Free Hondo (1953) by Louis L'amour

of the storm, remembering the house in the basin and wondering how Angie fared. She should have a man. It was not good for a woman to live alone. Nor a man.
    And that boy ... The lad needed a father.
    From a low place in the hills his eye caught a glistening something, and he reined over and rode nearer. It was a low roof, a stone-faced dugout in the side of a hill. He rode the horse down and, swinging down, opened the door. It was roomy and dry within.
    It was a struggle to get the horse through the door, but he made it. At the back of the dugout there was a dirt-floored cave where there was a hitch rail and a trough. He shucked out of his slicker and took wood from a pile of mesquite roots and built a fire in the crude fireplace. There was a little grain left in the bag brought from Angie's, and he hung a feed bag on the horse, then wiped him as dry as possible.
    The fire blazed up, the room grew warm. Hondo barred the door and fixed a meal, then lay down on the boards of the bunk and dozed. The firelight played on his face, the rain roared and pounded on the roof overhead.
    What kind of man could leave a woman like that in Apache country? His eyes were suddenly wide open and he was angry, thinking about it. She was all woman, that one. And a person ... a real person.
    Somewhere along the tangled trail of his thoughts he dropped off and slept, and while he slept the rain roared on, tracks were washed out, and the bodies of the silent men of Company C lay wide-eyed to the rain and bare-chested to the wind, but the blood and the dust washed away, and the stark features of Lieutenant Davis stared at the sky, where the lightning played and the fury of the storm worried its way out. Lieutenant Greyton C. Davis, graduate of West Point, veteran of the Civil War and the Indian wars, darling of Richmond dance floors, hero of a Washington romance, dead now in the long grass on a lonely hill, west of everything.
    The fire smoldered and blinked its light away, finding no fuel, and in the cold sundown Hondo Lane opened his eyes and looked up at the roof, and then swung his feet down.
    The rain was gone. There was no wind. Out there all was silent. He opened the door and stepped out. Broken clouds floated above, and in the far-off west the storm rolled and grumbled like a drunken sergeant in his sleep.
    Lane led out his horse and tightened the cinch, then stepped into the saddle again and followed westward, after the storm. And the storm clouds were topped with fire, spears of crimson shot out, piercing the tall sky, and a star appeared. It was cool now, and still.
    The miles fell behind. In the distance there was faint smoke, then came the rain-washed walls of the village and the rain-darkened parade ground, the sutler's store and the home of the Army west of the Rio Grande.
    Hondo Lane pulled his hat brim lower and started the lineback down the slope. At least, he thought, this is still here.
    But behind this thought there was the memory of a quiet-faced woman and a child, of a house beside a stream, and of a woman moving in the house while he slept. He shifted restlessly in the saddle and swore at the horse to cover his feeling and his wonder at it.

    Chapter Six
    The storm, sweeping westward across the vast reach of desert and mountain, had crossed the little ranch in the basin before it reached Hondo Lane and the bodies of Company C's fallen veterans. It had come roaring out of the sky, driving before it a barrage of rain that pelted the dry soil, lifting dust as it struck, and bringing to the air that peculiar odor that comes when rain first strikes dry ground.
    Not even the cliff protected the cabin from the force of the storm, or from the roar of thunder but it was filled with warmth, comfort, and the smell of coffee. But it was a house empty, for the man was gone.
    The sound of rushing water in the usually dry wash frightened her a little, for she had seen those torrents move all before them, and had seen them come when the sky