Novel 1968 - Down The Long Hills (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online

pig-headed, stubborn fool in my life. All right, I’ll stay with you, but only for one reason. If that boy is half as stubborn as you are, he’s probably too stubborn to quit or to die. Let’s get to huntin’.”
    Bill Squires had been studying his chewing tobacco. Now he bit off a bite and tucked it into his cheek. “If you two sidewinders would quit arguin’ long enough to think, you’d be askin’ yourselves a question.”
    They looked at him, and Squires took his time. He got his jaws to working on the tobacco, and was enjoying the suspense. “Yessir. If you two would stop to think, you’d ask yourselves what that Injun was doin’ out here in the rain.”
    They stared at him, and he rolled the tobacco in his jaws. “Now you look at that track. That there Injun pony left that track sometime before the rain quit. She’s a fairly fresh track, edges not broken down, yet there’s a showin’ of water in it, and there ain’t goin’ to be much seepage in that kind of clay.
    “So what have you got? You got an Injun who’s away to hell an’ gone out in the open, ridin’ through the drivin’ rain…that’s before he got to this point. An’ no Injun is fool enough to do that—not unless he’s close to his wickiup, he ain’t.
    “Now, we ain’t close to no camp or we’d have seen sign before this. That Injun is ridin’ alone through the rain, which no Injun is likely to do. So I got to ask myself why.”
    “You think he’s following the youngsters?”
    “Scott, an Injun would trail them kids through the worst storm you ever did see to get that stallion. This here’s the first promise we’ve had.”
    “It’s a slim chance,” Darrow agreed reluctantly. “Come to think of it, it
is
odd. An Injun would find himself a place to hole up until the storm was gone.”
    “We got nothin’ else,” Squires said, “so let’s try her on for size.”
    It was a slow, painstaking task to work out the trail. The Indian had held to hard surfaces when he could find them, and occasionally his tracks had been washed out by rivulets. Once they rode half a mile on trust because a belated rush of water down a stream bed had washed the sand free of any tracks after the Indian’s passing. Sure enough, further on, after an hour of scattering out and searching, they picked up a track.
    It was the Indian who led them to the shelter under the dead cottonwood.
    They reached it at the end of a long hard day, and made their own camp there. Bill Squires studied it with interest. “He’s a canny lad, that one,” he said admiringly. “He had himself a nice camp fixed up here, and one nobody was likely to find.”
    “That redskin found it,” Darrow commented wryly. He indicated the fire. “He covered that up well. They’ve been eatin’, too.” With a stick he pushed several charred shells out of the fire. “Hazelnuts.”
    “Look here.” Squires had found the impress of a tiny hand on the dirt beside the bed—just the outer edge of a palm, a smudge where the knuckles must have been, and the slight print left by the thumb. “He’s got Andy Powell’s girl with him, all right.”
    Hardy had left a small pile of wood neatly stacked against the bank on which the top of the tree rested, and they used it now for their own fire.
    Frank Darrow fried bacon and made up some frying-pan bread and coffee. Bill Squires sat musing and smoking. He rarely smoked on the trail.
    “We’ve got us some trouble,” he said finally.
    Darrow looked up, and Collins stopped shaving kindling for the morning fire.
    “You’ve told me a lot about that boy,” Squires said, “an’ I can see a good deal around here. He knows that Injun is after him.”
    They waited, while the bacon sputtered in the pan and the smell of coffee filled the small shelter.
    “It’s more a feeling than anything else. But look at this place. He took pains to hide out. He wasn’t just makin’ himself a shelter—he tried to cover it up, too.
    “He’s got a