Free Novel 1962 - High Lonesome (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour

while back,” Hardy said. Hardy was young. He always had something to say.
    “We’ll see a lot of them.”
    Considine was tired, but his weariness was as much mental as physical. They had brought it off—up to a point. Now they had to get away.
    He glanced back at their trail. Nothing in sight. By now they knew. By now Pete Runyon realized what the fight was all about, and he would be good and mad. So would the rest of them be mad…and although some of them would think it a good joke, it would not keep them from running him down and shooting him if he made a fight of it.
    His face throbbed with every step of his horse. It was puffed and bruised and cut. Sweat trickled into the cuts, but the sting and smart of the cuts was nothing to the memory of the part he had played back there. Granted that outlaws would be talking of it for years…what had he done?

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    I T WAS DUTCH who first saw the smoke. “Now what could that be?” he said, pointing toward the billowing cloud rising ahead of them.
    “I hope it ain’t what it looks to be,” Hardy commented. “I left my girl’s picture in that store.”
    Slowing their pace, each man shucked his rifle from its scabbard. Considine swung wide on the flank and a little in advance. The Kiowa fell back, on the far side. They came up to the store at a fast walk, a line of mounted skirmishers.
    The store was gone…only the adobe walls of one building remained, probably just as Honey Chavez had found it, long ago.
    “Tracks,” Hardy said, indicating them. “Fire still burning. They can’t be gone very long.”
    “He kill,” the Kiowa pointed to a large patch of blood. “Chavez kill this one.”
    Considine rode quickly around. The Indians were gone…all their dead and wounded carried off, as usual.
    “He made a fight of it,” Hardy said. “I’d never have believed he had it in him. He must have killed three, by the look of things. Wounded a couple.”
    Although they saw Chavez’ body lying there, they could not take time to bury him, but Chavez would have been the first to understand that. Let the posse do it.
    They rode out swiftly. There was nothing to keep them now. Westward at first, then south into the desert and toward the border.
    They went down the trail at a canter, all of them seeing the tracks of the Indian ponies in the dirt, superimposed upon the tracks of Lennie and her father. The Apaches would have seen those tracks, and they would know one of the riders was a woman…a good tracker would know which horse she rode.
    By this time Dave Spanyer would know what was behind him and the man was no tenderfoot. He had been up the mountain and over the hill, and he knew a lot about trouble and the packages in which it presented itself. And from what Dutch said the old man had told him, Lennie could handle her rifle better than most men.
    It was very hot. The air was still. They rode at a good pace, conserving the strength of their horses, yet keeping up a steady, distance-eating gait.
    The original plan was still good: to strike into the very heart of the desert, keeping to the
tinajas
and seeps, the water holes least frequented by the Indians and incapable of supplying more than four or five men at a time.
    The sky was a vast emptiness. Considine gave no thought to the money in the sacks they carried. He was thinking of the girl on the trail, and her father…and somewhere between them, the Apaches.

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    H OURS EARLIER, DAVE Spanyer had come to his moment of bleak decision.
    Before that, he had done a lot of soul-searching. Irritably, he ran over in his mind the events of the night before. After all, when a girl got to Lennie’s age she had to be trusted. What if something happened to him? She would be on her own, anyway, and the only way she would learn about men was by meeting them…besides, every bit of trail-side rumor he had heard said that Considine was a gentleman.
    “I ain’t much of a father,” he said suddenly. “Never had much truck with women