Lando (1962) Read online

  Lando

  Louis L’amour

  *

  Sackett Got To Texas With A Well-Oiled Hogleg, A Racing Mule That Didn’t Look Worth Its Salt And A Damn Good Idea Of The whereabouts of buried gold across the border in Mexico.

  In Mexico he had bad luck. His party had to run for it, and when Lando stood rear guard they pulled out and left him. Six years in a Mexican prison put muscles in his arms, fire in his heart and pure recklessness in his head.

  When he caught up with the men who betrayed him, it made no difference that he didn’t have a gun.

  They are the unforgettable pioneer family created by master storyteller Louis L’Amour to bring to vivid life the spirit and adventure of the American frontier. The Sacketts, men and women who challenged the untamed wilderness with their dreams and their courage. From generation to generation they pushed ever westward with a restless, wandering urge, a kinship with the free, wild places and a fierce independence. The Sacketts always stood tall and, true to their strong family pride, they would unite to take on any and all challenges, no matter how overwhelming the odds. Each Sackett novel is a complete, exciting historical adventure, and read as a group, Louis L’Amour’s The Sacketts form an epic story of the building of our mighty nation, a saga cherished by millions of readers around the world for more than a quarter century.

  THE GOLD WAS GOOD.

  Every single one of the million pieces—fat, yellow, fresh, Spanish coins, enough to make ten men rich for life!

  The gold was good, what was wrong was where it was buried, a sandy island in the Gulf, sixty miles south of the border—sixty miles inside Mexico!

  Lando Sackett knew the Mexicans weren’t about to let no Texan come in and get that gold.

  The one that tried could easy be a dead man soon as he laid a hand on it, but Lando needed gold, needed it bad, and the whole damn Mexican army wasn’t going to stop him!

  Chapter One.

  We Sacketts were a mountain folk who ran long on boy children and gun-shooting, but not many of us were traveled men. And that was why I envied the Tinker.

  When first I caught sight of him he was so far off I couldn’t make him out, so I taken my rifle and hunkered down behind the woodpile, all set to get in the first shot if it proved to be a Higgins.

  Soon as I realized who it was, I turned again to tightening my mill, for I was fresh out of meal and feeling hunger.

  Everybody in the mountains knew the Tinker.

  He was a wandering man who tinkered with everything that needed fixing. He could repair a clock, sharpen a saw, make a wagon wheel, or shoe a horse.

  Fact was, he could do almost anything a body could think of that needed doing, and he wandered up and down the mountains from Virginia to Georgia just a-fixing and a-doing. Along with it, he was a pack peddler.

  He carried a pack would have put a crick in a squaw’s back, and when he fetched up to my cabin he slung it down and squatted on his heels beside it.

  “If you reckoned I was Higgins,” he said, “you can put it out of mind. Your Cousin Tyrel cut his notch for the last Higgins months ago. You Sacketts done cleaned them out.”

  “Not this Sackett. I never shot ‘ary a Higgins, although that’s not to say I wouldn’t had they come at me.”

  “Tyrel, him an’ Orrin, they taken out for the western lands. Looks to me like you’re to be the last of the Sacketts of Tennessee.”

  “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” said I, a-working at my mill. “I’ve given thought to the western lands myself, for a man might work his life away in these mountains, and nothing to show for it in the end.”

  The Tinker, he just sat there, not saying aye, yes, or no, but I could see he had something on his mind, and given time would have his say.

  “You’re the one has the good life,” I said.

  “Always a-coming and a-going along the mountains and down to the Settlements.”

  There was a yearning in me to be off the mountain, for I’d lived too long in the high-up hills, knowing every twisty creek to its farthest reaches, and every lightning-struck tree for miles.

  Other than my cabin, the only places I knew were the meetinghouse down to the Crossing where folks went of a Sunday, and the schoolhouse at Clinch’s Creek where we went of a Saturday for the dancing and the fighting.

  “Tinker,” I said, “I’ve been biding my time until you came along, for come sunup it is in my mind to walk away from the mountains to the western lands.”

  Filling the mill’s hopper, I gave the handles a testing turn, then added, “If you’ve a mind to, I’d like you to come with me.”

  Now, the Tinker was a solitary man. A long-jawed man, dark as any Indian, but of a different cast, somehow, and he’d an odd look to his yellow eyes. Some said he hailed from foreign lands, but I knew nothing of that, nor ought of the ways of foreign folk, but the Tinker knew things a body could scarcely ken, and held a canny knowledge of uncanny things.

  Beside a fire of an evening his fingers worked a magic with rope or yarn, charming queer, decorative things that women took fancy to, but the likes of which none of us had ever seen.

  “I have given it thought, ‘Lando,” he answered me, “but I am a lone man with no liking for company.”

  “So it is with me. But now it is in my mind to go the western lands and there become rich with the things of this earth. You have the knack for the doing of things, and I have a knack for trade, and together we might do much that neither could do alone.”

  “Aye … you have a knack for trade, all right. A time or two you even had the better of me.”

  A time or two he said? Every time. And well he knew it, too, but it was not in me to bring that up.

  “Except for one thing,” I said. “You never would trade me a Tinker’s knife.”

  He took out his pipe and settled to smoke, and I knew it was coming, this thing he had on his mind.

  “You have enemies. Is that why you have chosen to leave at this time?”

  It ired me that he should think so, but I held my peace, and when I spoke at last, my voice was mild.

  “Will Caffrey and his son? They have reason to fear me, and not I to fear them. It was my father’s mistake to leave me with Will Caffrey to be reared by him, but pa was not himself from the grief that was on him, and in no condition for straight thinking.”

  “Caffrey had a good name then,” the Tinker said, “although a hard-fisted man and close with money.

  Only since he became a rich man has he become overbearing.”

  “And it was the gold I claimed from him at Meeting that made him rich, and none of his earning.

  He had it from my father to pay for my keep and education.”

  “You put your mark upon his son.”

  “He asked it of me. He came at me, a-swinging of his fists.”

  When I had emptied the meal from the hopper, I tightened the mill and filled the hopper again, for such a mill as that of mine could grind only to a certain coarseness on the first grinding, and then the mill must be tightened and the meal reground before it was fit for the baking or for gruel.

  “They are saying how you faced Will Caffrey at Meeting, and him a deacon of the church and all, and demanded he return the money your father left with him, and all the interest he had from its use.

  “They tell how he flustered and would give you the lie, but all knew how five years ago you ran from his farm and have lived alone in this cabin since, and how, suddenly, after your father left Will Caffrey had money with which to buy farms and cattle.

  “You’ll not be forgiven this side of the grave, not by Will Caffrey. He is a proud man and you have shamed him at Meeting.”

  “The money is rightfully mine, Tinker. When he decided my father
would not return, he took me from school and put me to work in the fields, and sent his son to school in my place.”

  The mill was ready, and again I ground my meal, the noise allowing for no talk, but when I’d emptied the hopper I said, “If it is enemies I have, it is the Caffreys. I know of no others.”

  He shot me a curious glance, which puzzled me with its content. “Not three tall, mustached men with dark hair and long faces? Three tall men as alike as peas in a pod … named Kurbishaw?”

  “It was my mother’s name.”

  “They are riding to kill you.”

  “You saw them where?”

  “In the Cherokee towns. They asked questions there.”

  “The Indians are my friends. They will tell them nothing.”

  “When last I saw them they had old Midah Wolf and were buying him drink.”

  Midah was an old man with a love for the bottle and a memory of youth that only drink could bring back. When drunk, he was enemy to no man and would surely talk. He would be sorry after, but that would be of no help.

  “The Kurbishaws are my mother’s folk. They will surely be coming for other reasons.”

  “I have heard them say, “We have killed the wolf, now we shall kill the whelp.”’”

  They had killed the wolf? If by that they meant my father, I did not believe them. My father might have many faults, but lack of shrewdness was not one of them. As I grew older I had remembered his actions around our mountain cabin, and now I knew that he had been aware of danger, that he had lived no moment without that awareness.

  Yet he had not returned … had they killed him, indeed?

  “I have only my father’s worn-out rifle,” I said, “and a dislike for shooting men I do not know, nor have I any appetite for violence.”

  The Tinker glanced at me shrewdly, and I wondered what went on behind those yellow eyes. Was he my friend, in truth? Had I learned this doubt of people? Was it acquired by brief but hard experience?

  “If they find their way to the Crossing, Caffrey will be quick to tell them where you are.” The Tinker turned his yellow eyes straight at me.

  “Did you never wonder why your pa came to this lonely place with his bride? There’s a story told in the lowland towns.”

  “There was trouble when he married ma. Her family objected to him.”

  “Objected is a mild ^w. They objected so much they hired a man to kill him when his brothers-in-law decided against trying it. Your pa killed the man and then lit out for the hills so he would not have to kill her brothers and have their blood between them.

  “Or so the story is told. Yet there is a whisper of something else, of something beyond pride of family. There is a tale that they hated your father for a reason before he even met your mother.”

  We Sacketts had come early to the mountains.

  Welsh folk we were, Welsh and Irish, and my family had come to America one hundred and fifty years before the Colonies fought for their independence. A relative of mine had been killed in the fierce fighting in North Carolina in the revolt that failed.

  We settled on the frontier, as it then was, along the flanks of the Blue Ridge and Smoky mountains, and there we made ourselves part of the rocky hills and the forests. Pa was the first of our family to run off to the lowlands and return with a bride.

  The Kurbishaws made much of themselves and cut a wide swath among the lowland folk, looking down their long noses at us who lived in the hills.

  We Sacketts set store by kinfolk, but we never held up our family with pride. A mill grinds no corn with water that is past. Come trouble, we Sacketts stand shoulder to shoulder as long as need be, but we made no talk of ancestors, nor how high they stood in the community.

  Yet it was no wonder that pa took the eye of the lowland girls, for he was a fine, upstanding man with a colorful way about him, and he cut quite a dash in the lowland towns.

  He rode a fine black gelding, his pockets filled with gold washed from a creek the Cherokees showed him, and he dressed with an elegance and a taste for fine tailoring. There was gold from another source, too, and as a child I saw those hoarded coins a time or two.

  My father showed me one of them and I loved the dull reflection of the nighttime firelight upon it.

  “There is more where that came from, laddie, more indeed.

  One day we shall gather it, you and I.”

  “Let it lie,” ma said. “The earth is a fit place for it.”

  Such times pa would flash her that bright, quick smile of his and show her that hard light in his black eyes. “I might have told them where it was, had they acted differently about us,” he would say; “but if they have it now it shall cost them blood.”

  How long since I had thought of that story? How long since I had even seen that gold until pa brought it out to turn over to Caffrey for my education and keep?

  Her brothers had planned for ma to marry wealth and power, and when she ran off with pa they were furious, and challenged him. He refused them, and as he refused them he held two finely wrought pistols in his hands.

  “You do not wish to fight me,” he said, and tossed a bottle into the air. With one pistol he smashed the bottle, andwiththe second he hit a falling fragment. It was after that they hired a man to kill him.

  Pa and ma would have lived their lives among the lowland folk had the Kurbishaws let them be, but they used their wealth and power to hound them out of Virginia and the Carolinas, until finally they took refuge in the mountain cabin among the peaks, which pa built with his own hands.

  The cabin was a fair, kind place among the rocks and trees, with a cold spring at the back and a good fishing stream not a hundred yards off. And happily they lived there until ma died.

  “If you stay here,” the Tinker went on, “they will kill you. You have but the one barrel of your old rifle and they are three armed men, and skilled at killing.”

  “They are my uncles, after all.”

  “They are your enemies, and you are not your father.

  These men are fighters, and you are not.”

  My head came up angrily, for he spoke against my pride. “I can fight!”

  Impatience was in his voice and attitude when he answered. “You have fought against boys or clumsy men. That is not fighting. Fighting is a skill to be learned. I saw you whip the three Lindsay boys, but any man with skill could have whipped you easily.”

  “There were three of them.”

  The Tinker knocked the ash from his pipe. his’Lando, you are strong, one of the strongest men I know, and surprising quick, but neither of these things makes you a fighter. Fighting is a craft, and it must be learned and practiced. Until you know how to fight with your head as well as with heart and muscle, you are no fighting man.”

  “And I suppose you know this craft?”

  I spoke contemptuously, for the idea of the Tinker as a fighting man seemed to me laughable.

  He was long and thin, with nothing much to him.

  “I know a dozen kinds. How to fight with the fists, the open hand, and Japanese-as well as Cornish-style wrestling. If we travel together, I will teach you.”

  Teach me? I bit my tongue on angry ^ws, for my pride was sore hurt that he took me so lightly. Had I not, when only a boy, whipped Duncan Caffrey, and him two years older and twenty pounds heavier? And since then I’d whipped eight or nine more, men and boys; and at Clinch’s Creek was I not cock of the walk?

  And he spoke of teaching me!

  Opening his pack, the Tinker brought out a packet of coffee, for he carried real coffee and not the dried beans and chicory we mountain folk used. Without moving from where he was, he reached out and brought together chips, bark, and bits of twigs left from my wood-cutting andof them he made a fire.

  He was a man who disliked the inside of places, craving the freeness of the open air about him. Some said it was because he must have been locked up once upon a time, but I paid no mind to gossip.

  While he started the fire and put water on to bo
il, I went to a haunch of venison hanging in the shed and cut a healthy bait of it into thick slices for roasting at the fire. Then I returned to grind more meal.

  Such mills as mine were scarce, and the corn I ground would be the last, for I planned to trade the mill for whatever it would bring as I passed out of the country.

  If it was true the Kurbishaws sought to kill me they could find me here, for mountains are never so big that a man is not known.

  But the thought of leaving this place brought a twinge of regret, for all the memories of ma and pa concerned this place. Yonder was the first tree I’d climbed, and how high the lowest branch had seemed then! And nearby was the spring from which I proudly carried the first bucket of water I could hold clear of the ground.

  No man cuts himself free of old ties without regret; even scenes of hardship and sadness possess the warmth of familiarity, and within each of us there is a love for the known. How many times at planting had my shovel turned this dark earth!

  How many times had I leaned against that tree, or marveled at the cunning with which pa had fitted the logs of our house, or put all the cabinets together with wooden pins!

  The Tinker filled my plate and cup. “We shall talk of fighting another time.”

  Suddenly my quieter mood was gone and irritation came flooding back. No man wishes to be lightly taken, and I was young and strong, and filled with the pride of victories won.

  “Talk of it now,” I said belligerently, “and if you want to try me on, you’ve no cause to wait.”

  “You talk the fool!” he said impatiently.

  “I am your friend, and I doubted if you have another.

  Wait, and when you have taken your whipping, come to me and I will show you how it should be done.”

  Putting down the coffee cup, I got to my feet. “Show me,” I said, “if you think you can.”

  With a pained expression on his lean, dark face he got slowly to his feet. “This may save you a beating, or I’d have no part of it. So come at me if you will.”

  He stood with his arms dangling, and suddenly I thought what a fool I was to force such a fight on a friend; but then my pride took command and my fingers clenched into a fist and I swung at him.