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

realize that I meant it.
    â€œYou’re not fooling me! You can’t get away with it.” And his thumb came forward to cock that pistol.
    Like I said, Arvie wasn’t too smart or he’d have cocked his gun as he drew it, so I just fetched out my six-shooter and let the hammer slip from under my thumb as it came level.
    Deliberately, I held it a little high, and the .44 slug smashed him in the shoulder. It knocked him sidewise and he let go of that big pistol and staggered back two steps and sat down hard.
    â€œYou’re a mighty disagreeable man, Arvie,” I said, “and not much account. When the boys down at the settlement start finding the marks you put on those cards you’ll have to leave the country, but I reckon you an’ Griselda deserve each other.”
    She was looking at me with big eyes and pouty lips because she’d heard the news, but I wasn’t having any.
    â€œYou-all been washing gold along the creek,” I said, “but you never stopped to think where those grains of gold started from. Well, I found and staked the mother lode, staked her from Hell to breakfast, and one day’s take will be more than you’ve taken out since you started work. I figure now I’ll dig me out a goodly amount of money, then I’ll sell my claims and find me some friends that aren’t looking at me just to see what I got.”
    They left there walking down that hill with Arvie astride the mule making pained sounds every time it took a step.

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    W HEN I HAD pulled that wild onion up there on that ledge overlooking the deer run, there were bits of gold in the sand that clung to the roots, and when I scraped the dirt away from the base of that outcrop, she was all there…wire gold lying in the rock like a jewelry store window.
    Folks sometimes ask me why I called it the Wild Onion Mining Company.
    END OF THE DRIVE
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    W E CAME UP the trail from Texas in the spring of ’74, and bedded our herd on the short grass beyond the railroad. We cleaned our guns and washed our necks and dusted our hats for town; we rode fifteen strong to the hitching rail, and fifteen strong to the bar.
    We were the Rocking K from the rough country back of the Nueces, up the trail with three thousand head of longhorn steers, the first that spring, although the rivers ran bank full and Comanches rode the war trail.
    We buried two hands south of the Red, and two on the plains of the Nation, and a fifth died on Kansas grass, his flesh churned under a thousand hoofs. Four men gone before Indian rifles, but the death-songs of the Comanches were sung in the light of a hollow moon, and the Kiowa mourned in their lodges for warriors lost to the men of the Rocking K.
    We were the riders who drove the beef, fighting dust, hail, and lightning, meeting stampedes and Kiowa. And we who drove the herd and fought our nameless, unrecorded battles often rode to our deaths without glory, nor with any memory to leave behind us.
    The town was ten buildings long on the north side of the street, and seven long on the south, with stock corrals to the east of town and Boot Hill on the west, and an edging of Hell between.
    Back of the street on the south of town were the shacks of the girls who waited for the trail herds, and north of the street were the homes of the businessmen and merchants, where no trail driver was permitted to go.
    We were lean and hard young riders, only a few of us nearing thirty, most of us nearer to twenty. We were money to the girls of the line, and whiskey to the tenders of bars, but to the merchants we were lean, brown young savages whose brief assaults on their towns were tolerated for the money we brought.
    That was the year I was twenty-four, and only the cook was an older man, yet it was my fifth trip up the trail and I’d seen this town once before, and others before that. And there were a couple I’d seen die, leaving their brief scars on the prairie that new grass would