Free Collection 1997 - End Of The Drive (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Page A

hoped he’d do. He balled up a fist and threw it at me. Trouble was, he took so much time getting his fist ready and his feet in position that I knew what he was going to do, so when he flung that punch, I just stepped inside and hit him where he’d been putting those doughnuts.
    He gulped and turned green around the jowls and white around the eyes, so I knocked down a hand he stuck at me and belted him again in the same place. Then I caught him by the shirt front before he could fall and backhanded him twice across the mouth for good measure.
    Griselda was a-hauling at my arms. “Stop it, you awful man! You hurt him!”
    â€œThat ain’t surprising, Griselda,” I said. “It was what I had in mind.”
    So I went back to making bear-sign, and after a bit Arvie got up, with Griselda helping, and he wiped the blood off his lips and he said, “I’ll get even! I’ll get even with you if it’s the last thing I do!”
    â€œAnd it just might be,” I said, and watched them walk off together.
    There went Griselda. Right out of my life, and with Arvie Wilt, too.
    Two days later I was out of business and broke. Two days later I had a barrel of doughnuts I couldn’t give away and my private gold rush was over. Worst of all, I’d put all I’d made back into the business and there I was, stuck with it. And it was Arvie Wilt who did it to me.
    As soon as he washed the blood off his face he went down to the settlement. He had heard of a woman down there who was a baker, and he fetched her back up the creek. She was a big, round, jolly woman with pink cheeks, and she was a first-rate cook. She settled down to making apple pies three inches thick and fourteen inches across and she sold a cut of a pie for two bits and each pie made just four pieces.
    She also baked cakes with high-grade all over them. In mining country rich ore is called high-grade, so miners got to calling the icing on cake high-grade, and there I sat with a barrel full of bear-sign and everybody over to the baker woman’s buying cake and pie and such-like.
    Then Popley came by with Griselda riding behind him on that brown mule, headed for the baker woman’s. “See what a head for business Arvie’s got? He’ll make a fine husband for Griselda.”
    Griselda? She didn’t even look at me. She passed me up like a pay-car passing a tramp, and I felt so low I could have walked under a snake with a high hat on.
    Three days later I was back to wild onions. My grub gave out, I couldn’t peddle my flour, and the red ants got into my sugar. All one day I tried sifting red ants out of sugar; as fast as I got them out they got back in until there was more ants than sugar.
    So I gave up and went hunting. I hunted for two days and couldn’t find a deer, nor anything else but wild onions.
    Down to the settlement they had a fandango, a real old-time square dance, and I had seen nothing of the kind since my brother Orrin used to fiddle for them back to home. So I brushed up my clothes and rubbed some deer grease on my boots, and I went to that dance.
    Sure enough, Griselda was there, and she was with Arvie Wilt.
    Arvie was all slicked out in a black broadcloth suit that fit him a little too soon, and black boots so tight he winced when he put a foot down.
    Arvie spotted me and they fetched to a halt right beside me. “Sackett,” Arvie said, “I hear you’re scraping bottom again. Now my baker woman needs a helper to rev up her pots and pans, and if you want the job—”
    â€œI don’t.”
    â€œJust thought I’d ask,”—he grinned maliciously—“seein’ you so good at woman’s work.”
    He saw it in my eyes so he grabbed Griselda and they waltzed away, grinning. Thing that hurt, she was grinning, too.
    â€œThat Arvie Wilt,” somebody said, “there’s a man will amount to something. Popley says he has a fine head for