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

for the first two or three hours. Then we stepped up the speed a bit, because both of us wanted distance between us and last night's camp.
    Most of the time I rode with a hand ready to grab a gun. From time to time I reached for that Walch Navy, and the butt had a mighty friendly feeling.
    Nothing feels better when trouble shapes than the butt of a good pistol.
    We kept scanning the trail ahead, hoping for a sign of our riders. Lucky for us the cattle seemed to want to get away from that place as much as we did.
    There were no trees. Meadows of grass appeared here and there, and sometimes there'd be grass for miles, but between the trail and the sea there was a regular forest of brush. Here and there were signs that the sea had on occasion even come this far. The last time must have been the great hurricane of 1844.
    If there had been another of such power since, we hadn't heard of it, but the one of #'dd was well known.
    The cattle drifted steadily. The heat rising from their bunched bodies was as stifling as the dust.
    Only once in a while did one of the steers cut loose and try to stray from the column. But for two riders it was too many cattle, and our horses would soon be worn to nothing.
    Off to the right was the sea ... that was east. As far as we were from it, I turned again and again to look that way, for though we had been close a time or two, I had never yet seen the ocean. It gave a man an odd feeling to known all the miles upon miles of water that lay off there.
    Somewhere out there, lying on the bottom close in to shore, was a ship loaded with gold and silver, with gems maybe, and schlike. Pa had found it and brought gold from it, and pa must have come back again after he left me. It would be like him to let on he was going for fur, then to trail south where the gold was. Why trap for skins, when the price of thousands of them lay off that coast in shallow water?
    It set a man to sweating, just to think of that much gold. It had never really got to me until now.
    And after all, that was what we'd come for. We hadn't really come for a few hundred scrawny Mexican steers. ... I wondered how long it would take that Herrara to figure that out.
    Not that a few folks weren't buying Mexican stock. With the prices offered in the railhead towns, it was a caution what folks would do to lay hands on a few steers.
    But this gold, now. LaFitte, he wasn't only a pirate and slave trader, he was a blacksmith in New Orleans with a shop where slaves did the work, and he and his brother ... now how did I know that?
    Had the Tinker mentioned it? Or Jonas?
    Jonas, probably, when we were talking. Yet the notion stayed with me that I'd heard it before.
    Now I was imagining things. I couldn't call to mind any mention of Jean LaFitte--not before we came up to that plantation house after leaving San Augustine. Not before we met Jonas.
    The dun was streaked with sweat and I could tell by the way he moved that he was all in. We hadn't come twenty miles, either. Not by a long shot.
    Miguel dropped back beside me, and that horse of his looked worse than mine.
    "Se@nor," he said, "we must stop."
    "All right," I said, "but not for the night. We'll take ourselves a rest and then push on."
    He looked at me, then shrugged. I knew what he was thinking. If we kept on like this we'd be driving those cattle afoot. We should have a remuda, and Jonas was supposed to be bringing one south. We weren't supposed to drive these cattle not even a foot after the vaqueros left us.
    We turned the herd into a circle and stopped them where the grass was long and a trickle of water made a slow way, winding across the flatland toward the dunes that marked the lagoon's edge.
    We found a few sticks and nursed a fire into boiling water for coffee. Miguel hadn't anything to say. Like me, he was dead beat. But I noticed something: like me, he had wiped his guns free of dust and checked the working mechanism.
    "I ain't going to no prison," I said suddenly. "I just ain't