Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0)

by Louis L'Amour

  Blocker glanced over at Attmore. “He’s got a point, Charlie.”

  “Yes,” Attmore agreed reluctantly, “so he has. Neither of us could afford either the time or the energy to explore that country, while he probably knows right where to go.”

  “Each of us has to sell what he has,” I said, feeling a little smug, for it was the first actual business deal I had ever made for myself.

  “It’s agreed then?” Blocker said. “And as soon as you’ve finished this business in Carolina, you’ll go west?”

  “I will.”

  We talked on for another hour and then, growing tired, I stood up, suddenly realizing I had no place to sleep and my bedroll was undoubtedly locked in the Wells Fargo office.

  “No problem,” Blocker said, when I explained. “Right down the street there’s a hotel…a good one, too. At this time of night Sam Dean will be on the desk. You just tell him Ben Blocker sent you.”

  Tired as I was, I was glad it would be no further. On the street I stopped for a minute, looking around. Several men stood on the curb, talking and chewing tobacco, and further down the street was another saloon and a crowd of men stood before it. Beyond it I could see a hotel sign. It must be the one Blocker mentioned.

  Turning, I started going along the street. Suddenly a voice spoke almost at my elbow. “Sir?”

  She was small, seemed scarcely more than a girl, and sedately dressed, but well dressed. She had big dark eyes and a lovely clear complexion. “Sir? Would you walk me past those men? It is very late, and I—”

  She took my arm. “Please! My father would die if he knew I was on the street at this hour, but Amy had so much to tell me and we hadn’t seen each other in so long and the time just flew!”

  As we spoke, we were walking along. She did not look like the sort of girl who would accost a man on the street, and I was going that way anyhow.

  “It isn’t far. Just around the corner. Oh, I am so glad you came along! I didn’t know what to do, and some of those men looked so rough!”

  “Is this your home?”

  “Oh, dear, no! My home is in Virginia, but papa had to come out here to buy cattle. And he is selling some horses, too. We raise horses, you know, and papa said these cattlemen are getting so they want fine stock and not just those grubby Mexican horses…mustangs, they call them.”

  I was accutely conscious of the fact that I was still wearing a shirt I’d had on for three days and that my suit was needing a good brushing. With my free hand I straightened my tie.

  Suddenly we were passing my hotel. I glanced inside and glimpsed a man behind the desk wearing a green eyeshade and sleeve garters. “This is my hotel,” I said. I was dead tired, and pretty or not, I needed sleep. In another few minutes I’d be flat on my face.

  “Please? It’s just around the corner.”

  “All right,” I said, “but I’m just about all in. I—”

  We turned the corner and suddenly her hands gripped hard on my right sleeve. “All right, here he is, kill him!”

  Chapter 18

  *

  HAD THERE BEEN time to think, I would have blessed my father. “Someday,” he told me when I was very young, “you may not have the use of your right hand, if only for a few days, so learn to use your left.”

  Boxing, where a left is of first importance, helped a lot, but I had deliberately used it for many things, becoming able to use it with saw or hammer as well as my right. Of course, I learned to use a pistol as well.

  My left hand drew the pistol without even thinking, and I fired. They were close together and coming at me, and I must have hit something. Jerking my right arm free, I sent her staggering toward them, fired again, and dodged around the corner.

  Thrusting the gun into my waistband, I stepped into the hotel. The night clerk was on his feet, spectacles in his hand. “What’s going on out there?” he asked.

  “Damned if I know,” I replied. “Ben Blocker told me to come to you and you’d fix me up with a room. I was almost to the door when the shooting started. I ran.”

  “Wise,” he said. He pushed the register toward me. “Sign right there. It will be number twelve, upstairs on the right.”

  People were running in the street outside, and there were shouts. “Crazy!” I commented. “A man’s a fool to go where there’s shooting. It’s a good way to get killed.”

  “You’re right,” he said, “but the world is full of rubbernecks. They want to see everything.”

  Locking the door behind me, I reloaded the empty chambers and put the gun on the dresser. Then I took off my coat and shirt, washed my hands and face, and pulling off my boots, I lay down on the bed.

  Just what happened out there I did not know. They had been close together and coming at me, but even so I might have missed. They had fired, but obviously I had not been hit. I had seen the girl fall, but that might have been from being off balance as I jerked free. In any event, Tom Speers was not going to like it.

  There was much confusion in the street below, but I had not lighted a light, wishing to attract no undue attention. For a long time I lay awake, thinking. Attmore would discover what must be done to claim my inheritance, but that would take time. In the meantime there was nothing to be done here. I could go to Carolina myself or go back west and wait to see what was happening.

  If I went west, I could scout the location for our ranch. I had a few ideas, but I’d be looking at the country with new eyes as it is one thing to ride through a country, another to plan a ranching operation, and the right location would be important. We had only discussed cattle, but I was also thinking of sheep as a possibility. Although I’d herded cattle and worked on ranches here and there, I’d never picked up the average cattle rancher’s dislike of sheep. Given the right area and management, they might be better and steadier money than cattle, but that needed some looking into.

  Lying there on my back, I considered all aspects. Finally I got undressed and into bed, but with a pistol at hand. Getting shot at was no pleasure, and although they were hunting me, I was not hunting them. I wanted to get out from under and I felt safer out west.

  That girl now, the one who grabbed my arm…was she one of them or somebody they hired for the job?

  It wasn’t until I got dressed the next morning that I found the bullet hole through the side of my coat. It had been hanging open, and the bullet had made two holes.

  That had been close…much too close.

  For several minutes before going down the stairs, I studied the street outside. There was only a little I could see of my own side of the street, but across the street there was nobody.

  When I reached the lobby, a place with hide-covered chairs and several buffalo and elk heads on the walls, there were men standing around and talking. The air was thick with cigar and pipe smoke.

  “Shot,” somebody said. “They found her on the street after that shooting. She’s not dead, but she was hit twice.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Who knows? It was some more of that night shooting that has been going on. She was a new girl over at Mary’s place.”

  “Why would anybody want to kill her?”

  “Speers believes she got mixed up in something that did not concern her. Right now he’s looking for a wounded man. He found some spatters of blood on the walk about twenty feet from where she fell.”

  Ben Blocker was at the Livestock Exchange when I came in. He waved at me to come over, and I crossed the room to sit with him. There were at least twenty men scattered around the room but nobody who looked familiar.

  Ben threw me a sharp look. “Shooting last night,” he said.

  “So I heard.”

  We had some bacon and eggs, and I told him I was leaving. “My problem,” I added, “is getting out of town. Obviously they are watching me.”

  Blocker took out a fresh cigar and removed the band. He glanced at it, then bit off the end and spat it out. He reached for his vest pocket and lifted out his watch. He glanced at it. “Ste
amboat,” he suggested, “to Leavenworth. I can arrange for you to pick up a horse there. You can catch the steam cars further west, if you like.”

  “My problem,” I explained, “is that I don’t know who to look for. Some of them I know, some I don’t, and there are so many they can hire.”

  Blocker shrugged. “Know what you mean. There’s a good fifty men within a dozen blocks of here who would kill a man for fifty dollars.”

  He glanced at me. “That shooting last night. Were you involved in that?”

  Briefly, I told him what had happened. “It was dark around that corner. I don’t know whether there were two or three of them. She grabbed my arm, and when I threw her off she must have staggered toward them, and they shot. At least one of them shot at me.” I showed him the holes in my coat. “And I shot twice at them, nicked one of them, I think. But my bullets didn’t hit her. She was well off to my right. I am sure they shot her by mistake, or she fell in the line of their fire.”

  We finished our coffee. “That steamboat…when does it leave?”

  He glanced at his watch again. “You’ve got an hour.”

  I got up. “That girl…where would she be?”

  “Down the street…at Mary’s place.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “Stay away from her. You’re in the clear. Not a thing to tie you to it, and there may be an inquiry. Will be, I should say.”

  “Take me a minute.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll go with you then.” He glanced across the room, motioning to Billy Jenkins and Carlin Cable.

  She was fully conscious when they showed me to her room. She was lying in bed, her face very pale, her large brown eyes, really beautiful eyes, seeming even larger now.

  She was scared when she saw me. Blocker carried such an air of authority that she was sure he was an officer.

  “I’m sorry you got hurt,” I said. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  She was very cool. “I tried to get you killed,” she said. “They paid me.”

  “How much?”

  She flushed. “I was to get fifty dollars, which they paid me, and fifty more if you were killed.”

  “Is it so easy to get a man killed?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I’ve seen them killed for less. What do you want with me?”

  “Nothing…except to say I am still sorry. And you earned your money, even if it didn’t work.”

  “You’re very good, you know,” she commented. “Nobody so much as thought about you shooting with your left hand. I was to keep your right hand in a tight grip and press against your gun.”

  “They really didn’t care about you, did they? Standing that close, there was every chance you’d get shot.”

  “I mentioned that. They said they couldn’t miss at that range.” She turned her eyes back to mine. “If you say I said any of this, I’ll say you’re a liar.”

  “You’re a cold-hearted little devil,” I replied, “but I am not going to say anything. I am just sorry you got shot.”

  Taking fifty dollars from my pocket, I gave it to her. “Get well,” I said. “And if you hope to live long, stay out of such things.”

  She took the fifty dollars. “You are a fool,” she said, “but if you wish to remain a live fool, watch out for the blond one.”

  She would say no more, and we left, and when the steamboat left the landing, I was upon it. Standing by the rail, alone in the darkness, I asked myself why I had not gone east? Was I afraid? Perhaps, I admitted, but mostly it was distaste at what I might find there. The country itself I knew I would love, but I wanted no more to do with the L’Ollonaises. After all, my future lay in the West. I liked Blocker. He was a solid, simple man, but a shrewd man of business and just such a one as I needed. The cattle on the range I could handle, but the business I would leave to him.

  My thoughts kept returning to Laurie, in Silverton. On a sudden inspiration I went below and sat down in the main cabin and wrote her a letter.

  There were few passengers aboard, and I kept to myself. So much had happened since the death of my father that there had scarcely been time to take stock, but I felt that now was the time to stop roaming about and to make something of myself. All about me the country was growing, expanding, developing, and I wanted very much to be a part of it. Also, Felix Yant’s questions as to what I intended to make of myself had irritated me. He had left me feeling inadequate, and less than I should be.

  What had become of him? Where was he now? The man was dedicated to killing me, yet there was something about him that I liked. Was it his resemblance to my father? Or to myself?

  Suddenly I looked about me. How did I know he was not near? Or some of the others? And what had that girl meant when she warned me against “the blond one”? She would say no more, having said that, and I knew not who she meant, or whether it was man or woman.

  At Leavenworth I took a room at the National Hotel, bought a newspaper, and scanned it. There was a presidential election coming, and with shame I realized I knew nothing of either man, nor had I ever taken interest in politics or government, unusual in my time, for politics was the chief subject of conversation wherever one went.

  My world was too narrow, too involved with myself and my own problems, and this when I lived in the land where government was the business of every man and such a government could only do well if each of us voted with intelligence. I shook the paper irritably. My father had talked of such things and I had listened with only half an ear, yet at the Livestock Exchange men had talked of little else.

  Determined to become more than I was, I read the paper through, each item betraying to me how little I knew. My father had tried to give me something of an education, but since then I had done nothing to further it.

  When morning came, I ate a quick breakfast in the hotel’s dining room and then went down Delaware Street to Sidney Smith’s Book and Stationery Store.

  Although I’d never done it myself, being too busy herding cattle, cutting railroad ties, or whatever, I knew that most men spent a lot of time in courtrooms. The popular heroes of the West were less likely to be stage drivers or gunfighters than lawyers. To hear one of the best-known lawyers plead a case, men would ride for miles, and when court was in session a western town was crowded with people. Most of those frontier lawyers were handy with quotations from Alexander Pope, from Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, or Francis Bacon as well as the Bible.

  The lawyers knew the public came for the show, and they usually managed to put on a performance. There were always a few men sitting around the cracker barrel in a store or on a bench in front of a saloon or the post office talking about trials. It was the theater of the West, before there was any theater. Lawyers were much admired, their quotations recognized like old friends, and their arguments analyzed. Nobody had to ask if court was in session in a western town, you only had to notice the number of rigs tied to the hitching rails, the number of men in black broadcloth, and the women in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. They came from miles out in the country and they brought picnic lunches. Many of the lawyers knew but little law, but they were long on common sense, the logic born of the frontier itself coupled with a shrewdness in reading people and juries. The emotional appeal was important, and they wasted no opportunities.

  Time and again I’d heard them quote, but I’d never read the books they quoted from, although a surprising number of the courtroom followers had.

  The bookstore was well stocked, but I didn’t know where to start. I ended up buying copies of Appleton’s and Blackwood’s magazines, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, and The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott. I knew nothing of either book except that pa had often talked about Scott and he had read me most of Ivanhoe. Once in a while when we were riding out across the country pa would recite poetry, of which he knew a lot. One I remembered was Lochinvar, by Scott. It was very popular all over the West. In a saloon one time, I heard a drunken cowpuncher recite most of it.

  There
was at least one more bookstore in town, operated by a Mr. Morgan, but I had no more time. The longer I remained, the greater were my chances of being located, if that had not happened already.

  At the bar of the Star of the West Saloon I found my man. He had been described, so I knew him on sight. He was a slim, dark man with a hawklike nose wearing a derby and a black broadcloth suit.

  “Hobie Jackman?” I asked.

  He gave me a quick, hard look. “It is,” he said.

  “Ben Blocker sent me.” I paused. “He said you’d give me a horse…or provide one.”

  “A horse, is it? A fast horse?”

  “Fast is all right,” I said. “A stayer is more important. I am riding west. I might need him as far as Abilene.”

  He paid for his drink and turned toward the door, and I followed. “Have you eaten?” he asked suddenly. “I was just about to have a bite next door at Delmonico’s.”

  I’d been browsing in the bookstore longer than intended, and it was nigh time for a noontime meal. “All right,” I said, not knowing if there was some other purpose in his suggestion. He was a sharp-looking character, not the sort of man with whom to trade horses.

  Delmonico’s was in a two-story brick building not exactly next door, but close. We got a table near the wall, where I could watch the door. He let me choose my seat, and when I chose the one where I could watch the door, he smiled for the first time. When he sat down, I saw he was packing a gun in a shoulder holster. I had not seen many of them, but heard of them.

  “Play cards?” he asked suddenly.

  “I don’t know enough about them,” I replied.

  He smiled again. His teeth were white and even, and when he smiled he was an attractive man. “Nobody does,” he said, “only some of us think we do.”

  We ordered beef stew, mashed potatoes, and coffee. He said suddenly, “Got the rigging? I mean, do you have a saddle?”