Over on the Dry Side by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online

gallivantin’ over the mountains.”
    â€œPa, I—”
    â€œYou leave him be. He’s lettin’ us have this outfit, ain’t he? He stood by us, didn’t he? Whose business is it what he does?”
    Well, there was that girl. Only Pa wouldn’t understand about her.
    â€œBoy, don’t you get no notions now. That there’s a good man, but he’s a hard man, too. He’ll take no nonsense from nobody. If that cabin up there is all he wants, tis little enough.”
    Pa was right. Yet I didn’t want him goin’ up there. He’d change things. Maybe she wouldn’t come there anymore. Then how would I ever find her?
    But all the time I knew I was playin’ the fool. Knowin’ nothin’ about her, and her not knowin’ me. And who was I? Just a green country boy who knowed nothin’ but horses and cattle. Scarce sixteen year old. How could any such girl be interested in me?
    I thought no such thing, only I
wanted
to think it. And most of all I didn’t want him to spoil it for me. So I went to work like Pa said and dug postholes and trimmed poles for the fence. But every now and then I’d stop and look to the mountains and wish I was up there under them aspen, ridin’ the green trails like him.

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    O WEN CHANTRY RODE his black horse into the canyon below the hogback. He had ridden in a wide half circle since leaving the ranch, scouting the country with care, and taking his time.
    It was all strange country, and the approach he was making gave him a better opportunity to locate the actual position of the cabin. Doby Kernohan had come upon it by accident and from another direction, and Doby’s grasp of its actual situation had been less than accurate…or perhaps Doby hadn’t wished to explain too well.
    Chantry frowned thoughtfully. What was it that bothered Doby? Could it be the girl herself? But Doby hadn’t even seen her, knew nothing about her…
    His brother had built the cabin on the rampart. That he knew.
    Chantry’s left hand held the reins. His right was never far from his gun. Nothing in his years had left him trusting of men or human situations. He never lay down at night without a built-in readiness to rise suddenly to action. He never sat down to a meal with the certain feeling that he would finish.
    He rode forward slowly. Kernohan had known nothing of the men who had tried to drive him out, nor of their connection with the girl. A lawless outfit, doubtless.
    On his right the towering mass of the rampart reared up, walls of rock almost sheer, but broken and rough enough so a skillful man might climb, if need be. It was crowned with a forest of trees.…Pine or spruce, he couldn’t make them out at that distance. It lay like a big long loaf, thrust out from the mass of the mountains behind it.
    He studied the mountains before him. He must work a little more to the east, for the mesa seemed thus easy of access, and the faint trail he followed led that way.
    A deer walked into the trail before him, unawares. It stepped slowly along, then suddenly caught a glimpse of him, ducked into the trees, and was gone. Overhead the sky was impossibly blue, with puffballs of white cloud. Toward afternoon they would bunch together, turn gray, and rain would fall. Every afternoon the rains came, never lasting for long. Sometimes the showers were intermittent.
    There were no tracks in the trail he followed except the tracks of deer. This trail was possibly unknown. Yet Chantry was cautious. It never paid to underrate an enemy, to assume they knew less than they did.
    Were they southern renegades, come west after the war? Some of the old Quantrill or Bloody Bill Andersen crowd?
    He drew up in the dappled shadow of a clump of aspens and studied the trail ahead of him, watching the trees, the ground, the birds…listening.
    Did they know of the cabin on the rampart? Possibly only the girl did, if she came there to be alone,