Free Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour

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    When I come to it was dark, and wet and muddy. I was face down in the trail, and there was no light, not even a star, no fancy bed, and surely no girl a-pattin’ me. Only the rain.
    “You always thought big about what you’d do when you come to manhood,” I said to myself. “Now, boy, you better crawl, or you just ain’t a-goin’ to make it.”
    So I crawled.
    Chapter 7
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    L IGHTNING FLASHED AND thunder rumbled back in the mountains. I saw the reflection of lightning on the rain-slick rocks. I saw the reflection off the rain-wet grass close to my face. I started to crawl.
    I towed behind me my blanket roll with my rifle stuck through the string that tied it. There was sense enough in me to hang onto that.
    Once I found a pool on the downhill side of a rock and I dipped my hand into it and drank. I was dry…dry inside me anyway—from losin’ blood, most likely.
    Finally I found a fallen tree, a dead spruce with heavy boughs, and I crawled close to it. It was a fresh fall, the earth likely loosened by the rain. I cut away a few branches with my knife, unrolled my blankets, and crawled in further, muddy and wet though I was.
    Twice during the endless night I woke up, once from the pain of my wound, another time from the cold. I felt sick and very tired, and when morning came at last, a gray, dull morning with slanting rain and lowering clouds, my mouth was dry, my head ached, and when I tried to stand I was weak and dizzy. But I knew I must move. If I stayed where I was, in the state I was in, I would surely die.
    Staggering, I got to my feet, made a clumsy roll of the blankets, and slipped into my slicker…there hadn’t been time before. Slinging the blanket roll around my shoulders, I worked my way back up the slope to my horse.
    For several minutes I listened to the rain, studied the layout, and when I was sure there was no one about, went up to the saddle.
    I got the saddlebags loose, tugged the one from under the horse, and then with them over my shoulder I started up the canyon.
    They’d said it was boxed in. Maybe. One thing was sure, the way I felt I wasn’t going down canyon to give them a shot at me. As I recalled, there was no cover near the cabin…I’d have to break into the open within easy range of it, and they could set right there in the warmth of the cabin and pick me off when I tried to get by.
    There was some grub in those saddlebags. Down on the slope I leaned against a tree, because it hurt to bend my leg to sit down, and I ate some jerked beef and a chunk of bread. Then I started on.
    My head was throbbing. When I’d made no more than a hundred yards, I had to sit down. I almost fell onto a log and stayed there, panting. My forehead was hot, and my eyes didn’t seem to focus right. After a bit I went on, struggling along through trees, over slippery rocks, working my way higher up the canyon.
    Presently the canyon narrowed, and a branch came in from the south. Standing there, swaying a little from weakness, I stared up the branch.
    You never saw such a mess. There’d been a blow down, leaving hundreds of trees, fallen and dead, crisscrossing the canyon.
    Sometimes a howling wind will funnel down such canyons, all its strength channeled into one tremendous blast. Every once in a while in the Rockies you’ll come on a canyon like that…they seem to suck the winds down them.
    This one had blown down most of a small forest, but it had left some trees standing, and others had grown up among them. The place was like a nightmare, but it gave me hope.
    Already I could see the rock wall at the branch canyon’s end, and it looked sheer and seemed to promise nothing, but I had just an idea that the mess of dead wood might offer something. They had said there was no way out, but I was willing to bet no cowboy had ridden into that canyon, or tried to climb very far through those fallen trees.
    Weak as I was, and fuzzy as was my vision as well as my thinking, I had the wild animal’s urge