Ride the Dark Trail (1972) by Louis - Sackett's 18 L'amour Page A

will, but I did give thought to getting into the town unseen, and to getting away when it was over ... if there was anything of me left.
    Not even a mouse will trust himself to only one hole, so I sat back and recalled the town, thinking out where the buildings and the corrals were situated. Somewhere along the line, sleep fetched itself to me.
    At breakfast Em was in a talking mood. She had been up shy of daylight, peering out through the shutters, studying out the land.
    "You should have seen it when me an' Talon came west," she said. "There was nobody out thisaway, just nobody at all. Talon had been far up the Missouri before this, on a steamboat, and he'd been up the Platte as far as a boat could go. He'd seen his buffalo and killed a grizzly or two, and he'd lived and traveled among Injuns, and fit with them a time or two.
    "We come west and he kept a-tellin' me of this place, and me, I was ready for it. I was a mountain gal, raised back yonder in the hills, and all that flat land worried me, nothing moving but the grass before the wind and maybe an antelope far away or a herd of buffalo.
    "Then we seen this place. We seen it from afar off, standing out on the grassland with the mountains behind. Talon had left four mountain men in a cabin on the land, but they weren't needed.
    "At first the Injuns just came to look, to stare at the three-story house looming above the country around. They called it the wooden tepee and sat their horses in astonishment, gaping at the house that had appeared like a miracle, for the Indians had been gone on the annual buffalo hunt when the house was built.
    "When the Cheyennes rode up to see, Talon went out to meet them. He took them, four at a time, through the house, showing them everything, from the enormous stretch of country that could be seen from the railed walk atop the house to the loopholes from which shots could be fired while the shooter was safe within.
    "He knew the story would be told, and he wanted them to know they could be seen a long time before they reached the house, and that an attacker could be fired upon from any place within the house."
    "But you've so much furniture!" Pennywell exclaimed. "How ever did you get it out here?"
    "Talon made some of it. Like I said, he was handy. The rest of it we brought out. Talon had trapped for fur, and he kept on trapping. He found some gold here and yon in the mountain streams, and he ordered what he had a mind to. We brought us a whole wagon train of things out from the east, for Talon liked to live well, and that's the sort of thing you break into mighty easy."
    Sittin' back in that big hidebound chair I could see behind her words. Seeing the Indians filtering back from their hunt, riding through an area they probably only saw once or twice a year, anyway, to find this great house reared up, staring out over the plains with the great, empty eyes of its windows.
    To them it must have been a kind of magic. It had been built quickly. Talon was a driving man, by all accounts, and the mountain men he had helping him were not the kind to stay in one place for long. How many he had to help Em never said, but there were four who had lived in a cabin on the place while Talon rode east to find his bride. There might have been more.
    Probably Talon and Sackett had framed much of the structure before their help arrived, and certainly the plan must have been put together in his mind whilst working on the rivers or building for other men.
    Sitting there, eyes half closed, listening to her tell it in that old Tennessee mountain tone of hers, I found myself getting restless again. Nobody had the right to take from them what they had built.
    Me, I was never likely to build anything. A no-account drifter like me leaves no more mark behind him then you leave a hole in the water when you pull your finger out. Every man could leave something, or should.
    Well, maybe it wasn't in me to build much, but I surely could keep the work of other men from