Novel 1962 - High Lonesome (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour

men he had known. He fought them, and they fought him, but each respected the other.
    The Indians understood and fought each other, and their customs and occupations were much the same until the white man entered the scene with superior weapons, a different set of standards, and a persistence scarcely understood by the Indian, who fought his battles for sport, for honor, and for loot, but rarely for territory to be seized and held.
    Choosing the ground for a fight was not easy to do when the Apache was the enemy, for he knew every inch of his desert land, and was a master in the use of terrain from a tactical sense. Dave Spanyer, however, knew this country south of the Gila and the Salt River Valley almost as well as did any Apache.
    He had no doubt they had followed every step of his progress for some time, and by now they had decided where the fight was to take place. By this time they undoubtedly knew something of him, too, for a man on a trail in Indian country soon reveals himself to a skilled observer. He reveals himself in the way he travels, in his approach to possible ambuscades, in his use of terrain for ease of travel and for concealment, in his observation of tracks and the country around.
    Dave Spanyer wanted to get into a position where an attack must come…where he could get in the first shot, carefully aimed. It was easier to kill that first man…when the firing became more general, men became careful.
    Night was not far off. If they could find an easily defended position they might hold off the Apaches until darkness, and escape during the night.
    Packsaddle Mountain lay to the south, and the cave at Castle Dome was beyond reach. Then he thought of the canyon on High Lonesome. There was a lot of rocky surface there, and it was a place where they might lose their pursuers.
    This was farther west than the Apache usually came, for the Papogoes and Pimas to the south and east were his deadly enemies, and there were Yumas to the south and Mohaves to the north.
    Spanyer glanced at the sun. Two hours, at least, until sundown.
    “We’ll go to High Lonesome,” he said aloud.
    “Pa?”
    “Huh?”
    “That Considine…is he a bad man?”
    Dave Spanyer studied the question with care. His first impulse was to tell her that he was, and then, thinking of the Apaches, he decided that whatever she might have to dream on would be a help. Besides, as men go, Considine was better than most.
    Spanyer knew that no man could be judged except against the background of his time. The customs and moral standards of a time were applicable only to that time, and Considine was a man who left big tracks. He was an outlaw, but so far as Spanyer knew he had been honorable, except in looting stages and, rarely, banks or trains.
    “No,” he said at last, “I reckon he’s not. He’s an outlaw, but he’s got the makin’s of a mighty good man.”
    And then, strangely, Lennie touched his arm with her fingers, and for a time she walked beside him for a little way, holding his arm. And Spanyer, who had known little of tenderness, and who had found only mystery in the sudden growing up of his daughter, was deeply moved.
    Around them the desert changed. The dead-white and faint buff of the sands became deeper in tone, the rocks were darker, and here and there ancient fingers of lava pushed down from the mountains, thrusting their probing fingers into the sand.
    Joshua trees lifted their contorted arms toward the empty skies as though caught and petrified in some agonized writhing. On their right was an inclined shelf of almost smooth rock, half a mile long and reaching upwards, unbroken for several hundred feet—a great upthrust, honed and smoothed by wind and rain and sand.
    He was reaching back into his memory now. Before High Lonesome Canyon there was a box canyon. That could be the trap…it was an ideal place for an attack, a place to be skirted widely.
    Spanyer turned abruptly at right angles away from the mountains, and out into