Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0) (5 page)

For a long time I stood shivering, studying the layout before me. There was an Indian village down off the mountain somewhere, and the trail should take me there, but an Indian trail in the mountains can take a body into some almighty scary places, and somewhere there might be a lot of ice. Yet when I thought of what food I had, the fuel that was left, I decided I had to chance it.

The snow crunched underfoot when I went back inside. I added a couple of sticks to the fire and then I saddled up. The roan didn’t offer any arguments, so I guess he didn’t take to that dark old cave no more than I did. About an hour after daybreak we rode out of the cave and taken the trail to wherever we were going.

We walked a spell, then trotted to warm up a mite, and then I got off and walked to keep warm. I had pa’s watch and I figured to keep going at least four hours, and then see where we were. Meanwhile, I’d keep an eye out for another camp, as I had no idea how long the roan could take it…or me.

We dipped down into the spruce, ragged, windblown trees that grew shaggier and shaggier. The snow was knee-deep, and in some of the canyons off the trail it looked to be twenty, maybe thirty feet deep. But the trail led down, circling among the trees, rounding boulders dropped off the ridge.

When I’d been riding or walking for four hours, we just weren’t anywhere. I saw no tracks of man or beast, and my feet were like clumps of ice again.

Once again the trail led upward, and I found myself riding across a great tilted slab of rock covered with snow. From where I came upon it to as far as I could see in the low clouds that shrouded the peaks, there was at least three miles of unbroken expanse. Nowhere was there a track of man or animal.

A lonely wind prowled above the snow with eerie, threatening whispers. In the vast silence even the roan seemed uneasy, and I was glad when I glimpsed a way off into the forested valley below, yet I held back, looking doubtfully at the steep slide that would take us down the first fifty feet or so. But the roan tugged at the bit, so I let him have his head and he went right into the notch and down the slide without hesitation.

Now we were in a thick, dark stand of spruce, a place of absolute silence. We crunched along, but here, too, I saw no tracks. Animals were simply not stirring, and of course the bear and the marmot were both hibernating, although there was no telling about a bear. He might wake up, be hungry, and go on the prowl even in the deepest winter.

At nightfall I found a corner of a cliff that gave us a break from the wind. I found a slab of rock that I could tilt up to serve as a reflector for my fire, and I got the roan in close to the wall, then built a fire.

There was wood aplenty as there is apt to be in high mountain country where wind and frost wreak havoc with trees. It was a cold night, but come daylight we were on our way again, and then all of a sudden the trees petered out and there we were, facing a trail one horse wide, covered with snow and probably ice under it. Down below, in a deep, wide valley, I could see a thin trail of smoke. So there were folks down there, of some kind, there was warmth, probably food. And we had to use that trail to get there.

It was unbroken snow. What lay under it a body could not guess, but we were going to have to go that way, and one stirrup would be hanging out in space with maybe two thousand feet of open air under it.

I tell you I swallowed a couple of times. I looked at the trail and felt the cold sweat start. The roan seemed edgy but willing. He started for the trail, tossed his head a couple of times, then with ears pricked he started forward.

“Boy,” I said, “if you slip—!”

He taken a step, then another. My boot scraped the side of the cliff, the other hung out in space. The roan walked on and headed for a bend around which we could not see. One thing I knew, that horse had to keep going. He couldn’t back very well on that narrow path, and it was a cinch I couldn’t get off unless over his hindquarters, which I wasn’t aiming to do.

He walked forward, stepping like he was on eggs. He’d been a wild mustang in his time and no telling where he’d gone then, but I hoped it was nothing like this. We edged around the corner of the cliff, and the trail sloped steeply away ahead of us. I kept my eyes on the trail, trying to think that horse for every step, trying to hold him on there by sheer willpower. Only once did I glance aside, when some movement in the valley drew my eye.

Maybe a dozen to twenty Indians had come out on the snow and were looking up at me. If I’d thought that trail was hairy before, I had no doubt of it now. Those redskins were out there to watch, and if it was that bad, it must be as mean as it could get. Indians take most any kind of a trail, but it looked like nobody took this one come snow-time.

But that roan was steppin’ easy and light. Once in a while he’d blow through his nostrils, scared as I was, but he knew the only way was down and he went right along.

All of a sudden the narrow part played out and the trail widened. I taken a long breath and I felt the roan do the same thing, then we trotted along the rest of the trail, took two or three switchbacks, and then we were cantering up to that Indian village.

It wasn’t much, just three tepees up against some aspen, but smoke lifted from those tepees and I was glad to see them.

For ten days I stayed with those Indians. Old Tom Beaver was one of them, and I’d fed him many a time up on that plateau. When I saddled up to leave, they were pulling down their tepees, too. “If anybody comes looking,” I said, “you don’t know anything.”

Lying there in that Indian village, I had time to think back to pa and to wonder who had killed him.

Blazer? Maybe…but why had pa always carried a gun?

Of course, most men did. Certainly all of them did when traveling, because there could be a lot of occasions when a six-shooter was essential. Occasions that had nothing to do with outlaws, Indians, horse thieves, or whatever.

And pa could shoot. I’d seen him shoot, and he was good, better than many a man who carried a reputation as a gunfighter.

When I came down off the mountain, it was to a strange town. There was a church there, because I seen its steeple from afar, and there was a double row of storefronts and a scattering of houses.

There were three two-story buildings, a store, the bank, and one with a sign that said Hotel.

There was a plump, white-haired woman dusting when I came in. She went behind the counter and looked at me with a wary eye. I had on pa’s black hat, which fitted, my blanket poncho, and those run-down boots. I hadn’t shaved in several days and must have looked like the wrath of God.

“Room will be two bits,” she said, “two bits each night, payable in advance. Four bits if you want a bath.”

I grinned at her, and her face lit up. She smiled back, friendly-like. “I’ll want a room for two nights at least,” I said, “and definitely a bath. I been riding some rough country.”

“You look it,” she said cheerfully.

So I dug down and come up with a dollar, which I gave her. “Hungry?” she asked.

“I could eat a wolf,” I said.

“We’re fresh out of wolves,” she said, “but we got us a cougar.”

“All right,” I said, “I never et cougar but I’m up to it.” I thought she was funnin’ me, but she wasn’t. Not a-tall.

“My pappy was a mountain man,” she said, “and he had the pick of the finest meat in the West, just for the shooting. He always rated cougar meat the best there was. After that come beaver tail and buffalo tongue.”

“Bring on your cougar,” I said. “Just be sure he’s declawed and defanged,’cause I’m a mite tuckered.”

“Bath first?”

I just looked at her. “All right, all right, you can eat first.” She indicated a door. “Right through that door, and don’t go to makin’ sheep’s eyes at the waitress. She’s my niece and she’s seen a sheep.”

Chapter 4

A
MAN SHOULD always bathe before he eats. I didn’t, and that choice got me into more trouble than you could shake a stick at.

I mean had I gone upstairs and had a hot bath, that man wouldn’t have been in the restaurant when I went in there. He’d have been off down the country, gone clean out of there, and I’d never have met up with him.

Sure, I was hungry, but it wasn’t the first time and I could have waited. They’d already shot their cougar and he wasn’t going anyplace. I mean the meat would have been there, and that pretty waitress would have been there, too. Only difference would have been in that man.

I’d just left trouble behind, and I walked right through that door into twicet as much. It wasn’t only that the man was there, it was what I said and what he saw.

I went through the door and he set there with his back to me. There was nobody else in the room but that girl, who was just coming through the door with a coffeepot in her hand. Had I seen her first, it might have changed everything, too, because she was right pert and pretty, but what I saw was that man’s back, a man in a black frock coat, and before I could think I said, “Pa?”

He looked so much like pa that it just come out of me, without me thinking, but it turned that man sharp around, and sure enough, he had a cast of feature much like pa’s only he was younger by ten years, and there was something else about him. Pa had a touch of gentleness in his face, where this man had none. His features were cold, handsome, clean-cut, but you needed only to look at him once to know there was no mercy in him, none at all.

“Pa?” he said. “I’m not your pa.” And then his eyes dropped to my gun.

The blanket-coat was off and slung over my arm, and he could see that gun with its pearl handle and its red birds. I seen his face change. The expression, I mean. His scalp kind of drawed back, and when he looked up at me it was like a wolf ready to jump a rabbit.

“What made you think I was your pa?”

I laughed, kind of embarrassed. “I didn’t, really. Only when I come through the door, your back looked like—I mean, he’s got him a coat like that. I’m sorry, I just made a mistake.”

I started across the room toward another table, but he spoke and his tone was quiet. “No need to eat alone, boy. Sit here with me.”

If that wolf I mentioned could have talked, he would have said something just like that, but what was I to do? If I could have thought faster, I might have excused myself. Instead I turned around, pulled back a chair, and sat down, and if there’d ever been a chance to avoid trouble, I missed it right then.

The girl brought me a cup and a plate with grub on it. There was meat, cougar meat from what they said, and there was some rice and beans. It looked good to me, and I set to, all the while wondering about that man at the table with me.

“Travel far?” he asked.

“Come down the mountain,” I said. “Been ridin’ herd on some cows up yonder.”

“Looks like you quit at the right time.” He sipped his coffee. “This pa of yours…with the coat like mine? He herdin’ cattle, too?”

“Not right now. Ain’t seen him in a while.”

He kind of prodded at me with questions, but I wasn’t telling him anything. Least of all where I’d come from. By this time Judge Blazer may have had the word out to pick me up.

As we sat there eating and sort of talking along, I began to get real bothered. This man had a gesture or two just like pa and a way of lifting an eyebrow like him when he was skeptical of something. Many a time I’d known kinfolk to have the same mannerisms and gestures—whether they inherited them or picked them up from seeing them used, I don’t know—and it began to come over me that this man did not only look like pa but that he might even be related to him.

What I wanted to know was who he was and where he hailed from, and in western country you never just up and asked a man his business or where he come from. You just waited until he told you, if he was of a mind to. Yet I could try.

“How’s things back east?” I asked.

“Times are hard,” he said. He studied me coolly, and I felt the thin edge of fear, and it angered me. I told myself I was foolish, that I was afraid of nothing. Besides, why should I fear him? Or anybody? Yet something about him haunted me, and it may have been his resemblance to pa.

“You and your father,” he asked, “have you been here long?”

“We move around,” I replied. “A man takes work where he can find it.”

“Your pa now? He was from back east?”

I chuckled. “Ain’t ever’body? Nobody come from this country but Indians, and from what they tell me they came from somewhere else, too.”

He threw me a hard glance. He didn’t like me any better than I liked him, and as we talked back and forth he would come out with a question or, more often, just some leading comment. He was fishing for information, and I wasn’t giving him any. Truth to tell, I knew mighty little about pa. I’d never guessed how little until he was gone, and with him the chance of learning more.

Now, maybe I’m only seventeen, but most of my years been spent working around over the mountains or desert and plains country, and I’d learned a thing or two. This man carried a six-shooter, that was plain to see, but he carried a sleeve gun, too, one of them gambler’s hideout guns, derringer type that fires two shots. Mighty good for close action across a card table. I noticed it because of the way he favored his right wrist when he put it down on the table and the way he held his arm. Only a mite different, but to somebody who knows it was plain enough.