the Man Called Noon (1970) by Louis L'amour Read Free Book Online

was? Or Dean Cullane? Or Matherbee?
    He looked again at the map. Only a few lines on a bit of paper, but that X might be this very ranch, and the dotted line could be that faint trail he had discovered.
    Why had Ruble Noon a ranch in the area? What was his connection with Tom Davidge? He had no answers - nothing but questions.
    He was hungry, and he had not thought to bring food with him. But he did not want to go back now. There was too much to think about, too much to decide. And he did not know what awaited him back at the ranch ... Ben Janish might have returned, and it was Ben Janish who had tried to kill him.
    He swung his horse around, returned to the trail, and turned the dun up the mountain. After a dozen quick, tight turns they began to wind through the forest, climbing steadily. The mountain was steep, but the deer had found a way to the meadows below. There were no horse tracks on the trail, only those of deer.
    He kept on, studying the country as he rode. The growth was so thick that only occasionally could he see the ranch or the valley below him. He followed the dim, narrow trail back and forth up the steep scarp until suddenly a notch in the mountain, invisible from below, opened before him.
    The dun went forward slowly, ears pricked with curiosity. The notch opened after some hundred yards into a long trough down which a stream ran. It was high grassland, the slopes covered with pines, and about a quarter of a mile away he could see a small cabin, perched on a shelf among the trees.
    There was no sound, nor any sign of life there.
    Above on the mountain a rock cropped out, bare and cold against the sky; below it only a few straggling pines, wind-torn and twisted, stretched black, thin arms against the sky.
    It was a lonely place where the shadows came early and where cold winds blew off the ridges. Who had found this spot? Above all, who had thought to build here, under the bleak sky? On any cloudy day the place must be rilled with damp, clinging gray clouds, and thunder must roll down this narrow valley, leaving the air charged and smelling of brimstone. It was a place of bitter solitude .. . yet somehow it appealed to him, somehow he knew this was his place, where he belonged.
    The only sound was that of the dun's hoofs in the tall grass, and occasionally the click of a hoof against stone.
    He went up the trail to the shelf and stopped before the cabin.
    It was built against a wall of rock, sheltered half beneath the overhang, and was of native stone, the cold gray rocks gathered from the foot of the cliff. It had been built a long time ago.
    No mortar had been used, only stone wedded to stone, but cunningly, skillfully done by the hands of a master. The stones had taken on the patina of years, and the heavy wooden bench made of a split log was polished as if from much use. A stable backed against the wall where the fireplace stood so heat from the fire would help to warm the stable. A passage led from the house into the stable, and a stack of wood stood high against the stable walls.
    Dismounting, he tied the dun to a post and went up to the door. It opened under his hand, and he stepped in.
    He had expected nothing like this. The floor was carpeted with skins, the skins of bear and mountain lion. There was a wall of books, a writing table, and a gunrack holding a dozen rifles and shotguns.
    In another smaller room there was a store of canned goods and other supplies. These things had never arrived over the trail by which he had come; therefore there must be another and better route.
    Somebody had lived here, perhaps lived here still, and that somebody was probably Ruble Noon, for this must be the cabin deeded to Noon by the document he carried.
    He walked to the windows. The view from them covered all the valley below. The only blind spot lay on the steep mountainside above the cabin, a place from which one might come to the cabin unseen. Otherwise the only access to it was by coming up from the