Free Novel 1966 - The Broken Gun (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour

me—not one to kill, just one to cripple or injure.
    There would be a search party. I knew that, which Colin could not know. During the past ten years I had been too much in the public eye, I had too many friends. I knew they would come looking, and that Colin would have no choice but to let them come. They would scour the country with helicopters in the air and search parties on the ground, and some of them, some of my old climbing friends, would be experts. They would know where to look.
    And a lot of good it would do me, for if I stayed here I would be dead.
    Under the overhang I struck a match, shielded it from the rising wind, and had a fire going. There was fuel enough, and more than enough, now that I proposed to make the attempt to escape. And after a while, with a gnarled old cedar root to hold the fire, I slept.
    It was a cold, shivering dawn that awakened me—not quite dawn, but a paling sky. I drank water and teased the fire into a blaze. There was still a bright star hanging low in the sky. It would be gone in a moment, behind the cliffs along which I meant to climb.
    There was no hopeful thought in me as I waited, for I knew that no man but a fool, or one in such a desperate plight as my own, would make such an attempt. There seemed not even a chance to begin it. A sheer face is never easy, even with ropes and pitons and help, and the way I must try was courting suicide. Suicide it would be, for I could not say I was ignorant of what I was attempting. And there was the uncomfortable realization that Reese might choose just that moment to return. With me out on the face of the cliff, and Reese with a rifle in his hands, he would have things just the way he wanted them, and it would be a pleasurable time for him.
    I waited there, cursing myself for having been such a fool as to get into such a box. All the pleasures; everything good in life was behind me now. The books I wanted to write and had not written, the things I wanted to do…I’d bought myself a package of trouble because of a few fading sheets of paper found in the barrel of an old pistol.
    Dawn found its way along the high cliffs, and a gnarled and dwarfed cedar held up its limbs in agonized gesture before the awakening light. Standing up, I put out the last of my fire—not that there was anything for it to reach out for, but the ways of habit are strong. The fire out, I stretched and stretched, loosening the muscles against the time for moving out, if there was a chance for that.
    Here and there I seemed to see just a thread of passage along the rock face. On the right the rock bellied out, leaving an awkward hollow beneath it. My first move would be to get off the ledge itself and onto the face, and looking at it I felt the cold of fear begin to creep up my spine.
    It was like glass—smooth and sheer. There might be an occasional meager handhold, but I’d be swinging free and clear, hundreds of feet above the rocks below, and it was a prospect I had no taste for.
    On the edge of the ledge I stood looking out, studying the cliff. Going down would be impossible. If I could make it at all from out there it would have to be up.
    My eyes went to the left. There was the sheer drop to the rocks, but about six feet out was a cedar, a small tree with many stiff branches, some old, some young. Beyond the cedar, and several feet higher up, I could see what might be considered a narrow ledge. It was not even two inches wide, and looked to be about six feet long.
    If I could get into that cedar and stand up, hoping it would not break, and then get my fingers on that ledge, I might inch along it, my body hanging against the rock…but where from that point?
    I saw that there was a crack in the rock just beyond, a crack not over four or five inches wide at most…or so it appeared from where I stood. If I could reach that, I might use a lie-back—my feet against the far side of the crack, my hands pulling hard against the near side, and so holding myself up