Taggart (1959) by Louis L'amour Read Free Book Online Page A

She afraid?"
    "Miriam?" Adam chuckled. "I don't think the devil himself could frighten Miriam.
    No, she just knows the kind of man she wants and she isn't going to settle for less , no matter how long she has to wait."
    "I think she is fool. "
    "We're all fools after a fashion. Look at me ... I gave up a law practice becaus e I wanted a ranch of my own, I wanted to be in the cattle business. So I studied geolog y and came west to find the gold to buy the ranch ... like a lot of other dreamers."
    "I think you fool." She paused. "Adam, we are no good for each other. Once I thin k I love you, but I was wrong." "Maybe you expect too much of me, Connie. Or mayb e you're looking for the wrong things in a marriage."
    She stared gloomily from the window. "Maybe I am bad. Maybe I am meant for bad girl.
    You are good man but you are frighten, Adam. You are frighten of Tom Sanifer."
    There was no anger in Adam. "He must have impressed you, Connie. That's why I worr y about you, because you're impressed by the wrong things."
    He leaned back in his chair. "Tom Sanifer was a fine-looking man, but he was an empt y man. I'm afraid you mistake the appearance of strength for strength itself."
    "The first chance I get, I leave you, Adam. I am finish. You don't say I don't tel l you. And you have no right to speak of Tom Sanifer. He told you he would come bac k for me, and he told you he would kill you."
    "It is a small man who talks big before women. If you must leave me, let it be fo r a really good man, not an empty bucket like Tom Sanifer."
    Miriam stood in the desert silence, listening for sounds she hoped not to hear, sound s long practice had taught her to distinguish from the usual night sounds of the desert.
    She was very still among the rocks, absorbing the cool beauty of the desert night.
    At the canyon's mouth the sky's breadth was enormous, vastly greater than in th e narrow canyon. In the north the Big Dipper hung in the sky among its legion of accompanyin g stars. The dark outline of Rockinstraw Mountain shouldered against the sky, par t of its top curiously flattened, looking like a turret, or perhaps a pulpit.
    There is no other night that has the stillness and the beauty of the desert nigh t ... the sea when it is quiet comes closest to that stillness that is not stillness , but the sea is always alive. The Arctic, too, has its own beauty, but the deser t is still with a curious alert stillness, a sense of listening, of poised awareness.
    Standing alone in the desert at night one feels that all about one there is thi s listening, an alertness for movement, for life, for change.
    The weirdly shaped figures of stone, eroded by years, the serrated ridges, the whit e stillness of the playas and the challenging fingers of the sahuarro . . . these ar e there, or the clustered canes of the ocotillo. The desert is always, by day or night , but especially by night, a place of mystery.
    Standing against the rocks, Miriam looked out over the de s ert, and against the sky overhead she saw the swoop of a bat. After minutes she hear d a rush of wings that might have been an owl. Sand trickled ... something rustle d in the sand nearby ... all else was quiet.
    And then she heard another sound, a faint stir of movement not far Off, a sound tha t was not of the night, and not of the desert. She knew the sound because she had hear d it many times before when she herself rode in the desert ... it was the brush o f cedar against a saddle . . . a rustle of sound she recognized at once.
    The mysterious rider came up out of the lower draw and was for a moment or two outline d sharply against the night sky, and then the horse walked into the open not far fro m her.
    Poised . . . half-frightened, she waited, fearing to move because he might hear th e slightest sound, but aware of something in the approaching figure that warned he r of an equal awareness in him.
    The rider came toward her and then turned slightly to the right and stopped, no t fifty feet