Bendigo Shafter (1979) Read Online Free Page B

There's Sacketts all over Tennessee and Carolina, but I lacked somebody of my very own. When I was shy of fourteen my pa was killed by Comanches on the Santa Fe Trail. Since then I've fetched up and down the country from Missouri to the shores of the western sea, but I hunger for a place of my own and somebody to do for.
    Cain's daughter Ann had gone right off to sleep like Lenny, but that Mae was making me nervous, acting like she was asleep but snuggling like she was about to crawl into my lap. If Ethan noticed he paid it no mind.
    Folks thought Ethan had eyes for the Widow Macken, and it needed no thinking to guess why. She was a mighty pretty woman and some years shy of thirty. Taller than most, with dark hair and gray eyes, she had skin that was clear and smooth.
    Little things never disturbed her very much, and she had a quick, easy smile that pleasured a man. Along with it she had an honest, straightforward, no-nonsense way of looking at things.
    She was one of us, but she held to herself, going her own way with quiet assurance. She was the real leader among us.
    Riding with Ethan one time, I had said as much. Yes and no, he'd said. Mrs. Macken is a thinking woman who knows her mind, but you watch and listen, Bendigo. You'll see she starts things. She opens the ball but nothing moves unless Cain says so.
    Now I hadn't noticed that before, but when he said it I knew at once it was the truth. Cain was not a talking man, preferring to work with his hands, and he was sure and cunning at his craft. Perhaps because of that he was a thinking man, for working with the hands helps a man to consider. Cain was never stirred by passing waves of excitement, never took off on tangents. His judgments were arrived at quickly enough, and he was wrong as rarely as any man I knew. I had learned something about my own brother, and from a stranger.
    A woman needs a man, Bendigo, even a woman like Ruth Macken. No woman, however strong, should have to stand alone. Believe me, she's a stronger woman because Cain is there and she knows he's there.
    As I sat there in the cold, my face roasting, my back half frozen, trying to keep those youngsters warm and feeding sticks into the fire, I thought about the men of our town.
    John Sampson, who came from the same town as Ruth Macken, had probably undergone the greatest change. As he gathered respect for his abilities, he also added a dignity, or perhaps we had only then begun to notice it.
    As some men quailed beneath the awfulness of sky and plain, he grew taller, and his eyes held on the far horizon. Far as the eye could reach and day after day, there was nothing. We traveled seven, eight, maybe on a good day as much as twelve miles. A time or two we camped within sight of our last night's camp, but to John Sampson it was more than a journey, it was a rebirth.
    I thought of the men with whom we shared the town and wondered if the town would change them as much as the plains had, for even then I had become aware that it is not streets and buildings that make a town, but men and women. I began to be glad we had John Sampson, Ruth Macken, and my brother Cain, and to wonder if I had it in me to meet the demands the town would make.
    At last morning came, a dead gray sky above the white hills of snow, the trees somber against the sky, and to the north, towering mountains, white, sublime, and still. We climbed from our shelter, circled wide the valley where the Indians stayed, and at last came to the ridge above our town.
    The wind had gone down in the hours before the dawn and the cabins lay white in the morning's still cold, slow smoke rising from the chimneys like beckoning fingers that promised warmth and security. We stood there a long moment looking upon it, lumps rising in our throats. It was all so new, and yet it was ours, the place we had built with our hands.
    A door opened and closed, and I saw my brother walking toward the corral with a bucket for the morning milking. A horse whinnied, and