Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0) (9 page)

“Watch for you?”

“So he will think I am coming.”

I rode out quickly at sundown, back a half hour later. He watched me from behind his curtain but did not follow. Was he so sure I’d be back?

Immediately I went to bed. I had eaten earlier, now I wanted rest, but I put my few things together first, and at four in the morning, with a cold wind blowing along the streets, I slipped out and went to the stables. Swiftly I saddled, keeping my face toward the door. Then I walked out and took a trail out of town, around the corrals and away from the street. When I passed from sight of any window in town, I started to canter.

It was still dark, and what warned me was a sudden catch of wood smoke on the air. Just a breath of it, then it was gone, yet instantly I was alert. The wind was wrong for the town, and there were no shacks out here that I knew of.

Instantly, I turned the roan into the deeper shadows along the edge of the forest and drew up, touching his shoulder gently with a gloved hand. Again I caught the smoke. A camp or a cabin of which I knew nothing…somebody was there…close by.

The roan walked at my signal, hoofs crunching a bit on the hard snow. Suddenly a man loomed up before me, rising out of a creek bed, but his rifle was not up, and I had the impression he had not meant to be seen, for when we glimpsed each other he shied as if he would try to hide, but there was no place, so he stood still. It was Wacker.

“So that’s it? He set you to spy on me?”

He stood silent, watching me warily. “I think,” I said, “I would be very slow about going to him with news of my ride. He won’t like it when I come back into town.”

“If you do.”

“If I do. But wouldn’t you like it better if I did not? Where is your bread buttered, Wacker? Would you rather have me gone where I cannot get people to asking questions, or in town where you have to worry?”

“I think he means to kill you.”

“I have no doubt of it, Wacker, but you found that I do not die easily, and I’m tougher now. Go if you like, but if I were you, I’d let well enough alone. Go in an hour from now and tell him you saw me leave…choose whatever time you like.” I grinned at him. “By that time I may be coming back.”

He stood there looking at me, and I was wasting time. “What is it between you? He wants you bad, I think.”

“Ask him.”

“I’d ask him nothing. Not that one.”

He stepped aside and I rode on, watching back, however, and trusting him not one whit. When there was a good two hundred yards and a bend in the road between us, I spoked the roan and we took the next mile at a good run, then slowed, steam rising from us in a cloud.

Felix Yant would be after me now. This would be his chance to kill. I had no doubt that he was a dead shot. His kind would be. An excellent horseman, also, but his horse was a finely bred eastern gelding, not a mountain horse. I felt very sorry for that horse.

My destination was Georgetown, but I headed west, away from it. I headed away from the high, snow-covered peaks with their passes choked with snow. I headed for the desert.

He had told me nothing of the years he had left behind, but I doubted they were akin to mine. He had lived well, I thought, or almost well, and he wanted more of that life. Now he would find how others lived, for I knew where he was to be taken. Mine were but seventeen, almost eighteen years, but they had been lean and hungry years, with long, lonely rides. Since I was old enough to recall, I had ridden the wild country, and I knew how to live there even like the coyotes who haunt the empty desert spaces.

Did he know the high desert in winter? Did he know those vast and empty spaces, sometimes spotted with patches of thin snow, always swept by cold and bitter winds? If he did not know, he would learn, for that was where I now went.

The roan knew. The roan was bred in those spaces, in the wild, remote canyon country and in the high deserts to the south of there. If Felix Yant wanted my hide, he would have to buy it with suffering, cold, and every bit of toughness there was in him.

Wild and broken was the land to the west, a land of little water and less rain, a land where the rivers ran in canyons a thousand feet deep and where the springs were hidden in hollows of rock. Where a few Indians lived and no white man except a chance prospector or a trapper whom no one had told that the great days of fur were gone.

I rode down with the wind, down off a lofty plateau and into a canyon, then out to the lonely outpost store, where I led my horse to the stable. I had an hour, perhaps two. I went inside after watering my horse and giving him a bait of corn. Inside the store was warm, and an old man, very tall and thin with steel-rimmed spectacles, read a book by the potbellied stove. He looked over his glasses at me. “Not many ride in this weather,” he commented.

“There’s a man behind me,” I explained.

“The law?”

“No…an enemy. I don’t know how much of an enemy, but if he follows where I am going, he’ll be wanting me bad.”

I walked to the counter and ordered what I would need, a side of bacon, some dried fruit, flour, salt, beans, a few odds and ends, and some hard candy. It would help me through the times when I could not stop. I also bought one hundred rounds of .44s.

“You been out there before?”

“I have.”

“Has he?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“West, south, and north,” he said, “there isn’t another white man for a hundred miles…more likely two hundred miles.”

“Nobody at Lee’s Ferry?”

“They come and got him. Or took him somehow. I don’t think there’s anybody there now.”

He looked at me. “You’re almighty young. Have you killed somebody?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m hoping not to.”

“If he ain’t use to it, an’ he follers you,” the old man said, “you won’t need to kill him. That country will do it.”

He looked at me again. “You been there, you say?”

“I come across with my pa. I was a youngster the first time, standing about as high as the sight on a Winchester.”

He nodded slowly. “With a tall man? A gentleman?”

“He was my father,” I said gently, “and he was always a gentleman, and always a man.”

“Ride well, son,” the old man said, “an’ make your grub last. I seen you come in. That’s a good horse.”

“This was his country,” I said. “Pa taken him from the wild bunch over there back of the Sweet Alice Hills.”

The land fell away in a vast sweep like a great, empty sea where no billows rolled, nor even waves. Stiff grass stood in the wind, scarcely bending, and the cedar played low, humming songs with the wind.

I rode away into the empty land, and there was no sound but the drum of hoofs upon the hard ground, and there was no dust, and scarcely a track to mark my passing.

Chapter 8

W
HAT IS IT makes a man do the things he does? Time to time I’ve wondered about that, and it was pa who set me to thinking. I never realized that pa was running until it was too late. Sure, it occurred to me now and again that we moved a lot, sometimes leaving good jobs and places we liked. It was only now that I wondered if pa was running away from something, or simply avoiding an issue, a settlement he did not wish to face.

Pa wasn’t scared. I’ll give him that. Several times I’d seen him face up to mighty dangerous situations, always calm, easy, and in command. And he was a good man with a gun.

Something happened back yonder in his younger years that had brought him to grief. That something was tied in with the reason Felix Yant would come riding after me. Oh, I never doubted he’d come! And deep inside me I was sure it was he, and nobody else, who killed pa.

What bothered me was I felt an uneasy kinship with the man. Maybe we were related, but it was more than that. Sometimes when he spoke, I knew what he would say before he said it, and that was strange, too, for he was a different kind of man than I’d ever known.

Some things about me bothered him, too. He didn’t like the language I used most of the time. What he hadn’t yet realized was that it was a sort of a vernacular most western men slipped into, no matter how well they could talk or how much they knew of the language. Part of it was that the educated ones didn’t want to seem to be putting on airs, as the saying was, but it was more than that. It was almost as if it was a dialect. We used a lot of contractions and Indian or Spanish words that came into our speaking natural-like.

Sometimes Yant, who was obviously new to the West, would stop and look at me to guess the meaning of what I’d said. I had an idea the words we used would in a short time become so much a part of the language nobody would even hesitate over them.

We used
lariat,
which was short for the Spanish
la reata,
and
hombre
was used almost as much as
man.
There were dozens of other words and expressions that sort of filtered into the everyday talk from the Indians, the Spanish, and the country itself.

Me an’ that roan, we just taken off into the desertlike country toward the west. Not that it was desert, but it was dry—least you knew where the water lay. And all the advantage lays with a man who is making the trail. He can go where he wishes, stop when he likes, and I was of no mind to make it easy.

At first I didn’t attempt to make myself hard to find. What I wanted most was distance, and I hit a fair pace and held to it. That roan could go all day at a kind of shambling trot.

I had no illusions about what I was getting into. Yant, if he had killed pa, was as cold-blooded as they come. He’d shot pa at point-blank range and in the back of the head, and he’d do the same for me if the chance allowed. Maybe I was better in wild country and maybe I wasn’t. In any event, the man was a good rider and a tough, dangerous man, not to be held lightly.

If I could shake him loose, I’d strike out for Georgetown and hope that pa had left something there. If not, I’d have to rethink the situation and go over pa’s back trail.

Wacker and the judge and them seemed far away and in another world. I was staking my life on outguessing Felix Yant.

There was nobody I could go to for help. Anyway, it wasn’t the way things were done in the West. A man saddled his own broncs and he fought his own battles. He stood alone, on his own two feet. A gang was a place for cowards to hide, because they were afraid to stand out in the open. They wanted others to fight their battles for them and to shield them from attack.

The wind was cold, right off the snow-covered flanks of the mountains, which lay behind me now. How far I was going west I had no idea, only that somehow I had to shake Yant from my trail and then turn east once more.

There was ice on the edges of Cherry Creek when I crossed it. Then, deciding here was where I should start, I turned downstream, keeping my horse in the water for a couple of miles, then out on the east bank again, and by high noon I was skirting the La Plata on the west side, hunting for an arroyo I dimly remembered that ran off to the northwest. Sometime about an hour later, I saw it off to the west and cut across-country. There was a trail but I chose to avoid it, crossing to the arroyo itself. There had been recent rains, but cattle had gone up and down the canyon leaving a maze of tracks that in the soft sand had no distinction, one from the other. Keeping to the arroyo for another hour, I reached the old Ute Trail, which would take me west to the Mancos River.

Leaving the roan to graze on whatever he could find, I climbed a high shoulder near the trail and sat there for a good half hour, watching my back trail. I saw nothing, not even dust. Instead of making me feel good, it left me worried.

Suppose I was all wrong and he had not followed me? Suppose he had outsmarted me and guessed my intention and was waiting until I started east again? He was a shrewd man, and I returned to my horse feeling none too good.

The land through which I rode was lonely, desolate, offering nothing. Here and there great mesas thrust up from the land about, towering like islands from a vanished sea. Off to the west was the tableland of Mesa Verde, its great promontory like the bow of a ship outlined sharply against the sky.

Everywhere there was a thick stand of cedar, and wherever there was an open space, it was grown up to sagebrush. From time to time up some branch canyon, there was a glimpse of spruce trees along the flanks or in the ends of the canyons. It was rough, broken country with many fallen slabs of rock and talus slopes. I needed a place to hole up. If Yant lost my trail, he might give up on me.

At the head of a canyon a trail branched off to the northwest. No Indian tracks, although this was Ute country, only a scattering of deer and other animal tracks. I was catching a sense of the country now, remembering it from a time long since, when pa and me had holed up here for a spell.

Red Horse Gulch was somewhere off to the south, and if I wasn’t guessing wrong, this trail led to a spring. I turned the roan along that trail, and from the way he quickened his step I had an idea there was water ahead.

Believe me, I was mighty uneasy. Felix Yant might be green to this country, but he’d ridden and hunted a lot and it would take some doing to fool him. I was banking that he’d sight-hunted mostly, or trailed game with dogs, and that he wasn’t much of a tracker. Yet to underestimate an enemy is always dangerous.