Novel 1968 - Brionne (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online Page B

mistaken identity? Possible, but doubtful.
    He had assumed the shot had been fired by one of the men who rode in the baggage car, the men who were friends of the conductor, or at least were associated in some way with him. The man he found in the saloon was one of them, but he might not have been waiting for Brionne.
    There was a chance that, knowing he had seen Grant, these men feared he had been sent west to investigate…what?
    Grant was an honest man, but as Colonel Devine had implied, he was surrounded by many who were political high-binders, out for all they could get. Brionne was known as a trouble-shooter, and it might be they suspected he was going west to investigate some of the Indian agencies, or something of the kind.
    But it was all too vague. In any event, he had left these things behind him.

----
    T HERE WAS A change upon the land now, a sense of something different. There was a new silence, a strangeness. Brionne welcomed it, and he watched his son with curious eyes. At last Mat said, “The air seems different. What is it?”
    “Pines…it’s the smell of pines, Mat. But that is only part of it. It is the feeling of loneliness, the sense of quiet. We’ve moved away from people, Mat. This is the wilderness.”
    “I like it.”
    “So do I.” He pointed toward the cliffs across the river. They ran east and west. “We will camp over there tonight, and find a way through them tomorrow. There are mountains beyond there, and we will find game.”
    He saw no tracks but those of deer. Occasionally they saw a buffalo. There were not many left in this country, and those few had drifted to the high meadows and the remote places.
    Brionne made camp in a sheltered cove of the Book Cliffs. Gathering fuel for the fire, Mat stopped and spoke to him. “Pa, this looks like coal.”
    Brionne took the piece of rock from Mat’s fingers. “It
is
coal,” he said. “Is there much of it? Show me.”
    The vein was a wide one. He knocked off a few chunks with his prospector’s pick and carried them to the fire.
    They had built it in a concealed hollow, and the rising smoke would have thinned out before it cleared the rocks around them. Brionne had killed a fool hen during the day, and they baked it in the coals. From time to time he walked out of the cove to listen to the night. All was still, with only the usual night sounds. Nonetheless, he continued to be uneasy.

----
    A T A BACK table in one of Corinne’s nineteen saloons, Cotton Allard sat behind a bottle. His naturally red face was flushed a deeper red from a mixture of whiskey and anger.
    “You had him an’ you let him get away? He sure didn’t up and fly through the air! Why wasn’t you watchin’?”
    “We watched. Only all of a sudden he wasn’t there any more.” It was the man from the Southern Hotel who spoke. “You ask Peabody.”
    Peabody Allard was the wide-hipped man who had been one of those who traveled with the horses.
    “Hoffman’s right. That Brionne is a sly one. I tell you he don’t miss a trick. Him an’ that boy of his’n, they—”
    “That kid!” Cotton Allard exploded. “He knows the both of us, you know that? He knows me and he knows Tuley, and he ain’t likely to forget it!”
    “What I can’t figure,” Peabody Allard said, “is how Brionne knew where to hunt for us. We didn’t leave nobody behind—not nobody. There wasn’t a way he could have known!”
    Cotton stared at him angrily. “Then how you figure he got here? By accident? He knows…I ain’t sayin’ how, but he knows!”
    “We got to find him,” Tuley said. “We got to kill him. We got to kill him an’ the kid now anyway, else he’ll find us.”
    “That reminds me,” Hoffman said. “Rody Brennan’s kin was aboard that train. I heard her say something about some silver mine or other.”
    “Rody’s dead,” Tuley said. “We got no call to worry about no kin of his. Leastways, not any girl kin.”
    “She was talkin’ to Brionne,” Peabody