Novel 1962 - High Lonesome (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online Page A

a rock as they rode by. Above them a lone buzzard circled lazily against the vault of the brassy sky.
    Spanyer was thinking of the men he had left, knowing how they felt right now. “Well,” he said aloud, “good luck to them.”
    Lennie glanced at him. She had no need to ask of whom he spoke, for she had been thinking of them, too—of Considine at least, and the way the dark hair curled over his forehead.
    How quietly he had faced her father, neither asking for nor refusing trouble! Nor had he made any excuses. The only words had been to clear her, the simplest words he could have spoken, and without apology.
    “Pa…?”
    He looked over at his daughter, aware of the change in her, for she was no longer angry with him.
    “Do you think they’ll make it?”
    He considered that in the slow way he had; considered the town of Obaro, and then he thought about Considine. After a while he commented, “He’ll do it if anybody can.” He paused briefly. “The trouble is, Kitten, that’s only the beginning. After that they chase you, and you run, if you’re smart. Maybe you get away that time, but you can’t always get away. When a man lifts his hand outside the law, he sets every man’s hand against him.
    “And you don’t make anything. Leaving honesty out of it, you just can’t make it that way. Mighty few outlaws ever sit down to figure out how little they make over the years.
    “Knew a big-time outlaw once…a man everybody talked about as being smart. Why, that man had spent a third of his grown-up life in prison, had two death sentences hanging over him, and he was living on handouts from other outlaws and folks.”
    Spanyer narrowed his eyes at the horizon where the heat waves shimmered above the desert.
    In the southwest, a smoke was rising.…
    Chapter 6
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    C ONSIDINE LOOKED AT his big silver watch. “You boys come into town at twenty minutes to one. I can promise you ten minutes…fifteen maybe.”
    Hardy shot him a quick glance. “That’s a long fight.”
    “He’s a tough man.” He grinned at them, a reckless grin they all knew. “And I’d better be.”
    He eased himself in the saddle. “And no shooting. Only if it is absolutely necessary. Once the shooting starts, you boys will be bucking some of the best shots in the West. I know—I’ve shot against them in target matches.”
    He started off, looked back once and saw them wave, and it gave him a turn to realize what he was leading them into…and they were good men. Good men, and tough.
    His thoughts turned to Lennie. It was strange, how right something like that could seem when he had only met the girl. It came to him suddenly that he could not remember ever feeling that way about Mary.…Had it simply been that he was young and Mary was the prettiest girl around?
    Or was it that he had finally grown up? His father had said something to him once that he had never forgotten. “Folks talk a lot about the maternal feeling in women, but they say nothing about man’s need to protect and care for someone; yet the one feeling is as basic as the other.”
    There could be something to that. When he was a youngster he had believed his father was out of date and didn’t know what was going on, but as he grew older he realized it had been he himself who didn’t know what it was all about. And now he had nobody to care for, and nobody who cared a thing about him.
    He had drifted into crime when it seemed like a prank. The trouble was, it wasn’t any prank. When you threaten men or steal their property it no longer is a prank. It’s man stuff, and not very good man stuff, either.…
    Maybe that was why Lennie appealed to him, because she needed somebody. She needed a man and she needed a home. Maybe it was because he wanted to give her the things a woman needs…and no woman was much account without a home or a man, or both. Anything else was unimportant. All the rest was play-acting.
    He drew rein when he came near enough to see the town, and there