Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online Page B

had a feeling if he was, it was more by birth than by instinct. Yet he was an interesting talker, and once started he could hold a body spellbound.
    “This is all very well,” he said, waving a hand at the surroundings, “but one needs to travel. You need perspective, some basis for comparison.”
    Seemed to me he was talking as much for Teresa as for me, and there’s nothing like a smooth-talking man to have a way with womenfolks. This here little one-horse town seemed mighty empty when he began talking of San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, and suchlike. Seemed to me he’d been everywhere and seen everything and remembered most of it. Teresa was looking at him all starry-eyed, and that didn’t set well with me. I began to feel sore. I wished I had a story to match him, but when all you’ve done is play nursemaid to a few cows, it doesn’t leave you much to spend on conversation.
    “Me an’ pa traveled some,” I said defensively. “We covered most of the West, time to time. I been to Dodge, and down there in El Paso…that’s right acrosst the river from Mexico!”
    “So it is.” Yant was amused and showed it. Then he slipped it in so casually I almost spoke up. He said, “Your father ever talk of taking you home? To his home, I mean?”
    That was one thing pa never mentioned, but I felt no need to say so. “Time to time,” I lied. But I wondered why he had never mentioned it. Why had he not talked of home? Told me of his family, the place where he was born? The memories of his childhood?
    And then suddenly something did come back. I’d been very young then, a mere child, and there’d been a woman in the room. I remember she was slender and dark-haired with large, lovely black eyes…or almost black. I do not know where she came from, how she came to be there, or where “there” was, except that she was wearing a cloak and she had come in out of the night.
    Did I remember anything? Or was it all my imagination? “I’ve only a few minutes. I’m afraid…deathly afraid! He’s coming back, Charles, and you know how he is! I’m afraid! If he ever finds out that I’ve even talked to you, he’d kill me. I mean it. Literally.”
    “You mustn’t be here. Leave…get away while you can. I only wish I—”
    “There’s nothing you can do, Charles. There’s nothing anybody can do! And if you come back, that would be the end of everything. They believe you did it, Charles. They all believe it…except grandfather. I don’t believe he does.”
    “Well, I didn’t do it. We had trouble, I’ll admit that, but it was nothing, and I’m not a vengeful person.”
    Did I remember all that? Why had I remembered it at all, when I had forgotten so much? Maybe it was her beauty, her sudden arrival out of the night, and the intensity with which she spoke.
    How long had it been? Thirteen years? Closer to fourteen, I thought.
    It was the only time I remembered a woman coming to our rooms, wherever we lived…that is, the only time when pa was home.
    There was that other time, the time I never liked to remember, the time I never told pa about, when the witch-woman came.
    I’d been alone in the room, but that was years later, and I was eight years old. I remember that because it was my birthday and pa had promised me something special, a real treat for my birthday.
    I never got my treat, and that I remembered most of all because pa always did what he promised, except that time. That was the time he got sick, he almost died…and for months after that he was sick.
    Was it because of the witch-woman?
     
    Chapter 5
----
     
    S ETTIN’ THERE OVER breakfast he riled me. Talkin’ smooth was one thing, but he looked so elegant, always lookin’ like he’d stepped out of a bandbox, as they used to say. Made me look shabby.
    Well, I had me a little money, so I made up my mind right then I’d get fixed up. Finally, he got up and left, but he’d been talkin’ smooth and easy-like and it got to me, him making himself