The Trail West by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone Read Free Book Online

mornin’,” he said as he buttoned up his trousers.
    The dog stood and began to wiggle his furry butt a mile a minute. Monahan figured it was a good thing Blue didn’t have more than a nub of a tail, or the force of its enthusiasm would have knocked down half the corral.
    He stooped slightly to pat the dog’s head. The fur was like speckled eiderdown under his fingers, and he wondered that anything could be so soft on so tough a beast. Blue pushed up against his leg and groaned softly.
    “Reckon you can come along if you like. Grabbin’ my rein like that,” he muttered with a shake of his head. “Danged if you don’t beat all.”
    And thus, Dooley Monahan, worn-out, beat up, forty-four summers old, and winding down into old age, fleeing for his life before invisible enemies and who hadn’t wanted any more burdens than the multitude he already carried, came to own the blue dog.

6
    Monahan and Sweeney rode out at first light with Blue trailing behind, while Carmichael’s men were still yawning in their blankets. They left without incident, except when they topped the hill over which Monahan had ridden the day before. The dog turned one last time and paused, lifting his head in a single long mournful howl.
    It set the hair on the back of Monahan’s neck to prickling.
    “C’mon, Blue,” Monahan said kindly. “Come along, fella.”
    After a moment the dog turned away from the ruined place it had lived and known good, hard work and love, and followed them.
     
     
    All that day they traveled south, with an occasional bob or weave to the west or east to avoid climbing a hill too high or skidding down a gorge too steep. It seemed to Monahan the farther south they went, the faster the calendar was pushed along. Spring roundup had just finished in the mountains, and he could still feel the recent memory of snowy climes and icy creeks chilling his old joints.
    But the Christmas smell of the high country had gone out of his nose entirely. The fellows around Phoenix would have finished their spring roundup a good month past. They’d get enough heat to bake a buffalo come summer, but they rarely saw more than a brief dusting of snow, and it never smelled like Christmas.
    He was beginning to think he’d best cowboy on the flats for a while, maybe forever. For old men with cranky old wounds, life was a good bit easier close to sea level than it was at seven or eight thousand feet. A good bit warmer, too.
    He’d managed to push thoughts of Dev Baylor pinning him to a pine with a rusty baling hook—and Alf twisting it—from his mind. Sweeney had had a point. If the Baylor boys were tracking him, and if they knew anything about him—which they probably did—they’d know he always traveled alone when he was between jobs. They wouldn’t follow the prints of two men and a dog.
    The young man was turning out to be a halfway decent traveling companion. At least, he was quiet enough after Monahan ignored four or five attempts to get a conversation going. Sweeney gave up and seemed content to ride in silence, and that was all right with Monahan, who figured he’d used up about all his talking back at the Morgan ranch.

    But he wasn’t deaf or stupid as Carmichael and the other others thought. He’d heard every word, when they were talking around their campfire the night before. He wasn’t as lackadaisical as Carmichael about those Apaches, either. He’d kept his ears cocked and his eyes open all day long.
    But the Apaches didn’t show.
    Monahan and Sweeney made camp for the night in a little hollow lush with paloverde just thinking about bringing up some yellow buds. Sweeney shot a big buck jackrabbit for their supper and was skewing it on a makeshift spit when his talking muscles all of a sudden kicked into high gear again. “Back up at the Circle D, those hands yammered about you all winter.”
    Monahan put the bean pot on the fire and sat back, shaking his head at the dog tossing the rabbit hide up into the air and