any stranger was a potential enemy, and he was a wise traveler who was forever alert.

Our white enemies were beyond the sea, and our only red enemies were the Seneca, living far away to the north beyond Hudsons River. No Seneca was apt to be found alone so far from others of his kind. The Seneca were a fine, fierce lot of fighting men of the Iroquois League who had become our enemies because we were friends of the Catawba, who were their enemies.

Whoever followed me was a good reader of sign, for I left little evidence of my passing. Such an enemy is one to guard against, for skilled tracking is a mark of a great hunter and a great warrior. Nor do I wish to leave my scalp in the lodge of some unknown enemy when my life is scarce begun.

What was this strange urge that drove me westward, ever westward into an empty land?

Behind me were family, home, and all that I might become; before me were nameless rivers, swamps, mountains, and forests, and beyond the great river were the plains, those vast grasslands of which we had only heard, and of which we knew nothing.

About me and before me lay a haunted land whose boundaries we did not know. What little we had heard was from the tales of Indians, and they shied from this land, hunting here but always moving and returning to their homes far away. When the night winds prowled they huddled close to their fires and peered uneasily into the night. There was game here in plenty, and when the need was great they came to hunt. We did not know what mysteries lay here or why the place was shunned, but they spoke of it as a dark and bloody ground.

Why, in such a land of meadows, forests, and streams, were there no habitations? Once it was not so, for there are earth mounds, and friendly Indians had told us of a stone fort built they know not when nor by whom.

Who were those who vanished? Why did they come, build, and then disappear? What happened upon this ground? What dark and shameful deed? What horror so great that generations of Indians feared the land?

There was a legend of white men, bearded men who came to live along the rivers in a time long past. All were killed. Some said it was done by the Cherokee, some by the Shawnee, but it was an old memory, and old memories have a way of escaping their origin, carried by word of mouth or by intermarriage from one tribe to the next.

There are rumors, also, of a dark-skinned people who live in secluded valleys, a people who are neither Indian nor African, but of a different cast of feature who hold themselves aloof and keep strange customs and a different style of living. But we know nothing beyond the rumor, for their valleys lie far from ours.

I do not come to solve mysteries, but to seek out the land.

My father was Barnabas, the first of our name to come to this place beyond the ocean from the England of his birth. Of Barnabas I was the third son, Kin-Ring and Yance born before me. My elder brothers had found homes among the hills. My younger brother, Brian, and my one sister, Noelle, had returned to England with our mother, my brother to read for the law, my sister to be reared in a gentler land than this. I do not believe I shall see them again, nor hear of them unless it be some distant whisper on the wind. Nor shall I again see my father.

I had been called the Strange One, like the others but different. I loved my brothers and they loved me, but my way was a lonely way and I went into a land from which I would not return.

Of them all my father understood me best, for with all his great strength and magnificent fighting ability there was much in him of the poet and the mystic, as there is in me.

Our last evening together I would not forget, for each of us knew it was for the last time. Lila, who prepared our supper, also knew. Lila is Welsh and the wife of my fathers old friend, Jeremy Ring, and had been a maid to my mother ere they departed from England.

My father, Lila, and I have the Gift. Some call it second sight, but we three often have pre-visions of what is to be, sometimes with stark clarity, often only fleeting glimpses as through the fog or shadows. All our family have the Gift to some degree, but me most of all. Yet I have never sought to use it, nor wished to see what is to be.

I knew how my father would die and almost when, and he knew also when we talked that last time. He accepted the nearness of death as he accepted life, and he would die as he would have wished, weapon in hand, trying his strength against others.

We parted that night knowing it was for the last time, with a strong handclasp and a look into each others eyes. It was enough. I would keep his memory always, and he would know that somewhere far to the westward his blood would seek the lonely trails to open the land for those who would follow.