Free Lando (1962) by Louis - Sackett's 08 L'amour

must score, and I must shape my mind to accept the fact that I must fire looking into a blazing gun. I must return that fire even though I was hit.
    South we rode, morning, noon, and night.
    South down the Shawnee Trail in moonlight and in sun, and all along the trail were herds of cattle--a few hundred, a few thousand, moving north for Kansas with their dust clouds to mark the way. We heard the prairie wind and the cowboy yells, and at night the prairie wolves that sang the moon out of the sky.
    We smelled the smoke of the fires, endured the heat of the crowded bodies of the herd, and often of a night we stopped and yarned with the cowboys, sharing their fires and their food and exchanging fragments of news, or of stories heard.
    There were freight teams, too. These were jerk-line outfits with their oxen or horses stretched out ahead of them hauling freight from Mexico or taking it back.
    And there were free riders, plenty of them.
    Tough, hard-bitten men, armed and ready for trouble.
    Cow outfits returning home from Kansas, bands of unreconstructed renegades left over from the war, occasional cow thieves and robbers.
    Believe me, riding in Texas had taught me there was more to the West than just wagon trains and cattle drives. Folks were up to all sorts of things, legal and otherwise, and some of them forking the principle. That is, they sat astraddle of it, one foot on the legal side, the other on the illegal, and taking in money with both hands from both sides. Such business led to shooting sooner or later.
    South we rode, toward the borderlands.
    Our second day we overtook a fine coach and six elegant horses, with six outriders, tough men in sombreros, with Winchesters ready to use.
    "Only one man would have such a carriage,"
    Jonas said. "It will be Captain Richard King, owner of the ranch on Santa Gertrudis."
    An outrider recognized Jonas and called out to him, and when King saw Jonas he had the carriage draw up. It was a hot, still morning and the trailing dust cloud slowly closed in and sifted fine red dust over us all.
    "Jonas," King said, "my wife, Henrietta. Henrietta, this is Jonas Locklear."
    Richard King was a square-shouldered, strongly built man with a determined face. It was a good face, the face of a man who had no doubts. I envied him.
    "King was a steamboat captain on the Rio Grande," the Tinker explained to me in a low voice, "and after the Mexican War he bought land from Mexicans who now lived south of the border and could no longer ranch north of the line."
    Later the Tinker told me more: how King had bought land from others who saw no value in grassland where Indians and outlaws roamed. One piece he bought was fifteen thousand acres, at two cents an acre.
    Instead of squatting on land like most of them were doing, King had cleared title to every piece he bought. There was a lot of land to be had for cash, but you had to be ready to fight for anything you claimed, and not many wanted to chance it.
    Brownsville was the place where we were to separate. At that time it was a town of maybe three thousand people, but busy as all get out. From here Miguel and I would go on alone.
    Looking across toward Mexico, I asked myself what sort of fool thing I was getting into.
    Everybody who had anything to do with that gold had come to grief.
    Nevertheless, I was going. Pa had a better claim to that gold than any man, and I aimed to have a try at it. And while I was going primed for trouble, I wasn't hunting it.
    First off, I'd bought a new black suit and hat, as well as rougher clothes for riding. I picked out a pair of fringed shotgun chaps and a dark blue shirt. Then I bought shells for a new Henry rifle. The rifle itself cost me $43, and I bought a thousand rounds of .44's for $21.
    That same place I picked up a box of .36-31liber bullets for my pistol at $1.20 per hundred.
    That Henry was a proud rifle. I mean it could really shoot. Men I'd swear by said it was accurate at one thousand yards, and I believed