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

never saw a man get superior so fast.
    He was running me down and talking up that Arvie Wilt who had a claim nearby the Popley place, and Arvie was a man I didn’t cotton to.
    He was two inches taller than my six feet and three, and where I pack one hundred and eighty pounds on that lean a frame, most of it in my chest, shoulders, and arms, Arvie weighed a good fifty pounds more and he swaggered it around as if almighty impressed with himself.
    He was a big, easy-smiling man that folks took to right off, and it took them a while to learn he was a man with a streak of meanness in him that was nigh onto downright viciousness. Trouble was, a body never saw that mean streak unless he was in a bind, but when trouble came to him, the meanness came out.
    But Arvie was panning out gold, and you’d be surprised how that increased his social standing there on Horse Collar Creek.
    Night after night he was over to the Popleys’, putting his big feet under their table and being waited on by Griselda. Time to time I was there, too, but they talked gold and how much they weighed out each day while all I was weighing out was gravel.
    He was panning a fine show of color and all I had was a .44 pistol gun, a Henry rifle, and my mining tools. And as we all know it’s the high card in a man’s hand to be holding money when he goes a-courting.
    None of us Sacketts ever had much cash money. We were hardworking mountain folk who harvested a lean corn crop off a side-hill farm, and we boys earned what clothes weren’t made at home by trapping muskrats or coon. Sometimes we’d get us a bear, and otherwise we’d live on razorback hog meat or venison.
    Never will forget the time a black bear treed old Orrin, that brother of mine, and us caught nine miles from home and none of us carrying iron.
    You ever tackle a grown bear with a club? Me and Tyrel, we done it. We chunked at him with rocks and sticks, but he paid them no mind. He was bound and determined to have Orrin, and there was Orrin up high in the small branches of that tree like a ‘possum huntin’ persimmons.
    Chunking did no good, so Tyrel and me cut us each a club and we had at that bear. He was big and he was mean, but while one of us closed in on him before, the other lambasted him from behind. Time to time we’d stop lambasting that bear to advise Orrin.
    Finally that old bear got disgusted and walked off and Orrin came down out of that tree and we went on to the dance at Skunk Hollow School. Orrin did his fiddling that night from a sitting stool because the bear had most of his pants.
    Right now I felt like he must have felt then. Every day that Griselda girl went a-walking past my claim paying me no mind but switching her skirts until I was fair sweating on my neck.
    Her pa was a hard man. One time I went over there for supper like I had when I’d been welcome, back when neither of us had anything. He would stand up there in his new boots, consulting a new gold watch every minute or two, and talking high and mighty about the virtues of hard work and the application of brains. And all the time that Arvie Wilt was a-setting over there making big eyes at Griselda.
    If anything, Arvie had more gold than Popley did and he was mighty welcome at table, but for me the atmosphere was frosting over a mite, and the only reason I dug in and held on was that I’d scraped my pot empty of beans and for two days I’d eaten nothing but those skimpy little wild onions.
    Now when it came right down to it, Popley knew I’d worked hard as either of them, but I was showing no color and he wanted a son-in-law who was prosperous, so needing to find fault, he taken issue with me on fighting.
    We boys from the high-up hills aren’t much on bowing and scraping, but along about fighting time, you’ll find us around. Back in the Cumberland I grew up to knuckle-and-skull fighting, and what I hadn’t learned there I picked up working west on a