Lando (1962) by Louis - Sackett's 08 L'amour Read Free Book Online Page B

least.
    "I never even heard his right name before, nor have I known of anybody who knew him outside the mountains."
    Not until we were seated did I again become conscious of my appearance. This table was no place for a buckskin hunting shirt, and Deckrow was probably right. I vowed then that this should not happen to me again.
    That snip of a Marsha did not so much as glance my way, but Virginia Locklear made up for it. "Virginia does not suit me," she said, in reply to a question about her name. "Call me Gin.
    Jonas calls me that, and I prefer it."
    The talk about the table was of things of which I knew nothing, and those who spoke might well have talked a foreign tongue for all the good it did me. Fortunately, I had never been one to speak much in company, for I'd seen all too little of it.
    I'd no need to be loose-tongued, so I held my silence and listened.
    But Gin Locklear would not have it so. She turned to me and began asking me of my father, and then of the cabin where I had lived so long alone. So I told her of the forest and the game I had trapped, and how the Indians built their snares.
    "Tell me about your father," she said finally. "I mean ... really tell me about him."
    It shamed me that I could say so little. I told her that he was a tall man, four inches taller than my five-ten, and powerful, thirty pounds heavier than my one hundred and eighty.
    She looked at me thoughtfully. "I would not have believed you so tall."
    "I am wide in the shoulders," I said. "My arms are not long, yet I can reach seventy-six inches--the extra breadth is in my shoulders. I am usually guessed to be shorter than I am.
    "Pa," I went on, "was skillful with all sorts of weapons, with horses, too."
    "He would be a man to know," she said thoughtfully.
    "I think I'd like to know him."
    It was not in me to be jealous. She was older than me, and a beautiful woman as well, and I did not fancy myself as a man in whom beautiful women would be interested. I knew none of the things about which they seemed to interest themselves.
    Yet, even while talking to Gin, I sensed the strange undercurrent of feeling at the table. At first I believed it was between Jonas and the Tinker, and there was something there, to be sure; but it was Franklyn Deckrow of whom I should have been thinking.
    After dinner, we three--Locklear, the Tinker, and I--stood together in Locklear's quarters. Deckrow had disappeared somewhere, and the three of us faced each other. Suddenly all the guards were down.
    "All right, Lengro," Locklear said sharply, "you have come here, and not by accident. ...
    Why?"
    "Gold," the Tinker said simply. "It is a matter of gold, and we have waited too long."
    "We?"
    "In the old days we were not friends," the Tinker said quietly, "but all that is past. The gold is there, and we know it is there. I say we should drop old hatreds and join forces."
    Jonas indicated me. "How much does he know?"
    "Very little, I think, but his father knew everything.
    His father is the one man alive who knew where it was."
    "And is he alive?"
    "You," the Tinker said carefully, "might be able to answer that question. Is he alive?"
    "If you suggest that I may have killed him, I can answer that. I did not. In fact, he is the one man I have known about whom I have had doubts---
    I might not be able to kill him."
    "I don't know what you're talking about," I said, "but I am sure my father is alive-- somewhere."
    "You told me he planned to come back," the Tinker said. "Do you think he would purposely have stayed away?"
    For a moment I considered that in the light of all I knew of him. A hard, dangerous man by all accounts, yet a loving and attentive father and husband. At home I had never heard his voice lifted in anger, had never seen a suggestion of violence from him.
    "If he could come," I said, "he would come."
    "Then he must be dead," the Tinker said reluctantly.
    "Or prevented from returning," Jonas interposed dryly, "as I was for four years."
    Far into the night we