Mojave Crossing (1964) by Louis - Sackett's L'amour Read Free Book Online Page B

came upon it suddenly--a basin in the white granite, filled to the brim with water ... and it was no mirage.
    I crawled down to it and splashed water into my face, then scooped a handful into my mouth and held it there, feeling the delicious coolness, and then the actual pain as some trickled slowly down my throat.
    It seemed a long time that I lay there, letting that one gulp of water ease down my raw throat. And then after a bit I tried again.
    The sun was blistering hot on the granite where I lay, so I crawled into the shade alongside the water. There was room to stretch out there. Several times I drank ... once my stomach tried to retch.
    When perhaps an hour had passed, I began to think.
    The girl was back there ... Dorinda. She and the horses ...
    But there had been a man who shot at me. Or had that been delirium?
    Weakly, I struggled to sit up, and then I filled the canteen. I was going back. I had to go back. I had to know.

    Chapter Four.
    My old tracks were on the sand to guide me, and I found the place where I had fallen in attempting to draw and return the fire of the man with the rifle. There was a rock where such a man might have stood, some distance off, but in plain sight. Around where I had fallen there were no tracks but my own.
    More carefully now--for it might not be delirium that the man had shot at me--I moved among the rocks of white granite toward the place. ...
    Gone ...
    Dorinda was gone, my horses were gone, my packs and my gold were gone. Nothing was left.
    There had been four or five riders, and they had approached from the west. They had taken Dorinda, my Winchester, my horses--and they had vanished.
    They must have believed me dead. Here I was, alone, on foot, and miles from any possible help.
    Standing there in the partial shade of that rock, I knew that I was in more trouble than I had ever been in my life. I had a canteen of water and a pistol with a belt of ammunition. But I had no horse, no food, and no blanket. The nearest settlement of which I knew was maybe a hundred miles away to the west--a Mormon town called San Bernardino.
    For the moment my canteen was filled with water, and I had recently drunk. The tank that I had found in the rocks was a half-mile back up the draw; if I retraced my steps and camped there for the night I should have walked a mile to no purpose.
    Pa, he always taught us boys to make up our minds, and once made up, to act on what we decided, and not waste time quibbling about. So I taken up my left foot and stepped out toward the west and followed it with my right, and I was on my way.
    But I wasn't going far at midday, which it was by now. So I walked on from one of those islands of rock to another, sometimes resting in the shade a mite, then going on to another one, but always holding to the west. And away down inside me I began to get mad.
    Until then I hadn't been mad, for we Sacketts, man and boy, are slow to anger, but when we come to it we are a fierce and awful people.
    Another thing Pa had taught us boys was that anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before--it takes something from him.
    When that black-eyed girl back there at Hardyville asked me to help her get on to Los Angeles, I suspicioned trouble, but woman-made trouble, nothing like this. Now those men who chased after her had got her, and they had shot at me, left me for dead. They had taken my outfit and my gold.
    Well, now, that was enough to make a body upset.
    Seemed to me this was a time for anger, and it came upon me. It was no wild, fly-off-the-handle rage, but a cold, deep-burning anger that pointed me at them like a pistol.
    They would have gone to Los Angeles, but no matter. Wherever they had gone, I would find them.
    A journey, somebody said, begins with one step, so I taken that step. I was started, and before I set my foot down for the last time on that journey there would be blood on the moon.
    At sundown I struck out,