Free Novel 1968 - Brionne (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour

he’s not alive now.”
    James Brionne took a cigar from his pocket.
    “Whatever Shaw had would go to his family, if he had any, and to whoever grubstaked him.”
    “If they could find the silver,” O’Leary agreed. “An’ that ain’t likely.”
    Mat Brionne remembered that night well, because it was since then that their manner of travel had been so strange. Not only had they several times moved suddenly, often after dark, but several times they had changed direction.
    “Always watch your back trail, Mat,” Brionne told him. “Country looks a whole lot different when you are facing the other way. Landmarks that show up very well when you’re going east may not look at all the same when you’re going west.”
    Mat remembered that, but he thought that his father took a lot of time studying his trail, and it was always from some vantage point where he could see a good bit of it. Mat often looked back with him, but he could never see anything special.
    The fact was that James Brionne was quite sure that he was being followed. Mat had guessed right when he decided his father must be looking at something besides landmarks during those long periods of studying his back trail.
    His sudden changes of direction had been for two reasons. First, to see if he was followed, and then, if so, to try to throw them off the trail. By now he was sure of the first, and he felt that he had not slowed them down even by a little. So they were fair country trackers, then. That posed a different sort of problem.
    So tonight he got up before daylight and packed swiftly, and when Mat woke up everything was packed except for his bed. The coffeepot was still on the fire. Until this trip Mat had never been allowed to drink coffee, but there was no milk to be had out here. There was a piece of broiling meat on a stick over the dying coals. He ate that and drank coffee, and then his father watched him mount up.
    They turned away from the camp, rode out on a rocky ledge, and switched around and rode right back along the ledge and into the water. Riding upstream for half a mile, they came out on another such ledge and rode through a thick stand of trees, where the floor of the forest was covered with leaves and where even at midday it was shadowed, as if it were twilight.
    All day they switched back and forth. Once they stopped for a few minutes to let the horses catch their wind after a steep slope, and Brionne broke out some pemmican and gave a good-sized chunk to Mat to chew on as he rode. Not until late afternoon did he pause to let the horses graze.
    There was no chance of watching the back trail now. Most of the travel was in forest, and even the character of the trees was changing. Now, as they climbed higher, the trees were mostly evergreen. Here, too, they ate pemmican. They drank cold water, then mounted up and rode on again.
    Although their change of direction was often due to the character of the ground, they continued to ride uphill. It was long after dark before they made a cold camp behind a clump of aspen. Mat was very tired, and he was almost falling off his horse when Brionne reached for him.
    Brionne prepared Mat’s bed, pulled off his boots and pants, and tucked him in. During all this time his eyes rarely left the horses, but they grazed contentedly, seemingly glad to stop. Not once did they look up or prick their ears.
    Brionne always enjoyed a problem, and he had one now. Ed Shaw had been prowling around the back country for a good many years, and he had spent some time trying to interpret the picture writing, or whatever it was, in Nine Mile Canyon. Suppose there had been a map to the silver mine that had been used by the Indians?
    Maps are of many kinds, and few primitive maps looked like those to which Europeans or Americans were accustomed. In the South Pacific they were sticks with shells tied on them to represent islands, the sticks indicating prevailing winds or ocean currents; but many ancient maps were done in