Free The End of the Trail by Brett Halliday

to foller the old route over thuh mountains.”
    â€œYou reckon we’ll run into bad trouble when we git down into Sanctuary Flat, Pat?” rumbled Ezra.
    Pat hesitated. He and Sam had told Ezra the full truth about their expedition after that first night when Sally was present, but not a word about the true situation in the Flat had yet been told to Dock. Pat hadn’t decided yet just what he was going to do about Dock. He had thought about leaving him behind at Fairplay, or at some ranch along the way to keep him out of danger, but he hadn’t mentioned these plans to the others.
    â€œWhat kind of trouble?” Dock now demanded excitedly. “What do you mean, Ezra?”
    â€œI reckon that’s fer yore Paw tuh say,” Ezra responded. “Ain’t you tol’ him about it, Pat?”
    â€œNot a word,” Pat admitted defensively. “You know Sally had me caught like I was in a nutcracker.”
    â€œTell me now,” Dock pleaded. “What about Sanctuary Flat? What’s likely to happen when we get there?”
    â€œIf we ever do,” Sam put in morosely. “We ain’t over the Divide yet, an’ don’t you ferget it.”
    â€œWe’ll wait until we get there,” Pat decided. “That’ll be time enough to tell you about it, Dock. Go to sleep now. We’ll be hitting the trail before sunup tomorrow.”

8
    It was dusk two days later when the little cavalcade approached the mining and smelter town of Fairplay. Following a tortuous canyon route westward, they had emerged this morning onto the flat, level reaches of the famed South Park, a lush mountain valley thirty miles wide in some places, stretching for more than sixty miles north and south against the very base of the Continental Divide at a mean altitude of some eight thousand feet above sea level.
    The town of Fairplay lay at the extreme northern end of South Park, an isolated village perched on the lower slope of the Divide, cramped against the base of a secondary range on the north. There was a wagon road from Fairplay into Denver over which the smelted gold ore was transported to the mint, and for years there had been agitation for a railroad to connect the mining center with the larger city.
    Fairplay itself was small, with a resident population of not more than a thousand, but it was a hell-roaring town in its own right when the bearded miners came down from the hills to carouse and gamble and get rid of the high wages paid them for mucking gold out of the bowels of the towering peaks above the little town.
    Fairplay was off a direct route to their objective where they hoped to follow a secluded pass over the Divide and down to Sanctuary Flat, and Pat had tried to argue his two partners out of making the northward swing necessary to bring them into the town, but Ezra and Sam had overruled his arguments.
    None of them had been in Fairplay for years, and it just didn’t seem right to Sam and Ezra for them to pass the town by without a visit. They had enough lonely travel over the mountains ahead of them, they reminded Pat, so it wouldn’t do any harm to spend one last night in civilization before striking out into the wilderness. And the way they were putting away the chuck he cooked up for them, Ezra pointed out, they’d be running out of staples before they ever crossed the Divide if they didn’t replenish their supply.
    Inwardly, Pat knew this was all merely for the sake of argument. His two companions were like boys playing hooky from school on this trip and they didn’t want to pass up the chance for excitement that a night in Fairplay offered. Pat grimly foresaw trouble when his partners cut loose among the saloons and gambling houses, and he was worried about what might happen to Dock in those surroundings, but he was one against two and was forced to give in.
    One against three, really, for his son quickly sided with Sam and Ezra when the argument began.