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

animal.
    The scene required no explanation. It told its own grim story, perhaps the prelude to one even more stark; for without a horse, in desert country, with Apaches on their trail, they would have small chance. This was no country in which to ride double, even if there were no Indians.
    Whatever a man does leaves a trail behind, and in his passing he leaves indications of the manner of man he is, of his character, and even something of his plans. It requires only the observant and understanding eye to read what the trail can show.
    Nor does any person stand completely alone in this world, for when he passes he brushes, perhaps ever so slightly, upon others, and each is never quite the same thereafter. The passing of Lennie Spanyer had left no light touch upon the consciousness of the man called Considine.
    The four men, loaded with the loot of their robbery, looked upon that dead horse and upon those tracks, and for each there was some personal message. Each was disturbed, but these were men without words, unused to voicing their thoughts for all to hear. Nor had they quite shaped those thoughts into words they could share with each other.
    Each of these men was worried, for in those moments in the store each had found that Lennie was in some part his own.
    For a brief instant her freshness, her brightness, and her open charm had brought something to them that had not been there before, and left a mark upon them. The danger to Lennie was a danger they all felt.
    Nor were they free of the images their own minds held of themselves. The man on horseback, the lone-riding man, the lone-thinking man, possessed an image of himself that was in part his own, in part a piece of all the dime novels he had read, for no man is free of the image his literature imposes upon him.
    And the dime novel made the western hero a knight-errant, a man on horseback rescuing the weak and helpless. Never consciously in their thoughts, to these men without words the image was there—and more. For Lennie was the sweetheart, the sister, the wife, each one of them would have…if only in daytime dreams.
    “That’s the girl’s horse.”
    Dutch cleared his throat uneasily. “No time to waste. We’d better push on.”
    They pushed on…and the tracks of the led horse lay in the dust before them.
    Spanyer, each man was thinking, was shrewd. Trust him to know what to do…else Lennie’s dark hair would hang in some wickiup.
    “None of our business,” Hardy said brusquely. “I’m a-worryin’ to see that Mex gal down Sonora way.”
    “It isn’t far to that
tinaja
in the Pedregosas,” Considine said; “let’s get along.”
    When they made that turn toward the
tinaja
they left this trail behind, they left Lennie and Dave Spanyer behind, and they turned south into the desert that lay between them and the Mexican border.
    They saw one last smoke before the sun went down, a smoke that ascended straight and unbroken, and then broke twice sharply and clearly. It gave them something to remember during the dark hours of the coming night.
    Darkness comes suddenly to the desert, where twilight is quickly gone. A bat dipped and fluttered above them, a star appeared…the serrated ridges gnawed at the deep, deep blue of the evening sky. A far-off coyote spoke the moon, and the hoofs of their horses, the creaking of their saddles, made the only other sounds.
    Hardy could contain himself no longer. “It must come to sixty thousand. Sixty thousand in gold!”
    There was no response. They were four belted men riding for the border, four men who had chosen to live by the gun…and some day to die by it. One was a man who wanted a woman in Mexico; one was a man who wanted a long, quiet drunk; and there was an Indian who wanted nothing at all. And there was one man who did not know what he wanted.
    Only he was beginning to be afraid that he did know.
    The Kiowa drew up suddenly. “Dust,” he said. “Horses pass.”
    They waited, a tight knot of men, sitting