Novel 1987 - The Haunted Mesa (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online Page A

infinite space beyond the solar system. And Einstein and the quantum theory were injecting strange new possibilities into our narrow world.
    The man who sat before a television set with a can of beer to watch a football game rarely realized that the world was exploding around him. The convenient horizons were disappearing, and the jobs at which he worked were being eliminated by progress. Changes that had once needed centuries were now happening almost overnight, and the jobs available were calling for greater expertise. The common laborer who had been with us forever was finding himself on skid row with no place to go, and no possibilities of work.
    A few things remained constant. The earth under his feet, the sky overhead, the road down which he could drive. For centuries there had been tales of other worlds, and people had read them or listened to them or watched them on
The Twilight Zone,
interested and amused but never taking them very seriously.
    It was always an amusing subject for casual conversation among friends, and offered room for speculation. Occasionally there had been stories of mysterious disappearances, usually explained away with bored amusement by some scientist with too much else on his mind.
    To deal with the expanding world around us was quite enough. Mike Raglan found no place in his thinking for yet another dimension, for a world here, right alongside our own. He was not mentally prepared to deal with it. He could understand the possibilities without knowing any more about the physics of it than the average man who can’t explain how his television set works.
    Mike Raglan did not want there to be another dimension. He did not need one. He was having trouble enough dealing with the three he had. Yet he remembered primitive people with whom he had dealt who accepted such ideas, who did not even think of them as a cause for wonder. Often their language could cope with such ideas with no adjustments whatsoever, and the same was true of their thinking.
    What of the Australian aborigines and their “dream time”?
    Mike picked up the daybook. Reluctantly, hesitantly, he turned the pages to where he had stopped reading.

    Immediately, I gathered what was important to me. My plans, notebooks, and the few books I’d brought along for reading. A half-dozen books I would leave, for one day I might return, briefly at least.
    It is not easy to see a dream die, and this home upon the mesa was a dream I’d had since boyhood. Suddenly, reluctant to go, I glanced around.
    And there she stood.
    Chapter 6
----
    My first impression was that she did not look like a girl who would leave a sunflower on a man’s table, nor put one behind a dog’s collar.
    My second impression, simultaneous with the first, was that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
    She stood just outside my door in the sunlight. Her hair was very black, parted in the middle and done in two knots on the back of her head. Her skin was the color of old ivory, her eyes very large and dark.
    The next thing of which I was aware was Chief. He was growling, but uncertainly, as if confused. At once I realized this could not be the person Chief had permitted to touch him.
    She motioned, indicating I should follow, so I stepped to the door and watched her walk to the kiva. With a walk like that she had no need to beckon.
    Yet I hesitated. Chief was holding back, pressing against my leg as if to prevent my going. There was something here he distrusted, and rightly so. She paused at the kiva’s edge to look back. When she saw me still standing in the ruin’s door, she beckoned again. I shook my head. For an instant I thought I glimpsed a flicker of irritation on her face, but it might have been my imagination.
    Beautiful she certainly was, yet “striking” might have been a better description. However, there was about her a subtle sense of evil, of foreboding. Despite her beauty, every sense in me warned me I