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

mustang leaped into the air and came down running.
    The horse lunged into the rocks, then broke loose on a dead run. Rounding a huge boulder, it hit the top of the rock slide running, and had no chance. The rock started to move under its hoofs, and the horse struggled madly to keep its feet, then fell and rolled over amid a cascade of rocks.
    Cursing wildly, Spanyer plunged his own horse in pursuit, even as he heard the crash of the falling rock and his daughter’s scream.
    Swinging around the rocks, he drew up and slid to the ground, yet even now he took a quick glance around—this was no time to be off the trail. He half ran, half slid down the rocks to Lennie’s side.
    She was already getting up. She was shaken, and undoubtedly bruised and skinned, but there seemed to be no broken bones. And she had clung to her rifle. He went past her to the horse.
    Even before he reached it he could see that its leg was broken. There was no hope for it—the leg was badly shattered, and for all he knew it had a snake bite too. He stripped off the pack behind the cantle of the saddle, then, not wishing to risk a shot, he stooped quickly and with his Bowie knife cut the horse’s throat.
    Lennie started toward him and he stopped her. “Gone,” he said brusquely, to cover his fear. “Leg broken. I had to kill him.”
    “Oh, Pa!” Tears started in her eyes. “He was such a fine horse!”
    “Are you crazy? That was a rattle-brained, hammer-headed broom-tail, and never an ounce of good to anybody.” He paused. “Nevertheless, we’re going to miss him.”
    One horse between them now, and hundreds of miles to go, most of it desert.
    “We’ll make out with one horse,” he said when they got to the top of the slide. “You mount up.”
    She squinted into the shimmering heat. She knew what was troubling her father, but there was nothing she could do. Without her, he might have had a chance.
    Oddly enough, although the Apaches worried him, he thought of them as a present and certain danger which he understood; what disturbed him more was the fact that Lennie needed him so badly, or needed somebody, and he did not know what to do.
    Walking ahead of the horse, he plodded steadily into the hot, dead air of the afternoon desert.
    Chapter 8
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    D AVE SPANYER HAD never known a time when he did not possess a gun, and use it when needed. The frontier where he grew up made guns a necessity, for despite what some easterners thought about the Indians, the Indian was first and last a warrior.
    His standards of behavior had nothing to do with the standards of the white men who opposed him, nor was he properly understood except by a very few people—and all of them were men who had lived with and around Indians.
    Failure to understand Indian standards and ideas had done as much harm as had well-meaning but uninformed people, do-gooders and such, and the political appointees who were the Indian agents.
    One of the basic mistakes in dealing with people of another cultural background is to attribute to them the ideas one has oneself. For instance, the white man’s standards of what constitutes mercy are strictly his own, and the American Indian had no such ideas. Battle was his joy. Battle and horse-stealing, combined with hunting, were his only means to honor and wealth, and a good horse thief was honored and respected more than a good hunter. An Indian would go miles upon miles to steal horses or get into a good fight.
    Dave Spanyer had never known a time when he was not in the vicinity of Indians, usually hostile ones. He understood them, often hunted with them, fought them when necessary. He knew that for an Apache the word cruelty had no meaning. Torture was amusing to him, and he felt no sympathy for a captured enemy. The Apache respected courage, fortitude, and strength, for these were qualities by which he himself survived. He also respected cunning.
    On the whole, Dave Spanyer had more respect for most Indians than for many of the white