Read Online Over on the Dry Side by Louis L’Amour - Free Book Online Page B

outfit. I heard.”
    â€œYou
heard
. Ain’t you always told me not to b’lieve all I heard?”
    â€œYou had trouble with ’em first, Doby.”
    Well, that kind of backed me up in a corner. It was true. They’d been mighty rough with me. So I just said, “That don’t prove nothin’.” It was a feeble answer and I knowed it.

----
    W E NEEDED POLES for fencing if we were growin’ any garden, so daybreak next day I packed me a lump and taken off for the hills to cut aspens.
    Aspens grow tall and slim. Just right for making a fence quick, usin’ them as rails. I taken an ax and when I fetched up to the nearest grove I got down and set to.
    Sixteen ain’t many years, but I was strong and I’d used an ax good, and I made the blade bite deep an’ fast. By noon I’d cut enough poles for the best part of a day. I looped a half hitch and a timber hitch to ’em, took a turn around the saddle horn, and dragged the poles out to where I could get at ’em when I come with the team.
    I dragged the first bunch, then the second. That done, I taken my horse to the creek, and when he’d had himself a drink I picketed him on the good feed there was where I’d been cuttin’ aspens, and then I set down by the stream and opened my lump.
    It looked like a lump, too, the bread all squeezed up and out of shape, but it tasted almighty good.
    When I finished eatin’, I hunted ’round for wild raspberries but they was skimpy and small. In a good year they’d be plenty of ’em around, if a body got to them before the bears and birds. But I found a few dozen and started to turn back to my horse when I seen something move out of the tail of my eye.
    My rifle was on my saddle so I just squatted down at the edge of the trees, hopin’ I hadn’t been seen.
    By that time it’d been the best part of an hour since I’d been choppin’ trees. So there’d been no sound from me that a body could hear more’n a few feet off.
    Lookin’ up to where I’d seen that movement, I set still an’ waited.
    The mountain sloped up under that cloak of aspens to the very foot of that great red wall that was the rampart below the mountain cabin. The cabin itself was across the canyon and more than a mile…maybe two mile off. Lookin’ over a canyon that way, distance can fool a man.
    Mountain air, specially over here on the dry side, is almighty clear and I could see somethin’ movin’ at the base of the red wall. He might be atop a rock slide. That was a place I’d never had cause to go, and I didn’t know for sure…but he was alongside the rampart.
    Now my eyesight is good, and blinkin’ my eyes a couple times, I set to lookin’ off to one side a little and, sure enough, I saw that movement again. Something was movin’ along the base of that cliff, for sure. And while I set and watched, that somebody—or something—moved along the base of the wall and finally disappeared. I set there a-waitin’, but whatever it was was gone.
    Now I studied on what I’d seen. It might have been a animal, but it looked otherwise to me. I believed it was a man, or a man on a horse, and whoever it was might have been lookin’ for a way to the top.
    If a body could find a way up that cliff, he could save himself several miles of ridin’ to and from…an hour or more each way. And it struck me then that whoever I’d seen was him…Owen Chantry.
    He was huntin’ a quick, easy way to the top.
    Well, why not? I could just as well do that my own self. Settin’ back where I was.…Well, I pulled back fifty yards from where I’d been an’ set down on a stump. Then I gave study to that red wall.
    Most places it was so sheer a man would have to be a sure-enough mountain climber to scale it. But there were a couple notches on the south side of the mesa that looked right