Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0)

by Louis L'Amour

  “Thanks, Chalk.”

  “He the one who did it?”

  “Seems like. I think he was family. I met him over yonder,” I said, gesturing south. “He’ll likely be along again, might even inquire after me.”

  “What should I tell him?”

  “You haven’t seen me. We’ll meet up someday, and I figure on it, but there’s some things I got to get straight first.”

  “Be careful, boy. He may be a pilgrim but he’s a hard, hard man. I seen it in him.”

  “Chalk? Did pa ever talk to you? I mean, you know more about folks than anybody around, and I’ve got to find out where he came from.” I kicked a toe into the dirt. “Chalk, I don’t rightly know who I am. I don’t know why that man killed pa, or why he’s wishful to kill me.”

  “Your pa was not a talking man, son, but he was a good man and he was a gentleman. Good family. I could tell that. He come from the South, too. I’d guess Caroliny, maybe Georgia. I could get it by his accent, although most of it was lost. He had the pride, too. Southern pride. I fit again them in the War, but they was good folks, mostly, wrong to want to split the Union, but good folks. Your pa was such a one.”

  “Thanks, Chalk. I’ll have a bite and go to sleep.”

  “Better get yourself a place first, because there’s a lot of strangers in town. Been some good ore showin’ up, and the boomers can smell it from a thousand miles off, the way they start comin’ in.”

  “Chalk? Better have that horse ready. You hear any shootin’, you saddle him, you hear?”

  “Will do.” Chalk hitched his belt and looked at me, then spat. “You take care of yourself, boy, and steer clear of grief.”

  When I had booked a room and left my gear in it, I went to the restaurant, but that freckle-faced girl wasn’t there and the fat-bellied man with the rolled-up sleeves and hairy arms did nothing to brighten my evening but bring me grub. That was good, however, and a body can’t expect too much of life.

  When I’d had something to eat, I walked out on Blair Street. In just two blocks of that street there were thirty-two places where a man might get what he wished in food, drink, or women. There was Big Mollie’s place, Diamond-Tooth Lil’s, the Sage Hen, the Mikado, the Bon Ton, and Lola’s. There was any kind of game you wanted, if it was gamblin’ you were hunting for.

  Here I was, weighted down with money, more than anybody on the street, I guess, but I’d learned not to flash it about, and looking at me nobody would guess that I had anything, especially as I was just rubbernecking around.

  Truth was I was lonely, just wishful of setting down with somebody to hear them talk. I was turning back toward the hotel when I saw that girl with the freckles. She was hurrying across the street with a couple of packages, and I spoke to her, but she hurried on, paying me no mind.

  “Ma’am?” I said. “I’ll pack your groceries for you. We talked some awhile back in the restaurant.”

  “Oh?” She hesitated, looking at me, and I taken off my hat. She recognized me then. “You’re the boy whose father was killed!”

  “Yes, ma’am. You were the one warned me to be careful.”

  “Yes, I did. I was afraid for you.” She stood looking at me. “Whatever happened to Judge Blazer?”

  “Last I seen of him he was with Tobin Wacker and a man they called Dick.”

  “I was afraid they had found you.”

  “Here.” I took the packages from her arms and walked beside her. “You lead the way and I’ll pack these for you.”

  “I liked your father,” she said. “He was a nice man.”

  “He was. A better father than I knew I had.” I hesitated a mite. “Do you know where they buried him? I taken out so fast—”

  “I’ll show you, if you are going to be around.”

  “Well…I can’t. There’s things I have to do back east a ways, but I’ll come back. I want to put some flowers on his grave. Maybe a marker.”

  “There’s a wooden cross with his name on it. We thought you knew.”

  “Knew? Why? Knew what?”

  “That there was to be a cross. That note you left.”

  “I left no note.”

  “There was one. It was in the post office, addressed To Whom It May Concern, and it left some money for a decent coffin, burial, and a marker. We thought you left it.”

  Felix Yant. It had to be him. Shoot a man and then…he had to be kin, to do a thing like that.

  “I reckon I know who done…did it. Anyway, I want some flowers on his grave. He’d have liked that. He was forever talking about the dogwood and laurel back home…wherever that was.”

  “It sounds like the South.”

  We had fetched up to a cabin with a little picket fence around it and a light in the window. She hesitated. “I’d like you to meet my mother, but not right now. I don’t think—”

  “Let me just set these things down inside,” I said, “and I’ll be on my way.”

  She opened the door and I stepped in behind her. There was a fire burning in a coal stove and there was a coal-oil lamp sitting on a table. Near it a woman was sewing. She was a thin, attractive woman, but she was some surprised when she saw me.

  She put her sewing down quick and said, “I—”

  “Now, ma’am, I just carried the groceries in for your daughter. I’ll be leaving now.”

  Something got knocked over in the next room, and then a big man, unshaven and not too clean, showed in the door. He had no shirt on, just his suspenders over his undershirt, and he looked bleary, whether from being waked up or booze I couldn’t tell.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, mighty rough.

  “Kearney McRaven,” I said. “I just showed your daughter home with—”

  “Get out!” he said. “By the Lord, I’ll not have any drunken saddle tramp coming around here! Get out!”

  Putting the groceries down on the table, I said, very quiet, “Mister, I’m not drunk and I’m not a saddle tramp.”

  “I don’t give a damn who you are! I said get out, and I mean out!”

  Her mother stood up then. She stood up quickly and she did it with grace and dignity. “Henry, the young man is a guest. He just carried Laurie’s groceries in.”

  He paid her no mind but walked into the room. “You get out,” he said, “or I’ll throw you out!”

  “I am leaving,” I repeated, “but, mister, don’t you ever try throwing me out. I don’t want to make any trouble for this young lady, but you’ve no call to talk like you’ve been. Now you just back up an’ back off.”

  He stopped, glaring at me. He’d expected me to get when he yelled, but there I stood. Laurie’s mother turned around quietly and said, “Mr. McRaven? Would you sit down? I was just about to make some coffee.”

  “Now, see here!” he blustered. “I’ll be damned if—”

  “Henry,” she said, turning on him, “you’ve said quite enough. We would like to have you join us. If you do not wish to, I am sure your friends down at the National will be waiting for you.”

  He was angry enough to have hit her, but I was standing there and I guess he didn’t like my manner.

  “McRaven, is it? You’re likely the son of that gambler who got himself killed.”

  “I am,” I said, “and he was shot in the back, so I do not believe ‘he got himself killed,’ as you put it. He was never afraid to face a man with a gun or any other kind of weapon. And,” I added, “neither am I.”

  He stared at me, a mean, ugly look. “There’s them as are lookin’ for you,” he said, “an’ I hope they find you!”

  I smiled at him. “Just be sure you are not with them when they do.”

  He stomped back in the other room, and Laurie’s mother gestured to a chair. “Please? I cannot let you go now.”

  “I don’t want to cause any trouble,” I suggested.

  “You are not causing trouble,” she insisted. “You are perhaps bringing to a head a difficult situation. Please sit down.”

  Well, I did so.
First I took off my coat and put it over the back of the chair. My hat was on the table beside me, but when I sat down they could see my cartridge belt and pistols. She noticed them, as did Laurie.

  “I just came in off the trail,” I said. “I’ve been traveling some rough country.”

  “That is perfectly all right, Mr. McRaven. My husband fought in the War between the States and often against Indians.”

  The man loomed in the door again and was about to say something else. Then he saw the gun I carried in my waistband, and whatever he was about to say died on his lips. He disappeared.

  “We do not often have visitors, Mr. McRaven, and Laurie works all day so we do not often go out. It is good to have company.”

  “Since pa died, I’ve been lonesome myself, ma’am. I haven’t talked to a woman…excepting one…in quite some time.”

  “It is cold for traveling,” she said. “Many of the high passes won’t be open for another month. That poor Mister Nilson, you know? The man who carried the mail? Some believe he took what money was in the mail and skipped out, but I think he was trapped in a slide. He’s been missing for months.”

  “It was a mean winter,” I said.

  “Your father was a southern man, Mr. McRaven? I did not know him, but he often talked to Laurie. She liked him very much. Said he was such a gentleman.”

  “He was from the South, but I never knew exactly where. He…he never talked about it much. Only some days he would get to remembering and he’d mention places…rivers and plantations and such. But I never did hear him mention a state or a town…only big towns like New Orleans or Charleston, but he spoke of Boston, too, and Philadelphia.”

  “Mr. McRaven, I’d like you to know that man is not my husband nor is he Laurie’s father. He is my brother-in-law, married to my sister until her death. He had no place to go and we took him in, and for a few weeks he worked and occasionally contributed to the expenses of living. For some time now he has done neither, but he considers himself the man of the house. You are not the first man he has ordered out.”

  “Why don’t you tell him to leave?”

  She smiled. “And if he refuses? What am I to do?”

  “Ma’am, you tell him to leave and I’ll see that he does, but if I’m not here, you or Laurie just go down to the marshal or some businessman you know and tell them. If that fails, you go to any saloon on Blair Street and tell them your troubles.”

  “They might hang him.”

  “Yes, ma’am, they might…and good riddance. Even the roughest of those men down along the street won’t see a decent woman abused.”

  The floor creaked faintly from the other room. The door was closed, but I had a feeling he had been listening. I put up a hand for quiet and drew my belt gun.

  Laurie’s mouth opened and I said, “There will not be any shooting.”

  The door opened suddenly, and he stood there with a rifle in his hands. “Now you git!” He raised the rifle threateningly, but it was not aimed, which was his mistake.

  He started into the room and then he saw that six-shooter in my hand and he stopped so fast he almost fell.

  “Put the rifle down.” I told him, “and take whatever belongs to you and get out. Get out and stay out. If you ever come back here again or if you so much as speak to one of these women, I’ll see you hang. I may not be around too long, but I shall talk to the marshal before I leave, and I’ll also talk to some of the boys down along Blair Street.”

  He dearly wanted to shoot. He wanted to lift that rifle and turn it on me, but he knew he didn’t have a chance. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he blustered.

  “I’m a friend of the family,” I said.

  He blustered and he grumbled but he went. He was a loafer and a bully but a man of no courage, yet I recalled my father warning me against taking such men too lightly.

  When he was gone, I moved my chair so that I couldn’t be seen from outside and holstered my pistol. “Sorry, ma’am. The only other thing was to throw him out bodily, and that might have torn up the room somewhat.”

  “Thank you, Kearney, thank you very much. He has been…oh, obnoxious! And getting worse every day.”

  She refilled my cup, and I sat back and enjoyed it, my eyes straying to the books on the shelf. There were a couple of novels by Sir Walter Scott, Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, and Vivian Grey by Benjamin Disraeli.

  She saw me looking at the books. “They are presentation copies,” she explained. “My husband knew them all, and his father went to school with Sir Walter. They were pupils of Mr. Luke Fraser, in his second-year class. He lived off Canongate Street, and they often walked home together. Later he moved to a house near that where John Knox died.”

  “What did your husband do?”

  She smiled. “Nothing very well, I am afraid, but he was a fine man for all of that and I loved him dearly. He wished most of all to paint, but his paintings did not sell. Then we were married and he had a small inheritance, so we came to America. He had known Sir Walter from childhood, but he met Mr. Dickens only when he came to London, and he knew Mr. Disraeli, then, too. In New York he taught painting and the piano, but the life was confining, so he joined the army at last. He became a sergeant major, and when the Indian wars needed men, they made an officer of him.”

  “I don’t even know your name,” I said.

  “Oh! I’m sorry!” She put her hand to her mouth. “I am Anne McCrae and my daughter is Laurie.”

  We talked long, and when I left it was to walk back to the hotel and to bed. First I stopped by the livery stable to see old Chalk. “Well, you don’t look in no hurry, so I guess you’ll be stayin’ over.”

  Taking a few minutes, I told him about Mrs. McCrae and Henry.

  “Know him,” Chalk said. “He’s no-account. He’s lazy and he’s a boozer. They’re well rid of him. An’ don’t you worry none. They’re fine folks an’ we’ll take care of them.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “You figure on coming back here, son?”

  “I do.”

  “That there’s a fine girl. We here in Silverton think a lot of her and her ma. They’re good folks, gentle folks.”

  “I know.” After a moment I said, “Chalk, there’s a man hunting me…maybe more than one. I think one of them is the man who killed my father. The others are men he has hired.”

  “We talked of that. I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  In the hotel I put a chair under the knob again and lay down to sleep with my six-shooter on a chair alongside the bed where I could lay a hand on it.

  Yet I didn’t go to sleep right away. There were movements in the hallways and horses passing in the street. Lying on my back, hands clasped behind my head, I thought back to my earliest memories.

  Finally I got up and went to the small desk in one corner of the room. I found a tablet in the drawer, and taking a pencil, I started to note down all I could recall.

  Lying on a boat dock or some such place with the sun on my back…the long-legged birds in the swamp…that time down on the sand by the sea, a lonely place…an old hulk half buried in the mud that pa wouldn’t let me go near, and the big, empty old house with the shutter banging…the gnarled old man in the faded green cloak who came to our house one night when pa was away, a man all crippled and twisted…or so he seemed.

  Pa talking. “No, I will not have her in the house! I will have nothing to do with them!”

  Somebody said something about a curse. “Curse? I know nothing about that, only they contaminate everything they touch! There’s evil in them…evil!”

  A door had closed and I had heard no more.

  Just odds and ends of memories, although I remembered my father had reacted strangely when I told him of the old man in the green cloak.

  And then there was the night that ended something and began something else, the night my father came home, bundled me up, and took me away, and we never went back.

  Names…there had been names—-Old Tolbert…Faustina…Webe
r…Naomi…There were many, but none of them seemed connected with anything. At last I returned to my bed and slept.

  When morning came, I went to breakfast and it was Laurie who served me. She came quickly to my table with coffee. “There are eggs,” she whispered. “If you want them, you’d better order, because there are not many and they do not last long.”

  “I’ll have two, scrambled.”

  Suddenly the door opened and two men came in. Both men wore badges on their vests and they looked quickly around the room. When they saw me, they turned and walked to my table.

  “McRaven? My name is Burns. I am making inquiries about a man named Blazer. Judge Blazer.”

  Chapter 11

  *

  A MOMENT ONLY, I held myself very still inside. This could be trouble, serious trouble.

  “I met him,” I replied.

  “So we understand. Would you explain what happened?”

  Laurie came over, looking frightened. “Laurie, would you bring some cups for these gentlemen? And some hot coffee?”

  Briefly, I explained about herding Dingleberry’s cattle in the high country, coming down to find my father murdered and then to hear of his heavy winning the night before. Then I told them about my showdown with Blazer.

  “I went to his office and he held back the money my father had won, evidently imagining I had not heard of it. So I told him I knew of it and impressed him with the necessity of turning it over to me.”

  “And he did?”

  “Well, I had to nudge him a mite. He didn’t take kindly to the notion of giving up all that money.”

  “And then?”

  “Mister, I hadn’t any friends around that I knew of, so I taken out. I figured they’d look up and down the trail for me, so I went back to the hills.”

  “‘They’?”

  “Yes, sir. He brought some men with him. Tobin Wacker for one. They followed me.”

  Choosing my words with care, I explained about the fight in the cabin, how I was badly beaten and escaped into the storm.

  “Indian woman fixed my nose. They broke it. She put the bone in place and put some kind of wax or something over it that stiffened up tight. They took good care of me.”