Free Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Page B

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
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    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