Galloway (1970) by Louis - Sackett's 16 L'amour Page A

hear our mountain expressions. We'd lost a few of them coming west, but an argument or a quarrel we still called an upscuddle, which seemed almighty funny to Nick.
    "We don't have so many words as you," I told him, "so we have to make those we have stand up and do tricks. I never figured language was any stone-cold thing anyway. It's to provide meaning, to tell other folks what you have in mind, and there's no reason why if a man is short a word he can't invent one. When we speak of beans that have been shelled out of the pod we call 'em shuckbeans, because they've been shucked. It's simple, if you look at it."
    "Learning," Galloway added, "isn't only schoolin'. It's looking, listening and making-do. If a man doesn't have much or if he's in wild country he'd better get himself to contemplate and contrive. Pa always taught us to set down and contemplate, take our problem and wrassel with it until there's an answer. And then we contrive. Back in the hills we couldn't buy much, and we didn't have any fancy fixin's, so we contrived. We put together what we could find and added it to something else."
    Nick, he knew a powerful lot of poetry, and like most lonesome, wandering men we liked it. Sometimes of a night he'd set by the fire and recite. He knew a lot of poetry by that fellow Poe who'd died about the time I was born. He used to live over the mountain in Virginia ... over the mountain from us, that is, who lived on the western slope of the hills.
    We'd never paid much mind to Nick Shadow's talk of gold. There'd been Spanish people in Colorado from the earliest times, and for awhile there'd been French folks coming west from New Orleans when Colorado was part of the Louisiana country. The story Nick told us about the gold he knew of was known to others, too. But treasure stories come by the dozen in gold mining country, and everybody you meet has got a mine worth a million dollars or many millions, depending on how many drinks the owner's had.
    One night he said, "Finding the big caches, where they hid the millions would be accident now, because nobody knows exactly where it was hidden, but there's another treasure that might be found, so I'm going to tell you about it.
    "My grandfather had a brother who trapped in this country nearly fifty years ago, and much of the sign left by those early French and Spanish miners was plainly visible when he arrived in the country.
    "The others had never heard the stories of the gold found in the La Platas, nor the less known stories of diamonds found there, and Arnaud was not the man to tell them of it, but he kept his eyes open, and he had an idea where to begin looking.
    "No need to go into all the details, but I figure we're not more than ten miles from that gold right now."
    "Ten miles is a lot of country," Galloway suggested.
    "They were headed up the La Plata, planning to take an old Indian trail that follows along the ridge of the mountains, and Arnaud was counting the streams that flowed into the river. Just past what he counted as the sixth one he saw what he was looking for ... a dim trail that led up into the peaks.
    "They continued on a mile or so further and then he suggested they stop and trap out a beaver pond they'd found. Arnaud volunteered to hunt meat for them and he took off along the river, and as soon as he was out of sight of the others he started back, found his trail and started up.
    "It was a steep trail, unused in a long time, and he figured that in the two miles or so of trail he climbed about three thousand feet ... he was judging in part by the change in vegetation. He reached a high saddle, crossed over and started down. He was looking for a creek that flowed out of the mountain, and he could see the canyon down which it flowed, but there was no longer a trail. That had played out when he reached the crest of the ridge.
    "It was very cold, and the going was difficult. He had to move slowly because of the altitude. He crossed over the saddle, as I've said, but