Novel 1974 - The Californios (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online Page B

for a long, long time!
    The growth thinned out, everywhere there was sandstone. How, he wondered, did the old man live? Where did he get water? What did he eat? Why had he not come down to the ranch where he would have been welcome at any time?
    Suddenly they were in a nest of smaller peaks almost atop the ridge. There were some trees here and some brush that was suddenly of a deeper green. They rounded a boulder into a small clearing and there before them, built against the wall of sandstone, was a small hut of woven branches. Part of it woven from still living, growing trees.
    On a bench at the door sat Juan, the Old One.
    He looked incredibly old, unbelievably frail. He wore a straw hat, a worn serape of many colors, and handwoven sandals.
    “How do you do, my friends?” His voice was low but resonant. “You have been long in coming.”
    “You have been waiting?” Eileen asked.
    “Of course. Your husband said that if anything happened to him I was to tell only you…or the boy.” He looked at Sean. “The boy is a man. It is good.”
    He waved a hand. “Will you be seated? My home offers little.”
    They dismounted. Montero led the horses into the shade, then returned and squatted on his heels and began to smoke a thin cigar.
    Sean put a hand on Mariana’s elbow. “Old One, this is Mariana de la Cruz. She is from Mexico.”
    The dark eyes turned to her. “Ah? Of course. I was there once…as a boy. A beautiful city, but not what I had expected. We were told it was an island in a lake, but there was no island and not much left of the lake.”
    They sat around on stones and benches, and the old man went within. When he returned it was with a pitcher of something cold and he filled a small clay cup for each. “It is an old drink, made of chia and honey. It is cooling…and it gives strength to the muscles.”
    “We are in trouble, Juan,” the Señora said gently. “Men would take the ranch from us if we do not pay. We thought you might know where my husband found the gold.”
    “Yes. I know you are in trouble, and I know you came about the gold. I will tell you, and then you must go. You are followed. Eight men follow you. They would kill you, all of you.”
    “You will come with us?”
    “I will come. You could not go alone.” He looked at Sean. “And once we have gone, only you may ever come back for gold. Remember…only you.”
    Montero rose. “I will get your horse, Old One.”
    “Gracias.”
The old man turned to Eileen. “You do not change, Señora. You are as one of us.”
    “Us?” she asked gently.
    He smiled, amusement stirring the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “My people are gone now, Señora, but once we were many. Never so many as you, never so many as most peoples, but enough.”
    “Your people did not age?”
    “All men age, as all men die. The thing is not to die too soon, Señora, and to live wisely. To live a long time is nothing, to live a long time wisely is something.”
    “You speak well. You are a strange man, Old One.”
    “I believe unfamiliar is the term, Señora.” He paused a moment, watching Montero come up from the rocks behind the hut leading a fine buckskin horse. “Until your husband came I was a lonely man. I needed ears to listen, a voice to reply. The Chumash were a good people, very bright and quick, but their experience was only with our land here. Your husband was a man who had traveled in ideas as well as upon trails and the sea. He listened well, he talked well. He understood much. His was a wide mind, given to acceptance where others might have denied.”
    “You are an educated man, Old One.”
    “What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life? There are many kinds of education, and often education closes as many doors as it opens, for to believe implies disbelief. One accepts one kind of belief but closes the mind to all that is, or seems to be contradictory.”
    Sean was sitting forward, all his attention upon