Trail of Shadows
Page 14
“Gangrene,” hissed Duncan. “Get a good whiff of it Thorne. He’ll be dead before sundown.”
Duncan stepped away from the three, caught Marianne’s arm, and started through the group of posse men, who all stepped aside, looking sheepish. Duncan paused three feet from Tom Black. These two exchanged a battered look.
Duncan said: “Mister, the next time I see you, go for your gun. This is fair warning. I’m going to kill you on sight.”
Black’s eyes, nearly hidden in swollen, discolored flesh, faltered. “I made a bad mistake,” he muttered.
“Yeah, you sure did. The next bad mistake you’re going to make is to stay in Leesville. I’m going to settle down there, and, like I said, if I ever lay eyes on you again, Black, I’ll kill you.”
“I’ll be riding on,” muttered the vanquished cowboy. “I’m plumb sorry about all this, Duncan.”
Duncan pushed roughly past Tom Black, still holding Marianne’s arm. He led her back through the underbrush, across the little creek, and out into the large, golden meadow. The farther he walked, the more anger and resentment dissipated in him until, near the north-south main trail, he felt almost normal again. He did not know where she’d tied their horses, so she led him the last few hundred yards, then halted beside their drowsing animals, swung sharply, stood up onto her tiptoes, and kissed Duncan squarely on the lips.
He stopped dead-still, blinking down into her face. For a second she returned his look, then whirled away, untied her horse, and stepped up over leather. Until then, she hadn’t spoken a single word to him since fetching back the posse. Now she did.
She said: “Todd, did you mean what you said to Tom Black?”
His face underwent a swift change, turned darkly savage again. He stepped up, yanked his reins loose, thumbed the cincha, toed in, and rose up to settle across his saddle.
“Every blessed word of it,” he finally snapped at her, his gaze hot, his voice defiant. “If I ever see him again, I’ll ... ”
“No,” she interrupted, “I didn’t mean that. I meant ... what you said about settling down in Leesville.”
He had to think back a moment to follow out this train of thought for her. His expression softened, though, and he nodded ultimately. “I meant it, yes,” he answered. “And there’s something else, Marianne. The matter of what I want out of life.” He swung his animal over beside her. “Would you care to hear what it is that I want?”
She saw the flash of temper in his gaze, felt the heat of his masculine hunger over that little intervening distance, and reddened as she reined out for the main trail, saying over her shoulder to him: “Well, not right here, Todd. But down in town, after we’ve both had something to eat and a little time to return to normal, I’d like to have you tell me that.”
She went pacing slowly back down the high-country trail. He reined out behind her, agreeing privately. They both had a heap of thinking to do before their lives could resume what had once been their normal, placid existences.
the end
About the Author
Lauran Paine who, under his own name and various pseudonyms has written over a thousand books, was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His family moved to California when he was at a young age and his apprenticeship as a Western writer came about through the years he spent in the livestock trade, rodeos, and even motion pictures, where he served as an extra because of his expert horsemanship in several films starring movie cowboy Johnny Mack Brown. In the late 1930s, Paine trapped wild horses in northern Arizona and even, for a time, worked as a professional farrier. Paine came to know the Old West through the eyes of many who had been born in the previous century, and he learned that Western life had been very different from the way it was portrayed on the screen. “I knew men who had killed other men,” he later recalled. “But they were the exceptions. Prior to and during the Depression, people were just too busy eking out an existence to indulge in Saturday-night brawls.” He served in the US Navy in the Second World War and began writing for Western pulp magazines following his discharge. It is interesting to note that all of his earliest novels (written under his own name and the pseudonym Mark Carrel) were published in the British market and he soon had as strong a following in that country as in the United States. Paine’s Western fiction is characterized by strong plots, authenticity, an apparently effortless ability to construct situation and character, and a preference for building his stories upon a solid foundation of historical fact. Adobe Empire (1956), one of his best novels, is a fictionalized account of the last twenty years in the life of trader William Bent and, in an off-trail way, has a melancholy, bittersweet texture that is not easily forgotten. In later novels like The White Bird (1997) and Cache Cañon (1998), he showed that the special magic and power of his stories and characters had only matured along with his basic themes of changing times, changing attitudes, learning from experience, respecting nature, and the yearning for a simpler, more moderate way of life.